The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  As Nicky headed back home, Little K was heartbroken to hear the news of his engagement. Before he left, he had negotiated the end of their affair, borrowing 400,000 roubles from Sandro and his brothers to buy her the house on English Prospect. ‘Whatever happens to my life,’ he wrote, ‘my days spent with you will ever remain the happiest memories of my youth.’ But Little K made a last attempt to destroy the engagement.

  Alix stayed with Victoria in Windsor where she began studying Russian, but she almost collapsed from neurotic tension: ‘yes darling Grandmama, the new position will be full of trials and difficulties’, she told Victoria. The queen in turn explained to Nicky: ‘she requires a great deal of rest and quiet – she had to lie down a great deal. Her dear father’s death, her anxiety about her brother, and the struggle about her future have all tried her nerves very much.’ Crippled by sciatica, Alix travelled to Harrogate to take sulphur baths, where ‘rude people stand at the corner and stare: I shall stick out my tongue at them another time’, she reported to Nicky,* who arrived in England on the imperial yacht Polar Star.

  They spent a month in England, staying at Windsor with the queen and at Sandringham with Bertie, whose ‘houseparty was rather strange’, Nicky told his mother. ‘Most of them were horsedealers, among others a Baron Hirsch’ – in other words, a Jew. Maurice Hirsch was supposedly the richest man in Europe and a campaigner against Russian anti-semi-tism, so perhaps Bertie was making a point. ‘The cousins [George, duke of York, and his sisters] rather enjoyed the situation and kept teasing me about it.’ But Nicky, eager to avoid any infection by the Jewish bacillus, boasted piously to his mother: ‘I tried to keep away as much as I could and not to talk.’

  At Windsor, ‘I have become part of the English family,’ he told Georgy, ‘as indispensable to my future grandmother as her two Indians and her Scotsman’ – though sometimes he called her ‘the old queen (belly woman).’ While they were staying at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, Alix received anonymous letters (clearly written by Little K herself) revealing the story of her romance with Nicky who confirmed the details with Alix. She was touched. ‘Have confidence in your girly dear,’ she wrote in his diary, ‘who loves you more deeply and devotedly than she can ever say. What is past is past and we can look at it with calm – we are all tempted in this world but as long as we repent, God forgives us.’*

  As Nicky sailed home, Queen Victoria reflected, ‘The more I think of sweet Alicky’s marriage the more unhappy I am. Not as to the personality for I like him very much but on account of the country and the awful insecurity to which that poor child will be exposed.’15

  On 25 July, Nicky was back in Petersburg to watch the emperor preside over the marriage of Xenia and Sandro,† but the heir noticed that the Colossus was exhausted by the end of the marriage banquet. By 10 August, Alexander III, who had ‘only been ill twice in his life’, was ill, losing weight, suffering headaches; his feet were swelling, his skin sallow. At manoeuvres he fainted. Dr Zakharin examined him but ‘couldn’t find anything seriously wrong’, wrote Nicky on 11 August. ‘He needs rest.’ So the family set offfor his Polish shooting lodges, first Białowiez˙ a, with its herd of rare European bison, then Spała, accompanied by both Nicky and Georgy. But there was little bison-hunting, and Georgy was so ill in the damp Polish forests that the emperor had to sit by his bed for entire nights until he was sent to the warmer south.

  Nicky wrote to ‘my own darling Sunny’, his new nickname for Alix, longing ‘to cover your sweet face with greedy, burning, loving kisses’. Alix wrote that her passion was ‘burning and consuming me’.

  ‘Everything is yours, yours, I’d like to scream it out loud!’ replied Nicky.

  ‘What joy when I can clasp you in my arms and gaze into your precious face and beautiful tender eyes,’ she wrote, teasing him that ‘I felt so funny putting on such smart undergarments and nightgowns, don’t be shocked. I suppose I ought to be shyer and primmer with you, but I can’t.’

  The emperor was deteriorating. Finally the German specialist Professor Ernst Leyden diagnosed nephritis, inflammation of the kidneys. It would be fatal.

  On 21 September, Alexander, accompanied by the empress and Nicky, arrived at the Little Palace at Livadia where Georgy was waiting. That night ‘we dined alone with Papa and Mama upstairs in their rooms,’ wrote Nicky. ‘I am terribly sad.’ Minny nursed him so sweetly that the emperor said, ‘Even before my death, I have got to know an angel,’ kissing her hand. ‘Poor dear Minny.’ By 5 October, the family was summoned. ‘I was overcome with emotion when we went in to the dear parents,’ recalled Nicky. ‘Papa was weaker.’ The prince and princess of Wales, Minny’s sister, were called from Vienna. Remembering how Minny had nursed his brother Nixa, the tsar had once told Bertie that ‘There are no better nurses in Europe than the king of Denmark’s daughters.’

