The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  * In her little circle, she was subjected to the chatter of her sister Maria and her trusted companion Vera ‘Vava’ Shebeko, both of whom were his exes, more or less in love with the tsar, which complicated matters. Shebeko was often a go-between and flirted heavily with the him. At least once, she walked in on him when he was stark naked – much to his amusement: ‘She saw everything!’ In his letters, Alexander sometimes called Katya’s vagina ‘Vava’. Since Shebeko had been his mistress before Katya, it is unclear where one Vava started and the other ended: ‘My compliments to Vava from mon bingerle which is suddenly fully armed!’ A ménage à trois was unlikely given Katya’s jealousy, so possibly they just enjoyed teasing Shebeko.

  * Kostia was tired of ‘my government-issue wife’ Sanny. ‘My father has only two passions,’ said his son Nikola, ‘ambition and his dancer.’ Kostia resided at the Marble Palace but spent most of his time with his ballerina, Anna Kuznetsova, and their children in their house on English Prospect. Mikhail was a paragon of virility: when he met the French empress Eugénie, she exclaimed, ‘That’s not a man, that’s a horse!’ The viceroy of the Caucasus was married to Olga (Cecilie of Baden) who was believed to be the natural daughter of her mother’s affair with a Jewish banker named Haber. Their seven children were brought up in exotic Tiflis and a 100,000-acre estate at Borzhomi where Mikhail built the mock-Gothic Likani Palace (Stalin later ‘honeymooned’ there with his wife Nadya and sometimes holidayed there; it still survives as a Georgian presidential villa).

  * The British, who had agreed that Khiva was within the Russian sphere, felt betrayed when the Russians took the city and the khan became a Russian client: his crown outlived the Romanovs, surviving until 1920. Then, in 1875, Kokand, beset with civil war, was annexed. This alarmed the British: Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his Indian secretary, the marquess of Salisbury, decided to turn Afghanistan into their own client state to stop the Russians – with disastrous consequences.

  * Afterwards, Alexander visited his daughter and her mother-in-law at Windsor. Thirty-five years after they almost fell in love, Queen Victoria found him ‘very kind but terribly altered, so thin, so old, so sad, so careworn’, while he thought her ‘an old fool’. With tears in his eyes, Alexander thanked Victoria for welcoming his daughter, and even the queen was moved as ‘I put my hand across the emperor and took Marie’s, she herself upset.’ Living at Clarence House in London, the Romanov offended the British court by showing off her intellectual tastes and claiming imperial precedence over everyone except the Queen who also disapproved of Maria’s jewels, once owned by Catherine the Great, that were ‘too good’ for a girl of twenty. After Petersburg, Maria ‘thinks London hideous, English food abominable, the visits to Windsor and Osborne [in other words, the Queen] boring beyond belief,’ noted her mother. Later, Alfred succeeded as duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. After Alfred’s death, she remained in Germany, the only Romanov there during the First World War.

  * Fanny wrote her memoirs, The Romance of an American in Russia. Shuvalov halted publication. Expelled from France, travelling with profitable peripatetic promiscuity through Monaco, Austria and Italy, she hooked Count Mirafiori, natural son of King Victor Emmanuel II. In April 1886, she died in obscurity in Nice. As for Nikola, during his first exile in Crimea, he had two children with a young noblewoman, Alexandra Abaza (she later married an aristocrat who brought up the children as his own). Moved to Orenburg, Nikola married police chief’s daughter Nadezhda von Dreyer. The emperor annulled the marriage and sent him to Samara, whence he started to organize scientific expeditions to investigate the route of a Turkestan railway and irrigation of the steppes.

  * Miliutin brought in universal conscription without noble privileges, a reduction in the time of military service, and repealed Nicholas I’s anti-semitic recruitment, giving the Jews equality at least in theory. Miliutin’s old patron, Prince Bariatinsky, had hoped to become a powerful chief of staff on the model of Prussia’s von Moltke – and chief minister too. Disappointed, he resisted the reforms until finally slapped down by Alexander himself. But when they met for dinner, they laughed uproariously about old times. Later Alexander could have used Bariatinsky’s ingenuity. When his paladin died on 26 February 1879, Alexander reflected, ‘I’ve lost a real friend.’

