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

by Robert K. Massie

  Catherine’s reign brought classical style to the Russian autocracy. Diderot, Locke, Blackstone, Voltaire and Montesquieu were her favorite authors. She wrote frequently to Voltaire and Frederick the Great; she built the Hermitage to serve as a guest house if Voltaire should ever come to Russia, but he never did. Catherine herself wrote a history of Russia, painted and sculpted. She never remarried. She lived alone, rising at five to light her own fire and begin fifteen hours of work. Over the years, she took dozens of lovers. A few, such as Prince Gregory Orlov and Prince Gregory Potemkin, helped her rule Russia. Of Potemkin, she wrote that their letters might almost be man to man, except that “one of the two friends was a very attractive woman.”

  Catherine died in 1796, the year that Napoleon Bonaparte was winning his first military triumphs in Italy. Eighteen years later, Napoleon invaded Russia and entered Moscow only to see his army destroyed by winds and snows. Two years after that, in 1814, Catherine’s grandson, Tsar Alexander I, rode into Paris at the head of a Russian army. After Alexander I came his brother, Nicholas I. Nicholas II, descendant and heir to Michael Romanov, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, was the great-grandson of Nicholas I.

  Maurice Paléologue once did some idle arithmetic and calculated that, by blood, Tsar Nicholas II was only 1/128th Russian, while his son, the Tsarevich Alexis, was only 1/256th Russian. The habit Russian tsars had of marrying German and Danish wives was responsible for these startling fractions; they suggest better than anything else the extent to which the original Romanov blood had been diluted by the beginning of the twentieth century.

  As head of the family, Nicholas II presided over an immense clan of Romanov cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews. Although keenly jealous of name and rank, they were often casual about duties and obligations. By education, language and taste, they were part of the cosmopolitan aristocracy of Europe. They spoke French better than they spoke Russian, they traveled in private railway coaches from hotels at Biarritz to villas on the Riviera, they were more often seen as guests in English country houses or palaces in Rome than on their family estates beside the Volga or the Dnieper or the Don. Wealthy, sophisticated, charming and bored, most of the Romanovs considered “Nicky,” with his naïve fatalism, and “Alicky,” with her passionate religious fervor, to be pathetically quaint and obsolete.

  Unfortunately, in the public mind, all the Romanovs were lumped together. If Nicholas’s inadequacies as tsar weakened the logic of autocracy, the family’s indifference to its reputation helped to corrode the prestige of the dynasty. Nicholas’s sister Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna recognized the family’s failure. Shortly before her death in 1960 she observed sorrowfully:

  “It is certainly the last generation that helped to bring about the disintegration of the Empire.… All those critical years, the Romanovs, who should have been the staunchest supporters of the throne, did not live up to their standards or to the traditions of the family.… Too many of us Romanovs had … gone to live in a world of self-interest where little mattered except the unending gratification of personal desire and ambition. Nothing proved it better than the appalling marital mess in which the last generation of my family involved themselves. That chain of domestic scandals could not but shock the nation … but did any of them care for the impression they created? Never.”

  The problem was divorce. By law, members of the Imperial family were forbidden to marry without the sovereign’s consent. They were also forbidden to marry commoners or persons who had been divorced. The Orthodox Church permits divorce in cases where adultery has been committed; indeed, in the eyes of the Church, the act of adultery itself dissolves a Christian marriage. But what is permitted is certainly not encouraged. In the Imperial family, whose private life was supposed to set an example, divorce was considered a stain and a disgrace.

  Yet, scarcely was Nicholas II on the throne before the strict code began to crumble. First, his cousin Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich casually married a commoner and went to live in England. Next, the Montenegrin princess Grand Duchess Anastasia divorced her husband, the Duke of Leuchtenberg, to marry Grand Duke Nicholas, the tall soldier who commanded the Russian armies in World War I. Soon afterward, the Tsar’s youngest uncle, Grand Duke Paul, having been left a widower, married a commoner and a divorcée.

