The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  On 22 December, Port Arthur surrendered. ‘Do Russians surrender?’ KR asked his diary. ‘Revolution’, he felt, ‘is banging on the door. How terrifying.’ But ‘I was plagued all day by bad thoughts.’ He longed to see his young lover in the bath house, yet revolution restored KR’s self-control. ‘What will the new year bring?’

  The front scarcely moved, yet Kuropatkin finally had numerical superiority: 275,000 infantry and 16,000 cavalry against a total of 207,000 Japanese. On 6 January 1905, Kuropatkin ordered a massive offensive. But time was running out.26

  That day, when the tsar attended the Blessing of the Waters on the frozen Neva, a salvo from the guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress shattered the windows of the Winter Palace: they contained real shot. Nicholas was unharmed, but the accident added to the unease as 160,000 workers went on strike in Petersburg’s factories. On 8 January, Nicholas heard that ‘There is some priest at the head of the workers’ union – the socialist Gapon.’ Gapon was a police agent but, tricking his Okhrana controllers, he organized a demonstration to present a petition to the tsar listing most of the demands in the revolutionary socialist agenda, from improved workers’ conditions, elections to a constituent assembly and peace. Mirsky and the police panicked. Instead of using Cossacks, whose charges were terrifying and whips painful but rarely fatal, the garrison’s infantry, under Uncle Vladimir, untrained for crowd control, guarded the Winter Palace and the bridges. That night the tsar secretly moved to Tsarskoe Selo.27

  The next morning, Sunday 9 January, just as the army launched its offensive in Manchuria, Gapon led thousands of workers towards the palace. At checkpoints they were called on to halt and turn back. When they did not, the troops opened fire and cavalry charged the crowds. Over a thousand were killed, 2,000 seriously wounded. ‘A terrible day! Lord how painful and sad!’ wrote Nicholas. ‘Mama arrived from town. Lunched with everyone. Went for a walk with Misha. Mama stayed the night.’ Faced with revolution and defeat, ‘My poor Nicky’s cross is a heavy one to bear,’ Alix wrote to her sister Victoria of Battenberg, ‘all the more as he has nobody on whom he can thoroughly rely. He has had so many bitter disappointments but through it all he remains brave and full of faith in God’s mercy . . .’ Bloody Sunday inflamed the discontent on all sides. ‘How I wish I were clever and could be of real use . . .’ the empress went on. ‘But the lack of what I call “real” men is great . . . Had his father seen more men, drawn them around him, we should have lots to fill the necessary posts; now only old men and quite young ones, no one to turn to. The uncles, no good; Misha a darling child still.’28

  The emperor summoned Uncle Sergei’s police chief General Dmitri Trepov* to govern Petersburg. Sergei grumbled, but he already disapproved of the reforms. Resigning as governor-general, he remained in Moscow – as an SR hit squad, disguised as cabbies, stalked their prey.

  On 2 February 1905 the hit squad was ready as the grand duke’s carriage arrived at the Bolshoi Theatre. The terrorist was about to give the signal to the bombers when he saw that Ella and the children were with the grand duke. On the 4th, the terrorists observed Sergei’s coachman waiting outside his palace. As the carriage rolled through the Kremlin, an assassin tossed his bomb from four feet away. Nothing was left except the back wheels of the carriage. Sergei’s head, shoulders, one leg and one arm were vaporized and never found. Fingers, one leg and a foot were sprinkled on to the square and roofs of surrounding buildings. A naked, one-armed, one-legged half-torso lay in the smoking debris. The coachman was alive but dying. Ella ran outside. Throwing herself to her knees in the bloody charred snow, she started to collect the ‘fragments of mangled flesh and placed them on an ordinary army stretcher’, rummaging in the snow for pieces of Sergei because, as she explained, ‘he loved order’. Two days later Ella went to see the arrested murderer to give him an icon: ‘The grand duke forgives you and I will pray for you.’

  At Tsarskoe Selo, the family gathered around the beleaguered emperor, who banned anyone even attending a church service and warned Uncle Alexis that he ‘was being tracked like a wild beast to be killed’. Alexis ‘sobbed like a child, crying “What a disgrace!”’ Ella became a nun, founding her own holy order, while their niece and nephew, Dmitri and Marie, who had lived with them, joined the emperor at Tsarskoe Selo.

