The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  Abroad, responses to the queen were not quite so enthusiastic. One well-informed member of the German government summed up the Prussian court on dit, “She was an77 undersized creature, almost as broad as she was long who looked like a cook, had a bluish-red face and was more or less mentally deranged. But she is very rich …” In Russia, George’s cousin, Tsarevitch Nicholas, just embarking on his military training, grumbled that the “celebrated anniversary78 of the English Queen” had caused several senior family members to go to London, and thus cut down his time at camp; “I resent this.”

  For the queen, however, the Jubilee had another significance, as a celebration of her dominance of a family that stretched across Europe, and one particular way in which she still had some claim to political influence. The day before the procession Victoria gave a banquet for her fifty “Royalties” (George’s word)—or as she called it, a “large family79 dinner.” King Christian of Denmark escorted her in. His son, King George of the Hellenes, sat next to her. Opposite her was her cousin King Leopold II of Belgium, who was in the process of turning the Belgian Congo into a horrible slave colony that would make him unimaginably rich. Wilhelm, grumbling about having been ignored and in bad odour with his grandmother, sat further down the table. George, whose diary was full of lunches with “Uncle Fritz” and his female “Prussian cousins”—“dear little brat” (Charlotte), and “Vicky, Sophie and Mossy”80—made not one single reference to Wilhelm.

  Intimacy between monarchies, the queen was certain, created friendliness between nations. It was a theory which neither history nor family relations confirmed.

  * Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, whose family had sided with Prussia.

  * The extent of Alexandra’s deafness28 can be gauged by a Russian grand duke’s account of a visit in the 1880s. He was taken aback by how everyone had to bellow in her company: “A stranger walking into the dining room of the palace would have thought he was witnessing a family quarrel.”

  3

  NICHOLAS

  A Diamond-Studded Ivory Tower

  1868

  All royal childhoods were isolated, but Nicholas Romanov’s childhood was isolated even by royal standards. And while his English cousin George’s closed childhood was at odds with the increasing openness of English society, Nicholas’s was a paradigm of the stagnation and closed nature of Russian society.

  Imperial Russia was a colossus anchored to traditions a hundred years out of date. At 8.5 million square miles it covered almost one-sixth of the world’s surface, had a population of 120 million (the combined populations of Britain, France and Germany) and a standing army of over 1 million men. Its tsars lived on an unparalleled scale of public splendour; its grand duchesses staggered under the weight of their diamonds, its social season was more spectacular than anything in Europe. At the same time, it was an underdeveloped and miserably poor agrarian society, more sparsely populated than anywhere in Europe, and barely a nation in the accepted sense. Rather, it was an unintegrated collection of eighty-odd nationalities from Poles to Uzbeks who had little in common except varying degrees of allegiance to the tsar. Its institutions were archaic, its communications infrastructure was lamentable, its government administration unable to keep up. Foreign wars had almost brought it to bankruptcy. Five-sixths of its population were peasants—who bore the weight of its taxation. Less than 20 percent1 of Russians were literate by the end of the nineteenth century, as compared to around 95 percent of Britons. Educated Russians, from tsarist bureaucrats to the aristocracy to the small new professional class, knew and hated the fact that their neighbours in Europe routinely regarded the country as backward and “Asiatic”—a word with connotations of tyranny, decadence, corruption and barbarity. Some, who characterized themselves as social progressives and free-thinkers, longed for Russia to be more Western and “civilized.” Others, who called themselves Slavophiles, maintained that Russia was different, special, incomprehensible to literal-minded Europeans, and that Russians must stick to their own proud traditions.

  Nicholas’s family, the Romanovs, had ruled Russia since 1613; but it had been only with the Napoleonic Wars that Russia had become a bona fide Great Power. In 1814, after defeating Napoleon, Tsar Alexander I had ridden down the Champs-Élysées as the arbiter of Europe. (It was surely an oblique nod to this epiphanic moment that caused Bismarck to crown his German emperor at Versailles in 1871.) The Russian tsars claimed their imperial status by virtue—somewhat implausibly—of being the heirs of the Byzantine empire. After the fall of Constantinople to Islam in 1453, the self-styled Grand Princes of All Russia had been the most powerful independent rulers left in the Byzantine—or Eastern Orthodox—Church. Prince Ivan the Great married the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, added the Byzantine two-headed eagle to his crest, adopted Byzantine court ritual and started calling himself “Tsar.” In so doing, he acquired a set of useful messianic myths about Russia’s world mission: to recapture Constantinople, or Tsargrad as the Russians called it, for Christianity (and rather more usefully, to gain secure access to Europe and the Mediterranean for its grain and navy), and to “protect” the Slavic peoples of the Balkans against the Ottoman empire. This dual mission caused his authority to be underwritten by the Russian Orthodox Church. The tsar became the great defender of Orthodoxy; the Church, tied closer to the state than in any country in Europe, declared that the tsar was God’s representative on earth and he must be obeyed at all costs.

