Nicholas and Alexandra Read online

  The “season” in St. Petersburg began on New Year’s Day and lasted until the beginning of Lent. Through these winter weeks, the aristocracy of the capital moved through a staggering round of concerts, banquets, balls, ballets, operas, private parties and midnight suppers. Everybody gave one and everybody went. There were receptions at which officers in brilliant uniforms with blazing decorations and old ladies in billowing white satin dresses milled about in high-ceilinged drawing rooms, plucking glasses of champagne from passing servants and filling their plates with cold sturgeon, chicken creams, stuffed eggs and three different kinds of caviar. There was the Bal Blanc, at which young, unmarried girls in virginal white danced quadrilles with young officers, carefully watched by vigilant chaperones sitting in stiff-backed gold chairs. For young married couples, there were the Bals Roses, a swirl of waltzes and gypsy music, of flashing jewels and blue, green and scarlet uniforms, that “made one feel one had wings on one’s feet and one’s head in the stars.”

  At the height of the season, ladies put on their diamonds in the morning, attended church, received at luncheon, took some air in the afternoon and then went home to dress for a ball. Traditionally, the finest balls of all were those given by Their Majesties at the Winter Palace. No palace in Europe was better suited for formal mass revelry. The Winter Palace possessed a row of gigantic galleries, each as wide and tall as a cathedral. Great columns of jasper, marble and malachite supported high gilded ceilings, hung with immense crystal and gold chandeliers. Outside, in the intense cold of a January night, the whole three blocks of the Winter Palace would be flooded with light. An endless procession of carriages drew up, depositing passengers who handed their furs or cloaks to attendants and then ascended the wide white marble staircases, covered with thick velvet carpets. Along the walls, baskets of orchids and palm trees in large pots framed huge mirrors in which dozens of people could examine and admire themselves. At intervals along the corridors troopers of the Chevaliers Gardes, in white uniforms with silver breastplates and silver eagle-crested helmets, and Cossack Life Guards in scarlet tunics stood rigidly at attention.

  The three thousand guests included court officials in black, gold-laced uniforms, generals whose chests sagged with medals from the Turkish wars, and young Hussar officers in full dress with elkskin breeches so tight it had taken two soldiers to pull them on. At a great court ball, the passion of Russian women for jewels was displayed on every head, neck, ear, wrist, finger and waist.

  An Imperial ball began precisely at 8:30 in the evening, when the Grand Master of Ceremonies appeared and tapped loudly three times on the floor with an ebony staff, embossed in gold with the double-headed eagle of the tsar. The sound brought an immediate hush. The great mahogany doors inlaid with gold swung open, the Grand Master of Ceremonies cried out, “Their Imperial Majesties,” and hundreds of dresses rustled as ladies sank into a deep curtsy. This announcement in the winter of 1894 produced the appearance of a tall, powerful, bearded man, Tsar Alexander III. Beside him, in a silver brocade gown sewn with diamonds, her famous diamond tiara in her hair, was his dark-eyed Danish wife, Empress Marie. The orchestra broke into a polonaise, then as the evening progressed, a quadrille, a chaconne, a mazurka, a waltz. At midnight, in adjacent rooms, a supper was served. While demolishing plates of lobster salad, chicken patties, whipped cream and pastry tarts, the merrymakers could look through the double glass of the long windows to see the wind blowing gusts of fine powdered snow along the ice-bound river. Through clusters of tables, the Tsar, six feet four inches tall, ambled like a great Russian bear, stopping here and there to chat, until 1:30, when the Imperial couple withdrew and the guests reluctantly went home.

  Tsar Alexander III had an enormous capacity for work and awesome physical strength. He could bend iron pokers or silver plates. Once at dinner the Austrian ambassador hinted at trouble in the Balkans and mentioned ominously that Austria might mobilize two or three army corps. Alexander III quietly picked up a silver fork, twisted it into a knot and tossed it onto the plate of the Austrian ambassador. “That,” he said calmly, “is what I am going to do to your two or three army corps.” Alexander’s mode of relaxation was to rise before dawn, shoulder his gun and set off for a full day of hunting in the marshes or forests. Like a bear, he was gruff, blunt, narrow and suspicious. He had a strong mind, strong likes and dislikes and a purposeful will. After making a decision, he went to bed and slept soundly. He disliked Englishmen and Germans and had a passion for everything Russian. He hated pomp and felt that a true Russian should be simple in manners, table, speech and dress; he wore his own trousers and boots until they were threadbare. Queen Victoria once said frostily of this huge Tsar that he was “a sovereign whom she does not look upon as a gentleman.”

