The messenger galloped back to Warsaw from St. Petersburg. Understanding how strange it would seem otherwise, the dowager empress “begged on her knees for Konstantin to come to St. Petersburg and declare his renunciation of the throne openly.”
The messenger hurried back from Warsaw to St. Petersburg. Konstantin refused to come to the capital (so worried they would persuade him to accept the throne). He asked his “beloved mother” to announce his renunciation on his behalf.
While messengers on troikas sped back and forth, the guardsmen realized that this moment of confusion over succession was the best time for a revolt.
At last, on December 13, the birthday of the late emperor Alexander, Nicholas decided to accept the will. He agreed to wear the crown. “What a day for me, Lord, determining of my fate,” wrote Nicholas in his diary. That same day a sealed envelope was brought to him. “I opened it and learned of a horrible conspiracy. I had to take decisive measures,” he recalled later.
The damned guards, who had killed his ancestors, were at it again. He knew what threatened him. Little Sasha was now the official heir to the throne. The next day, December 14, was the day his father was to take the oath. That same day, Nicholas wrote to his sister, “Pray to God for me…. Take pity on your wretched brother, victim of the Will of God and his two brothers.”
That evening was filled with anxious debates among the conspirators. Some did not want to risk a mutiny, because they doubted its success. One—Count Rostovtsev—decided to take a desperate step. He told his fellow conspirators that he was particularly obliged to Nikolai Pavlovich and now, “foreseeing danger for his benefactor, decided to go to him and beg him not to accept the throne.” All arguments to stop him were in vain.
The day after his meeting with the tsar, Rostovtsev brought a paper to the conspirators, entitled “The most beautiful day of my life.” It was a description of his meeting with Nicholas, who welcomed him amiably. Rostovtsev warned the tsar that “accepting the throne was very dangerous to him.” He “said nothing more than that.” Nicholas did not ask for details, but thanked him and sent him away.
Rostovtsev had hoped that by revealing the conspiracy he would force his comrades to give up their plans. He was wrong.
Now Nicholas knew for certain that there would be a mutiny. He had no choice but to carry on. In the evening Military Governor of St. Petersburg Miloradovich said to Prince Württemberg, a relative of Nicholas on his mother’s side, “I am anxious, because I do not expect success from tomorrow. The guards love Konstantin.”
“What do the guards have to do with success? There is the legal will of the late tsar,” said the prince.
Little did he know that the law of succession was subject to the will of the guards.
The conspirators were in the barracks, feverishly preparing their soldiers for the mutiny. They could not speak of a republic, which so many of them wanted, to the soldiers. When one of the officers told his soldiers that now they would have a republic, the soldiers immediately wanted to know who would be tsar then.
“No one.”
“Sire,” they told him, “you know that is just not possible.” As a Russian historian has written, “In Russia it was easier to imagine a country without people than without a tsar.”
According to legend, that night Nicholas had trouble sleeping, and he wandered the corridors of the Winter Palace, tormented by insomnia. A servant with a candelabra followed him. In the moonlit White Ballroom they saw a figure in a white nightgown. Nicholas froze in terror—it was his father. In an instant, Paul vanished through the wall.
If this story is true, then that is the moment that imbued Nicholas with the amazing determination he showed throughout the next terrible day. That meeting for him was like Hamlet meeting his father’s ghost. It was a call for revenge against the descendants of the officers who had killed his father and grandfather.
December 14 was not just another attack on the palace—it was a fight for a constitution. A great day for Russian liberals, and a watershed in Russian history.
Nicholas described what happened: “On that fateful day I awoke early. All the generals and regimental leaders of the guards were gathered at the Winter Palace.” Nicholas read them the will of Tsar Alexander I and the renunciation of the throne by Konstantin Pavlovich. “Receiving from each commander an oath of loyalty and readiness to sacrifice himself, I ordered them to go to their men and have the guards take the oath.”
The courtiers were “ordered to gather at the Winter Palace by 11:00
A.M.” While they got organized, Nicholas went to his mother’s rooms. He waited, on the alert.
