The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘Everywhere I was impressed by the lack of enthusiasm and the smallness of the crowds,’ noticed Kokovtsov – until they reached Moscow where, on 24 May, the jubilee finally took off. Huge crowds (and of course Rasputin) greeted the monarchs.

  ‘Now you can see what cowards the ministers are,’ Alexandra told Zizi Naryshkina. ‘They’re constantly frightening the emperor with threats and forebodings of revolution, but here – as you can see for yourself – we only need show ourselves and at once their hearts are ours.’ To the outsider, ‘Tsarism was victorious,’ recalled Lenin, ‘all the revolutionary parties were smashed. Dejection, demoralization, schisms, discord, desertion and pornography took the place of politics.’ His Bolsheviks were riddled with police agents. The economy was booming. Nicholas, like his cousin Willy in Germany, had restored some of his prerogative power but struggled to fill the vacuum at the hollow centre. His veteran secret adviser Prince Meshchersky advised him to sack Kokovtsov, as did his most influential minister, Alexander Krivoshein, a cunning operator and ex-ally of Stolypin whose job as agriculture minister, in charge of the peasant policies, made him a key adviser. As a first step, Nicholas chose a vigorous young governor and aggressive reactionary, Nikolai Maklakov, as the new interior minister. But the monarchy was a wedding-cake of exquisitely carved icing – with no filling. This was autocracy without an autocrat.

  A year earlier the shooting by troops of 150 striking workers on the Lena goldfields in north-eastern Siberia had ignited revolutionary hopes. As many as 300,000 workers went on strike. ‘The Lena shots broke the ice of silence,’ wrote an elated Stalin, recently elected to the Bolsheviks’ Central Committee for the first time. ‘The ice is broken. It has started.’ But it did not start. Maklakov unleashed the Okhrana. The Silver Age poet Alexander Blok, who later investigated its files, called the Okhrana ‘the only properly functioning institution’ in tsarist Russia. It decimated the Bolsheviks. ‘It’s a total bacchanalia of arrests, searches and raids,’ observed Stalin. Lenin, in Austrian Cracow, was despairing. Revolution, he thought, ‘might not happen in our lifetime’.

  Now in Moscow, the crowds seemed to confirm Nicholas’s achievement, but it was fragile. In a scene captured on film, Nicholas and Alexandra walked through Red Square surrounded by the grand dukes and courtiers, all in formal dress, epaulettes and sashes, followed by a uniformed Alexei, who, still unable to walk after his illness, was carried by a court Cossack. ‘I clearly heard exclamations of sorrow’, recalled the prime minister, ‘at the sight of this poor helpless child.’ The crowd made signs of the cross over the boy. The atmosphere was now overshadowed by a wild foreboding. The poets, playboys, dilettantes and aesthetes of the Silver Age – Blok called them ‘the children of Russia’s dreadful years’ – sensed the coming apocalypse and reacted in a doom-laden carnival of reckless if morbid hedonism, seeking the essence of salvation, art and freedom in opium, satanism and the transformative orgasm. The Symbolist poet-novelist Andrei Belyi warned ‘great will be the strife, strife the likes of which has never been seen in this world. Yellow hordes of Asiatics . . . will encrimson the fields of Europe in oceans of blood’, while Petersburg ‘will sink’. As strikes spread and war-clouds darkened, Blok felt the rumblings of a volcano:

  And over Russia I see a quiet

  Far-spreading fire consume all.53

  * ‘I am so sad not to be at your wedding,’ wrote Georgy. ‘It’s hard always to be away and even more so to be completely alone . . . The whole visit to Livadia seems like a dream which began pleasantly and ended up an awful nightmare.’

  * KR’s elder brother Nikola, the eccentric who had loved the American courtesan Fanny Lear, was now living like the tsar of Tashkent in his new art-filled palace, and set up a new business: his own cinema, the first in Central Asia. But he had not lost his sexual incontinence. In 1895, while his wife Nadya von Dreyer was away, he bought a Cossack girl of sixteen for 100 roubles who became his mistress, bearing him three children. Nadya always forgave him. In 1900, he wrote, ‘My attention was drawn to a beautiful schoolgirl, Valeria Khlemnitskaya,’ whom he married but Nicholas II had the marriage annulled. Of the family, only KR was allowed to visit him.

