Read Secret Lives of the Tsars Online
Authors: Michael Farquhar
Secret Lives of the Tsars
A Random House Trade Paperbacks Original
Copyright © 2014 by Michael Farquhar
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
ISBN 978-0-8129-7905-3
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-8578-8
Cover design: Victoria Allen
Cover illustration: John Holder
v3.1
“In the house of the Romanovs, a mysterious curse descends from generation to generation. Murders and adultery, blood and mud … the block, the rope, and poison—these are the true emblems of Russian autocracy. God’s unction on the brows of the Tsars has become the brand of Cain.”
—D
MITRI
M
EREZHKOVSKY
(1865–1941)
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CONTENTS
I
NTRODUCTORY
C
HAPTER
The Time of Troubles and the Rise of the Romanovs
C
HAPTER
1
Ivan V and Peter I (1682–1696): One Autocrat Too Many
C
HAPTER
2
Peter I (1696–1725): The Eccentricities of an Emperor
C
HAPTER
3
Catherine I (1725–1727): The Peasant Empress
C
HAPTER
4
Anna (1730–1740): “A Bored Estate Mistress”
C
HAPTER
5
Elizabeth (1741–1762): The Empress of Pretense
C
HAPTER
6
Peter III (1762): “Nature Made Him a Mere Poltroon”
C
HAPTER
7
Catherine II (1762–1796): “Prey to This Mad Passion!”
C
HAPTER
8
Paul (1796–1801): “He Detests His Nation”
C
HAPTER
9
Alexander I (1801–1825): Napoleon’s Conqueror
C
HAPTER
10
Nicholas I (1825–1855): “A Condescending Jupiter”
C
HAPTER
11
Alexander II (1855–1881): “A Crowned Semi-Ruin”
C
HAPTER
12
Alexander III (1881–1894): “A Colossus of Unwavering Autocracy”
C
HAPTER
13
Nicholas II (1894–1917): “An Absolute Child”
C
HAPTER
14
Nicholas II (1894–1917): “Gliding Down a Precipice”
C
HAPTER
15
Nicholas II (1894–1917): A Bloody End
The Time of Troubles and the Rise of the Romanovs
The live animals came hurtling through the air, tossed off a Kremlin tower by the knee-high tyrant-in-training who would one day rule as Ivan the Terrible. There were no consequences for the demented lad’s behavior then, nor would there be later when, as Russia’s first crowned tsar, he slaughtered almost the entire city of Novgorod—accentuating the massacre by shoving a number of his victims under the ice of the frozen Volkhov River. Ivan barely blinked when he personally gutted one nobleman after mocking his royal pretensions by dressing him like a king and seating him on a throne, or when he ordered hundreds of his perceived enemies skinned, boiled, burned, or broken in an orgy of retribution on Red Square. Yet while this savage monarch murdered with impunity (which, not surprisingly, made him the favorite tsar of the twentieth-century monster, Joseph Stalin) there was one act of homicidal rage that Ivan IV would deeply regret; a fit of pique that changed the course of Russian history.
When, in 1581, the tsar’s eldest son had the temerity to object to his father’s kicking his pregnant wife in the stomach, Ivan became so incensed that he clobbered the younger man on the head with his iron staff. Rage instantly turned to regret, though, as the half-crazed sovereign cradled his dying heir in
his arms. “May I be damned! I’ve killed my son! I’ve killed my son!” he cried. Indeed, he had. And with that bop on the head, Ivan had effectively destroyed the future of the ancient Rurik dynasty of sovereigns who had forged Russia into a nation.
Less than three years after killing his son, Ivan the Terrible was dead as well—felled by a stroke while playing chess. And though Russia began to recover from his ruinous policies, the relief was only temporary. In fact, Ivan IV’s reign of terror turned out to be a mere prelude to a far more devastating era of famine, civil strife, and bloodshed known as the Time of Troubles. During this violently unsettled period, a succession of schemers, opportunists, and even an imposter occupied the Russian throne before young Michael Romanov was elected tsar in 1613 and began a storied royal dynasty that would endure for the next three centuries.
