The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  These adventures, Witte rudely told the tsar, were ‘child’s play which will end disastrously’. Nicholas resented him and made his own private plans. As he told his secret adviser, his father’s friend Prince Meshchersky: ‘I’m coming to believe in myself.’12

  *

  On 26 October 1900, the emperor came down with a temperature, a blinding headache and pain in his legs while on holiday in Crimea. The pregnant empress nursed him like ‘a sister of mercy’ and guarded him ‘like Cerberus’. The doctors diagnosed typhoid. As rumours spread, Alexandra banned any bulletins, even though it was possible Nicky would die. His brother Misha was the heir, but the empress was pregnant again and believed she was bearing a tsarevich and, if the tsar died, she insisted she must serve as regent until her accouchement and, if it really was a son, up to the baby’s majority.

  Grand dukes, who all had their own Crimean palaces, consulted with the ministers, who always stayed at hotels in Yalta. Witte discussed ‘what to do if disaster struck and the emperor died. What to do about the Heir to the throne?’ Misha would automatically succeed, but the empress refused to countenance this. ‘No,’ answered Alexandra, ‘Misha will get everything into a mess, he’s so easily imposed on.’ It was Alexandra’s first political move. ‘The empress began the practice of giving orders on affairs of state,’ noted the courtier Mossolov, ‘and we began to realize the empress’s inadequacy for the task.’ The tsar recovered, but Alexandra was convinced that only her will could save Nicky and their unborn heir.*

  ‘Alix is looking very beautiful despite her pregnancy,’ wrote KR. ‘Everyone is anxiously hoping for a son.’ On 5 June, at Peterhof, Alexandra gave birth to her fourth daughter, Anastasia. ‘Forgive us, Lord,’ confessed KR, ‘if we all felt disappointment instead of joy.’

  Just over a month after the birth, on 10 July, the two Montenegrin princesses who had married into the Romanovs invited Nicholas and Alexandra to consult a French healer who became ‘Our Friend’.

  Their rapture had already begun: in Easter 1900, when they stayed at the Kremlin with Sergei and Ella, ‘The services in those ancient churches produce a feeling of enchantment,’ wrote Nicky to his mother. ‘I never knew I could reach such heights of religious ecstasy . . . Alix shares my feelings completely which is a great joy for me.’ Their journey reflected Nicholas’s concept of sacred monarchy. The couple ‘believed it was possible outside church and without regularly ordained bishops and priests to hold communion with God’, wrote a close friend. ‘They believed prophecy in the biblical sense of the word still existed through certain highly gifted and spiritually minded persons.’

  The Montenegrin sisters Militsa and Stana – later known as ‘the Black Women’ or just ‘the Crows’* – were enthusiastic explorers of a more esoteric road. When Stana was ill treated by her husband, Alexandra consoled her; when the empress fell ill, the sisters nursed her – but ‘the strongest bond between these women was their religious ecstasy’.

  First the Crows introduced Nicky and Alix to the epileptic holy idiot Mitka Kolyaba. But when Militsa’s son fell ill, she consulted a Frenchman, Nizier Anthelme Philippe, a peasant boy who, working in his uncle’s Lyons butcher shop, had experienced an epiphany and set himself up as a hierophant, specializing in the power of ‘psychic fluids and astral forces’ to heal sickness and cure female sterility. Philippe ‘was about fifty, small with black hair and black moustache’, wrote KR. ‘Very unsightly in appearance, with an ugly southern French accent.’ As Nicky and Alix struggled to conceive a boy, Philippe visited Petersburg. At the palace of Militsa and her husband Grand Duke Peter, noted Nicky, ‘This evening we met the amazing Frenchman.’ After the birth of Anastasia, Nicky and Alix started visiting Militsa every evening at her nearby estate, Znamenka, to meet the hierophant.

  ‘We spent the whole evening at Renella,’ wrote Nicky. ‘M. Philippe talked and instructed us. What a wonderful few hours.’ The next day, Philippe came to see Alix at Peterhof: ‘We showed him our daughters and prayed together with him in the bedroom.’ They were already calling Philippe ‘Our Friend’. On 13 July 1901, they were so rapt by him that they went to Znamenka twice, and when they reviewed a military parade in Petersburg, ‘Our Friend was present. After dinner we spent the whole evening at Znamenka.’

