The Tsar's Doctor (20 page)

Then even as the floods subsided, people in St Petersburg began to fall ill. Among them the Empress Elizabeth developed rheumatic fever, which badly affected her heart. Her own physician, Doctor Stoffregen, consulted Wylie who diagnosed her illness as firstly angina pectoris and later tuberculosis, which worsened her already weakened heart.
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The two physicians, greatly concerned for her, suggested to Alexander that, to escape the cold of St Petersburg, he should take his wife to recuperate in a warmer climate. He then put forward the idea of their going to Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov.

This caused great speculation. Why, the courtiers demanded, had Taganrog, of all places, been chosen as a suitable place for the empress, now known by everyone to be in a delicate state of health, to spend the winter? Taganrog was a small seaside port, built originally by Peter the Great on a site near the mouth of the River Don. It was not thought particularly healthy, there being river mashes nearby, and moreover it was well known to be prone to gales sweeping northwards across the Sea of Azov. Why, people asked, did they not go to the Crimea? There were some beautiful villas in Yalta, greatly superior to the Tartar houses in Taganrog. Why did the emperor not rent one of them? Moreover the climate there was warmer, so mild in fact that palms and semi-tropical plants flourished in profusion on the shores. No one, it seems, remembered that Crimean fever was endemic, although at the time it had yet to be discovered that mosquitoes were the carriers of the disease.

Whatever the arguments against Taganrog, the tsar would not be moved. His decision to go there has since prompted much conjecture that the real reason for choosing Taganrog was that it was a port where it would be easy to find a ship on which to slip out to sea unseen. At the time it was merely presumed that the tsar, who was known to be preoccupied with mysticism, was seeking a remote area where, for a time at least, he and the Empress Elizabeth, also known to hate public events, could live in seclusion, undisturbed.

The decision now reached, couriers were despatched immediately to find a suitable house in Taganrog. The little town, which then had about 8,000 or 9,000 inhabitants, stands on a promontory, from where, in the distance, the mountains of the Caucasus rear against the sky. To the east lies a bay, some distance from the mouth of the Don.

A house with eleven bedrooms, some of them with views over the sea, was found, and although rather small, it was considered suitable for the royal couple to rent. A visitor in 1890, calling it ‘the palace in Taganrog’ described it as it was then, apparently little changed from the time of Alexander and Elizabeth’s occupation sixty-five years before:

The palace in Taganrog consists of a small one-storey building. It has 13 windows facing the street; on the right is the gate which leads into the courtyard with a porch and an outhouse; there is a small garden on the left-hand side. The façade is painted in yellow ochre, its decorations are painted white; the roof supposedly was green. In general, the quite modest appearance of the building does not make it look like a palace.
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A string of wagons left St Petersburg for Taganrog, all of them loaded according to lists drawn up by Alexander himself. Curtains, carpets, beds and furniture, even the accoutrements of a chapel, china, silver, glass and ornaments were trundled down the length of Russia to the Sea of Azov in the south. Over and above this, every single stage of his wife’s journey was provided for by her husband including special pillow cases, candle shades, and even Dresden china for her breakfast and her tea. Elizabeth wrote to her mother, saying she was deeply touched by Alexander’s solicitude for her comfort. So worried was he, in fact, that no fewer than five doctors travelled with them, but it was only Wylie who, together with two aides-de camps, went on ahead of the empress with Alexander himself.

Before leaving St Petersburg Alexander interviewed all his ministers and wound up the affairs of state with the thoroughness for which he was renowned. On the evening of his departure he dined with his two brothers, Nicholas and Michael. ‘It was here,’ wrote Nicholas afterwards, ‘that he bade farewell to him for whom he ever cherished a sentiment of the deepest and most affectionate gratitude, and also to the Empress Elizabeth.’

Again with his extraordinary energy, Alexander was up at four o’clock the next morning to go alone, in the dark, to a service for the dead in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Afterwards he was closeted for some time in the cell of a celebrated hermit who had recently arrived in St Petersburg.

