The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  She and a companion set off on a European tour to ease her nerves. The courtiers presumed that this was the end of yet another minor fling – and forgot the Smolny schoolgirl. Perhaps this was meant to be the end. Madame Shebeko produced Katya’s pretty sister Maria, who loved him too.19

  The Prussians had vanquished Austria and expelled it for ever from Germany. Ever since Napoleon I, the Romanovs had treated the Hohenzollerns as their trustiest allies but also as poor relations – ‘the weakest of the weak’, thought Gorchakov with an astonishing lack of foresight. But they were not weak any more. Now Prussia challenged France, the last obstacle to Prussian mastery of Germany. Alexander revered his uncle King Wilhelm and despised Napoleon III, but he agreed to attend the World Fair in Paris which Napoleon had promoted.

  He believed that Napoleon III had ‘caused the premature death of my father’, he wrote in his diary. ‘I confess I certainly didn’t go to Paris for his sake!’ Really he went for the sake of someone else entirely.

  On 20 May 1867 at the Gare du Nord, Napoleon met Alexander, accompanied by his sons Sasha and Vladimir, and escorted them to the Elysée. Unfriendly crowds shouted ‘Long live Poland!’ At around midnight, the emperor awoke Adlerberg, the old court minister. ‘I’ll go for a walk,’ said Alexander.

  Adlerberg was flabbergasted: the tsar must be accompanied.

  ‘No need to accompany me. I’ll manage on my own but please, dear, give me a little money.’

  ‘How much does His Majesty require?’

  ‘No idea; how about 100,000 francs?’

  As the tsar disappeared into the Parisian night, Adlerberg awoke Shuvalov, who explained that Alexander would be followed by both Russian and French detectives. But the two counts waited up anxiously for Alexander’s return.

  Out in the street, the tsar hailed a taxi and headed out to the rue de la Paix, where he was dropped off. Consulting a note under a gaslight, he entered a house but the gates shut and he could not get out of the courtyard. He tried to open the gates until a Russian agent came over and pointed to the bellrope. The emperor entered the next-door house where Katya Dolgorukaya was waiting.

  ‘I’ll never forget our first meeting in rue de la Paix, Paris!’ he wrote later. ‘We were mad for each other’ – and when he was with her, ‘nothing else existed for us!’ The secretive tsar had said nothing to his entourage about Katya.

  Back at the Elysée, ‘terrible possibilities flashed in our minds’, recalled Shuvalov. ‘The idea of the tsar alone in Paris streets in the middle of the night, with 100,000 in his pocket, gave us nightmares. The idea that he could be in someone’s house never occurred to us!’

  Finally, at 3 a.m., he returned. Shuvalov wept with relief, eagerly listening to the reports of his agents on the tsar’s adventure. Only in hindsight did Shuvalov work out that the entire trip had really been arranged around Katya. Paris, Katya herself recalled, ‘was only charming because we had each other, and his obligation to see the Exhibition and other duties bored him because his only aim was me and he only came for that!’

  After the military show at Longchamp, Alexander shared his open carriage home with Napoleon, while Sasha and Vladimir sat behind them.

  As they trotted through the Bois de Boulogne, a young man fired twice at Alexander. The shots missed and the assassin was captured. The tsar and his sons considered cutting the trip short but Empress Eugénie beseeched Alexander to stay, while Napoleon informed him that the assassin was a Polish émigré. The pro-Polish French newspapers applauded the deed; tsar and heir could not wait to get home.

  The tsar attributed this second escape to Katya: ‘each time, my guardian angel’.20

  *

  Alexander himself regarded Napoleon III’s upstart empire as doomed. Napoleon could not allow a unified Germany and that now brought him into conflict with Prussia. At Alexander’s frequent meetings with his uncle Wilhelm and Bismarck, the latter suggested that Prussia would support Russia’s release from the treaty that ended the Crimean War – if Russia would protect Prussia’s eastern flank against Austria. Alexander was happy to help.

  In July 1870 Bismarck got his opportunity. Wilhelm’s cousin was offered the throne of Spain. France objected and the offer was refused but the French foreign minister demanded that Wilhelm promise that the Spanish offer would never be accepted. Playing on the king’s wounded sense of honour, Bismarck persuaded Wilhelm to declare war on France. The Franco-Prussian War changed the shape of Europe. Unexpectedly, the Prussians decisively defeated the much vaunted French army in a modern, swift and efficient campaign. At the Battle of Sedan, Napoleon himself was captured. The people of Paris revolted and Napoleon abdicated, going into English exile. The Prussians proceeded to besiege Paris and force a humiliating peace on France, annexing the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.

