The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The courtiers knew better. ‘Although the object of his affair lived in the Palace, no one ever drew attention to it,’ recalled lady-in-waiting Maria Frederiks. ‘It was done so subtly, so decently, so well. I saw them every day and never suspected anything, he held himself so respectfully in front of his wife and children. As for the lady, she never sought special privileges.’

  Nicholas’s erotic life was organized with military punctilio: he visited Varenka twice daily, first at 9 a.m., then he joined the empress, before visiting her again at 1.30 p.m. Varenka devoted her life to the emperor. When she gave birth to children, they were said to have been adopted by his trusted retainer General Peter Kleinmikhel, who brought them up as his own – the ultimate service to his emperor.

  Always on the lookout for new favourites, the emperor noticed Pushkin’s new wife and devised a neat way to supervise him and flirt with her.10

  In February 1831, the poet, thirty-one years old, married Natalya Goncharova, aged eighteen, a girl from a good family fallen on hard times. Even his proposal of marriage to Natalya had to be approved by the emperor. ‘His Imperial Majesty deigned to observe that he was pleased to believe . . . you had discovered within yourself those qualities of heart and character necessary for a woman’s happiness, especially a woman as amiable and interesting as Mademoiselle Goncharova,’ wrote Benckendorff with fustian pomposity. Before they married, the bride wanted to check that the tsar still favoured her fiancé: ‘As for your individual position,’ Benckendorff lectured Pushkin, ‘His Imperial Majesty, in wholly paternal solicitude for you, sir, deigned to charge me, General Benckendorff, not as head of the gendarmerie but as the person in whom he pleases to place his confidence, to observe you and guide you by my counsel.’

  On 30 December 1833, ‘I had the title “Gentleman of the Bedchamber” conferred on me (somewhat unbecoming for my years),’ Pushkin complained. ‘But the court [meaning the tsar] wanted Natalya to dance at the Anichkov.’

  Pushkin soon felt the icy grip of autocracy. On 23 Janary he and Natalya attended their first imperial ball at the Anichkov. ‘I arrived in [court] uniform. I was told the guests were in tailcoats. I left. The Sovereign was displeased.’ Nicholas noticed immediately, telling Natalya: ‘He might have given himself the trouble to go and put on a tailcoat and return. Reproach him for it!’

  Nicholas flirted with Natalya whenever he could, ‘dangling after her like some stripling officer’, wrote Pushkin. He danced the French quadrille with her and sat next to her all supper. ‘Of a morning, he purposefully drives past her windows several times and in the evening, at a ball, asks why her blinds are always down.’ At first Pushkin enjoyed the court entertainments and was charmed by the empress who, laughing, greeted him – ‘Oh it’s you!’ Whenever they met at court, Nicholas talked to Pushkin and, when Natalya’s dressmaker’s invoices threatened to bankrupt him, lent him money, but the supervision was suffocating and, worse still, he found that not only did he have Nicholas and Benckendorff on his back but the minister of education, Sergei Uvarov, started to censor the poet too.

  Uvarov, the son of a bandura-playing Guards officer who had flirted with Catherine the Great, was a classical scholar, Middle Eastern expert, pioneering geologist and visionary minister. Jealous of Pushkin, Uvarov orchestrated a campaign to undermine his reputation (and income) by attacking his history of the Pugachev Rebellion and his masterpiece, Onegin, the novel in poetry of heartbreak and duelling that, in many ways, created modern Russian literature. Nicholas tried to protect Pushkin,* but Uvarov was his chief ideologist, much more important to him than a penniless poet.

  Pushkin loathed Uvarov, whose sycophancy, social-climbing and secret homosexuality he mocked in verse, but he soon learned that Benckendorff’s spies were worse. In a letter to his wife about the coming of age of Caesarevich Alexander, he reflected, ‘I don’t intend to present myself to the Heir with congratulations . . . I’ve seen three tsars. The first [Paul] ordered my cap to be taken off and scolded my nurse; the second [Alexander] was not gracious to me and the third drafted me as a page of the bedchamber.’ When Benckendorff’s agents opened the letter, Nicholas was furious. The poet was disgusted: ‘What profound immorality there is in the usages of our government! The police unseal a husband’s letters to his wife and take them to the tsar (a well-brought-up and honourable man) and the tsar is not ashamed to admit this and put in motion an intrigue worthy of Vidocq [the French criminal who became a secret police chief].’

