The Three Emperors Page 10

  Nowhere was the complexity of the Russian-German relationship as vividly illustrated as in the new tsar’s family. His mother was Willy’s great-aunt; his grandmother was a princess from Hesse-Darmstadt. He was well aware how much Russia needed Germany. But his own Slavophilia made him bridle at German influence in Russia, and his wife bore Germany and the “Prussian barbarians,”33 as she called them, a virulent dislike quite as strong as her sister’s. Though she never directly interfered in politics, the German Foreign Office saw her as a worryingly anti-German influence.

  Alexander’s accession pushed the imperial family further into retreat. The new tsar used his father’s assassination to justify his desire to move permanently out of St. Petersburg to the country, to Gatchina, 25 miles southwest of the city. Minny hated the palace’s vast echoing dreariness. “Cold, disgusting34 and full of workmen,” she described it to her mother. “This uninhabited, big empty castle in the middle of winter cost me many tears, hidden tears, for Sasha is happy to leave the city.” A new cordon of soldiers and secret police surrounded it. The children disliked the secret police, who followed them even on their walks in the grounds. Nicky, who would be irked by them his whole life, called them “naturalists”35 because they were always jumping out from behind trees. Visits to St. Petersburg became rare. The increasing isolation was not necessarily unwelcome, however. The children had become anxious in the aftermath of their grandfather’s death. Since then Nicky’s cousin Sandro heard “an explosion in36 every suspicious sound.”

  It was no wonder that even the tsar described the family’s almost yearly summer visits to Denmark, to the Danish king and queen’s informal royal house parties, as like being freed from “prison.”37 In Denmark the imperial family felt “at glorious liberty” as they never did at home. They spent months there. “I shall never forget the thrill of walking down a street for the first time … It was more than fun! It was an education!”38 Olga remembered. Nicholas and his siblings found themselves in the unusual situation of being surrounded by other children who were of the same status as they were. The Romanov children regularly met their English cousins in Denmark. There is a group photograph taken at Amalienborg Palace in Copenhagen dated 1869, with George, aged four, sitting next to a one-year-old Nicky in a pram. The families met again the following year during the Franco-Prussian War, and again when five-year-old Nicky came to London with his parents in 1873 and stayed at Marlborough House. It was a relationship encouraged by Alexandra and Minny. “I fear that your39 sweet little Nicky has forgotten me,” Alexandra wrote when Nicky was eight, “which would make me sad as I love that angelic child.” There was a gaggle of families: the Danish cousins; the Cumberlands—the heir to the throne of Hanover, which had been dissolved by Prussia after the 1866 war, and his wife, Thyra, Minny and Alexandra’s younger sister; and the children of their brother George of the Hellenes, recently elected King of Greece, and his Russian wife, Olga, who was the tsar’s favourite cousin. The Russian, Greek and British cousins—each of whom had their own Georgie (“Greek Georgie” was particularly boisterous)—formed a club. The lingua franca appears to have been English—the British cousins were notably bad at languages and everyone else was fluent. The tsar would take the children off to catch tadpoles or steal apples; he let them ride on his knee and tug his beard; to all the children’s delight, he once turned a hose on the King of Sweden, “whom we all disliked.”40 George, so intimidated by his own grandmother, referred to the famously terrifying Alexander as “dear old Fatty”41 or “dearest uncle Sasha.”

  Nicky and Georgie became, according to Olga, “close friends.” Georgie teased his girl cousins, reducing Olga to giggles in inappropriate places by quietly invoking an old joke to “come and roll with me on the Ottoman,”42 and calling Xenia “Owl.” The boys had much in common: both loved the outdoors; both were shy, young for their age and most comfortable at home with their families; both had a predilection for “romps” and practical jokes; both had possessive mothers (whom they both addressed in English as “Motherdear”43) and powerful fathers. They also looked eerily alike: the Danish servants were forever confusing them. In Denmark in 1883, when George was off at sea and he was fifteen, Nicky conceived his first crush on Toria, George’s favourite younger sister. “I am in love44 with Victoria and she seems to be with me,” he wrote in his diary. “… In the evening I tried to be alone with her and kiss her. She is so lovely.”

