Nicholas and Alexandra had become intensive readers after the February Revolution. In her effort to pass on her religious understanding to their son, Alexandra studied Nikolai Gogol’s Meditations on the Divine Liturgy;1 and for her own edification she examined a general history of Christianity.2 Whereas Alexandra had packed her luggage with care, Nicholas had omitted to bring a supply of literature from Tsarskoe Selo. Luckily for him, Pankratov allowed him to request books from the Tobolsk lycée library. Nicholas looked at K. Golodnikov’s Tobolsk and its Surroundings.3 He also devoured Oskar Jäger’s World History.4 Sydney Gibbes lent him his copy of J. R. Greene’s A Short History of the English People. (Gibbes carried it around with him in case he found himself under arrest.) The book purveyed a cheerful analysis of England’s centuries of development and had sold well in multiple London editions. As Gibbes told the story, Nicholas went off with it after breakfast and finished the whole thing by 11 a.m. In fact, according to Nicholas’s diary, he took twelve days to get through it. When he returned the book to Gibbes, he said that he had looked at several such works in his youth and was grateful for the chance to refresh his acquaintance.5
He reserved most of his time, however, for the Russian nineteenth-century literary classics. They had not been part of his upbringing because his father, Alexander III, a cultural blockhead, thought that the arts might corrupt him. From 26 September 1917, Nicholas enjoyed filling the gaps in his education by reading stories by Nikolai Leskov.6 Such was his delight that on 16 October he read Leskov’s ‘The Robbery’ aloud to his family;7 and he followed this with Nikolai Gogol’s The Wedding.8 Later he went through Bram Stoker’s Dracula with them;9 for his own personal edification, he went back to the Russian canon and in March 1918 read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina for the first time. He admitted to being entirely distracted by the experience.10 From this he moved on to Mikhail Lermontov.11 And then on to the novels of Vsevolod Solovëv.12 For the family he meanwhile selected Ivan Turgenev’s A Huntsman’s Notebooks, followed by his novels On The Eve, Smoke and Spring Torrents.13
He also read aloud Scarlet Pimpernel stories by Baroness Orczy for the evening distraction.14 Set in the time of the French Revolution, they expressed deep sympathy for royalty and aristocracy and utter contempt for the Parisian poor. The opening tale set the tone on page one:
A surging, seething, murmuring crowd, of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate . . . During the greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries, of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for liberty and for fraternity.15
Orczy’s hero was the tall, blue-eyed Sir Percy Blakeney, who slipped across the Channel on covert missions to rescue ‘aristos’. The stories always depicted aristocrats, both English and French, as strongly built and generous of spirit whereas she dismissed revolutionaries such as Maximilien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat as mediocrities eaten up with murderous intent. When English men and women of the lower social orders put in an appearance, unlike the French, they knew their place and were loyal and patriotic – and tended to be comical in their mannerisms.
Orczy’s reactionary outlook must surely have enhanced her appeal to Nicholas and his family. She had been a best-selling author since 1903, when her original play The Scarlet Pimpernel reached the London stage. Nicholas had long been an admirer and in 1917 read all five of the then so-far-published novels.16 The former emperor himself was a man living under conditions of confinement. He did not face – or did not think he faced – a threat of execution. But he and his family evidently obtained a degree of psychological relief in Orczy’s tales. They warmed to her reactionary political outlook. (Orczy, a typical Hungarian conservative, consistently described Jews as dirty, snivelling, scheming and untrustworthy, and when she had Sir Percy Blakeney disguising himself as a Jewish trader, he performed entirely in accordance with the stereotype.)17 Kobylinski was to recall that Nicholas just ‘didn’t like Jews’ and usually referred to them as zhidy (‘Yids’).18 Nicholas summarized his feelings in a letter to his mother: ‘One thing is clear: it is that as long as the Yids remain in charge, everything will continue to get worse – what does Russia mean to them?’19
In November 1917 he wrote to his sister Xenia with a list of leftwing revolutionaries who had adopted pseudonyms to disguise their Jewish origins:
Lenin – Ulyanov (Tsederblyum)
Steklov – Nakhamkes
Zinoviev – Apfelbaum
Kamenev – Rozenfeld
Gorev – Goldman
Mekhovski – Goldenberg
Martov – Tsederbaum
Sukhanov – Gimmer
Zagorski – Krakhman
Meshkovski – Gollender20
He got both Lenin and others on the list wrong. Although one of Lenin’s grandfathers had been Jewish, there was no one called Tsederblyum among his forebears. But Nicholas was not bothered about exactitude. Rather, he was trying to make the point that Jews were capable of any subterfuge to win power – this, indeed, is what he thought had come to fulfilment in Russia since his fall from the throne.
