Two killings were being planned. Two thousand miles to the west, on Sunday, June 15, 1914, in the Russian calendar, the heir to the throne of Austria and Hungary drove in a motorcade through the streets of Sarajevo with the province governor. Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been watching army maneuvers in the Bosnian mountains. He was wearing the braided blue tunic and green-feathered cap of an Austrian cavalry general. Sarajevo was a provocative place to wear such a uniform. Bosnian Serb nationalists were set on expelling the Austrians and linking up with independent Serbia. A bomb was thrown as the motorcade neared the city hall. It hit the back of the archduke’s automobile but exploded behind it. A young Serb from the Black Hand terrorist group was arrested as he ran away.
The archduke, badly shaken, interrupted the mayor’s welcome. “To hell with your speech!” he shouted. “I come to your city and I am welcomed with bombs.” He left at once for the governor’s mansion. The driver of the lead car forgot the route, and the motorcade was briefly stalled. Another Serb, a nineteen-year-old student called Gavrilo Princip, stepped out of the crowd and fired what diplomatic incompetence and territorial greed transformed into the first shots of the First World War. The archduke’s wife, Princess Sophie Chotek, was hit in the stomach. The flowers on her picture hat caught in the strappings of her husband’s tunic as she sagged onto his chest. “Sopherl! Sopherl! Don’t die. Live for our children!” the governor heard him moan. He remained sitting erect, but the governor saw a stream of blood pumping from his neck. He was carried into the governor’s mansion as waiters proffered glasses of chilled white wine on silver salvers for the reception that was to be held in his honor. “It’s nothing,” he said, and died.
The following day, June 16, was soft and balmy in Pokrovskoye. Rasputin spent the morning trotting some newborn colts in the farmyard. He went to church with his wife and children. He was in excellent spirits as he ate a big meal of fish for lunch. He amused the table with tales of how he liked to offer raw country vodka with a kick like gasoline to pompous officials in St. Petersburg. They felt obliged to drink it; he said he called it Rasputin’s revenge. After lunch Maria went to a friend’s house to show off some snapshots she had taken in St. Petersburg.
What followed next was recorded by the deputy prosecutor of the Tobolsk district court. At around 3:00 P.M. a postman brought a telegram to the house. Rasputin “made up his mind to send a telegram in reply and, coming out of the gates into the street, called for the postman.” A woman standing by the gates, identified as Khioniya Kozmishna Guseva from the city of Syzran, Simbirsk province, bowed to him and begged for a coin. Her face—“of repulsive ugliness, her nose was crushed and misshapen”—was covered by a shawl. “You shouldn’t bow,” Rasputin told her kindly. “Taking advantage of the moment,” the prosecutor continued, “Khioniya Guseva drew a sharp dagger out of her coat and struck Rasputin in the stomach.” The knife entered the lower abdomen, and Guseva drew it upward to the navel.
As she pulled out the knife for a second thrust, Rasputin stretched out his hand with a coin. Confused, she took it and dropped it. Rasputin picked up a stick lying on the ground and hit her over the head. Angry villagers seized her and threatened to drown her in the river. “Let me go!” she yelled as they beat her. “I’ve killed the Antichrist!” Holding his entrails in his hand, Rasputin staggered back to the house. The prosecutor measured the distance; it was 108 steps, and Rasputin moaned as he ran: “Oh, what a pain I have.” His wife swept the remains of lunch off the table in the kitchen and laid him on it. His son, Dmitri, rushed to the post office to send telegrams alerting the Tobolsk governor to the murder attempt and asking Dr. Vladimirsky, the best surgeon in Tyumen, to gallop to Pokrovskoye at once. Maria rushed back to the house, almost fainting as she saw a large pool of blood turning brown in front of it.
The door was banged as she helped her mother cut away her father’s breeches and blouse from the area of the wound. She opened it to find Davidsohn. She knew in an instant, “like the burst of a skyrocket,” why the journalist had flattered her over the phone, why he had wanted to know the date she was traveling, why he had been on the steamer … why he was now at the house. He had a story to write; he wanted to see for himself that the victim was dead. It was never established whether Davidsohn was a part of the conspiracy; certainly he had wind of it. Maria slammed the door in his face and shrieked, “Haven’t you done enough?”
It was after midnight when Dr. Vladimirsky arrived in a troika with three exhausted horses. Rasputin refused ether and was conscious as the doctor cleaned the abdominal cavity and stitched the ripped intestines. He clasped a cross and muttered prayers. The doctor was in a dilemma as he prepared to transfer his patient to Tyumen at first light. If he drove fast on the pitted road, the bouncing might reopen the wounds and the patient could bleed to death. If they traveled the seventy miles slowly, the delayed shock could be fatal.
