The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The new tsar, Alexander III, was convinced that this tragedy had started with his mother’s death and his father’s remarriage. ‘All the scum burst out and swallowed all that was holy,’ he later wrote to Minny. ‘The guardian angel flew away and everything turned to ashes, finally culminating in the dreadful incomprehensible 1 March.’ Now he would restore sanctity to Russia.

  ‘A fire burned in his tranquil eyes,’ noticed Sandro. ‘A look of sacred determination had suddenly appeared in his cold sharp eyes. He rose. His relatives stood at attention.’

  ‘Have you orders, Your Majesty?’ asked the city’s police chief.

  ‘Of course,’ replied Alexander III. ‘The police have lost their heads. The army will take charge. I’ll confer with my ministers immediately at the Anichkov Palace.’ Sasha left with Minny – ‘Her miniature figure highlighted the mighty build of the new emperor.’ A crowd had gathered outside and now they cheered ‘this bearded giant with the shoulders of Hercules’. Surrounded by a phalanx of 100 Don Cossacks in attack formation, ‘red lances shining in the last rays of a crimson March sunset’, they rode home to Anichkov.

  Vladimir emerged to address the crowd with the traditional words at the demise of a tsar, carefully chosen not to mention the word ‘death’: ‘The emperor has bidden you to live long!’41

  More assassinations were expected at any moment. ‘When you decide to sleep, lock the doors behind you, not only in your bedroom but all the adjoining rooms,’ Pobedonostsev wrote to the young tsar. ‘Check alarm bells before sleep since a lead wire might have been cut. Check the tsar’s apartments to see no one has got in during the day.’

  Loris proposed pushing ahead with the constitutional reforms, but Pobedonostsev warned the tsar, ‘If they sing You the old sirens’ song that You should continue the liberal course, for God’s sake, Your Majesty, don’t believe them! This would be disastrous for You and Russia! The mindless malefactors who killed Your father won’t be satisfied by more concessions, they’ll become crueller.’ As for Loris, ‘Pardon my frankness. Don’t keep Loris. I don’t trust him. He’s a trickster. Not a Russian patriot.’ Sasha was ‘lost in indecision’.

  Pobedonostsev searched for a hard man to crush the terrorists. ‘May I remind you about Baranov,’ he wrote to the emperor. ‘A man devoted to You and he knows how to act when it is necessary.’ Alexander III appointed the naval captain Nikolai Baranov as city governor, a truculent fantasist, who had been demoted by Kostia for inventing naval heroics during the war. Baranov only intensified the panic, lurching around drunk, having trenches dug before the Winter Palace (and somehow finding time to seduce Pobedonostsev’s young wife). His new Commission of Public Order included an aristocratic bodyguard called the Sacred Retinue. ‘The drama’, noted Valuev, ‘is turning into comedy.’

  On 8 March, Alexander called a Council of Ministers at which Pobedonostsev launched a jeremiad, warning of ‘the end of Russia. I find myself not only in confusion but in despair . . . When do they propose a new parliament based on foreign models? Now only a few days after the nefarious deed when the remains of the benevolent tsar are not yet buried.’ Denouncing all Alexander II’s liberal reforms, he warned that ‘Constitutions are the weapons of all untruth and the source of all intrigue!’

  A few days later, Count Nikolai Ignatiev, the unscrupulous exambassador to Constantinople who had been becalmed in a provincial governorship, wrote to the tsar to denounce ‘the Polish-Yiddish yelps’ of ‘the large Polish-Yiddish group that controls the stock market, much of the press’ and had drowned out true Russian voices. The tsar declared that Ignatiev was ‘a real native Russian’ and appointed him a minister.

  Baranov uncovered yet another conspiracy and advised the emperor to abandon the capital. On 29 March, Alexander and his family rushed out to Gatchina, which became their main home. ‘To think after having faced Turkish guns, I have to retreat now before these skunks,’ the tsar grumbled to his family. But Pobedonostsev now regretted promoting the manic charlatan Baranov. ‘Baranov is enshrouded by fog. I don’t know what he’s doing but in my soul I don’t trust him. I am afraid there is something going on here.’ He suspected that Baranov’s plan was ‘to frighten a young tsar and put him in his power’. At least Loris had captured the assassins. On 3 April, Zhelyabov, Perovskaya and three others were hanged.

  Meanwhile, the tsar ordered Loris to deal with his father’s widow, still living with her children in the Winter Palace. On 10 April, Loris persuaded her to give up her apartments. Sasha gave her a new Petersburg home, the Pink Palace.* She hated him.

