The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia

by Candace Fleming

  To make this shortage even worse, a family’s parcels were usually not adjacent to one another. The acreage was scattered across a commune’s entire territory. “Strips [of land] six feet wide are by no means rare,” wrote one shocked journalist from the London Times. “Of these narrow strips, a family may possess as many as thirty in a single field!” Peasants wasted precious hours each day dragging plow and scythe from one scrap of land to another. Hitching their sons and daughters to crude wooden plows (just one in three peasants owned a horse), they struggled to furrow the muddy soil before planting their grain by hand.

  But no matter how hard a peasant family worked, most could not grow enough food to get through the year. A few managed to scrape together the necessary coins to buy flour. Most, however, simply tightened their belts even further. “There are many … households that do not have the means to buy [even] cabbage,” noted one visiting physician in 1907.

  Most peasants were convinced that the best way to improve their lot in life was to cultivate more acreage. And so they looked with land-hungry eyes toward the nobility’s estates. Remarked one nobleman, “Every single peasant believed from the very bottom of his soul that one day, sooner or later, the squire’s land would belong to him.”

  To the peasants’ minds, the nobility—who possessed not only half the land in Russia but also the most fertile acreage—did not legitimately own their estates. Peasants believed the land should belong to those who plowed it. Since the nobility did not work their estates themselves, the peasants felt justified in taking whatever they could. They picked fruit from the squire’s orchards, fished in his ponds, and gathered mushrooms and firewood in his forests. They knew these activities were illegal, but most ignored the law. After all, what was wrong with a hungry family stealing a few apples from a man who had more than he could ever use himself? “God grew the forests for everyone,” they would say, quoting a Russian proverb.

  Some peasants did eke out a living. But during the first decade of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands more abandoned their villages. Traveling by foot along the country’s dirt roads, they searched for work in the factories and mills that had cropped up in Russia’s cities. Most were young men looking to escape grinding poverty. “All the healthy and able men ran away from our village to [the city] and took whatever jobs they could find,” said one villager. Recalled another, “Everyone is trying as hard as he can to liberate himself from [farming] and find an easier means of existence.”

  Sadly, these men did not find an easier life. Instead, they crowded into city slums that reeked of human waste and unwashed bodies. Beggars stood on every corner; drunkards lolled in every doorway. Gangs of pickpockets, usually children, flitted through the crowds while prostitutes (many of them village girls who’d been unable to find work) plied their trade. In these miserable streets—beneath the constant fog of black smoke pouring from the factories’ chimneys—people worked and ate, worked and slept, too tired to do much besides visit the tavern. “I did not live, but only worked, worked, worked,” recalled metalworker Ivan Babuskin. “I worked morning, noon and night, and sometimes did not leave the factory for two days at a stretch.” The factory owner expected him there six days a week, and if he didn’t turn up, he would be fired. One’s only thought, remembered Ivan, was that “it would be work again tomorrow—heavy, continuous, killing work—but there would be no real life and no real rest to look forward to.”

  For these efforts, a worker earned around eighty kopecks a day (forty cents), hardly enough to support himself when just a loaf of bread cost twenty-four kopecks and a two-room tenement without water, kitchen, or toilet cost more than an entire month’s wages to rent. So to ward off starvation, a man’s wife and children had little choice but to trudge to the factories as well. It was common for mothers to work eleven hours a day and earn one-third what men did. The children received even less. According to one historian, boys in Moscow’s spinning mills “earned the equivalent of about a half cent for each frightening and dangerous hour spent darting in and out among the machines to tie threads, replace spindles, or oil moving gears.” At the same time, children coughing through the haze of noxious fumes in Moscow’s match factories earned a mere seventy cents a month!

  Poisonous chemicals. Flying gears and belts. Razor-sharp graters. These posed dangers to anyone who worked in the factories. But owners did nothing to promote safety or protect their workers. Instead, they posted signs that read “In the event of an accident, the owner and director of the factory assume no responsibility.” If workers thought their jobs were too dangerous, or their hours too long, they had no recourse. The tsar’s government had left all decisions regarding the running of factories to their owners. And while some government inspectors did try to enforce child labor laws that had been enacted in 1897, they lacked any real power. Factory owners simply ignored them. Thus, explained one worker, “The factory owner is the absolute sovereign … constrained by no laws, and who often simply arranges things to suit himself. The workers owe him unquestioning obedience as the rules [of the factory] proclaim.”

  Afraid of being fired, most workers did not complain. For as bad as being a worker was, being unemployed was worse. “We slept in gutters and doorways,” recalled one worker who’d lost his job, “and we survived by theft and begging. We had no other choice. The alternative was dying of starvation.”

  Outside the factory, workers suffered even worse conditions. With little affordable housing in the city, they squeezed into every available space—freezing attics, leaky basements. Sometimes as many as twenty men, women, and children lived in one small room. Overcrowding led to diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis that cut through the city’s poor. Children were especially vulnerable. Said a woman weaver, “I had eleven [children], but only three grew up. You’d go to the factory, but your soul always was in torment. Your heart always grieved for your children.”

