The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The fate of his father always reminded Alexander of the danger of challenging the clans of nobility and the autocracy of his grandmother and the militarism of his father ran much deeper in him than the liberalism of his education and coterie. Besides, the only way to impose his reforms was by his own despotism. He prevaricated on most of these measures (though he did repeal the law that allowed landowners to exile serfs for ‘insolence’), let the Intimate Committee lapse* – and became distracted by foreign affairs.

  At first Alexander pursued a policy of neutrality but then, keen to strut the international stage (and admire the famed beauty of the queen of Prussia), he organized his first royal summit. At Memel, on 29 May 1802, he met King Frederick William III and his charming queen Louise, with whom he fell a little in love. The emperor flirted with Louise and fought off her vampish sister. As his room adjoined their apartment, Alexander told Czartoryski that ‘he carefully locked his bedroom door to prevent his being surprised and led into dangerous temptations he wished to avoid’. This friendship with the Hohenzollerns connected him with the rising European resistance against French hegemony.

  Napoleon Bonaparte, first consul for life, who combined the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the liberties of the French Revolution with the monarchical conservatism of a born autocrat and the boundless ambitions of a condottiere, had mobilized the resources of France in the face of repeated coalitions designed to destroy him, organized by Britain and the powers of the ancien régime. Now he annexed much of Italy, took control of Switzerland and started to rearrange Germany. He probed Alexander, asking for his mediation with the British. But Napoleon’s domination of Germany challenged Russian interests there, while his treaty with the Ottomans gradually convinced Alexander that Bonaparte was ‘one of the most infamous tyrants in history’. Moving closer to Britain, Austria and his new Prussian friends, Alexander contemplated war against an overweening France. In April 1803, he summoned the Ape in Uniform, Paul’s drear henchman Arakcheev, whom he appointed inspector-general of artillery. Much more than that, the general was Alexander’s devoted enforcer, considerably more important than his liberal friends, and it was he who created the superb artillery that would hold its own against Napoleon.† As the tsar became increasingly involved in European politics, he was finally creating a family. But not with his wife.1

  Empress Elizabeth suffered from Alexander’s neglect and their lack of children. It was not all Alexander’s fault for there was something self-centred in Elizabeth’s sensibility – as her lady-in-waiting observed: ‘A burning, passionate imagination was combined in her with a cold heart incapable of real affection.’ When Czartoryski returned to Petersburg, he and Elizabeth were temporarily reunited, while the emperor had affairs with French actresses, international adventuresses and the wives of his courtiers. But he was so voraciously hunted by women that he resisted the more aggressive. Hence his nickname ‘le Don Juan Platonique’. Czartoryski bitchily implied that he preferred ‘Platonic coquetry – it seldom happened that the virtue of the ladies to whom Alexander paid his attentions was really in danger’. But by then the two men had ceased to be friends.

  In 1801, the ruling court beauty was the Polish Maria Naryshkina, née Princess Chetvertinska, whose father had been hanged as a traitor by the Polish revolutionaries in 1794. Famed for looks ‘found only in the paintings of Raphael’, ‘her beauty’, noted the memoirist Filipp Vigel, ‘was so perfect it seemed unnatural, impossible’. At sixteen, she had married the older Dmitri Naryshkin, master of the horse, but he could not control ‘the Aspasia of the North’, who always dressed with chic simplicity in a Grecian dress of white crêpe. She was the mistress of Valerian Zubov when Alexander fell in love with her. After two years, she succumbed to him.

  He never mentioned Naryshkina to his straitlaced mother but felt no guilt towards poor Elizabeth because, as he later admitted, ‘I imagined wrongly no doubt that the appearances that united my wife and I were without our participation . . . My rank obliged me to respect these appearances, but I thought I could dispose of my own heart and for fifteen years I was faithful to Madame Naryshkina.’

  Naryshkina kept out of politics, otherwise, Alexander explained, ‘everything would have been finished’. But she still tormented his discarded empress. Elizabeth longed for a child. When she saw ‘the Lady’ at a ball and asked after her health, Naryshkhina ‘had the impudence to tell me of her first pregnancy which was so little advanced that I wouldn’t have been aware of it . . . Don’t you think, Mama, this is the height of effrontery? She knew very well I was not ignorant of how she got pregnant.’ This baby died, as Elizabeth reported to her mother: ‘the death of that baby, that caused me so much pain, shows Providence doesn’t want to suffer an illegitimate child in this family’, but ‘I felt sorry for the emperor from the bottom of my heart.’ She noted that Alexander was heartbroken, while ‘the mother consoled herself quickly. She lost another baby last winter and danced three weeks later!’

