Carol did not give up hope of marrying a Romanov grand duchess. Two years later, he suggested to Nicholas that he marry Marie, then sixteen. Nicholas laughingly declared that Marie was only a schoolgirl. In 1947, having abdicated the throne of Rumania, Carol made the third of his three marriages. His wife was the woman who had been his mistress for twenty-two years, Magda Lupescu.
In Europe, the early summer of 1914 was marked by glorious weather. Millions of men and women went off on holidays, forgetting their fears of war in the warmth of the sun. Kings and emperors continued to visit each other, dine at state dinners, review armies and fleets and bounce each other’s children on their knees. Beneath the surface, however, differences were detectable. The important visits took place between allies: King George V visited Paris; the Kaiser visited the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand; Raymond Poincaré, President of France, visited the Tsar in St. Petersburg. In their entourages, the chiefs of state brought generals and diplomats who sat down quietly with their opposite numbers to compare plans and confirm understandings. Military reviews took on special significance. Troops on parade were carefully watched for signs of élan, vigor and readiness for war.
An event of special symbolic importance took place at the end of June when the dashing British Admiral Sir David Beatty led the First Battle Cruiser Squadron of the Royal Navy up the Baltic on a visit to Russia. England, alarmed by the rapid building of the Kaiser’s powerful High Seas Fleet, was reluctantly abandoning a century of “splendid isolation.” A closer tie with Tsarist Russia, hitherto despised in press and parliament as the land of the Cossack and the knout, was part of Britain’s new diplomacy. On June 20, a blazing, cloudless day, Beatty’s four huge gray ships, Lion, Queen Mary, Princess Royal and New Zealand, steamed slowly past the Standart and anchored at Kronstadt. The Imperial family went aboard Beatty’s flagship, Lion, for lunch. “Never have I seen happier faces than those of the young grand duchesses escorted over Lion by a little band of middies especially told off for their amusement,” reported the British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. “When I think of them as I saw them that day,” he added, “the tragic story of their deaths seems like some hideous nightmare.”
The following day, while thousands of Russians stared at the English ships swinging silently on the Baltic tide, Beatty and his officers visited Tsarskoe Selo. Beatty himself, the youngest British admiral since Nelson, made a tremendous impression. His youthful, clean-shaven face caused many Russians, accustomed to seeing admirals with beards to their waists, to mistake Beatty for his own flag lieutenant. But Beatty’s manner was unmistakably one of command. His square jaw and the jaunty angle at which he wore his cap suggested the sea dog. He spoke in a voice which would have carried over the howl of a gale. It was as if the solid reality of Britain’s enormous seapower, a thing few Russians understood, had suddenly been revealed in Beatty’s person.
After Beatty’s departure, the Imperial family boarded the Standart for their annual two-week cruise along the coast of Finland. They were at sea four days later, June 28, when the terrible day arrived which is known in European history simply as “Sarajevo.”
A hot Balkan sun shone down that morning on the white, flat-roofed houses of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. The streets were crowded with people who had come from miles away to see the middle-aged Hapsburg prince who one day would be their emperor. Tall and fleshy, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not ragingly popular anywhere within the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had been ruled for sixty-six years by his aged uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph. Yet Franz Ferdinand was sufficiently enlightened politically to see—as his uncle and the government in Vienna did not—that unless something was done about the Slav nationalism burning inside the empire, the empire itself would disintegrate.
Austria-Hungary in 1914 was a hodge-podge of races, provinces and nationalities scattered across central Europe and the upper Balkans. Three fifths of these forty million people were Slavs—Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Bosnians and Montenegrins—yet the empire was ruled by its two non-Slavic races, the Austrians and the Magyars of Hungary. Not surprisingly, most of the Slavic peoples within the empire restlessly longed for the day they would be free.
