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

by Robert K. Massie

  Most significantly, Sukhomlinov made this impression on the Tsar. Like many rogues, he could be enormously charming, and he carefully did everything in his power to please Nicholas. His reports, unlike those of other ministers, were brief and free from gloomy predictions. Knowing that the Tsar took pride in the army, he gave constant assurance that morale and equipment were in splendid condition. When he reported in person, he larded his talk with selections from his vast fund of funny stories. At court, he was known as “General Fly-Off” because of his alertness and speed in anticipating the Tsar’s wishes. Nicholas enjoyed him greatly, and, watching the superbly polished regiments of the Imperial Guard march past on parade, could not believe that the Russian army was unready for war.

  Sukhomlinov was a courtier who used high military rank to support a lavish way of life. His arch-rival, the Commander-in-Chief in the field, Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich, was a prince of the Imperial blood, a grandson of Tsar Nicholas I. Although born to great wealth and impeccable position, Nicholas Nicolaievich devoted his life to service in the army. In appearance, the fifty-seven-year-old Grand Duke was awesome. Standing six feet six inches tall, with a thin body, blazing blue eyes in a narrow face, his beard trimmed to a neat point, a dagger or sword hanging from his belt, he was the ancient warrior chieftain. “He was the most admired man in the army, not only an old-fashioned soldier, but deeply Slav,” wrote Paléologue. “His whole being exuded a fierce energy. His incisive measured speech, flashing eyes and quick, nervous movements, hard, steel-trap mouth and gigantic stature personify imperious and impetuous audacity.”

  In the army, the Grand Duke inspired feelings of awe. By “the peasant soldiers of the Russian army,” declared Knox, “… he was regarded as a sort of legendary champion of Holy Russia…. They felt that, though he was a strict disciplinarian and very exacting … he would ask from the private soldier no greater effort than he … imposed upon himself.”

  Naturally enough, the Commander-in-Chief and the Minister of War despised each other. The Grand Duke took his responsibilities as seriously as Sukhomlinov took his lightly. In 1908, when the Duma had criticized the appearance of members of the Imperial family in high military ranks, Nicholas Nicolaievich resigned from active command. Sukhomlinov, appointed War Minister in 1909, had seen a clear field for his own advancement to the more glamorous role of Commander-in-Chief once war was declared. To his chagrin, in 1914 the Tsar, having been dissuaded from assuming personal command of the armies in the field, appointed his cousin to the post. Thereafter, both in word and in deed, the jealous War Minister did what he could to undercut the Grand Duke. At one point, with messages streaming in begging for more shells, Sukhomlinov refused to raise the order for more ammunition. When the Chief of Artillery came to him weeping to say that Russia would have to make peace because of the shortage of shells, Sukhomlinov told him curtly to “go to the devil and shut up.”

  Both in Berlin and in Paris, strategy was tailored to the size and clumsiness of the Russian colossus. Aware that the state of Russia’s railroads would not permit a rapid concentration of the Tsar’s millions of soldiers, the German General Staff planned that the weeks before the cumbersome giant could move should be used to destroy France. “We hope in six weeks after the beginning of operations to have finished with France, or at least so far as to enable us to direct our principal forces against the East,” General von Moltke, Chief of the German General Staff, told his nervous Austrian counterpart in May 1914. The Kaiser characteristically expressed the German plan more crudely: “Lunch in Paris, dinner in St. Petersburg.”

  Knowing that the blow was coming, French generals and diplomats had struggled single-mindedly for twenty years to ensure that the Russians would move quickly in the East once war began. To speed up Russian mobilization, France had poured money into her ally; the loans were given strictly on condition that they be used to build railroads leading to the German frontier. Even with this new track, the number of men in position by M–15—fifteen days after mobilization—would be only a fraction of Russia’s strength. Nevertheless, France insisted that the Russians attack on M–15 with whatever they had ready; the French counted on seven hundred thousand men. To wait longer meant catastrophe for France.

