Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (11 page)

Nevertheless, educated as he was in seclusion without the luxury of the free exchange and exploration of ideas with others, Nicholas’s world
view remained narrow and unchallenged. Worse, he lacked any real friends of his own. His thoughts and opinions about issues in which he remained untutored were not solicited or broadened, leaving him often surprisingly ingenuous. A selection of professors and generals were later recruited to teach him the complexities of military science, political economy and international law. But amidst the circle of servile bureaucrats, army men and aristocrats who made up his entourage, none were capable of teaching him the true qualities of statesmanship. Nicholas’s natural intelligence was dissipated in the dull and stultifying curriculum imposed upon him, and in response he was a dull and dutiful student. One man among them, however, exerted a considerable influence in shaping the young Tsarevich’s mind: the coldly ascetic Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Procurator of the Holy Synod and an arch-conservative, anti-Semite and adherent of autocratic monarchy. Pobedonostsev ‘put the final seal on an already closed mind’, convincing Nicholas that parliamentary institutions were corrupt and decadent and instilling in him an unshakeable belief in the high ideal of his role as
batyushka-tsar
and God’s chosen protector of an Orthodox-observant nation. Nicholas was, as his brother-in-law Aleksandr observed, a man ‘vividly of the old system’, who trusted ever after to his vision of a plain, honest, God-bearing people (as Dostoevsky saw them) loyal to their tsar – even when all the signs were there that he had long since lost their respect.

Nicholas’s life at home in the great gloomy 900-room palace at Gatchina was spartan, like that of a military cadet, despite his vast retinue of servants. He became a creature of simple habits: he slept on a camp bed with a single hard pillow and a very thin mattress in a room with few home comforts, taking cold baths daily, eating the plainest of Russian food and allowing himself only a single glass of Madeira at dinner. He remained ever after a man of simple habits and simple tastes, modest in his style of dress (he always wore the belted tunic and tall boots of a soldier, and only donned civilian clothes on visits abroad) and utterly unworldly with regard to the value of things; after his marriage, his and Alexandra’s lifestyle at Tsarskoe Selo was simple to the point of parsimony, and he never carried money. Lots of fresh air was de rigueur and he quickly turned it to his advantage, making it an outlet for his repressed emotions. Exercise became an absolute fundamental in his daily life, with Nicholas enjoying the country pursuits of hunting, shooting, fishing, swimming, playing tennis, rowing and, most particularly, long, vigorous walks.

But within the confines of his narrow, proscribed existence as heir to the throne, nothing had given him greater pleasure than joining the Preobrazhensky Guards when he was 19. Now, at last, he was released
from the dreariness of studies and initiated into the macho world of fine uniforms, military exercises and the officers’ club. Like any young initiate, Nicholas had thrown himself into army life with gusto. He stayed up late drinking, dining and playing billiards. He joined fellow officers on visits to the gypsies. Night after night he could be seen living up to the classic royal playboy image – going to balls, the theatre and opera. And soon he entered into a discreet affair, after falling for the Imperial Ballet’s prima ballerina, Mathilde Kschessinska. His love of the army and all its associated pageantry never left him, and even in 1916 he would privately confide that his most agreeable duty was going to the Front and being among soldiers; it also provided welcome opportunities for avoidance, even in 1917: ‘My brain feels rested here – no ministers and no fidgety questions to think over.’

When the time came, Nicholas, as heir to the throne, dutifully set off on the necessary rites-of-passage world tour, a 10-month journey to India and the Far East in 1890. On a stopover in Japan he was attacked with a sabre by a mentally disturbed man and wounded in the head, as a result of which he suffered for the rest of his life from severe headaches. But his preparation for the onerous duties of state, daily dealings with ministers and ambassadors, speech-making, and the complexities of official policy had barely begun when his father died prematurely, of kidney disease, in 1894. Nicholas found himself tsar at the age of 26 – too young and guileless, ill prepared by a father who had constantly stalled about giving him responsibilities. His sister Olga was very clear on the matter: it was all their father’s fault – ‘He would not even have Nicky sit in the Council of State until 1893.’ A year later the bewildered Tsarevich found himself at the head of what had seemed to him till then one vast ancestral family estate of which he was now the unexpected, benign landowner. He was terrified at the responsibilities to come. He did not yet know his people and they certainly did not know him. ‘What is going to happen to Russia?’ he asked his uncle Grand Duke Alexander. ‘I am not ready to be a tsar. I cannot rule the Empire. I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers.’

