The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia Read online

  BLOODY NIKOLAS

  Back at Tsarskoe Selo, Nicholas decided to crack down on all his subjects. Now, he declared, they would “feel the whip.” Perhaps then they would think twice before rebelling.

  In cities all across Russia, police arrested anyone suspected of crimes against the tsar, imprisoning or exiling 38,000 so-called politicals, and executing another 5,000. Outspoken workers lost their jobs, their employers threatened with prison if they attempted to rehire them. Even children did not escape Nicholas’s terror. Police routinely rounded up workers’ children and beat them just to “teach them a lesson.”

  Things were worse in the countryside. Nicholas authorized what were known as Punitive Expeditions, detachments of tough, well-trained soldiers who restored order in the most brutal ways possible. Storming into a town or village, these soldiers killed citizens at random, burned entire communities without mercy, and left people wounded, homeless, and starving. “Don’t skimp on the bullets” were the orders they received. And they didn’t.

  Their work delighted Nicholas. Once, after reading a particularly gruesome report of hangings and beatings, he turned to an aide. “This really tickles me,” he said. “It really does.”

  It is estimated that between December 1905 and the start of the First Duma in April 1906, the Punitive Expeditions executed 15,000 people, wounded at least 20,000 more, and exiled another 45,000.

  One more measure was taken. In January 1906, with Nicholas’s agreement, his new prime minister—Peter Stolypin—established secret courts all across the country. The purpose of these courts was to allow for the quick arrest and conviction of anyone suspected of being a political revolutionary. Over the next two years, the tsar’s “extraordinary security,” as the police were called, rounded up more than 100,000 people. Stolypin’s courts sentenced most of these “politicals” to hard labor, prison, or exile. But at least two thousand were executed. The hangman’s noose soon became known as Stolypin’s necktie.

  Heads bowed, workers returned to their factories, peasants to their villages. By the saber and whip, order had been restored. The lower classes no longer acted out, recalled one noble, but their “courtesy, friendliness, bows [were replaced by] animosity [and] rudeness.” Fear alone now kept the people in their place.

  And the tsar had earned a new nickname—Bloody Nicholas.

  PROMISES MADE AND PROMISES BROKEN

  By the spring of 1906, Nicholas was also going back on the promises he’d made the previous October. “I am not convinced this [manifesto] requires me to renounce the right of supreme power,” he said. So just one week before the First Duma met, he decreed some new laws. He now granted himself absolute veto power over any law the Duma might try to pass, thus making his the final word on all legislation. Additionally, he gave himself the right to dissolve the Duma whenever he wanted, as well as the power to issue laws by imperial decree when the Duma was not sitting. Last but not least, he kept complete control over foreign policy, the military, the police, and the day-to-day administration of the government. By doing so, Nicholas effectively stripped the Duma of its power before it had even convened.

  And yet Nicholas still resented what he considered the Duma’s interference in his government. Under no circumstances, he decided, could its members (called deputies) be trusted.

  THE DUMA OPENS … AND CLOSES … OPENS … AND CLOSES

  On May 10, 1906, men from all walks of life, including noblemen in gold-braided uniforms, tradesmen in tailcoats, peasants in rough tunics, and workers in plain cotton blouses and coarse boots, streamed up the carved marble staircase of the Winter Palace. These were the Duma’s 524 duly elected deputies, representing all thirty-four provinces and three economic classes: landowners and wealthy businessmen; townspeople (including shop owners, tradesmen, doctors, lawyers, university professors, and factory workers); and peasants. Chosen through a complicated and indirect electoral process, the vast majority of deputies were noblemen and professionals. Still, one hundred peasants had found their way to the capital, as had twenty-five workers. And all had come to the Winter Palace for the opening ceremony of the nation’s first legislature.

  Entering the gold-and-white Imperial Throne Room, the deputies took their places on the left side of the hall. Some glared at the tsar’s ermine-draped throne, and at the four little stools on which sat the symbols of his power—the crown, the scepter, the seal, and the orb. A regimental band began playing the national anthem.

