The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  On 1 August, Nicholas showed the ministers he was the master, appointing Admiral Yevgeny Alexeev, more courtier than warrior (and supposedly a natural son of Alexander II much favoured by Uncle Alexis for his non-naval exploits), as viceroy of the East – ‘commander of all military forces and political chief’. Alexeev was an aggressive champion of the new Eastern empire, but Nicholas’s indecision was already undermining Japanese trust in his negotiations. Alexeev’s appointment delayed diplomacy even more. Then the emperor summoned Witte: ‘He shook my hand, embraced me . . . I returned home beside myself with happiness and found a written order for my dismissal on my desk.’ Witte, kicked upstairs to the sinecure presidency of the Council of Ministers, started to hate Nicholas, who was ‘100% Byzantine’.

  The Japanese were outraged when Russia broke its agreement to leave Manchuria. Bezobrazov had taught the emperor that treaties could be broken, and Nicholas was convinced that Russia could defeat those ‘macaques’ because Japan was ‘a barbarian country’ and Kuropatkin told Nicholas that ‘the Japanese army was a colossal joke’ but he did not want a war. The emperor blithely ordered the viceroy: ‘I don’t want war between Russia and Japan and will not permit this war. Take all measures so there is no war.’ Japan made further offers to Russia for a compromise but wondered if the inconsistent tsar was capable of negotiating a treaty yet alone honouring it.

  If his careless arrogance was astonishing, Nicholas knew that Russia was shaking. In July 1903, Plehve crushed a strike in Odessa that led to the fall of his most gifted secret policeman, Zubatov. ‘If I’d been told twenty years ago that a revolution was possible in Russia,’ said Plehve, ‘I’d have laughed, and here we are on the eve of a revolution.’ War would be a gamble, but Plehve explained to Witte and Kuropatkin that ‘to avert a revolution, we need a small victorious war’ to ‘distract the attention of the masses’.19

  As Nicholas was mishandling the Japanese negotiations, Alexandra was following Philippe’s last advice: if the tsar canonized an obscure elder, Seraphim of Sarov, who had died in 1833, and if the tsarina bathed in his spring, she would conceive a boy. Nicholas ordered Pobedonostsev, the by now doddery ober-procurator of the Holy Synod, to canonize Seraphim immediately, but he objected: the tsar could not canonize anyone. ‘The emperor can do anything,’ snapped Alexandra. Nicholas overruled the Church and on 17 July 1903, the tsar and tsarina, accompanied by the entire family, joined 150,000 pilgrims in Sarov where a spectacular event had been organized by Plehve to rally the peasants to sacred tsardom.

  The next day, in searing summer heat, Nicholas helped carry the saintly relics to Sarov Cathedral. ‘It was an incredible spectacle,’ Nicky felt, ‘to see how the crowd and especially invalids, cripples and unfortunates reacted to the holy procession.’ Following a service, ‘the elevation of the spirit was enormous’. After dinner, Nicky, Alix and Ella ‘went down to the source where we bathed with particular emotion in the stream of icy water. In the darkness no one recognized us,’ wrote Nicky. ‘God is miraculous through his saints.’ Soon afterwards, Alexandra became pregnant. Was she bearing the heir?

  At this tense moment with Japan, in September 1903, Nicholas and Alexandra travelled to Germany for the wedding of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg (future parents of Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh), then they went hunting. While waiting eight weeks for a reply to its final offers, Japan made other plans.

  ‘People claim, Nicky, war is at hand,’ Sandro said to Nicky back in Petersburg.

  ‘There’s no question of war,’ Nicky replied. ‘The Japanese aren’t going to declare war on Russia.’

  ‘Who will stop them?’

  ‘They won’t dare.’20

  After the annual Great Procession through the Winter Palace on New Year’s Day 1904, the emperor sent a note to Plehve: ‘It is time to crack down suddenly and hard. I wish you good strength and health this year.’ At the reception in the Winter Palace, he told the Japanese ambassador that ‘Russia was not just a country but a part of the world – in order to avoid a war, it was better not to try her patience or else it could end badly.’ It was probably too late to negotiate, but he spurned a last-ditch offer of a Russian Manchuria and a Japanese Korea, telegraphing Viceroy Alexeev that if the Japanese landed in southern Korea, ‘it would not be a cause of war’. As tensions rose, Kaiser Wilhelm cabled Nicky that war was ‘unavoidable . . . I hope the Admiral of the Pacific will not be angry with the Admiral of the Atlantic. Ta-ta!’ Nicky replied with a happy birthday telegram signed: ‘Nicky Admiral of the Pacific’.

