Secret Lives of the Tsars (24 page)

Even after Napoleon recrossed the Nieman, the conflict between emperors was still not over. Alexander had sworn that only one of them would end up with a crown. And so it came to be: The Russian tsar was hailed in Paris as Europe’s liberator, while the Corsican ogre he pursued to the last ended up a permanent resident of Elba.

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While her son disdained all the ceremony and glitter of sovereignty, and opted to live quietly, his haughty, cold, and categorical mother, Dowager Empress Maria, reveled in her royal position. “The Empress Mother is the one who displays her imperial state,” Savary reported to Talleyrand. “Every external honor, every homage is directed to that point.… The great personages of St. Petersburg are careful not to let two weeks pass without making an appearance at the Empress Mother’s. [Empress] Elizabeth [Alexander’s wife] almost never appears there, but the Emperor dines there three times a week and often sleeps there.”

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Napoleon’s courtesy did not extend to the monarchs of the various German kingdoms he now controlled. Indeed, they were treated as mere ornaments. During one formal dinner, King Maximilian Joseph raised his voice a little too loud for the French emperor, who snapped, “Hold your tongue, King of Bavaria!”

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There had long been concerns in France that Napoleon was too intoxicated by power and ambition. “The Emperor is mad, completely mad,” Minister of the Navy Denis Decrès declared; “he’ll bring ruin upon himself and upon us all.”

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Virtually nothing was accomplished by the assault on Smolensk, which the Russians abandoned and burned, except utter annihilation. “One had to walk over debris, dead bodies and skeletons which had been burned and charred by fire,” recalled a French officer. “Everywhere unfortunate inhabitants, on their knees, weeping over the ruins of their homes, cats and dogs wandering about and howling in the most heart-rendering way, everywhere only death and destruction.”

Nicholas I (1825–1855): “A Condescending Jupiter”

The emperor of Russia is a military commander, and each of his days is a day of battle.

—G
RAND
D
UKE
C
ONSTANTINE, BROTHER OF
N
ICHOLAS
I

The childless Alexander I was succeeded not by the legal heir, his brother Constantine, who rejected the crown, but by his next younger brother, Nicholas. The new emperor was an impressive sight indeed. “Colossal in stature,” as one American observer described him; “with a face such as one finds on a Greek coin … he bore himself like a god.” But behind this “regular Jupiter … every inch a king,” as another called him, lurked a trembling despot, terrified of losing control. His was a look of “worried severity,” the Frenchman Astolphe de Custine wrote. And it was those two essential qualities—fear and ferocity—that defined the sovereign who would rule Russia for three decades with the absolute repression he believed was essential to his survival. “If the Emperor has no more of mercy in his heart than he reveals in his policies, then I pity Russia,” Custine wrote; “if, on the other hand, his true sentiments are really superior to his acts, then I pity the Emperor.”

Crime and Punishment
had yet to be written; the same was true of
The Brothers Karamazov
. And on a bitter cold December
day in 1849, it appeared they never would. For it was then that the author of these future literary classics happened to be facing a firing squad. Fyodor Dostoevsky had taken a grave risk in meeting regularly with a group of fellow artists and intellectuals who freely expressed their thoughts on a variety of subjects, including the abject condition of the Russian serf. Such indulgences were downright dangerous during the repressive regime of Tsar Nicholas I, when strict adherence to the official doctrine of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” was required of all the emperor’s subjects.

Having dared stray beyond this narrowly proscribed creed with their political discussions, the members of Dostoevsky’s circle were denounced as subversives and duly arrested. Then, after enduring eight months of harsh imprisonment and interrogation at the Peter and Paul Fortress, the novelist and twenty other freethinkers in his circle were sentenced to death.

On the appointed day, the condemned were taken to the place of execution at Semenovsky Square, where three stakes had been erected for the occasion. “The horrible, immeasurably horrible minutes of awaiting death began,” Dostoevsky wrote. “It was cold, so terribly cold. They removed not only our coats, but our jackets. And it was minus twenty degrees.”

As Dostoevsky and the others stood shivering upon a black-draped scaffold awaiting their fate, the condemned men of the first group were tied to the stakes and hoods placed over their heads. “We were taken in threes,” the writer recalled. “I was in the second group. I had no more than a minute left to live.” Yet just as the firing squad raised their rifles and took aim, a sudden reprieve came from the emperor. Rather than a lethal lesson in the perils of independent thought, it was a cruel charade with the same message, orchestrated by Nicholas himself.

“I received the news of the termination of the execution dully,” Dostoevsky remembered. “There was no joy at returning to the living. People around me were shouting and making noise. But I didn’t care. I had already lived through the worst. Yes, the very worst. Wretched Grigoryev went mad.… How did the others survive? I don’t know. We didn’t even catch cold.”

