Queen Victoria's Gene

by D M Potts

  When the tsar was at Headquarters, he relied on Alix for information. ‘Yes, truly you ought to be my eyes and ears there in the capital’, he suggested, and ‘you really help me a great deal by speaking to ministers and watching them’, he encouraged. She took up the task enthusiastically. ‘I am no longer the slightest bit shy or afraid of ministers and speak like a waterfall in Russian’, Alix boasted to her husband. Gradually she used her influence to ease out the more independent members of the Council of Ministers and replaced them with Rasputin’s nominees. The incompetent Sturmer was made president, ‘Warmly recommended to the Emperor by Rasputin’. According to the liberal and pro-western Foreign Minister Sazonov, however, Sturmer was ‘A man who has left a bad memory whenever he occupied an administrative post’. When Sazonov advised the tsar to offer the Poles autonomy if the allies won Alix, fearing that her son’s domain would be diminished, hurried to Headquarters with Sturmer and persuaded the tsar to dismiss Sazonov and make Sturmer foreign minister as well as premier.

  Soon Rasputin, through Alix, began to give Nicholas military advice. ‘Move up our cavalry a little to the north, in the direction of Libau’, she ordered, and a little later, ‘I must pass on to you the following request from our Friend, suggested to him by a vision. He asks you to order an offensive near Riga. . . . He says that we can and must attack, and for me to write you that immediately.’ Nikolaevitch threatened to hang Rasputin if he ever set foot in the Headquarters but Alix eventually succeeded in having the grand duke dismissed.

  By the end of 1916 the demoralization of the nation and the army was complete. ‘The Tsar offends the nation by what he allows to go on in the palace’, wrote one right-wing politician. In a desperate effort to remove one cause of their troubles, a group of conspirators, including Prince Yussopov and the Grand Duke Pavlovitch, resolved to kill Rasputin. After the tsar, Felix Yussopov was the richest man in Russia12 and Dmitri Pavlovitch was a nephew of the Emperor Nicholas himself. Using the beautiful Princess Irina as bait, the plotters enticed Rasputin, in secret, to the Yussopov palace where they fed him with cakes and wine which were supposed to be laced with cyanide. To their amazement and consternation he ate and drank with gusto and called for music and song – a gramophone played ‘Yankee Doodle’. In desperation Yussopov finally shot him twice in the chest. Rasputin at first appeared to be dead but to Yussopov’s horror rose up and almost escaped to the street. Purishkevitch shot him twice more in the back of the head and dragged him back into the house where the prince beat the body with a large brass candlestick until he was exhausted. Finally, Rasputin was pushed through the ice into a canal. Remarkably an autopsy showed he was still alive at this point and when death finally came it was from drowning. The body was secretly buried in a church near Alexandrovsk but was later exhumed by the army, burned, and the ashes scattered to prevent the development of a Rasputin cult.

  The conspirators were hailed everywhere as heroes and in spite of Alix’s hysterical letters, escaped serious punishment. Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovitch wrote of Rasputin’s murder, ‘although it has cleared the air, everything they have accomplished is but a half measure since Alexandra Feodorovna [the Empress] and Protopopov must be got out of the way’.

  Even at this stage, if Nicholas had appointed a competent ministry acceptable to the Duma, the regime might possibly have survived; but when the tsar’s brother-in-law, Grand Duke Aleksander Mikhailovitch, urged this course on the imperial pair, Alix speaking on behalf of the royal couple ridiculed him, while Nicholas smoked and said nothing. Stubbornly, the tsar returned to be with his generals at the front.

  The army commandeered far more trains than it required and although there was food enough in the country, the citizens of St Petersburg were left cold and increasingly hungry. Protopopov had been placed in charge of the distribution of food at the request of Rasputin. On 23 February 1917 large crowds began to converge on the city centre and, although there were occasional cries of ‘Down with the police’ and ‘Down with the war’, they remained orderly. The Cossacks were called out but were obviously reluctant to break up the crowds. At this crisis, when the fate of the Empire was poised in the balance, Protopopov, Minister of the Interior in charge of security, in a darkened room, was desperately trying to contact Rasputin’s ghost for advice.