It had begun. The conspirators had raised rebellion in the army barracks. They told the soldiers that the lawful emperor, Konstantin, to whom they had pledged their oath, had been forced to abdicate. Without their greatcoats, despite the December cold, warmed by the fiery speeches of their officers (and even more so by vodka), the guards rushed with loaded rifles to Peter (now Senate) Square, to defend the rights of Konstantin.
They lined up on the square near the Senate building, ten minutes’ walk from the Winter Palace. The famous statue of Peter the Great on a rearing steed had its back to them. The great emperor seemed to be fleeing from them.
The soldiers shot into the air and shouted: “Long live Konstantin and Constitution!” The Russian word, konstitutsiya, takes a feminine ending, and the officers explained the unfamiliar term as the name of Konstantin’s wife.
No sooner had Nicholas entered his mother’s rooms than (according to Nicholas) “Major General Neigardt, chief of staff of the Guards Corps, appeared and announced that the Moscow Regiment was in complete mutiny.”
All the dignitaries had gathered at the Winter Palace. “But I had to keep the true situation from them, especially from Mother [who had already seen the guards at work, murdering her husband, Paul I—E.R.].” But Nicholas did not keep the truth from his wife. “I looked in on my wife and told her, ‘There is trouble in the Moscow Regiment; I am going there.’”
He remembered the fate of his father and grandfather; he had no doubt that this was a life or death moment. And not only his death, but that of his entire family. He was enraged. Though he wrote that “Thoughts came to me by inspiration,” more likely, he had thought through the situation in those anxious days before he took the oath, when he learned of the conspiracy.
He took action. He sent the regimental commanders gathered at the palace back to the barracks to bring out the regiments of loyal guards. He sent generals to the square to persuade the mutineers to disperse. He gave orders, then tossed his greatcoat over his shoulders and ran out of the palace.
He encountered a huge crowd of gawkers on Palace Square. “The procession toward the palace had begun, and the square was filled with people and carriages.”
A crowd that size in front of the palace was dangerous; it could easily be incited to turn into a mob. They could head over to the rebels on Senate Square or (more terribly) attack the defenseless palace. “I had to distract the people with something unusual…. I had to win time to allow the troops to gather.”
Nicholas began reading the manifesto of his succession to them. The crowd was thrilled to see the tsar addressing them in person. People applauded and roared hurrahs, drowning out the sound of shots from the mutinous square.
After he finished reading the manifesto, Nicholas experienced “the most terrible moment.” He saw a troop of guards running toward the Winter Palace. “A crowd of life grenadiers, led by officer Panov, was coming to take over the palace and in case of resistance to destroy our entire family.”
But at just that moment, loyal troops appeared in the courtyard—the Sapper Battalion, standing behind the new emperor. Seeing “strangers,” as they called guards loyal to Nicholas, the grenadiers turned back and ran to the square. That minute was the salvation of the family. Nicholas writes that he “saw a sign—God’s mercy.” Then came the battalion of the loyal Preobrazhensky Regiment. Nicholas g
ot on his horse and led the battalion to Senate Square.
One hundred meters along, by the arch of the General Staff Building, he saw the guards of the Grenadier Regiment. They were walking without officers and not in military line. They were a huge crowd with banners.
“As we approached them, I wanted to stop the grenadiers and have them take formation. But in response to my ‘Halt!’ they shouted at me: ‘We are for Konstantin!’ I pointed them to Senate Square.” He could not engage in battle in front of the palace, to be seen by his unsuspecting mother and dignitaries. “My heart froze so many times during that day…and only thanks to God’s support I got through it.”
Nicholas would never forgive the rebels for his humiliating fear.
He gave orders to move the children from the Anichkov Palace to the Winter Palace. As usual Sasha was at his lessons with the governor, Captain Merder, when the carriage came for him. The boy was quickly dressed and taken to the Winter Palace. Nicholas also had them “ready country equipages for Mother and my wife.” He had decided “that if events are still threatening to send them with the children out of the city to Tsarskoye Selo.”
