The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Now the prosecutor Grigory Chaplinsky reported to the emperor, ‘Your Majesty, I am happy to report that the true culprit in the murder of Yushchinsky has been found. The Yid Beilis.’ Nicholas should have stopped the case. Instead he crossed himself and approved.

  The tsar had lost Russia’s outstanding statesman due to the carelessness and negligence, if not deliberate conspiracy, of his police. Within two days, the newspapers learned that Bogrov was a police agent: had the Okhrana, inspired by the court camarilla, arranged Stolypin’s assassination? The tsar appointed a commission to investigate the disastrous police bungling which soon found that Kurlov and Kuliabko had been ‘crassly incompetent’. Bogrov was hanged, but Nicky refused to try the policemen. He cut Spirodovich dead for a while but soon forgave him.

  Stolypin had tried every combination to solve the riddle of how to build a conservative coalition of mass support for the autocracy while he modernized Russia, but all had failed. In the zany incoherence of Russian politics, where he had to deal with bewhiskered ultra-reactionaries on one hand and steely Marxists on the other, Stolypin made enemies in all camps while losing friends with each bold innovation. A man of his time and class, Stolypin remained at the mercy of the monarch who had appointed him. Once again, the obstacle to saving the autocracy was the autocracy itself.

  Nicholas’s fatalism allowed him to function under unbearable pressure, but his casual callousness here is striking. Four days later, he recounted to ‘dear sweet Mama, the most varied impressions, both joyful and sad’. After telling the story of ‘poor Stolypin’, he spoke of the ‘splendid’ army parade, the ‘glorious warm day’, the ‘great pleasure’ he’d felt in boarding the yacht again and the ‘truly brilliant sight’ of the navy, adding, ‘I’m having a good rest here and sleeping a lot,’ while ‘Alix too is tired – she had a great deal to do at Kiev.’

  Stolypin had abdicated the right to live: ‘those who have off ended God in the person of Our Friend,’ she told Grand Duke Dmitri, ‘may no longer count on divine protection.’ When a lady-in-waiting questioned their reception by marching-band at Sebastopol so soon after Stolypin’s murder, Alexandra snapped, ‘He was only a minister, but this is the Russian emperor.’

  As the family settled into their new White Palace at Livadia,* the tsar and tsarina welcomed the new prime minister. After lunch, Alexandra summoned Kokovtsov for an eerie sermon from her wheelchair. When he praised Stolypin, she replied, ‘You seem to do too much honour to his memory . . . Believe me, one must not feel sorry for those who are no more . . . When one dies that means his role is ended and he was bound to go since his destiny was fulfilled.’ Warning him not to ‘look for support in political parties; they are of so little consequence in Russia’, she concluded that ‘Stolypin died to make room for you and this is all for the good of Russia.’46

  On 3 November, the emperor threw a ball for Olga’s sixteenth birthday. The debutante wearing her hair up and a long white tulle dress with a lace bodice and sash, danced happily, surrounded by officers of the Shtandart and watched by the empress who did not yet know that her secret letters to Rasputin were circulating around Petersburg.47

  Rasputin had been saved by the providential ascension of Stolypin, but he knew that this scandal could destroy him. The semi-free newspapers were seething with revelations about him. ‘I shall never let the press free,’ the tsar once boasted. ‘The press shall write only what I want.’ But 1905 had changed all that, though, since the censors did not allow the press to name the peasant, they used the euphemism ‘Dark Forces’. While the tsar encouraged his ministers to censor the papers, the dowager empress was appealing to the politicians for help against her own son. On 12 February 1912, Minny summoned Kokovtsov and, speaking with outrageous disloyalty, tearfully denounced Alexandra: ‘My poor daughter-in-law doesn’t perceive that she is ruining both the dynasty and herself. She seriously believes in the holiness of an adventurer. We are powerless.’ On the very same day, Alexandra ordered Our Friend to test Kokovtsov’s loyalty.

  ‘I’m planning to leave for good,’ Rasputin wrote to him, ‘and would like to see you to exchange thoughts. Say when.’ Entering his office, Rasputin sat and silently fixed Kokovtsov with his deep-set grey eyes ‘and didn’t take them off me for a long time as if he imagined he was casting some sort of hypnotic spell’.

  ‘So should I leave? They’re telling tales about me.’

  ‘Yes, your place isn’t here and you threaten the Sovereign.’

  ‘It’s all lies. I don’t insist on going to the Palace. They summon me . . . All right I shall go!’ Kokovtsov had failed the test.

