The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Dear Sasha, In the event of my death, I entrust my wife and children to your care. Your friendly disposition towards them, which you displayed from the very first and which was a true joy for us, makes me believe you will not abandon them. Don’t forget me and pray for your Pa who loves you tenderly.

  The day of their return, the tsar held ‘a family dinner . . . I begged not to be present,’ recalled Katya, but Alexander insisted: ‘You’re the wife I’m proud of and my family should bow before the object of their father’s happiness.’ Katya did not seek their approval: ‘I never gave myself an air of importance, but I knew how to hold myself with the emperor’s daughters-in-law . . . I ceded them the honours, but they shouldn’t forget I was the wife of their Sovereign.’

  Alexander was ‘horrified by the mass of spitefulness’ and praised Katya’s ‘charm and your beauty which enrages the other women, furious at all the [male] looks directed at you’. Besides, ‘your family is older than the Romanovs’ and Russian – ‘which infuriated his family, above all the Germans’. She was in her prime. ‘This beauty’, observed a courtier, ‘was still well preserved and in fact had become more splendid.’

  Minny encouraged Sasha’s fury on his mother’s behalf. He confronted his father and told him he was decamping to Denmark. Alexander’s response was to say that if Sasha disobeyed him, ‘you will no longer be heir’. Sasha retreated. But when Yurievskaya presented herself to Minny at a Winter Palace reception, ‘To comply with court etiquette, the grand duchess gave her hand but did not kiss her as the tsar had evidently expected’, noted a courtier. ‘The emperor broke into a torrent of impassioned language’, exclaiming, ‘Sasha is a good son, but you – you have no heart.’ Katya fumed that his ‘heart of gold’ should tolerate ‘the monsters in his family’ who were as ‘heartless as they were uneducated’.*

  He was in a race against time, against the terrorists and his son. ‘If I had a capable replacement on whom I could depend,’ he told Katya, he would have abdicated already. The emperor fought back tears when he kissed the children good night: ‘When I’m no longer around, think and pray for your Papachka and don’t forget his love for you.’39

  *

  On 4 January 1881 in his study at the Winter Palace, Alexander and Loris approved the plan of reform that ‘would be special and strong but would have nothing in common with . . . Europe’. This timid measure did not establish an instant liberal democracy but it certainly marked the beginning of a changed path for Russia. The Romanovs could no longer ‘rest on a thousand bayonets’, said Alexander Abaza, the liberal finance minister, ‘and an army of officials’. Autocracy had to evolve and widen participation. Alexander recorded Miliutin’s advice: ‘These reforms are the only way to get me out of my grave political position and consolidate the Romanov dynasty.’ But they might as easily have accelerated the dynasty’s collapse, as Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms destroyed the Soviet Union. Combined with the bad idea of crowning Katya, this could have led to a reactionary coup, like that of August 1991 against Gorbachev.* More likely it would have broadened support for the autocracy – but its real nature depended on the attitude of the tsar, and his diaries prove that he saw this as a step towards a constitution.

  Loris was rounding up the terrorists. On 25 January 1881, a denunciation exposed a terrorist cell in a cheese shop on Malaya Sadova Street which Alexander travelled past every Sunday to review troops at the Mikhailovsky Manège. But there were two ways to get there and no one knew which he would choose. The police raided the house but found nothing.

  The emperor was rejuvenated† by reform and by Katya – he was breezy, acting at ‘sixty-four like an eighteen-year-old’. He even introduced her to Pobedonostsev but the sexless Torquemada was repulsed by her wanton appeal – ‘Just a wench!’ he spat.

  At a family supper, the grand master of ceremonies thrice tapped the floor with his ivory-handled staff and announced: ‘His Majesty the Emperor and Princess Yurievskaya.’ Grand Duke Sandro, the tsar’s fifteen-year-old nephew, was rapt as ‘The emperor walked in briskly with a strikingly attractive woman on his arm’ and ‘gave a gay wink to my father [Mikhail]’ before glancing at ‘the massive figure of the Heir’. Sandro recorded that ‘[I] couldn’t take my eyes off her – I liked the sad expression of her beautiful face and the radiance of her rich blonde hair.’ But ‘she knew she was hated’ and ‘frequently turned to the emperor’, who ‘whispered words of encouragement in her small ear’. Then at the end of dinner, a governess led in the children. ‘Ah there’s my Gogo,’ cried Alexander as the seven-year-old started to ‘rearrange his whiskers. “Tell us, Gogo, what’s your full name?”’

