The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Nikolai, their son, ‘Nikola’

  Nikolai Nikolaievich, brother of Alexander II, commander-in-chief of army, ‘Nizi’, married Alexandra (née Princess Alexandra of Oldenburg)

  Mikhail, brother of Alexander II, viceroy of Caucasus, married Olga (née Princess Cecilie of Baden)

  Alexander, their son, ‘Sandro’

  Elena Pavlovna (née Princess Charlotte of Württemberg), aunt of Alexander II, ‘Family Intellectual’

  COURTIERS: ministers etc.

  Count Vladimir Adlerberg, court minister

  Count Sasha Adlerberg, his son, emperor’s friend, court minister

  Prince Alexander Gorchakov, foreign minister, later chancellor, ‘Old Dandy’

  Prince Mikhail Gorchakov, his cousin, commander in Crimea

  Prince Alexander Bariatinsky, viceroy of Caucasus

  Count Alexei Orlov, secret police chief and envoy to Paris, prince

  Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, war minister, secret police chief

  Count Peter Shuvalov, secret police chief, minister, later ambassador to London

  Yakov Rostovtsev, general, president of Editing Committee of serf reform

  Nikolai Miliutin, vice-minister of interior and architect of serf reform

  Dmitri Miliutin, his brother, war minister, count, later field marshal

  Mikhail Loris-Melikov, general, emergency chief minister, count

  Konstantin Pobedonostsev, tutor to Nixa and Sasha, ober-procurator of the Synod, ‘Torquemada’

  Princess Alexandra Dolgorukaya, Alexander II’s mistress, ‘Tigress’

  Fanny Lear, American courtesan, lover of Grand Duke Nikolai

  ‘The world has come tumbling down,’ wrote Anna Tyutcheva. Her father was no less stricken: ‘It is as if a god had died.’ No Romanov since the first, Michael, had inherited such desperate straits as Alexander II – but no autocrat was better prepared. The day after his father died, Alexander praised his ‘unforgettable parent’ and wept before the State Council. When he saw the diplomats, he declared, ‘I want peace,’ but added ‘I’ll fight on and perish rather than cede.’

  His father lay in state for two weeks, and after the funeral Alexander sat with his wife and his brother, Kostia, the general-admiral, to take stock. Both brothers understood that the Crimean debacle proved that serfdom must be reformed because the peasant-dominated army could never compete with the armies of the industrialized West; but only Kostia demanded immediate reform. Alexander, backed by Marie, proposed ‘quiet for now’.

  The dire situation was about to get worse. Napoleon III planned to arrive in Crimea to take command, the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia joined the allies, and Austria threatened to attack. In June the allies attempted to storm Sebastopol, failing with heavy losses. ‘I am convinced we must go on the offensive,’ Alexander told General Mikhail Gorchakov on 30 July 1855, admitting, ‘I want a battle.’ This was his last chance to save Sebastopol – before the Austrians entered the war. In mid-August, 57,000 Russian troops attacked the French and Sardinians on the Chernaia River but were smashed. On 27 August, the French took the Russian redoubts. As the Russians withdrew, an inferno blazed in Sebastopol. On 7 September the tsar visited his armies. ‘Don’t lose heart! Remember 1812,’ he wrote to General Gorchakov. ‘Sebastopol is not Moscow. Crimea is not Russia. Two years after the burning of Moscow our victorious troops were in Paris. We are still the same Russians!’ But they weren’t. It was a different world.

  In mid-November, Alexander probed the intentions of the Austrians and the French but left out the British, whose new prime minister Palmerston favoured dismantling the Russian empire. Alexander declared, ‘We’ve reached the utmost limit of what’s compatible with Russian honour. I’ll never accept humiliating concessions.’ But then he received an Austrian ultimatum and the news that Sweden was about to join the allies.

  On 3 January 1856, Alexander’s ministers and his wise men, Nesselrode and Vorontsov, advised him to accept the terms. Only Kostia wanted to fight on.1

  Alexander sent the seventy-year-old Count Alexei Orlov, who had fought his way to Paris in 1814, back to the peace talks in the French capital. The swashbuckling old bravo – his hair bouffant, eyes twinkling under bristling eyebrows, his grey moustaches luxuriant, and sporting a green tunic decorated with the portraits set in diamonds of three tsars – knew how to charm the French. ‘So are you bringing us peace?’ asked Napoleon.

