Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family

by Robert K. Massie

  In 1899, Kerensky arrived in St. Petersburg to study at the university. The city, bursting with creative excitement in every field of the arts and intellect, was packed with students from every social class and every province of the empire. “I doubt whether higher education before the war was so cheap and so generally accessible anywhere in the world as it was in Russia…. The lecture fees were practically negligible, while all laboratory experiments and other practical work … were completely free … one could have dinner for from five to ten kopecks … the poorest among us often lived in very bad conditions, ran about from house to house giving lessons and did not dine every day; still we all lived and studied.”

  At first Kerensky, the loyal son of a government bureaucrat, had little interest in politics. But politics was a part of student life in St. Petersburg, and he became caught up in the waves of student agitation, mass meetings and strikes. Student opinion was split between the two leading Russian revolutionary parties, the Marxists and the Narodniki or People’s Party. Kerensky instinctively favored the latter. “Simbirsk, the memories of my childhood … the whole tradition of Russian literature drew me strongly towards … the Narodniki movement…. The Marxist teaching, borrowed in its entirety from abroad, deeply impressed youthful minds by its austere completeness and its orderly logic. But it tallied very badly with the social structure of Russia. In contrast … the Narodniki teaching was indistinct … inconsistent…. But it was the product of national Russian thought, rooted in the native soil, flowed entirely within the channel of the Russian humanitarian ideals.”

  Swept along by his youthful enthusiasm, Kerensky one day found himself making a speech at a student gathering; the following day, he was summoned before the rector and deans and temporarily sent home. He returned, planning an academic career, hoping to take up post-graduate study in criminal law. Before he had graduated, however, this “highly respectable pastime” began to pale for him—it “even, perhaps, repelled me a little. One does not want to attend to private interests when one dreams of serving the nation, of fighting for freedom. I decided to be a political lawyer.”

  For the next six years, Kerensky would travel to every corner of Russia, defending political prisoners against prosecution by the state. But before he left St. Petersburg, in 1905, an extraordinary episode occurred:

  “It was Easter and I was returning late at night, or rather in the morning, about four o’clock from the traditional midnight celebration. I cannot attempt to describe the enchanting spell of St. Petersburg in the spring, in the early hours before dawn—particularly along the Neva or the embankments…. Happily aglow, I was walking home … and was about to cross the bridge by the Winter Palace. Suddenly, by the Admiralty, just opposite the Palace, I stopped involuntarily. On an overhanging corner balcony stood the young Emperor, quite alone, deep in thought. A keen presentiment [struck me]: we should meet sometime, somehow our paths would cross.”

  8

  The Kaiser’s Advice

  In the early years of the reign, along with his mother, the tutor Pobedonostsev and his uncles, Nicholas was also taken in hand by his cousin Kaiser William II of Germany. From the first months, William peered over the Tsar’s shoulder, tapped him on the elbow, flattered him, lectured him and dominated him. William was nine years older than Nicholas and had become Kaiser in 1888, six years before Nicholas became Tsar. He thus had the advantage of experience as well as age, and he used it vigorously. For ten years, 1894–1904, the Kaiser manipulated Russian foreign policy by influencing the youthful, susceptible Tsar. Eventually, an older and wiser Nicholas shook off this meddlesome influence. But the harm was done. Urged on by William, Russia had suffered a military catastrophe in Asia.

  In character, the two Emperors were totally unlike. Nicholas was gentle, shy and painfully aware of his own limitations; the Kaiser was a braggart, a bully and a strutting exhibitionist. Nicholas hated the idea of becoming a sovereign; William all but wrenched the crown from the head of his dying father, Frederick III. As Tsar, Nicholas tried to live quietly with his wife, avoiding fuss. William delighted in parading about in high black boots, white cloak, a silver breastplate and an evil-looking spiked helmet.

