Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  Loyal Shuvalov took on all the cares of government. The reforms were not just dead; it was the time of counter-reform. Alexander the two-faced Janus was looking only back. On June 7, 1872, he approved a project of the new minister of internal affairs, Count Palen, to create a “Special Presence of the Governing Senate,” a new institution to oversee all serious political cases. These cases would be taken out of the normal course of jurisprudence and tried by the newly created body.

  The censor Nikitenko, who had recently hailed the tsar, wrote in his diary: “For some reason everything good in Russia is fated to begin but not reach an end. With one hand we make improvements, and with the other, we undermine them; with one hand we give, with the other we take away…. We want innovation in particulars but for the main things to remain as they were.”

  The tsar retreated into his personal life, unconsciously seeking salvation in love from the growing waves of problems rolling toward the palace cliff. Lost in love, he merely watched his appointee Shuvalov try to push back the water Alexander had agitated.

  He still followed his daily schedule. After his walk, the tsar went to the apartments of the empress, with the ritual kiss and the same conversation about her health and the children. They had coffee. The empress was always cold then and wrapped herself in a black shawl. She had become wraithlike. The disease was consuming her. He was desperately sorry for Masha and her dried-up body. He asked her to follow Dr. Botkin’s advice and go to Nice, where the climate was better for her lungs. She knew that he wanted to be rid of her. He continued to see the other woman in the late emperor’s study, where the dying Nicholas I had blessed her. But now when Alexander brought the other woman there, she was no longer alone.

  On April 30, 1872, the tsar noted the birth of his son. It took place in his late father’s study. Katya had a difficult birth and the doctors feared she would have puerperal fever. Alexander’s orders were: If there is a choice, sacrifice the child. She must live. Near morning, Katya gave birth to a boy. Alexander wrote, “The Lord is so generous. I praised God, in tears I thank Him.” The son was called Georgy.

  What Shuvalov had foreseen had come to pass. Tsars had always had illegitimate children, but it was done “covertly and decorously.” Alexander was no longer interested in hiding. He was spending more and more time in the luxurious house that he rented for her. When she was brought to the Winter Palace, the boy came with her.

  The extended Romanov family was concerned, because the newborn child was a threat to the heir. But they did not dare speak to the emperor. They did it through their august relations. Alexander, tired of these messages from relatives, wrote a letter to his sister Olga (the queen of Württemberg). “She [Princess Dolgorukaya] preferred to renounce all social amusements and pleasures so desired by young ladies of her age…and has devoted her entire life to loving and caring for me.” Then came the part that was intended to calm down the royal houses: “Without interfering in any affairs, despite the many attempts by those who would dishonestly use her name, she lives only for me, dedicated to bringing up our children.”

  That was all. No one had any pretensions to anything.

  But that was not enough for Shuvalov. He knew the tsar and he knew that the tsar was mad about the princess. Even worse, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, who hated Shuvalov, had made the acquaintance of the favorite, which boded for a very dangerous alliance.

  The chief of the secret police decided to enter into open warfare against the woman. Shuvalov had come up with a unique tone in dealing with the tsar. It was often gruff, the manner of an honest servant who did not fear the tsar’s wrath when it came to telling him the truth. To the relief of the family and the camarilla, Shuvalov spoke openly about the threat of the “situation” to the tsar’s prestige, “which should be so carefully protected in these difficult times.” He made sure the word got back to the tsar. The count felt that managing the Committee of Ministers and the secret police was not enough, he needed to direct the tsar’s life, as well. He tried to become a true Peter IV.

  The scandal erupted in Ems. Katya had given birth to a second child, a daughter, in 1873, a year after the birth of their son, and now they all went to Ems for the water. They were an elegant couple, a middle-aged and striking gentleman with a very young lady and two charming tots. He was incognito, naturally, but everyone in Ems knew who they were.