  Naryshkina gave Alexander several children. Two survived to adulthood. Alexander visited them daily, spending gemütlich evenings with them. He said his only real happiness was ‘my little family’.

  Yet the woman who was closest to Alexander was his sister Catherine – ‘Catiche’, snub-nosed but thick-haired, full-lipped and energetic. Calling her his ‘Absurd Little Mad Thing’ and for her Turkish looks, ‘Bisiam’, he told her, ‘If you are a mad thing, you are the most delicious one that ever existed. I adore you!’ She was eleven years younger and brought up after Alexander had long since left home. She was both familiar and stranger. ‘You’ve made a conquest of me and I am mad about you!’ he wrote to her in September 1805. ‘I love few things in the world like my Bisiam. Farewell light of my eyes, adored of my heart, pole-star of the age, wonder of Nature or better than all these, Bisiam Bisiamovna with the snub nose . . . on which I press the tenderest of kisses.’

  Alexander was happiest among women – yet his life would be dominated by a man who inspired admiration, hatred and fear: Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he saw as both ‘the transcendent talent’ and ‘the infernal’ genius of his time.2

  In March 1804, Bonaparte executed the duc d’Enghien, an act of terrorism that finally ruptured relations with Alexander, particularly since the Bourbon prince was kidnapped from Baden, the home of Empress Elizabeth, who was ‘totally overcome by the news’.

  At the Council on 5 April, Czartoryski declared that ‘this atrocious assassination’ proved France was a ‘brigands’ lair’. Soon afterwards, Bonaparte crowned himself emperor of the French. Alexander did not recognize his title – and demanded the evacuation of Bonaparte’s Italian and German conquests. On 30 March 1805, Russia and Britain, the latter pledging £1.25 million per 100,000 Russian soldiers, agreed to fight France just as Napoleon declared himself king of Italy. On 28 July, Austria joined the coalition.

  On 9 September, as two Russian armies took up position, covering neutral Prussia in the north and joining forces with the Austrians in the south, Alexander set off from Petersburg, surrounded by a golden suite including Czartoryski.* On the way he stopped at the Czartoryski estate at Pulaway where, exhilarated by expectation of victory, the ‘affable monarch’ as he called himself flirted with or had an affair with Potemkin’s niece. This was the forty-four-year-old Katinka Scavronskaya, now Countess Litta, whose ‘attractive adiposity has excited my imagination’. He basked in the admiration of the Poles who believed that this idyll signalled the recreation of the Polish kingdom under Czartoryski. But, as Napoleon headed across Germany, Alexander was playing a double game.

  Alexander secretly despatched his favourite Prince Peter Dolgoruky, aged twenty-seven, to negotiate with Frederick William III of Prussia, who would never contemplate a Polish kingdom, to tempt him into the war against Napoleon. At the end of September, Alexander travelled to seal the deal in Berlin, sworn by torchlight at the tomb of Frederick the Great. This was a betrayal of Czartoryski, who never forgave the tsar – though he remained fo
reign minister. Napoleon had already outwitted the allies, forcing an Austrian army into surrender at Ulm. The Russians withdrew to combine with the main Austrian army.

  When Alexander arrived, his troops received him ‘in coldness and mournful silence’ – for they had been outmanoeuvred and under-supplied. His general was the fat, one-eyed, and extremely experienced Mikhail Kutuzov. ‘One couldn’t be wittier than Kutuzov,’ noted the French émigré in Russian service, comte de Langeron, ‘nor less forceful’ nor ‘smarter and more cunning’. The general was blessed with ‘prodigious memory, well-educated amiability, good nature’, but this was combined with ‘the great violence and crudeness of a peasant, insurmountable laziness, and egotism’ – and a ‘villainous and disgusting libertinage’.

  Kutuzov withdrew, skilfully avoiding the battle Napoleon sought, but the inexperienced emperor now assumed the command against the world’s greatest general, ignoring Kutuzov in favour of ‘five or six young favourites’ who mocked that eighteenth-century relic. The general ‘was treated’, noted Langeron, ‘without respect’.

