The Romanovs
In 1864, General Mikhail Chernyaev exceeded his orders and seized Tashkent in the khanate of Kokand, which became a client state of Russia. ‘General Chernyaev has taken Tashkent and nobody knows why,’ observed Interior Minister Peter Valuev. ‘There’s something erotic in everything that happens on the distant frontiers.’
In 1868, the new governor-general of Turkestan, Konstantin von Kaufman, defeated the emir of Bukhara and annexed Samarkand, Tamerlane’s old capital. The khan of neighbouring Khiva, Mohammed Rahmin II, attempted to save his independence by turning to the British, who were trying to secure nearby Afghanistan.
‘We’ve got to finish with the British antagonism in Central Asia,’ decided Alexander on 11 February 1873. ‘I’ll throw them a bone.’ London was offered a free hand in Afghanistan in return for Russia having one in Khiva. ‘If God permits,’ mused Alexander, ‘we’ll get our hands on Khiva. In spite of secret British aid, we’ve got to teach these Asiatics a lesson.’
Now the tsar’s reprobate nephew commanded the advance guard in Kaufman’s army. ‘For ten days,’ Nikola wrote on 18 March, ‘we’ve seen nothing but the steppes, only sand.’ Then the Khivans ‘threw themselves at our riflemen with ferocious screams. I saw them fall dead’ – and ‘I commanded: charge! My heart beat faster as the bullets hissed around us.’
On 29 May, Khiva fell,* and there is no aphrodisiac like victory. ‘I kiss you like a fool, like a Spaniard. I want you. I must see you. I burn with impatience,’ Nikola told Fanny.
Nikola was decorated by the emperor, then he and Fanny set off on a European spending spree which soon exhausted even a grand duke’s budget. Back in Petersburg, they made wild love in his parents’ bed and he handed Fanny diamonds, saying, ‘Mama gave them to me’ or ‘It’s something old I found in the palace.’ He sensed that his behaviour would land him in serious trouble and advised Fanny to store her valuables at the American embassy.
Alexander was about to celebrate the British marriage of his adored only daughter Maria – and Nikola gave Fanny Lear a ticket to the ceremony in the Winter Palace. The scandal was about to break.25
Peering down at the emperors and princes at the royal wedding from her seat in the gallery of the great Winter Palace church, Fanny observed that Alexander ‘had a serious and sad look – very emotional with the traces of tears on his face’.
Alexander was not happy about his daughter’s marriage. No Russian princess had ever married an Englishman, Alexander had not forgiven Victoria for the Crimean War, and the empires were bitter rivals. Maria, short-haired, dark and plump, was no beauty but she was clever and intellectual, serving as her father’s assistant, helping him decipher letters, and she was sympathetic to his restlessness with her mother. But Maria had gone on holiday in Denmark with Sasha, Minny and Minny’s sister Alexandra, married to Bertie, prince of Wales. There she had met Bertie’s brother Prince Alfred, duke of Edinburgh, who, his mother the queen complained, was so irascible that he was ‘not a pleasant inmate in a house’. Maria disagreed and they fell in love.
The queen and the tsar tried to prevent the match, but ‘The fate of my daughter has been decided,’ Alexander wrote in Germany on 29 June 1873. ‘God give her happiness. After a tête-à-tête with Prince Alfred, she came to ask me to bless them. I did but with a heavy heart I confess.’ Queen Victoria was cross. ‘The murder is out!’ she exclaimed. The couple were married in both Orthodox and Anglican ceremonies. ‘During the ceremony of our darling Marie, all my thoughts’, the tsar wrote to Katya, ‘were prayers for them – and for us.’
Fanny was naturally most interested in the diamonds: ‘The bride was wearing a silver gown with velvet crimson train, trimmed in ermine with the most beautiful diamond crown I’ve ever seen.’* Fanny noticed Bertie, prince of Wales, and probably made sure that he spotted her: they were old acquaintances. Afterwards Nikola was so jealous that he hit her – then promised her more diamonds.
On 10 April, his mother Sanny noticed that something priceless had been stolen. ‘Sanny called me over’, wrote Kostia, ‘to show me that one of our wedding icons had been broken and the diamonds stolen . . . Just awful!’ They called the police. On the 12th, General Fyodor Trepov, the city governor, ‘told me that the diamonds from Sanny’s icon have been found pawned. Delightful news!’
His anxious father was at the opera when General Trepov came into his box and told him that Nikola’s adjutant was the pawner of the diamonds. ‘My heart was beating so hard, I was barely myself for the rest of the opera.’
