The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Counterfactual history is futile, but the death of this heir diverted the succession from a boy hailed by everyone for his sensitive intellect to two tsars distinguished by their narrowmindedness.

  When the emperor saw Minny soon afterwards, a relative suggested that she might still join the family. ‘She would be very welcome,’ replied Alexander.13

  ‘No one had such an impact on my life as my dear brother and friend Nixa,’ wrote Sasha as tsar twenty years later. His life had been spent in the shadow of his perfect brother: ‘What a change occurred in those hours and a terrible responsibility fell on my shoulders.’

  Sasha, twenty years old, a bearded giant, Guards officer, heroic drinker, poor linguist and bad speller with no cultural interests, was so strong that he could bend horseshoes with his bare hands. Nixa had nicknamed him ‘the Pug’, but in the family he was regarded as an oaf: ‘Modelled on the pattern of a Hercules or rather a peasant, he was always wrestling with something, always knocking against something, always upsetting chairs.’ His stupidity was so notorious that his greataunt Elena supposedly suggested that Alexander leave the throne to the next brother, Vladimir, who was only marginally more impressive. Visiting his irascible uncle Kostia in Warsaw, Sasha spilt the wine at dinner. ‘Look at the piglet they’ve sent from Petersburg!’ shouted Kostia. When a German princess thanked him after a cloddish dance at a ball, Sasha replied, ‘Why can’t you be honest? I’ve ruined your slippers and you’ve nearly made me sick with your scent.’

  Now he was the heir. ‘All the courtiers have horribly changed in attitude to me,’ wrote Sasha, ‘and have started to woo me.’ He was bewildered. ‘I know there are good honest people but not a few bad ones,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘How will I distinguish and how will I rule?’

  Almost immediately, Alexander and Marie, who had loved Minny, started to consider her as Sasha’s wife, just as the queen of Denmark gently suggested it to the tsar. Minny, who had been studying Russian and Orthodoxy, was still mourning. Sasha found her attractive and saw the sense in the match. But there was a problem.

  Sasha was in love with Princess Maria Efimovna (‘M.E.’) Meshcherskaya, one of his mother’s maids-of-honour, ‘a great beauty’ with ‘something Oriental about her whole person, especially her dark velvety eyes which fascinated everyone’. Minny was already writing to Sasha as ‘your sister and friend’, but within a month of Nixa’s death she heard about the plan hatched between Copenhagen and Petersburg. She wrote to the emperor – ‘Papa’ – that Sasha must be certain in his feelings.

  Sasha was in torment. He stopped seeing Meshcherskaya: ‘I still miss M.E.,’ he wrote in his diary on 25 June, yet ‘I have thought more about Dagmar and pray to God daily to arrange this matter which could mean my happiness for the rest of my life.’ Over the coming months, he decided, ‘I will say goodbye to M.E. whom I loved like no one before.’ Plans were made for him to visit Minny in Denmark.

  But he and M.E. could not stay away from each other: M.E. became engaged to a German prince but then Sasha went back to her: ‘I want to refuse to marry Dagmar whom I can’t love and don’t want. I don’t want any wife except M.E.’ The emperor was incensed. Sasha must obey. Sasha replied that he had never been as worthy as Nixa. He renounced the throne. While the heir was refusing the succession, their socialist enemies were planning to accelerate his inheritance – by assassination. It was easily planned because everyone knew that Alexander walked daily in the Summer Garden – even if they did not know the beautiful reason that he was there so often.14

  On 4 April 1866, the day planned for the assassination, the emperor met a girl of eighteen in the Summer Garden. ‘The emperor talked to me as usual,’ she recalled. ‘He asked me if I was going to visit my younger sister at Smolny. When I told him I was going there that night, he said he would meet me there with that boyish air of his that sometimes made me angry.’ Then they parted and he walked towards his carriage.

  They had first met seven years earlier. In 1859, the tsar, then aged forty, staying at the estate of her father for the manoeuvres to mark the 150th anniversary of Poltava, had encountered a doll-like girl of ten, in a pink cape with braided gold-auburn hair, when her mother sent her down to greet him.

  ‘And who are you, my child?’ he asked.

  ‘I am Ekaterina Mikhailovna,’ replied Princess Ekaterina ‘Katya’ Dolgorukaya.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Looking for the emperor.’ Years later he reminisced that ‘I made your acquaintance when you weren’t even eleven but you’ve only got more beautiful every year since.’ As for the girl, ‘I would never forget my ecstasy in catching sight of this superb face, full of kindness.’

