White Crow: the Life and Times of the Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov, 1859-1919 : The Life and Times of the Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov, 1859-1919 9780313012662, 9780275977788

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White Crow The Life and Times of the Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov, 1859–1919 JAMIE H. COCKFIELD

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cockfield, Jamie H. White crow : the life and times of the Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov : 1859–1919 / Jamie H. Cockfield. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–275–97778–1 1. Nikolaæ Mikhaælovich, Grand Duke of Russia, 1859–1919. 2. Nobility—Russia— Biography. 3. Intellectuals—Russia—Biography. 4. Russia—History—Nicholas II, 1894– 1917. I. Title. DK254.N497C63 2002 947.08′3′092—dc21 2002025209 [B] British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2002 by Jamie H. Cockfield All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002025209 ISBN: 0–275–97778–1 First published in 2002 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

He would have been a Pericles in Athens; He would have been a Brutus in Rome; But in Russia he was only a hussar officer. —Alexander Pushkin

To Rose Bootle, Kathryn M. Brown, Janie Bushardt, Margaret Carter, Katherine Gause, Elizabeth Hunt, Gene Moore, and Ada Stackhouse and to the memory of Emily Askins, Edred Gowdy, Elizabeth Gravely, Elizabeth Rickenbaker, Eris Smiley, and Emera Williams.

Contents

Preface

ix

Chapter 1

Outsiders within the Family

1

Chapter 2

A Young Grand Duke

29

Chapter 3

Imperial Scholar

67

Chapter 4

Pariah in the Family

95

Chapter 5

The Grand Duke at War

133

Chapter 6

Revolt in the Palaces

159

Chapter 7

A Country of Savages, March–November 1917

191

Chapter 8

Stillborn Future

221

Imperial Legacy

247

Notes

251

Bibliography

291

Index

303 Photo essay follows page 158.

Preface

The Romanov dynasty provided the Russian Empire with its tsars for more than 300 years, and in that capacity, it has been one of the most powerful families in history. Yet blessed with virtually every opportunity, few of its members, including many of those who ruled, left a distinguished mark in history. One of them who did, however, was Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, the only Romanov who was a true intellectual. A historian, a biologist, and a political reformer who stood for unpopular causes that he felt were just, Grand Duke Nicholas had almost nothing in common with the other members of his clan. Most of his family, and Russian high society as well, considered him a belaia vorona, literally a “white crow,” Russian slang for a “misfit” or “oddball.” Educated people outside Russia would not have considered him so, but to his family, most of whom spent their time and vast wealth pursuing sybaritic pleasures and guarding their considerable privileges, he was always an outsider. Only his immediate siblings understood and admired him for the remarkable person he was: The scholar, the reformer, the defender of human rights, and the champion of a free society. Biographers tend to make either saints or villains of their subjects, telling tales of great heroes or detestable blackguards. My grand ducal subject was certainly no saint and probably not the most pleasant of people, but I have endeavored to be objective, showing his warts with his merits. The most outstanding and respectable Romanov in the twilight of the

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empire, Nicholas Mikhailovich too had his failings, most of them personality flaws, which made him genuinely, and perhaps deservedly, unpopular with many of those around him and estranged him from the society in which his imperial connection made him move. He talked too much, disparaging the views of others, and was often eager to repeat and show a fondness for gossip. He was overly caustic and unduly sarcastic about those whom he held in contempt, which meant anyone of his station or in a position of power who was not his intellectual equal. He tended to be negative, pessimistic, and viciously critical of those in power who failed. He was given to petty dislikes and long-standing feuds. Nicholas Mikhailovich’s intelligence and his positive accomplishments, however, are undeniable. His work in history and the sciences made major contributions to those fields, and he was a tireless fighter for positive change, both social and political, within the Russian State. Even after the February Revolution of 1917, he encouraged his brothers and cousins to relinquish their state lands and surrender voluntarily their imperial privileges, and he became a republican because he felt that republicanism would then serve his nation best. It was ironic that he was born on the eve of the Great Reforms of the 1860s, living almost sixty years through the most momentous six decades of Russian history and dying in the revolution that the reforms, had they not been deformed after their creation, could have prevented. At the center of power, he witnessed and tried to influence the great events of his time, yet like all liberal reformers of the Russian nation, he ultimately failed for myriad unalterable reasons as he struggled for change in the bizarre political alchemy of Russian politics. As a result of his and other reformers’ failure, the Russian people had to endure the Soviet nightmare for three-quarters of a century, an incubus more diabolical than any tyranny any of the tsars had ever fashioned. The writing of a book represents the work of numerous people beyond the author, and there are many who assisted in this study. I would first like to thank those colleagues and friends who read and gave me guidance on chapters of the manuscript. They are, in alphabetical order, Rollin Armour, Robert Good, John Dunaway, Wayne Mixon, and Dale Steiner. Each generously shared with me their insight and editorial skills, which vastly improved the manuscript. One other colleague who was not available to read part of the work but who was most supportive, both financially and morally, was my former dean, Doug Steeples. His encouragement and generous research grants were major stimuli in the completion of this work. I had always said that there was no such thing as a good dean, only varying degrees of sorriness. Doug proved me wrong.

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Three friends examined the work in its entirety and agreed to endorse it: Catharine Brozman, professor emerita of Tulane University, Warren Lerner, professor of history in the department at Duke University, and David MacKenzie, professor of the department of history of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Each gave me broad guidance and spent more time with the manuscript than was requested of them. They have by their efforts improved it considerably. Along with them, I would like to thank my editors at Praeger, Heather Staines and Nicole Cournoyer, whose support and faith in the project maintained my enthusiasm for it. I have never worked with two editors who have been so thorough and moved so quickly. Due to their efficiency, I never suffered the “maddening delays” of which I wrote in chapter 3. I must also thank Mr. Andrew Romanov, who courteously took my phone calls and tried to help answer my questions, and Mr. Nikita Romanov, who gave me permission to read collections of his family’s papers at the Hoover Institution. Princess A. Kourakine of the Bibliothèque Slave de Paris graciously allowed me to read the grand duke’s papers archived there and has given me much help over the years with this and other projects. I also owe a special note of thanks to Carol Leadenham of the archive of the Hoover Institution for her many kindnesses and help beyond the call of duty, a treatment for which she is famous and from which many researchers have benefitted. I first encountered my grand ducal subject in 1969 when I began researching a dissertation topic which I later abandoned. In that time, however, I received help on what became this work from three men who unfortunately I must thank posthumously: Gleb Botkin, the son of the last tsar’s doctor, who moved with members of the imperial family; Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich Romanov, who allowed me to interview him several times in London and promptly answered several questions by mail; and Princess Eugénie of Greece, whose father saved Nicholas II’s life in an assassination attempt in Japan and who was writing a biography of the Tsarevich Aleksei at the time I first began investigating the grand duke. She generously shared with me her research and her contacts. All three of these fantastic sources of oral history had me into their homes and gave a very young and naive graduate student much more help than he probably merited. At one point after I had been at Prince Dmitri’s apartment for a number of hours, he suddenly jumped up from his chair and asked, “What time is it?” Thinking that I had delayed his departure for another appointment and he was politely telling me that I should leave, I looked at my watch, said, “Five-twenty,” and immediately began gathering my papers and notes. His response quickly put me at ease: “I knew something was wrong,” he said, and then he asked, “What will you have to drink?”

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I fear that I can only thank anonymously the many overworked and underpaid librarians and archivists at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Bakhmetev Archive of Columbia University, the Bibliothèque Tourgenev in Paris, the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, the Bibliothèque National in Paris, the Public Record Office in London, the Bodleian Archive in Oxford University, the archives of the University of Leeds in Leeds, England, the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow, the Lenin Library in Moscow, and the Russian State Library in St. Petersburg, Russia. Many of these people cheerfully helped me. I am especially grateful for the help of the employees of GARF because they professionally performed their duties quickly and efficiently at a time when they probably had not been paid in months. Finally a word on the number of persons to whom I am dedicating this work. Except for one of them, they were all teachers that I had in my twelve years in the public school system of Lake City, South Carolina. Sadly time has taken a number of them from us. The school faculty of which the individuals were the backbone was exceptional for a small town in the rural South of that day, and these individuals represent those who most influenced my young life. They run from “Miss Lizzy” Gravely, who was state teacher of the year one year and an instructor who could make a non-mathematical student love algebra, to Gene Moore, a coach and teacher of many subjects, who gave me the last spanking I ever got (although not the last one I ever deserved). Unfortunately I never had Margaret Carter as a teacher, for she retired from the teaching staff as a young woman to work in her family’s business. Quite a bluestocking, she possessed a personal library that in that day rivaled the local public library’s holdings. I have included Ms. Carter because she read and appraised for me some of my early creative writing and gave me strong encouragement to pursue it. Her family’s gain was definitely our school’s loss. Finally, I need to thank Connie Epps Roberts, a classmate and adopted sister who tracked down the whereabouts of our former teachers or their siblings so that I could let them know of my desire to show them my gratitude and appreciation.

Chapter 1

Outsiders within the Family

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy it its own way. —Leo Tolstoy1 It is true that none of them understands very much about Russia. But then who does? —Stavrogin in The Possessed 2 They are the blanket that smothers the struggling flame of civilization, these grand dukes, the tombstone that holds down the coffined soul of Russia. —Percival Gibbon3

In the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire was the world’s largest contiguous state ruled by one government. Sprawling thousands of miles from the plains of Poland in eastern Europe to the North American land boundaries of Alaska, the empire covered one-sixth of the dry land on this planet. Although recognized by its size as one of the great powers, it was easily the most backward. Its population of 70 million was almost totally illiterate, with 45.5 percent of it the “baptized

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property,” to use Alexander Herzen’s metaphor, of either the government or the quarter of a million nobles who owned most of the land and had virtually all of the rights and privileges. More than 92 percent of this population lived in rural Russia, isolated in small villages without any real contact with the outside world and oblivious to any life beyond perhaps the next village. Their ignorant isolation was encouraged by both the State and the Orthodox Church, the nation’s state religious institution, as a means of control, which both encouraged and taught racial and religious hatred as a means to hold peasant allegiance to the national state. The 8,000 national primary schools likewise taught the same bigotry, and their small numbers for so vast a population were unable to do little more than dent the stygian ignorance of the masses. Railroads, which were rapidly linking major cities and even rural hamlets with the outside world in such sprawling areas as the United States and Canada, had only recently appeared in Russia. This vast nation had only slightly more than 600 miles of track, the line between the “two capitals” Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the fifteen-mile long spur linking St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo, the cluster of palaces owned by members of the imperial family and some prominent nobles. This “third-world” state was governed by the Romanov family, the dynasty that had provided the Russian nation with a string of largely mediocre rulers since its installation in 1613. An Assembly of the Land, which had even included peasants, had chosen Mikhail Romanov, an insipid, weak-willed man, who on hearing that he had been elected tsar, had hidden in his mother’s closet rather than accept history’s destiny. He even asked the Land Assembly to remain and help him rule, thus creating the perfect condition for the grounding of a parliamental monarchy, which could have scripted Russia a very different history. Yet Mikhail ’s father, Filaret, who was at the time of his son’s election in prison in Poland, was not so weak-willed, and on returning to Moscow, he in effect assumed the reins of power, becoming the de facto tsar, and he sent the “parliament” packing. Whereas it was convoked a number of times in the seventeenth century, it never took root as a legislature that shared power with a ruler as Great Britain’s did, and it was never convened again after Peter the Great called a rump Land Assembly in 1697. The autocracy strengthened in the years following, and whereas various rulers were overthrown, the concept of political autocracy remained essentially unchallenged. In the process, the entire family became entrenched in power and privilege, feeding off of this nation they regarded as their personal property. At this time, all male members of the family carried the title of “grand duke,” although the distinction was to change in the reign of Alexander

Outsiders within the Family

3

III. The title guaranteed the holder the privilege of receiving a salary from the state, and by the time of the Revolution of 1917, that sum had grown to 280,000 rubles annually.4 Each grand duke also had enormous personal landed estates, either given to them or bought for them by the nation, and each had an army of servants, valets, coachmen, cooks, gardeners, and groomsmen at their beck and call to shield them from any real labor. As one journalist at the turn of the century wrote, “The country [Russia] is a money-making concern maintained for the benefit of the Romanovs, who give in return a little government, the glory of their countenance, and many foul examples of sensuality and extravagance to a king-worshiping people.” Noting that all monarchies have drones that live in idleness and add “no prestige to the throne,” he concluded that “none is sadder . . . [than] the Imperial House of Russia,” whose grand dukes live on the country like a “pillaging enemy.”5 The grand dukes’ lives were often one continuous excess. They lived in a boisterous, ruffianly fashion, with little regard for the feelings of others or the exercise of manners or politeness. Rudeness and drunkenness in public were often commonplace, as was sexual harassment of women around them, marriage on either side being no barrier. Moreover, they felt no obligation to those beneath them. One grand duke owed a haberdasher a considerable amount of money. When the businessman pressed the imperial creditor for the amount owed him, the government pulled his license and closed his stylish shop. An art student was arrested and disappeared because a grand duke fancied her. When her frantic relatives tried to learn her whereabouts, they were told that they need not fear for a grand duke “will take care of her.” That was the end of that.6 When a large amount of Red Cross money went missing during the RussoJapanese War and the investigation into its disappearance led to several grand dukes who had lavished it on French courtesans in St. Petersburg, the investigation was stopped. Soldiers died for lack of the supplies the money would have bought. Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich once struck a woman who had rebuffed his crude advances and fought a duel with her brother over the incident.7 Perhaps some of this swashbuckling behavior stemmed from the fact that in addition to being taught that they were demigods, as one grand duke observed, they learned never to show the smallest weakness in the presence of their inferiors. Each grand duke was always to maintain a “satisfied appearance, concealing his sorrow beneath a bright Russian shirt of blue silk.”8 Some of this behavior was curbed, at least openly, during the reign of the prudish tsar Alexander III (f. 1881–1894), who ruled the family with an iron hand. He felt that the royal family should set a moral example for the entire nation both in their private and their public lives, especially

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in foreign countries, where dissolute acts could reflect on the entire Russian Empire. Those who misbehaved were certain to incur the emperor’s strong displeasure.9 Yet with Alexander III’s death and the ascension of the rather timid Nicholas II, the family’s unsavory conduct returned in public, and instead of suppressing their unflattering lifestyles, the emperor and his Victorian wife Alexandra withdrew from their company, leaving them to behave as they would. When not living their dissolute lives in their palaces or on trips abroad, the grand dukes wasted away in idleness on their vast lands, either on their personal estates or the estates held for them by the government. At the middle of the nineteenth century, their government holdings alone consisted of 223,556,393 desiatins (one desiatin = 2.7 acres), an area more than four times the size of France (roughly the size of the Confederate States of America). Of this land, 116 million desiatins were arable, farmed and managed by an army of serfs and employees. Tsar Paul had established this privilege for his family to “insure forever their existence.” By the turn of the twentieth century, the holdings seem to have diminished considerably, but in 1896, the family still had an income of more than 50 million francs, 4 million of which was from the sale of its vineyards alone.10 Yet each grand duke owned his own personal lands as well. In Siberia alone, the tsar himself had 42.5 million desiatins and many mineral concessions. To the very end of the empire, they also held government “jobs,” some of great importance, but they usually did little with them, leaving the work to underlings. To the incomes from these estates and the grand ducal allowance were added the salaries they might have received for whatever government sinecures they might have held.11 Into this rarified yet sterile atmosphere, Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov, known to his family by the nicknames “Niki” and “Bimbo,” was born outside St. Petersburg at Tsarskoe Selo on April 26 (New Style), 1859,12 the eldest son of Grand Duke Mikhail Nicholaevich, the youngest son of Emperor Nicholas I, and his German wife Cäcilie (Cecilia) of Baden.13 He would stand out in the twilight of the Russian Empire as the most remarkable of his clan, garnering praise from contemporaries as well as historians of the political Left and Right. “Perhaps the most politically astute,” one recent historian would note as well.14 Another called him “the most intelligent, [and] articulate,” a frequent characterization. He was the only one of his family in the late empire who could even remotely be described as an intellectual, with perhaps a passing nod to his cousin, poet and thespian Grand Duke Constantine, who translated Hamlet into Russian and even acted in its performance. Even the Soviet historian P. A. Zaionchkovsky, who caustically describes the

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imperial family as “for the most part rather stupid individuals,” who divided their time “between the barracks and the restaurant,” noted that only these two “were in any way exceptional.” Instructively, Nicholas Mikhailovich is the only nonpolitical grand duke to appear in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and the great Social Revolutionary Victor Chernov described him as “the only intelligent man in the dynasty.”15 Nicholas Mikhailovich did not grow up to be charismatically handsome like his younger brother Alexander, although the court chancellor described him as “fairly good looking.”16 He grew to be tall, like the siblings that followed him, and all of his life he sported a black beard, which turned iron gray with age. Virtually everyone described him, at least in middle age, as being fat, although extant pictures of him do not show him to be overly so. His face suggests a strength of character and gives the correct impression that the person behind it had little patience with nonsense. This unusual Romanov grand duke, this “white crow” within the imperial family, would strive all of his life to reform his nation and fight against its corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy. Niki’s father, Grand Duke Mikhail Nicholaevich, had been born at Peterhof, a palace outside of St. Petersburg, on October 25, 1832. He was a tall man with piercing blue eyes and a long, bushy beard,17 and in pictures he appears an anachronism even for the Russia of his day. He received the strict military education given to all grand dukes, and early on he developed an interest in artillery, eventually becoming Russia’s leading expert on the subject. He had begun his work in that field in 1852 when he was appointed general field marshal, and in 1855 he directed the artillery preparation for the defense of Nikolaev in the Crimean War. In 1856, Alexander II named him the general in charge of ordnance for the Russian army. He remained in this position until he left St. Petersburg to become the governor general of the Caucasus in February 1863. He remained in this post for two decades, and it would be in this remote part of the Russian Empire that his family would be reared.18 While the careers of his older brothers Constantine Nicholaevich and Nicholas Nicholaevich faded into obscurity, Mikhail’s grew. He remained in important places, in part because he was Tsar Alexander III’s favorite uncle, and in part because he was tactful and practical, a trait often lacking, as we have seen, in most other family members. His tenure as governor general of the Caucasus was a positive one. Taking command of the Russian armies there, he was successful in subduing the mountain tribes and was awarded the Golden Dragoon Saber on which were inscribed the words “For Bravery.”19 Moreover, he won allegiance of the region’s people to the Russian crown.

