The Three Emperors Page 9
It was one of the peculiarities of the age that despite Russia’s political Anglophobia there was a strong strain of cultural Anglophilia in Russian society. Just like his cousins Georgie and Willy, Nicholas and his siblings spent their first years surrounded by English nurses and nannies, and the cold baths, long walks and plain food—porridge and boiled mutton—of an English nursery. Among the Russian nobility, as among many European royalty, English nannies were very much in vogue—one of the consequences being that many Russian aristocrats read and wrote English before Russian. Nicholas and his siblings certainly spoke good English from early on. The xenophobic tsar himself was devoted to his old English nanny, Kitty, who spent forty-six years in imperial service. Behind the walls of his favourite palace, Gatchina, described as an “English-style” stone palace complete with moat, the royal family lived neither in vast marble splendour as the Prussian did, nor in traditional Muscovite surroundings, but in modestly sized, distinctly English bourgeois-style rooms. Alexander disliked the public, palatial living of his ancestors, and the family inhabited a series of relatively small, stuffy rooms filled with bulky furniture and overstuffed sofas covered with English chintz.
Beyond their domestic arrangements, however, nothing about the Romanovs was small scale; everything was huge. Gatchina Palace outside St. Petersburg, where the family moved when Nicholas was twelve, had 900 rooms, most of them, except for the royal apartments, empty, dusty and dirty. One estimate put the number of royal servants across the Romanovs’ palaces at 15,000.15 The British royal family never lived on this scale. At George’s parents’ famously luxurious Christmas at Sandringham (“Dickens in a16 Cartier setting,” was how their grandson, the future Edward VIII, described it), there was one enormous Christmas tree round which presents for the servants were stacked. The Romanovs had six trees just for the family, in a hall many times bigger than any room in Sandringham. The Nicholas ball, the biggest court occasion of the St. Petersburg season, had 3,000 guests. Throughout the year there was a constant round of processions, formal receptions, presentations and banquets, all on a vast scale involving thousands of generals, churchmen, chamberlains, gentlemen and ladies of the court. At Anichkov Palace on Nevsky Prospekt, where the family spent the early months of the year, Nicholas would watch his mother dressing each evening, fussed over by five maids and the Mistress of the Wardrobe, stepping into the heavy silver brocade dress prescribed by imperial etiquette, ten rows of pearls around her neck—so covered in jewels she looked like an oriental deity. In spring, the family went to Peterhof, the huge Romanov estate on the Gulf of Finland, and stayed in one of the many family villas that dotted the estate. Summer was spent on the royal yacht, with perhaps a trip to Denmark or to the estates in balmy Livadia in the Crimea. Every move was a logistical nightmare. For a three-week trip to Denmark, the family was routinely accompanied by twenty railway trucks of baggage and an entourage of a hundred, to say nothing of the security around them. Since the first assassination attempt on Alexander II in 1866, the royal family had been surrounded by a wall of security. When they travelled by train from St. Petersburg to Moscow, soldiers lined the entire 400-mile track to protect it from sabotage.
The lives of all European royals were circumscribed by ritual and etiquette, but Russian ritual and etiquette were the most interminable. All royalty had to learn to stand for hours, but the Russians stood the longest. At Easter, even the smallest child was stuffed into full court dress and required to stand through a three-hour church service followed by an Easter egg–giving ceremony during which the tsar personally greeted the 5,000 men of the imperial guards regiments, and presented each with a porcelain egg. This could take all day. Once they were out of the nursery, etiquette pursued the children everywhere: at lunch and dinner they often ate with Alexander’s entourage. Meals lasted exactly 50 minutes,17 the youngest were served last, and Nicky’s sister Olga recalled that the children often had time for only a few mouthfuls before it was all over. On one occasion Nicky was so hungry that he prised open his gold cross which had in it a fragment of the True Cross embedded in wax, and ate the contents, wood and all. It was, he confided to Olga, “immorally good.”18 Henceforth anything really delicious was always “immorally good.”
