Nicholas and Alexandra Read online

  By mid-October 1905, all Russia was paralyzed by a general strike. From Warsaw to the Urals, trains stopped running, factories closed down, ships lay idle alongside piers. In St. Petersburg, food was no longer delivered, schools and hospitals closed, newspapers disappeared, even the electric lights flickered out. By day, crowds marched through the streets cheering orators, and red flags flew from the rooftops. At night, the streets were empty and dark. In the countryside, peasants raided estates, crippled and stole cattle, and the flames of burning manor houses glowed through the night.

  Overnight, a new workers’ organization bloomed. Consisting of elected delegates, one for each thousand workers, it called itself a soviet, or council. Like the strike itself, it came from nowhere, but grew rapidly in numbers and power. Within four days, a leader emerged in Leon Trotsky, a fiery orator and a member of the Menshevik branch of the Marxist Social Democratic Party. When the Soviet threatened to wreck every factory which did not close down, companies of soldiers were brought into the city. Sentries paced in front of all the public buildings, and squadrons of Cossacks clattered up and down the boulevards. The revolution was at hand; it needed only a spark.

  In one of his most famous letters, written to his mother at the height of the crisis, Nicholas described what happened next:

  “So the ominous quiet days began. Complete order in the streets, but at the same time everybody knew that something was going to happen. The troops were waiting for the signal but the other side would not begin. One had the same feeling as before a thunder storm in summer. Everybody was on edge and extremely nervous.… Through all those horrible days I constantly met with Witte. We very often met in the early morning to part only in the evening when night fell. There were only two ways open: to find an energetic soldier to crush the rebellion by sheer force. There would be time to breathe then but as likely as not, one would have to use force again in a few months, and that would mean rivers of blood and in the end we should be where we started.

  “The other way out would be to give to the people their civil rights, freedom of speech and press, also to have all laws confirmed by a state Duma—that of course would be a constitution. Witte defends this energetically. He says that, while it is not without risk, it is the only way out at the present moment. Almost everybody I had an opportunity of consulting is of the same opinion. Witte put it to me quite clearly that he would accept the Presidency of the Council of Ministers only on condition that his program was agreed to and his action not interfered with. He … drew up the Manifesto. We discussed it for two days and in the end, invoking God’s help, I signed it.… My only consolation is that such is the will of God and this grave decision will lead my dear Russia out of the intolerable chaos she has been in for nearly a year.”

  Sergius Witte, who gave Russia its first constitution and its first parliament, believed in neither constitutions nor parliaments. “I have a constitution in my head, but as to my heart—” Witte spat on the floor. Witte was a huge, burly man with massive shoulders, great height and a head the size of a pumpkin. Inside this head Witte carried the ablest administrative brain in Russia. It had guided him from humble beginnings in the Georgian city of Tiflis, where he was born in 1849, to the role of leading minister of two tsars.

  Witte’s mother was Russian, but on his father’s side his ancestry was Dutch. His father, a native of Russia’s Baltic provinces, was a cultured man who lost his fortune in a Georgian mining scheme, leaving Witte to battle upward on wits and ego alone. In both respects, Witte was handsomely equipped. “At the University [of Odessa],” he wrote, “I worked day and night and achieved great proficiency in all my studies. I was so thoroughly familiar with the subjects that I passed all my examinations with flying colors without making any special preparations for them. My final academic thesis was entitled, ‘On Infinitesimal Quantities.’ The work was rather original in conception and distinguished by a philosophical breadth of view.”

  Hoping to become a professor of pure mathematics, Witte was compelled instead to go to work for the Southwestern District Railroad. During Russia’s 1877 war with Turkey, he served as a traffic supervisor in charge of transporting troops and supplies. “I acquitted myself with success of my difficult task,” he declared. “I owed my success to energetic and well thought-out action.” In February 1892, he was promoted to Minister of Communications (including railroads). “It will not be an exaggeration,” he noted, “to say that the vast enterprise of constructing the great Siberian railway was carried out by my efforts, supported, of course, first by Emperor Alexander III and then by Emperor Nicholas II.” In August 1892, Witte was transferred to the key post of Minister of Finance. “As Minister of Finance, I was also in charge of our commerce and industry. As such, I increased our industry threefold. This again is held against me. Fools!” Even in his private life, Witte took care to ensure that he was not outsmarted. He married twice; both wives had previously been divorced from other men. Of his first wife he said, “With my assistance she obtained her divorce and followed me to St. Petersburg. Out of consideration for my wife I adopted the girl who was her only child, with the understanding, however, that should our marriage prove childless, she would not succeed me as heiress.”

