His face showing signs of exhaustion, with pouches under the eyes, Nicholas returned with his family from vespers; they were just sitting down to dinner when Frederiks called out the tsar, who retreated with him to his study. ‘My conscience is clear,’ he told Sazonov. ‘I did my utmost to avoid war.’
The family waited nervously. The emperor returned looking pale. Alexandra and then the four girls burst into tears. ‘War! And I knew nothing of it,’ Alexandra told Anna. ‘This is the end of everything.’
‘You can’t imagine how glad I am the uncertainty is over,’ Nicholas told Gilliard next morning. ‘I’ve never been through so terrible a time.’
The tsar should have followed Stolypin’s dictum of ‘twenty years of peace’, but it is likely his regime would not have withstood the popular outrage and prestige lost in abandoning Serbia. It was a decision of honour in an age of honour taken by a patriot steeped in the overlapping missions of Romanov autocracy, Russian nationalism and Slavophile solidarity. Then there was expediency – this might be Russia’s last chance to seize the Straits.
Only a victorious super-tsar, a Peter the Great, could have stayed out – and such a tsar would have been itching to fight. Nicholas’s clawback of power left him entirely exposed in 1914. He abhorred the slaughter of war but he, like most aristocrats of his time, saw it as a bracing national rite. There was no daylight between his views and those of Sazonov. After the humiliations of 1908 and 1912, retreat now would mean the end of Russia as a great power, the idea synonymous in Nicholas’s mind with Romanov monarchy. Not to uphold this was as unthinkable to him as ceasing to be tsar. He was fighting for Serbia, but on a deeper level he fought to save Russia – the Romanov version. It has become fashionable to spread the guilt of the First World War liberally around Europe. If guilt is to be apportioned, the chief culprits were Austria and Germany, followed by Serbia, Russia and Britain.
That afternoon, the emperor, in field marshal’s uniform, and empress sailed into Petersburg (which Nicholas now renamed ‘Petrograd’ as sounding less German). They celebrated a Te Deum with 5,000 officials and nobles in the Nikolaievsky Hall of the Winter Palace. The sovereigns emerged on to the balcony. Twenty-five thousand people fell to their knees. Within forty-eight hours, ‘good news’, wrote Nicholas, ‘England has declared war on Germany,’ and the day after, ‘Austria on Russia. Now the situation is quite clear.’ The Duma suspended itself in the cause of national solidarity and Nicholas basked in the ‘upsurge of national spirit’.8
Russia’s mobilization was a surprising success. As 4 million men rushed by railway to their units on the German and Austrian fronts, Nikolasha ordered two armies to advance into East Prussia – which was lightly defended, as Germany threw everything into its attack on France in the west.
Originally the plan had been to evacuate much of Poland and gather the main forces in the centre, with the ability to strike either Germany or Austria. But for political reasons and for the sake of the French ally, Sukhomlinov had framed Plan 19A, a compromise, committing Russia to attack Austria with four armies and East Prussia with two.
The French now begged for help. Nikolasha, a Francophile, did not hesitate, ordering both offensives simultaneously, even though neither was ready and the East Prussia operation required much greater force; instead he weakened it further. ‘God and St Joan are with us,’ Nikolasha told the French ambassador. On 29 July, the armies under Rennenkampf and Samsonov advanced into East Prussia to encircle German forces around the Masurian Lakes, while the southern armies invaded Austria Galicia.
On 7 August, the Russians won the first battle but Rennenkampf then managed to lose contact with the Germans. A newly appointed German command, led by General Paul von Hindenburg and Chief of Staff Erich Ludendorff, spotted the lack of co-ordination. Communications were pitiful – Nikolasha’s headquarters was barely in contact with the armies, with whom they communicated by sending telegrams to the Warsaw post office which were then rushed in bundles by car to the front. On 16 August, leaving a small force to hold Rennenkampf, Hindenburg encircled Samsonov’s Second Army, in the Battle of Tannenberg, capturing 100,000 prisoners. Samsonov committed suicide. A second German offensive around the Masurian Lakes ejected the Russians from East Prussia, but there was excellent news in the south where the Russians smashed into Galicia.9
The tsar, waiting at Tsarskoe Selo, could hardly sleep. Before he visited headquarters, he received Rasputin’s blessing in Anna’s villa. ‘Our Friend was so happy to have seen you yesterday,’ wrote Alexandra, but she already resented Nikolasha’s prominence. Rasputin warned the tsar that ‘the Crows want to get him the Petrograd throne or [the new principality of] Galicia. Grigory loves you jealously and can’t bear Nikolasha playing a part.’ The empress was beginning to interfere politically: ‘Now I’m bothering you with things that don’t concern me.’