  When news of the disturbances eventually reached Nicholas, he cabled General Khabalov: ‘I order you to bring all of these disturbances to a halt as of tomorrow.’ Khabalov took this as an order to fire on the crowds if necessary. Forty demonstrators died the next day but some troops were clearly reluctant to fire. One detachment of Guards in barracks seized their rifles and ran out into the streets, possibly intending to stop the bloodshed. Confronted by a detachment of police they exchanged a few shots and returned voluntarily to their barracks. When news of this minor incident spread it had an electrifying effect as it led to the belief that the army was joining the revolt. A last appeal that night to Nicholas to appoint a Ministry acceptable to the Duma was rejected. Next day the Guards regiment which had briefly clashed with the police mutinied. The February Revolution had begun.

  At this critical juncture the three older girls and the tsarevitch caught measles. Alix devoted so much time to nursing them in Tsarskoe Selo that she became even more out of touch than usual with events in St Petersburg twenty miles away. She advised her husband, ‘You must tell the workers that they must not declare strikes, if they do they will be sent to the front’. On 27 February13 Rodzianko ended a cable to the tsar: ‘The last hour has come when the fate of the dynasty and the fatherland is being decided’. ‘That fat-bellied Rodzianko has written me a lot of nonsense again, which I won’t even bother to answer’, the tsar commented to his wife, but by the 28th even Alix was worried. ‘Concessions are necessary. The strikes continue; many troops have gone over to the strikers’, she cabled, but by now it was too late. The next day Nicholas declared martial law and sent a single battalion to the capital, unaware that the 100,000-strong garrison had joined the revolt. Nicholas started back to St Petersburg in the imperial train. Too late, he offered the very concessions which earlier might have restored the situation.

  The Provisional Government demanded that the tsar step down in favour of his son, with his brother Grand Duke Michail as Regent. At 3 p.m. on 15 March 1917, in the imperial train, which had been literally halted in its tracks, Nicholas signed the instrument of abdication. It is possible that this solution might have prevented further revolutions but the saga of Victoria’s gene had one more twist to it. While the imperial staff waited for a train to take the papers to the capital, Nicholas began to question his physician, Dr Fedorov, about the tsarevitch’s future. Fedorov said, ‘Science teaches us, Sire, that it is an incurable disease. Yet those who are afflicted will sometimes reach an advanced old age. Still, Alexis Nicolaevich is at the mercy of any accident.’ The deposed tsar began to realize that he and Alexandra might well be exiled, while his son would be kept in Russia. At 9 p.m. on the same day he hand-wrote an abdication paper with the words, ‘Not wishing to part with our dear son, we hand over our inheritance to our brother, the Grand Duke Michail Alexandrovich . . .’. A few days later he rejoined Alix and sobbed on her breast like a child. By disinheriting his heir Nicholas further weakened the throne. Much of the residual loyalty that would have passed to the tsarevitch was not transferable to the tsar’s brother Michail, who was not in line to the throne. The new government, which was prepared to accept the boy as a constitutional monarch, feared that the grand duke might be as autocratic as his brother. Realizing that his position was hopeless, Michail abdicated after only one meeting with his ministers. The 300-year-old Romanov dynasty was at an end.

  A moderate government under Kerensky attempted to continue the war alongside the Allies, but in November, the Communists seized power in St Petersburg and several other cities. The Communist government soon made peace with Germany, allowing German troops to be transferred to the western front. For a while the war shifted in Ge
rmany’s favour but eventually the great German offensive of 1918 was driven back. King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Wilhemina of the Netherlands, as neutral sovereigns, tried to bring about peace but although the European monarchs had played a role in starting the war, they were unable to end it. By November 1918 German resistance was collapsing, the Armistice was signed and the kaiser abdicated.14 At the end of the First World War, the crowns of the European monarchs, in the words of one commentator, ‘were rolling about the floor’. Although many new republics were created, few were more democratic than their monarchical predecessors. Germany, Spain and Russia sooner or later became dictatorships.

