The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  On Wednesday 8 September, Nicholas received the poet Pushkin, worn down by six years of provincial exile.* Their relationship was so unequal that one forgets they were almost the same age – the tsar was thirty, Pushkin now twenty-seven – but the contrast between the strapping pewter-eyed emperor and the tiny, simian poet with wild whiskers could not have been greater. Nicholas noticed that Pushkin had sores. Having heard of the poet’s promiscuity, he suspected they were ‘from a notorious disease’. Benckendorff had suggested to Nicholas that the poet ‘is undoubtedly pretty much of a good-for-nothing but if one is successful in directing his pen, then this will be advantageous’. Anyway this pardoning of young talent suited Nicholas’s notions of chivalry. ‘The emperor received me’, wrote Pushkin, ‘in the kindest way possible.’

  ‘What would you have done had you been in Petersburg on 14 December?’ asked Nicholas.

  ‘I would have been in the ranks of the rebels,’ replied Pushkin.

  Nicholas asked ‘would he give me his word to think and act differently if I released him?’

  Pushkin ‘stretched out his hand with a promise to become different’, and the tsar offered to become Pushkin’s personal patron. ‘The tsar has freed me from censorship,’ wrote the poet. ‘He himself is my censor.’

  Afterwards Nicholas introduced Pushkin to his courtiers: ‘Here is my Pushkin!’ That night at a ball, the tsar declared: ‘Today I had a long conversation with the cleverest man in Russia.’

  Encouraged by Benckendorff, Nicholas secretly contemplated fundamental reforms, even the abolition of serfdom, which he regarded as ‘an obvious evil’, appointing a secret committee to consider them. But the committee, stacked with diehard reactionaries, proposed only minor changes and Nicholas never found the will or the moment to be more radical.4 Besides, it required the committed will of the tsar – and he was repeatedly distracted by the more glorious urgencies of diplomacy and war.

  Amid the coronation ceremonies, he learned that the Shah of Persia’s crown prince Abbas Mirza had invaded the Caucasus. ‘I am just crowned,’ Nicholas exclaimed, ‘and here are the Persians occupying some of our provinces.’ Blaming the negligence of his Caucasian commander,* Nicholas promoted his favourite paladin. Ivan Paskevich, son of Ukrainian gentry, was a valiant veteran who in 1816 became young Nicholas’s commander. Nicholas admired the general, fifteen years his senior, as ‘my father, my commanding officer’. Others were less impressed: ‘an unbearable ass gifted only with the cunning of a Ukrainian’, wrote his secretary, the poet Griboyedov, and ‘an idiot’. He was touchy, arrogant, dull and scarcely literate, but aggressive and efficient. Paskevich stormed Persian strongholds. ‘Yerevan lies at the feet of Your Imperial Majesty,’ he reported in a chivalrous formula that appealed to Nicholas. When he took Tabriz, the Persians sued for peace, ceding Russia much of modern Armenia and Azerbaijan. Paskevich, granted a million roubles and raised to count with the surname Yerevansky, was promoted to commander-in-chief of the Caucasus. His victories were perfectly timed – another war was starting.5

  Sultan Mahmud II had bowed before Nicholas’s ultimatum but then called in the dynamic semi-independent ruler of Egypt, Mehmet Ali, to crush his Greek rebels. Nicholas agreed that a joint Anglo-French and Russian squadron should enforce a European solution. When the Egyptian–Ottoman fleet remained defiant, Admiral Codrington destroyed it at Navarino, which forced the sultan to agree to Greek independence. But as soon as London and Paris were satisfied, the sultan repudiated his promises to Nicholas and declared jihad.

  In May 1828, as his troops advanced into present-day Romania, Nicholas enjoyed the exciting jaunt of war against Oriental inferiors. ‘Gaiety and good health are the order of the day,’ he boasted heartily to Constantine. ‘If Petersburg doesn’t know where to gather in the evenings,’ wrote Nesselrode, ‘we don’t suffer that dilemma here. We have several open houses . . . It is from morning to night an uninterrupted running fire of witticisms, bons mots and pranks.’

  On 27 May, Nicholas and his army crossed the Danube – but the Ottomans, though erratic in open battle, were formidable defenders of fortresses. Nicholas ordered three strongholds to be besieged simultaneously by overpromoted courtiers.* Nicholas’s brother Michael repeatedly failed to storm Brailov. ‘Cheer up, my dear Michael, you did well, the army showed courage, do we have power over the will of Heaven?’ he chivvied him. ‘If Brailov won’t surrender, I urge you to repeat the assault.’ Then he added, ‘If my opinion interests you, then let me tell you as a brother: “I’m pleased with you!”’