  The emperor heard no more of her until her feckless father spent his fortune, then died leaving the family penniless. Her mother appealed to Court Minister Adlerberg, who arranged for the tsar to pay for the children’s education: Katya went to the Smolny Institute, the Petersburg boarding school. When in 1864 the emperor and empress visited Smolny, the girls each curtseyed and greeted the visitors in French.

  Katya was still a child and his interest was ‘like a father’. Yet ‘The more I grew up,’ she recalled in her memoirs, ‘the more my love for him increased.’ But when she left the school, she was unlikely to see him again.

  Then by ‘happy chance, I bumped into the emperor on 24 December 1865 walking in the Summer Garden’. Alexander walked there daily with just an adjutant, or a couple of nephews – and his English red setter, Milord, watched by a crowd held back by one Gendarme. The tall and fit emperor, in his mid-forties, was still ‘very good looking’, noted a foreign visitor at this time, ‘his smile enchanting; the blue eyes all the brighter for the deep tan of his face, his mouth reminding me of a Greek statue’. When he spotted a pretty girl, she noticed how his ‘big beautiful light blue eyes gave me an acute look’.

  Katya was now sixteen and a half, a young woman with thick, ash-blonde hair, alabaster skin and a curvaceous figure. ‘At first he didn’t recognize me and then he came back and asked if it was me!’

  Alexander felt a true coup de foudre. A trusted courtier mentioned this to her ex-headmistress, who deputed her worldly cousin Vera Shebeko to approach Katya’s mother. Shebeko, daughter of a civil service family, was an ex-mistress of the tsar, and even though she remained attracted to him herself, she became Katya’s companion – and, some would say, the tsar’s pander.

  For four months, the tsar and Katya met every day in the Summer Garden. The tsar became ever more smitten by the serious girl who found young men tedious, dreaded marriage, was bored by balls and liked solitary reading. As a child of the reforms, she enjoyed sincerely discussing the blossoming of literature with her platonic walking companion.

  At 3 p.m. on 4 April 1866, leaving Katya, Alexander was about to climb into his carriage by the gates where a brooding provincial nobleman named Dmitri Karakozov stood among the usual small crowd. Expelled from Moscow University, he had joined Hell, a revolutionary faction, inspired by Chernyshevsky’s novel, which wished to overthrow tsarism and create a workers’ commune. Hell chose Karakozov to kill Alexander.

  As the tsar passed him, the young terrorist pulled out a revolver and raised it, but just as he was pressing the trigger, the man next to him, Osip Komissarov from Kostroma, jogged him. The revolver fired too high. In the tsar’s laconic diary entry: ‘Pistol shot missed. Killer caught.’ ‘General sympathy,’ added the emperor. ‘I went home then to Kazan Cathedral. Hurrah! The entire Guards in the White Hall.’ Sasha recorded ‘groups of people singing God Save the Tsar. General delight and thunderous hurrahs!’

  Back at the Winter Palace, Alexander received the shabby Komissarov whose jog had saved his life. Naturally he was hailed as a new Ivan Susanin, the peasant who had protected Michael, the first Romanov tsar. Weren’t they both from Kostroma? A performance of Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar was arranged. After the bemused Komissarov had been led through the ranks of the Guards in the White Hall, Ale
xander heaped him with prizes – money and nobility as Komissarov-Kostromsky – an accidental hero.* Yet privately the emperor attributed his survival to the love of an entirely different, much prettier saviour.

  When Katya heard the shots after parting from Alexander, ‘I was so shocked and ill, I cried . . . and wanted to express my joy to him. I was sure he felt the same need to see me.’ She was right. That night, the emperor, despite escaping assassination, appeared at the Smolny Institute as he had promised. ‘This meeting was the best proof that we loved each other,’ she wrote later. ‘I decided that my heart belonged to him.’