  Photography had taken Europe by storm. At first (as usual) many were against it. For instance, in Paris the poets declared photography a “humiliation of art.” Gradually they grew used to it. Even the king of the poets, Baudelaire, gave in and was photographed. Victor Hugo had a daguerreotype made as well. Even Pope Leo XIII not only was photographed but wrote a poem about his positive impressions. In Russia the Church was not pleased with photography. The tsar’s spiritual advisor Bazhenov said, “God created man in his image, and no human apparatus dares capture the image of God.” But gradually, the clergy accepted it, too.

  In Ems, Alexander wanted to have a group photograph, so that he could see her face before him all the time. They went to an ordinary studio, anonymously. To keep the photo from being dangerous (that is, too intimate), her friends, Countess Gendrikova and Vera Shebeko, posed with them. It was charming, and he ordered more copies. He was informed, however, that it could not be done, because Count Shuvalov had gone to the photographer, bought up the prints and the plates, and destroyed them all. Alexander was furious and commanded that Shuvalov be informed that he had no right to do that.

  As Minister Valuyev wrote in his memoirs, Shuvalov replied, “And I ask you to tell the tsar that he, as the Russian Tsar, had no right to make such a portrait!”

  This put an end to their good relations. The emperor began looking for a replacement. This pleased Kostya, who nagged him to do it soon. He kept hoping that if Shuvalov left, this horrible period would be over. Shuvalov understood the grand duke’s intentions and probably started preparing his responsive strike then.

  Politically, the emperor concerned himself with only foreign affairs. Emperor Wilhelm came to visit, accompanied by his elderly commander in chief, Field Marshal Moltke, the conqueror of Austria, Denmark, and France. The two old men with large gray sideburns had come to make an alliance with Alexander.

  They agreed that in case of attack, each side was to furnish twenty thousand soldiers to help the other. That would deter war in Europe, or, rather, war that was inconvenient for them. Austria was supposed to join them. Chancellor Gorchakov, who helped create this Triple Alliance, would only later understand what a far-reaching game the cunning Bismarck was playing. Bismarck knew that as soon as Russia completed its military reform and created a strong army, Alexander would continue his father’s work. A Russo-Turkish war was on the political horizon. Germany had no interests in the East, and Bismarck could not contain the Russian ally’s appetites here. But Austria had interests in the East, so when Russia and Turkey went to war, Austria would keep Russia from having too great a success.

  There was yet another question the emperors needed to discuss. Almost a quarter century earlier, during the revolution of 1848, Emperor Wilhelm saw the maddened crowds of Berlin. They killed soldiers and they forced his brother, the king of Prussia, to bare his head and beg forgiveness before the corpses of the dead mutineers. The king went mad from the humiliation. He was the first victim of revolution in the Hohenzollern family.

  Now both emperors felt that ahead lay great disturbances that would make all previous ones seem like nothing. They decided that the chiefs of police of their countries would instantly warn each other of all potential threats. They had to act together. Europe was turning into one big ship, and revolutions could turn into a general wave that would sink their familiar world.

  The modest Prussian kings were always stunned by the Byzantine opulence of the Russian court. Even though Uncle Willy was now a mighty emperor, he was still impressed. He was in fine form for a man in his seventies, dressed in his gold-trimmed uniform decorated with walls of med
als. While he visited, the days were filled with continual military parades, concerts, and performances, culminating in a magnificent ball in the Winter Palace.

  The formal rooms of the Winter Palace were usually decorated with palm trees and orchids for balls. Eight hundred people worked for two weeks on the decorations. The chefs and pastry chefs competed to create the most sumptuous dishes.

