The next heir, little Nicholas (who was called Niks by the family, like his grandfather), was incredibly talented and willful. He was the only one allowed by his grandfather to display his will. Niks did not want to study French. Alexander scolded him in the presence of the emperor.
“And how will you converse with ambassadors, Your Highness, if you do not learn French?”
“I’ll have an interpreter!” the boy countered merrily.
“Bravo, my little friend! But then, Your Highness, all of Europe will laugh at you.”
“Then I’ll declare war on Europe,” Niks replied, to his grandfather’s delight.
In fact, the boy studied French and spoke it brilliantly.
The frequent pregnancies and the damp climate of St. Petersburg had a deleterious effect on Maria Alexandrovna’s health. The combination led to pulmonary disease, which ate away at the tsarevna, as it had with previous German princesses.
As for the heir, there is little to write, except “His father eclipsed him.” The intelligent and sparkling young man turned dull the minute he returned to Russia. His position required him to be a member of the State Council and the Committee of Ministers, but he did not show any particular initiative. He merely attended the meetings. His iron father wanted nothing but obedience and subordination.
Serfdom had become an abnormality in Europe, where it had been long abandoned. Nicholas realized that he had to do something with Russia’s serfs. Slave labor was not productive, but that was not the issue. Back in 1839, Benkendorf wrote in a report from the Third Department that “serfs were a gunpowder cellar under the state.” The head of the secret police cautiously raised the question: Should not the matter be settled from above before the serfs tried to free themselves from below?
Nicholas formed a Secret Committee on the Agrarian Issue. He always kept secret anything to do with possible change. Society should not be aware of the considerations of authority, he believed. The tsarevich, the future emancipator of the serfs, took an astonishing position on that committee—he held that nothing should be changed; everything was fine as it was. Alexander sensed that was what his father wanted to hear. He never forgot that any contrary opinion was squashed ruthlessly, and followed with his father’s favorite rebuke: “Milksop!”
Alexander’s rival for his father’s attention had grown up in the meantime. Alexander’s brother, Konstantin, or Kostya, was a full nine years younger. He was short and unattractive, unlike the rest of the tall, slender, and handsome Romanovs. He was very intelligent, mean, and sarcastic. His uncle, Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich, dubbed him Aesop.
Aesop had a brilliant education, for Nicholas did not want his sons to have a haphazard and careless education like his own. He had Kostya brought up for the throne, just in case the heir “pulls a sudden trick and decides to die,” as Maria Frederiks recalled it.
This education and his great successes in school gave rise to little Kostya’s unbridled conceit. His amazing theories reached the tsar. “Sasha was born before our father became emperor, and I was born after. I am the son of the emperor and he is the son of a grand duke. It’s not fair that Sasha is the heir.”
His father punished the boy, repeating, “A divided kingdom falls. Remember that! God told us that. And it applies to the family.” Kostya remembered.
Kostya was groomed to head the Naval Department. He formed a plan, remembering that Catherine the Great had named his uncle Konstantin because she dreamed he would become emperor of what had been Byzantium, which she would win back from the Turks. The boy presented his father with a plan for capturing Constantinople from the sea, so that he could then become emperor of Byzantium.
Once again, Nicholas had to temper Little Aesop’s conceit, even though he liked it so much.
While smart little Kostya was growing up, the main intellectual force in the Romanov family was a woman, one of the most outstanding women of Nicholas’s Russia. The Württemberg princess Fredericka Charlotte Maria was sixteen when Alexander I arranged a marriage between her and his youngest brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich.
Elena Pavlovna (as she became known after her conversion to Orthodoxy) was brilliantly talented. She learned Russian during the journey to St. Petersburg, and then managed to read in Russian all three volumes of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State.
In St. Petersburg she attended lectures at St. Petersburg University, frequented the Academy of Sciences and the Free Economic Society. She studied Orthodoxy and entered into discussions with Russian theologians. She was the only one permitted to argue (very delicately, of course) with the tsar, and he would hear her out, albeit mockingly. He dubbed her “the family scholar.”
