Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty

by Robert K. Massie

  Nevertheless, in Goremykin’s enfeebled hands, the government had almost ceased to function. His fellow ministers avoided or ignored him. When he appeared in the Duma, the elderly man was greeted by a prolonged hiss which made it impossible for him to speak. The Tsar, the Empress and Goremykin himself understood that the situation could not continue. “I keep wracking my brains over the question of a successor for the Old Man,” wrote Nicholas. Alexandra sadly agreed, and for a while they thought of appointing Alexander Khvostov, the conservative Minister of Justice. An uncle of the singing Minister of Interior, this older Khvostov was one of the ministers who had refused to sign the infamous letter. First, however, Khvostov was to have a visit from Rasputin.

  “Our Friend told me to wait about the Old Man until he had seen Uncle Khvostov on Thursday, what impression he will have of him,” Alexandra wrote to the Tsar. “He [Rasputin] is miserable about the dear Old Man, says he is such a righteous man, but he dreads the Duma hissing him and then you will be in an awful position.” The following day, the Empress wrote, “Tomorrow Gregory sees old Khvostov and then I see him in the evening. He wants to tell his impression if a worthy successor to Goremykin.” But Khvostov did not survive the interview; Alexandra wrote indignantly that Rasputin was received “like a petitioner in the ministry.”

  The next candidate brought forward, Boris Stürmer, was more successful. Equipped with Goremykin’s arch-conservative instincts while lacking completely the old man’s courage and honesty, Stürmer, then sixty-seven, was an obscure and dismal product of the professional Russian bureaucracy. His family origins were German; his great-uncle, Baron Stürmer, had been Austria’s representative on the guard which sat on St. Helena keeping watch on Napoleon. Stürmer himself, first as Master of Ceremonies at court, then as the reactionary governor of Yaroslav province, had attracted a universally bad reputation. “A man who had left a bad memory wherever he occupied an administrative post,” declared Sazonov. “An utter nonentity,” groaned Rodzianko. “A false and double-faced man,” said Khvostov.

  When Stürmer first appeared, Paléologue, who had scarcely heard of him, busied himself for three days gathering information. Then he penned this discouraging portrait: “He … is worse than a mediocrity—third rate intellect, mean spirit, low character, doubtful honesty, no experience and no idea of State business. The most that can be said for him is that he has a rather pretty talent for cunning and flattery.… His appointment becomes intelligible on the supposition that he has been selected solely as a tool; in other words, actually on account of his insignificance and servility.… [He] has been … warmly recommended to the Emperor by Rasputin.”

  In fact, Stürmer was first recommended to the Tsar by Rasputin’s friend and protégé Pitirim, who, with Rasputin’s aid, had been named Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in Petrograd. “I begat Pitirim and Pitirim begat Stürmer” was the way Rasputin sardonically put it. Nevertheless, Stürmer’s name was the one that filled the Empress’s letters. “Lovy, I don’t know but I should still think of Stürmer.… Stürmer would do for a time. He very much values Gregory which is a great thing.… Our Friend said about Stürmer to take him for a time at least, as he is such a decided loyal man.”

  To the astonishment of Russia and even of the faithful Goremykin, who had no inkling that his wish for retirement was about to be granted, the unknown Stürmer was suddenly named Prime Minister in February 1916. The Duma regarded the appointment as a crushing humiliation, an insult to all of their work and aspirations. There was no doubt that when the new Prime Minister appeared before them, their outrage would exceed anything they had directed at Goremykin. At this point, Rasputin offered an ingenious suggestion. The starets had no love for the Duma, but he understood its usefulness. “Dogs collected to keep other dogs quiet,” he called the members. Under the circumstances, he advised Nicholas to make a placating gesture. “Of course if you could have turned up for a few words, quite unexpected at the Duma … that might change everything,” Alexandra explained the scheme to her husband. Nicholas agreed, and on February 22, 1916, the Tsar appeared in person before the Imperial Duma. The gesture was an overwhelming success. A Te Deum was sung, Nicholas greeted the members as “representatives of the Russian people” and presented the Order of St. Anne to Rodzianko. Although Stürmer was present at the side of the Tsar, his appointment was temporarily forgotten—as Rasputin had cunningly foreseen—amid a storm of cheers.

