The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Nicky was educated at home, both for security and out of parental inclination. This gave him that rarest of things in royal families, a warm, happy childhood – but it also made him isolated and naive. His education was deliberately easy-going, his tutor General Danilovich believing that ‘Mysterious forces emanating during the sacrament of coronation provided all the practical data required by a ruler.’ His other tutors were impressive, but Nicky was too immature to benefit. His legal and history tutor, old Pobedonostsev complained, ‘I could only observe he was completely absorbed picking his nose.’ But his favourite was his English teacher, Charles Heath. While hating English arrogance and liberalism, Nicky became the personification of Anglo-Saxon self-control, a highly unRussian quality. Perhaps his phlegm was a reaction against the unbuttoned sentimentality of his flawed grandfather. He had spent much time with Alexander II, whose serentiy in the face of danger he emulated: ‘I set myself the task of always following Grandfather’s example of calm.’ If so, he took it to such an extent that when faced with catastrophes his courtiers wondered if he felt anything at all. ‘He never laughed, and rarely cried,’ noted his cousin Sandro. This was partly a means of controlling the uncontrollable world around him and playing a role for which he felt inadequate, but it was linked to his profound mystical belief in fate. ‘He would often put his arm around me,’ recalled his sister Olga, ‘and say, “I was born on Job’s day – I’m ready to accept my fate.”’ Behind his manners and shyness lurked a strong strain of cunning and determination – both useful qualities in politics. Inscrutability and unflappability are assets in anyone watched so carefully, but there is a thin line between placidity and paralysis. His first cousin Missy loved his charm, ‘his eyes kind, there was something gentle about his voice, low-pitched and soft’, but something was missing: ‘one never felt estranged but neither did one get any closer.’

  Nicky was averagely intelligent: he learned quickly, his memory was impressive, he avidly read history, enjoyed Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, and was a superb linguist, fluent in German and French. His English was so perfect that the tsar asked him to write his letters to Queen Victoria. Yet his capabilities were limited by the tremendous parochialism of his education and outlook.

  His mother fostered his immaculate manners with traditional maternal advice for young heirs such as ‘Don’t listen to flatterers,’ yet it was his father who formed his political views. Tutored by Pobedonostsev and mentored by Meshchersky, Nicky embraced his father’s Muscovite vision of the throne founded on the mystical union of tsar and peasants whose devout loyalty was pure and sacred, compared to the filthy decadence of Petersburg, liberal Europe and Jewish modernity. Like his father, indeed like most of the royal and aristocratic families of fin de siècle Europe, he eschewed intellectual pursuits, which he would have regarded as middle class and unRussian, and he embraced Alexander’s distrust of politicians and society. While he should have been raised to see himself as a political figure, as his grandfather had been, he instead regarded himself as outside and above politics.

  Nicky was overwhelmed by his colossal father, who ‘could not tolerate weakness’. Once when Nicky allowed a playmate to take the blame for his own fault, Alexander roared: ‘You’re a girlie!’ Since the tsar favoured Georgy, Cherevin implied that he did not rate Nicky. Even so, Nicky declared, ‘Papa is always so dear and kind to me.’

  Yet he could not avoid his future. When he was thirteen, the sight of his shattered grandfather dying before him must have traumatized him, just as he was thrilled by the cheers of the Moscow crowds on his father’s first visit as tsar to Moscow: ‘What a majestic and touching picture. When Papa and Mama came through the doors and when Papa bowed to the people, such a deafening Hurrah resounded that I shuddered.’

  His father wished to shelter him, but he was also worried by Nicky’s personality. When Witte suggested involving Nicky more in the Trans-Siberian Committee, his father barked: ‘Have you ever tried to discuss anything of consequence with His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke? Don’t tell me you never noticed the Grand Duke is . . . an absolute child. His opinions are utterly childish. How could he preside over such a committee?’ Yet he put him on that committee and, among others, the Council of State. Nicky tried to avoid any responsibilities, but his father insisted.

  After his coming of age and induction as Cossack ataman, he served in the Preobrazhensky and Hussars, soon promoted to colonel, the happiest time in his life when he revelled in the routine, the camaraderie and the pranks.

  Even as a Guardsman, his closest friends were his Romanov commanding officers. His world was his family, in which his uncle Sergei – known as ‘Gega’ – was specially influential: they constantly corresponded and their relationship would become closer still when at Sergei’s wedding to Ella of Hesse, he met her younger sister.

