The Last Tsar (3 page)

The other woman was Sofia Perovskaya, who in the morning was going to take a direct part in the
cause
. They had convinced her to get some sleep.

Vera Figner and the four men worked through the night. Only toward morning did they fill the kerosene cans with blasting jelly. They now had four homemade bombs.

The cause was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, one of the greatest reformers in the history of Russia. That spring he had been preparing to give Russia its longed-for constitution, which would have brought his feudal despotism into the ranks of civilized European states.

But the young people were afraid that the constitution would create false contentment in society and distract Russia from the coming revolution. Also, the tsar’s reforms seemed to them too gradual. The young people were in a hurry.

By that time People’s Will terrorists had already made seven unsuccessful attempts on the tsar’s life. The price had been twenty-one death sentences. And now, once again, they were going out onto a Petersburg street—to kill Alexander II.

That day in the Pavlovsky Regiment barracks, which had a view on the Moika Canal and the Field of Mars, the young soldier Alexander Volkov was standing guard. From the direction of the Ekaterininsky Canal came two powerful explosions. Volkov saw the smoke disperse slowly over the canal and the police chief’s sleigh dash past.

Three Cossacks from the tsar’s escort were propping up the dying tsar: two standing to the side on the runners and one in front whose Circassian coat was black with Alexander’s blood. The savaged muscles of the tsar’s legs were gushing blood.

The sleigh was heading toward the Winter Palace. “I want to die there,” the tsar kept repeating. Alexander II had been mortally wounded by a bomb made in that same Petersburg apartment. The bomb that killed the Orthodox tsar had been disguised as an Easter cake, a fine-looking Easter gift—the young people had not overlooked the irony.

Then a coach under escort sped past Volkov. A huge, heavy, bald man and a thirteen-year-old boy were sitting in the coach—the new Tsar Alexander III and his thirteen-year-old son Nicholas, who that day became heir to the Russian throne.

The entire life of the soldier standing guard that day, Alexander Volkov, would be linked with this boy sitting in the coach. His life would rush by between two regicides.

——

Meanwhile Vera Figner and her friends had already learned of the mortal wounds to Alexander II. Their gruesome success evoked a strange exultation in the young woman: “In my agitation I could scarcely get the words out, that the tsar had been killed, and I wept: the terrible nightmare that had oppressed young Russia for so many decades had been broken off. All had been redeemed by this moment, this tsarist blood we had shed.” And they embraced for joy—the young people who had killed the tsar-reformer.

“The revolutionary is a
doomed
man.” This is a quotation from Mikhail Bakunin’s famous
Revolutionary Catechism
, according to which the revolutionary must break with the civilized world’s laws and conventions and renounce any personal life and blood ties in the name of the revolution. He must despise society and be ruthless toward it (and must himself expect no mercy from society and be prepared to die), intensifying the people’s misfortunes by all possible means, spurring them on toward revolution. He must know that all means are justified by a single goal: revolution.

They had resolved to smear the stalled Russian cart of history with blood. And roll on, roll on—to 1917, the Ekaterinburg cellar, and the Great Red Terror.

Tsar Alexander II passed away in the palace in agony.

This picture: the murdered grandfather bleeding profusely. It would not quit Nicholas his whole life long.

In blood, he became heir to the throne.

“A tsar’s blood shed” gave birth to his diary. Nicholas was the heir, and now his life belonged to history. Starting with the New Year he must record his life.

As a result of countless dynastic marriages, by the twentieth century scarcely any Russian blood flowed in the veins of the Russian Romanov tsars.

But “Russian tsar” is a nationality in itself, and the German princess who ascended to the Russian throne and brought glory on herself in Russian history as Empress Catherine the Great felt truly
Russian
. So Russian that when her own brother prepared to visit Russia she was indignant: “Why? There are more than enough Germans in Russia without him.” Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, was in his appearance and habits a typical Russian landowner who loved everything Russian. The proud formula “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality” flowed in the non-Russian blood of Russia’s tsars.

Nicholas’s mother was the Danish Princess Dagmar; his grandmother, the Danish queen. He called his grandmother “the mother-in-law of all Europe”: her numerous daughters, sons, and grandchildren had allied nearly all the royal houses, uniting the continent in this entertaining manner from England to Greece.

