Red Mutiny (13 page)

As Nicholas began his day, assaults on his reign and calls for change appeared endless. They arose from both the despised revolutionaries and from nobles who were able to gain an audience with him. In a way, the nobles' demands represented the greater betrayal—and a more plausible threat. Although the tsar tried to insulate himself from the chaos, this turmoil was enough to reaffirm his wish that he had never been born to become tsar. But that was his role, and he would be damned rather than betray his obligation to God and country. In his view, the Romanovs
were
Russia. To allow others a voice in its leadership meant nothing less than its death.

The first of the Romanovs, Michael, came to power in 1613 after nearly two decades of infighting among the princes of Moscow, which had left Russia in chaos. The country's aristocratic families decided that only a strong monarchy, like that of the past, could prevent anarchy and invasion from the Swedes or Poles. The kind of power they had in mind originated in the thirteenth century, when the Tatars overran Russia.

So they could survive and prosper under the yoke of the Tatars, the people of the Muscovite principality allowed their ruler absolute
authority. The prince taxed his lands, ruled his people, and dealt with enemies, internal and foreign, as his conscience dictated, unhindered by laws or bureaucratic interference. Ivan the Terrible, the first Muscovite prince to crown himself Tsar of All Russia in 1547, revealed the limitlessness of this absolute power. With the support of the Russian Orthodox Church, the prince's authority was also endowed with a divine mandate, a mystical connection between him and the Orthodox people he ruled.

For more than 250 years of continuous Romanov rule, the tsars reigned over Russia in this same paternalistic manner. Sporadic bursts of reform—attempts to form a functioning civil service, codify legal principles, loosen censorship, and create local governing assemblies called
zemstvos
—had failed to effectively challenge the tsar's power. In 1881, when Nicholas's father, Alexander III, ascended the throne, he was determined that this kind of reform (favored most recently by his own father, Alexander II, who was nonetheless assassinated by revolutionaries) would never take hold. He repressed dissent, debilitated the civic bureaucracy, and crushed any advances toward representative government, no matter how meager. While Russia faced the encroachment of the modern world—secularism, industrialization, urban populations, and democratic ideologies—in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Alexander III raised his son to follow the Muscovite tradition of rule, believing it the one true path to maintaining the Russian Empire's greatness.

Alexander III took easily to the role of autocrat. A tall, broad-shouldered gorilla of a man who, reportedly, could tie an iron poker into knots, he was a resolute, bluntly spoken leader with tremendous energy and little patience for formality. He enjoyed power, exercising it with great enthusiasm.

His son inherited few, if any, of his father's capabilities. A timid, small boy who often fell sick, Nicholas idolized his father even as he withered in the enormous shadow that Alexander cast. Brought up in the colossal Gatchina Palace at the Romanov estate in the town of the same name south of St. Petersburg, Nicholas, his two younger brothers, and his sisters followed a Spartan lifestyle together with their parents: sleeping on army cots, rising early, taking cold baths, and, at times, barely getting enough to eat. Apparently, this was done to teach discipline, but extravagant toys, doting governesses, and the obsequiousness with which everyone they met treated them, including those charged with their education, confused the effect. Furthermore, the tsarina, Marie, tended to be overprotective.

From a young age, Nicholas had a host of tutors. His earliest ones, including an elderly English gentleman named Mr. Heath, taught him perfect manners, an impenetrable calm, a keen interest in sports, an ability to dance, and a command of French, German, and English. It was an ideal education for a courtier but not for the future leader of 135 million people. Only when Nicholas turned fifteen did his father, who still viewed him as a child and privately considered him a disappointment, arrange for an education more suited to prepare Nicholas for the many challenges he would face as tsar.