In the meantime, Alexander sat in the study of his late uncle, Alexander I, with his mother and grandmother. Hungry, the boy was cranky. They brought him a meat patty. He realized that something was going on, for he could feel the tension of the adults. He ate his patty.
By this time, Nicholas was joined by the generals who had returned from the square. They told him bad news: There were more rebels—added to the Moscow Regiment were the two-meter-tall grenadiers and the Naval Regiment of the guards. The police were frightened into inaction, taking a wait-and-see position. The laborers building St. Isaac’s Cathedral hailed the rebels and threw stones at the tsar’s ambassadors, the generals.
Count Miloradovich, the governor of St. Petersburg, went to Senate Square to negotiate. The news came back almost instantly that he had been killed. Miloradovich had fought the entire war against Napoleon, he had been in every battle, without ever being wounded. He was nicknamed “Lucky,” only to be killed not by enemy fire, but by his own people. He fought in all the capitals of Europe only to die in his own.
The only good news was that the rebels were staying in Senate Square. That gave Nicholas the time he needed to gather loyal troops around him.
He did not want to begin his reign in bloodshed. He sent his youngest brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, to talk to the rebels, but they would not let him speak, and it was a miracle that they did not kill him. A madman shot at him twice; both times the gun would not fire. Then Nicholas, surrounded by the Preobrazhensky Regiment, headed for the square to persuade them himself, but the rebels would not let him approach. “They shot at me; the bullet flew over my head and fortunately no one was wounded. The laborers of St. Isaac’s began tossing lumber at us over the fencing.”
It was then that Nicholas sent the Horse Guards to attack the rebels, who easily fought them off with rifle fire.
It was getting dark. “I had to make the decision to put a swift end to this, otherwise the mob might join the rebels and then the troops surrounded by the mob would be in the most difficult circumstances.”
Alexander’s mother and grandmother were terrified. While Sasha ate his meat patty, they were imagining the worst. His grandmother was now fully informed. Twenty-four years earlier she had seen the mutilated body of her husband, the emperor. Now she might have to look upon the corpse of her son, the emperor. Sitting with her was Nicholas’s wife, worried to death, knowing the names of all the Russian tsars killed by the guards. Alexander’s mother developed a lifelong nervous tic over that day’s events.
Unable to stand the uncertainty, she asked Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, the famous writer and historian who was inside the palace for the festivities, to go see what was happening.
Nikolai Karamzin was a brilliant writer, the leader of the sentimental vein in Russian literature, who betrayed his muse of fiction at the height of his career. He served a new muse, the divine Clio, and became a historian. This career brought him immortality, as he realized his dream “to animate Russian history.” The first edition of his history of Russia sold out in twenty-five days. It was a revelation for the Russian public and became a source of inspiration for future Russian writers, and naturally an object of ruthless criticism for professional historians.
That day the brilliant writer and historian saw with his own eyes a fateful moment in Russian history.
Karamzin returned and told them about the rebel regiments on the square, just a ten-minute walk from the Winter Palace. He told them that the mob around the square hailed their success with delighted cheers and threw stones at him when he tried to reach the rebels. In his haste to get back (perhaps he had been forced to run for his life), Karamzin lost a heel. Now he paced the formal room in his socks. He was in a panic: “Is Peter’s city really going to fall into the hands of three thousand half-drunken soldiers, mad officers, and the mob?”
Nicholas made one last attempt to persuade the rebel regiments. He sent to the palace for the metropolitan, who was preparing for a religious service for Nicholas’s ascension to the throne. Now, instead, the metropolitan in his formal vestments headed for the square to talk to the rebels. They awaited his return anxiously at the palace. He returned frightened, threatened by gunfire and chased from the square.
A bloody decision was made. “Adjutant General Vasilchikov (commander of the guards) turned to me and said, ‘Your Majesty, there is nothing to be done: we need grapeshot!’
“‘Do you want me to spill the blood of my subjects on the very first day of my reign?’
