The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The tsar pushed for a harsh counter-revolution. Witte and the ministers ‘talk a lot but do little’, Nicky told Mama. ‘I am disappointed in Witte.’ On 3 December, Durnovo ordered the arrest of Trotsky and the Petersburg Soviet. ‘Everyone is delighted that 260 important leaders of workmen’s committees have been arrested,’ Nicholas told his mother, ‘all of which gives Witte courage to keep the right line of action.’ But on the 7th, the arrests triggered the Moscow insurgency planned by Lenin. Durnovo came to Tsarskoe Selo and urged Nicholas to launch full-scale repression.

  Planned by Durnovo with Nikolasha, now promoted to commander of the Guards and commandant of Petersburg, the repression was directed by the emperor’s top courtiers. The new governor-general of Moscow was Admiral Fyodor Dubasov, who had accompanied Nicky on his world tour. Using the Semyonovsky Guards, Dubasov stormed the barricades in the workers’ district with artillery and machine guns. He called himself a ‘barn-burner’ and he took no prisoners. Three thousand workers perished. ‘The armed rebellion in Moscow has been crushed,’ wrote the elated emperor. ‘The abscess was growing . . . now it’s burst.’ Next, the tsar appointed another ‘barn-burner’, his best friend General Alexander Orlov, commander of the Uhlan regiment, to reconquer the Baltics. When Orlov was not harsh enough, Nikolasha had his quartermaster explain that ‘Nobody on high [that is, the tsar] is going to condemn you for excessive severity but rather for the lack of it.’ Orlov shot more than a thousand and when he reported executing a group of seventy, Nicholas applauded him for ‘acting splendidly’.

  ‘Terror’, the tsar declared to Minny, ‘must be met with terror.’ Witte briefed him that agitators were arriving from the Far East: ‘Are they really letting these 162 anarchists corrupt the army?’ Nicky replied. ‘They should all be hanged.’ When he heard that a punitive detachment had accepted the surrender of rebellious Livonians, he insisted: ‘The town should have been destroyed.’ Arrests were celebrated with the word ‘Power!’, while the summary execution of twenty-six rebellious railway workers earned an imperial ‘Bravo’. Vladimir Bezobrazov, brother of Nicky’s Far Eastern adviser and one of his favourite Guards officers, staged ghoulish public shows of bodies dangling on gibbets. When Commander Richter, son of Alexander’s III’s crony, now leading a punitive detachment in the Baltics, not only shot his prisoners but hanged the bodies afterwards, Nicholas wrote another ‘Bravo’. Trepov informed him that Cossacks had over-used their whips. ‘Very well done,’ applauded Nicholas. When he heard of more executions, he commented ‘this really tickles me’.

  Durnovo behaved as if he was conquering a foreign country. ‘I earnestly request’, he commanded a Kiev subordinate, ‘that you order that insurgents be annihilated and their homes burned.’ Nicholas was impressed: ‘Durnovo acts superbly.’ Though official figures listed 1,200 executions with around 70,000 arrested, real victims are uncountable, but certainly more than 15,000 killed with 45,000 deported.*

  Next, as generals retook the Caucasus, fighting house to house in Tiflis and Baku, Nikolasha proposed that two commanders start at each end of the Trans-Siberian Railway and meet in the middle, annihilating rebels ‘with exemplary severity’ along the way. ‘Excellent idea,’ wrote the tsar, particularly if they destroyed the Jews and Poles, who had organized ‘the whole strike and later revolution’.33

  A pogrom against the Jews begun in Odessa, where 800 were murdered, unleashed a frenzy of attacks on Jews around the empire. Nicholas justified the anti-semitism to his mother: ‘Nine-tenths of the trouble-makers are Jews, [so] the people’s whole anger turned against them. It’s amazing how they took place simultaneously in all the towns of Russia and Siberia.’

  As the pogromchiki were killing 3,000 Jews from Vilna to Kishinev, two junior bureaucrats – Alexander Dubrovin and a rabble-rousing pogromist from Kishinev, Vladimir Purishkevich (the future murderer of Rasputin) – formed a Union of Russian People, a movement of noblemen, intellectuals, shopkeepers and thugs who rallied support for ‘Tsar, faith and fatherland’ around extreme nationalism and anti-semitic violence. The Union was the political wing of rightist vigilantes, the Black Hundreds, who fought revolutionaries and slaughtered Jews. Fascists fourteen years before the word was invented in Italy, the Black Hundreds marched in the tsar’s name but despised his compromises with parliamentarians. In December 1905, Nicholas welcomed Dubrovin to Tsarskoe Selo, telling him that ‘With your help, I and the Russian people will succeed in defeating the enemies of Russia’, and accepted honorary membership of the Union, wearing its badge and financing its newspapers. By 1906, it had 300,000 members. The Hundreds shared many of his views on Jews.