  In the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Bismarck declared a German empire, a federation of kingdoms with Wilhelm as kaiser, creating an ingenious hybrid constitution that combined absolute monarchy with parliamentary democracy. He conceded universal suffrage and workers’ welfare to disarm liberals and socialists, and deployed glorious nationalism to win popular support for his kaiser. This was so delicately balanced that it could be controlled only by the imperial chancellor, Bismarck himself.

  Alexander was naturally on the side of Uncle Wilhelm. Initially he was so thrilled by the victory of his ‘best friend’ that he sent medals to the German generals. And he noted: ‘I’ve just tried on my new Prussian uniform which suits me well.’

  ‘Prussia will never forget she is beholden to you that the war didn’t take a regrettable turn,’ wrote the kaiser to the tsar. ‘Your friend until death. Wilhelm.’ Bismarck delivered on his promise, enabling Gorchakov in November 1870 to revoke the ban on Black Sea fortifications. ‘The stone that oppressed my heart for fifteen years has just been lifted,’ wrote Alexander, but ‘the future lies in union with our powerful neighbour’. The Russians had not expected Germany to win such a dazzling victory over France and Gorchakov had sensibly advised the French not to be provoked. The German empire became a power-house that now directly bordered Russia; its industrial wealth, technical sophistication and modern army exposed Russian weakness and, however friendly the Romanovs and Hohenzollerns, there was bound to be some friction between Germany’s fresh ambitions and Russia’s traditional aspirations.

  Sasha, influenced by his Danish wife Minny, criticized the ‘shortsighted government’ (meaning his father) for helping these ‘Prussian pigs’. Alexander perhaps missed a chance to join in with Prussia and destroy Austrian power. That was not Bismarck’s plan, for he now needed Austria to limit Russia. He brought together Alexander and Franz Josef in his League of Three Emperors which, for now at least, gave Russia security and neutralized Balkan rivalries with Austria. The tsar celebrated with the kaiser and the ‘Iron Chancellor’ in Berlin and Petersburg, where, at the theatre, the old Hohenzollern was enraptured by the legs of the ballerinas. ‘Wilhelm certainly likes skirts,’ Alexander recorded in his diary. ‘He followed the scene without detaching his lorgnette from his eyes. Oh what an uncle!’21

  Every day, Alexander met Katya ‘my naughty minx’ at the townhouse he had rented for her on the English Quay which they called ‘our nest’. They wrote several times a day even after they had just seen each other, perhaps the most explicit correspondence ever written by a head of state, using their pet names to describe their love-making:* Les bingerles was sex itself. They both had uninhibited and exuberant libidos, but their unique circumstances meant they never lost the frenzied passion of new lovers. ‘I confess these memories reawaken my rage to plunge inside your delirious coquillage again,’ he would write. ‘Oh oh oh I’m smiling about it, I’m not ashamed, it’s natural!’

  He was delighted when she took the initiative. ‘I enjoyed until delirium’, wrote the emperor, ‘lying still on the sofa while you moved on me yourself . . . we’re made for each other and I see you before my eyes, now in bed, now without knickers.’ He prai
sed her intense capacity for pleasure: ‘I joyfully felt your fountain [ta fontaine] watering me several times which redoubled my pleasure,’ he wrote. On another day, he praised her coquille that ‘went crazy attaching herself to me like a leech’ and frequently sent ‘compliments from mon bingerle which is fully armed’.

  She relished the love-making as much as he, writing, ‘You know I want you. I received immense pleasure and feel overwhelmed by it, pleasure incomparable to anything else.’ She confessed, ‘I took pleasure like a mad thing under our dear blanket. This pleasure has no name, as we are the only ones who feel it.’ She counted the hours till they met: ‘My sleep was restless and short, I’m filled with seething and can’t wait 2.¼ hours to see you, don’t be late, I kiss you my angel, cuckoo, my everything!’

  The tsar thought ‘your body is so appetizing’ that he sketched her naked: the drawing shows her voluptuous figure and her thick tresses, usually tied up in a bun, down to her waist.