  Napoleon sent an envoy, General René Savary, to offer terms. Faced with ‘thirty popinjays who under various titles surround the emperor of Russia’, he informed Napoleon that ‘presumption, imprudence and thoughtlessness’ reigned in Alexander’s retinue. Alexander prepared for battle but sent Dolgoruky to demand that Napoleon renounce Italy. Napoleon’s sense of his own prospects was encouraged by this ‘excessively arrogant whippersnapper who spoke to me as one would speak to a boyar being sent to Siberia’. Napoleon laughed that the prince took ‘my extreme moderation as a mark of great terror’.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he told his foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talley rand, prince de Benevento, on 18 November, ‘there will probably be a very serious battle with the Russians . . . blood spilled uselessly . . .’ Alexander was a ‘brave and worthy man led astray by those around him who are sold to the English’. Massing near the village of Austerlitz, the coalition’s 85,000 men were numerically superior to Napoleon’s 65,000, but the emperor of the French was preparing for a battle he was sure he could win.

  ‘Whippersnapper’ Dolgoruky duly reported that ‘our success is beyond doubt’. The Holy Roman Emperor Francis joined the armies. Napoleon was unimpressed by his opponents: the thirty-seven-year-old Francis was ‘a blockhead occupied only in botany and gardening’, who ‘was so moral he never made love to anyone except his wife’, while Alexander was ‘too fickle and too weak’. The tsar, who had a tendency to disdain his own Russians and respect the higher civilization of Germans, accepted an Austrian plan that called for a complicated, reckless manoeuvre to abandon the high ground of the Pratzen Heights in an attempt to turn the French right flank. When Kutuzov queried the plan in his old-fashioned courtly manner, Alexander snapped: ‘None of your business.’

  At 7.30 next morning, 20 November, Napoleon calmly yielded his right flank to draw in the Russian–Austrian forces, who abandoned the Pratzen Heights and exposed their centre. This accomplished, the French emperor achieved surprise by appearing behind them to seize the very high ground they were just abandoning. Alexander galloped excitedly around the battlefield with Dolgoruky. ‘Instead of continually going to advance posts or exposing yourself, where the presence of Your Majesty only upset and hindered the generals,’ wrote Czartoryski in a devastating letter to Alexander afterwards, ‘it would be better to remain more distant.’ At 9 a.m., Kutuzov tried to stall the withdrawal, until Alexander and his suite of ‘thirty popinjays’ galloped up to almost accuse the old general of cowardice. ‘Mikhail Ilarionovich, why aren’t you advancing?’ asked Alexander. ‘We’re not in manoeuvres at Tsaritsyno . . .’

  ‘Sire,’ replied Kutuzov, ‘if I don’t start, it’s precisely because we’re not in the field of Tsaritsyno. But if you order it . . .’ Alexander overruled Kutuzov; the French occupied the heights that the Russians had just left, and at 10.15 a.m. Napoleon said, ‘Let’s finish this war with a thunderclap.’ A warlord at the pinnacle of his genius, he launched his attack on the exposed centre, precisely concentrating overwhelming force at the weakest point and most opportune time.

  Alexander, confused by the ‘horribly majestic spectacle’ opening up before him, was obliviously standing close to the fulcrum of this slaughter – 28,000 Russians were killed or wounded. Moments later he was almost run down by his own men as they fled for their lives. ‘It was precisely at the place where you were located that the rout was immediate and complete,’ added Czartoryski. Left with only Czartoryski, his friend Prince Peter Volkonsky and Dr Wylie, Alexander was bundled to safety in the countryside, in danger from his own fever, the risk of battle and capture by the French. ‘Seeking refuge in a peasant hut,’ Empress Elizabeth wrote, ‘whether from exhaustion or chagrin, not having eaten for twenty-four hours, he suffered such stomach cramp that Wylie feared he wouldn’t last the night.’ Dr Wylie sedated the shivering emperor with wine and opium.3

  ‘The Russian army is not merely beaten,’ Napoleon wrote to his wife Josephine, ‘it’s destroyed.’ Alexander was effectively abandoned by the Austrian emperor, who sued for peace, losing territories and the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Arriving in Petersburg on 26 November, Alexander was recognized as ‘the real cause of our defeat. Now all the misfortune is attributed to him alone,’ admitted Novosiltsev, who had been at Austerlitz with him. Even the tsar’s mother warned him that ‘lured and deceived by Prussia and betrayed by Austria, the glory of armies has suffered the most regrettable failure – the aura of invincibility is destroyed’.

