The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  By the end of 1916 the war had had a devastating effect on all three men. For Wilhelm the pressures had been too much from the start. By 1916 he was frequently described by senior soldiers and political advisers as a “broken man.” Depression made him lethargic and his entourage worried about complete breakdown and how worn and ill he looked. “Violent and unpredictable,” one of his entourage wrote, “dominated by a single thought, ‘Leave me in peace.’”65 Bad news and hard decisions inevitably insinuated themselves into army headquarters. The generals wanted him to back submarine warfare, to sack Bethmann-Hollweg. His attempts to hold out made him anxious and bad-tempered. Unlike his cousins he rarely referred to the casualties and sufferings of his subjects—in the German army it was understood that one was not pessimistic about the effects of war, but Wilhelm had always had difficulty in empathizing with others’ difficulties. As the industrialist and writer Walther Rathenau wrote of him, “The Emperor had no66 consciousness of tragedy, even the unconscious feeling of the problem.”

  George looked at least ten years older than he was: his beard had almost turned white, his face was lined and bagged, he looked, someone remarked, like an old, worn penny. His dogged, melancholic, unsmiling stare became ubiquitous. “He feels it67 profoundly,” Lord Esher wrote of the king, “every pang that war can inflict.” Each year he made an increasingly gruelling visit to the Western Front. The more he saw, the more depressed he became. “Very often I68 feel in despair,” he wrote to Mary in 1918. In October 1915 he had a serious accident there when the horse he was riding got frightened, reared up and fell on him. With the typical concern of the British royal family he anxiously enquired after the horse; his own fractured pelvis and ribs weren’t diagnosed for several days. It was an injury from which George never quite recovered; the pain made him more grumpy, but he was at least now permitted a small occasional tipple for medicinal purposes. “I still have to69 walk with a stick,” he told Nicholas in early 1916. “A horse is a very heavy thing to fall on you and I suffered a great deal of pain, as I was badly crushed and bruised.” In July 1917 the queen and her old friend Mabell, Countess of Airlie, accompanied George on his fourth visit to the Western Front. The royal couple seemed to feel it was their duty not to acknowledge too vividly how awful it was: a gruelling parade of ammo depots, railway depots, hospitals and walks—to the sound of far-off artillery shells—through a no-man’s-land blasted by enormous craters. The Countess of Airlie felt no such compunction. “The most harrowing70 sight,” she wrote,

  a vast stretch of land that had once been fertile and smiling with crops, but was now only a tumbled mass of blackened earth fringed by sparse and splintered trees … We climbed over a mound composed of German dead … all that was left of a whole regiment who had died in wresting a strip of land from Our troops, only to lose it again … We stood there speechless. It was impossible to find words. The Queen’s face was ashen and her lips were tightly compressed. I felt that like me she was afraid of breaking down.

  At the hospitals the countess was struck by the “terrible sameness of young faces and broken bodies.” Even the reticent George wrote of driving through “ruined villages and towns, utterly destroyed by shell fire.” He described the deaths in a night raid, during the visit, of twenty-five patients and three staff at a nearby hospital. And he recorded a story he’d 71heard about the Premier of New South Wales standing next to an Australian general, who was killed by a shell only yards away from him. The carnage he saw in France overwhelmed him; xenophobia depressed him, republicanism alarmed him. “You can’t conceive72 what I suffered going round those hospitals in the war,” he said years later.

  By the end of 1916 Nicholas was stick thin and looked somehow hollowed out.73 When his former chief minister, Kokovtsov, saw him for the first time in a year in January 1917, he was genuinely disturbed. It wasn’t just the ageing. The tsar’s famously “kind eyes” were faded, yellowed and “lifeless.” He wore a constant, awful, vacant, almost “sickly,” smile, he glanced about nervously. In the middle of the conversation he completely lost the thread. There was an awkward silence. A simple question reduced him “to a perfectly incomprehensible state of helplessness.”74 Almost in tears, Kokovtsov told Nicholas’s doctor, Botkin, that he was convinced the tsar must be on the verge of a breakdown. Botkin smiled and said he was merely tired. But the French ambassador had reached similar conclusions. “Despondency, apathy75 and resignation can be seen in his actions, appearance, attitude and all the manifestations of the inner man,” he wrote in the autumn of 1916.

