Alexander was head of the extended Romanov family. But he was not able to maintain the discipline his father had. His sister Masha secretly wed Count Stroganov and had children by him.
It was difficult for the emperor to be the moral guardian, since he was living quite openly with Ekaterina Dolgorukaya—and they had children, which everyone knew about. The other Romanovs followed his example. His brother Kostya, who had condemned the emperor’s romantic intrigues in his diary, now lived openly with the ballerina Kuznetsova. His younger brother, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, also lived with a ballerina. In fact, the Imperial Ballet was more like a bordello for the palace. The carriages of the young grand dukes parked on Rossi Street where the ballet school was located, to pick out their prey. Affairs with ballerinas became their norm. So at the ballet, the audiences watched the imperial box. If one of the numerous Romanovs frequented the performances of a particular young ballerina, the public drew the right conclusion.
Many of the grand dukes (and the last tsar, Nicholas II, when he was heir) traditionally began their sex lives having an affair with a ballerina. In the evenings, the crowd saw the bared body of the woman the tsar’s brother caressed at night.
A sign of the dissolution of the Romanov family is the scandal that shocked the court and society, involving Grand Duke Nicholas, Nikola, the tsar’s favorite nephew.
Both Alexander and Konstantin had named their firstborn sons Nicholas in honor of their father. Both young namesakes met tragic ends. After the premature death of the heir, Niks, it was Nikola’s turn.
The annual St. Petersburg masquerades were held at the Maryinsky Theater. Nocturnal revelry took place in the opulent imperial theater with its gilt, mirrors, and velvet. Masks hid identities, and the queens of society mixed with the queens of the demimonde. Nikola was a frequent and welcome guest, tall, “the ornament of the right wing,” and a trendsetter for the capital’s golden youth. One night a petite little cat in a Venetian mask slipped through the dancers to approach him. This was a meeting that can truly be called fateful.
Fanny Lear, an American with a dangerous fire in her French blood, was born in the New World. She was born too late: The golden age of adventure, of Casanova and Cagliostro, the eighteenth century, was over. And her place of birth was not the best milieu for her talents: provincial puritanical America. Her thirst for adventure sent her from the New World to the Old.
She quickly found a place among the charming creatures that flittered from European capital to capital, breaking hearts and acquiring fortunes. She called herself a dancer to avoid the term “courtesan,” but she was a brilliant courtesan. Naturally, she ended up in the Babylon of the times, Paris.
In the early fall, the glittering ladies of the demimonde left France’s stuffy capital and moved to the promising shores of the Côte d’Azur, where very wealthy Russians congregated. Here, as the poet put it, “the Russian beluga went to lay its golden caviar.” The “newest Russians” (as they were called then in Russia), the newly rich merchants and manufacturers, came to the Riviera to party. The heir Niks died here; the empress with her entourage came here for her health; and here rich Russian aristocrats played and wasted their lives.
Fanny soon developed close relationships with very elderly and very rich Russians. She dubbed them the “club of the silvery aged,” and they were quite unlike the cautious French. They easily spent and gambled away entire fortunes. Fanny helped them wholeheartedly. She became entranced with the vision of the distant and equally rich northern capital. She made her way there, impelled to search for new adventures.
In St. Petersburg, Fanny Lear kept to “silvery embraces” at first. Then the queen of St. Petersburg courtesans (and of course an agent of the Third Department), the British Mabel Grey, told her about the tireless seeker of amorous escapades, Grand Duke Nikola. Fanny realized that her silver age was over and it was time for gold. A plan was set in motion. Fanny was noticed, and Nikola’s adjutant was sent to her. The grand duke was soon boasting of his conquest to other rascals.
Nikola’s father now usually spent the night with his dancer, and his mother lived sadly in the lavish palace in Pavlovsk. On their first night, Nikola brought Fanny to the Marble Palace, where Fanny saw the opulence of the palace in private.
They went up the marble staircase to the second floor. A servant with a candelabra lit the way. Passing through an enfilade of empty formal rooms they came to a white marble room, a thousand square meters in size, illuminated by gigantic crystal chandeliers. We can imagine her delight as she danced alone in that ballroom.
They were together all the time. Nikola’s games ended unexpectedly this time: The prey turned into the hunter. When his mother was in St. Petersburg, Nikola took Fanny to Pavlovsk. The halls were decorated with formal portraits of emperors, Nikola’s ancestors, the slain Peter III and the slain Paul I, and with furniture and bronzes in the style of yet another slain king, Louis XVI. During military exercises with the emperor in Krasnoe, all the young Romanovs knew and envied the fact that Fanny was there with Nikola, tucked away in his charming cottage. When they took romantic walks, as soon as she saw the tsar or some other family member, Fanny immediately went away, “protecting his reputation,” but actually reveling in the knowledge of how much the other young Romanovs lusted after her gorgeous body as they watched her. She was skillfully obedient to Nikola, who was essentially a milksop who considered himself a debaucher.
