The Russian Album (8 page)

Ignatieff played the keyboard of the European press with the same cynical virtuosity, feeding both the pan-Slavist publicists at home and the Gladstonian liberals abroad with stories of Turkish atrocities against the Balkan Christians. A natural mimic, he put on English country heartiness for Russell of
The Times,
and his rolling French r's for the correspondent of
Le Figaro.
In 1876, he toured the capitals of Europe drumming up support for the Russian cause against the Turks. In London, the cartoonist Spy drew him for
Vanity Fair,
bringing out the long straight fleshy nose, the sandy moustache and the formidable curvature of his frock coat. ‘A manipulator of phrases' was the caption in
Vanity Fair.

In Berlin Bismarck came away pleasantly surprised from his meetings with the Russian ambassador. Ignatieff was less of a windbag and more of a force to be reckoned with than press reports had suggested. Ignatieff told Bismarck that he wanted to accomplish a Russian revenge for the humiliations of the Crimean War through diplomacy rather than through force of arms. The Ottoman Empire, he said, was an artichoke, whose leaves he would peel off at his leisure, one at a time.

As he progressed through Europe in 1876, giving interviews to the press, posing for cartoonists, holding talks with the great powers, his Foreign Minister in St Petersburg, Prince Gorchakov, grew more and more impatient. Ignatieff, after all, was his subordinate, and it was intolerable to hear him speaking for Russian interests abroad without bothering to consult the Ministry at home. Yet Gorchakov knew that for the moment Ignatieff was untouchable. His courtship of the Slavophile press had made him a national figure at home, and his father had sufficient influence with the Tsar to protect his son from any whispering campaign mounted against him by the Foreign Ministry.

Ignatieff was that anomaly: a diplomat with a policy of his own. But he was not an adventurer. He was shrewd enough to know that any false move in the Balkans could be catastrophic. He made it clear to the Christians of Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro that he would support them only so long as their campaign against the Turks did not pitch the area into a European war. ‘Never “try” anything,' he told his Christian spies. ‘Leave it alone if you cannot see it through to the end, but once you put your hand to something, never yield.' This was his motto: to balance daring with care. In the upward spiral of Slav and Christian revolts, massacres and counter-massacres that brought Russia and Turkey to war in 1877, he played for time until the Russian army would be ready to deal the blow that his policy had striven to prepare.

When war came in 1877, his son Paul, then aged seven, was evacuated down the cliffs to the Bosphorus at night and rowed out to a paddle-steamer riding at anchor with its windows blacked out to elude the Turkish sentries. Next morning when he awoke the steamer was cutting through the Black Sea, taking the family to the safety of the Crimea. While the son played Turks and Russians with the peasant boys in the fields of the family estate at Kroupodernitsa in the Ukraine, the father rushed to join the Tsar's side in the muddy little Balkan towns that served as army headquarters. Before leaving for the front, the Tsar appointed Nicholas's father, the old general Paul Ignatieff, protector of the Russian throne in his absence.

Through the terrible months of the siege of Plevna, Nicholas Ignatieff stood by the Tsar's side while the monarch trained his field glasses on the agonizingly costly assaults by his troops on the Turkish redoubt. Once the siege was broken, he pleaded with the Tsar to take the campaign all the way to Constantinople, to make Russia at last master of the Dardanelles. Against him were ranged the Tsar's uncle, Grand Duke Nicholas, and in Petersburg, the Foreign Ministry, both of whom counselled a defensive strategy.

The Russo-Turkish War was the first campaign that Europe read about the next day in the telegraphed despatches of war correspondents at the front. Ignatieff became the Tsar's public-relations impresario, doling out morsels of hard information to the correspondents in return for access to the army telegraph and titbits of information of their own. At one point during the seesaw battle for the Shipka Pass, Ignatieff pulled the
Evening News
messenger off his horse and marched him into the Tsar's tent so that the blood-spattered boy could bring the monarch the latest state of the struggle in the passes.

After Plevna fell in the late autumn of 1877, the Russian armies began to pour through the ice-bound Balkan defiles towards Constantinople. Soon they were at the outskirts of the city. A British fleet was patrolling in the Dardanelles and a face-to-face encounter with the British Empire was only hours away. The Grand Duke called a halt and negotiated an armistice with the Turks. Hearing this news in Bucharest Ignatieff was beside himself at the thought that fifteen years of assiduous plotting on his part was about to be frustrated by timidity on the battlefield. He raced across the snow-bound passes to Russian headquarters. Once the sleigh overturned and pitched his papers and baggage into a ravine, but he scrambled out, mounted one of his guard's horses and raced on to Russian headquarters where, scarcely dismounted, he began dressing down the Grand Duke in front of the general staff. Eventually the Grand Duke exploded and said he was damned if Ignatieff was going to saddle Russia with a war against England. The Russian troops would stay where they were.