Princess Dagmar was first engaged to the elder son of Alexander II—Nicholas. But Nicholas died from consumption in Nice, and Alexander became heir to the throne. Along with his title, the new heir took his deceased brother’s fiancée for his wife: on his deathbed Nicholas himself joined their hands. The Danish Princess Dagmar became Her Imperial Highness Marie Feodorovna.

The marriage was a happy one. They had many children. Nicholas’s father proved to be a marvelous family man: his main precept was to preserve the foundations of the family and the state.

Constancy was the motto of Nicholas’s father, the future Emperor Alexander III.

Reform—that is, change and quest—had been the motto of Nicholas’s grandfather, Emperor Alexander II.

His grandfather’s frequent enthusiasms for new ideas found a unique extension in his many romantic involvements. Alexander II’s love affairs followed one after the other, until
she
—the beauty—appeared: Princess Catherine Dolgorukaya. To everyone’s astonishment, Alexander II was faithful to his new mistress. Children were born. An official second imperial family appeared, and Alexander II spent nearly all his time with them. And when the revolutionaries began their tsar hunt, Nicholas’s grandfather took an extravagant step: for their safety he settled both his families in the Winter Palace.

In 1880 Nicholas’s grandmother, Marie Feodorovna, Alexander II’s official wife, died, whereupon Nicholas’s grandfather married his mistress. Although the intelligent and punctilious Princess Catherine was quick to renounce all rights to the throne for her eldest son, who knew? Today, perhaps tomorrow, the impossible.… Alexander II was sixty-two years old, but he was at the dawn of his powers and health. Nicholas’s father took a marked step into the background. But now, just a few months after Alexander II’s shameful marriage, a bomb exploding on the Ekaterininsky Canal carried
Nicholas’s grandfather to his grave. Naturally, Nicholas heard what people around him were saying: divine retribution for the sinful tsar!

In the fall of 1882 Nicholas sang a song which so impressed him that when he got home he wrote it out on the inside cover of his very first diary (“The song we sang while one of us hid”). This folk song about the old hag death combing out the curls of the slain lad opens his diary. Yet another mysterious portent.

“Began writing my diary on the 1st of January 1882. In the morning drank hot chocolate, dressed in my Life Guard reserves uniform.… Took a walk in the garden with Papa. We chopped and sawed wood and made a great bonfire. Went to bed at about half past 9.… Papa, Mama, and I received two deputations. Presented me with a magnificent wooden platter inscribed ‘The peasants of Voronezh to their Tsarevich.’ With bread and salt and a Russian towel.”

Games at Gatchina, visits with his cousins the grand dukes, who were his age. The large Romanov family.

“This morning the canaries were moved into a small wooden cage.… Sandro [Alexander] and Sergei … skated and played ball, and when Papa left we started a snowball fight.”

Boys at play. A carefree life. Sergei and Sandro were the sons of Grand Duke Michael, his grandfather’s brother.

Nicholas (or Nicky, as everyone called him) was especially friendly with Michael’s sons. Sergei, Sandro, and George Mikhailovich were his diary’s favorite characters, the comrades of his childhood games, his youth. The eldest was also a Nicholas, later the distinguished liberal historian Nicholas Romanov, who looked bemusedly on their play. He would always regard Emperor Nicky with gentle irony.

Later, outside at the Fortress of Peter and Paul, Nicholas Mikhailovich and George Mikhailovich would be executed, and Sergei Mikhailovich would lie at the bottom of a mine shaft with a bullet in his head.

“We worked in the garden. Cleared three trees that had fallen on top of one another. Then made a huge bonfire. Mama came to look at our bonfire it was so inviting.”

Burning, burning, a huge bonfire in the dark of night. Many years later this gray-eyed adolescent would kindle another bonfire in which an empire would perish.

