The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Alexander’s contempt for his own ministers was a futile attitude in the modern world. In his reverence for his autocracy, he failed to see that his own arbitrariness was a flaw. ‘Sire,’ explained Richter, ‘we have a terrible evil. Lack of law.’

  ‘But I always stand for compliance with the laws.’

  ‘I’m not talking about you but about your administration, which abuses its power. Today Russia is like a colossal boiler in which pressure is building; when it gets a hole, people with hammers rivet them; but one day the gases will blow out a hole that can’t be filled and we’ll suffocate.’6

  It was time to crown the tsar – if the terrorists did not kill him first.

  On 10 a.m. on 12 May 1883, escorted by the Horse Guards, the emperor rode alone into Moscow at the head of a procession of grand dukes followed by a long file of golden carriages with the empress and her little daughter Olga in the first. Three days later, the tsar crowned himself and Minny in the Dormition Cathedral. Afterwards, they attended the public feast at Khodynka Field for which Sasha ‘supervised every detail personally’. This was ‘the happiest day’ of his life and he treated the ritual as a credo for autocracy. This ‘great event’, he explained afterwards to Minny, ‘amazed and showed morally tainted Europe that Russia is the most holy Orthodox Russia as it was under the Muscovite tsar and will be for ever’.7 Alexander believed in Russia’s Slavophile mission, but after 1877 he was determined to avoid war.

  ‘We have only two allies in this world,’ Alexander liked to say. ‘Our army and our navy.’ But neither was powerful enough to project Russia’s imperial pretensions in competition with the industrialized Western powers. The tsar was faced with an impossible dilemma: to maintain the façade of imperial power, that prerequisite of Romanov autocracy, while coping with the reality of a backward peasant-dominated economy, an ill-organized army and a navy that was no match for Britain in the Baltic and smaller than the Ottomans’ fleet in the Black Sea. The emotional demands of Slavophile opinion, made up of a section of the educated classes, were as dangerous for the dynasty as foreign defeat. ‘If we lose the confidence of public opinion in our foreign policy,’ Alexander said with his ability to get to the heart of the matter, ‘all is lost.’

  He may have been a primordial throwback, but now Alexander had to operate in the world of public opinion, stock markets and newspapers in which he found some of his most unlikely advisers* – none more so than Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, known by enemies at court as ‘the Prince of Sodom’ and among the intelligentsia as ‘Prince Full-stop’ after he demanded all reform must come to that punctuation mark. Meshchersky had been Sasha’s go-between with his first love, ME, who was his cousin. When they married, the empress tried to ban her husband from seeing his friend, but Sasha kept up a secret correspondence with him. In the 1870s, Meshchersky founded a conservative newspaper called the Citizen, which Sasha funded: as tsar he made payments as large as 100,000 roubles. ‘We want to have a conservative press,’ he explained. ‘Just look what Bismarck spends.’

  Meshchersky was an ultra-reactionary but original and gifted. Although he disapproved of female education and believed that ‘there is nothing people fear except the birch’, he was a surprising opponent of the regime’s short-sighted persecution of minorities, even that of Jews. His was the only newspaper that Alexander read, and Meshchersky, who sometimes met the tsar secretly, started to send him his acerbic ‘diary’. Yet all the time he was living an openly gay life* under an emperor who prided himself on his straitlaced Orthodox morals. When Meshchersky tried to get his young lover, a bugle-boy, a job at the palace, his enemies caught the pair in flagrante. Pobedonostsev muttered that this was ‘the man who was caught with a trumpet-player of the Guards’. Anyone else would have been destroyed. Yet the tsar made his own rules.

  All the tsar’s nationalist advisers were highly suspicious of Germany but the only solution for now was to maintain the League of Three Emperors and run an ersatz great-power policy that looked strong and hope it was not tested. Alexander was convinced that Russia would one day have to fight Germany. As for Austrians, he once bent a silver fork into a parabola to warn their ambassador: ‘That’s what I’m going to do to your two or three army corps.’†

  Six months later, the League was put to the test when Alexander’s cousin Alexander Battenberg, prince of Bulgaria, united his independent state with the Ottoman province. Even though this was exactly what Russia had wanted in 1878, the tsar was incensed. Battenberg had exposed Russia’s failure to control its own client state and was forced to abdicate. The tsar hoped to replace him with his Georgian courtier Prince Mingrelsky. But at a melodramatic meeting in a box at the Viennese opera house, the Bulgarians offered the throne to the half-French, half-German Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, an officer in the Austrian army, a perfumed, bejewelled, wasp-waisted dandy with a high-pitched voice and a Bourbon nose who enjoyed courtesans and rentboys with equal relish. ‘This candidature is as ridiculous as the individual,’ Alexander boomed. But, over the next twenty-five years, ‘Foxy’ Ferdinand successfully established Bulgaria and defied Russia at will.

