Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  “Afterwards we talked a lot. Both of us had many questions and many answers. Thus we spent our first night together—and we never slept!”

  Alexander’s contentment with his new bride, who was given the name Marie Feodorovna upon her conversion to Orthodoxy, extended well beyond the honeymoon suite. Minnie became his constant companion and encouraged him as he began training to become Russia’s next tsar. It was a daunting task, given Sasha’s total lack of preparation prior to Nixa’s death and his grievous deficiency in inherent ability. (His tutor lamented that Alexander “had been so badly misused by Nature, who sent him into the world with the shabbiest of intellectual gifts.”) Yet with his cheerful bride by his side, Sasha persisted. Minnie somehow managed to make everything better.

  “All the reports … of [Alexander’s] being so unhappy with Minny—and she having married him to please her mother—are not true,” the Crown Princess of Prussia reported to her mother, Queen Victoria. “I think they are very domestic and attracted to each other and he makes a very good husband.”

  Alexander himself affirmed his feelings in a diary entry several weeks after his wedding: “God grant … that I may love my darling wife more and more, she who loves me with all her heart, a love for which I am so grateful, and for the sacrifice that she made by leaving her parents and her fatherland for my sake. I often feel that I am not worthy of her, but even if this were true, I will do my best to be.”

  Though their private intimacy was apparent, what the public saw of the couple left the impression that there was very little to recommend them to each other. Minnie was sparkling and vivacious, with a joie de vivre that enchanted all who met her. “No wonder the emperor [Alexander II] likes her, and no wonder the Russians like her,” wrote an American observer, Thomas W. Knox. “I like her, and I am neither emperor nor any other Russian, and never exchanged a thousand words with her in my life.”

  The young empress-to-be loved nothing more than a party, where she invariably dazzled. At one ball not long after her marriage, an observer noted that she was “indefatigable” and “in high spirits … with her cheeks flushed by dancing, she had a freshness of look very rare in Russia.” The tsarevitch, on the other hand, much preferred solitary pursuits like hunting and fishing. “He looked like a big Russian muzhik [peasant],” Alexander’s future finance minister, Sergei Witte, wrote; “in manner he was more or less bear-like.” When he was dragged to obligatory social events, much against his will, Sasha was indeed as awkward and ungainly as a dancing Russian bear. Once, after a partner thanked him for a dance, Alexander replied bluntly: “Why can’t you be honest? It was just a duty neither of us could have relished. I have ruined your slippers and you have made me nearly sick with the scent you use.”

  Yet beneath this boorish exterior, Sasha had a “wonderful heart, good humor, and fairness,” as Witte observed. “I like him very much,” the Crown Princess of Prussia (“Vicky”) wrote in the report to her mother, Queen Victoria. “He is awkward, shy and uncouth, from being so very big, but he is simple and unpretending not proud and capricious as most Russians are, and has something straightforward and good-natured about him which I like and I think you would also.” Furthermore, Vicky noted of Minnie, “She seems quite happy and contented with her fat, good-natured husband who seems far more attentive and kind to her than one would have thought.”*1

  So it was that the ursine tsarevitch and his petite bride settled into harmonious domesticity at the Anichkov Palace and began to raise a family. Their firstborn was the doomed future emperor Nicholas II, whose arrival in 1868 thrilled his father: “God has sent us a son.… What a joy it was—it is impossible to imagine. I rushed to embrace my darling wife; who at once grew merry and was awfully happy.” Young Nicholas was followed by five siblings: Alexander (who died of meningitis before his first birthday), George, Xenia, Michael, and Olga. At their father’s insistence, the royal children were reared under relatively Spartan conditions amid the opulence of the palace. They slept on cots and were served only the simplest of meals. But they had parents who adored them.

  A contented Sasha wrote to his wife after nearly twelve years of marriage: “My dear love Minny … I would to embrace you in my thoughts and with my whole heart wish us both our old, sweet, dear happiness; we do not need a new one, and preserve, O Lord, that happiness which we, thanks to his grace, have enjoyed for more than 11 years.”