  William II’s thin face, bleak gray eyes and light-colored curly hair were partially masked behind his proudest possession, his mustache. This was a wide, brushy business with remarkable upturned points, the creation of a skillful barber who appeared at the palace every morning with a can of wax. In part, this elegant bush helped to compensate for another physical distinction, one which William tried desperately to hide. His left arm was miniaturized, a misfortune believed to have been caused by the excessive zeal with which an obstetrical surgeon used forceps at William’s birth. William arrived in the world with his arm pulled almost from its socket; thereafter the arm grew much too slowly. As much as possible, he kept this damaged limb out of sight, tucking it into especially designed pockets in his clothes. At meals, the Kaiser could not cut his meat without the aid of a dinner companion.

  In the military atmosphere of the Prussian court in which he grew up, William’s bad arm had a pronounced effect on his character. A Prussian prince had to ride and shoot. William drove himself to do both expertly and went on to become a swimmer, rower, tennis player as well. His good right arm became extraordinarily powerful, and its grip was as strong as iron. William increased the sensation of pain in those he greeted by turning the rings on his right hand inward, so that the jewels would bite deep into the unlucky flesh.

  When he was nineteen and a student in Bonn, William fell in love with Princess Elizabeth of Hesse, the Empress Alexandra’s older sister. William often visited in Darmstadt with the Hessian family of his mother’s sister. Even as a guest, he was selfish and rude. First he demanded to ride, then he wanted to shoot or row or play tennis. Often he would throw down his racket in the middle of a game or suddenly climb off his horse and demand that everybody go with him to do something else. When he was tired, he ordered his cousins to sit quietly around him and listen while he read aloud from the Bible. Alix was only six when these visits occurred, and she was ignored. But Ella was a blossoming fourteen, and William always wanted her to play with him, to sit near him, to listen closely. Ella thought he was dreadful. William left Bonn, burning with frustration, and four months later he became engaged to another German princess, Augusta of Schleswig-Holstein. After Ella married Grand Duke Serge of Russia, the Kaiser refused to see her. Later he admitted that he had spent most of his time in Bonn writing love poetry to his beautiful cousin.

  William’s restless temperament, his vanities and delusions, his rapid plunges from hysterical excitement to black despair kept his ministers in a state of constant apprehension. “The Kaiser,” said Bismarck, “is like a balloon. If you don’t keep fast hold of the string, you never know where he’ll be off to.” William scribbled furiously on the margins of official documents: “Nonsense!” “Lies!” “Rascals!” “Stale fish!” “Typical oriental procrastinating lies!” “False as a Frenchman usually is!” “England’s fault, not ours!” He treated his dignitaries with an odd familiarity, often giving venerable admirals and generals a friendly smack on the backside. Visitors, official and otherwise, were treated to dazzling displays of verbosity, but they could never be sure how much to believe. “The Kaiser,” explained a dismayed official of the German Foreign Ministry, “has the unfortunate habit of talking all the more rapidly and incautiously the more a matter interests him. Hence it happens that he generally has committed himself … before the responsible advisors or the experts have been able to submit their opinions.” To witness the Kaiser laughing was an awesome experience. “If the Kaiser laughs, which he is sure to do a good many times,” wrote one observer, “he will laugh with absolute abandonment, throwing his head back, opening his mouth to the fullest possible extent, shaking his whole body, and often stamping with one foot to show his excessive enjoyment of any joke.”

  William was convinced of his own infallibility and signed his
documents “The All Highest.” He hated parliaments. Once, at a colonial exhibition, he was shown the hut of an African king, with the skulls of the king’s enemies impaled on poles. “If only I could see the Reichstag stuck up like that,” blurted the Kaiser.

