The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  After he had arrived in Petersburg, his first patron Archimandrite Feofan introduced him to his first Romanov, Nikolasha, and that severe cavalryman was convinced by his holiness and introduced him to the Montenegrins. Rasputin’s peasant simplicity was his essential quality for Nicky and Alix who, estranged from Petersburg society and out of touch with the countryside, craved his authenticity – ‘a real Russian peasant’ is how Nicky described him. He was the proof, the fulfilment and the personification of the tsar and tsarina’s vision of themselves and their sacred union with the peasantry. His lechery and debauchery were evidence that he was a Christ-like outsider; the repulsion he provoked from ‘the Pharisees’ of sophisticated society proved his exceptional sanctity. To Nicky and Alix, he benefited from a holy circle: the more they revered him, the more the Pharisees hated him, which proved that he was all the holier. ‘He is hated’, the empress often said, ‘because we love him.’

  He would never have achieved so much without the misfortune of Alexei’s haemophilia. He alone could staunch the boy’s bleeding either by divine healing or by his ability to calm the patient and perhaps as importantly to soothe the hysterical mother. This belongs in the realm beyond scientific explanation. Gradually he became more and more essential to the anxious parents, their trust inexplicable to a court and public that did not know Alexei’s secret. But our modern hunger for family empathy has led us to neglect an equally important part of his appeal. Both the monarchs made clear that he became indispensable to them for their own needs – for Alexandra in her worsening mental condition and for Nicholas in his struggle to play the tsar. Even when Alexei was well, they needed him.

  Had Nicholas kept him as a discreet family healer, and had Rasputin been content to remain one, he would still have caused a scandal. Even in a constitutional monarchy, Queen Victoria’s Scottish and Indian servant-confidants John Brown and Munshi provoked outrage. In an autocracy, any royal intimate has political power but Nicholas failed to channel Rasputin away from politics. It was the promotion of Rasputin, mainly by Alix, and particularly after 1914, to the role of adviser on all matters, that helped destroy him – and his patrons.

  When he met sceptics, such as Stolypin, his staring and eye-rolling, his muttered mumbo-jumbo and esoteric gestures were exposed in all their amateur hucksterism, while his petulant, vindictive anger when these tricks failed to impress, revealed a mean spirit that existed alongside his sincerity.

  He was a born showman, like any evangelical preacher. He may have been unsophisticated but he was boundlessly ambitious with a sly sense of the flux of power and an instinctive feel for the psychology of courts – worldly gifts that in no way affect our judgement of whether he was a true healer or a charlatan. The fact remains that, over the years, he put himself forward as a full-service personal, religious and political consigliere, at the same time constantly advancing his power by threat and stealth, boasting of his connections, showing off his letters from the tsarina, raking in bribes for his powerbroking and influence-peddling, and seducing, even raping, women. Much of this was due to the weakness of tsar and tsarina and their need, indeed hunger, for Rasputin’s support and validation. On Rasputin’s side, it was due to his overweening vanity but also his need to guarantee his own safety by controlling the police. He was a mixture of mystical power and worldly ambition, common sense, decent intentions and unfettered egotism. His advice was often practical and humane – he was always against war and stood up for minorities like Jews – but his personnel choices were self-serving, incompetent and ultimately disastrous for the regime.

  After Rasputin had prayed over Alexei, the emperor wrote to inform his prime minister that he ‘has a strong desire to see you and bless your injured daughter with an icon. I very much hope you will find a minute to receive him this week.’ Rasputin visited Stolypin and prayed over his daughter. He was not shy of the great.37

  The Crows bathed in Rasputin’s reflected glory. ‘Stana and Militsa came to dinner and spent the whole evening telling us about Grigory,’ wrote Nicholas. Like everyone else, the Crows wanted something from the tsar. Stana Leuchtenberg wanted to divorce her husband and marry Nikolasha. The latter, who generously presented his entire palace to his jilted mistress, boasted to KR that the marriage ‘couldn’t have been managed without the influence of Philippe from beyond’. Nicky gave his permission. ‘Authorization can only be seen as connivance,’ noted KR, ‘due to Nikolasha’s closeness to the emperor and that of Stana to the young empress.’ This was against the family rules, so rigorously applied in other cases, but Nicky excused himself to his mother: ‘I’m in such need of him.’ Nikolasha and Stana quietly married in Crimea. The Terrible was so happy, he was transformed, calling Stana ‘My Divine Salvation, Gift of God’.

