In 1916 a grand ceremony took place in wartime Irkutsk, the great Siberian city south of Lake Baikal, at a time when the Great War was exacting its dreadful toll in lives on the Eastern and Western Fronts in Europe. The purpose was to raise morale in that out-flung region of the Russian Empire. It had been twenty-five years since Nicholas II had visited Siberia when he was still only heir to the throne of the Romanovs and was finishing a global tour that had taken in Vienna, Trieste, Greece, Egypt, India, China and Japan.1 To commemorate that visit, Governor-General Alexander Pilts gave a keynote speech to the Siberian dignitaries in which he commended the bravery of the imperial forces: ‘At a recent audience with our Sovereign Emperor, he kindly told me: “As soon as the war is over, I’ll gather my family and come as your guest to Irkutsk.”’ The audience greeted the announcement with a loud hurrah. It was a remarkable fact that no ruling emperor had come to Siberia since its conquest by Russian traders and troops around the end of the sixteenth century. Siberians high and low felt unloved and neglected, and loyal inhabitants looked forward to a visit by Tsar Nicholas and his family.2
No one could know that, in less than a year, he would be returning to Siberia not as the ruling Tsar of All Russia but under arrest as Citizen Romanov. He who had dispatched thousands of political prisoners to Siberian forced labour, imprisonment or exile would himself be transported to detention in Tobolsk. Thrown down from power in the February 1917 Revolution, he and his family would be held under strict surveillance in the little west Siberian town that, by a twist of fate, possessed one of the empire’s largest prisons, although the Romanovs were spared the unpleasantness of being locked up inside its walls and were instead confined to the provincial governor’s residence. The Bolsheviks overturned the Provisional Government in the October 1917 Revolution and after a few months transferred the imperial family to Ekaterinburg, their power base in the Urals, while they considered what to do with them. In July 1918 the decision was made to kill them all. Taken down into a cellar, they were summarily shot along with their doctor, their servants and one of their pet dogs.
A short, slight man, Nicholas had succeeded his huge bear of a father, Alexander III, in 1894. Nicholas had inherited a pale complexion from his Danish mother Maria Fëdorovna (née Dagmar) and lost his summer ruddiness as autumn drew on.3 He engaged in few recreations except hunting in the winter and shooting pheasants in the autumn, but felt it right to drop these pursuits in wartime.4
There was an ascetic aspect in Nicholas’s character, and even on winter nights he left the window open. He loved the fresh air in any season and spent at least two hours in daily exercise out of doors – four if he had the chance.5 He thought nothing of striding from his palaces without an overcoat on the coldest December day. The emperor, mild of manner, was tough as old boots.6 He was indifferent to luxury. When in civilian dress, he wore the same suit he had used since his bachelor days. His trousers were on the scruffy side and his boots were dilapidated. For food, he favoured simple Russian dishes like beetroot soup, cabbage soup or porridge – European-style refined cuisine was not to his liking. He was no drinker, and when champagne was put before him at banquets he just took a few sips as a token of conviviality; he handed bottles from the Alexander Palace wine cellar to his guard commander with the comment: ‘You know, I don’t drink it.’ One witness claimed that at dinner with the family, he usually took a glass of aged slivovitz followed by one of madeira. Although others mentioned different beverages, all agreed that he was unusually restrained in the amount that he quaffed.7
Tradition was important for him. Among his ancestors, he disapproved of Peter the Great as having broken the natural course of Russian historical development. He disliked Russia’s capital, St Petersburg, because he believed it out of joint with the customs of old Muscovy. To Nicholas’s way of thinking, the city had been founded on ‘dreams alone’.8 The Russian heritage from the centuries before the reign of Tsar Peter appealed to him. With this in mind, he frequently wore a long red shirt. He ordered his entourage to refrain from using words of foreign origin and scored them out of reports that came to him from ministers and generals. He even considered a project to change official court dress to something more like what people had worn in the reign of Emperor Alexei, the founder of the Romanov dynasty in the early seventeenth century.9 He thought of himself as a quintessential Russian. He adored the music of Tchaikovsky.10 After a concert in Livadia by the singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya, he effused: ‘I always had the thought that nobody could be more Russian than I. Your singing has shown me to be wrong. I’m grateful to you from the bottom of my heart for this feeling.’11