  As authority drained away from the government and the harvest failed, the peasants rose up. The revolutionary parties, from Social-Democrats to Georgian Federalists and Armenian Dashnaks, assassinated over a thousand officials in a year. In Baku, Muslim Azeri mobs slaughtered 2,000 Armenians. In Petersburg, the tsar swung between repression and concession. When his new interior minister suggested radical reforms, he reprimanded him: ‘One would think you are afraid a revolution will break out.’

  ‘Your Majesty,’ replied the minister, ‘the Revolution has already begun.’29

  *

  The autocrat desperately needed good news from the East – but on 24 February, Kuropatkin had lost the Battle of Mukden. ‘It is painful and distressing,’ wrote Nicholas, who dismissed Kuropatkin. Meanwhile the Baltic fleet disappeared into the Indian Ocean, ready for battle. Admiral Togo’s Japanese fleet steamed to cut it off. On 14 May, the fleets met in the Tsushima Strait in the greatest naval battle since Trafalgar, the only full-scale clash in the Dreadnought era. The Russians were annihilated, losing 4,380 dead, 5,971 prisoners (including a wounded Rozhdestvensky), and twenty-one ships sunk including six battleships, while the Japanese lost just 117 killed and three torpedo boats. ‘Our picnic party at Gatchina was interrupted by a messenger: our fleet had been annihilated,’ recalled Sandro. The emperor ‘said nothing. As usual. Went deathly pale and lit a cigarette.’ Nicholas kept ‘admirable composure’, but wrote, ‘Terrible news’ in his diary – and told his mother: ‘I fear we shall have to drain the bitter cup to the dregs.’

  The disaster was mostly due to the fundamental challenges of deploying Russian naval power in the Pacific, but if any individual could be blamed it was Uncle Alexis. The windows at his palace were shattered by the stones of rioters. When his ballerina mistress, Eliza Baletta, whom the director of imperial theatres described as ‘a worthless wench who ruins the repertoire’, attended the ballet, the audience pointed at her jewellery and shouted: ‘You’re wearing our battleships!’

  Alexis resigned, admitting to his nephew that he ‘didn’t believe in human beings’. Nicky was sorry for him: ‘Poor soul.’ Alexis retired to Paris where he died three years later. ‘My favourite uncle,’ wrote Nicky, ‘noble, honourable, courageous.’

  A way out of the war now presented itself. The US president Teddy Roosevelt offered to mediate with Japan, inviting envoys to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The battleship Potemkin mutinied in Odessa.

  On 29 June, Nicky summoned Witte and asked him to represent Russia at the talks, adding that ‘he wouldn’t pay a kopek or cede an inch of territory’. Witte decided to ‘act as befitted the representative of a great empire’. He did more than that – he behaved ‘with democratic simplicity’ while in the United States, giving interviews to the press, meeting Jewish leaders. Witte was lucky: Japan was almost bankrupt and he won an amazingly lenient treaty signed on 23 August, that gave up half Sakhalin Island but paid no indemnities. ‘I began to accustom myself to the thought that this is probably good,’ reflected the emperor who received Witte on board Shtandart in the Gulf of Finland, the only safe place for the family to go on holiday. He raised him to count.

  ‘Your Majesty, will you now cease to doubt my loyalty and believe I’m not a revolutionary?’ asked Witte.

  ‘I entirely trust you,’ lied the tsar, who still resented him, ‘and pay no attention to all these calumnies.’

  Bruised by defeat, embittered by British hostility and Gallic chilliness, Nicky received an invitation from his loyal friend Kaiser Willy.30

  As their yachts, Hohenzollern and Shtandart, met off the island of Björkö, the kaiser, who declared, ‘I come as a simple tourist without ceremony,’ had never been a mo
re welcome sight. Both emperors were thrilled to exercise the ancient prerogatives of autocracy. ‘The tsar embraced me and pressed me to him as if I were his own brother,’ Willy told his chancellor, ‘and looked at me constantly with gratitude and joy.’ At breakfast next morning, 11 July 1905, on the Shtandart, Nicky denounced Anglo-French intrigues, particularly those of his wicked Uncle Bertie, ‘the arch-intriguer’, at which Willy produced a copy of a Russo-German treaty ‘that I happen to have in my pocket’. ‘His dreaming eyes sparkled with light,’ wrote Willy. ‘I pulled out the envelope, unfolded the paper on Alexander III’s desk.’

  ‘Excellent! I quite agree,’ said the tsar.

  The kaiser, ‘my heart beating so hard, I could hear it; my forehead and back running with moisture’, then asked, ‘Will you sign it?’