  ‘Sire,’ answered Orlov, ‘I’ve come to find it for it is in Paris that all things are to be found.’ Nonetheless the peace, signed on 18 March 1856, was the Romanovs’ worst setback since the Time of Troubles: Russia lost Bessarabia, and worse, its fortifications on the Black Sea, its right to have a navy there, leaving its coastline and its vast commercial interests vulnerable to the British. Orlov, raised to prince, signed on Alexander’s behalf in Paris. ‘It was a lasting nightmare,’ reflected Alexander. ‘I signed,’ he later shouted, banging the table. ‘An act of cowardice.’

  He had had little choice, but he set about reversing Paris with the help of his new foreign minister, Prince Alexander Gorchakov,* who tested the resolve of the allies. ‘The emperor wishes to live in good harmony with all governments,’ declared Gorchakov. ‘Russia does not sulk. Russia is collecting herself.’ Their policy was based on a familial alliance with Prussia, while they set out to lure France away from Britain.

  Alexander sent his brother Kostia to see Napoleon, a trip on which the grand duke negotiated a Russian base at Villefranche and started the Russian relationship with Nice, while Napoleon sent to Petersburg his debonair half-brother Auguste, comte de Morny, who had opened secret negotations with the Russians during the war.† ‘I rejoice to see you here,’ Alexander said on greeting him.

  ‘It’s impossible’, Morny told Napoleon, ‘not to be friends with him.’

  Alexander launched a charm offensive abroad and at home. The emperor was not just the best looking and most sensitive of the Romanovs, he was also the most endearing. Now he toured Europe to visit his Coburg, Württemberg and Hessian cousins in the wider European royal family. In Stuttgart, he met Napoleon. The two got on well, but ‘Let’s await the facts,’ said the tsar, ‘to see if we can count on him in the future.’

  At home, he toured the country, relaxing court rules and university restrictions, easing censorship, signalling a new openness, the smiling tsar so different from his glowering father. But behind the smiles he knew that change was essential, and he secretly planned his moves. First he turned to his best friend to restore some prestige to Russian arms in the war against Shamyl.2

  Alexander offered Alexander Bariatinsky his choice of ministries – but he chose to be viceroy of the Caucasus with the task of destroying Shamyl. Bariatinsky, a grand seigneur related to the Romanovs, was an ingenious soldier, an imaginative politician and an irresistible seducer. When he flirted with Nicholas I’s daughter, Ollie, who was in love with him, Jupiter was furious. But Bariatinsky redeemed himself in fighting Shamyl. He was famed for his courage and his style. When he captured some Chechens, he left them their weapons and asked them to guard him while he went to sleep. His seduction of his officers’ wives was as lethal as his battle plans. ‘The mere thought of Bariatinsky’, one of his generals told Leo Tolstoy, ‘shatters all my dreams of marital happiness. This man is so brilliant that I can’t imagine my wife won’t one day prefer him to myself.’

  Alexander, who was highly secretive, trusted Bariatinsky, signing his letters: ‘Be sure, dear friend, I embrace you from the bottom of my heart.’ The viceroy* advised on all matters. When Alexander was in crisis, ‘The only thing that gives me pleasure is the thought of seeing you soon and being able to discuss with you all the trouble in which we find ourselves.’

  As Bariatinsky tightened his grip on Shamyl, shortening the blockade lines to force him out of the Chechen highlands, the emperor prepared for his coronation.3

  On 17 August 1856, the tsar rode into the ancient capital in a green tunic and cape at the front o
f a ‘golden river’ of horsemen, his brothers, sons and grandees. The coronation was always a test of endurance. As he entered the stifling cathedral his father’s retainers bore the regalia – Menshikov held the orb and General Gorchakov the sword – until the latter fainted and dropped it. ‘It’s all right to fall here,’ Alexander reassured him, ‘the important thing is that you stood firm on the battlefield.’

  After Alexander had crowned himself, he placed a small crown on his kneeling empress, but as she rose, it clattered off her head. The tsar calmly replaced it, but the mistakes reflected the laxness at court: Anna Tyutcheva noticed that ‘no one prayed, they laughed, chatted’, and ‘some even brought food in to eat during the long service’. Afterwards there were banquets – the people were traditionally invited to a vast picnic on the Khodynsky Field for spit-roasts with wine-spurting fountains, but the crowds stampeded. It was an accident waiting to happen. Morny gave the last, most sumptuous ball, at which Alexander appeared wearing the white uniform of the Chevalier-Gardes with a Légion d’Honneur sent by Napoleon III. ‘The words ‘sympathetic to France’ are repeated so often, they’re getting on my nerves,’ boasted the suave Morny. His job was done.* Now Alexander turned to reform, which was to be at least partly a family affair.4

  Kostia was the abrasive champion of reform and scourge of the rigid conservatives whom he called ‘the Retrogrades’. He was both asset and liability: this choleric shouter was an intellectual, a cellist and a musical connoisseur – a breath of fresh air. Even under his father, Kostia had used his presidency of the Russian Geographical Society and his general-admiralship to promote young reformers, new technology and a spirit of glasnost. He persuaded Alexander: ‘No weakness, no reaction.’ But Alexander was well aware of Kostia’s faults, warning him on his trip to Paris ‘to listen, don’t compromise yourself, pushing your own ideas’. He also recognized his brother’s dynamism: ‘If others don’t know how to appreciate you, I appreciate your diligence and your devotion.’