Though Nicholas was a devout Christian, he abhorred long church services and having to get down on his knees.12 His faith was grounded in ideas that even some in his entourage regarded as being no better than superstitions – his favour for the self-styled ‘holy man’ Grigori Rasputin, whose drunken binges and serial promiscuity became a public scandal, was taken as proof of his eccentricity. Nikolai Bazili, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs official at the high command HQ, was to recount: ‘He was born on the saint’s day of Job and believed that fate condemned him for this. He thought that he had to pay for his ancestors whose task had been so much easier.’13
Although few people feared him, Nicholas inspired respect and had a ‘presence’ that discouraged anyone from contradicting him.14 Sydney Gibbes, who tutored his children, gave this description: ‘He was usually rather dignified and reserved, though he unbent in a charming way with those whom he liked and trusted. Though not more than middle height, he looked every inch an Emperor. His tastes were simple, just those of a country gentleman. He abhorred intrigues and all kinds of pretence and insincerity.’15 Certainly, the tsar listened attentively to each of his leading ministers and had an aversion to open disagreement. But Gibbes was a doe-eyed admirer. In fact, Nicholas was downright duplicitous in the way that he left people with the impression that he concurred with their advice. He thus disappointed many of them when he went on to do the exact opposite of what he had appeared to promise. He had been tsar for over two decades and had outlasted all his ministers. Longevity in power had given him an unwarranted confidence in his own judgement. He aimed to appoint obedient public figures to head the Council of Ministers, and when one of them, Pëtr Stolypin, showed signs of independent conservative opinions, he ceased to trust him – Stolypin had known that his political star was on the wane for years before he was assassinated in 1911. Tension between emperor and prime minister was recurrent, and Nicholas got rid of those who refused to toe the line.
At his coronation in 1896 he swore an oath to maintain his autocratic powers and urged critics to abandon any ‘senseless dreams’ of democratization. As a boy he had been tutored by the arch-conservative Konstantin Pobedonostsev, under whose guidance he imbibed the principles of absolutism, dynasty, military greatness and the official religious tradition. From this he had never seriously diverged.
Revolutionary tumult had nearly overwhelmed the Russian Empire in 1905 when almost all classes of society, from top to bottom, clamoured for change. Workers went on strike and, guided by revolutionary militants, elected their own councils (‘soviets’) in defence of their interests. Many peasants took to violent action against gentry landlords. Poles, Georgians and others in the imperial borderlands rose up in revolt. There were mutinies in the Black Sea fleet and among soldiers returning from defeat in the continuing war with Japan in the Far East. In October 1905, Nicholas issued a manifesto promising fundamental reforms. Next year, a State Duma was elected with his consent and under terms that involved the legalization of political parties and the relaxation of censorship restrictions. But when the Duma refused to support his policies, he and Stolypin redrafted the electoral rules so as to produce a less recalcitrant body of representatives. When even this coup against the movement for democracy in Russia failed to quell dissenting voices in the Duma, Nicholas got used to ruling in the teeth of continuing criticism.
His actions were those of a ruler who always thought he was right. He dealt with public disparagement by cocooning himself in the warmth of his family. His wife, Alexandra, born Princess Alix of Hesse and brought up in England at the court of her grandmother Queen Victoria, sustained his inclination to rule without consulting the popular will. Theirs was a close partnership based on shared values and a strong sexual attraction.16 Alexandra strengthened his determination to manage without advice whenever the advice appeared to damage his personal authority and status. She counselled severity towards those who withheld support from him: ‘Be Peter the Great, John [i.e. Ivan] the Terrible, Emperor Paul – crush them all under you.’17 Several members of the extended Romanov family were horrified by his reluctance to compromise, and his own mother thought that Alexandra exerted an undue and malign influence in this direction. Rasputin was just one of the individuals whom polite, educated society felt that he ought to reject from his court. But Nicholas went his own way, and it was noticed that vehement critics of the boisterous ‘holy man’ were likely to be removed from the imperial entourage.18 Count Vladimir Frederikhs, the elderly court minister who had served both Alexander II and Alexander III, was one of the few who got away with it, albeit also with a curt instruction not to interfere in politics: ‘This,’ said Nicholas, ‘is my business.’19 The fact that the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy took against Rasputin did not bother the emperor, who was drawn towards folk traditions of religiosity. Rasputin in his eyes epitomized the nation’s essential wisdom and goodness.
