The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The British enjoyed these Russian defeats, whipped up by that ‘old madwoman the Queen, that tramp!’ spluttered Alexander on 15 September. Finally, on 23 September, Alexander appointed General Eduard Totleben ‘to impose a total blockade’. To Katya he wrote:

  I hear the cannons of Plevna . . . On the advice of Totleben, we’ve given up trying to storm it and hope to force the garrison to surrender by famine . . . But all my thoughts are with you more than ever, my adored angel . . . May God keep you, give you happiness and not refuse the one thing we lack . . . I hope you won’t have your period when I return as I long to have you, which is forgivable after five months of abstinence.

  They would ‘fall on each other like cats’.

  On 6 November, good news arrived from the Caucasus: the fortress of Kars then the town of Batumi fell.† On the 28th, an adjutant burst in with another message for Alexander. ‘Osman Pasha has surrendered. I couldn’t believe my ears,’ the elated tsar told Katya. ‘I hear Hurrahs endlessly.’ Alexander rode straight to Plevna. ‘The tsar seemed younger,’ wrote Miliutin. ‘The emperor held out his hand to me, asking “To whom do we owe the taking of Plevna and not retreating? We owe this success to you!”’ Awarding the St George’s Cross to Miliutin, he joked, ‘Does the war minister think I deserve one too?’

  Yet it was now winter. The Shipka Pass, where Gurko still held out, was shrouded in snow. It seemed unlikely that the Russians could push through in such conditions. Instead of waiting, Miliutin’s reformed army marched to relieve Gurko. In a remarkable exploit, Gurko stormed back through the pass, helping to take 30,000 prisoners, and on 8 December the Russians broke into Bulgaria. The tsar arrived back in Petersburg for a Te Deum and bingerles with Katya. Would Alexander finally take Constantinople – known as ‘Tsargrad’, Caesar’s city – the longed-for prize of the Romanovs?30

  On the day before Christmas, Sofia fell. Alexander spent much of New Year with Katya – soon pregnant again. As for Gogo, six, and Olga, five, the tsar recorded that ‘They missed their Papasha and they’re more tender to me than ever.’

  Nizi was racing towards Constantinople. ‘The news of our armies makes me very happy,’ Alexander wrote to Katya on 9 January 1878. ‘God grant us a peace worthy of Russia.’ Beaconsfield was alarmed that the Russians might take Constantinople and sent in the Royal Navy, backed by a belligerent Victoria and a jingoistic public.* The tsar recorded, ‘[Nizi] has just told me that he could occupy this city without any difficulty’, though ‘The English fleet is sailing towards the Bosphorus.’ Alexander shared every detail with Katya, mixing sex and war: ‘Oh how I enjoyed our bingerles,’ he wrote on 14 January. ‘If the Turks accept our conditions, the armistice can be announced sooner and I hope our cavalry is headed for Constantinople.’

  Europe teetered on the edge of war. The dreams of the Romanovs were so close to being realized, but as ‘I’d heard often from the intelligent prescient Bismarck’, victory could be self-defeating. The brothers bickered. Nizi acted ‘in a haphazard manner’, complained Alexander on 11 January. ‘It’s easy to take Constantinople; the challenge is how to keep it.’ He told his brother that if the Ottomans did not accept his terms within forty-eight hours, ‘we’ll only talk again under the walls of Tsargrad’. Nizi reported that ‘The occupation of Constantinople is inevitable.’ If the Russians entered the city, Britain would fight.

  On 12 January, Alexander ordered Ignatiev, whom he had just raised to count, to make a deal. After his earlier hesitations, Nizi was now desperate to grab the city. ‘Success has gone to Nikolai’s head,’ wrote Alexander next day. ‘Constantinople, Tsargrad – but now it involves risks and dangers that are my responsibility.’ The emperor hesitated: ‘My God enlighten me and inform me!’ he wrote on 15 January. Next day, ‘We are four versts from Tsargrad,’ but the ‘sultan accepts everything!’ Alexander halted his armies. ‘I imagine how Bismarck will laugh . . . History will condemn me for my hesitation.’

