† The tsar and tsarina had been against this match, believing that Xenia was too young. Sandro, one of the brash Mikhailovichs with their Caucasian exoticism and dubious Jewish blood, was regarded as arrogant and demanding. Finally his father Grand Duke Mikhail intervened. The tsar agreed. ‘They spend the whole day kissing, embracing and lying around on the furniture in the most improper manner,’ Nicky told Georgy. ‘I was indeed amazed at the gymnastics,’ replied Georgy. ‘They almost broke the ottoman and behaved in the most improper way, for instance they would lie on top of each other, in what you might call an attempt to play Papa and Mama.’ Sandro recorded how the Romanov marriage regulations dictated even the costumes worn by the couple on their wedding night – in his case, a heavy silver dressing-gown and silver slippers. Intelligent, ambitious and innovative, Sandro was Nicky’s close friend until 1905, but after the Revolution, his beautifully written (if self-serving) memoirs mercilessly exposed the flaws of Nicholas II.
* As the revolutionary Leon Trotsky put it, adapting the Cleopatra’s Nose theory, if Alexander III had not drunk so much, history would be different. If he had lived, he would have been sixty-nine in 1914. But would he have acted any differently from his son?
SCENE 4
Master of the Land
CAST
NICHOLAS II, emperor 1894–1917, son of Alexander III and Minny, ‘Nicky’
Alexandra Fyodorovna (née Princess Alexandra of Hesse), empress, ‘Alix’, ‘Sunny’
Olga, their eldest daughter
Tatiana, their second daughter
Maria, their third daughter
Anastasia, their youngest daughter
Alexei, caesarevich, tsarevich, their son, ‘Tiny’, ‘Baby’
THE ROMANOVS
Maria Fyodorovna, dowager empress, widow of Alexander III, ‘Minny’
Uncle Vladimir, commander of Guards, military governor of Petersburg, married Miechen
Uncle Alexis, general-admiral of the Russian Imperial Fleet, ‘Beau’
Uncle Sergei, governor-general of Moscow, ‘Gega’, married Ella (née Princess Elizabeth of Hesse, sister of Empress Alexandra)
Uncle Paul, ‘Pitz’, widower of Princess Alexandra of Greece, married Olga Pistolkors
Georgy, caesarevich, second brother of the tsar
MICHAEL II, emperor, third brother of the tsar, ‘Misha’, ‘Floppy’
Xenia, the tsar’s sister, married Alexander Mikhailovich, ‘Sandro’
Olga, his other sister, married Peter, duke of Oldenburg
Nikolai Nikolaievich, commander-in-chief, ‘Nikolasha the Terrible’, married Stana, daughter of King Nikola of Montenegro, one of the ‘Black Women’, ‘the Crows’
Peter Nikolaievich, his brother, married Militsa, daughter of King Nikola of Montenegro, one of the ‘Black Women’, ‘the Crows’
Konstantin Konstantinovich, son of Kostia, friend of the tsar, playwright, poet, writing under name of ‘KR’, married ‘Mavra’ (née Princess Elizabeth of Saxe-Altenburg)
Nikolai Mikhailovich, eldest son of Mikhail, brother of Sandro, ‘Bimbo’, ‘White Crow’
Alexander Mikhailovich, son of Mikhail, brother of Bimbo, Minister of Merchant Marine, married Xenia Alexandrovna, ‘Sandro’
Marie, ‘Missy’, crown princess of Romania, married to Prince Ferdinand, daughter of duke and duchess of Edinburgh, Nicky’s first cousin
Melita, her sister, ‘Ducky’, grand duchess of Hesse-Darmstadt, married to Ernst, brother of Alix, later married to Grand Duke Kyril
COURTIERS: ministers etc.
