The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  At Stavka, as the retreat went on, Nikolasha vented his hatred of Alexandra to his chaplain: ‘Put her in a monastery and everything will be different and the emperor will be different. She is leading everyone to destruction.’ Fat Orlov, devoted to the tsar yet friends with Nikolasha, was frantically plotting. ‘We’re living through dangerous times,’ he wrote to Yanushkevich on 2 June. ‘The terrible cloud of revolution is approaching.’ The tsar must sack Sukhomlinov to ‘throw them a bone’ but ‘if we don’t succeed, then we will have the Grand Duke [Nikolasha] in reserve’. This was repeated back to Alexandra who told her husband that Fat Orlov was planning a coup.

  ‘Everything is so serious and just now particularly painful,’ wrote Alix on 10 June. Nicky compromised. Three days later, at Stavka, the tsar, at Nikolasha’s suggestion, sacked Sukhomlinov and Maklakov and appointed moderates in their place. In his nearby railway-wagon, Nikolasha was so exhilarated that ‘he quickly leapt from his place, ran to an icon, kissed it. Then just as quickly lay down on the ground and kicked his legs in the air,’ laughing, ‘I want to somersault with joy.’ The greater the disasters at the front, the more popular Nikolasha paradoxically became. The tsar was not even able to protect his fallen minister. Sukhomlinov had been incompetent and corrupt – but now he was also arrested for treason, the subject of a High Commission of Investigation, and facing the death penalty.

  The demands for the mobilization of a modern war economy cohered with the clamour for liberal reform and the paroxysm of spy-mania. On 14 June at Stavka the tsar agreed with Nikolasha to recall the Duma and create a Special Council of Defence to co-ordinate between ministers, the volunteer organizations and the war industries. Finally, the government started to produce the required shells by spending lavishly on defence contracts.* Stimulated by this enormous expenditure, the economy was soon growing fast – but, as it did so, a series of bottlenecks in supply created a new crisis.

  The Duma demanded a national government. Nicky refused, at which the parliamentarians formed a Progressive opposition bloc. Nicholas had bowed before society, and before Nikolasha, and now he bitterly resented it. ‘Be more autocratic my very own Sweetheart,’ advised Alix, who hated the new ministers. ‘I don’t like Nikolasha having anything to do with these big sittings [of ministers],’ she wrote on 17 June. ‘He imposes on the ministers by his loud voice and gesticulations.’ Nicholas needed her: ‘People are afraid of my influence, Grigory said, because they know I have a strong will and sooner see through them and help you being firm.’ She reminded him how ‘our first Friend [Monsieur Philippe] gave me that Image with the bell to warn against those who are not right . . . God wishes your poor wify to be your help, Grigory always says so and Mr Philippe too.’ The tsar was often at the front, so now they wrote several times a day, exchanging some 1,600 letters, which reveal Alix’s increasingly demented voice in its idiosyncratic English.

  ‘Never forget what you are and must remain autocratic Emperor! We’re not ready for a constitutional government.’ Then she came to the heart of the matter: ‘Nobody knows who is the emperor now – you have to run headquarters and assemble the ministers there!’ As if to alleviate this bombshell, she added: ‘Do my long grumbling letters aggravate you, poor wee One!’

  On 22 July, Warsaw fell to the Germans – and still the Russian army retreated. ‘It can’t go on like this,’ Nicholas told Anna. On 4 August, when Kovno surrendered, Nikolasha was found weeping in his wagon at Stavka: ‘What more can one do? It’s awful, awful!’ But the emperor knew what to do. ‘You don’t know how hard it’s been for me to refrain from taking command of my beloved army,’ he confided to the Lovesick Creature, Anna. He must take command. But this command would perilously expose the monarch. When they heard of the plan, his ministers begged him not to follow that course.

  Alexandra summoned Rasputin from his home in Siberia to encourage the tsar. Arriving in Petrograd on 31 July, he met Nicholas twice then returned home, sending delphic telegrams: ‘Firmness is a rock but wavering is death to all.’

  Nicholas found divine guidance: ‘I was standing opposite our Saviour’s big picture in the big church,’ he later recalled, ‘when an interior voice seemed to tell me to make up my mind and write about my decision to Nikolasha apart from what our Friend told me.’

