The tsar had a pronounced death rattle, and he gasped hoarsely to Mandt, “Wird diese infame Musik noch lange dauern?” (Will this disgusting music continue much longer?) Mandt assured him it would not be long.
The priest blessed the dying man with his cross. The tsar made a sign for him to bless Alexander and his wife with it. He tried to show his love for the family until his dying breath. After the Communion, the tsar said, “Lord, accept me in peace.” He also managed to whisper hoarsely to his wife, “You were always my guardian angel, from the moment I first saw you until this last minute.”
He said nothing else. The death agony was brief. He passed away, and the thirty-year reign was over. The family kneeled at his bed.
When Alexander looked at his father, he was amazed: His father looked younger and his features seemed carved in white marble. As Anna Tyutcheva later described it, “The unearthly expression of peace and completion seemed to say, ‘I already know everything, see everything.’”
Alexander got up from knees as Emperor Alexander II.
As he came out of the study, he heard people saying, “May the Lord bless you, Your Majesty.” He said, “Don’t call me that yet: It’s still too painful. I have to get used to it.”
At the funeral in the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, the sun shone. The coffin rested on a pedestal covered with red brocade under a canopy of silver brocade and ermine. The cathedral, filled with rays of sunshine, also glowed with thousands of candles. The new empress told Anna Tyutcheva later that at the moment when the coffin was to be closed, the dowager empress put a cross made of the mosaic from the church of Hagia Sofia in Constantinople over his heart. She wanted to believe that the dream of liberating Constantinople and the fellow Slavs from the Turks was what had killed her knight.
His brother Kostya was first to pledge his loyalty to Alexander, in order to quell any rumors of rivalry between them. Before the ceremony, they fell into each other’s arms and wept bitterly for their father. Kostya said, “I want everyone to know that I am the first and most loyal of all the emperor’s subjects.” There had been rivalry, but the death and the final words of their father reconciled them forever. They would be together to the very end.
Then came the ringing of the bells, followed by a gun salute in honor of the new emperor. The celebratory shots somehow echoed the horrible cannon fire that had accompanied his father’s ascension to the throne. It reminded Alexander that the guards’ attacks on the palace were over, thanks to his father. The guards were forever banished from interfering in the affairs of the Romanov dynasty. For the first time in almost a century and a half, the succession passed in total tranquility.
Tsar Alexander II and his large family came out on the balcony of the Winter Palace above the Saltykov Entrance (that was the entrance to the private apartments of the royal family) to greet his subjects. Nicholas, 13, Alexander, 11, Vladimir, 9, Alexei, 6, and Maria, 3, and their mother surrounded the new emperor.
He would come out on that balcony above the Saltykov Entrance after every assassination attempt. A quarter of a century later, his bloodied body would be carried through those doors.
PART II
Emperor
CHAPTER 5
The Great Time
For almost four decades, Alexander had been waiting in the wings. And now, as his thirty-sixth year drew to an end, he came out to center stage. The time was perfect for the new ruler: Russians understood that they could not go on living the way they were.
Hard as it was for him to admit, a heaviness was lifted from the capital after his father’s funeral. The oppression was over, and it was removed from him as well. They had buried not only a tsar, but an entire era.
Anna Tyutcheva recorded this impression. “I feel terribly sorry for him, may he rest in peace. But he reaped what he had sown. For in the last few years he was not concerned with his country but with some ‘order in Europe,’ and nations considered him a despot.”
It was February, but there was unusually sunny weather in St. Petersburg. After the funeral, Alexander sat with his wife and Kostya and summed up the situation. His father had left the affairs of state in disorder. The treasury was empty, the army helpless, its weapons prehistoric, and there was no steam-powered fleet. All of Europe had done away with corporal punishment, but in Russia people were still flogged. Wherever one looked, things were rotten. They had serfdom, forgotten in Europe, and a bizarre feudal court system where officials were judges, often without the presence of the contesting parties, and where bribes decided the outcome.