  The tsar fell ill with dysentery. Benckendorff told him he was no general and reported discontent in the empire. As the army withdrew back across the Danube, Nicholas returned to Petersburg* and appointed Dibich, who, in May 1829, recrossed the Danube and defeated the Ottomans. In the Caucasus, Paskevich captured Erzurum. The sultan sued for peace – Nicholas’s second victory.6

  ‘Russia dominates the world today,’ Lord Aberdeen, British foreign secretary, told Princess Lieven, ‘omnipotent everywhere.’ But on 29 July 1830, Charles X was overthrown in Paris, replaced by his cousin Louis-Philippe, whom Nicholas called ‘a vile usurper’. But the tsar was confident: ‘Russia has nothing to fear.’ Danger was closer than he knew, however: in 1815 Poland had been given a constitution, but in the witchhunt for revolutionary societies, Alexander and Nicholas had cracked down on Polish freedoms. Constantine, commander-in-chief of the Polish army, was now loathed as a Russian tyrant.

  On 17 November, Polish rebels attacked the Belvedere Palace in Warsaw hoping to capture Constantine. The Poles failed to seize him and he withdrew to his residence outside the city. Constantine could have put down the ‘riot’ but not wishing to spoil his immaculate army, he hesitated and lost Warsaw. Nicholas brushed aside negotiations with moderates. ‘Well, now it’s war,’ he told Dibich (now glorying in the surname Across-the-Balkans – Zabalkansky). But the Poles fought back. Dibich retreated.

  ‘All this is truly inexplicable,’ Nicholas berated Dibich. ‘For God’s sake be firm in your decisions, stop beating around the bush all the time and try, through some brilliant daring attack, to prove to Europe that the Russian army is still the same as twice marched to Paris.’ Nicholas sent in Paskevich. Cholera was spreading through the empire and it ravaged the army too, killing first Dibich, then Constantine. Nonetheless, Paskevich crushed Poland.

  ‘Warsaw is at the feet of Your Imperial Majesty,’ he reported on 13 June 1831 to Nicholas, who rewarded him with the title prince of Warsaw and the governorship of Poland where he abolished the constitution and the kingdom. Nicholas earned the undying hatred of Poles: ‘I know they want to kill me, but if God doesn’t will it, nothing will happen so I am quite calm.’

  In the east, the aggressive Egyptian strongman Mehmet Ali conquered Palestine and Syria and advanced towards Constantinople. Nicholas preferred a weak sultan to a strong Mehmet Ali. Sending ships and soldiers to save Constantinople, he persuaded the sultan to accept his protection. Persians,* Poles and Ottomans were at his feet, Austria and Prussia bowed before him, and within Russia his awesome majesty seemed Olympian.7

  Ten days after the fall of Warsaw, a cholera outbreak sparked rioting on the Haymarket in Petersburg. Hastening there with just two adjutants, Nicholas faced down the mob, then ordered them to their knees. ‘I have to ask God’s mercy for your sins,’ thundered God’s own emperor. ‘You have offended Him deeply. You’ve forgotten your duty of obedience to me and I must answer to God for your behaviour! Remember you’re not Poles, you’re not Frenchmen, you’re Russians. I order you to disperse immediately.’ The rioters obeyed. No wonder Nicholas believed he was the sacred personification of Russia. ‘I am only here’, he told his children preciously, ‘to carry out her orders and her intentions.’ Nicholas was convinced that ‘Our Russia was entrusted to us by God,’ once praying aloud at a parade: ‘O God, I thank Thee for having made me so powerful.’

  ‘No one was better created for the role,’ wrote Anna Tyutcheva
, a young maid-of-honour who later wrote a superbly indiscreet diary. ‘His impressive handsomeness, regal bearing and severe Olympian profile – everything, down to the smile of a condescending Jupiter, breathed earthly deity.’ He played the role perfectly: ‘There is nothing more terrible on earth than the gaze of his colourless pewter eyes.’

  Nicholas worked late in his study. Minutely managing virtually everything, it was a tiring thing to be an autocrat. The tsar, noted his mother soon after his accession, ‘is overwhelmed with business. He’s never in bed before 2 or 3 and doesn’t even have time to have dinner in peace.’ He slept on a metal army cot under an army cloak and rose at dawn, dressed in his Horse Guards uniform with its skintight breeches; then he received ministers, usually Benckendorff, Chernyshev and Volkonsky, until ten when he joined the empress for an hour’s breakfast.

