Secret Lives of the Tsars (25 page)

Nicholas was never supposed to be emperor, at least according to the strict law of inheritance enacted by his father.
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The childless Alexander I should have been succeeded by Nicholas’s older brother Constantine, but the legal heir, then serving as the military governor of occupied Poland, had renounced his claim years before.
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It was at that time Alexander named his second younger brother as his heir in a secret manifesto that he immediately had stashed away—perhaps with the intention of destroying the document should Constantine ever reconsider. Nicholas, who had never been prepared for the role of sovereign and was perfectly content imposing his will as a military commander, was horrified to learn that his future had now been inexorably altered. He later described his feelings:

“My wife and I remained in a position which I can liken only to that sensation that would strike a man if he were going calmly along a road sown with flowers and with marvelous scenery on all sides when, suddenly, an abyss yawns wide beneath his feet, and an irresistible force draws him into it, without allowing him to step back or turn aside.”

The secrecy that had surrounded the altered succession proved to be most problematic when Alexander I died in 1825. Most Russians assumed that Constantine would be the next emperor. Further complicating matters, Nicholas himself swore fealty to his brother. He had been warned by the
military governor of St. Petersburg that a conspiracy to overthrow the government had been festering for some time among certain officers of the Guard, and that the hatred they felt for “martinet Nicholas” could very well precipitate a rebellion should he take the crown.

All too familiar with the fate of his forebears at the whim of the Guard—including the murder of both his father and grandfather—Nicholas was more than amenable to ceding the dangerous throne back to his older brother, the legal heir. Unfortunately, Constantine remained firm in his earlier renunciation. “My previous intention is immutable,” he declared in a message from Warsaw. Now Nicholas was stuck. “Pray to God for me,” he wrote to his sister. “Take pity on your wretched brother, victim of the Will of God and his two brothers.”

The confusion surrounding the succession—when the oath of allegiance was sworn first to Constantine then almost immediately switched to Nicholas—afforded the rebel Guards officers and their followers an ideal opportunity to strike. And on December 26, 1825, the first day of Nicholas I’s reign, they did. Fueled by fiery speeches and abundant amounts of vodka, they swept into the heart of St. Petersburg and amassed at Senate Square. The rebels were belligerent enough to call for the restoration of Constantine and the adoption of a constitution, but not yet cohesive enough to take definitive action. This gave the frightened new emperor valuable time to gather reinforcements and weigh his options from the nearby Winter Palace.

Hoping to distract a crowd that had gathered in front of the palace from joining the nascent rebellion at the square, Nicholas appeared before them and read aloud the late emperor’s succession manifesto. It was then, in what the tsar
later described as “the most terrible moment,” that a mass of soldiers rushed toward his home to take it over, “and in case of resistance to destroy our entire family.” The precarious situation was only defused when the sudden appearance of loyal Guards behind the emperor persuaded the menacing rebels to scurry back to their comrades.

In an effort to quell the mounting unrest, a succession of generals was sent to Senate Square to reason with the agitated men and persuade them to return to their barracks. Not one of them was successful. In fact, one general, a hero of the Napoleonic Wars, was slaughtered on the spot. The head of the Orthodox Church and the emperor’s younger brother Michael also failed in their missions. Even a personal overture from the tsar himself was violently rejected. “They shot at me,” Nicholas recalled; “the bullet flew over my head and fortunately no one was wounded. The laborers of St. Isaac’s [a cathedral under construction nearby] began tossing lumber at us over the fencing.”

At a time when the tsar was still considered God’s representative on earth, taking shots at him in a public space was a sure sign that the rebels had abandoned all reason. The Russian author and historian Nicholas Karamzin was sickened by the events he witnessed that day, writing, “Is Peter’s city really going to fall into the hands of three thousand half-drunken soldiers, mad officers, and the mob?”

By the time evening approached it was clear that some drastic action would have to be taken. “I had to make the decision to put a swift end to this,” Nicholas wrote; “otherwise the mob might join the rebels and then the [loyal] troops surrounded by the mob would be in the most difficult circumstances.” A bloody clash seemed inevitable.