  They devoured each other across court receptions: ‘Our eyes couldn’t help searching each other out . . . I found your outfit astounding and in my eyes you were the most beautiful of the pretty girls. But you were a little pale.’ He wanted to waltz with her ‘but I think you understood I decided to dance with others only so I could dance with you. I could sense we wanted bingerle.’

  They plotted each day ‘so tomorrow we will be able to see each other during the morning walk’, he wrote. ‘Our meeting on Sadovaya Street was a ray of sunshine,’ she enthused. ‘You looked so wonderful in your hussar helmet that I was proud of my dream husband.’ They regarded themselves as already married in ‘a cult of us’: ‘I admit,’ she wrote, ‘nothing compares to the joy of taking pleasure in a frenzy of feeling as we belong to each other only before God and our bond is for ever.’

  His doctors tried to limit their lovemaking sessions. After Alexander had talked of ‘four times’, ‘on every piece of furniture’ and ‘in every room’, she suggested that ‘If you think we overtire ourselves, let’s rest a few days.’ That was at 11 a.m.; by midnight, she was adding, ‘This evening, I want you,’ and by eleven o’clock next morning, ‘I slept restlessly, everything inside me trembles, I can’t wait till 4.45.’

  ‘He had no one who really thought of him,’ she wrote. ‘I worried for him all the time.’ Finding he was sleeping on ‘a bed as hard as stone’, his father’s army cot, ‘I replaced it with soft bedsprings.’ Noticing that he was reviewing troops during winter wearing a summer tunic, ‘I introduced uniforms of impermeable materials.’ Truth is always a rare commodity in an autocracy, but when ministers lied to him, ‘I was a lioness to stop him being tricked – his glory was my life.’

  Yet this life was hard for her; it is the mistress’s destiny always to be waiting. ‘I saw no one. I followed him everywhere, lodging in shacks and attics, experiencing terrible privations but with happiness (the essential thing was to see him).’ Courtiers gossiped maliciously. ‘Oh how sad’, the tsar wrote sympathetically, ‘that you face unpleasantness.’ He thought sex was the answer: ‘What a pity I can’t fly to you to cheer you and have bingerle to forget the world.’

  Yet she could be forceful, obstinate and sharp tongued, calling herself ‘this darling special despot who wants to be loved by her adored husband’. She was insecure. ‘I arrived full of love,’ he complained on 5 February 1871, ‘you received me like a dog and only became sweet when you saw that you’d pushed me to the edge!’ She believed gossip, but he reassured her: ‘I beg you not to believe everything you hear which mostly exists only in the imagination.’*

  The stress made her ill. Alexander sent her to ‘famous doctors’ who ‘announced to him that the only thing that could save me was to have children’. Soon she was pregnant, and she asked him to be faithful: ‘I know what you are capable of in one moment when you want to make it, to forget that you desire only me, and to go and make it with another woman.’ But pregnancy saved her.

  ‘We were created to bring forth his sacred conception before which everything else pales . . . I hope God doesn’t forsake me during the childbirth,’ she wrote on 12 November 1871, ‘which frightens me terribly.’ On 30 April 1872, Katya gave birth to a son, Georgi, on the couch in Alexander’s study at the Winter Palace. Afterwards she and the child returned to her townhouse. Ultimately they also had two daughters together.

  The poor empress realized that Alexander was in love with the mistress. When her ladies discussed how Mouffy had known about Nicholas’s mistress, she warned that if anyone mentioned such a thing to her, she would never see them again. Nixa’s death had reduced their marriage to a morbid cult of remembrance, celebrating his birthday and deathday together. ‘I ask you to respect the woman in me,’ she told Alexander, ‘even if you won’t be able to respect the empress.’ But wracked by her TB, she was often away, sent by the doctors to Livadia or Nice. The lovers longed for the empress’s death. At a wedding, Alexander’s eyes met Katya’s. ‘Our glances reflect our innermost feelings,’ Alexander wrote. ‘Because we would wish ourselves to be in place of the newly-weds.’22

  Alexander was not alone in his sinning. Grand-ducal carriages queued every night on Rossi Street outside the Imperial Ballet, which the Romanovs treated as an escort agency. The tsar’s brothers Kostia and Nizi (Nikolai) both had children with ballerinas. Only the youngest brother, Mikhail, was happily married.* But it was the young generation who provoked Alexander’s next crisis.