  Alexander did not collapse but tried to coax Prussia back into the war. He removed Czartoryski in July 1806 and henceforth conducted his own foreign policy, with increasing skill. He declared a holy crusade against that ‘Beast of the Apocalypse’ Napoleon, diabolical enemy of Orthodoxy and champion of the Jews (the Romanovs’ first resort to official anti-semitism). That July, Frederick William agreed to return to the war against France. But Napoleon was not resting either: he opened a second front behind Alexander, encouraging the Ottomans to retake control of Wallachia and Moldavia. In October, long before the Russians and Prussians could combine forces, Napoleon destroyed the Prussians at Jena. Alexander should now have made peace, but he still sought glory on behalf of Russia and his stricken (but duplicitous) Prussian friends – and, as commander, turned to Count Bennigsen, murderer of his father.

  On 26 January 1807, Bennigsen fought Napoleon himself to a grinding bloody draw at Eylau, losing 26,000 men; the French lost 20,000. But the Russian army was intact until 2 June, when Napoleon defeated Bennigsen at Friedland, where the Russians lost 20,000 dead, over 40 per cent of their men. Alexander needed immediate peace.4

  ‘I desire that a close union between our two nations may repair past evils,’ Alexander instructed Prince Dmitri Lobanov-Rostovsky, his envoy to Napoleon. ‘An entirely new system . . . and I flatter myself Emperor Napoleon and I will understand each other easily provided we deal without intermediaries.’ They agreed to meet at Tilsit, where their engineers erected a white pavilion on a specially constructed raft in the middle of the Niemen River, the border between their empires. ‘Few sights will be more interesting,’ wrote Napoleon. He was right. The division of Europe between two emperors, based on an expedient friendship, made this one of the most famous summits in history.

  As Alexander prepared to meet his vanquisher, accompanied by Constantine, he was under no illusions. ‘Bonaparte claims I’m only an idiot,’ he soon afterwards wrote to his sister Catiche. ‘He who laughs last laughs best! And I put all my hope in God.’ After his disastrous rush for glory, Alexander was entering a long game. He could hardly believe what was about to happen, as he told Catiche: ‘Me, spending my days with Bonaparte! Whole hours in tête-à-tête with him!’ Alexander’s practice in duplicity qualified him well for the seduction of Napoleon. ‘He possessed to a high degree’, wrote his courtier Baron Korff, ‘the facility to subordinate men to himself and penetrate their souls while hiding all hi
s own feelings and thoughts.’

  On 13 June, Napoleon was rowed across to the raft so that he was there to meet Alexander when he disembarked from his side. The two men embraced, then Alexander said, ‘I will be your second against the English.’ Napoleon was delighted: ‘Those words changed everything.’ They turned together and disappeared through the pavilion door surmounted with Russian and French eagles and elaborate ‘A’s and ‘N’s, to talk for two hours in French without interpreters. Alexander pleaded for Prussia, which he wished to save not only out of chivalry for its queen but as an essential ally.

  The younger emperor, still only twenty-nine, was ‘not dazzled by false confidence’ but was happy to learn from ‘this extraordinary man’ who ‘liked to show me his superiority in imaginative sallies’. For his part, Napoleon, the elder at thirty-eight, could not help but be a little patronizing, yet he was utterly charmed. ‘My dear, I’ve just seen Emperor Alexander and I’m very pleased with him, a very handsome, good and young emperor,’ he told Empress Josephine. ‘More intelligent than is commonly thought,’ he later decided, ‘it would be hard to have more wit than Alexander, but there’s a piece missing and I can’t discover which.’ Alexander was somewhat seduced by the genius of his era. Napoleon’s ‘light-grey eyes’, he later recalled, ‘gaze at you so piercingly that you cannot withstand them’.

  On the second day, Frederick William was allowed to sit in silently on their discussions, when he no doubt learned that Prussia was to be harshly diminished. After the meeting, a hundred guns saluted and Alexander joined Napoleon in Tilsit. Each night, the three monarchs dined together, with Napoleon and Alexander bored to tears by the lumpish Prussian; they would say good night – and then, like a secret assignation, Alexander would steal back to join Napoleon for long talks into the night.