Secret Lives of the Tsars (26 page)

Tensions between father and son became particularly fraught when young Alexander refused to give up his Polish mistress, a woman Nicholas found entirely unsuitable for the heir to the Russian throne. To resolve the issue, the emperor was prepared to follow the example of the one Romanov predecessor he admired most. “But for me the State counts above everything else,” he wrote to his wife in 1839; “and much as I love my children, I love my fatherland much more still. And, if this becomes necessary, there is the example of Peter the Great [see
Chapter 2
] to show my duty; and I shall not be too weak to fulfill it.” Alexander obligingly gave up the girl.

Even the emperor’s beloved wife, Alexandra, was not immune to her husband’s bouts of fury. Nicholas had fallen in
love with the Prussian princess, whom he endearingly called “Mouffy,” when he visited her father’s kingdom as a young man. And nineteen years after they married, he was still smitten.

“God has given you such a happy character that it is no merit to love you,” Nicholas wrote to Alexandra in 1836. “I exist for you, yes, you are I—I do not know how to say it differently, but I am not your salvation, as you say. Our salvation is
over there
yonder, yonder where we shall all be admitted to rest from the tribulations of life. I mean, if we earn it down here by the fulfillment of our duties. Hard as they may be, one performs them with joy when one has a beloved being at home near whom one can breathe again and gain new strength. If I was now and then demanding, this happens because I look for everything in you. If I do not find it, I am distressed, I say to myself, no, she does not understand me, and these are unique, rare, but difficult moments. For the rest, happiness, joy, calm—that is what I seek and find in my old Mouffy. I wished, as much as this was in my power, to make you a hundred times happier, if I could have divined how this end could have been obtained.”

In many ways Alexandra was the perfect mate for the temperamental emperor: sweet, submissive, and just flighty enough not to harbor any political opinions she might be tempted to express. “Her tender nature and shallow mind replaced principles with sensitivity,” wrote the empress’s lady-in-waiting Anna Tyutcheva. “Nicholas had a passionate adoration for this frail and exquisite creature of a strong nature for a weak thing, who obediently turned him into her sole ruler and legislator.… Nicholas placed her in a golden cage of palaces, brilliant balls, and handsome courtiers.… In her magical dungeon she did not once think of freedom. She
did not allow herself to dream of any life beyond the golden cage.”

The one occasion Alexandra did seek a respite from her gilded existence at court, Nicholas made her regret. The empress’s health was always fragile—a constant source of irritation to her robust and restless husband—but in 1845 it grew markedly worse. Alexandra’s physician recommended she avail herself of the healing sunshine of Sicily to restore her strength, and the empress agreed. But with an attachment to his wife that bordered on obsessive, Nicholas reacted as if the doctor had suggested she sleep with the Third Army Battalion.

Alexandra recorded in her diary that the emperor “appeared beside himself, that is, in his own way like no other man could be, not storming or angry, or crying, but icily cold and that towards me. He did not address to me two sentences in the course of an entire week. Those were such bad days, such a burden, such tugs at the heart that I had to become sick and nervous. But I shall write no more about this.”

Rather than tormenting poor Mouffy as she tried to improve her health, the emperor might have taken comfort in the arms of one of his mistresses. There were plenty to choose from, after all. Indeed, like so many of his Romanov ancestors, Nicholas’s libido knew few limits.

“He gave his attention … not only to all the young beauties in the court—the ladies-in-waiting—but also the young women he met during walks,” reported Custine. “If someone caught his fancy on a walk or at the theater, he told his adjutant. She would then be checked. If there was nothing against her, the husband (if she was married) or her parents (if a maiden) were informed of the honor that had befallen them.… The tsar never met resistance to his lust.… In that
strange country sleeping with the emperor was considered an honor … for the parents and even the husbands.”

In the spring of 1844, Nicholas I made a state visit to Britain, after which Queen Victoria, then just a young woman of twenty-five, recorded her impressions of the all-powerful Russian sovereign who had dominated his realm for nearly two decades:

“He is certainly a
very striking
man; still very handsome; his profile is
beautiful
, and his manners
most
dignified and graceful; extremely civil—quite alarmingly so, as he is full of attentions and
politesses
. But the expression of the eyes is
formidable
, and unlike anything I ever saw before. He gives me and Albert [the queen’s consort] the impression of a man who is
not
happy and on whom the weight of immense power and position weighs heavily and painfully; he seldom smiles, and when he does the expression is
not
a happy one.…

“He is stern and severe with fixed principles of
duty
which
nothing
on earth will make him change:
very clever
I do
not
think him, and his mind is an uncivilized one; his education has been neglected; politics and military concerns are the only things he takes great interest in; the arts and all softer occupations he is insensible to, but he is sincere, I am certain,
sincere
even in his most despotic acts, from a sense that it
is
the
only
way to govern.”

What the queen saw as sincerity actually amounted “to a burning conviction, by normal human standards bordering on the insane, of the absolute rectitude, the divine virtue of his own views,” wrote historian Edward Crankshaw. “And yet, with this conviction there went a profound, concealed uncertainty.” It was, in fact, fear—the inner terror that had haunted
the emperor since he was a boy and which he masked with unswerving despotism. The refuge of the frightened was, as it always had been, immobility; a desperate clinging to a fixed order, without growth, risk, or enlightenment. Thus, Crankshaw concluded, “The reign of Nicholas I was not a development; it was a prolonged situation.”