“‘In order to save your empire,’ Vasilchikov replied.”
This is how Nicholas remembered it. But this is most likely the version all rulers use to explain bloodshed; they oppose, but their advisors insist.
In fact, Nicholas liked history and knew Bonaparte’s reaction when he watched the mob storm the French king’s palace. “What an ass the king is! It wouldn’t take more than a battery to disperse these scoundrels!” (The vanquished Napoleon remained an idol of the victorious Russian officers.)
Nicholas commanded the cannon himself. He thirsted for revenge for his father and grandfather, and most of all, for his fear.
Inside the Winter Palace, the dignitaries in their ribbons and medals sat along the walls and awaited the results of the battle. Suddenly the palace’s tall windows were illuminated, as if by several bolts of lightning at once, followed by distant thunder. The cannon were shooting. The first was a warning shot over the rebels’ heads that struck the Senate building. The cannonball stuck in the wall, and Nicholas did not permit its removal for several years, as a reminder to hotheads. The rebels responded with scattered fire and shots of “Hurrah Constitution! Hurrah Konstantin!”
Hearing the cannon fire, Alexander’s grandmother exclaimed, “Oh, my God! What will Europe say about us! My son is ascending the throne in blood!” But his youngest brother, Mikhail, soothed their beloved mother.
“It’s bad, impure blood!” he assured her.
Everyone happily made the sign of the cross. The dignitaries understood that a real master had appeared: a strict tsar. Sasha was told by his mother to bless himself. Then his father came in, embracing grandmother, mother, and children. They all headed to the Big Church, where they knelt and said thanks for the deliverance.
Then little Alexander was dressed in a tiny parade Hussar uniform, and his grandmother’s valet carried him out to the palace courtyard. His father and the guards awaited him in the bonfire light. They were men from the Sapper Battalion that had saved the palace.
Nicholas raised his son in his arms and exclaimed, “Here, boys, this is my heir, serve him faithfully!” And they responded, “Hurrah! Long live Grand Duke Alexander Nikolayevich!” And then Nicholas ordered the first man from each company to step forward to kiss him, which was done. They came up in turn to kiss the boy, scraping him with their rough cheeks and enveloping h
im in the smell of cheap shag. Little Sasha wept. He did not like it.
The mutineers of that December became known as the Decembrists in Russian history. The Russian intelligentsia has loved them ever since.
But the Decembrists left us a puzzle. Why did they just stand on the square in that strange inactivity? Why didn’t they attack the palace before the loyal troops got organized?
The answer lies in the nature of the conspiracy. It was easy for them to dream of liberty over cards and punch, at balls and in salons. But then they saw it in action—the drunken ignorant soldiers who believed that Konstitutsiya was Konstantin’s wife and the mob that was on the verge of rioting. The mob was picking up the lumber from the construction site of St. Isaac’s in preparation for attacking the city and looting it. That was when the bloody specter of the French Revolution rose above the rebel square, the specter of Terror. The Decembrists felt fear. Not knowing what to do, the guards’ intellectuals and handful of civilian intelligentsia shuffled their feet mindlessly until the cannons roared.
Before bedtime, little Alexander was taken to say good night to his papa. The room was brightly lit by candles. An arrested guards officer stood before his father. His hands were tied by the officer’s sash (just like the one used to strangle Emperor Paul). On a sofa next to a small table sat an old general, who took down the prisoner’s statement. The emperor himself led the interrogation.
All night, while Sasha slept soundly, the leaders of the Decembrist uprising were brought to his father’s study.
Later that room became Sasha’s schoolroom.
The next morning was their first in the Winter Palace, now home for little Alexander. His governor, Karl Merder, led him through the rooms. Their private rooms ended at the bronze-covered doors. An enfilade of formal halls followed. Beyond the windows lay the Neva River, constrained by ice. The low, bloody winter sun hovered over the Neva. The ice glittered. The gold and silver plates hung by the doors glistened and so did the brass helmets of the cavalry guards. They stood at attention by the columns, as immobile as the columns themselves.
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