  The liberals were at war with Torquemada. ‘I’m living with madmen,’ said Pobedonostsev, ‘and they think I’m an idiot from the sixteenth century!’ He ranted at Loris: ‘I’m a believer . . . You idolators worship idols of freedom, all idols, idols!’

  On 21 April, the tsar met them again at Gatchina. This time, Pobedonostsev was conciliatory, Alexander positive, and Loris and Miliutin left in triumph. But things were not as they seemed. ‘They want to lead us to representative government,’ the tsar wrote to Pobedonostsev. ‘I won’t permit it.’ The ober-procurator saw his chance, sending the tsar a draft manifesto: ‘You must speak out.’

  ‘I approve wholeheartedly,’ wrote the tsar on 26 April. ‘Meet tomorrow at 2 to talk.’ Pobedonostsev hurried to Gatchina. The next evening, at a meeting in Loris’s home, the imminent publication of an imperial manifesto was suddenly revealed. ‘Such unexpected news struck us like lightning,’ recalled Miliutin. ‘What manifesto? Who prepared it?’ Pobedonostsev admitted that it was he. The ministers screamed at him. Pobedonostsev, sure that ‘TRUTH is with me,’ fled lest ‘the frenzied Asiatic Loris’ should try some Armenian ruse.

  The liberals resigned.† ‘They wanted to take me into their clutches and enslave me,’ Alexander told his younger brother Sergei, ‘but they failed and I’m especially happy to get away from Count Loris who, with just a bit more of his liberal tricks, would have brought the eve of revolution.’ Alexander appointed Ignatiev as interior minister (sacking the fantasist Baranov).

  The era of reform was over. ‘In the midst of Our great grief,’ announced Alexander III, ‘the voice of God bids Us to stand staunchly for government relying on God’s design with faith in the truth of autocratic power.’42 The tsar would rule like a curmudgeonly landowner.

  * He was a cousin of the commander in the Crimea. A friend of Pushkin, then Nesselrode’s aide at the congresses of the 1820s, Gorchakov, an intellectual owl in round spectacles, old-fashioned velvet waistcoat and long jacket, described by Pushkin as a ‘disciple of fashion, friend of high society, observer of dazzling customs’, could quote whole stanzas of Schiller and Byron. As the tsar promoted Gorchakov, he retired Chancellor Nesselrode, moved War Minister Dolgoruky to head the secret police and appointed Orlov president of the State Council.

  † Sugar nabob, racehorse-owner, bourse-speculator, art-collector, political manipulator and connoisseur of courtesans, Morny was himself a piece of Napoleonic legend – the grandson of both Talleyrand and Empress Josephine. He had organized the coup that made his half-brother emperor. Morny was the fruit of the affair between the comte de Flahaut, son of Talleyrand, and Hortense de Beauharnais, queen of Holland, daughter of Josephine, wife of Napoleon’s younger brother Louis – and mother of Napoleon III.

  * Among his achievements, Bariatinsky gradually swallowed the last Georgian principalities. First was Abkhazia, ruled for forty years by the ex-Muslim Hamud Bey, who became Prince Mikheil Shervashidze; then Mingrelia was annexed from the Dadiani dynasty.

  * Morny returned home – with a wife. In his late forties, the roué fell in love with a Smolny schoolgirl, Princess Sophie Trubetskoi, possibly an illegitimate daughter of Nicholas I. After their marriage, Alexander and Marie called on the Mornys before he returned to Paris to be president of the Corps Legislatif. Rewarded with a dukedom, Morny’s early death in 1865 removed the one man who might have saved Napoleon III.

  † Elena was the patr
oness of Anton Rubinstein and his brother Nikolai, both Jewish-born pianists and composers. Anton Rubinstein played at her soirées in Petersburg and before the Romanovs in Nice. Together they founded the Russian Musical Society in 1859 and the Conservatoire in 1862. They patronised the young Tchaikovsky, who, aged nineteen, attended musical theory classes in Elena’s Mikhailovsky Palace.

  * Miliutin and his brother, Dmitri, a soldier, were the nephews of Count Pavel Kiselev, Nicholas I’s chief of staff for peasant affairs who had achieved limited reforms in relation to state peasants. While Miliutin planned serf emancipation, his brother Dmitri was Bariatinsky’s chief of staff in the Caucasus – and would soon become war minister.