  ‘Returning from my walk, I had a disagreeable surprise from Alexis,’ wrote the tsar on 18 August 1871, ‘who announced his affair with a girl who’s now pregnant and he asked my consent to marry her and I lost an hour of my time for work.’

  Alexis, a lovable but shameless rogue, twenty-one years old, had joined the navy (he became a midshipman at the age of seven) and had already served long stints at sea. His girlfriend was a maid-of-honour, Alexandra Zhukovskaya, daughter of the poet, with whom Alexis had a son. ‘The intrigues of this demoiselle Zhukovskaya are beyond belief!’ grumbled Alexander, who despatched the prodigal sailor on a world tour that included an American visit to consolidate their alliance.

  Ten years earlier, Bertie, the prince of Wales, had been fêted by the Americans who liked royalty providing they were breezy, mischievous and ebullient – and Alexis was all of these. He met President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House, enjoyed assignations with a burlesque dancer in St Louis and an actress in New Orleans and then embarked on what the newspapers called ‘The Great Royal Buffalo Hunt’ in Nebraska. The grand duke’s companions were the finest of the Old West: General George Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody and Native American chief Spotted Tail. ‘Regarding my success with American ladies about which so much is written in the newspapers,’ Alexis claimed to his prudish mother, ‘I can honestly say it’s complete nonsense.’ Like many naughty princes since, he blamed media harassment for his own escapades: ‘They looked on me like a wild animal, like a crocodile!’23 But the tsar soon had family problems closer to home: a courtesan known as ‘the American’ had just arrived in Petersburg.

  ‘Anything that glitters captivates me,’ wrote Harriet Blackford, a saucy and bold-eyed blonde girl from Philadelphia who, after adventures under her new name ‘Fanny Lear’ with French millionaires and British royalty, arrived in pursuit of more glitter in Petersburg. ‘I soon found myself introduced to counts, barons and princes.’ Fanny expanded her clientele from elderly princes (‘the silver old age’) to ‘the golden youth’. At a masquerade at the Mariinsky Theatre, she noticed ‘a young man of 22, 6 feet tall, magnificently built, tall and slender’ with a dimpled chin, ‘lips, red, full, sensual and passionate’ and an expression of ‘mockery and scepticism . . . I was certain I had a Grand Duke in front of me.’

  ‘Do you know who I am, little one?’ he asked her. She took him home to her room at the Hôtel de France.

  Nikola, Kostia’s son and the tsar’s nephew, fell obsessively in love with her, making her sign an agreement of total possession: ‘I swear not to speak t
o nor to see anyone, never anywhere without permission of my august master as a well-brought-up American and I declare myself a slave in body and soul of a Grand Duke of Russia.’ In return, he promised her 100,000 roubles.

  Nikola commissioned a nude statue of Fanny that reveals her allure. (It still stands in his Tashkent palace.) He was jealous, an occupational hazard with a courtesan, and flew into rages. She was insecure and demanded jewels. At first his father was intrigued by his son’s mistress. ‘Nikola, I think it’s the American,’ laughed Kostia when Nikola hid the giggling grande horizontale in the Marble Palace, ‘and I wish to see her because they say she’s very pretty.’ Soon Kostia and Alexander were worried about the hold the American had gained over Nikola. In February 1873, Kostia reprimanded his son; then the emperor resorted to the Romanov equivalent of a British father despatching a reprobate to the colonies: he sent him to fight in Central Asia.24

  ‘We are in Asia!’ Nikola wrote to Fanny on his way to fight the khan of Khiva. ‘Goodbye Europe! Goodbye Fanny Lear, my love!’

  Nikola arrived on the steppe to join the new Great Game, the struggle for Central Asia and the borderlands of India waged between Russia and Britain. ‘Here I am a staff officer of the Russian army of Central Asia, the same army that one beautiful day will cross Afghanistan to occupy British India!’ Nikola told Fanny on 8 March 1873.

  After the disaster of the Crimean War, Russia was scarcely strong enough to project power against modern industrialized powers, but Alexander and Bariatinsky saw the three main kingdoms of Central Asia as a way to reinvigorate Russian arms, promote trade and threaten British India. Here, Bariatinsky told Alexander, a British army could be lured ‘to the edge of the world’ and annihilated. Gorchakov justified this imperialism, arguing that ‘all civilized nations’ were forced to expand their empires to defend their frontiers from ‘half-savage nomads’. The officers who had once flocked to the Caucasus became the conquistadors of Central Asia.