Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  The emperor was a jealous god who insisted upon ruling alone. Gone were the days of powerful ministers and influential favorites that every monarch since Peter the Great kept close to them. “I don’t need smart men; I need loyal ones,” insisted Nicholas, who was equitable only in the sense that he believed all men were beneath him. The tsar personally controlled every aspect of government—from foreign policy to the fight against cholera—as he deemed himself the only one capable of doing so. “You should know that I have neither a mind nor a will,” wrote one official. “I am merely a blind tool of the emperor’s will.”

  Perhaps the only man who wielded any real influence in Nicholas’s government was Sergei Uvarov, who formulated the official creed of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality”—the holy trinity of despotic Russia. As minister of education, Uvarov was charged with a rather simple task: to keep the people stupid. “If I can extend Russia’s childhood another fifty years I will consider my mission accomplished,” he declared.

  An ignorant population was a docile one, which is why the emperor was incensed to learn that in one instance a potential constitution, formulated during his brother’s reign, had been printed in Poland. “The publication of this paper is most annoying,” he wrote to Prince Paskevich in Warsaw. “Out of one hundred of our young officers [stationed in Poland] ninety will read it, will fail to understand it or will scorn it, but ten will retain it in their memory, will discuss it—and, the most important point, will not forget it. This worries me above everything else. This is why I wish so much that the guards be kept in Warsaw as briefly as possible. Order Count Witt to try to obtain as many copies of this booklet as he can and to destroy them, also to find the manuscript and send it to me.”

  The emperor made it his personal task to suppress any publication that might give his subjects the absurd idea that they were free to choose their own destinies. Literature and newspapers were thoroughly scrutinized, often by the tsar himself, and even ellipses used to replace censored text were forbidden lest the reader “fall into the temptation of thinking about the possible contents of the banned part.” Writers suffered immeasurably under Nicholas, and any who dared stray from the official doctrine were usually branded as criminally insane. This designation, rather than imprisonment, was a means of silencing voices forever, as it was thought no one would listen to the ravings of a lunatic.

  Alexander Nikitenko, a former serf elevated to the position of censor, was also a freethinker who sought, as he wrote, “to give secret aid to literature.” “At first we feverishly wanted to be heard,” Nikitenko recorded in his diary, a vivid account of that repressive era. “But when we saw that they were not fooling with us; that our talent and intelligence were doomed to grow torpid and rot at the bottom of our souls … that any bright thought was a crime against the social order, when, in a word, we were told that educated people were pariahs in our society, and that … a soldier’s discipline was considered the only principle—then our entire young generation became morally depleted.”

  And that’s just the way Nicholas liked it. “I’ve cut them once and for all from interfering in my work,” he gloated. But it wasn’t enough just to stifle writers and intellectuals. The emperor aimed to control all of his subjects. He managed this with the help of his secret police, or Third Department, along with an army of informants eager to curry favor. “With Germanic tenacity and precision,” the essayist Alexander Herzen wrote, “Nicholas tightened the noose of the Third Department around the neck of Russia.”

  As with every other aspect of governing, however, the emperor was not content to leave all the surveillance to the Third Department. He made himself appear omnipresent by ceaselessly traveling all over Russia to observe things for himself. “Fifteen days have now passed since I left you,” Nicholas wrote to his wife, Empress Alexandra, “but I have seen and done much. We are not wasting our time. This manner of traveling, when one can bear it, is really good, because one sees everything, and they never know when or where I am going to arrive. They expect me everywhere, and if anything is not well, they at least try to make it so.”

  The emperor’s unannounced pop-ins often proved traumatizing to those unfortunate enough to receive them—like the administrators of one high school. Nicholas strode into a classroom and saw that one of the best and brightest students was leaning on his elbow as he listened to a history lecture. The instructor was instantly dismissed on the emperor’s orders for allowing such a gross breach of discipline. Then, upon encountering another such egregious incident, Nicholas personally fired the school principal.