  Along with the throne, Nicholas inherited Witte from his father. Both the new Tsar and the veteran Minister hoped for the best. “I knew him [Nicholas] to be inexperienced in the extreme but rather intelligent and … he had always impressed me as a kindly and well-bred youth,” Witte wrote. “As a matter of fact, I had rarely come across a better-mannered young man than Nicholas II.” The Empress Witte liked less, although he was forced to admit that “Alexandra does not lack physical charms.” As Minister of Finance, he struggled successfully to put Russia on the gold standard. He brought in armies of foreign traders and industrialists, tempting them with tax exemptions, subsidies and government orders. His state monopoly on vodka brought millions into the treasury every year. Nicholas disliked Witte’s cynicism and arrogance, but admitted his genius. When Witte brought the Portsmouth peace negotiations to what under the circumstances amounted to a brilliant conclusion for Russia, the Tsar recognized his indebtedness by making Witte a count.

  Experienced, shrewd and freshly crowned as a peacemaker, Witte was the obvious choice to deal with the spreading revolutionary upheavals. Even the Dowager Empress Marie advised her son, “I am sure that the only man who can help you now is Witte.… He certainly is a man of genius.” At the Tsar’s request, Witte drew up a memorandum in which he analyzed the situation and concluded that only two alternatives existed: a military dictatorship or a constitution. Witte himself urged that granting a constitution would be a cheaper, easier way of ending the turmoil. This recommendation gained further weight when it was vehemently endorsed by Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich, the Tsar’s six-foot-six-inch cousin, then in command of the St. Petersburg Military District. So violently did the Grand Duke object to the idea that he become military dictator, that he brandished the revolver in his holster and shouted, “If the Emperor does not accept the Witte program, if he wants to force me to become Dictator, I shall kill myself in his presence with this revolver. We must support Witte at all cost. It is necessary for the good of Russia.”

  The Imperial Manifesto of October 30, 1905, transformed Russia from an absolute autocracy into a semi-constitutional monarchy. It promised “freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association” to the Russian people. It granted an elected parliament, the Duma, and pledged that “no law may go into force without the consent of the State Duma.” It did not go as far as the constitutional monarchy in England; the Tsar retained his prerogative over defense and foreign affairs and the sole power to appoint and dismiss ministers. But the Manifesto did propel Russia with great rapidity over difficult political terrain which it had taken Western Europe several centuries to travel.

  Witte now had maneuvered himself into an awkward corner. Having forced a reluctant sovereign to grant a constitution, Witte was expected to
make it work. He was installed as President of the Council of Ministers, where he quickly obtained the resignation of Constantine Pobedonostsev. After twenty-six years as Procurator of the Holy Synod, Pobedonostsev left, but not before he had scathingly referred to his successor, Prince Alexis Obolensky, as a man in whose head “three cocks were crowing at the same time.”

  To Witte’s despair, rather than getting better, the situation grew steadily worse. The Right hated him for degrading the autocracy, the Liberals did not trust him, the Left feared that the revolution which it was anticipating would slip from its grasp. “Nothing has changed, the struggle goes on,” declared Paul Miliukov, a leading Russian historian and Liberal. Leon Trotsky, writing in the newly formed Isvestia, was more vivid: “The proletariat knows what it does not want. It wants neither the police thug Trepov [commander of the police throughout the empire] nor the liberal financial shark Witte: neither the wolf’s snout, nor the fox’s tail. It rejects the police whip wrapped in the parchment of the constitution.”

