The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (11 page)

On the morning of December 20, the tsar’s police attempted to arrest the leaders of the soviets, the organizations Nicholas had earlier declared illegal. This action incensed people in Moscow. Students, workers, and even well-dressed citizens surged into the streets to protest. Social Democrats, both Bolshevik and Menshevik, seized their chance and urged the people to fight against autocracy. And the people listened. Working together, they built barricades from whatever they could find—fences, overturned streetcars, telegraph poles, doors torn from nearby homes and shops. These barricades soon ringed the workers’ section of the city. “
The whole of Moscow has become a battleground,” said one eyewitness. Homemade bombs exploded. From all directions came the sound of gunshots.

Revolutionaries from St. Petersburg and other cities rushed to join in the struggle. But not Lenin. The police had picked up his trail, and the Bolshevik leader could do little but shuttle from hiding place to hiding place. Still, the events in Moscow delighted him. “
Go ahead and shoot!” he cried. “Summon the … regiments against
the Russian peasants and workers. We are for a broadening of the struggle, we are an international revolution.”

At Tsarskoe Selo, Nicholas chain-smoked furiously. Was this what he got from the people in return for his generous concessions? He decided to take matters firmly in hand. Deploying a special fighting unit to Moscow, he ordered them to clear the streets, using any means necessary.

The tsar’s troops were ruthless. Bringing up artillery, they bombarded the workers’ section until the whole district was nothing but smoldering rubble. Then soldiers entered the area. Their orders were to shoot anyone who had not already fled. Men, women, and children were systematically mowed down. By December 31, the rebellion was over. More than a thousand people had been killed, and thousands more were injured.

And a despairing Lenin slipped away into Finland. He felt sure he’d just lost the only chance for revolution in his lifetime.

Back at Tsarskoe Selo, Nicholas decided to crack down on all his subjects. Now, he declared, they would “
feel the whip.” Perhaps then they would think twice before rebelling.

In cities all across Russia, police arrested anyone suspected of crimes against the tsar, imprisoning or exiling 38,000 so-called politicals, and executing another 5,000. Outspoken workers lost their jobs, their employers threatened with prison if they attempted to rehire them. Even children did not escape Nicholas’s terror. Police routinely rounded up workers’ children and beat them just to “
teach them a lesson.”

Things were worse in the countryside. Nicholas authorized what
were known as Punitive Expeditions, detachments of tough, well-trained soldiers who restored order in the most brutal ways possible. Storming into a town or village, these soldiers killed citizens at random, burned entire communities without mercy, and left people wounded, homeless, and starving. “
Don’t skimp on the bullets” were the orders they received. And they didn’t.

Their work delighted Nicholas. Once, after reading a particularly gruesome report of hangings and beatings, he turned to an aide. “
This really tickles me,” he said. “It really does.”

It is estimated that between December 1905 and the start of the First Duma in April 1906, the Punitive Expeditions executed 15,000 people, wounded at least 20,000 more, and exiled another 45,000.

One more measure was taken. In January 1906, with Nicholas’s agreement, his new prime minister—Peter Stolypin—established secret courts all across the country. The purpose of these courts was to allow for the quick arrest and conviction of anyone suspected of being a political revolutionary. Over the next two years, the tsar’s “extraordinary security,” as the police were called, rounded up more than 100,000 people. Stolypin’s courts sentenced most of these “politicals” to hard labor, prison, or exile. But at least two thousand were executed. The hangman’s noose soon became known as Stolypin’s necktie.

Heads bowed, workers returned to their factories, peasants to their villages. By the saber and whip, order had been restored. The lower classes no longer acted out, recalled one noble, but their “
courtesy, friendliness, bows [were replaced by] animosity [and] rudeness.” Fear alone now kept the people in their place.

And the tsar had earned a new nickname—Bloody Nicholas.