  The war had achieved nothing – except unprecedented death and destruction. It aborted the economic and political leadership of Europe. The origins of the disaster lay not in the need to set right some intolerable injustice, in unacceptable commercial tensions, or even in some dark, longstanding religious division. It was a diplomatic folly and militaristic adventure where old men totally misunderstood the effects of new technology: the kaiser told his troops they would be ‘home before the leaves fall’. It was a war where the cry ‘King and Country’ was heard often. Kings played a major role in starting the conflict – especially the jingoism of Wilhelm, Franz Joseph’s desire to crush the Serbs and Nicholas’s dithering, which was exacerbated by his genuine love for a congenitally sick son.

  Russia had been an anomaly even in 1914, a modern European power with a medieval government. Change of some kind was inevitable, a communist revolution was not. Indeed, the Marxists themselves expected to come to power in one of the older industrialized states first. Both by virtue of his background and his limited mind Nicholas was an obstacle to change, but he was also very weak, and in different circumstances he might easily have accepted change. The real misfortune was Alix. She might have proved the tsar’s evil genius even if the tsarevitch had not been a haemophiliac and even without Rasputin, but it is clear the tsarevitch’s illness gave Rasputin his power. Rasputin’s power, in turn, ensured that the throne was surrounded by scoundrels, nonentities and idiots – and when the crisis came the royal family had lost the natural reservoir of loyalty and goodwill among all classes of society which had supported the throne down the previous centuries.

  Without doubt, the haemophilia gene Nicholas’s wife carried, through its political side-effects, hastened his family’s end. Whether any part of the lineage lived on is the subject of the next chapter.

  EIGHT

  THE PRETENDERS

  When a king dies violently pretenders to the throne quickly volunteer to fill the vacancy or overthrow the usurper. After Richard III died at Bosworth both Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck falsely claimed to be the rightful heirs. The circumstances of the murders of the tsar and his family were particularly obscure. For seventy years after the deaths the scene was closed to the rest of the world by Communist paranoia. The family was murdered at a remote spot during the chaos of a civil war, while the world’s attention was distracted by the climactic battles of the First World War, then taking place on the western front. Although the anti-Communist White Russians captured Ekaterinburg eight days after the murder they did not appoint Sokolov to hold an inquiry until six months later and his incomplete report only became available four years later still when he fled to the west. Only recently has perestroika, and later the collapse of the Communist regime, made new evidence available. In the years following the murders a variety of pretenders appeared. Some were rapidly exposed but one, variously known as Mrs Anderson, Mrs Manahan or Anastasia, was a cause célèbre for much of the twentieth century. The story filled cheap gossip columns and reached the highest judicial circles of Germany, producing 8,000 pages of legal documents in the longest legal case of the century. It was the subject of a government inquiry, numerous books, three films – including one with Ingrid Bergman – and enough newspaper and magazine articles to bring Fleet Street or Times Square to a halt. Recently the most sophisticated genetic tests of bone, hair and tissue samples of Mrs Manahan, the skeletons of the Russian royal family and of living relatives, have demolished the claims of Mrs Manahan but the status of at least one other possible survivor of the massacre remains in doubt, and as long as the exact fate of the tsarevitch and one of his sisters is unknown, speculation will continue.