  Pushkin resigned from court which Nicholas regarded as ingratitude. ‘I never detain anybody,’ the tsar told Zhukovsky. ‘But in that case, everything will be finished between us,’ a threat that made Pushkin withdraw his resignation. ‘I pardon him,’ Nicholas told Benckendorff, ‘but summon him to explain the senselessness of his behaviour.’

  Pushkin had to endure watching the attentions that his wife enjoyed as a court beauty, attentions that would now lead to tragedy. At a ball, a guest watched Natalya surrounded by flirting Guards officers – while ‘a little to the side, stood a pensive Alexander Sergeievich [Pushkin] taking not the slightest part in the conversation’.11

  A young Guardsman fell obsessively in love with Natalya. Baron Georges d’Anthes was a French exile who had arrived in Petersburg with his older patron, Baron Jakob van Heeckeren, the Dutch ambassador. Heeckeren was homosexual, and clearly in love with d’Anthes, whom he adopted as his son. The ambassador had him enrolled in the gorgeously kitted Chevalier-Gardes who patrolled the palace. Whether d’Anthes ‘lived with Heeckeren or Heeckeren with him’, wrote his fellow Chevalier-Garde Prince Alexander Trubetskoi, who shared rooms with him, ‘buggery at that time was widespread in high society. To judge by the fact that d’Anthes continually pursued ladies, it must be assumed his relations with Heeckeren were passive.’

  ‘I am madly in love,’ d’Anthes told Heeckeren in January 1836, with ‘the most delicious creature in Petersburg . . . and she loves me’, but ‘the husband is revoltingly jealous’. Delighted momentarily by the Frenchman, Natalya flirted too, but d’Anthes’ obsession became that of a stalker who deluded himself into believing that they had had an affair and then could not accept that he had been rejected. In the autumn, he started again, cynically pursuing Natalya’s plainer unmarried sister Ekaterina to get closer to her. Meanwhile the tsar himself, meeting Natalya at the Razumovskys’, warned her to guard her spotless reputation.

  On 4 November, Pushkin received an anonymous letter nominating him as ‘coadjutor to the Grand Master of the Order of Cuckolds’. The poet was troubled even though he was not the only one to receive such a letter. Natalya confessed her flirtations with d’Anthes to Pushkin, who never doubted her innocence but believed (wrongly) that Heeckeren had sent the letters.* Pushkin challenged the ambassador to a duel. Heeckeren tried to avoid the challenge by pushing d’Anthes to marry Natalya’s sister, Ekaterina, whom he had seduced in order to force Pushkin to call off the duel. Finally Pushkin agreed. The emperor summoned Pushkin and made him promise not to fight. When d’Anthes went through with the marriage to Natalya’s sister, even the empress was fascinated: ‘is it devotion or diversion?’ But now that d’Anthes was Natalya’s brother-in-law, he could publicly flirt with her.

  On 21 January 1837, the emperor, along with the Pushkins and the newly married d’Anthes, met at a ball where Nicholas reassured the poet of his wife’s chastity. Pushkin, bursting with indignation, had to thank him.

  ‘But could you have expected aught else from me?’ replied Nicholas smugly.

  ‘Not only could, Sire, but to speak frankly, I suspected you too of paying court to my wife.’ Across the ballroom, Pushkin watched furiously as d’Anthes praised her with outrageous double entendres which Natalya later reported to her husband.

  Next morning, Pushkin challenged d’Anthes to a duel. On the afternoon of 27 January, Pushkin and d’Anthes met, each accompanied by seconds, on the outskirts of Petersburg. They were placed twenty paces apart and handed their pistols. Pushkin was takin
g aim when d’Anthes fired. Pushkin was hit in the side and fell, but he got up to take his shot which passed through the fleshy part of d’Anthes’ arm, bouncing off a button, to do him no more harm than a scratch. But d’Anthes’ bullet had travelled through Pushkin’s stomach to smash his sacrum. Called urgently to Pushkin’s apartment, the imperial doctor Nikolai Arendt reported to the tsar that he was dying. ‘If God ordains we are not to meet again in this world,’ the tsar, just back from the theatre, wrote to Pushkin, ‘then accept my forgiveness and my advice to die in a Christian manner, and do not worry about your wife and children. They will be my children and I will take them into my care.’ Ordering the doctor to deliver this, Nicholas added, ‘I won’t go to bed, I’ll wait.’

