The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  The imperial household and the imperial court consisted of 16,500 persons, mostly servants. Among them were four large black men, known in the palace as “Ethiopians” (though at least one was American), dressed in a kind of northern fantaisie of Turkish harem dress—white turbans, gold-embroidered jackets, slippers curved at the toe—whose sole function was to stand outside the tsar’s study ready to open the doors silently. There were hundreds of court officials: 287 chamberlains, 309 chief gentlemen-in-waiting, 103 stewards, 40 gentlemen of the bedchamber, 22 churchmen, and in the imperial suite, hundreds of officers from major-generals to adjutants. So numerous was the court that the office which ran it itself required a staff of 1,300.

  Then there were the palaces: in addition to the hundred-room Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, there was the larger Catherine Palace, the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the many summer villas at Peterhof, the various hunting lodges—including three in Poland—the estates at Livadia in the Crimea, a bunch of other royal palaces occupied by various relatives such as the Anichkov and Pavlovsk. And there were the yachts—the grandest of which, Standart, elegantly black with a gold stripe down the sides and a gold double eagle on the stern, was the size of a warship and weighed 4,500 tons, sat eighty for dinner and housed a full balalaika orchestra. Everything was paid for by a one-off payment which Nicholas received each year on 1 January, and which also covered, among other things, his Romanov relatives’ lavish lifestyles, the court personnel’s pensions, and all the various theatres and ballets and initiatives of which the tsar was patron. It was a much-repeated truism among the Romanovs that poor Nicholas was often “broke” by the autumn, which rendered the thriftiness all the more Marie Antoinette–esque and out of kilter with reality.

  The move to Tsarskoe Selo represented more than just geographical distance from the aristocratic and governing elite of St. Petersburg. In his father’s time, the tsar’s antipathy to St. Petersburg had been mitigated by his mother, who had been a bridge between the emperor, court and society. Nicholas had inherited his father’s suspicion of the city and desire to be in the country, and preferred the intimacies of home to wider society. Alix had quickly developed an intense dislike of St. Petersburg and was almost hysterically shy and uncomfortable in public. “She longed to8 disappear under the ground,” she told her friend Sophie Buxhoeveden, “her French evaporated, and her conversation languished; she blushed and looked ill at ease.” Rushed into the role of empress, she had had no time to acclimatize to the strangeness of Russia, and her shyness tended to manifest itself as buttoned-up unfriendliness, quickness to take offence, and as an instinctive suspicion of strangers. Even her greatest defenders admitted she was “over sensitive and9 in a way haunted by the notion that she was unpopular and unloved.” Like many self-conscious enclosed elites, gossipy, frivolous St. Petersburg was not especially welcoming or generous. “If Alicky smiled10 they called it mockery. If she looked grave they said she was angry,” her sister-in-law Olga recalled. Those who did make the effort frequently felt their good intentions were met with “stinging answers.”11 She showed her disapproval of society’s frivolity by publicly reprimanding12 ladies whose dresses she thought were too revealing at imperial balls, and even on occasion sending them home. The ladies of St. Petersburg riposted by wearing overlong feathers in their headdresses, which swept across her face when they curtseyed to her, and made her sneeze. She got no points for the philanthropic and charitable projects, hospitals and sewing circles in which she involved herself; nor for her chronic ill health—“It was contrary13 to Russian Court etiquette even to mention the health of the sovereign or his wife.” Her illnesses, however, provided another excuse for her, and her husband’s, less frequent appearances outside Tsarskoe Selo.

  Within Tsarskoe Selo, and despite having a personal suite of 600, including 200 ladies-in-waiting to call on, Alix confined herself to her family and a small, tight coterie of women. She viewed the rest of the world with intense mistrust and, Mossolov recalled, “showed jealousy14 of everything that deprived her of the company of her husband”—including affairs of state. When she once complained that she and the tsar saw very few people, a courtier suggested that perhaps they should see more. “Why? So as to hear15 still more lies?” she answered. Nicholas, who as a bachelor had enjoyed parties and dancing, found it only too easy to follow her. “Neither the Tsar16 nor the Empress had any desire to enlarge the circle of the persons admitted to their presence,” Mossolov wrote. By mid-1897 a Russian-based German diplomat expressed concern to the German chancellor that the tsar was “so reserved and closed-off17 that one fears he might lose touch with the living element of his people.”