On these turbulent Slav provinces within the empire, the small independent Slav kingdom of Serbia acted as a magnet. Inside Serbia, passionate Slav nationalists plotted to break up the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire and weld the dissident Slav provinces into a single Greater South Slav Kingdom. Serbia lacked the military strength to wrest the provinces away by force, but Belgrade, the Serb capital, became a fountainhead of inflammatory Slav nationalist propaganda. Belgrade also became the headquarters of a secret terrorist organization called the Black Hand, designed to strike at Austria-Hungary by sabotage and murder.
In Vienna, the Imperial capital, the disruptive influence of Serbia was greatly feared. Field Marshal von Conrad-Hötzendorf, Chief of the Austrian General Staff, described Serbia as “a dangerous little viper.” For years, Conrad-Hötzendorf had impatiently awaited orders to crush the Serb menace. But in 1914 the Emperor Franz Joseph was eighty-four. He had come to the throne in 1848; the years of his reign had been marked by tragedy. His brother Maximilian had become Emperor of Mexico and had been shot by a firing squad on a Mexican hillside. His only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, had died with his mistress in a love-pact suicide at Mayerling. His wife, Empress Elizabeth, had been struck down by an assassin’s knife. His nephew and heir, Franz Ferdinand, had defied his will and married a commoner, Countess Sophie Chotek. Before settling the succession on Franz Ferdinand, the old Emperor forced the Archduke to renounce the throne for any children he should have by Sophie. On public occasions, Sophie, wife of the heir, was forced to walk behind the least important ladies of the royal blood and to sit at a distant end of the Imperial table. She found the humiliations unbearable; the Archduke made violent scenes with his family, but the Emperor refused to give way. His last hope was to die in peace with his Imperial dignity and his empire intact.
Busy soothing his wife, absent from the court, Franz Ferdinand knew nevertheless that the Emperor would not live forever. Politically, he understood that the policy of drift could not continue. His proposal was to appease the Slavs within the empire by bringing them into active participation within the government: he foresaw an eventual broadening of Austro-Hungarian “dualism” into a “trialism” which would include in the government Austrians, Magyars and Slavs. His solution was opposed by all concerned: by Austrian and Magyar ministers who did not wish to share their power, and by Slav nationalists who feared that the plan’s success would destroy their own dreams of a South Slav kingdom. Yet Franz Ferdinand persisted. As a preliminary step, he decided that while he was watching Austrian army maneuvers in the Bosnian mountains, he would also pay a ceremonial visit to the provincial capital of Sarajevo. To expand this gesture of friendship, the Archduke brought his wife, the mother of his three disinherited children. In addition, he asked that the troops which normally lined the streets during an Imperial visit be dispensed with. Except for 150 local policemen, the crowds were to have free access to the Heir to the Throne.
Franz Ferdinand was dressed that day in the green uniform of an Austrian field marshal, with feathers waving from his military cap. As his six-car motorcade entered the town, he was in the open back seat of the second car with Sophie beside him. On the streets, he saw smiling faces and waving arms. Flags and bright-colored rugs hung as decorations, and from the windows of shops and houses his own portrait stared back at him. Franz Ferdinand was enormously pleased.
As the procession neared the city hall, the Archduke’s chauffeur glimpsed an object hurled from the crowd. He pressed the accelerator, the car jumped forward and a bomb which would have landed in Sophie’s lap bounced off the rear of the car and exploded under the wheels of the car behind. Two officers were wounded. The young Serb who had thrown the bomb ran across a bridge, but was apprehended by the police.
Franz Ferdinand, meanwhile,
arrived at Sarajevo’s city hall. He was pale, shaken and furious. “One comes here for a visit,” he shouted, “and is welcomed by bombs!” There was a quick, urgent conference. One of the Archduke’s suite asked if a military guard could be arranged. The provincial governor replied acidly, “Do you think Sarajevo is filled with assassins?” It was decided to go back through the city by a different route. On the way, however, the driver of the first car, forgetting the alteration, turned into one of the prearranged streets. The Archduke’s chauffeur, following behind, was momentarily misled. He too started to turn. An official shouted, “Not that way, you fool!” The chauffeur braked, pausing to shift gears not five feet from the watching crowd. At that moment, a slim nineteen-year-old boy stepped forward, aimed a pistol into the car and fired twice. Sophie sank forward onto her husband’s breast. Franz Ferdinand remained sitting upright, and for a minute no one noticed that he had been hit. Then the governor, sitting in front, heard him murmur, “Sophie! Sophie! Don’t die! Stay alive for our children!” His body sagged and blood from a wound in his neck spurted across his green uniform. Sophie, the wife who could never become an empress, died first from a bullet in the abdomen. Fifteen minutes later, in a room next to the ballroom where waiters were preparing chilled champagne for his reception, the Archduke died. His last muttered words were “It is nothing.”
