The Last Tsar

by Edvard Radzinsky

  He was right. The 17th was an important date for their family.

  October 17: the train wreck at Borki, when by a miracle Nicholas survived.

  January 17: Nicholas appeared for the first time, so disastrously, before the Russian public.

  October 17, 1905: The end of the autocracy. That day Nicholas signed a manifesto granting the first Russian constitution.

  December 17: The death of Rasputin.

  And 1917: The end of Nicholas’s empire.

  In the early morning hours of July 17: His own death and that of his family.

  All this time Nicholas remained calm and silent, as always. In his letters to his mother, though …

  “Peterhof. 19 October, 1905.… It feels as though I have not written you for a year, so many difficult and unprecedented events have we experienced. You of course remember those days we spent together at Tsarskoe in January.… But they are nothing compared with now. The railway strikes that began around Moscow overtook all of Russia immediately thereafter. Petersburg and Moscow have been left cut off from the inner provinces.… The only contact with the city is by sea—which is quite convenient at this time of year! After the railways the strike spread to factories and plants, and then even to municipal institutions.… Imagine the shame! We have just had news of strikes, of policemen, Cossacks, and soldiers slain, of riots, disorders, and upheavals.… The gentlemen ministers have been arguing like wet hens … instead of acting decisively. There have been ‘meetings’—a fashionable new word—where armed insurrection was openly debated and approved, which I learned about immediately.… The use of arms was prescribed in the event of troops being attacked. Quiet, ominous days set in. It was like the feeling you sometimes get in the summer before a powerful storm. Everyone’s nerves were stretched beyond the limit. Of course, this situation could not last very long. During those terrible days I saw Witte constantly. Our conversations began in the morning and ended in the evening in full darkness. It seemed we could choose one of two paths: either appoint an energetic military man and do everything in our power to suppress the sedition. Or else present the population with civil rights, freedom of speech, press, assembly, and unions, and so on.… That would also entail an obligation to pass all kinds of legislation through the State Duma.… This is for all intents and purposes a constitution. Witte insisted heatedly on this path. And everyone I turned to answered me exactly as Witte had. The Manifesto was written by him and Alexei Obolensky. We discussed it for two days, and eventually I said a prayer and signed it.… Dear Mama, you cannot imagine how much I have suffered. My only comfort is that such is God’s will, and that this difficult decision will lead my dear Russia out of this unbearable, chaotic state in which it finds itself for nearly a year.”

  Pierre Gilliard, the grand duchesses’ tutor, saw the empress on the day the manifesto was signed. She was sitting like a sleepwalker, staring at one point. Her world had fallen apart. Her son had been snatched in his cradle. He would not be the autocrat. She decided to fight.

  In November the second capital rebelled. Barricades went up in Moscow. Trams were overturned. Nicholas felt the anger of a man deceived. He had given them a constitution, he had outdone himself. And in response, it all continued!

  His troops pacified Moscow.

  At Christmas Nicholas wrote his mother a letter, his usual tender letter, but there was already bloodshed in it. He was growing more and more inured to blood.

  “22 December. Dear sweet Mama! All my prayers for you will be especially fervent during this holiday.… It will be very sad around the tree without you. It has been so cozy at Gatchina upstairs….

  “In Moscow, as you know, thank God, the uprising was crushed, thanks to the loyalty and steadfastness of our troops.… The revolutionaries losses were enormous, but it is hard to get precise information, since many of those killed burned up and the wounded were carried away and hidden.”

  While the revolution was being put down, Alix instilled in Nicholas—with all her faith and passion—the idea of Witte’s evil intentions. The manifesto had led to nothing. The uprisings had continued anyway. Great shadows loomed behind him—his Romanov ancestors and his heavenly protector, Serafim of Sarov. With him, they had crushed the revolution, not the pathetic manifesto, which he had been forced to sign during a grave crisis.

  Witte was Nicholas’s mother’s man. In struggling against him Alix was removing his mother from power. For good.