  On the other side of the hall stood the tsar’s ministers, admirals, and generals as well as members of the Romanov family—Nicholas’s sisters, brother, aunts, uncles, even cousins. The men had come in full dress uniform, their chests glittering with medals, while the women were adorned in silk and dripping with jewels.

  “The two … sides stood confronting one another,” recalled one eyewitness. “The court dignitaries … looked across in a haughty manner … at the ‘people off the street’ whom [events] had swept into the palace. One of the deputies, a tall man in a worker’s blouse, scrutinized the throne and the courtiers around it with obvious disgust. As the tsar and his entourage entered the hall, he lurched forward and stared at them with an expression of hatred.”

  As Nicholas approached the throne, the nobility’s side of the hall burst into cheers. But many of the deputies remained silent. “They neither crossed themselves nor bowed, but just stood with their hands … in their pockets,” Nicholas’s sister Xenia noted with shock. Instead, they watched, stone-faced, as the tsar mounted the dais.

  Pale, nervously twisting a pair of white military gloves he clutched in his hand, Nicholas began reading from a prepared speech. He said nothing about the rebellion that had forced him to create the Duma. Instead, he clung to the notion that it was all God’s will. “The care for the welfare of the country entrusted to me by the Most High,” he declared, “has caused me to summon representatives elected by the people to assist in the work of legislation.”

  While Nicholas spoke, Alexandra gripped her ostrich-feather fan so tightly her knuckles were white. She looked “tragic,” recalled one onlooker, “and her face became alternately red and pale.” When he finished, tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Nicholas, too, was overcome. As the imperial family filed from the hall, he could not hold back his emotions. “Poor Nicky was standing there in tears!” exclaimed Xenia.

  Shaken by the sight of so many commoners in the palace, Nicholas’s mother declared it a “terrible ceremony.… They … reflec[ed] a strange hatred for us all.”

  Nicholas’s sister Olga agreed. “The peasants looked sullen. But the workmen [from the cities] were worse. They looked as though they hated us.”

  Just two days later, the Duma demonstrated its anger over the tsar’s gutting of its power by demanding he release all political prisoners. The Duma knew that granting amnesty was Nicholas’s right. It also knew it could no longer enact laws without the tsar’s agreement. In other words, the deputies knew their demand was nothing more than a symbolic gesture. Their real goal was to give voice to their frustrations, and perhaps force the crown to return some authority to the Duma.

  Nicholas fumed. How dare the deputies make such a demand? Agreeing with Xenia who declared, “The Duma is such filth … a hearth of revolutionaries,” Nicholas decided to exercise his right to dissolve it. On July 21, 1906, the doors of the Tauride Palace were locked and the tsar’s imperial decree posted. Outraged deputies could do nothing to stop this action. After just seventy-two days, their legislative careers were over.

  Nicholas did not intend to allow a second election. This denial was also his right. Prime Minister Peter Stolypin convinced him otherwise. Stolypin grasped what Nicholas could not. The government needed to appear to be working with the Duma. The Russian people saw the tsar’s signature on the October Manifesto as a sacred promise. To violate it would anger the people. Did Nicholas really want to face another rebellion?

  Reluctantly, Nicholas changed his mind. He allowed the election of
a second Duma.

  But when the Second Duma (whose makeup was similar to the first) met in February 1907, it proved just as troublesome. And just as radical. Deputies publicly raged against the tsar and demanded, among other things, that Nicholas end capital punishment, abolish government violence, and start distributing nobility-owned estates to land-hungry peasants.

  And so, in June 1907—just three months after it was convened—Nicholas dissolved the Second Duma, too. “Slap! And they are gone,” he told his mother.

  But the legislative experiment was still not over. Another election for a third Duma, complete with new deputies, was set. Why did Nicholas bother? Because it gave the impression that Russia was becoming more democratic (especially important when making trade and military alliances with leaders of Western Europe who tended to see Russia as a backward country). Still, Nicholas could not stomach another hard-to-manage Duma. At Stolypin’s suggestion, he decreed a change in the voting system. Under the tsar’s new system, votes were heavily weighted by class. Now it took 230 landowners’ votes to elect a single deputy, 1,000 votes for wealthy businessmen to elect a deputy, and 15,000 votes for members of the lower middle class to elect a deputy. Peasants needed 60,000 votes before they could send a representative from their class to the Duma. And workers? They needed a whopping 125,000 votes!