  With Stürmer installed at the top, the Empress, urged on by Rasputin, continued to weed among the ministerial ranks. Her next major target was Polivanov, the Minister of War. The Empress had never liked him. “Forgive me,” she had written the Tsar when Polivanov was appointed, “but I don’t like the choice of Minister of War Polivanov. Is he not our Friend’s enemy?” In the short time since he replaced the indolent Sukhomlinov, the brusque, efficient Polivanov had worked wonders in training and equipping the army. It was primarily due to his efforts that the beaten Russian army of 1915 was able to recover and launch the great offensive of 1916. Nevertheless, Polivanov was marked, not only by his rough refusal to have anything to do with Rasputin, but also by his eagerness to work closely with the Duma in obtaining maximum support for his army program. In the end, Polivanov’s doom was sealed when he discovered that Rasputin had been supplied by Stürmer with four high-powered War Office cars too fast to be followed by the police when he set off for one of his steamy nocturnal haunts. Polivanov sternly objected, and soon Alexandra was writing to Nicholas, “Get rid of Polivanov … any honest man better than him.… Remember about Polivanov.… Lovy, don’t dawdle, make up your mind, it’s far too serious.” On March 25, Polivanov fell. “Oh, the relief! Now I shall sleep well,” she said when she heard the news. Others were appalled. Polivanov was “undoubtedly the ablest military organizer in Russia and his dismissal was a disaster,” wrote Knox. General Shuvaiev, Polivanov’s successor, Knox described as “a nice old man, quite straight and honest. He had no knowledge of his work, but his devotion to the Emperor was such that if the door were to open and His Majesty were to come into the room and ask him to throw himself out of the window, he would do so at once.”

  The next to go was Sazonov, the Foreign Minister. A brother-in-law of Stolypin, Sazonov was a cultivated man of liberal background and a close friend of both Buchanan and Paléologue. He had been Foreign Minister since 1910 and was completely trusted both by the Tsar and by the Allied governments. Nevertheless, since his signing of the ministerial letter, Alexandra had wanted him removed. She suspected, rightly, that along with his friendship with England and France, he also wanted a responsible government in Russia; both, she believed, would undermine the autocratic Russia she hoped to pass along to her son. Through the winter, she kept up a barrage at “long-nosed Sazonov … Sazonov is such a pancake.” Then, in March 1916, she wrote to Nicholas, “Wish you could think of a good successor to Sazonov—need not be a diplomat. So as … to see we are not later sat upon by England and that when questions of ultimate peace come we should be firm. Old Goremykin and Stürmer always disapproved of him as he is such a coward towards Europe and a parliamentarist—and that would be Russia’s ruin.”

  Sazonov’s downfall came in July 1916, and was actually precipitated by the question of autonomy for Poland. At the outbreak of war, Russia had promised a virtually independent, united Polish kingdom, linked to Russia only in the person of the Tsar. The Poles were enthusiastic, and on first entering Galicia, Russian troops were welcomed as liberators. Military defeat and the loss of most Polish territory in 1915 had delayed action on the pledge, at the same time encouraging those Russian conservatives who resisted its enactment, fearing that autonomy for one part of the empire would stimulate other provinces to seek the same thing. Alexandra, spurred by Rasputin, argued that “Baby’s future rights” were challenged. Nevertheless, Sazonov, backed by Britain and France, continued to insist.

  On July 12, Sazonov saw Nicholas at Headquarters. “The Emperor has entirely adopted my views
.… I won all along the line,” he reported jubilantly to Buchanan and Paléologue. In enormous good humor, the Foreign Minister left for a Finnish holiday during which he planned to draft an Imperial proclamation on Poland. Meanwhile, both Stürmer and the Empress hurried to Headquarters, and while he was still in Finland, Sazonov was abruptly dismissed. Appalled, Buchanan and Paléologue pleaded that the dismissal be set aside. Failing, Buchanan then boldly asked the Tsar’s permission to have King George V grant the fallen minister a British court decoration in recognition of his services to the alliance. Nicholas agreed and was genuinely pleased that Sazonov, whom he liked and had dealt with shabbily, was receiving the honor.