There was only one way in which Nicholas could cope with the huge and unending burden of official papers, many of them tedious and utterly trivial, that rapidly piled on to his desk. He adopted a rigorous routine to which he strictly adhered. Everything about his daily life was tidy, systematic, down to the rows of neatly ranked pens and pencils on his desk, the pedantic orderliness with which he carefully stuck thousands of photographs in his albums, the laborious way in which he composed letters. He was extremely hardworking and thorough in an unimaginative way, perversely refusing the help of a private secretary let alone a
secretariat, and often sitting up late over a vast range of documents that would have taxed the mental energy of several men. His coping strategy for the onerous responsibilities before him came from an extraordinary self-control – developed from a very early age with the help of his English tutor Charles Heath as a deliberate counter to an inborn hot temper. Whilst such calmness was repeatedly misinterpreted as indifference, if not a total absence of feeling, Nicholas’s personal rigour ensured an exceptional tolerance of the tedium of official work and endless audiences and state functions. But diligence could not make up for the absence of monarchical
gravitas
, or for the fact that whenever he found himself in a difficult or confrontational situation he was incapable of dealing harshly with people face to face. Such were the contradictions in a man who sought the opinions of others and courteously listened as they expressed them, but who was then incapable of making independent judgements. In the end he frequently resorted to accepting the advice of the last person he spoke to. He rarely acted on anyone else’s advice other than his wife’s, but when things went wrong he blamed his political misfortunes on his ministers, and rather than come into conflict with them simply dismissed them out of hand.

Avoidance became Nicholas II’s métier when faced with a stronger will than his own. And that included his wife. Alexandra was unendingly frustrated by her husband’s pathological timidity, his lack of moral courage. From the beginning she had recognised this fatal weakness and she spent her entire married life attempting to instil in her meek husband the magisterial demeanour of the great Russian tsars – Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great – who had gone before him. Traditionally Russians had long since seemed to respond best to ‘a touch of madness or magic in their rulers’, and Nicholas had neither. Marriage to the sickly and highly strung Alexandra, and with it capitulation to her baleful influence, dulled his natural gregariousness and he gradually ceased to engage with people in his normal way. Nevertheless, he remained confident that he had his own personal window on to what was best for the Russian people, refusing to face up to the many social and political problems confronting the country.

No doubt the seeds of Nicholas’s mistrustfulness of change, and with it a lifetime’s dread of assassination, had been sown when in 1881, at the age of 13, he had watched his horribly mutilated grandfather Alexander II die, the day they carried him into the Winter Palace after a bomb attack on his carriage on St Petersburg’s Ekaterininsky Canal. Nicholas’s own father’s reactionary response to the assassination and the threat of terrorism had been to govern Russia with a hard and retrogressive hand. He passed his autocratic policies on to his son and with them a profound
suspicion of any form of constitutional government. Fearful of innovation and change, Nicholas shrank back, clinging to his Oriental fatalism and to the steadying rock of ‘Papa’s policy’. He had no wish to break the oath made at his coronation to maintain and transfer to his long-awaited heir the autocratic system he had inherited from his father. And so he resisted the guidance of strong-minded politicians such as his prime minister Petr Stolypin and finance minister Sergey Witte. When men such as they attempted to take the initiative and suggest reform, he dug his heels in, seeing their action as a usurpation of his power. He could not bear to lose control. He preferred instead the reassuring mediocrity of those who did not challenge him and who told him what he wanted to hear. In his social contacts Nicholas eschewed the company of modernisers and industrialists, court society and representatives of contemporary culture in a backward-looking preference for the rituals and etiquette of what seemed to him the safe old order. The Russian masses were incapable of dealing with any other form of government, of that he and Alexandra were certain, and none was more vocal than she in expressing it: ‘We are not a constitutional country and dare not be; our people are not educated for it.’

But after the 1905 revolution and the horrific debacle of the massacre of nearly 200 marchers by Cossacks on Bloody Sunday, the faith of the common people in their benign
batyushka
had been seriously undermined and a rapid alienation of tsar and people had set in, irrevocably damaged by the Rasputin scandal. A rising tide of insurrection in St Petersburg forced the Tsar reluctantly into a ‘constitutional experiment’, announced in a manifesto of 17 October 1905. It was the beginning of the end of the old autocratic regime that Nicholas had cherished. The inauguration of the Duma did nothing to quell growing unrest in the country and the resurgence of a revolutionary movement that Alexander III had so rigorously suppressed. Repressive measures introduced in the wake of a string of terrorist murders, including that of Grand Duke Sergey in 1905 and Stolypin in 1911, now earned the Tsar the epithet of ‘Nicholas the Bloody’. Noble, high-minded, conscientious, courteous, selfless, chivalrous towards women – in every possible way the Tsar had once been viewed as a true gentleman. But now there was blood on his hands and the testimonies to his fine personal qualities as a private individual that had poured from the pens of courtiers, friends, priests, diplomats and ministers alike could no longer counter the new propagandist images portraying the Tsar as the repository of all the despotism and brutality of a corrupt and antediluvian system. Between 1906 and 1910, 3,741 people were executed for political crimes and thousands more sent into forced labour, exile and prison. The wave of revolution continued to rise until
1914; then the war came and with it an almost overnight reunion of tsar and people in one cause – defence of the motherland. But this lasted barely a year before a massive loss of faith in Nicholas’s wartime leadership brought further troubles and prophecies of the imminent collapse of the monarchy.