The assassin, Gabriel Princip, was a native Bosnian of Serb extraction. On trial, the boy declared that he had acted to “kill an enemy of the South Slavs” and to “avenge the Serbian people.” The Archduke, Princip explained to the court, was “an energetic man who as ruler would have carried through ideas and reforms which stood in our way.” Years later, after Princip had died of tuberculosis in an Austrian prison, the truth came out: the plot had been laid in Belgrade, capital of Serbia, by the Serbian terrorist society known as the Black Hand. Its leader was none other than the chief of Serbian Army Intelligence.
The Austrian government reacted violently to Princip’s act. The Heir to the Throne had been killed in a Slav province by a Serb. The time and the pretext had arrived to crush “the Serbian viper.” Field Marshal von Conrad-Hötzendorf immediately declared that the assassination was “Serbia’s declaration of war on Austria-Hungary.” Count Berchtold, the Chancellor, who hitherto had opposed preventive war against Serbia, changed his mind and demanded that “the Monarchy with unflinching hand … tear asunder the threads which its foes are endeavoring to weave into a net above its head.” The most candid appraisal of the situation came in a personal letter from the Emperor Franz Joseph to the Kaiser:
“The bloody deed was not the work of a single individual but a well organized plot whose threads extend to Belgrade. Although it may be impossible to establish the complicity of the Serbian government, no one can doubt that its policy of uniting all Southern Slavs under the Serbian flag encourages such crimes and that the continuation of this situation is a chronic peril for my house and my territories. Serbia,” the Emperor concluded, “must be eliminated as a political factor in the Balkans.”
Despite the excitement in Vienna, most Europeans refused to consider the Archduke’s assassination a final act of doom. War, revolution, conspiracy and assassinations were the normal ingredients of Balkan politics. “Nothing to cause anxiety,” said the Paris newspaper Figaro. “Terrible shock for the dear old Emperor,” Britain’s King George V wrote in his diary. The Kaiser received the news three hours later aboard his sailing yacht, Meteor, as he was setting out from Kiel to take part in a race. A motor launch sped toward the yacht and William leaned over the stern to hear the shouted news. “The cowardly detestable crime … has shaken me to the depths of my soul,” he wired his Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg. But William did not think that the assassination meant war. What appalled him was the occurrence of that most monstrous of crimes, a regicide.
Three days before the events at Sarajevo, the Russian Imperial family sailed from Peterhof on their annual summer cruise along the Baltic coast. As they were boarding the Standart, Alexis, jumping for the ladder leading up to the deck of the yacht, caught his foot on a rung and twisted his ankle. Toward evening that day, he began to feel serious pain.
The following morning, the Standart was anchored in the heart of one of the Finnish fjords. Gilliard, making his way to Alexis’s cabin, found both Dr. Botkin and the Empress with his pupil, who was suffering intensely. The hemorrhage into the ankle was continuing, the joint swollen and rigid. Alexis was weeping; every few minutes, as the throbbing pain mounted, he screamed. Alexandra’s face was white. Gilliard went back to collect his books and then settled down to read to him as a distraction. Despite the illness, the cruise continued.
It was aboard the Standart that Nicholas and Alexandra learned what had happened at Sarajevo. Because neither he nor his ministers expected the assassination to lead to war, the Tsar did not return to his capital. On the day following the Archduke’s death, other news, even more sensational for every Russian, arrived on the Standart. It passed quickly through the ship in excited whispers: an attempt had been made on Rasputin’s life. None dared speak openly, but almost every person aboard hoped that the starets was finished. Alexandra, struggling with Alexis’s illness, became frantic with worry. She prayed continually and telegraphed daily to Pokrovskoe.