  * Bimbo – Nikolai Mikhailovich – was a sarcastic and outspoken historian. After he had fallen in love with first cousins whom he was not allowed to marry, he resolved not to wed. He and his Mikhailovich brothers loathed Vladimir and his children. Fascinated by history from an early age, he started to research in the archives, producing biographies of Alexander I and his wife Elizabeth. Thanks to him, swathes of Romanov correspondence were published and this author has used much of his research in this book.

  * Frederiks was a genial bewhiskered Guards officer of Finnish descent who called Nicky and Alix ‘the children’ and the tsar ‘my boy’, and was so absent-minded he once mistook the tsar for someone waiting for an audience. He headed the huge machine of the court with 500 courtiers; the imperial suite and entourage; plus 15,000 servants; and 1,300 bureaucrats of the court ministry administering the imperial theatres, palaces, hunts and estates. He led the team that ran the tsar’s life: his deputy was the head of the chancellery and secretariat of petitions, Alexander III’s friend Otto Richter, then (after 1900) Frederiks’s son-in-law General Alexander Mossolov; Alexander Taneev managed his office; Prince Alexander Dolgoruky then Count Paul Benckendorff organized their daily lives as grand marshals of court. Prince Vladimir Orlov, known as ‘Fat Orlov’, ran the tsar’s military chancellery. As his name suggests, he was so porcine he could not sit on a horse, while his wife was so chic and slim they were known as ‘Flesh and Bone’. Alexandra had her own chancellery; the most powerful of her ladies was the mistress of robes, the overbearing Princess Maria Golitsyna, until her death in 1909 when the tsarina finally appointed a friend, Zizi Naryshkina.

  * At least he only poked the tsar. When he spanked the bottoms of Grand Duke Vladimir and King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, he caused diplomatic incidents.

  * ‘Little Ukhtomsky is such a jolly fellow,’ wrote Nicky during their world tour. Unusually tolerant for a Russian nobleman, an advocate for Buddhists but also for Muslims, Poles and Jews, Ukhtomsky was a gentle eccentric who, though he remained a Christian, revered Buddhism. He introduced Nicholas first to a Buriat herbal apothecary, Peter Badmaev, whose potions soon anaesthetized half of fashionable Petersburg in their purple haze. Badmaev had met Witte and been introduced to Alexander III whom he liked to claim stood godfather when he converted to Orthodoxy. As influence-pedlar and espionage entrepreneur he backed Russian advances into the Far East. Now he met Nicholas. Then Ukhtomsky introduced Agvan Dorzhiev, a Buddhist priest who was the Dalai Lama’s secret envoy, who on several visits asked Nicholas to protect Tibet from British aggression.

  * A few weeks later, Alix lost her maternal figure. On 9 January 1901 (22 January New Style), Queen Victoria died. While he wrote warmly to Uncle Bertie, now Edward VII, Nicky had relished the humiliation of Britain in the Boer War. ‘I wish all success to these poor people in this unequal and unjust war,’ he told his mother. He also wrote as ‘your loving nephew’ to reprimand Bertie for Britain’s ‘war of extermination’, a sign of his growing confidence.

  * The elder sister Militsa was married to the sickly Peter, son of Nizi, commander-in-chief in 1877; the younger, Stana, had married Georgi, duke of Leuchtenberg, who had run off with his French mistress, leaving her to her spiritual adventures.

  * Nicholas was unlucky in his foreign ministers. Giers and Lobanov had already died. Now Muraviev, the architect of the forward China policy, dropped dead after a row with Witte at the age of fifty-five. His new foreign minister, Count Vladimir Lamsdorf, was a ‘strange-looking’ recluse, ‘very pale’, ‘exquisitely perfumed’ and secretly gay. The emperor nicknamed him ‘Madame’. Lamsdorf disapproved of the Eastern policy but was a submissive courtier from a vanished era. ‘I ask for nothing,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Just decide everything and I will follow my assignment.’

  * Plehve p
romoted Zubatov to head of the Okhrana in Petersburg. He expanded the agency from three bureaux to eighteen. Like many of the new generation of secret policemen, he had been a young Populist terrorist who converted to monarchism. A master of conspiratsia, he believed that double-agents were to be paid, groomed, intellectually engaged and almost seduced like ‘a beloved woman with whom you have illicit relations. Look after her like the apple of your eye. One careless move and you will dishonour her.’ Zubatov was precisely the sort of secret policeman that the tsar found distasteful. Plehve sent Nicholas a capacious weekly ‘tsar’s briefing’, cataloguing everything from mining accidents to opposition intelligence, but the emperor rarely met the Okhrana leaders, sharing his father’s haughty view that the Okhrana organization was necessary but repellent, and that it interfered with his authentic communion with his people. But any Russian leader needs to master his own security organs.