  “I had a rather stern talk with Uncle Paul which ended by my warning him of all the consequences his proposed marriage would have for him,” Nicholas wrote to Marie on this occasion. “It had no effect.… How painful and distressing it all is and how ashamed one feels for the family before the world. What guarantee is there now that Cyril won’t start at the same sort of thing tomorrow, and Boris and Serge the day after? And in the end, I fear, a whole colony of members of the Russian Imperial family will be established in Paris with their semi-legitimate and illegitimate wives. God alone knows what times we are living in when undisguised selfishness stifles all feelings of conscience, duty, or even ordinary decency.”

  Three years later, Grand Duke Cyril, Nicholas’s first cousin, fulfilled the Tsar’s gloomy prophecy by marrying a divorcée. To make matters more delicate, Cyril’s new wife was Princess Victoria Melita, whose former husband was Empress Alexandra’s brother Grand Duke Ernest of Hesse. It had been at the wedding of “Vicky” and “Ernie” that Nicholas had proposed to Alexandra. Nicholas reacted to Cyril’s move by dismissing him from the Imperial Navy and banishing him from Russia. This action, in turn, infuriated Cyril’s father, Grand Duke Vladimir, who threatened to resign all his official posts. In the end, Nicholas retreated. “I wonder whether it was wise to punish a man publicly to such an extent, especially when the family was against it,” he wrote to Marie. “After much thought which in the end gave me a headache, I decided to take advantage of the name day of your grandson and I telegraphed to Uncle Vladimir that I would return to Cyril the title which he had lost.”

  Of all the blows delivered against the dynasty by the Romanov family itself, none was more damaging or more personally painful to the Tsar than the one which came from his brother Michael. Like many another youngest son and younger brother of a reigning monarch, Michael was ignored in public and indulged in private. Even as a child, he had been the only one able to tease his redoubtable father, Alexander III. A family story told of the morning that father and son were strolling in a garden when the Tsar, suddenly angry at Michael’s behavior, snatched a watering hose and drenched his son. Michael accepted the dousing, changed his dripping clothes and joined his father at breakfast. Later in the morning, Alexander got up from his desk and, as was his habit, leaned meditatively out of the window of his study. A torrent of water descended on his head and shoulders. Michael, waiting at a window above with a bucket, had had his revenge.

  Grand Duke Michael, ten years younger than Nicholas, grew up a handsome, affectionate nonentity. Although from the death of his brother George in 1898 until the birth of his nephew Alexis in 1904 Michael was Heir to the Throne, no one seriously considered the possibility of “darling Misha” becoming tsar. It was unthinkable. Even in public, surrounded by government ministers, his sister Olga Alexandrovna blithely addressed Michael by her own pet name for him, “Floppy.”

  Michael himself enjoyed automobiles and pretty girls. He had a garage filled with shiny motorcars which he loved to drive. Unfortunately, the Grand Duke had the troublesome habit of falling asleep at the wheel. Once, with Olga beside him, speeding to Gatchina to dine with their mother, “Floppy” nodded off and the car rolled over. Both brother and sister were thrown clear, unhurt.

  Among his relatives, Michael was closest to Olga, the other baby of the family. Consequently, he was often around Olga’s attractive young female friends and maids-of-honor. In 1901, at the age of twenty-three, Michael decided that he was in love with the prettiest of these girls, Alexandra Kossikovsky, whom Olga called “Dina.” Romantically, he followed his sister and her suite to Italy, and in Sorrento he and Dina began planning an elopement. Before the scheme had advanced bey
ond the planning stage, Empress Marie heard about it. Summoning Michael, she overwhelmed him with anger and scorn. Dina was summarily dismissed.

  Five years later, in 1906, Michael, now twenty-eight, again fell in love. This time, he wrote to his brother asking permission to marry a woman who was not only a commoner but who had twice been divorced. In dismay, Nicholas wrote to Marie: “Three days ago, Misha wrote asking my permission to marry.… I will never give my consent.… It is infinitely easier to give one’s consent than to refuse it. God forbid that this sad affair should cause misunderstanding in our family.”

