The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  At 10.30, cannon thundered, bells tolled, Tchaikovsky’s Fanfare rang out and the crowds cheered as tsar and tsarina appeared atop the Red Staircase and then processed down to the square and into the Dormition Cathedral, escorted by the swaggering uncles and his grandfather’s old minister Miliutin bearing the crown, all sheltered under a cloth-of-gold baldachin. As he was invested with the ermine-lined Imperial Mantle by Uncle Vladimir and Misha, his St Andrei chain with diamonds broke, the only accident during the ceremony. A chamberlain picked the pieces up and Vorontsov put them in his pocket. As Alexandra was crowned, ‘no joy seemed to unlift her,’ noticed Missy, ‘not even pride; aloof, enigmatic, all dignity but no warmth.’ Afterwards the mantles and crowns were removed for the anointing by holy oil before Nicholas celebrated the eucharist as a priest – the expression of the tsar’s sacred link between God and man. ‘In the sight of my Maker,’ he later told his mother, ‘I have to carry the burden of a terrible responsibility, ready to render an account to Him of my actions.’ Now he had no doubt that he was chosen by God to rule.

  On 17 May, as the tsar watched his ex-love Little K dance for his new tsarina, hundreds of thousands of peasants were massing at the Khodynka Field. ‘Every visitor to the field stalls will receive a kerchief containing sweets, gingerbread, sausage, an enamel mug, a breadroll,’ promised the posters around Moscow. ‘Special stalls are set up around the edge of the field for dispensing beer and mead.’ Some 400,000 packages had been prepared, but nearly 700,000 people turned up, their arrival eased by the new railways.

  ‘Are you certain Uncle Sergei realizes the difficulty of the task?’ Sandro asked Nicky. ‘I remember how concerned your father was on this occasion.’

  Sergei, who was embroiled in a bitter rivalry with the court minister Vorontsov over the organization of the coronation, deployed a meagre cadre of policemen to control the 700,000 peasants on an expanse that was pitted with trenches and pits, left over from military exercises.

  As the masses arrived during the hot summer night, they queued for their packages, but the pressure became so intense that the crowds pushed those ahead of them into the pits and on to the ground, piling on to those who had already fallen. By the dawn, around 3,000 bodies covered the meadows, their faces ‘dark-purple, blue-black and crimson, dried blood filling nostrils’. The police heaped some of the bodies on to wagons, ‘lumbering along with a quivering load of the dead, poor crushed peasants still in their gaudy festal clothes, driven through the city’. The rest of the bodies were pushed under the pavilion.

  Later that morning, at ten o’clock, Sergei arrived to tell Nicholas, who noted that ‘Today a great sin occurred.’ He should have cancelled the schedule, replacing magnificent ceremony with a public display of grief for the dead, but Sergei tried to suppress the news. Vorontsov, however, advised the tsar to issue a statement. Nicholas was persuaded by Sergei that the tragedy ‘must not be permitted to cast a shadow over the joyous occasion’. As the family headed out to Khodynka, Nicky’s sister Olga saw carts filled with vigorously waving peasants: ‘At first I thought that people were waving at us. Then my blood froze. I felt sick. Those carts carried the dead – mangled out of all recognition.’

  At two o’clock, the tsar and tsarina, ‘quiet and very pale’, arrived at the Khodynka pavilion, where, welcomed by Sergei, they reviewed the peasants. The tsar’s other sister Xenia, married to Sandro, was appalled: ‘The orchestra and band played the anthem endless times! It was painful and sad. While we were there, they were still carrying out bodies.’ That night, the emperor was due to appear at the ball of the French ambassador, the marquis de Montebello. The tsar sensed that it would be right to cancel, but Sergei insisted that any retreat would signify surrender to a ‘bleeding heart’. As Alix wept, Nicky compromised: they would go for half an hour.

  At 10.30 p.m. in the Sheremetev Palace, the tsars opened the dancing with the Montebellos. When they made to leave as planned, Uncles Sergei and Vladimir buttonholed them, criticizing such ‘useless sentimentality’ that would make ‘a bad impression’. Their cousin Bimbo,* backed up by Sandro and their brothers, intervened forcefully: Sergei must be dismissed and the festivities cancelled. Uncle Alexis piled in, accusing the Mikhailovichs of playing ‘to the radical grandstand, siding with the revolution, trying to get the Moscow governorship’. At this ‘infantile remark’, Bimbo evoked Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. ‘Remember, Nicky,’ he said, ‘the blood of those 5,000 will remain for ever a blot on your reign.’ Nicky and Alix returned miserably to the dance floor while Bimbo and his brothers stormed out.