  Nicholas’s table-talk was peppered with anti-Jewish banter, typical of many a European aristocrat of this era – telling his mother how a courtier ‘amused us very much with funny Jewish stories – wonderfully good at imitating Jews and even his face suddenly looks Jewish!’ Alexandra herself talked of ‘rotten vicious Jews’, often noting after a semitic name, ‘a real Jew for sure’. But it was more than that: to Nicholas the Jews represented everything bad about the modern world. ‘The Englishman is a Yid,’ he liked to say. To him, a newspaper was a place where ‘some Jew or other sits . . . making it his business to stir up passions of peoples against each other’. As he explained to his bodyguard commander Alexander Spirodovich, ‘As a Russian and as a man, knowing his history, he could not like the Jews but he did not hate them either.’ But actually his hatred was visceral. After reading his cousin KR’s play King of Judaea, he wrote, in an usually candid letter, ‘I was fired by a hatred of the Jews who crucified Christ.’

  In December 1905, an anti-semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which blamed the Jews for the secret diabolical orchestration of world war,* was published by the Petersburg Military District press, probably under Nikolasha. As pogroms spread, Witte discovered that the Interior Ministry was printing anti-semitic pamphlets. When he reported this to Nicholas, ‘His Majesty was silent and appeared familiar with all the details.’34

  Nicholas was desperate to rid himself of Witte, who is ‘absolutely discredited with everybody except the Jews abroad’. But first the prime minister had to agree the rules of the new constitution, the Fundamental Laws, with the tsar, who insisted on preserving his autocracy* – and then negotiate a loan of 2.25 billion roubles to fund the bankrupt government. As soon as this was done, Witte resigned, declaring, ‘Russia is one vast madhouse.’ Nicholas was delighted. ‘He hates me as much as I hate him,’ said the tsar who regarded Witte as a pro-Jewish traitor. When the retired Witte started to re-emerge, ‘the Jewish clique sows sedition again,’ Nicky told Minny. Now he appointed in Witte’s place his original choice, the lazy, mediocre bureaucrat Ivan Goremykin, sixty-seven years old, who was ‘indifferent to everything’, which was what Nicholas liked.

  ‘What’s important to me’, said Nicholas, ‘is that Goremykin will never act behind my back; I shan’t be given any surprises.’ But the Interior Ministry mattered. When Witte’s government resigned, the tsar gave the ensanguined Durnovo 200,000 roubles and Goremykin suggested that Peter Stolypin, a provincial governor, replace him as interior minister. Meeting the tsar, Stolypin refused the job – unless ordered.

  ‘I order you,’ replied Nicholas, standing before an icon. ‘I understand your self-sacrifice. I bless you. This is for the good of Russia.’

  ‘I obey,’ said Stolypin, kissing the tsar’s hand. Nicholas ‘seized me with both arms and shook me warmly’, wrote Stolypin. ‘The die was cast.’

  Son of a general, this wealthy, cultured and happily married nobleman, tall, imposing and handsome with a slightly withered right arm, was a visionary leader. While governing Saratov, he had personally disarmed terrorists. ‘Nervousness is pardonable in ladies; in politics, there must be no nerves,’ he declared. He was unusually pro-semitic, regarding Russia’s 6 million Jews as ‘not only necessary but very convenient and pleasant’. The remarkable Stolypin, a pragmatic monarchist determined to remake the poli
tical system, would soon dominate Russia.35

  The night before the opening of the Duma, the tsar ‘couldn’t sleep’, wrote his sister. ‘He kept lying there with a feeling of sadness and melancholy.’ When the train arrived at Peterhof from Tsarskoe, the tsar’s ‘only friend’ General Orlov eased the tension by presenting Alexandra with a bouquet of roses. Next morning, they boarded the yacht Alexandria.

  At 1.45 p.m. on 27 April 1906 at the Winter Palace, Nicholas, preceded by courtiers bearing the crown and regalia, followed by his wife, mother, sisters, in gowns and tiaras, and courtiers in full uniform, walked slowly into the Georgievsky Hall. To the right gathered the State Council, aristocrats in their uniforms and orders; across the room in suits and caps stood the elected Duma. Xenia stared at ‘several men with repulsive faces and insolent disdainful expressions! They neither crossed themselves nor bowed.’ As the tsar’s new security chief Spirodovich put it, ‘One group seemed to saying “We’ve finally got what we wanted” and the other “Don’t celebrate too soon.”’