“Your Majesty, there is nothing to be done,” announced Adjutant General Vasilchikov. “We need grapeshot!”

“Do you want me to spill the blood of my subjects on the very first day of my reign?” said the emperor.

“In order to save your empire,” replied Vasilchikov.

Nicholas’s mother, Dowager Empress Maria, was appalled by the prospect. “Oh, my God!” she cried. “What will Europe say about us! My son is ascending the throne in blood!”

But for all that, Nicholas knew what he had to do. Even as a ten-year-old boy, he had written of King Louis XVI’s stupidity in failing to crush his rebellious subjects while he still had the chance. And Louis ended up with his head sliced off. There would be no similar revolution in Russia—the force of cannon would ensure that. The end came that night as scores of Decembrists fell under fire and the rest fled. A massive roundup of the rebel leaders followed, with Nicholas himself conducting the interrogations. Then there were the reprisals. In a gleeful twist of the knife, the emperor left it to one of the leading liberals of his late brother’s reign to pronounce the death sentences.

“Dear, dear Constantine,” Nicholas wrote to his older brother. “Your will has been done: I am Emperor, but, my God, at what a price! At the price of my subjects’ blood!”

The new emperor emerged from the Decembrist revolt like a frightened and angry bull after finally managing to gore its tormenting matador. And as he cast about his ferocious glare in search of any further challenges to his might, all of Russia trembled.

Like his revered predecessor Peter the Great, Nicholas I meant to transform Russia. Not with an eye toward the West,
however, but far, far away from its pernicious influences—back to a time when the tsar ruled supreme over blindly obedient subjects with no concept of personal liberty. “Only autocracy corresponds to the spirit of the Russian people,” he declared. And only Nicholas seemed to possess the qualities to impose it.

“No one was better created for the role of autocrat,” wrote Anna Tyutcheva, one of the empress’s ladies-in-waiting. “His impressive handsomeness, regal bearing, and severe Olympic profile—everything down to his smile of a condescending Jupiter, breathed earthly deity. There was something solemn and reverential in the palace air. People spoke in hushed tones and were slightly bowed … in order to appear more obliging … everything was imbued with the presence of the lord.”

The emperor was a jealous god who insisted upon ruling alone. Gone were the days of powerful ministers and influential favorites that every monarch since Peter the Great kept close to them. “I don’t need smart men; I need loyal ones,” insisted Nicholas, who was equitable only in the sense that he believed
all
men were beneath him. The tsar personally controlled every aspect of government—from foreign policy to the fight against cholera—as he deemed himself the only one capable of doing so. “You should know that I have neither a mind nor a will,” wrote one official. “I am merely a blind tool of the emperor’s will.”

Perhaps the only man who wielded any real influence in Nicholas’s government was Sergei Uvarov, who formulated the official creed of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality”—the holy trinity of despotic Russia. As minister of education, Uvarov was charged with a rather simple task: to keep the people stupid. “If I can extend Russia’s childhood another
fifty years I will consider my mission accomplished,” he declared.

An ignorant population was a docile one, which is why the emperor was incensed to learn that in one instance a potential constitution, formulated during his brother’s reign, had been printed in Poland. “The publication of this paper is most annoying,” he wrote to Prince Paskevich in Warsaw. “Out of one hundred of our young officers [stationed in Poland] ninety will read it, will fail to understand it or will scorn it, but ten will retain it in their memory, will discuss it—and, the most important point, will not forget it. This worries me above everything else. This is why I wish so much that the guards be kept in Warsaw as briefly as possible. Order Count Witt to try to obtain as many copies of this booklet as he can and to destroy them, also to find the manuscript and send it to me.”

The emperor made it his personal task to suppress any publication that might give his subjects the absurd idea that they were free to choose their own destinies. Literature and newspapers were thoroughly scrutinized, often by the tsar himself, and even ellipses used to replace censored text were forbidden lest the reader “fall into the temptation of thinking about the possible contents of the banned part.” Writers suffered immeasurably under Nicholas, and any who dared stray from the official doctrine were usually branded as criminally insane. This designation, rather than imprisonment, was a means of silencing voices forever, as it was thought no one would listen to the ravings of a lunatic.