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In 1881, he was appointed to the presidency of the State Council largely due to his popularity, and he and his family returned to St. Petersburg. A relative described him as a “venerable old gentleman,”20 and that opinion seems to have been universal among those who knew him. His daughter-in-law Marie, the wife of his son George, wrote that she had “rarely met so kind a man and such a perfect gentleman, a grand seigneur in every sense of the word.”21 His great-niece Maria Pavlovna spoke of him as a person of “unforgettable elegance” who “fascinated us by the perfection and harmony of his gestures, by his affability and his air of a grand seigneur of an epoch already vanished.” Unlike the young men of her time, he bowed “with touching grace” before the women when he kissed their hands.22 He appreciated perfect etiquette in others as well. When Barbara Dolgorouki passed through a receiving line where she had to kiss the hand of the dowager empress and then the empress and then shake the hand of the emperor, she performed her duties with consummate correctness. This execution elicited from the elderly grand duke a “Bravo!”23 His kindness and sensitivity to others is well and often recorded. Once, when Nadine Wonlar-Larsky, the aunt of the author Vladimir Nabokov, jokingly said in the grand duke’s presence that she would be a wallflower for lack of male attention, Mikhail Nicholaevich sent two of his officers to her the next day to invite her to be his dinner companion at a ball that evening (one rarely dined in Russian high society with one’s own spouse).24 Once, when giving a ball himself, the grand duke discovered that he had somehow omitted sending an invitation to a woman at whose wedding he had been a sponsor. Horrified that he might have hurt her feelings, he sent a general of the court to hand deliver one, and at the party he paid her a great deal of attention, even giving her an emerald brooch to compensate for the slight.25 His own son, Grand Duke Alexander, whose memoirs are remarkably objective, described his father in them as “one of the few men I had known who never wavered in his duty and lived up to the standards of Emperor Nicholas I.”26 Mikhail Nicholaevich’s gentleness and kindness extended even to those beneath him, behavior unusual for a grand duke. Francis Vogel, who directed a post and transport service in the Caucasus and who served the grand duke on many occasions, spoke highly of him in his manuscript memoir. Noting that the grand duke was a great equestrian and lover of horses, he added that he often encountered him on the highways around Tiflis. When he did, the grand duke nearly always cordially invited Vogel to accompany him.27 Vogel also often observed that the grand duke was much liked and respected by the Caucasian people, despite the fact that he was the representative authority of their conquerors. Vogel tells of the

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grand duke’s arrival at a camp one morning, where “the fields of the encampment were crowded with people gathered from the surrounding countryside, and again I observed with what great veneration the Caucasian people clung to the grand duke.”28 Yet not all shared the adulation of the many. Even though Mikhail Nicholaevich was his favorite uncle, Tsar Alexander III was exasperated at how the grand duke repeated much of he was told, including many things that he should not. He told State Secretary A. A. Polovtsov, a member of the State Council, how when he once reprimanded Nicholas Mikhailovich for talking too much, he defended himself by saying that “Papa said [this same thing] in the presence of others.”29 He also lacked the reputation for any great intelligence. Zaionchkovsky, a Soviet historian known for his objectivity and fairness, described him as “very limited” and quoted Empress Eugénie, the wife of emperor Napoleon III, who said after meeting the grand duke on a tour of the Caucasus, “This is not a man but a horse.”30 Count Michael Loris-Melikov, the very practical advisor to Tsar Alexander III, was even harsher, calling him “an egotist, envious and false in the full sense of the words.” The count also described the grand duke as a coward, saying that he was “frightened and timid as a rabbit, both on the battlefield and in time of peace.” He added that he was an “ignoramus” who does not trust his own abilities, who “readily deferred to those around him.”31 His children, however, admired him as a tower of gentle strength and an example of duty. He was a somewhat remote person to them, however, and when referring to him to other people, they called him “Mikhail Nicholaevich.” When they spoke to him, they weighed their words carefully and controlled their emotions. His son Grand Duke Alexander remembered that when his mother died, the distance between the children and their father made it difficult for them to express their sympathy or grief.32 They did not dare engage him in vague conversation on no particular subject, the mere thought of which was “something short of madness.” He seems to have largely remained for them “a cold and distant figure.”33 Yet this seemingly detached father came to their bedroom at night to tuck them in. He would appear shortly after midnight, the clicking of his spurs on the floor waking everyone. “This tall awesome figure would say a prayer over his children, invoking God’s help in making them good Christians and faithful subjects of the empire.”34 Curiously, this austere man provided the young grand dukes with what little parental coddling they received. Alexander III felt close to him, and it seems that he regarded his favorite uncle as a father figure. When he felt that it was time for his eldest son to marry, Alexander III deputized Mikhail Nicholaevich

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to broach the subject to him, which the grand duke dutifully did. Nicholas the tsarevich had already made his choice, Alix of Hesse Darmstadt, the woman he did indeed marry. He told his uncle of the selection, and Mikhail Nicholaevich dutifully reported back to the emperor. The future tsar’s mother, Empress Maria Feodorovna, was not pleased. Shy Alix did not make a good impression, and the empress had immediately disliked her, an opinion that would never change. What is more, hemophilia lurked as a potential problem in Alix’s family. Her grandmother, Queen Victoria, had passed it to one of her sons.35 Mikhail Nicholaevich supported the match, however, and whatever doubts that either the heir or his parents might have had were put aside, and Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich married her shortly after his father’s death. Grand Duke Mikhail’s relationship with his eldest son Niki seems to have differed little from his relationship with the rest of his children. There was always the respected presence, but there seems not to have been much contact, probably because the father was often away on family and governmental business. Yet Niki’s papers reveal a great reverence and almost hero worship for his father. His collection in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) contains a gargantuan number of materials relating to his father and his life and career—clippings from newspapers, letters, pictures, and so forth—the collection of which demonstrates a love and devotion. Still, his correspondence often shows a deference that demonstrates the formal distance, as if the son hesitated to show affection for fear that it would not be returned. Niki’s first extant letter to his father shows this remoteness. In absolutely perfect penmanship, a talent he was to later lose, he wrote, “Dear Papa, I’m very sad that you left. Mama is fine. Antie has put me down [?]. Mama has given me an egg. Misha and Gogi [brothers Mikhail and George] kiss you. Nikolai (Nicholas).”36 There seems to have been no response to that letter, but later that year the grand duke replied to another from his son, thanking him for his “kind letter” and asking him to thank Maria and Shaka (?) for their letters. “Papa is fine,” he wrote of himself in the third person. “I am still coughing. Here the weather is bad. Hug you. God be with you.”37 Another letter describing a wedding was equally as short and lacking in warmth and detail.38 A piece of correspondence the next year is a bit longer, but there is the same curious distance in it, like a letter an aunt or uncle might write to a niece or nephew to whom she or he is not close and rarely sees. Thanking Niki for his two previous letters, Mikhail commented on how happy he was that they were all in good health, although they were suffering from the heat. “I understand that you are going to Borjomi [a family estate in the Caucasus]. I will be glad when you are able to ride horseback like a cossack.”39

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On his eleventh birthday, Niki wrote to his father an account of what he had done that day, which essentially had been to visit an old castle in his mother’s native Baden. “We did not stay long because it was cold,” he wrote, adding, “We always eat with the children of Antie and with their friends.” The letter continued as a catalogue of banal information on the weather and other activities that might be included in a letter to someone when there is not much to say.40 Another letter, the date of which is unclear, was possibly from the same trip to Baden and was equally contrived and stilted, but it did end with, “I kiss you and the brothers strongly, strongly. Nicholas.”41 A letter written in November of that same year is suddenly much more sophisticated than his former ones, but its tone remains formal even though the writer is more chatty. The letter added a somewhat new dimension: a desire to please and even impress his father. “I am now riding on horseback without stirrups [like a cossack?] ,” he wrote, but added “rather badly.” He concluded the letter with “I will try to behave myself. Your Nicholas.”42 When in his late twenties, Nicholas Mikhailovich continued to show his devotion and duty to his father, visiting him often when his mother was away, as she frequently was in the latter years of her life. Apparently the grand duke had written her, telling her of his son’s attention and how it pleased him. His visit had “erased the monotony and boredom” he endured when Olga Feodorovna was not with him.43 Perhaps some filial bond did develop between them with the passage of time, but there remained an unusual formality between father and son. Niki’s relationship with his mother was totally different, in part because she was so totally different from her husband. Born Cäcilie Augusta in 1837, the youngest daughter of the reigning Grand Duke of Baden, she was descended from King George II of England and the Russian Rurikovich dynasty as well as from Anna of France, the daughter of the Kievan Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise. Her mother was SophiaWilhelmina, a princess of the Vasa dynasty, the reigning house of Sweden. Count gossip in Baden had it that Cäcilie was not really the grand duke’s daughter but the product of an adulterous affair her mother had had with an American Jewish banker named Haber. True or not, both Tsar Alexander III and his son Nicholas referred to her snidely as “our Antie Haber.”44 Niki’s suspected “Jewish lineage” was whispered all of his life. Hélène Izvolsky, the daughter of the Russian foreign minister and a tsarist ambassador to Paris, and who was in no position to know anything but worthless court rumor, wrote in her memoirs that he was descended from a Russian diplomat with the Jewish name Shapiro. She notes that Nicholas Mikhailovich was very proud of this Jewish connection,45 revealing that she certainly did not know the grand duke well. Aside from

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the unlikelihood that anyone of Jewish lineage would have ever become a prominent diplomat in tsarist Russia, it is even less likely that Niki would have been proud of it, given that as he became older, he became markedly anti-Semitic. If he had any Jewish lineage, it most likely came from the American banker. Moreover, by Jewish law, Cäcilie was not, of course, Jewish, yet the rumor followed Niki all of his life. In the dark months of late 1916, when the family was trying to avert the imminent revolutionary disaster by arguing for the removal of the Empress Alexandra from the political arena, the empress exploded on hearing of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s role in the effort, calling him a “bad man, grandson of a Jew!”46 On August 28, 1857, whatever her ancestry, Cäcilie Augusta became the wife of Grand Duke Mikhail Nicholaevich Romanov in St. Petersburg. She joined the Orthodox Church before the wedding, and in taking a Russian Orthodox name, she picked Olga Feodorovna. She was quite intelligent and something of a bluestocking. He letters to her son Niki frequently attest to this bent, and she may have been the guiding force that directed her eldest son into a life of a scholar. “Don’t forget to send the new books,” she wrote him in the late summer of 1888, “Also if [it] exists a small edition of Molière,”47 she added. Olga Feodorovna was, most certainly, the iron will of the family, the stern disciplinarian, a typical German matriarch, while her husband seems to have shown what little parental compassion and tenderness the children received. Her personality, however, does not seem to have been very pleasant, with her motherly instincts virtually nonexistent. She was sharp-tongued, very critical of others, and a rather neurotic hypochondriac who complained endlessly about her health.48 She dominated her family, and one gathers that she henpecked her rather mild-mannered husband. She was not warm to her children and was quite frank in her appraisal of them. She could be rather cruelly unkind, as she was to her son Mikhail, whom she repeatedly told was stupid.49 For this emotional abuse he would one day repay her in spades, intentionally or not. Her youngest son Alexander remembered that as he was departing for a three-year naval cruise she directed an ensign on his ship “to take care of the boy.” Alexander was surprised and touched, but he noted in the first volume of his memoirs that his mother had shown him very little love when as a child he needed it most.50 Once when her daughter Anastasia was at a dinner party celebrating her own engagement to the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, she said a trifling thing of which her mother disapproved. In front of all the assembled guests, she ordered her adult daughter from the table and forbade her to appear that evening at her own party. Recounting the

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embarrassment years after, Anastasia still felt the humiliation inflicted by her insensitive parent.51 Whereas Mikhail Nicholaevich treated all of the children equitably, with possibly some favoritism for his only daughter Anastasia, Olga Feodorovna was openly partial. Niki was always unquestionably her favorite child, the one on whom she would bestow whatever maternal affection she was able to show, and her favoritism was generally known even outside the family.52 In 1883, when Niki was twenty-four, she wrote him, “Tomorrow evening Sandro [the Georgian nickname for Niki’s brother Alexander, mentioned above] came [sic], which pleases me. Frankly I would have preferred you.”53 As for Niki, the love for his mother reflected in his letters seems almost oedipal, and she undoubtedly controlled his life. His correspondence with her was voluminous: He wrote her almost every day that he was not with her, beginning with his teenage years.54 These interminable letters, reminiscent of those of Madame de Sévigné to her daughter, are full of court news and gossip about family and friends, and they also contain endless conversations that a young man might write to a sweetheart. For example, in 1882 he wrote, “I now await with impatience your arrival.”55 When he was almost thirty, he wrote, “ It is three AM, I have not slept and I am consoling myself by writing you. It is as if I cansais [?] with you in dear Borjom, . . . What a delicious memory that I hold of the three weeks spent with you. . . . Life is replete with unhappiness. I am crying now as I write you this, and I feel unhappy—unhappy because I must always run away from those I love.”56 In 1887 he wrote her that Mikhailovskoe, one of the family’s houses outside St. Petersburg, had “a very empty feeling without you.”57 Moreover, his letters show an overriding, almost groveling desire to please her. His eager reporting of his good academic performance was likely an attempt to win the approval of his erudite mother. Once when she had given him some cuff links and he had forgotten to thank her sufficiently, or at least thought that he had, he wrote, “My dear Mother, yesterday when you left, I did not fully grasp [what I had done]. Forgive me for not thanking you adequately for the cuff links. I will take them with me every day.”58 Olga Feodorovna’s letters to Niki are loving, yet full of challenges and demands. When he was nine, she admonished him about obeying his parents, adding, “I hope that you continue to be a pleasure to Papa, me, and those around you.”59 A decade later, she was issuing him the same challenge. After concluding one of her letters, she added a P.S., “Always try to please Papa in everything.”60 Niki’s letters to his mother conversely show his attempt to earn his parents’ devotion. They are always warm, effusively full of thanks for her

