The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  THE EMPEROR’S SIBLINGS

  Vladimir, commander of the Guards, married Maria Pavlovna, ‘Miechen’ (née Princess Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin)

  Alexis, general-admiral, ‘Beau’

  Sergei, ‘Gega’, governor-general of Moscow, married Ella (née Princess Elizabeth of Hesse)

  Paul, married Princess Alexandra of Greece, ‘Pitz’

  Maria, married to Prince Alfred, duke of Edinburgh and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha

  Marie, their daughter, later queen of Romania, ‘Missy’

  Melita, ‘Ducky’, their daughter, later grand duchess of Hesse-Darmstadt, married to Ernst

  COURTIERS: ministers etc.

  General Peter Cherevin, adjutant-general and security chief

  Count Ilarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, court minister

  Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, newspaper editor and adviser, ‘Prince of Sodom’

  Konstantin Pobedonostsev, ober-procurator of the Holy Synod, ‘Torquemada’

  Count Nikolai Ignatiev, interior minister, ‘Lord Liar’

  Count Dmitri Tolstoy, interior minister

  Sergei Witte, finance minister

  Mathilde Kshessinskaya, ballerina, mistress of Nicky, ‘Little K’

  Now thirty-six years old, Alexander III was six feet three inches tall, and still so strong that his party-trick was to bend pokers and tear up packs of cards. Nicknamed ‘the Colossus’, he was the sort of tsar who always knew who he was and what he wanted – no small qualities in a leader.

  The Colossus was not sorry to retire to that hulking barracks-like palace of Gatchina, for he was deeply shy and hated social frippery and court balls. Ursine, husky and stout, he seemed, wrote one of his ministers, ‘an absolute lout like a big Russian peasant’, and relished hunting, practical jokes, rough-housing and drinking. He made his own coarseness into a nationalistic virtue and prided himself on his gruff plain Russianness, dressing in boots and blouse and sporting a full beard, the first tsar to do so since Alexei.

  The empress, Minny, was his opposite – she ‘loved to preside at solemn ceremonies’ with ‘a radiant smile for everyone’; she adored dresses, diamonds* and balls. When they attended his brother Alexis’s ball, ‘the emperor as always appeared and hid’, noticed Admiral Shestakov, while ‘the empress as always danced tirelessly’.

  If she went away, he missed her bitterly: ‘My sweet darling Minny, for five years we’ve never been apart and Gatchina is empty and sad without you.’ She replied, ‘I’m so pleased you missed me. I thought you didn’t care and wouldn’t even notice . . . I terribly miss you and the idea that you’re lonely and sad at Gatchina tears me apart!’

  Sasha was no Lothario, but once, meeting the Austrian and German kaisers, he was so dazzled by the Austrian actress Katharina Schratt (soon to be Franz Josef’s mistress) that he embarrassed everyone by paying her court and sending her flowers. Minny flirted heavily with at least one courtier, who signed his notes: ‘I kiss your dainty teeth.’ But theirs was that rare thing: a happy and faithful royal marriage. The emperor was most content presiding over horseplay with his three sons and two daughters, the last of whom, Olga, was born soon after his succession. Sasha felled trees, roasted apples, rowed on the lake and indulged in food fights with bread-balls. He was not interested in books. Instead ‘He wanted us to read the book of nature as easily as he read it himself,’ recalled Olga, who was allowed to sit under his desk while he worked. ‘Papa turned on the hose, then we ran through the jet and got terribly wet,’ the sixteen-year-old Nicky recorded on 7 June 1884. ‘The children of course are our great consolation,’ the tsar told Minny; ‘only with them can I relax mentally, enjoy them and rejoice, looking at them.’ But the Colossus was so dominating that his sons were crushed. The second son Georgy was ‘the cleverest’ and, according to General Cherevin, ‘the favourite of both parents’, but the youngest, Michael – ‘Misha’ – enjoyed special rights: only Misha dared to avenge the tsar’s hosing by pouring a bucket of water over his head.

