A People's Tragedy (7 page)

The result of all this was to deprive the government of effective leadership or coordination during the final years of the tsarist regime. Nicholas was the source of all the problems. If there was a vacuum of power at the centre of the ruling system, then he was the empty space. In a sense, Russia gained in him the worst of both worlds: a Tsar determined to rule from the throne yet quite incapable of exercising power. This was

'autocracy without an autocrat'. Perhaps nobody could have fulfilled the role which Nicholas had set himself: the work of government had become much too vast and complex for a single man; autocracy itself was out of date. But Nicholas was mistaken to try in the first place. Instead of delegating power he indulged in a fantasy of absolute power. So jealous was he of his own prerogatives that he tried to bypass the state institutions altogether and centre power on the court. Yet none of his amiable but dim-witted courtiers was remotely capable of providing him with sound advice on how to rule the country, coming as they did from a narrow circle of aristocratic Guards officers who knew nothing of the Russia beyond St Petersburg's fashionable streets. Most of them were contemptuous of Russia, speaking French not Russian and spending more time in Nice or Biarritz than on their landed estates in the provinces. Under the court's growing domination, Nicholas's government was unable to create coherent policies to deal with the

mounting problems of society which were leading inexorably towards revolution.

During its final years, especially after Stolypin's downfall in 1911, the government drifted dangerously as one sycophantic mediocrity after another was appointed Prime Minister by the Tsar. Nicholas himself spent more and more time away from his office.

Government business had to be delayed for weeks at a time, while he went off on hunting trips, yachting parties and family holidays to the Crimea. But in the apparently secure refuge of his family another tragedy was unfolding.

iii
The Heir

The Empress Alexandra found the jubilee celebrations a strain. She dragged herself with difficulty to all the public functions, but often left early with obvious signs of distress.

At the magnificent ball given by the Moscow nobility she felt so ill that she could scarcely keep her feet. When the Emperor came to her rescue, it was just in time to lead her away and prevent her from fainting in public. During the gala performance at the Marinsky Theatre she appeared pale and sombre. Sitting in the adjacent box, Meriel Buchanan, the British Ambassador's daughter, observed how the fan she was holding trembled in her hands, and how her laboured breathing:

made the diamonds which covered the bodice of her gown rise and fall, flashing and trembling with a thousand uneasy sparks of light. Presently, it seemed that this emotion or distress mastered her completely, and with a few whispered words to the Emperor she rose and withdrew to the back of the box, to be no more seen that evening. A little wave of resentment rippled over the theatre.24

The fact was that the Empress had not appeared in public on more than a dozen occasions during the previous decade. Since the birth of her haemophiliac son, the Tsarevich Alexis, in 1904, she had secluded herself at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo and other imperial residences away from the capital. It had been hoped that she would use the opportunity of the tercentenary to improve her public image. Having turned her back on society, she had come to be seen as cold and arrogant, while her dependence on the 'holy man' Rasputin had long been a matter of political concern because of his growing domination of the court. Yet shortly before the jubilee the illness of her son had taken a turn for the worse, and this was constantly on her mind during the celebrations. To make matters worse, Tatyana, her second daughter, had fallen ill with typhoid after drinking the infected water of the capital.

Alexandra did her best to conceal her inner anguish from the public. But she lacked the heart to go out and win their sympathy.

Alexandra was a stranger to Russia when she became its Empress. Since the eighteenth century, it had become the custom for Romanov rulers to marry foreign princesses. By the end of the nineteenth, inter-marriage had made the Romanovs an integral part of the family of European crowned heads. Their opponents liked to call them the 'Gottorp-Holstein' dynasty, which in genealogical terms was not far from the truth. Most statesmen shared the view that the balance of power in Europe would be secured by these dynastic ties. So there was reason to welcome the engagement in April 1894 of the Tsarevich Nicholas to Princess Alexandra, or Alix for short, daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt and Princess Alice of England. It was expected that the Princess would have plenty of time to prepare herself for the role of Empress. But Alexander III died only six months later, and the 22-year-old woman suddenly found herself on the Russian throne.