  ‘My greatest enemy Beaconsfield arranges all sorts of intrigues’ but ‘if they won’t listen to reason . . . I’ll force him to respect me and Russia.’ The tsar could not sleep, yet he still managed heroic amounts of sex: ‘What delicious bingerles before dinner,’ he wrote on 27 January. But, he went on, ‘The English conduct is infamous and our honour can’t support it. I’m glad you understand everything that’s happening,’ he told Katya. The Royal Navy sailed into the Bosphorus.

  On 28 January, Alexander ‘in high excitement’ ordered Nizi to take Constantinople, but this time the grand duke, who could see the British ships, hesitated. Alexander warned Abdul Hamid that if ‘a single Englishman landed, Nikolai would occupy Tsargrad’. Now the tsar bombarded his brother with orders to conquer: ‘I’d be more calm if we had Constantinople.’ The sultan appealed to London. Nizi advanced to San Stefano just outside Constantinople. ‘The capital is in our hands,’ wrote Alexander excitedly on 12 February.

  Not quite. Alexander allowed Ignatiev to negotiate a Slavophile peace. On 19 February, Abdul Hamid signed the Treaty of San Stefano, which created a large Russian client-state, Bulgaria, dominating the Balkans, almost the size of the medieval Bulgar empire, recognized the full independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania, and granted Russia Bessarabia and conquests from Kars to Batumi plus territory in Anatolia and right of passage through the Straits. On 21 February, the emperor celebrated with Katya: ‘You saw how my bingerle was glad of your invitation, how he wanted it and how he was ready crying ‘Yes! Yes’ – quel horreur!’

  ‘The British are furious,’ wrote Alexander. ‘Jubilation!’ wrote Miliutin.31

  The triumph was short-lived. Ignatiev had overridden the informal deal with Austria. Britain and Austria demanded a European conference – or war. Bismarck offered to mediate at a congress in Berlin. Alexander and Miliutin planned a (delusional) attack on British India.* But the tsar could not risk war against Britain and Austria. Trusting the dynastic link with Uncle Wilhelm, he hoped Bismarck would help him. ‘If I’d had a Bismarck,’ he wrote on 5 March, ‘I’d surely have told Nikolai at the vital moment: “Take it; talk afterwards!”’

  ‘Berlin promises nothing good,’ he told Katya on 11 March. ‘I’m in terrible anguish. I fear another bad night.’

  Nizi was sacked but promoted to marshal – and replaced by Totleben. In June, ‘All Europe gathered in Berlin under the presidency of the great genius Bismarck,’ Alexander bitterly told Katya. Beaconsfield triumphantly recounted every Russian mistake in his comical letters to Queen Victoria. As the Congress opened, ‘Prince Gorchakov, a shrivelled old man, was leaning on the arm of his gigantic rival’ Bismarck, when the latter, ‘seized with a sudden fit of rheumatism, both fell to the ground and unhappily Prince Bismarck’s dog, seeing his master apparently struggling with an opponent, sprang to the rescue.’

  Gorchakov’s mauling set the tone. The senile Gorchakov blundered, mistakenly showing Beaconsfield a map of Russia’s maximum concessions which he immediately accepted. When the British insisted that Jewish rights be protected in Romania, Gorchakov held forth about the backwardness of Russian ‘Yids’. Beaconsfield, despite being wheezy himself, played a brilliant hand. ‘That old Jew,’ said Bismarck, ‘he’s the man’ while Gorchakov was just ‘the old fop’. But it was the acute Shuvalov who took over the actual negotiations and saved Russia from a disastrous European war. Alexander was forced to accept a diminished Bulgaria divided between an Ottoman province in the south and an autonomous principality in the north which, he decided, should be ruled by his nephew, Prince Alexander of Battenberg. Serbia and Montenegro gained full independence. Russian regained Bessarabia at the mouth of the Danube and Batumi on the Black Sea. These gains were substantial – but to the bellicose Slavophiles they seemed paltry compared to the prizes of San Stefano, a disappointment made more bitter by Austria winning the administration of Bosnia and Britain gobbling Cyprus – all won with Russian blood.

  Bismarck hoped to settle the Balkans, fearing, as he put it prophetically, that ‘One
day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.’ Alexander realized that Bismarck ‘is plotting against us with Austria’, the start of their secret alliance aimed at Russia. ‘The alliance of the Three Emperors’, he wrote, ‘no longer exists’ – though it endured for want of an alternative.