  William’s bad manners were as offensive to his relatives as to everyone else. He publicly accused his own mother, formerly Princess Victoria of England, of being pro-English rather than pro-German. Writing to her mother, Queen Victoria of England, the Princess said of her twenty-eight-year-old son, “You ask how Willy was when he was here. He was as rude, as disagreeable and as impertinent to me as possible.” Tsar Alexander III snubbed William, whom he considered “a badly brought up, untrustworthy boy.” When he spoke to the Kaiser, Alexander III always turned his back and talked over his shoulder. Empress Marie loathed William. She saw in him the royal nouveau riche whose empire had been made in part by trampling over her beloved Denmark and wrenching away the Danish provinces of Schleswig-Holstein. Marie’s feeling was that of her sister Alexandra, who was married to King Edward VII. “And so my Georgie boy has become a real, live, filthy, blue-coated Pickelhaube German soldier. I never thought I would live to see the day,” Queen Alexandra wrote to her son, later King George V, when George became an honorary colonel in one of the Kaiser’s regiments. When it came Russia’s turn to make the Kaiser an admiral in the Russian navy, Nicholas tried to tell Marie gently. “I think, no matter how disagreeable it may be, we are obliged to let him wear our naval uniform; particularly since he made me last year a Captain in his own navy…. C’est à vomir!” After another visit from the Kaiser, he wrote, “Thank God the German visit is over…. She [William’s wife] tried to be charming and looked very ugly in rich clothes chosen without taste. The hats she wore in the evening were particularly impossible.” The Empress Alexandra could barely be civil to William. She turned away when he made his heavy jokes, and when the Kaiser picked up her daughters in his arms, she winced. A mutual loathing of William was perhaps the point of closest agreement between the young Empress and her mother-in-law.

  Nicholas himself was both repelled and attracted by the Kaiser’s flamboyance. From the first, William managed to restore the old custom of former monarchs who kept personal attachés in each other’s private retinues. This, the Kaiser pointed out, would enable Nicholas “to quickly communicate with me … without the lumbering and indiscreet apparatus of Chancelleries, Embassies, etc.”

  The famous “Willy-Nicky” correspondence began. Writing in English and addressing himself to his “Dearest Nicky” and signing himself “Your affectionate Willy,” the Kaiser drenched the Tsar with flattery and suggestions. Delighted by Nicholas’s “senseless dreams” address to the Tver Zemstvo, he hammered on the importance of maintaining autocracy, “the task which has been set us by the Lord of Lords.” He advised that “the great bulk of the Russian people still place their faith in their … Tsar and worship his hallowed person,” and predicted that “the people will … cheer you and fall on their knees and pray for you.” When they met in person, William tapped Nicholas on the shoulder and said, “My advice to you is more speeches and more parades.”

  Using this private channel, William bent himself to undo the anti-German alliance between Russia and France. Nicholas had been Tsar less than a year when the Kaiser wrote to him: “It is not the friendship of France and Russia that makes me uneasy, but the danger to our principle of monarchism from the lifting up of the Republicans on a pedestal…. The Republicans are revolutionaries de nature. The French Republic has arisen from the source of the great revolution and propagates its ideas. The blood of their Majesties is still on that country. Think—has it since then ever been happy or quiet again? Has it not staggered from bloodshed to bloodshed and from war to war, till it soused Europe and Russia in streams of Blood? Nicky, take my word, the curse of God has stricken that people forever. We Christian kings have one holy duty imposed on us by Heaven: to uphold the principle of the Divine Right of Kings.”

  Russia’s alliance with France withstood these assaults, but on another theme the Kaiser’s exhortations had a striking success. William hated Orientals, and often raved about “the Yellow Peril.” In 1900, bidding farewell to a shipload of German marines bound for China to help disperse the Boxer revolutionaries, the Kaiser shouted blood-curdling instructions: “You must know, my men, that you are about to meet a crafty, well-armed, cruel foe! Meet him and beat him. Give no quarter. Take no prisoners. Kill him when he falls into your hands. Even as a thousand years ago, The Huns under King Attila made such a name for themselves as still resounds in terror through legend and fable, so may the name of German resound through Chinese history a thousand years from now…”

  In writing to the Tsar, William elevated his prejudice to a loftier pedestal. Russia, he declared, had a “Holy Mission” in Asia: “Clearly, it is the great task of the future for Russia to cultivate the Asian continent and to defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow Race. In this you will always find me on your side, ready to help you as best I can. You have well understood the call of Providence … in the Defense of the Cross and the old Christian European culture against the inroads of the Mongols and Buddhism…. I would let nobody try to interfere with you and attack from behind in Europe during the time you were fulfilling the great mission which Heaven has shaped for you.”

