From 1915, when the Eastern Front was stabilized, the Russian armed forces established their general headquarters, known as Stavka, in nearby Mogilëv. Standing on the left bank of the Dnieper, the town had for decades been linked with Kiev by river steamers, and there was a railway station lying a mile to the south-east. But commercial traffic remained at a low pitch even in peacetime conditions. Mogilëv was a place where little happened in daytime, far less in the evenings. Despite being a provincial capital, it was irrefutably dingy. Although most of the 50,000 inhabitants were Russians, there had long been a substantial Jewish minority.1 Life went on just as it had done for centuries. The nearest thing in Mogilëv to a modern transport system was its four horse-drawn trams. The Hotel Bristol served wine but no vodka after the inception of a ‘dry law’ in 1914 that was scheduled to last until the war came to an end. Still, though, the town had a problem with hooligans. The tsar’s presence did little to enhance the capacity of police and army to maintain law and order. Russia in peacetime was always ructious. In time of war it was becoming less and less governable.2
At ten o’clock every morning Nicholas walked from Governor’s House, a two-storeyed, nineteenth-century building, to the military quartermaster’s offices and received the day’s oral report from Chief of the General Staff Mikhail Alexeev. Once Alexeev had explained the latest plans, Nicholas returned to Governor’s House and busied himself with his correspondence from ministers in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed to make it sound less Germanic) or with visits from foreign attachés.3
At midday Nicholas would enter the dining hall to greet the two dozen selected officers who had received a card stating: ‘You are invited to His Majesty’s breakfast tomorrow.’ Nicholas with a smile shook hands with each of his guests and, with Alexeev at his right hand, listened to their thoughts about news from the front. Two simple courses were served, and Nicholas hung around afterwards to talk to individuals he had picked out. There followed a break of one or two hours. This was a time when Nicholas usually took a stroll with a member of his retinue while the general staff’s personnel returned to work. Supper began at six o’clock and Nicholas again presided. When the courses were finished, he would announce: ‘Gentlemen, permission to smoke.’ He himself had set a fashion for using a cigarette-holder. More often than not he stubbed out his first cigarette – a sign of nervousness because he immediately lit up and smoked a second. Every evening there was a film or musical show, which Nicholas attended together with his son. A military band struck up the Preobrazhenski march as the emperor took his place in the governor’s box and made courteous conversation with the wives of Stavka personnel.4
Although Nicholas enjoyed his time with the men of his armed forces, he had to stay abreast of state affairs in the rest of the country. Apart from military matters, he had always been preoccupied with foreign policy and exerted personal control over decisions of prime importance. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the capital kept him regularly informed about Russia’s changing situation in international relations. Nicholas also expected his Council of Ministers chairman and his Minister of Internal Affairs to apprise him of news affecting political security.
On other matters, he followed rather than led policy. Pëtr Stolypin had persuaded him that if revolutionary disturbances were not going to be repeated, there had to be a new agrarian policy to foster the emergence of a class of yeoman farmers. Stolypin argued that the communal traditions of Russian peasants subsumed individual responsibility. He also emphasized Russian national pride at the expense of the other peoples of the empire – and the two men were at one about this even though Nicholas himself took no initiative. On other items of governmental business he was even less active. The prewar years were a period when industry was recovering from the near-revolution of 1905–1906. Nicholas left the process of oversight to ministers, dutifully reading reports but contributing little to the discussions. After the Great War’s outbreak it soon became obvious that Russia badly needed to improve the coordination of manufacturing output. This led to the creation of so-called war-industry committees involving both industrialists and their workforces. The result was a public debate noisier than the autocrat in Nicholas would have wished, but he went along with it. In truth, he had no other option if he wanted victory on the Eastern Front.
He did, though, sense that he was losing his grip on politics in Petrograd. The empress kept him informed as best she could, drawing his attention to what she saw as nefarious speeches and activities in the Duma. He reserved the most powerful ministries for individuals of dependable loyalty. At the outbreak of hostilities he had saddled himself with the aged, incompetent Ivan Goremykin, who was all too aware that he failed to understand the requirements of modern governance. In 1916 Goremykin successfully pleaded to be released into retirement and Nicholas replaced him with the uninspiring younger bureaucrat Boris Shturmer, only to get rid of him in favour of the no more dynamic Alexander Trepov. This carousel of appointments and sackings from top to bottom in the Council of Ministers brought disruption to civil administration, and Nicholas was made aware of the growing difficulties it produced in securing food supplies to the towns and the armed forces. There was also increasing disarray in industrial output. Nicholas overruled those who said that his next council chairman should be a man whom the Duma leaders could trust. Instead he appointed Count Nikolai Golitsyn, who was no more eager to take the post than Goremykin had been.