At 9 a.m., Trepov interrogated the adjutant in the presence of Kostia and Nikola – and the truth was revealed. ‘The most terrible day of my life,’ wrote Kostia, ‘when I learned my son was a thief and crook.’ At 11.30, Kostia reported to the tsar, who talked to Shuvalov, secret police chief, and Sasha Adlerberg, who had just succeeded his father as court minister. At the ballet, Kostia got a message from Shuvalov: ‘I scented evil!’ The secret police chief had discovered that Nikola had stolen the diamonds ‘to give money to The American’.
After midnight, Shuvalov and Kostia interrogated the prodigal son for three hours. ‘It was absolute hell for me to see the spiritual decline and corruption of Nikola,’ wrote Kostia. ‘No remorse. A wretched creature. I took his sword and placed him under guard so he wouldn’t kill himself. I went to bed at 4 a.m., morally and physically destroyed.’
The next morning, Alexander received his brother Kostia with ‘tears and tender love’, but ‘this affection horrifies me’. Kostia wanted Nikola declared mad.
Fanny, hearing nothing from her paramour, went to the Marble Palace, using her secret key, but a servant told her that Nikola had been arrested. Back at her house, a note arrived: ‘Don’t be afraid, they’ll search your house, be calm. Your unfortunate N.’
Moments later, fifteen Gendarmes burst in and arrested Fanny, taking her to a cell in Trepov’s house. Her servants rushed to Marshall Jewell, the American ambassador, who demanded to know where she was held. Shuvalov sent an official to negotiate with her. This turned out to be Count Levashov, ‘a very distinguished member of the silver old age’ who, unsurprisingly in this farce, already knew Fanny. ‘It was the first time I’d ever seen him sober’ – and possibly with his clothes on. Fanny expected 100,000 roubles. Levashov offered 50,000 in return for jewels, papers, discretion – and instant departure. She accepted the deal. ‘The mismanagement’, reported US diplomat Eugene Schuyler to Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, ‘was due to Count Shuvalov wishing to revenge himself’ on the liberal Kostia. That ‘dog on a chain’ had played politics with the Romanovs’ reputation.
Alexander was mortified. ‘I could see clear signs of how upset he was,’ noticed Miliutin on 18 April. ‘He could not speak without tears of the shame brought on the family [by Nikola’s] abominable behaviour.’ He dismissed Nikola from the army and declared him mentally ill – though he kept his allowance.
‘Thank God,’ wrote Kostia. ‘However hard it is to be the father of a lunatic son, it would be unbearable to be the father of a criminal, which would make my position [as general-admiral and chairman of the State Council] untenable.’ The doctors reported that Nikola was mentally abnormal but not insane, which his father ‘had to accept with gratitude! I weep constantly.’ But Nikola’s journey was just beginning. In many ways, this cultured, radical erotomaniac* turned out to be the most gifted of the later Romanovs.26
Alexander took the waters at Ems and visited his German cousins. But now Katya and the children followed him on his holiday: ‘Our bingerles were delicious,’ he wrote, ‘we were crazy experiencing the frenzy of dipping into each other in every imaginable position. How can I forget how I lay on my back and you rode me like a horse.’ When Alexander holidayed in Crimea, tsar and tsarina stayed in the big Livadia Palace, Sasha and Minny with Nicholas and the other children in the small one – and the mistress stayed nearby in her own villa, Byuk-Sarai. ‘At four, I’ll fly to you on horseback,’ he wrote, to play with ‘Darling Gogo [the nickname of t
heir son George] . . . a veritable angel!’).
Shuvalov was undermined by his own mistakes. After the Prussian victory, Alexander realized the army had to modernize. War Minister Miliutin proposed sensible reforms: German victories proved that only a short-service army with a big reserve of trained troops could hope to compete in a European war. His measures included equality of service for Jews. On the State Council, Shuvalov and the Retrogrades resisted any concessions to the Jews, who increasingly got the blame for all the problems of the empire, but the measure was passed.* Then, in March 1874, thousands of students, inspired by a mixture of utopian egalitarianism and a sentimental faith in the soul of the peasantry, set off to the countryside to lead the Russian people, the narod – to revolution. Yet Shuvalov had missed these Narodniki – Populists – completely. It was the last straw for Alexander. ‘You prefer it in London, don’t you?’ he said languidly, appointing Shuvalov ambassador. Miliutin had triumphed. ‘The hostile party was tamed,’ he wrote. ‘I can step calmly into the Winter Palace.’
The peasants themselves were bewildered by these earnest Populists. Alexander ordered Shuvalov’s successor at the Third Section, Alexander Potapov, to round up 4,000 Populists, who were brutally treated, often in solitary confinement: thirty-eight went mad and forty-eight died in prison, including twelve suicides. The combination of the failure of their ‘going to the people’ tactic and police repression turned some sentimental revolutionaries into terrorists.27
Just as the radicals swerved back towards violence, the Orthodox Slavs of Bosnia-Herzogovina rebelled against the Ottoman sultan, sparking Balkan uprisings – and a Slavophile clamour for war.