All this went on at Gatchina, where Alexander III shut himself in with his family after his father’s assassination. The tsar appeared in Petersburg from the New Year until Lent, during which time he gave royal balls whose Asiatic splendor stunned the foreign emissaries. But this was window dressing. The family’s real life was at Gatchina, where they lived in a magnificent palace whose formal rooms were empty. Alexander and his family occupied the mezzanine, once the servant’s quarters. His numerous family lived in small rooms so narrow one could scarcely bring in a piano. The shade of his murdered father haunted Alexander III. There was a chain of sentries along the fence, guards around the palace, and guards inside the park. The life of the young Nicholas began with a prison accent.

Meanwhile, the young soldier Alexander Volkov was beginning to make a career for himself: he was brought into the inner Palace Guard. After midnight he watched the emperor fish on the lake.

A moonlit night over the Gatchina park. Volkov stood all alone on the bank, demonstrating the guard’s small numbers. The real guard, comprising thirty men, was hiding in the bushes around the lake. Beyond the tsar’s boat was another guard with a convoy.

In the tsar’s boat the huntsman held up a lantern, the fish swam toward the light, and the huge, heavy tsar speared the surfacing fish.

Fishing and hunting at times even pushed back affairs of state. “Europe can wait while the Russian tsar fishes.” This aphorism of the powerful monarch, the master of one-sixth of the earth’s surface, circulated through the newspapers of the world.

Nicholas was taken hunting and fishing, but more often his father took Michael, the younger brother. The hardy rascal Michael was his father’s and mother’s favorite.

The tsar is drinking tea with guests on the balcony, and below Misha, as Michael is called, is playing. The father gets an idea for a bullyish prank: he takes a watering can and douses the boy from above with water. Misha is pleased. Misha laughs, the tsar laughs, the guests laugh.

But suddenly, an unexpected cry: “And now, Papa, your turn.”
The tsar obediently presents his bald spot—and Misha douses him with the watering can from head to foot.

But the father’s iron will broke Michael’s childish independence. Both brothers would grow up good, gentle, and timid, as often happens with children of strong fathers.

This was when Nicholas grasped what is for an adolescent the bitterest truth: They don’t love me, they love my brother! His adolescent insight did not make him mean, sullen, or less obedient. He simply became reticent.

Alexander appointed the distinguished K. P. Pobedonostsev, chief procurator of the Holy Synod, Nicholas’s tutor.

Alexander III ascended to the throne with an understandable logic: there were reforms under my father, and what was the result? His murder. So Pobedonostsev was called to power. The desiccated old man with protruding ears had the dry wheeze of a grand inquisitor wasted away from fasting.

Pobedonostsev would explain that Russia was a special country where reforms and a free press would inevitably result in decadence and disorder. “Like frost he inhibits any further decay, but nothing will grow under him,” a Russian commentator pinpointed Pobedonostsev. But the frost-man was then already feeling the heat of the fiery luminescence advancing on the empire: revolution. Who was going to stand up to it? This kind boy whose nature was anything but that of a tsar? Pobedonostsev respected Nicholas as the future monarch, but he could not love him. Nicholas found no love in his tutor.

Instead of love he got—the army!

Alexander III had the nickname “Peacemaker.” He avoided wars, but the army loomed over society as imposing as ever. The army, which had always made Russia strong. “Not by its laws, nor its civilization, but by its army,” as Count Witte, the powerful minister and adviser to both Nicholas and his father, wrote. “Russia as a state is neither commercial nor agricultural but military, and its calling is to be the wrath of the world,” said a Cadet Corps textbook. The army meant obedience and diligence above all else. Both these qualities, which the shy youth already possessed, the army would foster ruinously.

The heir to the throne did his service in the Guards. Ever since the eighteenth century Russia’s wealthiest, most distinguished families had sent their children to Petersburg and the Guards. The richest
grandees, having retired to live out their days away from Petersburg in hospitable Moscow’s magnificent palaces, sent their children off to Petersburg and the Guards. Drinking, gypsies, duels—these were the Guards’ gentlemanly occupations. The Guards had been responsible for all of Russia’s palace revolutions. Guards had brought the Romanov empresses—Elizabeth and Catherine—to the throne and killed Emperors Peter III and Paul I. But the Guards had done more than plot against the imperial court. In all of Russia’s great battles, the Guards had been in the van.