Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  Even after Napoleon recrossed the Nieman, the conflict between emperors was still not over. Alexander had sworn that only one of them would end up with a crown. And so it came to be: The Russian tsar was hailed in Paris as Europe’s liberator, while the Corsican ogre he pursued to the last ended up a permanent resident of Elba.

  * * *

  *1 While her son disdained all the ceremony and glitter of sovereignty, and opted to live quietly, his haughty, cold, and categorical mother, Dowager Empress Maria, reveled in her royal position. “The Empress Mother is the one who displays her imperial state,” Savary reported to Talleyrand. “Every external honor, every homage is directed to that point.… The great personages of St. Petersburg are careful not to let two weeks pass without making an appearance at the Empress Mother’s. [Empress] Elizabeth [Alexander’s wife] almost never appears there, but the Emperor dines there three times a week and often sleeps there.”

  *2 Napoleon’s courtesy did not extend to the monarchs of the various German kingdoms he now controlled. Indeed, they were treated as mere ornaments. During one formal dinner, King Maximilian Joseph raised his voice a little too loud for the French emperor, who snapped, “Hold your tongue, King of Bavaria!”

  *3 There had long been concerns in France that Napoleon was too intoxicated by power and ambition. “The Emperor is mad, completely mad,” Minister of the Navy Denis Decrès declared; “he’ll bring ruin upon himself and upon us all.”

  *4 Virtually nothing was accomplished by the assault on Smolensk, which the Russians abandoned and burned, except utter annihilation. “One had to walk over debris, dead bodies and skeletons which had been burned and charred by fire,” recalled a French officer. “Everywhere unfortunate inhabitants, on their knees, weeping over the ruins of their homes, cats and dogs wandering about and howling in the most heart-rendering way, everywhere only death and destruction.”

  Nicholas I (1825–1855): “A Condescending Jupiter”

  The emperor of Russia is a military commander, and each of his days is a day of battle.

  —GRAND DUKE CONSTANTINE, BROTHER OF NICHOLAS I

  The childless Alexander I was succeeded not by the legal heir, his brother Constantine, who rejected the crown, but by his next younger brother, Nicholas. The new emperor was an impressive sight indeed. “Colossal in stature,” as one American observer described him; “with a face such as one finds on a Greek coin … he bore himself like a god.” But behind this “regular Jupiter … every inch a king,” as another called him, lurked a trembling despot, terrified of losing control. His was a look of “worried severity,” the Frenchman Astolphe de Custine wrote. And it was those two essential qualities—fear and ferocity—that defined the sovereign who would rule Russia for three decades with the absolute repression he believed was essential to his survival. “If the Emperor has no more of mercy in his heart than he reveals in his policies, then I pity Russia,” Custine wrote; “if, on the other hand, his true sentiments are really superior to his acts, then I pity the Emperor.”

  Crime and Punishment had yet to be written; the same was true of The Brothers Karamazov. And on a bitter cold December day in 1849, it appeared they never would. For it was then that the author of these future literary classics happened to be facing a firing squad. Fyodor Dostoevsky had taken a grave risk in meeting regularly with a group of fellow artists and intellectuals who freely expressed their thoughts on a variety of subjects, including the abject condition of the Russian serf. Such indulgences were downright dangerous during the repressive regime of Tsar Nicholas I, when strict adherence to the official doctrine of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” was required of all the emperor’s subjects.

  Having dared stray beyond this narrowly proscribed creed with their political discussions, the members of Dostoevsky’s circle were denounced as subversives and duly arrested. Then, after enduring eight months of harsh imprisonment and interrogation at the Peter and Paul Fortress, the novelist and twenty other freethinkers in his circle were sentenced to death.

  On the appointed day, the condemned were taken to the place of execution at Semenovsky Square, where three stakes had been erected for the occasion. “The horrible, immeasurably horrible minutes of awaiting death began,” Dostoevsky wrote. “It was cold, so terribly cold. They removed not only our coats, but our jackets. And it was minus twenty degrees.”