  On 24 January, Japan broke off diplomatic relations. ‘War, so be it, peace so be it, but the current uncertainty is really bothersome,’ reflected Nicholas. ‘All day I was in an excited mood’, he reflected after he met his ministers. Petersburg held its breath – as a Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo steamed towards Port Arthur.

  Next day, the emperor attended Rusalka at the Mariinsky Theatre. Nicholas had ruled for almost ten years, longer than most democratic leaders. His reputation as a weak but noble man, along with the tragedies of his family, lay ahead. It was true he never sought power and might have preferred the life of a Guards officer. But he now believed in his holy mission with a righteousness that justified any intrigue.

  ‘I had rarely come across a better-mannered young man,’ wrote his enemy Witte. ‘His good breeding conceals all his shortcomings.’ He was unknowable and inscrutable: ‘he seemed to live in an imperial mist,’ noticed cousin Missy. But stealth and guile are essential skills in any leader, and the emperor’s ability to choose his own advisers was, as Plehve understood, ‘connected with the basic principle of autocracy’, and he prided himself on it. ‘You have no idea how sly I can be,’ he boasted to Alix. But Nicholas took his Byzantine duplicity so far that no one could trust him. He was ‘incapable of playing fair’ or, as another minister noted, ‘incapable of supporting anyone over anything’. Faced with bickering advisers, his attitude – ‘Why are you always quarrelling? I always agree with everyone about everything and then do things my own way’ – became corrosive. In his private notes, Witte catalogued the tsar’s ‘petty craftiness, stupid childlike cunning, timid dishonesty’. These were the judgements of ministers whom he sacked, but even a loyal one such as Ivan Durnovo warned, ‘Mark my words, Nicholas II will prove a modernized version of Paul.’ Yet, if this had been his last night on the throne, historians might today reflect that the reign of Nicholas II, who had held the line of autocracy and laid the foundations for new conquests, had been successful, even lucky.21

  The tsar and the audience did not know that the shooting had already started: ten Japanese warships had ambushed the fleet in Port Arthur, a Russian Pearl Harbor. Three capital ships had been damaged. Port Arthur was in chaos; the inept Viceroy Alexeev did not believe the attack had actually happened and then convinced himself it was a victory. It took him many hours to inform Nicholas.

  After Rusalka which he thought was ‘very good’, the tsar received a telegram: ‘Around midnight . . . Japanese torpedo boats launched sudden attack on our squadron at Port Arthur. Adjutant-General Alexeev.’

  ‘Is this undeclared war?’ he asked himself, copying the telegram to his mother: ‘This has just arrived. So the war has begun. May God be with us. Nicky.’ Next day, the tsar prayed for victory in the Winter Palace chapel; crowds cried ‘God Save the Tsar’. Nicky and Alix bowed from the window.

  Viceroy Alexeev had only 60,000 men to defend a vast span of territory, so everything depended on how quickly Russia could get troops to the Far East, but the Trans-Siberian Railway was the only route and it took a minimum of fifty days and usually a month to deploy a regiment there. The day after their surprise attack, the Japanese landed in Korea with scarcely any Russian resistance and started to advance. Nicholas, who toyed with the idea of taking command himself, appointed Kuropat-kin to command the Manchurian army under the viceroy. Meanwhile at sea, on 1 April, the Far Eastern flagship the Petropavlovsk hit a mine and sank
with the loss of 635 men including its admiral. At the Winter Palace, ‘Poor Alix is in bed!’ wrote Xenia. ‘I found Mama there – she and Nicky are terribly upset and depressed.’

  On 17 April, Kuropatkin tried to stop the Japanese at the Battle of the Yalu River but, for the first time in recent history, Occidentals were defeated by Orientals. When the Japanese swiftly landed at Nanshan in the north of the Kwangtung Peninsula, Alexeev did not dare oppose their bridgehead. As the Japanese marched south to besiege Port Arthur, the commanders started to squabble and appealed to the tsar: the squabbling of generals was to be a fixture in the Russian command. At one point, two even indulged in a public brawl. For now, Port Arthur was too prestigious to abandon yet too exposed to defend. When an attempt to relieve it failed, the city was doomed.22

  As the Russians fought their Eastern war, the most respected Romanov was ‘at war with my conscience.’ ‘My predilection has always been for simple men,’ admitted KR in his diary on 19 April 1904. ‘I dream of going to the bathhouse on the Moika . . . I can picture the familiar attendants Alexei, Frolov and particularly Sergei.’ The tsar’s beloved cousin, KR, forty-five years old,* happily married with nine children and known as ‘the best man in Russia’, found himself in a struggle between his public virtue and private homosexuality.