  Where thirty years of legal argument were inconclusive modern scientific technology has recently proved, ten years after her death, that Mrs Manahan was not the daughter of the tsar, but her story was a remarkable one and shows clearly how it is difficult to make sufficient allowance for coincidence. Facts are often stranger than fiction. As social beings we are intensely interested in other people’s lives and enjoy romantic interpretations of the data. It would have been more exciting for Mrs Manahan to have been the daughter of the tsar, mysteriously snatched from a firing squad, than a munitions worker – and her claims were corroborated by so many remarkable coincidences that many who had known the real Anastasia were prepared to accept her. She bore such a remarkable physical resemblance to the real Anastasia that some experts on physiognomy, after examining her ears, skull and body scars, declared her to be Anastasia. Like Anastasia her middle fingers were short, her big toes were deformed and even her handwriting was similar. She seemed to have had detailed information on the Winter Palace, and to know enough of court etiquette to fool some of the surviving relatives of the tsar. She had a good knowledge of English as well as German and some arcane knowledge of the activities of the royal families of Europe. How a munitions worker who had been certified insane, after being seriously injured in an explosion, managed all this is a mystery in itself. Finally, when the grave of the Russian royal family was opened the remains of only three of the daughters were found. The Russians first announced that it was the skeleton of Anastasia that was missing, adding circumstantial credibility to her claim.

  While Mrs Manahan was still alive we attempted to check her identity by determining whether she carried Queen Victoria’s gene for haemophilia. In the event we were thwarted by an obstructive lawyer and her sudden death, although the more recent tests have shown that the results would have been negative.

  The real Anastasia was born in 1901. She inherited her father’s intense blue eyes, was slightly plump, with fair hair and, in the words of a cousin, ‘frightfully temperamental’. Much is known about Anastasia’s court life and even her school books survive, with lessons neatly written in English, German and Russian. She was the daughter of the absolute monarch of the world’s largest nation and life at court instilled in her a strict observance of protocol. At the same time she expected the world to do her bidding and as a child she was sometimes a tomboy, rough and spoiled, who kicked and tripped up the servants.

  The early months of 1917 were the last of Anastasia’s old way of life. The previous year had ended inauspiciously, as Rasputin’s corpse was dragged from the frozen canal on 19 December, yet few had guessed the country would be on the verge of revolution only three months later. In Switzerland, Lenin could still write, ‘we older men may not live to see the decisive battles of the approaching revolution’.

  With solid reason, the tsar was blamed for Russia’s woes. Worse, in St Petersburg the tsarina was said to have betrayed Russia to her German relatives – a false but understandable accusation. Following their abdication the Kerensky government decided to keep the imperial family out of harm’s way at their summer palace, Tsarskoe Selo.

  After the abdication the tsar appealed to King George V for political asylum and the Kerensky government made a formal application via the British ambassador in St Petersburg, who wrote, ‘I earnestly trust that, in spite of the obvious objections, I may be authorised, without delay, to offer his majesty asylum in England’. At first the king reluctantly agreed and even the kaiser volunteered safe conduct for a vessel through the Baltic, but the war on the western front was going badly and government opinion turned against the imperial family. ‘The Empress is not only a Boche [German] by birth’, wrote
the British ambassador in Paris, ‘but in sentiment.’ Prime Minister Lloyd George was anxious to quarantine the virus of Lenin’s revolution, even if this meant persuading King George to turn his back on his own cousin. The king himself also feared that ‘the presence of the Imperial Family (especially the Empress) in the country would raise all sorts of difficulties’, and started to raise all sorts of difficulties himself. He demanded that the impoverished Kerensky government should meet all their expenses in Britain, had misgivings about the sea voyage and even suggested that Balmoral Castle, a possible refuge, was not a suitable residence in winter, although Aberdeenshire must be almost tropical compared to Russia. The decisive influence seems to have been the king’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham. Eventually, the king persuaded the British government to withdraw their offer. The weak but loyal autocrat and his family were left to their fate.

  In August 1917 the Kerensky government moved the royal family and their immediate servants from St Petersburg to Tobolsk in Siberia, where they thought the local population would be less hostile. Two months later the Communists under Lenin seized the reins of government and in March the following year concluded the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. Russia had suffered an unprecedented defeat and Brest-Litovsk ushered in a brutally unequal peace: Russia ceded one-third of its population, half its industry and nine-tenths of its coal mines to Germany. One Russian delegate to the treaty was so humiliated that he shot himself. On hearing of the treaty the tsar said, ‘I should never have thought the Emperor William and the German Government could stoop so low as to shake hands with these Bolshevik traitors’.