  Like so much about Nicholas’s life, the seeds of this withdrawal from the aristocracy predated him. There had always been a gap between the emperor and the aristocracy, which was by the laws of the autocracy as subject to the whims of the tsar as anyone else. Previous emperors had been suspicious of St. Petersburg’s frivolity and tendency to intrigue, but while the tsar had a foot in the city and in the world, this mattered less. Nicholas and Alexandra’s willed and intense isolation and evident wariness of their natural constituency would create a wedge that would alienate even members of the elite.

  Nicholas and Alix claimed to be bored by court etiquette, but were utterly in thrall to the processes which kept them separated from the world. “The sovereigns themselves18 always insisted that they valued in people nothing so much as simplicity and sincerity … they actually appraised people almost solely according to the amount of attention these people gave to quite outward and often nonsensical etiquette,” wrote Gleb Botkin, son of the imperial family’s doctor, who grew up in the imperial family’s orbit. On their travels in 1896 the household at Balmoral had found them at first a little stand-offish and “on their magisterial19 dignity;” and in France it had been noted that the imperial couple spoke only to the most senior government figures and generals. Beyond the court and government Nicholas met virtually no one and he took no interest in the Russian new elites: Jewish society and the new industrial millionaires of Moscow—in contrast to his uncle Bertie in England. “Neither [group] touched us,”20 one of Alix’s ladies wrote. Nicholas’s distance from these and the St. Petersburg elite meant that, even though he and Alix were more literate than their English and German cousins and he knew about the great Russian portraitist Ilya Repin because he painted the court, and he’d seen some plays by Chekhov, who was now world famous, he had little sense of the extraordinary artistic flowering taking place in his country. Nicholas’s ancestors had been the great builders and collectors of Russia, but though he paid for some of the theatres and concert halls where music, opera and ballet were performed, Nicholas had very little direct involvement in patronage.

  Once the exclusiveness of the Russian court had been a way to keep the monarch in control and the aristocracy under control; now it simply kept the court from the rest of the world. This was the pattern throughout all the European courts, all desperately trying to keep out new forces—trade, the bourgeoisie, industry, democracy—which they saw as threats to their status and influence, but their only weapon besides barricades was a desperate holding on to the past. They had ceased to be places where one went to seek one’s fortune, where art was created or political debate took place, as they had been in the eighteenth century, instead becoming strangled by hierarchy and a million tiny rules, the more arbitrary the better. But most of all they were crushingly boring—even the tsar admitted this—and most of what took place kept everyone busy but was pointless. In Russia, Nicholas’s preoccupation with his own family and the fact that it was not done to receive anyone who wasn’t noble, meant his court had become little more than a huge extended domestic household full of people obsessively measuring their gold braid. The famous court balls of the winter season, said to be the most glittering and lavish in the world, had their own interminable formal demands. Most people’s experience of them involved standing in a room allotted by class (no
chance for the beautiful daughter of minor gentry to be swept off her feet by the handsome prince), and waiting for hours for the emperor to arrive so one could bow to him. Even the head of Nicholas’s own Chancellery admitted to being “royally bored.”21

  It was the same in England. The British court had long since given up any claim to being a nexus of power and influence, and now consisted of the queen’s household and a series of annual social engagements. Victoria’s retirement had turned it into a quiet pool of tedium where the outside world rarely intruded, dictated by her whims. The queen would disappear into her apartments for days at a time, leaving her courtiers to hang about bored in corridors, unable to leave the building until she did, or smoke, or warm themselves, as she believed fires were unwholesome.

