‘The whole story is damnable,’ the emperor told Alix on 5 March. But she still wanted ministers sacked – even when she could not find new ones. As for the Duma member Guchkov: ‘Could one not hang him?’ Her mission was to protect Rasputin – and prepare the throne for Alexei. ‘For Baby’s sake,’ she wrote on 17 March, ‘we must be firm as otherwise his inheritance will be awful as with his character he won’t bow down to others but be his own master as one must in Russia while people are so uneducated – Mr Philippe and Gregory said so too.’ Yet the plan to kill Rasputin only confirmed her faith. ‘During the evening Bible, I thought so much of Our Friend,’ she told Nicky during Easter on 5 April, ‘how the bookworms and Pharisees persecute Christ . . . yes indeed a prophet is never honoured in his own country.’21
Just as the home front dissolved into black comedy, the army, resupplied with shells, was rejuvenated. Confidence grew. Nikolasha’s Caucasian forces burst into the Ottoman heartland, taking Erzurum in February 1916 and then Trebizond in April, while a Russian cavalry force cleared pro-German forces from Persia and then galloped for Baghdad in Iraq to aid the British there.†
Yet the army struggled to conscript enough new recruits despite the huge pool of manpower available. Even when they did gain numerical superiority and new supplies, the Russian commanders failed to change their primitive tactics to co-ordinate infantry and artillery in order to make a breakthrough on the main front.
At Stavka, in March 1916, they planned an offensive at Lake Naroch near Vilna against the Germans who were occupied in the west at the Battle of Verdun. ‘Everything is ready for our offensive,’ Nicky told Alix on 3 March. On the 5th, 350,000 Russians and 1,000 guns were thrown at 50,000 Germans, who were ready for them. The muddy season invited disaster, the artillery barrage was ill planned and futile, and as usual the co-ordination between armies hopeless. The Russians lost another 100,000 men. ‘We have so few good generals,’ wrote Nicky. Yet out of this debacle a new army was gradually emerging: that spring, the tsar and Alexeev sacked the commander of the south-western front and appointed General Alexei Brusilov in his place. Brisk, imaginative and thoughtful, Brusilov devised a new system of preparation, reserves and concentration, to launch a modern offensive. When all the other generals apathetically concluded that they could no longer launch offensives, Brusilov believed he could win.
Meanwhile the romance of Nicky and Alix thrived. Both of them were reading a soppy English tale Little Boy Blue, which made her muse: ‘Every woman has in her the feeling of a mother too towards the man she loves, it’s nature, when it’s all deep love.’ The emperor was moved too: ‘I like it . . . I had to use my handkerchief several times,’ he wrote on 31 March 1916. The tsar remembered how he had fought to marry her ‘like little Boy Blue but more tenacious’. Henceforth she called him ‘you sweet Boy Blue’. Their sexual passion was undimmed. ‘My sweet love, I want you so!’ he wrote on 8 April. ‘Please don’t have Madame Becker [her period] when I come home.’ She telegraphed back, on 11 April, ‘what a shame the engineer-mechanic came’, but when he came home, she was ready. ‘Your tender caresses and kisses are such balm and such a treat – I always yearn for them,’ she wrote on 24 April as he returned to Stavka. ‘We women long for tenderness (though I don’t ask for it or show it often).’
On 22 May, General Brusilov, using new shock tactics, broke through the Austrian lines, heading for the Carpathians. By 12 June, he had taken 190,000 prisoners. The emperor repeatedly confided military plans to Alexandra, adding, ‘I beg you not to tell anyone this.’ He meant the garrulous Rasputin as usual, but she virtually always told him anyway: Our Friend ‘begs we shouldn’t yet strongly advance in the north because if our successes continue being good in the south, they will themselves retreat in the north’, she wrote on 4 June. It is incredible that she was sending military advice from Rasputin. Confiding that they were not really going to attack in the north, he underlined on 5 June: ‘Please don’t mention this to anybody not even our Friend. Nobody must know this.’
General Alexeev was worried. ‘I told Alexeev’, the tsar wrote on the 7th, ‘how interested you were in military questions and about those details you asked me. He smiled and listened silently.’ It was a strange situation when the chief of staff distrusted his own sovereign and his wife. As Brusilov kept advancing, the emperor was longing for her: ‘How I miss your sweet kisses! Yes beloved One, you know how to give them! Oh how naughtily! Boysy hops from remembrances . . .’