Vladimirsky called for the five fastest horses on the Rasputin farm. The starets had loved horses since he was a boy, and the cash from admirers he had invested in them now helped to save him. Three were harnessed to the troika, the two spare horses allowing the doctor to change them every hour. Rasputin was laid between Maria and the maid Dunia so that their bodies cushioned his from the shocks as the troika careered along the trakt. He slipped into a coma, coming around once to mutter, “He must be stopped, he must be stopped.” Maria thought he was referring to Nicholas and the threat of war, or so she wrote later. The journey took six hours.
The starets was critically ill for ten days. Skillful medical treatment helped—the empress gave Vladimirsky a gold watch in gratitude—but Rasputin’s great physical and mental toughness were crucial. His body absorbed debauchery; it withstood the knife wound.
Connecting the murder in Sarajevo with the attempt in Siberia became part of the Rasputin legend. Maria claimed that, in muttering the words “he must be stopped” as he lay semi-conscious on the troika, her father had foreseen the coming war and sought to warn the tsar to keep Russia neutral. How could he have known of events in the Balkans? Maria claimed that the telegram he had received moments before the stabbing was from the empress, bidding him return to St. Petersburg because of the archduke’s assassination. The archduke died shortly after noon Central European time the day before the stabbing. It is known that Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was informed of the killing aboard his yacht Meteor three hours later. Alexandra was on the imperial yacht Standart several miles off the Finnish coast. It is technically feasible that she received news of the death as promptly, weighed its implications, and radioed a message from the yacht for transmission to Pokrovskoye by telegram. But Sarajevo was not yet feared as a prelude to war; the tutor, Pierre Gilliard, who was on the yacht, reported that Alexandra’s only concern was with Alexis. The boy had twisted his ankle as they boarded the yacht. The ankle swelled as it hemorrhaged, and Alexis wept as Gilliard read to him to distract him from the pain. Rasputin’s instant precognition of war was almost certainly an invention.
It was a convenient one, however, for it offset the new scandal caused by the stabbing. Guseva was at once identified as a former prostitute and an admirer of Iliodor. It was also said that she had been Rasputin’s lover, that he had spurned her, and that she had tried to castrate him by stabbing him low in the stomach. The newspaper Russkoye Slovo claimed that she was the sister of a terrorist named Grigory Zaitsev, who had been arrested for murdering a policeman in St. Petersburg in 1907. Taking him to Siberian exile the following year, his convict convoy passed through Pokrovskoye on its way to the holding prison in Tobolsk. He was allowed to meet his sister, who was staying with Rasputin. The starets offered him money; he refused to accept it and rebuked Rasputin for his lewdness and bad influence. He tried to convince his sister to walk out on Rasputin, the newspaper said, but she remained faithful, “and it was only a few years afterward that she recalled the words of her brother and made up her mind to kill Rasputin.”
There was no doubt that it was Iliodor who had encouraged Guseva in her murder attempt. He fled from his village immediately after he heard the attempt had failed. Disguised as a woman he slipped over the border to Finland; once he was safely out of Russia, he admitted his involvement. Guseva herself told police interrogators that Rasputin was a heretic who raped nuns. She said that she wished to punish the “false prophet,” both in revenge for the fall of Iliodor and to kill “the khlyst in Rasputin’s person.” The authorities did not want her to repeat such accusations in open court in front of the press. There was no question of her standing trial for attempted murder. Instead she was declared insane and committed to an asylum in Tomsk. Relatives who tried to have her released were told that doctors had found unmistakable symptoms of “psychological disturbance and exalted religiosity.”
The public was not totally robbed of scandal, though. Davidsohn filed a sensational account of the wounding for Birzhevye Vedomosti. Another journalist, signing himself S. P., wrote an account of a surreal interview in Rasputin’s hospital ward in the daily paper Russkoye Slovo that caught the starets’s vivid phrasings, the restlessness of his mind as it darted between subjects, the philosophizing and cunning. The staff put him into a white hospital gown. He met Maria Rasputin outside the ward. She refused to let him in, so he asked if he could see Akulina Laptinskaya, who was also nursing the patient. It was a sensible request. She was amenable to rubles; the investigating commission was to characterize her as “a sly and calculating woman, who demanded money from visitors.”
Laptinskaya came to the door of the ward. The journalist noticed her tranquil gray eyes; she had the transparent shadow of a knowing smile on her face. He asked to see the patient and explained that he had come all the way from St. Petersburg. She hesitated—rubles passed hands—and agreed. The ward was all white. The bed was covered with a fiery red satin blanket. Strong, bony fingers played with it. Rasputin’s head lay feeble on the pillow. He stretched out a hand. “Hallo, sit down,” he said. “Here’s my wife and my father.”
The father was thickset, shaggy, clumsy. He looked awkward in his white hospital coat; he reminded the journalist of linen aired on an elm stump. Praskovya Rasputin had a sad, withered face. The journalist thought she had the kind of eyes the wives of celebrities—artists and writers—have; they share the grief of the failures and the troubles of hard labor but are not able to share the joy of success.