Instead of presiding over a conference to dismember the Ottoman Empire, Ignatieff was ordered to turn the armistice into a permanent peace. At San Stefano, a little town on the Sea of Marmara, between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, he re-drew the map of the Ottoman Empire while the defeated Turks watched in disconsolate silence. Bessarabia, lost in the Crimean War, was returned to Russia. Bosnia, Serbia and Herzegovina were given their independence and a new state of Bulgaria, with frontiers that stretched to within miles of Constantinople to the east and within miles of the Aegean on the south, was created as a client of the Russian Empire.

Scarcely had the treaty's terms been published than Bismarck in Berlin, Disraeli in London and Andrassy in Vienna set out to undo it, with the assistance of Gorchakov and the Russian Foreign Ministry in Petersburg. Disraeli considered that a client state of Russia with access to the Aegean and the Dardanelles was a threat to British sea-lanes; the Austro-Hungarians considered the independence of the new Balkan states a threat to their designs on domination of the Balkan peninsula and Bismarck said he could only permit the existence of the new Bulgaria if it was headed by a German prince. In Petersburg, the combined opposition of the Great Powers and his own Foreign Ministry was too much for the Tsar. He was persuaded that Ignatieff had gone too far.

The wheel of the ambassador's fortunes began to turn. In February 1878, the treaty of San Stefano made him a national hero; in April the Tsar ennobled the family; all male descendants of Paul Ignatieff were to take the title of Count. But in May, Count Nicholas found himself banished to his estates south of Kiev; in September, brooding on the front porch of the manor house at Kroupodernitsa, he read the telegraph reports from the conference in Berlin where his treaty was dismembered and everything he had striven to achieve for fifteen years was traded away. The boundaries of Bulgaria were driven back from the edge of Constantinople to the Shipka Pass in the north, and from the Aegean to the hinterlands of Macedonia. The howls of betrayal that issued from the Slavophile press throughout Russia were small comfort to his wounded vanity.

Gloomy and embittered, he took the whole family to Nice in the winter of 1878–79 to soak up the sun and to escape Petersburg. His son Paul remembered how miserably cold the Riviera was that winter: the olive logs burned fitfully in the grate, sending smoke throughout the corridors of their clammy villa. Outside the oranges in the groves wore little hats of snow. Paul tiptoed round the house while his father brooded and his mother rested upstairs: another child was due in June.

Then just as suddenly as it had vanished, his father's furious energy returned. He whisked them home again during the last week of Lent, with an addition to the troupe of nannies, valets, maids and coachmen that followed in their wake. This was a new tutor for Paul, Monsieur Castellot, a professor of mathematics at the Collège d'Etampes. He was a neat little man who always wore a frock coat, a top hat and the blue ribbon of his Palme Académique in his lapel.

The family party swept home across Europe via Florence and Vienna, switching from the train to carriages at a small station in the Ukraine. It was a grand procession, this homecoming, with four carriages, Paul's parents in the first, the boys and Monsieur Castellot in the second, the girls and their nurses in the third, and the rest of the servants in the fourth. They thundered along the dusty roads, with Monsieur Castellot up on the box beside the coachman, the tails of his frock coat folded over his knees and his mouth opening and closing in alarm as the coaches rumbled across the rough-hewn planks of the local bridges or, where there were no bridges, thrashed through the stream and up onto the meandering cart tracks which led through the fields to home.

They spent one night along the way at Porechie, an abandoned estate Paul's father was interested in buying. The old wooden veranda sagged, the windows were cobwebbed, and a steward showed them through the damp and peeling rooms, hastily pulling dust sheets off the furniture. Paul's father stretched out on a dusty sofa, pulled his greatcoat over his shoulders and announced that this was where they would bivouac for the night. His pregnant wife was bedded down on an old sofa and the boys were despatched next door with Monsieur Castellot. The steward spread hay on the floor for them to sleep on and Paul remembered that all night the boys shrieked and threw hay at each other, while Monsieur Castellot tried in vain to restore order, wondering all the while what could ever have possessed him to leave the Collège d'Etampes for this troupe of savages.