  Just as the tsar recommended Rasputin to his prime minister, Alexandra’s newest friend also needed the peasant’s help. Anna Taneeva, twenty-one years old, twelve years younger than Alexandra, was the daughter and granddaughter of directors of the tsar’s private chancellery. Appointed maid-of-honour, Anna nursed Alexandra’s friend and lady-in-waiting Princess Sonia Orbeliani, who was dying of paralysis in the palace – but Anna ended up caring for the empress herself. ‘Sentimental and mystical’ with the ‘mind of a child’, this bovine, moon-faced girl, ‘tall and stout with a puffy, shiny face, and no charm whatsoever’, was unintelligent but ‘extremely crafty’. She fell for Alexandra with the blushing devotion of a schoolgirl passion, irresistible for the empress who ‘only entertained friendships in which she was quite sure of being the dominant partner’.

  Alexandra invited Anna on the Baltic cruise in 1905: ‘Dear Anna, God has sent me a friend in you.’ Keen to help her awkward protégée, Alexandra acted as her matchmaker with a sailor wounded at Tsushima, Alexander Vyrubov. Anna was an unstable combination of credulous mystic, galumphing romantic, cloddish narcissist and physical exhibitionist: when court doctor Eugene Botkin treated her sore throat, she insisted on being examined naked, while the guards complained of her undressing at the window.

  Anna was unsure about marriage, so Alexandra asked Militsa to introduce her to Rasputin. Anna was dazzled. ‘I saw an elderly peasant’ with ‘the most extraordinary eyes . . . capable of seeing into the very mind and soul’. The marriage could be unhappy, he advised, but should go ahead.

  Anna married Vyrubov but accused him of sexual degeneracy – and remained a virgin. She divorced him – but she became Rasputin’s devoted follower, hailing him as a ‘saint who uttered Heaven-inspired words’. Anna became the link between the Romanovs and Rasputin. ‘She plays an increasingly important role’, noticed Xenia, ‘in everything.’

  The other perennial guest at Peterhof and on the cruises was the ‘emperor’s unique friend’ General Alexander Orlov* (no relation to Fat Orlov and his Catherinian clan), ‘a good-looking officer and a famous man-about-town of charming and elegant manners’ who, noticed Mistress of the Robes Zizi Naryshkina, ‘pleased both Their Majesties’.

  Orlov behaved towards Alexandra like a cavaliere servente, bringing her bouquets and paying her compliments. He was her only male friend. ‘I’ll admit the empress flirted with him a little,’ wrote Naryshkina, ‘and that such an indiscretion on the part of a woman as cold and proud as her, was bound to attract considerable attention . . .’38

  Nicholas and Alexandra began to invite Rasputin frequently to the palace:† ‘At 2.30 Grigory came to see us and we received him with all the children.’ Even Romanovs needed appointments to see the tsar, but Rasputin just turned up. ‘After tea upstairs in the nursery,’ wrote the emperor on 29 March 1909, ‘I sat a while with Grigory who had come unexpectedly.’

  ‘It is an unspeakable joy that You, our beloved,’ the empress wrote to Rasputin on 7 February 1907,

  were here with us. How can we thank You enough for everything?. . . I wish only one thing: to fall asleep on Your shoulder . . . You are our all. Forgive me my teacher – I know I have sinned . . . I try to do better but I don’t succeed . . .
I love You and I believe in You . . . God grant us the joy of meeting soon. I kiss You warmly. Bless and forgive me – I am your Child.

  Later in the year, Nicholas asked his sister Olga, unhappily married to the homosexual Peter of Oldenburg, if she would ‘like to see a real Russian peasant’. In the nursery, ‘Rasputin led Alexei into the room and the three of us [Olga, tsar and tsarina] followed and we felt as if we were in church. He was praying and the child joined him in his prayer . . . conscious of his utter sincerity . . . All the children seemed to like him, completely at their ease with him.’

  On another visit, he put ‘an arm round my shoulders’ and ‘started stroking my hand’. Once, in Nicky and Alix’s mauve boudoir, Rasputin openly cross-questioned Olga about her sex life: ‘Did I love my husband? Why didn’t I have any children?’