  ‘The emperor is in a bad mood,’ observed Miliutin, ‘and feels humiliated.’ Alexander was tired, his asthma and eyesight had deteriorated: Katya read him his despatches. The treaty ‘makes my heart bleed’ but ‘our bingerles before dinner were delicious – you’re so tasty, Moushka!’

  The wasted victory sapped the invisible authority that is essential to every regime. It outraged the Slavophiles – and empowered the terrorists. Soon the tsar would be hunted in the streets.32

  A new terrorist group called Land and Freedom planned to assassinate the tsar, launching a murderous assault on the wounded regime – just as 193 Populists were tried by jury in Petersburg. But most were acquitted. Alexander ordered their rearrests. On 28 January 1878, General Trepov, governor of Petersburg, was shot in his office by the twenty-eight-year-old Vera Zasulich after he had ordered radicals whipped in prison. Trepov was only wounded and the girl was arrested. Yet this would-be assassin won widespread sympathy. On 31 March, Zasulich faced jury trial but was acquitted after a brilliant defence attacked Trepov for the whippings. ‘It’s inexplicable!’ protested Alexander. ‘Does it mean that Trepov should be condemned to death? I ordered the arrest of Zasulich,’ but she was spirited out of Russia. Suddenly the terrorists struck everywhere: an official was assassinated in Kiev. A radical in Odessa, who had shot a policeman, was executed.

  The head of the Third Section, General Nikolai Mezentsov, was stabbed to death in the street. ‘This horrible assassination has completely upset me,’ Alexander told Katya on 4 August. ‘I miss him and don’t know yet with whom to replace him . . .’ He worried that Katya would miscarry. ‘What a charming century we live in!’ His new secret police chief, General Alexander Drenteln, was almost shot in his carriage. On 3 September 1878, ‘nine months after the day of his return’, Katya wrote, ‘God gave us a daughter’ – Catherine, born in Crimea. Back in Petersburg, they walked together and made love – ‘It’s good to cry out,’ he said, ‘but I’m worried blood has shown. I hope it’s not our bingerles of yesterday!’ He was determined not to impregnate her again: ‘I wouldn’t forgive myself.’ The emperor, sixty and weary,* celebrated New Year with Katya. ‘I’m still steeped in our delicious bingerles last night,’ he wrote on 1 January 1879. Even under pressure, Alexander managed to keep what Miliutin admiringly called his ‘happy character’. The emperor recognized his own ‘serenity of personality which I hope to keep in spite of everything as I work to do my duty according to my conscience without either genius or perfection’.

  ‘Today was assassinated the governor-general of Kharkov, Prince Dmitri Kropotkin,’ wrote Alexander on 22 February 1879. ‘The masked killer disappeared without trace.’ In fact he came to Petersburg to kill the tsar.33

  On 2 April 1879, just after 8 a.m., the tsar, followed at a distance by Captain Kokh, his bodyguard, was strolling home across Palace Square when a young man saluted him. As he passed him, Alexander looked back into the barrel of a raised pistol. The tsar ran across the square, dodging a shot to the left and another to the right. A bullet grazed his greatcoat, another ricocheted around his legs, as Kokh tackled the assassin with his sabre. Hearing the shooting, Shuvalov, who had kept his Winter Palace apartment, rushed out and helped Alexander into a carriage.

  ‘It’s the third time God has miraculously saved me from death,’ wrote Alexander, rushing to Katya. ‘God has saved me for you!’ But ‘he cried a long time in my arms’, she recalled. When he told Empress Marie, she sensed the death of an epoch. ‘There’s no reason to live,’ she told her lady-in-waiting Alexandra Tolstoya. ‘This is killing me. Today the killer hunted him like a hare!’ Marie, ‘broken, desperate, her eyes feverishly bright’, went into a decline.* When her ladies tried to cheer her up, she just said, ‘Why picnic around a bier?’

  Alexander appointed governor-generals with emergency powers.† ‘Three were executed today,’ he told Marie. ‘Sad but what can you do?’ ‘Dissatisfaction grips everyone,’ wrote Valuev, now president of the Committee of Ministers. Alexander ‘looks tired and speaks of nervous irritation which he tried to hide’, added Valuev after a visit to Tsarskoe Selo, shocked to see ‘a half-ruined sovereign’ surrounded by policemen and Cossacks. ‘The earth is quaking, the building threatens to fall, the proprietor has a dim presentiment of danger but conceals his anxiety.’