  Sazanov’s replacement at the Foreign Ministry was none other than Stürmer, who took on the office in addition to the Premiership. The appointment was a further hideous shock to Buchanan and Paléologue, who would now be dealing daily on an intimate professional level with Russia’s new Foreign Minister. Each Ambassador reacted in character: Buchanan stiffly wrote London that “I can never hope to have confidential relations with a man on whose word no reliance can be placed.” Paléologue, after an interview, confided to his diary, “His [Stürmer’s] look, sharp and honeyed, furtive and blinking, is the very expression of hypocrisy … he emits an intolerable odor of falseness. In his bonhomie and his affected politeness one feels that he is low, intriguing, and treacherous.”*

  The key ministry in troubled times was not Foreign Affairs or even the presidency of the ministerial council. It was the Ministry of Interior, which was responsible for the preservation of law and order. Under this office came the police, the secret police, informers and counterespionage—all the devices which, as a regime grows more unpopular, become all the more necessary to its preservation. In October 1916, the Tsar suddenly appointed to this critical post the Vice-President of the Duma, Alexander Protopopov. The choice was a disaster, yet, ironically, Nicholas made it at least in part as a gesture to Rodzianko and the Duma.

  Alexander Protopopov was sixty-four, a small, sleek man with white hair, a mustache and bright black eyes. In his native Simbirsk, the Volga town which also gave Russia Kerensky and Lenin, Protopopov’s social position was far higher than that of either of his famous fellow townsmen. His father was a nobleman and landowner who also owned a large textile factory; the son went to cadet cavalry school, studied law and became a director of his father’s factory. An important local personage, he was elected to the Duma, where, although he showed little political distinction, his smooth and ingratiating air made him thoroughly popular. “He was handsome, elegant, captivating in a drawing room, moderately liberal and always pleasant.… There was a slightly cunning air about him but this seemed very innocent and goodnatured,” wrote Kerensky, who also sat in the Fourth Duma.

  Protopopov’s charm and his membership in the large, moderately liberal Octobrist Party saw him repeatedly elected to the Duma vice-presidency. Rodzianko, as President, respected his deputy’s abilities. In June 1916 he suggested to Nicholas that Protopopov would make a good minister. “For the post [of Minister of Trade] he proposed his tovarish Protopopov,” Nicholas wrote to Alexandra, adding, “I have an idea that our Friend mentioned him [Protopopov] on some occasion.” But no changes were made at that time, and Protopopov remained as the second man in the Duma. In this capacity, he led a delegation of Duma members on good-will visits to England and France in July 1916; on the way home, he stopped at Stockholm and had a mysterious talk with a Swedish financier known to be close to the German Embassy. Upon arriving in Russia, he traveled to Headquarters to make an official call on the Tsar. “Yesterday I met a man I like very much, Protopopov, Vice President of the State Duma,” Nicholas wrote. “He traveled abroad with members of the Duma and told me much of interest.”

  All of the ingredients necessary for Protopopov’s elevation to the Ministry now were present: he had charmed the Tsar with his manner, he had been recommended as a solid worker by Rodzianko and, most important of all, he had the sweeping endorsement of Rasputin and therefore of the Empress. Protopopov’s acquaintance with Rasputin stretched back over several years. The prospective Minister was not in good health. He suffered from a disease variously described as progressive paralysis of the spine or advanced syphilis, depending on the informant’s feelings about Protopopov. When doctors were unable to help, Protopopov went to Badmayev, a quackish Siberian herb doctor then fashionable in Petrograd. Badmayev knew Rasputin, and Protopopov, who was fascinated by mysticism and the occult, was introduced into an outer ring of the starets’s circle. Now, struck by the news that Nicholas was pleased by his amiable protégé, Rasputin seized the initiative and began proposing that Protopopov be named Minister of Interior.