It never occurred to Nicholas that something must be awfully wrong if there was no longer anyone who wanted to head the government for him. Debates in the Duma teetered on the verge of overt criticism of him. Liberal leader Pavel Milyukov was determined to secure the creation of a cabinet that he and his political allies could choose, and when attacking the chaos and corruption at the apex of power in November 1916, asked repeatedly: ‘Is this stupidity or is it treason?’5 Nicholas took scant notice. His interest remained with the armed forces, and he spoke sadly to the commanders at GHQ at the moments of failure in military operations. He wanted them to know that he was as committed to crushing the Germans as they were. When he heard of the growing difficulty in getting supplies to the front, he said: ‘I can’t get to sleep at all at night when I think that the army could be starving.’ People noticed ‘his sad eyes and gloomy, agitated face’.6
The war years weighed him down so much that he became almost emaciated in appearance. His wife’s confidante Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden wondered whether he had problems with his kidneys. When she put the question to Dr Evgeni Botkin, he confided: ‘His heart isn’t in order. I’m giving His Majesty iodine, but that’s between you and me.’7
Defeats at the front in 1915 had depressed him as German armies rampaged over Russia’s Polish territory, but in summer 1916 the Russians at last registered a substantial victory in the Austro-Hungarian sector of the front when General Alexei Brusilov experimented with the use of formations of shock troops. Brusilov’s success compelled the Germans to redeploy forces from the Western Front and Russia no longer appeared one of the weakest of the Allies. Nicholas felt encouraged. He always wanted to do whatever he could to assist the war effort, and his pleasure in the company of soldiers who were putting their lives at risk was unmistakable. Nobody at Stavka was in any doubt about his fundamental sincerity. Whereas he was at his happiest when alone with his family, he was eager to fulfil what he regarded as his dynastic duty near to the front. The obvious drawback was the fact that his military training equipped him with qualifications no higher than those of an average guards officer. He was out of his depth on strategic and operational questions, and he knew it – leaving such business strictly to Alexeev.8 His principal contribution, as he saw it, was to act as a figurehead for the imperial war effort while providing fatherly encouragement to commanders, including those like Alexeev who were a lot older than him. His simple dignity and earnest care for all ‘his’ officers and soldiers impressed everyone at GHQ.
He got on well with Alexeev, who had headed the general staff since 1915 when Nicholas moved to GHQ and parted with the services of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, his first cousin once removed, whom he appointed as Viceroy of the Caucasus.9 For Alexeev, this was a chance to overhaul the high command in his own image. He cleared out the aristocrats and filled the general staff with competent technicians like himself. By early 1917 he had concentrated seven generals and eighty-seven officers as the core personnel to run the machinery of war from Mogilëv. All were expected to sleep, eat and think about the Russian war effort. Such supplies as Alexeev brought to Stavka did not include a library. The general staff, except when it broke for meals, were allowed no moment of distraction during the working day.10 Alexeev inspired awe among his subordinates by working at his desk for hours at a time.11 Like the emperor, he disliked luxury and favoured simple clothing and diet, but he was driving himself to the point of exhaustion after medical crises with bladder stones and migraine. He shrugged off advice to let up. Brusilov’s advance on the Eastern Front convinced him that Germany and Austria-Hungary could be beaten. Alexeev was setting an example of belief and dedication. The war was there to be won.12
Alexeev’s personal loyalty to his sovereign, however, had quietly crumbled and he had even begun to talk secretly to individual politicians who aimed to transfer the throne to a less reactionary Romanov.13 It was in this spirit that he tried to persuade Nicholas that it was in his and the country’s interest to compromise with the Duma leadership. While reporting on operational questions, he took his chance to mention the worsening political situation. Nicholas listened but would not budge.14 He had a tender spot when speaking to generals who had served with his revered father Alexander III, and one of them – Kaufman-Turkestanski, who was a member of the State Council – approached him with the same thoughts as those expressed by Alexeev. The result was the same: Nicholas was stubbornly against letting Duma leaders set his agenda even though he was not averse to appointing ministers with a view to improving relations between Duma and government.15 Romanov family members were equally unsuccessful. Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, young and passionate, found himself rebuffed when he implored Nicholas to change his line. Even Nicholas’s mother, Maria Fëdorovna, failed to dent his determination. Mild-mannered Nicholas acted as if he had already made one too many concessions by allowing the creation of the Duma in 1906. His mind was closed and no one else at Stavka dared to raise the matter, even though nearly everyone agreed with Alexeev.16
If the emperor had ever toyed with the idea of appointing a government ‘responsible to the Duma’, he certainly had no such intention after December 1916 when a cabal of aristocrats, high-society figures and politicians assassinated Rasputin. Nicholas and Alexandra were horrified. Rasputin had endeared himself to them as the one person who could bring calm to their son and heir Alexei, a haemophiliac, when he fell ill – the doctors had proved inadequate at frequent times of crisis. Rasputin told them that the family’s prayers alone would help.17 But during the war his notoriety had continued to grow. Rumours spread that he took advantage of Nicholas’s departure for Mogilëv to conduct an affair with Alexandra herself. He was known to take bribes to intercede in the matter of ministerial appointments. He had his own ideas on foreign affairs and had warned against entering the alliance against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Opinion formed in the Duma and other public circles that he might well be promoting the German cause at court and hoping to convince the emperor of the desirability of a separate peace with Germany. The imperial couple knew of the stories about him but stubbornly ignored them, and were distraught when his corpse was pulled from the ice in the River Malaya Nevka in central Petrograd.
Two of the conspirators, Prince Felix Yusupov and the arch-reactionary Duma deputy Vladimir Purishkevich, were hoping to confound the rumoured moves being made at court towards withdrawal from the war. In broader political circles the news of Rasputin’s death gave rise to the hope that Nicholas would be brought to his senses and agree to compromise with conservatives and liberals in the Duma. In fact the murder, by robbing Nicholas of the only person with the capacity to settle young Alexei, served to harden his resolve to stick to the path he had always chosen. Reform was intolerable to him.