Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty

by Robert K. Massie

  “Really?” the young woman is said to have replied, at the same time pulling the front of her dress still lower. “Pray tell Her Majesty that in Russia we do wear our dresses this way.”

  Alexandra’s new zeal over Orthodoxy embarrassed society. Themselves Orthodox from birth, they thought of the Empress with her aggressive collecting of rare icons, her wide reading of church history, her pilgrimages, her talks about abbots and holy hermits, as crankish. When she tried to organize a handiwork society in St. Petersburg whose members would knit three garments a year for the poor, most St. Petersburg ladies declared that they had no time for such rubbish.

  Members of the Imperial family resented the way the Empress seemed to seal them off from the palace and the Tsar. Large and scattered though it was, the Russian Imperial family, like most Russian families, had always been closely knit. Uncles and aunts and cousins were accustomed to frequent visits and invitations to dine. Anxious to be alone with her young husband, Alexandra was slow to issue these invitations. The family became indignant. Imperial grand duchesses, themselves the sisters or daughters of a tsar, huffed that a mere German princess should attempt to come between them and their prerogatives.

  Society enjoyed the friction between the two Empresses, Alexandra and Marie, siding openly with Marie and talking longingly of gayer days. But Marie lived mostly abroad, either in Copenhagen or visiting her sister, now Queen Alexandra of England, or staying in her villa on the French Riviera.

  Perhaps, because of the shyness she carried from childhood, the Empress Alexandra could never successfully have acted the public role demanded of her. Yet, in addition to her own personality, every happenstance conspired against her. Marie had lived in Russia for seventeen years before she came to the throne; Alexandra barely one month. The new Empress spoke almost no Russian. Unable to grasp the intricate ranking of the court, she made errors and gave offense. Once she was Empress, there was no way for her to make friends; ladies could not simply drop in on her or casually invite her for tea. Her sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth, who might have acted as a bridge between the throne and society, had moved to Moscow. Alexandra’s private plans to start giving lunches were interrupted by her recurring pregnancies and long confinements. Childbearing was not easy for her and, long before each birth was due, she canceled all appointments and went to bed. After the birth, she insisted on nursing each child and disliked being far from the nursery.

  Between the Empress and the aristocracy it became an unhappy cycle of dislike and rebuff. In her own mind, Alexandra found the explanation for this by telling herself that they were not real Russians at all. Neither the jaded nobility, nor the workers who went on strike, nor the revolutionary students, nor the difficult ministers had anything to do with the real people of Russia. The real people were the peasants she had seen during her summer at Ilinskoe. These humble people, multiplied into millions, who walked through the birch groves on their way to the fields, who fell on their knees to pray for the Tsar, were the heart and soul of Holy Russia. To them, she was certain, she was more than just an Empress; she was Matushka.

  * The strange phenomenon of powerful chiefs of state withholding vital government information from their immediate heirs has not been restricted to Russia or autocracies. Only when he suddenly became President on the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt did Harry Truman learn that the United States was in the final stage of an immense effort to build an atomic bomb.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Two Revolutionaries

  ALEXANDRA’S view of life in the provinces, although oversimplified, was generally accurate. Even at the turn of the century, the Russian countryside was studded with manor houses belonging to loyal country squires, and with villages inhabited by peasants whose fathers had been serfs and who themselves still clung to traditional patterns of life. Each sleepy provincial town was much like the next: at the top a crust of local nobility and gentry, then the bureaucrats and professional classes—judges, lawyers, doctors and teachers—and below them, priests and clerks, shopkeepers, artisans, workmen and servants. At times a current of unrest, a tricklet of liberalism, might run through one of these towns, but overwhelmingly the prevailing mood was conservative. Ironically, exactly such a town was Simbirsk on the Middle Volga, the childhood home of two men who in succession would play major roles in the overthrow of the Russia of Nicholas and Alexandra. One was Alexander Fedorovich Kerensky. The other, eleven years Kerensky’s senior, was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, called Lenin.