Her happy marriage to Grand Duke Mikhail mystified St. Petersburg.
Mikhail and the tsar were inseparable as children. They both proudly considered themselves martinets. When he became tsar, Nicholas appointed Mikhail commander of the guards. Mikhail worked assiduously to turn the dangerous guards into the ballet, harassing them with reviews and parades. Someone said of him, “He’s got the Romanov disease, ‘military parade fever.’”
He played the role of ruthless commander zealously. Brows furrowed and face grim, he watched the behavior of officers even at palace balls; his forbidding gaze did not pass over the ladies, however. Like his brother, he was a womanizer.
“Why look so dour? Everyone knows how good-natured you really are,” the beautiful lady-in-waiting Alexandra Patkul once asked.
“I must punish, and the tsar show clemency,” he explained gruffly, and then, without changing his somber tone, made her laugh with yet another of his puns. Gloomy-looking martinet Mikhail was brilliantly witty, and it was he who gave everyone in the family a pet name. His witticisms were repeated throughout St. Petersburg, and he was helpless, in turn, in the face of anyone’s wit. Despite the cautions from Benkendorf, he often saved witty guardsmen from the wrath of the Third Department. He was mentor to a well-known wastrel in the Horse Guards, Bulgakov, whose dangerous jokes made the rounds. Bulgakov always lost at cards. He would casually drop by Mikhailovsky Palace to see his strict commander. In the presence of the valet (who was accustomed to the procedure), he would slip an envelope marked with the amount of his losses under the study door of the grand duke. In response, the envelope returned by the same path, filled with money.
Grand Duke Mikhail died young, and his forty-year-old widow turned her energies to public service. She built hospitals, created the Russian Red Cross and the “sisters of mercy” movement. She was also the greatest patron of the arts in Russia. She described her mission as “bandaging the wings of young talents.”
Her music secretary was one of the greatest musicians of the era, Anton Rubinstein. When he was a child, Liszt heard Rubinstein play and called him his heir. Later, young Rubinstein performed his famous act for the tsar, which never failed to amuse him. The wicked teenager imitated Liszt, ruthlessly parodying his manner of playing and his celebrated grimaces.
Rubinstein, the son of a converted Jew, stocky and with an enormous head of hair, very similar in appearance to Beethoven, became a close friend of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. It was only with her help that a Jewish pianist could have founded the first conservatory in Russia, where a twenty-two-year-old official would come to study. His name was Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Elena Pavlovna gave young Rubinstein rooms in her wonderful palace on Kamenny Ostrov. His piano pieces, including “Kamenny Ostrov,” capture the brilliant musical evenings in the palace of the middle-aged but still charming duchess.
She was always ahead of the curve, and naturally she was the first (after Nicholas) to manage to read Catherine’s “Notes.” Copies of the manuscript made during the reign of Paul I circulated in St. Petersburg’s higher circles. Paul, stunned by his mother’s memoirs, lent them overnight to his then close friend Prince Kurakin. (Overnight, his serf scribes made a copy for him.) Elena Pavlovna did not hide her delight in reading them, after which Nicholas ordered eve
ryone in the court to hand over their copies; he started a real hunt for them.
Young Kostya and the not-young duchess formed the radical wing of the family. The faceless, apathetic heir looked even more gray next to them. No one would have thought then that a couple of decades later he would perform the greatest act in Russian history and that they would become his closest associates.
The question is whether the tsarevich was in fact apathetic or chose to appear that way.
“I don’t need smart men, I need loyal ones.” Nicholas’s phrase was the motto of his empire. Everything in the country was done according to the rules, everything was subordinated once and for all to the established order. The idea of order was best served by the military. A military man, habituated to executing orders without asking questions, and capable of training others to follow orders, became the ideal executive. Real talent, knowledge, and experience stopped mattering. Gradually, the military held all the government positions.