What had happened was this: Rasputin, returning to his village on June 27, had been followed there without his knowledge by Khina Gusseva, Iliodor’s agent. Gusseva caught the starets alone in a village street. She accosted him and, when he turned, drove Iliodor’s knife deep into his stomach. “I have killed the Antichrist,” she screamed hysterically and then attempted unsuccessfully to stab herself.
Rasputin was gravely hurt; the slash in his stomach had exposed his entrails. He was taken to a hospital in Tyumen, where a specialist sent by his friends in St. Petersburg performed an operation. For two weeks, his life was uncertain. Then, with the enormous physical strength which marked his life, he began to recover. He remained in bed for the rest of the summer and, accordingly, exercised no influence on the momentous events which were to come. Gusseva was placed on trial, declared insane and put into an asylum.
It was sheer coincidence that placed the two assassination attempts, the one at Sarajevo and the one at Pokrovskoe, so close together in time. Yet the coincidence alone is enough to provoke a tantalizing bit of speculation: Suppose the outcome of these two violent episodes had been reversed. Suppose the Hapsburg Prince, a well-meaning man, the heir and the hope of a crumbling dynasty, had lived, while the surging life and mischievous influence of the Siberian peasant had ended forever. How different the course of that long summer—and perhaps of our twentieth century—might have been.
On July 19, the Standart returned its passengers to Peterhof. Alexis, still suffering from a swollen ankle, was carried ashore. Nicholas and Alexandra plunged immediately into preparations for the state visit of the President of France, Raymond Poincaré, who was due in St. Petersburg the following day.
Raymond Poincaré was ten years old in 1870 when Prussian armies seized his native province of Lorraine, exiling him for most of his life from the place of his birth. Poincaré became a lawyer and then, successively, Foreign Minister, Premier and President of France. A short, dark-haired, robust man, he impressed all who met him. Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, reported to the Tsar: “In him [Poincaré], Russia possesses a reliable and true friend endowed with a statesman-like understanding that is exceptional and with an indomitable will.” The German ambassador in Paris had much the same impression. “M. Poincaré differs from many of his countrymen by a deliberate avoidance of that smooth and fulsome tone characteristic of the Frenchman,” he wrote. “His manner is measured, his words unadorned and carefully weighed. He makes the impression of a man with a lawyer’s mind who expresses his conditions with stubborn emphasis and pursues his aims with a powerful will.” Nicholas, who had met Poincaré once before, said simply, “I like him very much. He is a calm and clever man of small build.”
Paléologue’s diary began on July 20, 1914, the day that Poincaré arrived in Russia. The President was steaming up the Baltic aboard the battleship France; that morning the Tsar invited Paléologue to lunch with him aboard his yacht before the arrival of the France. “Nicholas II [was] in the uniform of an admiral,” wrote Paléologue. “Luncheon was served immediately. We had at least an hour and three quarters before us until the arrival of the France. But the Tsar likes to linger over his meals. There are always long intervals between the courses in which he chats and smokes cigarettes….” Paléologue mentioned the possibility of war. “The Tsar reflected a moment. ‘I can’t believe the Emperor [William II] wants war…. If you knew him as I do! If you knew how much theatricality there is in his posing!’ Coffee had just arrived when the French squadron was signalled. The Tsar made me go up on the bridge with him. It was a magnificent spectacle. In a quivering silvery light, the France slowly surged forward over the turquoise and emerald waves, leaving a long white furrow behind her. Then she stopped majestically. The mighty warship which had brought the head of the French state is well worthy of her name. She was indeed France coming to Russia. I felt my heart beating. For a few minutes there was a prodigious din in the harbor; the guns and the shore batteries firing, the crews cheering, the Marseillaise answering the Russian national anthem, the cheers of thousands of spectators who had come from St. Petersburg on pleasure boats.”
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family Page 33