Direct and fiery Kostya suggested immediately announcing a break with the past and the start of radical reforms. But the empress expressed Alexander’s thought: “Everything is crashing, but we will have to be quiet now,” in order to preserve his father’s honor and memory. Alexander decided that first they would erect a monument before beginning reforms.
The monument was erected not far from the square where Nicholas routed the rebel Decembrists. Then they began preparation for a great event.
Even though Alexander had shown nothing but wordless obedience to his father, the change in regime elicited great hopes in Russia. Leo Tolstoy, who had transferred from the Caucasus to the Crimean army, wrote from besieged Sevastopol, “Great changes await Russia. We must work and take courage to participate in this important moment in the life of Russia.”
But the skeptic Chaadayev did not believe it. He was irritated by the eternal Russian “docile enthusiasm.” Chaadayev came up with a very eccentric gesture. He asked a doctor for a prescription for arsenic, to kill rats. Any time anyone started talking about his hopes for the new emperor, he took out the arsenic prescription and silently presented it.
But beneficial steps were taken right away. Alexander had not forgotten his meeting with the Decembrists. After thirty years of imprisonment and exile, the remaining Decembrists were given permission to return. The former brilliant guards officers who came back were now elderly.
There were also the first liberal changes in the censorship system. The immovable, eternally frozen river cracked noisily, its ice broken.
Voices that had been silent for so long spoke up loudly. Everyone criticized the past and everyone demanded reforms. There was public outrage over the embezzlement of state funds, which had reached epic proportions by the end of Nicholas’s reign. Petitions with suggestions flooded the palace. “Here, in St. Petersburg, public opinion is spreading its wings…. Everyone is talking, discussing matters inside and out, sometimes stupidly, but at least talking. And by doing so, learning. If this continues for five or six years, an informed and powerful public opinion will be created, and the shame of our recent mindlessness will be reduced somewhat,” wrote the pundit Konstantin Kavelin to another columnist, Mikhail Pogodin.
The writer Nikolai Melgunov announced his belief that “under the new tsar European glasnost would at last appear.” The father of the lady-in-waiting Anna Tyutcheva, the poet and diplomat Fedor Tyutchev, hailed Alexander’s first orders with the famous definition, “The Thaw.” Glasnost and thaw would be key concepts, and they would be inherited by all later Russian perestroikas—as would the rake, on which Russia always steps during reforms.
A phrase was repeatedly circulated in society, allegedly spoken by the dying Nicholas to his son and heir. “I had two desires—to free the Slavs of the Turkish yoke and to free the peasant from the power of the landowners. The first is impossible to do now. The second, to free the serfs, I will to you to do.”
These words were persistently repeated. Apparently, this was the way Alexander and his brother Kostya intended to prepare Russia for the greatest upheaval in Russian life. The conservatives were asked to believe that the coming change was not a new-fangled idea of new people but the legacy of Nicholas I.
First, they had to end the war. The new emperor decided to head to Sevastopol yet again. The empress suggested that they go to the Trinity–St. Sergius Monastery before the trip to the Crimea, to pray before the rel
ics of St. Sergius of Radonezh. In Russia, German princesses gladly and quickly turned into medieval Moscow tsaritsas. The former Lutheran believed in the power of holy relics to win Sevastopol.
Her lady-in-waiting Anna Tyutcheva was part of the retinue. In those days, she had a schoolgirl crush on the empress, but that did not keep sarcasm from creeping into her description of that visit.
The emperor, empress, and retinue came to the monastery. A very long service was held in the magnificent cathedral. The metropolitan’s words could barely be heard over the arrogant chatter of the retinue. Then the royals kissed all the ancient icons and relics of saints, of which there turned out to be a great number. The metropolitan was falling off his feet, but the empress was inexhaustible. After the service she asked to be taken to the famous caves. At the caves they were met by a yurodivy, or holy fool, who lived as the Christian ideal of a character neither corrupted by the world nor impressed by worldly status or authority. This one had a hangover-puffy face and unfocused gaze.