  The empress concentrated on ‘baby sweet’ Alexei, who was escorted by two Cossack bodyguards at all times, while she treated her daughters – known by the collective acronym ‘OTMA’ for Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia – as a single entity, dressing them in identical clothes or, when the older two could no longer wear youthful dresses, in pairs: the Big Two and Little Two. The girls shared rooms in twos, slept on hard beds and suffered cold baths every morning, so they grew up ‘without a trace of hauteur’. Their only luxuy was a single pearl and diamond for their birthday, and each had their own favourite Coty scent. The family, especially the girls, embraced photography, taking thousands of family shots with their Box Brownie cameras. Anastasia even pioneered the selfie, sitting on a chair before a mirror holding the camera at her waist.

  As Alexandra and the girls did their knitting, ‘behind her chair, bringing into splendid relief her bright gold hair,’ recalled Anna, ‘stood a huge negro servant, gorgeous in scarlet trousers, gold-embroidered jacket and white turban’. There were now just four Nubians of whom two were Americans. Their favourite was Jim Hercules, a Virginian exboxer, son of a slave, who went home on holiday every year and brought back guava jams beloved by the grand duchesses and a Native American tepee that stood in Alexei’s playroom.

  Meanwhile Alexandra was defiantly self-absorbed, chronicling her ever-mutating neurotic and physical illnesses – sciatica, headaches, backaches, leg aches, angina, grading the gravity of her enlarged heart from Number One (slight) to Number Three (severe).* Nicholas suffered too, telling Anna, ‘I would do anything, even going to prison, if she could only be well again.’ Alexandra spent most of her time lying on sofas and being pushed around in bathchairs. ‘She shut herself up in her own room refusing to see anyone, even the children,’ recalled Anna. They missed her. ‘My darling Mama,’ wrote Tatiana in broken English. ‘I hope you won’t today be tied and that you can get up to dinner. I am always so awfully sorry when you are tied and can’t get up. Perhaps I have lots of folts but please forgive me.’

  Her ‘girlies’ revered Rasputin as a confessor and confidant. Olga told Rasputin about her first love for a young officer: ‘It’s hard without you. I’ve no one to turn to about my worries . . . Here’s my torment. Nikolai is driving me crazy . . . I love him . . . I want to fling myself at him.’ But Rasputin advised, ‘Be cautious.’ Tatiana longed to see him again: ‘When will you come? Without you it’s so boring!’

  ‘My little Pearl . . . I miss your simple soul,’ Rasputin wrote to Maria. ‘We will see each other soon. Big Kiss.’ Alexandra lectured the eldest, Olga: ‘Remember above all to be always a good example to the little ones, only then our Friend will be contented with you.’

  Nicholas appreciated Rasputin because he soothed Alexandra. ‘Better one Rasputin’, he said, ‘than ten fits of hysterics every day.’ But it was more than that. When Nicky set off on a trip, ‘Grigory watches over this journey,’ Alix wrote to him, ‘and all will be well.’ In his quieter, less demonstrative way, Nicholas soon found Rasputin indispensable as a sort of priest-psychiatrist. ‘I have only survived because of his prayers,’ he later said.

  As Rasputin’s arrivals were recorded by security, Anna arranged for the emperor and empress to meet him at her bungalow, writing to the commandant of the palaces: ‘The elder arrived at 2 and Their Majesties wish to see him today. They think it would be better at my house.’ Anna’s cottage, which still stands today outside the gates of Tsarskoe Selo, became what one minister would later call the ‘the portico of power’. As Nicky recorded in his diary: ‘We dropped in on Anya and saw Grigory and talked with him for a long time.’

  In this period before his notoriety, Rasputin was a regular presence in Nicky’s record of his genteel existence. There were strolls, tennis, dominoes and billiards with his children; teas with Rasputin and meetings with the prime minister: ‘Received Stolypin. We dined together on the balcony.’39

  ‘I can’t tell you’, Nicky told his mother on 11 October 1906, ‘how much I’ve come to like and respect Stolypin.’ On 20 February 1907, when the second Duma assembled, it was much more radical than the first, containing 118 socialists, in the wake of the decision by Lenin and Martov to allow their parties to participate. Stolypin and Nicholas immediately started to consider its dissolution, ‘but it’s too early for that’, the tsar told his mother; ‘one must let them do something manifestly stupid . . . Then slap! And they are gone!’ The radicals demanded the confiscation of land, a measure which neither tsar nor premier would consider. On 6 March, Stolypin defied them in a virtuoso performance. ‘Such attacks aimed at paralysing the government amount to two words addressed to the authorities – “Hands Up!”’ he proclaimed. ‘To these two words, gentlemen, the government must respond with only two words: “Not Afraid!”’ Even Nicholas was impressed.