  Nicholas mounted the steps of the throne, took a speech from Frederiks and briskly hailed ‘the great historic moment’. As he finished, ‘a cheer broke out, the choir sang the anthem’, recalled Xenia. ‘Mama and Alix were crying and poor Nicky was standing there in tears, his self-control finally overcome.’ Back at Peterhof, Nicholas ‘was delighted he’d at last be able to sleep properly’.

  Yet the Duma, meeting in Potemkin’s Taurida Palace, was dominated by a liberal-leftist party of constitutional democrats, known as the ‘Kadets’, who immediately challenged the tsar’s powers, attacked the new ministry and debated confiscation of land. Trepov sensibly and secretly explored a Kadet ministry, possibly with Nicky’s permission but when it was revealed, the tsar typically withdrew his favour. Trepov died soon afterwards. Nicholas and Stolypin agreed the Duma would have to go. On 5 July, Nicholas let the servile Goremykin resign and appointed the forty-four-year-old Stolypin as both prime minister and interior minister. On the 8th, flooding Petersburg with soldiers, Stolypin oversaw the dissolution of the Duma.

  As Stolypin cracked down on the rebels, all the revolutionary parties, Bolsheviks and SRs as well as Georgian Federalists and Armenian Dashnaks, turned to gangsterism to fund themselves, as well as to assassination to express themselves: 3,600 officials were assassinated between October 1905 and September 1906.

  At Peterhof, the tsar, accompanied by (thin Alexander) Orlov as well as Fat (Vladimir) Orlov, felt besieged by ‘these horrible crimes’. On 12 August, Stolypin was receiving visitors at his dacha on Aptekarsky Island when three suicide bombers of the SR Maximalist faction entered the room and blew themselves up, killing twenty-seven and maiming seventy. Bleeding from the face, Stolypin carried his wounded daughter out of the ruins, followed by his three-year-old son; both gradually recovered but, at Nicholas’s invitation, he moved the family into the more secure Winter Palace.

  The terrorists hunted down the scourges of revolution. The next day, Min, one of the crushers of the Moscow Revolution, was assassinated. ‘We had to sit here, virtual prisoners,’ Nicky told his mother. ‘After killing Min, those anarchist scoundrels came here to Peterhof to hunt me, Nikolasha, Trepov, Orlov and Fat Orlov.’*

  That day Stolypin presided over the cabinet ‘as if nothing had happened’. The tsar sent a personal message hailing a ‘divine miracle – my thoughts are with you’.

  ‘My life belongs to YOU, YOUR MAJESTY,’ replied Stolypin. The tsar demanded summary executions, a travesty of due process. ‘The emperor deigns to command’, wrote War Minister Alexander Rediger to Stolypin, ‘that a person who commits a crime punishable by death now faces no long wait but that the sentence be decided and carried out no later than 48 hours after the crime.’ The indirect order of the tsar was blamed on Stolypin. The noose was henceforth nicknamed ‘Stolypin’s necktie’, and prison trains were known as ‘Stolypin wagons’ into the reign of Stalin. The prime minister’s severity dovetailed with the Okhrana’s brilliant infiltration and fragmentation of the revolutionaries.

  Yet tsarist repression was surprisingly gentle compared with the Soviet equivalent. If one includes junior policemen among the victims, 16,000 officials were murdered between 1905 and 1910, yet only 3,000 terrorists were hanged, while the most frequent punishment, Siberian administrative exile, was boring, cold and isolated but more like a Spartan reading-holiday than a prison camp. Stalin escaped a total of eight times, sometimes on foot, sometimes romantically by reindeer sleigh and sometimes prosaically by catching a train. Hard labour, often in the mines, on the other hand, was brutal.

  ‘You may say I’m fighting against revolution,’ Stolypin boasted ‘but for reform.’ Modelling himself on Bismarck, he believed in a strong nationalistic monarchy backed by a parliament, but not parliamentary government. ‘What we want,’ he said, ‘is a Great Russia.’36 As Stolypin energetically pursued his vision, Nicky and Alix were getting to know the man who, more than any other, would come to personify their reign.

  That October, Nicky and Alix received a telegram from Grigory Rasputin, ‘the man of God’. ‘Little Father Tsar,’ it read, ‘having arrived in town from Siberia, I would like to bring you an icon of the Blessed St Simon Verkhotursky the Miracle-Worker.’

  They had already met Rasputin twice, first with the Crows a year earlier and then for a short tea on 18 July, but now this simple telegram, Rasputin’s first direct communication to them without Montenegrin intermediaries, caught their imagination. The Crows had told Rasputin that he was never to communicate with the tsars without going through them. Naturally, Rasputin, with his instincts for human nature and power play, ignored this order.

