Crowns in Conflict

by Theo Aronson

  The House of Savoy – in spite of its long history – was at that stage so shallowly rooted in the soil of newly united Italy, so lacking in blood relations in the courts of Europe, so apprehensive of the spread of socialism within its realm, that it had imagined its position would be strengthened by allying itself to some long-established monarchical power. To this, the Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires, mastering their distaste for the brand-new kingdom of Italy, agreed. Austria hoped that the alliance would keep Italy out of its own happy Balkan hunting grounds, and Germany that it would secure another monarchist ally against republican France.

  The Triple Alliance, signed in Vienna on 20 May 1882, bound Austria and Germany to support Italy in the unlikely event of her being attacked by France; and Italy to support Austria if she were attacked by two or more great powers, and to support Germany if she were attacked by France alone. It was not, in truth, much of a bargain for Italy.

  In the years since then, the alliance had undergone various strains. Unlike his father, Umberto I, Victor Emmanuel had very little love for the Central Powers. To the liberal and self-effacing Victor Emmanuel, the Kaiser seemed ridiculously theatrical and his Reich dangerously authoritarian. His distaste for Wilhelm II's flamboyance was hardly diminished by the Kaiser's state visit to Rome in 1903. The German Emperor arrived with a suite of eighty, including a selection of hand-picked grenadiers whose height – intentionally or not – made the diminutive King of Italy appear even smaller. To the astonishment of the British ambassador, the Kaiser referred to Victor Emmanuel as 'the Dwarf' and to his Queen as 'a peasant girl'.4 Nor were matters helped when, in his determination to improve the shining hour, the Kaiser, having laid the customary wreaths on the tombs of Italy's kings, plucked roses from the wreaths and handed them round to the Committee of Welcome.

  The Emperor Franz Joseph, Victor Emmanuel liked even less. Not only did he consider him patronising and reactionary but he still regarded the Habsburg monarchy as the traditional enemy of a united Italy. After all, it was mainly from Austria that Italy had won its independence. So it was not really practical politics for Victor Emmanuel III to be allied to Franz Joseph when a completing of the Risorgimento depended on winning the Italian-speaking cities of Trieste and Trento and their hinterlands from Austria. Only by fighting Austria could Italy hope to reclaim her territory.

  Inclining, far more naturally, towards the Triple Entente powers, and particularly towards democratic France and Britain, Victor Emmanuel's Italy began a secret flirtation with them. Never were the qualities of foxiness, of which the Italian King was so often accused, more in evidence than in the series of clandestine agreements drawn up during his reign. The most outrageous example of this Italian duplicity came in 1902 when Victor Emmanuel signed a secret agreement with France. In direct violation of the Triple Alliance, the two countries agreed on a policy of mutual neutrality. Seven years later he signed a secret agreement with that other Entente power, Russia, whereby the two nations agreed to co-ordinated action in the Balkans.

  As an ally in war, Bismarck had once declared, Italy would be worth next to nothing. By now, she could not even be counted on as an ally at all.

  5

  Autocrat of All the Russias

  OF ALL THE MONARCHS of twentieth-century Europe, the Tsar of Russia was, potentially, the most powerful. Not even those other autocratic emperors, Wilhelm II or Franz Joseph I, were in a position to wield as much personal power as Nicholas II. To the millions of peasants who made up the vast bulk of his subjects, this Autocrat of All the Russias was as a god.

  The near-divinity of the Tsar was emphasised when, in the year 1913, Nicholas II celebrated the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty. Throughout that summer, the imperial family took part in various national celebrations. The ceremonies began in March with a great choral Te Deum in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan in St Petersburg. From the gigantic Winter Palace, stretching for a quarter of a mile along the River Neva, the imperial procession drove out through the streets of the city. Built, two centuries before, by Peter the Great on the marshes of the River Neva, St Petersburg was designed to be Russia's 'Window on Europe' – a spacious, Italianate, westernised city of baroque palaces, sweeping boulevards and ornamental gardens. With its pink granite quays, innumerable waterways and elegant bridges, it was known as 'the Venice of the North'. Its more barbaric splendours – and its undeniably northern climate – earned it the title of 'the Babylon of the Snows'. No sovereign in Europe could have wished for a more grandiose capital.