Entrusted to some of Russia's greatest minds, he began a broad range of study including mathematics, science, history, geography, literature, law, and military science. This program was overseen by Alexander Ill's former tutor and lay head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. A gaunt figure, usually dressed in black and looking as if he had just climbed out of his grave, Pobedonostsev was a reactionary of the highest order. He viewed democracies as akin to rule by the devil, considered constitutions "the instruments of the unrighteous," and labeled a free press "the instrument of mass corruption." According to Pobedonostsev, God himself had chosen the tsar and guided him; if his earthly representative failed to rule as an autocrat, allowing others a hand in government, then the tsar had failed God and deserved punishment.

These lessons Pobedonostsev taught Nicholas personally. They made a deep impression, reinforced by his father's like-minded views and by the assassination of his grandfather, whose legless and bloodied body Nicholas was forced to view as a thirteen-year-old in 1881. Overall, however, Nicholas had little thirst for the knowledge imparted to him in the long, dreary lectures, which neither tested him nor allowed him to think for himself. At their conclusion in May 1890, the twenty-one-year-old tsarevich noted in his diary, "Today I finished definitely and forever my education."

Nicholas preferred his command of the Preobrazhensky Guards Regiment; he was entranced by military pomp and circumstance as well as by the leisurely life of a gentleman officer. An agreeable and courteous young man, who appeared attentive and always managed to
say and do the proper thing, he would have been unremarkable in St. Petersburg's court were it not for his proximity to the throne. Yet his father was a robust forty-four-year-old in 1890, and Nicholas likely faced decades before he would become tsar, so he pursued his hobbies, idling away his time instead of learning the ponderous details of running an empire. He drank with his fellow officers, played billiards, attended grand balls, traveled the world, and had a dalliance with a ballerina before falling for Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, a German princess and granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

In 1894, his father suddenly came down with kidney disease; the doctors could do nothing. Nicholas hurried to his father's side with the rest of the family at Livadia, their Crimean palace on the Black Sea. Soon after, Alexander III lost his colossal strength, and he died on November 1. That afternoon, Nicholas felt the weight of the Russian Empire crashing down upon him. After escorting his brother-in-law, Grand Duke Aleksandr, down the stairs and into his room, Nicholas embraced him and, with tears in his eyes, despaired. "Sandro, what am I going to do? What is going to happen to me, to you, to Xenia, to Alix, to Mother, to all of Russia? I'm not prepared to be tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers." One of these ministers, the head of the navy, was equally troubled. On the eve of Alexander Ill's death, he wrote, "The heir is a mere child, without experience, training, or even an inclination to study the great problems of state.... The helm of state is about to fall from the hands of an experienced mariner, and I fear that no hand like his is to grasp it for many years to come. What will be the course of the ship of state under these conditions the Lord only knows."

At twenty-six years of age, Nicholas was now tsar. His official coronation in May 1896 portended the many disasters to come. Accompanied by his new wife, Alexandra, Nicholas entered the grand Uspensky Cathedral in Moscow to the chanting of the choir and climbed the fifteen steps to the throne under a purple canopy. He swore to uphold the imperial autocracy, wrapped himself in the imperial cloak, and placed the diamond-encrusted crown on his own head. The pealing of bells proclaimed his ascendancy, and Nicholas rode from the cathedral on horseback with his golden scepter in
hand. For three days, Moscow and the whole of Russia celebrated the coronation.

On the fourth day, May 16, Nicholas was scheduled to present gifts to his people on Khodynskoye Field, a drill ground lined with trenches and thronged with nearly half a million peasants from every region of the empire. Early in the morning, peasants rushed to the front of the field to get their hands on the cakes and the specially engraved tin cups that were to be handed out to them later in the day. Thousands fell into the ditches, young and old alike, and they were trampled to death in the stampede of people. Into the night, wagons carted away the dead and mangled, as Nicholas, having reluctantly agreed to continue the coronation festivities at his uncles' suggestion, attended the French ambassador's ball. From that moment, he felt that his reign was cursed, while the public wondered, in outrage, how their new tsar could dance in the midst of such a tragedy.