  As Dostoevsky and the others stood shivering upon a black-draped scaffold awaiting their fate, the condemned men of the first group were tied to the stakes and hoods placed over their heads. “We were taken in threes,” the writer recalled. “I was in the second group. I had no more than a minute left to live.” Yet just as the firing squad raised their rifles and took aim, a sudden reprieve came from the emperor. Rather than a lethal lesson in the perils of independent thought, it was a cruel charade with the same message, orchestrated by Nicholas himself.

  “I received the news of the termination of the execution dully,” Dostoevsky remembered. “There was no joy at returning to the living. People around me were shouting and making noise. But I didn’t care. I had already lived through the worst. Yes, the very worst. Wretched Grigoryev went mad.… How did the others survive? I don’t know. We didn’t even catch cold.”

  It was only after being returned to his prison cell that Dostoevsky came to fully embrace the joy of having his life restored—even though he now faced four years of hard labor in Siberia, followed by a forced induction into the army. He was alive. And Russian literature would be far richer for it. Others, however, were not so fortunate.

  The nearly three-decade reign of Nicholas I was inaugurated in bloodshed when, in 1825, what became known as the Decembrist Rebellion was decisively crushed on the very first day of the new emperor’s rule. Five of the rebel leaders were subsequently hanged, while numerous others—including members of Russia’s most ancient noble families—were condemned to eke out whatever meager existence they could in the frozen Siberian wastelands. It was a fitting launch to the tsar’s totalitarian regime, the likes of which would not be seen again until Stalin held sway less than a century later.

  “Here everything is oppressed; cowering in fear,” wrote Custine, the French observer of Nicholas’s Russia; “everything is grim, silent, and blindly obedient to the invisible rod.”

  Every Russian was considered the emperor’s slave—from the lowliest serf to the grandest nobleman—and with that came the requirement of total submission to the imperial will. In the midst of a modernizing world, Nicholas I reinvigorated an autocracy reminiscent of Ivan the Terrible. He ruthlessly established himself as the sole font of authority, answerable to no one but God. “Everything must proceed from here,” the emperor declared while pointing to his breast.

  The Enlightenment that swept through the rest of Europe with its odious concepts concerning the rights of man would not infect Russia. Nicholas made certain of that. As Dostoevsky and countless others discovered, free expression was strictly forbidden and censorship elevated to an art. Indeed, the tsar himself spent endless hours poring over books, plays, and periodicals, searching for anything that might smell of subversion. And with the emperor’s brutally efficient secret police force, complemented by a vast network of informers, ordinary Russians could never escape the feeling that invisible eyes and ears were everywhere. “They’re in my soup!” one contemporary exclaimed.

  With his imposing stature, refined classical profile, and a regal glare that one observer noted “had the quality of a rattlesnake to freeze the blood in your veins,” Nicholas I looked every inch the autocrat. “Virgil’s Neptune,” Custine called him;*1 “one could not be more emperor than he.” Yet beneath the godlike bearing that awed all who encountered him, Nicholas was a churning mass of anxiety and paranoia—the demons that drove him to rule with such unswerving ferocity.

  “Nicholas I’s insistence on firmness and stern action was based on fear, not confidence,” wrote his biographer Nicholas Riasanovsky; “his determination concealed a state approaching pa
nic, and his courage fed on something akin to despair.”

  The neuroses that plagued Nicholas may have had something to do with the fact that he was just four when his father, Emperor Paul, was murdered with the complicity of his older brother, Alexander, and he was left with an imperious mother who cared little for him.*2 The traumatized little boy was consigned to the care of his tutor, Count M. I. Lamsdorf, who was, as Nicholas later related, something less than nurturing:

  “Count Lamsdorf instilled in us only the feeling of fear; such fear and certainty of his omnipotence, in fact, that our mother assumed only secondary importance in our understanding. This arrangement deprived us completely of any filial confidence in our mother, into whose presence we were rarely admitted alone and then, only as if some sort of sentence was being passed upon us. Incessant changes in the personnel of our entourage instilled in us from our earliest childhood the habit of searching for weakness in them in order to turn them to our advantage.… Fear, and efforts to escape punishments, occupied my mind more than anything else.”