  The tsar considered war against Austria to remove this jackanapes, but in 1879 Bismarck had signed a defensive treaty with Austria, forming a Germanic bloc in central Europe which was soon joined by Italy to become the Triple Alliance. Alexander refused to renew the League of Three Emperors. As the German and Russian press raised the tension between the countries with talk of a coming Teutonic–Slavic struggle, Bismarck proposed a Reinsurance Treaty ensuring neutrality in the event of war against a third party, with a secret clause giving Russia undefined rights to Constantinople. Alexander accepted Bismarck’s ingenious plan, yet it contradicted Germany’s alliance with Austria. Secretly Alexander was convinced that ‘We must break up Germany as soon as we get the chance.’

  Public opinion demanded that Russia play the Slav champion. But Bulgaria was ungrateful and Serbia cleaved to Austria, so Alexander sought more dependable Slavs. The tiny principality of Montenegro was ruled by the Petrovic´ dynasty of bishop-princes. Its prince Nikola, who liked to sit all day in a gold-braided uniform smoking cigarettes on a bench in front of his minuscule ‘palace’ and would risk anything to take over a greater Serbia, had placed four of his nine daughters in the Smolny Institute. In 1889, during a visit to Petersburg, the tsar proposed the marriage of Princess Militsa to Grand Duke Peter Nikolaievich (younger son of Nizi, the commander of the 1877 war) and another daughter, Stana, to Georgi, duke of Leuchtenberg.* These sisters would later introduce Rasputin to the Romanovs. At the betrothal banquet, Sasha toasted Prince Nikola as ‘the only sincere and faithful friend of Russia’. The Balkan states were unreliable but unavoidable. Alexander decided that the only essential interest was, one day, winning the Straits. He realized he needed a new alliance – and a new economy. At this dangerous moment, he reached out in surprising directions to deliver both.8

  On 17 October 1888, the tsar and his family were on the train back from Crimea when he received the director of the South-Western Railway, Sergei Witte, to whom he complained that the train was going too slowly. ‘Is this railway run by Yids?’ asked the tsar. Witte, a brash engineer, contradicted the tsar, explaining that the trains were being driven too fast. But Alexander ordered his train to accelerate.

  At midday, ‘we were just finishing breakfast’ near Borki, reported young Nicholas to his uncle Sergei,

  when suddenly we felt a strong jolt then another much stronger and everything started to crash and we were thrown out of our chairs, the table just flew over my head and was gone. I’ll never forget the smash . . . I closed my eyes and lay expecting to die . . . I saw a light and climbed out and pulled out [his sister] Xenia . . . I thought with horror about Mama and Papa and what divine joy when I saw them standing on the roof of the former dining wagon . . .

  Twenty-three were dead, and the Herculean tsar helped rescue the wounded by lifting up the roof of the carriage. A child was screaming: �
��Now they’ll murder us all’* – it was his youngest daughter, Olga, who had been thrown clear of the train. Afterwards the emperor joked: ‘Imagine [his next-eldest brother] Vladimir’s disappointment when he hears we’ve survived.’†

  Borki was not a bomb, but the tsar remembered the blunt railwayman Witte, who was first promoted to run the railways. Then, summoned to Petersburg where Alexander, wary of the Jewish railway moguls, asked him, ‘Are you a friend of Jews?’, Witte replied that if it was not possible to drown them all in the Black Sea, they should at least be treated as humans. Satisfied, the tsar appointed him communications minister, the start of an astonishing rise.

  Bombastic and barrel-chested, the thirty-nine-year-old Witte was a new species of minister – the provincial technocrat. Son of a civil servant of Lutheran Scandinavian origins and a Dolgoruky princess, raised in Tiflis and qualified as an engineer in Odessa, this artful intriguer was abrasively confident yet thin-skinned, mendacious, manipulative and overweeningly narcissistic. He made a virtue of ‘the lack of restraint and brazenness of speech that are part of my character’ – qualities appreciated by the tsar. When it came to safeguarding a unique asset like Witte, Sasha changed his own rules: soon after arriving in the capital, Witte offered to resign because he had fallen in love with a divorced Jewess. The tsar admired Witte’s chivalry in marrying the woman. As Minny later told Witte, ‘You were my husband’s favourite minister.’