  When ministers learned that the decision was imminent, they were outraged. On 6 August, the emperor officially wrote to Nikolasha, ‘I have decided to take supreme command . . . I appoint you viceroy of the Caucasus.’ He went on, ‘If there were any mistakes, I forgive them.’ The next day the ministers begged a tense tsar, gripping a Rasputin-blessed icon given to him by Anna, not to take command. ‘I have heard what you have to say,’ he replied, ‘but I adhere to my decision.’ The ministers had no faith in his military ability, though he chose a competent general Mikhail Alexeev as chief of staff and the new Stavka was actually a considerable improvement on Nikolasha’s shambolic outfit. But the tsar’s job was to run the country.

  The idea of the tsar taking command was not necessarily absurd. Every country at war, including Britain, was facing a similar crisis of confidence. Total war required sacrifices that demanded charismatic, legitimate leadership. The emperor could take command at Stavka and either appoint an all-powerful minister, such as Krivoshein, to solve the supply crisis or appoint a parliamentary government led by Rodzianko or a military dictator, Nikolasha perhaps. It is easy with hindsight to second-guess these decisions, but there was no obvious answer.* Instead, he took only half the essential decisions and, almost by default, he left Alexandra in charge.

  Nicholas ended the meeting: ‘Gentlemen, in two days I leave for Stavka.’ He emerged ‘wet with perspiration’.

  Afterwards, the ministers met secretly and, on 22 August, ten of the thirteen signed a letter threatening to resign, the first ministerial mutiny in Romanov history. Alexandra was ‘shocked and horrified’.16

  That same day, Nicholas took command of the new Stavka at Mogilev – with an inspiring letter from Alexandra offering to take command of Russia:

  God is very near you more than ever. Never have they seen such firmness in you before . . . Lovy, I am here, don’t laugh at silly old wify but she has ‘trousers’ on unseen . . . Tell me what to do, use me, at such a time God will give me the strength to help you because our souls are fighting for the right against the evil . . . It’s the beginning of the glory of your reign, He [Rasputin] said so and I absolutely believe it. And so you will charm all those great blunderers, cowards, blind narrowminded and dishonest false beings . . . Only get Nikolasha’s nomination quicker done – no dawdling . . . Sleep well, my Sunshine, Russia’s saviour.

  He took Rasputin’s comb with him: ‘Remember to comb your hair before all difficult talks and decisions, the little comb will bring its help.’ Possibly thanks to the Sacred Comb, the next day, 23 August, Nikolasha quietly accepted his dismissal and set off, accompanied by Fat Orlov, whom Alexandra regarded as a traitor.

  ‘Thank God it’s all over,’ the emperor told the empress, ‘and here I am with this new heavy responsibility on my shoulders. But God’s will be fulfilled – I feel so calm. A sort of feeling after Holy Communion.’

  As supremo, existing in the isolated routine of Stavka, Nicholas seemed to achieve a sort of apotheosis. As for his chief of staff, he wrote of him, ‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am with General Alexeev,’ whom he nicknamed ‘my squinting friend’. ‘He does it so well.’ He was delighted by Alexandra’s new role: ‘Fancy my Wify helping Huzy when he’s away! What a pity you didn’t perform the duty long ago or at least now during the war!’

  ‘So Sweetheart, please forgive your little wify if in anyway I grieved or hurt and for having bored you so much these trying weeks,’ she wrote. ‘I am so touched you want my help.’ Days later, she and her friends Anna and Rasputin were auditioning new ministers with the help of the most disreputable band of scoundrels ever to advise a tsar. The empress possessed ‘a will of iron linked to not much brain and no kn
owledge’, wrote Benckendorff, while Missy thought that Alix was ‘passionately ambitious and absolutely convinced her judgement was infallible.’ Both knew her well. Indeed she boasted that she was the first empress to receive ministers since Catherine the Great.17

  Alexandra had spent twenty years avoiding ‘the miasma’ of Petrograd, so when she needed to select ministers she knew no one – except Rasputin, who was despised by reputable society. As a result, in August 1915 the empress and Rasputin turned to Prince Mikhail Andronnikov, forty-one years old, an influence-pedlar who had a gift for courting the powerful with his high-camp patter – and made a fortune in war-racketeering with the help of the fallen minister Sukhomlinov. Half Georgian, half Baltic German, he was described by Witte as ‘a cross between a spy con amore and a titled hanger-on’. He wittily called himself ‘the ADC of the Almighty’, in which capacity ‘I have to know everything going on in Petrograd – my only way of showing my love for my country.’