Count Ilarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, court minister, then viceroy of Caucasus
Baron Vladimir Frederiks, court minister
Count Paul Benckendorff, grand marshal of court
Serge Witte, finance minister, later first prime minister and count
General Alexei Kuropatkin, war minister, commander in Far East
Count Vladimir Lamsdorf, foreign minister, ‘Madame’
Alexander Bezobrazov, state secretary, adjutant-general and secret adviser
Admiral Yevgeny Alexeev, viceroy of the Far East
Dmitri Sipiagin, interior minister
Vyacheslav Plehve, interior minister
Peter Durnovo, interior minister
General Dmitri Trepov, governor-general of Petersburg, deputy interior minister, later palace commandant
Prince Vladimir Orlov, chief of tsar’s military chancellery, ‘Fat Orlov’
Alexander Orlov, general and friend of the tsar, ‘Thin Orlov’
Admiral Zinovy Rozhdestvensky, commander Second Pacific Squadron
Ivan Goremykin, prime minister, ‘Old Fur Coat’
Peter Stolypin, interior minister, prime minister
Alexander Izvolsky, foreign minister
Vladimir Kokovtsov, prime minister, count, ‘Gramophone’
General Vladimir Sukhomlinov, war minister
Sergei Sazonov, foreign minister, ‘Wobbler’
Alexei Khvostov, interior minister, ‘Tail’
Nikolai Maklakov, interior minister
General Alexander Spirodovich, commander of the tsar’s bodyguard
Alexander Guchkov, president of the Duma
Mikhail Rodzianko, president of the Duma, ‘Fatso’
Anna Vyrubova (née Taneeva), Alexandra’s friend, ‘Ania’, ‘Lovesick Creature’, ‘Cow’
Countess Elizabeth Kurakina-Naryshkina, mistress of the robes, ‘Zizi’
THE HIEROPHANTS
Monsieur Nizier Anthelme Philippe, French hierophant, ‘Our Friend’
Grigory Rasputin, Siberian holy man, ‘Our Friend’
The face now rotting and black, the remains of Alexander III lay in state in the Peter and Paul Cathedral. Meanwhile at the Anichkov Palace, the new tsar – ‘My head was spinning’ – was receiving his fellow monarchs. ‘The King of Serbia paid me a visit then Ferdinand of Romania – they deprived me of those few free moments when I am able to see Alix.’ At the burial on 7 November 1894, Minny broke down, shrieking, ‘Enough! Enough!’ and falling into the arms of her sister the princess of Wales. Nicky presided over audience after audience in a daze. He missed his brother and closest friend Georgy, who was now his heir, the Caesarovich, but was confined to the Caucasus. And then there was his fiancée: ‘It’s a trial to see so little of Alix,’ wrote Nicky. ‘I can’t wait to be married.’1
At 11.30 a.m. on 14 November, Nicky, accompanied by his second brother, sixteen-year-old Misha, left the Anichkov in an open carriage and headed for the Winter Palace, just as his mother departed the same palace in a carriage to collect Alexandra from the Sergeievsky Palace of Sergei and Ella, where the bride had spent her last single night. Alexandra, not yet in her wedding dress but draped in furs, accompanied the dowager empress to the Winter Palace. There, the tsar paced the Arabian Hall smoking while his bride, assisted by her sister Ella and his mother Minny, was dressed in the Malachite Hall, her hair done by a French hairdresser who then fitted the Romanov Nuptial Crown and a tiara of diamonds set in platinum. She wore Catherine the Great’s Rivière necklace of 475 carats with matching earrings so heavy that they were supported with wires looped round her ears. Her dress – silver brocade, with an underskirt of silver tissue, trimmed with ermine and gold-threaded, with a diamond-studded bodice and a fifteen-feet train – required eight pages and a chamberlain to manoeuvre. When KR saw her, ‘She looked even paler and more delicate than usual, like a victim destined for a sacrifice.’ As she and Minny processed through the palace, ‘Dear Alicky looked quite lovely. Nicky is a very lucky man,’ the duke of York (the future King George V) reported to Queen Victoria.
The emperor, in scarlet Hussars tunic, holding a beaver-fur hat with an ostrich plume, was followed by the kings of Denmark and Greece and the Waleses until they reached the palace cathedral for the ceremony where his brother Misha and cousin Kyril, Uncle Vladimir’s eldest, held the crowns. ‘I couldn’t get rid of the thought that beloved unforgettable Papa was not among us
,’ the emperor wrote to Georgy, ‘and you were far away and alone. I had to summon all my strength not to break down in church – in front of everyone.’* Since they were still mourning, there was no reception. While the princes were crowding around the emperor to congratulate him, Ernie of Hesse noticed that his sister had vanished: he found Alix alone in tears, saying the dress was so heavy she could not move.
Afterwards, the emperor and empress rode back to the Anichkov Palace. ‘We dined at 8,’ wrote Nicky, ‘and went to bed early as Alix had a bad headache.’ To Alix, it ‘seemed a mere continuation of the masses for the dead, with this difference, I now wore a white dress instead of a black one.’ But the passion was a success. ‘I’m unbelievably happy with Alix,’ wrote Nicky, ‘it’s only a pity that my work takes up so much time I’d like to spend with her.’2
‘A completely new life has started for me,’ the tsar confided to Georgy. ‘I can’t thank God enough for the treasure he’s sent me in my wife . . . But the Lord has given me a heavy cross to bear.’ The cumbersome machine of Russian bureaucracy had instantly come to rest on Nicky’s frail shoulders.