  This time, Michael did not give up. The lady involved was born Nathalie Cheremetevskaya, the daughter of a Moscow lawyer. At sixteen, she had married a merchant named Mamontov, then divorced him three years later to marry a Captain Wulfert of the Blue Cuirassier Guards. The colonel of her new husband’s regiment was none other than His Imperial Highness Grand Duke Michael. Within a few months Nathalie managed to become Michael’s mistress. From that moment on, she dominated his life.

  Nathalie Cheremetevskaya was a beautiful woman of great allure. Paléologue encountered her once in a St. Petersburg shop during the war and hurried home to describe her to his diary with Gallic exuberance: “I saw a slender young woman of about 30. She was a delight to watch. Her whole style revealed great personal charm and refined taste. Her chinchilla coat, opened at the neck, gave a glimpse of a dress of silver grey taffeta with trimmings of lace. A light fur cap blended with her glistening fair hair. Her pure and aristocratic face is charmingly modeled and she has light velvety eyes. Around her neck a string of superb pearls sparkled in the light. There was a dignified, sinuous soft gracefulness about her every movement.”

  At first, Michael respected the Tsar’s denial of permission to marry. Nevertheless, he and Nathalie left Russia to live together abroad. In 1910, Nathalie bore the Grand Duke a son whose name became George. In July 1912, the lovers took up residence in the Bavarian resort village of Berchtesgaden. One morning in October of that year, they secretly crossed the border into Austria and in a small Orthodox church in Vienna they were married. Only after their return to Berchtesgaden as man and wife did they notify the Tsar.

  Their telegram was delivered to Nicholas at Spala. Coming immediately after the crisis with Alexis, it staggered the Tsar. “He broke his word, his word of honor,” Nicholas said, agitatedly rubbing his brow as he showed the telegram to Anna Vyrubova. “How in the midst of the boy’s illness and all our trouble, could they have done such a thing?” At first, Nicholas wanted to keep the marriage a secret. “A terrible blow … it must be kept absolutely secret,” he wrote to Marie. The impossibility of this soon became obvious. Nevertheless, Nicholas deprived his brother of the right of regency on Alexis’s behalf, and put Michael in a state of tutelage as if he were a minor or a mental incompetent. Grand Duke Michael, second in line for the Russian throne, was then forbidden to return to Russia.

  Later, the reason for Michael’s seemingly impetuous decision to marry became clearer. From the medical bulletins and news reports that were filtering across Europe, Michael suddenly became aware of the fact that his nephew might die at any moment. If Alexis died, Michael knew that he would be compelled to return to Russia under circumstances which would make it impossible for him to marry a woman of Nathalie’s standing. Before this could happen, he—or she—decided to act. “What revolts me more than anything else,” said Nicholas, “is his [Michael’s] reference to poor Alexis’s illness which, he says, made him speed things up.”

  Despite his anger, Nicholas could not ignore his brother’s fait accompli Nathalie was now his brother’s wife. Reluctantly, he granted her the title of Countess Brassova and consented that her infant son, his nephew, should be styled Count Brassov. When the war began, Nicholas permitted the couple to return to Russia and Michael went to the front in command of a Caucasian division. But neither Nicholas nor Alexandra ever received or uttered a word to the bold and beautiful Nathalie Cheremetevskaya.

  To those who remember it, the winter season in St. Petersburg following the tercentenary seemed especially brilliant. The tall windows in the great palaces along the Neva blazed with light. The streets and shops were filled with bustling crowds. Fabergé, with its heavy granite pillars and air of Byzantine opulence, was thronged with customers. In elegant hair-dressing salons, ladies sat on blue-and-gold chairs, congratulating themselves on getting an appointment and exchanging the latest gossip. The most delicious story that year concerned Vaslav Nijinsky’s expulsion from the Imperial Ballet. The banishment followed a performance of Giselle in which the magnificent dancer had worn an unusually brief and revealing costume. When he appeared on stage, there was a commotion in the Imperial box. The Dowager Empress was seen to rise, fix the stage with a devastating glare and then sweep out of the theatre. The dancer’s expulsion followed immediately.