“I was in Pokrovskoye,” the journalist said. Rasputin’s fingers started to move restlessly and swiftly, as if they were spinning a web. He dropped his head to one side and looked at his visitor slyly, showing the whites of his big, light eyes. The eyes were blue, the color of a flax field in blossom. “Eyes of a woman,” the journalist noted. “Sinful eyes. Eyes of Jean Baptiste by Leonardo da Vinci.”
“Like the village?” the starets asked, holding out his hand in the journalist’s direction and pecking at him with a long finger.
“No, I didn’t. People live better where I’m from.”
“In Russia!” Rasputin snorted. “The muzhik in Russia is not a muzhik but a martyr. In Perm province, it’s all right.” Perm was the closest province across the Urals. “But no farther. They eat potatoes out there. Our muzhik eats white bread.”
“Filling, but dirty,” said the journalist, who was no admirer of Siberia. “Cream with cockroaches. Shit in the yards up to one’s knees. They say you can’t stay for long in the yard here calling out your cow: cow dung gnaws around your legs.”
“Dirt,” said Rasputin. “Princes come out of dirt. Sow oats in the dirt, and you’ll become a prince. All Russia, my dear, comes out of dirt. All Russia is out of dirt. Cockroach.… How can you do without a cockroach? It whispers, whispers, whispers …”
Rasputin showed the whites of his eyes, the whites only. His face was pale. He raised his eyelids and looked at the journalist sharply, piercingly, turning a lock of his beard with a finger. “Dirty you say, my dear …”
“And two floors,” the journalist said of Rasputin’s house in Pokrovskoye. “What do you want two floors for if you live on one with an empty chamber?”
“My dear, you can’t live on the first floor,” Rasputin said, indicating his wife. “Praskovya Fedorovna here has five cows, and thirty sheep, and a pig with sucklings, and hens.… And what about the chamber? Let the chamber be there. A guest comes. Joy comes with him. Let the chamber be there for guests. Shit.… Throw your cleanliness into shit and trample on it. Chamber. There’s a chamber …”
He closed his eyes and was silent for a moment. He went on in a different, calm voice, without rambling.
“This thing that happened to me. The stick was small, the knife was big.” He started to tell how the Noseless One had assaulted him; that is what local people were calling Guseva, because of the way syphilis had disfigured her face. “The stick was small.… I keep close to the fence. And I hold the wound. I’m afraid to let it go, I hold it with my hand.… And she follows me with the knife. The way I see it, I’m not going to make it. Then I look down and see a chip on the ground—a small stick lying there. I pick it up and I touch her lightly with it on the shoulder. She gets scared and backs off.”
His head dropped back on the pillow and he looked sideways, craftily. “The knife was as big as that. Her hand trembled. See?” He demonstrated. “She approaches me and I give a pyatachok, five kopecks. Alms. Her hand trembled. Otherwise … You can defend yourself with alms. The stick was small.”
Laptinskaya signaled for the journalist to go. Rasputin started looking for something. “This pyatachok … she threw down the pyatachok,” he said. “Threw it on the ground, right there. Conscience. That’s conscience. She threw the pyatachok. A boy found it and brought it to me. My pyatachok. Came back to me. Here—where is it?—my pyatachok.”
He rummaged around under the blanket. He looked angrily at Akulina. She smiled amiably and arranged his pillow.
“Here it is,” Rasputin said triumphantly. “She dropped it. And she dropped the knife, too …”
Alexandra was told of the murder attempt aboard the Standart the day after it happened. Gilliard noticed unusual excitement among the retinue. A colonel told him that a woman had knifed Rasputin in the stomach and that the wound might be mortal. There was a great commotion; “people whispered no end, mysterious meetings took place.” The whisperings stopped immediately at the approach of “anyone supposedly belonging to the Rasputin circle”—by that Gilliard meant Vyrubova or the empress and her children. The prevailing hope on the yacht was that the starets would die and the family would “at last be set free from this pernicious creature.” They were not convinced, however. Gilliard said they thought that “the soul of this cursed muzhik was sewn on his body” and that he would live.
That did not include the empress, of course. She sent a stream of telegrams from the yacht to the Tyumen hospital. They were all more or less the same, Gilliard said: “We are frightened by the war that threatens us. Do you think it might start? Pray for us. Encourage us by your advice.” The Austrians were threatening Serbia, and Berlin had sided with Vienna. Alexandra was deeply worried that her birthplace would soon be at war with her country of adoption. Nicholas shared her yearning for peace; “one had to see him,” Gilliard wrote, “to understand what tortures and moral trials he had to suffer.”