  * And this was not the only good news from the empire. ‘In Asia, we’ve just pulled off two immense successes,’ Alexander told Bariatinsky. The irrepressible governor-general of eastern Siberia, Nikolai Muraviev, had agreed a new border on the Amur River with China, which had opened its cities to Russian trade. ‘Our position in Asia becomes much more powerful!’ Alexander raised Muraviev to count with the surname ‘Amursky’. The decaying empire of China gave Russia, checkmated in Europe, the chance to expand.

  * Shamyl was exiled to Kaluga where he lived with his wives, sons and retinue until he was allowed to go on haj to Mecca, dying in 1871. Alexander sent Bariatinsky the St George’s Cross and field marshal’s baton. After Shamyl’s defeat in the north-east Caucasus, the Circassian – or Cherkess – tribes in the north-west continued their less-organised resistance until Bariatinsky defeated them, cleansing their villages and driving them into Ottoman exile, a tragedy in which 400,000 were deported and thousands perished. The Circassians had long been a warrior-nation, producing the Mamluk military slave-sultans of thirteenth-century Egypt. In modern times, they still provide the bodyguards of the Assad dictators of Syria and Hashemite kings of Jordan. After twenty years of Caucasian wars, Bariatinsky’s health failed and he was replaced as Caucasus viceroy by the tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, who continued the cleansing of the Circassians. Bariatinsky remained Alexander’s confidant and suggested his chief of staff, Miliutin, as war minister.

  * The peasants could no longer be bought and sold like chattels, no longer whipped, but they still faced arbitrary justice. They could acquire property, marry and trade, yet the liberation was not complete: they still owed their ancient labour obligations to their former masters. After seven years to work out the details of the settlement, the government would pay around 80 per cent of the value of peasant lands to the landowners. The peasants had to pay the rest. Other land could be owned by peasant communes.

  * On 10 September 1863, US President Abraham Lincoln signed his own Emancipation Proclamation, freeing 6 million black slaves. Russia and America, the tsar told the US minister to Petersburg, Cassius Clay, ‘were bound together by a common sympathy in the common cause of emancipation’. During the Crimean War, America had supported Russia, sharing the same foe, Britain. During the American Civil War, Britain and France leaned towards the Confederacy, but Alexander backed the Unionists, sending his Baltic Fleet to New York and his Pacific Fleet to San Francisco for seven months. The autocracy and the democracy remained allies.

  * Daniel Dunglas Home was a Scottish medium, the illegitimate son of the earl of Home, who, in the early 1850s, had become an American celebrity with his ability to levitate and contact the dead who would then communicate with cries (from the entranced Home), pinchings, bangings and knockings. He won many followers but also aroused much scepticism especially since his séances were always in darkened rooms. When observed, he was seen to deploy false limbs and take off his shoes using his naked feet. Returning to Europe, he held séances for aristocrats, writers and royalty, including Napoleon III and Eugenie who, touched by his naked foot, thought it was the hand of a dead child. Arriving in Petersburg in 1858, still in his mid-twenties, Home met Kostia’s mystical wife Sanny who, that July, arranged the first of three séances attended by Alexander and Marie, the dowager empress Mouffy and Kostia (Elena the Family Intellectual refused to attend) plus the tsar’s mistress Alexandra ‘Tigress’ Dolgorukaya and courtier Anna Tyutcheva who recorded all in her diary. Sitting around a table in the dark, ‘an inner fire seemed to radiate from’ Home. The table levitated, Mouffy’s ring was pulled off her finger, everyone was pinched: ‘this elicited cries of fear, terror and surprise . . . The Sovereign received a revelation . . . the spirit of Emperor Nicholas and the young grand duchess (Lina). They both responded to questions from the Sovereign by knocking the letters of the alphabet, but the company was struck by the ‘inappropriate and empty’ answers. Home thrived in Russia, marrying a noble Russian girl with the novelist Alexander Dumas as best man. He returned twice. After the death of his wife, he married a second Russian. He died in 1886.

  * In 1860, when the tsar asked his architect if he could have the same marble as the Vorontsovs at Alupka, he was told he could not afford it. Instead he built a two-storyed, cramped and gloomy stone Great Palace at Livadia with a smaller wooden Little Palace for his heir. Crimea became a favourite Romanov – and aristocratic – holiday resort.

  † ‘My rule’, as he later explained to his mistress, ‘is only to talk to my entourage about the things for which they are responsible. But I never prevent anyone, neither my brothers nor others, from talking to me frankly if they need to share something with me. As for all the grave questions for which I can’t be responsible on my own, I let them be discussed in my presence in the Council so that when I approve my decisions, everyone shares in them and if they don’t, they can either submit or resign.’ Alexander warned Bariatinsky, ‘The minister is responsible to me for his sphere and you for yours, and it’s my duty to make sure neither of you goes beyond it.’