The tsar and tsarina immediately adopted the routine that they would follow until 1905. They started the year at the Winter Palace, with the Great Procession, the Blessing of the Waters and the social season, until Easter when they moved to Tsarskoe Selo, then spent the summer at Peterhof, followed by a cruise on the new imperial yacht Shtandart (built in Denmark and launched in 1895) before heading down to Livadia for the early autumn, followed by hunting at their Polish lodges.
Every day Nicky rose at eight and worked punctiliously. His ‘study was a perfect model of orderliness’, his desk so tidy he boasted that he could ‘go into his study in the dark and put his hand at once on any object he knew to be there’. He used a blue pencil to comment on his ‘unbearable papers’, often leaving just a blue dot. He had no personal secretary. He ‘was so jealous of his prerogatives that he himself would seal the envelope containing his decisions,’ noted a trusted courtier. The powerful Chancellery of Nicholas I had become so enormous it had been broken up and distributed among the ministries at the end of Alexander II’s reign, leaving the last tsars with little support from their petitions secretariat, the remnants of the First Section. Refusing to delegate, Nicky signed off on trivialities such as every change of name and divorce in the empire, and lists of staff to receive Easter eggs – as well as sentences of exile and death.
He told his cousins that ‘he now wishes to investigate everything, to instigate changes slowly but persistently’, but his immediate challenge was his uncles – and his mother. ‘It’s better to sacrifice one man, even an uncle,’ he declared, ‘than risk the good of the realm.’ Yet none was sacrificed – so ‘Nicky spent the first ten years of his reign sitting behind a massive desk,’ wrote Sandro, ‘listening with near awe to the bellowing of his towering uncles’, especially ‘250 pounds of Uncle Alexis packed into his resplendent uniform . . . He dreaded being alone with them.’ Sandro, a naval officer, regularly tried to have Alexis sacked as general-admiral but Nicky simply replied: ‘Sack my father’s favourite brother? I believe they’re right you did turn Socialist in America!’ Minny refused to give her jewellery to Alix, the trivial start of the bitter schism between Nicholas’s mother and wife. He was no happier with the ministers. ‘It is as if my gentlemen ministers have decided to wear me out, they are so persistent and tiresome,’ he told his mother on 27 April 1896. ‘I’m amazed my head doesn’t burst with all the rubbish being stuffed into it.’3
Kaiser Willy immediately started to bombard Nicky with cloying yet meddlesome letters, hoping somehow to bully him into breaking the French alliance. As for the expectations of a return to the reforms of his grandfather, Willy told him that ‘We Christian Kings and Emperors have only one duty imposed on us by Heaven – to uphold the principle: By the Grace of God.’
The Tver local assembly now asked for the right to discuss reform. These zemstvos – introduced in 1864 – were run by loyal liberal aristocrats, but Nicky, advised by Uncle Sergei (governor-general of Moscow) and the ghost of his father, closed down the Tver assembly. On 17 January 1895, ‘I was in a terrible state about having to go into the Nikolaievsky Hall and address the representatives of the nobility, the zemstvos and town committees.’ Holding his speech in his hat as a cue, he declared that ‘I will retain the principles of autocracy as unbendingly as my unforgettable late father’ without ‘the senseless dreams of taking part in the business of government’. The phrase ‘senseless dreams’ was a quotation from Nicholas I. Afterwards, he ‘strolled in the garden with Uncle Sergei’.
Nicholas confided in his friend KR* that ‘his father had never once mentioned the responsibilities that awaited him’. But if he was not the best prepared of heirs, he was far from the worst. Nothing could prepare a man for autocracy – except living it.4
His consolation was happiness with Alix, who now started to decorate their main homes: their apartments in the Winter Palace, where no one had lived since Alexander II (whose blood still marked the bed and whose last cigarette was still in his ashtray), and the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe where Nicky had been born. She decorated both palaces in the art nouveau style with a strong English flavour – all bric-a-brac, palms, clutter and plain furniture ordered from the catalogue of Maples of Tottenham Court Road – and as much of her favourite colour, mauve, as possible, particularly in her boudoir. Their taste was totally unRussian: the drawing rooms and Nicky’s studies, with much leather and wood panelling, belonged in an unpretentious English country house or gentleman’s club – except for Nicky’s weights and bars, on which he liked to hang upside down, his special pool that he used for fashionable hydrotherapy, and of course the resplendent Nubians on silent watch outside his study. The tsar took some interest in the interior design: ‘Please warn Gonov he shouldn’t order the fabric selected by me yesterday, it’s only for the curtains,’ he told Count Paul von Benckendorff, marshal of the court. When he moved into their homes out of the Anichkov he was so happy with Alix that, ‘my bliss is without bounds,’ he wrote on 26 November. ‘For the first time since the wedding we’ve been able to be alone and live truly soul-to-soul.’