  Despite their similarities the two boys were on opposite sides of a bitter international rivalry. It wasn’t too much to say that Russia and Britain were arch-enemies: both ideological opposites and imperial rivals. It was the imperial clashes that gave the ideological conflict bite—otherwise they would simply have been two countries on either side of Europe each minding its own business. But from the late 1870s, Britain and Russia, along with the other Western Great Powers, had launched themselves into a violent phase of territorial acquisition, carving up the globe beyond Europe into colonies and “spheres of influence.” There are many complex and conflicting arguments as to why the (mostly) Western, (relatively) developed powers all decided they needed an empire: the natural evolution of global power politics made it inevitable that the few rich, militarily superior, technologically developed powers would dominate and exploit the other, more “backward,” weak territories; the need of the industrialized nations for raw materials, and for new places to put their capital; a sense of fierce competition among the Great Powers and a perception that new territories were the way to steal a march on their competitors. All these aspects played their role. The colonizers believed that colonies provided opportunities for wealth and new markets—Britain’s empire, the exemplar, had made it the most influential and wealthy country in the world and allowed it to punch way beyond its own weight. As the biggest imperial power indeed, it saw itself as the world’s imperial policeman, a disinterested regulator of the world’s affairs by virtue of its utilitarian need to maintain the status quo and peace for free trade—a claim which had some truth but which the other Great Powers resented. The frantic new phase of territory-grabbing got into gear after 1882, the year of Britain’s quiet takeover of Egypt, which convinced the European powers—including three new would-be colony-hunters, Belgium and the newly unified Italy and Germany—that if they didn’t get in first, Britain would grab the whole of Africa. The so-called scramble for Africa revivified the old Anglo-French antipathy, as France tried to prevent Britain from establishing itself too comfortably in Egypt, and gave rise to a new reason for new colonies—that they might not necessarily contribute wealth, but that simply by existing they provided status, and proved the greatness of the Great Powers. For Britain, the arrival of more imperial competitors stimulated a fear that its dominance, its territories and its routes to its furthest-flung colonies might be threatened. The scene was set, as one empire competed with another, for an endless stream of nasty little regional conflicts.

  In many respects Russia’s empire was different. It was one continuous outstretching land mass which had already in previous decades absorbed the Crimea, much of Poland, Finland, the central Asian territory bordering Mongolia and all of Siberia to the Pacific. Expansion had never been primarily about trade or markets but more about myths of conquest: that Russia had a God-ordained destiny to take up the legacy of the Byzantine empire and to dominate the Balkans and Asia, even to the Indian Ocean. The new imperial fever, however, gripped just as strongly as anywhere else. For the Russian elite, imperial expansion was an all-too-welcome distraction from Russia’s impossible internal problems and the need for domestic reforms. It subscribed to a simplistic equation which papered over a multitude of cracks: since empires kept countries great, why should not Russia keep itself in the first rank through territorial expansion? After all, the one thing it had plenty of was soldiers. The British imperial juggernaut, meanwhile, now had territory and interests in Asia, and the two countries found themselves constantly in conflict. “It is an axiom45 of Russian policy,” a seasoned B
ritish Russia-watcher wrote, “that the constant, most persistent and most effective opponent of Russian expansion is England.” One flashpoint was Constantinople and the Bosphorus. The Russians believed they had a God-given mission to take Constantinople for Christendom—and they wanted to secure the narrow channel of the Bosphorus, sometimes called the Turkish Straits, which joined the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. This was the route by which most of Russia’s grain travelled out of the country, and the exit for Russia’s southern fleet, which by the 1878 Treaty of Berlin was bottled up in the Black Sea.