  In its first weeks, the war ran brilliantly according to the German timetable. Through the hot weeks of August, the cream of the German army, one million men in gray uniforms, moved like a human scythe across Belgium and northern France. On September 2, less than a month after crossing the frontier, the Kaiser’s weary advance guard stood thirty miles north of Paris. With a single lunge, they would be on the Champs-Elysées.

  From the day war began, the primary mission of the French Ambassador in St. Petersburg was to urge the Russians to hurry. With a stream of anguished telegrams from Paris flowing into his Embassy, Paléologue bustled from one office to the next, begging, imploring and demanding haste. On August 5, he told the Tsar, “The French army will have to face the formidable onslaught of twenty-five German corps. I, therefore, implore Your Majesty to order your troops to take the offensive immediately. If they do not, there is danger that the French army may be crushed.” Nicholas responded emotionally. Reaching out and clasping Paléologue in his arms, he said, “Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, let me embrace in you my dear and glorious France…. The moment mobilization is complete I shall order an advance. My troops are most enthusiastic. The attack will be pressed with the greatest vigor. No doubt you know that the Grand Duke Nicholas is extraordinarily forceful.”

  On the same day, the Ambassador called on the Grand Duke: “The generalissimo received me in his enormous study where maps were spread out on all the tables. He came towards me with his quick firm strides. ‘God and Joan of Arc are with us,’ he exclaimed. ‘We shall win….’” “How soon will you order the offensive, Monseigneur?” asked Paléologue. “Perhaps I shan’t even wait until the concentration of all my corps is complete. As soon as I feel myself strong enough, I shall attack. It will probably be the 14th of August.” Escorting Paléologue to the door, he vigorously shook the Ambassador’s hand, crying, “And now, into God’s hands.”

  The Grand Duke was as good as his word. The front he commanded was 550 miles long, beginning in the north on the Baltic where the Russian Baltic provinces bordered East Prussia. From there, the front curved south and west around the enormous bulge that made up Russian Poland. Then, along the bottom of the Polish bulge, it ran eastward to the frontier of the Ukraine. On the southern sector of this long line, in the Austrian province of Galicia, an Austro-Hungarian army of one million men was massing. West of Warsaw, on the direct line to Berlin, the Russians could not advance because of the danger on their lengthy Galician and East Prussian flanks. The Russian attack, therefore, was delivered in the north, against East Prussia.

  Two Russian armies were selected to make the attack. The First Army, consisting of 200,000 men under General Rennenkampf, was to move southwest parallel to the Baltic coast, while the Second Army, 170,000 men under General Samsonov, would advance northward from Poland. Rennenkampf’s army was to start first, drawing on itself the bulk of the German forces in East Prussia. Two days Later, once the Germans were fully engaged, Samsonov was to strike north for the Baltic, putting himself across the rear of the Germans fighting Rennenkampf. Each of the Russian armies individually was larger than the German force. If the Grand Duke’s strategy worked, the Germans would be ground up between the two armies, and the Russians would begin crossing the Vistula River below Danzig. Ahead of them, the road to Berlin—only 150 miles away—would lie open.

  Because of the need for haste, the Russian offensive was assembled piecemeal. Grand Duke Nicholas did not leave the capital for field headquarters until midnight of August 13. Allowing his train to be shunted onto sidings so that troop trains could pass, he took fifty-seven hours for the journey and arrived on the morning of the 16th. General Samsonov, commander of the Second Army, was an asthmatic and had been on leave with his wife in the Caucasus. He
arrived at his headquarters on the 16th to find his troops already on the march toward the frontier. General Rennenkampf, a swashbuckling cavalry officer, sent his Cossacks raiding across the border as early as the 12th. A German machine gun, captured on one of these forays, appeared as a trophy two days later on the lawn at Peterhof, where it was examined with interest by the Tsar and the Tsarevich. On August 17, Rennenkampf’s entire army advanced, driving the German frontier troops before them. In these first skirmishes, Rennenkampf’s tactics recalled the Napoleonic Wars one hundred years before. Under fire from German cannon, the General sent his cavalry to charge the guns. As a result, in the war’s first engagements many young Guards officers, the flower of Russia’s aristocratic youth, were shot from their saddles.