  ‘I am overwhelmed by sinful thoughts during the committee meeting,’ he wrote on 21 May. ‘I dismissed my coachman on the Morskaya. I walked up and down twice past the bathhouse doors; on the third time I went in. And so once again, I have sinned. My mood is foul.’

  KR had had his first homosexual encounter in the Guards, but when he married he managed to overcome his tendencies until the new century when suddenly he threw himself into the bathhouses of Petersburg. ‘How appalled all these people who love and respect me would be if they knew of my depravity,’ he wrote. ‘I am loved, praised and promoted beyond what I deserve, my life is happy, I have a beautiful wife, delightful children, I’ve received a special mark of favour from the throne. How is it I can’t deal with it?’

  ‘Bad thoughts keep coming into my head . . . particularly in church,’ he wrote on 15 December 1903. On 23 June the following year, as the Russians fought the Japanese, KR’s attendant Sergei brought his twenty-year-old brother Kondraty, ‘and I led the lad astray. Perhaps I caused him to sin for the first time.’ He let himself go: ‘in the morning in the bathhouse. Once again I find myself like a squirrel on a wheel . . .’23

  The Japanese were now besieging Port Arthur, at the same time turning their guns on the main Russian army of Manchuria. The Russian generals feuded while the Japanese won every engagement. Morale was even lower at home.

  On 3 June, Bobrikov, the hated governor-general of Finland, was assassinated. Plehve, protected by eight guards and travelling in an iron-windowed carriage, moved into the secret police headquarters at 16 Fontanka, but he was reassured by his super-agent Azev that assassinations were temporarily suspended. In fact Azev blamed Plehve for the Kishinev pogrom. On 15 July, Plehve was riding in his carriage to the station on his way to report to the tsar at Tsarskoe Selo when an SR terrorist tossed in a ‘pomegranate’ (as the terrorists nicknamed their bombs) that killed the minister instantly.

  As Nicholas mourned ‘my friend’, Alexandra gave birth to a son on 30 July: ‘a great and unforgettable day for us . . . there are no words to thank God enough for sending us this comfort in a time of sore trials’. KR noticed Misha ‘radiant with happiness at no longer being heir’.

  A 301-gun salute marked the birth of a boy. Nicholas and Alix credited Philippe. ‘Please somehow or other pass on our gratitude and joy to Him,’ the tsar told Militsa. Nicky thought Russia had had ‘enough Alexanders and Nicholases’, so he named the boy Alexei after his favourite tsar. But after the cutting of the umbilical cord, the doctors noticed blood in Alexei’s swaddling clothes. His navel bled for two days.

  On the day of the birth, when Militsa and her husband drove over to Peterhof, she immediately realized that the baby might have haemophilia. Afterwards she called the tsar, suggesting he ask the doctors ‘if there is any sign of haemophilia’. The tsar ‘fell silent on the phone for a long time’, then started to question her and ‘ended by quietly repeating the word that staggered him: haemophilia’. The family were only too aware of what Xenia called ‘the terrible disease of the English family’, carried by women, suffered by men, and caused by a genetic mutation. It had appeared for the first time in the British royal family only with Queen Victoria who, through her well-married nine children, passed it to the wider cousinhood of Europe. Her son Leopold, duke of Albany, had died of it, so had Alexandra’s brother. Her sister Irene, married to the kaiser’s brother Heinrich, had just lost a child to it. Life expectancy would be roughly thirteen years but many sufferers lived longer. Alexandra tearfully told the nurse, ‘If only you knew how fervently I’ve prayed for God to protect my son from our inherited curse.’ The doctors explained, Nicky wrote to Militsa on 1 August, ‘that approximate loss of blood in 48 hours was from 1/8th to 1/9th of the total quantity’.

  Nicholas and Alexandra made the decision to keep the disease a secret, which as the boy grew up placed the fatalistic tsar and the hysterical tsarina, still only thirty-two, under extraordinary pressure. Very few – Sergei, Ella and the Crows – would ever know. After the invalid Georgy, this second ailing caesarevich would have made the Romanovs seem weak and unlucky. But the alternatives were not tempting – feckless Misha then Uncle Vladimir’s sons – unless Nicholas changed Paul’s laws to make his eldest daughter Olga his heir, an option which he considered. Instead the couple were determined that ‘Tiny’ (or ‘Baby’, their nicknames for Alexei) must succeed to the plenitude of autocracy, which could only intensify the stress. Their suffering has formed their sympathetic modern image, yet it is worth remembering that Queen Victoria also lived in fear of Leopold’s bleeds and she too kept his illness secret, though he was not her heir, and a British monarch endured far fewer responsibilities.