If Nicholas had abdicated in 1905, as many in retrospect have felt he should have done, he and his family might well have lived out their lives in quiet provincial retirement somewhere abroad. But instead of confronting the turbulent issues that Russia faced, Nicholas and Alexandra retreated to their palace at Tsarskoe Selo, to where they felt safe and unthreatened. Nothing, however, could stem the tide of gossip about the true nature of the Tsarevich’s haemophiliac condition and the increasing hostility towards Alexandra after she invested all her hopes for Alexey’s survival in the hands of Grigory Rasputin. Gossip and rumour, crude propagandist cartoons in the papers of the most salacious kind, all stoked the fires of disenchantment with their monarch among the population at large. And with it, the Imperial couple increasingly became subject to nameless fears. They saw plotting and betrayal at every turn and withdrew increasingly into the selfish protectiveness of family life. It gave them a false sense of security, and like the court of the Sleeping Beauty they slumbered on at Tsarskoe Selo, in wilful ignorance of what lay outside, beyond the palace gates.

When Nicholas finally abdicated, on 15 March 1917, he took it with complete equanimity, as part of God’s greater plan for him. As he confided to Anna Vyrubova, the Tsaritsa’s closest friend, if a scapegoat were needed to save Russia, then God’s will be done, he meant to be that scapegoat. One thing became clear: even at such a moment of crisis, no one was allowed to cross into the forbidden territory of the Tsar’s inner thoughts. To the end Nicholas remained inscrutable, enigmatic, a riddle to those around him. That day, while his mother sat sobbing and his entourage contained their own distress, he signed the abdication document and then, as the train taking him back to Petrograd pulled out, stood calmly staring out of the window of his carriage, lighting one cigarette after another. Within a couple of months of giving up his throne, his empire, his power, Nicholas was confiding to his diary the pleasures of now being able to spend more time with his ‘sweet family’ than in ‘more normal years’. Rowing, walking, sawing wood, digging the garden, riding bicycles with his daughters around the park at Tsarskoe Selo – such for him was true happiness. The only thing he missed about his former life was contact with his dear mama. ‘But I am indifferent to everything else’, he wrote.

He had not always been so detached. Throughout his reign, the signs
had been there of a constant inner battle in the Tsar to suppress his apprehensions and indifference when in the company of others: the deliberate slowing down of his speech, punctuated by pauses for thought, his unhurried movements, a scrunching of his toes in his boots or a shrugging of his shoulders – all signalled moments of insecurity or self-consciousness, as too did a nervous cough and the constant self-comforting stroking of his moustache and beard with the back of his right hand. His eyes, whilst warm and kind, never lighted for long on the person he was talking to but constantly flickered distractedly out into the distance. But of all the props Nicholas increasingly relied on to ease the anxieties and tensions of his burden as tsar, none was more important than cigarettes, which he chain-smoked, often using a pipe-shaped meerschaum cigarette holder. His smoking had become even heavier after the outbreak of the First World War. Cigarettes provided a literal smokescreen behind which Nicholas concealed his anxieties or lack of will to discuss issues or confront problems. He constantly lit one, stubbed it out half finished and lit another. Which was all very well all the time he was able to indulge his craving for nicotine with his usual Benson & Hedges bearing the imperial crest, or the delicious Turkish cigarettes sent to him by the Sultan just before hostilities with the Turks broke out in 1914. Even in Tobolsk a loyal member of his army staff, Major General Vladimir Voiekov, had managed to send the Tsar cigarettes. But by the time he arrived in Ekaterinburg, the fine cigarettes would probably long since have been exhausted and Nicholas was reduced to relying on his captors to give him cheap
papirosy
, with their cardboard tubes filled with the stinking
makhorka
tobacco so beloved of ordinary Russians. Nicholas hated the stuff and perhaps chose, as part of his road to Calvary, to suffer the agonies of nicotine withdrawal until occasionally the nuns from the Novo-Tikhvinsky Convent were able to bring him tobacco with the daily supplies of milk and eggs.