In July 1849, the emperor wrote a rather self-pitying letter to his wife in which he expressed the concept of
duty
as the essence of his very being. But, if he replaced that word and idea with
fear
—raw, all-consuming terror—the emperor would have presented a near-perfect encapsulation of himself and his reign:

“How remarkable really is my fate. I am told that I am one of the mightiest rulers of the world, and one must say that everything, that is, everything that is permissible, should be within my reach, that, within the limits of discretion, I should be able to do what I please and where. But in fact just the opposite is the case as far as I am concerned. And if one asks about the basic cause of this anomaly, there is only one word: Duty! [
Fear!
] Yes, this is no empty word for those who have become accustomed from their youth to understand it as I have. This word has a sacred meaning which makes all personal considerations retreat, everything must keep silent in front of this one feeling, everything must step back, until one, together with this feeling, disappears into the grave. That is my key word. It is hard, I admit it, I suffer more from it than I can tell—but I have been created to suffer.”

Decades of effort spent trying to sustain a stagnant empire in the face of an inevitably changing world began to take a physical and psychological toll on the emperor as early as 1846. “He has to make an effort to conquer fatigue, to do what seemed easy to him until now,” the Austrian ambassador
reported that year. “He has become silent. He avoids assemblies. He says that society, balls, and fetes have become a drudgery, and that he prefers to live like a bourgeois.… The conviction is gaining more and more ground that the Emperor, in spite of his constant work and energy, will not succeed in doing the good he wants to do, nor in destroying the evil he sees.”

The decline of “Virgil’s Neptune” had indeed commenced, and it would accelerate rapidly in the coming years as he witnessed the revolutions in central Europe he had worked so assiduously to prevent, the worsening health of his beloved Mouffy, and the continued strain of ruling Russia virtually alone. “Emperor Nicholas has aged ten years,” reported the French diplomat Marquis de Castelbajac in 1854. “He is truly sick, physically and morally.”

The crowning blow came with the devastating defeats the emperor’s forces suffered in the Crimean War, a conflict Russia fought all alone against a coalition of European powers. Then, in February 1855, Nicholas, not yet fifty-nine, caught a slight cold but ignored it and continued his routine. After a review of his troops in subzero temperatures, pneumonia set in, and his condition quickly turned grave enough for his doctor to call in a priest.

“Then I am dying?” Nicholas asked calmly, his cold eyes boring into the doctor.

“Your Majesty,” the physician replied, “you have only a few hours left.”

The emperor, autocrat to the end, issued various orders in his final hours on March 2. Then, with his last breaths he addressed his son, soon to become Alexander II: “I wanted to take everything difficult, everything heavy upon myself and leave to you a peaceful, orderly, and happy realm. Providence
determined otherwise. Now I shall ascend to pray for Russia and for you. After Russia, I loved you above everything else in the world. Serve Russia.”

Now, all that was left was Nikitenko’s terse assessment of the late emperor: “The main failing of the reign of Nicholas Pavlovich was that it was all a mistake.”

*
1
“He cannot smile at the same time with his eyes and his mouth,” Custine also noted; “a disharmony which denotes perpetual constraint.” The essayist Alexander Herzen was one of many others who commented on the emperor’s eyes, which he described as “entirely without warmth, without a trace of mercy, wintry eyes.”

*
2
Count Benckendorff, a close associate, wrote of Empress Maria: “Demanding of herself she was also demanding of her subordinates; always tireless, she did not favor them if they appeared tired; finally, loving sincerely and constantly those to whom she had deigned to give her friendship or whom she patronized because of the inclination of her heart or of her mind, she demanded from them complete reciprocity. The only failing of this extraordinary woman was her being excessively, one may say, exacting of her children and of the people dependent on her.”

*
3
Peter the Great had once decreed that the sovereign could name an heir of his own choosing. A century later, Emperor Paul altered the law to limit the succession only to the monarch’s oldest male son. Women were barred entirely from ever again inheriting the crown.

^*4
In renouncing the crown, Constantine reportedly declared that he would be pleased to serve as the sovereign’s “second valet; just not to be tsar on the throne.”

Alexander II (1855–1881): “A Crowned Semi-Ruin”

Am I such a wild beast that they should hound me to death?

—E
MPEROR
A
LEXANDER
II

Alexander II was every bit the autocrat his father, Nicholas I, had been; he just lacked the same ferocity. Even when he tried to adopt the late emperor’s icy glare, he came off looking more absurd than scary. Still, the son surpassed his father in one significant way. While Nicholas I had pronounced serfdom “an evil, palpable and obvious to all,” Alexander II actually did something about it. On March 3, 1861—nearly two years before Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation—the emperor signed the order freeing twenty million of his subjects from centuries of bondage to masters who could beat, rape, and kill them with impunity. And though the measure was more expedient than benevolent—“If we don’t give the peasants freedom from above, they will take it from below,” he had said—it nevertheless earned Alexander II the enduring sobriquet “Tsar-Liberator,” and launched major reforms in the courts and in the army, which had long forced serfs into its ranks to be slaughtered on countless battlefields
.