  And still the tsar wasn’t finished with the school. He returned unexpectedly on another occasion, and Alexander Nikitenko recorded what ensued: “The sovereign arrived angry, went everywhere, asked about everything, with the obvious intention of finding something wrong. He did not like the face of one of the pupils.—‘What sort of an ugly … mug is this!’ he exclaimed, looking at him with fury. In conclusion he told the director:

  “ ‘Yes, in appearance you have everything in order, but what mugs your pupils possess! The First High School must be first in everything: they have not that vivacity, that fullness, that nobility which distinguishes, for instance, the pupils of the Fourth High School!’ ”

  Nicholas’s wrath was not limited to people who displeased him, but inanimate objects as well. In 1829, the warship Raphael surrendered in a battle with the Turks. The emperor was incensed with the vessel and wrote to the admiral of the fleet: “Trusting in the help of the Almighty I persevere in the hope that the fearless Black Sea fleet, burning with the desire to wash off the shame of the frigate ‘Raphael,’ will not leave it in the hands of the enemy. But, when it is returned to our control, considering this frigate to be unworthy in the future to fly the flag of Russia and to serve together with the other vessels of our fleet, I order you to burn it.”

  There were times when the tsar’s intrusive involvement in the affairs of his subjects actually transcended the absurd, as when he declared after the annulment of one woman’s marriage, “The young lady shall be considered a virgin.” Such was the state of absolute control in Russia that one observer wryly commented, “Fish swam in the water, birds sang in the forest because they were permitted to do so by the authorities.”

  Nicholas I found great relief from the burdens of micromanaging the Russian Empire in his family, to which he was entirely devoted. Still, the tsar demanded the same blind obedience from them as he did from any one of his other subjects. And woe to that unfortunate relative who defied or displeased him—like his son and heir, the future Alexander II. “Don’t be a milksop!” was the emperor’s usual admonition to the young man, but that was merely gentle chiding compared to those instances when the tsarevitch really made his father mad. “Begone!” Nicholas thundered after some misdeed. “You are not worthy of approaching me after such behavior; you have forgotten that obedience is a sacred duty. I can forgive anything except disobedience.”

  Tensions between father and son became particularly fraught when young Alexander refused to give up his Polish mistress, a woman Nicholas found entirely unsuitable for the heir to the Russian throne. To resolve the issue, the emperor was prepared to follow the example of the one Romanov predecessor he admired most. “But for me the State counts above everything else,” he wrote to his wife in 1839; “and much as I love my children, I love my fatherland much more still. And, if this becomes necessary, there is the example of Peter the Great [see Chapter 2] to show my duty; and I shall not be too weak to fulfill it.” Alexander obligingly gave up the girl.

  Even the emperor’s beloved wife, Alexandra, was not immune to her husband’s bouts of fury. Nicholas had fallen in love with the Prussian princess, whom he endearingly called “Mouffy,” when he visited her father’s kingdom as a young man. And nineteen years after they married, he was still smitten.

  “God has given you such a happy character that it is no merit to love you,” Nicholas wrote to Alexandra in 1836. “I exist for yo
u, yes, you are I—I do not know how to say it differently, but I am not your salvation, as you say. Our salvation is over there yonder, yonder where we shall all be admitted to rest from the tribulations of life. I mean, if we earn it down here by the fulfillment of our duties. Hard as they may be, one performs them with joy when one has a beloved being at home near whom one can breathe again and gain new strength. If I was now and then demanding, this happens because I look for everything in you. If I do not find it, I am distressed, I say to myself, no, she does not understand me, and these are unique, rare, but difficult moments. For the rest, happiness, joy, calm—that is what I seek and find in my old Mouffy. I wished, as much as this was in my power, to make you a hundred times happier, if I could have divined how this end could have been obtained.”