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letters and for anything she may have recently done for him. When writing in Russian, he addressed her with the familiar Ty (you), which he capitalized. He always ended his letters with, “I kiss you from all my soul.” In the early years he wrote to her in Russian, although he would sometimes break into French, a language in which he was to develop native ability. In later years, both wrote to each other in French, in which the grand duchess was apparently more at home than she ever became in Russian. Her correspondence to him gives ample evidence of the rather unpleasant person she was. Her letters, much shorter than his but almost as numerous, include endless complaints about people, the weather, how tired she is, and often about her health: headaches, sleeplessness, and even her constipation!61 Sometimes she would address him with the formal vy (you) and occasionally signed the letters “Olga,” not “Mama.” Several times she drew what seems to be a smiley face on the bottom. She usually kept him au courant about her husband’s activities, just as Niki would do for her in later years, even such small events such as “Papa killed a wood grouse” in a short telegram.62 Frequently her responses were simply telegrams, thanking him for a letter he had sent, always adding the prayer “God be with you” and telling him about the weather wherever she was. As he got older, Olga’s telegrams became longer, almost letters in themselves. She would report on the activities of his brothers as a group (she always referred to them as “les frères”), but rarely included detail about any one of them (e.g., “The brothers have been hunting some—killed a stag”).63 She also told him about the family pets, Bella and Jack. It is unclear whether these were cats or dogs, but they slept with her despite the fact that they disturbed her in the night, because “I can’t rest all alone and these two little ones give one such pleasure.”64 Her love for Niki took one typical maternal manifestation: that in the form of calories. When he was nine and was away from her, she sent him from Germany a “new type of bonbon by way of M. de Peters.”65 Olga Feodorovna seems to have been a most active consort to her husband and an asset to his career, always appearing with him at receptions, parties, and state occasions. Frequently she stood in for him at functions when he could not attend. She also included the children at these public events. Niki went with his mother when he was seven on what seems to have been a state visit to Novocherkask in December 1866.66 When Tsar Alexander II visited Tiflis in 1871, both Olga Feodorovna and her “august children” were very much in evidence,67 and upon his arrival at military headquarters, he was greeted by Olga Feodorovna and “his distinguished nephew Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich.”68

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The marriage and home life of Mikhail Nicholaevich and Olga seems to have been a stable one. Her frequent and detailed reports to her son on her husband’s activities confirm a caring interest, and she was most certainly a dutiful wife. In 1885 Olga Feodorovna spent so much time in the south of France, Mikhail Nicholaevich complained of being bored without her.69 In the last years of her life, when they were apart a great deal, Niki wrote letters replete with her husband’s activities, something he would not have done if his parents had been estranged. When Mikhail Nicholaevich was appointed viceroy of the Caucasus, the region was a wild, primitive area on the borders of Turkey that had been annexed by the Russian Empire in the reign of Grand Duke Mikhail’s father, Tsar Nicholas I. For thirty years, the Russians had fought the local tribes and especially their charismatic leader Shamil, who became quite a hero in western Europe for his valiant role in resisting Russian imperialism. The region would probably be today the equivalent of north-central Alaska, had there continued to be hostile denizens in that part of the world. Christian and Muslim groups fought each other as well as the Russians, as revolts still sputtered in the wilder regions. Into Tiflis (modern Tblisi), the capital of this colorful part of the Russian Empire, Grand Duke Mikhail, his wife, his eldest son Niki, and his daughter Anastasia arrived on April 16, 1863, in what the local newspaper Kavkaz (The Caucasus) described as a “triumphal entrance,” where he met with an association of local figures. The usual greeting followed, including a religious procession and a troop review. That night the city was ablaze as part of the festivities, which Kavkaz reported, more as propaganda than truth, were “a demonstration of popular ecstasy that continued through the night.”70 The next day four-year-old Niki celebrated his birthday with a liturgical mass in the Sionsky Cathedral in conjunction with one given for Tsar Alexander II, with whom he shared a birthday. At another festivity, in an open carriage despite the fact that a soft rain was falling and a strong wind was blowing, Olga Feodorovna entered the main square, where a large crowd had just sung “God Save the Tsar.” Niki and his sister were not there with her, probably due to the inclement weather.71 Mikhail Nicholaevich’s predecessors had advised him upon taking the position of viceroy to respect local customs, and he did. By 1864 he had also subdued the sporadic rebellions, and very quickly he enforced the new law abolishing serfdom. He traveled over much of the region, coming to know the tribal leaders and working hard to win their loyalty to the Russian tsar. All Russians seem to have agreed that Grand Duke Mikhail gave the Caucasus a “wise rule,” to use Russian diplomat Baron Roman Rosen’s description,72 and his success earned him the distinguished

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St. George Cross of the Second Class.73 He remained in the region until the early 1880s. More important for the family, however, was the fact that it was in the Caucasus, thousands of miles from St. Petersburg and the rest of the Romanovs, that Niki and his brothers and sister were reared. All agreed that their physical isolation had a profound effect on their lives and their outlook, and their view of almost everything would be profoundly different from that of the rest of their kin. The Mikhailovichi were called “liberals” by the rest of the family,74 and the development of their young lives far from the conservatism of the capital and the rakishness of the rest of the family set them more than physically apart from their relatives. Their Caucasian upbringing created a chasm between Niki and his siblings and their cousins, who grew up in the north. As brother Alexander put it, “We did not approve of everything going on in the palace. We spoke frankly and criticized constructively.” The “Northerners” called the Mikhailovichi “dangerous radicals” for their out-of-step views,75 and the “Caucasians” tended to remain largely aloof from the majority of the family. To further aggravate the situation, the “Northerners” suspected the “Caucasians” of getting special favors from Tsar Alexander II; the Mikhailovichi, for their part, accused the “Northerners” of “ridiculous haughtiness.”76 When the family finally visited St. Petersburg in 1874, they were quite awed by the city that was so much a part of their cousins’ lives, and their reaction tended to make the Petersburg Romanovs regard the Mikhailovichi as country bumpkins. Moreover, the latter had indeed been sheltered by their prudish German mother. When they finally left the Caucasus in 1880, they were informed for the first time of Tsar Alexander’s second “wife” and family. Alexander II had taken a mistress, Catharine Dolgorouki, by whom he had several children. Unable to marry her legally because his first wife was very much in evidence, he proclaimed her his “wife before God,” and even moved her into the Winter Palace (the Hermitage today) with him when his legal wife was an invalid dying of cancer. As she lay immobile in her bedroom, she could hear him romping on the floor above with his illegitimate children by this “wife before God.” When the empress finally died, he married this “other woman” shortly before his assassination, so on the arrival in St. Petersburg of the Mikhailovichi in 1880, he had only been married a short time. The Mikhailovichi children, who were quite good at arithmetic, could not comprehend how the emperor and his newly wed second wife could have children that were so old.77 A. A. Mossolov, the head of the court chancellery, remembered, however, a different view of the Mikhailovichi, who he felt had “no common trait of character,”78 but whose different upbringing could not have helped

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but produce a different mind-set. Yet aside from friction between individuals that can occur in any family, they seemed to have had a cordial and even warm relationship with some of their “northern” cousins. Mathilde Kschessinska, Tsar Nicholas II’s mistress in his bachelor days, remembered that when Nicholas, the future tsar, came to see her, he often brought along Niki’s brothers George, Alexander, and Sergei, and the three would sing Georgian songs that they had learned growing up in the Caucasus.79 Sergei was the best man in Nicholas and Alexandra’s wedding. Yet in the minds of the “Northerners” in general, the Mikhailovichi would always be apart, different, and regarded so. The relative absence of Mikhailovichi snobbery is best evidenced in the memoir of the director of the coach line, the above-mentioned Francis Vogel, who spent a great deal of time around the Grand Duke Mikhail and his sons. He wrote that the Mikhailovichi were always exceedingly friendly toward this nonaristocratic foreigner. He remembered that of all, Nicholas Mikhailovich was the “most cordial,” and Niki’s intellectual curiosity led him to take every opportunity to ask Vogel about America, where the German immigrant had lived. Before meeting the Mikhailovichi, Vogel wrote that he had formed an incorrect picture of the royal family, and from the grand duke and his sons, he “learned to have an altogether different view” of what the imperial family was like. He found them to be “friendliness and affability itself,” and their behavior toward him led him to “love the gand duke’s family.” Vogel added that “if every one of their [the Romanovs’] subjects felt toward them as he, a foreigner, did, there would not a disloyal subject in all of Russia.”80 For their common worldview and their “liberalism,” each of the Mikhailovich children was quite different. Niki’s only sister, Anastasia, was born the year after he was, and she was the object of devotion not only as her father’s “exclusive favorite,” but as all of her brothers’ favorite as well. One of her female friends described her as “very beautiful, tall and slight with Grecian features and a small head, which she carried haughtily. In fact, she seemed the ideal princess.”81 This tall, dark-haired, greeneyed beauty was “worshiped,” according to her brother Alexander, by all her brothers, who found in her a familial bond of affection that was so lacking with their parents. She was kept, however, from her brothers much of the time, and they were permitted to be with her only on Sundays when there were all allowed to take a walk together.82 As her brother remembered, “We liked to pose as the faithful knights ready and willing to execute the orders of this dame sans merci.” They found in her a repository for all the love “stored during months and years of dull military drills,” and as is often the case in such sibling devotion, these young grand dukes automatically detested her suitors. When Friedrich-Franz, the Grand Duke

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of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, came to the Caucasus to meet their sister, to whom he had become affianced, they all automatically hated him. They would probably have found fault with anything he did, but they especially found distasteful his elegant German manner, so admired by their father, of clicking his heels and kissing hands. Nicholas, as was his wont, felt particularly strongly about Friedrich-Franz when he learned of his mission, and his dislike turned to a very obvious hatred that never abated,83 even after their marriage in the fall of 1878. The German grand duke was the younger brother of Maria Pavlovna, the wife of Grand Duke Vladimir, Tsar Alexander III’s brother, who in no way deserved the disapproval of his brothers-in-law and indeed seems to have been a gentle and sensitive man. Kschessinska, who had a “deep friendship” with him, found him to be “a man of great charm.”84 To the Mikhailovich brothers, however, he was the person who had taken their beloved sister from them. Anastasia’s wedding was a stunning affair. This slim, beautiful bride cut a very striking picture in her silver dress, the traditional wedding gown of all Russian grand duchesses. Representatives of all the ruling houses of Europe attended, and she was given away by the tsar himself. In the span of forty minutes, they were married twice, first by an Orthodox clergyman, the second time by a Protestant minister. Two days of festivities followed, and at the end of the second day, Anastasia and Friedrich boarded a train to leave for their honeymoon. A saddened brother later wrote, “The whistle blew, the guard of honor presented arms, and we lost our Anastasia.”85 The brothers probably did not realize that this unhappy occasion was the last time that the family would ever be together under both their parents. Anastasia was making her own life, and the three younger brothers were leaving the nest to join their military regiments. They would all see each other again, but there was now an outsider in the family, and the three eldest boys had broken out of the protective cocoon in which they had been reared. Anastasia’s extant letters, always chatty and friendly, to her older brother Niki reveal a warm, caring person, who always seems to have been happy about life.86 Moreover, her correspondence as a young girl shows an intelligence well beyond her years. She also seems to have admired and especially loved Niki, and to him the intellectual side of her character seemed especially to shine. When she was thirteen, she wrote to her fourteen-yearold brother of her visit to the Hermitage. “I was in the Russian, Spanish, and Italian [sections],” she noted. “In the Russian section, I very much liked the picture of Ridel [?], in the Italian I saw sculpture of Raphael.”87 When many eagerly greeted the outbreak of war after the Austrian ultimatum in 1914, she wrote Emperor Nicholas, “I hope that the war will not happen and that we even can say ‘perhaps in a few days

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we’ll all be together again,’”88 It was, of course not to be. Anastasia lived most of her life outside of Russia, especially at her homes on the Riviera, the Villa Wender in Cannes, and later the Villa Fantasia in Eze, where Niki and her other brothers often visited and where their father died. Here she passed the time in the usual pursuits of royalty, including gambling at Monte Carlo. Not everyone found her appealing, however. One associate remembered that she was “completely indifferent to anything but her own desires.”89 Given the pedestal on which her father and her brother placed her, she would not have been human if she had been otherwise. Niki’s next youngest sibling and the oldest of his brothers was Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich, known in the family as “Miche-Miche.” He was born at the palace of Peterhof outside St. Petersburg on October 16, 1861. He loved the military life, something his older brother Niki came to hate, and served in the Chasseur Egersky Regiment of the Guards. Very handsome and in great demand on the social circuit in the capital, Mikhail resembled an officer in a Dostoevskian novel, with endless parties, dancing, and gambling.90 He seems to have been rather shallow and not very bright, as we have seen that his rather insensitive mother often observed. Tsar Alexander III once called him a “fool.”91 Whereas Niki and Miche-Miche were close during their childhood and adolescent years, they seem to have drifted apart somewhat later in life. Niki, however, continued to worry about his sibling. Within Nicholas II’s papers in GARF is a somewhat mysterious, caring letter, dated 1912, from Niki to the tsar, which expresses great concern about his brother.92 Mikhail Mikhailovich’s most salient talent seems to have been horsemanship. Francis Vogel often met him in his youth on the various highways of the Caucasus, and the affable young grand duke, emulating his father’s courtesy, always invited him to ride along. Once they rode from the station town of Mikhailovo to Borjomi by night, with the grand duke changing horses every nine versts, where the cossacks had replacements waiting for him.93 The fourth child, George, known as “Gogi,” was the first of the Mikhailovichi actually to be born in the Caucasus. His mother gave birth to him at Belyi Kliuch near Tiflis on August 23, 1863. He was eighteen before his family left the region, so the Caucasus was always home to him. Gogi was very tall, about six foot four, had brown eyes, no beard, but a large moustache. He became bald at an early age. In his youth he did some permanent damage to his leg, which prevented the active military career he wanted, although he served in some limited capacity in Her Majesty’s Lancers.94 He fell into the typical lifestyle of the rich noble Russian— drinking, parties, gambling, and women. Yet of all the brothers, Gogi came the closest to being the intellectual his oldest brother actually was.