  Holding court in an opéra-bouff e apartment with a bed set in a mock-Christian shrine topped with a crown of thorns, the prince (according to his servant) ‘had more than a thousand male conquests in my two years’ service’. He favoured bicycle-messengers, official couriers. Getting them drunk and seducing them under the crown of thorns, he read their messages. If they announced promotions, he would rush to congratulate the recipients before they had heard officially, claiming they owed their good fortune to the ADC of the Almighty.

  This, in a contradiction beyond mere satire, was the sinister blackguard to whom a prim, self-righteous empress turned to find the ministers to rule Holy Russia. Knowing that the interior minister and police chief were about to be dismissed, Andronnikov approached Alexei Khvostov, the obese governor whom Rasputin had interviewed for interior minister in 1911, now a Duma member. If Nicholas was to reject his present ministers, Khvostov looked a plausible choice. Andronnikov proposed a triumvirate: he himself would be the fixer, Khvostov the minister, and Stepan Beletsky the police chief, a post he had held before. Andronnikov introduced the candidates to Rasputin, who accepted their compliments with the peasant’s disdain for the self-abasing nobleman. Then Rasputin introduced Andronnikov to Anna Vyrubova in her little villa at Tsarskoe, where she agreed to meet Khvostov. Anna was now the gatekeeper to Alexandra.

  Khvostov charmed the Lovesick Creature. She and Rasputin recommended him to the empress as the next interior minister. On 29 August, Alix reported to Nicky that Anna had met Andronnikov and Khvostov, who ‘made her an excellent impression. He is most devoted to you, spoke gently and well about Our Friend’. Anna then introduced Khvostov to the empress, whom he buttered up royally. Khvostov ‘looks upon me as the one to save the situation’, tsarina told tsar, ‘while you are away and wants to pour out his heart to tell me his ideas’. Codenaming him ‘Tail’ (khvost in Russian), she urged Nicholas to appoint him: ‘Wire to me “Tail alright” and I’ll understand.’

  Alexandra met the prime minister, the Old Fur Coat, every day. The Duma was out of control, booing Goremykin every time he appeared there. ‘I long to thrash’ most of the ministers, she said, and appoint new ones who would understand that anyone who persecuted Rasputin ‘acts straight against us’, which was ‘unpardonable and at such a time even criminal’. On 2 September, Nicholas prorogued the Duma. One of its liberal members now compared Russia to an automobile, driven too fast by a mad chauffeur whom the passengers dare not stop for fear of killing them all.

  Soon, on 7 September, Alexandra was demanding the dismissal of the ministers. As for their replacements, ‘Well dear here are a list of names . . . Anna got them through Andronnikov . . .’ she wrote. ‘Please take Khvostov.’ Betraying her naivety, she added, ‘Should he be the wrong man, he can be changed – no harm in that at such times.’ She offered herself to Nicholas as ‘your Guardian Angel and helper in everything – some are afraid I’m meddling in state affairs (the ministers) and others look upon me as the one to help you (Andronnikov, Khvostov).’ The Tail was ‘a man, no petticoats who will not let anything touch us and will do all in his power to stop attacks upon our Friend’.

  On 26 September the emperor appointed Tail Khvostov as Russia’s minister in charge of all security. Two days later, the three scoundrels celebrated their success chez Andronnikov, where they presented Rasputin with envelopes of cash. The Tail planned to become prime minister – and order a murder.18

  ‘I’ll let you have Baby,’ Alix promised Nicky when he became commander-in-chief. The image of tsar and tsarevich at Stavka was endearing propaganda, and the eleven-year-old Alexei, so long confined to bed and banned from boisterous play, was longing to put on a uniform and go to war. The experience would also be good training: ‘all his life the tsar has suffered from natural timidity and the fact he was kept too much in the background so he found himself badly prepared’, Alexandra explained to the tutor Gilliard. ‘The tsar vowed to avoid the same mistakes in his son.’

  The boy, a private soon promoted to corporal, spent much of the next year at Stavka, sharing a room with the tsar in the governor’s small mansion. Reporting on ‘Babykins’, Nicky told Alix how they played and prayed together. Alexei complained of the imperial farting in the Romanov dormitory. ‘Baby Boy wrote today,’ Alix told her husband on 7 October: ‘Papa made smells much and long this morning. Too naughty!’

