Secret Lives of the Tsars (33 page)

Yet bleak as the situation had become in 1904, it served merely as a preview for the momentous year that followed—what Dowager Empress Marie called “the year of nightmares.”

The new year, 1905, opened with a debilitating setback for Russia, news of which the French ambassador recorded in his diary: “Port Arthur, the Gibraltar of the Far East, the great fortress, symbolizing Russian domination in the China Seas … surrendered this morning.” Not only did the fall of this strategic gem have the effect of “piling national humiliation on national anger,” as Crankshaw wrote; it also unleashed widespread strikes by workers long disgruntled with the abysmal living and working conditions to which they were subjected as Russia rapidly industrialized. What resulted was, at least to that point, the nadir of Nicholas II’s reign.

A youthful priest by the name of George Gapon was able to marshal the workers’ simmering discontent into a mass march on the Winter Palace, where he planned to present their grievances directly to the tsar. On Sunday, January 22, the rally began. Enormous crowds began to peacefully march to the palace from all directions. Jubilant in their expectations, they carried crosses, icons, and portraits of Nicholas, while singing the imperial anthem, “God Save the Tsar.”

Although the converging processions to the center of the city were celebratory, the sheer mass of people proved overwhelming to the soldiers charged with maintaining order. A
number of them opened fire, and men, women and children fell by the hundreds. “The day, which became known as ‘Bloody Sunday,’ was a turning point in Russian history,” wrote biographer Robert K. Massie. “It shattered the ancient, legendary belief that tsar and the people were one. As bullets riddled their icons, their banners and their portraits of Nicholas, the people shrieked, ‘The Tsar will not help us!’ It would not be long before they added the grim corollary, ‘And so we have no Tsar.’ ”

Nicholas, who was actually at Tsarskoe Selo when the slaughter took place, recorded the tragedy in his journal that night: “A painful day! Serious disorders took place in Petersburg when the workers tried to come to the Winter Palace. The troops have been forced to fire in several parts of the city and there are many killed and wounded. Lord, how painful and sad this is!”

Other members of the imperial family reacted with revulsion as well. “We’re lost, aren’t we?” cried the tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Paul; “within and without, everything’s crumbling!” Similarly, Paul’s wife, Olga, declared, “What a horrible day! Now we shall have revolution—it’s the end!… Today’s disaster is irreparable!”

The response to Bloody Sunday was a call for revolt and terrorism rarely seen in Russia since the days of Alexander II. “The Revolution has come,” declared the Marxist Leon Trotsky. From his hiding place, Father Gapon wrote a public denunciation of “Nicholas Romanov, formerly Tsar and at present soul-murderer of the Russian empire,” while the Russian Social Democratic Party issued a violent manifesto: “Yesterday you saw the savagery of the monarchy. You saw the blood running in the streets.… Who directed the soldiers’
rifles and shot against the breasts of the workers? It was the Tsar! The Grand Dukes, the ministers, the generals, the scum of the Court … may they meet death!”

Three weeks later, the tsar’s uncle (and Alexandra’s brother-in-law), Grand Duke Serge, did indeed meet death—in an assassination even more ghastly than that of his father Alexander II (see
Chapter 11
). He was blown to smithereens after a bomb was tossed into his carriage. “The unfortunate grand duke was reduced to pieces and we literally found nothing of his head, which must have been shattered into tiny pieces,” recounted the tsar’s cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas. “Parts of his body, such as two fingers, were found on the roof of the Palace of Justice, and those which were laying on the snow, were fragments full of blood and frightful limbs, etc.”
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Such was the specter of violence in the capital that the emperor and empress were unable to attend Serge’s funeral, as it was deemed far too dangerous. However, the murdered grand duke’s brother Paul, who had been exiled for having married a commoner without the tsar’s consent, was allowed back home to attend. And what he found after meeting with his nephew Nicholas II was troubling. According to Paul, the tsar seemed oblivious—both to the perils of the continuing war with Japan, with the massive losses that accompanied it, and to the rising revolutionary fervor that resulted.