Leaving the church, and joined by Doctor Wylie and the two aides-de-camps who were to travel with him, he headed for Tsarskoye Selo to say goodbye to his mother and sisters. Day had now dawned and on a piece of high ground he ordered his coachmen to rein in the horses. Through gaps in the trees, as he looked back at St Petersburg, he could see the familiar view of the gilded spires and domes rising above the Neva, before the distant rim of the sea, shining clear in the morning light. Afterwards his faithful driver was to say that it had seemed as though he was committing to memory the great city of his realm.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The Doctor’s Diaries

First-hand accounts of the calamitous and historic incidents which took place in Russia from the autumn of 1825 until the following spring, are revealed by the diary kept by Sir James Wylie, and the journal of his fellow physician Doctor Robert Lee.

Wylie was mostly concerned with the state of the emperor’s health. Lee, on the other hand, wrote a vivid description of the Crimea, through which he was travelling just before and after Alexander and Wylie arrived at Taganrog.

Lee, after graduating at Edinburgh University, had led a varied and in many ways strange career. After working for one year in a country practice and two in Edinburgh hospitals he had, through the influence of the famous Sir Gilbert Blane, gone down to England to look after the epileptic son of William Lamb and his notoriously eccentric wife, Lady Caroline. After five unhappy years in that disordered household, he had managed to escape to Paris, where, after spending some time in improving his knowledge of anatomy in the dissecting rooms and clinics of the city, he had become doctor to the Bessborough family. Then, in 1824, when he was still only thirty-one, he had become personal physician to no less a person than Count Michael Vorontzov, Governor General of South Russia. Travelling across Europe from Paris he had finally reached the Ukrainian capital Odessa. The city, founded by Prince Potemkin, uncrowned emperor of South Russia, remained in a state of development. The palace of the Vorontzovs was not yet even finished, which meant that Lee had to live with the family in a house nearby.

Arriving in Odessa he had at first got the impression that society there was as free and easy as in London. But after some time, becoming suspicious, he had discovered that a plot was afoot to destroy the Emperor Alexander and subvert the government of the country. Intrigued, and slightly apprehensive, he had then been made aware of the powerful network of detection, organized to counteract subversion when, at a public ball, after he had been talking to Count de Witt, Prince Serge Volkonsky had tapped him on the shoulder and whispered in his ear ‘take care what you say, he is the emperor’s spy’.

Lee claimed that ‘the army is rotten to the core. Many of the officers detest the present system of government . . . and long to see the slaves educated and gradually emancipated.’ He then forecast, with remarkable accuracy, that the revolution, which he rightly believed to be inevitable, would begin in the ranks of the army.

That Alexander himself was aware of the unrest within Russia is clear from all contemporary accounts. It is also known, from his own words, that the weight of the responsibility that had been his since the death of his father twenty-four years before, was becoming almost more than he could endure. A main reason for going to Taganrog, in addition to Elizabeth’s frail health, must have been to escape for a time the constant demands put upon him in St Petersburg, if not perhaps forever.

Wylie, perhaps secretly, did keep a diary, jotting down the details of his visit with Alexander to Taganrog in that fateful autumn of 1825. His dates are those of the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian, which although by then commonly used in Britain, was not to be accepted in Russia until 1918.

From what he writes it would seem that Alexander made a diversion into Poland before heading south. Historians have since considered it significant that Wylie describes their arrival at Taganrog as the end of ‘the first part of their journey’. Presumably it can be taken that by then he knew of Alexander’s intention to visit the Crimea – or can it be surmised that he was already party to a plot by which, in this remote location, the tsar meant to stage his disappearance? Wylie begins his diary on 1 September 1825.

The leaves have started fading and falling, the grass has grown yellow; the morning was cold, the weather was beautiful. Like migrating birds we set off on our flight – the time has come for us to depart, in order to find a warmer climate. His Majesty approved of the list of medicines.

As was usual with Alexander, he travelled at a hectic speed. Details of the journey from the edge of the Baltic to the shore of the Sea of Azov, which drains into the Black Sea, noted by Wylie in his diary, show how it affected them both.