  ‘Tell me the truth,’ Alexander asked his doctor. ‘How long do I have to live?’

  ‘That is in God’s hands, but I have seen marvellous cures,’ replied Leyden.

  ‘Can I still live for a fortnight?’

  When the doctor nodded, Sasha told Nicholas to summon Alix at once. The tsar insisted that Nicky must marry properly in Petersburg, not in Livadia, but ‘Papa and Mama have permitted me to send for Alix,’ Nicky wrote. ‘Ella and Uncle Sergei will bring her here.’

  When Alix arrived, the tsar spent much energy dressing up in full uniform and medals, so that he could receive her properly, but he was barely able to rise and kiss her when she knelt at his feet and the effort ‘strongly excited the patient despite the joy it caused him’. ‘Every moment became an agony,’ remembered his twelve-year-old daughter Olga. ‘He couldn’t even lie in bed.’

  As the Colossus made his confession, Father Yanishev asked if the tsar had briefed Nicky, but Alexander replied: ‘No, he himself knows everything.’ Yet, even now, Nicky was scarcely consulted by the courtiers. Alix resented his mother Minny. ‘Be firm,’ Alix urged Nicky, ‘and make the doctors come to you alone every day and tell you how they find him so that you are always the first to know.’ She at least felt the sacred burden of the crown hovering over his self-deprecating head. ‘Show your own mind,’ she exhorted him on 15 October, ‘and don’t let others forget who you are.’

  Late on the 19th, the tsar coughed up blood and groaned that he could not breathe, he had to get out of bed. Dressed in a grey tunic, he was moved to his armchair where he waited for the dawn. When Minny came in, he sighed. ‘I feel the end approaching,’ he said. ‘Be calm; I am calm.’ He was given oxygen. The priest held his head and Minny sat beside him, around them a ‘crowd of relatives, physicians, courtiers and servants’. Nicky and Sandro paced the verandah, ‘watching the death of the Colossus’. At 3.30 p.m., Father Ioann of Kronstadt administered the Last Sacraments and heard his confession – ‘then he started to have slight convulsions’. The family knelt as Father Ioann prayed. Just as a doctor gave him a glass of water, Alexander III ‘muttered a short prayer and kissed his wife’, then sighed, and his head fell on to Minny’s chest. ‘The end came quickly,’ wrote Nicholas. ‘It was the death of a saint.’ The Colossus ‘died as he had lived’, wrote Sandro, ‘a bitter enemy of resounding phrases, a confirmed hater of melodrama’.*

  ‘Nobody sobbed,’ recalled his daughter Olga. ‘My mother still held him in her arms.’

  The family kissed the late tsar’s forehead, then the new tsar’s hand. ‘My head is spinning, I don’t want to believe it!’ wrote Nicholas II.

  ‘For the first and only time in my life I saw tears in Nicky’s blue eyes,’ recalled Sandro. ‘He took me by the arm and led me downstairs to his room. We embraced and cried together,’ then he exclaimed: ‘Sandro, what am I going to do? What’s going to happen to me, to you, to Xenia, to Alix, to mother, to all of Russia? I’m not ready to be tsar. I never wanted to become one. I’ve no idea of even how to talk to the ministers. Will you help me, Sandro?’ This was not in itself evidence of his lack of acumen. Every heir since Paul had had
such understandable moments of doubt.16

  At 4 p.m., at a field altar in the garden, the late emperor’s confessor Father Yanishev administered the oath to Nicholas II as the battleships of Sebastopol fired a salute. Next morning, at ten o’clock, Alix was received into Orthodoxy with the name Alexandra Fyodorovna – ‘a quiet radiant joy’, noted Nicky – before more prayers around the body: ‘the expression on Papa’s face was wonderful, smiling’. But the body was rotting. First it was lifted from the chair and laid on a camp bed. Then after prayers at 9 p.m., ‘We had to carry the body downstairs,’ wrote Nicky, ‘as it has rapidly begun to decompose.’