Although in later years she was to be cursed by her subjects as 'the German woman', Alexandra was in fact in many ways the quintessential English woman. After the death of her mother, in 1878, she had been brought up in England by her grandmother, Queen Victoria, whose strict morals, attitudes and tastes, not to speak of her tenacity of purpose, she had assimilated. Alexandra spoke and wrote with Nicholas in English.

Russian she spoke poorly, with a heavy English accent, only to servants, officials and the clergy. Her housekeeping at the Alexander Palace was austerely Victorian. Factory-produced furniture was ordered from Maples, the English middle-class department store, in preference to the fine imperial furniture which much better suited the classic Empire style of the Alexander Palace. Her four daughters shared a bedroom, sleeping on narrow camp-beds; the Empress herself was known to change the sheets. Cold baths were taken every day. It was in many ways the modest ambition of Nicholas and Alexandra to lead the lifestyle of the English middle class. They spoke the cosy domestic language of the Victorian bourgeoisie: 'Hubby' and 'Wifey' were their nicknames for each other.25 But the Empress was wrong to assume, as she did from her knowledge of the English court, that such a lifestyle, which in England was a result of the monarch's steady retreat from the domain of executive power, might be enjoyed by a Russian autocrat.

From the beginning, Alexandra gave the impression of resenting the public role which her position obliged her to play. She appeared only rarely at court and social functions and, being naturally shy, adopted a pose of reserve in her first appearances, which made her seem awkward and unsympathetic. She gained a reputation for coldness and hauteur, two very un-Russian vices. 'No one liked the Tsarina,' wrote the literary hostess Zinaida Gippius. 'Her sharp face, beautiful, but ill-tempered and depressed, with thin, tightly pressed lips,

did not please; her German, angular height did not please.' Learning of her granddaughter's unpopularity, Queen Victoria wrote to her with some advice: There is no harder craft than our craft of ruling. I have ruled for more than fifty years in my own country, which I have known since childhood, and, nevertheless, every day I think about what I need to do to retain and strengthen the love of my subjects. How much harder is your situation. You find yourself in a foreign country, a country which you do not know at all, where the customs, the way of thinking and the people themselves are completely alien to you, and nevertheless it is your first duty to win their love and respect.

Alexandra replied with an arrogance suggesting her reputation was deserved: You are mistaken, my dear grandmama; Russia is not England. Here we do not need to earn the love of the people. The Russian people revere their Tsars as divine beings, from whom all charity and fortune derive. As far as St Petersburg society is concerned, that is something which one may wholly disregard. The opinions of those who make up this society and their mocking have no significance whatsoever.

The contents of this correspondence soon became known in St Petersburg circles, resulting in the complete breakdown of relations between the leaders of high society and the Empress. She steadily reduced her public appearances and limited her circle of friends to those from whom she could expect a slavish devotion. Here lay the roots of her paranoic insistence on dividing court and society into 'friends' and 'enemies', which was to bring the monarchy to the brink of catastrophe.26

The unpopularity of the Empress would not have mattered so much had she not taken it upon herself to play an active political role. From her letter to Queen Victoria it was clear that the mystical attractions of Byzantine despotism had taken early possession of her. Even more than her mild-mannered husband, Alexandra believed that Russia could still be ruled — and indeed had to be — as it had been ruled by the medieval tsars. She saw the country as the private fiefdom of the crown: Russia existed for the benefit of the dynasty rather than the other way round. Government ministers were the private servants of the Tsar, not public servants of the state. In her bossy way she set out to organize the state as if it was part of her personal household. She constantly urged her husband to be more forceful and to assert his autocratic will. 'Be more autocratic than Peter the Great', she would tell her husband, 'and sterner than Ivan the Terrible.' She wanted him to rule, like the medieval tsars, on the

basis of his own religious convictions and without regard for the constraints of the law.