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  Afterwards, they embraced emotionally. The kaiser celebrated this ‘turning point in the history of Europe’, breaking the encirclement of Germany and the Franco-Russian alliance. This is usually given as evidence of Nicky’s ineptitude but, in some ways, he was pushing a policy that would have avoided the First World War by breaking up the two power blocs dividing Europe. Unfortunately such total reversals of policy have to be well prepared.

  The tsar enjoyed his coup for over a month before he deigned or dared inform his foreign minister ‘Madame’ Lamsdorf, who insisted that Björkö was a betrayal of France on which Russia depended for its finance. Nicholas excruciatingly had to explain to the kaiser that the treaty ‘will not be applicable’ – it was null and void. The emperor had ended the war – but the Revolution rolled on.31

  On 3 August, Nicholas’s ministers announced a compromise – a limited consultative assembly. Nicholas had agonized and consulted about this but now it was too little, too late. Workers went on strike, peasants attacked landowners, students rioted, swathes of the Baltics and Caucasus became independent revolutionary fiefdoms.

  General Trepov, just promoted to deputy interior minister, urged Nicholas to create a dictatorship. On 8 October Count Witte came to Peterhof with the opposite advice. Next day, Witte was invited back to talk to Nicky and the empress. ‘The basic motto of the societal movement is freedom!’ he told them. Offering his help, he boomed that ‘A government that follows events and doesn’t direct them leads the state to disaster – such is an axiom of history . . . Either stand at the head of the movement that has seized the country or proceed firmly in the opposite direction’ – dictatorship. Nicky and Alix listened in near silence.

  Witte heard nothing for three days. ‘I assure you,’ Nicky told his mother, ‘we have lived years in these days, such torments, doubts and indecisions.’ But the dowager empress,* who competed with Alexandra to influence Nicky, gave her blessing to Witte, ‘the only man who can help you now – a man of genius, energetic and clear-sighted’.

  ‘Petersburg and Moscow are entirely cut off from the interior,’ he told his mother. ‘The only way to get to town is by sea. How convenient for this time of year . . . It makes me sick to read the telegraphic despatches. Nothing but new strikes in schools and factories, murdered policemen, Cossacks and soldiers, riots, disorder, mutinies. But the ministers, instead of acting with quick decision, gather like frightened hens and cackle.’

  In Petersburg and Moscow, the revolutionaries planned armed uprisings. ‘I immediately gave command of all troops in Petersburg to Trepov,’ wrote Nicholas, who ‘made it plain that any disorder would be ruthlessly put down’. Trepov ordered his soldiers ‘not to use blanks and not to spare bullets’. In Peterhof, the emperor waited: ‘Everybody knew something was going to happen . . . like before a thunderstorm in summer.’ The choice was dictator ‘and rivers of blood’, or parliament.

  Nicholas blinked. On 14 October Witte steamed out to Peterhof; they talked all day. At the same time, the tsar’s courtiers Frederiks and Fat Orlov advised dictatorship. The emperor laconically telegraphed the prospective dictator, his cousin Nikolasha: ‘Come. Nicholas.’

  Nikolasha – Nikolai Nikolaievich, son of Nizi, known in the family as ‘the Terrible’ for his fearsome temper – rushed to Peterhof. A rigorous inspector of cavalry, Nikolasha fancied himself as a medieval knight, still keeping a court of dwarfs, and once demonstrating the sharpness of his sword by cutting one of his borzoi dogs in half before appalled guests. Revering ‘the divine origin of Tsarist power’, he believed that the autocrat possessed ‘some special secret strength through his anointing’. If the tsar ordered him to jump out of a window, ‘I’d do so without hesitation.’ Minny thought him ‘a good soldier at heart’, but she supposedly said, ‘He suffers from an incurable disease. He’s stupid.’ If not brilliant, Nikolasha was certainly commonsensical, and he was the only Romanov with the stature to become dictator. But he was not quite the strongman he seemed. A porcelain-collector, this excitable giant – he was six feet five – was now in love with the married Stana, with whom he shared fluffy beliefs in spiritism, table-turning and Philippe. Recently Nikolasha had discovered a new healer, a peasant from Siberia named Rasputin.