  ‘Our Friend’, Alix wrote to Nicky, was the ‘one comfort to me . . . How rich life is since we know him and everything seems easier to bear.’ When Philippe told them he was praying for them in Lyons, she noted, ‘Don’t forget Saturday evening towards 10.30.’ The emperor not only granted Philippe (who had scarcely attended high school let alone medical school) a medical licence but appointed him a court doctor. Soon Philippe was giving political advice: when Nicky met Kaiser Wilhelm, Alix told her husband, ‘Our Dear Friend will be near you and help you answering William’s questions,’ giving him the toughness to ‘be friendly and severe, so that he realizes he dare not joke with you – that he learns to be afraid of you’. As for reform, Philippe advised Nicky that a constitution ‘would be the ruin of Russia’.

  In the spring of 1902, Alix fell pregnant – and Our Friend was prophesying, ‘Russia was chosen to dominate the Far East.’13

  Nicky was introduced, by Sandro and Vorontsov, to a well-connected Chevalier-Gardes officer turned merchant adventurer, Captain Alexander Bezobrazov, who dazzled him in private conversations ‘twice a week and for hours on end’. Bezobrazov told Nicholas that it was his ‘historic destiny’ to conquer Manchuria and Korea. He himself wanted to be Russia’s version of Cecil Rhodes. ‘This incoherent and pretentious braggart’ told Nicky that ‘sooner or later we’ll have to contend with the Japanese. Better to lay our cards on the table now.’ If Russia had to fight, ‘Only the bayonet can guarantee the success of our activities in Manchuria.’ Promises did not matter: ‘As for treaties and agreements we should never let them stand in the way.’

  ‘I was inspired by him,’ admitted the emperor later, ‘and I was pleased to listen to Bezobrazov when he explained that we’d chosen the wrong policy in the Far East. I realized he was right.’ Revelling in the cloak-and-dagger intrigue behind the backs of Witte and his ministers,* he and his secret adviser communicated through their batmen. In early 1903 the emperor granted Bezobrazov 2 million roubles ‘for purposes known only to His Majesty’, and promoted him to state secretary and adjutant-general. Bezobrazov toured Manchuria secretly, setting up a secret paramilitary force. Witte and the other ministers realized that ‘Two policies have arisen in the Far East – the imperial and the Bezobrazovian.’ A ‘half-mad preposterous adventurer’ was running Russia’s Far Eastern policy.14

  The Eastern adventure dovetailed with Nicholas’s dreams at home of a return to a Muscovite monarchy, which were encouraged by an eccentric fogey who was a most unusual interior minister. Dmitri Sipiagin was not like a minister at all. Sporting a full-length Muscovite beard, he decorated the dining room in his mansion like the Palace of Facets and gave dinners in boyarish robes. Sipiagin addressed Nicholas as ‘Most Tranquil Tsar’, playing into Nicholas’s patrimonial view of himself as a Muscovite tsar (not a European emperor). ‘I conceive of Russia as a landed estate of which the proprietor is the tsar,’ Nicky explained, ‘the administrator is the nobility and the workers are the peasantry.’ When he filled in the 1897 census, he described his own profession as ‘Master of the Russian Land’ and Alexandra’s as ‘Mistress of the Russian Land’.

  The tsar called Sipiagin ‘my dear friend’. While they were enjoying these boyarish fantasies, Sipiagin’s Okhrana were charting the creation of a terrifying new terrorist threat.

  The boom and then recession had created a worrying instability. During the boom, a million peasants had moved from the villages to work in the textile factories and oil refineries of Petersburg, Moscow and Baku. Their conditions were appalling, but the regime had to find a way to manage the new proletariat. In Moscow, Sergei was backing a brilliant secret policeman Sergei Zubatov, chief of the Moscow Okhrana, who was sponsoring and guidin
g his own unions in the new labour movement – so-called ‘police socialism’.

  Yet Russia was beset not just by the struggle of the classes but by the awakening of nations too. In this age of nationalism which seemed to doom multinational empires, the tsar chose to link his throne to the Russian nation, who made up less than half of his citizens while alienating his non-Russian citizens by aggressively following his father’s russification policies from the Caucasus to Finland. Young Finns, Georgians, Jews, Poles and Armenians flocked to join nationalistic parties. But two factions ominously crossed ethnic boundaries.

  The Socialist Revolutionary Party, known as the SRs, the heir of the old Populists and the People’s Will, promoted peasant revolution, backed by terrorism. The writings of Karl Marx had become popular in Russia. Marx had argued that history inevitably led, by means of class struggle, through rigid stages of feudalism, capitalism and socialism, to the paradise of Communism, the common ownership of wealth. Now thanks to the success of Witte’s industrial revolution, Russia possessed its own proletariat.