Rasputin’s early replies were ambivalent. “Do not worry too much about war,” he cabled the empress from his sickbed on July 3. “When the time comes you will have to declare it, but not yet, there’ll be an end to your troubles.” He was noncommittal on July 6: “My dears, my precious ones, do not despair.” As Alexandra’s cables became more desperate, he shifted against war. “I believe in, I hope for peace,” he cabled her later in the day. “They are doing wicked things, we are no part of it, I know how you suffer, it is very hard to be apart from one another.” As he sent this message, the Standart’s summer cruise ended. Alexis, still in pain from his ankle, was carried gently ashore in Nagorny’s arms.
The following day, the Standart lay to off St. Petersburg to await the arrival of French President Raymond Poincaré aboard the battleship France. Over lunch Nicholas chatted with Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador, about the Serbian crisis. The tsar said that he did not believe that Kaiser Wilhelm wanted war. “If you knew him as I do!” he said. “If you knew how much theatricality there is in his posing!” The battleship steamed slowly toward them in a silver light, her wake white against an emerald sea, shore batteries firing salutes that merged with the thunder of the “Marseillaise” and the cheers of spectators on an armada of pleasure boats. A state banquet was held for Poincaré that evening in the Peterhof Palace.
The Zaria, the army’s summer review, was held at the Krassnoye camp outside the capital two days later. The weather was cloudless and intensely hot, and the tart scent of forest fires hung in the air. Ambassadors and their families were present, and Meriel Buchanan listened to the chatter on Paris fashions—wider skirts and no sleeves, trying unless one had pretty arms—and complaints about dishonest cooks and the price of vegetables. “I wonder after all what an army is for,” a woman said. “It’s so immense, isn’t it?” An officer looked up at her. “Just a toy for kings and emperors to play with, Madame,” he said. “Rather dangerous toys,” she replied.
The capital was airless when the guests returned from the review. Riots had broken out in the Vyborg slums, and some barricades had been thrown up. The manager of a big factory was shot by a terrorist. Cossack patrols were out on the streets. The windows of a streetcar were smashed. Kaiser Wilhelm thought Russia was in “the mood of a sick tomcat.” The thud of hooves came closer, and horsemen with sloping lances rode by, rank after rank, weary and dusty, sent directly from the review into the city as a precaution against insurrection. Buchanan recognized one of the officers, a boy she had danced with during the winter, and he saluted her and called out a laughing good night before he and his horse were swallowed by the twilight haze.
Poincaré left on July 10. He gave a farewell dinner aboard the France. Alexandra exchanged pleasantries with Paléologue. “I’m glad I came tonight,” she said. “I was afraid there would be a storm.” The ship’s band struck up an allegro with brass and drums. She put her hands to her ears; with a “pained and pleading glance” she pointed and said, “Couldn’t you?” The ambassador signaled to the conductor to stop. The royal party transferred to the Standart as the France raised steam. Paléologue and the tsar watched the battleship and its escorts speed westward, their wakes sparkling across a calm and moonlit sea. Nicholas again reassured the ambassador that Kaiser Wilhelm had no stomach for adventure and that the only wish of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria was to die in peace.
He was no better a judge of emperors than of men. While he was speaking Austria gave Serbia an ultimatum. It said that the archduke’s murder had been planned in Belgrade and carried out with a revolver supplied by Serbian officials. It demanded the dismissal of anti-Austrian officials and the suppression of all Serb nationalist groups and anti-Austrian propaganda. Austrian officials were to be granted free access to investigate the murder. Serbia was given forty-eight hours to reply. The text reached Serge Sazonov, the Russian foreign minister, at 10:00 A.M. on July 11. “It means war in Europe!” he exclaimed.
Sazonov warned the tsar by telephone that the brutal Austrian note must have been worded in agreement with Berlin. The Serbs could not conceivably comply with it; the note was a prelude to military action. Sazonov added that the Germans were “certainly in the most advantageous position owing to the supreme efficiency of their armies.” They wanted a war because they thought they would win it.
Nicholas was not impressed. A few minutes later the finance minister, Peter Bark, had an audience with him. “He said he thought Sazonov was exaggerating the gravity of the position and had lost his nerve,” Bark recalled. The tsar told him that no one wanted to start a general European war over the Balkans. He thought it unlikely that the note had been sent after consultation with Berlin; “the German emperor had frequently assured him of his sincere desire to safeguard the peace of Europe.” The cabinet was less optimistic. The same afternoon it decided that, if Austria refused negotiations with Serbia, Russia would mobilize four military districts in the hope that this would warn off Vienna and not provoke Berlin.
