The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  On 16 September 1908, Izvolsky met the Austrian foreign minister Baron Alois von Aehrenthal at a Moravian castle to discuss a Balkan deal that would satisfy the dyspeptic appetites of both ailing empires and revise the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. Russia wanted the Straits opened to Russian warships and the possibility of special influence over Constantinople. Ever since 1878, Austria had ‘administered’ the Ottoman province of Bosnia, which was populated mainly by Serbs. Aehrenthal wished to revitalize Austria by annexing Bosnia, thereby overawing Serbia, which aspired to rule not just Bosnia but all the Southern Slavs.

  Nicholas had given his permission for this arrangement and, when Aehrenthal agreed, the tsar was ‘extraordinarily pleased’. This deal creating Balkan spheres of influence could conceivably have prevented 1914, but when it went wrong, no event, until the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, did more to accelerate the world war. While Izvolsky was still winning support in foreign capitals, Aehrenthal double-crossed Russia and simply announced Bosnia’s annexation. Serbia objected; the Austrian chief of staff pushed for war; Germany was ready to support Vienna.

  When the news broke, the Duma, the press and Slavophile opinion attacked Izvolsky’s cynical betrayal of Russia’s Slavic brothers and threatened war against Austria. An enraged Stolypin assailed Izvolsky for risking European war. The tsar, who had approved this transaction, listened with ‘frigid reserve’ and typically pretended to know much less than he did, but he agreed the deal was dead. Izvolsky called Aehrenthal (who was said to have Jewish origins) ‘that dirty Jew’. Aehrenthal called him ‘a black-hearted ape’. Serbia was keen to fight,* but the tsar warned that ‘The Balkans aren’t worth the world to fight about.’

  Yet Austria and Russia prepared for war. On 1 March 1909, Germany presented Russia with an ultimatum: accept the annexation or Germany would intervene to back Austria. Europe was on the verge of conflict. At 6 p.m. on 6 March at Tsarskoe Selo, the emperor consulted his ministers, but the war minister, Rediger, baldly warned that ‘Russia lacks soldiers, artillery and fortresses! It is therefore wholly impossible to fight’ Austria, let alone Germany. Besides Russia’s ally France was not yet ready to be drawn into a Balkan quarrel. The tsar backed down bitterly. ‘The role Germany has played in the crisis is odious and disgusting,’ he told his mother.* ‘The form and method of Germany’s action – I mean towards us – has simply been brutal and we won’t forget it.’ Next time, Russia would be ready to fight. After this fiasco, it would have to.42

  The emperor and his critics in the Duma were united in one thing at least – their determination to rearm Russia. The army was damaged after 1905, the navy depleted. Nicholas appointed a State Defence Council under Nikolasha to work out a military strategy but the giant cousin failed to agree such a policy and the tsar initially ordered a new fleet. The head of the Duma’s defence committee, the irrepressibly unscrupulous Alexander Guchkov, an industrialist and avid duellist who had fought for the Boers against the British, proposed that the military should be run with parliamentary (that is, Guchkov’s) supervision – instead of remaining the responsibility of the tsar. Stolypin backed the bill, but this touched on the emperor’s control of the military. Nicholas vetoed it. Stolypin resigned. The tsar rejected it.

  ‘That is my will,’ Nicholas wrote to Stolypin in the authentic voice of a reinvigorated autocrat:

  Remember that we live in Russia and not abroad, so I will not allow any thought of retirement. Of course Petersburg and Moscow will chatter but hysterical screams will soon subside. I order you to work out with war and naval ministers the necessary changes to military naval laws . . . I warn you I categorically reject a request for dismissal for you or anyone else.