The emperor “discussed the war with
alarming complacency
,” as the French diplomat (and future ambassador) Maurice Paléologue reported Paul saying in a conversation he had
with the grand duke. “The revolutionary outbreaks hardly worry him at all; he claims that the masses are not in the least interested in them; he believes he is one with the people.”

The tsar’s mother was far more realistic about the situation than her son, and offered Paul a bleak outlook: “We’ve lost our last chance of winning in the Far East; we’re beaten already; we ought to make peace at once; otherwise there’ll be a revolution.” When the grand duke asked his sister-in-law if she had been so candid with her son, the dowager empress replied, “I tell him so every day, but he won’t listen to me; he doesn’t realize our military situation any better than the position at home. He can’t see that he’s leading Russia into disaster.”

Marie’s dire assessment proved all too accurate as “the year of nightmares” progressed. On May 27, the Russian Baltic Fleet, after sailing halfway around the globe over seven months, was ambushed by the Japanese as it made its way up the Tsushima Strait. More than four thousand Russians were killed in the epic naval battle that ensued—the largest since Trafalgar a century before—and six thousand more were captured. In all, twenty warships were lost, forcing Russia’s surrender the next day. After receiving the report, Nicholas II “turned ashen pale,” according to his sister Olga; “he trembled, and clutched at a chair for support. Alicky broke down and sobbed. The whole palace was plunged into mourning that day.”

After this ignominious surrender, there was no choice now but to end the entire war. Sergei Witte deftly negotiated rather favorable peace terms for Russia,
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but as author W.
Bruce Lincoln noted, “even [he] could not shield Nicholas from being the first ruler in Europe to admit defeat at the hands of Asians.”

Meanwhile, violence and disturbances were erupting across Russia at an alarming rate, which, Lincoln wrote, made it evident that Bloody Sunday had been but “the first bloodletting of the year.” “What’s happening to Russia?” exclaimed Grand Duke Constantine (known as K.R.). “What disorganization, what disintegration, just like a piece of clothing that is beginning to rip and tear along the seams, and fall open.”

Even Nicholas now seemed at last to grasp the seriousness of the situation. “It makes me sick to read the news,” he wrote; “strikes in schools and factories, murdered policemen, Cossacks, riots. But the ministers, instead of acting with quick decision, only assemble in council like a lot of frightened hens and cackle about providing united ministerial action.” Yet despite the tsar’s lament, the ultimate authority and responsibility rested, as it always had in autocratic Russia, with the sovereign. And he was helpless.

“My poor Nicky!” his mother wrote. “May God give you
the strength and wisdom
in these terribly difficult times to take the right measures and so overcome this evil.… May God help you, that is my constant prayer.” Mother also had a bit of advice left for the emperor who had begun listening to her less and less. “I am sure that the only man who can help you now and be useful is [Serge] Witte … he certainly is a man of genius,
energetic
and clear sighted.”

By mid-October, in what Lincoln called “a storm unlike
any Russia had ever seen,” the entire country was paralyzed by strikes. Workers from virtually every sector walked off their jobs in the cities, while peasants rampaged through the countryside, burning and pillaging. “The revolution was at hand,” wrote Massie; “it needed only a spark.”

“So the ominous quiet days began,” Nicholas wrote to his mother. “Complete order in the streets, but at the same time everybody knew that something was going to happen. The troops were waiting for the signal but the other side would not begin. One had the same feeling as before a thunder storm in the summer. Everybody was on edge and extremely nervous.… Through all these horrible days I constantly met with Witte. We very often met in the early morning to part only in the evening when night fell. There were only two ways open: to find an energetic soldier to crush the rebellion by sheer force. There would be time to breathe then but as likely as not, one would have to use force again in a few months, and that would mean rivers of blood and in the end we should be where we started.”