September 5th. We arrived at Dorogobuzh [about 50 m. E. of Smolensk] quite late; my ill health still persists; good weather holds; the roads are dry and wonderful. His Majesty assured me yesterday that he did not feel the slightest pain in his leg. This town trades mostly with Riga.

6th. Everything goes perfectly: the weather, the road. The horses agree with our wishes. Conversation today turned around political economy. Here we are entering the domain of Repnin.

7th. The weather has changed: it has become foggy and rainy. On my arrival I found 12 patients left in the hospital of the Sixth Division, they are very ill but on the other hand well kept. Doctor Korbov (22nd Infantry) is good.

8th. The roads are rather rough and the weather is rainy: today we spent the whole time in Novgorod,
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a market town, an unimportant place.

9th. The hospital in Sherbury(?) is in a good situation; the eparch served wonderfully in the cathedral; the weather has improved: the roads in the Orel and Kursk Governments are far superior to those in Chernigov.

10th. Spent the night at Bogatoye [about 50 m. E. of Kuyby-shev]. Duca’s people were present. I saw Bibikov. From there we headed for Chuguyev [approx. 25 m. S.E. of Kharkoy].

11th. We are in Chuguyev, in the palace. Leontovich and Shivanov arrived from Kharkov. The hospital is too far from the water, the windows are too high, the building has no eaves-troughs; the patient care is poor.

Travelling through the Ukraine the tsar saw for himself how the peasants were suffering due to locusts ravaging the land. Despite an exceptionally cold winter, when the Black Sea had frozen so hard that Constantinople and the Mediterranean had been cut off from all forms of shipping, the whole of the district, between the great rivers of the Danube and the Dniester, was over-run by these pests. By now they were spreading from beyond the Dnieper and the Don into the Caucasus. There were millions of them, said to move with the south wind only in the light of day. Doctor Robert Lee, who two months earlier, in July, had travelled from Kiev to Odessa, describes how:

They rose as our carriages approached, with a peculiar rattling noise, and in such number that they filled the air like flakes of snow in a storm. They swarmed in the streets of Odessa, in the vineyards and on the surrounding steppe, at the beginning of August, and masses of the dead bodies of those drowned in the sea covered the shore.

Everywhere peasants were working frantically, trying to destroy the pests. Gangs of men were digging ditches, hoping to control their advance. Lined up above were children, waiting to catch and destroy any insects that tried to crawl up the sides. Deep holes were dug in the trenches into which the locusts were swept before slaves shovelled them into sacks with wooden spades. Doctor Lee was distressed by the plight of the people of these areas.

A more wretched, ill-clothed, miserable race, I never saw; lodging in holes in the ground, worse covered than our common vagrants and beggars, and men behind them with whips which I saw used.
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In the Ukraine, at least in the summer months, the peasants simply lay down to sleep in the fields once their work was done. Across the steppes, however, came roaming bands of Tartars, proud, dark-skinned men in robes, their hair concealed by turbans, riding ponies with the ease of born horsemen. Their women and children travelled in wagons, which they drew up at night to form squares, the drivers sitting round their fires in the centre while the oxen grazed outside.

Returning to Odessa Lee then sailed with Count Vorontsov and his suite on Admiral Greig’s yacht to the Crimea. Aleksey Samuilovich Greig, an Admiral of the Imperial Russian Navy, was a son of the famous Samuel Greig, who, coming from Inverkeithing in Fife, had been appointed by Catherine the Great as commander of her famous navy. The son, so like him in appearance, was commander of the Black Sea Fleet and Military Governor of Sevastopol and Nikolayev. Also on board was Count Fyodor Pahlen, son of the organizer of Tsar Paul’s murder, now Plenipotentiary President of the Divans in the Danube principalities.

Having crossed the Black Sea to Sevastopol, Lee with several companions took leave of the admiral and sailed for Yoursouff, the seat of Count Vorontsov, on the south coast of the Crimea.

There, in the very south of the Crimea, they found themselves in what Lee describes as ‘a terrestrial paradise. The weather was delightful. There were none of the sudden and violent changes which happened so frequently in the countries lying to the north of the Black Sea’. Yet despite the near perfect climate the country was rampant with disease.