Bagging 425,000 prisoners, Brusilov almost knocked Austria out of the war, one of the most successful operations of the entire conflict. The Germans, though facing the Somme offensive on the western front, rescued their ally while the timid or pessimistic Russian generals failed to support Brusilov. His last hope was the Guards, the cream of the Tsarist army: 60,000 men commanded by General Vladimir Bezobrazov, who, as Alexandra put it, was the tsar’s ‘old comrade’ from his days in the Guards. Bezobrazov declared that the Guards, which ‘should only be commanded by people of class’ (so the tsar’s Uncle Pitz, who had returned from exile in 1914, received a corps), never retreated. In late July, Bezobrazov ‘ordered the advance across bogs known to be impregnable’, Alix told Nicky, and ‘his rashness . . . let the Guards be slaughtered’. Thirty thousand Guardsmen were lost. Indeed Peter the Great’s Guards almost ceased to exist – and the emperor lost his most loyal praetorian defenders just when he would most need them. Rasputin begged the tsar to stop ‘useless sacrifices, useless massacres’. On 27 September, Nicholas halted the operation – but the war was going so well against the Turks that he planned to take Constantinople, forming a Tsargradsky Regiment.22
At the height of Brusilov’s triumph, the emperor was strangely detached: ‘Brusilov is firm and calm. Yesterday I discovered two acacia in the garden.’ War is particularly corrosive in its effect on its leaders. ‘I felt so tired in the train yesterday,’ Nicky told Alix on 3 March 1916, ‘I remained lying down in the compartment.’ When Alexei was home, the sovereign was lonely. At Stavka, the ministers ‘persist in coming here nearly every day and take up all my time; I usually go to bed after 1.30 a.m. spending all my time in a continual rush . . . it’s simply desperate.’ His entourage noticed that he was close to ‘general nervous exhaustion’. Benckendorff told Dr Botkin, ‘He can’t continue this way much longer . . . He’s no longer seriously interested in anything. He’s become quite apathetic. He goes through his daily routine like an automaton paying more attention to the hour set for his meals or his walk in the garden.’*
After two years of struggle, the Russians had pulled off the most successful allied operation of the war and the war economy was recovering: by the end of 1917, there would be a surplus of 18 million shells. But the morale of the home front was cracking, inflation raging, food shortages spreading. Ironically there was no shortage of grain. The harvests were plentiful, yet the peasants sold less of their grain at a moment when the cities were swollen by an extra million workers. The trains were so poorly managed that the grain was not properly collected or delivered to the cities and armies. Rasputin, who observed the food queues on Petrograd streets, offered some of his more sensible if simple ideas which Alix passed on to the emperor.
Nicky considered appointing a dictator as ‘master of the whole situation’, but ‘the eternal question of supplies troubles me most of all’. The tsar realized that ‘old Stürmer can’t overcome these difficulties . . . The most damned question I ever came across. I’ve never been a merchant and don’t understand questions of provisions.’
Yet when a minister ‘tried to tell His Majesty in detail about the food supply . . . the emperor kept interrupting me with questions related to everyday trivia . . . the weather . . . children and flowers . . .’ Watching the tsar, Benckendorff warned, ‘One can’t rule an empire or command an army in this manner. If he doesn’t realize it in time, something catastrophic is bound to happen.’23
Back at the Alexander Palace, the empress was busily reshuffling. She could n
ot find an interior minister so Rasputin suggested Stürmer and he was appointed. She had the efficient war minister sacked for links to the Duma and hostility to Rasputin, who rarely initiated these policies but encouraged Alexandra to sack ministers already distrusted by Nicholas – and then tried to find their replacements. The tsar no longer trusted Sazonov after his role in the ministerial mutiny and a proposal to offer Polish autonomy. Alexandra arrived at Stavka on 6 July and had ‘the Pancake’ dismissed the next day. But she and Rasputin could not find the right foreign minister, so they appointed Stürmer. Now that cipher held the three chief ministries.
The empress thrived on the excitement, yet lived in a state of neurotic hysteria. ‘Feel rotten as had such pains in my tummy in the night,’ she reported in January 1916, and had to ring for her maid to ‘fill up my hotwater bottle and give me opium’. She reflected on life and death. ‘One lives too quickly,’ she declared in one of her saner letters on 5 March, ‘impressions follow in rapid succession – machinery and money rule the world and crush all art – I wonder what will be after this great war is over.’ She feared for the future. ‘Oh darling it is difficult to be happier than we have . . . May our children be as richly blessed . . . Life is a riddle, the future hidden behind a curtain and while I look at our big Olga my heart fills with emotions and wondering what is in store for her,’ Alix wrote on 12 November 1915, their twenty-first wedding anniversary.