He wrote an extremely naïve note that he demanded she sign: “I swear by all that is holy for me in this world, to never talk to anyone or see anyone without permission of my august Master. I promise faithfully, like an honorable American, to keep this vow and declare myself body and soul the slave of the Russian Grand Duke. Fanny Lear.”
She laughed and signed. She could laugh because she knew which of them was the slave. He showed it off to his friends. But in exchange for “body and soul,” Fanny asked for a trifling hundred thousand rubles and a will made out in her favor, so that she, poor thing, would have at least something of her own. The grand duke owned nothing, he lived with his parents, but she knew his allowance was a million francs a year, so he would be able to pay.
Storm clouds began gathering in their sunny skies. Nikola’s father learned of the relationship—belatedly, because for some reason the Third Department had not reported it to him, even though many people knew of the connection.
Konstantin consulted with the tsar. Neither man was in a position to lecture Nikola on morality. They decided to send the “love-crazed boy” to war.
Alexander had begun the conquest of Central Asia. In his time, Prince Potemkin, lover and comrade-in-arms of Catherine the Great, had persuaded the empress to look to the south, which is how Russia got the Crimea and the Black Sea. Its temporary loss in the Crimean War was now restored, but for Alexander that was only the beginning. The cross made of mosaic pieces from Hagia Sophia in Constantinople lay in his father’s grave, and he dreamed of continuing the war with Turkey. It was for this that he had introduced military reform and was creating a new army.
In the meantime, the emperor continued expansion to the south. The Caucasus was conquered, and it was time to move on to Central Asia. The khanates of Bukhara, Khiva, and Kokand were weak and ready for picking. The British considered it their region because it protected their territories in India. The tsar had to hurry. His official excuse was that Russia’s militant neighbors were continually raiding the outskirts of the country. They used robbery as their livelihood, and they could not be taught to change their behavior. Therefore, they had to be conquered.
To begin with, Alexander commanded General Chernyaev to take several fortresses belonging to the emir of Bukhara. Mikhail Chernyaev was a good-looking, sturdy man with narrow Mongol eyes and a thundering voice, a favorite with the soldiers, and had been through the Crimean and Caucasus wars.
In Central Asia, the general was inventive. During the siege of Chimkent, in the deep of night, his soldiers crawled through the ancient and abandoned water channel in the fortress wall. They appeared inside the fortress in the moonlight like ghosts from underground and easily crushed the resistance, after which, Chernyaev took two thousand bayonets toward Tashkent. They moved through a sandstorm: The sand was everywhere, in their hair, their clothes, their food. The general was traveling light, with only twelve cannon, and the storm did not stop his push toward Tashkent. He found a city of one hundred thousand people with an army of thirty thousand.
The emir was furious. The British threatened international complications. Chernyaev was ordered to move swiftly. The first storming of Tashkent was unsuccessful, and the city was filled with whoops and cries of victory, music, and dance. The emir promised to display the heads of Russian officers in the square. But after a second day of fierce attack, the general’s small army took the legendary city, sixty-three cannon, and large quantities of gunpowder and arms.
The general had a good sense of Asiatic psychology. The day after he took Tashkent, he rode around the city triumphantly, accompanied by only two Cossacks. That evening, he calmly went to the local steam baths, where, naked, he chatted peaceably and respectfully with naked residents, as if he were among his own people. The city understood that the Russians were there to stay. Soon after, the emir became the tsar’s docile vassal.
Samarkand fell next. It was the ancient capital of the great Tamerlane, and where his black coffin with a worn golden cover lay under a seven-thousand-pound marble sarcophagus, beneath the light-blue cupola of the mausoleum.
To soothe the mighty British, the southern advance was halted in the late 1860s. Even the brave General Chernyaev, who was military governor of the region he had conquered, was recalled. But when passions had subsided in the early 1870s, Alexander unexpectedly decided to continue his incursion into Central Asia. The subjugation of the Khiva Khanate began. The entire ancient region had to be part of his empire. This was where the tsar and Kostya decided to send Nikola to fight.