  * Yet the repression was so soft that an arrested socialist, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, was able not only to write in his prison cell but also to publish the first work of the Revolution, What is to be Done?, an ideological novel whose hero Rakhmetov was a new type – the ‘Special Man’, so ruthlessly dedicated to revolution that it was worth any human suffering: ‘the worse, the better’. If the first radicals had been well-off noblemen, this new generation were educated lower-born members of a new class, the intelligentsia, many of whom started to form the first revolutionary cells, dreaming of assassinations and uprisings. (Lenin, not yet born, would read the book five times – ‘an overwhelming influence’.)

  * ‘Only since I arrived here [in Petersburg] have I believed in war,’ Bismarck explained. After the Austrian betrayals, Russia would always help Prussia ‘to find a way to get even with Austria.’ Indeed ‘the calm and gentle emperor spits fire and rage when he talks about it.’ He was so close to the Romanovs that he enjoyed ‘the status of an envoy to the family.’ But his dearest friend there was the dowager empress, Mouffy, (the favourite sister of Wilhelm) with whom he almost fell platonically in love: ‘for me she has something in her kindness that is maternal and I can talk to her as if I had known her from childhood . . . I could listen to her deep voice and honest laughter and even her scolding for hours . . .’ When he saw her off on a holiday, ‘it was so enchanting . . . I had the urge . . . to leap onto the ship to travel with her.’

  * As the boy was deteriorating, on 2 April, just after the surrender of the Confederacy, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at a theatre in Washington, DC, as part of a concerted conspiracy to liquidate the Unionist leadership. When the news arrived, the highly emotional emperor wept, ordered prayers chanted at the Kazan Cathedral and wrote to Mary Lincoln that the President ‘was the noblest and greatest Christian of our generation – a beacon to the whole world – nothing but courage, steadfastness and desire to do good’.

  * Soon afterwards, US President Andrew Johnson sent a delegation to congratulate Alexander on his survival: ‘We thank God a grief was spared to the Russian people, the peril averted by Providence cannot but make us remember our own deep sorrow at the murder of our Head, our Leader and Father.’ This amity brought forw
ard the question of Russian America. Fort Ross (originally Fort Russia), the Russian port in California, had been founded by the Russian-American Company in 1812, but it had been sold privately in 1841. Emperor Paul had granted the company a trade monopoly in Alaska, ruled from New Archangel (today’s Sitka), but American and British commerce undermined Russian profits, while Vladivostok became a more important port. Kostia believed that Alaska was a financial liability and militarily indefensible – as well as a potential source of friction with America. On 16 December 1866 Alexander, Kostia and Gorchakov agreed to order Baron von Stoeckl, Russian minister in Washington, to negotiate with US Secretary of State William Seward to sell Alaska for a minimum of $5 million. On 18 March 1867, Alaska was sold for $7.2 million. American newspapers mocked the transaction as ‘Seward’s folly’.

  † He sacked two of his personal friends in charge of security, the arch-liberal Petersburg governor-general Prince Alexander Suvorov-Italiisky, who had studied at the Sorbonne (grandson of the generalissimus), and the secret police chief Vasily Dolgoruky (his father’s last war minister). The Hangman of Poland, Muraviev, was commissioned to investigate the conspiracy. Meanwhile, the crushing of Poland intensified. Even the most liberal Russians, confronted with a Polish rebellion, turned into oppressive nationalists. Alexander tried to ban the use of Polish, Ukrainian or Lithuanian languages – yet simultaneously he was promoting not just Finnish language but a parliament in Helsinki, where a statue of ‘Good Alexander’ still stands. Such are the inconsistencies of multinational empire.

  * M.E. was married off to the rich Paul Demidov, whose family had procured the Napoleonic title prince of San Donato, but within two years she had died in childbirth.

  * Their letters and diaries have scarcely been used by historians and most of them are unpublished because they have only recently been placed in the Russian archives. After Alexander’s death, Katya smuggled most of the letters to Paris. A few letters were somehow sold to private buyers, but the great majority lay forgotten until collected by the French Rothschilds who, in return for banking archives captured by the Soviets in the Second World War, restored them to the Russian archives, where they remain uncatalogued. During the reign of Nicholas II, some of Alexander’s diaries and letters to Katya were collected within the archives but judged too shocking to publish. Katya’s memoirs, also used here, were written after Alexander’s death and are unpublished too.