  ‘I sat next to little twelve-year-old Alix whom I really liked a lot,’ Nicky wrote on 27 May 1884, though he fancied Sergei’s bride Ella even more. On 31 May at Peterhof, ‘Alix and I wrote our names on the rear window of the Italian house [which as tsar he would convert into their home, the Lower Dacha] (we love each other).’ But by November his passion had eased. ‘The desire to marry lasted until breakfast,’ he wrote on the 19th, ‘and then went away . . .’12

  Alix’s life had been formed by tragic death, English phlegm, obsessive piety, sanctimonious prudery and a blend of male weakness and female will. One of the many daughters of Duke Ludwig of Hesse and Princess Alice of England, she was brought up in Darmstadt.

  Alix’s doom-laden world was rocked by a series of tragedies. Her mother Alice was depressive and sickly. Her little brother ‘Frittie’ suffered from the ‘English disease’ – haemophilia – and died of bleeding after falling from a window. At six, she lost her mother and her favourite sister to diphtheria. When she grew up she acted as her father’s hostess until he too died, after which she helped her weak brother Ernst (‘Ernie’) in the same role. ‘Tall, slender, graceful, with a wealth of golden hair’, with blue eyes and high cheekbones, she had crystalline beauty, touching vulnerability and neurotic intensity that won her the special favour of her grandmother Queen Victoria, who ‘most anxiously and carefully’ watched over ‘my sweet Alicky’ while noting her hysterical nature and appalling health. ‘As she has no parents, I am the only person who can really be answerable for her,’ Victoria explained later. The tensions ‘have tried her nerves very much’. As an orphan, ‘poor dear Alicky has no one but me at all’. Victoria taught her how to nurse and make a bed without disturbing the patient and other ‘useful things’. The grief-stricken (Prince Albert had died in 1861) and reclusive Queen Victoria was the biggest influence on the girl, the personification of female power.

  Brought up by an English governess under Victoria’s wing, Alix was fascinated by her Lutheran faith and by international politics, growing up into a solemn, inhibited and highly strung English lady who blushed in company, broke out in rashes and was frequently incapacitated by agonizing sciatica and stomach cramps. Beneath the crippling shyness and royal chilliness, she concealed a surprising combination of dogmatism, obstinacy and a tendency utterly to misread people and situations. Neither intelligent nor well-educated, she possessed an ‘iron will’. As her brother Ernie put it, ‘she’s splendid’ but ‘what she needs is a superior will which can dominate her and which can bridle her’.

  She was a tangle of sensibility, a passionate believer who talked of ‘her big heart’. As her son’s tutor put it later, ‘She was nothing if not sincere.’ Her thin, tight lips rarely smiled.

  Five years after their first meeting, Nicky met Alix again on one of her visits to Sergei and Ella. Nicky and Alix talked and danced. In their letters, they codenamed each other ‘Pelly I’ and ‘Pelly II’. Ella and Sergei escorted her and encouraged their romance. On 29 January 1890, Alix came out at her first ball at the Winter Palace, dressed in ‘white diamonds, white flowers and sash’; her cotillion dance was with Nicky. She stayed at Sergei’s estate, Illi
nskoe.

  ‘Oh God, I want to go to Illinskoe,’ wrote Nicky on 20 August. ‘If I don’t see her now, I shall have to wait a whole year.’

  When she left, Nicky told the tsar of ‘my dream – one day to marry Alix of Hesse’. But there was a problem. Her grandmother Queen Victoria wanted her to marry the heir to the British empire, Prince Eddy, the duke of Clarence. Minny wanted Nicholas to marry Hélène, the daughter of the French Bourbon, the comte de Paris. The tsar and his wife did not approve of Alix, wondering if this sombre girl was suited to be empress. Queen Victoria, who loved her, agreed: ‘It would not do on account of the religion and I know moreover that Minny doesn’t wish it.’ As Nicky enjoyed partying with wild Guards officers, Cherevin had already prompted the tsar to find him a ballerina.

  On 23 March 1890, the tsar and tsarina took the twenty-one-year-old Nicky to the graduation ceremony of the Imperial School of Theatrical Dance. There Nicky noticed the teenaged Polish ballerina Mathilde Kshessinskaya, who had already been selected by the tsar. At the informal supper afterwards, Alexander III ordered Mathilde to sit next to him and then placed Nicky on her other side. ‘Careful!’ he boomed. ‘Not too much flirting.’ Mathilde noted in her diary: ‘He will be mine.’