  ‘Prince Georgi Alexandrovich Yurievsky.’

  ‘Glad to make your acquaintance, Prince Yurievsky,’ said the emperor. ‘By the way, prince, how would you like to be a grand duke?’

  Sasha’s teenage son, the future Nicholas II, ‘seemed to enjoy immensely the idea of having acquired a seven-year-old uncle at the age of thirteen’. Minny was horrified that her children were cavorting with the spawn of the Odalisque. Sandro thought that Katya ‘would have succeeded in winning over the men had they not been watched by the women’. Afterwards his mother Olga declared: ‘I shall never recognize that scheming adventuress. I hate her!’

  ‘Whether good, bad or indifferent,’ replied Mikhail, ‘she is married to the tsar.’

  At meetings at the Winter Palace then at the Anichkov, the tsar’s Commission, chaired by Valuev, approved the reform plan – and Sasha acquiesced. On 17 February, ‘I signed with great joy,’ wrote Alexander, ‘and decided to reread it before the Council on 4 March.’ Loris planned to publish the decree on the reforms on the same day as the one on Katya’s coronation. Alexander was amused by this ‘Armenian ruse, though I confess it’s tactful and intelligent’.

  Sasha had turned against the liberal Loris, ‘angry because he is courting Princess Yurievskaya’. Pobedonostsev observed how ‘this master-manipulator-charmer became even stronger because he untangled an even more confused knot in the stricken family’, finding himself a new patron ‘in a certain woman’. Then this minister let rip, in a letter to his confidante, against his emperor: ‘Forgive this man, O Lord, for he knows not what he does . . . it sickens me to look at him!’ As for the emperor, he sensed Sasha’s disloyalty: ‘I look forward to living quietly without feeling that someone close to me is calculating the number of days left for me to live.’40

  ‘Are the Palace guards completely safe?’ Loris asked Alexander on 22 February.

  ‘Are there traitors in my own house? If so,’ replied the emperor, ‘a poor peasant must be happier than me, the tsar of Russia.’ Loris reassured him. The police had not yet caught Perovskaya, who the tsar wrote on 20 February was ‘a real terrorist capable of killing anyone who stands in her way’. They had found nothing at the shop on Sadova, yet on 23 February an unknown person delivered a warning to Katya via her brother that ‘I am in great danger and I should be very prudent.’ But four days later, Loris arrested the ‘famous Zhelyabov’. Perhaps this relieved the ‘great danger’?

  On the 28th, the police, this time led by a general, again searched the house on Malaya Sadova, after being warned that the terrorists had dynamited a tunnel under the road. They found nothing again. At the very least, the police were negligent and clueless. At worst, they were traitors. Their boss was Sasha’s friend Cherevin, deputy interior minister, who later admitted, ‘I owe my career to Alexander II, but it’s good they got rid of him or he’d have led Russia to disaster.’

  Loris warned Katya that the assassins were still out there. ‘Every Sunday,’ she wrote, ‘I beseeched [Alexander] not to go to the parade because it tormented me, but he was frustrated not to see his adored troops.’

  Adlerberg begged the tsar not to go the next day.

  ‘Listen, Adlerberg,’ shouted Alexander, ‘I’ve told you before and I command you now: don’t dare tell me anything about attempts on my life. Take whatever measures you and [city governo
r Adrian] Dvorzhitsky think necessary but leave me in peace!’ That night, ‘I felt nervous.’ Dr Botkin gave him valerian drops.

  The next morning was Sunday 1 March. On Sundays, the tsar loved to review the Guards at the Mikhailovsky Manège. ‘Although a pessimist, Loris is in good humour this morning.’ Alexander approved the announcement of the reforms, which would be signed off at the Council on the 4th. Katya begged him not to attend the parade but Alexander did not want to disappoint Kostia’s son Dmitri – it was his first time as aide-de-camp.

  The tsar did two things that always comforted him: he wrote his diary and then, pulling up Katya’s skirts, he ‘toppled her on to a table and took her’, before, at 12.45, heading out in his bullet-proof carriage, a gift from Napoleon III, escorted by six Cossacks on horseback with another beside the coachman, followed by two sleighs, one conveying Colonel Dvorzhitsky, and the other the imperial bodyguards under Captain Kokh. ‘To the Manège,’ he ordered the coachman, via Catherine Canal.

  ‘The parade went very well,’ recalled Miliutin, who was with him, ‘the tsar was pleased by everything and in a good mood, joking.’ Afterwards Sasha returned to the Anichkov Palace for lunch, while the tsar ordered the coachman: ‘To the Winter Palace by the same route.’ He was returning by the Catherine Canal.