  ‘There go the four imperial followers of Robespierre,’ Alexis remarked to Sergei, whose ‘broad smile led foreigners to believe the Romanovs had lost their minds’. Nicky and Alix stayed until 2 a.m. The next day they visited the injured at a hospital. Sergei did not cancel his own ball either. He ‘washed his hands of everything, saying it’s nothing to do with him and Vorontsov is to blame’, wrote Xenia. Sergei’s wife Ella was in even greater denial, insisting, ‘Thank God, Sergei has nothing to do with this.’

  Sandro and Bimbo continued to demand Sergei’s head and called for a formal investigation. ‘In three days,’ noted KR, ‘the emperor changed his mind three times.’ Sergei won. Vorontsov resigned, to be replaced by Baron Vladimir Frederiks.*

  ‘Our dear uncles have behaved in a thoroughly improper manner,’ Georgy told the tsar. ‘I am amazed at their effrontery and even more by your patience.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about Moscow,’ Nicky replied. ‘It makes me sick to remember. It’s not particularly comforting to think about the sad side of the coronation. This seems to be a year of hard labour with Alix and me as the martyrs.’ The thousands of mangled men, women and children might have disagreed.7

  Afterwards, ‘the martyrs’, as Nicky complained to Georgy, ‘are going to Austria, Germany, Denmark, England, France and finally Darmstadt’, and ‘on top of it we have to drag our poor little daughter with us.’ Nicholas, like most other monarchs of his day, regarded foreign policy as his personal responsibility but he admitted to his first foreign minister, Nikolai Giers: ‘I know nothing.’

  Faced with limited opportunities in a Europe now dominated by Germany, Nicholas saw the East as ripe for Russian expansion in the race for empire. China was disintegrating – though, locally, a resurgent Japan was keen to win its own empire. Just after Nicky’s accession, Japan had defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War. In one of his earliest decisions, Nicky, advised by Prince Alexei Lobanov-Rostovsky, the elderly grand seigneur who became foreign minister after Giers died, helped force Japan to give up some of its gains.

  Kaiser Wilhelm encouraged Nicky ‘to cultivate the Asian Continent and defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow Race’, while both powers would seize Chinese ports. Soon afterwards, Willy sent Nicky his sketch showing Christian warriors fighting ‘the Yellow Peril’.

  Finance Minister Witte, already the maestro of the Trans-Siberian Railway, planned to expand into Manchuria in northern China through his policy of pénétration pacifique: he persuaded and bribed the Chinese to let Russia build an Eastern Chinese Railway into Manchuria. At almost the same time, Lobanov agreed with Japan to share influence in Korea. These successes gave Nicholas some confidence as he, Alix and little Olga set off on their tour.

  At Breslau, the kaiser was eager to co-opt the tsar in a manic skein of ill-conceived ideas, but above all he was desperate to seduce Russia from the embrace of France. ‘I arranged his marriage, I have priority with him,’ he declared, though describing him as ‘small, weakly, timid with hardly a word to say’. Willy jabbered at the tsar ‘about everything with a great desire to make himself agreeable and captivate me’. But his tactile over-familiarity irritated Nicky, who complained that ‘he would poke him in the ribs and slap him on the back like a schoolboy’.* In September 1896, Nicky and Alix arrived on the Shtandart at Leith to visit Grandmama at Balmoral: ‘the baby is magnificent’, declared Queen Victoria. But be
hind the baby-dandling, Nicky and Grandmama were the emperor and queen-empress of empires locked in a Eurasian cold war. Britain was still Russia’s chief rival though they shared growing suspicion of Germany. Nicky confided in Lord Salisbury, now British prime minister, that Willy ‘was a very nervous man’, while he himself ‘was a very quiet man and he could not stand nervous men. He could not endure a long conversation with Kaiser Wilhelm as he never knew what he would do or say.’

  Afterwards, the emperor was delighted by the Parisian welcome of Russia’s new allies: ‘Our daughter made a great impression everywhere,’ Nicky told his mother. ‘The first thing in the morning [President Félix] Faure asked Alix about was the health of “the little grand duchess”’. Everyone in the street greeted her with ‘Vive la Grand Duchesse!’ But, as they headed home, Lobanov-Rostovsky died suddenly on the imperial train – just when Nicholas needed his wisdom.

