Nicholas’s regal gaze was remembered by his courtiers to their dying day. Alexander, his son, practiced the autocrat’s merciless gaze, “which had the quality of a rattlesnake to freeze the blood in your veins.”
Alexander’s father, while not endowed with a profound mind or education, had monstrous willpower and capacity for work. He labored in his first-floor office at the Winter Palace until late at night. He slept there, too, in spartan quarters, on an iron camp bed, covered by a soldier’s greatcoat. That was to stress yet again that Russia was a military state. As he fell asleep in his office on the camp bed, he could see the marble face of his faithful hound Benkendorf.
Besides creating the secret police, Nicholas made one more great contribution to the establishment of a totalitarian state. In his reign a formula was produced that survived the empire: “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality were the three pillars on which Russia was to stand.” The formula was invented by Minister of Education Uvarov and it became the basic ideology of Nicholas’s Russia. Alexander would be reminded of it more than once.
The third mainstay of the formula in Russian is narodnost’, traditionally translated as “nationality,” which has no equivalent in English. It means being based on the narod, the people, and therefore has overtones of the peasantry, as in German, the Volk. In the Russian Empire, where the highest levels of society spoke French and the most influential part of the court was made up of German families and where the tsars had 90 percent German blood, it seemed an odd conceit.
But in fact, it was a brilliant invention. The servile, docile, and hounded public was given a necessary toy—great pride. The country of serfs, who could be bought and sold or gambled away, was declared the crown of civilization. Innumerable writings described the imminent collapse of rotten, obsolete Europe, which only Russia could save with an influx of fresh blood. Some of the discourse lapsed into the comical—for instance, Nadezhdin, the editor of the liberal journal Telescope, praised “the mightiness of our Russian fist,” as compared with the puny European fist. Millions of serfs, suffering daily beatings, would attest to its might.
Naturally, the tsar’s beloved creation, the Russian army, supposedly the greatest in the world, was also praised. The army consisted of serf recruits, also with no rights, who were subjected to cruel corporal punishment.
Autocracy was pronounced the main reason for Russia’s incomparable greatness. The Russian people were the people of the great tsars, and the Russian tsars were the heirs of the biblical kings. “Only Autocracy corresponds to the spirit of the Russian people,” declared Nicholas.
The grandeur of autocracy and nationality was complemented by the idea of the grandeur and immutability of Russian Orthodoxy, inseparable from autocracy. In fact, it was the remnants of paganism remaining in Orthodoxy that were inseparable from autocracy. Just as the Roman Caesar was a religious leader, the Russian tsar, taking the title of Caesar, was head of the church. Like Caesar, the tsar was a pagan god. When Nicholas addressed the troops, the soldiers blessed themselves, as if before an icon. Railroad watchmen who met the train carrying Alexander II knelt and made the sign of the cross. The courtiers were no different from these simple folk, and they too perceived the tsar as a living deity.
“No one was better created for the role of autocrat than [Nicholas I]. His impressive handsomeness, regal bearing, and severe Olympic profile—everything down to his smile of a condescending Jupiter, breathed earthly deity. There was something solemn and reverential in the palace air. People spoke in hushed tones and were slightly bowed…in order to appear more obliging…everything was imbued with the presence of the lord.” So wrote lady-in-waiting Anna Tyutcheva in her diary.
The triad—Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality—took on immortality in Russia. When Stalin created the Bolshevik empire, he said, “The Russian people need a God and a Tsar.” He made himself tsar and god and turned Marxism-Leninism into a new religion. The great paradox was that the Bolshevik empire, created by Russian radicals, had an amazing resemblance to the empire of their hated Nicholas I. The words of Alexander Herzen, pronounced in the middle of the nineteenth century, were indeed horribly prophetic: “Communism is merely Nicholas’s barracks transformed.”
Such was the world of iron-willed Nicholas, in whose shadow Alexander spent three decades.
CHAPTER 4
How to Bring Up a Caesar
Alexander grew up in a happy family. His parents made a handsome couple: Nicholas, the indomitable giant, and his wife, Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, frail and gentle, with azure eyes. This difference helped create the great harmony of their marriage. They were the first Nicholas and Alexandra on the throne, and they loved each other as tenderly as the last crowned Romanovs, Nicholas II and his Alexandra. However, there was a certain nuance in their love. But more about that later.