  * The meddling and indulgence of the family was already infuriating Nicky. Now he exiled Uncle Paul to Paris for breaking the Family Law. Paul had been married to Alexandra of Greece with whom he had a daughter. But she died in childbirth, producing a son, Dmitri. Much later, Paul fell for the married Olga Pistolkors, whom he married in Paris without permission. ‘The nearer the relative who refuses to submit to our family statutes the graver must be his punishment,’ Nicky told his mother. ‘I fear a whole colony of the Russian imperial family will be established in Paris with their semi-legitimate and illegitimate wives. God knows, what times we’re living in when undisguised selfishness stifles all conscience, duty and ordinary decency.’ Paul’s children Dmitri and Maria were raised by Sergei and Ella.

  * To be fair to Nicholas, it is worth remembering that not just Russia but liberal Britain was also pursuing reckless adventures in the East. In April 1903, the viceroy of India, George Curzon, despatched Colonel Francis Younghusband and a small British army to invade Tibet – partly to stop the Russians getting there first. Younghusband massacred hundreds if not thousands of Tibetans and took Lhasa for a short time, enforcing a treaty that made the country a British protectorate. But China protected Tibet. Britain was embarrassed and the Tibetans rejected the treaty.

  * KR was a contradiction. On one hand he was a tall, handsome Guards officer of impeccable wholesomeness and vast wealth since he had inherited the Marble Palace and Pavlovsk among other estates, and a close friend to Nicky. Married to Mavra (formerly Princess Elizabeth of Saxe-Altenburg), he was an adoring father to his huge brood. On the other hand, he was an amateur poet, playwright and actor; he had been friends with the late Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky, the latter impressed enough to set his poems to music. He regularly performed his plays for the imperial family. But his diaries are his masterpiece: KR specified that they could not be read for ninety-nine years after his death, and his wife Mavra often joked about what they might contain. In fact, they were preserved in the archives after the Revolution, forgotten for decades – and their astonishing revelations emerged only after the fall of Communism.

  * Formerly in the Horse Guards, ultra-reactionary and devoted, Trepov was one of the four sons of Fyodor Trepov, the governor of Petersburg under Alexander II who had investigated Fanny Lear, had dissidents whipped and been shot and wounded by a female Nihilist. All four sons held high posts under Nicholas II and one became prime minister. For now, Trepov became the emperor’s essential henchman.

  * The Romanovs aggravated Nicholas even during this supreme crisis. In 1894, Nicky and Alix had got engaged at the marriage of Ducky (Melita, daughter of the duke of Edinburgh, and sister of Missy) to Alix’s brother Ernst of Hesse. But the marriage had failed and Ducky fell in love with Kyril, Uncle Vladimir’s son who had almost died in the sinking of the Petropavlosk by the Japanese. On 25 September 1905, Kyril and his first cousin Ducky married – without the tsar’s permission. Nicky and Alix were furious; Nicky stripped Kyril of his title and income at which his father, Uncle Vladimir, resigned all posts, throwing his medals on Nicky’s desk. ‘I am having doubts about punishing a man publicly at a time when people are generally ill-disposed towards the family,’ Nicky told his mother, so he restored Kyril’s title and rights. ‘Ouf! What tiresome unpleasant days.’ Vladimir died in 1908, but his widow Miechen became Alexandra’s chief enemy. ‘How she must have hated us,’ reflected Nicky.

  * The Social-Democrats were divided into two factions with some overlap but increasingly different styles. In 1902, in his essay What is to be Done?, Lenin demanded a revolution organized by ‘a few professionals as highly trained and experienced as the imperial security police’. At the Party’s second congress held in August 1903 in London and Brussels, Martov and most Social-Democrats outvoted Lenin, who then formed his own Majority (Bolshevik) faction, dubbing his opponents the Minority (Mensheviks) because he had won a few unimportant votes. The Mensheviks were numerous nationally and more influential in the Petersburg Soviet. The interlinked factions fought beside one another in Moscow and Georgia, but their rivalry was increasingly vicious and the schism remained permanent.