  Alas, the family’s tranquil existence at the Anichkov Palace was shattered in 1881, when Emperor Alexander II was finally killed after six previous assassination attempts. “Oh, what sorrow and despair, that our beloved Emperor should be torn away from us and even in this dreadful way!” Minnie wrote to her mother, Queen Louise of Denmark. “No, anyone who has not seen the appalling sight himself can never imagine anything like it! The poor, innocent Emperor—to see him in that terrible condition was truly heartrending! His face and head and upper body were untouched but his legs were completely crushed and torn up to the knees, so that at first I did not understand what I was actually looking at, a bleeding mass with half a boot on the right foot; all that was left was the sole of his foot! Never in my life have I seen anything like it; no, it was horrible.”

  Sasha was as devastated as his wife by the sight of his father’s shattered body. He wept bitterly. Now “the bullock” who had once exclaimed in despair “I was not raised to be Emperor” assumed the role he had long dreaded. “A strange change came over him in that instant,” Grand Duke Alexander (Sandro) wrote of the new sovereign. “This was not the same tsarevitch Alexander Alexandrovich, who liked to amuse the small friends of his son, Nicky, by tearing a deck of cards in half or bending an iron rod into a knot. In the course of five minutes he was completely transformed. Something incomparably greater than the simple consciousness of the duties of the monarch illuminated his heavy figure. A fire burned in his tranquil eyes.”

  Indeed, Emperor Alexander III emerged from his father’s murder to become, in the words of one, “a colossus of unwavering autocracy.”*2

  With St. Petersburg “reeking of dynamite—a nest of invisible assassins,” as a visiting Englishman described it at the time, Alexander III launched his campaign to crush dissent and subdue the liberalizing elements in government he had long believed encouraged the violence and rebellion of his father’s reign. As the emperor’s nephew, Grand Duke Alexander, later wrote, “the future of the empire, possibly of the entire world, depended upon the issue of the coming contest between the new Czar of Russia and the fast increasing forces of destruction.”

  Alexander’s tutor and advisor, the ultraconservative Constantine Pobedonostsev, had long despaired of imparting the nuances of rule to his intellectually limited student. But the future tsar had no problem absorbing the simple creed that defined the reign of his grandfather, Nicholas I: “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality.” In fact, these united entwined precepts spoke to the very soul of the emperor, whose entire education consisted of what one courtier described as an “unshakable belief in the omnipotence of the tsars of Russia.”

  Now that Alexander ruled, Pobedonostsev warned him: “If siren songs are sung to you about the necessity of pacification, of continuation of the liberal regime, and yielding to so-called public opinion, oh, please God, do not … hearken to them. This will mean ruin, the ruin of Russia and of you.” The emperor hardly needed to be reminded. Within two months of his accession he issued the Manifesto of Unshakable Autocracy, in which he declared that he would “take up vigorously the task of governing … with faith in the strength and truth of the autocratic power that we have been called upon to affirm and safeguard for the popular good from any infringement.”

  The war against subversion was on, beginning with the hanging deaths of Alexander II’s assassins, while the Okhrana, or secret police, was established to ferret out other dangerous elements for the gallows. But the enemy wasn’t so easily cowed. Because of the lurking menace, Alexander and his family were forced to live under the tightest security at Emper
or Paul’s fortress palace of Gatchina—the so-called citadel of autocracy—where they were essentially prisoners for their own protection.

  The threat of terrorism was in fact so insidious that it entirely pervaded the emperor and empress’s coronation in Moscow, which took place in May 1883, two years after Alexander III’s accession. Mary King Waddington, wife of a French diplomat, noted the “highly charged atmosphere” surrounding the event, while Mrs. Frederic Chenevix Trench, wife of the military attaché to the British embassy, observed of the “stringent” security measures that “no amount of precaution seems too minute to counteract and prevent possible machinations of the Nihilists.”

  Mrs. Trench reported that on the morning Alexander and Marie were set to make their ceremonial entry into the Kremlin, “several anonymous letters had been received by both the Emperor and the Empress telling them to prepare for the worst if they persisted in the intention of going in state to the Kremlin.… Yet, there sat the Empress with a smile on her face, not knowing at what moment there might be a desperate attempt upon her own or upon the Emperor’s life. Not only did the imperial couple receive such letters of warnings, but many of the attendants who were to form part of the pageant, and the littlest pages and postilions who accompanied the Empress’s chariot, each received separate letters telling them that they would not reach the Kremlin alive.”