  The intelligence warnings about the cheese shop on Sadova were entirely accurate. For months, Zhelyabov’s terrorists had been excavating under the street to blow the tsar to smithereens after his Sunday parade. If he took the other route, they trained to abandon the tunnel and rush to kill him on the Catherine Canal. Zhelyabov’s arrest would have aborted the plan were it not for the ruthless drive of Sophia Perovskaya.

  Outside the cheese store, Perovskaya saw the Gendarmes vanish – which meant the tsar was taking the other route. She waved her handkerchief, which ordered her four terrorists to the Canal.

  The tsar stopped at the Mikhailovsky Palace, where he and his brother Mikhail took tea for thirty minutes with their cousin, Elena’s daughter Maria.

  At 2.15, the tsar mounted his armoured Napoleonic carriage and headed down Catherine Canal. As the convoy approached Konyushenny Bridge, a young man, Nikolai Rysakov, tossed a bomb under the carriage. When the smoke cleared, the carriage was intact, with just its rear end damaged, but one of the mounted Cossacks and a young passer-by lay dying on the street, while a policeman and another passer-by stood wounded. As the guards caught the bomb-thrower, finding a pistol and knife in his coat, the emperor dismounted and crossed himself. He had miraculously survived a sixth time, but ‘He was unsteady and understandably upset,’ recalled Dvorzhitsky, who asked if he was okay.

  ‘Thank God, I’m not wounded,’ replied Alexander. Dvorzhitsky offered him a ride home in his sleigh just as he heard the arrested terrorist addressing someone in the crowd and simultaneously understood that there was another bomber. He asked the tsar to leave at once; the coachman begged him to get back into the carriage. ‘But His Majesty, without a word in response to the coachman’s request, turned and headed towards the pavement on the canal side,’ walking alone, followed by the colonel and four dismounted Cossacks leading their horses. ‘They surrounded the tsar,’ who almost slipped and was steadied by Dvorzhitsky. Alexander wanted to talk to the terrorist, Rysakov, held by four soldiers. ‘How’s the tsar?’ asked an officer, not recognizing him.

  ‘Thank God, I’m fine,’ answered Alexander. He gestured at the dead and wounded. ‘But look . . .’

  ‘Don’t thank God yet!’ cried out the terrorist.

  Alexander asked him his class, and was relieved to learn that he was not a nobleman. ‘A fine one, you are!’ he reprimanded him, then turned back towards the carriage. Dvorzhitsky again begged the tsar to get into the sleigh. He hesitated.

  ‘All right, but first show me the site of the explosion.’ Some soldiers from the parade had arrived and flanked the tsar with the Cossacks and bodyguards, and he was inspecting the hole in the road, deciding what to do next, when a young man, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, leaning on the canal railings, suddenly turned and threw a bomb at Alexander’s feet. The blast knocked everyone down – the tsar, Dvorzhitsky, Cossacks. Twenty lay on the street, some crawling, some dead, some stirring. Amid the snow and debris ‘you could see epaulettes, sabres, and bloody chunks of human flesh’. The suicide-bomber himself lay dying.

  The explosions reverberated across the city. At the Anichkov Palace, Sasha and Minny, who was getting her son Nicholas ready for ice-skating with his cousin Sandro, heard them. They looked at each other ominously.

  On the Catherine Canal, the tsar lay near the ‘deafened, burned, wounded’ Dvorzhitsky. But as the smoke cleared ‘I heard His Majesty’s weak voice: ‘Help!’ Gathering what strength I had,’ wrote Dvorzhitsky, ‘I rushed to the tsar, half-lying, half-sitting, leaning on his right arm. Thinking that he was merely wounded heavily, I tried to lift him but the tsar’s legs were shattered and blood poured out of them.’