There were compensations. At Gatchina, the children had a menagerie including an albino crow, a wolf and a tame hare, and an enormous indoor playground. The palace’s Arsenal hall had a billiard table, a fortress full of toy soldiers, a mini-mountain to climb and a fully functional model kitchen. Next door was a room of stuffed animals and beyond it hundreds of rooms to explore, including the fairy-tale room, full of frescoes illustrating Pushkin’s stories. Outside in the thousands of acres, there was a lake, an echo grotto and secret passages leading back into the palace.
Like Willy and George, Nicky left the nursery when he was seven, with his brother George, to be educated by his governess, Alexandra Ollongren. It was an induction a good deal gentler than that of many of his Russian cousins who were forced immediately into a life of austere military discipline. He saw his parents twice a day, at 11 a.m. to discuss his day and briefly before bed, and sometimes he would be “commanded” to accompany his father on an afternoon walk. He was bright, a fast learner with an aptitude for languages, and his English was particularly good. Then, aged ten, in 1879, having easily passed the middle school exam taken by boys of his age, he was handed over, in the usual way for a European prince, to a military governor, Grigory Danilovich, who oversaw both his military training and the rest of his education. Even at the conservative Russian court Danilovich was regarded as hopeless. “That old dotard19 of a Jesuit,” one member of the Romanov household later called him. Nicky referred to him as the “Cholera;” his cousin Sandro thought Danilovich “simple-minded.” Nicholas’s education became skimpy: a smattering of history, which he really enjoyed, a bit of geography and chemistry, and instruction in English, French and German—at which he was very good. He was also taught to dance, as the tsar had to lead the polonaise at every imperial ball. Like Bertie and Alexandra, the tsar and his wife weren’t very exercised about education. Alexander felt he’d done perfectly well without it; Minny, like her sister, believed that good manners, religious education and a decent grasp of languages were quite sufficient. Neither they nor Danilovich saw any need for larger thinking about how to prepare the heir for his future rule. Danilovich told Nicky that “the mysterious forces emanating during the sacrament of taking the oath on the day of the coronation provided all the practical data required.”20
Nicky’s favourite tutor was his English teacher, Charles Heath. Heath, a popular former master at the Alexander Lycée, St. Petersburg’s grandest school, didn’t just teach English, he taught English public school values: decency, fairness and the virtues of self-control and good manners, the alleged qualities of an English gentleman. “Aristocrats are born,”21 he told the boy, “gentlemen are made.” It was a lesson Nicky absorbed; from his late teens his great courtesy and almost English politeness were frequently commented upon—and not always appreciatively. Such control was “un-Russian.” As one of the government’s most able ministers, Count Witte, would later write with some bitterness, “I had rarely22 come across a better-mannered young man than Nicholas II. His good-breeding conceals all shortcomings.” In fact, Heath’s concept of gentlemanliness was almost the only novel idea in the whole of Nicky’s childhood.
Not surprisingly, Nicky’s idea of life outside his tiny world was extraordinarily limited; nor was it helped by his parents’—perhaps understandable—desire to protect their children from the world’s harsh realities. The depth of the children’s inexperience is encapsulated in the fact that though their mother gave them a relatively spartan upbringing, it had no context: many European aristocrats disdained cash, but the children had no idea of the value of anything. Etiquette forbade any member of the imperial family from setting foot in a shop. As a teenager Xenia gave her mother a sapphire-encrusted silver perfume bottle for Christmas which she�
�d picked out of a selection that Cartier had sent for her mother to see; Xenia had no idea that it was worth much more than the little presents she stitched herself. The Romanov children knew nothing about their grandfather’s reforms. Newspapers were banned from the nursery, as Minny, like Alexandra, insisted that politics be kept out of her children’s education. As far as they were concerned, General Cherevin, a senior officer in Okhrana, the brutal secret police, was “Friendly, generous and humble” and “very popular in St. Petersburg.”
Not that Nicholas wouldn’t have liked more experience of the world. When they were in St. Petersburg, his and Xenia’s favourite pastime was standing for hours behind the high balustrades that surrounded Anichkov Palace, watching ordinary people walking down Nevsky Prospekt.