  Since their meager pay did not keep up with the rise in the price of goods, workers lived on a diet of cabbage soup, dried peas, and sour black bread. They wore rags. At the neighborhood taverns, they tried to drown their misery by squandering precious kopecks on cheap vodka and watered-down beer. Only then, in that misty, drunken haze, did many of them see “reflections of a better, less unjust world.”

  BEYOND THE PALACE GATES:

  PEASANT TURNED WORKER

  Sixteen-year-old Senka Kanatchikov arrived in Moscow in 1895. A far cry from his tiny village of Gusevo, the place both amazed and terrified him, as he recalled in his autobiography, originally titled From the Story of My Life:

  What a stunning impression Moscow made on me.… Huge, multistoried houses—most of them with lighted windows—stores, shops, taverns, beer halls, horse-drawn carriages going by—all around us crowds of bustling people.… Compared with village hovels, what struck me about the houses of Moscow was their grandiose appearance, the luxury.

  “Am I to live in a house like that?” I asked with delight.

  “You’ll find out in due course,” Father responded.

  And sure enough … we turned into a side street, and entered the gates of a huge stone house with a courtyard that looked like a large stone well. Wet linens dangled from taut clotheslines all along the upper stories. The courtyard had an acrid stench … [and] throughout … were dirty puddles of water and discarded vegetables. In the apartments and all around … people were crowding, making noise, yelling, cursing. My delight was beginning to turn into depression, into some kind of inexplicable terror.… I felt like a small insignificant grain of sand, lost in the unfamiliar and hostile sea of people that surrounded me.…

  Here, in the hostile world of Moscow, I felt lonely, abandoned, needed by no one. While at work in the painting shop … which smelled of paint and turpentine, I would remember pictures of our village life and tears would come to my eyes, and it was only with great effort that I could keep from crying.… Awkward, sluggish, with long hair that had been cut under a round bowl, wearing he
avy boots with horseshoes, I was a typical village youth. The skilled workers looked down on me, called me a “green country bumpkin” and other insulting names.

  Our workday at the factory lasted eleven and a half hours, plus a one-and-a-half-hour lunch break. In the beginning I would grow terribly tired, so as soon as I got home from work … I would fall into my filthy, hard, straw-filled sack and sleep like a dead man, despite the … bedbugs and fleas.

  I roomed and boarded not far from the factory, in a large, smelly house inhabited by all kinds of poor folk—peddlers, cabmen, casual laborers and the like. We rented the apartment communally [with] fifteen men.… I was put in a tiny, dark, windowless corner room; it was dirty and stuffy with … the strong smell of “humanity.” There was a kerosene lamp hanging between the windows. Underneath the lamp was a cheap print of the Tsar’s family. The room also contained two wooden cots. One belonged to [a man named] Korovin; the other I shared with Korovin’s son, Vanka, who also … worked in the factory’s pattern shop.

  Our food was purchased communally … and on credit at [the factory] shop; our individual shares were assessed twice monthly and taken from our paychecks. Every day at noon, as soon as the factory’s lunch bell rang, we would hurry … to sit down at a table, where a huge basin full of cabbage soup was already steaming. All fifteen men ate from a common bowl with wooden spoons. The cabbage soup contained little pieces of meat.… Everyone waited tensely for a signal. [Then] someone would bang his spoon against the … soup basin and say the words … “Dig in!” Then began the furious hunt with spoons for the floating morsels of meat. The most dexterous would come up with the most.… Everyone was hungry as a wolf; they ate quickly, greedily. After lunch—if there was time—everyone threw himself down to rest without removing his boots or work shirt. Stomachs still grumbled and muscles ached.…

  Were we all, the whole upper crust of Russian society, so totally insensitive, so horribly obtuse, as not to feel that the charmed life we were leading was in itself an injustice and hence could not possibly last?

  —Nicolas Nabokov

  Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan

  THE BOY WHO WOULD BE TSAR

  On a frosty March day in 1881, the boy who would become Russia’s last ruler glimpsed his future. That morning, Nicholas’s grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, was riding through the streets of St. Petersburg when a man stepped off the sidewalk. He hurled a bomb at the imperial carriage. Miraculously, the tsar went uninjured, but many in his retinue were not as lucky. Concerned about his people, Alexander stepped from his carriage. That’s when a second bomb was thrown. This one landed between his feet. An explosion of fire and shrapnel tore away Alexander’s left leg, ripped open his abdomen, and mangled his face. Barely conscious, he managed one last command: “To the palace, to die there.”

  Horrified members of the imperial family rushed to his side. Thirteen-year-old Nicholas, dressed in a blue sailor suit, followed a thick trail of dark blood up the white marble stairs to his grandfather’s study. There he found Alexander lying on a couch, one eye closed, the other staring blankly at the ceiling. Nicholas’s father, also named Alexander, was already in the room. “My father took me up to the bed,” Nicholas later recalled. “ ‘Papa,’ [my father] said, raising his voice, ‘your ray of sunshine is here.’ I saw the eyelashes tremble.… [Grandfather] moved a finger. He could not raise his hands, nor say what he wanted to, but he undoubtedly recognized me.” Deathly pale, Nicholas stood helplessly at the end of the bed as his beloved grandfather took his last breath.