Nicholas was a devout Christian as well as a military patriot who revered the Russian Army and wanted to leave Russia mightier and more prosperous than when he came to the throne. His nationalism had been with him since childhood. He had a lifelong contempt for Germans, even though he had married one.20 He also shared his father’s hatred of Jews, whom he accused of seeking to dissolve the bonds that bound ordinary Russians together. Nicholas believed that dark Jewish forces had been behind the revolutionary tumult of 1905–1906, and when reactionary nationalist organizations were formed he gave them his endorsement. The chairman of the Council of Ministers, Stolypin, was aghast at how the Union of the Russian People and the similarly named Union of Russian People fomented disorder with their pogroms in the western borderlands.21
Despite assuring Stolypin of his support, Nicholas refused to accept the judicial verdicts against those charged with violent excesses. The Unions were forerunners of mid-century fascism. Nicholas was happy to accept a membership card from the Union of Russian People, declaring: ‘The burden of power placed on Me in the Moscow Kremlin I will bear Myself, and I am certain that the Russian people will help Me. I will be accountable for My authority before God.’22 Alexandra sustained his inclination, thinking that such organizations contained her husband’s ‘healthy, right-thinking, devoted subjects’. ‘Their voice,’ she assured him, ‘is Russia’s and not society or the Duma’s.’23 Nicholas was not the sole monarch of his day to have crude political inclinations and an ignorant, opinionated wife. Nor was he unusual in having a poor acquaintance with his nation’s high culture. Nicholas shunned intellectuals and drew confidence from the belief that he had a sound understanding of the Russian people. When meeting peasants on his frequent pilgrimages to religious sites, he felt sure that if only they could be kept insulated from pernicious alien propaganda, all would be well for Russia. It did not occur to him that the Russian peasantry might hold genuine grievances against the system of power that his ancestors had imposed. He lived and breathed complacent extreme conservatism.
Nonetheless, he was more complicated than he seemed. Despite his contempt for elections and for most of the Duma’s politicians, he had no personal obsession with absolute power – in this matter he was more liberal in his ideas than the wife he adored. He explained this to his offspring’s tutor, Pierre Gilliard: ‘I swore at my accession to guard intact the form of government that I received from my father and to hand it on as such to my successor. Nothing can relieve me of my oath; my successor alone will be able to modify it at his accession.’24 This was not a passing idea. Before the Great War he had told Sophia Buxhoeveden: ‘Alexei won’t be bound. He’ll repeal what’s unnecessary. I’m preparing the way for him.’25
But while he was emperor, he fulfilled his coronation oath as best he could. Beneath his soft exterior there lay a stubborn, hard kernel. Whether they were loyal subjects or active revolutionaries, people saw only inflexibility in him. Loyalists admired him as a strong tsar who confronted those who were working against the empire’s finest traditions, and they had celebrated the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty with gusto. Revolutionaries saw him as Nicholas the Bloody or Hangman Nicholas. Between these two poles of opinion there were millions of subjects who wanted change but feared the turmoil that revolution was likely to unleash. The experience of disturbance and revolt in 1905–1906 had intimidated many into political passivity. At the same time there was a widespread feeling that things could simply not continue as they were. The educated strata of the empire felt embarrassment about Russia in comparison with the world’s other great powers – and Nicholas was held to blame for his insistence on conserving the maximum of personal power and responsibility. It was a toxic situation long before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.