Nicholas and Alexandra Read online

  In his work habits, Nicholas was solitary. Unlike most monarchs and chiefs of state—unlike even his own wife—he had no private secretary. He preferred to do things for himself. On his desk he kept a large calendar of his daily appointments, scrupulously entered in his own hand. When official papers arrived, he opened them, read them, signed them and put them in envelopes himself. He once explained that he placed things exactly because he liked to feel that he could enter his office in the dark and put his hand on any object he desired. With much the same sense of privacy, Nicholas disliked discussions of politics, especially in casual conversation. A new aide-de-camp, galloping at the side of the Tsar near Livadia on a morning ride, supposed that his duty was to amuse the Tsar with small talk. He chose politics as his subject. Nicholas replied reluctantly, and quickly switched the conversation to the weather, the mountain scenery, the horses and tennis. When the aide persisted, Nicholas put spurs to his horse and galloped ahead.

  This sense of privacy, along with an unwillingness to provoke personal unpleasantness, created perennial difficulty between the Tsar and his ministers. Ministers were appointed and dismissed directly by the crown. In theory, they were the servants of the Tsar, and he was free to give these posts to whomever he liked, to listen to or ignore a minister’s advice, and to hand down dismissals without explanation. In practice, the ministers were the heads of large government departments where continuity and coordination were administrative necessities. In addition, the ministers were also ambitious, proud and sensitive men. Nicholas never mastered the technique of forceful, efficient management of subordinates. He hated scenes and found it impossible to sternly criticize or dismiss a man to his face. If something was wrong, he preferred to give a minister a friendly reception, comment gently and shake hands warmly. Occasionally, after such an interview, the minister would return to his office, well pleased with himself, only to receive in the morning mail a letter regretfully asking for his resignation. Not unnaturally, these men complained that they had been deceived.

  The major lines of Nicholas’s character as Tsar were set in these early years of the reign. Coming to the throne unprepared, he was forced to develop his administration of the office as he went along. Because he was influenced at first by his mother, his uncles and his tutor (Pobedonostsev remained Procurator of the Holy Synod until 1905), his enemies declared that he had no will of his own. It would be more accurate to say that he was a man of narrow, special education; of strong and—unfortunately—unchanging conviction; of soft-spoken, kindly manner; and, underneath, of stubborn courage. Even Sergius Witte, whose abrupt dismissal from office later bred in him a venomous hatred of Nicholas, nevertheless wrote of the early years: “In those days, the young Emperor carried in himself the seeds of the best that the human mind and heart possess.”

  To the despair of Russian liberals who had hoped that the death of Alexander III would mean a modification of the autocracy, Nicholas quickly made it clear that he would closely abide by his father’s principles. Even before the coronation, he struck this note. In sending to the new Tsar the traditional address of congratulation on his accession, the Zemstvo of Tver, a stronghold of liberalism, had voiced an appeal “that the voice of the people and the expression of its desires would be listened to” and that the law would stand “above the changing views of the individual instruments of supreme power.” In this mild language Pobedonostsev discovered a dangerous challenge to the principle of autocracy, and with his help the young Tsar drafted a reply which he delivered in person to the Tver delegation. Admonishing them for their “senseless dreams of the participation of the Zemstvos’ representatives in the affairs of internal administration,” Nicholas added, “I shall maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly as it was preserved by my unforgettable dead father.”

  Nicholas’s speech was a blunt dashing of liberal hopes and a renewed challenge to revolutionaries, who once again set to work to undermine the monarchy. Yet within the family he was widely congratulated. From Kaiser William II came a happy note: “I am delighted by your magnificent address. The principle of the monarchy must be maintained in all its strength.”