  Nicholas got his way. He promoted Stolypin to court steward and state secretary, but he appointed his own man, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, ex-chief of staff, as war minister to act as his military co-ordinator. Small, dapper, devious and frivolous, Sukhomlinov was an adept courtier but his Achilles heel was his sexy, pretentious wife, thirty-two years younger, who loved money and jewels. Soon loathed by the Duma on one hand and by Nikolasha on the other, he was bumptious and corrupt but more competent than he seemed. Sukhomlinov, backed by the tsar, launched a huge rearmament campaign, starting with the Little Programme straight after the Bosnian Crisis, followed by a ‘reorganization’ in 1910 and then expanding into the Great Programme of 1913, all funded by an economy that, aided by good harvests and years of foreign investment and railway construction, was booming: government revenue almost doubled between 1900 and 1913–14.*

  Nikolasha and the Crows now turned against Rasputin whom they saw as impertinent, ungrateful and, worse, out of their control. When the Crows confronted the starets, he ranted so arrogantly about ‘the importance of his mission’ that Militsa accused him of heresy. Alexandra despised Nikolasha because he had ‘turned against a man of God’. For his part Nikolasha regretted ever meeting the peasant: ‘Imagine my horror, Rasputin got to the tsar through my house.’

  If the tsar got his way about the military, Stolypin now dominated foreign policy, appointing his brother-in-law Sergei Sazonov as the new minister. ‘For the success of the Russian Revolution,’ Stolypin said, ‘war is essential. Without war, the revolutionists can do nothing.’

  In late 1910,† Stolypin proposed to extend the elected zemstvo assemblies to the Polish provinces, but conservatives in the State Council defeated the bill. Stolypin denounced them to Nicholas as ‘shady, smooth-tongued, mendacious reactionaries’.

  On 5 March 1911, weary after six years of struggle and sensing the tsar’s duplicity, Stolypin again resigned. ‘Think of some other way out and let me hear,’ ordered Nicholas, but there were fundamental as well as personal differences: Nicholas believed that Stolypin’s attempts to compromise with parliament were weakening the bulwarks that protected Russia from revolution. Stolypin wanted to create a new foundation for the monarchy among the lower orders, using land reforms to strengthen the peasantry and workers’ welfare to win over the proletariat and concessions to win over Poles and other nationalities, but the tsar and his camarilla undermined him at every turn. He could not forgive his brilliance or insolence: ‘Do you suppose I liked always reading in the papers that “The chairman of the council of ministers had done this, the chairman has done that?”’ he exploded later in a rare revelation of the bitterness behind the genteel English phlegm. ‘Don’t I count? Am I nobody?’

  Stolypin named his price for staying. The tsar must send his opponents away from Petersburg, prorogue the Duma and force the bill through by decree. Mama intervened. She summoned Nicky, who wept with frustration as Stolypin passed him in the corridor outside her drawing room. ‘I have informed my son that you alone possess the strength and ability to save Russia,’ she told him. Stolypin received a sixteen-page letter from the tsar: ‘I don’t wish to permit your departure . . .’ Resenting the ultimatum but keen ‘to retain you at all costs’, the tsar bent before Stolypin. But Stolypin’s rule by decree was a mistake.

  Rasputin was no longer a secret. Stolypin learned from courtiers about his frequent meetings with the monarchs, while Alexandra allowed the peasant to suggest the new ober-procurator of the Holy Synod. Guchkov, now Duma president, attacked ‘irresponsible influences’ at court, earning Alix’s undying hatred.43

  The prime minister and tsar had more serious political differences, and Rasputin was a problem merely of the imperial household. Yet Stolypin, as an avid monarchist, regarded it as his duty to warn the tsar about the Siberian’s debauchery and sectarian links. He had him followed by the Okhrana. When he presented reports of Rasputin’s orgies with prostitutes in bathhouses, Nicholas answered, ‘I know and he preaches the Holy Scriptures there,’ finally telling the prime minister: ‘Everything you say may be true about Rasputin. In any event I can do nothing about it.’ The tsar suggested that the two men meet.

  ‘Rasputin ran his pale eyes over me,’ Stolypin recalled. ‘He mumbled mysterious and inarticulate words from the Scriptures and m
ade strange movements with his hands.’ The prime minister sensed ‘the great power of hypnosis which produced a strong impression’, but, collecting himself, he threatened ‘this vermin’ with prosecution as a sectarian unless Rasputin left the capital. Rasputin stormed out. Stolypin banned him from Petersburg for five years, challenging the tsar, who promised that he would not see Rasputin again, a promise he soon broke. Rasputin retreated to his new house in Pokrovskoe.