  By then it was all clear. Nicholas had dealt with the Revolution. Having lived through that storm the rightists evidently gave up on the idea of replacing the monarch on the throne, but they were contemplating a change in the guard by the throne: the time had come to sweep away the liberals. As always: “Witte has done his deed.”

  Not coincidentally, soon afterward Nicholas Nikolaevich joined forces with Alix. Yesterday he was embracing Witte and praising the manifesto; now he was its enemy. The tsar was avid to believe in this new stance. The fury of battle had changed him. A knight and his sword defending his God-given rights, a warrior for his people and his dynasty—Nicholas liked that image.

  Now in his letters to his mother there was a pervasive martial tone:

  “I want to see my regiments and shall begin, in turn, with the Semyonovsky.” “There was a review of my favorite Nizhegorodsky.” “A review of the officers of the Cavalry Guards.” “A review of the Marine of the Guard.”

  Soon after Nicholas informed his mother:

  “I have never seen a chameleon, someone who changes his convictions, the likes of [Witte]. Thanks to this quality of character, almost no one believes him anymore.”

  In April 1906 Witte handed Nicholas his letter of resignation, and Nicholas replied with satisfaction:

  “Count Sergei Yulievich! Yesterday morning I received your letter in which you asked to be relieved of all the positions you now hold. I hereby express my consent to your request. Nicholas.”

  Vera Leonidovna:

  “The revolution was dying.… Darkness and despair had set in. The intelligentsia had run into error, into anarchism.… Now, looking back, I understand: this was the despair of people who had looked revolution in the face for the first time. The intelligentsia had seen the bloody face of popular revolt and shuddered.… The revolution was not a celebration of freedom but a natural disaster, like a tornado.… The most terrifying part, though, was that we had a feeling, perhaps unconscious, but still: it would return.”

  Witte was huge, corpulent. The tall Witte was replaced by the giant Peter Arkadievich Stolypin. Nicholas’s two most famous ministers were tall. Here lay his hidden complex: his large father had always been a reliable and strong defense. He had confidence in tall people.

  Late in April in the Winter Palace throne room, Witte, now removed from affairs of state, observed the meeting between his own offspring—the State Duma—and the tsar. “Nicholas is pale,” Witte noted in his diary. “He gave a speech. ‘May my fervent hopes be fulfilled to see my people happy and to bequeath to my son a stronger, better, and more enlightened state.’”

  Witte must have chuckled when he heard these words about the heir. The old minister understood everything.

  A son robbed by a manifesto—this was Alix’s pathos. Nicholas declared to the uncomprehending Russian parliament that the heir would receive what belonged to him—the old autocracy without a constitution. In other words, Nicholas told the Duma that he intended to disband it.

  Later the tsar received the first Russian parliamentarians: in black frock coats, like jackdaws, they jostled among the brilliant uniforms of the tsar’s suite.

  Witte foresaw an inevitable conflict between the tsar and the Duma, and he believed that, as always, in a moment of disaster, Nicholas would come running to him. Witte wrote mockingly:

  “It has reached society’s consciousness that despite my strained relations with His Highness … despite my total disfavor, as soon as the situation becomes critical my name will immediately come up.” He added sternly: “But
they are forgetting one thing: there is a limit to everything.”

  This was a weighty statement: a powerful new figure had already appeared on the horizon.

  Peter Arkadievich Stolypin, the new prime minister, was Witte’s direct opposite. From an old noble line, he was “one of them.” Considered a liberal, he was nevertheless a liberal-landowner. Stolypin knew and loved the muzhik, as well a landowner should. In the muzhik, he saw the country’s future. That was why he immediately appealed to the tsar. Stolypin could appreciate Nicholas’ long-held dream: “the people and the tsar.”

  The First Duma was disbanded and a second elected, but to his astonishment Nicholas saw that nothing had changed. The calmest people, as soon as they stepped out on the dais, became rebels. Speaking before the Duma seemed to intoxicate them.

  There was Alexander Ivanovich Guchkov, for example, an honorable man, a full state councilor, a councilor of the Petersburg Municipal Duma. Stolypin offered him a ministerial post, and not only did he refuse, but in the new Duma he reviled all the grand dukes at one fell swoop.