It was only after being returned to his prison cell that Dostoevsky came to fully embrace the joy of having his life restored—even though he now faced four years of hard labor in Siberia, followed by a forced induction into the army. He was alive. And Russian literature would be far richer for it. Others, however, were not so fortunate.

The nearly three-decade reign of Nicholas I was inaugurated in bloodshed when, in 1825, what became known as the Decembrist Rebellion was decisively crushed on the very first day of the new emperor’s rule. Five of the rebel leaders were subsequently hanged, while numerous others—including members of Russia’s most ancient noble families—were condemned to eke out whatever meager existence they could in the frozen Siberian wastelands. It was a fitting launch to the tsar’s totalitarian regime, the likes of which would not be seen again until Stalin held sway less than a century later.

“Here everything is oppressed; cowering in fear,” wrote Custine, the French observer of Nicholas’s Russia; “everything is grim, silent, and blindly obedient to the invisible rod.”

Every Russian was considered the emperor’s slave—from the lowliest serf to the grandest nobleman—and with that came the requirement of total submission to the imperial will.
In the midst of a modernizing world, Nicholas I reinvigorated an autocracy reminiscent of Ivan the Terrible. He ruthlessly established himself as the sole font of authority, answerable to no one but God. “Everything must proceed from here,” the emperor declared while pointing to his breast.

The Enlightenment that swept through the rest of Europe with its odious concepts concerning the rights of man would not infect Russia. Nicholas made certain of that. As Dostoevsky and countless others discovered, free expression was strictly forbidden and censorship elevated to an art. Indeed, the tsar himself spent endless hours poring over books, plays, and periodicals, searching for anything that might smell of subversion. And with the emperor’s brutally efficient secret police force, complemented by a vast network of informers, ordinary Russians could never escape the feeling that invisible eyes and ears were everywhere. “They’re in my soup!” one contemporary exclaimed.

With his imposing stature, refined classical profile, and a regal glare that one observer noted “had the quality of a rattlesnake to freeze the blood in your veins,” Nicholas I looked every inch the autocrat. “Virgil’s Neptune,” Custine called him;
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“one could not be more emperor than he.” Yet beneath the godlike bearing that awed all who encountered him, Nicholas was a churning mass of anxiety and paranoia—the demons that drove him to rule with such unswerving ferocity.

“Nicholas I’s insistence on firmness and stern action was based on fear, not confidence,” wrote his biographer Nicholas Riasanovsky; “his determination concealed a state approaching panic, and his courage fed on something akin to despair.”

The neuroses that plagued Nicholas may have had something to do with the fact that he was just four when his father, Emperor Paul, was murdered with the complicity of his older brother, Alexander, and he was left with an imperious mother who cared little for him.
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The traumatized little boy was consigned to the care of his tutor, Count M. I. Lamsdorf, who was, as Nicholas later related, something less than nurturing:

“Count Lamsdorf instilled in us only the feeling of fear; such fear and certainty of his omnipotence, in fact, that our mother assumed only secondary importance in our understanding. This arrangement deprived us completely of any filial confidence in our mother, into whose presence we were rarely admitted alone and then, only as if some sort of sentence was being passed upon us. Incessant changes in the personnel of our entourage instilled in us from our earliest childhood the habit of searching for weakness in them in order to turn them to our advantage.… Fear, and efforts to escape punishments, occupied my mind more than anything else.”

Fireworks, thunder, and cannons all frightened the emotionally deprived child, who often lashed out with an impotent rage at those around him. “Whatever happened to him,”
an observer reported, “whether he fell down, or hurt himself, or whether he believed that his wishes remained unfulfilled and that he was insulted, he would immediately use abusive words, hack with his little axe the drum and other toys, break them, and beat his playmates with a stick or with anything else at hand, even though he loved them very much, and had a particularly passionate attachment to his younger brother [Michael].”

The only comfort the young man seemed to find as he grew older was in rigid military discipline. Like his father (Paul) and grandfather (Peter III) before him, Nicholas delighted in constant drilling, designing uniforms, and inflicting punishment for the slightest infraction. A true martinet, he was thoroughly despised by the men serving under him. But for Nicholas, the military was a means of regimenting the chaos that would otherwise consume him.

“Here [in the army] there is order,” he wrote, “there is a strict unconditional legality, no impertinent claims to know all the answers, no contradiction, all things flow logically one from the other; no one commands before he has himself learned to obey; no one steps in front of anybody else without lawful reason; everything is subordinated to one definite goal, everything has its purpose. That is why I shall always hold in honor the calling of a soldier. I consider the entire human life to be merely service, because everybody serves.”

It was this concept of rigid harmony—of service and obedience, without question—that Nicholas I sought to impose on his subjects. “The emperor of Russia is a military commander,” wrote his brother Constantine, “and each of his days is a day of battle.”