It is true that Jewish militants were over-represented at every level of the Bolshevik leadership in comparison with the percentage of Jews in the imperial population. They were also prominent in the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary parties, and even the Constitutional-Democrats and other liberal organizations contained influential members who were Jewish. Other national and ethnic groups, too, supplied many activists who had positions of authority in the revolutionary movement, including the Bolsheviks – Georgians, Latvians and Poles were prominent among them. But it was the purest fantasy to believe, as Nicholas did, that Russia’s Jews in particular had set up a centralized political-religious conspiracy. Nicholas, moreover, was overlooking the part that he himself had played in attracting hostility from many of his Jewish subjects who were politically active: he had not exactly kept secret his enthusiasm for the Union of the Russian People and other far-right organizations which helped to instigate the pre-war pogroms against Jews, and it would have been surprising if the widespread memory of this violence had been forgotten or forgiven. His name had long been a byword for religious intolerance in the lands he once had ruled.
Nicholas himself sought solace in his Christian devotions, and by March 1918 he had made up his mind to read the entire Bible from start to finish, a plan he quickly dropped in favour of other books on his shelves.21 One volume he devoured was one of the foulest works that has ever gone into print, Sergei Nilus’s The Imminent Coming of the Antichrist and the Realm of the Devil on Earth.22
Published by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1917, it was the expanded edition of a book that had first appeared twelve years earlier. Nilus was a priest, a self-styled mystic and a fanatical anti-Semite. His chapters reproduced, word for word, the notorious ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ that had circulated in Russia and abroad since the early 1900s and which purported to supply the transcript of an international Jewish convention that was held in Paris to organize a plot for Jews to bring the entire world under their rule. The ‘protocols’ were in fact a forgery of multiple obscure origins. Nilus had publicized them as a way of turning Russians away from socialism by fomenting hatred of Jewish people as being the cause of all the Russian Empire’s ills. In the political free-for-all after the February Revolution, the Orthodox hierarchy had no compunction about playing the anti-Semitic card by making their publishing house available to him. The fact that they were a fabrication had been established by an inquiry which Stolypin had set up in 1906, and Nicholas himself was said to have concluded: ‘Abandon the protocols. The sacred cannot be defended by dirty methods.’23
Even so, Nicholas returned to the book in Tobolsk as if the Stolypin inquiry had never happened. From the evening of 9 April 1918, indeed, he chose it for reading aloud to his wife and children. He alternated it with passages from the Gospels because it was the season of Lent and the Romanovs were studying the works of the Evangelists. But Nilus had become a preoccupation for Nicholas, who chose The Imminent Coming as the main text for him to present to the family on Good Friday and Easter Sunday; he continued reading it to them in the days that followed until he reached the final page.24 He liked the denunciations of both Freemasons and Jews; it was, he concluded, ‘a very timely reading’.25 Like Nilus, Nicholas accused the Jews of thirsting for mastery in Russia. He thought of Russians as a ‘good, fine, soft people’. At least this is what Bitner concluded from her observations, believing that he assumed that once the revolutionary tide subsided, his people would return to their old governable ways – as Nicholas saw things, the current state of affairs was only temporary. Bitner concurred with Kobylinski when he commented that the emperor believed that Jews had come to exercise dominance over the Russians and led them on to a revolutionary path.26
Nicholas evidently endorsed the idea that leading adherents of the Jewish faith had concocted an international plot for the downfall of civilization. The Imminent Coming impregnated the core of his thinking, and he wanted Alexandra and the rest of the family to listen to every word and share his repugnance at this alleged global conspiracy.