  In many ways Alexandra was the perfect mate for the temperamental emperor: sweet, submissive, and just flighty enough not to harbor any political opinions she might be tempted to express. “Her tender nature and shallow mind replaced principles with sensitivity,” wrote the empress’s lady-in-waiting Anna Tyutcheva. “Nicholas had a passionate adoration for this frail and exquisite creature of a strong nature for a weak thing, who obediently turned him into her sole ruler and legislator.… Nicholas placed her in a golden cage of palaces, brilliant balls, and handsome courtiers.… In her magical dungeon she did not once think of freedom. She did not allow herself to dream of any life beyond the golden cage.”

  The one occasion Alexandra did seek a respite from her gilded existence at court, Nicholas made her regret. The empress’s health was always fragile—a constant source of irritation to her robust and restless husband—but in 1845 it grew markedly worse. Alexandra’s physician recommended she avail herself of the healing sunshine of Sicily to restore her strength, and the empress agreed. But with an attachment to his wife that bordered on obsessive, Nicholas reacted as if the doctor had suggested she sleep with the Third Army Battalion.

  Alexandra recorded in her diary that the emperor “appeared beside himself, that is, in his own way like no other man could be, not storming or angry, or crying, but icily cold and that towards me. He did not address to me two sentences in the course of an entire week. Those were such bad days, such a burden, such tugs at the heart that I had to become sick and nervous. But I shall write no more about this.”

  Rather than tormenting poor Mouffy as she tried to improve her health, the emperor might have taken comfort in the arms of one of his mistresses. There were plenty to choose from, after all. Indeed, like so many of his Romanov ancestors, Nicholas’s libido knew few limits.

  “He gave his attention … not only to all the young beauties in the court—the ladies-in-waiting—but also the young women he met during walks,” reported Custine. “If someone caught his fancy on a walk or at the theater, he told his adjutant. She would then be checked. If there was nothing against her, the husband (if she was married) or her parents (if a maiden) were informed of the honor that had befallen them.… The tsar never met resistance to his lust.… In that strange country sleeping with the emperor was considered an honor … for the parents and even the husbands.”

  In the spring of 1844, Nicholas I made a state visit to Britain, after which Queen Victoria, then just a young woman of twenty-five, recorded her impressions of the all-powerful Russian sovereign who had dominated his realm for nearly two decades:

  “He is certainly a very striking man; still very handsome; his profile is beautiful, and his manners most dignified and graceful; extremely civil—quite alarmingly so, as he is full of attentions and politesses. But the expression of the eyes is formidable, and unlike anything I ever saw before. He gives me and Albert [the queen’s consort] the impression of a man who is not happy and on whom the weight of immense power and position weighs heavily and painfully; he seldom smiles, and when he does the expression is not a happy one.…

  “He is stern and severe with fixed principles of duty which nothing on earth will make him change: very clever I do not think him, and his mind is an uncivilized one; his education has been neglected; politics and military concerns are the only things he takes great interest in; the arts and all softer occupations he is insensible to, but he is sincere, I am certain, sincere even in his most despotic acts, from a sense that it is the only way to govern.”

  What the queen saw as sincerity actually amounted “to a burning conviction, by normal human standards bordering on the insane, of the absolute rectitude, the divine virtue of his own views,” wrote historian Edward Crankshaw. “And yet, with this conviction there went a profound, concealed uncertainty.” It was, in fact, fear—the inner terror that had haunted the emperor since he was a boy and which he masked with unswerving despotism. The refuge of the frightened was, as it always had been, immobility; a desperate clinging to a fixed order, without growth, risk, or enlightenment. Thus, Crankshaw concluded, “The reign of Nicholas I was not a development; it was a prolonged situation.”