Rasputin was well enough to sit up in bed and write. He was now fully alert to the danger of war—the only senior politician to share his insight and foreboding was Sergei Witte, long out of office—and accurately foresaw disaster. He was not a pacifist in the sense of rejecting all war, but he sensed that the particular war in prospect, against the Germans, a people he admired, would prove a cataclysm. He sent a scrawled, misspelled letter to Nicholas, headed by a cross. “My friend, I saw again—a terrible storm menaces Russia,” he wrote. “Woe, disaster, suffering without end. It is night. There is not one star … a sea of tears. And so much blood. I cannot find words. The terror is infinite. I know that all want war of you.… You are the tsar, the father of your people. Do not let fools triumph. Do not let them do this thing. If we conquer Germany, what will become of Russia? When I think of that I see an awful martyrdom. Russia drowned in her own blood … Grigory.”
Nicholas did not reply. He continued the royal round of prize givings and hospital visits, and played tennis and canoed with his daughters. On July 13 he received the master of the horse of the court of the obscure German dukedom of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who had come to fulfill his traditional obligation to inform the tsar that his duke had died; Nicholas gave him lunch. The tsar was not alone in this apparent indifference; Kaiser Wilhelm took a short cruise on his yacht. The joint roles of chief executive and monarch were difficult to reconcile. Neither Nicholas nor Wilhelm truly controlled the slide toward hostilities. Rasputin was to claim that, had he not been in a Siberian hospital ward, there would have been no war. Nicholas did not want war either; but he was driven by his ministers and generals, by Russia’s tradition as the protector of Slavs, and by the timetables of mass mobilization.
Rasputin’s tantalizing hypothesis needs two ifs, not one; if he had been in the capital, and if his influence over the tsar had been conclusive. The first did not occur. He was not in St. Petersburg; even had he been, the second is unlikely. The impulses to war were too strong. For all his bluster—“Serbia must be disposed of, and that right soon!”—Wilhelm was as much in the hands of his generals and officials as Nicholas. In Austria, Franz Joseph was eighty-four, tired and freighted with tragedy; his son Rudolf had committed suicide in a love tryst at Mayerling in 1889, his wife, Elizabeth, had been stabbed to death by an anarchist in Geneva ten years later, and now the murder of his heir, Franz Ferdinand, had precipitated the crisis. His chancellor was so set on war that, when the Serbs made an unexpectedly humble reply to the Austrian ultimatum, he hid it.
On July 16, though white flags were flying in the Serbian capital, the Austrians began shelling Belgrade across the Danube. Rasputin cabled Vyrubova: “Let Papa not plan war because war will mean the end of Russia and yourselves and you will lose to the last man.” Vyrubova told the tsar, but she admitted that he took little notice of it. Nicholas was, however, doing his best to slow the stampede to war, sending telegrams and a personal envoy to Wilhelm begging him to restrain the Austrians. The cables between the cousins maintained a family gloss—the two monarchs remained on “Willy” and “Nicky” terms—but Berlin had little interest in compromise. The pressure for Russia to aid its fellow Slavs in Serbia was overwhelming.
Sazonov saw the tsar at 3:00 P.M. the following day. The foreign minister told him that the order to mobilize could no longer be postponed; the tsar showed “extreme loathing” for war and was visibly irritated. “Think of the responsibility you advise me to take,” he said. “It would mean sending hundreds of thousands of Russians to their deaths.” Sazonov persisted; he said that the Austrians and Germans were hell-bent on enslaving Russian allies in the Balkans, and that Russia was being reduced to “pitiful dependence” on the whims of the Central Powers. Nicholas agreed to general mobilization. A message was sent from the Central Telegraph Office in St. Petersburg to all points of the empire: “His Imperial Majesty orders colon the army and navy to be placed on war footing stop to this end reservists and horses to be called up according to the mobilization plan of the year 1910 stop.” Red cards ordering men to mobilization points were nailed on signposts.
At midnight on July 18, Count Pourtalès, the German ambassador, delivered a German ultimatum to Sazonov. Russia was to reverse the mobilization order within twelve hours or face the consequences. Pourtalès gave the Russians extra time. He did not return to see Sazonov until shortly after 7:00 P.M. on July 19, but he carried orders from Berlin to declare war even if the Russians proposed further negotiations. After he had delivered the declaration, the ambassador looked out of Sazonov’s window at the soaring Alexander Column and the oxblood bulk of the Winter Palace, and wept. Sazonov rose and embraced him. “So the die is cast!” the French ambassador, Palèologue, wrote in his diary. “The part of reason in the government of peoples is so small that it has taken merely a week to let loose universal madness!”
Nicholas and his family were at vespers as Germany declared war. Gilliard was struck by the tsar’s exhausted look; he wrote, “The features of his face had changed, and the small bags which appeared under his eyes when he was tired seemed far bigger.” In church he prayed that God would still spare his people war, “his whole being absorbed by religious feeling, simple and convinced.” Alexandra, at his side, had the sad expression of suffering the tutor had seen when she was nursing Alexis through a bout of bleeding. They returned to the palace at 8:00 P.M. Before going in to dinner Nicholas went to his study, where he read Sazonov’s report of the German declaration. He had a short telephone conversation with the foreign minister. He appeared in the dining room—Alexandra had been about to send Tatiana to look for him—and told the family the news. Vyrubova found the empress weeping hysterically in her bedroom later in the evening. “War!” she cried. “And I knew nothing of it! This is the end of everything!”