Next to the magnificent Peterhof Palace, which rivaled Versailles, Nicholas had built a small cottage, which he called Alexandria, in honor of his wife. There the tsar got away from his cares and the grandiose columns, marble, and gilt of the imperial palaces. Here the children lived. It featured low ceilings, small rooms with many paintings on the walls, and a cozy study for Nicholas on the second floor with a marvelous endless vista of the gulf. Meadows and forests surrounded them.
In 1825, the imperial heir, Sasha, was in his eighth year, and it was time to start the tsarevich’s education seriously. A family council decided unanimously to make Vassily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, the famous poet and father of Russian Romanticism, the chief tutor of the heir.
The kindness and sentimentality of Zhukovsky were the subject of jokes. The poet had been seventeen when the eighteenth century ended. But that eternal romantic remained a man of the gallant age. Even his birth was a romantic story.
During the war with the Turks, the Russians took a beautiful Turkish girl prisoner. Some serfs serving in the army gave the Oriental beauty to their master. He had her baptized and naturally made her his concubine. Thus issued the love child Vassily Zhukovsky. As the son of a Turkish woman and a wealthy Russian landowner, he was given a brilliant education at the Moscow University boarding school, which was attended by the children of Moscow nobility. Many of his school friends became the elite of Nicholas’s reign—ministers, courtiers, and masters of the minds of the coming age.
Young Zhukovsky suffered over his dubious social position, but his amazing heart not only did not become embittered, it “broke into music.” He started writing poetry that immediately received recognition. During the war with Napoleon, the entire country recited his patriotic verses.
Yet it was not his fame as a poet that opened the palace doors to him, but his translations from German into Russian. The dowager empress, widow of Paul I, Maria Fedorovna, and the mother of Alexander, Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, adored Schiller and the German Romantics. They were delighted by Zhukovsky’s translations and particularly by conversations with him about their favorite poets.
Zhukovsky was appointed reader to the dowager empress. He also taught Russian to the young empress. Zhukovsky had an “in” at the palace and with the royal family. When the question of the heir’s education came up, the answer was obvious. The family council entrusted little Sasha to the Master of Russian Poetry. Society members (trying to forget the days when they called the tsar a martinet) considered this decision desirable and beautiful—the great poet would raise the future great tsar.
Zhukovsky was a bachelor. As a true Romantic poet should, he had fallen in love at an early age and had been rejected; he carried a torch for his first love for years. Sasha was like a son for him. In his later years, Zhukovsky received a reward for his fidelity. At the age of fifty-five, the gray-haired poet fell in love for the second time in his life—with a sixteen-year-old. His love was requited, and he enjoyed a happy marriage, with children.
Later, in his forties, Alexander II would recall his teacher’s example when he, too, fell in love with a seventeen-year-old.
When Zhukovs
ky began his tutoring, Alexander was only seven. Zhukovsky devoted himself totally to the royal scion. The poet wrote to his sister, “My real duty will take up all my time. Farewell forever to poetry with rhyme. A poetry of another sort lies ahead of me.” In his hands lay the future of Russia.
Zhukovsky put together a ten-year plan of “Journeys,” as the poet called the heir’s education. Like everything else in Russia, the plan had to be approved by the tsar. Nicholas supervised its execution closely, often severely correcting the tutor.
Zhukovsky brought up the heir to be a true Christian, with feelings of compassion. Once Nicholas came into their classroom after a history lesson. It was the same room where Nicholas had once interrogated the participants in the Decembrist uprising. It awakened memories. He knew how often kindly Zhukovsky spoke about Christian forgiveness with little Sasha. The tsar asked his son, “What would you have done with the Decembrist rebels?” The boy answered as Zhukovsky had taught him, following Christian doctrine, “I would have forgiven them!”
Nicholas said nothing and left in silence. But later he told the boy, shaking his fist and repeating the words over and over, “This is how you rule. Remember this: Die on the steps to the throne, but do not give up power!”