On 19 September, the emperor arrived by train at Nikolasha’s headquarters – Stavka – at Baranovichi, an oasis of railway wagons in the midst of birchwoods, where staff officers, allied military representatives and a flock of grand dukes lunched, gossiped, attended briefings. This weirdly becalmed limbo was so quiet Nikolasha called it ‘my hermitage’ and praised his adjutant brother Peter, for being ‘my sleeping pill’. Indeed ‘It’s hard to believe a great war is being waged not far from this place,’ mused the tsar.
Nikolasha looked and sounded the part of a Romanov warlord, but this cavalryman, now fifty-seven, had never commanded in battle and was surprisingly passive – ‘he avoids speaking about business and sends one to Yanushkevich’, complained Guards commander Vladimir Bezobrazov – leaving his generals to argue over strategy ‘so as not to get in their way’. The ostensible chief of staff, Yanushkevich, was no better, a military clerk overpromoted by Sukhomlinov who wanted no rival in his position. This inadequate figurehead often tried to resign. In practice, Stavka was almost a phantom headquarters. A single Hughes apparatus and sixty men ran an army of 6 million. The fronts acted more or less independently, scarcely co-ordinating and regularly delaying or ignoring Stavka orders. The tsar decorated a tearful Nikolasha in his carriage and conveyed Alexandra’s request that Rasputin visit Stavka. Afterwards Nikolasha told his staff that if Rasputin showed his face, he’d hang him, a comment that soon reached the mauve boudoir.
Nikolasha was wildly confident. When his friend Fat Orlov visited Stavka a few weeks later, he concluded that ‘Everything is going well, morale is wonderful and soldiers fighting heroically.’ Nikolasha planned a thrust from eastern Poland into the heart of Germany.10
Back home, the tsar’s girls were experiencing the terrible power of modern war. As the tsar toured the country in his train inspecting troops, the empress and her daughters became nurses at the military hospital set up in the Catherine Palace. There Alexandra, Olga and Tatiana, who were joined by Anna, cared for the broken bodies of the wounded, seeing unspeakable sights.
Alix tended a pitifully mutilated young man – ‘scarcely a man any more, so shot to pieces perhaps it must be cut off as so bad but hope to save it, horrible to look at. I washed and cleaned and painted with iodine’ and helped apply a catheter. Even her daughters saw a patient die, but ‘All behaved well, none lost their head, and the girlies were brave.’ On 26 November, Alexandra reflected on this new and atrocious sort of war. ‘Well, we all knew that such a war would be the bloodiest and most awful ever known and so it has turned out.’
All became attached to their wounded young men. Alix, a born nurse, was heartbroken when her favourite boy died: ‘Wify feels hideously sad,’ she told Nicky. ‘My poor wounded friend has gone.’ But there was also fun, pillow fights and love on the wards: Olga fell for a young Georgian soldier. As for Anna, Alexandra complained of her egotism. ‘Be nice and firm when you return,’ she asked the tsar, ‘and don’t allow her footgame.’
Yet Alexandra thrived in the war. Her own ‘illness and weakness forgotten,’ the empress, recalled Anna, ‘was at her very best’.11
In S
eptember, Hindenburg and Ludendorff launched an offensive into southern Poland, swinging north to threaten Warsaw. The battle was a draw, but on the southern front the Russians were rolling up the Austrians. As Nikolasha prepared his invasion of Germany, the Germans on 29 October pre-empted him, attacking towards Łódź, capturing 100,000 prisoners. Nikolasha was startled. He dismissed generals and ordered a limited retreat.
On 19 November, the tsar, visiting Stavka, found a chastened Nikolasha: ‘he has lived through terrible moments’. Shells, rifles, boots and horses were already running short: Sukhomlinov had failed to prepare for this longer war. No one had planned for a war of such infernal intensity that used up the shell reserves so fast. Rodzianko, the Duma president, visited Nikolasha to discuss the crisis. The two agreed to bypass the incompetent War Ministry and procure supplies through public organizations and private industrialists. Rodzianko asked if Nikolasha had really threatened to hang Rasputin. ‘The Grand Duke laughed and said, “Well, not exactly,”’ before confiding his distaste for ‘the fatal influence of Empress Alexandra. She was a hindrance to everything. The Grand Duke realized the empress hated him and desired his dismissal.’