  After the shooting, the tsar ‘received an anonymous letter’ that so upset him that even at midnight ‘I don’t feel like sleeping . . .’ This may have been a terrorist threat against Katya Dolgorukaya and the children, who lived in their townhouse on English Quay. Just after the war, on 24 April 1878, the emperor had secretly legitimized his children with the princely title Yurievsky – one of the original Romanov names – and, as Katya emphasized, that of the founder of Moscow, Yuri Dolgoruky.

  Alexander could not protect Katya. After worrying for weeks, he quietly moved her and the children into the third floor of the Winter Palace close to the courtiers’ quarters, far from where his wife was dying on the second floor. The tsar revelled in being ‘all together’: ‘I love it that I got to wake up with you,’ he told Katya, ‘and you in bed next to me, eyes closed, prettier than ever in our sunlit room.’

  But Adlerberg, court minister, disapproved. ‘Out of some sense of decency, refined tact,’ recalled Adlerberg, ‘the tsar said nothing to me about that awkward subject and I pretended to know nothing.’

  On 10 May 1879, down in Crimea, thinking of his plight by the seaside, Alexander felt like a lover in a novel:

  If I was a real writer, I’d start my journal: what a beautiful May day in this natural paradise but what hell in my soul. My God, my God, how pitiful to live outside one’s heart and in a marriage which is only political. My ideas, my feelings, my passions, all are far from my imperial cage. Everyone closes their eyes but they’ll get a brusque wake-up the day when . . .

  Days later, the eleven leaders of Land and Freedom met secretly in a forest near Lipetsk to found a terrorist faction, People’s Will, electing a twenty-five-member Executive Committee that included a mousy-haired girl, Sofia Perovskaya, descended from the Razumovskys, niece of Nicholas I’s interior minister and daughter of a Petersburg governor. She was the mistress of Andrei Zhelyabov, the terrorist mastermind. ‘The emperor has destroyed in the second half of his reign almost all the good he did in the first,’ they agreed. ‘The Executive Committee passed a death sentence on Alexander II.’

  Alexander soon heard about it. ‘I find myself’, he wrote on 30 August, ‘like a wolf tracked by hunters.’34

  On 17 November 1879, Alexander left Crimea by train. There were two trains and two possible routes. The first train always conveyed the retinue and baggage, with the tsar in the fourth wagon of the second imperial train half an hour behind. As the second train passed through Rogashska Zastava, a colossal explosion blew it into the air. The terrorists, led by Sofia Perovskaya, knew his movements. But unusually he had travelled in the first train because the retinue train had broken down. The amateurish Third Section struggled to cope with an ingenious organization of suicide-killers – but they arrested two terrorists who were carrying dynamite; one revealed the identities of its leaders while the other, as Alexander noted on 4 December 1879, ‘had a plan of the Winter Palace; the dining room marked with a cross which is surely not without significance. Below the dining room are my guards. My God, are they even among them?’

  Yet security in the Winter Palace, observed one of the servants, a carpenter named Stepan Khalturin, was astonishingly lax: ‘While most high-ranking people couldn’t pass through the main entrances of the Palace, the back doors were open all day and night for any tavern acquaintance of the lowliest servant.’

&nb
sp; Khalturin was surprised because he was a People’s Will assassin who was daily smuggling nitroglycerine into the palace which he stored under his pillow. ‘There were frequent searches but they were so superficial no one ever thought to lift my pillow (my luck!) which would have destroyed me.’ At one point, the carpenter was called in to mend something in Alexander’s own study; the tsar was there but he could not bring himself to kill a man from behind. Khalturin accumulated so much dynamite that it was poisoning him. He had to store it in a trunk in the cellar, underneath the dining room marked with a cross. They planned to kill not just the tsar but the entire family.

  On 1 January 1880, ‘The tsar told me’, explained Kostia, ‘he would like to show Russia a sign of trust for the 25th anniversary of his reign* – he’d like to give society more participation in the discussion of important affairs.’ He ordered Valuev to draw up the plan.