  In the summer, the family stayed at the Cottage at Peterhof and often travelled to stay with Minny’s family in Copenhagen where, ‘out of prison’ as the tsar put it, he could live with much less security. Minny loved to spend time with her sister, the princess of Wales. Alexander bought a house where he behaved ‘just like a schoolboy’, squirting King Christian of Denmark or King Oscar of Sweden with hosepipes, his favourite means of social expression. In a family story that is told today by Prince Philip, the duke of Edinburgh, he loved to walk in the park with his brother-in-law the prince of Wales and other relatives, where they once encountered a lost tourist who obliviously asked the way to the town centre and then asked their names so he could thank them. ‘The emperor of Russia, the king of Denmark, the king of Greece and the prince of Wales,’ came the answer. ‘And I’m the Queen of Sheba,’ replied the tourist.*

  Minny had little political influence, trying in vain to rid herself of the emperor’s brutish adjutant-general Cherevin. A cross between ‘a primeval savage, an ignoramus royal batman and a refined courtier’, Cherevin ‘idolized Alexander III’ and explained that ‘he divided the world into two halves: at the top, Alexander III with him, Cherevin, on guard and beneath them, the rabble’ of ministers and other Romanovs. ‘Nothing matters but the tsar’s will,’ he explained to a friend. ‘I’m not evil and I like you, but if the emperor ordered “hang him”, I wouldn’t question the order!’ ‘The terror of the palace’ sat at a desk outside the tsar’s study and would not let anyone, especially importuning Romanovs, interrupt him. ‘How dare you disturb me. I’m serving the state protecting the sovereign,’ he shouted drunkenly. Cherevin enjoyed insulting the tsar’s pompous brother Vladimir, who complained of his rudeness. ‘If you’re pissed off,’ replied Alexander, ‘challenge him to a duel.’

  The tsar and Cherevin loved to drink, ‘but the emperor drank at the right time’, the general remembered. ‘Not in the morning or afternoon in order to keep a clear head nor at the Wednesday-evening receptions – until only his pals remained. Then he started to frolic and play’ – getting so drunk that the tsar ‘lay on his back and waved his arms and legs about, behaving like a child, trying to get to his feet and then falling down, grabbing the legs of anyone who walked past’.

  But ‘In the late 1880s, the doctors forbade him to drink so the worried tsarina began to follow us and check there was no drinking at the receptions. But when at the end of the evening, His Majesty was lying on his back, kicking legs and squealing, the tsarina couldn’t understand how!’ They defied Minny’s drinking bans like this: ‘The emperor and myself managed to get by! We ordered jackboots with special compartments in which we could carry a flask holding the equivalent of a bottle of cognac. When the tsarina was beside us we played like good children,’ but when she left, ‘we’d exchange glances. Then: 1-2-3! We’d pull out our flasks, take a swig and then it would be again as if nothing had happened.’ The tsar ‘was very pleased with this amusement. We named it Necessity is the Mother of Invention.’

  ‘1-2-3. Necessity, Cherevin?’ said the tsar.

  ‘Invention, Your Majesty,’ replied Cherevin.

  ‘“1-2-3!” – and then we’d swig!’1

  Alexander found his self-indulgent, extravagant and over-extended family exasperating.* When the wider family got too big for their boots, the emperor smacked them down. ‘Stop playing the tsar,’ he once telegraphed to his second-youngest brother Sergei.† He ‘repeated that grand dukes should not head departments . . .’. But ‘on a sudden impulse’ he entrusted the navy to his brother, the buffalo-hunting sailor Alexis, who had spent 1,722 days at sea and now devoted himself to pleasure.

  ‘Our Beau Brummel’, as Sandro called Alexis, ‘was the best looking of the family.’ His niece Missy (daughter of their sister the duchess of Edinburgh) thought him a ‘Viking type, and would have made a perfect Lohengrin . . . fair beard, blue eyes, enormous, a superb specimen of humanity,’ with ‘a sailor’s love for all good things and beautiful w
omen in particular.’ His New Orleans tour had given him a taste for zoot suits. ‘His handsome figure was accoutred in a strange garb of his own choosing and invention which gave him the appearance of a real showman,’ remembered his nephew Kyril. His favourite was a ‘a red-striped flannel suit, a Mephistophelian affair, of which he alone among all men on earth was the proud possessor. “I’m better dressed than any of you fellows,” he’d say.’ He was also extremely kind and cheerful.

  As for the serious question of the navy in the age of the Dreadnought arms race, ‘My grand duke seems indifferent not only to the Navy but to all matters,’ Admiral Shestakov noted in his diary. ‘He drives me mad with his laziness and indifference.’ He lived for ‘love-making, food and liquor’, wrote his cousin Sandro, ‘fast women and slow ships.’