  This electoral change placed power in the hands of the nobility, wealthy landowners, and businessmen—the very type of Russian that tended to support tsarism. Sarcastically called “the Duma of the Lords, Priests and Lackeys,” this third group of deputies, who took their seats in November 1907, was highly acceptable to Nicholas. With no reason to dissolve it, he allowed the Third Duma to sit for the next five years.

  RASPUTIN

  “We made the acquaintance of a man of God,” Nicholas noted in his diary in November 1905, just weeks after signing the October Manifesto. “Gregory from Tobolsk province.”

  Gregory Rasputin began his life as a peasant farmer. But one day, as he plowed the fields outside his Siberian village, he claimed to see a vision from God. Abandoning his wife and four children, he walked two thousand miles to a monastery in Greece. When he returned two years later, he declared himself to be what Russians called a starets—a holy man. Soon, he was wandering the countryside, blessing the poor and praying for the sick. By the time he arrived in St. Petersburg, he had gained a reputation as a healer and a prophet.

  Meanwhile, Nicholas and Alexandra had been frantically searching for a way to help their sick son. Medical specialists from across Europe had been called in. Priests had been summoned. Even a Tibetan herbalist had appeared at court. But Alexei still suffered. So when the imperial couple heard about Rasputin from cousin Militsa, they eagerly invited him to the palace.

  Did Nicholas and Alexandra cringe when Rasputin first appeared at Tsarskoe Selo that fall? According to some reports, the man was revolting, with his long, unwashed hair and scraggly, food-encrusted beard. Other eyewitnesses, however, contradicted this description. “Rasputin was exceptionally clean,” remembered his friend Alexei Filippov. “He often changed his underwear, went to the baths, and never smelled bad.”

  If the starets’ hands were soiled when he presented Alexandra with his gifts of holy icons and loaves of blessed bread, the royal couple surely looked past them. That’s because it was the starets’ astonishing eyes people noticed first. They possessed such a strange power, many people found it hard to resist his gaze. “[It] was at once piercing and caressing, naïve and cunning, far-off and intent,” recalled the French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue. “His pupils seemed to radiate magnetism.” No one knows what Rasputin and the imperial couple spoke about during their first meeting. But soon the starets began visiting the palace.

  He usually came after dinner, joining Nicholas and Alexandra in her lilac drawing room. After kissing three times in the Russian fashion, they would talk—about God, miracles, and Alexei’s health. Then the three would head upstairs to the nursery.

  There Rasputin led everyone, parents and children alike, into Alexei’s bedroom. “There was something like a hush,” recalled Nicholas’s sister Olga, “as though we had found ourselves in Church.… No lamps were lit; the only light came from the candles burning in front of some beautiful icons. [The children] stood very still by the side of the [starets], whose head was bowed. I knew he was praying. I also knew that my little nephew [and nieces] had joined him in prayer.” Added Olga, “[All the children] were completely at ease with him.”

  But it wasn’t just conversation and prayers that kept getting Rasputin invited to the palace. It was his apparent ability to ease Alexei’s pain.

  His aunt Olga remembered one such incident. Arriving at the palace, she learned her little nephew was sick. She immediately went up to the nursery to look in on him. “The poor child lay in pain, dark patches under his eyes, and his little body all distorted,” she said. “The doctors were just useless … more frightened than any of us … whispering among themselves.”

  Alexandra sent an urgent message to Rasputin in St. Petersburg. He arrived at the palace around midnight, and closing himself up in Alexei’s room, stood at the end of the bed, praying. Then he laid his hand on the boy’s leg. “There’s a good boy,” he said, his voice low and soothing. “You’ll be all right.”

  The next morning when Olga peeked in on her nephew, she could not believe her eyes. “[He] was not just alive—but well! He was sitting up in bed … [his] eyes clear and bright, not a sign of any swelling.”