  When the newly elected fourth Duma convened, its rotund president, Mikhail Rodzianko, a devoted monarchist, was determined to confront the tsar about Rasputin. Minny summoned him. ‘Don’t do it,’ she said. ‘The emperor won’t believe you. He’s so pure in heart, he doesn’t believe in evil.’

  ‘Your Majesty,’ replied Rodzianko, ‘it’s a question of the dynasty.’

  ‘God bless you.’ Nicky’s mother hurried after him. ‘But don’t hurt him too much.’

  At his audience with the chain-smoking tsar, Rodzianko challenged him about ‘the starets Rasputin and the inadmissible fact of his presence at Your Majesty’s court’.

  ‘Speak,’ said the tsar with ‘bowed head and averted gaze’.

  ‘The whole government from ministers to inferior ranks of the secret police is mobilized for the purpose of shielding this adventurer.’ The tsar gave him permission to investigate allegations against Rasputin and even presented him to the tsarevich Alexei. ‘I introduced myself as the fattest and biggest man in Russia,’ recalled Rodzianko. Alexei laughed. When Rodzianko returned with his damning report, Nicholas refused to expel Rasputin from Petersburg. He nicknamed Rodzianko ‘Fatso’.

  Alexandra’s friend Princess Zinaida Yusupova, sole heiress to Russia’s greatest fortune, tried to persuade her that the parliamentarian Rodzianko was a patriot, but the empress ranted at her: ‘Hanging is too good for men like Rodzianko.’ So finally Minny decided to speak out. ‘We had a conversation about Grigory,’ wrote Nicky on 15 February 1912. Alix defended Rasputin – ‘an exceptional man’ – and denounced society as ‘dirty-minded gossips’ and the ministers as ‘all cowards’.

  Rasputin’s mischief – and the intrigues against him – now reached not just the court but the nursery: the governess Sophia Tyutcheva thought that Rasputin’s visits to the girls were no longer appropriate when Olga and Tatiana were teenagers. Her views reached the newspapers. ‘What’s going on in the nursery?’ the emperor asked her. ‘So you don’t believe in the sanctity of Grigory? And what if I told you that all these difficult years I have survived only because of his prayers?’

  Tyutcheva was dismissed. Rasputin ‘is hated because we love him’, Alexandra told Anna, adding to Dr Botkin that ‘Saints are always calumniated.’

  Back in 1909, Rasputin had shown the empress’s letters – in which she declared her devotion to the Siberian – to the demented priest Iliodor, who stole them and now gave them to a Duma member who publicized them. The new interior minister Alexander Makarov confiscated the letters and returned them to the tsar, who ‘turned pale, nervously took the letters from the envelope’ and put them in his desk drawer. Makarov was soon dismissed. Rasputin was meant to ease the stress of ruling. Now he was magnifying it. Family was meant to be Nicholas’s sanctuary from public duty. Instead it had become his torment. This time, even Alexandra turned against Rasputin. He was out.48

  In September 1912, Nicholas and the family moved to Spała, his Polish hunting estate. Jumping into a boat, Alexei, now eight, struck his groin which swelled up. Then on 2 October, after a bumpy carriage ride through the Spała woods, Alexei, fever raging, haemorrhaging in his upper thigh and abdomen, collapsed. His screams echoed round the hunting lodge for eleven days as he prayed, ‘O Lord have mercy on me!’, begging Alexandra, ‘Mama, help me!’ Sometimes he felt he was dying: ‘When I’m dead build me a little m
onument of stones in the wood.’ Once, on seeing his pain, poor Nicky ‘rushed weeping bitterly to his study’. The emperor ‘took turns with Alix to sit with Alexei’ – their secret agony heartbreaking. ‘The poor little mite’, Nicky told Minny, ‘suffered terribly, pains gripped him in spasms, he was delirious.’ On 6 October, his fever rose as he haemorrhaged into his stomach. The doctors persuaded the emperor to issue medical bulletins – without mentioning haemophilia. ‘When I’m dead,’ Alexei asked Alexandra, ‘it won’t hurt any more will it?’ On the 8th, as Nicky and Alix watched, Alexei received the last rites. The boy was dying.

  Alexandra appealed to Rasputin, at home in Siberia. The next morning, 9 October, she appeared smiling. ‘I am not the least bit anxious myself,’ she said. ‘During the night I received a telegram from Father Grigory.’