Overlaying everything was a deeply idealized fantasy about “Russianness” which Alexander passed on to his children, but which was belied by practically everything about their upbringing. Almost nothing about the Romanovs was “Russian.” Their lives were those of Westernized aristocrats, their court etiquette was German, their parks and palaces were neoclassical, their home comforts English. Even by blood they were barely Russian at all, the product of endless marriages into German royal families. Nicholas’s mother was Danish, and his paternal grandmother was German, as his paternal great-grandmother had been. It was perhaps the reason Nicholas became so attached to the rituals of Russian Orthodoxy, the one “authentic” Russian experience open to him. He and his siblings knew hardly anything about “the real Russia”: they’d never seen the “black earth” of Russia’s central heartland; they barely knew Moscow, its traditional capital. They habitually idealized Russian peasants but never met any. They were told that their father’s affectation of peasant clothes was a sign of his deep understanding of the common people. They assumed that the palace servants, who’d often served the family for generations and had as little connection to the peasant communes as they did, represented the average Russian peasant. When they saw the masses beyond the palace, they were invariably soldiers cheering their father at reviews or weddings. “The look of love and dedication in all those upturned faces was unforgettable,” Nicky’s sister Olga insisted decades later. “… Between the crown and people was a relationship hardly ever understood in the West. That relationship had nothing to do with government or petty officialdom.”23
After the Russian Revolution overturned their lives, several of Nicky’s Russian cousins wrote memoirs dwelling on the miserable inadequacy of their childhood, the repression of personality that was demanded, how they were trained to engage with the modern world as little as possible and what a disaster this turned out to be. Sandro recalled the pointless isolation and strictness and how lonely he was. The Grand Duchess Marie, another of Nicky’s cousins, bemoaned the closedness and the helplessness it engendered: “they kept me purposely24 in ignorance of the situation into which I had been born.”
In March 1881, when Nicky was twelve, his grandfather Alexander II—having just that morning signed a new constitution which set up conditions for a very limited form of representative government—was mortally injured in a terrorist bomb attack. He was carried, bleeding profusely, to his study in the Winter Palace. Nicky was on his way to skate with his mother and his cousin Sandro. Hearing the explosions, the two boys ran to the palace, where they followed the blood on the marble floors to the emperor’s study. The tsar’s wounds were horrific: his right leg was torn off, his stomach was ripped open, his face covered in blood. “His face was25 deadly pale,” Nicholas remembered years later. “There were small wounds all over it. My father led me up to the bed. ‘Papa’ he said, raising his voice, ‘your sunshine is here.’” In front of his grandson and family, the tsar bled to death.
Alexander II’s death meant the end of Russia’s experiment with liberalization. His son, now Tsar Alexander III, tore up the new constitution and resolved to restore the autocracy. To ensure that no one misunderstood his intentions his first proclamation announced, “We shall preside26 serenely over the destinies of Our Empire, which henceforward will be discussed between God and Ourself alone.” The government bestowed on itself special powers to suspend the rule of law whenever and wherever it felt threatened—a state of affairs that continued until 1917. Alexander brought in a slew of “counter reforms,” including severe press censorship, legislation to ban the employment of those regarded as politically suspect, the abolition of the autonomy of universities, and the harsh exclusion of those from non-noble or non-professional backgrounds from grammar schools and universities—so as to close down the social mobility that Alexander II’s reforms had allowed. In the name of quelling “rural disturbances,” the power of the new zemstvos, which had proved such a force for progress, was overridden by new government enforcers, “Land Captains,” who could impose punishments without trial and set aside court decisions at will.
Beyond the Russias, Alexander brutally extended his father’s not especially enlightened policy of Russification, from Poland and Finland to Muslim Transcaucasus. Local languages were outlawed; non-Orthodox believers such as Catholics, Muslims and Protestants were discriminated against; Jews, whom Alexander literally regarded as “Christ-killers,”27 were viciously persecuted: excluded from education, expelled from their homes and subjected to brutal, often police-initiated, pogroms. As a result, the 1880s saw the first wave of Jewish mass emigration from Russia, and created the perfect breeding ground for a generation of furious, disaffected revolutionaries. By the 1890s the disenfranchisement of peasant communities had created intense resentment, and the Russification policies helped a series of equally furious separatist movements to take root across the empire. Nor was Alexander able to put the genie back in the bottle, however much he wanted to: Russia was—slowly and painfully—changing.