By the spring of 1906, Nicholas was also going back on the promises he’d made the previous October. “
I am not convinced this [manifesto] requires me to renounce the right of supreme power,” he said. So just one week before the First Duma met, he decreed some new laws. He now granted himself absolute veto power over any law the Duma might try to pass, thus making
his
the final word on all legislation. Additionally, he gave himself the right to dissolve the Duma whenever he wanted, as well as the power to issue laws by imperial decree when the Duma was not sitting. Last but not least, he kept complete control over foreign policy, the military, the police, and the day-to-day administration of the government. By doing so, Nicholas effectively stripped the Duma of its power before it had even convened.

And yet Nicholas still resented what he considered the Duma’s interference in his government. Under no circumstances, he decided, could its members (called deputies) be trusted.

On May 10, 1906, men from all walks of life, including noblemen in gold-braided uniforms, tradesmen in tailcoats, peasants in rough tunics, and workers in plain cotton blouses and coarse boots, streamed up the carved marble staircase of the Winter Palace. These were the Duma’s 524 duly elected deputies, representing all thirty-four provinces and three economic classes: landowners and wealthy businessmen; townspeople (including shop owners, tradesmen, doctors, lawyers, university professors, and factory workers); and peasants. Chosen through a complicated and indirect electoral process, the vast majority of deputies were noblemen and professionals. Still,
one hundred peasants had found their way to the capital, as had twenty-five workers. And all had come to the Winter Palace for the opening ceremony of the nation’s first legislature.

Entering the gold-and-white Imperial Throne Room, the deputies took their places on the left side of the hall. Some glared at the tsar’s ermine-draped throne, and at the four little stools on which sat the symbols of his power—the crown, the scepter, the seal, and the orb. A regimental band began playing the national anthem.

On the other side of the hall stood the tsar’s ministers, admirals, and generals as well as members of the Romanov family—Nicholas’s sisters, brother, aunts, uncles, even cousins. The men had come in full dress uniform, their chests glittering with medals, while the women were adorned in silk and dripping with jewels.

“
The two … sides stood confronting one another,” recalled one eyewitness. “The court dignitaries … looked across in a haughty manner … at the ‘people off the street’ whom [events] had swept into the palace. One of the deputies, a tall man in a worker’s blouse, scrutinized the throne and the courtiers around it with obvious disgust. As the tsar and his entourage entered the hall, he lurched forward and stared at them with an expression of hatred.”

As Nicholas approached the throne, the nobility’s side of the hall burst into cheers. But many of the deputies remained silent. “
They neither crossed themselves nor bowed, but just stood with their hands … in their pockets,” Nicholas’s sister Xenia noted with shock. Instead, they watched, stone-faced, as the tsar mounted the dais.

Pale, nervously twisting a pair of white military gloves he clutched in his hand, Nicholas began reading from a prepared speech. He said nothing about the rebellion that had forced him to create the Duma. Instead, he clung to the notion that it was all God’s will. “
The care for the welfare of the country entrusted to me
by the Most High,” he declared, “has caused me to summon representatives elected by the people to assist in the work of legislation.”

While Nicholas spoke, Alexandra gripped her ostrich-feather fan so tightly her knuckles were white. She looked “tragic,” recalled one onlooker,
“and her face became alternately red and pale.” When he finished, tears rolled down her cheeks.

Nicholas, too, was overcome. As the imperial family filed from the hall, he could not hold back his emotions. “
Poor Nicky was standing there in tears!” exclaimed Xenia.

Shaken by the sight of so many commoners in the palace, Nicholas’s mother declared it a “
terrible ceremony.… They … reflec[ed] a strange hatred for us all.”

Nicholas’s sister Olga agreed. “
The peasants looked sullen. But the workmen [from the cities] were worse. They looked as though they hated us.”

Just two days later, the Duma demonstrated its anger over the tsar’s gutting of its power by demanding he release all political prisoners. The Duma knew that granting amnesty was Nicholas’s right. It also knew it could no longer enact laws without the tsar’s agreement. In other words, the deputies knew their demand was nothing more than a symbolic gesture. Their real goal was to give voice to their frustrations, and perhaps force the crown to return some authority to the Duma.