  * Nicholas was careful with his historical reputation, ordering Witte and his ministers to return any documents recording his severity, hence few of them survived. He repeatedly refused to let terrorists off the death penalty, but when there was a miscarriage of justice he regarded it as his role as tsar to give justice. In 1908, on the night before an execution, a young aide-de-camp was convinced by the fiancée of a condemned man that he was innocent. The ADC bravely awoke the emperor at Peterhof and explained the case to the pyjamaed tsar. ‘I commend you for acting this way,’ said Nicholas. ‘Thank God neither of us need reproach our consciences.’ He went into his study and returned with a telegram that read: ‘Delay execution. Await further orders. Nicholas.’ Handing it to the ADC, he said simply: ‘Run!’

  * The pamphlet was actually the result of adapting two books published in the 1860s and aimed at Napoleon III but we still do not know who created it. Produced at the turn of the century, Russian secret policemen, perhaps Rachkovsky in Paris, may have commissioned this preposterous though powerful forgery, but this is unproven. If they did, the tsar believed it to be genuine since he was still reading it after his abdication.

  * The suffrage was broad and pivoted towards the supposedly loyal peasantry. The monarch totally controlled foreign policy and the armed forces, appointed ministers and could summon and dismiss the Duma, veto its laws and rule by decree if necessary. The result was a hybrid autocratic–parliamentary system. Like the other hybrid system in Europe, Germany’s, this was still dominated by the emperor who could claw back almost absolute power if he so wished, but its problem was that the lines of authority between monarch, ministers and parliamentarians were unclear and proved even more chaotic than they had been before.

  * Admiral Dubasov was wounded in another assassination attempt. In February 1906, in the Georgian capital, General Fyodor Griazanov, who had retaken Tiflis in brutal street-fighting, was killed by Bolsheviks, a hit partly organized by young Stalin while General Alikhanov-Avarsky, a Muslim from Daghestan, who had earned the nickname ‘The Beast’ for his reconquest of western Georgia and Baku, was murdered by Dashnaks. Hunted by these same terrorists, the tsar and his family scarcely appeared in public for the next six years. They never again lived at the Winter Palace, confined to the parks of Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof, guarded by concentric circles of security by their Life Guards, by the Cossack Escort (under the command of their palace commandant), then by the 250 plain-clothed agents whom the tsar jokingly called ‘the Naturalists’ because they pretended to be looking at nature, the 250 uniformed ‘Imperial Police’, and finally by his 300-strong bodyguard commanded by General Alexander Spirodovich, who as Okhrana chief in Kiev had been wounded by a terrorist. He became a family favourite. Fat Orlov coordinated all of them.

  * Nicholas was no longer friends with Sandro, who had citicized him during the war and furiously resigned as a minister when the tsar conceded a constitution – he then panicked during the revol
ution, preparing to flee in his yacht. After 1905, the imperial couple became closer to the captain of the imperial yacht Shtandart, N. P. Sablin. The 420-feet yacht, named after Peter the Great’s first ship and fitted with mahogany salons and 47mm guns, became a totally secure home from home, its crew regarded as members of the extended family. (After 1917, it was converted to a minesweeper and took part in the defence of Leningrad during the Second World War, finally being scrapped in 1963.)

  † At the same time, knowing that the name ‘Rasputin’, which resembled the Russian for ‘debauchee’, sounded vulgar, Nicholas ordered Marshal of Court Paul Benckendorff to arrange for his name to be changed to ‘Novi’, signifying his new life and his role as the New One after the disappearance of Philippe.

  * Dr Eugene Botkin, son of Alexander II’s physician, prescribed Veronal, a barbiturate, for her illnesses – for which she also took opium, cocaine and morphine. Botkin was criticized for caving in to Alix’s demands and doling out ever more of these opiates.

  * Their increasingly desperate gangsterism was now hugely unpopular. When the Social-Democrats met in London in early May, the Mensheviks banned ‘expropriations’ (bank robberies). But at the same meeting Lenin, who despised Menshevik scruples, ordered Stalin to keep robbing banks to fund the Party. The ‘expros’ revealed unbridgeable differences between the two factions, which now became different parties. This brigandage reached its climax in Tiflis on 26 June 1907 when Bolshevik brigands, organized by Stalin, held up the State Bank stagecoach and stole 250,000 roubles, worth many millions today, killing fifty passers-by in the bomb-tossing mayhem. Afterwards, despised in his native Georgia, Stalin moved to Baku. But he was soon betrayed by double-agents, arrested and despatched into Siberian exile, where he would spend most of his time until 1917.