  On 22 October, the prince of Wales arrived. Finding Nicky incapable of making decisions, he took control of funeral arrangements. ‘I wonder what his tiresome old mother [Queen Victoria] would have said’, mused Olga, ‘if she’d seen everybody accept Uncle Bertie’s authority! In Russia of all places!’

  The doctors embalmed the body – but the job was botched. Soon the imperial cadaver was stinking. The family debated when the new tsar should marry. Minny and Nicky himself wanted to marry Alix there and then ‘while Papa is still under the same roof’, but the uncles and Bertie insisted that the ceremony be held in Petersburg. On the 27th, the little tsar, Georgy and their uncles carried the coffin out of the Little Palace, handing it to a Cossack guard of honour, who bore it to the pier at Yalta, thousands of peasants falling to their knees as it passed, and on to a battleship where it lay under a canopy. At 10 a.m. on 1 November, Nicholas II arrived by train in Petersburg with the body.17

  * The tsar found the ideal presents for a wife who already had everything: in 1885, he commissioned Peter-Carl Fabergé, a Baltic German jeweller in Petersburg, to make the Hen Egg, a bejewelled egg that opens to reveal a yoke that opens to reveal a hen that opens to reveal a nest of diamonds. Altogether under Alexander and his son Nicholas II, the Romanovs commissioned fifty Fabergé eggs, usually with the only rule that they must contain a surprise.

  * Behind the family bonhomie, the prudish Sasha was scandalized by the decadence of his English brother-in-law, the prince of Wales. When Bertie was implicated in a sleazy baccarat scandal, the tsar was disgusted: ‘Stupid Bertie implicated in this filth! How nice it must be for poor Alix [Alexandra, princess of Wales] and the children to see their father mixed up in this abomination! Thank God such scandals with the Heir can only happen in England! What poor Alix must go through thanks to her feckless, depraved husband!’

  * The Romanovs’ fundamental laws were becoming untenable in such a huge family. The family was also too expensive: each grand duke received an annual salary of 250,000 roubles and each grand duchess received a dowry of a million. Sasha changed the rules to limit the number of grand-ducal ‘Imperial Highnesses’ to the children and grandchildren of emperors; the rest would be princely ‘serene highnesses’ who could with permission marry commoners, but he also banned morganatic and non-Orthodox marriages.

  † In June 1881, he exiled Fanny Lear’s lover Grand Duke Nikola permanently to Tashkent where he came into his own: he built an arabesque palace which housed his art collection (including the nude life-sized statue of Fanny) and published scientific works, irrigated the deserts, built a sixty-mile canal, towns for workers, cotton factories, bakeries and a zoo; he even paved the streets of Tashkent. The emperor was no less harsh to the rest of the family. When the eldest of Uncle Mikhail’s sons Nikolai, nicknamed ‘Bimbo’, ambled around Petersburg with unbuttoned coat and a cigar clenched in his teeth, the tsar had him arrested. When Bimbo’s brother Michael (known as ‘Miche-Miche’) married a commoner, Sophie von Merenburg, a granddaughter of Pushkin, Alexander exiled him to London where he spent the rest of his life: through his children’s marriages, the duchesses of Abercorn and Westminster are descended from the unique combination of Nicholas I and Pushkin.

  * Ilarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, who had led the Sacred Retinue, the secret chivalric order of counter-terrorist tsarist knights after Alexander II’s murder, now ran court/family matters. He was married to Elizaveta Shuvalova, daughter of Andrei Shuvalov and Sophia Vorontsova, the natural child of the affair between Pushkin and Elisa Vorontsova. The Vorontsov-Dashkovs, uniting three of the greatest clans of tsarist Russia and that of Potemkin, were thus vastly rich, inheriting the Alupka Palace among other treasures.

  † The novelist Leo Tolstoy was the interior minister’s cousin. The emperor regarded Tolstoy’s War and Peace as a masterpiece but saw him as a ‘godless nihilist’ and banned his later socialistic works such as What I Believe. After Dostoevsky’s death in 1881, Tolstoy was the most famous man in Russia with huge moral authority, but he was increasingly hostile to the regime, embracing a puritanical Christian socialism with sanctimonious dogmatism. Tolstoy’s appeal (citing Christ’s mercy) to spare the assassins of Alexander II convinced the tsar and Pobedonostsev that he was a dangerous lunatic. ‘Your Christ is not our Christ,’ replied Pobedonostsev. Alexander forbade publication of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata ‘because it’s written on a completely false theme and with great cynicism’. Tolstoy’s wife Countess Sophia appealed to the tsar who gave her an audience at which he declared ‘he himself would censor the works of her husband’. He was sounder on music, promoting Tchaikovsky whom he received and decorated.