  Through the last months of 1916 and into 1917, person after person tried to alert Nicholas to the bomb under his throne—how angry the country was and how the malign influence of Rasputin and the disastrous meddling of the empress were making it so much worse. He remained deaf to all warnings. Contradiction now constituted betrayal. Vladimir Orlov, one of his few friends, was exiled to his estates for criticizing Rasputin. The tsar’s devoted court chancellor, Fredericks, breaking the habit of a lifetime, spoke out and was warned, “Let us remain76 friends and never, mind you, never, touch on the subject again.” Sandro’s brother Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, well known for his liberal constitutional beliefs, returned from England in November 1916 with news that George was genuinely worried because “well-informed agents of77 the British Secret Service predicted a revolution in the very near future.” The grand duke wrote Nicholas a letter urging him to get rid of Rasputin and to make the reforms the Duma wanted before it was too late. Nicholas passed the letter to Alix, who professed herself disgusted and told him to send Mikhailovich to Siberia. At the end of 1916 Alix’s sister Ella left the convent where she had lived since 1905, to plead with her to send Rasputin away. “She dismissed me78 like a dog,” Ella reported. Alix wrote to Nicholas interspersing descriptions of their new kitten climbing into the hearth with hysterical denunciations of Duma members and demands that ministers be sacked. “Be the Master, & all will bow down to you.” He signed himself, “your very own poor little huzy with a tiny will.”79

  Three days later, on 17 December 1916, Rasputin was murdered. The assassins were Prince Felix Yusupov, a twenty-nine-year-old bisexual cross-dresser and Oxford graduate, who was the son of the richest woman in Russia and married to Nicholas’s niece Irene; Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, a first cousin of Nicholas’s; and Vladimir Purishkevich, an extreme right-wing anti-Semitic monarchist. The idea was to save the monarchy and the nation by killing Rasputin and consigning Alix to a mental institution. They lured Rasputin to a small “party,” with the promise that he would meet the Grand Duchess Irene, and tried to poison him. When several pieces of cyanide-filled cake and a glass or two of poisoned Madeira failed to do the trick, they shot him in the back. When he staggered up again, they panicked, fired an entire gun barrel into him, loaded his body with chains, and threw it into the Neva. In England, Alexandra—informed by Minny—told George, “the wretched Russian monk80 caused a tremendous sensation in the world! but [is] only regretted by poor dear Alix who might have ruined the whole future of Russia through his Influence.” The murder had entirely the opposite effect to that intended. It merely reinforced the imperial couple’s sense that the world was against them, and drew them closer together. “I believe in no81 one but my wife,” Nicholas told his cousin Sandro (Yusupov’s father-in-law) icily in the aftermath.

  By mid-January several Romanov family plots to get rid of Alix and depose Nicholas were being so widely discussed in the salons of Petrograd that General Henry Wilson, a member of the British delegation which had come to Russia in a last-ditch attempt to try to coordinate strategy, noted wonderingly that “Everyone—officers,82 merchants, ladies—talks openly of the absolute necessity of doing away with them.” Even Minny and Nicholas’s sister Xenia discussed the plan to send Alix and her much-hated best friend, Anna Vyrubova, to a convent. “If things don’t83 change it will be the end of everything,” Xenia wrote to her mother. The president of the Duma, Rodzianko, requested an audience wi
th the tsar and told Nicholas tactfully that the country wanted a new government and that the empress was universally hated and must be stripped of all authority. Rodzianko claimed the tsar put his face in his hands and asked him, “Is it possible84 that for twenty-two years I tried to act for the best and that for twenty-two years it was all a mistake?” To which Rodzianko answered “Yes.”