“Thank God! This is a truly Orthodox Empress,” said the Metropolitan, who had accompanied her, barely audibly. He had lost his voice in the speeches and prayers.
“But the Empress did not give up even after that. At midnight she led the Tsar to the ancient church, dimly lit by votive lights. They prayed a long time at the shrine with the relics of St. Sergius.”
Nonetheless, Alexander lost Sevastopol.
When he arrived in the port, the new tsar understood the futility of resistance. For more than a year the city had held up under hellish cannon attack. Leo Tolstoy, who fought in Sevastopol, described the daily life of war in the besieged city. “Early morning…the doctor is hurrying to the hospital; somewhere a young soldier climbs out of a trench, washes his sunburned face with icy water, and turning to the reddening east, quickly makes the sign of the cross and prays to God; somewhere a tall, heavy wagon creaks its way to the cemetery to bury bloodied corpses, with which it is piled almost to the top…. White flags fly from our bastion and the French trench, and between them in the flowering grass mutilated bodies are gathered and loaded into carts. A horrible, heavy smell of dead bodies fills the air. People speak with each other peacefully and kindly, joking, laughing…. But the cease-fire is only for picking up the bodies. And the firing resumes.”
When Sevastopol fell, the allies got piles of rubble and earth steeped in blood. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and their enemies lay in the Sevastopol soil. Alexander’s relative the king of Holland “had the despicableness at that time to send two medals,” wrote lady-in-waiting Anna Tyutcheva, one to Alexander II to commemorate his ascension to the throne and one to Napoleon III to commemorate the taking of Sevastopol. The king’s mother, Alexander II’s aunt, left the Netherlands in protest and headed for Russia. His aunt’s protest was generous, but unfortunately, his aunt was a very difficult person, and having her near for the rest of her life created many cares.
“Sevastopol is not Moscow, and even after Moscow was taken, we later got to Paris,” Alexander told the nation. But he knew then that it was impossible to continue the war. At sea, he did not have contemporary ships; on land, he had no long-distance rifles or rapid-fire artillery. And even the antediluvian weapons did not reach the army. Pavel Annenkov, a celebrated writer, noted in his memoirs, “Robbery had taken on Roman scope by the end of the reign. In order to get appropriations for their units, commanders paid bribes to the treasury—eight percent of the total. A bribe of six percent was considered a courtesy.”
The bribe-taking, theft, and corruption were everywhere. During a coronation the entire square in front of the Kremlin is traditionally covered in red cloth. When they began preparations for Alexander’s coronation, it was discovered that most of the red broadcloth supplies had been filched from the warehouse.
It was impossible to wage a war with such a rotten system. First, order and might had to be restored. And for that, he needed peace. Alexander made a decision: In 1856, in the Paris his father had hated, Alexander II concluded a peace. He sent Prince Alexei Orlov as head of the Russian delegation. Four decades earlier, as commander of the cavalry guards regiment, Prince Orlov had entered Paris with Alexander I. Now Orlov was meant to remind Napoleon III that Russian weapons had defeated the great Napoleon I.
The prince was a warrior personified. The magnificent cavalryman with big gray mustache, medals for his victories over the French on his chest, astonished Paris. He executed the tsar’s mission: He demonstrated the new direction in Russian policy—he embraced French generals, scornfully cold-shouldered the treacherous Austrians, and was very cool toward the British.
In response, Napoleon III was tender in his attitude toward Orlov. But he and his allies forced Russia to accept difficult terms. Russia essentially lost the Black Sea, which had been won by Catherine II, Alexander’s great-grandmother. It lost the entire eastern shore (Kars Fortress and part of Bessarabia) and the right to keep a military fleet in the Black Sea or build fortresses on its coast. The Black Sea was of paramount importance for the Russian economy. Fourth-fifths of Russia’s main export, wheat, went through its ports.
Russia also lost Nicholas I’s favorite mission—the right to be the protector of the Slavic peoples vanquished by Turkey. Consequently, the old dream of the Russian tsars to revive Byzantium and the Great Slavic Empire was also lost. In signing this treaty, Alexander seemed to betray the cross placed in his father’s coffin. He had no choice.