At the time, however, Alexander was perceived in Russia as a great success: a big strong man to keep the empire safe. The 1880s were a time of confidence in Russia. It seemed, one of his nephews wrote, as if Russia had recaptured a “new proud,28 ‘imperial spirit.’” The literate classes largely accepted Alexander’s new repressive laws as the price of security. His swiftness in hunting down and hanging his father’s killers appeared to have utterly crushed the nascent revolutionary movement. Those who worked for him were impressed by his toughness and lack of self-doubt. Even clever, sophisticated men like his minister of finance, Serge Witte, who recognized the tsar was no genius and that his views were simplistic, praised his “noble outstanding29 personality.” He even managed at times to look progressive. He supported Witte’s plans for Russia’s industrialization, though the way capital was raised—through the exportation of grain levied from subsistence peasant farmers who needed it to feed themselves—would contribute to an appalling famine in the early 1890s. And he kept Russia out of expensive foreign wars. Not that Alexander felt any special warmth for anywhere abroad—quite the opposite in fact. “We have just two30 allies in this world … our armies and our navy. Everybody else will turn on us on a second’s notice.” He was inveterately xenophobic—even of the new Germany, led by Russia’s traditional ally, Prussia.
The two countries shared not only a long frontier but complex dynastic, cultural and historical links. Like the British royals, the Russian tsars had found the German kingdoms a handy source of wives—so much so that both the British and Russian royal houses were more German than anything else. There had been so much intermarriage with Germans that three of the junior branches of the Romanov family were naturalized German families: the Oldenburgs, the Leuchtenbergs and the Mecklenburg-Strelitzes. And for generations, in the absence of its own indigenous professional class, the Russian government had welcomed large numbers of clever, ambitious Germans into senior government office, to such an extent that a large proportion of senior Russian statesmen was German by descent. The relationship had always had a delicate balance. Until unification, the German states had always been the junior partner, even if culturally and intellectually they were far ahead. For
educated Russians, Germany was the centre of culture: the home of Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Bach, Mozart, “German symphonism,” and more recently Nietzsche and even Marx. Russian audiences had embraced them all. It was Russia’s might, however, which had bulldozed Napoleon out of Germany.
Yet there had long been fault-lines in the relationship, and many Russians resented Germany’s cultural and intellectual dominance. Many Germans in turn distrusted the colossus which loomed on their eastern frontier. Germany’s rise onto the world stage and its implicit assertion that it was Russia’s equal, not junior, created a host of new strains and suspicions. In 1878, at the Congress of Berlin, Russia had been deprived of most of the spoils it had just won in the Russo-Turkish War, giving rise to a—not unjustifiable—feeling in St. Petersburg that Chancellor Bismarck was not quite the devoted ally he claimed to be. It was true: while Bismarck wanted to keep Russia sweet, he was not prepared to give unqualified support to its interests. He had also decided that he needed to be on good terms with Austria-Hungary—for which Russians of all classes felt a growing antipathy as both countries competed for influence in the Balkans. It was becoming increasingly and discomfortingly clear as well that Russia had become vulnerable to German financial muscle. Germany had become the Russian government’s main source of borrowed money, and it was the chief market for Russian wheat. If Bismarck closed the money markets or raised grain tariffs—as he would in the late 1880s—Russia was in trouble. It was galling to realize that Russia had nothing like the same purchase on the German economy.
Xenophobia was widespread across Europe, but it was particularly virulent in the Russian educated classes. Instinctive hostility towards other nations was inculcated, according to Nicky’s cousin Sandro, by the Orthodox Church “and the monstrous31 doctrine of official patriotism”: his class hated “Poles, Swedes, Germans, British and French,” while reserving special hatred for Jews, “the monstrous doctrine.” From the 1880s, moreover, rising nationalism and expansionist ambitions were being channelled into the notion of Pan-Slavism, and pointed at Germany as a dangerous potential rival to their ambitions in central Europe. Pan-Slavism had begun as a romantic, philosophical exceptionalism, a belief that Russian spirituality, the “all-uniting Russian soul,” had a unique ability and a special mission to heal “the anguish of Europe.” It had quickly turned into a chauvinistic justification of the Russian “mission” to dominate the Balkans, accompanied by the view that it was inevitable that the Teutons and the Slavs32 would eventually duke it out.