  That summer, the tsar and Nicky attended the Krasnoe Selo manoeuvres where the grand dukes stayed in wooden cottages, parading by day, attending the theatre by night. ‘I positively like Kshessinskaya very much,’ wrote Nicky on 17 July. Once backstage she bumped into the tsar who bellowed, ‘Ah you must be flirting!’ But Nicky was no ladykiller, and the two had not managed to meet up before Nicky was sent away on his tour. Instead of the traditional visits to the West, the heir turned East.13

  Nicky set off with his brother Georgy, his cousin George of Greece and a diminutive Buddhism expert, Prince Esper Ukhtomsky, who believed that Russia’s destiny lay in the Far East. His adventures were eagerly observed by the courts of Europe, particularly those with belly-dancers and geishas; as Kaiser Wilhelm noted, such encounters ‘would be a blessing for, up to now, he’s refused to go near any woman’.

  ‘How intolerable to be once again surrounded by Englishmen and their scarlet uniforms,’ wrote Nicky in India and he was delighted by any hint of British senescence, noting the rusty Royal Navy ships in Singapore: ‘This makes me happier, dear Papa, since we must be stronger than the British in the Pacific Ocean.’ His petulance earned a gentle rebuke from his mother: ‘I’d like to think you’re very courteous to all the English . . . You have to set your personal comfort aside; be doubly polite and never show you are bored.’

  But two events cast a shadow. His adored brother Georgy had to return home with a mysterious lung illness that turned out to be TB. ‘You can’t imagine what anguish I’ve passed the last few days,’ wrote Minny.

  Then in Otsu in Japan, a lunatic policeman attacked him with a sword which was adeptly deflected by George of Greece with a walking-stick. When the news reached them, Minny and Sasha ‘suffered agonies – at the end of our strength’, but it was the ‘second time God has saved you’ after the Borki railway crash. The tsar recalled him. On the way home, he turned the turf on the eastern end of the Trans-Siberian Railway in Vladivostok, then passed through the small town of Tomsk. Among the cheering crowds there, he was seen by a young boy, Yakov Yurovsky, who as a man, in a very different world, was to meet him again, twenty-eight years later, at the very end of his life.14

  On his return, the caesarevich met up with Mathilde Kshessinskaya. ‘Since our meeting, I’ve been in the clouds! I shall try to come back as soon as possible.’ Yet he had not forgotten Alix. ‘I have loved her a long time,’ he wrote on 21 December 1891. He spent evenings at Uncle Alexis’s louche palace where, on 4 January 1892, the mistress ‘Zina amused us with singing.’

  ‘I never thought two loves could coexist,’ he wrote, analysing himself on 1 April 1892. ‘I’ve already loved Alix for three years and hope to marry her . . . Since camp of 1890 I’ve been madly (platonically) in love with little K,’ yet ‘I never stop thinking about Alix. Would it be right to conclude from this that I am very amorous?’

  Nicky and his cousin Sandro visited the ballerinas so often that the tsar grumbled to Minny that the boy had vanished: ‘Nicky is still in Petersburg. I don’t know what he does, he doesn’t telegraph, doesn’t write.’

  On 25 January 1893, he lost his virginity: ‘This evening flew to my MK and spent the very best evening with her up to now. I am still under her spell – the pen is shaking in my hand.’ Setting her up in a mansion, 18 English Prospect, which had been the love nest of his great-uncle Kostia, he ‘spent the night ideally’ with ‘Little K’.

  Nicky had not forgotten Alix and when he crisscrossed Europe to attend the many weddings of the royal cousinhood he hoped she would be there. He probed to see if Alix would convert to Orthodoxy, but still she stuck to her Lutheran faith. Nonetheless, the tsar changed his view, swayed by Nicky’s declaration that he would not marry anyone else. Besides, the tsar’s own mother was a Hessian princess. He gave his permission for Nicky to investigate Alix’s own feelings. Ella and Sergei were the go-betweens. In agonizing negotiations, coded so that ‘he’ meant ‘she’ and vice versa, Nicky’s waverings and Alix’s obstinacy exasperated the intermediaries. When Nicky first asked Ella to invite Alix to Russia and then turned cold, Sergei lost his temper. ‘My wife [Ella] was so disappointed and outraged by your letter that she asks me to tell you she considers this case decisively finished . . . You have to go to her . . . If you have no strong character, no will or your feelings have changed,’ the uncle wrote to the future tsar on 14 October 1893, ‘it’s deplorable you haven’t told me or my wife . . . You empowered her to ask this question and when everything is ready, your strange answer appears. I repeat: everything is over and my wife asks you not to mention this again. It grieves my heart to have to write this to you!’

