I recently re-read Simon Sebag Montefiore's masterful account of the Romanov dynasty. Simply titled The Romanovs: 1613-1918, Montefiore takes us on a journey from Michael Romanov's ascension to the throne, through the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, to the colourful Alexander II, his son Alexander III, and finally his son, Nicholas II. It did not bother me that I had read the book before; Montefiore's writing is so vivid as to allow any history lover to feel themselves transported in time, to get to know the very human characters who made up Russia's last imperial family. I highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in Imperial Russia.
But I didn't finish the book, and not just because I had read it before. In a recent piece on Richard Nixon, I wrote about how the often referenced danger of a biographer falling in love with their subject extends to the biography reader, and while I certainly had not grown to love Tsar Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra, I felt a huge amount of sympathy when reading about them because I knew how tragically their story would end. Their demise is even worse when one thinks of their five children, aged 13-22, slaughtered with the Tsar and Tsarina in a Siberian basement by Russian revolutionaries. So I stopped reading Montefiore's book soon after the point where Nicholas is forced to abdicate in 1917, because I just found it too sad.
It is well known that Nicholas and Alexandra were a devoted couple, madly in love with each other and their children, in contrast with some of Nicholas' more philandering predecessors. When they were apart, their letters to each other always enquired about the children, were always signed off affectionately - they mostly referred to each other as ‘Nicky', ‘Alix', ‘huzzy' or ‘wifey' - and quite often detailed the sexual acts they wanted to carry out on each other, hinting at a very active royal sex life. These details make them sympathetic to the reader who can recognise a happy marriage between two people who love and care deeply for their country and their family.
Nicholas and Alexandra pose for a photo surrounded by their five children (image from Britannica)
However, mixed in with my sympathy for Nicholas and Alexandra when reading about them was an utter abhorrence of their behaviour throughout Nicholas' reign. In a previous post about the pre-first world war dynasties of Europe I wrote that ‘one makes their way through (Miranda) Carter's book being both astounded by his (Nicholas') naivety and infuriated by his lack of imagination – all the more so when one is aware of the awful destination his follies are leading him to.' I felt exactly the same phenomenon when reading Montefiore's book, but would extend the quote to include Alexandra as well. My abhorrence of their behaviour was not from a moral standpoint - although Nicholas' outright encouragement of anti-semitic pogroms at various points in his reign stands out as absolutely shocking, even for an age rife with anti-semitism - so much as it was from the point of view that I remain astounded that they simply could not appreciate the critical mistakes they were making.
Nicholas' childhood was dominated by his father, the man mountain that was Alexander III, who drilled into his son that autocracy was the only way to govern Russia. The young heir, who as a teenager witnessed his grandfather, the reform-minded Alexander II, endure a painful death after being caught by an assassin's bomb, never forgot this lesson. In 1895, Nicholas used one of his first public speeches to declare that he would ‘retain the principles of autocracy as unbendingly as my unforgettable late father'.
Montefiore uses Nicholas and Alexandra's correspondence with each other and with other European royals to tease out their essential view of Russian politics; namely, that the Tsar is the expression of God's earthly power in Russia and as such is unanswerable to any civilian politician. The growing liberal, socialist and Bolshevik movements meant nothing to them, and they were intensely suspicious of St. Petersburg society. In 1895, Alexandra's grandmother, Queen Victoria of Britain, lectured her about the need to ‘win' the people's ‘love and respect'. The Tsarina replied: ‘you are mistaken my dear grandmamma; 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…as far as Petersburg society is concerned, that is something which one may wholly disregard.' As Montefiore grimly notes, this response explains much about what was to come for her and her husband.
The imperial couple's wake up call should have come in 1905. Emboldened by a series of disastrous Russian naval defeats to Japan in the far east, workers in St Petersburg rose in revolt, sparking a series of uprisings across other Russian cities and among peasants in the countryside. As his regime teetered on the brink, Nicholas' response was typically unimaginative: ‘you know I don't hold autocracy for my own pleasure,' he snapped at a minister. ‘I act in this sense only because it's necessary for Russia…I'll never accept a representative form of government because I consider it harmful to the people whom God has entrusted to me.' By the end of the year Nicholas was forced to accept an elected legislature, the Duma, but felt an immense amount of shame for having done so and sought to undermine it from the beginning.
Nicholas and Alexandra still inhabited a fantasy world where they were adored by an obedient Russian people, and they were simply unable or unwilling to accept the changing world around them. Reading Montefiore's book, I can't quite decide - did they refuse to relinquish any power because of their own lust for it? Or were they both just slightly unintelligent? I think it is more the latter, combined with a fierce amount of naivety and stubbornness.
Nicholas and Alexandra had effectively ‘got away with one' in 1905; I find it frankly unforgivable that they did not heed the warning. Instead of showing some contrition, they retreated further into their own delusions. These delusions were not helped by their introduction to the infamous Grigory Rasputin, the mysterious peasant priest whose reverence for the royal couple confirmed everything they believed about the Russian peasantry and the Tsar's divine connection to them. Rasputin was damaging in this sense, and became more so when a series of predictions he made about political events and their son's health (young Alexei tragically suffered from haemophilia) came true. The imperial couple, particularly Alexandra, were far too credulous about these apparent ‘miracles' and came to rely on Rasputin for advice which he had no place giving. Directly or indirectly, Rasputin had a hand in decisions ranging from ministerial appointments to foreign policies, arousing the intense jealousy of the professional politicians who ought to have been advising Nicholas. He and Alexandra were not blind to the disquiet that the influence of ‘our friend' was causing, but simply dismissed it as the concerns of a bourgeois political class who had lost touch with the soul of Russia. When reading about this I found myself becoming frustrated at them because of how foolish it all was, not only to let Rasputin dictate such decisions in the first place but also to ignore how politically vulnerable it made them. It goes back to what I said at the end of the previous paragraph - I just don't think they were very intelligent people.