  Alexander III dominated his family as he did his empire. His wife achieved a role of her own by charming the gruff giant; his children, especially his three sons, scarcely had any independence at all. The Tsar’s words were commands and, to one official of his court, when he spoke he “gave the impression of being on the point of striking you.” When he gathered a small group to play chamber music together, the Tsar dominated the room, puffing away on his big bassoon.

  Under Alexander III, the Russian system of autocracy appeared to work. The tsar personally was the government of Russia. His power was absolute, his responsibility only to God. From the tsar, power flowed downward and was exercised across the empire by an army of ministers, governors, clerks, tax collectors and policemen, all appointed in the name of the tsar. No parliament existed, and the people had no say in their government. Even members of the Imperial family, the grand dukes and grand duchesses, were subject to the tsar’s will. Imperial grand dukes served as governors of provinces, or high-ranking officers in the army or navy, but they served only at the pleasure of the tsar. A snap of his finger and they stepped aside.

  Alexander III was a dedicated autocrat, exercising to the limit the powers of his rank. He would have been a forceful tsar under any circumstances, but the fierceness of his belief in autocracy was inspired by his revulsion against those who had murdered his father, the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II. That his father’s assassins were not liberals but revolutionary terrorists did not concern Alexander III; he lumped them all together.

  Throughout the thirteen years of his reign, Alexander III devoted himself to crushing all opposition to autocracy. Hundreds of his political enemies made the long journey to exile in the lost towns of Siberia. Heavy censorship shackled the press. Before long, the vigor of his policies actually began to create a psychological force in favor of autocracy, and the zeal of the assassins and revolutionaries began to wane.

  Except in his reactionary political views, Alexander III was a forward-looking tsar. He made a military alliance with republican France and acquired the huge French loans he needed to build Russian railways. He began rebuilding the Russian army and resisted all temptations and provocations which might have dragged it into war. Although he disliked Germans, he encouraged German industrialists to bring their capital and develop the coal and iron mines of Russia.

  The attempt to run this vast empire by himself required all of Alexander III’s great energy. In order to work undisturbed, he chose to live in the palace at Gatchina, twenty-five miles southwest of St. Petersburg. The Empress Marie much preferred living in town, and every winter she brought him into the capital to preside over the season. Alexander III flatly refused, however, to live in the huge, ornate Winter Palace, which he thought cold and drafty, and the Imperial couple took up residence in the smaller Anitchkov Palace on the Nevsky Prospect.

  It was Russia’s good fortune that Alexander III was married to a woman whose talents exactly suited her position. Born Princess Dagmar of Denmark, she was a younger sister of Princess Alexandra, who married Edward, Prince of Wales, and became Queen of England. As a girl, Dagmar was engaged to Tsar Alexander Ill’s older brother, Nicholas, then the heir to the Russian throne. When Nicholas died before their marriage, he
bequeathed to Alexander not only his title of Tsarevich, but his dark-haired fiancée as well. Before her marriage, Princess Dagmar took the Russian name of Marie Fedorovna.

  Russians loved this small, gay woman who became their Empress, and Marie gloried in the life of the Russian court. She delighted in parties and balls. “I danced and danced. I let myself be carried away,” she wrote at the age of forty-four. Seated at dinner, she was an intelligent, witty conversationalist and, with her dark eyes flashing, her husky voice filled with warmth and humor, she dominated as much by charm as by rank. When something worth gossiping about occurred, Marie delightedly passed the tidbit along. “They danced the mazurka for half an hour,” she once reported in a letter. “One poor lady lost her petticoat which remained at our feet until a general hid it behind a pot of flowers. The unfortunate one managed to hide herself in the crowd before anyone discovered who she was.” Amused by human foibles, she was tolerant of human weaknesses. She regarded with droll pity the ordeal suffered by the Archduke Franz Ferdinand when he paid a ceremonial visit to St. Petersburg in 1891: “He is feted, he is stuffed with lunches and dinners everywhere so that he will end by having a monstrous indigestion. Last night at the theatre, he looked already rather pasty and left early with a migraine.”