  At Peterhof, Witte proposed his constitution to the tsar and Nikolasha, but left without an answer. Deep into the night, Nicholas discussed what to do. The tsar tried to persuade Nikolasha to become dictator. Nikolasha left the room and ‘ran to Frederiks, ran like a madman around his room with tears in his eyes’, yelling, ‘We must save the Sovereign.’ Then he ‘pulled out his revolver’ and, holding it against his head, shouted, ‘If the Sovereign doesn’t accept Witte’s programme and wants to nominate me dictator I will shoot myself in front of his eyes with this very revolver. We must go to the Sovereign . . . We must do this for our own sake and Russia’s!’ Alexandra never forgave Nikolasha for this hysterical blackmail and called the constitution ‘Nikolasha’s fault.’ But, surprisingly, the ultra-reactionary Trepov advised accepting and the tsar trusted only Trepov: ‘You are the only one of my servants on whom I can completely rely.’ But he now had little choice: ‘Yes, Russia is being granted a constitution.’

  The tsar, still trying to avoid Witte, sent Frederiks and Fat Orlov to Witte’s home to negotiate terms while feeling out other candidates and by the time they left at 2 a.m. Witte, now aged fifty-nine, was close to breakdown ‘after all this evasion, these unworthy games, secret meetings’. Witte cursed ‘this interlaced body of cowardice, blindness craftiness and stupidity’ – a description of the tsar himself. Next day, his doctors prescribed cocaine to pep him up and he set off for Peterhof.

  At 5 p.m. on 17 October, in the presence of Witte and Nikolasha, Nicholas signed a document that conceded – or ‘imposed’, in imperial jargon – civil rights for all, a bicameral parliament with the lower house, the Duma, elected with (almost) universal suffrage, a half-appointed, half-elected upper house (the State Council, not unlike Alexander II’s plan in 1881), and a government co-ordinated by a prime minister: Witte.

  The emperor and Nikolasha noticed that it was the anniversary of the Borki railway crash. ‘Twice on this day,’ agreed Nikolasha, ‘the imperial family has been saved.’32

  As Russia’s first ever prime minister returned to the capital to publish the Manifesto on the Improvement of State Order, the tsar thought of his mother who had travelled to Denmark: ‘My dear Mama, you can’t imagine how I suffered,’ but ‘we are in the midst of a revolution. I know you are praying for your poor Nicky.’ The tsar never forgot these ‘evil days’ when, as he confided in Zizi Naryshkina, ‘this person’ (Witte) whose name he could not bear to utter ‘was trying to lead me on a wrong path but I hadn’t the strength to oppose him’.

  Witte forced his new cabinet on the emperor. ‘I shan’t forget his insolence,’ seethed Nicholas. On 23 October, they appointed Peter Durnovo as interior minister, who turned out to be the indispensable strongman of 1905. ‘Small, all muscle and nerves’, an ex-naval officer and enthusiastic womanizer, Durnovo had served Alexander III as director of police. He ordered his agents to open letters from his own mistress, a Petersburg court
esan, to a Brazilian diplomat. Discovering that she was two-timing him, he had the police raid her love nest and steal the rest of her letters. The mistress complained to the diplomat, who informed the emperor. ‘Get rid of this swine [Durnovo] in twenty-four hours,’ boomed Alexander III – but he died a year later, allowing Durnovo to rebuild his career.

  This shady policeman was a quick, ruthless and astute decision-maker. Three days after his appointment, the Baltic sailors, stationed close to Petersburg, rebelled. Within five days, Durnovo had crushed them.

  ‘When we depart the shore, we will begin to be tossed about,’ Witte warned Nicholas. Sure enough, instead of bringing order, the Manifesto aggravated the Revolution. The momentum seemed unstoppable. In Petersburg, a Soviet – a council of workers and peasants – chaired by the preening showman of revolution Leon Trotsky, directed the disorders. Lenin, now the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Social-Democrats, secretly arrived from Geneva.* Siberia, the Caucasus and the Baltics passed out of government control. In Baku, the Armenians avenged themselves in a slaughter of Azeris as the oilfields burned.

  Nicholas blamed Witte. ‘It’s strange such a clever man should be wrong in his forecast of an easy pacification,’ he told his mother. He appointed his stalwart Trepov as the commandant of Imperial Palaces, where he became ‘an indispensable secretary, experienced, clever and cautious. I give him Witte’s bulky memoranda to read and he reports concisely.’

  On 1 November, at the lowest ebb of the emperor’s life so far, the Crows invited Nicky and Alix to come over from Peterhof to the neighbouring Sergeevka estate. ‘We had tea with Militsa and Stana,’ wrote the tsar. ‘We made the acquaintance of a man of God – Grigory from the Tobolsk region.’ They did not meet again for months, but a link had been established, and the devotion of this authentic peasant confirmed their belief in the masses just as they feared they had lost them.