  Mouffy was the centre of his life. ‘Her tender nature and shallow mind replaced principles with sensitivity. Nicholas had a passionate adoration for this frail exquisite creature,’ placing her ‘in a golden cage of palaces, brilliant balls and handsome courtiers. She adored him and saw only the beautiful and happy.’ Even Pushkin was touched by her warm effervescence. ‘I love the empress terribly,’ he wrote, ‘despite the fact she’s already thirty-five.’ Her graceful dancing was ‘like a winged lily’ who ‘quietly weaves and glides’. Nicholas appreciated her nature: ‘God has bestowed upon you such a happy character that it’s no merit to love you.’ Only she could melt the despotic iceberg. When the Winter Palace caught fire, he ordered the firemen to rescue their love letters before anyting else.* Even after decades of marriage, Nicholas wept when his doctors sent the frail Mouffy to take the sun in Palermo: ‘Happiness, joy and repose that is what I seek and find in my old Mouffy.’8

  Nicholas called this family breakfast la revue de la famille as if it was a military parade; yet family life, he told Annette, ‘is dearer to me than any conquest’. Each of his children, four boys and three girls, was expected to keep a diary which the ‘father-commander’, as he called himself, inspected along with their schoolwork. But Nicholas was most concerned to train his eldest son.

  Alexander possessed the blue-eyed good looks of the Württembergs along with the blazing sensuality of Catherine the Great. But he was easy-going and emotional. Nicholas tried to avoid the brutal boredom of his own education by providing Alexander with teachers like the reformer Speransky, who advised him that in Russia’s ‘pure monarchy’ a tsar needed morality more than laws – and that he must always balance political factions and never place all his faith in one. His tutor was Vasily Zhukovsky, the romantic poet who had taught his mother Russian. ‘Learn to read the book that belongs to you from birth,’ he told the boy. ‘That book is Russia.’ Zhukovsky brought out the sensitivity of the boy, whom he adored, and dared criticize the emperor himself for too much militarism. The tsar carefully balanced Mouffy’s sweetness and Zhukovsky’s sentimentality with a governor, General Karl Merder, a hero of 1812, who encouraged the family’s pervasive militarism. Alexander grew up in his Life Guards uniform. When Merder recorded the boy’s decent impulses but a lack of willpower and military ardour, Nicholas boomed, ‘I want him to know I won’t be pleased by a lack of enthusiasm. He must be a soldier in his soul!’ The balance worked.

  Nicholas constantly analysed the heir. ‘My children are delightful,’ he told Annette, ‘the little fellow is definitely a soldier . . . my boy shoots with a big rifle and rides horseback with me,’ but he worried that he was ‘angelic but very absent minded’ – like his soft-hearted mother. Alexander wept a lot. ‘30 March. Wrote badly and cried for no reason,’ he wrote in the diary that was inspected by his father.

  Nicholas believed he could shape the boy: ‘What would you have done with the Decembrist rebels?’

  ‘I would have forgiven them,’ replied little Alexander in Christian spirit.

  ‘This is how you rule,’ replied Nicholas. ‘Remember this: die on the steps of the throne but don’t give up power!’ Duty and obedience ranked above all else. If Alexander had to be punished, Nicholas explained that ‘it’s for the Motherland that you do your duty. It’s not I but the Motherland who punishes and rewards you.’ But there was fun too: at Peterhof, Nicholas drilled the boys in their ‘play regiments’ with real uniforms and rifles, in the Petrine tradition, and presided over character-building games in which the children and their friends had to race up the astonishingly beautiful cascade of fountains beneath the Great Palace.

  Surprisingly it all worked: Alexander was the best-prepared heir in Romanov history. In April 1834, when he turned sixteen, Nicholas devised a solemn ceremony, held in the Great Church of the Winter Palace, at which Alexander took an oath, written by Speransky, to obey the autocrat and defend autocracy. Not just Alexander and his mother but even Nicholas ended up in tears. Henceforth all Romanov grand dukes celebrated their sixteenth birthdays in the same way.

  Nicholas’s second son was not a crybaby. Konstantin, always known as ‘Kostia’, was ‘a big fat handsome fellow so quick I can’t hold him’, Nicholas told Annette. ‘He seems to belong to the family as the only thing he hears with pleasure is the drum.’ Another recruit!