  * In the years since the Crimean War, Alexander had rechannelled the Russian appetite for Jerusalem into a cultural conquest: he sponsored the Palestine Society, underwrote the annual pilgrimage of tens of thousands of Russians and built an entire Russian Compound in Jerusalem to house them in massive dormitories. Placing his pious son Sergei in charge, he sent him on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

  † On 30 July 1876, Alexander reminisced to Miliutin about how he had ridden fifty years earlier, aged eight, at his father’s coronation. ‘That’s why at the age of eight, he’d promoted his own grandson,’ the future Nicholas II. ‘It’s time to take this child out of female hands’, said Alexander, appointing a military tutor for the boy. The tsar always called Nicky ‘Sunbeam’. During summers at Peterhof, Nicky and his brother George liked to visit Alexander at his Farm Palace daily, playing in his study as he worked. During crises or even a violent thunderstorm, Nicky recalled his grandfather’s ‘face was calm and unperturbed’.

  * The ‘family soldier’ Nizi ‘liked all women except his wife’. He fell in love with a teenaged ballerina, Ekaterina Chislova, who was venal and promiscuous but gave him four illegitimate children. For convenience, he set Chislova up in a mansion across the square from his palace. When Chislova offered sex, she put a candle in her window, an opportunity for which Nizi would interrupt any event. If it was during family dinner, an aide-de-camp would announce, ‘Your Imperial Highness, there’s a fire in the city,’ until finally his wife, a frumpy and mystical Oldenburg princess, snapped, ‘Don’t distress yourselves, it’s only a candle on fire!’ When the grand duchess complained about the mistress, the emperor replied, ‘Your husband is in his prime and needs a woman. Look at yourself! Look how you dress!’ She left Nizi to live in Kiev with a dubious priest. Meanwhile, outraged by Chislova’s greed which was bankrupting his foolish brother, Alexander had her arrested for corruption by General Trepov, an embarrassing mission since the governor had slept with her himself. Nizi later got her released.

  * Created after the Crimean War out of Wallachia and Moldavia, the new state of Romania had appointed a Catholic cousin of the Prussian king, Karl von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen as its ruling prince and later king, Carol I.

  * The emperor moved up to a house closer to Nizi at Gorny Stoudene. The government was now based in a cottage beside the Danube, where the tsar was accompanied by War Minister Miliutin, Court Minister Sasha Adlerberg, Dr Sergei Botkin and ex-governor-general of Petersburg Prince Suvorov-Italiisky. Here he wrote nightly letters to Katya, entertained his sons and cousins for teas, chatted to his younger friend the artillery officer Emmanuel Meshchersky, husband of Katya’s sister, and went on walks and rides with Suvorov. Here he met his overmighty ally, Carol of Romania, ‘who thinks he’s a great power’, while regularly denouncing the intrigues of ‘that pig Beaconsfield who decides everything according to his own bonce!’

  * The Russians again tried to storm the Shipka Pass where Katya’s brother-in-law Emmanuel Meshchersky was killed. ‘I’m saddened to the bottom of my heart – what a noble character and I lose in him a real friend,’ wrote the emperor. Soon afterwards (12 October) his nephew Serge Leuchtenberg was killed by a cannonball to the head, ‘a beautiful death that proves the family serve like others’. Alexander wept when he saw the list of dead Guardsmen whom he knew personally. ‘I spent a restless night,’ he wrote on 5 September, ‘inconsolable about Emmanuel.’ And his baby Gogo was sick. Alexander suffered asthma and fell ill with fever.

  † The war had another front in the Caucasus where Alexander had appointd his youngest brother Mikhail as commander-in-chief. A kind man and magnificent specimen of manhood, he was no general, admitting to his staff ‘In wartime it’s bet
ter to be a coachman than a commander-in-chief.’ His top general, the Armenian, Mikhail Loris-Melikov was not impressed: the grand duke was ‘as frightened as a rabbit on the battlefield’, wrote Loris-Melikov. ‘Masked by his handsome appearance and good manners, he’s an ignoramus.’ But Loris possessed all the aptitude Mikhail lacked and delivered a series of victories.