  The retreat had slowed but the Germans captured Vilna and pushed into Ukraine. Alexeev planned a counter-attack against the weaker Austrians. ‘You must not speak of this to anyone – please do me that favour,’ Nicky wrote on 18 December. He meant she was not to tell Rasputin.

  Meanwhile the tsar spent much time reading Alexandra’s and Anna’s letters* – and an English novel The Millionaire Girl. As the year ended with the imperial couple apart, they craved each other. On 30 December 1915 she wrote to him: ‘I press you tightly to my breast, kissed every sweet place, I gently press my lips to yours and try to forget everything, gazing into your lovely eyes.’ On 4 January 1916, he wrote back: ‘My dear I long for you, your kisses and caresses . . . Here away from ministers and visitors we’d talk over various questions and spend a few cosy hours together. But what can we do? Our separation is our own personal sacrifice.’

  She was pushing him to replace Prime Minister Goremykin: ‘Why don’t you, now that you are free prepare all for the Old Man’s change.’ But who would take his place?19

  *

  Only the most obsequious time-servers sought office in this tragicomedy: Rasputin found the new prime minister in a retired governor of ill repute, Boris Stürmer, aged sixty-seven.

  On 20 January, Nicholas appointed Stürmer as prime minister. Stürmer then met Rasputin to receive his blessing. Even Rasputin thought, ‘He’s old but that doesn’t matter – he’ll do.’ Stürmer, however, secretly despised the peasant. When he ignored Rasputin’s wishes, the peasant upbraided him, boasting: ‘Stürmer had better stay on his string. If he doesn’t, his neck will get broken. If I say the word, they’ll toss him out.’ But Rasputin did give some sensible advice – an imperial visit to parliament. ‘One must call the Duma together even for a short session,’ Alix argued to Nicky, ‘especially if you, unknown to others, turn up there it will be splendid . . . as now all are willing to try and work – one must show them a little confidence’. On 9 February, Nicholas surprised everyone by appearing at the Duma, but the appointment of Stürmer, the mediocre prime minister with the German name, looked like either contempt or negligence. He was mocked, and disastrous rumours started to corrode the regime.

  Pamphlets with titles like Secrets of the Romanovs and The Life and Adventures of Rasputin depicted a traitorous German pornocracy with naked lesbian hellions Alexandra and Anna in thrall to Rasputin’s throbbing phallus. In a system where everything was decided secretly and ineptly, these rumours metastasized through the body politic.20

  Stürmer’s premiership infuriated Khvostov. The three scoundrels fell out among themselves. Khvostov turned on Andronnikov, denouncing him to Anna. And
ronnikov avenged himself by sending a photograph of Anna and Rasputin to the dowager empress. Tail tried to bribe Rasputin to leave Petrograd, but in late January 1916 the interior minister offered Rasputin’s Okhrana bodyguard Komissarov 200,000 roubles to strangle the starets, poison him and dump him under the ice of a frozen river. Komissarov tested the poison on Rasputin’s cat. Rasputin thought that Andronnikov was trying to intimidate him and had the Almighty’s ADC arrested and exiled. Tail hired another hitman, who was arrested by the third scoundrel, police chief Beletsky, who publicized this tale of pure Grand Guignol.

  At first Alexandra thought this was a plot against Rasputin, ‘trying to drag in Khvostov with the Jews just to make a mess before the Duma’. While the emperor was confiding on 13 February that he was reading an English novel The Room of Secrets and sniffing Alix’s letter sprayed with her English perfume, Atkinson’s White Rose – ‘the scent excites me and quite drew me to you’ – she was confronting the reality. ‘Am so wretched that we through Gregory [Rasputin] recommended Khvostov to you,’ she confessed to Nicholas on 2 March 1916, ‘it leave me not peace – you were against it and I let myself be imposed upon.’ But as for her minister, ‘The devil got hold of him.’ Now Tail had to be sacked too because ‘I honestly am not quiet for Gregory and Ania as long as Khvostov is in power and has money and police.’ Such was Nicholas’s fear of confrontation and self-control that he politely received even this loathsome rapscallion, dismissing him later by letter.*