* In May 1908, Edward VII and Queen Alexandra were met at Reval by Nicholas, the family and Stolypin, on the Shtandart. Bertie regarded Nicky as ‘deplorably unsophisticated, immature and reactionary’; Nicky thought Bertie ‘the most dangerous intriguer.’ But now Bertie charmed Nicky and delighted Russian sailors by greeting them ‘good morning, children’ in Russian. Nonetheless, prompted by his Jewish friends the Rothschilds, Bertie asked Stolypin to improve Jewish rights – and teased Alix that her children spoke English with Scottish accents. At the tsar’s dinner, a British courtier found Alix weeping hysterically on deck. A year later, Nicky, the family and Stolypin sailed to the Isle of Wight for the regatta, where Olga and Tatiana were allowed the treat of a heavily guarded shopping trip to Cowes, their first public outing since the Revolution.
* Foxy Ferdinand exploited the crisis to declare himself ‘Tsar of Bulgaria’. Minny thought this breathtakingly impertinent and Nicholas called it ‘the act of a megalomaniac’. But he had to recognize Foxy’s title. Prince Nikola of Montenegro demanded the tsar’s approval to attack Austria, backed by his daughter Stana and Nikolasha.
* That October, the tsar lost ‘his unique friend’ Alexander Orlov, who died in Cairo of TB. Nicholas built him a large mausoleum where Alix often laid flowers.
* He tried to raze many of the obsolete fortresses, to modernize artillery, to create reserves to call upon in war and update the mobilization schedules. His promotion to war minister marked the downgrading of the post of chief of staff and it was now in his interest that the holders of this post were mediocrities unable to challenge him. Yet no one trusted him. ‘There is something about General Sukhomlinov that makes me uneasy,’ Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador, later reflected. ‘I know few men who inspire more distrust at first sight.’ He was certainly no visionary. When Sandro suggested an air force, he replied amid paroxysms of laughter: ‘Blériot playthings in our army?’
† On 31 October that year, Tolstoy, widely seen as Russia’s other tsar, abruptly left his estate to escape his wife Sonia but fell ill on the train and had to dismount at a remote station. The world watched the ensuing drama of the dying sage. Tolstoy had long been a dangerous enemy of tsarism. In 1901, Pobedonostsev had organized his excommunication from the Church while the tsar received rude letters from the novelist (delivered by his cousin Bimbo who typically had befriended Tolstoy) telling him: ‘don’t believe’ any popular enthusiasm ‘is an expression of devotion for you . . . just a crowd of people who will go after any unusual spectacle.’ When he finally died on 7 November, it was ‘an event discussed a great deal too much in my opinion,’ Nicky told Minny, ‘but fortunately he was buried quietly’ at his estate Yasnaya Polyana, which Stolypin shrewdly proposed to buy for the nation. Nicholas vetoed the idea.
* This had replaced Alexander II’s wooden palaces and continued to be the scene of the annual visits of the exotic emirs of Bukhara and khans of Khiva, who brought the children generous presents. In early 1945, this was the scene of the Crimean conference of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. FDR stayed in the palace itself, sleeping in the empress’s boudoir; Churchill at the Vorontsov Palace; Stalin at the Yusupov Palace.
* Nicholas and Sazonov tried to turn their ungrateful, trigger-happy Slav brothers into obedient, responsible allies, but they all wanted the same territories. Serbia, guided by a powerful Russian ambassador and military aid, wanted a Greater Serbia including modern Albania, Bosnia and Macedonia. Nikola of Montenegro, promoting himself to king, aspired to the same Greater Serbia but ruled by himself. The tsar sent Nikolasha and the Crows to Nikola’s coronation and gave him 600,000 roubles a year in return for Russian command of his army. Foxy Ferdinand aspired to the medieval Bulgar Empire including Macedonia and Thrace. Hoping to gain influence, Nicholas paid off Foxy’s debts of 2 million francs.
* On 9 May, before the main festivities, the tsar, accompanied by Fat Orlov and Benckendorff, attended the wedding of the kaiser’s daughter Victoria Louise to Ernst August of Hanover. In Berlin, he was met with ‘special cordiality’ by his two cousins, Wilhelm II of Germany and George V of England. In their carriage, the kaiser mentioned his plan to send a German general to Constantinople; the tsar made no objection. It was the last meeting of the three emperors.