  In parts of Russia, the Manifesto, by stripping the local police of many of their powers, led directly to violence. In the Baltic states, the peasants rose against their German landlords and proclaimed a rash of little village republics. In the Ukraine and White Russia, bands of Ultra-Rightists, calling themselves Black Hundreds, turned against the familiar scapegoats, the Jews. In Kiev and Odessa, pogroms erupted, often with the open support of the Church. In the Trans-Caucasus, similar attacks, under the guise of patriotism and religion, were made on Armenians. In Poland and Finland, the Manifesto was taken as a sign of weakness; there was a sense that the empire was crumbling, and mass demonstrations clamored for autonomy and independence. At Kronstadt on the Baltic and Sevastopol on the Black Sea, there were naval mutinies. In December, the Moscow Soviet led two thousand workers and students to the barricades. For ten days they held off government forces, proclaiming a new “Provisional Government.” The revolt was crushed only by bringing from St. Petersburg the Semenovsky Regiment of the Guard, which cleared the streets with artillery and bayonets. During these weeks, Lenin slipped back into Russia to lead the Bolsheviks; the police soon found his trail and he was forced to flit secretly from place to place, diminishing his effectiveness. Still, he was gleeful. “Go ahead and shoot,” he cried. “Summon the Austrian and German regiments against the Russian peasants and workers. We are for a broadening of the struggle, we are for an international revolution.”

  Nicholas, meanwhile, waited impatiently for his experiment in constitutionalism to produce results. As Witte stumbled, the Tsar became bitter. His letters to his mother mark the progression of his disillusionments:

  November 9: “It is strange that such a clever man [Witte] should be wrong in his forecast of an easy pacification.”

  November 23: “Everybody is afraid of taking courageous action. I keep trying to force them—even Witte himself—to behave more energetically. With us nobody is accustomed to shouldering responsibility, all expect to be given orders which, however, they disobey as often as not.”

  December 14: “He [Witte] is now prepared to arrest all the principal leaders of the outbreak. I have been trying for some time past to get him to do it, but he always hoped to be able to manage without drastic measures.”

  January 25, 1906: “As for Witte, since the happenings in Moscow he has radically changed his views; now he wants to hang and shoot everybody. I have never seen such a chameleon of a man. That, naturally, is the reason why no one believes in him any more.”

  Feeling his status slipping, Witte tried to recapture the Tsar’s good will by cynically chopping away most of the strength from the Manifesto he had only recently written. Without waiting for the Duma to be elected, Witte arbitrarily drafted a series of Fundamental Laws based on the declaration: “To the Emperor of all the Russias belongs the supreme autocratic power.” To make the government financially independent of Duma appropriations, Witte used his own great personal reputation abroad to obtain from France a massive loan of over two billion francs.

  Despite these efforts, Sergius Witte took no part in the affairs of the Russian parliament which he had helped to create. On the eve of its first meeting, Nicholas asked for his resignation. Witte pretended to be pleased by the move. “You see before you the happiest of mortals,” he said to a colleague. “The Tsar could not have shown me greater mercy than by dismissing me from this prison where I have been languishing. I am going abroad at once to take a cure. I do not want to hear about anything and shall merely imagine what is happening over here. All Russia is one vast madhouse.” This was nonsense, of course; for the rest of his life, Witte itched to return to office. His hopes were illusory. “As long as I live, I will never trust that man again with the smallest thing,” said Nicholas. “I had quite enough of last year’s experiment. It is still like a nightmare to me.” Eventually, Witte returned to Russia, and Nicholas made him a grant of two hundred thousand roubles from the Treasury. But in the nine years which were to pass before Witte died, he would see the Tsar only twice again, each time for a brief interview of twenty minutes.

  In all these months of war with Japan and the 1905 Revolution, Nicholas and Alexandra had had only one brief moment of unshadowed joy. On August 12, 1904, Nicholas wrote in his diary: “A great never-to-be-forgotten day when the mercy of God has visited us so clearly. Alix gave birth to a son at one o’clock. The child has been called Alexis.”