Shortly after 9:00 P.M. the tsar met his ministers and the British and French ambassadors. He went to his bedroom after midnight and drank a cup of tea with Alexandra. A servant knocked on the door at 1:30 A.M. with a telegram from the kaiser, imploring him not to let his troops cross the German frontier. Six hours before the Germans had declared war; now the kaiser was suggesting that Nicholas could still avert it. He read Alexandra the telegram. “You’re not going to answer it, are you?” she said. He replied that he would not. “I felt that all was over forever with me and William,” he said. “I slept extremely well. When I woke at my usual hour, I felt as if a weight had fallen from my mind. My responsibility to God and my people was still enormous, but at least I knew what I had to do.”
A grand levee was held in the Winter Palace on July 20 to read the manifesto of war. Alexandra turned up the brim of her hat to give the crowds a rare glimpse of her face. A Te Deum was sung by the court clergy. An intensely mystical expression crossed the tsar’s face as he prayed, Paléologue thought; Alexandra’s breast was thrust forward, her head high, lips crimson, eyes glazed—when she closed them her livid face made the ambassador think of a death mask. All fell to their knees to receive the tsar’s blessing. The enthusiasm was boundless. The tsar was mobbed as “highborn ladies, the reserved as well as the exuberant, old and young” rushed forward to catch a glance from the tsar, to touch him, to kiss a fold of his uniform. When he stepped onto the balcony to show himself to the crowd, the ourrahs—the deep-throated, echoing Russian hurrahs—seemed to shake the palace walls. Foreign diplomats climbed on top of their cars on the edge of the square to get a better view. In the depths of rural Russia, the liberal Pavel Miliukov wrote, “eternal silence reigned.”
The next morning Count Pourtalès and his staff left St. Petersburg on a special train for Stockholm. The military plenipotentiary left his Stradivarius violin behind in the rush. The imperial rooms at the Finland Station were kept open for them; a senior foreign ministry official ensured that they departed unmolested. Their embassy did not escape so lightly. The mobs who had thrown up barricades a few days before transferred their hatreds from the Romanovs to the Germans on July 22. They burst into the building, tore down tapestries, smashed precious busts and statues from Pourtalès’s private collection, and pulled down the famous bronze horses from its roof. The St. Petersburger Zeitung and the Herold, the capital’s German-language newspapers, disappeared, and the favorite German restaurant, Leinners on the Nevsky, closed its doors. Later in the month Nicholas issued a ukase changing the city’s German-sounding name to Petrograd. Ambassador Paléologue thought this “a little puerile”—he wondered what would happen if the French changed the name of Strasbourg “and all the other bourgs in France”—but he thought that the collective soul of Russia was showing itself more strongly than at any time since Napoleon’s invasion a century before.
On July 23 news came that Britain had declared war on Germany; the red, white, and blue flags of Russia, France, and Britain floated together above the city. The mood was triumphal. “It has been a splendid time,” the London Times correspondent Robert Wilton wrote on July 25, “and I think these people are out to win. They are now our fast friends for ever.” The Duma committed itself unconditionally to the war. Nicholas, for the first and last time in his life, praised it lavishly. “The State Duma has shown itself worthy of its position,” he said, “and has truly expressed the will of the nation, because the whole Russian people feels the insult Germany has caused it. I now look on the future with complete confidence.” He named his cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich, the giant husband of the Montenegrin Anastasia, commander in chief. Alexandra and Rasputin railed against the appointment of their ex-friend. Pettily, the empress insisted that the tsar should not bid the grand duke farewell at Petrograd’s Warsaw railroad station when he left for the front on August 1.
It seemed a crusade, a “duel to the death between Slavism and Germanism.” Ninety-six percent of the reservists answered the tsar’s call to the colors. Guards officers, foreseeing a victory parade down the Unter den Linden in Berlin, wondered whether they should pack their dress uniforms. Napoleon’s invasion, the wars against Turkey and Japan had all been over inside eighteen months. The Russian high command’s twin war plans, A and G, like the corresponding German Schlieffen plan, anticipated a result within months. Cheeky and confident postcards were sold of Kaiser Wilhelm as a miserable tomcat:
Uncle Fritz has gone quite barmy,
Wants to have a boxing match!
So who leads the German Army?
Willy Whiskers—stupid cat!