The princes of Serbia and Montenegro, autonomous Orthodox principalities within the Ottoman empire, backed their Bosnian brethren and declared war on the sultan. Some 3,500 Russian officers rushed to fight for the Serbs, and General Chernyaev, conqueror of Tashkent and Slavophile hero, took command of the Serbian army – though he had to resign from the tsar’s service.
The tsar demanded Western backing to force the Ottomans to protect the Orthodox, promising Queen Victoria, ‘We cannot and don’t wish to quarrel with England. On our part it would be madness to think of Constantinople and India.’ But the British feared Russian power more than Ottoman atrocities. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was convinced that this was a Russian power-grab, while Queen Victoria suspected that Petersburg had ‘instigated the insurrection in the Balkans’. The tsar asked his English son-in-law, Alfred, to restrain his mother – an impossible task, of course.
At home, Alexander was overwhelmed by a wave of enthusiasm that united all parties from Slavophiles to Populists in a fever for war and Constantinople.* ‘It’s nauseating,’ Sasha ranted to Minny. ‘All these bastards of officials who think of their own bellies not as ministers of the Russian Empire. Papa doesn’t have a single decent one!’
Encouraged by his ex-tutor Pobedonostsev, who believed that ‘This government must either take this popular movement in hand and lead it or it will inundate the authorities,’ Sasha blamed his father’s ‘absence of intelligence, strength, will’. Even Empress Marie criticized ‘our apologetic and cautious policy’. Miliutin reported that Russia could defeat the Ottomans but not the British. Alexander was balancing two foreign policies: the half gaga Gorchakov was tentative while the rabidly Slavophile ambassador in Constantinople, Nikolai Ignatiev, was keen for war, threatening and provoking the Ottomans.
‘Things are going badly for the Serbs,’ recorded Miliutin. ‘Russian public opinion is displeased by our inactive diplomacy,’ and the talk of war concentrated the tsar’s mind on the future.† He was at Livadia with the family, half fearful of war, half tempted by victory. Every afternoon he rode over to Katya. ‘In spite of my best efforts to avoid it, this could lead to war.’ He hoped that ‘Turkey has no allies unlike in 1856, and it’s not impossible Austria and Prussia will join us.’ Alexander agreed with Austria that he would limit Russian gains to a small Bulgaria and compensate Vienna with Bosnia. But Ignatiev did not believe that the Pan-Slavic tsar should be bound by any limits.
The Bulgarians rebelled, only to be massacred by Ottoman irregulars. ‘Alas!’ the tsar confided to Katya, ‘war plays on my nerves terribly! But may God help the Good Cause triumph!’ He was consoled ‘by the joy of being with my pretty wife and children who daily make our happiness’, while ‘I feel the delicious sex in my depths.’
‘Serbia is in dire straits,’ recorded Miliutin on 16 November. ‘Without strong aid from Russia, Serbia can’t fight on.’ Disraeli’s support for the cruel Ottomans backfired badly when his rival William Gladstone published his pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the British turned against war, while Bismarck told the Reichstag that the entire Ottoman empire was ‘not worth the bones of one Pomeranian grenadier’.
Given this breathing-space, Alexander issued an ultimatum to the sultan, and called for a conference of the powers. The diplomats met in Constantinople, where a revolution now forced a new sultan, Abdul Hamid II, to concede a constitution. His resistance to Russian demands was encouraged by Disraeli, just raised to the earldom of Beaconsfield.
‘What does the new year hold for us?’ Alexander asked on 1 January 1877. ‘I see no other end but war.’ But ‘if we prevent a coalition against Germany, Bismarck guarantees us freedom in the East’ and Austria promised neutrality. Miliutin observed ‘the tsar’s impatience to take up arms’. ‘Just after midnight 11/12 April,’ wrote Alexander, ‘I signed the declaration of war.’28
As the armies massed in Bessarabia, Alexander was mobbed by crowds: ‘I confess I’m profoundly moved.’ He longed to command in person, heading with a gilded entourage towards the front, but instead he over-promoted his younger brother Nikolai as commander-in-chief – a bungling general of six feet five known as ‘Nizi’, who also happened to be a raging sex-addict.*
‘The panorama is magnificent,’ the tsar wrote on 14 June as he reviewed some of the 200,000 troops, ‘and I had the feeling of being at the manoeuvres rather than a serious affair. My brother even had them put up a little tent and served an excellent breakfast.’ Miliutin knew that Alexander ‘was not as calm as he seemed’, he wrote on 15 June. ‘The emperor admitted he dreamed of his father on the eve of important events – he dreamed of him last night. He wept and we left the room to give him time to recover.’