  Pushkin kissed the letter. He took communion. His pain intensified as gangrene inflamed his intestines. Dr Arendt eased his suffering with opium, while Natalya had hysterics. The tsar summoned Zhukovsky. ‘Tell him from me I congratulate him on fulfilling his Christian duty,’ said Nicholas sanctimoniously. On the afternoon of 29 January, Pushkin died. Nicholas ordered Zhukovsky to inspect his papers for treason. Instead Zhukovsky was disgusted to see how Pushkin had been harassed, scolding Benckendorff: ‘These reprimands of such little account to you coloured his whole life. You turned this protection into police control.’

  Ten thousand mourners passed the body in his apartment. The outpouring of grief was policed by Uvarov and Benckendorff who banned press articles reporting the funeral. Nonetheless huge crowds attended St Isaac’s Cathedral, after which the coffin was despatched to be buried near Pushkin’s Mikhailskoe estate. Nicholas would have been amazed to learn that his own triumphs have been overshadowed in historical memory by this mere poet who would be revered as Russia’s true royalty.*12

  Yet Nicholas was not getting his way everywhere. He was losing a war against jihadists led by Imam Shamyl in Chechnya and Daghestan, in the eastern Caucasus. But when Russia’s fortunes improved and he heard that victory was finally imminent, Nicholas decided to receive the surrender in person.

  On 8 October, as the emperor, accompanied by Adlerberg, rode in his carriage down the precipitous road towards his Georgian capital Tiflis, ‘The horses bolted,’ he reported to Paskevich, ‘and we would certainly have plunged into the abyss as the horses headed over the parapet if the hand of God had not intervened. The horses hung by their necks over the edge until the traces broke and they fell, releasing us with a small injury. I thought I would die.’ Afterwards, escorted by twenty-four Georgian princes, the shaken Nicholas entered Tiflis to a jubilant welcome. To the north-east, his generals had trapped Shamyl, whom Nicholas expected to come to Tiflis and submit.

  The mountain tribes had been resisting the Christian advance into the Caucasus ever since the 1780s, but Russia’s clumsy brute force had sparked a full-scale jihadist insurgency. In 1834, Shamyl had murdered his predecessor and declared himself the imam of the black-bannered Murids, a movement of Sufi Islam. When his stronghold was stormed, Shamyl, though wounded, had leapt over the walls into an abyss and escaped, the only warrior to survive.

  Now in 1837, he had been forced to agree an armistice which had been broken by the Russians themselves. He refused to submit and, fortifying a new stronghold, Akhulgo, Shamyl returned to war. The Russian victory was spoiled as much by Nicholas’s meddling and the bureaucratic rivalries of different committees and ministers as by Shamyl’s genius for asymmetrical warfare.

  In Tiflis, Nicholas’s adjutants tried to entertain him with anything from celebrations of mass to girls, but the emperor replied, ‘I have no eyes but for my army.’ Before he left, he appointed new generals to crush Shamyl. ‘Now,’ he declared with preposterous magniloquence, as he climbed into his carriage, ‘I know the meaning of the words in Genesis – ‘let there be light and there was light.’’*13

  On 21 October, at Novocherkask, Nicholas met up with his son Alexander and together they rode in Cossack uniform through the ranks of the Don Cossacks who then gathered in a circle around the cathedral. There the ataman gave the mace of office to Nicholas, who then handed it to a thrilled Alexander. ‘May this serve as proof of how close you are to my heart,’ boomed Nicholas, before turning to the Cossacks and crying, ‘When he replaces me, serve him as loyally as you serve me!’

  In fact, Nicholas was worried about his son’s indiscipline and erotic adventures. Alexander, now nineteen, had been on a tour of the empire, accompanied by his poet-tutor Zhukovsky. Alexander was mobbed by crowds, who described him as a ‘beauty’, but he was pursued by his father’s lecturing letters. ‘I try to find in you’, wrote Nicholas, ‘the promise of future happiness for our beloved Mother Russia, the one for which I live, to which you were dedicated even before you were born!’

  Alexander tried to live up to his paternal Jupiter, whom he saw as ‘the personification of our Fatherland, more than a father’. He coped by developing a ‘powerful secretiveness’, that essential armour of heirs to the throne. He also inherited his father’s libido – without his glacial control. At fourteen, he fell in love with his mother’s maid-of-honour Natalya Borzdina: after one of Nicholas’s masquerade balls in medieval dress at Tsarskoe Selo, Alexander rendezvoused with her in the park, a tryst at which he lost his virginity. Nicholas dealt with this like a true Victorian paterfamilias, taking his son to visit a syphilis hospital. But this did not discourage Alexander, who now fell in love with another of Mouffy’s maids-of-honour, a Polish girl, Olga Kalinovskaya. Alexander told everyone, even his mother, about his love for Olga. Nicholas read his son’s diary with some amusement. But, alarmed by hints of marriage, he removed the girl and gave Alexander some guidance: ‘I explained that fondness for one female is natural but no need to surrender to dreams if they aren’t appropriate in rank or status. I think his taste is decent’ – even if he did have an attraction for Polish girls.