  Although the German General Staff had anticipated a Russian advance into East Prussia, the news that Cossack horsemen were riding over the rich farms and estates of Junker aristocrats sent a thrill of horror through Berlin. Temporarily ignoring the Russian Second Army moving up from the south, the Germans engaged Rennenkampf’s force on August 20. The Russian artillery, firing 440 shells per day, was effective, and the result was a partial German defeat. In desperation, the German General Staff hastily dispatched a new pair of generals to take command. On August 22, Paul Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, the formidable military duo which was to lead Germany through four years of war, were both aboard the same train bound for East Prussia.

  While Rennenkampf rested—too long—from his victory, Samsonov’s army was struggling north through the wild, uninhabited country north of the Polish border. The route lay through a maze of pine and birch forests intersected by streams and marshes, with few inhabitants, poor roads and no railroads. There were few farms on this sandy soil, and the army ate only what it could pull behind it in carts. On the eve of battle, some of the men had been without their full ration of bread for five days.

  Despite their hardships, Samsonov’s men struggled forward. Many of the men, coming from small Russian villages, were pleased at the sight of the East Prussian towns. Soldiers of the 23rd Corps, reaching the town of Allenstein, cheered enthusiastically, believing themselves to be entering Berlin. Samsonov himself was less sanguine. At the end of a long chain which began in Paris, passed through Paléologue, the Grand Duke and the Northwest Front commander, Samsonov received constant signals to hurry. “Advancing according to timetable, without halting, covering marches of more than 12 miles a day over sand. I cannot go more quickly,” he telegraphed back. As it was, his men were hungry, his horses without oats, his supply columns disorganized, his artillery mired.

  On August 24, a day after their arrival in East Prussia, Hindenburg and Ludendorff decided on a sweeping gamble. Leaving only two brigades of cavalry to face Rennenkampf, whose army still was motionless five days after its victory, they loaded every other German soldier onto trains and trundled them south to meet Samsonov. By August 25, the transfer was complete. Rennenkampf still had not resumed his advance, and Samsonov was now confronted by an army equal in size and vastly superior in artillery. Informing General Jilinsky, commander of the Russian Northern Front, of his predicament, Samsonov was rudely told, “To see the enemy where he does not exist is cowardice. I will not allow General Samsonov to play the coward. I insist that he continue the offensive.”

  In four days of battle, Samsonov’s exhausted troops did what they could. Nevertheless, faced with hurricane barrages of German artillery, enveloped on three sides by German infantry, the Second Army disintegrated. Samsonov was fatalistic. “The enemy has luck one day, we will have luck another,” he said and rode off alone into the forest to shoot himself.

  The Germans named their victory the Battle of Tannenberg in revenge for a famous Slav defeat of the Teutonic Knights near the same site in 1410. At Tannenberg, the Russians lost 110,000 men, including 90,000 prisoners. Blame fell on General Jilinsky, who was replaced, and on Rennenkampf, who was discharged from the army. Grand Duke Nicholas, whose southern armies were winning a great victory against the Austrians in Galicia, met the defeat at Tannenberg with equanimity. “We are happy to have made such sacrifices for our allies,” he declared when the French military attaché at his headquarters offered condolences. In St. Petersburg, Sazonov told Paléologue, “Samsonov’s army has been destroyed. That’s all I know,” and then added quietly, “We owed this sacrifice to France, as she has showed herself a perfect ally.” Paléologue, thanking the Foreign Minister for the generosity of his thought, hurried on to discuss the only thing that truly concerned him: the massive threat to Paris which was mounting by the hour.