‘It would have been unbearable’, Alexander told Katya on 22 June, ‘if I’d stayed far from the theatre of war, an ordeal that would have reminded me of the pitiful state of my father that cost him his life.’ It was not just Russia that was mobilized: ‘My bingerle sends compliments!’ he wrote to Katya on 17 June at 11 p.m. ‘He is suddenly armed!’
The plan was bold: first to cross the Danube in the face of the Ottoman river fleet, passing through allied Romania* into Ottoman territory; then a smaller force would seal the main Ottoman fortresses while the main army of 112,000 stormed the Shipka Pass to race through Bulgaria towards Constantinople. On 27 June, the Russians skilfully crossed the Danube, mining both sides of the river to stymie the Ottoman flotilla. Nizi, who did not grasp the implications of his own plan, split his forces into three, sending one to besiege Rustchuk to the east, another to take Plevna in the west, underestimating both fortresses. Most fatally, he reduced the vital Shipka corps to just 12,000. Yet, in an extraordinary feat, General Josef Gurko stormed the pass and held it – even when the Ottomans counter-attacked and placed the Russian forces under siege. Meanwhile, monitoring Russian progress, Beaconsfield ordered the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet to wait at the mouth of the Dardanelles.
At first all went well, but the sultan’s best general, Osman Pasha, garrisoned the stronghold of Plevna with 36,000 men. On 9 July, the name ‘Plevna’ appears in Alexander’s diary for the first time. ‘I heard the disagreeable news of the first failure’ at Plevna. ‘I realize all depends not on force but on art,’ he wrote on 18 July, but trying to storm fortresses and trenches manned by infantry with modern firearms wa
s bound to be very costly.
He should have sacked Nizi. ‘Hello, angel of my soul,’ he wrote to Katya, who was awaiting news of Plevna, ‘to you, I tell the truth! Alas, my brother refuses to believe in the superiority of enemy forces there.’ All day, he visited hospitals where the casualties haunted him: ‘I find it hard to not to weep in front of them.’
At night he unwound by reminiscing to Katya about their open-air sex a year earlier: ‘I confess these memories give me the frenzy to be inside your delirious coquille!’ The old harem of his little Turkish house made him long ‘to plunge inside you again but instead I go to bed sadly all alone’.29
The next attack was ‘defeated again by the great superiority of enemy forces’, he wrote on 19 July, adding again, ‘in which alas my brother refuses to believe’. The Russians needed their best troops and Alexander summoned the Guards. Journalists flocked to Plevna to chronicle the drama. The pressure was wearing down the emperor, who ‘fainted during mass in the camp church’.
Nizi ordered another assault, aided by his Romanian allies. Mikhail Skobelev, a ferocious conquistador of Central Asia, known as ‘the White General’ because of his white uniform, led constant attacks, but the Ottomans counter-attacked, inflicting 7,000 casualties.
On 26 August,* the tsar rode to ‘take our places on a mountain where one could see the batteries as well as those of the Turks without the least danger’. Alexander spectated under a canopy as guns softened up the Turks. ‘My God, my God,’ he wrote on 29 August, ‘what a frightful fusillade, what blood, what innocent victims!’ Three thousand Russians were killed. Then on the 31st came the great assault of 84,000 troops. Skobelev seized several bastions. When the Turks retook them, Skobelev stormed them all over again.
‘The entire time, the emperor sat there next to the commander-in-chief, a pity to see him like that,’ wrote Miliutin. The war minister himself felt so ill ‘that I had to lie on the grass’ as the assault again failed. ‘The emperor was bitter – I’ve never seen him like that.’ At an impromptu council of war under the canopy, the Russians panicked. ‘We’ve got to abandon Plevna,’ whispered Alexander. Nizi called for retreat. Miliutin disagreed, at which Nizi shouted, ‘If you think this is possible, you take command and sack me!’ The emperor decided to stay and ‘reinforce our positions.’ Nizi was out of ideas. Sasha remarked that Nizi ‘was always stupid – we need to find some kind of genie to turn a stupid man into a wise one’ and demanded his dismissal. Alexander, losing patience with ‘the silliness and incompetence’ of the ‘stupid Nikolai’ and ‘infuriated by his unpardonable defeatism’, almost dismissed him. ‘My brother no longer inspires confidence.’ The dynasty was built on its military competence, yet the expectation that Romanovs should be superb generals was a flaw in a family that had produced generations of paradomaniacs but no great captains since Poltava.*