  ‘God has seen your tears and prayers,’ he wrote. ‘The little one will not die.’ Alexei’s fever abated. Within two days the bleeding had stopped and the swelling receded. Whether this was a miracle, the result of relaxing the mother, or the attack had already reached its climax, Rasputin was indispensable.49

  Meanwhile Europe was on the verge of war. Keen to prepare for conflict in case it came, the emperor and Duma were raining money on the armed forces – the so-called Great Programme. Sukhomlinov was modernizing fast, building strategic new railways which meant that by 1917 Russia would be able to mobilize 100 divisions in eighteen days, just three days behind Germany. By 1914, Russia was spending more on its army than the Germans and almost as much on its navy. The German generals, watching the creation of this Russian super-army, now believed that it would be better to fight soon rather than wait for the Russians to be ready. Yet enjoying generous budgets was one thing; overcoming backwardness of training, thinking and technology was quite another. Indeed there was so much money that Sukhomlinov could not spend it all. At Livadia, the prime minister warned his sovereign, ‘Your army is in terrible condition,’ blaming Sukhomlinov.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ replied the tsar, ‘the money won’t be used and our armaments won’t improve.’

  Alexandra cut Kokovtsov dead and the court minister approached him. ‘The tsar’, Frederiks explained, ‘asked me to express his displeasure at your remarks about the War Minister.’ As spasms of European sabre-rattling, intensified by Balkan rivalries and Ottoman decline, became more frequent, the emperor could hardly resist rearmament: ‘You’re always right,’ he told the premier, ‘but I cannot refuse military appropriations. Heaven forbid we shan’t put out the Balkan fire.’50

  The new Balkan states were bound to appeal to both Russia and Austria, but the schism after 1908 made it even easier for them to play off the two anxious, weakened empires. Both powers rightly feared war and hoped to preserve the status quo, yet both believed war was ultimately essential in the struggle for survival of the fittest. Russia remained highly suspicious of Austrian ambitions and cultivated the Slav states to prevent any more advances. This time, the spark came from Italy, a new kingdom left behind in the imperial race and keen to catch up. In October 1909, Nicholas and Izvolsky had visited Italy and agreed that, in return for future support in opening the Straits, the Italians could seize the Ottoman provinces of today’s Libya in North Africa. In 1911, the Italians attacked Libya, threatening European stability and bringing the Balkans to simmering point. When the sultan temporarily closed the Straits, Russian exports were choked and Nicholas’s ministers panicked, recommending the seizure of the Straits before it was too late.

  The Italian conquest of Libya was the starter-pistol for war, escalating the carve-up of Ottoman Europe. The belligerent Balkan Slavs, armed with new weapons and frenzied nationalism, planned to redeem long-lost lands in an attack on the vulnerable Ottomans. The tsar and foreign minister Sazonov encouraged their appetites and co-ordinated their creation of a Balkan League around Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro, hoping to control this bloc and use it as a barrier against Austro-German expansion southwards.*

  Small, immaculate and slant-eyed, Sazonov was a decent Muscovite nobleman, compared by a subordinate to ‘the type of womanly Slav, easy and generous but soft and vague, constantly changing, resisting all sustained efforts at thinking to the logical end’. A moderate Slavophile committed to the Anglo-French alliance and ultimately to the project of winning the Straits, he combined naive idealism with an emotional instability that made him unsuited to dealing with the irredentist firebrands of the Balkans. He hoped to guide the Balkan League, using his Russian veto, and, if war came, to mediate. A more sensible man might have worked to restrain the Slavs and make a deal with unstable Austria, but Sazonov was excitable and inconsistent. Foreigners soon called him ‘the Wobbler’. Alexandra later dubbed him ‘Wet Chicken’ or just ‘Pancake’.

  On 8 October 1912, King Nikola of Montenegro declared war. As 1.2 million soldiers on both sides took the field in the First Balkan War, the Slavic armies triumphed on all fronts over the Ottomans. Sazonov had lost control of his own monster. The Bulgarians smashed through Thrace towards Constantinople. What would Russia do if Bulgaria grabbed Tsargrad? ‘All right, let them,’ Nicky told the kaiser’s brother Heinrich: they could occupy it, but only temporarily. ‘The occupation of Constantinople’, explained Sazonov, ‘could compel the appearance of our entire fleet before the Turkish capital.’