The heir was unusually handsome, a true prince. His father thought him too feminine, with a too-tender heart. When his mother left on a trip, Sasha sent a bouquet of heliotrope after her, as befits the student of a romantic poet. He adored solitude and daydreaming. Nicholas wanted his son to be manly. The tsar demanded that Zhukovsky arrange for classmates for Alexander. Two boys, the sons of courtiers, were selected—Alexander Patkul and Josef Vilyegorsky.
To Nicholas’s relief, Zhukovsky formulated a strict schedule for this trio. Reveille at six. By seven, the heir was in the classroom with his comrades. Lessons continued for five hours, until noon. No one, not even the tsar, could enter the inner sanctum, the classroom, during lessons. A two-hour break began at noon. Zhukovsky and his three pupils would leave the palace and walk around St. Petersburg, where the lessons continued. Dressed in military uniform, the boy was supposed to “attentively observe the public buildings, educational and scientific institutions, industrial establishments and other points of interest along the way,” and to discuss them with his tutor. “Learn from childhood to read the book that belongs to you from birth. That book is Russia,” Zhukovsky taught him.
During their walks, poetry was read aloud. Like Seneca in his letters, Zhukovsky gave his primary pupil aphoristic guidelines for his life.
“A tsar’s power over man comes from God, but do not make that power a mockery of God and man.”
“Respect the law. If the tsar neglects the law, it will not be kept by the people.”
“Love and disseminate education. A people without education are a people without dignity. They are easily led, but it is easy to turn slaves into furious rebels.”
“Revolution is a destructive effort to leap from Monday directly into Wednesday. But the effort to jump from Monday back to Sunday is just as destructive.”
The aphorisms were carefully vetted by “the best of fathers” and Nicholas repeated them himself during his rare walks with his son.
After the walks came an hour for lunch and then more lessons from three until five. An hour for rest followed, and then the boys changed for sports. They had gymnastics and athletic games from seven until eight. Dinner was at ten, after an “edifying conversation with his parents.” After dinner came prayers and sleep.
The list of subjects that the heir was taught at the age of thirteen is instructive: history, Russian, mathematics, physics, philosophy, geology, law, French, English, German, Polish, drawing, music, gymnastics, swimming, fencing, dancing, military studies, woodworking…and on and on.
The best minds of Russia taught the heir. The famous Count Speransky taught him jurisprudence. The tsar did not fear the influence of the former freethinker. Exile had had a good effect on him, as his participation in the trial of the Decembrists had proven. Speransky taught the heir about the permanence of autocracy. “There is no power on earth, either within the borders or outside the borders of the empire, that could put an end to the Supreme power of the Russian monarch. All the laws of the empire serve that power.”
On Sundays, with other children of members of the court—Adlerberg, Baranov, Shuvalov—he played the kind of competitive games his militant father so enjoyed. At the upper level of the fountain in the park grounds near the Big Palace at Peterhof, the empress stood next to a marble table holding the children’s prizes. She had an excellent view of the watery fireworks—the Grand Cascade of the Peterhof Fountains. Sixty-four fountains sent powerful streams of water up to the sky. The water cascaded down marble steps. The bronze statues of antique gods gleamed in the sunlight.
At the very bottom of the cascade, at a statue of Samson, Nicholas lined up the boys. On his command, they rushed forward and ran up the slippery steps through the icy jets of water. There were a thousand steps through the watery curtain. The empress awarded the happy, wet contestants chocolates and books, but the best prize was Nicholas’s benevolent smile. One day it went to Sasha Adlerberg, son of the minister of the court. His father, however, chided him for winning—the emperor’s son must always be first.
An ordinary boy can sometimes be lazy, cranky, and disobedient. Alexander’s classmates were permitted that, but not Alexander. The enormous and regal emperor kept explaining to his son, “You must always remember that it is only through your whole life that you can repay your God-given birthright.”
Alexander had to keep a diary, in which he would record all his transgressions:
“K.K. [his governor, Karl Karlovich Merder] was pleased with me throughout the day,” he reported at the age of eight. But shortly after, on Tuesday, January 12: “I did not do very well at my lessons…. K.K. is not very pleased: I teased my sister, Maria Nikolayevna, and stopped writing before I was told.”