  How had Rasputin done it? To this day, no one knows. Some historians have speculated that he used his strange, piercing eyes to cast a sort of hypnotic spell over the sick and frightened boy, calming him so the bleeding slowed. Others have suggested that the starets simply had good timing, that he waited until the symptoms had run their course before appearing at Alexei’s bedside to take credit for his improvement.

  But Alexandra believed Rasputin’s healing powers were a gift from God, the answer to all her long hours of prayer. Here at last, she told herself, was the man whose coming “Dr.” Philippe had foretold two years earlier: the man “who will speak to you of God.”

  SCHOOL DAYS

  On a fall morning in 1908, Sydney Gibbes, a nervous man with painstakingly combed brown hair, arrived at the Alexander Palace. Strangely, he wore a long-tailed frock coat, black bow tie, and silk top hat. The unsuitableness of his outfit made him even more nervous. Still, “[court] etiquette was that gentlemen who had not a uniform wore evening dress,” Gibbes later explained, “and so I set off to the Palace in evening dress at 6:00 in the morning. A ghastly experience!”

  Gibbes’s nerves could be chalked up to more than his clothing. Here he was, the new English teacher for the three oldest grand duchesses, and he had yet to meet a single member of the imperial family. Neither Nicholas nor Alexandra had even bothered to interview him. Seemingly summoned out of the blue, he found himself being led to a small schoolroom on the second floor. For several minutes, he was left there alone. Then the door opened. And Gibbes braced himself. The imperial children, he had heard, “generally behaved like young savages.”

  But Gibbes saw none of this—at least not right away. “I took my first lesson with the two elder girls … [thirteen-year-old] Olga and [eleven-year-old] Tatiana.… Then I had the third daughter [nine-year-old Marie] by herself.”

  Seven-year-old Anastasia and four-year-old Alexei were still too young for school. But while Gibbes was teaching, the tsarevich sneaked down the hall to visit the schoolroom. “A tiny little chap in wee white knickerbockers and a Russian shirt trimmed with … embroidery of blue and silver,” recalled Gibbes, Alexei “toddle[d] into my classroom … look[ed] around and then gravely shook hands.”

  Gibbes was not the only tutor. The grand duchesses’ lessons were taught by a string of teachers who arrived at the palace once or twice a week to focus on a particular subject. Among them was Peter Petrov, a friendly old man who taught Russian; Catherine Schneider, the Ge
rman instructor; and Master Sobolev, the arithmetic teacher.

  Sadly, these teachers were mostly a “mediocre bunch,” recalled a family friend. “Not one of [them] enjoyed any prominence or had any outstanding achievement to his credit,” agreed a member of court. Thus the grand duchesses’ education was “to some extent neglected.”

  This was their parents’ fault. Nicholas and Alexandra put little stock in education. “I was amazed that such a family, which possessed all the means, did not surround the children with the best possible teachers,” remarked one observer. “Just how little attention was paid to the children’s development could be judged by the interest with which they listened to the most ordinary things, as though they had never seen, read, or heard about anything. At first I thought this was simple bashfulness. But soon I came to realize that the situation concerning their education and intellectual development was very bad.”

  And for too long, remembered court official A. A. Mosolov, “the grand duchesses had no teacher. There were nurses to be seen in their apartments, but that was all. When the nurses had gone [because the children had grown too old for them] they had virtually no supervision, except, of course, that of their mother.” But Alexandra did nothing to challenge their intellect. Instead, claimed Mosolov, she “remained always in an arm chair, motionless, and never spoke to her daughters in the presence of a third party.”

  Even with teachers, the grand duchesses’ curriculum was an easy one. They studied some literature (although, curiously, none of Russia’s great classics), religion, a little science, and only the most basic math. What they needed most, Alexandra felt, was languages—Russian, French, English, and German. “Four languages is a lot,” she admitted, “but they need them absolutely.” They were, after all, necessary for everyday living. English was the language spoken within the family circle because Alexandra’s Russian was shaky. Russian, of course, was the children’s native tongue, and they occasionally spoke it with their father and others but never when their mother was present. German was their mother’s native tongue, and even though Nicholas spoke it fluently, he and Alexandra never used it to communicate with each other. And French was spoken at court.