  * The popular song of the day coined the neologism ‘jingoism’: ‘We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do / We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too / We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true / The Russians shall not have Constantinople’. But one sailor on board HMS Sultan in the Bosphorus was uneasy: the tsar’s son-in-law and Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred. Earlier in the crisis, the Belgian king Leopold II had suggested him as the ideal Anglo-Russian candidate to be emperor of Byzantium. ‘I’d sooner end the remainder of my days in China to such a fearful prospect,’ he replied. Now he feared orders to fire on his father-in-law’s soldiers. Queen Victoria bombarded him with anti-Russian letters, which he showed to his wife and she to her parents. ‘The insulting things the Queen says in her letters to Alfred’, Empress Marie wrote, ‘about the tsar and the Russian people are worthy of a fishwife.’

  * The war minister envisaged a three-pronged attack, then considered an action on the Afghan border. But this too was cancelled. Beaconsfield reacted by establishing an Afghan protectorate under a client king until the Russians sent in a pretender to contest the Afghan throne. The British, who had not learned from their catastrophic Afghan expedition in 1842, had invaded Afghanistan and imposed British control. But their minister and staff were massacred. ‘It’s what they deserve,’ Alexander told Empress Marie on 26 August 1878. Once London had disentangled itself from the Afghan quagmire, Britain was happy to withdraw provided Kabul did not become a Russian protectorate.

  * Their letters give a good idea of what it was like to be a tsar. When she grumbled about his work, he explained on 13 May 1872 that he had ‘to fulfil the obligations of my position which impose duties on me which I cannot neglect’. The Council ‘kept me for 2.1/2 hours this afternoon’; a ball lasted until midnight: ‘I was colossally bored’; the visiting shah of Persia was ‘an imbecile’ and ‘getting home at 11.30 p.m. I find a heap of papers to read’. In an age of telegrams, trains and howitzers, the demands of autocracy were becoming too much for one man. ‘Oh I love my tranquillity.’

  * Alexander still wrote tender if short letters to the TB-ravaged tsarina, ‘my dear friend’, saying, ‘Sorry to hear you’re feeling unwell.’ They shared the anniversaries of Nixa’s death, looked forward to meeting up again (‘I kiss you tenderly. I rejoice we’ll be reunited together soon’). He reported on ‘manoeuvres with the boys’ and wrote: ‘May you enjoy complete calm and new resources of health’ even though he secretly longed to marry Katya.

  † The governor-generals were mostly successful generals in the war: Gurko governed Petersburg, Totleben, Odessa and Loris-Melikov, Kharkov.

  * The upcoming jubilee has an enduring legacy. Nikolai Rubinstein commissioned his friend Tchaikovsky to produce a symphony that would be performed at the opening of the new Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow: the result was the 1812 Overture, so flamboyant, spectacular and almost cinematic with its booming cannons that it made Tchaikovsky internationally famous – and also embarrassed him for the rest of his life.

  * The marriage was morganatic, meaning the monarch’s titles could not be inherited by children of this union.

  * Pobedonostsev cultivated a network of reactionary allies through the nationalist newspaper barons Mikhail Katkov and Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, who had hired Dostoevsky to edit his newspaper the Citizen which the heir secretly funded. The prince introduced Dostoevsky to Pobedonostsev, and they became best friends, meeting on Saturday nights for hours of discussion. ‘I shall run again to you as I came to you on other days for instructions,’ wrote the novelist as he developed The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky best expressed their Slavophile instincts: ‘the Russian nation is an extraordinary phenomenon in the history of human genius.’ He was an avid monarchist, seeing the tsars as ‘a mystery, a sacrament, an anointment . . . the primary fact of our history’. Delighted that one of the titans of Russian literature had decent views, Pobedonostsev introduced Dostoevsky to Sasha who had read and admired Crime and Punishment. The meeting was awkward – Dostoevsky could not play the courtier but it did not matter. Alexander II invited him to give lectures to the younger grand dukes, Sergei and Paul and their cousin KR. Dostoevsky, once sentenced to death by one tsar, had become the confidant of the Romanovs. He died in early 1881.