  By the time she was thirty, Marie had met the requirements of royal motherhood by producing five children. Nicholas was born May 18, 1868, followed by George (1871), Xenia (1875), Michael (1878) and Olga (1882). Because of her husband’s involvement in work, it was Marie who clucked over the children, supervised their studies, gave them advice and accepted their confidences. Frequently she acted as a maternal buffer between her growing brood and the strong, gruff man who was their father. Her oldest son, the shy Tsarevich Nicholas, was especially in need of his mother’s support. Everything about Alexander inspired awe in his son. In October 1888, the Imperial train was derailed near Kharkov as the Tsar and his family were eating pudding in the dining car. The roof caved in, but, with his great strength, Alexander lifted it on his shoulders and held it long enough for his wife and children to crawl free, unhurt. The thought that one day he would have to succeed this Herculean father all but overwhelmed young Nicholas.

  As the year 1894 began, Nicholas’s fears appeared remote. Tsar Alexander III, only forty-nine years old, was still approaching the peak of his reign. 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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Tsarevich Nicholas

  IT WAS with special care that Fate had selected Nicholas to be Tsarevich and, later, Tsar. He was not a firstborn son. An older brother named Alexander, who had he lived would have been Tsar Alexander IV, had died in infancy. Nicholas’s next brother, George, three years younger than the Tsarevich, was gay with quick intelligence. Throughout their childhood Nicholas admired George’s sparkling humor, and whenever his brother cracked a joke, the Tsarevich carefully wrote it down on a slip of paper and filed it away in a box. Years later when Nicholas as Tsar was heard laughing alone in his study, he would be found rereading his collection of George’s jokes. Unhappily, in adolescence George developed tuberculosis of both lungs and was sent to live, alone except for servants, in the high, sun-swept mountains of the Caucasus.

  Although the palace at Gatchina had nine hundred rooms, Nicholas and his brothers and sisters were brought up in spartan simplicity. Every morning, Alexander III arose at seven, washed in cold water, dressed in peasant’s clothes, made himself a pot of coffee and sat down at his desk. Later when Marie was up, she joined him for a breakfast of rye bread and boiled eggs. The children slept on simple army cots with hard pillows, took cold baths in the morning and ate porridge for breakfast. At lunch when they joined their parents, there was plenty of food, but as they were served last after all the guests and still had to leave the table when their father rose, they often went hungry. Ravenous, Nicholas once attacked the hollow gold cross filled with beeswax which he had been given at baptism; embedded in the wax was a tiny fragment of the True Cross. “Nicky was so hungry that he opened his cross and ate the contents—relic and all,” recalled his sister Olga. “Later he felt ashamed of himself but admitted that it had tasted ‘immorally good.’ ” The children ate more fully when they dined alone, although these meals without their parents’ presence often turned into unmanageable free-for-alls, with brothers and sisters pelting one another across the table with pieces of bread.

  Nicholas was educated by tutors. There were language tutors, history tutors, geography tutors and a whiskered dancing tutor who wore white gloves and insisted that a huge pot of fresh flowers always be placed on his accompanist’s piano. Of all the tutors, however, the most important was Constantine Petrovich Pobedonostsev. A brilliant philosopher of reaction, Pobedonostsev has been called “The High Priest of Social Stagnation” and “the dominant and most baleful influence of the [last] reign.” A wizened, balding man with coldly ascetic eyes staring out through steel-rimmed glasses, he first came to prominence when as a jurist at Moscow University he wrote a celebrated three-volume text on Russian law. He became a tutor to the children of Tsar Alexander II, and, as a young man, Alexander III was his faithful, believing pupil. When Alexander mounted the throne, Pobedonostsev already held the office of Procurator of the Holy Synod, or lay head of the Russian Orthodox Church. In addition, he assumed the tutorship of the new Tsarevich, Nicholas.

  Pobedonostsev’s brilliant mind was steeped in nationalism and bigotry. He took a misanthropic Hobbesian view of man in general. Slavs in particular he described as sluggish and lazy, requiring strong leadership, while Russia, he said, was “an icy desert and an abode of the ‘Bad Man.’ ” Believing that national unity was essential to the survival of this sprawling, multi-racial empire, he insisted on the absolute authority of Russia’s two great unifying institutions: the autocracy and the Orthodox Church. He insisted that opposition to them be ruthlessly crushed. He opposed all reforms, which he called “this whole bazaar of projects … this noise of cheap and shallow ecstasies.” He regarded a constitution as “a fundamental evil,” a free press as an “instrument of mass corruption” and universal suffrage as “a fatal error.” But most of all Pobedonostsev hated parliaments.