  Alexis and his brothers now spent much of their time in Paris – their hangouts were known as la tournée des grands ducs, their fashion le style grand duc. There Alexis once had a French actress wheeled into dinner on a silver tray nude except for rose petals. Daydreaming in the State Council, this libertine ‘can think only about how he could escape to Zina’s bed’, observed State Secretary Alexander Polovtsov. Zina was General Skobolev’s sister and the wife of his cousin Eugene of Leuchtenberg, glorying in the Napoleonic-Romanov title of duchesse de Beauharnais. ‘When I say Zina was “beautiful”,’ explained Sandro, ‘I’ve never seen anyone like her in all my travels which is fortunate because women of her maddening pagan appeal shouldn’t really be permitted to roam at large.’ She was ‘naughty’, recalled Missy, ‘and would have made her fortune on the screen as a vamp.’

  When the duke found his own bedroom locked and heard Zina’s orgasmic cries, he banged on the door at which Alexis threw him downstairs. Leuchtenberg appealed to Alexander III, who replied that if he could not manage his own life, how could he expect others to help? But Beau’s naval post would prove to be Alexander’s worst decision.2

  In April, as the tsar organized his government, murderous anti-semitic riots known as pogroms (from gromit, ‘to destroy’) broke out, starting in Kherson and spreading to Odessa and Warsaw. Forty Jews were murdered and women gang-raped. Even though scarcely any of Alexander II’s assassins were Jews, rumours spread that Jews had killed God’s tsar. The rumours were stoked by an economic depression also blamed on Jewish merchants. Alexander ordered his interior minister Ignatiev to restore order but blamed the Jews for their own plight.

  ‘Deep in my soul,’ he told the Warsaw governor General Josef Gurko, ‘I am very glad when they beat up Jews, but nevertheless it can’t be allowed.’ The tsar believed that ‘on the soul of the Jews, a sin is burning’. He had ‘a fierce hatred of the Jews’, according to his State Secretary Polovtsov, and always opposed any improvement in their lives. ‘Their condition is lamentable,’ he wrote, ‘but it was forecast in the Gospel.’ They deserved their suffering, he explained, as they themselves had wanted the blood of Christ to remain ‘upon us and our children’.

  When asked why he had refused to promote an officer, he replied ‘he is a rotten, lousy Jew.’ Just about anything could be blamed on the Jews: when his train ran too slowly, the tsar blamed ‘the Yids’. In the family, he called Mikhail’s wife Olga ‘Auntie Haber’ after her supposedly American Jewish father, and he encouraged an almost fetishistic anti-semitism among his entourage. ‘What you write about the Yids is completely just,’ Pobedonostsev had written to Dostoevsky. ‘They have coarsened everything, but the spirit of the century supports them. They are at the root of the revolutionary socialist movement and of regicide, they own the periodic press, they have the financial markets.’ He believed ‘one faith is the true faith’ and all the others must be subject ‘to non-recognition or outright persecution’.

  Cherevin boasted to a dinner party that he had arrested and destroyed an innocent Jewish lawyer, explaining that ‘the dirty Jew’ may not be guilty today ‘but would be yesterday and tomorrow’. The pogroms were not ordered from Petersburg, but they thrived in this atmosphere.

  Troops were deployed to restore order, and in September Alexander signed Emergency Laws to ‘preserve state security’, followed, in May 1882, by Temporary Regulations on Jews, which banned pogroms but were more concerned with protecting ‘the interests of the local populace’ by banning Jews from living in the countryside or outside the Pale.

  Not all the entourage agreed with this repression: the court minister Count Vorontsov-Dashkov* warned Alexander against ‘Count Ignatiev’s policy of lies which reflect on you, Sire! I’m amazed how negligent Count Ignatiev is . . . to stir up hostility against the Germans, smash the Jews, persecute the Poles – these are the fundamentals of his internal ethnic policy – that will end in streams of blood.’ He was right. This ruined Russia’s image in Europe. Most Jews were loyal, but tsarist repression drove many to become revolutionaries – or emigrate. After 1881, over 60,000 Jews left annually for America.3

  The emperor and Pobedonostsev were already dissatisfied with Ignatiev, the intelligent intriguer who was so well known for his lies that he was nicknamed ‘Lord Liar’ and may have suffered from Munchausen Syndrome. Once order had been restored, Alexander planned his coronation. Ignatiev proposed to call an Assembly of the Land, like the one that had elected the first Romanov tsar. ‘I was stricken by horror,’ wrote Pobedonostsev to Alexander, ‘[fearing] the consequences should Count Ignatiev’s project be executed. There will be a revolution, the destruction of Russia!’