  * The tsar’s youngest sons, Sergei and Paul, were in Florence on a Grand Tour. ‘The coming winter seemed to me a terrible nightmare,’ Sergei wrote to Sasha, who now told him that ‘there are so many, new shocking things. Thank God you’re not spending winter in Petersburg . . . I can’t give you details until we meet . . . I’ll add one thing: we can’t go against the fait accompli. One thing remains: to obey and fulfil the wishes and will of Papa . . .’ But Sergei and Paul still did not know about the marriage. ‘We’ve just received a letter from Papa talking about his wedding,’ Sergei wrote to Minny. ‘It hit me like a thunderbolt.’ Paul ‘cried a lot. The future is a black cloud,’ but ‘Tell Sasha we know our duty and all Papa’s orders will be sorrowfully obeyed.’ When their sister Maria of Edinburgh visited, she too was appalled by the presence of a new stepmother. Only the naughty Alexis understood.

  * ‘The realization of the project might have been a step toward a constitution but might not: everything depended on what would be stronger: the revolutionary party and liberal society or the resistance of the very powerful, coherent and unscrupulous party of adherents of autocracy.’ This was the later judgement of one of Russia’s shrewdest analysts of power, Vladimir Ulyanov, then an eleven-year-old schoolboy. Later he would become known as Lenin.

  † Alexander’s good mood was heightened by General Skobolev’s conquest of the lands across the Caspian, today’s Turkmenistan, though he massacred 25,000 civilians in the storming of Geog-Teop. Massacring helpless natives was gradually becoming less fashionable and Skobolev was recalled.

  * Sasha later commissioned the Church of the Saviour of Spilled Blood that stands on the site.

  * But he had forgotten about Crimea. On his first visit to Livadia, he and Minny were distressed to find Yurievskaya and her children in his mother’s apartments. They had a very awkward holiday together. To honour their father, Grand Dukes Sergei and Paul visited her: ‘You can’t imagine how hard it was for us. At Peterhof she was even more tactless and disgusting than ever.’ Afterwards, she left for France, taking much of her royal correspondence. Living in luxury, with residences in Paris and the Riviera and a private railway car, she brought up her children abroad, only occasionally returning to the Pink Palace in Petersburg. She lived only for the memory of Alexander, preserving his bloody uniform and creating a replica of his study while writing memoirs denouncing ‘the incapacity’ of Alexander III. When they were in Paris, Alexis and Vladimir dutifully called on her. She was friendly with Alexis, who helped her spoilt son Gogo join the Russian navy, but his abysmal conduct led to his dismissal. Nicholas II let him join the Guards instead. The three children married well. When Katya returned in the next reign, Nicholas II refused to meet her or to witness her daughter Olga’s marriage to Count Merenberg, a grandson of Pushkin. Katya died in 1922. Gogo died in 1913. The youngest daughter Catherine became a nightclub singer in England, living on Hayling Island on a pension from George V’s widow Queen Mary until her death in 1959.

  † Kostia was sacked as general-admiral and president of the State Council (replaced by the tsar’s younger uncle Mikhail, who complained, ‘They just want me to sit here powerless like a turkey’). ‘They throw me away like an old glove,’ Kostia wrote. While his wife Sanny remained in Petersburg, Kostia retired with his ballerina and family to Crimea. When the thi
rd uncle, Nizi, was dismissed from all positions, he tearfully asked the tsar to ennoble his illegitimate brood, to which he agreed. The death of his mistress Chislova drove him mad, his priapic sexuality now metamorphosed into hypersexual insanity: ‘suffering from delusions’, he ‘molested every woman he met’ and, after a ballet, he ‘became so aroused he went backstage and tried to seduce everyone he saw’, even male dancers. This was probably tertiary syphilis. He was confined to his Crimean palace. His brother Mikhail wittily expressed his ‘astonishment that a man of such excessive stupidity could still lose his mind’.

  SCENE 3

  Colossus

  CAST

  ALEXANDER III, emperor 1881–94, son of Alexander II and Marie, ‘Sasha’, ‘Colossus’

  Maria Fyodorovna (née Princess Dagmar of Denmark), empress, ‘Minny’

  NICHOLAS II, emperor 1894–1917, their son, the heir, ‘Nicky’

  Alexandra Fyodorovna (née Princess Alexandra of Hesse), Nicky’s fiancée, ‘Alix’, ‘Sunny’

  Georgi, second son of Alexander III and Minny, ‘Georgy’

  Xenia, their elder daughter, married Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, ‘Sandro’

  Michael, their third son, ‘Misha’

  Olga, their younger daughter