SCENE 5
Catastrophe
CAST
NICHOLAS II, emperor 1894–1917, ‘Nicky’
Alexandra Fyodorovna (née Princess Alix of Hesse), empress, ‘Alix’, ‘Sunny’
Olga, their eldest daughter
Tatiana, their second daughter
Maria, their third daughter
Anastasia, their youngest daughter
Alexei, caesarevich, tsarevich, their son, ‘Tiny’, ‘Baby’
THE ROMANOVS
Maria Fyodorovna, dowager empress, widow of Alexander III, ‘Minny’
Uncle Paul, ‘Pitz’, married Olga Pistolkors, Princess Paley
Nikolai Nikolaievich, commander-in-chief, viceroy of Caucasus, ‘Nikolasha the Terrible’, married Stana, daughter of King Nikola of Montenegro, one of the ‘Black Women’, ‘the Crows’
Peter Nikolaievich, his brother, married Militsa, daughter of King Nikola of Montenegro, one of the ‘Black Women’, ‘the Crows’
Nikolai Mikhailovich, ‘Bimbo’, ‘White Crow’
Alexander Mikhailovich, ‘Sandro’, his brother, married the tsar’s sister Xenia
Dmitri Pavlovich, son of Uncle Paul, the emperor’s first cousin and companion, murderer of Rasputin, friend of Yusupov
Marie, ‘Missy’, queen of Romania, married to Ferdinand, first cousin of Nicholas II
Prince Felix Yusupov, married Irina, daughter of Sandro and Xenia, murderer of Rasputin
COURTIERS: ministers etc.
Baron Vladimir Frederiks, court minister, later count
Prince Vladimir Orlov, chief of tsar’s military chancellery, ‘Fat Orlov’
General Alexander Spirodovich, commander of the tsar’s bodyguard
Vladimir Kokovtsov, prime minister, count, ‘Gramophone’
Nikolai Maklakov, interior minister
General Vladimir Sukhomlinov, war minister
Ivan Goremykin, prime minister, ‘Old Fur Coat’
Alexander Krivoshein, agriculture minister
General Nikolai Yanushkevich, chief of staff
Sergei Sazonov, foreign minister, ‘Wobbler’
General Mikhail Alexeev, chief of staff
Prince Mikhail Andronnikov, influence-pedlar, ‘ADC to the Almighty’
Alexei Khvostov, interior minister, ‘Tail’
Boris Stürmer, interior minister, foreign minister, prime minister
Alexander Trepov, communications minister, then prime minister
Alexander Protopopov, last interior minister
Alexander Guchkov, president of the Third Duma
Mikhail Rodzianko, president of the Fourth Duma, ‘Fatso’
Anna Vyrubova (née Taneeva), Alexandra’s friend, ‘Ania’, ‘Lovesick Creature’, ‘Cow’
Countess Elizabeth Kurakina-Naryshkina, mistress of the robes, ‘Zizi’
THE HIEROPHANT
Grigory Rasputin, Siberian holy man, ‘Our Friend’
‘The tsarevich’s illness and the empress’s religious exaltation didn’t prevent normal life,’ wrote Spirodovich, especially for the tsar and his daughters. After Moscow, on 9 August 1913 the family headed to Crimea. The girls had now blossomed. ‘Extremely pretty, with brilliant blue eyes and lovely complexion’ and resembling Nicholas, Olga was the ‘cleverest’ with a ‘strong will’. Tatiana, tall and slender with ‘English manners’, was a dutiful organizer like her mother but, unlike her, ‘She liked society and longed pathetically for friends.’ Open and playful, Maria was the best-looking, full lipped and yellow haired with ‘splendid eyes and rose-red cheeks’, while Anastasia was a reckless mischief and naughty tomboy, a ‘very monkey for jokes’, the family entertainer.
Alexandra ‘dreaded for her daught
ers the companionship of over-sophisticated’ or ‘precocious’ girls from ‘decadent society’, so the girls mixed only with the officers from the Shtandart and the Cossack Escort. Olga was in love with Lieutenant Pavel Voronov of the Shtandart: ‘I love him so so much,’ she wrote, calling him ‘Sweetie pie’.
As for Alexei, still protected by his two sailor-bodyguards, he was banned from playing any rough games. ‘Can’t I have a bicycle?’ he begged his parents.
‘Alexei, you know you can’t.’