  An Ottoman massacre of somewhere between 13,000 and 30,000 Armenians almost led to war: the Russian ambassador to Constantinople urged an immediate assault to seize the Straits and safeguard the 50 per cent of Russian exports that passed through them. Nicky approved this expedition by five battleships and 30,000 men until Witte, backed by Uncle Vladimir, warned that it would ‘lead to European war’. This may have been one of those elusive moments when Russia could have made a deal with Austria – the Straits in return for influence in the western Balkans – that might have prevented the First World War, but the will was lacking, the prizes too tempting.

  On 29 May 1897 Alix gave birth to her second daughter, Tatiana, in the Farm at Peterhof. ‘I was already preparing to go into retirement,’ Caesarevich Georgy joked to Nicky, ‘but it was not to be.’

  ‘My God, what will the nation say?’ cried Alexandra, who retired to her icon-filled boudoir. Her isolation was a vicious circle. She already sensed her unpopularity in Petersburg society, but this frigidly haughty Englishwoman made it quite obvious she did not care. Nicky’s cousin Missy sensed ‘nothing seemed to give her pleasure; she seldom smiled and when she did it was grudging . . . This of course damped every impulse towards her.’

  Just as Nicky’s politeness masked his cunning, so her shyness concealed a surprising arrogance. ‘There’s no harder craft than our craft of ruling,’ Queen Victoria wrote to Alicky. ‘I’ve ruled more than 50 years . . . and nevertheless every day I think about what I need to do to retain and strengthen the love of my subjects . . . It is your first duty to win their love and respect.’ Alexandra’s reply explains much of what happened later: ‘You are mistaken my dear grandmamma; Russia is not England. Here we do not need to earn the love of the people. The Russian people revere their Tsars as divine beings . . . As far as Petersburg society is concerned, that is something which one may wholly disregard.’

  Indeed ‘Petersburg society’ was not as important as it liked to think it was. This was the beginning of the Silver Age of poetry and art (following the Golden Age earlier in the century) in which, dissatisfied by Orthodox religion, Victorian morality and scientific rationalism, and exhilarated by the rush of the modern, the avant-garde tested the meaning of art, faith and pleasure by experimenting with imagery, language and dance, as well as sexual adventurism, necromancy and narcotics. While a powerful mercantile class of textile and railway tycoons emerged in the cities, the nobility was mortgaging its estates, a retreat before the energy of the merchants as played out in Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. The tsar could have made these vibrant bourgeois a pillar of monarchy as in Germany and Britain. Instead the new tycoons were excluded from all government and consoled themselves with collecting Impressionist and Cubist art. In the meantime, society was the tsar’s only link to the modern world, but Alexandra was irredeemably priggish. When cousin KR performed his translation of Hamlet for the sovereigns, Alix was scandalized by the obscenity of Shakespeare. To Petersburg, this meant that she refused to receive anyone where there was a whiff of scandal, crossing so many names off the court-lists that there was no one left. Instead the couple only socialized with Romanovs, mainly Sandro and Xenia, while politically they looked towards the traditional mystical union with their hundred million peasants, with whom they had no contact except on public occasions. While Alix hoped for a son, Nicholas gambled for an Eastern empire.8

  In August 1898 Kaiser Willy arrived in Petersburg. ‘I’m sorry to tell you’, Nicky informed his mother, ‘we’ll have to give Wilhelm the rank of Admiral in our navy. Uncle Alexis reminded me and no matter how disagreeable we’re obliged. It makes me vomit!’ Riding in a carriage at Peterhof, Willy suddenly asked Nicky if Germany could annex the Chinese port of Kiaochow which had earlier been offered to Russia. The tsar avoided answering. Soon afterwards, the murder of two German missionaries in China gave Willy his pretext and he wrote to ask Nicky’s permission. ‘Can neither give nor withhold consent,’ replied Nicky. This persuaded his new foreign minister, Count Mikhail Muraviev (grandson of Alexander III’s Hangman), that ‘it might be advantageous to seize another port at the earliest opportunity’ – Port Arthur. As for the Chinese, ‘History teaches us that the Oriental respects strength and might above all.’

  ‘Absolutely correct,’ agreed the tsar.