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He was a painter of some ability and served as curator of the Alexander III Museum (today the Russian Museum) in St. Petersburg. Also a leading Russian numismatist, he wrote ten monographs on the subject of coins, one of which was recently reproduced in facsimile in the United States. He also accumulated an extremely valuable collection of Russian coinage, which was smuggled out of Russia during the Revolution. Some of it was stolen in the West, but his wife did receive part of it, which now resides in the Smithsonian Institution.95 His personality was unlike that of his eldest brother. Quiet and withdrawn, outside of his coins and art he held an interest only for his two daughters. He was good-natured and joked a lot when he did speak, often picking teasing fights with his friends. He had a voracious appetite and would often show up early for meals. Even his estranged wife Marie wrote that he was known “for his kindness of heart and his sound judgment.”96 Yet in the words of Mossolov, he was “not one who carried any weight” in the family and was entrusted only with ceremonial duties such as visiting troops and passing out medals.97 Personally, he was a stickler for protocol. Once, when Prince Gavrill Constantinovich sat uninvited in the tsar’s box at the theater with George and his brother Sergei, George felt the need to tell him “in quiet tones” that without the tsar’s express invitation, one did not enter the emperor’s loge.98 Niki’s third brother was Alexander, named for Tsar Alexander II, but known better in the family by his Georgian nickname “Sandro.” He was by far the most well-known of the Mikhailovichi because he held prominent governmental positions, survived the Revolution, lived in the West, made a number of lecture tours, and wrote three popular books on the Russian world he had left behind. Sandro was born on April 1/13, 1866, in Tiflis, and like his brother Gogi, grew up in the Caucasus. At the age of seven he was moved into the barracks bedroom with his older brothers and subjected to the spartan life imposed by their German mother, taking orders from the older brothers’ tutors. Over six feet tall with dark hair and brown eyes and a neat beard, he was blessed with a charismatic beauty, and one contemporary remembered “when he entered a room, he riveted attention.”99 His good looks were augmented by a charm and genuine friendliness, and he was extremely popular wherever he went, with the cadets with whom he served or the friends with whom he played bridge. He was something of a “ladies’ man,” and after losing his virginity to an American prostitute in a Hong Kong brothel while on a naval deployment, he became one of the greatest lovers in the Russian fleet.100 Sandro met his cousin Nicholas Alexandrovich, the future Nicholas II, when he was nine, and the two became lifelong friends. This friendship, coupled with the fact that he eventually married the tsar’s sister Ksenia,

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gave him a most-favored position at court. Mossolov noted that he was intelligent “but not as intelligent as his eldest brother” Nicholas Mikhailovich. He showed the family penchant for historical collecting, however, and on his first cruise in the Russian navy, he began to collect rare naval works, ultimately compiling a personal library of around 20,000 titles. Like Gogi, he was also a numismatist and amassed quite a collection of rare coins that he fortunately left in Paris, so it escaped the clutches of the Revolution. The sale of it gave him money on which to live in exile.101 Alexander had a prominent military career, but not in the army. Against his father’s wishes, he joined the navy and would later be the commander of Russia’s fledgling air force. He took a greater interest in the outside world than did any of his brothers, including the scholarly Niki, and he even traveled to America, visiting the Chicago World’s Fair. He went often to San Sebastián, Spain, making tourist excursions to obscure places into the interior that would not have interested most of his brothers.102 Alexander seems to have idolized Niki, yet only from afar. When he was eleven, he wrote his oldest brother a letter that was almost apologetic in tone: “I suppose you will find this letter not at all interesting. I am sure you will not answer me, though I hope to receive one day just a little bit of a letter from you.”103 Never one to leave a letter unanswered, Niki did write back, and very quickly, but the reply has not survived. It somehow, however, disturbed little Sandro, for he replied, “My dear brother-servant Nicholas! I thank you for your letter which does not please me. You can imagine why.”104 Alexander was probably his mother’s second favorite son, but as noted above, he was unaware of her love until he was in young adulthood. With age, he became a rather complicated man, a contradiction in qualities. In the preface of his book, Always a Grand Duke, an American friend described him as “opinionated and tolerant, belligerent and kind, sarcastic and romantic,” yet he notes one consistency: Alexander Mikhailovich was “an arch-foe of bunkum in all its forms and disguises.”105 Like anyone who is popular and powerful, he had his detractors. V. I. Gurko, a prominent general of World War I fame, implies that Alexander was “easily interested” in underhanded schemes.106 Gleb Botkin, the son of the last tsar’s doctor who grew up around members of the imperial family, told this author in 1969 that Alexander was a “lech.” When asked what he meant by that, as the conversation had nothing to do with sex, Mr. Botkin replied that he had pushed the marriage of his daughter Irina to the homosexual Felix Youssoupov because of the Youssoupov wealth, although this story probably has no validity. The Romanovs could certainly match the Youssoupovs ruble for ruble, and as we shall see,

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Alexander was profoundly disturbed by the rumors of Youssoupov’s homosexuality until Felix somehow managed to convince him that they had no basis in fact. Albeit a little more slowly, the other children kept coming. Three years after Alexander, Sergei was born at Borjomi on October 7, 1869. There was much ado about his arrival, including the firing of 301 cannons and the pealing of church bells. It was a raw, cold day, but thousands waited outside the grand ducal palace with the traditional Russian greeting of bread and salt to welcome the newborn when he arrived to be taken to his christening. Within two weeks he was enrolled in a military unit that was named for him, the 153rd Infantry Vakunskii Regiment of his Imperial Highness Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich. Kavkaz, ever ready to sprinkle glory on the imperial family, noted, “It was marvelous how these poor visitors and petty merchants of the locality gathered 150 rubles for this event to show respect for their ‘Imperial Borjomi master.’”107 A holiday was proclaimed after his christening. This child welcomed into the world with such pomp would in time become the sibling most like his father. Sergei loved the military and served during his life in a number of regiments,108 but like his father, he was drawn toward ordnance and artillery, becoming in 1904, the Inspector General of Artillery, a post he held until 1915. He had the family height, finally reaching six foot three, but he was the only one of the children to inherit his father’s blue eyes and blond hair. By all accounts he was the least handsome of the male children. Once when his older brother George asked him why he was so ugly, he replied, “It’s my charm.”109 He developed a defeatist, pessimistic nature, due, his brother Alexander felt, to treatment from a childhood tutor, a Colonel Helmerson. He had the habit of saying “Tant pis!” (So much the worse!) to any bad news, so that he got the secret nickname of “Monsieur Tant Pis.”110 Many described him as “clever,” and he was, unlike his brothers, interested in mathematics and physics, which coincided with his interest in artillery. Unlike his older brothers, history and art held no interest for him. His only artistic interest was choral singing, and he formed an amateur chorus of more than sixty voices, including some professional singers. They were directed by Kasatchenko, the master of the Imperial Theater. For a decade, the group met at Sergei’s palace every Monday evening from 8 to 10:30 before the Russo-Japanese War stopped it. During their breaks they were given a buffet of sweets and other foods.111 Possessing a tendency to be rude, Sergei does not seem to have had a very pleasant personality. His jokes could sometime be cruel, and he was quite moody.112 He never married, living in his father’s and later Niki’s palace on the Neva in an apartment and riding throughout the palace on

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a bicycle.113 He did form some sort of lifelong friendship with the everpopular Kschessinska, who was the lover of Nicholas II, and possibly of his brother George as well. Whatever may have happened in the bedroom, Sergei was an ever-faithful dog for her, running errands and posing as her protector. In 1894 he even bought her a villa on the sea. Sergei also carried letters of the tsar to her and many times acted as a go-between for them during their affair, according to Kschessinska.114 Nicholas II asked him to take care of her when he married Alexandra, and the grand duke dutifully fulfilled this obligation to the end of his life. As we shall see, his willingness to do her bidding got him into some serious trouble during the Great War and also probably cost him his life. In later years, he developed rheumatism while traveling near Lake Baikal just before the outbreak of war in 1914, and he suffered with it terribly, the illness being made worse by some of the medicine given him.115 He does not seem to have ever grown close to his oldest brother, although Niki clearly cared for him. Telling someone of this rheumatism, Niki called Sergei’s problems “a perpetual care on my heart,” and his health had given him some “anguish.”116 Sergei seems to have been much closer to George, whose letters to his daughter in England during the war are replete with references to “Uncle Sergei” and few about “Uncle Niki.”117 Six years after Sergei was born, the last Mikhailovich child came into the world, Aleksei Mikhailovich. He was what might be called an “afterthought” today, born when his mother was almost forty. He was the only grand duke to have both the name and patronymic (a Russian’s middle name, which is always the father’s name) of a Russian tsar. He was born on December 16, 1875, and died in February twenty years later of virulent tuberculosis. Because of his short life and his illness, which kept him isolated, little is known of him. He was tall, thin, intelligent, and quite good-looking in a uniform. Alexander III took an interest in him and suggested that he come to him with any marital questions. The second day after he was born, all of the older brothers were allowed to see him. They regarded him in silence. He came to be closest to Sandro, who seems to have had a special fondness for the young grand duke and remembered feeling sympathy for him, hoping that by the time he was ready for his education, the teachers who were such a torment to the older brothers would be gone. He must have been a sensitive, easily hurt child, judging from the cryptic comment Alexander wrote in his memoirs: “I never regretted his passing away,” he admitted in writing. “A brilliant boy of liberal heart and absolute sincerity, he suffered acutely in the atmosphere of the palace.”118 Polovtsov called him “an intelligent especially dear child” but felt, without explaining himself, that his association with his older brothers, “especially the elder [sic] Nicholas,” was ruining his character.119

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He probably meant that their attention was spoiling their youngest brother. Because of such remarks about him, and because he lived too short a time for us really to become acquainted with him, he remains the most mysterious of the Mikhailovichi. Aleksei died in San Remo, Italy, on February 22, 1895, and his body was returned to Russia by sea, followed by a funeral procession by train to St. Petersburg. Sergei seems to have arranged the funeral, which featured military units everywhere, especially those representing the artillery. Aleksei was interred in the cathedral in the Petropavlovsky Fortress, the only one of the Mikhailovichi to be so buried. His grave is still there today next to those of his parents. Curiously, there is no mention in accounts of the funeral of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s presence there, but it is highly unlikely that he was absent.120 All of the Romanov grand dukes received a military education, and all were expected to pursue a military career.121 For the Mikhailovichi, their daily education from their teenage years therefore resembled the training acquired in a military academy. They lived together as in barracks, sleeping on small, springless iron beds covered with only the thinnest mattresses on top of the wooden slats that were the basis for the springless bed. They were awakened at 6:00 AM, and if they were slow in rising, they were punished. They then said prayers in front of icons before taking a cold bath. Breakfast was only tea, bread, and butter. Nothing else was permitted lest the young grand dukes develop a taste for the soft life. Then they exercised and practiced with firearms, even artillery. Sandro remembered that at the age of ten, he would have been able to participate in the bombardment of a large city.122 From 8 to 11:00 AM and from 2 to 6:00 PM they had lessons with their tutors and did their homework. The three-hour break between the sessions was for lunch and a nap. The schooling of the young grand dukes at home resembles something out of Dickens. Alexander wrote that the smallest mistake in spelling of a German word was punished by denying the unfortunate child a dessert. The miscalculation of the meeting place of two trains on a collision course meant that the student had to kneel for an hour. “The unnecessary severity of our tutors,” Alexander wrote, “created considerable bitterness.”123 As often befalls the eldest child, the most rigorous treatment was Niki’s. All of the grand dukes had to study foreign languages, history, mathematics, literature, penmanship, and music. Nicholas and Mikhail were required to study Latin and Greek, a “nonsensical torture” not required of the younger children. There was also study of religion, including the study of comparative religions, the intensity of which would be adequate for

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the average clergyman today. French and German were required, as was English. Years later in his correspondence with the great Tolstoy, the writer quoted Henry George in English. Nicholas Mikhailovich asked for a French or Russian translation. “Although I read English,” he wrote the famous author in his reply, “many words do not compute for quick reading.”124 Even his younger brother Alexander, whose English came to be native in time, wrote him in English because he felt that his older brother “needed the practice.” Throughout his life, Niki would inject English words or phrases into his writing and general correspondence (e.g., when writing in his diary about Rasputin’s murder, he described it as being “Exceedingly funny!”),125 but he never seems to have become proficient in it. The available sources on Niki’s early education are somewhat contradictory. Some of the sources state that he attended the Lycée in Tiflis, studying in the classical gymnasium there.126 There are, however, other indications that he studied privately but took the standard exit exams at the Lycée. Whatever the case, he received a comprehensive liberal education before the entered the military academy in St. Petersburg, which was merely a continuation of what had already been a thorough military education. All of the brothers seem to have been able to survive relatively unscathed the rigors of their somewhat spartan education, and Nicholas seems to have thrived on it. Perhaps academic excellence was the only way to gain recognition from their cold, intellectual mother. If indeed it was, Niki certainly gained it. He seems to have always tried to impress her with his grades, and his letters to her always included reports on his academic performance. When he was fourteen he wrote her, “Here are my grades: algebra 4 [B], history 5 [A], penmanship 5 [A] . . . and Latin 5–4½ [A– B plus].” The next day he finished the letter adding that he had made a 4½ [B plus] in French.127 Less than a week later, he reported proudly of receiving a “5 plus” in German,128 his mother’s native tongue. In the rare cases that his grade slipped below A–B plus, he would make 5 the next time he reported on it. In time almost all of his grades became 5 pluses. His use of French, despite grammatical errors, curious spelling, and labored syntax, became essentially native, with the use of slang and a comprehension of shades of meanings of someone who had spoken the language in an educated environment from childhood. Yet he had not. At fourteen he wrote his mother, whose French was obviously much better than her Russian, “I will now try to write several lines in French. I am sure that I will make some mistakes, but nevertheless I must try it.”129 Yet he made no mistakes in that letter nor in the ones that followed. From this point on, part of every letter was written in French. By the time he

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was in his twenties, it was the only language he and his mother used with each other. In correspondence with others, he would frequently wander from Russian into French and back to Russian again, apparently not realizing that he had done so.130 And he frequently used French words as though they were Russian (e.g., otel for “hotel,” shance for “chance,” motor for “motor,” and even at least once he used a Latin word as a Russian one (kunktator for “cunctator,” meaning “delayer”). Nicholas seems to have had some knowledge of music, but all educated Europeans grew up with some knowledge and a great respect for it. It was almost unavoidable, yet music does not seem to have been a great passion in his life. In his collected papers in GARF appears one musical notebook entitled simply, “Notebook with notes.” It is not clear even whether or not he copied it, but it contains musical score and handwritten songs.131 The young children seem to have had little contact with other children outside of their immediate family, and Sandro felt that this deprivation had a bad effect on them. He wrote that they were “love starved.” Their father’s position kept them from other children, and they suffered from “extreme loneliness.” Curiously, they were too proud to complain of their sufferings to one another. Behind this isolation seems to have stood their Teutonic mother who “dedicated all her efforts to the ungrateful task of suppressing even the slightest exterior signs of tenderness or affection.” Sandro felt that this austere quality in her was the result of the “far-fetched ideas of her notions of a spartan education advocated in her native Germany.”132 As we have seen, the children all seemed to have admired their eldest brother, perhaps because they sought a parental figure in him they did not find in their parents. They wrote him chatty letters such as the one from Alexander quoted above. Like Niki’s efforts to discuss academics with his mother, Sandro seems to have felt the same need with his eldest brother. “I just finished a very interesting book, ‘The Channings,’ [quotes in original] by Henry Wood,” he wrote. “It is a good book and without much nonsense in it.” He added, “I have read your book ‘Les Memoires du duc de Montpensier,’” adding that he had found it “very interesting.”133 Even the children’s conversations were controlled. There were certain set responses to certain questions from guests, who seem to have been always present in the Mikhailovich household, especially at mealtimes. Once at lunch when a family friend asked George what he wanted to be, he forgot that all grand dukes were slated for a military career and replied honestly that he wanted to be a painter of portraits. This reply, not being the programmed response, silenced the table, and the young grand

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duke had to watch in humiliation as a dessert was brought to everyone at the table but him.134 Yet there is some indication that the young grand dukes’ manners were not always so well controlled and that their discipline was not always so strict. One family custom that was not typical of their station and time was the presence of the children with their parents at meals. Most royal families do not dine with their children, yet the Mikhailovichi were always at the table, even when there were guests. Grand Duke Alexander remembered that the children had to remain silent and listen to such things as “a pompous general commenting on the folly of Disraeli’s latest undertaking.”135 Yet sometimes they did not. State Secretary Polovtsov, who dined frequently with Grand Duke Mikhail while attending to business of the State Council, wrote with some annoyance that once on being invited to breakfast at the unusual hour of 12:30 PM, “All the children and all persons occupied in their upbringing were there,” noting that in the confusion, “anything like reasonable conversation was impossible.”136 Another time he wrote that at a meal the “five sons” dined with them “as always,” with the youngest Aleksei running around the table and generally wreaking havoc.137 He noted another time that the brothers were pelting each other with bread at the dinner table, “with their parents and guests present.”138 Their discipline, therefore, must not have always been quite as rigid as Alexander later remembered it. The only free time the Mikhailovichi seem to have had to play was one hour after lunch and twenty minutes after dinner. During this time the children were allowed to romp in their father’s study, of all places. They spent much of it looking down on Golovinsky Prospekt, the main street of Tiflis, at the locals passing in their strange costumes and with their jewel-decorated daggers.139 Outside of their immediate family, the only associations other than with their tutors was with a few members of their extended family, yet distance precluded much contact. Moreover, there were often strained relations with many of them. The Mikhailovichi had been raised differently for the most part, and it appears that their mother at any rate was not eager for her sons to be contaminated by association. One commanding presence in the Romanov family, until his death in 1919, was Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, the second son of Alexander II, who intimidated almost everyone in his presence, especially his nephew Tsar Nicholas II. A gourmet and a great hunter, Vladimir was a boisterous, loud, overbearing, take-charge type, always ready to give gratuitous advice on any subject, no matter how unqualified he was to give it. He somehow became president of the Academy of Fine Arts,140 and once, while watching a ballet rehearsal from the imperial loge, he stopped