  In March 1898, nine delegates gathered in a wooden house near Minsk to found the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, the future rulers of the Soviet Union. The Okhrana arrested most of them, but Vladimir Lenin, who was in Siberian exile before leaving for Europe, and Julius Martov (né Tsederbaum) quickly became its leaders. Young people across Russia were convinced by Marx’s certainty that the old order of tsars, priest, landowners and factory masters would be destroyed. This ‘was not only a theory’, wrote Josef Djugashvili, the future Stalin, then a young seminarist, ‘it’s an entire worldview, a philosophical system’.

  The SR Battle Group was, for now, the greater threat. When Sipiagin crushed student protests, his Cossacks killed thirteen demonstrators, and the SRs took their first scalp, assassinating the education minister. Sipiagin worried he was not suited to directing repression, warning, ‘We’re standing on a volcano.’

  On 2 April 1902, he was approached by a man with a package in the lobby of the government offices, in the Mariinsky Palace. As he took it, the SR terrorist shot him dead. He bled to death in the arms of his friend Witte. The emperor confided in Meshchersky, ‘I feel fit and strong in spirit but with a deep wound in my heart from the loss of my friend Sipiagin.’ Meshchersky advised repression. ‘We need not only hardness but harshness,’ believed Nicholas – and the Prince of Sodom proposed the man to deliver it.15

  ‘It’s time to crack down,’ the tsar told his new interior minister, Vyacheslav Plehve, ruthless lawyer-turned-policeman who had drafted Alexander III’s anti-Jewish laws and shared his views on most matters. ‘Now one more thing,’ wrote Nicholas in a friendly tone, ‘I forgot to mention during our audience,’ going on to dismiss one official ‘as a cunning humbug . . . I don’t like him very much . . .’ and denounce another ‘as a smug, arrogant scoundrel’. Here was the tsar’s authentic voice with a trusted minister. Plehve turned the Okhrana into the world’s most sophisticated secret police, launching a concerted policy to lure the top revolutionaries into becoming super-informers.* Their star double-agent was the chief terrorist of the SR Battle Group, Evno Azeff. This was as risky as the CIA recruiting Osama bin Laden. In return for a vast salary, Azeff gave the Okhrana useful information – yet remained a committed terrorist.

  As a Jew from Rostov, Azev seemed a typical revolutionary to Plehve. ‘Jews are much more dangerous than any constitutionalist,’ he said. He believed that controlled anti-semitism was a lightning-conductor for discontent and a banner to rally the masses.

  In Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia, at Easter 1903, the murder of a Russian man and the death of a Russian girl in the local Jewish hospital unleashed mobs who killed forty-six Jews, wounded 600 and burned 700 homes, while the local governor did almost nothing. The pogrom appalled the world. Plehve sacked the governor but his anti-semitism was so well-known that he became hated in liberal society. He backed Nicholas’s Eastern policy. ‘Bayonets not diplomats’, said Plehve, ‘made Russia, and the Far Eastern problems must be solved by bayonets not pens.’16

  Meanwhile Alix was pregnant again. The tsar wrote from manoeuvres to tell her about ‘the ladies, some rather good looking with fatal eyes . . . [who] kept looking at Misha and me’. But he only wanted ‘my sweet Wify. I kiss you. I love you and want you. Oh! So naughty!’

  ‘Sweetest lovey mine,’ she replied, praising ‘the adorable expression of shyness that creeps over you and makes your sweet eyes all the more dangerous . . . You old sinner!’

  When Philippe Our Friend returned, ‘we listened to him over supper and for the rest of the evening until 1 a.m.,’ wrote Nicholas. ‘We could go on listening to him for ever.’ But the family were getting nervous about this infatuation and resolved to intervene. When the emperor was away at manoeuvres, Alexandra was challenged by her sister Ella, who ‘assailed me about our Friend . . . I explained it all came from jealousy and inquisitiveness.’ As for what they were really up to, Alix congratulated herself on lying to her sister. ‘I stuck to the story of the remedy,’ concealing the ‘spiritism . . . which might have been difficult to explain to her’. The dowager empress asked the secret agent Rachkovsky, the Okhrana rezident in Paris who had guarded Alexander III on his foreign trips, to investigate Philippe: he exposed Our Friend as a charlatan who had been prosecuted for practising medicine without a licence. When he saw this insolent report, the tsar sacked Rachkovsky.

  Philippe ordered Alexandra not to be examined by doctors, but though she had put on weight, by the end of the summer the pregnancy was not advancing. Where was the baby? In early August she moved to Peterhof for her accouchement.