  The reformers were backed by the emperor’s delightful aunt Elena. ‘The Family Intellectual’ was the most exceptional woman in the family since Catherine the Great, an innovator in everything from nursing to music. She founded the Russian Musical Society and then the Conservatoire (in which Peter Tchaikovsky was among the students).† Naturally she was a liberal on serfdom. Alexander was unsure how to reach his end, but he started on 30 March 1856 when he surprised the Moscow nobility by declaring that serfdom was an evil, its abolition inevitable – and it would be better if the liberation ‘came from above rather than below’. He created the Secret Committee on Peasant Reform but, always playing the game of two steps forward, one step back, to carry his courtiers with him, he appointed the reactionary Prince Orlov to head it. Orlov blocked the reforms.

  In the summer of 1857, Alexander holidayed in Germany where he met up with Aunt Elena, who revealed Nicholas’s last wishes that she should help him liberate the peasants. She commissioned a young official in the Interior Ministry, Nikolai Miliutin,* to devise a plan to free the serfs on her own huge estates. At her suggestion, Alexander replaced Orlov with Kostia. ‘Here,’ Alexander told Bariatinsky, ‘everyone’s preoccupied with the emancipation of the peasants, but unfortunately our way of chattering and inventing things have created a feverish anxiety.’

  Alexander prodded his governor-general of Vilna, Nazimov, into persuading local nobility to request reform – then allowed them to form provincial committees to deliberate on the terms. But the nobles offered the peasants freedom – without any land. The tsar stepped in: the peasants needed land.

  ‘The great question has just made its first step,’ Alexander told Bariatinsky. In the summer of 1858, the emperor toured the country, encouraging and scolding the ‘obstinate nobles’. Alexander and Marie were cheered wildly. ‘We’re received everywhere’, the sovereign told Kostia, ‘with ineffable cordiality sometimes rising to madness.’

  ‘Thank God,’ replied Kostia, ‘our people haven’t changed their attachment to their White Tsar, and in You, dear Sasha, they still see the one who conceived the great deed of reform of serfdom.’

  Bypassing the Retrogrades, Alexander pushed the Committee to produce the proposals while promoting Elena’s protégé Miliutin to deputy interior minister. But vicious infighting broke out between Kostia and the Retrogrades. The brains behind the reform, Miliutin feared that ‘a reaction has begun to set in’. When Alexander was walking in the park at Tsarskoe Selo, a clerk on the Committee thrust a petition complaining of the slowness of reform into the tsar’s own hands. Days later, the clerk was summoned to see Prince Orlov who warned him, with threatening glee, that Nicholas ‘would have banished you to a place so remote they’d never even have found your bones’. However, Orlov added, ‘Our present Sovereign is so kind he’s ordered me to kiss you. Here! Embrace me!’ Alexander was determined to push the reform through. ‘We began the peasant matter together,’ he told an aide, ‘and we’ll take it to the end hand in hand . . .’5

  The news from Chechnya was ‘brilliant!’, exclaimed Alexander on 19 May 1858. ‘The submission of the people of little Chechnya delights me.’ Bariatinsky’s forces surrounded Shamyl, who in August managed a last counter-attack. Alexander admired his enemy. ‘Shamyl is a famous fellow for having dared this diversion even as he’s almost surrounded.’* Then suddenly, a Murid horseman despatched by Shamyl arrived at Russian headquarters to ask for a doctor: Jemal-Eddin, the eldest son he had lost and won back, was sick. Bariatinsky allowed a doctor to be sent. The young man was dying of sorrow. Father and son had found it impossible to reconcile, the father still a jihadist; the boy now an ex-Russian officer depressed and alone. In July, the boy duly died. Alexander waited for the endgame ‘with impatience’.6

  Alexander did not trust the young reformers, so he turned to an unlikely champion. Yakov Rostovtsev was the young Guardsman who on 12 December 1825 had warned Nicholas of the revolt. Now thirty years later, General Rostovtsev, beloved by the tsar, was one of the members of the Committee to oppose the reforms. Miliutin, seeing him as chief Retrograde, recruited the exiled socialist and journalist Alexander Herzen to blacken Rostovtsev for his role in 1825. Alexander was furious, calling Miliutin ‘a Red’, and Elena had to intervene. In fact Rostovtsev had just become a convert to freeing the serfs and at the same time giving them the right to redeem their land. Again Elena was decisive. She realized that Alexander, ‘jealous of his power’, could take her female advice and that he needed Rostovtsev. At her Thursday salon, she reconciled old Rostovtsev and ‘Red’ Miliutin.