  Despite the ominous warnings, the coronation in the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Assumption was a splendid display of sacred imperial tradition. Alexander first crowned himself, then his wife as she knelt before him. After that, Marie unexpectedly rose and warmly embraced the emperor. “I cannot describe, cannot express how touching and tender it was to see these embraces of husband and wife and kisses under the imperial crown,” recalled Alexander’s cousin Constantine (K.R. to the family)—“this ordinary human love in the glitter and radiance of imperial majesty.”

  When it was all over, Marie, who some reported as having looked “very much agitated” and “very pale” during the ceremony, recounted the day in a letter to her mother. “I felt myself literally as a sacrificial lamb,” she wrote. “I wore a silver train and was bare-headed having only a small pearl necklace on my neck.… We had a truly blissful feeling on return to our rooms when everything ended! I had the same feeling as right after I had given birth to a baby.”

  By nearly every account, Marie made a splendid empress—“the idol of the Russian people,” as Princess Catherine Radziwill called her. Whether working on one of her numerous charitable endeavors or greeting guests at a glittering ball, the empress consistently maintained the same graciousness and regal effervescence that left those who met her in awe. “She was very short, but her bearing, her distinguished and forceful personality, and the intelligence which shone in her face, made her the perfect figure of a queen,” wrote Crown Princess Cecilie, daughter-in-law of the German kaiser. “Wherever she went, her winning smile conquered the hearts of people. The way in which she bowed when passing in her carriage was charming in its gracefulness. She was extraordinarily well loved in Russia, and everyone had confidence in her … and [she was] a real mother to her people.”

  Certainly Marie dressed the part of empress, always resplendent in jewels and the most flattering fashions. “Her Majesty the Empress of the Russias, she gives me the inspiration sublime, divine,” declared the renowned Parisian couturier Charles Frederick Worth of his imperial client. “And when she carries my work she so improves it. I do with difficulty recognize it. Bring to me any woman in Europe—queen, artiste, or bourgeois—who can inspire me as does Madame Her Majesty, and I will make her confections while I live and charge her nothing.” Still, behind the baubles and expensive French gowns was a woman entirely unique in her appeal. Writing of Marie, the American observer Knox noted that there was “no lack of diamonds” on her person, “but sparkle bright as they may, they cannot surpass the beauty of her keen, clear, and flashing eyes.”

  Although the emperor was personally frugal—“Neither in the Imperial family nor any of the nobility was there anyone who better appreciated the value of a ruble or a kopeck than Emperor Alexander III,” Witte wrote—he never begrudged his wife her extravagances. As one German reporter observed, “Because the Emperor is unsociable, he is glad that his wife finds inexhaustible joy in dancing and amusements, even though she runs up bills to the goddess of fashion, which are not seldom as long as those of Josephine, the first wife of Napoleon, who spent half her life in the dressing room.”

  But there was another, more compelling reason for the emperor’s indulgence: Sasha simply loved his Minnie. She was “the only person on the face of the earth in whom the Autocrat of all the Russias puts any real trust,” The London Reader reported in 1888. “In his gentle consort he has unlimited confidence.” Indeed, Alexander called his wife “the Guardian of Russia.”

  Yet while the emperor lovingly doted on his adored empress, he remained to the rest of the world the same gruff Russian bear he had always been. “He glowered rather than looked,” one junior officer recalled, “and had the habit of thrusting his head forward in the most menacing way, when anything displeased him.” During dinner one night, the Austrian ambassador spoke of the growing unrest in the Balkans and hinted that his nation might mobilize two or three army corps. In response, the emperor picked up a fork, twisted it in a knot, and tossed it contemptuously onto the ambassador’s plate. “That,” he announced, “is what I am going to do to your two or three army corps.”