  The empress defended ‘Our Friend’. ‘Gradually,’ noticed Zizi Naryshkina, ‘everyone was judged by them according to their attitude to Rasputin. Whoever praised him was “good”; whoever objected to him was “bad”’ – even if it was the prime minister, who Alexandra now regarded as an enemy. ‘He has fulfilled his role,’ she later said spookily, and would ‘retire into the background since he had nothing more to accomplish’.

  The battle for Rasputin was fought in the boudoirs and nurseries of the Alexander Palace. First Rasputin raped one of his earlier followers. Alexandra despatched her dim friend Anna Vyrubova and two ladies to Siberia to investigate. Naturally they found nothing untoward, but on the train, Rasputin just could not resist a captive audience: he climbed into the bunk with the maid and fondled her until she screamed.

  When the Crows reported all this, Alexandra told them never to mention Rasputin again, and they realized they had been replaced in the empress’s affections by Anna. They became her sworn enemies, a deepening rupture. ‘The family had been an undivided block with the emperor as pivot,’ noticed Missy, but it was ‘a great mistake to allow the family feeling to fall to pieces . . . Too self-centred, too exclusively interested in their own children, Nicky and Alix neglected their imperial relations, undermining their loyalty.’

  ‘You have mentioned your desire to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land,’ said Nicholas to Rasputin. ‘This would be a good time for it.’ He would pay for the trip which ‘you’ve earned through your many services to the Crown’. Rasputin spent Easter in Jerusalem but, on his return, was restored to favour.

  ‘After dinner,’ Nicky wrote, ‘we had the joy of seeing Grigory after his return from Jerusalem and Athens.’ Alexandra had already commissioned a book, Russian Saints Who were Holy Fools in Christ, to explain his traditional role. But his absence had not calmed his enemies: his former supporters in the Church, Bishop Hermogen and the epileptic fool Mitka Kolyaba, lured him to a meeting and, shrieking, grabbed his penis and squeezed until he confirmed his sins. Rasputin rushed to Nicholas the next day and had Hermogen sacked and exiled.44

  Stolypin returned from his holidays with radical – but almost fantastical – plans to create new ministries of nationality to restore the loyalty of the minorities, to remove ‘all restrictions on Jews’ and to establish a social security system to develop health cover for workers. He would visit Washington to build an American alliance.

  Needless to say, these measures would be anathema to emperor, court and police. To diminish Stolypin, Nicholas planned to take the Interior Ministry (more powerful in this strange system than the premiership because it controlled security) away from the prime minister. Amazingly the tsar asked Rasputin to travel out to Nizhny Novgorod to ‘gaze into the soul’ of its ‘repulsively fat’ young governor Alexei Khvostov, who might make a good interior minister. Not understanding that this peasant was the secret envoy of Nicholas II, he dismissed Rasputin, who nonetheless left with the feeling that this was a creature he could use.

  At the end of August 1911, the tsar and family travelled to Kiev to unveil a statue of Alexander II. Stolypin was already there – and the tsar had invited Rasputin too. At the unveiling of the statue, Rasputin, watching the tsar and prime minister from one side, pointed at Stolypin’s carriage: ‘Death is riding with him!’

  Stolypin looked ill and gloomy. He feared either assassination (not unreasonably, since there were said to have been seventeen attempts) or death from heart attack.

  He was right to worry. As the local Okhrana chief, Colonel N. N. Kuliabko, checked on any threats, one of his double-agents, a young revolutionary named Dmitri Bogrov, warned of a terrorist plot to assassinate Stolypin at the upcoming opera at Kiev’s Municipal Theatre. Interviewed by Kuliabko and the tsar’s chief bodyguard Spiridovich, Bogrov offered to identify ‘the assassin’, who was staying in his apartment, if they would give him a ticket to the event. The man in charge, General Pavel Kurlov, deputy interior minister, approved this idiotic scheme.

  On 1 September, the tsar and the two older grand duchesses, Olga and Tatiana, accompanied by Foxy Ferdinand’s son, Crown Prince Boris of Bulgaria, a possible suitor for the girls, arrived in the imperial box for Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tale of Tsar Saltan. The boxes were filled with Polish aristocracy in their finery, while Stolypin, wearing a white summer court uniform with gold shoulder boards, joined other ministers a few yards away in the first rows of the stalls. The policemen Kurlov, Kuliabko and Spiridovich looked for their frockcoated double-agent Bogrov, to whom they had given tickets. Kuliabko found him in the first intermission. Bogrov promised that ‘the assassin’ had not yet left his apartment. In the second intermission, a nervous Kuliabko ordered Bogrov to go home and watch his dangerous guest. Instead Bogrov headed down towards the pit where Stolypin was chatting to Frederiks.