A few were more prescient. Rasputin feared calamity by instinct and Peter Durnovo, a former interior minister, by reason. In a brilliant analysis, later found among the tsar’s papers, Durnovo listed Russian weaknesses: “Insufficiency of war supplies,” his litany began. “Far too great dependence on foreign industry … inadequate strategic railroad network … rolling stock insufficient for colossal demands of a European war … heavy artillery far too inadequate and there are few machine guns. Expenditures beyond Russia’s limited financial means … military disasters and shortcomings in supply inevitable.” He moved on to the terrifying consequences of a long war: “Nervousness and spirit of opposition,” he wrote. “All the blame will be put on the government.… socialist slogans, capable of arousing and rallying the masses … division of all valuables and property. Army having lost its most dependable men, and carried away by a primitive peasant desire for land, will find itself too demoralized to serve as a bulwark of law and order.… The intellectual opposition parties, lacking real authority in the eyes of the people, will be powerless to stem the popular tide, aroused by themselves, and Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy.” The paper was stunningly accurate; it was ignored.
On the road between the new Petrograd and Tsarskoye Selo, amid an endless line of ammunition wagons, field kitchens, ambulances, and gun limbers, Paléologue noted a departing soldier and a woman—young, delicate, a red and white scarf around her fair hair, a blue cotton sarafan drawn in at her waist by a leather belt, an infant at her breast—fixing each other silently with “mournful, loving eyes.” The ambassador wondered how many men would return. Witte, mortally sick with a cerebral tumor, returned from summering in Biarritz convinced that tsardom, “this insane regime … this tangle of cowardice, blindness, craftiness, and stupidity,” would not survive the test of war.
At first the war had “one joyful as well as unexpected consequence,” Gilliard said; it removed Rasputin to the background. He was back from Siberia at the end of September, almost recovered from his wound, though he continued to have stomach pains for the rest of his life. But he paid few visits to the palace. In the thrill of war his warnings seemed outdated. Alexis’s ankle mended, and the boy was in good health through the winter. The tsar was preoccupied with news from the front; Alexandra was recovering from the shock of a war that had made enemies of her closest relations.
Rasputin was at the palace on October 17. A rare entry in the Kammerfurier recorded that he met Nicholas and Alexandra “at 9 1/2 in the evening.” Maria Rasputin remembered it as the only occasion when the tsar was cold with her father. Rasputin told the tsar that the only victors in the war would be the ghouls of death and hospitals for the blind and maimed. When it was over crippled veterans would roam the cities and ghettos and villages, despised by those for whom they had fought. Tears streamed down his face as he spoke. The tsar said nothing but slowly sipped a drink. The empress looked pained but made no comment.
The starets was right; Durnovo’s predictions were well grounded. A chronic shortage of shells and machine guns developed at once. “With his sly look, his eyes always gleaming watchfully under the heavy folds of his eyelids,” Paléologue wrote of the man largely responsible, the war minister, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, “I know few men who inspire more distrust at first sight.” The tsar agreed that Sukhomlinov’s looks were against him, “but,” he wrote, “he is an excellent minister and I trust him entirely.” This drawing room soldier, “scented, pomaded, with gold chain bracelets on his white wrists and a secret twist to the pale lips between the short gray beard,” spent much ingenuity in maximizing his expense account to keep his wife, thirty-five years younger than himself, in parties and clothes. He had last fought against the Turks, in 1878, boasted that he had not read a military manual in twenty-five years, and held that machine guns and rapid-firing artillery were cowardly. He was so lazy that, after preparing a mobilization plan during the first Serbian crisis two years before, he left for a vacation on the French Riviera. “Why not?” he told his critics. “A mobilization doesn’t have to be conducted by the war minister in person.” He and his wife were friendly with Rasputin and Alexandra, however. His job was not in jeopardy even when reservists reporting to their depots found only enough .299-inch rifles for two men in three, and some were not issued boots. Signals units had no wire for field telephones, and communications were forced onto radio. Because there was also a shortage of code books, many radio messages, to the joy of German intelligence, were in clear.
The Russians consistently outfought the Austro-Hungarians. Smashing fifteen Austrian divisions, which fled in panic crying, “Kosaken kommen!” “The Cossacks are coming!” they rapidly captured Lemberg in Galicia. Austrian officers taken prisoner accepted parole and dined in Russian messes, telling their hosts that they wanted no part of German aggression. The Russian press wrote that the campaign was all but over; against Rasputin’s advice, Nicholas visited Lemberg to celebrate its return to its old Russian name, Lvov, riding streets gay with bunting to a thanksgiving service in the cathedral and a gala dinner. He slept in the bed reserved for the Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph, but the visit was not a success. Although Nicholas shared his wife’s belief in the loyalty of his peasant-soldiers, he was too shy to approach them in the uniformed flesh. The army was “cold and indifferent” to him. The new governor, a third-rate former hussar officer, conducted a witch-hunt against the Galician Catholics, and they were soon as hostile to their fellow Slavs from Russia as they had been to the Austrians. “Our Friend would have found it better,” Alexandra wrote to Nicholas, “had you gone after the war to the conquered country.” Rasputin feared that it would soon be won back.