  “Gregory earnestly begs you to name Protopopov,” Alexandra wrote in September. “He likes our Friend for at least 4 years and that says much for a man.” Two days later, she repeated: “Please take Protopopov as Minister of Interior. As he is one of the Duma, it will make a great effect and shut their mouths.” Nicholas balked and chided his wife for accepting every one of Rasputin’s whims: “This Protopopov is a good man.… Rodzianko has for a long time suggested him for the post of Minister of Trade. [But] I must consider this question as it has taken me completely by surprise. Our Friend’s opinions of people are sometimes very strange as you know yourself—therefore this must be thought out very carefully.” Nevertheless, a few days later the Tsar gave in and telegraphed, “It shall be done.” In a letter, he added, “God grant that Protopopov may turn out to be the man of whom we are now in need.” Overjoyed, the Empress wrote back, “God bless your new choice of Protopopov. Our Friend says you have done a very wise act in naming him.”

  The appointment caused a sensation. In the Duma, Protopopov’s acceptance of office under Stürmer was regarded as a scandalous betrayal. When an old friend in the Duma bluntly told the new Minister that his appointment was a scandal and that he ought to resign immediately, Protopopov, bubbling with excitement over his promotion, replied candidly, “How can you ask me to resign? All my life it was my dream to be a vice-governor and here I am a minister.”

  Rodzianko was angriest of all. Shaking with rage, he confronted the turncoat and lambasted him for his treachery. When, in servile tones, Protopopov explained, “I hope I shall succeed in bringing about some changes,” Rodzianko replied scornfully, “You haven’t sufficient strength for the fight and will never dare to speak outright to the Emperor.” Soon afterward, Protopopov returned to Rodzianko, hinting that, with his help, the Duma President might be appointed Premier and Foreign Minister in place of Stürmer. Rodzianko, fully aware that neither Nicholas nor Alexandra would dream of such an appointment, stated his terms: “I alone shall have the power to choose the Ministers … the Empress must remain … at Livadia until the end of the war.” Hastily, Protopopov suggested that Rodzianko speak to the Empress herself.

  Once he was in office, Protopopov’s behavior became wholly eccentric. Although a minister, he kept his seat in the Duma and appeared at meetings wearing the uniform of a general of gendarmes, to which, as head of the police, he was entitled. Beside his desk he kept an icon which he addressed as a person. “He helps me do everything; everything I do is by His advice,” Protopopov explained to Kerensky, indicating the icon. Even more astonishing was the sudden transformation of Protopopov the Duma liberal into Protopopov the arch-reactionary. He was determined to become the savior of tsarism and Orthodox Russia. Not only was he not afraid of revolution; he hoped to provoke it in order to crush it by force. At meetings, Rodzianko wrote, “he rolled his eyes repeatedly, in a kind of unnatural ecstasy. ‘I feel that I shall save Russia. I feel that I alone can save her.’ ”

  In addition to controlling the police, Protopopov also assumed responsibility for the most critical problem facing Russia, the organization of food supplies. The idea was Rasputin’s. Not without logic, he proposed that authority should be transferred from the Ministry of Agriculture, which was floundering, to the Ministry of Inte
rior, which had the police to enforce its orders. Seizing the idea, the Empress issued the transfer command herself. It was the only episode in which Alexandra did not bother first to get the Tsar’s approval. “Forgive me for what I have done—but I had to—our Friend said it was absolutely necessary,” she wrote. “Stürmer sends you by this messenger a new paper to sign giving the whole food supply at once to the Minister of Interior.… I had to take this step upon myself as Gregory says Protopopov will have all in his hands … and by that will save Russia.… Forgive me, but I had to take this responsibility for your sweet sake.” Nicholas acquiesced, and thereby, as Russia moved into the critical winter of 1916–1917, both the police and the food supply remained in the trembling, ineffectual hands of Alexander Protopopov.