Even though it was an arduous expedition, Nikola was happy, for like all the Romanovs, he adored the army. The advancing Russian troops were met with water shortages and other delights of the desert. Soldiers and officers often slept on the sand with saddles for pillows, chilled by the sudden plunge in temperatures in the night. The Khivans destroyed wells by shoveling in dirt and pollutants. People died of thirst. They found a well at last, from which the soldiers hauled a semirotted dog carcass. Nonetheless, suffering from thirst, they all drank that water. Nikola put up with all the privations easily and described their adventures in long letters to his beloved Fanny.
The Russians took Khiva. The ancient city was a real-life story from A Thousand and One Nights—the moon over the minarets and mosques. Long negotiations ensued. The khan, in the manner of the Orient, spoke only of tangential things; a warm-up, like tuning instruments before a concert.
Nikola and his adjutant Vernovsky planned to visit the sultan’s harem, going up a rope ladder. But their escapade was stopped. The commander explained to impulsive Nikola that the harem was inviolate, as the khan had accepted Russia’s protectorate and would become the faithful supervisor of his people for Russia.
The grand duke returned to St. Petersburg as a colonel with medals. The emperor gave him a captured cannon from Khiva, which was placed in the courtyard of the Marble Palace.
They decided to marry off Nikola quickly, and even bought him a small palace. He moved Fanny into it and continued his affair. His spending was getting out of control. When Nikola’s mother returned to the Marble Palace from Pavlovsk, she discovered a theft, an impossible, sacrilegious theft. Precious stones, diamond rays, were dug out of the setting of her wedding icon.
The servants were suspected, and St. Petersburg city governor Trepov led the investigation. Count Peter Shuvalov, chief of the Third Department, who openly hated Grand Duke Konstantin, also took part. His investigation was exceptionally brief. On April 12, 1874, Trepov came to the Marble Palace and in great sorrow informed Konstantin of circumstances that could occur only in a nightmare.
Konstantin recorded them in his diary: “Trepov reported that the diamonds from the icon were found in a pawnshop!!!! And that they were pawned by my son’s adjutant. The arrested adjutant testified that Nikola gave him the diamonds and Nikola ordered him to pawn them….
“15 April, the horrible scene of Nikola’s interrogation by P. A. Shuvalov and myself. No repentance. Obduracy and not a single tear.
“16 April. Nikola displays obduracy, swagger, and nonrepentance.”
They arranged for Nikola and his adjutant Vernovsky to confront each other. “Vernovsky’s pure-hearted testimony made it possible to reconstruct the picture.” The theft was related to Nikola’s expenditures on Fanny Lear. The business with the promissory note signed by Nikola was revealed then, as well.
Trepov had a frightened Fanny brought to his office. As she wrote in her memoirs, it was “a grim building where people sometimes vanished without a trace.” She was ordered to leave Russia instantly after returning the promissory note for one-hundred thousand rubles. The thought of that loss emboldened Fanny. She threatened to turn to Mr. Jewel, the American ambassador, for help. But they told her that if the ambassador were to learn only a part of what she had been doing, he would not help her. So she gave up the note.
Someone informed the court of the incident. And the tsar had to tell War Minister Dmitri Milyutin the story during their daily meeting. Milyutin wrote in his diary: “The tsar told me everything that happened; the details are outrageous. It turns out that Nikolai Konstantinovich after various filthy escapades over several years finally stooped to gouging out the icon at his mother’s bedside.”
Now the court anticipated the fall of Konstantin. The tsar would have to punish his nephew mercilessly for sacrilegiously attacking a holy icon, one doubly sacred for being the icon in the marriage ceremony of his own parents. How could the father who brought up his son to be a criminal take part in political life?
Alexander and Kostya came up with the only way out of a hopeless situation. From Kostya’s diary: “18 April. What to do with Nikola? After long vacillation, we decided to wait for the doctor’s evaluation and no matter what it says, publicly to declare him spiritually ill and lock him away. That will be enough for the public. But for Nikola, he will be locked away in strict solitary confinement with a punitive and correctional regime. Yesterday the necessary medical findings came…. At the end of the conference, I told myself: ‘No matter how painful and hard, I can be the father of a sick and mad son, but being the father of a criminal, publicly stunned by the blow, would make my future impossible.’”
They preferred to declare Nikola mad.
Alexander and Konstantin understood who had been working backstage and who had done everything to make the scandal public instead of hushing it up. The omnipotent Shuvalov lost his position.
How was it done? We can only make suppositions. All the foreign courtesans were under surveillance by, and some actually worked for, the Third Department. Fanny was probably told to inform Nikola of the usual, banal result of an affair: She was pregnant and needed money. She needed a lot, right away, otherwise she’d have to get into the bed of some old rich man.