  Fireworks, thunder, and cannons all frightened the emotionally deprived child, who often lashed out with an impotent rage at those around him. “Whatever happened to him,” an observer reported, “whether he fell down, or hurt himself, or whether he believed that his wishes remained unfulfilled and that he was insulted, he would immediately use abusive words, hack with his little axe the drum and other toys, break them, and beat his playmates with a stick or with anything else at hand, even though he loved them very much, and had a particularly passionate attachment to his younger brother [Michael].”

  The only comfort the young man seemed to find as he grew older was in rigid military discipline. Like his father (Paul) and grandfather (Peter III) before him, Nicholas delighted in constant drilling, designing uniforms, and inflicting punishment for the slightest infraction. A true martinet, he was thoroughly despised by the men serving under him. But for Nicholas, the military was a means of regimenting the chaos that would otherwise consume him.

  “Here [in the army] there is order,” he wrote, “there is a strict unconditional legality, no impertinent claims to know all the answers, no contradiction, all things flow logically one from the other; no one commands before he has himself learned to obey; no one steps in front of anybody else without lawful reason; everything is subordinated to one definite goal, everything has its purpose. That is why I shall always hold in honor the calling of a soldier. I consider the entire human life to be merely service, because everybody serves.”

  It was this concept of rigid harmony—of service and obedience, without question—that Nicholas I sought to impose on his subjects. “The emperor of Russia is a military commander,” wrote his brother Constantine, “and each of his days is a day of battle.”

  Nicholas was never supposed to be emperor, at least according to the strict law of inheritance enacted by his father.*3 The childless Alexander I should have been succeeded by Nicholas’s older brother Constantine, but the legal heir, then serving as the military governor of occupied Poland, had renounced his claim years before.*4 It was at that time Alexander named his second younger brother as his heir in a secret manifesto that he immediately had stashed away—perhaps with the intention of destroying the document should Constantine ever reconsider. Nicholas, who had never been prepared for the role of sovereign and was perfectly content imposing his will as a military commander, was horrified to learn that his future had now been inexorably altered. He later described his feelings:

  “My wife and I remained in a position which I can liken only to that sensation that would strike a man if he were going calmly along a road sown with flowers and with marvelous scenery on all sides when, suddenly, an abyss yawns wide beneath his feet, and an irresistible force draws him into it, without allowing him to step back or turn aside.”

  The secrecy that had surrounded the altered succession proved to be most problematic when Alexander I died in 1825. Most Russians assumed that Constantine would be the next emperor. Further complicating matters, Nicholas himself swore fealty to his brother. He had been warned by the military governor of St. Petersburg that a conspiracy to overthrow the government had been festering for some time among certain officers of the Guard, and that the hatred they felt for “martinet Nicholas” could very well precipitate a rebellion should he take the crown.

  All too familiar with the fate of his forebears at the whim of the Guard—including the murder of both his father and grandfather—Nicholas was more than amenable to ceding the dangerous throne back to his older brother, the legal heir. Unfortunately, Constantine remained firm in his earlier renunciation. “My previous intention is immutable,” he declared in a message from Warsaw. Now Nicholas was stuck. “Pray to God for me,” he wrote to his sister. “Take pity on your wretched brother, victim of the Will of God and his two brothers.”

  The confusion surrounding the succession—when the oath of allegiance was sworn first to Constantine then almost immediately switched to Nicholas—afforded the rebel Guards officers and their followers an ideal opportunity to strike. And on December 26, 1825, the first day of Nicholas I’s reign, they did. Fueled by fiery speeches and abundant amounts of vodka, they swept into the heart of St. Petersburg and amassed at Senate Square. The rebels were belligerent enough to call for the restoration of Constantine and the adoption of a constitution, but not yet cohesive enough to take definitive action. This gave the frightened new emperor valuable time to gather reinforcements and weigh his options from the nearby Winter Palace.