‘Why can other boys have everything and I nothing?’ In Romanov tradition, he adored drilling his friends from the Military School. Like every heir, he had a strong sense of his own special importance, accentuated by his secret sickness. His parents could not discipline him. KR complained about his appallingly boorish table manners: ‘He wouldn’t sit up, ate badly, licked his plate and teased the others; the emperor often turned away while the empress rebuked her elder daughter Olga for not restraining him.’ The boy was touchy about his rank, loudly reprimanding a courtier who did not introduce him in full, while film footage shows him shoving a woman who turned her back on him for a second. The tsar called him ‘Alexei the Terrible’. ‘Lor, he does love ragging,’ said Nicky in his old-fashioned English to a British officer.
On 28 September, while he was in Livadia, the emperor closely followed the ‘blood libel’ trial of the innocent Beilis, who had languished in jail for two years as the state built its unconvincing case of ritual murder against the Jewish brickmaker. Realizing that Beilis was probably innocent, Justice Minister Shcheglovitov did not cancel a trial designed to strengthen the union of tsar and people. Instead he insured himself by dividing the indictment into two counts: first, was Beilis guilty of murder; second, had the victim been killed in a ritual murder?
An array of scientific ‘experts’, many of them reputable professors, testified in a Kiev courtroom that draining the blood of Christian children was a Jewish tradition and that the body had been skilfully drained through thirteen wounds, thirteen being a magic Jewish number. But a brilliant defence team discredited the case. On 28 October, Beilis was found not guilty but the jury found it ‘proven’ that the victim had indeed been ritually murdered. ‘I am happy Beilis was acquitted,’ Nicholas told Spirodovich, on hearing the news at Livadia, ‘because he is innocent,’ but ‘it’s certain this was a case of ritual murder’. Yet he had approved a fraudulent case against an innocent man and the promotion of a medieval lie.1
Back in Petersburg, Nicholas anxiously monitored a febrile Balkans. Bulgaria had emerged so triumphantly from the First Balkan War that its rivals, Serbia, Greece and Romania, clubbed together to steal its gains. That summer when the Second Balkan War started, the Bulgarians were defeated on all fronts, their spoils shared among the others. Even the Ottomans joined in. Nicholas called the Balkan states ‘well-behaved youngsters who’ve become stubborn hooligans’, but he was now backing the most dangerous hooligan on the block. Serbia’s premier Nikola Pašić came to Petersburg to confirm their alliance – for when the Austrian war came.2
In November, the tsar realized that a German general, Otto Liman von Sanders, had been appointed to command the Ottoman corps guarding the Straits. A junta of ‘three pashas’ led by the young officer Ismail Enver had just seized power in Constantinople. Enver believed that only a severe combination of refreshing war and Turkic nationalism could save the empire. Once it had been protected from Russia by Britain, but even under Bismarck the Germans had started to offer themselves as a new protector. Kaiser Wilhelm had twice visited the sultan. After the Anglo-Russian alliance, Enver turned to Germany and started to rearm, ordering new battleships that would dominate the Black Sea. Russia could not risk the choking off of 50 per cent of its exports through the Straits. It had hoped to postpone any action until it was fully rearmed, but time was running out. Enver’s two battleships were about to arrive. As for Liman, the Germans stepped back, agreeing a face-saving compromise.
These crises concentrated the minds of all sides. If Germany threatened France, a Balkan spark might be the only way to draw Russia in against Germany. Starting in the autumn of 1912, France, in the person of Raymond Poincaré as premier then president, confirmed that it would back Russia in a Balkan crisis. Simultaneously the scale and success of Russia’s Great Programme of rearmament was alarming Berlin and Vienna. Perhaps time for them too was running out if they were to stop the Russian steamroller.