The court criticized the Treaty of Paris (in whispers, naturally) and spoke of the indignation in the army. In her diary, Tyutcheva cites a “modest officer outraged by the peace. ‘We would have gladly died for tsar and Russia. The tsar should have said to us in the words of the blessed Alexander I: We’ll go to Siberia, but not yield to the enemy.’”
Interestingly, at the same time, her future husband, the Slavophile writer Ivan Aksakov, wrote to his father, “If anyone talks to you indignantly about the shamefulness of the peace, don’t believe it. With the exception of a very, very small number of people, everyone else is delighted.”
Right after the conclusion of the Treaty of Paris, as if to stress the new turn in Russian policies, Alexander appointed a new minister of foreign affairs, Prince Alexander Gorchakov. Gorchakov was in his fifties, as were the other ministers brought in to reform Russia. All these nobles had been brought up in his father’s time. Nicholas had taught them unquestioning obedience, which was what Alexander needed.
Gorchakov, the scion of an ancient line, had studied at the Tsarskoye Selo Lycée with the poet Alexander Pushkin, his friend. “Disciple of fashion, friend of high society, observer of dazzling customs,” was how Pushkin described him.
At twenty, Prince Gorchakov began his brilliant career. He was an aide to Count Nesselrode, Russian minister of foreign affairs, and attended all the congresses of the Holy Alliance, the monarchs who had defeated Napoleon. He had knowledge of all the infighting among the allies for the primacy of Europe.
Gorchakov dared to ignore certain rules of Russian life. For example, when the omnipotent chief of the Third Department Count Benkendorf came to Vienna, where Gorchakov was the Russian ambassador, Gorchakov paid him the required call. Benkendorf asked the accomplished diplomat to order lunch for him.
“If you need lunch, the custom here is to call the maître d’hôtel.” Gorchakov rang the little bell. Benkendorf was surprised, because it was a society of slaves. Together they were slaves of their emperor, and then, down the ladder, everyone was the slave of his boss.
The incident became known, and Gorchakov got the dangerous reputation of “behaving like a European grandee.” His inflexible backbone ended his career.
But Prince Gorchakov continued to scintillate with wit in St. Petersburg salons, being a master of social conversation, reminiscent of the French salons of the gallant age. His too-refined French, like his velvet waistcoat and long jacket, seemed a bit old-fashioned.
Now his career was taking off again. On becoming minister o
f foreign affairs, Prince Gorchakov vowed that he would see the shameful Treaty of Paris undone. Alexander II made the same promise to his family. In the meantime, his new policies were enough to make his father spin in his grave.
The main policy point was nonintervention in European affairs. “The defense of the interests of the nations subject to the tsar cannot serve as a justification for violating the rights of foreign nations,” wrote Gorchakov in the famous letter circulated to embassies and missions on August 21, 1856. The policy of being the gendarme of Europe was jettisoned.
“This does not mean that Russia refuses a voice in European international questions,” explained Gorchakov, “but now it is gathering its strength for the future.” “La Russie ne boude pas—elle se recueille” (Russia is not pouting, it is gathering its strength) became a famous sentiment in Europe.
The tsar and Gorchakov formulated this policy: “For a long time the imperial cabinet was shackled by traditional memories and family ties, which, unfortunately, were sacred only for Russia. The war returned freedom of action to Russia…. Everyone who wishes Russia ill is an enemy of Russia, no matter what they are called.”
Now, instead of the “traditional union” with Austria (that had sided with his enemies) and “family ties” with “dear uncle and friend,” the Prussian king (as the tsar had called his German relative in letters), the new tsar received Charles de Morny, the French ambassador.
Alexander charmed him. The new tsar then decided to meet with Napoleon III, yesterday’s sworn enemy so hated by his late father. The king of Württemberg arranged the meeting by inviting both to his seventieth birthday celebration.
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