  The following day, 5 April, ‘I announced to my parents that I’d prefer to die than to get married.’ Then she set off for the Summer Garden, where she found courtiers erecting an outdoor chapel for a Te Deum to thank God for Alexander’s escape. The emperor soon arrived with his entire suite. ‘I will never forget’, she wrote, ‘with what love he looked at me.’ When he saw her there, ‘I had no doubt you were my guardian angel.’ Their love would only intensify with each terrorist attack.15

  If he was consoled by his ‘guardian angel’, Alexander blamed the liberals for unleashing assassins against him and sacked any official who could be blamed, even intimates.† Removing the liberal education minister ‘for letting young people get out of control’, he appointed a gifted arch-conservative, Count Dmitri Tolstoy, to suppress the universities. But he really needed an attack dog and he found one in Count Peter Shuvalov, who became head of the Third Section and informal chief minister.

  Son of Prince Zubov’s Polish widow and thus the heir to that colossal fortune, Shuvalov, aged just thirty-four, had flirted with Alexander’s widowed sister Maria, duchess of Leuchtenberg, until the tsar reprimanded him. But now Alexander needed Shuvalov’s unscrupulous cunning. Kostia called him ‘the dog on a chain’, and he was so powerful he was nicknamed ‘Peter IV’.

  Shuvalov created the first bodyguard of forty men for the tsar and reformed the Gendarmes. Privately he knew that reform was essential, preparing a radical plan to expand participation in government, but this champion of the nobility had venomously fought the emancipation of the serfs and now he undermined the liberal reforms, crushing the perestroika of the 1860s. ‘Everything is done under the exclusive influence of Count Shuvalov who bullies the Sovereign with daily reports about the terrible dangers,’ wrote the only remaining liberal in power, Dmitri Miliutin, war minister. ‘Now all are pulling back. Now the emperor has lost confidence in everything he created, even in himself.’16

  Sasha bowed before his father’s orders to marry Minny. Twice brokenhearted, once for M.E. and once for Nixa, Sasha wrote desperately: ‘Oh God, what a life, is it worthwhile after everything? Why was I born and why aren’t I already dead?’*

  Arriving in Copenhagen on 2 June 1866, escorted by Alexis, his jovial younger brother, Sasha spent two weeks edging towards Minny. Bismarck’s latest war had just broken out: when Austria challenged Prussia over their joint administration of Schleswig-Holstein, Bismarck secured the neutrality of Alexander, estranged from Austria after the Crimean War. Prussia then defeated Austria, annexed swathes of northern territory and became the hegemon of Germany.

  As the Germanic powers fought, the two youngsters talked endlessly about Nixa until on 11 June, looking at photographs of the dead boy, Sasha plucked up the courage to ask Minny if she could ever love another, at which she virtually leapt on the amazed heir and kissed him. When they told the family, both burst into morbid tears for Nixa, until they were cheered up by Alexis.

  On 28 October 1866, Minny, now Maria Fyodorovna, married Sasha, moving into the Anichkov Palace. Empress Marie could not quite forgive Minny for moving on from Nixa. When the couple took over the Crimean Little Palace, the empress wrote, ‘It’s so sad to think what might have been, and one’s heart bleeds for poor Minny who must feel it so, stepping over the threshold of a home she’d planned so delightfully with another.’ Sasha struggled to get used to his new life: sometimes he got drunk and violent. Yet out of this awkwardness, Sasha fell in love with Minny and, when he was on manoeuvres, he wrote of his fantasies of being naked with her ‘like Adam and Eve’. She was soon pregnant.

  On the night of 6 May 1868, at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, Minny’s accouchement was one of those awkward public–private occasions endured by princesses. The emperor and empress joined Sasha for the delivery, ‘which bothered me intensely!’ Minny told her mother. ‘The emperor held me by my hand, my Sasha by the other while every so often the empress kissed me.’ Sasha was in tears: ‘Minny suffered very much. Papa . . . helped me hold my darling . . . At 2.30 God sent us a son . . . I sprang to embrace my darling wife.’ The son became Nicholas II.17

  Shuvalov’s crackdown infuriated the radicals and drove them deeper into their cult of violence. A student Nihilist named Sergei Nechaev, a charismatic psychopath, had been inspired by Chernyshevsky’s ‘Special Man’ to believe that only the assassination of the entire Romanov dynasty could free Russia. In 1868, after travelling around Europe meeting the many Russian émigrés who now filled the cafés of Geneva and London, plotting revolution, Nechaev returned to Russia where he helped orchestrate student riots.