From the beginning, the new tsar made clear how he was going to rule. A deputation of officials from numerous provinces came to pay their respects shortly after Alexander Ill's death. After receiving their gifts and listening to their words of support, Nicholas thanked them, but then announced, "It has come to my attention that during the past months there have been heard in some of the
zemstvos
the voices of those who have senseless dreams that they could some day be called to participate in the government of the country. I want everyone to know that I will concentrate all my strength on maintaining, for the good of the whole nation, the principle of absolute autocracy, as firmly and as strongly as did my lamented father."

But Nicholas was no equal to his father. Although personally charming and diligently devoted to the empire's affairs, he had neither his father's keen mind nor his self-assurance. "Nicholas spent the first years of his reign at his desk, listening, with a feeling best described as alarm, to avuncular advice and insinuations," recounted his brother-in-law Grand Duke Aleksandr Mikhailovich. The tsar's wife, Alix, who barely spoke Russian when they married and knew little about the country, urged her husband to lead the empire with the same forceful hand as Ivan the Terrible, ignoring the multitudes who would give him direction. Given the meddling foolishness of his four uncles and other court members, this might actually have been sound counsel.

However, Nicholas managed to create the worst of all worlds. First, he refused to delegate, personally handling the most trivial details of the empire—school budgets, provincial midwives' appointments, and peasant petitions—while neglecting to set out a cohesive plan for his vision of Russia. Second, he gave key positions within his government to family members, appointing his boorish uncle Sergei as governor-general of Moscow and his bon vivant uncle Alexis, who had little naval experience, as grand admiral of the fleet. Protective of his powers, Nicholas also favored mediocre sycophants over strong-willed, capable ministers such as Sergei Witte, his father's minister of finance, whom Nicholas eventually removed from office despite his substantial abilities and devotion to Russia. Third, Nicholas kept these ministries separated, meeting with each head individually and eliminating any chance of coordinated effort. As one official in Nicholas's administration commented, "There were as many governments as there were ministries." Finally, Nicholas relied on God for wisdom, believing completely that it was the Almighty alone who guided his hand. But, as a monarchist newspaper editor quipped in a moment of candor, "The Sovereign listens only to God, and only from God does he take advice, but because God is invisible he takes advice from everyone he meets: from his wife, from his mother, from his stomach ... and accepts all this as an order from God."

As if his own personal failings weren't enough, Nicholas had inherited an autocratic state coming apart at the seams. Alexander III had pushed his country along the path of industrialization through the 1880s, fearing that Russia had fallen dangerously behind the rest of the world. His policies created a boom, rapidly expanding the economy and creating large urban centers, but the workers suffered in the process. Their peasant families back in the countryside fared as badly, burdened by a population explosion, low productivity, high state taxes, crippling land fees, and a useless bureaucracy. The landed nobles, who had always served as the tsar's chief supporters, continued an economic decline begun with the emancipation of serfs and exacerbated by an agricultural depression. Their attempts at bettering their position (and that of peasants) through
zemstvos,
organizations first promoted by Alexander II, were thwarted by his son, who viewed this type of localized government as a check on his authority. Progressive state bureaucrats who also came to the fore during the reforms of
the 1860s, bringing with them rule of law and rational Western-minded policies, were similarly vanquished. With them, workers lost any chance at curbing the abuses of factory owners, making them ripe candidates for revolution.

The great famine of 1891 revealed the failings of Alexander Ill's autocratic state. The regime bungled relief efforts, deepening a crisis that eventually killed over half a million people. Alexander's belated, desperate call to the public for assistance, answered foremost by
zemstvos
leaders as well as by merchants, landless nobles, students, teachers, doctors, engineers, and other individuals in the cities, sparked a demand for change. Once the crisis subsided, however, Alexander returned to his old ways. In the aftermath, some Russians were radicalized, but many others, including
zemstvos
leaders such as Prince Georgy Lvov, campaigned for the tsar to open the government to public influence. These were the individuals whom Nicholas II addressed soon after his father's death, when he referred to their ambitions as "senseless dreams." It was a critical mistake on his part. As German chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said, "The power of revolution lies not in the extreme ideas of its leaders, but in that small portion of moderate demands unsatisfied at the right time."