The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (3 page)

Some peasants did eke out a living. But during the first decade of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands more abandoned their villages. Traveling by foot along the country’s dirt roads, they searched for work in the factories and mills that had cropped up in Russia’s cities. Most were young men looking to escape grinding
poverty. “
All the healthy and able men ran away from our village to [the city] and took whatever jobs they could find,” said one villager. Recalled another, “
Everyone is trying as hard as he can to liberate himself from [farming] and find an easier means of existence.”

Sadly, these men did not find an easier life. Instead, they crowded into city slums that reeked of human waste and unwashed bodies. Beggars stood on every corner; drunkards lolled in every doorway. Gangs of pickpockets, usually children, flitted through the crowds while prostitutes (many of them village girls who’d been unable to find work) plied their trade. In these miserable streets—beneath the constant fog of black smoke pouring from the factories’ chimneys—people worked and ate, worked and slept, too tired to do much besides visit the tavern. “
I did not live, but only worked, worked, worked,” recalled metalworker Ivan Babuskin. “I worked morning, noon and night, and sometimes did not leave the factory for two days at a stretch.” The factory owner expected him there six days a week, and if he didn’t turn up, he would be fired. One’s only thought, remembered Ivan, was that “it would be work again tomorrow—heavy, continuous, killing work—but there would be no real life and no real rest to look forward to.”

For these efforts, a worker earned around eighty kopecks a day (forty cents), hardly enough to support himself when just a loaf of bread cost twenty-four kopecks and a two-room tenement without water, kitchen, or toilet cost more than an entire month’s wages to rent. So to ward off starvation, a man’s wife and children had little choice but to trudge to the factories as well. It was common for mothers to work eleven hours a day and earn one-third what men did. The children received even less. According to one historian, boys in Moscow’s spinning mills “
earned the equivalent of about a half cent for each frightening and dangerous hour spent darting in and out among the machines to tie threads, replace spindles, or oil moving gears.” At the same time, children coughing through the
haze of noxious fumes in Moscow’s match factories earned a mere seventy cents a month!

Poisonous chemicals. Flying gears and belts. Razor-sharp graters. These posed dangers to anyone who worked in the factories. But owners did nothing to promote safety or protect their workers. Instead, they posted signs that read “
In the event of an accident, the owner and director of the factory assume no responsibility.” If workers thought their jobs were too dangerous, or their hours too long, they had no recourse. The tsar’s government had left all decisions regarding the running of factories to their owners. And while some government inspectors did try to enforce child labor laws that had been enacted in 1897, they lacked any real power. Factory owners simply ignored them. Thus, explained one worker, “
The factory owner is the absolute sovereign … constrained by no laws, and who often simply arranges things to suit himself. The workers owe him
unquestioning obedience
as the rules [of the factory] proclaim.”

Afraid of being fired, most workers did not complain. For as bad as being a worker was, being unemployed was worse. “
We slept in gutters and doorways,” recalled one worker who’d lost his job, “and we survived by theft and begging. We had no other choice. The alternative was dying of starvation.”

Outside the factory, workers suffered even worse conditions. With little affordable housing in the city, they squeezed into every available space—freezing attics, leaky basements. Sometimes as many as twenty men, women, and children lived in one small room. Overcrowding led to diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis that cut through the city’s poor. Children were especially vulnerable. Said a woman weaver, “
I had eleven [children], but only three grew up. You’d go to the factory, but your soul always was in torment. Your heart always grieved for your children.”

Since their meager pay did not keep up with the rise in the price of goods, workers lived on a diet of cabbage soup, dried peas, and
sour black bread. They wore rags. At the neighborhood taverns, they tried to drown their misery by squandering precious kopecks on cheap vodka and watered-down beer. Only then, in that misty, drunken haze, did many of them see “
reflections of a better, less unjust world.”

Were we all, the whole upper crust of Russian society, so totally insensitive, so horribly obtuse, as not to feel that the charmed life we were leading was in itself an injustice and hence could not possibly last?

—Nicolas Nabokov
Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan

On a frosty March day in 1881, the boy who would become Russia’s last ruler glimpsed his future. That morning, Nicholas’s grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, was riding through the streets of St. Petersburg when a man stepped off the sidewalk. He hurled a bomb at the imperial carriage. Miraculously, the tsar went uninjured, but many in his retinue were not as lucky. Concerned about his people, Alexander stepped from his carriage. That’s when a second bomb was thrown. This one landed between his feet. An explosion of fire and shrapnel tore away Alexander’s left leg, ripped open his abdomen, and mangled his face. Barely conscious, he managed one last command: “
To the palace, to die there.”

Horrified members of the imperial family rushed to his side. Thirteen-year-old Nicholas, dressed in a blue sailor suit, followed a thick trail of dark blood up the white marble stairs to his grandfather’s study. There he found Alexander lying on a couch, one eye closed, the other staring blankly at the ceiling. Nicholas’s father, also named Alexander, was already in the room. “
My father took me up to the bed,” Nicholas later recalled. “ ‘Papa,’ [my father] said, raising his voice, ‘your ray of sunshine is here.’ I saw the eyelashes tremble.… [Grandfather] moved a finger. He could not raise his hands, nor say what he wanted to, but he undoubtedly recognized me.” Deathly pale, Nicholas stood helplessly at the end of the bed as his beloved grandfather took his last breath.

“
The emperor is dead,” announced the court physician.

Nicholas’s father—now the new tsar—clenched his fists. The
Russian people would pay for this. Alexander II had been a reformer, the most liberal tsar in centuries. He’d freed the serfs (peasant slaves) and modernized the courts. But his murder convinced his son, Alexander III, that the people had been treated too softly. If order was to be maintained, they needed to “
feel the whip.” And for the next thirteen years of his reign, Alexander III made sure they did.

Young Nicholas, standing beside his grandfather’s deathbed, knew nothing of politics. Frightened, he covered his face with his hands and sobbed bitterly. He was left, he later confessed, with a “
presentiment—a secret conviction … that I am destined for terrible trials.”

Nicholas’s family, the Romanovs, had sat on the Russian throne for almost three hundred years, ruling their subjects under a form of government called autocracy. In an autocracy, one person—in this instance, the tsar—holds all the power. The Romanovs claimed God had given them this power, had chosen them to rule the Russian people. As God’s representative on earth, they maintained, the tsar should be left to run the country according to his own ideas of duty and right. This meant that
all
of Russia’s political power was in the tsar’s hands. Unlike most other nations, Russia had no constitution, no congress, no court of appeal for its citizens or supreme court to review or limit the tsar’s power. There were only two restrictions: he had to abide by the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church (of which he was official head), and he had to follow the laws of succession (those rules determining inheritance of the throne). On all other matters the tsar was supreme, and he made laws and policies according to his will … or whim.

The tsar’s will was carried out by a multitude of officials and administrators. Below him sat thirteen ministers collectively called the Imperial Cabinet. Chosen by the tsar, each of these noblemen headed a large government department. There was a chief minister (or prime minister), as well as ministers of war, finance, justice, and the interior, to name a few. Their job was to implement the tsar’s decrees and to offer advice. Whether the tsar chose to listen was his choice. The tsar could dismiss a minister at any time, and for any reason. Since they could be hired and fired on a whim, the tsar’s ministers (with some exceptions) tended to be flatterers, telling him what he
wanted
rather than needed to hear.