Kindly Zhukovsky loved him and forgave him many things. But Karl Merder, who initiated Sasha into the mysteries of warfare, did not. Merder also loved Sasha, but to the great pleasure of his father, Merder ruthlessly hounded anything that could keep the boy from becoming a real warrior. Merder did not like the boy’s hot temper, but even more so, the strange melancholy that sometimes plunged him into absolute inaction. He was also concerned by Sasha’s tearfulness, so inappropriate to a military man.
They made the heir add tears to his list of transgressions in his diary, which his father read scrupulously.
“March 30. Wrote badly, and cried for no reason.”
“April 1. Studied well. Hit myself with butt-stock and cried.”
Alexander really did like to cry. When strict Merder died, sixteen-year-old Sasha buried his head in the couch pillows and no one could stop the flow of tears for a long time. His tears were a gift from his beloved tutor Zhukovsky. The sentimental poet often wept. He wept with joy reading Schiller, he wept over his pupil’s disobedience, he wept recalling his unrequited love. The poet’s frequent tears came from the previous century. In eighteenth-century Russia it was fashionable to be sensitive. When Alexander’s great-grandmother, Catherine the Great, told the Kazan nobility about the work of Peter the Great, the entire room wept over the grandeur of Peter’s acts. When Catherine read her new “instruction” to the deputies of the Legislative Commission, the legislators wept out loud over the wisdom of the empress. When Catherine’s young lover died, her former lover, the very ruthless Prince Potemkin, wept bitterly with her.
This was the great sensibility of the gallant age, learned by little Alexander. A half century later, signing his final decrees, he would weep with excitement.
Nicholas hated the tears, and the boy was often punished for them.
His father knew the remedy for tears and foolish sensibility. It was the favorite activity of Nicholas I, his father, Paul I, and his grandfather, Peter III—army drill. To Merder’s delight, Nicholas demanded more military mustering
. Zhukovsky boldly disagreed. “I fear that then His Imperial Highness will think that the people are a regiment and the country a barracks.”
Nicholas benevolently allowed Zhukovsky to grumble, for he knew that his son loved the army, as did all Romanovs. He was put on a horse at the age of six, and he liked it. At eight, he galloped gleefully on the flank of the Life Guards Regiment. And during the coronation of Nicholas, the eight-year-old “Heir on Horseback” stole the show.
“At 7 A.M., Alexander Nikolayevich in full parade uniform of the Life Guards Regiment galloped to the Peter Palace. Here he mounted the Arabian steed prepared for him and flew to the Emperor, past whom the troops were marching ceremonially—67,000 men. All of Moscow ran out to look at the majestic sight,” wrote Karl Merder in delight. “The appearance of the heir on a marvelous steed, which he controlled with incredible agility, eclipsed everything else.”
The triumph was repeated a few days later. “Everyone was mad about him, especially the ladies,” wrote Merder jokingly. Napoleon’s marshal Marmont (who had betrayed Bonaparte and opened the road to Paris for the Allies) was impressed by the small rider. His severe father finally expressed his highest approval, out loud. And his maternal grandfather, the Prussian king, was very proud when he read the accounts of the event.
Like all the Romanovs, Sasha loved the order of the guards, the glimmer of the cuirasses, bared sabers, and brass helmets topped with eagles. He even drew a new design for the grenadiers’ uniform. The heir to the Russian throne had to be “military in spirit.” “Russia is a military state and its destiny is to be the terror of the world.” That sentence, uttered by Nicholas, was made part of the textbook for the cadet corps. A civilian “is lost in our age,” the tsar explained to his son.
Sasha understood all that. He wanted to be with the troops and found it a bore publishing his own magazine, The Anthill, under the auspices of the poet Zhukovsky. As Count Peter Panin once said, “I think the Romanovs will not give up their love of the army until a cripple tsar is born in the family.” Over Zhukovsky’s protest, Nicholas sent ten-year-old Sasha to study at the Cadet Corps, where he would be taught soldiering and become a junior officer so that he could become a staff captain at thirteen and take part in his father’s beloved parades.
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