  The long-awaited boy arrived suddenly. At noon on a hot summer day, the Tsar and his wife sat down to lunch at Peterhof. The Empress had just managed to finish her soup when she was forced to excuse herself and hurry to her room. Less than an hour later, the boy, weighing eight pounds, was born. As the saluting cannon at Peterhof began to boom, other guns sounded at Kronstadt. Twenty miles away, in the heart of St. Petersburg, the batteries of the Fortress of Peter and Paul began to thunder—this time the salute was three hundred guns. Across Russia, cannons roared, churchbells clanged and flags waved. Alexis, named after Tsar Alexis, Nicholas’s favorite, was the first male heir born to a reigning Russian tsar since the seventeenth century. It seemed an omen of hope.

  His Imperial Highness Alexis Nicolaievich, Sovereign Heir Tsarevich, Grand Duke of Russia, was a fat, fair baby with yellow curls and clear blue eyes. As soon as they were permitted, Olga, nine, Tatiana, seven, Marie, five, and Anastasia, three, tiptoed into the nursery to peek into the crib and inspect their infant brother.

  The christening of this august little Prince was performed in the Peterhof chapel. Alexis lay on a pillow of cloth of gold in the arms of Princess Marie Golitsyn, a lady-in-waiting who, traditionally, carried Imperial babies to the baptismal font. Because of her advanced age, the Princess came to the ceremony especially equipped. For greater support, the baby’s pillow was attached to a broad gold band slung around her shoulders. To keep them from slipping, her shoes were fitted with rubber soles.

  The Tsarevich was christened in the presence of most of his large family, including his great-grandfather King Christian IX of Denmark, then in his eighty-seventh year. Only the Tsar and the Empress were absent; custom forbade parents to attend the baptism of their child. The service was performed by Father Yanishev, the elderly priest who had served for years as confessor to the Imperial family. He pronounced the name Alexis, which had been carried by the second Romanov Tsar, Alexis the Peaceful, in the seventeenth century. Then he dipped the new Alexis bodily into the font, and the Tsarevich screeched his fury. As soon as the service was over, the Tsar hurried into the church. He had been waiting anxiously outside, hoping that the aged Princess and the elderly priest would not drop his son into the font. That afternoon, the Imperial couple received a stream of visitors. The Empress, lying on a couch, was seen to smile frequently at the Tsar, who stood nearby.

  Six weeks later, in a very different mood, Nicholas wrote again in his diary: “Alix and I have been very much worried. A hemorrhage began this morning without the slightest cause from the navel of our small Alexis. It l
asted with but a few interruptions until evening. We had to call … the surgeon Fedorov who at seven o’clock applied a bandage. The child was remarkably quiet and even merry but it was a dreadful thing to have to live through such anxiety.”

  The next day: “This morning there again was some blood on the bandage but the bleeding stopped at noon. The child spent a quiet day and his healthy appearance somewhat quieted our anxiety.”

  On the third day, the bleeding stopped. But the fear born those days in the Tsar and his wife continued to grow. The months passed and Alexis stood up in his crib and began to crawl and to try to walk. When he stumbled and fell, little bumps and bruises appeared on his arms and legs. Within a few hours, they grew to dark blue swellings. Beneath the skin, his blood was failing to clot. The terrifying suspicion of his parents was confirmed. Alexis had hemophilia.

  This grim knowledge, unknown outside the family, lay in Nicholas’s heart even as he learned of Bloody Sunday and Tsushima, and when he signed the Manifesto. It would remain with him for the rest of his life. It was during this period that those who saw Nicholas regularly, without knowing about Alexis, began to notice a deepening fatalism in the Tsar. Nicholas had always been struck by the fact that he was born on the day in the Russian calendar set aside for Job. With the passage of time, this fatalism came to dominate his outlook. “I have a secret conviction,” he once told one of his ministers, “that I am destined for a terrible trial, that I shall not receive my reward on this earth.”

  It is one of the supreme ironies of history that the blessed birth of an only son should have proved the mortal blow. Even as the saluting cannons boomed and the flags waved, Fate had prepared a terrible story. Along with the lost battles and sunken ships, the bombs, the revolutionaries and their plots, the strikes and revolts, Imperial Russia was toppled by a tiny defect in the body of a little boy. Hidden from public view, veiled in rumor, working from within, this unseen tragedy would change the history of Russia and the world.