  On 12 October, he arrived at the Alexander Palace to present his icon. ‘He made a remarkably strong impression both on Her Majesty and on myself,’ the tsar told Stolypin. Alexei, now aged two, was suffering a minor bleed. The parents were anxious. ‘Instead of five minutes, our conversation went on for more than an hour,’ explained the tsar, and it ended with Rasputin being taken into the nursery to meet their daughters, but above all to pray over Alexei. Rasputin must have calmed the child and the mother. He then offered to help Stolypin and his daughter, wounded in the bombing. Once he had left the palace, the tsar asked a courtier what he thought of the peasant. When the courtier suggested that he was insincere and unstable, the tsar said nothing. But, whatever happened with Alexei, Rasputin had made a greater impression than anyone yet knew. Nicky and Alix believed he was the new ‘man of God’ prophesied by Philippe. This couple, who were morbidly suspicious of sophisticated people, welcomed him with open-armed credulity.

  Grigory Rasputin, thirty-seven, born in the village of Pokrovskoe, 250 miles east of the Urals, was in his charismatic prime: he was physically striking – long dark hair centre-parted, unkempt beard, swarthy, windburned, pockmarked skin, a broken nose and deep-set staring eyes that fascinated some with their intensity and repelled others with their brazen theatricality. Rough-hewn, malodorous and coarse, he liked and understood women, who provided most of his followers; he clearly possessed a pungent appeal.

  He grew up to be a wild horse-stealing, skirt-chasing, hard-drinking rakehell who discovered God on a pilgrimage to a local monastery. He was unlettered but literate, and knew much of the Scriptures by heart. He became a holy elder, a starets, and a wandering pilgrim, a strannik, who claimed to possess mystic power to communicate directly with God and to heal. His faith – in his religion, his mystical powers and his destiny – was ‘utterly sincere’, noted Grand Duchess Olga and that belief was self-fulfilling.

  Whether one believes his powers were miraculous, hypnotic or thespian, his charm was rough and simple. Siberian peasants had never been serfs and Rasputin almost smelt of the freedom of the great open spaces of the east. Rasputin was utterly self-possessed, and he handled his aristocratic and royal clientele with masterful directness and fearless confidence, without a hint of servility, making even tsars feel that they were privileged to be in his company
. He insisted that Grand Duchess Militsa kiss him thrice peasant-style, and it is likely that Alexandra kissed his hands; he called Nicky and Alix ‘Batushka’ and ‘Matushka’, addressing them with the intimate ty; he treated Alexei like a normal child; and, observed Grand Duchess Olga, ‘he radiated gentleness and warmth’, far from the froideur of courtiers. He revelled in his feral magnetism and never concealed his sexual worldliness. On the contrary, his sinfulness was an essential component of his holiness for he believed that only by testing his restraint by sexual temptation and by exuberant bouts of debauchery could he experience the elation of forgiveness and intimacy with God. He may have been influenced by the illegal Khlysty sect which sought to achieve union with God by frenzied dancing, singing and fornication, but if so, he was not a member of the sect and denied any connection.

  Both unique and typical, he was a link in the tradition of sacred wanderers. In the Silver Age, his rise reflected not just the fad for mystics and séances but a febrile decadence in society and a deep disillusionment with the Orthodox Church itself which, now no more than a government department, was filled with corrupt timeservers like the rest of the bureaucracy. Rasputin was just the latest of a host of fashionable healers patronized by seekers like the Crows. After wandering for many years, marrying and fathering children in his village, then making the pilgrimage to Mount Athos in Greece, he had arrived in Petersburg for the first time in 1903, and was hailed by the hierarchs of the Church, eager, like everyone else, to find gritty holiness amid so much cynical decay, in a son of the Siberian soil.

  To society ladies married to dull officers in golden epaulettes who divided their time between drilling soldiers and playing cards, this Siberian peasant with his greasy beard and wandering fingers was thrillingly real. More to the point, his insolence played on their guilt at living in palaces while the peasants starved. He was unpretentious, funny and playful, giving everyone nicknames, teasing them with earthy tales of fornicating horses while questioning them about their sex lives. His own feral sexuality, harnessed to peasant charm and mystical prestige, was irresistible to some: one woman boasted that she had fainted during the orgasm he delivered. His penis was said to be equine in scale, while (his future murderer) Felix Yusupov claimed that a fortuitously positioned wart explained his prowess. But in fact his promiscuity may be exaggerated and when later he saw prostitutes virtually every day they testified that he often just wanted to look at them and talk. Temptation and denial were the essence of his faith. Perhaps the power to shock and tempt was more satisfying than the act itself, or alcohol may have rendered him impotent. It may be that history’s most notorious sex-beast – even celebrated in pop songs – was not much of a lover at all.