  On the Aegean coast, Serbia and Montenegro were swallowing the new entity of Albania. Fearing that a Serbian port would become a Russian base, Austrian generals threatened war against Serbia – which stimulated war fever in Petersburg. While Sazonov backed the preservation of Albania, Nicholas, still at Spała with the ill Alexei, had been joined by Nikolasha, that husband of a Montenegrin princess and champion of the Balkan Slavs, who encouraged him to back the Serbs. The Austrians massed their armies on Serbia’s borders. Europe tottered on the edge of the precipice.

  Sukhomlinov and the tsar agreed to keep 350,000 conscripts in the ranks in case they were needed. Then the war minister suggested mobilizing his armies on the Austrian, but not German, border – even though Austria and Germany were committed to aid each other. The insouciant Sukhomlinov planned to launch this part-mobilization – and then take his wife on holiday to the Riviera. The tsar agreed.

  Meanwhile, twenty miles from Constantinople, Foxy Ferdinand was anticipating his coronation as Caesar, ordering his state coach and self-designed Byzantine royal robes.

  In early October 1912, Admiral Ivan Grigorovich, navy minister, had proposed protecting Constantinople or seizing the Straits. Constantinople, said Sazonov, would grant Russia ‘the natural crown of her efforts and sacrifices over two centuries’, giving the monarchy such prestige that it would ‘bring health to our internal life’ and ‘unite government and society’. Russia planned to send 5,000 troops to protect the Christians of Constantinople, followed by the entire fleet – but it was questionable whether the navy could even launch such an operation.

  On 10 November, Sukhomlinov summoned Kokovtsov to the tsar’s study at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘The tsar opening a map on the table began to explain calmly and clearly . . . it was decided to mobilize’ Kiev and the Austrian borders, adding, ‘I wish to stress we have no intention of taking any steps against Germany.’ Russia had been close to going to war without telling its own prime minister.

  The prime minister warned that mobilization would bring European war.

  ‘I don’t allow the thought of imminent war,’ answered the tsar, who still believed that his will was self-fulfilling. ‘We’re not ready.’ The Wobbler, who had initiated the entire scheme, now wobbled, saying he was ‘overwhelmed by the approaching catastrophe’. The tsar cancelled the mobilization, telling Kokovtsov graciously: ‘I’m even more pleased than you.’ Nonetheless the tsar and Sukhomlinov kept discussing these plans for another month. In the end, Sukhomlinov was allowed to bring up cavalry to the Austrian border but no partial mobilization.

  Now came welcome news: the Ottomans had thrown back the Bulgarians, but Russia’s other uncont
rollable brothers, Serbia and Montenegro, had occupied northern Albania and its Adriatic ports. This time, Austria issued an ultimatum threatening war unless they withdrew.

  ‘I will fight to the last goat and cartridge,’ threatened the king of Montenegro, who had many goats but few cartridges. Sazonov refused to back the Montenegrins who finally retreated. The real victor of the war was Foxy Ferdinand whose Bulgaria emerged almost double in size – to the fury of his erstwhile allies and Russia. The tsar turned to a more reliable protégé whom he presumed would not push Russia into a European war: Serbia.51

  *

  Alexei was recovering, but his illness triggered another crisis. Nicholas’s brother Misha, nicknamed ‘Floppy’ because he tended to fall asleep while driving, was in love with Natasha Wulfert, the ‘slender, dignified, sinuous and softly graceful’ twice-divorced wife of a brother officer, with whom he had a son. But he promised the tsar that he would never marry her. Now, if Alexei died, he would again be heir and would never be allowed to marry Natasha. Escaping the Okhrana, who were watching him, he and Natasha eloped across Europe and married in Vienna. The tsar was incensed by his brother’s use of Alexei’s illness as an excuse and at a time when ‘everyone is talking of war’. ‘Between him and me,’ said the tsar, ‘everything is now alas at an end,’ just when he was about to celebrate the dynasty’s tercentenary.52

  On 21 February 1913, a twenty-one-gun salute launched the jubilee: as Nicholas and Alexandra processed from the Winter Palace to a Te Deum in the Kazan Cathedral, Rodzianko, president of the Duma, found Rasputin sitting in his reserved seats. ‘I was invited here by people more highly placed than you,’ said Rasputin, who fell to his knees praying.

  ‘Enough of this tomfoolery,’ replied Rodzianko. ‘If you don’t clear out, I’ll drag you by your beard.’*

  First the tsar and his family cruised down the Volga to Kostroma, where Michael Romanov had been hailed as tsar. Rasputin was there too, sitting in the front row of the cathedral.