  Simbirsk in the 1880’s and 1890’s was an isolated town perched on a hill above the Volga River. There was no railroad, and although paddlewheel steamers stopped at its quay during the summer, in winter the only highway was the ice of the frozen river. On the crest of the hill, looking out over the river and the meadowland stretching away to the eastern horizon, stood the town’s cathedral, the governor’s mansion, the high school, the library. “From the summit right down to the waterside,” recalled Kerensky, “stretched luxuriant apple and cherry orchards. In the spring the whole mountain-side was white with blossom, fragrant, and at night breathless with the songs of the nightingales. From the summit … the view across the river over miles of meadowland was magnificent. With the melting of the snow, the river used to leave its banks and flood the low-lying fields … stretching like an endless sea over the fields which later in the heat of summer would be gay with the songs and games of peasants and townspeople come to mow the rich, fragrant grass.”

  In this pleasant place Vladimir Ulyanov was born in 1870, two years after the birth of Nicholas II. His father, Ilya Ulyanov, the son of a serf who had won his freedom, had graduated from Kazan University and begun his career as a teacher of mathematics. Ilya Ulyanov rose rapidly through the ranks of the state educational system and in 1863 he married Maria Blank, a Volga German whose father, a doctor, owned a large estate. Vladimir, named after the saint who became the first Christian ruler of Russia, was the third of Maria’s six children.

  In 1869, the year before Lenin’s birth, Ilya Ulyanov became Inspector and, five years later, Director of Schools for the Province of Simbirsk. He worked zealously training teachers and opening new schools, and he was away from home for long periods, but in twelve years the number of primary schools in the province rose from 20 to 434. In recognition of this work, Ilya was promoted to the rank of Actual Councilor of State, a rank in the hereditary nobility equivalent to an army major general. When Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, Ilya Ulyanov “sadly buttoned on his official uniform and went off to the Simbirsk cathedral to mourn the death of the Tsar-Liberator.”

  Vladimir, called Volodya in the family, was a plump, red-haired boy with a large head, stocky body and short legs. In the summers, with his brothers and sisters, he swam in the Volga and hunted mushrooms in the birch woods; during the winters, he went ice-skating and sleighing. Unlike Alexander, his impulsive, idealistic older brother, Vladimir tended to be precise and sarcastic. When he played chess with his brothers and sisters, he established a strict rule: “Under no circumstances, take a move back. Once you have touched a piece, you have to move it.” He was an excellent student in school, and when the other Ulyanov children brought their marks home and solemnly reported them to their parents, Volodya simply burst through the door and up the stairs, shouting, “Excellent in everything!”

  Within a span of sixteen months in 1886 and 1887, the comfortable Ulyanov household collapsed. In 1922, replying to a census questionnaire, Lenin wrote: “Nonbeliever [in God] since the age of 16”—this was his age when, in January 1886, his father died of a stroke before his eyes. In the spring of 1887, his older brother Alexander was arrested in St. Petersburg, along with four other university students, on the charge of trying to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. They had been apprehended with a crude, unworkable bomb concealed inside a hollowed medical dictionary. Alexander did not deny the charge. To his mother, who hurried to his side, he declared, “I tried to kill the Tsar. The attempt failed and that is all there
is to it.” In May 1887, Alexander Ulyanov was hanged. His mother walked beside him to the gallows, repeating over and over, “Have courage. Have courage.”

  The effect of his brother’s death on Vladimir is a subject of dispute. “The execution of such a brother as Alexander Ulyanov was bound undoubtedly to have a crushing and destructive psychological result upon any normal mind,” said Alexander Kerensky. But Lenin, of course, was very far from normal. In addition, there is evidence of friction between the two brothers, especially after their father’s death. “Undoubtedly, a very gifted person but we don’t get along,” said Alexander of Vladimir during this period. Alexander particularly disliked Vladimir’s impertinence, arrogance and mockery of their mother. Once when her two sons were playing chess, Maria reminded Vladimir of something she had asked him to do. Vladimir answered rudely and did not move. Maria insisted and Vladimir became ruder. At this point, Alexander said calmly, “You either go and do what Mama asks or I shall not play with you again.”

