Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family

by Robert K. Massie

  The addressees retaliated by unfrocking Iliodor. Raging, he screamed, “I will not allow myself ever to be pardoned,” and renounced Orthodoxy. Uncertain what to do with himself, he considered becoming a shepherd and “borrowed sufficient money to buy a flock of fifty sheep.” But this idea seemed tame, and, instead, he decided to start a revolution. “It was my intention to start a revolution on October 6, 1913. I planned the assassination on that day of sixty lieutenant governors and forty bishops throughout Russia…. I chose a hundred men to execute this plan.” But the plan was uncovered by the police and Iliodor went into hiding. As a fugitive, he gave his blessing to the formation of an organization of women and girls, most of them wronged by Rasputin, which had as its sole purpose Father Gregory’s castration. One of the women, a pretty twenty-six-year-old former prostitute named Khina Gusseva whom Rasputin had used and then spurned, wished to go further and kill the starets. Iliodor pondered the thought, agreed, opened her blouse and hung a knife on a chain around her neck, instructing her, “With this knife, kill Grishka.”

  Eventually, Iliodor slipped across the frontier into Finland disguised as a woman and began writing a book about himself and Rasputin. When his book was finished, Iliodor first offered it to the Empress for sixty thousand roubles. This piece of blackmail was rejected and the vengeful former monk then took his manuscript to an American publisher. Later, even he admitted that into the book he had put “a bit extra.”

  Although he wielded great influence, Rasputin was not a frequent visitor at the Alexander Palace. He lived in St. Petersburg, and when he came to Tsarskoe Selo, it was usually to the little house of Anna Vyrubova. Avoiding the palace was not Rasputin’s idea. Rather, it represented a decision by the Imperial couple to observe a certain circumspection in their interviews with the controversial starets. The palace police saw everything. It was impossible even to creep up a back staircase without the event being noted and recorded; the following day, the news was all over St. Petersburg. In the later years, so rarely did Rasputin come that Gilliard never met him inside the palace. Baroness Buxhoeveden, who lived just down the hall from the young Grand Duchesses, never met him at all.

  Nevertheless, despite the fact that she saw Rasputin infrequently and then under circumstances ideal for him, Alexandra refused to consider that there might be another side to her Man of God. “Saints are always calumniated,” she told Dr. Botkin. “He is hated because we love him.” The family despised the police who surrounded them day and night; they took it for granted that the police reports of Rasputin’s activities were fabrications. The Empress flatly refused to accept any hint of Rasputin’s debauchery. “They accuse Rasputin of kissing women, etc.,” she later wrote to the Tsar. “Read the apostles; they kissed everybody as a form of greeting.” Alexandra’s opinion was confirmed by the faithful Anna Vyrabova. “I went often to Rasputin’s lodging,” said Anna, “bringing messages from the Empress, usually referring to the health of Alexis.” But Anna saw nothing of which she did not devotedly approve. “Rasputin had no harem,” she insisted. “In fact, I cannot remotely imagine a woman of education and refinement being attracted to him in a personal way. I never knew of one being so attracted.”

  Neither by temperament nor by experience was Anna Vyrubova equipped to judge the matter of physical attraction. Nevertheless, her innocent reports of Rasputin’s behavior were not the result of blindness or stupidity. When Anna was present—and her visits were always announced in advance—Rasputin’s behavior was rigidly correct. The ladies of his circle, knowing Anna’s importance to their hero, followed suit.

  After the Revolution, Basil Shulgin, an intensely monarchist member of the Duma and one of the two men who, trying to preserve the monarchy, obtained the abdication of Nicholas II, analyzed Rasputin’s role: “Rasputin was a Janus…. To the Imperial family he had turned his face as a humble starets and, looking at it, the Empress cannot but be convinced that the spirit of God rests upon this man. And to the country he has turned the beastly, drunken unclean face of a bald satyr from Tobolsk. Here we have the key to it all. The country is indignant that such a man should be received under the Tsar’s roof. And under the roof there is bewilderment and a sense of bitter hurt. Why should they all be enraged? That a saintly man came to pray over the unhappy Heir, a desperately sick child whose least imprudent movement may end in death? So the Tsar and the Empress are hurt and indignant. Why should there be such a storm? The man has done nothing but good. Thus a messenger of death has placed himself between the throne and the nation…. And because of the man’s fateful duality, understood by neither [Tsar nor people], neither side can understand the other. So the Tsar and his people, however apart, are leading each other to the edge of the abyss.”