  One of the people who, as he described it, made “one last effort85 to save the Emperor, in spite of himself,” was the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. Like many others he had been charmed by Nicholas and had come to feel almost protective of him. In his last audience with the tsar, fully aware he was overstepping his position, he told Nicholas that he felt “like a man trying to86 save a friend whom he sees falling over a precipice.” He said that Protopopov was “bringing Russia87 to the verge of ruin,” that the empress was “discredited and accused of working in German interests,” warned him about the gossip in Petrograd, and asked him to give the Duma what they wanted—a representative government. Buchanan knew he was treading a fine line, but thought on balance the interview had gone well—Nicholas pressed his hand as he left. In fact, the tsar, so characteristically veiling his true feelings, was outraged by Buchanan’s presumption. According to two88 of Alix’s ladies-in-waiting, he had turned against the ambassador months before, after he discovered he had been talking with several senior Duma members and had therefore, as Nicholas saw it, joined the other side. In her memoirs, Anna Vyrubova accused Buchanan of being “personally” involved in the grand ducal89 plot to overthrow Nicholas, in order to “weaken” Russia when peace negotiations came. Nicholas had apparently considered asking the king to recall him, but decided he didn’t want to make public his distrust of his British allies.

  The level of denial seems astonishing. A couple of weeks before the end Nicholas crossly upbraided the courtier Mossolov when he made a stray comment that betrayed anxiety about the future: “What! You Mossolov,90 are you too going to tell me of the peril that menaces the dynasty? People are continually harping on this supposed peril. Why, you have been with me and have seen how I was received by the troops and the people! Are you too, even you, panicking?” Mossolov answered, “I have seen all that Sire, but I also see them when they are not in Your Majesty’s presence. Forgive my freedom of speech.” Nicholas collected himself and reverted to his usual “smile” to denote he was not put out.

  Why was Nicholas so insistently resistant to the warnings? Because they attacked his wife. Because he had become practised at dismissing the rest of the world as wrong. Because he had come to believe that the October manifesto, which he regarded as his greatest failure, had been unnecessary and extracted from him by deceit, and that if he’d held his nerve he would never have had to agree to it. Because, encouraged by Protopopov, he’d convinced himself that the alarming reports of growing disaffection were simply a ploy to frighten him into more reforms he didn’t want to make. And perhaps because, at some level, he wanted a crisis, something so awful, a national catastrophe so great, that he would be forced to abdicate, to give away the burden of ruling which depressed, overwhelmed and crushed him, and be able to tell himself he hadn’t done so willingly. That’s not to say that the tsar brought on the revolution, but that he did nothing to stop it. Several observers half-suspected something of this nature. A few weeks before the end, his cousin Sandro felt he’d given up, taking refuge in his infuriating fatalism. “God’s wishes shall91 be fulfilled,” Nicky told him. “I was born on May sixth, the day of Job the Sufferer, I am ready to accept my doom.” The French ambassador, Paléologue, seeing the tsar for the last time, wrote that he “feels himself overwhelmed92 and dominated by events, that he has lost faith in his mission;” he had “… abdicated inwardly and is now resigned to disaster.”

  By February 1917 Petrograd was a seething hub of anger and desperation. It was the third year of the war, and the whole of Europe was thick with “war weariness.” Millions had died on battlefields across Europe; the civilian populations of Russia and Germany were suffering from terrible shortages. In Petrograd neither food nor fuel was arriving in sufficient quantities to supply the population, which had swollen by a third since 1914. Lack of fuel had brought industry to a standstill in December 1916. In January 1917 150,000 people hunger-marched through the capital, frightened by rumours that the city would be left to starve. The railway network was sagging under the demands from the front. It couldn’t deal with supplying the civilian population too. In his last letter to George, Nicholas wrote about “the weak state”93 of the railways. “The question of transport of stores and food becomes acute.” The cold reached minus thirty-five. “Children are starving in the most literal sense of the word,” ran one secret police report. Some food prices had more than quadrupled since 1914—eggs, for example—while wages had decreased in real terms by 20 percent.

  On 8 March 1917 by the Western calendar, an angry group of women textile workers marched up Nevsky Prospekt demanding bread. Crowds poured onto the streets to join them. Within a few days there was full-scale anarchy. By 10 March, most of working Petrograd was on strike, trams had stopped running and newspapers had not been printed. Locked up in her palace, like the rest of aristocratic Petrograd, Xenia could hear shooting and shouting. The crowds chanted slogans against “the German Woman,” Protopopov and the war. The Council of Ministers cabled the tsar begging him to return to Petrograd. With the exception of Protopopov, they offered their resignations and asked him to appoint a ministry acceptable to the Duma.