Next day, the coaches rolled through the gates of Kroupodernitsa, the family home in the rolling wheat and sugar-beet fields southwest of Kiev. It was not a grand estate: no imperial columns or neat English lawns, but instead a plain whitewashed Ukrainian house of three stories, with three wings, built by Paul's father sometime in the 1860s. There were Ukrainian fan decorations on the rooftops, carved wood fluting over the latticed shutters and inside, small chintzy rooms crammed with portraits of old ancestors and memorabilia from Peking, Khiva, Bokhara and Constantinople: silks and swords, muskets and wall hangings. The driveway was rough earth and the back gardens that ran down to the river Ross were a jungle of woods, cut through here and there by chestnut alleys. Peasant children were underfoot everywhere: queuing at the door of the pantry with berries for the cook to buy for jam or lining up outside the Countess's rooms to be treated with her homeopathic remedies for cuts and fevers. A short walk from the house was the church, a small-scale Santa Sofia built of brick overlooking the river, and around it clustered a raggle-taggle village of thatched whitewashed cottages.

Paul spent all his summers there and grew up a country child. The Ukrainian summers were dry and hot, scented with the strong odours of grain and manure from the surrounding fields. The still and airless afternoons were broken with screaming plunges into the river Ross. In the evenings the coachman and Monsieur Castellot would use him as a bird-dog on their hunting expeditions in the marshes. They would run him to exhaustion in search of game and then take turns carrying him home asleep in their arms.

When Paul was old enough to harness the pony and trap he would set out on the bright cool mornings and race through the oak woods to Bossibrod, the little wooden station built specially for the family on the Kiev–Odessa railway line. He would pick up his father's mail at the station and bowl along home with
Le Figaro, The Times
and
Novoe Vremie
from St Petersburg jouncing on the seat beside him. His father would be pacing the veranda in his dressing gown, sipping his coffee, waiting to pore over the papers for signs of the political climate back in Petersburg. He bore his banishment fretfully and longed for a return to power.

For several months in 1879 he was recalled, but only to serve as temporary governor for the annual commercial fair and market at Nizhni Novgorod. With his usual energy, he ordered the old
bidonville
of wooden and tin shacks that had served the market for centuries to be knocked down and replaced with vaulted steel and glass hangars of the kind he had seen in Les Halles in Paris. But this was not the work he longed for and he was soon back on the veranda in Kroupodernitsa, pacing and brooding and then making furious visitations to buy up vacant properties nearby. He plunged into speculation as he had once plunged into Asian adventure. Speculators came to him with propositions and he was soon deep in the Caspian caviar business and the Volga steamboat trade. His interest in these concerns was fitful and erratic and he turned them over to an ingratiating young steward, Grinevetsky. The family soon had its doubts about Grinevetsky, who was to be found living in the best hotel in Kiev, profiting from what he could skim off the Ignatieff enterprises. Nicholas's wife tried to get her husband to restrain his financial impulsiveness, but he never tolerated her interference. If they wouldn't let him serve his country, he grumbled, he could at least improve his neighbourhood. Dilapidated estates were purchased and done up, steamboats named after General Ignatieff began plying the Volga, and for the moment at least there was money enough to pay for this balm to wounded pride.

The call back to service in Petersburg finally came in March 1881, at a time of national crisis. Nicholas's old master, Alexander II, who had freed the serfs in 1861 and had triumphed over the Turks in 1878, was assassinated by terrorists in a Petersburg street. His successor, the massive and dim-witted Alexander III, began a search for men ruthless enough to put down what he believed was a conspiracy that threatened the future of the dynasty itself. The new Tsar had served at Plevna in the Turkish campaign and remembered late-night conversations with General Ignatieff in which he had asked for advice about his future reign and had been told with gruff decisiveness: ‘Draw closer to the people.' Alexander III consulted his uncle the Grand Duke Nicholas and was told that Ignatieff was often a ‘liar in small things', but might be truthful with big things. This equivocal recommendation was good enough for the new monarch. In May 1881, Ignatieff was named Minister of the Interior. All of the energies dammed up since San Stefano were now poured into the task of mastering the most serious crisis the autocracy had faced since the Decembrist uprising of 1825. He masterminded the arrest and deportation of agitators, the infiltration of émigré groups in Zürich and Paris and student clubs and salons at home. He reorganized the secret police, the Okhrana, and turned them loose on the People's Will, the terrorist group that had struck down Alexander II.