  The mood of the capital was one of hope. Russia was prosperous, memories of the war with Japan had faded, the tercentenary had provided a surge of enthusiasm for the ancient monarchy. There were rumors that court balls would be held again, now that the Tsar’s daughters were growing up. Grand Duchess Olga, golden-haired and blue-eyed, had already made her first appearances at St. Petersburg balls. Grand Duchess Tatiana, slender, with dark hair and amber eyes, was ready to be presented. The court balls did not take place that winter, but the social event of the season was a ball which the Dowager Empress gave for her granddaughters at the Anitchkov Palace. The Empress came, but left at midnight, and it was the Tsar who remained until 4:30 a.m. to escort his daughters home. On the train back to Tsarskoe Selo, he sipped a cup of tea and listened while the girls discussed the party and planned how late they would sleep the next morning.

  Beyond the circle of sparkling light, the enthusiasm of the tercentenary quickly dissipated. Unrest among the workers and peasants continued to grow. In April 1912, an incident had taken place in the remote Lena goldfields of Siberia. The miners had gone on strike and were walking in protest toward the office of the Anglo-Russian Lena Gold Mining Company when a drunken police officer ordered his men to open fire. Two hundred people were killed, and Russia seethed with anger. In the Duma and the press, the massacre was called “a second Bloody Sunday.” The government ordered a Commission of Inquiry, and the Duma, unwilling to rely on the report of a government commission, decided to conduct its own investigation. The head of the Duma commission was Alexander Kerensky.

  Since leaving the university in St. Petersburg in 1905, Kerensky had become a familiar figure as he defended political prisoners in courtrooms all across Russia. Although his arguments and his successes frequently were embarrassing to the government, “I was not subject to the slightest pressure,” he said. “No one could oust us from the courts, no one could lift a finger against us.” The same sense of legal fair play prevailed at the Lena goldfields investigation: “The government commission sat in one house and we sat in another. Both commissions were summoning and cross-examining witnesses … both were recording the testimony of the employees, both were writing official reports.… The gold fields administration greatly resented our intrusion but neither the … [government investigators] nor the local officials interfered in any way; on the contrary … the Governor actually helped.” Kerensky’s report bitterly damned the police, and not long afterward the Minister of Interior resigned.

  From the goldfields, Kerensky went straight to the Volga region to run for election to the Fourth Duma. He ran as a critic of the government, was elected, and for the two years before the war he traveled across Russia making speeches, holding meetings and doing “strenuous political organizing and revolutionary work … The whole of Russia,” he wrote, “was now covered with a network of labor and liberal organizations—the co-operatives, trade unions, labor clubs.” It was no longer even necessary for agitators to be secretive about their work. “In those days a man as openly and bitterly hostile to the government as myself toured from town to town quite freely making speeches at pu
blic meetings. At these meetings, I criticized the government sharply.… [Never] did it enter the heads of the Tsarist Cheka to infringe on my parliamentary inviolability.”

  Kerensky’s work, and that of others like him, had an effect. In 1913, the year of the tercentenary, seven hundred thousand Russian workers were on strike. By January 1914, the number had grown to one million. In the Baku region, fighting broke out between the oil workers and the police, and, as it had always been in Russia, the Cossacks came at a gallop. By July 1914, the number of strikers had swollen to one and a half million. In St. Petersburg, mobs of strikers were smashing windows and erecting barricades in the streets. That month, Count Pourtalès, the German Ambassador, repeatedly assured the Kaiser that in these chaotic circumstances Russia could not possibly fight.

  The end of the Old World was very near. After three hundred years of Romanov rule, the final storm was about to break over Imperial Russia.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Long Summer of 1914

  BY the spring of 1914, the nine-year-old Tsarevich had made a good recovery from the attack at Spala eighteen months before. His leg had straightened and, to his parents’ delight, he walked with only a trace of a limp. In celebration of Alexis’s return to health, the Tsar decided one clear May morning to abandon his papers and take his son on an outing. The excursion from Livadia into the mountains was to be entirely male. Alexis was overjoyed.