  Alexander was hanged in the spring of Vladimir’s final year in the Simbirsk high school. Outwardly unperturbed, Vladimir took his final examinations and, wearing a tight-fitting blue uniform, graduated at the head of his class. When he did so, the school headmaster (at considerable risk, considering the scandal then hanging over the Ulyanovs) wrote a warm endorsement of Vladimir:

  “Very gifted, always neat and assiduous, Ulyanov was first in all his subjects, and upon completing his studies received a gold medal as the most deserving pupil with regard to his ability, progress and behavior. Neither in the school, nor outside, has a single instance been observed when he has given cause for dissatisfaction by word or by deed to the school authorities.… Religion and discipline were the basis of this upbringing …, the fruits of which are apparent in Ulyanov’s behavior. Looking more closely at Ulyanov’s character and private life, I have had occasion to note a somewhat excessive tendency towards isolation and reserve, a tendency to avoid contact with acquaintances and even with the very best of his school fellows outside school hours.”

  The signature under this document was that of Fedor Kerensky, headmaster of the school, and friend and admirer of the deceased Ilya Ulyanov. Because of this friendship, the court temporarily entrusted Fedor Kerensky with the management of young Vladimir’s affairs.

  As the widow of a hereditary nobleman, Maria Ulyanov continued to draw her pension, but the scandal made it necessary for her to move from Simbirsk. Vladimir entered the University of Kazan and was quickly expelled for taking part in a mild student demonstration. Thereafter, hoping to save her second son from the course which had destroyed his brother, Maria bought a farm of 225 acres and installed Vladimir as farm manager. He did not like it. “My mother wanted me to engage in farming,” he recalled. “I tried it but I saw that it would not work. My relations with the moujiks were not normal.” The farm was sold and the family moved to Samara to live with Maria’s parents. There, sitting beside his grandfather’s fireplace, Vladimir read omnivorously: Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. He began to study law at home and crammed four years of work into a single year; when he received permission to take his examinations, he was again first in his class. Despite his academic brilliance, he failed in his brief attempt at legal practice. He took a dozen cases in Samara on behalf of peasants and workmen accused of minor crimes; all were found guilty. For exercise, he swam every day. In the winter, he hung upside down and did gymnastics on a pair of cross-bars he made himself.

  With the same intensity with which he had mastered law, he began to study Karl Marx. The totality of the Marxist dream and the compelling logic of Marx’s style appealed to Vladimir far more than the impulsive emotionalism displayed by his brother Alexander Ulyanov. Alexander thought of assassinating a single man whose death would alter nothing. Marx—and after him, Lenin—wished to change everything. To his mother’s despair, Vladimir turned every family meal into a heated discussion of Das Kapital. She despaired even more when he announced that, because Marx had declared that the core of the revolution would be the urban proletariat, he intended to follow his brother’s footsteps to St. Petersburg.

  In 1893, just one year before the youthful Tsar Nicholas mounted the throne, twenty-three-year-old Vladimir wearing his father’s frock coat and top hat, arrived in St. Petersburg, where it was arranged that he would work in a law office. He joined a Marxist study group which met to debate in the evenings. At a traditional Russian Shrove Tuesday supper of blinis, Vladimir first met another dedicated Marxist, Nadezhda Krupskaya. A round-faced, snub-nosed schoolteacher with short hair, full lips and unusually large eyes, Krupskaya, as she was always called, was a year older than Vladimir. After the party, Vladimir walked her home along the banks of the Neva. Thereafter they attended meetings together. At one of these, someone suggested the establishment of literary committees to educate the masses. “Vladimir Ilyich laughed,” recalled Krupskaya, “and somehow the laughter sounded so wicked and dry.… ‘Well,’ he said, ‘anybody who likes to save the fatherland with a literacy committee, why, fine, we shall not interfere.’ ”

  In 1895, Vladimir went abroad for the first time. He was eager to go to Geneva to meet George Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism and idol of all young Russian revolutionaries. Yet Plekhanov, after twenty years in exile, had begun to lose touch with the movement in Russia, and Vladimir, anxious to talk, found him cold and distant. He went on to Zurich, Berlin and Paris, where he admired the wide tree-lined boulevards. A few weeks later, he returned to Russia with a false-bottomed trunk stuffed with wads of illegal literature, and plunged into organizing strikes and printing anti-government leaflets and manifestoes. For the sake of expediency, he avoided personal attacks on the young Tsar, who had been on the throne for less than a year. “Of course, if you start right away talking against the Tsar and the existing social system, you only antagonize the workers,” he explained. Arrested in December 1895, he spent a year in jail in St. Petersburg and then was exiled for three years to Siberia.