  Alexander’s cap had fallen off, his coat was shredded, his face bloodied, one eye half closed, the other staring into space. ‘Cold, I’m cold,’ he murmured, just as Mikhail, wearing parade uniform, arrived in his carriage and knelt beside him. ‘Take me to the Palace . . . there . . . to . . . die!’ gasped the emperor. Nearby a third terrorist, Ivan Yemelyanov, saw that his bomb would not be needed. The blood throbbed out of the tsar’s body.*

  Alexander lost consciousness. Instead of bandaging his legs with a tourniquet or taking him to a hospital, the crowd, who included the terrorist Yemelyanov, lifted him on to the sleigh where he continued to bleed as it raced towards the Winter Palace. He was carried up the marble staircase to his study, leaving a trail of blood. They pulled his camp bed out of the alcove and laid him there, ‘completely unconscious’, half sitting up, his face towards the window, shirt open, a Prussian medal round his neck, still wearing one bloodied glove. Mikhail sent an aide to the Anichkov Palace. There Minny was holding Nicholas’s ice-skates and anxiously discussing the crump of the two explosions when they saw a sleigh speeding down Nevsky Prospect with an officer standing up in it. They sensed what it meant. Sasha ran down the steps. Seconds later he and Minny, accompanied by little Nicholas and his ice-skates, were racing by sleigh towards the Winter Palace, where the first doctor had just arrived.

  ‘The first thing I noticed’, recalled Dr Markus, ‘was the terrible disfigurement of the lower limbs, especially the left leg, which, below the knee, was a shattered bloody mass; the right leg was also damaged. Both shattered legs were cold.’ The doctor tried to press the arteries to staunch the bleeding. Dr Botkin and the other doctors arrived. At the foot of the bed, Mikhail stood sobbing, while back at his own palace a servant was announcing to his wife Olga and son Sandro that both the tsar and Mikhail had been killed. They too raced towards the Winter Palace along with some Preobrazhensky Guards rushing to defend the family.

  When he arrived, Sandro followed ‘the big spots of black blood on the marble steps and then along the corridor to the tsar’s study’ where he found his father unharmed, which was such a relief that his mother, hastening after him, fainted. The emperor ‘looked horrible, one eye shut, the other staring’. Sasha cried, ‘This is what we’ve come to,’ while his wife Minny still held Nicholas’s ice-skates. Sandro ‘clung to the arm of Nicky, deathly pale in his blue sailor’s suit’, and started to cry.

  ‘Steady, my boy, steady,’ said the towering Sasha, squeezing his shoulders.

  The courtier Alexandra Tolstoya was in her room when Varenka Nelidova – Nicholas I’s ex-mistress, now in her sixties – burst in: ‘The emperor’s just been brought in wounded on a sleigh . . .’ Tolstoya ran through the entire palace to reach the study, where she heard Grand Duke Vladimir order troops to secure Palace Square. The entire family and the chief ministers Loris and Miliutin had arrived. The room was packed. Tolstoya was shocked to see the emperor ‘lying in a shirt on his camp bed, which had been brought out into the middle of the room, covered with a drape that left his smashed
legs open – a horrible sight. I looked away.’

  Suddenly there was a commotion. Perhaps an officious grand duke had tried to stop her entering, but then Katya, ‘half-dressed, ran in, fell on top of the tsar’s body kissing his hands’ and crying out his name. She ordered the doctors ‘to bring pillows, to bring oxygen, to try to revive the emperor’.

  The grand duchesses started to sob. Alexander was given oxygen, but his breathing rattled. He did not move, noticed Tolstoya – except for his little finger. ‘I didn’t take my eyes off him.’ Father Bazhenov administered communion and extreme unction – and the tsar swallowed the wine.

  Katya and Sasha held his head. Sasha asked Botkin how long his father would live. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ replied the doctor. ‘A hoarse voice called out: “Silence please; the end is near!”’ A deep silence reigned in the crowded room. ‘Everyone held their breath,’ recalled Tolstoya.

  ‘The emperor is dead,’ said Dr Botkin at 3.30, releasing the tsar’s bloodied wrist to the cries of his widow. A ‘terrible sob burst from all chests’, while ‘Princess Yurievskaya shrieked and dropped to the floor like a felled tree,’ noted Sandro, ‘her pink and white peignoir soaked in blood.’ Sasha, ‘now our young sovereign, lay before the body of his father, shedding floods of tears’. Then, ‘standing up, he noticed Princess Yurievskaya, walked up to her and hugged her’. Next he embraced Tolstoya.

  The family knelt as one around the body; ‘looking to my right’, wrote Sandro, ‘I saw the new ruler of Russia’, Alexander III. ‘A strange change came over him in an instant,’ no longer the bovine joker.

  ‘I saw the illegitimate children of the emperor come in, led by Madame Shebeko,’ wrote Tolstoya. ‘The poor babies looked frightened and didn’t understand.’ Then ‘two Guards carried Princess Yurievskaya to her suite, doctors dressed the body of the late emperor and Gogo cried in tormented bewilderment.’ All of this, the death, the shrieking, was witnessed by Nicholas.