  On 14 November, he invited his ministers to Tsarskoe Selo where the navy argued against the Port Arthur plan because they wanted a better port in Korea, while Witte warned that these annexations threatened his Chinese alliance and railway – as well as disturbing relations with Japan. ‘The emperor refused to sanction the occupation,’ wrote Witte, but Muraviev worked on Nicky, telling him (falsely) that the British were about to seize Port Arthur. ‘I have decided to occupy Port Arthur,’ he told Witte. ‘Our ships with troops are on their way.’ He revealed his excitement to few. ‘You already know, dear Mama, of the occupation of Port Arthur which will be the terminus of the Siberian railway,’ he wrote to Minny. ‘At last we have a real port that doesn’t freeze. I’m thankful the occupation was peaceful. This gives me real joy! Now we can feel safe out there for a long time.’ ‘This fatal step’, Witte said, ‘will have disastrous results!’9

  If Witte saw the East in terms of railways and markets, Nicholas saw a mystical Buddhist Shangri-la as well as a new empire in Manchuria, Korea and Tibet. His companion on his world tour, Prince Esper Ukhtomsky, told him that Tibet would welcome him as the Great White Tsar of myth who could rescue them from the British. Nicholas’s ‘soft haze of mysticism’, thought Witte, ‘refracts everything he beholds and magnifies his own person’.

  Now these two strands united in Nicholas’s imagination. ‘The emperor is getting restless,’ noticed his new war minister, General Alexei Kuropatkin. ‘One of his more dangerous traits is his love for mysterious lands and individuals such as the Buriat Badmaev and Prince Ukhtomsky’ who ‘inspire him with fantasies about the Russian tsar’s greatness as ruler over all Asia’.* Kuropatkin was convinced that Russia should concentrate on Europe and that there was a colossal practical flaw in all Far Eastern adventures: even with the railway, it took far too long to send troops to the East and, worse, it was almost impossible to deploy the main Baltic fleet there. Yet the tsar was not alone in his ambitions: Britain, France and Germany were racing to seize new colonies in Africa and the East, and Nicholas knew that Russia could never outrace the sophisticated arsenals of Europe. Prompted by Kuropatkin, he proposed a conference in The Hague to promote disarmament – much to the kaiser’s contempt. But then events in China provided Nicky with an opportunity.10

  *

  On 14 June 1899 at Peterhof, where they had moved into their new ‘Italian Renaissance’-style Lower Dacha, one of their favourite homes, Alix went into labour. ‘A happy day,’ Nicky noted. ‘The Lord sent us a third daughter Maria.’ Minny and the family celebrated with a Te Deum. ‘And so there’s no Heir. The whole of Russia will be disappointed!’ wrote KR. But Nicky reassured Alix: ‘I dare not complain the least having such happiness on earth, having a treasure like you my beloved Alix and already three cherubs.’ Heartbreaking c
ongratulations came from Georgy: ‘Unfortunately I’m no longer fit for any kind of service. I’m no longer able to walk.’

  A few days later, Georgy went bicycling on his own and suffered a lung haemorrhage, and was found lying in the dust. He was twenty-eight. On 14 July, Georgy was buried in a ‘nightmare’ service during which ‘Mama suddenly staggered, collapsed on me (with wide-open eyes yet seeing nothing) and said loudly, “Home, let’s go home, I can’t stand any more!”’ She snatched Georgy’s hat from the coffin and tottered out. 11

  In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion, an insurrection of ‘Righteous and Harmonious Fists’ against Western imperialism, soon backed by Chinese troops, besieged the embassies in Peking and then spread along Russian’s Manchurian Railway. Nicky joined Germany, Britain, America and Japan in sending an expeditionary force to relieve the embassies, but he was quick to withdraw. ‘The happiest day of my life will be when we leave Peking and get out of that mess.’ Yet it was just starting: he had to protect ‘Witte’s kingdom’ and railway in Manchuria. Now the Boxers attacked the Russian headquarters in Harbin. In June, Nicholas sent 170,000 troops into Manchuria – the end of Witte’s pénétration pacifique. ‘I’m glad,’ wrote Kuropatkin, ‘this will give us an excuse for seizing Manchuria.’

  This run of opportunistic successes – intervention against Japan in 1895, annexation of Port Arthur and now expansion into Manchuria – encouraged the imperial ambitions of Nicholas, who forced the Chinese to sign over Manchuria for many years and planned to seize Korea as well. ‘I don’t want Korea for myself,’ he explained, ‘but neither can I countenance the Japanese setting foot there. Were they to try, that would be a casus belli.’