One of the few men thought capable of crushing dissent and establishing what would in effect be a military dictatorship was the tsar’s imposing cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas (“Nikolasha,” to the family), commander of the St. Petersburg Military District. But the grand duke made quite clear his opposition to any such plan by brandishing a gun and declaring that if the emperor “wants to force me to become a dictator, I shall kill myself in his presence with this revolver.”

That left the only other option Witte outlined for the emperor, which Nicholas described to his mother: “The other way out would be to give the people their civil rights, freedom of speech and press, also to have all laws confirmed by a State Duma—that of course would be a constitution. Witte defends
this energetically. He says that, while it is not without risk, it is the only way out at the present moment.”

After much debate, Nicholas II—“invoking God’s help,” as he wrote—signed what became known as the October Manifesto, granting the people liberties previously unimaginable. In that moment Russia became a semiconstitutional monarchy. And while the emperor retained certain prerogatives, such as conducting foreign affairs and the appointment of ministers, the age-old autocracy was no more.

“My dear Mama, you can’t imagine what I went through before that moment,” Nicholas wrote to Marie. “There was no other way out than to cross oneself and give what everyone was asking for. My only consolation is that such is the will of God, and this grave decision will lead my dear Russia out of the intolerable chaos she has seen for nearly a year.”

The rest of the imperial family reacted with horror to what the tsar had done. In a stroke, he had hobbled the very institution he had sworn to uphold at his coronation. “That was the end,” wrote Nicholas’s cousin and brother-in-law, Grand Duke Alexander (“Sandro”—married to the tsar’s sister Xenia). “The end of the dynasty and the end of the empire. A brave jump from the precipice would have spared us the agony of the remaining twelve years.”

Nicholas himself was tormented by his decision. “I am too depressed,” he tearfully confided to Prince Vladimir Orlov. “I feel that in signing this act I have lost the crown. Now all is finished.”

All the more distressing was the fact that the October Manifesto did little to quell the violent upheavals. “For the most part the peasant disturbances are still going on,” Nicholas reported to his mother. “They are difficult to put down because there are not enough troops or Cossacks to go round.
But the worst thing is another mutiny of the naval establishments in Sebastopol and part of the garrison there. How it hurts, and how ashamed one is of it all.”

That December, a massive revolt in Moscow resulted in the deaths of five thousand people, with fourteen thousand more wounded. “The driving force behind both the troops and the rebels is no longer that of enthusiasm or any human impulse,” a correspondent for
The New York Times
reported. “It is the force of superhuman hate, and hence the deeds reported are not acts of patriots, soldiers, or otherwise, but the enormities of madmen.”
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So 1905 came to a close. And out of the chaos and destruction of the “year of nightmares” emerged one of the darkest, most mysterious figures in Russian history—the “Holy Devil” who would lead the Romanov dynasty to its ultimate destruction twelve years later: Rasputin.

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1
Actually, it was World War I that would ensure the “great separation” of families Victoria feared. A number of the queen’s descendants—including her grandsons George V of Britain and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany—would face one another as mortal enemies.

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2
The bombastic and ultramilitarist German emperor, loathed by most of his royal relations in Britain, was related to Alix through their mothers, both of whom were daughters of Queen Victoria.

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After the assassination of her husband, Alexandra’s sister Ella founded a convent in Moscow and became a nun. Her life of charitable work came to a ghastly end under the Bolsheviks in 1918, when she was tossed, still alive, down a mine pit and left to die with several others.

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The peace conference was held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. The real winner was Witte, however, who managed to obtain favorable concessions for Russia and was awarded the title of count by the tsar. “He went quite stiff with emotion,” recounted Nicholas, “and then tried three times to kiss my hand.” The warm feelings were not to last. (See footnote on
this page
.)

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Nicholas bitterly turned on Count Witte as the experiment in constitutional government he had advocated seemed to fail. “As for Witte,” the tsar wrote to his mother, “since the happenings in Moscow he has radically changed his views; now he wants to hang and shoot everybody. I have never seen such a chameleon of a man. That, naturally, is the reason why no one believes him any more.”