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the music, came on stage, and started giving directions to the performers, even to the point of showing the dancers himself how the ballet should be performed.141 He treated the young grand dukes with contempt, and they never talked to him unless they were prepared to discuss art and French cuisine.142 He was next in line for the throne after Alexander III and his children, and he apparently always gave the impression of feeling himself the heir apparent, ready to assume the throne should something befall the Alexandrovichi. Kschessinska wrote that he was Alexander III’s favorite brother, 143 but this statement is probably not true. When Alexander III and his entire family survived a serious train wreck in the 1870s, the tsar commented sarcastically on learning that all were unharmed: “Imagine Vladimir’s disappointment when he hears that we all escaped alive.”144 Vladimir’s wife Maria Pavlovna, a princess of the German principality of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and as we have noted, the sister of Anastasia’s husband, was no less a presence than her husband. Known in the family as “Aunt Miechen,” she amazed everyone: Her “extreme amiability and her use of language bordered on perfection, since she could always find the precise word for the occasion.”145 Her relative by marriage, Marie Pavlovna, the daughter of Grand Duke Paul, felt that she was the “only grand duchess at the time who liked and knew how to entertain.”146 Once on a trip to Bulgaria, she talked for three hours at a reception and never forgot one person’s name. When someone expressed amazement, she casually replied, “One ought to know one’s job,” and then snidely added, “You may pass that on to the grand court.”147 An outgoing, dynamic woman, she eagerly rushed to fill the void created by the shyness of the Empress Alexandra. Maria Pavlovna’s dislike for the tsar and his wife came from more than simple dynastic rivalry. In 1913 she had written to Nicholas II the suggestion that her son Boris, a dissipated wastrel of the first water, might be a possible husband for the tsar’s daughter Olga. The empress was reduced to “mortified tears,” her confidant Anna Vyrubova recalled, and the suggestion was rejected out of hand. For this insult, Maria Pavlovna would repay the empress.148 In the last years of the monarchy, she maintained what was in effect a rival court to that of Nicholas and Alexandra, and she gave balls and parties that competed with those of the emperor. Although he never seemed to have liked her, Nicholas Mikhailovich became in time a steadfast ally of the grand duchess in their joint attempts to save the Russian throne. A cousin who would influence the Mikhailovichi was Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, the youngest son of Tsar Alexander II. He was the handsomest of Alexander III’s brothers, and he looked especially good in a

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uniform. He was also the most pleasant. His first wife was Princess Alexandra of Greece, who died in 1891. He then married a divorced commoner, one Olga Pistolkors, the ex-wife of a colonel, and this indiscretion forced his exile to Paris. Returning to Russia later, he disastrously led the Guard Army during the Brusilov offensive in 1916 and was removed from command afterward. Sandro wrote that Paul was “by far the most democratic one” of Alexander II’s sons, generally attributing his exile in Paris after his morganatic marriage to that fact.149 This man, like Niki, was a prime mover in the family during the last days of the monarchy. The Mikhailovichi as a family, apparently without Niki, went to St. Petersburg in the spring of 1873. On Easter Sunday they all attended mass together and had dinner afterward with the emperor. The next day they attended a theater performance and joined “a big family dinner” with musical accompaniment.150 The trip seems to have been a rare event. Even when separated from Niki, Olga kept him in close touch by mail and with telegrams. Her correspondence radiates with the love she feels for him that must have been lacking or muted for the other children. Typical was the telegram she sent in April of the year before: “Thank you for your letter. How do you feel? Sorry [désolé] to be so far from you. May God protect you. Olga.” No matter her distance from him, however, she tried to run every aspect of his life. From Naples she wrote that same year, “I hope that you understand, dear Nikolai [she suddenly wrote his name in Cyrillic letters], . . . that you should try more and more to give effort to your studies,” adding that to do so would “build character.” She then added that God had given him the ability “to do well, as small as you are. You have your duty and it is with God [both italics in original] that . . . you will be able to fulfill it.”151 She unceasingly hammered away on his morals and always with a heavy dose of religion: “God has blessed you, my dear son, [and] given you the strength always to do everything to see the proper life and to guard you toward good principles and morality . . . [along with] the sentiment to resist evil and remain honest as one must.”152 Even in his late adolescence she tried to form his personality, particularly and unsuccessfully, to redirect a developing part of his makeup that was not very pleasant. “I hope that you don’t tell any foolishness to Papa, by foolishness you know that I mean something bad about people—that changes nothing, and it can only bother Papa, who has enough [to bother him] already.”153 Even as she tried to run his life when he was an adult, she continued to address him in childish terms such as “my dear child” and “my dear boy.” Such was the family and the early years of Niki-Bimbo, Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov, the most singular member of the

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Romanov family in the twilight of the empire. His stern isolated upbringing, his intellect, and the abnormally close relationship with his mother were to combine with the somewhat dysfunctional nature of his family to produce a rare creature, this imperial belaia vorona, who would strive to reform his native land and wage war all his life against its backwardness.

Chapter 2

A Young Grand Duke

There is such a thing as the purity of youth, and that must be protected. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky1 A boy’s will is the wind’s will And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. —Longfellow from “My Lost Youth”2

In the 1880s, the family seems often to have been scattered by their various careers and interests. Also, Olga and Mikhail Nicholaevich appear to already have been living apart a great deal, although not because of any marital problems, but as a result of Olga’s declining health and the grand duke’s duties as president of the State Council, a body of aristocrats and bureaucrats established by Tsar Alexander I to advise the tsar on legislation. When possible, Niki kept Olga posted on his father’s activities if father and son were together, and she seemed to miss him. For example, in 1881 she wrote to Niki, “Papa will leave perhaps next week” but expressed hope that “his absence will be of short duration!!!”3 Mikhail Nicholaevich seems to have been very visible if his wife was not. One close observer of the imperial scene in the 1880s noted that Niki’s father was the only grand duke not to disappear “from both the political and social

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horizons of St. Petersburg.”4 He was the type of man who did his duty, and if doing his duty called for visibility, he would be visible. As Niki grew older, he began to correspond more regularly with his father, although he never wrote with the daily regularity that he exercised with his mother. His handwriting was still neat but less childish, in fact it was very adult for someone who was only twelve years old. So was his language and his use of language. His letters also became longer and more detailed, and he always used the familiar “you” with both parents. With his father, his letters were always in Russian, although he sometimes broke into French. One element absent from his correspondence with his father that was ever present in his letters to his mother were reports on his academic work, reflecting perhaps his father’s lack of interest in it. Niki clearly loved Mikhail Nicholaevich, and his letters frequently are concluded with “I kiss you with all my soul” or “I kiss you strongly, strongly.” When he was twenty, he reported a hunting trip with his father to his brother Miche-Miche. “Yesterday morning . . . I was hunting with Papa. . . . Papa mortally wounded a stag, and I have killed with one shot a couple [italics in original] of young stags with my new gun.”5 The outing with his father seems to have been most important to him, and perhaps such excursions gave him his lifelong passion for hunting. His father also seems to have shared a great undemonstrative affection for his eldest son. In 1888 his mother wrote him, “Papa returned yesterday, sad not to find you.”6 Even when Niki was in his thirties, his father expressed an almost guilty reaction for not having written sooner to his son. “My dear Nicholas!” he wrote in 1895, “Forgive me! It has been so terribly long [italics in original] since I wrote you.”7 Niki’s childhood reverence for his father seems to have turned into a less distant relationship as Nicholas Mikhailovich became an adult. After his mother’s death, the two became even closer. Niki’s relations with his sister and younger brothers also remained close as they became older, and his mother seems to have encouraged the younger children, not surprisingly, to look up to him. His brother Sandro wrote Niki, “Yesterday Mama read us part of your letters [“your” is in the singular, but “letters” is in the plural],”8 and because Niki was her favorite child, we can be certain that the readings were laced with adulation and admonitions to be like their oldest brother. They called him by his nickname “Bimbo.” His sister regularly used it in letters to him,9 and to his nieces and nephews he became universally “Uncle Bimbo.” He even once made a reference to his sobriquet in a letter to his cousin Tsar Nicholas II.10 As he grew older, he was most attentive to his younger siblings, writing them often, especially Miche-Miche, and sending them presents.

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Niki always loved small children, and “Uncle Bimbo” as an older uncle spent much time in later years with his nieces and nephews, playing with them, showing them great affection, and teasing them as a loving uncle would. His nephew Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich remembered that when he would come by their house to visit, he would terrify his young nephew, so on learning of his arrival at their palace, young Dmitri would run and hide from him. Knowing that his nephew was somewhere in the palace, Nicholas Mikhailovich would hunt up and down the long halls of his home and into the cavernous rooms until he found him, and grabbing him amid his squeals of delight, he would tell him in a ferocious voice, “I’m going to eat you niania [nanny],” and then he would enumerate the various vegetables he would have to accompany his cannibalistic meal.11 Although he never married, it was told in the family that he fathered several illegitimate children of his own. He does not seem, however, to have been close to any of them, if this tale is true.12 Tsar Alexander III’s marriage laws complicated, but did not make impossible, Nicholas Mikhailovich’s marriage chances. In June 1889 the tsar decreed that members of the family could marry only women of the Orthodox faith (if not christened Orthodox, the bride would have to convert before marriage), and in 1893, he forbade morganatic marriages. Niki’s father was terribly disturbed by the decree, given that he had six sons. “My children can’t marry except Orthodox and of equal stations,” he is said to have exclaimed. “Where then would they find such fiancées? Or should they put a bullet to their head?”13 His brother Nicholas Nicholaevich, the father of the famous son by the same name who led the Russian armies in the Great War, opined that the new law “dooms grand dukes to bachelorhood, with all the troubles [?] resulting from it.”14 Of all his siblings, Niki seems to have been in time closest to his first brother Miche-Miche, which is not surprising as they were closest in age. His correspondence with Miche-Miche is far more extensive than with any of his other brothers.15 Miche-Miche seems to have grown up to become a most affable and friendly young man. Francis Vogel, who, as we have seen, spent some time with him, was often invited to play cards with Miche-Miche and other grand dukes at the palace, despite the fact that he was not only a foreigner but a commoner. During the summer of 1887 he became “more intimately acquainted” with all of the Mikhailovichi, especially Mikhail and his brother George. Vogel was often invited to their palace to play “Skat” and was “received as a true colleague by them,” but he quickly adds in his reminiscences that he was never invited to dine with them.16 When the tsar visited the region and Vogel was to transport his baggage, he had all sorts of problems with the “advance men” until Mikhail, at his request, intervened. Mikhail even invited Vogel to one of

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the parties as his guest.17 Once when Vogel came to the palace to make plans for a hunting party, Grand Duke Mikhail, while waiting for his brother George to join them, noted that “Mr. Vogel” was not smoking, and when informed that he had “nothing to smoke,” gave the man not only a number of cigars and cigarettes, but a silver cigarette case complete with silken cord for lighting “to keep as a remembrance” of the young Grand Duke Mikhail.18 Niki’s life remained close to Miche-Miche until the latter married and moved abroad. Niki noted in a letter to his mother how they had played billiards after lunch. “Mikhail won despite the fact that I was much more [advanced, accomplished?—word illegible] than he.”19 In 1878 Niki sent Easter greetings to his brother, beginning with the traditional Russian Easter greeting, “Christ is Risen!” He then added, “Just returned from the Winter Palace. Greetings from everyone.”20 He sent birthday greetings to his brother on his sixteenth birthday. Mikhail was serving at the time in the army, and Niki combined the natal day greetings with a general congratulations on a Russian military victory that had come on his birthday. “From my soul I greet you on your birthday and on your glorious victory over the Turks,” he wired Miche-Miche, adding “Seven of ours defeated six battalions [of theirs].”21 As a young man Mikhail Mikhailovich had, for a royal, a great deal of trouble getting married. In 1886 at twenty-five, he made efforts toward Irene, the daughter of Ludwig IV of Hesse, but nothing came of it. The next year, he made an effort to gain the hand of Princess Louise, the youngest daughter of King Edward VII, but he was rejected, a family account says, because he told her that he did not really love her and was not expected to do so, given his position. Several attempts to marry commoners followed, as did the concomitant conflict with his parents over such unfavorable matches. One of his great loves was Countess Catherine Ignatiev, but Alexander III blocked the union because she was not a princess of royal birth. Mikhail was sent abroad to overcome his disappointment, but instead quickly discovered another prospective wife, who was also unsatisfactory, Countess Sophie Merenberg, the daughter of the Prince of Nassau, and granddaughter through her mother to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.22 One story has it that he met Sophie in Biarritz when he dramatically stopped her bolting horse. She was then, according to one source, the morganatic wife of Prince Nicholas of Nassau and was visiting Biarritz at the time with her daughters. A divorce followed, and Mikhail and Sophie were finally married in the Russian church in San Remo, Italy, in 1891.23 Stripping Miche-Miche of his military rank for embarrassing the family, Tsar Alexander III banished him from Russia, and he subsequently lived

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rather comfortably in Great Britain and on the Riviera, where he came to be known as the “Uncrowned King of Cannes.” He built the Russian church there and was often called on to lay the cornerstone for hotels and casinos in the vicinity. Miche-Miche became an excellent golfer, and he and his wife were fixtures at house parties of the great and the neargreat.24 Always attempting to be a comic, Mikhail Mikhailovich once ordered a chocolate soufflé in a restaurant, and when it arrived, he sat on it.25 Initially not permitted to return to Russia, he continued to see members of his family on their visits to the West. He was allowed to visit Russia for his father’s funeral in 1909 and for the festivities around the centennial of the battle of Borodino in 1912. Even from exile, however, he continued to serve his country. In 1905 he organized a hospital for Russian officers wounded in the Russo-Japanese War, and during the Great War, he acted as an agent for Russian loans in France.26 Although somewhat estranged from Miche-Miche in these years, Niki nevertheless wrote a letter to the tsar at this time expressing great concern about his brother, probably due to some contact he had with him during the Borodino festivities.27 With her marriage, Stassie, as Anastasia was called, left Russia and was never again in the midst of all the family, although her brothers and her father visited her often in her home, the Villa Wender, in Cannes. She and her husband Grand Duke Friedrich Franz III had three children, one son and two daughters. Alexandrine, the eldest daughter, married Christian X of Denmark, and Cecilie married Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany, son of the last kaiser.28 As he grew older, Niki never became as close to his younger brother George as he was to Miche-Miche, yet there still seems to have been the devotion in both directions that characterized his relations with his other siblings. At the age of thirteen, Gogi wrote his eldest brother, “My dear Niki,” he began, “I thank you very much for the pozhari [probably podarki, the Russian word for “presents”].” Then he reveals Niki’s attention to him and his observance of his brother’s flair for letter writing by adding, “How do you write so often? It is very enjoyable.”29 The next month Gogi wrote his brother, “Dear Nikolai, I thank you for the interesting letter,” then added the curious sentence, “I think that a merchant sent me the letter [misspelled] because [misspelled] it was written on merchant’s dirty paper.” He signed it only as “Younger brother.”30 George grew up to be the least impressive of the Mikhailovich boys. He spent much of his life in total leisure, without even seeming really to take a position as a causa honoris. In letters to his daughter, he repeatedly tells her of having played bridge, which seems to have occupied much of his time.31 Princess Radziwill observed him as “a pleasant little person,

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whose numerous frailties of conduct [?] are rather the subject of amusement than of criticism.”32 When very young, George fell in love with a Georgian princess Nina Chavchavadze, but both families opposed any union. For the Romanovs, it would have been morganatic, resulting in Gogi’s being exiled as Miche-Miche had been. Nina’s mother objected because she looked down on the Romanovs and their German wives. Both lovers were heartbroken and neither married until each was thirty-seven.33 In 1892 Gogi fell in love with Marie, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria’s second son Alfred, the duke of Edinburgh, and Marie, the daughter of Alexander II. Marie (fille), however, would not convert to Orthodoxy, at least that was the reason her parents gave for not permitting the union. Normally unromantic Alexander III even sent a letter to his sister pleading for her permission, but she would not change her mind. Moreover, when George carried the letter to England, the elder Marie would not even allow him to see her daughter. She did reply to the letter, but what she said was unknown. Marie eventually became the famous queen of Rumania.34 Gogi finally became engaged to Marie of Greece, the daughter of King George I of Greece. She was descended both from the Danish and Russian royal families. Her father was the second son of King Christian IX of Denmark, who had married Queen Louise, the aforementioned princess of Hesse-Cassel, who was herself the heir to the Danish throne as King Frederick VII was childless. She ceded her right to rule, however, to her husband. Marie was George’s first cousin once removed. He was the first cousin of her mother Olga Constantinovna, a granddaughter of Nicholas I, her father being Grand Duke Constantine Nicholaevich, the mid-nineteenth century Romanov liberal who chaired the government committee that led to legislation emancipating the Russian serfs in 1861. Marie, sometimes called Minny, married George in Corfu in 1900 after delaying the wedding for five years. George arrived for the banns in a Russian battleship. Marie was glad to avoid marrying in the elaborate costumes of the Russian imperial family; she wore only a white satin dress with a small crown.35 The two honeymooned in Italy and returned to St. Petersburg, where they were met by Gogi’s brother Sergei. They moved into an apartment in Mikhail Nicholaevich’s palace on the Neva Quay, the house later to belong to Niki. They had two daughters, Ksenia, born in 1901, and Nina, born in 1903. The latter, ironically, married a Chavchavadze. Gogi and Marie’s language problems caused trouble with their children. They were constantly in a dilemma their mother later remembered: They spoke Russian with their father, English with their mother, while their parents used French and German with each other.36 The grand duke and his wife later built a house in the Crimea, to which