  Theoretically the tsar’s power was unlimited—the Romanovs liked to think of Russia and its empire as one enormous feudal estate in which everything derived from them. They were tenacious in their determination not to let go of a single drop of power. This meant that anyone trying to initiate change found it extraordinarily difficult, as any change could be seen as a challenge to the tsar’s prerogatives and summarily repressed. There were no representative assemblies of any kind, and no one, not even ministers and legislators—whom the tsar appointed and sacked as he wished—could be seen to make policy, law or any public initiatives without him. Everything must come from the tsar. Even divorce decrees needed to be personally signed by him. Anton Chekhov remembered2 a poor wretch from his childhood who languished forgotten for years in the town gaol, having been arrested for collecting money without permission to build a local church. Everyone in Europe who read a newspaper knew how brutally Russia had crushed the Polish separatist movement, how it tacitly encouraged Jewish pogroms, how it persecuted small religious sects, though because of press censorship not everyone in Russia did. The government seemed to go out of its way to persecute its greatest—and often far from radical—writers. Turgenev had been put under house arrest for writing a sympathetic review of Gogol; Dostoevsky was sentenced to death (commuted to four years’ hard labour in Siberia) for being a member of an innocuous group of liberal Utopians. European liberals—especially in England—hated tsarism as the symbol of all that was backward-looking and anti-democratic. Monarchists—especially in Germany—saw it as a reassuring bulwark of conservatism.

  By the middle of the 1850s, however, Russia’s bureaucracy and its ministries were silting up, and the country was falling behind commercially and industrially. The dead hand of the state was the chief reason for this. A good example was the way that Russian society was still locked in the near-feudal hierarchy established by Peter the Great nearly 120 years before. Class segregation was enforced by the government—everyone was registered to a particular social estate, and your estate dictated your dress, the education you were entitled to, the occupations you could follow, where you could travel, how much tax you paid—the more socially lowly paid proportionally more. It was no accident that so many of the great Russian artists and writers of the mid-nineteenth century were aristocrats, and that the country had failed to industrialize. The problem for the government was that if Russia fell too far behind Europe it would lose its status as a Great Power. Being a Great Power, at the top of the international status tree—along with England, France, A
merica, Austria-Hungary and the newcomer Germany—was vital to the tsarist government’s sense of itself, and, it believed, the empire’s very existence. The question was, could the country modernize and develop, even industrialize, without the tsar sacrificing an iota of his power, or even losing all of it? When Nicholas was born in 1868, it was this conundrum that had caused his grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, to introduce a series of modest reforms that would earn him the title of “liberator”—abolishing serfdom, liberalizing the press, introducing the beginnings of social mobility, and setting up zemstvos, local rural councils, which had considerable success in building the roads, schools and hospitals the state had signally failed to supply. But at the same time a series of assassination attempts on the tsar convinced conservatives in the government that even a modicum of liberalization was too dangerous for Russia.

  Among those conservatives was Nicholas’s father, Alexander, the tsarevitch. Alexander was a man-mountain of shaggy determination. Like his ancestor Peter the Great, he stood well over six feet and was enormously strong, “built like a3 butcher” as one British journalist wrote. His party trick, brought out to intimidate foreign dignitaries and to amuse his children’s friends, was to bend pokers and forks in and out of shape. Unlike Peter the Great, he disapproved of Westernization: “He tried to be4 Russian down to the smallest details of his personal life, and that was why his bearing seemed less aristocratic than that of his brothers,” one of his courtiers wrote. “He claimed, perhaps without reasoning it out, that a true Russian should not be too highly polished in his manners, that he should have a touch of something like brutality.” Alexander made a point of being rough and deliberately provincial. He wore a long beard—a mark of deliberate Slavophilia and in stark contrast to his clean-shaven sophisticated brothers—and sack-like Russian peasant shirts, and was famously brusque, taciturn and deeply mistrustful of almost everybody. He was xenophobic and anti-Semitic and deplored his father’s reforms. He made a point of disapproving of the extravagance and Europeanized sophistication of St. Petersburg, and loathed its winter social season. He had no interest in art or culture, haute cuisine or good wine. He did like the country: his children’s most vivid memories of him were the walks he took them on, during which he taught them to start a fire, clear a path, follow an animal’s tracks. He was not especially bright and, like his nephew George, he was the second son and his education had been neglected—his views had been formed in the army. But he was an impressive figure, not least because he seemed entirely immune to self-doubt.