  The day of the ball came. In the white marble hall, footmen in liveries with the state coat of arms and white stockings and patent leather shoes received the guests’ fur coats. The guests went up the formal Jordan Staircase: marble walls with gilt decorative plasterwork, mirrors reflecting thousands of candles, and a ceiling with Greek gods above their heads. Between the lines of Cossacks in black hats and “Moors,” actually black servants in turbans, the guests made their way up the stairs. The men were in blindingly white and bright red uniforms, their helmets bearing gold and silver eagles. The fashion called for tight-fitting dresses with trains, and with their bared alabaster shoulders, the ladies looked like marble statues. Diamonds cascaded everywhere—diadems in two rows of large diamonds on the head, diamond necklaces, rings and bracelets on the hands. Smaller diamonds circled the neckline and fell down the back in sparkling ropes to meet at a diamond flower attached at the waist. The ladies-in-waiting wore a diamond-outlined monogram of the empress or her portrait in a frame of diamonds.

  At the last landing the guests saw the splendor of the formal rooms: the Field Marshal Hall with gold portraits of military leaders, the Peter Room with the throne, the marble thousand-meter White Hall, where on Epiphany the guards held their parades—an entire regiment fit in that room.

  Among the glittering guests masters of ceremony silently passed, bearing ivory staffs topped with eagles, waiting for the moment. At 8:30, after three blows of the ivory staffs, to the sound of the polonaise, the turbaned Arabs opened the door of the Malachite Room. The tsar and tsaritsa and Uncle Willy and the big Romanov family made their entrance. The guests froze in the required bow. The ball began.

  The emperor and the painfully fragile empress opened the ball with the polonaise. The court polonaise was not a dance in the usual sense of the word. It was a formal procession of the Romanov family with their august guest. Several chamberlains, masters of ceremony, and hofmarshals preceded them, announcing the family’s walk through the formal rooms of the Winter Palace. The long line of “dancers” included the heir with Tsarevna Maria Fedorovna and the grand dukes and grand duchesses in order of seniority. The grand duchesses wore the family jewels. The stones matched the dress: Pink gowns called for rubies with diamonds, blue ones for sapphires with diamonds, but pearls and diamonds could be worn with any color.

  There were not enough young grand duchesses to make up all the couples. There were noticeably more men in the Romanov family. So some of the young dukes escorted “important court ladies,” who were not very young and remembered the childhood of the dukes’ fathers and often fell asleep in their chairs between dances.

  The only dances permitted by etiquette were the quadrille, waltz, and mazurka. The empress left immediately after the opening polonaise. The court always pitied her, knowing that she left the ball not only because she was ill. As they passed through one of the formal rooms, the members of the court surreptitiously looked up at the marble balcony. She was there, the young beauty with blond hair and cameo profile. The tsar made a point of being in that room often and would stop and unabashedly look up with a gentle smile.

  The palace gossips had a name for Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya—Odalisque—and everyone knew who it meant.

  Bismarck put up with the pageantry and got what he wanted at the negotiating table. The tsar’s circle continued to shrink. Alexander II’s daughter had married Queen Victoria’s youngest son, the duke of Edinburgh, in 1874. In January 1873 the “family scholar,” Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, had died. Now it was up to Kostya to torment the tsar with reminders of the great period of reforms. Every meeting with Kostya turned into a small dispute. Kostya stubbornly tried to reawaken the reformer in the tsar. A new life pulsed outside the windows of the Winter Palace, a life created by his reforms, and now Alexander seemed to be trying to freeze that life.

  Kostya and Minister of War Dmitri Milyutin were the only holdovers from the reform period. At that time Milyutin wrote bitterly in his diary, “What an astonishing and distressing comparison to the atmosphere when I entered high government thirteen years ago! Then everything was surging forward; now it is dragging backward. Then the tsar sympathized with progress and moved things forward; now he has lost his faith in everything he had created, everything that surrounds him, including himself.”

  In 1874, Kostya could no longer be involved in the reforms. The unthinkable, improbable, and horrible had happened. His son, Nikola, the playboy of the Romanov family of playboys, turned out to be a thief.

  CHAPTER 11

  A Hollywood Story

  Alexander was head of the extended Romanov family. But he was not able to maintain the discipline his father had. His sister Masha secretly wed Count Stroganov and had children by him.