On 30 January 1914 the tsar dismissed the cautious, sensible Kokovtsov. The obvious replacement was Krivoshein, who had pushed for this change, but he slyly suggested appointing old Goremykin, ‘an upright corpse’, as premier.* ‘What success can I hope for?’ the ‘corpse’ asked. ‘I’m like an old fur coat. Packed way for months in mothballs, I’m being taken out merely for the occasion. Then I’ll be packed away till the next time.’ With Goremykin in charge, Nicholas had reasserted his power, but all this only added to the uneasiness in public life, the frustration that the promises of 1905 had not been honoured, the gridlock between government and Duma. Interior Minister Maklakov proposed a coup to liquidate the constitution. ‘I was pleasantly surprised by the content of your letter . . . which will make Mr Rodzianko and his cronies take our bit between their teeth,’ wrote Nicky, who preferred to transform the Duma into a consultative body. When he discussed this plan with the other ministers, all warned against it.3
In February, the dowager empress gave a ball for the debut of Olga and Tatiana at the Anichkov Palace. ‘A stranger visiting Petersburg in 1914’, wrote Sandro, ‘felt an irrepressible desire to settle in the brilliant capital that combined classical beauty with a passionate undertone of life, cosmopolitan but thoroughly Russian in its recklessness.’ At Minny’s ball, the tsar found himself a stranger in society. ‘I don’t know anyone here,’ he murmured, while his daughters could dance only with officers of the Cossack Escort: they did not know anyone else. But now that Olga was almost eighteen, she should marry. The tsar’s first choice was the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich.4
‘Dmitri was extremely attractive, tall, elegant, well bred with deep thoughtful eyes,’ recalled his friend Felix Yusupov. ‘He was all impulses, romantic and mystical,’ and he was ‘always ready for the wildest escapades’. He was Nicky’s first cousin, but almost a surrogate son – they enjoyed billiards, tennis and hijinks. Dmitri competed as an equestrian at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Inheriting the riches of both his uncles Alexis and Sergei, he lived in splendour at the latter’s pink Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace. No one was so intimately irreverent: who else could joke to the emperor about masturbating over the empress? ‘How’s the health of Her Majesty? Tell her I so often think about her that deluged in tears of powerless useless passion, I hug my pillow thinking about her.’ He often signed off: ‘I cover my aunt’s arm with voluptuous kisses.’
He and the tsar chuckled about Dmitri seducing the old courtiers at Livadia: ‘I wish I was there with you. Are you dancing in the evenings? It would be a great opportunity for me to . . . saucily press against Baroness Frederiks . . . Hee-hee-hee!’ He signed himself, ‘I embrace my illegal mother (sorry I am her illegitimate son). Embrace the children moistly . . . Yours with heart, soul and body (except for arsehole), Dmitri.’ Apologizing for a long letter, he suggested, ‘Take this message with you when you go to shit. Time will be pleasant, ideal, and in extreme cases you can wipe your arse with it (mixing business with pleasure).’5
‘Almost every night’, Dmitri and Felix Yusupov drove to Petersburg to ‘have a gay time at restaurants, nightclubs and with the gypsies’. Hearing of their adventures, Alexandra decided that Dmitri was not an appropriate mate for Olga; the grand duke himself had meanwhile fallen in love with another eligible Romanov, the tsar’s niece Irina.
Prince Yusupov, a bisexual transvestite who was heir to a super-wealthy family,* had borrowed his mother Zinaida’s dresses to flirt with officers at the fashionable Bear restaurant. After studying at Oxford, where he had joined the Bullingdon Club
, Felix often played tennis at Livadia where on 11 November 1913 the tsar called him ‘the best tennis player in Russia. He can really teach one something.’ When he and his friend Dmitri both fell for Grand Duchess Irina, daughter of Sandro and Xenia, she chose Yusupov. ‘She was eighteen, very beautiful and very naive,’ says her niece, Princess Olga Romanoff. ‘She didn’t even know what a homosexual was. Yet the marriage was very happy. She was a very strong character. In the Romanov family, the women are often stronger than the men.’ For their wedding on 9 February 1914, the tsar lent the couple a state coach and led Irina into the church.
Now Nicky and Alix had to confront the problem of Olga’s marriage, which they discussed with Sazonov, the foreign minister. ‘I think with terror that the time draws near when I have to part with my daughters,’ the tsarina told him. ‘I could desire nothing better than that they should remain in Russia but . . . it is of course impossible.’
On 15 March, Olga’s suitor, cousin Carol of Romania, arrived with his parents, the glamorous Missy and the gawky Ferdinand, heir to the Romanian throne. Alexandra ‘managed to put an insuperable distance between her world and yours . . . The pinched unwilling patronizing smile was one of the most disheartening impressions,’ thought Missy. ‘When she talked it was almost in a whisper hardly moving her lips as if it were too much trouble.’ The mothers agreed that the children ‘must decide for themselves’ and Missy ‘much preferred the company of the girls to their mother . . . they considered me a good sport and took me for walks.’ Carol failed to charm Olga. ‘I am a Russian and want to stay one,’ she told her brother’s tutor Gilliard. ‘I don’t want to leave Russia (and) papa has promised not to make me’ – loving paternal sentiments except that a foreign marriage would have saved her life. After the Romanians had left, the family headed to Livadia.6
‘We’ve had two very happy months,’ the tsar reflected after one of his Crimea hikes – but there was a fat lovesick fly in the ointment.
The Romanovs Page 76