  The British believed Russia couldn’t be allowed to take Constantinople, firstly because it would threaten the security of their vital overland route to India; secondly because Russia’s presence in Turkey would destabilize the balance of power in eastern Europe and the Balkans to which the British were wedded; and thirdly because it would give Russia an advantage in next-door Persia. The two countries were competing for control there too: Russia because it was on its border, Britain because the land route to India lay through it, and because of the reserves of oil that were thought to lie hidden beneath it. The clash with Russia had led to Britain’s propping up of the crumbling Ottoman empire and its involvement in the Crimean War during the 1850s, which had sparked frenzied public antipathy between the two countries. In the Russo-Turkish War of the mid-1870s, Britain had not taken part, but British public opinion had angrily demanded intervention and that, as a song of the time went, the Russians “shall not have Constantinople.” Many Russians in turn believed that Britain had secretly backed and helped the Turks. The other flashpoint was ever-ungovernable Afghanistan, sandwiched between British India’s north-west frontier and Russian-controlled Turkestan. The idea that Russia was just waiting to invade India was a great bogey of British foreign affairs, even though the logistics of invading India—simply of getting over the Himalayas—made this virtually impossible. Russia, however, was relentlessly pushing forward its frontiers in central Asia, and the British periodically became obsessed with “securing” Afghanistan, and cast their eyes greedily towards Tibet. Each side was convinced that the other had no business there.

  Imperial conflicts gave teeth to ideological divisions: to the British, Russia was the incarnation of tyranny. British opinion regarded itself as especially well informed on this subject, as it was in Britain—with its relaxed censorship laws—that writers such as Alexander Herzen and Tolstoy had published their indictments of the Russian system. The Russian government was infuriated by what it saw as Britain’s smug hypocrisy, which allowed it to harbour political enemies of the Russian state in the name of freedom, and to extend itself aggressively across the globe in any way it could, shamelessly exploiting the natives, while claiming it was on a mission to bring the benefits of civilization to the world. It was true that the British imperial justification somehow typically managed to mix two opposite arguments: a belief that the empire had philanthropically taken up the “white man’s burden” to civilize and improve the lot of inferior races (it was a given that subject races were inferior, though it was also understood that it was not done in polite society to talk too explicitly about this); and a conviction that stronger nations would inevitably dominate weaker ones. Though it was also rarely said in public, the British considered that most other empires treated their natives abominably. Sometimes they were right, as Anton Chekhov recognized. Having seen both British-occupied Egypt and Russian exploitation in the Crimea, where the native Tartar population had been systematically impoverished and had their land confiscated, he wrote in 1890, “Yes, thought I,46 the Englishman exploits the Chinese, sepoys, Hindus, but then he gives them roads, acqueducts, museums, Christianity; you too exploit, but what do you give?”

  Among the two ruling dynasties the conflict had become personal. It was just as well that King Christian banned the discussion of politics at Fredensborg,* as Alexander’s Anglophobia was practically written into his DNA. Queen Victoria loathed Russia. “Those detestable48 Russians,” she’d complain, “they will always hate us and we can never trust them.” Over the years she denounced the Russian government as “wicked, villainous49 and atrocious,” the tsar as “full of hate … and tyranny,” and the people as “horrible, deceitful, cruel.” During the Russo-Turkish War she tried so hard to bully Disraeli into intervening that one politician’s wife observed that she had “lost control of herself, badgers her Ministers and pushes them towards war.”50 Alexander III detested her right back: “He said she was a pampered, sentimental, selfish old woman,” as well as “nasty” and “interfering.”51 Visiting German52 diplomats knew that the best way to put the tsar in a good humour was to tell damaging stories about the British royal family, especially the queen.