  The assassinations continued: General Min, the subduer of Moscow, was shot.

  A bomb exploded on Aptekarsky Island, at Stolypin’s dacha. It was a Saturday, Stolypin’s at-home day, and many visitors were waiting for him in the first-floor rooms. On the second floor of the dacha were the family’s rooms, where Stolypin’s children, a daughter and a son, were playing.

  Three men dressed in military uniforms entered the house. The guard immediately noticed a defect in their uniforms and tried to restrain them, but with a shout—“Long live the revolution!”—one of them threw a bomb. Everyone in the room, including the terrorists themselves, died. The force of the explosion was such that trees on the Neva embankment were torn up by the roots. Stolypin himself was knocked to the ground by a shock wave but was not harmed. Injured people stirred under the fragments of the demolished house, bits of human flesh lay about. Among the fragments they found Stolypin’s injured daughter. Stolypin himself pulled his four-year-old son out from under a heap of rubble.

  ——

  At the same time the Tsar of All the Russias was made a hostage in his own home. Nicholas learned that terrorists had turned up in Peterhof, where he spent the summers. “We sit here virtually locked up,” he informed his mother. “What a shame and disgrace to speak of this.… Those anarchist scoundrels came to Peterhof to hunt for me, Nikolasha, Trepov [Moscow police chief].… But you understand my feelings: not to be able to go horseback riding, not to go out beyond the gates anywhere at all. And this at my own home in ever peaceful Peterhof! I blush to write you of this.”

  His life was under guard. No walks. In constant terror for the safety of Alix and the children. Like a rehearsal for a future life—twelve years hence.

  “Sunshine,” “Baby,” “Little Man”—they had many pet names for their sick son. Nonetheless, Nicholas—father and tsar—could not protect him from a bomb in his own home. He underwent a sea change. He had to repay all the suffering and humiliation, and he had to preserve his rule—subdue the rebels, give the country peace. That is what his father’s shadow demanded; that is what Alix and his mother demanded. “The monsters must be exterminated!” the dowager empress wrote him.

  So he tried to be merciless.

  He could hardly have managed it, however, were it not for the powerful figure of Stolypin by his side. Stolypin, a firm, indomitable, power-loving man, had something in common with the gentle Nicholas: he adored his family and was very dependent on his beloved wife. The suffering of their injured children had hardened both wife and husband. Now Stolypin was prepared to punish and to execute. “Stolypin’s tie”—that’s what the revolutionaries would call the nooses around their necks.

  In June 1906 the Duma repealed the death penalty. But while Europe was sending congratulatory telegrams, Nicholas was passing a law on field courts-martial.

  The hangman set about his work. Not since the time of Ivan the Terrible had Russia seen so many executions.

  When Witte reminded the former liberal Stolypin of his previous views, the minister replied: “Yes, that was how I used to feel. Before the explosion on Aptekarsky Island.”

  ——

  On August 26, 1907, the sovereign “royally saw fit to instruct that troop commanders be informed” that they must “see to it” that the tsar not receive any telegrams requesting pardons.

  In the time of Nicholas’s father, Alexander Ulyanov had been hanged for attempting to assassinate the tsar. This punishment was instrumental in shaping the character of his brother, the future leader of the revolution, Vladimir Ulyanov: Lenin. Execution and blood infiltrated his subconscious.

  Under Nicholas, brothers and sisters of the slain all across Russia swore their hatred for the tsar.

  “I don’t want to die at all: at night they’re taken out into the back courtyard, even in the wet, in the rain. By the time they get there they’re soaked through, and that’s how they’re hanged, wet.… You get up in the morning and you’re as happy as a child to be alive, to have an entire day ahead of you to enjoy life”—these were the kinds of letters families were reading.

  In blood he became heir, in blood he was tsar, this gentle man. Bloody Sunday. Bloody Khodynka. The blood of the First Revolution. Like an omen of what was to come: his unlucky son’s strength was draining away with his loss of blood.

  The First Revolution ended. They had had a remarkable rehearsal for the future, for what would happen twelve years later. But the warning passed them right by.