'You and Russia are one and the same,' she would tell him as she pushed him this way and that according to her own ambitions, vanities, fears and jealousies. It was the Tsarina and Rasputin who — at least so the public thought — became the real rulers of tsarist Russia during the final catastrophic years. Alexandra liked to compare herself with Catherine the Great. But in fact her role was much more reminiscent of Marie Antoinette, the last queen of
ancien-regime
France, whose portrait hung over her writing desk in the Alexander Palace.27

Alexandra made it her mission to give the Romanov dynasty a healthy son and heir. But she gave birth to four daughters in succession. In desperation she turned to Dr Philippe, a practitioner of 'astral medicine', who had been introduced to the imperial family in 1901 during their visit to France. He convinced her she was pregnant with a son, and she duly expanded until a medical examination revealed that it was no more than a sympathetic pregnancy. Philippe was a charlatan (he had been fined three times in France for posing as a regular practitioner) and left Russia in disgrace. But the episode had revealed the Empress's susceptibility to bogus forms of mysticism. One could have predicted this from the emotional nature of her conversion to Orthodoxy. After the cold and spartan spiritual world of north German Protestantism, she was ravished by the solemn rituals, the chanted prayers and the soulful singing of the Russian Church. With all the fervour of the newly converted, she came to believe in the power of prayer and of divine miracles. And when, in 1904, she finally gave birth to a son, she was convinced it had been due to the intercession of St Seraphim, a pious old man of the Russian countryside, who in 1903 had been somewhat irregularly canonized on the Tsar's insistence.

The Tsarevich Alexis grew up into a playful little boy. But it was soon discovered that he suffered from haemophilia, at that time incurable and in most cases fatal. The disease was hereditary in the House of Hesse (one of Alexandra's uncles, one of her brothers and three of her nephews died from it) and there was no doubt that the Empress had transmitted it. Had the Romanovs been more prudent they might have stopped Nicholas from marrying her; but then haemophilia was so common in the royal houses of Europe that it had become something of an occupational hazard. Alexandra looked upon the illness as a punishment from God and, to atone for her sin, devoted herself to religion and the duties of motherhood. Had the nature of her son's illness not been kept a secret, she might have won as a mother that measure of sympathy from the public which she so utterly failed to attract from it as an Empress. Alexandra constantly watched over the boy lest he should fall and bring on the deadly internal bleeding from which the victims of haemophilia can suffer. There was no way he could lead the life of a normal child, since the slightest accident

could start the bleeding. A sailor by the name of Derevenko was appointed to go with him wherever he went and to carry him when, as was often the case, he could not walk.

Alexandra consulted numerous doctors, but a cure was beyond their science. She became convinced that only a miracle could save her son, and strove to make herself worthy of God's favour by donating money to churches, performing good works and spending endless hours in prayer. 'Every time the Tsarina saw him with red cheeks, or heard his merry laugh, or watched his frolics,' recalled Pierre Gilliard, the Tsarevich's tutor, 'her heart would fill with an immense hope, and she would say: "God has heard me. He has pitied my sorrow at last." Then the disease would suddenly swoop down on the boy, stretch him once more on his bed of pain and take him to the gates of death.'28

It was her desperate need to find a miracle cure that brought Rasputin into her life and into the life of Russia. Grigorii Rasputin was born into a relatively wealthy peasant family in the village of Pokrovskoe in western Siberia. Until recently it was thought that he had been born in the early 1860s; but it is now known that he was younger than people assumed — he was in fact born in 1869. Little more is known about Rasputin's early years. A commission set up by the Provisional Government in 1917 interviewed a number of his fellow villagers, who remembered him as a dirty and unruly boy. Later he became known as a drunkard, a lecher and a horse thief, which was almost certainly how he acquired his surname, from the word
rasputnyi,
meaning 'dissolute'.* At some point he repented and joined a group of pilgrims on their way to the nearby monastery of Verkhoturye, where he stayed for three months before returning to Pokrovskoe, a much changed man. He had renounced alcohol and meat, learned to read and write a little, and become religious and reclusive. The main cause of his conversion seems to have been the 'holy man' or
starets
Makarii, a monk at the Verkhoturye Monastery, whose spiritual powers, like those of the
starets
Zosima in Dostoevsky's
Brothers
Karamazov,
had attracted disciples from all over the region. Makarii had been received by the Tsar and the Tsarina, who were always on the lookout for Men of God among the simple folk, and it was Makarii's example that Rasputin later claimed had inspired him.