  Yet for all the glories, both of the setting and the ceremonial, the tercentenary celebrations in St Petersburg were only a qualified success. The crowds lining the streets were lukewarm. Amongst the aristocratic audience at the state performance of Glinka's A life for the Tsar there was, says one observer, 'little real enthusiasm, little real loyalty'. The forty-five-year-old Nicholas II, so handsome in his uniform, looked disappointingly distant and dreamy. The forty-one-year-old Tsaritsa Alexandra, for all the magnificence of her clothes and jewels, appeared stiff and disdainful. Twice – once at a glittering reception at the Winter Palace and once at the Maryinsky Theatre – she left early. 'A little wave of resentment rippled over the theatre', noted one member of the audience.

  Their four daughters, whose ages ranged from eighteen to twelve, were appealing enough but their only son, the nine-year-old Tsarevich, was apparently unable to walk. He had to be carried everywhere in the arms of a giant Cossack of the Guards. Only a handful of people knew what was wrong with him.

  Things improved when, in May, the imperial family set off on a dynastic pilgrimage to Kostroma on the River Volga, where the first Romanov had been told of his elevation to the throne. As their luxurious steamer sailed up the river, peasants crowded the banks; some even plunged waist deep into the waters to get a closer look at the fabled Tsar. When he walked through the streets of provincial towns, workmen fell to the ground to kiss his shadow.

  Climax to the celebrations came in Moscow where, in the great central square, Nicholas dismounted from his horse and walked, behind a row of chanting priests, into the Kremlin. At last, beneath the golden domes and among the twinkling icons of the Ouspensky Cathedral, in the ancient heart of Holy Russia, the Tsar could feel at one with his people. For here, he fervently believed, was the true Russia. St Petersburg, with its decadent aristocracy, its critical intellectuals, its bickering politicians and its discontented workers, was, as the Tsaritsa once put it, 'a rotten town, not one atom Russian'.

  The authentic voice of the people, the imperial couple believed, could be heard in the address which the peasant delegation delivered to the Tsar. 'Be sure that our Lives belong to Thee,' ran the splendidly anachronistic phrases. 'Be sure that at the first call we shall place ourselves before Thee like a wall and sacrifice ourselves . . . for Thy dear life, Thy House and the glory of our country. Rule Tsar of the true faith to our glory and the terror of our foes.'

  'Now you see for yourself what cowards those state ministers are,' remarked Alexandra to a lady-in-waiting at the height of the Moscow celebrations. 'They are constantly frightening the Tsar with threats of revolution, and here – you see it yourself – we need merely to show ourselves and at once all hearts are ours.'1

  The Tsaritsa was being much too optimistic. No more than the Tsar did she understand the true nature of the web in which they had become enmeshed. For Nicholas and Alexandra were caught up in a personal and political situation of monumental significance.

  Nicholas II, declared Wilhelm II on one occasion, was 'only fit to live in a country house and grow turnips'.2 The Kaiser's judgement, for all its harshness, contained more than a grain of truth. Nicholas II was an unsophisticated and unintellectual man with a taste for family life and country living.

  'He was not', says his cousin, Princess Marie of Romania, 'one of the giants, but the gentleness of his expression made him infinitely sympathetic; something seemed to melt in one's heart when one looked at him, at his soft hazel eyes,
at his gentle lips, when one watched his quiet movements, listened to his soft, low-toned voice.' With his affable manners and his considerable personal charm, the Tsar was frequently described as 'the most perfect type of English gentleman'.

  Yet beneath that gentlemanly English exterior there lurked a profoundly Russian soul. And this despite the fact that, as a member of Europe's inter-married royal clan, almost no Russian blood flowed through his veins. Born on 18 May 1868, Nicholas had inherited neither the iron will of his father, Tsar Alexander III, nor the common sense of his mother - that lively Danish princess, sister to Britain's Queen Alexandra, who had become the Tsaritsa Marie Fedorovna. On the contrary, he was as stubborn, sentimental, superstitious, devious, secretive and fatalistic as any Russian moujik– peasant.