  He and Alix never did understand that the revolution had been subdued not by bullets but by the words on the paper that his minister had written and that Nicholas had signed. They imagined a different lesson for themselves instead: force is necessary.

  Wise Witte realized then that this would be their ruin. Sitting in his study and contemplating the events of the era, the old man wrote these terrible words:

  “Much blood may be shed, and you yourself could perish in that blood.… And it may kill your own firstborn, your pure infant, your son and heir.… God grant this not be so. In any event that I never see such horrors.”

  God did: Witte died in January 1915. Before his death the old man wrote Nicholas a letter and instructed that it be given to the sovereign after his death. Thus Nicholas received Witte’s message from beyond the grave.

  In his letter, Witte asked the tsar to give his title of count to his “most beloved grandson, L. K. Naryshkin. Let him be called Naryshkin, Count Witte.” But this was only a pretext. The most important part came after his request. It was a rundown of Nicholas’s greatest deeds, which also happened to be linked with the name of Witte. In first place stood the constitution: “This is your undying service to your people and to humanity.”

  The dying old man had no intention of wounding Nicholas or reminding him of his own services by his mention of the constitution. Even then, in 1915, the great politician sensed the current situation’s uncanny similarity to the eve of the tragic year 1905. He realized the storm would soon break. So he decided to prompt the tsar once more with the chief lesson of 1905: know how to yield!

  But that year Alix and Nicholas were caught up in another battle with the Duma. Nicholas was angered by this reminder of his “past sin” (as he now referred to the constitution). He did not grant his former minister’s small request: Naryshkin never did become Count Witte.

  Vera Leonidovna:

  “I don’t agree with Count Witte. The mysterious lesson of 1905 lay elsewhere. A certain church historian explained this to me: During the Time of Troubles, in the seventeenth century, when the ancient dynasty of tsars was broken and widespread troubles ensued, when the noble boyars handed Russia over to foreigners, it was the ecclesiastical authority—the patriarch—that preserved Russia. There is good reason why, under the first Romanovs, patriarchs bore the title Great Sovereign. Peter the Great, in an effort to strengthen secular authority, did away with the patriarchate. Two centuries without a
patriarch weakened the church. Under Nicholas talks were initiated on reviving the patriarchy, but matters never progressed beyond talks. When the events of the First Revolution began, the tsar must have understood: he was weak. The Lord in his mercy had given him a warning that he had not understood. In the event of major new disasters, he must establish a second center—by bringing back the authority of the patriarch. Only a strong church could keep Holy Russia from eventual catastrophe. But he had not understood the warning.”

  Chapter 4

  A MIGHTY PAIR

  “THANKS BE TO GOD; HE HAS SENT ME A FRIEND”

  The revolution in Russia coincided with a revolution in the tsar’s family. At just this time, two people appeared at Tsarskoe Selo who are little reflected in Nicholas’s diaries, although they occupied an important place in his life. And in the life of the family. And the country. Grigory Rasputin and Anna Taneyeva Vyrubova.

  In her memoirs, Anna Taneyeva writes about her family. Her father, Alexander Sergeyevich Taneyev, was a marshal of the count and director of the imperial chancellery. His grandfather and great-grandfather had held the same post under previous emperors, and his other great-great-grandfather was the conqueror of Napoleon, Field Marshal Kutuzov. True, she fails to mention in her book one other ancestor, whom society rumor plausibly ascribed to the Taneyevs: Emperor Paul I. The blood of this mad emperor (or rather his illegitimate child) flowed in Anna Taneyeva’s veins. Yes, she too was of the Romanov clan.

  As a young lady, intoxicated by her first encounter with society, she danced at twenty-two balls and was presented to the empress. Alix had noticed her.

  Very soon after, a footman conveyed the empress’s invitation to Anya, as she was called, over the telephone.

  Their first conversation. Anya Taneyeva told Alix that as a child she had contracted typhus and was at death’s door when her father summoned Ioann of Kronstadt, who raised her from her sickbed with prayer. The story must have made an impression on the unhappy empress. The miracle of healing. That was all Alix could think of when she looked at this lovely woman: her son.