Alexander Nikitenko, a former serf elevated to the position of censor, was also a freethinker who sought, as he wrote, “to give secret aid to literature.” “At first we feverishly wanted to be heard,” Nikitenko recorded in his diary, a vivid account of
that repressive era. “But when we saw that they were not fooling with us; that our talent and intelligence were doomed to grow torpid and rot at the bottom of our souls … that any bright thought was a crime against the social order, when, in a word, we were told that educated people were pariahs in our society, and that … a soldier’s discipline was considered the only principle—then our entire young generation became morally depleted.”

And that’s just the way Nicholas liked it. “I’ve cut them once and for all from interfering in my work,” he gloated. But it wasn’t enough just to stifle writers and intellectuals. The emperor aimed to control all of his subjects. He managed this with the help of his secret police, or Third Department, along with an army of informants eager to curry favor. “With Germanic tenacity and precision,” the essayist Alexander Herzen wrote, “Nicholas tightened the noose of the Third Department around the neck of Russia.”

As with every other aspect of governing, however, the emperor was not content to leave all the surveillance to the Third Department. He made himself appear omnipresent by ceaselessly traveling all over Russia to observe things for himself. “Fifteen days have now passed since I left you,” Nicholas wrote to his wife, Empress Alexandra, “but I have seen and done much. We are not wasting our time. This manner of traveling, when one can bear it, is really good, because one sees everything, and they never know when or where I am going to arrive. They expect me everywhere, and if anything is not well, they at least try to make it so.”

The emperor’s unannounced pop-ins often proved traumatizing to those unfortunate enough to receive them—like the administrators of one high school. Nicholas strode into a classroom and saw that one of the best and brightest students
was leaning on his elbow as he listened to a history lecture. The instructor was instantly dismissed on the emperor’s orders for allowing such a gross breach of discipline. Then, upon encountering another such egregious incident, Nicholas personally fired the school principal.

And still the tsar wasn’t finished with the school. He returned unexpectedly on another occasion, and Alexander Nikitenko recorded what ensued: “The sovereign arrived angry, went everywhere, asked about everything, with the obvious intention of finding something wrong. He did not like the face of one of the pupils.—‘What sort of an ugly … mug is this!’ he exclaimed, looking at him with fury. In conclusion he told the director:

“ ‘Yes, in appearance you have everything in order, but what mugs your pupils possess! The First High School must be first in everything: they have not that vivacity, that fullness, that nobility which distinguishes, for instance, the pupils of the Fourth High School!’ ”

Nicholas’s wrath was not limited to people who displeased him, but inanimate objects as well. In 1829, the warship
Raphael
surrendered in a battle with the Turks. The emperor was incensed with the vessel and wrote to the admiral of the fleet: “Trusting in the help of the Almighty I persevere in the hope that the fearless Black Sea fleet, burning with the desire to wash off the shame of the frigate ‘Raphael,’ will not leave it in the hands of the enemy. But, when it is returned to our control, considering this frigate to be unworthy in the future to fly the flag of Russia and to serve together with the other vessels of our fleet, I order you to burn it.”

There were times when the tsar’s intrusive involvement in the affairs of his subjects actually transcended the absurd, as when he declared after the annulment of one woman’s marriage,
“The young lady shall be considered a virgin.” Such was the state of absolute control in Russia that one observer wryly commented, “Fish swam in the water, birds sang in the forest because they were permitted to do so by the authorities.”

Nicholas I found great relief from the burdens of micromanaging the Russian Empire in his family, to which he was entirely devoted. Still, the tsar demanded the same blind obedience from them as he did from any one of his other subjects. And woe to that unfortunate relative who defied or displeased him—like his son and heir, the future Alexander II. “Don’t be a milksop!” was the emperor’s usual admonition to the young man, but that was merely gentle chiding compared to those instances when the tsarevitch really made his father mad. “Begone!” Nicholas thundered after some misdeed. “You are not worthy of approaching me after such behavior; you have forgotten that obedience is a sacred duty. I can forgive anything except disobedience.”