All state officials wore uniforms. Even students wore uniforms. The dream of the assassinated Peter III and Paul I had come to pass: The country was ruled by the Prussian barracks. Reviews and parades became the primary content of state life. Everything was done for show, for the tsar, so that he would come and say, “Good!” hand out awards, and leave.
“What was behind that, in real life, no one bothered to look, that was the back alley,” wrote a contemporary.
The military had to correct disorder everywhere. Nicholas was quite worried by the Jews who were unwilling to subordinate themselves to the general order of things, that is, become Christian. They wore the wrong clothing and read the wrong books. The tsar levied a tax on Jews for wearing yarmulkes and long coats. Then he banned Jewish clothing completely. A special committee for the final correction of Jews and converting them to Christianity was created. Naturally, the tsar considered the best medicine for improving Jews to be his beloved army. It used to be possible to pay a tax to avoid army service, but now the Jews were expected to send recruits. The tsar believed that in the course of army service, which was twenty-five years, Jews would become Christian. To speed up the process, Jewish boys at the age of twelve were given military preparation in special canton schools.
One such converted Jew who graduated from a canton school was an ancestor of Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin.
We will never know what young Alexander thought during those years of the country’s silence. But the perceptive Custine, who saw him then, wrote, “Beyond the external appearance of kindliness, which youth and beauty and German blood usually give, we must recognize powerful secretiveness in him, so unpleasant in a very young man.” Life with an all-powerful despot father will do that.
But the talented and sensitive young man had to see the amazing failures that occasionally happened in the iron system. The order that Nicholas imposed to the point of absurdity began to turn into disorder. It had begun even in the first decade of his reign. In 1836, in the darkest hour of brutal censorship, the servile journal Telescope printed a daring article that elicited shock and then a storm.
Its author was Peter Chaadayev, whose name would become a talisman for all Russian liberals. His life could have been described by the bitter words of his friend, Alexander Pushkin. “The devil made me born with spirit and talent in Russia.” The poet wrote of Chaadayev, “In Rome, he would have been Brutus, in Athens, Pericles, but here he is simply a Hussars officer.” Alexander Griboyedov modeled the protagonist of Woe From Wit, one of the most famous plays in Russian literature, on Chaadayev. The original title of the play, Woe to Wit, could serve as yet another epigraph for his life.
A dashing officer who fought courageously in the Napoleonic wars, and a handsome aristocrat, Chaadayev had a brilliant career under Alexander I. The idol of St. Petersburg’s youth and a celebrated dandy, Chaadayev always went against the current. Russian higher society was in the thrall of Francophilia—they dressed, spoke, and even thought in French. As the diplomat Joseph de Maistre put it, “the French genius has saddled Russia.” So, naturally, Chaadayev became an Anglophile.
He retired in an extraordinary way. On his way to a top position, as adjutant to the tsar, Chaadayev asked for permission to retire. At the age of twenty-four, he became a mystic and philosopher. At the start of Nicholas’s reign, Chaadayev appeared frequently in St. Petersburg salons and balls. His glorious head with perfect profile and cold gray-blue eyes rose above the crowd. “He stood in silence, with a bitter smile and his arms always crossed. The arms formed the Latin letter V,” wrote Alexander Herzen, “and that gestured showed his scornful veto to the servile life around him.”
In 1836 the mystic and philosopher spoke publicly—he printed an article that blew up the obedient silence of the times. It was titled “Philosophical Letter.” How could it have appeared in the Telescope? Censorship was so pervasive that no one expected anything any longer from writers. The censors worked on automatic pilot. The dull title misled them, and they read it inattentively.
“There hasn’t been such a scandal in all the time since books and literary activity began in Russia.” “For an entire month in all of Moscow there hasn’t been a house where they haven’t been talking about Chaadayev’s article and the ‘Chaadayev affair,’” wrote contemporaries.