  Once they had decided to dissolve the Duma, Stolypin planned a political coup d’état to change the electoral law. ‘I waited all day long with impatience for notification from you,’ Nicholas wrote to Stolypin. ‘Things are being dragged out. The Duma must be dissolved tomorrow. No delay. Not one moment of hesitation.’

  On 1 June, Stolypin told the Duma to expel its extremists. When the Duma refused, he went into action. On the 3rd, police surrounded the Taurida Palace, arresting many of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Holding new elections, Stolypin narrowed the suffrage (excluding non-Russians) to elect a third Duma dominated by noblemen and businessmen in which the Party of 17 October known as ‘Octobrists’, who supported the semi-constitutional autocracy, held a majority. Yet the old convergence between Romanovs and the nobility was long since ruptured: the third Duma lasted for five years, but much of its opposition now came from the gentry. Even this ‘king’s parliament’ defied Stolypin.40

  ‘Sometimes Stolypin is so high handed I get annoyed,’ Nicky admitted, ‘but it doesn’t last and he is the best prime minister I’ve had.’

  The revolutionary parties were broken. While there had been 150,000 Social-Democrats in 1907, there would soon be fewer than 10,000. Many Bolsheviks quietly retired into normal life and got jobs or went into exile to fulminate and feud, like Lenin in Switzerland and Austria.* The right-wing Unionists also withered. The tsar admired his prime minister, but there were real differences between this Muscovite autocrat and this conservative modernizer. As Stolypin simultaneously cultivated nationalist right-wingers, secretly funding Unionist newspapers, he was preparing for much more liberal reforms that challenged Nicholas’s deepest convictions and he started with Nicholas’s fetish – the Jews.

  ‘Isn’t it abnormal to arouse and embitter a race of 5 million people?’ asked Stolypin. ‘Clearly this is wrong.’ He even reflected that ‘the Jews throw bombs’ but ‘if I lived under such conditions, perhaps I too would throw bombs’. He wanted to lift all their restrictions, but in October 1906 he proposed a ‘modest’ improvement in Jewish rights. The appalled tsar did not answer for two months but thought about the Jewish question ‘night and day’. Finally, on 10 December, he told Stolypin that ‘An inner voice keeps insisting more and more that I don’t take this decision. So far my conscience has not deceived me. I intend to follow its dictates.�
� He then explicitly declared his view of the tsar’s mystical link to God: ‘The heart of the tsar is in God’s hands. So be it.’

  Nicholas instinctively wished Russia to be an international power again, a role so linked to Romanov legitimacy. Both he and Stolypin agreed that Germany and Austria were the main threats, that Russia must show sympathy for the Slavs and press on to win control of the Straits. Yet Stolypin insisted, ‘We need peace. War in the course of the next few years would be fatal for Russia and the dynasty.’ Anything but a ‘strictly defensive policy’ would be ‘insane’. But the emperor now pursued the traditional ambition of the Romanovs in a gambit that almost led to European war.

  After the Japanese peace, Nicky’s new, liberal foreign minister, Alexander Izvolsky, advised a Western orientation against Germany. Izvolsky, suggested by Minny, was ‘obviously a vain man and he strutted on little lacquered feet’, wrote Harold Nicolson, son of the British ambassador to Russia. ‘His clothes from Savile Row were moulded tightly upon a plump frame. He wore a pearl pin, an eye glass, white spats, a white slip to his waistcoat, his face pasty and fattening, with loose surly lips . . . and he left behind a slight scent of violette de parme.’ The British increasingly feared Germany. The foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey kept probing Russia. But the tsar remained frosty. Edward VII wrote warmly to his nephew and jovially entertained the Russian ambassador. Izvolsky argued for it. Nicky overcame the bitterness of fifty years of enmity: it made strategic sense. In August 1907, Izvolsky agreed the treaty that settled the conflicts – Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet – between the empires.* Since Russia was allied to France, which was enjoying its Entente Cordiale with Britain, Izvolsky joined a bloc to rival that of Germany, Austria and Italy.41