  Pierre Gilliard was more succinct. “The fatal influence of that man [Rasputin] was the principal cause of death of those who thought to find in him their salvation.”

  17

  “We Want a Great Russia”

  If any man outside of the Imperial Family could have saved Imperial Russia, it was the burly, bearded country squire who served as prime minister from 1906 to 1911, Peter Arkadyevich Stolypin. A man of the country with roots in the rural nobility, Stolypin had little in common with either the great figures of the princely aristocracy or the dry, professional civil servants who scrambled diligently up the ladders of promotion to the seats of power in the St. Petersburg bureaucracy. Stolypin brought to the Imperial government a clean, strong breath of youth and fresh country air. Direct, outspoken, brimming with impassioned patriotism and overwhelming in his physical energy, Stolypin grappled with the fundamental causes of Russia’s troubles. A passionate monarchist, he hated the revolutionaries and ruthlessly crushed the last outbursts of the 1905 Revolution. But Stolypin was also a realist who sensed that the monarchy would survive only if the government and the structure of society itself could adapt to the times. Accordingly, he reconstructed the system of peasant land ownership and began the transformation of an absolute autocracy into a form of government more responsive to the popular will.

  No Russian statesman of the day was more admired. In the Duma, Stolypin’s big, bearlike figure attracted every eye. Dressed in a frock coat with a watch chain across his chest, he spoke with such eloquence and such evident sincerity that even his adversaries respected him. “We are not frightened,” he boomed at his enemies on the Left in the Second Duma. “You want great upheavals, but we want a great Russia.” His ministerial colleagues were unanimous in their praise. “His capacity for work and his moral power of endurance were prodigious,” wrote Alexander Izvolsky, the Foreign Minister. Vladimir Kokovtsov, the Finance Minister, declared that Stolypin’s “nobility, courage and devotion to the State were indisputable.” Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, called him “an ideal man to transact business with … his promises were always kept.” Most important of all, Stolypin pleased the Tsar. In October 1906, after Stolypin had been in office for only three months, Nicholas wrote to his mother, “I cannot tell you how much I have come to like and respect this man.”

  Peter Stolypin was born in 1863 while his mother rested at the Rhineland spa of Baden-Baden. He was educated in St. Petersburg, where his father had a position at court and his mother was in society. Stolypin himself preferred the country, and most of his career was spent away from the capital. In 1905, at the height of the first revolution, he was governor of Saratov province, charged with suppressing local peasant uprisings that were among the most violent in Russia. Stolypin accomplished his task with a minimum loss of life. Often, rather than ordering government troops to bombard an insurgent village, Stolypin himself would walk into the village alone to talk to the rebel leader and persuade him to have his men lay down their arms.

  Because of his success in Saratov province, Stolypin was brought to St. Petersburg in 1906 to become Minister of Interior. He arrived as Witte was departing and took office under Witte’s successor, an elderly bureaucratic relic named Ivan Logginovich Goremykin. Gorem
ykin conducted his office on the simple, undeviating principle that ministers were servants of the tsar, appointed to execute, not initiate, policy. Sir Arthur Nicolson, who preceded Buchanan as British Ambassador, called on Goremykin at this time, expecting to find a harried, overworked statesman. Instead, he found himself confronting “an elderly man with a sleepy face and Piccadilly whiskers” reclining on a sofa surrounded by French novels. Goremykin foundered after only three months in office, and before departing, he recommended to the Tsar that Stolypin be appointed in his place.

  On the evening of July 7, 1906, Stolypin was summoned to Nicholas’s study at Tsarskoe Selo and asked to become Prime Minister. Kokovtsov wrote later: “Stolypin told us that he had attempted to point out his lack of experience and his unfamiliarity with the cross-currents of St. Petersburg society, but the Tsar had not let him finish: ‘No, Peter Arkadyevich, here is the icon before which I often pray. Let us make the sign of the Cross over ourselves and let us ask the Lord to help us both in this difficult, perhaps historic, moment.’ Then the Tsar made the sign of the cross over Stolypin, embraced him and kissed him, and asked him on what day it would be best to dissolve the Duma.”