  Alexander ‘needs a stronger personality’, Mouffy told her lady-in-waiting Baroness Frederiks. ‘Otherwise he will perish. He falls in love too easily. He must be removed from Petersburg.’ Hence his tour of Russia – but on his return, he missed Kalinovskaya and moped. Observing this ‘tendency to reverie’, the emperor ordered him to find a wife and despatched him on a European tour.

  After Berlin, Vienna, Milan, he passed through Hesse-Darmstadt where he was attracted by Princess Marie, modest, pretty and slight. ‘I like her terribly at first sight,’ he wrote to Nicholas, who had heard, like the rest of Europe, that there was a problem with Marie, who was possibly the daughter not of the duke but of a French stablemaster. Travelling on to London, he was enamoured by the single twenty-year-old Queen Victoria. ‘I’m really quite in love with the Grand Duke, a dear delightful young man,’ she gushed in her diary on 27 May 1839. ‘The Grand Duke is so very strong, you are whisked around like in a waltz which is very pleasant . . . I never enjoyed myself more. I got to bed at ¼ to 3 but I couldn’t sleep till 5!’ Nicholas warned Alexander that such a marriage was impossible, but he could return to Darmstadt.

  On his last evening with Victoria, Alexander ‘took my hand and pressed it warmly; he looked pale and his voice faltered as he said, “Words fail me to express what I feel.”’ He kissed her hand and cheek. ‘I felt so sad to take leave of this dear amiable young man. He is so frank, so really young and merry’ with ‘such a nice open countenance, sweet smile’, wrote Victoria, ‘and such a manly figure’.

  Back in Darmstadt, Alexander and mournful Marie exchanged long love letters. Alexander sent his favourite adjutant, Prince Alexander Bariatinsky, to ask his father’s permission. ‘Our joy, the joy of the whole family is indescribable, this sweet Marie is the fulfilment of our hopes,’ enthused the tsar. ‘How I envy those who met her before me.’

  Once home again, Alexander returned to Kalinovskaya. Nicholas was infuriated, threatening to disinherit him like Peter the Great and make Kostia the heir. But Alexander corrected himself. His Hessian princess was brought to Petersburg at sixteen, and converted to Orthodoxy as Maria Alexandrovna –
though she was always known as Marie. Her early married life was dominated by her parents-in-law. After the wedding in April 1841, they lived in the Winter Palace right next to Alexander’s parents, while at weekends they were given the Farm at Peterhof, another mock-Gothic house beside the Cottage. Within two years, Marie gave birth to a daughter, the first of many children, but she suffered at court. Anxiety caused her to break out in rashes that she covered with a veil. ‘I lived like a voluntary fireman, ready to jump at the alarm’ but not sure ‘where to run or what to do’. Her role was simple: to please the emperor, deliver children – and turn a blind eye to Alexander’s adventures. She succeeded at all three, becoming beloved by the courtiers. Alexander was kind and solicitous, but she was hardly the lubricious partner for this breezy Lothario: he was probably still in love with Kalinovskaya, now Princess Oginski: her son Bogdan, born in 1848, was widely believed to be his.

  Meanwhile Alexander was groomed for power. He attended the State Council, commanded the Guards, served on the Caucasus Committees, but like every fashionable officer, he longed to serve in the war against Shamyl. Finally Nicholas let him go. In the forests, the heir led a charge against the Chechens. The Russians were closing in on Shamyl.14

  In June 1839, Nicholas’s generals besieged Shamyl in his stronghold Akhulgo for eighty days and forced him to give up his eldest son Jemal-Eddin as a hostage for his good behaviour. On 29 August Akhulgo fell – but Shamyl had vanished. ‘Excellent,’ Nicholas wrote on the despatches. ‘So far so good. But a pity Shamyl escaped.’ He had Jemal-Eddin brought to Petersburg, where he welcomed the boy whom he hoped to train to become his puppet ruler of the northern Caucasus. The tsar set him up in a townhouse with his own Russian nanny. Prince Jemal-Eddin Shamyl was enrolled in the Corps de Pages. The empress took him for walks. He became russified but was tortured by memories of his indestructible father.