  * Astonishingly Degaev escaped from Russia and vanished, changing his name to become Alexander Pell, professor of mathematics at the University of South Dakota, dying in 1921 in Pennsylvania.

  * The proprietor of the Moscow News, Mikhail Katkov, son of poor parents, not only helped get Dmitri Tolstoy appointed to the Interior Ministry but became the brains behind many of his policies. He was almost a ‘shadow government’, received by the tsar, whom he bluntly told, ‘My newspaper is not simply a newspaper: many decisions were reached within it.’

  * Meshchersky was friends with Tchaikovsky who, after a disastrous marriage and years of torment about his sexuality, lived a discreet gay life until his death from cholera in 1893. There was nothing discreet about Meshchersky.

  † Britain remained the real enemy. In the remote mountains of Central Asia, British and Russian adventurers duelled for influence in the Great Game which brought Alexander’s first crisis. In 1884, an enterprising officer seized Merv, bringing the Romanovs to the Afghan border but alarming the British. In March 1885 an Afghan force, acting as British proxies, faced a Russian unit in a stand-off at Panjdeh. ‘Drive them back and give them a sound thrashing,’ ordered Alexander. Forty Afghans were killed. The British threatened war but Prime Minister Gladstone and the tsar controlled the crisis, setting up a commission to work out the border.

  * Not a success: when the tsar heard that Leuchtenberg had abandoned Stana for a French mistress in Biarritz, he thundered that ‘the prince is washing his filthy body in the waves of the ocean!’

  * Her reaction demonstrated the family’s entirely understandable fears. The terrorists were still hunting the tsar. On 1 March 1887, for the first time since his retreat to Gatchina, Alexander and his family rode through the streets of Petersburg to commemorate the fifth anniversary of his father’s murder – but, as he approached, the police arrested three young People’s Will terrorists carrying bombs to perpetrate a second 1 March outrage. Five terrorists were hanged, including their bomb-maker, Alexander Ulyanov, aged nineteen, whose execution had a decisive influence on his younger brother, Vladimir, the future Lenin.

  † Vladimir, cultured but grandiloquent, was convinced he would have made a better tsar, but his only real achievements were to collect his favourite Parisian recipes, to hold spectacular parties with his haughty wife Miechen (née Marie of Mecklenburg) and to patronize the singer Chaliapin, pianist Rachmaniov, painter Repin and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. But Miechen foolishly corresponded with Bismarck, and she was denounced to the emperor who harshly reprimanded her. He was even crosser when the Vladimirs cavorted at Cubat restaurant with a French actor and his mistress. When Vladimir kissed the mistress, the actor kissed the grand duchess and the gr
and duke threatened to kill him. The tsar ordered the French pair and the Vladimirs (temporarily) to leave Russia at once.

  * Alix did have the example of her sister. In 1888, the emperor sent Sergei, president of the Palestine Society, to Jerusalem to dedicate the gold-domed Church of St Mary on the Mount of Olives to their mother. He was accompanied by Ella who, having refused to convert, experienced an epiphany in Jerusalem and embraced Orthodoxy passionately.

  * KR was the nom de plume, ‘Konstantin Romanov’, of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, the second son of Kostia and hence the next brother after the wild Nikola, Fanny Lear’s lover. His superb diary is one of our best sources – though it also contained the details of KR’s secret life.

  * Yet the family’s joy was tinged with sadness: the doctors advised that Nicky’s TB-stricken brother Georgy had to live in the warn climate of the Caucasus, far from the family. He settled in Abbas Tuman where he was protected by exotic Caucasian bodyguards but his was a lonely existence. ‘It is so terribly hard to see one’s child suffer,’ wrote his broken-hearted mother. The brothers were so close that Nicky regularly reported on the progress of his romance.

  * Little K did not vanish. The effervescent dancer became the mistress simultaneously of two grand dukes, Sergei Mikhailovich (Bimbo and Sandro’s brother) and Andrei Vladimirovich (son of Vladimir and Miechen). Exploiting their power and her own ability to appeal to Nicholas II, she came to dominate the Mariinsky Ballet while amassing a fortune. When she had a child, she was unable to say who was the grand-ducal father. Asked how it felt to have two grand dukes at her feet, she replied: ‘Why not? I have two feet.’