  Minny and Alexandra, however, were determined that personal relations should be more than civil. To that end, in 1874 they had promoted the marriage of Bertie’s younger brother Affie to Alexander’s only sister, Marie, a union the queen had yielded to with bad grace.* Their husbands acquiesced, Bertie partly out of loyalty to Alexandra, partly one suspects because it was in his nature to try to get on with people and make them like him; Alexander because the relaxed freedom of Fredensborg was important to him. Both also believed in the idea of the brotherhood of royalty; Bertie thought of being royal as his “profession;” Alexander liked to talk about the “monarchical principle,” the idea that royalty was linked by supra-national bonds—a philosophy contradicted by everything else he believed. According to his daughter, he respected Bertie but didn’t really like him. On the other hand, Bertie’s much publicized differences with his mother—gleefully covered by the European press—definitely made the Russians warm to him. The Romanovs decided to make a careful distinction between friendliness with the British royals and antipathy to Britain. It must have been a difficult line to hold. “I loved uncle Bertie and George and so many others,” Olga told an interviewer decades later, “and they have done so much for me. But, of course, it has never been possible to discuss with them the utterly vile politics of successive British parliaments. They were nearly all anti-Russian—and so often without the least cause. So much of British policy is wholly contrary to their own tradition of fair play.” For Olga, her father’s ambivalence was translated into an uncertainty about the British royal family’s smell, which for her teetered somewhere between an evocative wintry garden scent and acrid damp mouldiness: “English royalty smelled of fog and smoke … we ourselves smelled of well-polished leather.”54

  The fragility of the relationship between the two families was exposed whenever international relations became strained. In 1884–85, a crisis in Afghanistan seemed about to erupt into fully fledged armed conflict. “I can hardly see how we can avoid going to war with Russia now,” Bertie wrote to the British prime minister, William Gladstone, in the spring of 1885 at the height of the crisis. He told his mother that Russian “promises and assurances … are of no value whatsoever.”55 In fact, neither side wanted war and Britain and Russia eventually began negotiations that—to everyone’s surprise—produced a genuine resolution of boundary disagreements. Bertie met Alexander at Fredensborg that autumn, and reported to George that the visit had been “very quiet.” (Nicholas and Toria’s romance had cooled into friendship.) There were, however, other, equally bitter sources of dynastic conflict, namely Bulgaria, which to Alexander’s fury had proclaimed independence from Russia, under the leadership of Sandro of Battenberg, the German princeling the Russians had themselves installed. The Russians believed the newly independent Balkan states—many of which, like Bulgaria, had been liberated from the Ottoman empire with Russian blood and money—ought happily to acquiesce to Russian dominance. When he heard that Vicky, Wilhelm’s mother, wanted to marry her daughter Moretta to Sandro of Battenberg, Alexander couldn’t quell his suspicions that it was all a plot to build Anglo-German influence in the Balkans. The thought maddened him. In mid-1886 the Russians abducted Battenberg and forced him at gunpoint to abdicate. Bertie and Alexandra did not appear at
Fredensborg that year. The couples met up, however, in the summer of 1887, just as Russia and Germany were falling out seriously. Bismarck’s son Herbert56 was convinced Bertie and Alexandra had used the visit to turn the tsar against Wilhelm with stories of his unfilial behaviour. It’s possible that57 the tsar and the Prince of Wales bonded that summer over shared suspicions and stories about the young kaiser-to-be.

  In 1885, when Nicky was seventeen, a series of eminent ministers and academics was summoned to Gatchina to lecture the tsarevitch on international law, chemistry, military science and finance. It was a two-year mini-apprenticeship in government—a belated acknowledgement that one day he would actually be in charge of the whole Russian empire. How much benefit Nicky really derived from it was questionable. One of his lecturers, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, later said that when he tried to explain the workings of the tsarist state to Nicky, “I could only58 observe that he was completely absorbed in picking his nose.” Pobedonostsev was, nevertheless, an important influence in Nicky’s life. A senior Russian statesman and chief censor—the intelligentsia, who hated him, called him “The Grand Inquisitor”—he was fearsomely reactionary and was Nicholas’s father’s chief political mentor. He had come to believe that only autocracy in its most repressive form could “save” Russia and that Alexander II’s reforms had been a disaster. The masses, he said, were weak, childish and gullible; everything must be done to prevent the invasion of Western ideas such as freedom of the press and representative government. Russia must effectively stagnate, in order to keep the Romanovs in power. Many people believed Pobedonostsev was the moving force behind the domestic repressions of the 1880s.