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they gave the Greek name Horax, as Marie was so homesick for her homeland. When he traveled abroad, Gogi took with him butlers, valets, chefs, coachmen, four generals, two doctors, a master of the household, and four aides-de-camp.37 George loved Marie deeply, but sadly she did not return his affection. She had fallen in love with a lesser figure in her father’s court to whom marriage was out of the question, and she accepted her marriage to George only as one to be endured as a royal marital pawn. Their children did not remember their parents’ marriage as a pleasant one, and in the summer of 1914, Marie and the children went to England in what was probably a trial separation. The war began in August, and she and the children never returned to Russia. Nina remembered her mother as a Victorian martinet who insisted that the girls be chaperoned at all times, and they always seemed to be wearing black mourning clothes for someone or other. George kept in close touch by mail with his daughter Ksenia during the war, and their voluminous correspondence, in his inimitable penmanship, testifies to his devotion.38 Alone in Russia, he too formed a strong friendship with Kschessinska.39 Their relationship, however, may have been simply platonic. Niki’s brother Alexander was, judging from the extent of his correspondence, much closer to his eldest brother Miche-Miche than he was to Niki.40 Yet Sandro did write his eldest brother on some occasions. At the age of ten in 1876, he wrote Niki on lined writing paper telling him of several “captives” he had made for Niki in conjunction, doubtlessly, with his elder brother’s work on butterflies: “My dear Nicholas,” he wrote, “the caterpillars which we collected for you, a few died [?], others made it. I cringe to tell you [some ] escaped. . . . I wrote you the first letters [plural incorrect] on ticket paper [the first letters were on very small pieces of paper like tickets].”41 The next year Sandro’s letters reveal an enormous improvement in literary ability, and he was already writing very well in English, well enough to tweak his brother on his own ability in that language: “My dear Nicholas! I think it will be a good practice for you as well as for me to correspond [with you] in English, and on the other it rather amuses me to write in this language.” He adds, “Miss Ascoff [his governess] pretends that I am in an ‘Anglo-mania.’” English must have become tiresome for him, however, for before the letter is finished, he begins substituting Russian words and phrases.42 In that same letter he included a discussion of English foreign policy at the time when England and Russia were having disagreements over Russian incursions into the Balkans and Central Asia. His language was way beyond his years: “You will find it [Sandro’s writing to his brother in English] right now, because John Bull is not kind

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with the Russians[,] and truly English people, though great patriots, are not very noble in their [foreign] policy.” He was clearly becoming an Anglophile, for although Great Britain was opposing Russian interest in various places in the world, he still found “English home life very sympathetic,” although he added that all he knew about it he had gleaned from books.43 Knowing of Niki’s love for Borjomi, he reported that it was “as splendid as ever.” He was, however, dreading the first of June because lessons would begin. In August that same year, he wrote Niki about his French lessons with a Monsieur Mourrier, a true bavard [talkative] Frenchman, who had been only at that point to one lesson. Then Alexander added in French, “Je me tenais comme une bûche sans dire un mot [I act like a blockhead without saying a word].” He told his brother that during the lesson he had written a composition “of which I was very pleased,” but the teacher was critical of his performance because he did not speak.44 Alexander’s main adulthood home was Ai-todor, a grand house about eight miles from Yalta and near George and Marie’s Horax. He inherited Ai-todor from his mother, who had bought the land when he was an infant, and it was only a barren strip on the shores of the Black Sea. She had herself directed the landscaping of the gardens. An old lighthouse stood on the property, and for the children it became a symbol of happiness.45 As a young man, Alexander fell in love with and married Grand Duchess Ksenia, the daughter of Alexander III and therefore his first cousin once removed. Curiously, his younger brother Sergei sought her hand also, but Sandro won out, more so, it appears, because of his more senior position in the family than due to any choice of the bride. After the young couple’s betrothal, Sandro, his future bride, and both sets of parents lunched together. It is a testament of the closeness of the family that Sergei was most gallant about the matter of losing out. He smiled at his brother as if to say that all was forgiven. Alexander wrote of this tense time in his memoirs: “He [Sergei] understood my fears and would not spoil my happiness. Nobody could have guessed his sufferings. His sportsmanship was superb.”46 The family held the wedding at Peterhof in the summer of 1894, after the difficulties of marriage between two cousins could be overcome by the Holy Synod. It took six months for dressmakers and jewelers to prepare the trousseau. Wedding presents came from all over the world.47 After his marriage, Alexander pursued his career in the navy, then later in the army, although the rapidly growing family lived from the income of his properties, which consisted of two estates in the Crimea and two in the Caucasus, where he grew seedless tangerines.48

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Sergei Mikhailovich, the youngest brother to grow into full adulthood, became more and more like his father as he aged. Moreover, he more closely followed his father’s career than any of the other children. Accounts of their mutual activities in his adolescent and young years have the two together a great deal as Mikhail Nicholaevich went about his business as the inspector general of artillery,49 and in time, Sergei even assumed his father’s job. General A. I. Spiridovich, a memoirist of the times, highly praised Sergei’s work in the field of artillery, noting that he kept current on all innovations and improvements,50 although the lack of readiness of Russian artillery in the Great War would cast some doubt on this appraisal. His misplaced trust in those around him in time would lead to his dismissal,51 and no connection with the imperial family could save him. Sergei’s love life was rather sterile like that of his eldest brother. His true love having gone unrequited, he became a lifelong bachelor, but he, like so many of his family, formed some sort of intimate friendship with the by now rather shopworn Kschessinska. The exact nature of the the relationship is unclear. In the war years he wrote Niki, “You know that I have lived with Malechka [Mathilde Kschessinska] for twenty-two years (not in a physical sense but I [we?] live in one house and by one means),”52 implying that the relationship was platonic (or had simply cooled off ?). He continued his association with her after she married his cousin Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, and when the married couple had a child, Vova, everyone wondered which of the two Romanovs in this imperial ménage à trois was the real father. Outside of the Caucasus and the family property Borjomi, a 200,000 acre estate 90 miles from Tiflis, Mikhail Nicholaevich came to own several estates and houses scattered about Russia. The most impressive home, and the chef-lieu of the family, was his palace built on the Neva embankment in St. Petersburg between the Winter Palace and the passage entering into the Champs de Mars at the Marble Palace, the former home of Grand Duke Constantine. A large, imposing structure begun in 1857 at the time of his marriage to Olga Feodorovna, it contained vast rooms, parlors, and dining halls. In adulthood, some of the family almost always lived there, even after it became Nicholas Mikhailovich’s exclusive property. Niki and his father, as well as George and Marie, inhabited the mansion at one time, the latter in an apartment furnished for the Grand Duke Mikhail and Olga Feodorovna in what must have been an unfinished building before they moved to the Caucasus. The furniture was mostly Victorian and stiff, but the building had a number of beautiful state rooms adorned with gorgeous parquet floors inlaid with the rarest woods of different colors in lovely designs.53 A grand marble staircase graced the front entrance, and the draw-

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ing rooms were filled with works of art, often of the French revolutionary period, reflecting Niki’s chief historical interest. Later, when Niki came into full possession of the home upon his father’s death, he redecorated it. He covered the walls of his study with the paneling of the French Revolutionary Council of Five Hundred54 and decorated the dining-room walls with a striking leather treatment. After the turn of the century, he converted part of the palace into a museum. Today, the building houses two institutes: the Institute of Far Eastern Studies and the Institute of the History of Material Culture. Nicholas Mikhailovich’s study serves as the reading room for the library and archive of the Far Eastern Institute. The paneling today seems old enough to have come from revolutionary France, but whether it is that of the Council is impossible to say. The leather wall covering still adorns the dining room, with one addition added since the grand dukes were in residence. There is an enormous tear in the wall opposite the window overlooking the river made by a shell that fell during the 900-day siege of Leningrad in World War II.55 Outside the capital on the Baltic, the family owned Mikhailovskoe, a rather grim-looking structure, judging from its picture, built in the Italian style with terraces, pergolas, and balconies. The stables were sufficient to house a hundred horses.56 The family’s greatest property, and hence in time Niki’s greatest, was Grushevka, a gargantuan estate almost the size of Belgium in southern Ukraine that spanned three guberniia (governmental divisions like American states): Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, and Taurida. It was about 190,000 acres and contained sixteen villages and seven German colonies, the latter being most Mennonites.57 This property had originally been given by Catherine the Great to Prince N. M. Viazemsky, allegedly a descendant of Rurik, the semilegendary founder of the Russian State. Niki’s father had bought Grushevka in 1860 from Baron de Stieglitz, the brother-in-law of Polovtsov, yet by the time of his death forty-nine years later, he still had not once set foot on it.58 Like all the other Mikhailovich properties, it became Niki’s upon his father’s death. This estate became, when he inherited it upon his father’s death in 1909, Niki’s largest source of income, bringing him somewhere between 500,000 and a million roubles annually.59 That part of the Russian Empire was treeless, with the horizon in all directions unbroken by natural impediment. Describing it once, Nicholas Mikhailovich wrote, “Imagine a vast, cultivated plane as far as the eye can see, a sort of steppe continuing to the horizon with grain, wheat and barley holding up their heads, then the rye, the corn and the lentils, the potatoes, and the various grasses for pasture—and you will have an approximate idea of the country where

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I am at this moment. . . . Not a tree in the environs—except for several near the house.”60 Unlike his father, Niki visited the property many times, at least once, as we shall see, involuntarily. Included in the family properties was also Olga Feodorovna’s above-mentioned Ai-todor, which she left to Sandro. Niki inherited all of these properties upon his father’s death except Aitodor, and to these he himself added the 11,000-acre estate Talsi, which Catherine the Great had given a banker in return for the gift of a diamond so large and beautiful that it was added to the imperial crown. Niki bought the estate in the 1890s because it supposedly had the finest pack of borzoi hunting dogs in Russia. These “Russian wolf hounds” were trained to run down the wolves, pin them to the ground, and kill them. By 1913, which must have been the last time Niki regularly visited this property, his dogs had killed 635 cubs and yearlings, but only fifty-six grown wolves, stark evidence that the adults were more able to defend themselves.61 Nicholas Mikhailovich’s income from these estates was indeed stunning. Not only did he receive agricultural income from them, but Borjomi bottled gas water and supplied it to all of Russia. Known as the “Vichy of Russia,” Borjomi’s bottling factory even used bottles from Vichy, France. The combination of his grand ducal allowance and his general’s salary made him the wealthiest of all the grand dukes by the outbreak of the Great War.62 The family’s daily regime in the Neva palace seems to have been somewhat informal, with Sergei’s riding about on his bicycle and the various components of the family wandering in and out of one another’s living space. Meals were always taken in the company of Grand Duke Mikhail. Lunch was usually a formal occasion with numerous guests from the court in attendance in the huge dining room overlooking the Neva and the Petropavlovsky Fortress on the other side of the river. Marie remembered not liking these stuffy meals. She always found herself seated opposite her father-in-law and between two old generals with whom it was not interesting to converse. Dinner on the other hand was en famille, taken in Grand Duke Mikhail’s rooms without the presence of court ladies and gentlemen.63 Niki formed individual family friendships after the move to St. Petersburg, especially with some of his cousins, because in the words of his cousin Pauline Gray, Niki was “a letter writer extra ordinaire.”64 Given the voluminous nature of Niki’s correspondence, one wonders when he found time to do anything else. Besides the daily letters to his mother, there were those to his brothers and sister, his mother’s relatives, his Romanov relatives, his friends, and those with whom he had business. The

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only member of his family that he seemed to have passionately disliked was his extremely tall cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich, the famous leader of the Russian armies in the early days of the Great War. The two relatives met when they were in their teens (Niki was sixteen, his cousin three years older), and they hated each other from then on. One suspects that Niki maintained the feud, which probably diminished somewhat for his cousin. Niki’s brother Sandro seems to have known the cause of their problem but leaves us ignorant when dealing with the subject in his memoirs. The feud, he notes, “belongs to the world that is no more,” adding, “Both of them are dead and both have long since entered the Hall of History.”65 Paul Chavchavadze, who married Nina, the daughter of Niki’s brother George and who chronicled the lives of all the grand dukes, simply put it down to different views on the military.66 Such differences of military opinion may have deepened the feud, but it is highly unlikely that it fomented the problem at the age of sixteen. Grand Duke Alexander’s son Prince Dmitri Romanov told this author that the basis was simply the great difference in their personalities.67 Whatever its cause, it affected the relations of other family members. Sandro noted that “one had to decide whether one supported the tall Nicholasha or whether one’s sympathies were with the learned Nicholas Mikhailovich.” Sandro had passed severe judgment on “the enemy” long in advance of his first encounter with his towering cousin in an 1879 dinner in the Winter Palace. In his memoirs he wrote that he “saw no reason to change my opinion” of his grand ducal cousin that he had formed in loyalty to his brother Niki.68 For the rest of his life, the opinion others held of his dynastic enemy always flavored the opinion Niki held of them. Almost four decades later, Niki was uncomplimentary about General Pierre, the marquis de LaGuiche, the French military liaison with the Russian army, because the French aristocrat “followed the star of my cousin Nicholas.”69 Yet in Nicholas Mikhailovich’s book on hunting published during the war, his adversary Nicholas Nicholaevich is listed among his hunting guests, although he does not seem to have gone on any hunts in the company of his nemesis.70 One collection of cousins for whom he held a low-grade antipathy were the Vladimirovichi and their mother Maria Pavlovna. Her rather boorish son Boris seems to have been the only exception. All of the Mikhailovichi seem to have liked and been liked by the last tsar. As has been noted, he was a lifelong friend of Sandro, and brother Sergei was the best man at his wedding. Niki and George served as representatives of the empress.71 In 1881 Grand Duke Mikhail left the Caucasus to become the Inspector General of artillery for the Russian army, and although the family kept Borjomi, they never lived there permanently again. For the first time they

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came into prolonged contact with the rest of their family, and it was then that they formed their likes and dislikes. The local paper Kavkaz expressed “sadness and woe” at the grand duke’s departure, waxing rapturous about his tenure of almost two decades as governor general, observing that his “humanity and justice of his administration” had drawn to the grand duke “the merited sympathy of all words of our multi-charactered population.”72 Demonstrations paying tribute to him massed in the streets. Probably because he was the eldest child, Niki seems to have been the only son to have accompanied his father in his departure from Tiflis, and in the towns and cities along the way local dignitaries assembled to greet them. They listened to endless speeches at each stop praising the elder grand duke, and to the great delight of the crowd, they “deigned” to worship at the Sionsky Cathedral.73 The following year, Niki was also the only son who was present for the inspection of the artillery work around Warsaw. He came alone and was met at the Warsaw station by his father and other dignitaries.74 At this point Niki was still planning a military career, and being with his father on such occasions was both desired and expected. He accompanied Mikhail Nicholaevich and his brother Sergei to the Mikhailovsky Artillery School for a celebration of its anniversary in November 1886, where for about an hour “they socialized with many of the junkers.”75 Yet such public appearances with his father seemed to diminish after that time, and the issues of Russkii invalid, a military newspaper, which chronicled every move Niki’s father made in those years, including those of his wife and other children, make few references to Niki’s being with them. He was by this time in the General Staff College, which may have been the reason he was not often with his father, but at this point in his life, he was probably beginning to lose interest in the military.76 Niki did join his family for a vacation at their beloved Borjomi in 1885, which must have been a welcomed break for all. Life in St. Petersburg was much more strenuous than the one in Tiflis, with the endless rounds of state functions, luncheons, and parties. “Very busy, very tired,” Olga described herself to her son in 1888.77 Her letters from this period chronically complain of fatigue, which might be labeled hypochondria if we did not know of her impending death within a few years. This family gettogether in 1885 seems to have been the last assemblage for all of them at Borjomi. Niki arrived first on August 18 around 1:00 in the afternoon, bringing with him a secretary (Sievert) and a doctor (Dr. Nikitin). Vogel, who handled the transportation of their luggage, chatted with Nicholas Mikhailovich when they stopped at Kavanachevi to change the grand duke’s horses. Vogel felt it important to note that the grand duke was “very friendly and gracious.” There were not enough horses for all of the