  For all the reckless gallantry and foolish ineptitude of the premature Russian offensive, it nevertheless achieved its primary objective: the diversion of German forces from the West. The limited penetration of East Prussia had had a magnified effect. Refugees, many of them high-born, had descended in fury and despair on Berlin, the Kaiser was outraged, and von Moltke himself admitted that “all the success on the Western front will be unavailing if the Russians arrive in Berlin.” On August 25, before the decisive blow against Samsonov, von Moltke violated his supposedly inviolable war plan of ignoring the Russians until France was finished. On urgent orders, two army corps and a cavalry division were stripped from the German right wing in France and rushed to the East. They arrived too late for Tannenberg; they could not be returned before the Marne. “This was perhaps our salvation,” wrote General Dupont, one of Joffre’s aides. “Such a mistake made by the Chief of the German General Staff in 1914 must have made the other Moltke, his uncle, turn in his grave.”

  As France’s generals had foreseen, one key to the salvation of France lay in immediately setting the Russian colossus in motion. Whether the colossus met victory or defeat mattered little as long as the Germans were distracted from their overwhelming lunge at Paris. In that sense the Russian soldiers who died in the forests of East Prussia contributed as much to the Allied cause as the Frenchmen who died on the Marne.

  21

  Stavka

  At the outbreak of war, Nicholas’s first impulse had been to take command of the army himself, assuming the ancient role of warrior-tsar at the head of his troops. He was urgently dissuaded by his ministers, who pleaded that he not risk his prestige as sovereign, especially—as Sazonov put it—“as it is to be expected that we may be forced to retreat during the first weeks.” The supreme command went to Grand Duke Nicholas, who departed with his staff from Petrograd on August 13 to establish field headquarters at Baranovichi, a Polish railway junction midway between the German and Austrian fronts. The camp, called Stavka after an old Russian word meaning the military camp of a chief, was set off the main Moscow-Warsaw track in a forest of birch and pine. Here, surrounded by three concentric rings of sentries, the Grand Duke and his officers lived and worked in a dozen army trains drawn up fanwise beneath the trees. In time, as the encampment became semi-permanent, roofs were built over the cars to shield them from heat and snow, and wooden sidewalks were laid so that officers could walk from train to train without slipping on mud or ice.

  From his private railway car spread with bearskins and Oriental rugs, the Grand Duke dominated the life of the camp. On the wall of his sleeping compartment, crowded between the windows, were more than two hundred icons. Over the doors of all the rooms frequented by the Grand Duke, small pieces of white paper were affixed to remind the six-foot-six-inch Nicholas Nicolaievich to duck so as not to bump his head.

  General Sir John Hanbury-Williams, British military attaché in Petrograd, arrived at Stavka on Grand Duke Nicholas’s train and remained there until the Tsar’s abdication. His diary of these two and a half years gives a vivid portrait of Imperial Russian Headquarters during the First World War: “We all attended the little wooden church in the camp. All the headquarters troops were drawn up at the entrance to the church, Guards and Cossacks of the Guard … all in khaki with long, grey overcoats reaching to their feet—still as rocks—looking almost like a line of statues against the pine
forests. Here we waited till suddenly a fanfare of trumpets rang out and in the distance, coming along a road from the train, there marched, stern-faced and head erect, that great and to the army he loved so well, almost mystical figure, Grand Duke Nicholas…. He reached the line and swung around facing his men … looking them absolutely straight in the eye, and called out to all ranks the customary ‘Good day.’ With the rattle of presenting arms came the answering shout from every man in reply … and so we all slowly filed into church.”

  It was to this vigorous, masculine atmosphere that the Tsar came often as an enthusiastic visitor. When the Imperial train, its long line of blue salon cars emblazoned with golden crests, glided slowly under the sunlit foliage onto a siding alongside the Grand Duke’s, the Tsar stepped happily into the routine of army life. He loved the disciplined sense of purpose at Stavka, the clear-cut giving and taking of orders, the professional talk at the officers’ mess, the rough, hardy, outdoor life. It called back memories of his days as a junior officer when his heaviest responsibility was getting out of bed in time to stand morning parade. It was a release from government and ministers and a change from Tsarskoe Selo, where, no matter how devoted he was to wife and children, the world was small, closed and predominantly feminine.