Grigory Rasputin had an undue influence in the Russian court (image coloured by Marina Amaral)
When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist in June 1914 and Austria-Hungary threatened war with Serbia, Nicholas supported intervening on Serbia's behalf but quickly perceived how a conflict in the Balkans could engulf the whole of Europe. He frantically tried to reverse the Russian mobilisation and engaged in a desperate exchange of telegrams with his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who himself was appalled at the thought of a pan-European war. But neither emperor was able to prevent the outbreak of the war that would see them both lose their thrones.
Nicholas initially settled into the performative role as a war leader, but worried all the time about his troops on the front. Again, Montefiore provokes some sympathy for him when we see the Tsar wracked with guilt that he was sending ‘hundreds of thousands of Russian men to their deaths.' It is not that Nicholas was a bad man per se - if you can ignore his violent anti-semitism - but it is frustrating to read about an emperor and his wife putting their whole family in mortal danger through sheer pig-headedness and political ineptitude.
This perception of Nicholas is only re-enforced when, against the advice of all his ministers, he made himself commander of the Imperial army in 1915. Perhaps you can credit him for trying to take accountability, but in this action he made himself the face of Russian military failures, thus leaving himself even more politically vulnerable. The decision was compounded in its lethal misdirection when, instead of appointing a competent minister to look after the home front in his absence, Nicholas selected Alexandra.
The Tsarina was thrilled in her new role, and gleefully wrote to Nicholas about her new found confidence in giving various ministers a dressing down when she felt it was required. But she was utterly incapable of being an effective regent for her husband - not least because she remained so in thrall to Rasputin, to whom she disclosed top secret military plans. She and Rasputin made ill-conceived ministerial appointments, culminating in Boris Sturmer as Prime Minister and Alexander Protopopov as Minister for the Interior, neither of whom was up to the tasks they were asked to perform but both of whom were considered harmless by Rasputin, who Montefiore notes was ‘not acting out of megalomania: he was fighting for his life.' His political instincts were sharper than Alexandra's; he knew that allowing one of his many enemies to take either post would mean certain death for him. In the end, it didn't matter - he was assassinated at a dinner party in December 1916, with the entire Russian nobility, and even the Tsar's mother, closing ranks around the assassins and preventing Nicholas from punishing them. Nicholas and Alexandra arranged a private funeral for Rasputin, and did not even invite his daughters.
Russia's war was not as bad in military terms as it is sometimes portrayed, but that is only because there was a seemingly endless supply of soldiers who could be sent to the front. In human terms, vast numbers of Russian men were losing their lives because of ill-conceived plans which Nicholas, as commander-in-chief, was accountable for. On the home front, there was plenty enough food to go around but the ineffective ministers appointed by Alexandra could not make the logistical arrangements for the food to be delivered where it needed to be.
By the time Nicholas returned to St Petersburg - re-named ‘Petrograd' during the war to make it sound less German - in January 1917, Russia was on the brink. One morning, the Tsar's brother-in-law Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich dropped in on the royal couple in their bedroom and begged them to consider reform: ‘must we suffer your blind stubbornness?' Alexandra's response was revealing: ‘I refuse to continue this dispute….you're exaggerating the danger. Some day when you're less excited, you'll admit I knew better.' For his part, Nicholas ‘said nothing and continued to smoke.' Perhaps even he was beginning to appreciate the scale of the disaster that was about to befall him and his family.
Nicholas left Petrograd soon after, the last time he would do so as Tsar. In February, women gathered on International Women's Day to demand food, and soldiers brought in to quell the unrest mutinied and joined the women. The city became ungovernable, the unrest spread across the empire, the regime collapsed and Nicholas was forced to abdicate in a nondescript village, miles away from the capital. He relinquished the throne to his brother, Michael, who wanted no part in the process and himself abdicated within hours. The Romanov dynasty had come to an end.
This is where I stopped reading - we all know what came next. I was left to reflect on Russia's last imperial couple and the grotesque mistakes they had made to bring them to that Siberian basement in 1918. Both of them no doubt arouse sympathy in the reader, not just because of the manner of their deaths but because their letters reveal their very real human sides - loving, empathetic, concerned about their children and burdened by the responsibility on their shoulders. But their sheer instrangience in the face of such obvious danger leaves one perplexed and angry. How could they not see that such a rigid adherence to autocracy was unsustainable? How could they not appreciate the folly of entrusting decisions of state to a cynical Siberian peasant? How could they bury their heads in the sand when everyone around them warned for years about the danger of revolution? How could they have not heeded any lessons at all from the 1905 revolution? Perhaps some form of Russian revolution was unavoidable and would have occured whatever Nicholas and Alexandra did. But I don't sense that their lives had to end so horribly. Tragic and unjustifiable though their deaths were, I think they were entirely avoidable.
Cover image from Tatiana Z on Pinterest