  Alexander III was a fierce nationalist, and though his genetic descent was almost entirely German, he considered himself a true Russian—and looked it, too, right down to his traditional costume of baggy trousers, colored shirts, and high boots. The emperor’s motto was “All for Russia,” and an intense program of “Russification” accompanied it. All the diverse regions and ethnicities throughout the empire were now to speak the same national language and observe the same religion and customs.

  And, of course, the preservation of the ancient order always remained the paramount objective of Alexander III’s reign. “Everything about him suggested strength, solidity, and unshakeable resolve,” wrote historian W. Bruce Lincoln. “He suffered no self-doubts or even questioned that his major purpose was to preserve the Romanovs’ autocracy undiluted by concessions to public opinion.”

  But the reactionary Goliath needed to relax once in a while. Perhaps nowhere did Alexander III feel more cozy and at home than during the imperial family’s retreats out of Russia to visit Fredensborg, the country estate of the empress’s parents in Denmark, where royal relations from across Europe converged each year to spend time together. “We are an immense family gathering,” wrote the tsar’s brother-in-law, Britain’s future King Edward VII—“quite a Babel, seven different languages spoken, never sitting down to dinner less than fifty or sixty.”

  All cares of state and security were abandoned during these Danish sojourns, and as the emperor’s daughter Olga later wrote, “No member of the Okhrana was there to guard us from dangers which did not exist.” Amid the estate’s lush lawns, the mighty Alexander III was simply good old Uncle Sasha, who never failed to entertain the scads of royal children who adored him. “[He was] an unending delight,” recalled the emperor’s nephew, Prince George of Greece; “when he was with us he was just a schoolboy up to all kinds of pranks.”

  The only difficult part of visiting Fredensborg was leaving it, “that awful moment of tearing ourselves away from one another, not knowing where and how our next meeting may be,” as the empress’s sister Alexandra described it. “Poor little [Minnie],” she continued. “I can see her now, standing at the top of the steps in utter despair, her eyes streaming over with tears, and trying to hold me as long as she could. Poor Sacha [sic] too felt the parting very much and cried dreadfully.”

  It was during one such farewell that Emperor Alexander stooped down to kiss the children of the Prince and Princess of Wales. “Good-bye, my dears,” he said. “You are going back to your lov
ely English home, and I to my Russian prison.”

  It was true that the imperial family continued to live in fortresslike conditions. While Alexander III’s efforts to stamp out subversion had been largely effective—reducing the revolutionary movement to what one socialist bitterly called “a cottage industry”—terrorist threats nevertheless persisted. And so did the security measures that confined them. “A lane of troops [were used] to protect him from the bombs, and mines, and other machinations of his own subjects,” wrote biographer Charles Lowe. “Every bridge, every culvert, every level-crossing of the railway lines by which he journeyed was guarded by well-trained sentries, and the whole route patrolled by soldiers … and his Majesty’s destination was never known until he reached it.”

  In 1887, Alexander III was spared the fate of his father when a band of revolutionaries was discovered with a cache of bombs hidden in books. Among those hanged for the thwarted crime was Alexander Ulianov, older brother of the ferocious socialist who would later emerge as Lenin. The following year, in what may have been a terrorist attack (though never proven), the train carrying the imperial family violently derailed and nearly crushed them all to death. It was only by means of the emperor’s brute strength that he shouldered the wreckage long enough for his family to escape. “The bullock,” it seemed, had triumphed.

  “Tsar Alexander III, only forty-nine years old, was still approaching the peak of his reign [in 1894],” wrote Robert K. Massie. “The early years had been devoted to reestablishing the autocracy in effective form. Now, with the empire safe and the dynasty secure, he expected to use the great power he had gathered to put a distinctive stamp on Russia. Already there were those who, gazing confidently into the future, had begun to compare Alexander III to Peter the Great.”*3

  But the Russian bear was vulnerable after all; his kidneys were failing. Some attributed the tsar’s physical decline to the train accident six years before, when he saved his family but perhaps depleted whatever vigor he had remaining. In September 1894, he traveled to Livadia, the imperial retreat in the Crimea, where it was hoped the temperate climate might help restore his health. But Alexander continued to fail.