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coaches to change, so Vogel decided to continue without changing his own. Nicholas expressed concern for the tired animals, but they made it without problems, and Vogel returned to Kavanachevi to await the remainder of the imperial party.78 At 4:00 PM on August 18, the grand duke and Olga arrived with their sons Gogi, Sergei, and Aleksei. In all, 180 horses and thirty or more vehicles were utilized. A Cossack unit provided an escort for the family, children’s tutors, ladies-in-waiting, stewards, orderlies, personal physician, and extra servants. Their sons Miche-Miche and Sandro arrived a few days later.79 The family stayed until mid-October when they returned to St. Petersburg, a city Sandro described as “thoroughly Russian in its recklessness.”80 Their arrival came in time to prepare for “the season,” the time between Christmas and Lent, during which there were constant parties and balls. Niki, Gogi, and their cousin Peter Nicholaevich visited Borjomi the next year for their summer vacation, but no other members of the family seem to have joined them.81 In September 1886 Niki left to make his now annual pilgrimage to Paris, but George and Peter did not leave until early October. With their departure the season of the Caucasus ended, and the horses in such demand while they were there could be put away for the winter. Many of the Mikhailovichi returned the next year joined by their cousin Peter Nicholaevich, but Niki was not with them.82 In October the young grand dukes and their father went to the encampment of several regiments stationed near Achalzich, about thirty-five miles from Borjomi, to pension and dismiss the troops in the barracks. Vogel remembered that although the elder grand duke had not been in the Caucasus in six years, he was still popular despite his absence. At one point the aging grand duke was mobbed by a friendly Caucasian crowd in their excitement.83 The grand duke returned to the area with part of his family in 1888, which seems to have been the last time that any number of the family were there. Niki was never with them, for by now his army duties consumed or at least controlled his time. As we shall see, he was banished there alone in 1888 by Alexander III for a public indiscretion, but because his brothers Alexander and George were occupied elsewhere, he had no sibling visitors. He passed his “exile” at Borjomi collecting butterflies, one of his intellectual passions, and probably enjoyed being away from the military world he was coming so strongly to dislike. After leaving Borjomi, he visited his parents and then left for one of his now frequent trips abroad.84 By this time Olga Feodorovna was making with some regularity her long separations from her husband, one part of the year in Baden, another in Ai-todor, or some time on the Riviera, where she

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sought a better climate than the one in St. Petersburg. Sometimes she was seeking better physicians, as she did on a visit to Amsterdam. If she was abroad when Niki was, it is certain that he found her. By the 1880s, the young Nicholas Mikhailovich was developing into a complex individual. A portrait of him by Maria Etlinger (Erestova) in the State Hermitage Collection, painted when Niki was twenty-three, shows a rather handsome man with a long face and no sign of the weight problem all of his contemporaries felt the need to mention in their later recollections of him. He is holding a cigarette or a small cigar, an everpresent adornment that he was to carry literally to his death.85 He had become a “good looking young man,” as people usually remembered him (one said “fairly good looking”),86 but almost everyone remembered his being “fat.”87 Yet extant pictures of a later time, while revealing a rather well-fed middle-aged man with a paunch inevitably acquired from good living, do not reveal a man that is anything like obese. References exist to his height as well, but he was neither as tall nor handsome as his brother Alexander. In middle age he lost his hair. His personality, not his looks, was the trait that set him apart from his brothers. He was already in his twenties developing the sulfuric tongue that shredded those who attracted his disfavor. It unfortunately sowed behind him a spoor of unpopularity his entire life and did him much harm. He was almost never liked by his peers, whose shortcomings, as he perceived them, were in constant need of being pointed out, and savagely if necessary. One repeatedly gets the impression that people avoided him. Polovtsov, who makes frequent barbed remarks about him in his diary, did not like him, and it seems that the state chancellor had a razor for a tongue as did the young grand duke.88 He once referred to having passed a “pleasant half hour” with Nicholas Mikhailovich, “whom I always upbraid in unrestrained language.”89 The main reason for others’ disapproval of him was his habit of shocking people with his remarks, especially those demeaning others. His language and comments about those around him assumed an insulting tone, with slights on physical and especially intellectual shortcomings. Someone was often “ugly” or “fat.” Often the cracks he made were gratuitous. In passing, a diplomat may have been said to be “colorless” or a general was “dim-witted.” His letters to his mother are continuously sprinkled with the words “stupid,” “imbecile,” “ignorant,” and so forth. If not impugning a victim’s intelligence, he would attack arrogance (a certain general marched into a dinner party “like a bird of prey”).90 A Russian politician was “a savage of the Right.”91 Nicholas talked loudly, and his intemperate blasts could be heard well beyond those who assembled to

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be regaled with his wicked tongue. During the Great War, he would lash out at the empress to any assembled members at the Yacht Club, calling her “the Hessian Tigress” and other insulting names. Mossolov, who seems as well to have strongly disliked Nicholas Mikhailovich, wrote of him, “He always criticized but never did anything himself. . . .”92 Felix Youssoupov, who married his niece, described him a “garrulous” and noted that he would often “speak of matters on which he should have presumed silence.”93 Nicholas Mikhailovich realized these tendencies, but he either could not, or did not want to, do anything about them. Writing to a friend during the Great War, he apologized for his language, but added, “It is truly ridiculous to speak in subtleties [demi-mots].”94 Once when writing some very blunt words to the tsar, he apologized for his forthright manner, adding, “My tongue is without bones. I am liable to flare up and say what I think.”95 Add to this trait what he called his “habitual pessimism,” and there is small wonder that he was unpopular. People with so savage a tongue are rarely liked; people may laugh at their scorching attacks on other people, but they fear that when they are not there, they are receiving the same treatment. Even the empress, who was generally not very perceptive about other people, observed, “Even those who do not much like us are disgusted with him [Nicholas Mikhailovich] and his talks—.”96 Niki knew he had this problem, although sadly, in Niki’s mind, he did not see it as a problem. One other trait about which many wrote or spoke, but as for his weight the evidence is less obvious, was his alleged propensity for gossip and intrigue. Polovtsov speaks of having to sit next to Nicholas Mikhailovich, who “gossiped and slandered.” Mossolov remembered that “he [Nicholas Mikhailovich] spun intrigues wherever he went.”97 Indeed, his memoir in his papers of military service and his letters to his mother are somewhat gossipy about fellow officers and in general those around him.98 Sir Bernard Pares, a leading English authority on the Russian Revolution, noted that the grand duke “discounted the value of his influence by his reputation for inquisitiveness and gossip.”99 Countess Kleinmichel was most severe in her appraisal, reporting that Nicholas Mikhailovich “employed his leisure in engineering quarrels between his friends,” and he was most delighted when he had succeeded in estranging two old friends or a husband and a wife “by treacherous allusions.”100 The harsh view held by Countess Kleinmichel and others is certainly greatly overstated. Niki might have been titillated by gossip and passed it on, but he certainly did not enjoy destroying marriages and friendships. Nor was he probably any worse than others around the Russian court. An observer of the time noted that one of Niki’s letters during the Great

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War “oozes with envy and malice,” but he adds that this envy and malice was “so prevalent in Russian politics and Petersburg society.”101 He may have come by this trait somewhat naturally, as both his mother and his father tended to pass on whatever they heard.102 Undeniably, however, Niki casually reported to his friend the French historian Frédéric Masson much information that would be termed “classified” in wartime and would have been erased by a censor, had a censor been allowed to read the grand duke’s correspondence.103 Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador to Russia during the Great War, spent a great deal of time in the company of Nicholas Mikhailovich and gives us a most insightful view of his nature. He noted that what he euphemistically calls Niki’s “open-hearted talk and the outbursts of confidence and enthusiasm” were used to satisfy “the selfless needs of his impetuous nature.” This trait “expressed itself in cynicism, disparagement, and jealous egoism,” Paléologue noted, and then he added, “It is then that deep down within him one catches a glimpse of a great open sore— his pride—and suspects the uneasy presence of ambitious dreams and hopes unfulfilled.” Paléologue observed that Nicholas Mikhailovich, “realizing his worth,” felt that there was no role that he could not play. Yet at the same time he felt “looked down upon, useless and impotent, an object of suspicion [because of his political views] to his sovereign and his caste,” while deriving advantages from the political system that he damned.104 Most likely much of this analysis is basically true. It is axiomatic that literary critics are often failed writers. Those who criticize are often those who are excluded from the inner circle; if they ever are included, the criticism ceases. Niki was doomed by his nature, tastes, and scholarly pursuits to be the “white crow” of the Romanov family, and his outsider status most certainly reinforced his caustic nature. All humans, however, have personal frailties. Abraham Lincoln loved bawdy stories, and Martin Luther was quick to apply crude anal descriptions in his discussions (it was human feces, not an inkpot, he claimed that he threw at the Devil). His namesake Martin Luther King plagiarized his dissertation and was a notorious adulterer. Yet these character flaws in no way diminish the men’s positive contributions to their countries and their causes. If Niki was a notorious gossip and savaged people with his words, it in no way diminishes his accomplishments as a scholar or his work to reform and in the end to save Russia. On more than one occasion Olga Feodorovna tried to mute her son’s acerb nature. In his nineteenth year, she twice in one summer admonished him for his condemnation of other people. “[I] ask you for some calm, tact, and prudence in speech,” she wrote her son in reply to what

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must have been a response to some bombastic attack on someone.105 In June that same year she had felt the need to wire him the suggestion, “[My] advice, henceforth, [is] not to judge without knowing nor understanding. [It is] neither intelligent nor appropriate.”106 Yet despite her great influence (indeed control) over her son, Olga Feodorovna seems to have had little effect on this element of his personality, and his caustic, sarcastic nature stayed with him literally to the last seconds of his life. Those in stations below him always spoke, however, of his kindness, cordiality, generosity, and sensitivity.107 Constantine Brummer, his aide-decamp wrote, “His generosity knew no equal. He was always ready to oblige. He did not know how to refuse.”108 What alienated Nicholas Mikhailovich most poignantly from the rest of the family, and much of upper-crust Russian society, however, were his political views. “The most enlightened member of his tribe,” as one observer put it,109 Nicholas Mikhailovich was plainly and simply a twentiethcentury liberal, he was an ardent champion of basic Lockean civil rights, and whereas it is not clear whether he favored pure democracy, he unquestionably wished Russia to be governed by some sort of a constitutional system and a representative government. His liberalism led him to associate and move with ease with those in stations beneath him, and he chose many of his friends from among the nonnoble classes as a result of his views. It was easy for them to regard him as their equal.110 His brother Sandro wrote that he was “no doubt the most ‘radical’ (and most talented) member of the family,”111 and his views earned him such sobriquets as “Nicholas Egalité.” In 1905, for his support of the creation of a legislature, the foreign press dubbed him “the Red Prince”112 and “the Philippe Egalité of the Russian imperial family,” referring to Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, the relative of Louis XVI who voted for the execution of his own cousin in the French Revolutionary National Convention. He was the only observer in the Duma’s visitors’ gallery who dared to applaud when Vladimir Purishkevich, the political Rightist, had the courage to attack the dark forces around the throne on the eve of the great revolution.113 Yet Niki was never as far to the Left as his reputation placed him, and he was certainly no socialist, as Charles Rivet, the St. Petersburg correspondent of Le Temps, labeled him.114 He was, until after the February Revolution, a staunch monarchist, albeit a constitutional one, and on certain issues he could be rather conservative. He had the common touch, traveling about the streets in cabs, despite the large number of automobiles in his garages. Meriel Buchanan, the daughter of the English ambassador George Buchanan, remembered seeing “his tall figure” riding along the streets in a small izvozchik (taxi), with his jovial, good-humored voice booming in the street as he carried on a lively con-

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versation with the driver.115 His egalitarian spirit led him to insist that his valet, “who was as fat as he was,” his nephew remembered, sit with him at breakfast when they visited relatives in Livadia in the Crimea. Because the rest of the family would not sit down with servants, Niki and his valet had to eat alone. Prince Dmitri remembered how they would sit eating above the others on an outside balcony by themselves, and how the rest of the family would snicker at them. After the Revolution, the valet went over to the Revolution, apparently forgetting, or at least not appreciating, Uncle Bimbo’s demonstrated belief in equality.116 His strong sense of equality led him to attack viciously the Russian political Right. His nephew-in-law Felix Youssoupov, who thought of the grand duke as “an extreme liberal,” remembered that he “sharply criticized current events.”117 His outspokenness against the conservatism of Russian society hit its stride in the war years when the blindness of the people in power not only endangered the war effort but the very existence of the empire itself. It is not clear what produced this “radical” amidst a bastion of privilege and status quo. Merely being reared in the Caucasus would not have done it. None of his brothers was a true liberal. Probably Niki’s scholarly pursuits pulled him in that direction as it has done many, both before and after him. Certainly his love of France, the birth-mother of the Enlightenment, contributed to and reinforced his feelings. One accusation that did not affect him was the generally held belief that he was a Freemason. The Masonic movement was associated throughout Europe, and especially in Russia, with any Left-leaning individual and revolution. Many of the Decembrists, who led a revolt against the autocracy in 1825, were alleged to have been Masons, despite the fact that Tsar Alexander I had ordered the society disbanded. The great poet Alexander Pushkin was supposed to have been one and even worked some of the Masonic ritual into his short story “The Queen of Spades.” The secretiveness of the organization added to the mystery and the readiness of the conservative element of society to condemn it. The Russian Masons were reorganized in 1906 from French lodges and then entered a period of dormancy, only to be revived again in the winter of 1910–1911. There was another revival in 1915. If Nicholas Mikhailovich was a member, it was probably during this last revival that he joined. Moreover, there were numbers of organizations that called themselves “masonic” but that had only the secret nature of the society as a common denominator, sharing no other similarities with the real order.118 The Freemasons could not claim to have the support of all liberals, thus weakening the argument that it was a “liberal” front. Paul Miliukov, the leading Russian liberal in the prerevolutionary era, refused to join, and the organization even included some Marxists, who distrusted

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liberals more than they did the Right. Prince V. A. Obolensky, a major figure in the Russian Masonic movement, wrote that he could not convene a meeting of his lodge because the diversity of the group made it impossible for all of them to remain together in the same room.119 If indeed Nicholas Mikhailovich was ever a Mason, it was not a large part of his life. Indeed, in letters to Masson, he expressed a distrust for the order.120 The “proof” that the grand duke was a Mason is completely based on hearsay and was probably just assumed by his enemies, given his politics. General Spiridovich noted that it was “talked.”121 George Katkov, whose history of the February Revolution abounds in conspiracies, asserted that Nicholas Mikhailovich was a Mason because he was a close friend of Count Orlov-Davidov, who had been connected with the Masonic movement in Russia since 1905. He also cites what he calls Nicholas’s “intimate contact” with Alexander Kerensky, the first socialist in the Provisional Government and a Mason, as “difficult to explain otherwise than a Masonic link.”122 Such is the “evidence,” an outstanding example of intellectual McCarthyism. The diplomat A. Nekliudov, who had known the grand duke for years and often saw him in Paris and St. Petersburg, remembered that his enemies believed it, but that “nothing could be less true.”123 What is more, given the grand duke’s reputation for not being able to keep a secret, a society that valued discretion would hardly have wanted him as a member. Aside from the whispered Masonic ties, Nicholas’s behavior always reinforced the view that he was a Leftist. One outstanding occurrence was the display performed by Niki and his brothers on the night of the Khodynka catastrophe. During the coronation festivities for the reign of Nicholas II in 1896, thousands of peasants assembled on the Khodynka field outside Moscow for the purpose of receiving free trinkets, especially coronation cups, that had been placed on tables on one side of the field. Unknown to the assembling crowd, a large ditch, which separated them from the tables of souvenirs, had been covered with wooden planks, and when rumors spread among the gathering that there would not be enough of the gifts for everyone, the crowd became restless and breaking the police barriers, ran for the tables. As the early waves passed over the ditch, the planks broke though. Those behind, knowing nothing of the impending disaster, kept pushing forward, forcing those in front into the nowopen ditch. Thousands were crushed in the melee. The French ambassador was having a reception for the new tsar that night, and Nicholas Mikhailovich and his brothers begged Nicholas II to cancel the event as a sign of mourning for those who had died that day. They even called for the removal of their uncle Grand Duke Sergei, the governor general of Moscow, whose mishandling of the business had created the disaster.