  Once in power, Stolypin became a whirlwind of energy. He meant to attack root problems such as the peasants’ long-suppressed thirst for land of their own, but nothing could be done about these matters until the terrorist attacks on local officials and police had been suppressed. To restore law and order, Stolypin established special field courts-martial. Within three days of their arrest, assassins swung from the gallows. Before the end of the summer, six hundred men had been strung up and Russians had named the hangman’s noose “Stolypin’s necktie.” Yet, the number of men hanged by the government was smaller than the sixteen hundred governors, generals, soldiers and village policemen killed by terrorists’ bombs and bullets.

  Inevitably, Stolypin himself became the assassins’ target. On a Saturday afternoon, scarcely a month after taking office, he was writing at his desk in his country villa outside St. Petersburg when a bomb exploded. A wall of the house collapsed and thirty-two people, including visitors and servants, were killed. Stolypin’s young son, playing on an upstairs balcony, was hurt, and his daughter, Natalia, was badly maimed. But Stolypin himself was merely splattered with ink. “A day and a half after the explosion, the Ministers’ Council resumed its work as if nothing unusual had happened,” Kokovtsov wrote. “Stolypin’s calm and self-control won the admiration of everyone.”

  The government’s repression, to which the bomb plot was a reaction, was only a harsh preliminary to reform. While terrorists still dangled at the end of government ropes, the new Prime Minister attacked the basic problem of land. In 1906, three quarters of the people of Russia coaxed a living from the soil. Since 1861, when Alexander II freed the serfs, most of Russia’s peasants lived in village communes, made communal plans for the land and worked it in partnership. The system was ridiculously inefficient; within each commune, a single peasant might farm as many as fifty small strips, each containing a few thin rows of corn or wheat. Often, the peasant spent more time walking between his scattered furrows than he did plowing the earth or scything the grain. Stolypin overturned this communal system and introduced the concept of private property. By government decree, he declared that any peasant who wished to do so could withdraw from the commune and claim from it a share of ground to farm for himself. Further, the new plot was to be a single piece, not in scattered strips, and the peasant was expected to pass it along to his sons.

  Nicholas strongly approved Stolypin’s program and, in order to make more land available, proposed that four million acres of the crown lands be sold to the government, which in turn would sell them on easy terms to the peasants. Although the Tsar needed the consent of the Imperial family to take this step, and both Grand Duke Vladimir and the Dowager Empress opposed him, eventually he had his way. The land was sold and Nicholas waited hopefully for members of the nobility to follow his example. But none did so.

  The impact of Stolypin’s law was political as well as economic. At a stroke, it created a new class of millions of small peasant landowners whose future was tied to an atmosphere of stability which could be provided only by the Imperial government. As it happened, the most vociferous peasant troublemakers were often the first to claim land, and thus became supporters of law and order. By 1914, nine million Russian peasant families owned their own farms.

  At bottom, political success or failure in Russia depended on the crop. For five fruitful years, nature smiled on Peter Stolypin. From 1906 to 1911, Russia was blessed with warm summers, mild winters and steady, gentle rain. Acre for acre, the crops were the best in Russia’s history. As food became plentiful, government tax revenues rose; the budget was balanced and even showed a surplus. With the help of large French loans, the railroad network expanded rapidly. Coal and iron mines broke records for production. American firms such as International Harvester and Singer Sewing Machine Company established offices in Russia. In the Duma, the government introduced and passed bills raising the salaries of primary-school teachers and establishing the principle of free primary-school education. Censorship of the press was lifted, and the government became more liberal in the sphere of religious tolerance. “It is all wrong,” said Stolypin, explaining these changes to Sir Bernard Pares, “that every proposal of reform should come from the opposition.”