  Kostia, nicknamed ‘Aesop’ for his clever sarcasm, was as awkward as he was ambitious, as caustic as Alexander was affable. He was naughty: only he dared pull a chair from under a minister, Count Ivan Tolstoy, who fell on the floor – in front of his father. ‘Madame, arise,’ Nicholas said to Mouffy. ‘We shall apologize to Ivan Matveievich for having brought up our son so badly.’ And Kostia had a will to power like his father: ‘Sasha [Alexander]’, he complained in his tactless way, ‘was born before our father became emperor and I was born after. I am the son of an emperor and he is the son of a grand duke. It’s unfair Sasha is the heir.’ As a boy, Alexander had agreed with him. ‘I wish I’d never been born a tsarevich,’ he told his tutor. This was all reported to Nicholas, who lectured Alexander on duty and destiny and Kostia on family unity.

  Somehow both sons grew up not just revering but loving their father – though it was easier to be one of Jupiter’s daughters. ‘Mary is in the giraffe stage . . . Ollie is getting thin,’ he told Annette, while the youngest Adini, whom he described as ‘very small and very mischievous’, was his favourite: ‘a moppet – so sweet’.

  The emperor then returned to work, emerging much later for the frequent balls – public at the Winter Palace, private at his old home as grand duke, the Anichkov – at which his aquiline eye instantly noticed any infringements of the dress code. ‘I like people having fun,’ he said. ‘It keeps them from saying silly things.’

  His court was designed to be an awe-inspiring expression of his view of the world as a military hierarchy. Attended by a suite of 540 adjutants (more than doubled since Alexander), he regulated every detail of its Germanic ranks, the Great Processions on important holidays, the baise-mains on the imperial namedays, and the sartorial specifications, designing uniforms for men, dresses for women and servants, including the baggy red trousers, gold-braided, gold-epauletted black jackets, yellow shoes and white turbans of his twenty black guards, many of whom were now Americans.* At the Anichkov Palace, Mouffy loved to dance – and the tsar loved to flirt.9

  Everyone in the family, even his mother, knew that Nicholas was highly sexed. When Mouffy was unable to have sex due to her frequent pregnancies, the empress dowager Maria had told Annette that ‘she needs to strengthen her health’ as ‘Nicholas is already distracted at the abstinence he must observe.’ The courtiers encouraged the myth that the emperor looked elsewhere only after 1842 when Mouffy became ill but, however happy his marriage, his courtiers ran a well-oiled but discreet system of seduction, as well as a worldly coterie of married aristocratic beauties who were his mistresses.

  For a while, the ruling favourite was the gold-curled ‘beautiful, amusing but cunning’ Baroness Amalia Krüdener. One evening she had supped with Nicholas who then went on to flirt with another of his favourite beauties, Countess
Elizaveta Buturlina. ‘You supped with him,’ an inquisitive courtier asked Amalia, ‘but last honours are for her?’

  ‘He is a strange man,’ replied Amalia. ‘These things have to have a result but with him there is never an end, he hasn’t the courage for it, he has a peculiar idea of fidelity.’

  When he saw a girl in the street or at a theatre who took his fancy, his adjutants approached her to arrange an assignation. ‘The tsar never met resistance to his lust,’ noted the French travel-writer the marquis de Custine. ‘I grew up feeling not only love but reverence,’ wrote a nineteen-year-old girl at court. ‘I regarded the tsar as an earthly god.’ When she was presented to him, ‘my heart fluttered. I felt my knees buckling.’ The tsar, observed Pushkin, ran ‘a harem of budding actresses’.*

  In 1832, he met a girl at a masque ball. As they danced, the masked beauty told him details of his own children which amazed him. At the end of the night, she revealed herself as Varvara Nelidova, a penniless orphan who knew so much because she was the niece of Emperor Paul’s mistress. The emperor invited her to court where she charmed not only the empress but their daughter Olga, known as Ollie. Appointed maid-of-honour to his wife, ‘Varenka’ as she was known ‘looked Italian and had lovely dark eyes and eyebrows’, with marble shoulders, high breasts, tiny waist. She was ‘such fun’, wrote Olga, ‘that she saw the comic side in everything. Papa often drank tea with her. She told him immodest stories that made Papa cry with laughter. Once he laughed so much his chair went over backwards.’ But the daughter insisted, as daughters do, that this was only an ‘innocent flirtation – Papa was faithful to his wife’.