Nicholas fumed. How dare the deputies make such a demand? Agreeing with Xenia who declared, “
The Duma is such filth … a hearth of revolutionaries,” Nicholas decided to exercise his right to dissolve it. On July 21, 1906, the doors of the Tauride Palace were locked and the tsar’s imperial decree posted. Outraged deputies could do nothing to stop this action. After just seventy-two days, their legislative careers were over.

Nicholas did not intend to allow a second election. This denial
was also his right. Prime Minister Peter Stolypin convinced him otherwise. Stolypin grasped what Nicholas could not. The government needed to appear to be working with the Duma. The Russian people saw the tsar’s signature on the October Manifesto as a sacred promise. To violate it would anger the people. Did Nicholas really want to face another rebellion?

Reluctantly, Nicholas changed his mind. He allowed the election of a second Duma.

But when the Second Duma (whose makeup was similar to the first) met in February 1907, it proved just as troublesome. And just as radical. Deputies publicly raged against the tsar and demanded, among other things, that Nicholas end capital punishment, abolish government violence, and start distributing nobility-owned estates to land-hungry peasants.

And so, in June 1907—just three months after it was convened—Nicholas dissolved the Second Duma, too. “
Slap! And they are gone,” he told his mother.

But the legislative experiment was still not over. Another election for a third Duma, complete with new deputies, was set. Why did Nicholas bother? Because it gave the impression that Russia was becoming more democratic (especially important when making trade and military alliances with leaders of Western Europe who tended to see Russia as a backward country). Still, Nicholas could not stomach another hard-to-manage Duma. At Stolypin’s suggestion, he decreed a change in the voting system. Under the tsar’s new system, votes were heavily weighted by class. Now it took 230 landowners’ votes to elect a single deputy, 1,000 votes for wealthy businessmen to elect a deputy, and 15,000 votes for members of the lower middle class to elect a deputy. Peasants needed 60,000 votes before they could send a representative from their class to the Duma. And workers? They needed a whopping 125,000 votes!

This electoral change placed power in the hands of the nobility,
wealthy landowners, and businessmen—the very type of Russian that tended to support tsarism. Sarcastically called
“the Duma of the Lords, Priests and Lackeys,” this third group of deputies, who took their seats in November 1907, was highly acceptable to Nicholas. With no reason to dissolve it, he allowed the Third Duma to sit for the next five years.

“
We made the acquaintance of a man of God,” Nicholas noted in his diary in November 1905, just weeks after signing the October Manifesto. “Gregory from Tobolsk province.”

Gregory Rasputin began his life as a peasant farmer. But one day, as he plowed the fields outside his Siberian village, he claimed to see a vision from God. Abandoning his wife and four children, he walked two thousand miles to a monastery in Greece. When he returned two years later, he declared himself to be what Russians called a
starets
—a holy man. Soon, he was wandering the countryside, blessing the poor and praying for the sick. By the time he arrived in St. Petersburg, he had gained a reputation as a healer and a prophet.

Meanwhile, Nicholas and Alexandra had been frantically searching for a way to help their sick son. Medical specialists from across Europe had been called in. Priests had been summoned. Even a Tibetan herbalist had appeared at court. But Alexei still suffered. So when the imperial couple heard about Rasputin from cousin Militsa, they eagerly invited him to the palace.

Did Nicholas and Alexandra cringe when Rasputin first appeared at Tsarskoe Selo that fall? According to some reports, the man was revolting, with his long, unwashed hair and scraggly, food-encrusted beard. Other eyewitnesses, however, contradicted this
description. “
Rasputin was exceptionally clean,” remembered his friend Alexei Filippov. “He often changed his underwear, went to the baths, and never smelled bad.”

If the
starets’
hands were soiled when he presented Alexandra with his gifts of holy icons and loaves of blessed bread, the royal couple surely looked past them. That’s because it was the
starets’
astonishing eyes people noticed first. They possessed such a strange power, many people found it hard to resist his gaze. “
[It] was at once piercing and caressing, naïve and cunning, far-off and intent,” recalled the French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue. “His pupils seemed to radiate magnetism.” No one knows what Rasputin and the imperial couple spoke about during their first meeting. But soon the
starets
began visiting the palace.