He was correct. The Austrians, demoralized, riven by cross-nationalisms, were one thing. The Germans were quite another. They were better equipped and better led than the Russians, who were frequently obliged to face them, not at a time and place of their own choosing but in response to pleas from the distant French and British. Within a month of the outbreak of war, the Germans were within thirty miles of Paris. To ease the pressure on their allies, the Russians attacked with two armies in East Prussia.
The First Army under General Rennenkampf was to drive southwest parallel to the Baltic coast, drawing the bulk of the German forces, while the Second Army under General Samsonov moved north out of Poland. Samsonov made slow progress in difficult country. When his men broke into the small town of Allenstein, they cheered because they thought they were in Berlin. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the formidable German generals facing them, feared the two armies would link up and trap them. But radio intercepts of uncoded signals gave them the exact dispositions of Russian units and their objectives. The information was so priceless that the Germans kept asking “anxiously over and over if we should believe them.” Aerial reconnaissance and telephone calls from local inhabitants—the Russians had not bothered to cut the lines—confirmed that the Russian commanders were unable to coordinate their armies’ movements.
As Samsonov drank a toast to his “victory” in Allenstein, the Germans cut into his flanks. His men floundered in marshes and forests of sixty-foot pines. They had few maps, and the Germans had burned signposts between the villages. They milled on sandy tracks, deep and powdery, which German shells threw up into a choking dust. Their own artillery was silent for lack of ammunition. Samsonov tried to ride out of the trap with his chief of staff and a few officers. “The enemy has luck one day, we will have luck another,” he said. He fell behind the break-out party in the thick woods. They heard a single shot; he killed himself in shame at losing his army. Only fifty officers and 2,100 men of his Thirteenth and Fifteenth Corps escaped; he had lost 110,000 men in four days.
The Germans named their victory Tannenberg, in revenge for a fifteenth-century defeat the Teutonic Knights had suffered against the Slavs nearby. Then they turned on Rennenkampf. In his Twenty-eighth Division, companies were stretched out in rows with their officers after rapid-firing artillery caught them, “as if they had been frozen into those poses in which they met death”; trenches six feet deep were filled with dead and wounded Russians. Rennenkampf fled back across the border in a car; in contempt his staff called him Rennen ohne Kampf, “running without fighting.” He left 145,000 men of the First Army behind him, dead, wounded, or captured.
News of the disaster reached Petrograd, “stilling the music, the cheers, the gay self-confidence.” The skies turned leaden with fall. Mobs took vengeance on German bakeries and shops. The music of Beethoven and Bach was banned from concerts. The synod outlawed Christmas trees as a German custom. Alexandra shared the loathing. She said that Germany had become “a country I did not know and had never known” and feared that the “monstrous” kaiser would avenge himself on her by sending her brother to the Russian front, but more than ever the Russians thought of her as German.
The wounded came back in streams. The empress trained as a nurse with her elder daughters and Vyrubova. “We have an amputation in the big hospital,” Alexandra wrote on November 20. “My nose is full of hideous smells from those blood-poisoning wounds.” She had met gangrene; five days later she saw death. “We were occupied all morning—during an operation a soldier died—the first such time it happened,” she wrote. “The girlies were brave—they and Ania [Vyrubova] had never seen such a death.… It made us all so sad as you can imagine—how near death always is.”
She did not forget to mention Rasputin. “Once more the hour of separation has come—& always equally hard to bear … when you are gone … a bit of my life gone,” she wrote to Nicholas after he left to review troops in the Caucasus. “You always bring revival as our Friend says … comforting to know His prayers follow you.”
The Friend was making the most of his relations with Goremykin. The premier set up an infirmary for wounded soldiers. Simanovich persuaded the banker Dmitri Rubinstein to make a donation of 250,000 rubles to it. In return Rasputin introduced the financier to the premier. In due course Madame Rubinstein was appointed an honorary president of the infirmary, and her husband was able to boast of his intimate connections with the government. He made a point of telephoning Goremykin when he wished to impress a visitor, asking after his wife’s health and having a chat so trivial that his closeness to the premier could not be doubted. Word spread quickly, and Rubinstein used his reputation in share ramping. He bought a majority of stock in the banking house Yunker & Co. He then held a ball—making sure that Goremykin and Rasputin were present—to which he invited a Kiev sugar baron, Lev Brodsky. After he had seen Rubinstein “talking like pals” with the premier and the starets, Brodsky was persuaded to buy several million rubles’ worth of overpriced stock. Rubinstein, Simanovich said admiringly, “knew how to put himself forward.”