  It was difficult for the emperor to be the moral guardian, since he was living quite openly with Ekaterina Dolgorukaya—and they had children, which everyone knew about. The other Romanovs followed his example. His brother Kostya, who had condemned the emperor’s romantic intrigues in his diary, now lived openly with the ballerina Kuznetsova. His younger brother, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, also lived with a ballerina. In fact, the Imperial Ballet was more like a bordello for the palace. The carriages of the young grand dukes parked on Rossi Street where the ballet school was located, to pick out their prey. Affairs with ballerinas became their norm. So at the ballet, the audiences watched the imperial box. If one of the numerous Romanovs frequented the performances of a particular young ballerina, the public drew the right conclusion.

  Many of the grand dukes (and the last tsar, Nicholas II, when he was heir) traditionally began their sex lives having an affair with a ballerina. In the evenings, the crowd saw the bared body of the woman the tsar’s brother caressed at night.

  A sign of the dissolution of the Romanov family is the scandal that shocked the court and society, involving Grand Duke Nicholas, Nikola, the tsar’s favorite nephew.

  Both Alexander and Konstantin had named their firstborn sons Nicholas in honor of their father. Both young namesakes met tragic ends. After the premature death of the heir, Niks, it was Nikola’s turn.

  The annual St. Petersburg masquerades were held at the Maryinsky Theater. Nocturnal revelry took place in the opulent imperial theater with its gilt, mirrors, and velvet. Masks hid identities, and the queens of society mixed with the queens of the demimonde. Nikola was a frequent and welcome guest, tall, “the ornament of the right wing,” and a trendsetter for the capital’s golden youth. One night a petite little cat in a Venetian mask slipped through the dancers to approach him. This was a meeting that can truly be called fateful.

  Fanny Lear, an American with a dangerous fire in her French blood, was born in the New World. She was born too late: The golden age of adventure, of Casanova and Cagliostro, the eighteenth century, was over. And her place of birth was not the best milieu for her talents: provincial puritanical America. Her thirst for adventure sent her from the New World to the Old.

  She quickly found a place among the charming creatures that flittered from European capital to capital, breaking hearts and acquiring fortunes. She called herself a dancer to avoid the term “courtesan,” but she was a brilliant courtesan. Naturally, she ended up in the Babylon of the times, Paris.

  In the early fall, the glittering ladies of the demimonde left France’s stuffy capital and moved to the promising shores of the Côte d’Azur, where very wealthy Russians congregated. Here, as the poet put it, “the Russian beluga went to lay its golden caviar.” The “newest Russians” (as they were called then in Russia), the newly rich merchants and manufacturers, came to the Riviera to part
y. The heir Niks died here; the empress with her entourage came here for her health; and here rich Russian aristocrats played and wasted their lives.

  Fanny soon developed close relationships with very elderly and very rich Russians. She dubbed them the “club of the silvery aged,” and they were quite unlike the cautious French. They easily spent and gambled away entire fortunes. Fanny helped them wholeheartedly. She became entranced with the vision of the distant and equally rich northern capital. She made her way there, impelled to search for new adventures.

  In St. Petersburg, Fanny Lear kept to “silvery embraces” at first. Then the queen of St. Petersburg courtesans (and of course an agent of the Third Department), the British Mabel Grey, told her about the tireless seeker of amorous escapades, Grand Duke Nikola. Fanny realized that her silver age was over and it was time for gold. A plan was set in motion. Fanny was noticed, and Nikola’s adjutant was sent to her. The grand duke was soon boasting of his conquest to other rascals.

  Nikola’s father now usually spent the night with his dancer, and his mother lived sadly in the lavish palace in Pavlovsk. On their first night, Nikola brought Fanny to the Marble Palace, where Fanny saw the opulence of the palace in private.

  They went up the marble staircase to the second floor. A servant with a candelabra lit the way. Passing through an enfilade of empty formal rooms they came to a white marble room, a thousand square meters in size, illuminated by gigantic crystal chandeliers. We can imagine her delight as she danced alone in that ballroom.