  William pursued the theme into allegorical art. He sent the Tsar a portrait showing himself in shining armor, gripping a huge crucifix in his raised right arm. At his feet crouched the figure of Nicholas, clothed in a long Byzantine gown. On the Tsar’s face, as he gazed up at the Kaiser, was a look of humble admiration. In the background, on a blue sea, cruised a fleet of German and Russian battleships. In 1902, after watching a fleet of real Russian battleships steam through naval maneuvers, William signaled from his yacht to the Tsar aboard the Standart, “The Admiral of the Atlantic salutes the Admiral of the Pacific.”

  William’s hatred of Orientals was genuine, but there was more to his game than simple prejudice. For years, Bismarck had urgently promoted Russian expansion in Asia as a means of diminishing Russian influence in Europe. “Russia has nothing to do in the West,” said the crafty German Chancellor. “There she can only catch Nihilism and other diseases. Her mission is in Asia; there she represents civilization.” By turning Russia away from Europe, Germany decreased the danger of war in the Balkans between Russia and Austria, and Germany herself was left a free hand with Russia’s ally, France. In addition, wherever Russia moved in Asia, she was certain to get into trouble: either with Britain in India or with Japan in the Pacific. William II enthusiastically revived Bismarck’s design. “We must try to tie Russia down in East Asia,” he confided to one of his ministers, “so that she pays less attention to Europe and the Near East.”

  The Kaiser was not the only man filling Nicholas’s head with expansionist dreams; many Russians were equally anxious to go adventuring in Asia. The temptations were strong. Russia’s only Pacific port, Vladivostock, was imprisoned in ice three months a year. Southward, the decrepit Chinese Empire stretched like a rotting carcass along the Pacific. In 1895, to Russia’s chagrin, the vigorous, newly Westernized island empire of Japan occupied several Chinese territories which Russia coveted, among them the great warm-water port and fortress of Port Arthur. Six days after Japan had swallowed Port Arthur, Russia intervened, declaring that Japan’s new arrangements “constituted a perpetual menace to the peace of the Far East.” Japan, unwilling to risk a war, was forced to disgorge Port Arthur. Three years later, Russia extracted a ninety-nine-year lease on the port from the helpless Chinese.

  The occupation of Port Arthur was heady stuff in St. Petersburg. “Glad news …,” wrote Nicholas. “At last we shall have an ice-free port.” A new spur of the Trans-Siberian was constructed directly across Manchuria, and when the railroad was finished, the Russian workmen and Russian railway guards remained behind. In 1900, during the Boxer Rebellion, Russia “temporarily” occupied Man
churia. Only one further prize remained on the entire North Pacific coast, the peninsula of Korea. Although Japan clearly regarded Korea as essential to her security, a group of Russian adventurers resolved to steal it. Their plan was to establish a private company, the Yalu Timber Company, and begin moving Russian soldiers into Korea disguised as workmen. If they ran into trouble, the Russian government could always disclaim responsibility. If they succeeded, the empire would acquire a new province and they themselves would have vast economic concessions within it. Witte, the Finance Minister, vigorously opposed this risky policy. But Nicholas, impressed by the leader of the adventurers, a former cavalry officer named Bezobrazov, approved the plan, whereupon Witte in 1903 resigned from the government. Predictably, Kaiser William chimed in, “It is evident to every unbiased mind that Korea must and will be Russian.”

  The Russian advance into Korea made war with Japan inevitable. The Japanese would have preferred an agreement: Russia to keep Manchuria, leaving Japan a free hand in Korea. But the Mikado’s ministers could not stand by and watch the Russians swarm along the whole coast of Asia, planting the Tsar’s double-headed eagle in every port and promontory facing their islands. In 1901, the greatest of Japanese statesmen, Marquis Ito, came to St. Petersburg to negotiate. He was treated shamefully. Ignored, finding no one to talk to, he put his requests in writing; replies were delayed for days on trifling pre-texts. Eventually, he left Russia in despair. Through 1903, the permanent Japanese Minister in St. Petersburg, Kurino, issued urgent warnings and begged in vain for an audience with the Tsar. On February 3, 1904, bowing grimly, Kurino also left Russia.