  Of course it was not over. Yet Alix steadfastly refused to convert. ‘I cannot do it against my conscience,’ she wrote on 8 November 1893. ‘You Nicky who also have such a strong belief will understand me.’* Now Nicky claimed that ‘everything is over between us’ – ‘you hardly know the depth of our religion’. But he did not give up: ‘Do you think there can exist any happiness in the whole world without you?’

  His disappointment was all the more intense when on 12 January 1894 his cousin Sandro (Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich) got engaged to his sister Xenia. ‘I am thrilled,’ wrote Nicky. ‘Uncle Vladimir dragged me to supper in a new club where I got rather tipsy.’ He was still seeing Little K and enjoying ‘four-day binges’, nine-hour dancing bouts, games of macao with Uncle Alexis, and ‘the cavalry gala suppers’ with gypsies and his commanding officer, his cousin Konstantin – ‘KR’.*

  At a party at the Obolenskys’, on 24 January, Nicky and his cousins ‘played hide and seek like little children’. Hide-and-seek, reflected State Secretary Polovtsov, was ‘a peculiar pastime for a 24-year-old Heir’. Later that month, Little K was waiting for Nicky when she received a note that the caesarevich had been ‘detained by the illness of his father’. It was unthinkable that the tsar could be seriously ill. ‘My father’, noted Nicky’s sister Olga, ‘had always enjoyed an athlete’s health.’

  Minny begged the tsar to drink less but, as Cherevin recalled, ‘he ignored doctors’. The two pals drank on, using their cognac-equipped boots: ‘1-2-3 swig!’ But the emperor recovered.

  On 2 April, Nicky set off by train to meet virtually the entire royal cousinhood of Europe in Coburg – ‘the Royal Mob’, as Victoria called them, and some of ‘the Club’, Nicky’s posse of royal friends – for the marriage of Ernie, brother of Alix and Ella to ‘Ducky’ Melita of Edinburgh, granddaughter of both Queen Victoria and Alexander II. Alix awaited him there.

  ‘My God, what a day,’ wrote Nicky in Coburg on 5 April. ‘Alix came to Aunt Ella’s rooms. Noticeably prettier but extremely sad. They left us alone but she is still against changing her religion.’ He told her she had to agree. �
��No I cannot,’ she whispered.

  ‘Queen Victoria arrived in great pomp, a squadron of her dragoon guards in front and a whole battalion behind the carriage.’ Next day, after another painful discussion with Alix, ‘Having changed into Prussian uniforms, we went to the station to meet Wilhelm.’ The British queen and German kaiser, along with the rest of the cousinhood, worked on Alix. Victoria was informed of every twist, while at Gatchina the tsar and tsarina were ‘waiting with an almost febrile impatience’, in Minny’s words. ‘You can’t imagine how painful to be separated from you at a moment like this.’ Perhaps Ernie’s marriage was decisive: the arrival of a duchess in Hesse ended Alix’s role in Darmstadt.

  On 7 April, after the wedding, the kaiser ‘even had a talk with Alix’ and then next morning ‘brought her to us at home’, recorded Nicky. ‘She then went to Aunt Miechen and soon afterwards came into the room where I was sitting with the uncles, Aunt Ella and Wilhelm. They left us alone.’ Kaiser Willy ‘sat in the next room with the uncles and aunts waiting for the outcome of our talk’, and ‘the first thing she said was . . . she agreed!’ exulted Nicky. ‘I started to cry like a child and so did she!’ Alix immediately became ‘gay, talkative, tender’. After enduring the embraces of Willy, Nicky and Alix rushed to Queen Victoria, whom ‘I must now call “Granny”’, before the caesarevich wrote to his mother Minny. She replied on 10 April: ‘My dear sweet Nicky! I was so happy and ran to announce this news to Papa.’ She sent a Fabergé egg and jewels: ‘Does she like sapphires or emeralds?’ The tsar was thrilled but surprised: ‘I was sure your attempt would fail completely,’ but ‘everything that happened will surely have been useful in showing that not everything is so easy’. He still saw Nicky as a child: ‘I can’t imagine you as a fiancé – how strange and unusual!’