  Nicholas, Olga and Tatiana left their box to get some tea in the foyer just as, down in the pit, the young man approached the prime minister. Stolypin ‘looked curiously at him as if to ask what he wanted’, only for Bogrov to draw a pistol and fire two shots, one hitting his target’s raised hand and the other hitting the Vladimir Cross on his chest and then penetrating his body to strike his liver. ‘The orchestra was playing an intermezzo,’ recalled Zizi Naryshkina, sitting in the imperial box next to the tsar, ‘when suddenly there was a metallic sound.’ Nicholas heard the two pops and, thinking ‘a pair of binoculars must have fallen on somebody’s head from above’, brushed aside his girls’ attempt to stop him and rushed back into his box: ‘right there opposite me stood Stolypin,’ he wrote. As women screamed, ‘I saw a group of officers dragging someone away.’ Stolypin ‘turned slowly to face me and made the sign of the cross with his left hand. It was only then that I noticed he was very pale and had blood on the right arm of his jacket.’ The blood was bright on his white tunic. Stolypin touched his chest, realizing he had been hit. Then, looking at the tsar and speaking to Frederiks, he said: ‘Your Majesty, happy to die for the tsar.’ Frederiks rushed to the edge of the box to tell Nicholas, who replied: ‘I hope there’s no reason to talk of death.’

  ‘I fear there is,’ said Frederiks. ‘The emperor was pale as death,’ recorded Naryshkina. ‘Tatiana was weeping.’ Members of the audience were punching the assassin as Stolypin, attended by Dr Botkin, sank into a seat, unbuttoning his jacket. He was able to walk out of the theatre to the ambulance that rushed him to hospital, followed by the assassin who was only just rescued by the police from being lynched. Still accompanied by the two shocked girls, ‘who saw everything’, the tsar remained in his box, ‘obviously distressed but showing no fear’. The cast came on stage and, falling to their knees, weeping, sang the national anthem. ‘I left at eleven,’ Nicky told his mother. ‘You can imagine with what emotions.’ Back in the palace, Nicky told Alix what had happened. Accompanied by their governess Sophia Tyutcheva, who did not sleep all night, Olga ‘put on a brave face’ while Tatiana was ‘very tearful’. Rasputin arrived to pray with them.

  ‘Poor Stolypin suffered a lot that night,’ wrote Nicholas, ‘and had to be given morphine.’ On 3 September, at the Mayakovsky Hospital, Stolypin’s wife found him chatty, but the bullet lay beside his liver. When the tsar visited, she did not allow him to talk to her husband for fear of agitating him. Sepsis set in. On the 5th, Stolypin said, ‘Turn out the light’ and died. Next morning, Nicholas II prayed at his deathbed, repeating ‘Forgive me!’

  The tsar immediately appointed the cautious, dapper little finance minister Vladimir Kokovtsov, whose verbosity had earned him the nickname �
�the Gramophone’, to replace Stolypin. When it emerged that Bogrov was Jewish, Kiev’s Black Hundreds called for a pogrom. Nicholas declared that he ‘would not allow a pogrom against the Jews on any pretext’. The new prime minister rushed troops to Kiev. The emperor knew that the city was already seething with anti-semitic malice for another reason.45

  While he was in Kiev, the city’s prosecutor briefed Nicholas on a new case of the ‘blood libel’. On 20 March 1911, the body of a boy named Andrei Yushchinsky had been discovered in a cave outside Kiev. The Black Hundreds claimed that the body had been drained of blood by Jewish ritualists. While the boy had almost certainly been murdered on the orders of a vicious female gangster, the authorities, both to promote counter-revolutionary nationalism and to prevent anti-semitic disorders, arrested and framed an innocent Jewish brickmaker named Mendel Beilis. Even though the evidence was non-existent and the ritual itself was a myth, the justice minister, Ivan Shcheglovitov, briefed the tsar and appointed the top Kiev prosecutor to prosecute Beilis.