  The life of a political exile in Siberia during the last years of tsarist rule was not always a frozen nightmare. It could be and often was a remarkably permissive arrangement. Punishment consisted only in the requirement that the exile live in a prescribed area. If the exile had money, he could live exactly as he did in European Russia, establishing a household, keeping servants, receiving mail, books and visitors.

  Vladimir, released from prison in St. Petersburg, was given five days in St. Petersburg and four in Moscow to prepare for his exile. He traveled alone across the Urals, taking with him a thousand roubles and a trunk filled with a hundred books. His three years in the quiet backwater Siberian village of Shushenskoe near the Mongolian border were among the happiest of his life. The river Shush flowed nearby and was filled with fish, the woods teemed with bears, squirrels and sables. Vladimir rented rooms, went swimming twice a day, acquired a dog and a gun and went hunting for duck and snipe. He was the wealthiest man in the village and demonstrated to a local merchant how to keep his books. His mail was enormous, and through it he maintained contact with Marxists in every corner of Russia and Europe. Several hours each day he worked on his lengthy work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia.

  He had been there a year when Krupskaya joined him. Herself arrested for organizing a strike, she had arranged to be sent to Shushenskoe by telling the police that she was Vladimir’s fiancée. Vladimir was delighted to see her and to have the books she brought, but less happy to welcome her mother, whom she had brought along and whom he disliked. To his own mother he wrote that Nadezhda “has had a tragi-comic condition made to her; if she does not marry immediately, she has to return to Ufa.” On July 10, 1898, to solve the problem, they married. As newlyweds, they settled down to translate The Theory and Practice of Trade Unionism by Sidney and Beatrice Webb; their Russian version ran to a thousand pages. In the winter, they ice-skated on the frozen river. Vladimir was expert; with his hands in his pockets, he glided quickly away. Krupskaya tr
ied valiantly and stumbled behind. The mother-in-law went once and fell flat on her back. But all three loved the whiteness of the Siberian winter, the clear, glowing quality of the air, the peaceful silence of the snowy woods. “It was like living,” said Krupskaya, “in an enchanted kingdom.”

  Because his term ended before hers, Vladimir left his wife and her mother in Siberia and returned to St. Petersburg. Soon after, he drew up a petition from “the hereditary noble, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov” asking the authorities to permit him to return to Siberia to see his wife before going abroad. The petition was granted, Vladimir said goodbye and began a lonely life as a Russian revolutionary in the cities of Europe. His work as an underground organizer and a forceful writer had already brought him a significant reputation; this was enhanced when he became an editor and regular contributor to Iskra (The Spark), a revolutionary magazine published abroad for smuggling into Russia. It was at this point that Vladimir began to use the pen name “Lenin.” He wrote a pamphlet titled What Is to Be Done? which attracted wide attention, and drafted a program for the Social Democratic Party, as the exiled Russian Marxists had begun to call themselves. He no longer feared to attack the Tsar personally; “Nicholas the Bloody” and “Nicholas the Hangman” were favorite expressions.

  When Krupskaya’s term of exile was ended, she joined her husband in Munich. In 1902 the offices of Iskra were moved to London, and Lenin and Krupskaya followed, arriving in a dense fog. For Krupskaya particularly, the transition from a peaceful Siberian village to an immense city with its noise and dirt and clanging traffic was painful. They rented an unfurnished two-room apartment at 30 Holford Square kept by a Mrs. Yeo, and Lenin, under the name “Jacob Richter,” applied for entrance to the Reading Room of the British Museum. In the mornings he worked, and in the afternoons he and Krupskaya took trips around London on the top of a double-decker bus. There was trouble with Mrs. Yeo, who protested that Krupskaya did not hang curtains and wore no wedding ring. Finally a Russian friend warned the landlady that her lodgers were legally married and that if she persisted in chattering, she would be sued for defamation of character.