In his “Letter,” Chaadayev attacked everything Alexander’s father held sacred. He blamed Russian Orthodoxy, and said it was a “fatal flaw” that Russia “took Christianity from hopelessly outdated Byzantium, which was despised by other nations by then.” “This did not only create a schism in Christianity. This kept us from going hand in hand with other civilized nations. Isolated in our heresy, we could not absorb anything that went on in Europe. The separation of churches violated the general course of history toward universal unification of all nations of the Christian faith, violated “Thy Kingdom come.’”
Chaadayev wrote that “true religiousness sadly differs from the stifling atmosphere in which we always lived and apparently will live. For we exist between West and East without having mastered the customs of either one. We are in between. We are alone.”
Looking at Russian history, Chaadayev made his terrible diagnosis, “If we are moving forward, it is strangely: crookedly and sideways. If we are growing, we never flourish. There is something in our blood that is an obstacle to any true progress.”
This was a challenge to a society accustomed to slavery. With shameful unanimity, it demanded ruthless punishment for the audacious writer. The tsar responded wisely. If he were to punish Chaadayev, it would imply that a person could have his own opinion, hostile to the state, in his empire. Instead, he came up with an amazing punishment: He declared one of the most exceptional thinkers of Russia mad. The tsar mockingly ordered the Moscow governor to protect Chaadayev “with his addled reason” from “the effects of the damp and cold air that could exacerbate his illness.” That meant that the philosopher was to be kept under house arrest. Further showing his “concern,” the tsar ordered constant medical supervision for Chaadayev. Now he would be visited by a physician who would report monthly to the concerned tsar “on the heath of the deranged.”
What did eighteen-year-old Alexander think of Chaadayev’s work? Most likely, he did not read it. But he had to be aware of the scandal that rocked both capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg, especially when the tsar himself dealt with Chaadayev.
Certainly Alexander knew about the next literary scandal, which resonated throughout Europe.
When he had traveled abroad, Sasha saw that his father was mocked in Europe. His uncle, Alexander I, the savior of monarchic Europe from revolutionary Bonaparte, felt entitled to interfere in European affairs. Nicholas considered himself the legal heir of his conqueror brother. The tsar believed that Russia’s historical mission was to control European affairs—to guard European order.
He gave Europe a lesson early in his reign. Poland rose up, and the army of his field marshal Paskevich stormed Warsaw. Scaffolds, the scorched estates of rebelli
ous aristocrats, and the destruction of the remnants of Polish self-rule was the penalty the insurgent Poles had to pay.
Karl Nesselrode, Nicholas’s minister of foreign affairs, formulated the goal this way: “The threat of revolutions in Europe forces Russia to support the regime wherever it exists, bolster it where it is weakening, and defend it where it is attacked.”
Thus Nicholas appointed himself the gendarme of Europe. He was also ridiculously high-handed. Never forgetting that after his defeat at the hands of Napoleon, the king of Prussia had only saved his throne thanks to Russia, he treated his father-in-law like a butler. On his trip, Sasha heard people wonder at Nicholas’s rudeness in Berlin and openly laugh at his pretensions in London and Vienna. In Europe Sasha read the European press, filled with jokes and insults at his father’s expense. His father hated the European newspapers and had them confiscated at the border.
Benkendorf came up with a way to change public opinion. His agents in Paris reported that a famous writer, the marquis de Custine, was hoping to travel in Russia and write about it. The marquis was the grandson of a famous general guillotined during the terror of the French Revolution. His father died on the guillotine as well. He was influential in Paris, had entrée in fashionable salons, and (most important) was a fanatic supporter of absolute monarchy. “His book will change the unfair opinion of Europe,” claimed Benkendorf.
Nicholas liked Benkendorf’s idea. He decided to invite the marquis and make him welcome in Russia. Nicholas even agreed to receive him. But unfortunately, as the saying goes, “We wanted to do it as well as possible, but instead it turned out as usual.”
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