  When the doctor arrived for the delivery, Alexandra finally let him examine her: she was not pregnant and never had been. Her symptoms of pregnancy were either the result of Philippe’s powers of suggestion or a ‘molar pregnancy’, the growth of a non-viable egg that causes the womb to swell as in a pregnancy. ‘Poor things,’ wrote KR. Alexandra was understandably hysterical, writing to her courtier Countess ‘Zizi’ Naryshkina: ‘Dear friend, don’t come! There will be no christening – there’s no child – there’s nothing! It’s a catastrophe.’

  Minny and Nicky’s sisters persuaded Nicky that Philippe had to go.* Before he left, laden with presents including a Serpollet motor car, he gave the empress a little bell that would ring if dark forces lurked. Philippe died soon afterwards, but not before he had warned that he would merely vanish and then reappear: ‘Some time you will have another friend like me who will speak to you of God.’17

  On 7 February 1903, Nicky held the first – and as it happened – the last social spectacular of his reign. The guests were in costumes of the time of the Tsar Alexei, and the ‘magnificent pageant’ was an expression of Nicky’s wish (in the words of Sandro) ‘to be back in the glorious past of our family,’ inspired by the late Sipiagin’s idea of restoring Muscovite dress to court, in place of Peter the Great’s Germanic ranks. Nicky, who came in the gold-brocaded robes and fur-trimmed crown of Tsar Alexei, and Alexandra, who dressed as Tsarina Maria Miloslavskaya in a silver-brocaded sarafan, bearing a mitre set with emeralds and diamonds, presided over a hall ‘filled with ancient Russian people’ at the Hermitage Theatre. But ‘while we danced’, wrote Sandro, ‘the workers were striking and the clouds in the Far East hanging dangerously low’.18

  In January 1902, Japan had isolated Russia by signing a defensive treaty with Britain which forced Nicholas to agree a phased withdrawal from Manchuria – but the emperor was more confident than ever. ‘Our sovereign has grandiose plans in his head,’ wrote Kuropatkin on 16 February 1903, ‘to absorb Manchuria into Russia, to begin to annex Korea. He also dreams of taking Tibet under his orb. He wants to rule Persia, to seize the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.’ If this outraged Britain, he felt he could depend on the kaiser who, at Reval in August, offered support. ‘In 1904 I shall declare war on Japan,’ said Nicky according to Willy, who shouted: ‘From now on Emperor Nicholas is called Admiral of
the Pacific and I call myself Admiral of the Atlantic.’ ‘He’s raving mad,’ whispered the tsar.

  ‘Witte, Lamsdorf and I anxiously watch Bezobrazov,’ wrote General Kuropatkin, ‘and especially worry about the emperor’s private correspondence with this dreamer and adventurer.’*

  The tsar trusted the favourite Bezobrazov over his ministers, and this entire episode fits into the long tradition of autocrats, and explains much about Nicholas. ‘The distrust of ministers is common to all sovereigns, starting with Alexander I,’ explained Plehve, who understood autocracy better than anyone. ‘Autocrats listen to their ministers, outwardly agree with them but always turn to outsiders who appeal to their hearts and inspire suspicion of their ministers, accusing them of encroaching on the autocratic law.’ Kuropatkin realized that Nicholas thought ‘we ministers hold back the sovereign from the realization of his dreams – he still thinks he’s right and better understands the glory of Russia’. Kuropatkin gently teased the emperor, suggesting he would trust him more if he was not a minister. ‘It’s strange,’ mused Nicholas, ‘but perhaps that’s psychologically accurate.’ He continued to consult Prince Meshchersky, whom he called ‘my secret and reliable friend’.

  Bezobrazov called the ministers ‘the mangy triumvirate’, using code in his telegrams: Witte was ‘Nostril’, Kuropatkin ‘Grouse’ and Lamsdorf ‘Tadpole’. But the adventurer had gone too far: ‘It’s essential to avoid a quarrel with Japan,’ said Nicholas several times. ‘War is completely undesirable.’ On 7 May, he met his Eastern committee still dominated by Bezobrazov, whose project he now recognized as part of the imperial effort to win Korea. The ministers tried to resign and the tsar sacrificed Bezobrazov who had been like a ‘mustard plaster’, he admitted. Now ‘I have to pull it off.’ But he was even more committed to winning ‘exclusive influence over Manchuria’. The Japanese offered the only sensible solution: Russian Manchuria in return for Japanese Korea. But Nicholas rejected it. He would get both.