  “The emperor is dead,” announced the court physician.

  Nicholas’s father—now the new tsar—clenched his fists. The Russian people would pay for this. Alexander II had been a reformer, the most liberal tsar in centuries. He’d freed the serfs (peasant slaves) and modernized the courts. But his murder convinced his son, Alexander III, that the people had been treated too softly. If order was to be maintained, they needed to “feel the whip.” And for the next thirteen years of his reign, Alexander III made sure they did.

  Young Nicholas, standing beside his grandfather’s deathbed, knew nothing of politics. Frightened, he covered his face with his hands and sobbed bitterly. He was left, he later confessed, with a “presentiment—a secret conviction … that I am destined for terrible trials.”

  ROMANOV RULE

  Nicholas’s family, the Romanovs, had sat on the Russian throne for almost three hundred years, ruling their subjects under a form of government called autocracy. In an autocracy, one person—in this instance, the tsar—holds all the power. The Romanovs claimed God had given them this power, had chosen them to rule the Russian people. As God’s representative on earth, they maintained, the tsar should be left to run the country according to his own ideas of duty and right. This meant that all of Russia’s political power was in the tsar’s hands. Unlike most other nations, Russia had no constitution, no congress, no court of appeal for its citizens or supreme court to review or limit the tsar’s power. There were only two restrictions: he had to abide by the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church (of which he was official head), and he had to follow the laws of succession (those rules determining inheritance of the throne). On all other matters the tsar was supreme, and he made laws and policies according to his will … or whim.

  The tsar’s will was carried out by a multitude of officials and administrators. Below him sat thirteen ministers collectively called the Imperial Cabinet. Chosen by the tsar, each of these noblemen headed a large government department. There was a chief minister (or prime minister), as well as ministers of war, finance, justice, and the interior, to name a few. Their job was to implement the tsar’s decrees and to offer advice. Whether the tsar chose to listen was his choice. The tsar could dismiss a minister at any time, and for any reason. Since they could be hired and fired on a whim, the tsar’s ministers (with some exceptions) tended to be flatterers, telling him what he wanted rather than needed to hear.

  Because of Russia’s size, the tsar required a second tier of officials and administrators to carry out his will. Outside St. Petersburg, the country was divided into thirty-four provinces, each administered by a governor (also chosen by the tsar). Each had at his disposal an imperial army and police to help enforce the tsar’s laws. Additionally, each province was divided into districts overseen by the zemstvo, or local council. The zemstvo managed the collection of taxes in their localities and dealt with issues like food supply and road maintenance. Not surprisingly, most members of the zemstvo were landowning nobility or wealthy townsmen.

  Russia also required a huge imperial bureaucracy to enforce laws, impose fines and fees, and keep records. Because the majority of bureaucrats were neither well educated nor well paid, they were easily corrupted. It was common for low-ranking bureaucrats (those working closest to the citizens) to demand bribes for everything from issuing business licenses to approving land titles. Because of this, the lower classes despised bureaucrats. They viewed them as greedy, petty cheaters. Unfortunately, since the low-ranking bureaucrat was the most visible of all government workers, he became the public face of Romanov rule.

  The tsar’s government was propped up by both its military and its police force. Public safety was not the first priority of either organization. Instead, their most important function was protecting the autocracy from political dissent. If Russians so much as grumbled about the government, they could be arrested and exiled to far-off, frozen Siberia without recourse. To keep the peace and protect order, the tsar censored the press, banned books, limited public speech, and refused people the right to assemble for political reasons. Houses could be searched. Mail could be opened and read. Businesses and universities could be closed for no other reason than that the tsar commanded it. Even members of the nobility were subject to his will. The tsar could seize their property, refuse them permission to marry, and banish anyone from the country—all with just a snap of his autocratic fingers.

  GROWING UP

 
Nicholas did not look forward to the day he would sit on the Russian throne. Shy and gentle, he enjoyed playing tennis, taking long walks, and reading in his bedroom. Every month the imperial librarian sent him twenty books from around the world. Nicholas, a fast reader, especially liked military history. He wasn’t anything like his bullheaded, tough-as-nails father, Tsar Alexander III, who boomed when he spoke, and who had strong opinions and an even stronger will. How could he possibly live up to the expectations of his big Russian bear of a father?

  And his father was bearlike. Standing six foot three, Tsar Alexander was so strong he could bend iron fire pokers and tie silver forks into knots. Once, while he was riding on the imperial train with his family, the locomotive jumped the rails, causing the roof to cave in. Using his tremendous strength, Alexander hoisted the roof onto his wide shoulders and held it until everyone escaped unhurt.

  Alexander possessed incredible political strength, too. He demanded complete obedience from his subjects. “The tsar is swift and harsh. He shows no mercy,” one of Alexander’s courtiers noted. “He raises his iron fist, and the … people shudder, and obey.” Once, when an adviser threatened to resign, the tsar picked up the man by his lapels and flung him to the marble floor. “Shut up! When I choose to kick you out, you will hear of it in no uncertain terms!”