  Six weeks after the birth, ‘little Alexei started to bleed from the navel’, noted Nicky. The doctors rushed to bandage the wound, but ‘How painful it is to live through such moments of anxiety.’ Alix wrote to Nicky that Philippe ‘our dear Friend is watching over you as He did over Tiny last week – oh what anguish it was. Thank God he is well now . . .’

  The tsar agonized over who to appoint interior minister. His mother persuaded him, supposedly on her knees in tears, to conciliate the opposition by appointing a wealthy liberal, Prince Peter Sviatopolk-Mirsky, who immediately loosened Plehve’s repression and made overtures to society. Nicky knew that ‘it is always dangerous to stop halfway’, but this swerve intensified expectations. When Alexei was christened, his godparents included the kaiser, Uncle Alexis, and the entire army in Manchuria.24

  The morale among Alexei’s godparents was deteriorating. The Japanese bombarded desperate Port Arthur and shattered the Pacific fleet. On 10 August, 158,000 Russians faced 125,000 Japanese in a two-week battle for Manchuria which ended in another retreat and then a further defeat. Finally the emperor recalled the incompetent viceroy and reshuffled the generals, though he longed to take command himself. ‘I asked Uncle Alexis – he thinks my presence with the army in this war is not necessary.’

  In August, Nicholas wondered whether to send his Baltic fleet around the world to fight the Japanese. His naval chief, Uncle Alexis, ‘had nothing to say and the courage to admit it’, recalled Sandro, but he expected ‘our eagles to give a sound beating to the yellow-faced monkeys’. Sandro, now minister of the merchant navy, urged Nicholas not to send the fleet; and its designated admiral, the fifty-five-year-old Zinovy Rozhdestvensky, a gruff disciplinarian who had risen from the ranks, begged for more modern battleships. But there was no supply of new ships. After the meeting that decided the destiny of the forty-two ships and 12,000 sailors of this so-called Second Pacific Squadron, the erotomaniac Uncle Alexis cheerfully appraised girls in conversation with Sandro asking, ‘Had I seen
Mrs X and how did I find Mrs Y?’

  On 27 September, the fleet sailed. ‘Bless its path, Lord, let it reach its destination whole,’ wrote Nicky in his diary, ‘to fulfil its hard mission for Russia.’ Next to his diary entry, he drew a cross.

  As he entered the North Sea, Rozhdestvensky feared that the Japanese – or their British allies – would attack him. Just after midnight on 8/9 October, he spotted shadowy silhouetted boats, surely Japanese, around him on the Dogger Bank. ‘Open fire!’ he shouted. In the panic, his flagship Suvorov fired on a British trawler, beheading two fishermen. ‘All this is very awkward,’ Nicky told his mother. ‘The English are very angry and near boiling point . . . getting their squadrons ready for action.’ He sent regrets to Edward VII, ‘but I did not apologize’. Later the Russians paid £65,000 to the bereaved of Hull. The challenge was now to coal the huge fleet around the world in the face of British hostility. The kaiser, spotting a chance to prise Russia away from France, reassured the tsar – ‘sorry for the mishap in the North Sea’ – and helped provision the fleet. If this quixotic adventure succeeded, Nicholas would be celebrated for ever for seizing victory from defeat.25

  ‘Authority is shaking and all our misfortunes stem from the emperor’s lack of will,’ wrote KR on 18 November. As the siege of Port Arthur neared its end, back home students and workers demonstrated; liberals ran a campaign to demand constitutional reform. The new minister, Mirsky, advised the tsar to concede an elected legislature: ‘If you don’t, then change will come in the form of revolution.’

  ‘You know I don’t hold autocracy for my own pleasure,’ the emperor lectured Mirsky. ‘I act in this sense only because it’s necessary for Russia.’ Buttressed by Uncle Sergei, Nicky declared, ‘I’ll never agree to a representative form of government because I consider it harmful to the people whom God has entrusted to me.’ He turned against his minister, who despaired: ‘Everything has failed. Let us build jails.’ Mirsky’s wife called Nicholas ‘the most false man in the world’.