  Escaping to Geneva, he wrote his Revolutionary Catechism, which stated that ‘The revolutionary is a doomed man . . . subsumed by one single interest, single thought, single passion: revolution. All tender feelings of family, friendship, love, gratitude and even honour must be squashed . . . Day and night he must have only one thought, one goal – ruthless destruction.’ Ultimately ‘we must join with the swashbuckling robber world, the true and only revolutionary in Russia’. This was Leninism before Lenin.

  Yet simultaneously the autocracy was under attack from the Slavophile right too. The talented editor-proprietor of Moscow News, Mikhail Katkov, a conservative radical, was embarking on a career that saw him become as influential as the grandees of old. Now he argued that the tsar should bypass the nobility to forge a nation-state, the monarchy buttressed by Russian nationalism. Meanwhile Katkov was publishing instalments of the two novels that defined this decade: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky – surely the greatest literary scoops in media history. Tolstoy concentrated on realistic portraits of Russian characters and families in 1812, that seminal moment of Russian history – and for the moment stayed out of politics. Dostoevsky had returned from his exile a believer in the exceptional Orthodox destiny of the Russian nation and became an unlikely supporter of the Romanovs. As an ex-prisoner once sentenced to death, he was horrified but fascinated by the Nihilists, whom he alone understood: Raskolnikov, the hero of Crime and Punishment, dreamed of ‘making humanity happy and saving the poor through murder’. Now Dostoevsky’s predictions started to come true.

  By November 1869, Nechaev had groomed a covin of susceptible disciples into a semi-mythical organization, People’s Reprisal. As a test of nihilistic loyalty, he ordered his cohorts to kill an innocent student. When he was arrested and tried, Russia was shocked and Dostoevsky was inspired to write The Devils. Nechaev died in jail.

  The spasm of youthful violence seemed to have passed. Alexander ruled through Shuvalov, who prided himself on knowing everything about the court and the radicals. He was better at palace intrigue than secret police work – yet he did not know that Alexander was wildly in love.18

  ‘I always felt’, Alexander wrote to Katya Dolgorukaya, ‘there was something that attracted us to each other, an irresistible draw.’ But the teenaged virgin was reserved. She did not succumb to the emperor. Whispering observers watched them walking in the Summer Gardens every day, so they moved their strolls to the shore at Peterhof and the park at Tsarskoe Selo, where her mother took a house for the summer.

  On 1 July 1866, ‘I met you’, he later reminisced with her, ‘on horseback near Mon Plaisir and you suggested we meet later under the pretext of giving me your portrait.’ They met at the Belvedere, an exquisite villa used by Alexander I and Nichol
as I for meeting mistresses, on Babigon Hill. ‘We sat on a bench waiting for it to be opened,’ the tsar wrote ten years later, always relishing his memories.

  ‘It was our first tête-à-tête,’ she wrote simply in her memoirs.

  ‘I’ll never forget what happened on the sofa in the mirrored room when we kissed on the mouth for the first time,’ he told her later, ‘and you made me go out while you removed your crinoline which was in our way and I was surprised to find you without your pantaloons. Oh, oh quel horreur? I was almost mad at this dream but it was real and I felt HE was bursting. I felt a frenzy. That’s when I encountered my treasure . . . I would have given everything to dip inside again . . . I was electrified that your saucy crinoline let me see your legs that only I had ever seen’ – and also by her unexpected capacity for pleasure which made her his sexual equal: ‘We fell on each other like wild cats.’

  She was grateful for his kindness: ‘Knowing nothing of life, innocent in my soul, I didn’t appreciate that another man might have taken advantage of my innocence while he conducted himself towards me with the honesty and nobility of a man who loves and esteems a woman like a sacred object.’ They were both religious and believed this was, as she put it, ‘a passion inspired by God’.

  Afterwards she told him that she ‘dedicated her life to love him . . . I could no longer struggle with this feeling that devoured me.’ The emperor solemnly swore, ‘Now you are my secret wife. I swear if ever I am free, I will marry you.’ It was, he later wrote, ‘the happiest day of my life’ and ‘the start of a honeymoon that has never ceased!’

  The emperor insisted on appointing her a maid-of-honour to the empress. But Katya had no interest in preening her feathers at court. Nonetheless the courtiers chattered. Katya hated the gossip but she hated to be parted more. She met him to make love in his study in the Winter Palace. They saw each other every day, ‘mad with happiness to love each other’, as she put it. But when his duties parted them, she found ‘the nightmare of leaving him was torture’.