  Ironically, the fiercest opposition to Stolypin’s programs came from the extreme Right and the extreme Left. Reactionaries disliked all reforms which transformed the old, traditional ways. Revolutionaries hated to see any amelioration of a system which bred discontent. For Lenin and his dwindling band of exiles, the Stolypin era was a time of fading hope. Sadly convinced that a “revolutionary situation” no longer existed in Russia, Lenin wandered from library to library through Zurich, Geneva, Berne, Paris, Munich, Vienna and Cracow. Gloomily, he watched the success of Stolypin’s land reforms. “If this should continue,” he wrote, “it might force us to renounce any agricultural program at all.” For some dedicated Marxists, it seemed that the dream was entirely dead; in 1909, Karl Marx’s despairing daughter and son-in-law Laura and Paul Lafargue committed suicide. Lenin took the news with grim approval. “If one cannot work for the Party any longer,” he said, “one must be able to look truth in the face and die the way the Lafargues did.”

  The appearance in May 1906 of the First Imperial Duma was so new, so alien to everything that had gone before in Russia, that neither the Tsar nor the members of the fledgling representative body knew quite how to behave. Everything had to be begun at the beginning and be constructed overnight: constitution, parliament and political parties. Before October 1905, there were no political parties in Russia other than the Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries, both revolutionary parties which had worked underground. Under the circumstances, it was remarkable that two responsible liberal parties sprang up quickly: the Constitutional Democrats or Cadets, led by the historian Paul Miliukov, and the Octobrists, who took their name from their adherence to the 1905 October Manifesto and were led by Alexander Guchkov.

  Nevertheless, the gap in understanding between monarch and parliament remained too wide. The Duma was received by the Tsar in the throne room of the Winter Palace. It was not a promising occasion. Masses of police and soldiers waited outside in the palace square. The newly elected deputies, some in evening clothes, others in peasant blouses, stood on one side of the room, staring at the huge crimson-and-gold throne, at the court officials in gold braid, and at the Empress and her ladies in formal court dress. On the other side stood the court and the ministers, among them Count Fredericks. “The deputies,” he said. “They give one the impression of a gang of criminals who are only waiting for the signal to throw themselves upon the ministers and cut their throats. What wicked faces! I will never again set foot among those people.” Fredericks was not the only one who felt uncomfortable. The Dowager Empress Marie noticed the “incomprehensible hatred�
�� on the deputies’ faces. Kokovtsov found himself staring at one of the deputies particularly, “a man of tall stature, dressed in a worker’s blouse and high oiled boots, who examined the throne and those about it with a derisive and insolent air.” Stolypin, standing near Kokovtsov, whispered to him, “We both seem engrossed in the same spectacle. I even have the feeling that this man might throw a bomb.”

  The feelings of the Duma were quickly manifested. Scarcely had the 524 members taken their seats in a hall of the Tauride Palace when they formulated a sweepingly aggressive “Address to the Throne.” To Nicholas’s horror, it demanded universal suffrage, radical land reform, the release of all political prisoners and the dismissal of ministers appointed by the Tsar in favor of ministers acceptable to the Duma. At Nicholas’s command, old Goremykin tottered down to the Duma and, with trembling hands and in a scarcely audible voice, rejected everything the Duma had asked. When Goremykin sat down, there was a moment of complete silence. Then one member leaped to the rostrum and cried, “Let the executive power bow before the legislative.” He was greeted by deafening applause. Other speakers followed, each more stinging in his attack on the government. When those ministers who were present rose and attempted to speak, they were shouted down with cries of “Retire! Retire!”

  Appalled by these scenes, Nicholas was eager to dissolve the Duma, but he recognized that Goremykin was not the man to ride out the turmoil which would follow dissolution. It was at this point, in July 1906, that Goremykin resigned and Stolypin was appointed. Two days later, Stolypin locked the doors of the Tauride Palace and posted the Imperial decree dissolving the Duma. That afternoon, a number of members took trains across the nearby border into Finland. Meeting in a forest, they declared, “The sessions of the Duma are hereby resumed,” and called on the nation to refuse to pay taxes and to send no recruits to the army until the Duma was restored. But this appeal, the famous Vyborg Manifesto, had no effect. Numbed by revolution, Russians were not willing to fight again to preserve their parliament.