Olga was depressed. ‘She goes about so pale’ but ‘must lie more – the arsenic injections will act quicker,’ Alix informed Nicky in October 1915. Now OTMA were less tolerant of her eccentric views. ‘The children with all their love rarely understand my way of looking at things,’ she wrote in March 1916, ‘the smallest even, and when I say how I was brought up they find it dull. Only when I speak quietly with Tatiana she grasps it. Olga is always most unamiable and when I am severe, sulks me.’*
Yet Olga’s moods were nothing compared to the rage of the Romanovs. Only Uncle Pitz remained close to Alexandra now. The dowager empress knew that Alix was simply mad and she compared Nicky’s reign to the last days of Emperor Paul. She confronted her son one more time, supposedly threatening, ‘Rasputin or me,’ but in May she moved to Kiev. In Petrograd, Bimbo – Nikolai Mikhailovich – wittily mocked Alexandra ‘the Abominable Hessian’ at the Imperial Yacht Club, calling her ‘the Woman Who Put Jesus Right’. Alexandra called him ‘the White Crow’ – and told Nicholas: ‘We’ve been far too weak and kind to the family.’
Meanwhile Dmitri and Yusupov considered the ultimate solution to the Rasputin problem – just as Alexandra had found the perfect man to protect him. In fact she was placing a syphilitic madman in charge of imperial security.24
Rasputin recommended Alexander Protopopov as interior minister. He looked like the perfect minister. Elegant, multilingual and a pianist, the deputy president of the Duma was an urbane liberal conservative who had first been recommended to the tsar by Rodzianko himself. Even King George V, who met him on a visit to London, was impressed.
Nicky remembered that Rasputin had first mentioned him. ‘Pleased me very much,’ wrote Nicholas after their first meeting on 20 July 1916; ‘he’s an ex-officer of the Cavalry Grenadiers.’ He was also a textile tycoon – the ideal man to solve the supply crisis. In September, Rasputin praised Protopopov to Alexandra, who started manically hectoring the emperor: ‘I don’t know him but I believe in Our Friend’s wisdom and guidance. Gregory begs you earnestly to name Protopopov there. You know him and had a good impression – happens to be a member of Duma and will know how to be with them.’
‘I must think that question over,’ Nicky replied on 9 September. ‘Our Friend’s ideas about men are sometimes queer as you know. One must be careful, especially in nominations of high people . . . All these changes exhaust the head. I find they happen much too often.’ This was an understatement: during Alexandra’s rule, there would be four prime ministers and five interior ministers – and his suspicions were justified.
Protopopov was ‘queer’ indeed. There was something ‘peculiar’ in his rolling eyes, quivering sweats, cursing outbursts and jerky conversation. Half mad, probably syphilitic, he had been cured of a disease by the doctor feelgood of Petrograd, Badmaev, Rasputin’s ‘bosom friend’ in Alix’s words. Now he was said to be addicted to Badmaev’s ‘arousing powders’ – probably cocaine. In a new version of the three scoundrels, Badmaev proposed his patient as minister and his business partner General Kurlov as police chief. This was the very same Kurlov responsible for Stolypin’s assassination. Tempted by power, Protopopov became an apostle of Rasputin and a convert to Alexandra’s mystical autocracy. When they met, she found him ‘very clever, coaxing, beautiful manners’.
‘Please take Protopopov as interior minister,’ she wrote to Nicholas.
‘It shall be done,’ Nicholas wrote back.
‘God bless your new choice of Protopopov,’ she celebrated. ‘Our Friend says you have done a very wise act.’
She sent Nicholas an agenda to discuss with Protopopov at their first meeting – ‘he should listen to Our Friend and trust his advice’; she added, ‘Keep my list in front of you. Our Friend begged you to speak of all these things.’
Alix was proud of her new confidence: ‘I’m no longer the least bit shy or afraid of the ministers and speak like a waterfall in Russian. They see I’m energetic and report all to you and that I’m your wall in the rear, a very firm one. I may be of some wee use to you.’
The tsar praised their arrangement: ‘Yes verily you ought to be my eye and my ear there near the capital while I stick here,’ he told her on 23 September 1916. ‘This is just the part for you to keep the ministers going hand in hand – you’re rendering me and our country enormous use. Oh! You precious Sunny I’m so happy you’ve found the right work for yourself.’