  Alexander’s older brother, Nicholas, the heir, had died of TB in 1865. There was a pretty legend that on his deathbed Nicholas had joined the hands of his fiancée, Minny, daughter of the Danish king, Christian, and sister of Alexandra of Wales, and his brother to indicate his wish that they should marry. In reality, Alexander’s intended was banished abroad, and he was virtually frogmarched to Copenhagen to propose to his brother’s fiancée, who gracefully accepted. They were married in 1866. Minny seemed the opposite of her husband: she was tiny and delicately pretty—though not, everyone said, as pretty as her sister Alexandra—and charming. She was tougher and brighter than her sister; she had actually been known to read books5 and was an amateur painter. Like Alexandra she was extravagant, loved beautiful clothes, lavish jewels and parties—especially the St. Petersburg season. She was popular too—no mean feat as Russian aristocratic society was factional, competitive and gossipy. To everyone’s surprise, however, Minny and Sasha, as they were called in the family, were a great success. She charmed St. Petersburg so he didn’t have to. He turned out, unlike many Romanov men, to be extremely uxorious. They shared a strong, simple religious faith, a love of the outdoors—like her sister, Minny was a fine rider—a devotion to family, and an unsubtle taste for practical jokes. In their case typical “jokes” involved the throwing of bread pellets at dinner and the turning of water hoses on unsuspecting victims.

  Their first son, Nicholas, was born two years later on 6 May 1868, the feast day of Job, whose stoic fatalism would have a certain appropriateness. Minny’s sister, Alexandra, wrote to her wishing she could send her own nurse, Mrs. Clarke, reminding her what had happened to Vicky’s son, “who came out6 wrong.” Alexander was present at the birth, showing a tenderness in his diary—“What joy it was,”7 he wrote; “… I was crying like a baby”—that belied his public image. Five siblings followed: a brother who died in infancy, then two boys and two girls: George and Xenia, and the babies of the family, Michael and Olga.

  Nicholas grew up in a series of snow-covered palaces in the northern fastnesses of the Russian empire. Everything about the circumstances of his childhood conspired to make him innocent, naïve and young for his years. Alexander loved his children, but his misanthropy, overprotectiveness and insistence on complete obedience were not guaranteed to create big, confident personalities—and they didn’t. The rigid etiquette which surrounded Russian royalty insulated them from modern life and other people even more so than other royals—Alexander’s intense distrust of almost everyone beyond the family, his dislike of St. Petersburg and his concerns over security meant that Nicholas was denied even what St. Petersburg high society might have offered: a little cosmopolitanism, culture and company. As it was, contact with anyone save his brothers and sisters and servants was difficult and rare. “Servants, pets8 and relations, in that order,” was how the children prioritized their relationships with the outside world—court and society coming a long way after. Nicholas’s most constant playmate was his brother George, younger by three years, whose practical jokes—he was forever tripping up the servants and setting his pet parrot on the tutors—and bons mots so delighted Nicky that he would write them down and keep them in a box, bringing them out and shouting with laughter at them years later. He occasionally saw a few grand ducal cousins such as his cousin Alexander Mikhailovich, known as Sandro, and the children of Minny’s friend and lady-in-waiting Lili Vorontsova-Dashkova. One of the few children whom Nicky encountered beyond these was his governess’s son, Vladimir Ollongren, who joined his classes for three years when Nicholas was seven. For all the warmth within the family it was, inevitably, lonely.

  The Romanov children, not unlike their English cousins Eddy and George, were said to be lively and jolly. Sandro, Nicky’s cousin, who first met him in 1875 when he was seven, recalled a slightly fragile, sweet-natured, smiling boy, who had a great deal of his mother’s charm. Vladimir Ollongren thought him a very happy child, keen on hopscotch and birds, his mother and the long theatrical rituals of the Orthodox Church which he liked to act out. His piety was something his younger sister Olga remembered too. Ollongren couldn’t help but compare the boy to his hulking father. Next to him, slight, quiet little Nicky seemed frankly “girlish.” The tsar Ollongren remembered as “a quite exceptionally cheerful and simple man;”9 several people observed that Alexander seemed to prefer children to adults.

  Nicholas was utterly in awe of him. He seemed superhuman, so huge and strong, so utterly without doubt. When the imperial family were caught in a train derailment at Borki in 1888 in which twenty people died (whether it was a bomb or badly laid track was never established), Alexander single-handedly lifted the roof of the carriage in which his family was trapped, and saved them. He was extremely loving of his children, but he was ruthless about any sign of weakness, expected absolute obedience and could be extremely frightening. One observer wrote that even when talking normally he sometimes “gave the impression10 of being on the point of striking you.” Vladimir Ollongren recalled an occasion when he took the blame for something Nicky had done. “You are11 a little girl,” Alexander told his son crushingly. One member of the imperial household felt this created an uncomfortable atmosphere “of dissimulation12 and restraint” in the family.

  Minny was no less powerful. She could be extremely imperious and took her position in society very seriously. With the exception of her firstborn, who adored her, her children found her both demanding and distant.
Nicholas deferred to her well into adulthood. “I hope my13 Nicky will do everything to be friendly and charming with everybody and will be ready to carry out his personal duties even if they are boring at times,” she wrote to him when he was trekking across Siberia aged twenty-two, as if he were a small boy at someone else’s party. Her youngest daughter, Olga, who disliked her, felt that she went out of her way to scupper their sister Xenia’s marriage because “My mother just14 did not want to lose all control over Xenia.”