  Hoping to distract a crowd that had gathered in front of the palace from joining the nascent rebellion at the square, Nicholas appeared before them and read aloud the late emperor’s succession manifesto. It was then, in what the tsar later described as “the most terrible moment,” that a mass of soldiers rushed toward his home to take it over, “and in case of resistance to destroy our entire family.” The precarious situation was only defused when the sudden appearance of loyal Guards behind the emperor persuaded the menacing rebels to scurry back to their comrades.

  In an effort to quell the mounting unrest, a succession of generals was sent to Senate Square to reason with the agitated men and persuade them to return to their barracks. Not one of them was successful. In fact, one general, a hero of the Napoleonic Wars, was slaughtered on the spot. The head of the Orthodox Church and the emperor’s younger brother Michael also failed in their missions. Even a personal overture from the tsar himself was violently rejected. “They shot at me,” Nicholas recalled; “the bullet flew over my head and fortunately no one was wounded. The laborers of St. Isaac’s [a cathedral under construction nearby] began tossing lumber at us over the fencing.”

  At a time when the tsar was still considered God’s representative on earth, taking shots at him in a public space was a sure sign that the rebels had abandoned all reason. The Russian author and historian Nicholas Karamzin was sickened by the events he witnessed that day, writing, “Is Peter’s city really going to fall into the hands of three thousand half-drunken soldiers, mad officers, and the mob?”

  By the time evening approached it was clear that some drastic action would have to be taken. “I had to make the decision to put a swift end to this,” Nicholas wrote; “otherwise the mob might join the rebels and then the [loyal] troops surrounded by the mob would be in the most difficult circumstances.” A bloody clash seemed inevitable.

  “Your Majesty, there is nothing to be done,” announced Adjutant General Vasilchikov. “We need grapeshot!”

  “Do you want me to spill the blood of my subjects on the very first day of my reign?” said the emperor.

  “In order to save your empire,” replied Vasilchikov.

  Nicholas’s mother, Dowager Empress Maria, was appalled by the prospect. “Oh, my God!” she cried. “What will Europe say about us! My son is ascending the throne in blood!”

  But for all that, Nicholas knew what he had to do. Even as a ten-year-old boy, he had written of King Louis XVI�
��s stupidity in failing to crush his rebellious subjects while he still had the chance. And Louis ended up with his head sliced off. There would be no similar revolution in Russia—the force of cannon would ensure that. The end came that night as scores of Decembrists fell under fire and the rest fled. A massive roundup of the rebel leaders followed, with Nicholas himself conducting the interrogations. Then there were the reprisals. In a gleeful twist of the knife, the emperor left it to one of the leading liberals of his late brother’s reign to pronounce the death sentences.

  “Dear, dear Constantine,” Nicholas wrote to his older brother. “Your will has been done: I am Emperor, but, my God, at what a price! At the price of my subjects’ blood!”

  The new emperor emerged from the Decembrist revolt like a frightened and angry bull after finally managing to gore its tormenting matador. And as he cast about his ferocious glare in search of any further challenges to his might, all of Russia trembled.

  Like his revered predecessor Peter the Great, Nicholas I meant to transform Russia. Not with an eye toward the West, however, but far, far away from its pernicious influences—back to a time when the tsar ruled supreme over blindly obedient subjects with no concept of personal liberty. “Only autocracy corresponds to the spirit of the Russian people,” he declared. And only Nicholas seemed to possess the qualities to impose it.

  “No one was better created for the role of autocrat,” wrote Anna Tyutcheva, one of the empress’s ladies-in-waiting. “His impressive handsomeness, regal bearing, and severe Olympic profile—everything down to his smile of a condescending Jupiter, breathed earthly deity. There was something solemn and reverential in the palace air. People spoke in hushed tones and were slightly bowed … in order to appear more obliging … everything was imbued with the presence of the lord.”