  His duplicity was the despair of his ministers. 'Our Tsar', complained one of them, 'is an Oriental, a full-blooded Byzantine.' The minister went on to cite the occasion when, after a friendly, successful, two-hour-long meeting with the Tsar, he returned home to find the Tsar's written order for his dismissal lying on his desk.

  Again, it was the Kaiser who supplied the explanation for his fellow sovereign's apparent shiftiness. 'The Tsar is not treacherous,' said Wilhelm, 'but he is weak. Weakness is not treachery, but it fulfils all its functions.' And Nicholas II's uncle, Edward VII, always maintained that his nephew was as weak as water.

  It was this weakness, this inability to make up his mind, this avoidance of any open discussion, this lack of moral courage, that drove the Tsar's ministers to near distraction. They never knew where they stood. Once, after Nicholas had congratulated his prime minister on having drawn up a complicated programme of reform, the Tsar sent him a note cancelling the whole project. 'An inner voice', explained the Tsar, 'keeps on insisting that I do not accept responsibility for it. So far my conscience has not deceived me. Therefore I intend to follow its dictates. I know that you, too, believe that a Tsar's heart is in God's hands. Let it be so. For all laws established by me, I bear a great responsibility before God . . .'3

  In other words, by leaving things to God, the Tsar could avoid having to make any firm decisions. That he was merely an instrument in God's hands, that it was to God alone that he was accountable, that he had been ordained by God to uphold Orthodoxy and autocracy, Nicholas II had no doubt at all. Only in this clinging to the theory of his God-given rights was he ever firm, or usually firm.

  'The gentle but uneducated Emperor', sighed the British ambassador, Sir Arthur Nicolson, 'is afflicted with the misfortune of being weak on every point except his own autocracy.'

  Backing up the Tsar, every inch of the way, was his wife, the Tsaritsa Alexandra Fedorovna. Born in 1872 as Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, Alexandra had long since forsaken her sensible Coburg background and her sober Lutheran upbringing. She had by now fully, even fervently, identified herself with her husband's country. But Russia had not taken to her with anything like the same ardour. In spite of her determination to dedicate herself to the welfare of the Russian people, the Tsaritsa was very unpopular. And she had been so from the start. Her hasty marriage to Nicholas, brought forward on the sudden death of his father, Alexander III, in 1894, had seemed somehow ill-omened. Their new Tsaritsa had come to them, whispered the superstitious Russians, behind a coffin.

  In the twenty or so years since then, the Tsaritsa's luck had hardly improved. Although – with her firm features, sea-green eyes and red-gold hair – she was a woman of considerable beauty, her manner lacked all grace and charm. Painfully shy, she loathed all public appearances. Yet in no court in Europe were sovereigns on such merciless display. The magnificent Russian palaces, with their gigantic halls, their huge columns of jasper and malachite and their wealth of gold and silver ornamentation, were the setting for the most formal and exacting ceremonial in the world. The imperial couple were the central figures in a set piece of almost barbaric splendour. Yet through all this kaleidoscopic brilliance the Tsaritsa moved like an automaton. Incapable of saying a gracious word or of making a spontaneous gesture, she appeared cold, haughty, unapproachable.

  And not only was Alexandra ill at ease in St Petersburg society, she thoroughly disapproved of it. To this withdrawn, intense and serious-minded woman, their decadence and frivolity were abhorrent. She was shocked by the happy-go-lucky way in which they practised their religion. Having been converted to Orthodoxy before her marriage, Alexandra had embraced it with all the fervour of her nature.

  With equal ardour, she had embraced the principle of autocracy. No less than the Tsar – indeed even more, for she was more earnest, more passionate, more assertive than he – did she maintain that he was responsible to God alone. His autocratic powers must be preserved at all costs. She not only encouraged but strengthened her husband's distrust of all political reform. Her political creed was simple. The Russian people – and by the people she meant the humble, devout, unquestioning peasants – were devoted to the Tsar but, because of their childlike simplicity, they had to be ruled firmly and autocratically. Anyone wanting to destroy this autocracy was automatically an enemy, not only of the Russian people, but of God. The autocratic Tsar was God's anointed: thus the revolutionaries, or even the liberal reformers, were God's enemies.

  In spite of these uncompromising beliefs, Alexandra was far from being the arrogant, power-hungry virago of her critics' imaginings. Among her family and her household, safe from the sneers of fashionable St Petersburg society, she revealed herself as a charming, compassionate and utterly unaffected woman.