‘Never did I believe there could be such utter happiness in this world. I love you!’ she added in his diary. ‘No more separations.’ Then she wrote: ‘Darling it’s hard to be happier than we have been.’ But there was also a sense of fate: ‘We’re all placed in God’s hands. Life is a riddle, the future hidden behind a curtain . . . At last united for life,’ she wrote in his diary, ‘and when this life is ended, we meet again in the other world to remain together for all eternity.’ They combined Victorian prudishness with private passion: ‘I burn with impatience to see you as soon as possible,’ she wrote, ‘to feel myself in your arms. I long for you terribly.’ When he was away, ‘Nobody to kiss and caress you,’ she told him. ‘In thoughts I am always doing it, my Angel.’ Like every passionate couple, they created a secret sexual vernacular with nicknames for their intimate parts: his was ‘boysy’, hers was ‘lady’. We do not have letters from this time, but those from the Great War give us an idea of their intimacy: ‘Tell boysy that lady sends him her tenderest love and kisses and often thinks of him in lonely sleepless nights,’ she wrote. Her periods were, for reasons unknown, ‘Madame Beker’ or the ‘military engineer’.
Even years later, Nicky would give a ‘clear musical whistle like a bird call’ when he wanted to summon Alix, who would jump up like a young bride, blushing, and say: ‘That’s him calling.’ He often reflected that ‘I wouldn’t have endured the burden had God not given you to me as wife and friend,’ but in his stiffly English way he told her, ‘It’s difficult to say such truths, easier for me to write out on paper due to foolish shyness.’ She laughed that ‘silly old boy you are shy – except in the dark’.
Yet Alexandra was not quite happy as empress. ‘I feel myself completely alone,’ she wrote to a German friend. There is a great lone
liness inherent in monarchy – in autocracy, even more so. This could be helped by the presence of trusted friends. Alexandra had none and made few and, instead of being able to prepare while crown princess, she was simply dumped straight into the carnivorous world of Petersburg and court, which exacerbated her already fragile nature. She was so overwhelmed by the rigidities of the court that even after years as empress, she still did not dare change the biscuits served at tea, let alone remove her cantankerous mistress of robes. ‘I am in despair that those who surround my husband are apparently false . . . I weep and worry all day long because I feel my husband is so young and inexperienced. I am alone most of the time. My husband is occupied all day and spends his evenings with his mother.’ She was only too aware of her dynastic duties.
‘The young empress fell faint in church,’ noticed KR. ‘If this is for the reason the whole of Russia longs for then praise be to God.’5
On 2 November 1895 she went into labour in the Alexander Palace. The dowager empress and Ella massaged her back and legs during a twenty-hour labour that culminated in a forceps delivery: ‘a baby’s voice was heard and we all breathed a sigh of relief’. A girl! It was ‘a great joy’, wrote the tsar’s sister Xenia, ‘although it’s a pity it’s not a son’. They named the infant Olga. Nicky comforted himself by saying, ‘I’m glad the child is a girl. Had it been a boy he would have belonged to the people. Being a girl she belongs to us.’
The preparations for the coronation were almost complete. ‘Here the town is topsy-turvy with the preparations,’ Ella wrote to Nicky on 20 April 1896 from Moscow. ‘Dust, noise and Sergei works hard daily with all the affairs.’ Sergei boasted to his brother Paul that ‘all sorts of business, of course mostly coronation, exhaust me and there is so much nonsense . . . Everyone bothers me all day, no time for myself.’6
On 9 May, the emperor rode into Moscow in a simple uniform on a white horse. ‘It was joyful and triumphant as it can only be in Moscow,’ wrote Nicholas. On the 14th, Nicholas and Alexandra rose at dawn to dress for the coronation, he in Preobrazhensky colonel’s uniform with white breeches, she in a gown of silver brocade. As they prepared, Nicky paced up and down smoking while Alexandra and her ladies practised his placing of the crown on her head.