  In foreign affairs, Alexander III had left a legacy of thirteen peaceful years, but he had not considered it important to acquaint his heir with even the most basic information concerning Russia’s international position. It was not until Nicholas’s accession, therefore, that the young Tsar learned the terms of the Franco-Russian alliance.”* Anxious to keep this peace and unwilling to trust it solely to a military alliance, Nicholas issued a dramatic appeal for disarmament and “universal peace” which led to the formation of the International Court of Justice. In August 1898, a Russian note lamenting the economic, financial and moral effects of the armaments race was delivered to all the governments of the world, proposing an international conference to study the problem. It has been suggested that the Tsar’s proposal stemmed wholly from the fact that Austria was re-equipping her artillery with modern field guns which Russia was unable to match, but this was not entirely the case. Another reason was the publication that year of a six-volume work by Ivan Bliokh, an important Russian Jewish railroad financier, who depicted in a massive array of facts, statistics and projected casualty rates the grim horror of any future war. Bliokh had an audience with Nicholas and helped persuade the Tsar to issue the appeal.

  The strange proposal from St. Petersburg astonished Europe. From some quarters Nicholas was hailed as a tsar who would be known in history as “Nicholas the Pacific.” Sophisticated folk, on the other hand, dismissed it in the tones of the Prince of Wales, who described it as “the greatest nonsense and rubbish I ever heard of.” The Kaiser was instantly, frantically hostile. Imagine, he telegraphed the Tsar, “a Monarch … dissolving his regiments sacred with a hundred years of history and handing over his town to Anarchists and Democracy.”

  Despite apprehensions, in deference to the Tsar and Russia a conference was convened at The Hague in May 1899. Twenty European powers attended along with the United States, Mexico, Japan, China, Siam and Persia. The Russian proposals for freezing armament levels were defeated, but the convention did agree on rules of warfare and established a permanent court of arbitration. In 1905 Nicholas himself referred the Dogger Bank incident between Britain and Russia to the World Court, and in 1914, on the eve of the First World War, the Tsar pleaded with the Kaiser to help him send the dispute between Austria and Serbia to The Hague.

  Europe’s surprise that so unusual an idea as universal peace should come out of “semi-barbaric” Russia betrayed its lack of awareness of the richly creative culture which was flourishing there. The early years of Nicholas’s reign were a period of such glittering intellectual and cultural achievement that they are known as the “Russian Renaissance” or the “Silver Age.” The ferment of activity and new ideas included not only politics but philosophy and science, music and art.

  In literature, Anton Chekov was writing the plays and short stories which would become world classics. In 1898, Constantine Stanislavsky first opened the doors of the famous Moscow Art Theatre, and its second play, Chekov’s The Sea Gull, written in 1896, determined its success. Thereafter the appearance of Uncle Vanya (1899) and The Cherry Orchard (1904) confirmed the arrival of a new concept of naturalistic acting and a new era in the history of the theatre. In 1902, Stanislavsky directed The Lower Depths, a grimly realistic play by Maxim Gorky, hitherto known primarily for his massive novels. In Kiev, from 1900 to 1905, Sholom Aleichem, who had already lost a fortune trading on the grain and stock exchanges, was devoting himself entirely to writing in Yiddish the scores of short stories which have made him known as the “Jewish Mark Twain.”

  In philosophy, Vladimir Solov’ev, the preeminent religious philosopher and poet, had begun publishing his works in 1894. In 1904, the poems of Solov’ev’s famous disciple Alexander Blok began to appear. At the Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg, Ivan Pavlov, one of a group of Russian scientists
making significant advances in chemistry and medicine, was conducting the experiments in physiology which won him a Nobel Prize in 1904.

  Russian painting was in transition. Ilya Repin, then a professor of historical painting at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts, was crowning a career of painting the great historical scenes of Russia’s past. Victor Vasnetsov and Michael Nesterov had gone back even further and were attempting to re-create medieval religious art. Meanwhile, a rank of younger artists was responding excitedly to exhibitions in Russia of Cézanne, Gauguin and Picasso. Serov, influenced by the French Impressionists, painted evocative portraits of many contemporary Russians including, in 1900, the Tsar. In 1896, Vassily Kandinsky, a lawyer in Moscow, gave up his career and left Russia to begin painting in Munich. In 1907, Marc Chagall arrived in St. Petersburg to study with the famous contemporary painter Lev Bakst.