  “Among the falsest of political principles,” he declared, “is the principle of the sovereignty of the people … which has unhappily infatuated certain foolish Russians.… Parliament is an institution serving for the satisfaction of the personal ambition, vanity, and self-interest of its members. The institution of Parliament is indeed one of the greatest illustrations of human delusion.… Providence has preserved our Russia, with its heterogeneous racial composition, from like misfortunes. It is terrible to think of our condition if destiny had sent us the fatal gift—an all-Russian Parliament. But that will never be.”

  For the same reason, and from his special position as—in effect—Minister of Religion, Pobedonostsev attacked all religious strains in Russia unwilling to be assimilated into Orthodoxy. Those who most strenuously resisted, he hated most. He was violently anti-Semitic and declared that the Jewish problem in Russia would be solved only when one third of Russia’s Jews had emigrated, one third had been converted to Orthodoxy and one third had disappeared. It was the pupil of Pobedonostsev speaking in Alexander III when he wrote in the margin of a report depicting the plight of Russian Jewry in 1890, “We must not forget that it was the Jews who crucified our Lord and spilled his precious blood.”

  Pobedonostsev’s virulent prejudice was not restricted to Jews. He also attacked the Catholic Poles and the Moslems scattered across the broad reaches of the empire. It was Pobedonostsev who wrote the document excommunicating Leo Tolstoy in 1901.*

  The Russia described to Nicholas by Pobedonostsev had nothing to
do with the restless giant stirring outside the palace windows. Instead, it was an ancient, stagnant, coercive land made up of the classical triumvirate of Tsar, Church and People. It was God, the tutor explained, who had chosen the Tsar. There was no place in God’s design for representatives of the people to share in ruling the nation. Turning Pobedonostsev’s argument around, a tsar who did not rule as an autocrat was failing his duty to God. Heard as a school lesson, the old man’s teaching may have lacked a basis in reality, but it had the compelling purity of logic, and Nicholas eagerly accepted it.

  For Nicholas, the most dramatic proof of Pobedonostsev’s teachings against the dangers of liberalism was the brutal assassination of his grandfather, Alexander II, the most liberal of Russia’s nineteenth-century tsars. For his historic freeing of the serfs, Alexander II was known as the “Tsar-Liberator,” yet his murder became the preeminent objective of Russian revolutionaries. The assassins went to extraordinary lengths. Once, near Moscow, they purchased a building near the railway track and tunneled a gallery from the building under the track, where they planted a huge mine. The Tsar was saved when his train left Moscow in a different direction. Six other attempts were made, and on March 13, 1881—ironically, only a few hours after the Tsar had approved the establishment of a national representative body to advise on legislation—the assassins succeeded. As his carriage rolled through the streets of St. Petersburg, a bomb, thrown from the sidewalk, sailed under it. The explosion shattered the vehicle and wounded his horses, his equerries and one of his Cossack escorts, but the Tsar himself was unhurt. Stepping from the splintered carriage, Alexander II spoke to the wounded men and even asked gently about the bomb thrower, who had been arrested. Just then a second assassin ran up, shouting, “It is too early to thank God,” and threw a second bomb directly between the Tsar’s feet. In the sheet of flame and metal Alexander II’s legs were torn away, his stomach ripped open, his face mutilated. Still alive and conscious, he whispered, “To the palace, to die there.” What remained of him was picked up and carried into the Winter Palace, leaving a trail of thick drops of black blood up the marble stairs. Unconscious, he was laid on a couch, his right leg torn off, his left leg shattered, one eye closed, the other open but vacant. One after another, the horrified members of the Imperial family crowded into the room. Nicholas, aged thirteen, wearing a blue sailor suit, came in deathly pale and watched from the end of the bed. His mother, who had been ice-skating, arrived still clutching her skates. At the window looking out stood his father, the Heir Apparent, his broad shoulders hunched and shaking, his fists clenching and unclenching. “The Emperor is dead,” announced the surgeon, letting go of the blood-covered wrist. The new Tsar, Alexander III, nodded grimly and motioned to his wife. Together they walked out of the palace, now surrounded by guardsmen of the Preobrajensky Regiment with bayonets fixed. He stood for a moment, saluting, then jumped into his carriage and drove away “accompanied by a whole regiment of Don Cossacks, in attack formation, their red lances shining brightly in the last rays of a crimson March sunset.” In his accession manifesto, Alexander III proclaimed that he would rule “with faith in the power and right of autocracy.” For the thirteen years of his father’s reign, Nicholas saw Russia ruled according to the theories of Pobedonostsev.