  Russia was still mired in depression. In 1891, thousands died in a famine, exacerbated by the policy to finance industrialization by borrowing, which in turn had to be paid for by selling grain abroad. Yet Sasha denied its very existence, claiming that it was Nihilist propaganda. Only Vorontsov’s intervention alerted the tsar.

  Just as Russia emerged from this crisis, in 1892, Alexander promoted Witte to finance minister. As a monarchist and patriot, Witte believed that only a breakneck industrialization programme, funded by foreign borrowing, would overcome ‘two hundred years of economic sleep’ and give Russia the power to compete with the European powers in the geopolitical tournament – or as he later put it ‘the fulfilment of the great political tasks of the monarchy’. Ukraine was now the breadbasket of Europe, much of its grain sold through Odessa’s bourses and thence by ship through the Straits. As Russia became Europe’s top agricultural producer, Witte injected the economy with foreign and government investment to produce a boom. Between 1890 and 1900, the production of pig iron, steel and coal all tripled, railway tracks doubled in length while textiles made Russia one of the world’s top five industrial powers. Oil was discovered in Baku, which soon produced half of the world’s supply.

  Nothing so symbolized Witte’s dynamism as the Trans-Siberian Railway. Although already commissioned by Alexander, Witte made it his showcase. As the railway edged its way across Siberia, Witte was dizzy with the possibilities. ‘From the shores of the Pacific and the heights of the Himalayas,’ he told Alexander III, ‘Russia will dominate not only the affairs of Asia but Europe as well.’

  While Russia surged towards industrialized modernity, the emperor tried to hold the state together by mobilizing Russian nationalism and repressing the empire’s minorities. In this multinational empire of 104 nationalities speaking 146 languages, according to the 1897 census, pure Russians (excluding Ukrainians) were a minority of 44 per cent. Now the emperor ordered that in addition to anti-semitic policies, only Russian was to be taught in Polish, Armenian and Georgian schools: an own-goal for the regime, unnecessarily converting millions of these people into enemies.9

  In 1889, Dmitri Tolstoy died, mourned by Alexander. No one could replace ‘the last of the Mohicans’ but the new interior minister, Ivan Durnovo, was an anti-semitic bigot with a preposterous fork-shaped beard, who found an ally in Alexander’s strange younger brother, Sergei. In March 1891, Alexander appointed Sergei governor-general of Moscow. But ‘my brother doesn’t want to go to Moscow’, explained Alexander, ‘unless it’s cleared of Jews’, who had moved out of the Pale of Settlement as its restrictions were relaxed. The tsar ordered the police to ‘expel the Jews of Moscow’. On 28 April, Alexander signed the first of a series of laws allowing Sergei to deport whole categories – ‘Jewish artisans, distillers, brewers, general craftsmen and workmen’ and even ‘discharged Jewish soldiers’. In Moscow, Sergei closed the Great Synagogue, sent Cossacks to raid Jewish homes and allowed Jewish women to remain only if they were registered as prostitutes. Twenty thousand Jews were expelled. This crackdown encouraged Jewish emigration to America to reach 137,000 a year. Sergei had mixed feelings about his post, telling his nephew Nicky, ‘Here I am as governor-general of Moscow, funny but also sad, I miss my regiment . . . my circle of old comrades . . . I confess leaving Petersburg, I just cried like a baby.’ But Sergei was ambitious: ‘The job doesn’t scare me, it interests me very much.’

  Sergei was ‘obstinate, arrogant, disagreeable, [and] he flaunted his many peculiarities’, in Sandro’s view. ‘I can’t find a single redeeming feature.’ Sergei was ‘the most frightening of the uncles,’ wrote Missy. ‘Abrupt and severe . . . his lips thin and in a firm line almost cruel . . . his eyes steely grey, his pupils narrow like a cat . . . There was something menacing about him, something in his face of the fanatic he was in his heart.’

  ‘Introspective, his spirit imprisoned within him, he hid private impulses of exceeding sensitiveness,’ thought his niece Maria Pavlovna, that were ‘almost feminine’. Happiest as the commander of the Preobrazhensky Guards, he was, recalled Witte, ‘always surrounded by comparatively young men who were excessively affectionate towards him’, revealing his own ‘marked liking for young men’.