  At the Imperial Ballet, Marius Petipa was in the midst of a half-century reign as choreographer which would last until he resigned in 1903. In richly magnificent succession, he staged sixty major ballets, among them Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty. It was Petipa who thrust onto the stage the glittering parade of Russian dancers which included Mathilde Kschessinska, Tamara Karsavina, Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky. Even today, the great ballet companies of the world are measured for excellence against the standards set by Petipa. In 1899, Serge Diaghilev founded the influential journal The World of Art and editorially began to criticize Petipa’s conservative style. In 1909, Diaghilev, with a daring new choreographer, Michael Fokine, founded the Ballet Russe in Paris and took the world by storm.

  In the superlative music conservatories of St. Petersburg and Moscow, an unbroken succession of famous teachers passed their art to talented pupils. Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov was the conductor of the St. Petersburg Symphony. While writing his own magnificent Golden Cockerel, he was instructing a youthful Igor Stravinsky, whose brilliantly original ballet scores written for Diaghilev, Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and Rite of Spring (1913), were to have gigantic influence on all twentieth-century music. Later, in 1914, another of Rimsky-Korsakov’s pupils, Serge Prokoviev, was to graduate from the conservatory. Among the violinists and pianists trained in Imperial Russia were Serge Rachmaninov, Vladimir Horowitz, Efrem Zimbalist, Mischa Elman and Jascha Heifetz. Serge Koussevitsky conducted his own symphony orchestra in Moscow. In 1899, the matchless basso Fedor Chaliapin made his debut and thereafter dominated the opera stage.

  Across Russia, people flocked to hear music and opera. Kiev, Odessa, Warsaw and Tiflis each had its own opera company with a season of eight to nine months. St. Petersburg alone had four opera houses. In 1901, Tsar Nicholas built one of these, the Narodny Dom or People’s Palace. Believing that ordinary Russians should have an opportunity to savor the best in national music and drama, Nicholas had constructed a vast building which included theatres, concert halls and restaurants, with admission fees of only twenty kopecks. In time, the best orchestras and the leading actors and musicians appeared there. St. Petersburg society, enjoying the flavor of something new, trooped to follow.

  During these years, the young Tsar’s family grew rapidly. At two-year intervals, three more daughters were born. In 1897, when Alexandra was pregnant a second time and feeling ill, the Dowager Empress advised: “She ought to try eating raw ham in bed in the morning before breakfast. It really does help against nausea. I have tried it myself, and it is wholesome and nourishing, too.… It is your duty, my dear Nicky, to watch over her and to look after her in every possible way, to see she keeps her feet warm.…” That June, Grand Duchess Tatiana was born.

  A year later, in October 1898, Alexandra was pregnant again. “I am now in a position to tell you, dear Mama, that with God’s help we expect a new happy event in the family next May,” wrote Nicholas. “Alix does not go driving any more, twice she fainted during Mass.…” A month later, in November: “The nausea is gone. She walks very little, and when it is warm sits on the balcony.… In the evening, when she is in bed, I read to her. We have finished War and Peace” Grand Duchess Marie was born in May 1899, and their fourth child, also a girl, arrived in June 1901. They named her Anastasia.

  Along with births, there were illnesses and deaths. In the summer of 1899, Nicholas’s brother Grand Duke George finally died at twenty-seven of tuberculosis, and in the fall of 1900, Nicholas himself came down with typhoid fever in the Crimea. Alexandra nursed him herself. “Nicky was really an angel,” she wrote to her sister. “I rebelled at a nurse being taken and we managed perfectly ourselves. Orchie [Mrs. Orchard] would wash his face and hands in the morning and bring my meals in always. I took them on the sofa.… When he was getting better, I read to him almost all day long.” “Alix looked after me better than any nurse,” Nicholas wrote to Marie once he was feeling better. “All through my illness I could not stand up. Now I can easily walk from the bed to the dresser.”