He asked his parents for money, and they (as Shuvalov knew they would) refused, knowing for whom it was intended. And then, infuriated, Nikola got money by using their icon in revenge. Nikola had been lured into a trap to put an end to his father.
The tsar decided to get rid of the father of the intrigue. Count Shuvalov’s eight-year rule ended. The powerful “Peter IV” was removed from his post as chief of the Third Department and made ambassador to England.
But Shuvalov was only the tip of the iceberg. He left a dangerous legacy—the union he created between the retrograde party and the secret police. Shuvalov had given the tsar a chance to remove Grand Duke Konstantin, who was considered the real initiator of the “disastrous liberal direction.” The tsar preferred to remove Shuvalov.
That made things worse for the tsar.
The tsar sentenced Nikola: The grand duke was sent “for treatment” thousands of miles away from the capital to Orenburg, in the Urals, stripped of all his medals and rank as colonel. Nikola continued his scandalous escapades in Orenburg. The royal prince married Nadezhda von Dreer, the local police chief’s daughter. That was his revenge on the family that had betrayed him. The marriage cost him his royal title and he was sent even farther away, to Tashkent in Central Asia, where he had fought.
Nikola lived in Tashkent like a little tsar. He still received his allowance from St. Petersburg and he spent it generously. He funded numerous scientific expeditions, digging up ancient burial mounds and finding weapons and gold ornaments. He had a canal dug to irrigate part of the hungry steppe. On a cliff by the confluence of the river and the canal, he had carved a huge letter N topped with a crown. He built a magnificent palace in Tashkent and filled it with paintings by Russian and European artists that were purchased for him abroad. This collection formed the core of today’s State Museum of Art in Tashkent.
He was not permitted to wear a military uniform, so he had a Parisian tailor make him black suits. He continued to fall madly in love to the end of his days. He abducted a fifteen-year-old high school student and tried to marry her. The wedding ceremony was stopped by the arrival of her parents. Another woman he loved made him jealous, so he had her tied up in a sack and thrown into the canal. She was rescued in time.
With his wife still living, he married a young Cossack woman. Nikola survived the revolution and died on January 14, 1918, in the house of his new wife, peacefully, unlike most of the Romanovs. Like his uncle Alexander I and his grandfather Nicholas I, the grand duke died because he did not want to continue living after the revolution. He is buried at the Cathedral of the Transfiguration in Tashkent.
One other survivor of the Bolsheviks bears note. Her name was Natalya Androsova, and she was the most beautiful woman in post–World War II Moscow. She lived in the neighborhood called the Arbat and everyone called her the Queen of the Arbat. Every evening in a huge wooden barrel built in the Central Park of Culture and Rest, she rode her motorcycle on the inside wall, gradually rising to the very top of the sloping sides. That was her profession. She did fifteen or twenty shows a night.
“It was terrifying and beautiful, the rumble of the motorcycle, her face turned pale, her eyes widened, and her long reddish curls floated behind her, leaving a golden trail. She was a goddess, motorcycle racer and Amazon,” wrote Yuri Nagibin. “All the kids from the Arbat and the lanes knew her red-and-chrome Indian Scout bike, in every heart, like a radiant image, burned her eyes, her inhumanly beautiful face, and the flying figure in a man’s checked shirt of jacket, her lovely legs in breeches and leggings, tenderly squeezing the roaring, beast-like Indian Scout.”
Some of our great poets—Alexander Galich, Andrei Voznesensky, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko—wrote poems about her. The beauty Natalya Androsova was the grandchild of that mad grand duke Nikolai Konstantinovich. She was the only Romanov to live on in the Soviet Union after the revolution. She was born in the Tashkent palace. Her mother was the daughter of the grand duke by his marriage to the police chief’s daughter. Her father was a tsarist officer, who fled from Russia after the revolution of 1917. Her mother remarried, hiding herself and her daughter under the name of the new husband, Androsov.
When I met Natalya Androsova in the late 1980s, she was an old woman. But her sad one-room apartment was filled with photographs of her in her youth, a gorgeous woman who brought glamor and Romanov breeding to a bleak time in Moscow. She told me her story. As I was leaving, I asked, “Do you remember him?”
“Very vaguely. For some reason, his hands…and his kiss. I remember the palace better. I see the paintings in my dreams. And sometimes him, a clean-shaved handsome man.”
She died in 1999, as if refusing to leave the century in which their dynasty was buried. I often recall her eyes, the blue eyes of the great-granddaughter of Nicholas I.