  On 17 February 1859, Alexander made Rostovtsev chairman of the Editing Commission for the reform and he ordered Miliutin to draft the decree. Elena had done her work well. As the prize got closer, noble ‘ignorance and selfish interests’, Alexander told Bariatinsky, tried to sabotage the reform but ‘with perseverance and firmness, I hope to succeed. In my position, one needs a good dose of calm and philosophy to endure the daily stresses and feuds.’

  Meanwhile abroad, his relationship with Napoleon III was tested as the French and Piedmontese challenged the Austrians to unify Italy. Alexander was thrilled to threaten Franz Josef: ‘We’re playing the same role to them as they played to us in the [Crimean] war.’ This was the key result of the Crimean War – the estrangement of Russia from Austria which eased the rise of Prussia. At the Battle of Solferino, the French defeated the Austrians. Most of Italy was united under the king of Piedmont.

  Every day Alexander awaited news from Bariatinsky – the viceroy and the imam were negotiating surrender. ‘Promise him a pardon for all his past ill-deeds and an independent household – though far from the Caucasus.’

  On 16 August 1859, Bariatinsky sat on a rock, his staff all around him, high in the misty mountains of Daghestan near the last Murid stronghold of Gounib, which had been surrounded by the Russians. At dawn, out of its gates, rode Shamyl himself, with fifty ragged Murids. As the Russian soldiers cheered, Shamyl dismounted and walked towards the prince
. Refusing to surrender his sword to anyone else, he offered it to Bariatinsky.

  ‘Glory to Thee, O Lord!’ wrote Alexander to Bariatinsky on 11 September. ‘These are the sentiments that filled my heart. I couldn’t have hoped for or desired a more complete success.’ He added that the victory ‘belonged to you, dear friend’. Alexander was heading south to inspect his armies, but ‘I hope to meet Shamyl.’

  At a parade in Kharkov, the Great Imam rode out to meet the Great White Sultan. ‘I am happy you are here in Russia,’ said Alexander. ‘I wish it could have happened sooner. You won’t regret it’ – and he embraced him.* Just as the first draft of the serfdom decree was ready, Rostovtsev fell ill with gangrene.7

  *

  The tsar wept when he visited the dying general and wondered how to continue. Always ready to ease the path to reform, Aunt Elena introduced the tsar to ‘Red’ Miliutin, and the two got on well. Then to the horror of the liberals and the delight of the Retrogrades, Alexander appointed a conservative, Count Vladimir Panin, to head the Commission. But Panin was an old-fashioned servitor who reassured Kostia, ‘If the emperor has a view different from me, I consider it my duty to abandon my convictions immediately.’ He did so now.

  ‘The great matter of the emancipation is almost done,’ Alexander told Bariatinsky, ‘and to be completed has only to go through the State Council.’ On 27 January 1861, Alexander addressed the Council: ‘You can change details but the fundamental must remain unaltered . . . The autocracy established serfdom and it’s up to the autocracy to abolish it.’ The decree was approved.

  On the night of 18 February, twenty-four cannon stood primed outside the Winter Palace, and cavalry patrolled the streets; Alexander spent the night at his sister’s palace with horse and carriage ready to gallop in case revolution struck. Next morning, the tsar, accompanied by his eldest sons Nikolai (‘Nixa’) and Alexander (‘Sasha’), and joined by Kostia and Sanny with their naughty eldest son Nikolai (‘Nikola’) led a procession to the Great Church of the Winter Palace. After what Kostia called ‘marvellous prayers’, the tsar presided over a jovial family breakfast. Then Alexander invited the heir Nixa, as well as Kostia, to enter his study. ‘First he read it out loud,’ wrote Kostia in his diary, ‘and after crossing himself he signed. I poured sand on the ink. He gave the pen to Nixa. A new era has begun. They predicted revolution.’ Twenty-two million serfs were freed. ‘In spite of all the fears of alarmists’, his ‘great work’ passed ‘in perfect calm’, the tsar wrote to Bariatinsky. It was a grand compromise,* but it was also probably the greatest achievement of Russian autocracy. ‘God knows where we would have ended up on the matter of squires and peasants if the authority of the tsar had not been powerful enough,’ Alexander told the Prussian ambassador Otto von Bismarck soon afterwards.