  Scarcely had Nicholas recovered when Queen Victoria died. Only the summer before, when the eighty-one-year-old Queen had invited the Empress to England, Alexandra had written to a friend: “How intensely I long to see her dear old face … never have we been separated so long, four whole years, and I have the feeling as tho’ I should never see her any more. Were it not so far away, I should have gone off all alone for a few days to see her and left the children and my husband, as she has been as a mother to me, ever since Mama’s death 22 years ago.”

  When the news of Victoria’s death arrived in January 1901, Alexandra wanted to start immediately for Windsor, but, being pregnant with Anastasia, she was persuaded not to go. At the memorial service in the English church in St. Petersburg, the Empress wept in public. To her sister she wrote, “How I envy you being able to see beloved Grandmama being taken to her last rest. I cannot really believe she has gone, that we shall never see her any more.… Since one can remember, she was in our life, and a dearer, kinder being never was.… England without the Queen seems impossible.”

  The death of her grandmother did more than carry away the woman Alexandra loved best. It also removed an influence of stability and a source of encouragement. Ever since her marriage, the Empress and the Queen had written regularly, although Alexandra destroyed their letters in March 1917. The Queen had always worried about Alexandra’s excessive shyness, fearing that the dramatic ascent in a single month from being a German princess to becoming Empress of Russia had left no time for developing ease in society.

  This had, in fact, been a problem since Alexandra’s first public appearance as Empress in the winter season of 1896. As she stood beside her husband at a ball, Alexandra’s eyes were cold with fright and her tongue was stilled by nervousness. That night, Alexandra later admitted, she was terrified and would have liked to sink beneath the polished floors. But she stayed until midnight and then gratefully swept away.

  The new Empress’s first receptions for the ladies of St. Petersburg were blighted by the same shyness. As the reception line filed past, the invited ladies found themselves confronting a tall figure standing silent and cold before them. Alexandra rarely smiled and never spoke more than an automatic word of welcome. In an awkward way, her hand hung in the air, waiting to be kissed. Everything about her, the tight mouth, her occasional glance down the line to see how many more were coming, plainly indicated that the young Empress’s only real desire was to get away as soon as possible.

  It did not take many of these balls and receptions before nervousness and uncertainty turned on both sides to active dislike. Alexandra’s childhood in the little court at Darmstadt, her training under the strict Victorian standards of Windsor, had not prepared her for the gay, loose society of St. Petersburg. She was shocked by the all-night parties, the flaunted love affairs, the malicious gossip. “The heads of the young ladies of St. Petersburg are filled with nothing but thoughts of young officers,” she declared, accurately enough. Scandalized by the flourishing love affairs among the aristocracy, Alexandra took the palace invitation lists and began
crossing off names. As one prominent name after another disappeared, the list was decimated.

  Many people in St. Petersburg society quickly dismissed the young Empress as a prude and a bore. There is a story that at one of her first court balls she saw a young woman dancing whose décolletage she considered too low. One of her ladies-in-waiting was sent to tell the offender: “Madame, Her Majesty wants me to tell you that in Hesse-Darmstadt we don’t wear our dresses that way.”

  “Really?” the young woman is said to have replied, at the same time pulling the front of her dress still lower. “Pray tell Her Majesty that in Russia we do wear our dresses this way.”

  Alexandra’s new zeal over Orthodoxy embarrassed society. Themselves Orthodox from birth, they thought of the Empress with her aggressive collecting of rare icons, her wide reading of church history, her pilgrimages, her talks about abbots and holy hermits, as crankish. When she tried to organize a handiwork society in St. Petersburg whose members would knit three garments a year for the poor, most St. Petersburg ladies declared that they had no time for such rubbish.

  Members of the Imperial family resented the way the Empress seemed to seal them off from the palace and the Tsar. Large and scattered though it was, the Russian Imperial family, like most Russian families, had always been closely knit. Uncles and aunts and cousins were accustomed to frequent visits and invitations to dine. Anxious to be alone with her young husband, Alexandra was slow to issue these invitations. The family became indignant. Imperial grand duchesses, themselves the sisters or daughters of a tsar, huffed that a mere German princess should attempt to come between them and their prerogatives.