The transfer of power after the death of Ivan IV in 1584 had been peaceful enough; a deceptive lull, as it turned out. The bloody tsar was succeeded by his simple and uninspiring second son, Feodor I. “Of mind he has but little or … none at all,” a Polish envoy wrote of the malformed monarch, who was guided by a group of regents. Among them was Tsar Feodor’s brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, a shrewd politician and able administrator who emerged as the sole power behind the slow tsar’s throne.
Early in Feodor’s reign, Godunov crushed a revolt by the family of one of Ivan the Terrible’s last wives,
*
1
Maria Nagaia, thwarting their effort to place on the throne the late tsar’s
youngest son, Dmitri. The
tsarevitch
(tsar’s son) and his mother, Maria, were exiled to the small principality of Uglich, and there, in 1591, the eight-year-old boy died under mysterious circumstances, his throat slashed. While Maria and her family loudly blamed their enemy Boris Godunov for Dmitri’s death, inciting a deadly riot in the process, an investigative commission determined the child had been playing with a knife and fatally wounded himself with it during a seizure. Godunov was officially exonerated, but Dmitri would nevertheless loom large in his future.
In 1598, the enfeebled Tsar Feodor died without an heir, thus ending with a whimper the once-mighty Rurik dynasty. Boris Godunov, who had served as Russia’s de facto ruler while Feodor merely reigned, was now selected to take his place. After a great show of reluctance, he was crowned amid general acclaim and seemed poised to bring Russia to greatness. Even with a severe economic crisis, crippling taxes, and an emerging policy that bound the majority of the population to the land against their will, Tsar Boris sat securely on his throne. But then the weather got really bad.
Climatic upheavals wrought by the Little Ice Age caused horrific famines during Boris Godunov’s seven-year reign. “I swear to God that this is the truth,” one witness to the disaster reported. “I saw with my own eyes people lying on the streets, eating grass like cattle in summer and hay in winter. Some were already dead, with hay and dung in their mouths and also (pardon my indelicacy) had swallowed human excrement.… Many dead bodies of people who had perished through hunger were found daily in the streets.… Daily … hundreds of corpses were gathered up at the tsar’s command and carried away on so many carts, that to behold it (scarcely to be believed) was grisly and horrible.”
In the midst of this unrelenting misery and deprivation, when nearly a third of Russia’s population perished, a pretender appeared in 1604, claiming to be Ivan the Terrible’s youngest son, Dmitri, miraculously rescued from Boris Godunov’s attempt to assassinate him. Another boy had been killed, the False Dmitri asserted, and now he had come to claim his rightful place on the throne and to rescue the Russian people from the darkness and chaos caused by the sins of the usurper Godunov.
The true identity of the imposter remains a mystery. Some claimed he was a defrocked monk by the name of Gregory Otrepiev, who, backed by the Catholic king of Poland, had come to Russia to destroy Orthodoxy. Others have proposed that he may have been raised since childhood to actually believe he was in fact Dmitri. Whoever he really was, the pretender quickly gained a following among a disaffected populace desperate for relief and eager to believe that he was God’s chosen.
In April 1605, while the rebellion that formed around the False Dmitri raged, Tsar Boris Godunov conveniently died, probably of heart disease. Two months later the pretender triumphantly entered Moscow, his path cleared by the strangulation of Godunov’s son and successor, Feodor II. “Dmitri” created a stirring spectacle when he visited the tomb of Ivan the Terrible. “Oh, beloved father!” he cried. “You left me in this world an orphan, but your saintly prayers helped me through all the persecution and has led me to the throne.” The next day he was crowned in the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Assumption. An imposter now sat on Russia’s throne, but he would rule for less than a year.
No sooner had the False Dmitri been enthroned than a grasping boyar (noble) by the name of Vasili Shuisky began
scheming against him. During the celebrations surrounding Dmitri’s marriage to the Catholic Marina Mniszech, the pseudo-tsar met a ghastly end. He was hacked to death by his assassins. Then, with ropes tied around the feet and genitals, his naked corpse was dragged out to Red Square and left exposed to scorn and ridicule for three days. Finally, the body was incinerated; the ashes were mixed with gunpowder and shot from a cannon toward the southwestern frontier, where the imposter first appeared.