Now he had to cope with a third front. Enver Pasha brought the Ottoman empire into the war on the German side. On 16 October, Ottoman battleships (recently transferred from the German navy) bombarded Odessa, then in December the Ottoman vice-generalissimo launched a colossal but reckless mountain offensive across the Caucasus. The local commander panicked, ordered a retreat and fled back to Tiflis; the fear spread and the local command reported frantically to Nikolasha that they had begun to evacuate Tiflis if not ‘the entire Transcaucasus’.
At Stavka, Nikolasha asked the British envoy to draw Ottoman troops away from the Caucasus. The request was forwarded to Secretary for War Earl Kitchener and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, who devised an attack on the Dardanelles. But the Caucasus panic did not last long. Enver’s offensive ended in total catastrophe, losing around 40,000 men, while the Russian advance continued into Austrian Galicia. Yet in London the Dardanelles planning went on.12
On the main front at the end of 1914, the two sides were close to where their lines had been at the start of the war – but the Russians had lost 1.8 million men in those five months and the failures had exposed such levels of incompetence and corruption that Sukhomlinov and his flashy wife were discredited. ‘She is a common woman, and vulgar soul,’ Alix told Nicky. Sukhomlinov was ‘in despair’.
On 25 January 1915, Nikolasha and Yanushkevich ordered a ‘cleansing’ of the entire theatre of operations through the expulsion of ‘all Jews and suspect individuals’. Nikolasha shared the tsar’s anti-semitism, once telling the State Defence Council that the Jews were ‘an undesirable element . . . as well as their unattractive moral cast of mind, they are weak, cowardly and devoid of sense of duty’. The Jews, who spoke the Germanic Yiddish, were suspected of treason. Nikolasha took Jewish hostages and executed suspects. Around 500,000 Jews were expelled in scenes of such desperate misery that even interior minister Maklakov complained, ‘I’m no Judaeophile but I disapprove.’*
The tsar admired Nikolasha’s conduct under pressure. ‘I must say when he is alone and when in quiet mood, he is sound – I mean he judges rightly,’ he told Alexandra on 26 January. But Nikolasha’s view of Rasputin outraged her. Earlier that month Anna had almost been killed in a train crash that crushed her head. She was expected to die until, Anna wrote, ‘I opened my eyes and saw standing beside the bed the tall gaunt form of Rasputin. He looked at me fixedly and said in a calm voice: “she will live but always be a cripple”.’ The crash restored Alix’s intimacy with Anna and intensified their faith in Rasputin.
These military reverses, supply shortages and cases of government ineptitude led Nikolasha to expand Stavka’s almost dictatorial powers in the vast areas behind the front in a frenzy of spy-mania. ‘I predict in several days there’ll be no shells at all,’ on the north-east front, warned Nikolasha, who sought to explain the setbacks by encouraging a witch-hunt for German spies. But it was also a way to destroy his enemy, Sukhomlinov. On 18 February, he arrested the minister’s corrupt crony Colonel Sergei Miasoedov. Nikolasha ensured he was found guilty and hanged five hours later; three of his associates, all Jews, were hanged too. When four others were found innocent, Nikolasha had them retried and hanged. Sukhomlinov was damaged. Nikolasha undoubtedly believed that the men were guilty, but they were almost certainly totally innocent – and he damaged the regime, never imagining that people would presume the Romanovs themselves were German agents too.13
The emperor, heading back to Stavka, had high hopes: ‘All the front is pretty well.’ On 6 February, Britain and France attacked the Dardanelles in a bid to break the deadlock of the western front, knock Turkey out of the war and ease the supply lines for Russia, while Sazonov negotiated to win Constantinople after the war. Alexandra was so excited by the prospects that she did her homework – ‘I’ve been rereading what Our Friend wrote when he was at Constantinople – oh what a day when Mass will be served at St Sophia.’14
‘Just at this moment,’ Nicky told Alix on 9 March, ‘Nikolasha rushed into my carriage, out of breath and with tears in his eyes and announced the fall of Peremyshl [in Austrian Galicia]. Thank God – a sudden ray of sunshine. Oh Lovy-mine, one is so deeply happy!’ Celebrating the capture of 130,000 Austrians, Nikolasha and Nicky drank champagne together. The tsar immediately planned to inspect these new conquests. Yet Rasputin sensibly wondered if it was too soon: ‘Our Friend would have found it better if you had gone after the war to the conquered country’ – and Alexandra, now ever more suspicious of Nikolasha, added, ‘it’s not for N to accompany you – you must be the chief one. You find me an old goose, no doubt, but if others won’t think of such things, I must.’ Alexandra was now obsessed about the popular and majestic Nikolasha, who completely dwarfed the tsar, physically and figuratively. If he was not a great commander, he was, like Lord Kitchener in Britain, a good poster.