  Aged eight, he had been affected by the death of his eldest brother Nixa and the sufferings of his mother that led her to spend many months at her ancestral home in Hesse-Darmstadt. There Sergei met his cousin Princess Elizabeth of Hesse, who was growing up with her tragic mother, Queen Victoria’s daughter Alice, and wanted to become a nun. ‘A ravishing beauty’ of ‘rare intelligence, delightful sense of humour, infinite patience and generous heart’, blonde with grey eyes and alabaster skin, she was the ‘first love’ of the German crown prince, Willy. But Sergei was determined to marry her and, though she refused to convert to Orthodoxy, in 1884 he succeeded. (Willy, later the kaiser, never forgave him, spreading the story that Sergei ‘was buggering his handsome young domestic chaplain’.) Their childless marriage was possibly never consummated yet ‘Serge worshipped her in spite of his scoldings,’ noticed Missy and ‘Ella’, as she was known, understood him: ‘He loved order.’ He may have suited Ella, who was as coldly vain as she was beautifully virtuous – ‘her purity was absolute’, thought Missy who worshipped ‘this vision, a joy for the eyes.’

  Sergei’s marriage to Ella led to Nicky’s first meeting with Ella’s sister, Alexandra of Hesse (‘Alix’), and their relationship developed – just as Russia’s relationship with the new Germany deteriorated.10

  The accession and new policies of the twenty-nine-year-old kaiser Wilhelm II, inconsistent, impulsive and unstable, made up Alexander’s mind for him. Straight after his accession in 1888, Willy set off to visit Alexander, who loathed ‘the rascally young fop who throws his weight about, thinks too much of himself and fancies that others worship him’. Cherevin remembered that the tsar ‘was literally nauseated by Wilhelm who physically disgusted him’. He regarded him as a sort of infantile monkey. When the tsar paid his return visit, Willy suddenly suggested the division of Europe between Germany and Russia, at which Alexander growled: ‘Stop whirling around like a dervish, Willy, just look at yourself in the mirror!’

  Alexander felt Russia was isolated. He grasped long before most of his ministers that Bismarck was ‘ignoring the kinship of Romanovs and Hohenzollerns’. It was a new era. ‘I desire to establish the principle of protecting the rights of peoples as well as dynasties,’ he told Giers. ‘I suggest you maintain a friendly attitude to France . . . at the proper time . . . to negotiate a formal alliance.�
�� But the French were immoral revolutionaries! ‘Such is impossible,’ replied a shocked Giers. Not so, answered Alexander, this was his order. But he moved with glacial slowness. In 1890, the kaiser suddenly sacked old Bismarck, and the new chancellor General von Caprivi urged him not to renew the Russian treaty – to avoid its contradictions with the Triple Alliance into which he hoped to tempt Britain. This made a French alliance inevitable. In July 1891, Alexander invited the French fleet to Kronstadt and the autocrat took off his hat for the republican (and previously illegal) ‘Marseillaise’. When he visited the French Exhibition in Moscow, a courtier was covering a nude statue with a blanket when the emperor bellowed: ‘Leave it alone! I know that costume is the one the French most admire!’ Both nations were threatened by Germany – and Britain. In 1894, the tsar signed the alliance with France.

  The kaiser desperately tried to win back the tsar. Alexander, accompanied by Nicky, finally met him at the naval review at Kiel. There Alexander ‘was in the best of spirits’, noted the kaiser, while Nicky ‘has greatly developed and is a charming, well-bred boy with agreeable manners’.11

  *

  The boisterous tsar was only forty-six, so it was unlikely that Nicky would inherit for a long time. Five feet seven inches tall, timid, childlike and inscrutably passive, Nicky was fit, loving exercise and hunting, sported a clipped auburn beard and possessed velvety, radiant blue eyes, his best feature, inherited from his mother.

  ‘The heir, now twenty-four,’ wrote the deputy foreign minister, Lamsdorf, ‘makes a strange impression, half-boy, half-man, small of stature, thin and undistinguished’, yet also ‘obstinate’ and ‘thoughtless’. His mother had tended to infantilize her boys. ‘He wore his little sailor suits longer than most boys do,’ noted Countess ‘Zizi’ Naryshkina. ‘He was a man with a small horizon and a narrow outlook and for years had barely gone beyond the wall’ of the Anichkov and then Gatchina palace gardens. Even when Nicky was a Guards colonel, his mother still addressed him as ‘my dear little soul, my boy’. His diary tells of hide-and-seek, drinking games and contests with conkers and fir cones well into his twenties.