  It was worse in Berlin. Dona’s puritanism—she’d banned modern dances like the polka and the two-step—and Wilhelm’s bossiness made the court so dull that many aristocrats had absented themselves altogether. The main preoccupations of the court had become precedence, rigid ceremonial, the maintenance of endless petty, arbitrary rules and, of course, complete obedience to the sovereign. “It almost seemed22 like living in a prison,” wrote Ethel Howard, an English governess to Wilhelm’s children. The court’s humourlessness and protocol were legendary. Wilhelm liked to say23 that he did not give balls as amusements but as lessons in deportment. “Anything stiffer24 and more wearisome … is difficult to imagine,” one British attaché observed. Members of the court were not allowed to use public transport, or wear spectacles because no one was permitted to look at the monarchs through glass,* and everywhere members were reminded of their position in the hierarchy. They were graded and classified by colour-coded passes; these decided, among other things, which room they stood in at balls and how large a Christmas present they received from the imperial couple. Even the size of Christmas trees set up for members of the imperial family at the Berlin Schloss each year was determined by how high up the scale they were.

  Being part of the kaiser’s entourage seems to have been in large part simply an exercise in fortitude and standing up: no one was allowed to sit in his presence or allowed to go to bed until he did. In the evenings he would insist on reading—with expostulations—or lecturing them for hours as they tried to stay awake. “The elderly generals25 of the Kaiser’s suite were much to be pitied,” one English governess noted. “They wore a smile of patient suffering most of the time, for William showed little consideration for their age and infirmities … As a rule he exacted every ounce of service that a man could give—in a pleasant affable way, it is true—still he exacted it. They looked tired to death sometimes, these gentlemen, bored with the incessant trivialities of their office, bored with William’s flow of conversation which gave them little opportunity to express their own thoughts.” So awful was spending time in the kaiser’s entourage that one adjutant, Gustav von Neumann-Cosel,26 particularly renowned for his obsequiousness and his enthusiasm for kissing the kaiser’s hand, would return home after his statutory time at court, lock himself in his room, swear loudly, then sleep for twenty-four hours.

  Because Nicholas and Alexandra were closed off within the court, their experience of other classes remained minimal. While they might imitate the modest values and habits of the middle classes, they actually viewed them as potentially troublesome opponents whose aspirations were a direct challenge to the structures of Russian hierarchy and the tsar’s authority. The educated middle class in particular, which made up the questioning liberal opposition, the “intelligentsia”—a Russian coinage—Nicholas hated. Sergei Witte recalled that “one day at table someone had used the word ‘intellectual,’” to which the tsar replied, “How I detest that word.” He added that he “should order the Academy of Sciences to suppress it in the Russian dictionary.”27 As for the poorest and the workers, Nicholas saw them from his carriage, cheering him, or encountered the odd peasant on rides he made out of Tsarskoe Selo (surrounded naturally by secret police) and would ask how the harvest had gone, unaware of the wretched situation in which they lived. His attitude to them was like the sentimental British colonialists’ attitude to the savages they were “civilizing.” He was their little father, they were honest, innocent children, susceptible to evil influences from which he must protect them. After the Winter Palace massacre of 1905, when government troops shot into a peaceful crowd, Alix wrote, “The poor workmen28 who had been utterly misled, had to suffer, and the organizers have hidden as usual behind them … I love my new country. It’s so young, powerful, and has much good in it, only utterly unbalanced and childlike.”

  In this the Russian royal family were more cut off than any of their contemporaries. Even in Germany Wilhelm had broken through some of Prussia’s tight etiquette to meet Jewish banking and shipping magnates, to visit the yachts of American millionaires, to become friendly with the heir to the Krupp empire, the largest company in Europe. More significantly, through his speeches and use of the press, Wilhelm had made himself available to the non-aristocratic literate population of Germany, the German equivalent of the new Daily Mail readers of England—nationalistic, patriotic, aspirational, urban—as no monarch had done before. While he encountered opposition in government or the Reichstag, these new classes increasingly formed the bedrock of his national support. But whereas Wilhelm felt truly alive and in tune only when he was exposing himself to the world, public events still made Nicholas sick with anxiety. “I felt green29 and trembled all over,” he told his mother, after addressing the Viennese court in 1896. The British royal family, meanwhile, were forced to meet influential commoners—even upstart radical politicians such as Joseph Chamberlain and David Lloyd George—by virtue of their constitutional position.