  In July 1849, the emperor wrote a rather self-pitying letter to his wife in which he expressed the concept of duty as the essence of his very being. But, if he replaced that word and idea with fear—raw, all-consuming terror—the emperor would have presented a near-perfect encapsulation of himself and his reign:

  “How remarkable really is my fate. I am told that I am one of the mightiest rulers of the world, and one must say that everything, that is, everything that is permissible, should be within my reach, that, within the limits of discretion, I should be able to do what I please and where. But in fact just the opposite is the case as far as I am concerned. And if one asks about the basic cause of this anomaly, there is only one word: Duty! [Fear!] Yes, this is no empty word for those who have become accustomed from their youth to understand it as I have. This word has a sacred meaning which makes all personal considerations retreat, everything must keep silent in front of this one feeling, everything must step back, until one, together with this feeling, disappears into the grave. That is my key word. It is hard, I admit it, I suffer more from it than I can tell—but I have been created to suffer.”

  Decades of effort spent trying to sustain a stagnant empire in the face of an inevitably changing world began to take a physical and psychological toll on the emperor as early as 1846. “He has to make an effort to conquer fatigue, to do what seemed easy to him until now,” the Austrian ambassador reported that year. “He has become silent. He avoids assemblies. He says that society, balls, and fetes have become a drudgery, and that he prefers to live like a bourgeois.… The conviction is gaining more and more ground that the Emperor, in spite of his constant work and energy, will not succeed in doing the good he wants to do, nor in destroying the evil he sees.”

  The decline of “Virgil’s Neptune” had indeed commenced, and it would accelerate rapidly in the coming years as he witnessed the revolutions in central Europe he had worked so assiduously to prevent, the worsening health of his beloved Mouffy, and the continued strain of ruling Russia virtually alone. “Emperor Nicholas has aged ten years,” reported the French diplomat Marquis de Castelbajac in 1854. “He is truly sick, physically and morally.”

  The crowning blow came with the devastating defeats the emperor’s forces suffered in the Crimean War, a conflict Russia fought all alone against a coalition of European powers. Then, in February 1855, Nicholas, not yet fifty-nine, caught a slight cold but ignored it and continued his routine. After a review of his troops in subzero temperatures, pneumonia set in, and his condition quickly turned grave enough for his doctor to call in a priest.

  “Then I am dying?” Nicholas asked calmly, his cold eyes boring into the doctor.

  “Your Majesty,” the physician replied, “you have only a few hours left.”

  The emperor, autocrat to the end, issued various orders in his final hours on March 2. Then, with his last breaths he addressed his son, soon to become Alexander II: “I wanted to take everything difficult, everything heavy upon myself and leave to you a peaceful, orderly, and happy realm. Providence deter
mined otherwise. Now I shall ascend to pray for Russia and for you. After Russia, I loved you above everything else in the world. Serve Russia.”

  Now, all that was left was Nikitenko’s terse assessment of the late emperor: “The main failing of the reign of Nicholas Pavlovich was that it was all a mistake.”

  * * *

  *1 “He cannot smile at the same time with his eyes and his mouth,” Custine also noted; “a disharmony which denotes perpetual constraint.” The essayist Alexander Herzen was one of many others who commented on the emperor’s eyes, which he described as “entirely without warmth, without a trace of mercy, wintry eyes.”

  *2 Count Benckendorff, a close associate, wrote of Empress Maria: “Demanding of herself she was also demanding of her subordinates; always tireless, she did not favor them if they appeared tired; finally, loving sincerely and constantly those to whom she had deigned to give her friendship or whom she patronized because of the inclination of her heart or of her mind, she demanded from them complete reciprocity. The only failing of this extraordinary woman was her being excessively, one may say, exacting of her children and of the people dependent on her.”

  *3 Peter the Great had once decreed that the sovereign could name an heir of his own choosing. A century later, Emperor Paul altered the law to limit the succession only to the monarch’s oldest male son. Women were barred entirely from ever again inheriting the crown.

  *4 In renouncing the crown, Constantine reportedly declared that he would be pleased to serve as the sovereign’s “second valet; just not to be tsar on the throne.”

  Alexander II (1855–1881): “A Crowned Semi-Ruin”

  Am I such a wild beast that they should hound me to death?

  —EMPEROR ALEXANDER II