  Back at army headquarters, Nicholas insisted that the disturbances were minor. His children had come down with measles94 and all he could think about was missing them and worrying about Alexis. He sent a telegram to Petrograd’s military governor ordering him to “make these disorders95 stop immediately.” The next day, 11 March, soldiers shot dead 200 people across the capital, but they failed to disperse the crowds, and some regiments began to refuse to fire on civilians and retired to their barracks. In an attempt to communicate the seriousness of the situation, the Duma president, Rodzianko, sent a final cable to Nicholas, telling him the troops were joining the revolution, begging him to appoint someone trusted by the country to run a government. Nicholas told his senior commander Alekseev, “Fat Rodzianko96 has sent me some nonsense which I shall not even bother to answer,” and suspended the Duma.

  On 12 March the Petrograd garrisons mutinied and joined the revolution. In the church at army headquarters that morning, Nicholas was stricken with “an excruciating97 pain in the middle of my chest,” that left him almost unable to stand for fifteen minutes. That night the Council of Ministers, despairing of the tsar, adjourned and handed itself over to the Duma—even Protopopov, who initially muttered that he was going off to shoot himself. The Duma, by no means confident that it could control the mobs and soldiers, announced it would form a government, and that workers and soldiers would be represented by a soviet, their own council. The celebrations on the streets of Petrograd were frighteningly intense. Several units shot their commanding officers. The last soldiers abandoned the defence of the Winter Palace. At Stavka, Nicholas wrote in his diary that his officers were uneasy,98 and decided to take the imperial train to Tsarskoe Selo the next morning. En route to Tsarskoe Selo, Nicholas’s generals effectively kidnapped him, took him up a branch line and told him to abdicate. General Alekseev had been in touch with Rodzianko and the new provisional government, whose hold on power was fragile. The crowds in Petrograd were baying for the imperial couple’s blood, the new workers’ soviet looked disconcertingly powerful, and the provisional government had agreed that the tsar must go. A voluntary abdication might help to stabilize the situation. Alekseev knew Nicholas would need pushing. So he canvassed the generals at the fronts. Their replies were unanimous: the tsar must go to save the war effort.

  Even Grand Duke Nicholas “begged on his knees”99 for Nicholas to abdicate. Nicholas looked vacant. He went for his afternoon walk. He returned for tea. He agreed. “My
abdication is necessary,” he wrote in his diary, “… to save Russia and bring order back to the armies on the front.” Throughout the whole process he seemed, the officers all agreed, unnervingly calm, even when he signed the document of abdication on the evening of 15 March. But in his diary he wrote, “All about me is treachery, cowardice and deceit.”100 Unable to bear the thought of separation from Alexis, and the pressure on his health, Nicholas had decided to abdicate on his son’s behalf too. This left his younger brother Misha as heir and he, confronted by the scary crowds on the Petrograd streets demanding a republic, quickly stepped down too.

  “Bad news from Russia,” George had written in his diary on 13 March. “Practically a revolution has broken out in Petrograd, and some of the Guards Regiments have mutinied and killed their officers. This rising,” he added, “is against the Govt. not against the war.” By 15 March there was more information. “I fear Alicky is the cause of it all and Nicky has been weak … I am in despair.”101

  He was almost the only one. Across the streets of the Russian empire, from Moscow to Tiflis, the end of autocracy was greeted with bells, songs, cheering and flags. The symbols of imperial power, the insignias and statues, were ripped off buildings and plinths. In France and Britain the fall of the tsar was greeted with relief. The regime’s excesses had become an embarrassment, and it was hoped a democratic Russia would be much less likely to make a deal with Germany. The United States, which had just entered the war, enthusiastically recognized the new government a week after the abdication. Lloyd George, who was struggling to combat war weariness with the idea that the Entente’s sacrifices were in the great cause of liberty and democracy, sent a telegram congratulating the revolution, “the greatest service102 that the Russian people have yet made to the cause for which the Allies are fighting.” It demonstrated “the fundamental truth that this war is at bottom a struggle for popular government as well as for liberty. It shows that, through the war, the principle of liberty, which is the only sure safeguard of peace in the world, has already won a new resounding victory.”