Stürmer and Protopopov destroyed what little remained of imperial prestige. Stürmer was suspected of probing for a separate peace with Germany – rumours that may have been correct, though there is no evidence Nicholas approved. Now known as ‘the German’, Alexandra was widely suspected of secret German negotiations. She was certainly contacted by her German connections, but she was devoted to Russia. The babbling Protopopov boasted that he ruled with the help of Jesus Christ. ‘I feel I shall save Russia,’ he said, ‘I alone can save her.’
In the Duma, Pavel Milyukov, the leader of the liberal Kadet Party, denounced Stürmer’s ineptitude – and Alexandra’s management – with the deadly question: ‘Is this stupidity or is this treason?’
‘Both!’ cried many.
On 9 November, Nicholas dismissed Stürmer and appointed a competent organizer, the ex-communications minister Alexander Trepov, as prime minister. But Alexandra and Rasputin were enraged. ‘Our Friend is very grieved at his nomination as He knows [Trepov] is very against him,’ Alexandra protested to the tsar, ‘and he’s sad you didn’t ask his advice.’ Sure enough, Trepov advised Nicholas to sack Protopopov and exile Rasputin.
Here was an opportunity for the tsar and he seized it, telling Alexandra on 10 November that he was dismissing Protopopov, who may be ‘a good honest man’ but he was ‘not normal’, jumping ‘from one idea to another’ thanks to a ‘certain disease’. He asked, ‘Please don’t mix in Our Friend! It’s I who carry the responsibility.’
‘You don’t go and change Protopopov now, he’ll be all right,’ she wrote back. ‘Give him the chance to get the food supply matter into his hands and all will go well.’ As for his supposed insanity, ‘He’s not mad!’ And Trepov should be hanged.
I am but a woman fighting for her Master and Child . . . Darling remember, it doesn’t lie in the man Protopopov or xyz but is the question of monarchy and your prestige . . . I am fighting for your reign and Baby’s future . . . Don’t listen to men who aren’t from God but cowards. Your Wify to whom you are ALL in ALL. True unto death!
Alexandra told Rasputin about Nicky’s plans and the starets bombarded him with telegrams. Rasputin was not
acting out of megalomania: he was fighting for his life here. Drinking heavily, he had ‘no doubt they’ll kill me. They’ll kill Mama and Papa too.’*
Alexandra rushed to Stavka. In a unique row, she demanded that her husband keep Protopopov and Rasputin. Nicholas exploded. ‘These days were indeed hard ones,’ Nicky apologized. ‘Forgive me if I’ve been cross or impatient, sometimes one’s temper has to get through.’ He surrendered.
Trepov tried to bribe Rasputin to leave politics. The sovereigns were disgusted by this insult to Rasputin’s sanctity. Yet the failure to remove Protopopov sealed Rasputin’s fate.25
* The tsar considered appointing the astute Durnovo as prime minister but decided against it, most likely because he disapproved of his foreign policy. A month later, Durnovo sent Nicholas his prophetic warning against war with Germany when Russia’s entente with Britain and France had somehow metamorphosed into a military obligation though no Russian interests were at stake: ‘In the event of defeat, social revolution in its most extreme form is inevitable.’ He was not alone in this view. The French and Serbian alliances were not Russia’s only choice. Many believed that Germany and Austria were its natural allies. The ageing Prince Meshchersky also advised against a war on behalf of France and Serbia.
* The family had been close to the tsars since their ancestor, a Nogai princeling named Yusuf, converted to Orthodoxy. They now owned four palaces in Petersburg and three in Moscow, as well as thirty-seven estates and some Baku oilfields. Felix’s father was governor of Moscow. His elder brother Nikolai had been killed in a duel by the jealous husband of his mistress, leaving Felix as heir.
* On 29 January, the empress complained to the tsar about Nikolasha’s unwise orders ‘that only aggravate things’, adding: ‘See that the story of the Jews is carefully done without unnecessary rows.’ Even the tsar was moved when he saw ‘masses of Jews, trains arrived with them from Courland – painful sight with all their packages and wee children’. Alexandra asked Nicky to let a wounded Jewish soldier live in Petrograd – ‘It is difficult for a Jew who is always hampered by legislative restrictions,’ she wrote on 7 April 1916. ‘Though he is a Jew, one would like him to be justly treated.’ Nicky agreed.