  Her marriage had been a brilliant success. Nicholas and Alexandra adored each other: they were as much in love after twenty years as they had been when they married. Together with their five children they formed a delightful family group, and since the unsociable Tsaritsa discouraged the children from mixing with others, the four young grand-duchesses and the little Tsarevich remained closely attached to each other and to their parents. At the very centre of national life, yet curiously cut off from it, the imperial family formed an island of domestic tranquillity.

  Isolating the family still further from the realities of the Russian situation was their chosen way of life. For they lived, not in St Petersburg, but some fifteen miles south of the capital, at Tsarskoe Selo – the Tsar's village. The so-called village was, in fact, the very symbol of autocracy: an ornate, artificial, self-contained world of grandiose palaces, leafy parks, formal gardens, triumphal arches, heroic monuments and domed pavilions, all protected from the outside world by a high, ceaselessly patrolled circle of iron railings.

  The imperial family lived in the Alexander Palace – the smaller of the two palaces – in an atmosphere which, in spite of the relative simplicity of their own tastes, was almost overwhelmingly lush, formal and, in the final analysis, unreal. Year after year slipped by, wrote one member of the household, 'and the little enchanted fairyland of Tsarskoe Selo slumbered peacefully on the brink of an abyss . . .'4

  Their annual migrations in no way strengthened their contact with the real world. Spring and autumn took them, in their heavily guarded train, to the luxuriant scenery and mild climate of the Livadia Palace in the Crimea. In May they moved to the Peterhof Palace on the Baltic coast, an architectural extravagance created by Peter the Great to rival Versailles. June found them cruising the Gulf of Finland in the yacht Standart which, although as big as a small steamer and fuelled by coal, was as graceful as a sailing ship. In August they went to the imperial hunting lodge at Spala, deep in the Polish forest. In November they returned to Tsarskoe Selo for the winter and for their increasingly rare public appearances during the St Petersburg season. And wherever they moved, they were guarded, shielded, kept at arm's length from almost anyone other than their soft-footed servants, obsequiously bowing officials or respectful members of their households.

  One cloud obscured their happiness. It was a cloud that, in the end, was to contribute to the destruction of them all. The Tsarevich, who turned nine in the yea
r 1913, suffered from haemophilia.

  On the Tsaritsa, the boy's illness had a particularly devastating effect. Appreciating that it was she who had passed the dreaded bleeding disease on to her son, that it was because of her that he had to suffer such terrible agonies, Alexandra dedicated herself, almost entirely, to his welfare. As there was nothing that the doctors could do to alleviate, let alone cure, her son's illness, she had turned, more and more, to God. Alexandra had always been drawn to the supernatural, to that particular Russian world of miracles, weeping statues, saintly relics, unaccountably glowing icons, faith healers and wandering Men of God. And, by the year 1913, she felt confident that, in this twilight world, she had found her link with the Almighty.

  It had been in 1905 that the imperial couple had first met Gregory Rasputin – the dirty, uncouth, lank-haired, thirty-thrce-year-old starets or miracle worker, with his extraordinarily hypnotic eyes. There were several things, other than his reputation as a healer, that attracted the Tsaritsa to Rasputin. She liked his apparent simplicity. Never sycophantic, never grovelling, this plain-speaking moujik seemed the very personification of the loyal, devout, unchanging Russia of Alexandra's naïve imaginings.

  But, more important than any of this, Rasputin was the one person who was able to relieve the Tsarevich's sufferings. Precisely how he achieved this is uncertain. One explanation is that Rasputin, with his hypnotic eyes and self-confident presence, was able to create the aura of tranquillity necessary to slow the blood through the boy's veins. Where the demented mother and the dithering doctors merely increased the tenseness of the atmosphere around the child, Rasputin calmed him and sent him to sleep.

  Had Rasputin confined his activities to alleviating the Tsarevich's agony, things might have been different. But far from being a simple, pious starets, Rasputin was a man with a passionate lust for power. As his hold over the Tsaritsa and, through her, over the weak-willed Tsar increased, so did he come, ever more forcefully, to voice his political opinions and exercise his political influence.