  Ignatiev resigned, replaced by the very personification of reactionary repression, Count Dmitri Tolstoy, the cultured, wealthy ex-liberal who as education minister had become loathed by liberal society. Tolstoy was Alexander’s ideal minister. He soon tired of the creepy Pobedonostsev. To the tsar, Tolstoy was ‘the last of the Mohicans’. He promoted the battered gentry, undermined the zemstvos and jury trials, created the new post of land captain – government-appointed officials to replace justices of the peace – and tightened censorship.† Then Tolstoy created a secret police that was at last qualified to take on the terrorists.4

  After Alexander II’s assassination a cabal of aristocrats led by Sasha’s cronies Cherevin and Vorontsov had founded a clandestine counterrevolutionary hit and espionage squad, the Sacred Retinue, to protect the new tsar and ‘respond to terror with terror’. After a series of amateurish capers to assassinate revolutionaries, Dmitri Tolstoy closed the Retinue but hired its best agents. He turned perlustration into a science, organizing such efficient ‘black offices’ that soon only the tsar and the interior minister himself could be certain that their mail was not being read. He set up a new organization, the Okhrannye Otdeleniia – Security Bureaux – nicknamed the ‘Okhrana’ (the Little Security Bureau), in Moscow and Petersburg dedicated not just to stopping terrorist attacks but to penetrating the movements. Grigory Sudeikin, chief of the Petersburg Okhrana with the title inspector of the secret police, pursued the terrorists ‘not out of obligation but out of conviction, enthusiastically, not unlike a hunt, an art, cunning and risky with pleasure derived from success’.

  When he turned a People’s Will leader, Sergei Degaev, he was able to arrest many of the terrorists until they became suspicious, sentencing Degaev to death unless he proved his loyalty. On 16 December 1883, Degaev arranged to meet his controller and then shot Sudeikin dead.* Despite this setback, the Okhrana became increasingly effective. Yet Alexander regarded his secret policemen as disreputable but necessary, not unlike the plumber who unblocks one’s cesspit. And he did not think much more of his own ministers.5

  The emperor ‘despised the bureaucracy and drank champagne to its obliteration’. He ran the government by divine appointment and his ministers had to know their place. When a minister impertinently threatened to resign, he seized him by the collar and shouted, ‘Shut up! When I choose to kick you out, you will hear of it in no uncertain terms!’ Politicians were ‘scoundrels’, on whose reports he would write comments like ‘what a beast!’ He often shouted, ‘as for the ministers, the
devil take them’. His foreign minister Nikolai Giers was a ‘dummy’ who, he said, acted as his ‘clerk’. He tried to find a way around the ministers, and, as he struggled to absorb complex issues, he asked his three henchmen, Cherevin, Vorontsov and head of the court chancellery, General Otto Richter, to form an all-powerful triumvirate, reducing ministerial reports to short digests. But they shied away from this responsibility.

  Ultimately the ministers respected Alexander because he was a plain-dealing manager. ‘His words never differed from his actions.’ His rages were short but sudden – and he was charming when he wanted to be. When, in an early case of press intrusion, a journalist published an account of Alexander barking at his family on holiday at his Polish shooting lodge Spała, the tsar exploded, tearing a shred off Vorontsov who, as court minister, had approved it: ‘I haven’t read anything more foolish, hurtful and wrong in the newspapers, what stupid details!’

  ‘I’m responsible for all this,’ Vorontsov replied, resigning his ministry. ‘I’d give anything for this not to have happened.’ But the gruff emperor soothed him with this note: ‘Dear Ilarion Ivanovich, will we actually split up over such trivia? If this miserable occasion gives you the idea to resign, knowing how difficult if not impossible I’d find it to replace you, I’m sure you’ll give up your intention and remain in your high position as my assistant and friend.’

  Rough and unlettered as he was, Alexander had, recalled a minister, the clarity of a ‘great administrator’, possessing ‘enormous character, good nature, firmness’ and ‘a remarkable intuition, a kind of intelligence more important than reason’. This was combined with ‘straightforward, childlike naivety and simple-mindedness’.

  He could be brutal. When a female political prisoner insulted a Gendarme, Alexander ordered: ‘Flog her.’ His minister asked for a lesser sentence than the maximum 100 strokes since she was fragile, but the tsar insisted, ‘Give her the hundred strokes.’ They killed her. ‘He is not wicked,’ wrote the diplomat Vladimir Lamsdorf, ‘but he’s drunk with power.’ His war minister General Vannovsky joked that he was like ‘Peter the Great with his cudgel’ – except ‘here is only the cudgel without the great Peter’.