  The truth was Nicholas had no idea—and didn’t want to know—how Russia was changing; how the state was no longer the only organizing force; how the zemstvos were increasingly the most effective providers of services in the country; how his grandfather’s reforms had, despite his father’s best efforts, begun to break down the old rigid class determinants—serfs were becoming merchants, tradesmen’s children were becoming teachers, engineers and doctors; how peasant life was impoverished and in crisis and the urban working class was living in misery. And how could you process the changes the modern world was bringing if, like Nicholas and Alexandra, you had convinced yourselves that protocol and etiquette were so ubiquitous that you were, as Alix’s closest friend, Anna Vyrubova, said, “unable to change30 a single deadly detail of the routine of the Russian court,” and that even afternoon tea was immutable. “The same plates for hot bread and butter on the same tea table were traditions going back to Catherine the Great.” Nicholas could see no reason why this should change—the country must remain as it always had been. It was as if he had made it structurally impossible for himself to learn from experience—just like Wilhelm, who for different reasons was quite unable to learn from his mistakes—as if he was systematically disqualifying himself from taking part in the modern world.

  As the son of Dr. Botkin, the imperial doctor, wrote, “The enchanted little31 fairyland of Tsarskoe Selo slumbered peacefully on the brink of an abyss, lulled by the sweet songs of bewhiskered sirens who gently hummed ‘God Save the Tsar.’”

  Driving Nicholas ever more intensely into the arms of his family was his fear, discomfort and dislike of his new role as emperor. He took his inheritance exceptionally seriously, but he had no ideas save holding on to his father’s truisms: only autocracy could save Russia; liberal reform and a free press were recipes for disaster; close family were the only people you could trust; Russia must be preserved in aspic. He quickly acquired a reputation as a good man, but neither as firm nor consistent as could be wished. He was too susceptible to his bullying uncles and the last person who’d spoken to him. “Our young monarch32 changes his mind with terrifying speed,” sighed one senior Foreign Office bureaucrat in 1896. “He remains33 too often under the impression, and consequently under the influence of the last words sp
oken to him,” his cousins Sandro and Konstantin agreed in 1897. “The Emperor is34 influenced by the arguments of his last adviser,” one British ambassador reported. “The reputation of35 the monarchy has suffered …” the German ambassador told the chancellor in 1898. “Like a reed in the wind, Tsar Nicholas is wavering between the Ministers and Grand Dukes and last but not least his own mother.”

  Wilhelm, of course, had been accused of the same thing. “It is unendurable. Today one thing36 and tomorrow the next and a few days after that something completely different,” one minister had written wearily. The personal roots of their inconsistency were different—Wilhelm’s manic restlessness, Nicholas’s insecurity—but in both cases it reflected an underlying inability to grapple with the ever-expanding demands of modern government, and a deep desire not to rely on any one person who might undermine their power.

  Nicholas compensated for his anxious feelings of inadequacy and lack of preparedness by holding tenaciously to his belief in divine right. The moment the crown had touched his head, he had become a vehicle for God’s purpose and had magically absorbed a kind of spiritual superiority which made him, whatever his inadequacies, better equipped than any minister to know what Russia needed. It was a mystical idea far more literal even than the pronouncements about his relationship with God which had brought Wilhelm such derision in Europe, and in Nicholas it encouraged a kind of fatalism which would make him oddly passive in a crisis. It also made him extremely possessive of his authority, and sensitive to anything that could be interpreted as interference. While Nicholas the family man was gentle and charming, Nicholas the emperor was often touchy, mistrustful and stubborn.