‘Show you are the master,’ Alexandra told Nicholas. ‘Forgive me Precious One but you know you are too kind and gentle – sometimes a loud voice can do wonders and a severe look.’ As for Nikolasha, ‘you are above him.’ She felt she had to hector him: ‘You think me a meddlesome bore but a woman feels and sees things.’ He did not always agree with her, however.
‘Darling mine, I’m not of your opinion . . . On the contrary the Commander in Chief must accompany me.’ While she was afraid her husband would be assassinated by a ‘rotten vicious Jew’, she shared his joy at the conquests – ‘wouldn’t Nicholas I have been delighted?’
On 9 April, the emperor rode into Lvov in triumph surrounded by ranks of Cossack Life Guards. Then, he wrote, ‘I slept in old Franz Josef’s bed if you please!’15
Yet the glory was short lived. Berlin could not let Austria collapse. On 19 April 1915 the Germans attacked around Gorlice-Tarnów. Nikolasha retreated, losing 100,000 dead and 750,000 prisoners. On 9 June, Lvov fell, but worse was to follow as the Germans consumed Poland. The emperor tried to calm the generals at Stavka. Nikolasha, he added, ‘wept in my cabin and asked whether I was not thinking of replacing him with a more capable man’. Russia lost 300,000 men in one month, but ‘the only thing that causes anxiety’, admitted Nicky, ‘is lack of ammunition’ – and 300,000 rifles. Most countries had stockpiled shells for a short war, but in Russia the ordering of new ammunition and the adapting to a war economy had been particularly slow and inept, with a reluctance to spend the sums necessary. What began as a question of supply became a public scandal. Everything was blamed on the shell shortage, which accelerated a crisis of confidence in the army and of state authority. Anti-German riots broke out in Moscow. Yet Nicholas could not see its importance. ‘You’re always writing about public opinion,’ he told a journalist, ‘but we have no public opinion in Russia.’
The blame fell on Sukhomlinov and the inspector-general of artillery, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, lo
ver of the ballerina Little K who had made such a fortune that she had recently built an art deco mansion in Petrograd. Nikolasha and his generals joined up with Duma politicians and the press to destroy Sukhomlinov. ‘It is with a heavy heart I let you leave this time,’ wrote Alix as Nicky travelled to Stavka. ‘You bear all so bravely and by yourself – let me help you my Treasure. Surely there is some way a woman can be of help and use. I do so yearn to make it easier for you and the ministers all squabbling among each other . . . it makes me rage.’ The ministers ‘must learn to tremble before you – you remember Mr Ph[ilippe] and Gr. [Rasputin] say the same thing.’
Alexandra blamed Nikolasha’s defeats on his rejection of Rasputin: ‘Would to God Nikolasha were another man and had not turned against a man of God.’ The tsar redoubled security around Rasputin, who returning to Petrograd, frail and shaken after his near-fatal stabbing, was keen to support the imperial couple against liberal society and Nikolasha. In March 1915, Alexandra, eager to boost his religious kudos, published Rasputin’s memoirs of Jerusalem (which he had dictated and she had edited) and ordered him to pray in the Kremlin churches, a visit that led to saturnalia not saintliness. On 26 March, Rasputin cavorted with Gypsy singers at the Yar restaurant, becoming what the police called ‘sexually psychopathic’, drunkenly boasting of his erotic exploits with the empress – ‘the Old Lady . . . I can make her do anything’. When diners asked if he was the famous Rasputin, he proved it by dropping his breeches and brandishing his penis accompanied by the ‘shrieks of women, a man’s curse, broken glass and the banging of doors’. This was at least partly a set-up, a provokatsia by General Vladimir Djunkovsky, noble Guards officer and the police director, who then presented his kompromat to the tsar. Nicholas, as usual, coldly placed it in his drawer, demanding total secrecy. Frustrated, Djunkovsky showed his file to Rasputin’s enemy Nikolasha. The knowledge that the police were plotting to destroy Our Friend encouraged Alexandra and Rasputin to look for an interior minister and police chief who would protect him.