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Grand Duke Aleksei, one of the reactionaries in the family, told the impressionable young tsar that the real motive was to replace Sergei with one of their own, and that the Mikhailovichi were always “playing to the radical grandstand” and were in this case, “openly siding with the revolution.” Niki replied to this accusation for his brothers with a clear-cut speech, explaining the horror of the situation. He invoked the image of the French Revolution with Louis XVI’s dancing in the parks at Versailles while ignoring the “signs of the approaching storm,” and he reminded the tsar that the blood of those victims will remain forever as a “blot on your reign.” He noted that he could not revive the dead, but he could show sympathy for the living. “Do not let the enemies of the regime say that the young tsar danced while his unfortunate subjects were taken to potters field,” Niki pleaded. Nicholas II sided, however, as he almost always did, with the conservatives, and he attended the ball. The foreigners were horrified. Nicholas Mikhailovich and his brothers appeared at the event solely for the purpose of walking out in a demonstration of displeasure, which they did as the dancing commenced. Uncle Aleksei sneered on their departure, saying, “There go the four imperial followers of Robespierre.”124 Yet all of his life, even literally to the last minutes of it, Nicholas Mikhailovich showed this personal sense of democracy that was not simply rare among the grand dukes, it was nonexistent. He addressed the soldiers under his command as “my friends.”125 He gave much money to the less fortunate, such as his 1,000-rouble gift to the poor of Kharkov in April 1891 in memory of his mother.126 He was most attentive to the needs of the peasants on his estates, evidence of which is found in his letters, especially those of 1917. When he learned that widows of fallen soldiers who had received the Cross of St. George had obtained no pensions, he personally collected all the necessary information and saw that it got to the proper authorities.127 His collection in the State Archive in Moscow contains thirteen editions of Alexander Herzen’s mildly socialist newspaper Kolokol,128 which he, although not a socialist, had collected from somewhere, something no other grand duke would have done. This very dedicated reformer, however, was never a revolutionary. Gradual change for the better was, he believed, the only path for Russia, and he bitterly criticized the “bomb-throwers” and condemned the “Hydra of Anarchy” often in his correspondence. In his mind, the future of Russia lay not with the revolutionaries. Curiously, after the Revolution, when the country was slipping into anarchy, he did not abandon his liberalism. He hated the drift of the country to be sure, because it was toward anarchy, not orderly change, but he never retreated into

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reaction even as he saw his own position in society threatened. Indeed, in time he even became a democratic republican. Nicholas Mikhailovich’s liberalism, however, contained a bizarre contradiction. Like most Russians of that era, and sadly many of the present day, the grand duke was ethnically and racially bigoted. His racism went beyond ethnic slurs and jokes, of which there were always plenty. He habitually called Italians “the macaronis,” and once he referred to Nicholas Chkheidze, a Social Democrat from Georgia, as a “mongrel.”129 His views on Jews went much further than simply condescending ethnic humor: They were only a shade less than naziistic. At the turn of the century, there were about 4 million Jews in the Russian empire.130 There had been more, but the brutal anti-Semitic policies of Tsar Alexander III (“God, I love it when they beat the Jews,” he wrote once in the margin of a note) caused many to flee to the ghettos of Manhattan, New York. Those who remained were under the “temporary regulations” imposed by this “peaceful tsar” in 1882. These racial laws, anticipating the Nuremburg Laws of Nazi Germany, reinforced residence in the Pale, required quotas in schools and professions, and encouraged outright religious persecution. Nicholas Mikhailovich’s correspondence with Masson, who was also an anti-Semite,131 is riddled with anti-Jewish statements. Often he seems to link Germans and Jews,132 a bizarre analogy given both his overwhelming German ancestry and his mother’s questionable heritage. The world was “pretty near sold to the Jews,”133 he wrote once in a stereotypically anti-Semitic slur. “The capital of the Jews is more powerful than ever,” he wrote another time.134 He frequently lashed out at “International Jewry” and blamed Russia’s internal problems on Jews. In the war years he praised the bravery of Nicholas II for visiting the Russian armies in Galicia, that is, “to these places where the Jews swarm everywhere.”135 The Third Reich’s analogy of Jews to rats comes to mind. When the war began, it was assumed by most Russians that the Jews would be pro-German, shirkers in the war effort, and generally disloyal. As the German and Austrian armies advanced in 1915 into the area of the Pale, the Russian government savagely uprooted the Jews, driving them eastward while making no provision for their care. Needless to say, it was always easy for the authorities “to find” spies among the Jewish population. Nicholas Mikhailovich saw a photo of one who had been condemned for treason. The grand duke, who was apparently opposed to capital punishment, wrote, “It is the first time that I have seen a condemned man. . . . It made no impression on me for the expression of the Jew was so repulsive.”136 Strangely, he accused Paul Miliukov, one of the most liberal members of the Provisional Government after the Revolution, of being “supported by all Jewry,”137 and he referred to the Soviet

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formed after the Revolution as being composed of “Jews and Georgians,” whom he seems to have regarded with equal contempt. One figure of the revolutionary Left was “a mean and vindictive Jew” and another was simply dismissed as “another Jew.”138 The anti-Semitism Niki demonstrated was well grounded within his family. His brother George’s letters to his wife during the war139 contain some of the same anti-Semitic flavor of his oldest brother’s, although not as vitriolic. At one point after the Revolution when he wrote to his wife that “they” were planning to change the dynasty, he could not imagine who their candidate would be but “probably some Jew.”140 At another point he wrote that a revolutionary bureaucrat “seemed to be a Jew,” and another time he felt the need to point out that someone “was not Jew.”141 Their brother Sandro came out forcefully against granting equal civil rights for the Jews. “I protested as strongly as I could, saying . . . that we could not afford to be merciful to a race which the Russian people hate even more now because of their negative attitude towards the war.”142 Even Nicholas Mikhailovich’s nephew, the very courtly and gentle Prince Dmitri Romanov, told this author, “Of course you know that it was the Jews who shot the tsar.”143 Anti-Semitism was preached by the Orthodox Church, as it was by virtually every other Christian denomination in that day, so it is not surprising that anti-Semitism was rampant in Old Russia. More surprising, however, is the fact that it has, since the fall of Communism, come into the open once again. 144 Yet for someone of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s education and worldview, it is amazing that he carried that stigma. It was not, however, simply a black mark on the Russian imperial family but one on all of Old Russia as well. It is not too surprising that Nicholas Mikhailovich does not seem to have been especially religious. He quite naturally was reared in a religious environment, as were all Russians of that day, and his education curriculum, as we have seen, consisted of a heavy dose of religious studies. Niki’s parents were devoutly religious, and this family situation could not have but rubbed off on him to some degree. Moreover, as Dostoevsky wrote in The Possessed, “A Russian cannot be godless. As soon as he becomes godless, he ceases to be Russian.”145 In 1888, when George nearly died of an illness through which his mother nursed him, Niki wrote her, “The Good Lord has wanted to save George,”146 which implies sensitivity toward his mother’s very religious feelings, if not outright religious expression of his own. As she grew older, he seems to have become more religious, especially after the Revolution. Writing of the menacing 1918 German offensive in France, he expressed his support for the French nation by saying, “My ardent prayers and thoughts are with you, and God willing, you will yet repel them and decisively.”147 In other correspondence, he quotes scripture: “It is the words

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of Christ which are only able to sustain you: Those which sustain the trails up to the end will be saved.” He also speaks of passing into “a better world.”148 Whatever religious opinions Niki had as a young and middleaged man, they were not a dominant force in his life, and he never seems to have had anything like the religious devotion of many members of the Romanov family. As for his hobbies and relaxing diversions, Niki was much more like the remainder of his kin. Polovtsov notes several times in his diary that he was at functions where he saw Nicholas dancing, on one occasion from 11:00 PM to 5:00 AM.149 He also developed the usual royal passion for hunting. He had hunting locations on all of his estates, and since there was for him no hunting season, he regularly traveled to whichever estate or preserve afforded him the best action. “I’m going south to get the geese,” Niki would tell his family upon leaving St. Petersburg for Grushevka or Borjomi.150 He reserved the time from late March through early April exclusively for hunting. Even when he was forced by his war work to stay in Petrograd in the spring of 1915, he left immediately after the Historical Society meeting for Lake Ilmen, where he had a comfortably large masonry house and some land for hunting.151 So great was his love for the sport that he wrote a book about his hunting experiences, and in it his house on Lake Ilmen is featured among the many pictures. The book reveals the not surprising fact that Niki hunted in great comfort, as did most Russian gentry of his day, with lots of attendants and even a boat with the modern addition of an outboard power motor, surely one of the few in the entire Russian nation. His hunts he described in the book seem to have been most successful, as the book is replete with many pictures of the hunters standing or seated behind large numbers of geese.152 A draft of this hunting account appears in his papers and was written on stationery of the Grand Hotel d’Europe at Uriage-les-Bains.153 On one of his hunting excursions near Baku, in the first few days the hunting party bagged sixty-eight wild boars, thirteen jackals, two wolves, and two foxes. Later they killed an astounding 135 more wild boars, eleven stags, one wolf, five jackals, a fox, and a wildcat. Nicholas Mikhailovich himself killed a total of eighteen of the boars, one wolf, one jackal, and the above-mentioned wildcat.154 His second great passion was gambling. Niki and all of his siblings, including Anastasia, were avid patrons of the Riviera casinos, but Niki seems to have been the most enthusiastic, winning and losing enormous sums, his sister-in-law Marie tells us.155 He also used war metaphors for his gambling excursions. Until a casino appeared in Cannes, Niki went regularly to Monte Carlo, where he visited an establishment owned by a Monsieur Blanc. “Tomorrow I am preparing to give decisive battle at Monte Carlo,”

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he wrote to a friend in January 1906, adding, “from which will depend the final result of my heroic struggles.”156 In 1898 he wrote, “If I don’t hit the jackpot in Monte Carlo, I will be back here [in Paris] in a couple of weeks.” A week later he wrote, “Victory! Up until this evening I have a net winning of 80,000 [francs].”157 Several years later he wrote of one of his gambling trips, “The cards have been splendid. I have already sent 60,000 francs to Tiflis, and there remain here 40,000 francs with which to play . . . the battle of winter has given me 46,000 francs . . . net.”158 He never spoke of any money lost at the tables. In fact, he so hated to lose that, to avoid seeing his losses, he would never sit and gamble. Instead, he would bet on some numbers with every possible combination on a half dozen tables simultaneously, dashing around in all directions. He would then ask the chef de partie what had happened. Once when leaving to catch a train to Paris, he bet on zero and its neighboring numbers one, two, and three. Then turning to a perfect stranger, he said, “I must be off now. Please look after my money. If it wins, double up.” Then he left. In his absence, he won the maximum. The chef turned to the stranger and asked, “What do we do?” For some reason they declined to give it to Anastasia, who was present, and sent it instead to the Crédit Lyonnais in Paris.159 All of the grand dukes traveled with a financial manager who paid their hotel and restaurant bills, bought their train tickets, and in general obliterated with money whatever obstacles usually confront most travelers. The managers also paid their gambling loses. Prince Dmitri Romanov remembered that when his Uncle Bimbo won, he pocketed the money; when he lost, he left the casino, and his financial manager covered his losses at the casino bank. As a result, in his mind he always won and would return to Russia and brag about his great winnings.160 Nicholas did sometimes win big, as we have seen, sometimes sums as large as 100,000 francs. When he won, he usually gave the money away in the form of presents to Marie’s daughters and bought objets d’art for himself. We can presume that he sometimes lost that much as well. Because all grand dukes were expected to make a career in the Russian military, Niki had no option but to follow that career “choice,” and it seems that initially as a young man he genuinely wanted such a life. Curiously, it was driven by a desire to imitate his enemy-cousin Nicholas Nicholaevich, who came in time to be thought a great military leader despite the fact that he had had much difficulty passing the various officers’ exams. By the age of eighteen, at the beginning of the RussoTurkish War of 1877–1878, Niki was made a second lieutenant in a brigade of sharpshooters by one account,161 and an ordnance officer on the Caucasus front by another.162 At any rate, his first duty was under his

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father’s command. Mikhail Nicholaevich led a Russian army in the Caucasus in the fall of 1877 at Aladija Dagh to a great victory over a Turkish army led by Maukhtar Pasha, capturing thirty-two guns and 10,000 POWs. He also captured Kars, a city-fortress that was considered impregnable because it had been built by European engineers. It fell to a Russian night attack, with the Russians taking 20,000 Turkish prisoners.163 For his distinguished service in this theater, the tsar made Grand Duke Mikhail a field marshal of the Russian army and awarded him the Cross of St. George of the First Class. Niki’s service under him resulted in his receiving the Cross of St. George of the Fourth Class. Because he was never near any fighting, we can assume that the decoration came as a result of his imperial connections, not his exploits on the field of battle. Writing his mother, Niki dutifully reported his father’s activity, doting on his every action. “Papa received the troops,” “Papa does this, Papa does that,” and so forth. He sympathized with him about his trials and burdens. Once he wrote to Olga Feodorovna, “What is the most disturbing here is Papa, because everything in one day comes down on his head.”164 When in September his father’s troops were temporarily unsuccessful, he wrote his mother, “Father has been very sad, suffering because the battle was without result.”165 He gloried in his father’s approval of his military performance, reporting to his mother that “Papa continues to be content with me,” adding, “I have spoken with him often.”166 Niki’s war work was not, however, in the front lines but with the wounded. His generally sensitive nature for those beneath him made him suffer with the wounded themselves. To his mother he described the wounds of the soldiers in the most graphic manner, painting a picture of “a most horrible tableau.” The word “gangrenous” appears most often in his descriptions.167 In June of 1877 he wrote that that day he had been with the wounded, and he was clearly shaken by what he saw. “An officer has two shattered arms, the leg also,” he wrote, adding that two wounded friends of his had died. As his letters had been replete with his talk of the casualties, his mother wrote of her sympathy for them. “My dear Nikolai [she wrote his name in Cyrillic in an otherwise French language letter], my heart suffers each time that I hear that all of our troops are dead or wounded. . . . Perhaps it is that the dead are happier than the wounded.”168 Fearing that his graphic accounts were disturbing his mother, he wrote consolingly, “You have been unhappy with my description of my day; I am destroyed by it.”169 Yet the letters that followed dwelled endlessly on the horrors of the life he witnessed, for war even from his safe haven had clearly upset him. His later abandonment of a military career may well have had its genesis with his work with the wounded.

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In September 1877 Niki injured his leg, and the accident left him bedridden and unable to write for more than a week. His apology to his mother was almost groveling (“I ask you a million times to pardon me for not having written you”), but she did not seem to object to it. She used her correspondence with her son to send things to the soldiers (once a thousand handbags, with a thousand more coming). Suddenly in September after dinner one evening, Niki was ordered “after a day of anguish” to go to Borjomi for twenty-four hours.170 The remainder of the letter is illegible, and one wonders about the purpose of the trip. Could it be that he was clearly about to snap, and someone in command gave him leave to get himself together? It is possible that he would not have been told if it had. His younger brothers envied the fact that Niki was old enough to go off to war and “cover himself with glory.”171 War is often glorious only to those who do not fight it, and his younger siblings could hardly realize that their brother, who only saw the effects of the fighting, would have gladly left the “glory” to someone else. After the war ended the next year, Nicholas hoped to relocate to St. Petersburg and enter the university there, but a military education was all that was permitted him. He therefore entered the General Staff Academy, and his superior intellect, abetted by his lifelong desire to please his mother with an outstanding academic performance, led him to graduate from the college in 1885 with top honors. He was still at this point outwardly enthusiastic about a military life, because in December of that year, he complained to Polovtsov on the train to Gatchina that promotion in the army was so slow and that would preclude his having a “brilliant” career.172 His family connections, however, gave him a great boost. His father interceded with Polovtsov to obtain for him a desired transfer into the cavalry.173 There was resistance to his joining the force and help was needed because, as Polovtsov told Niki’s father, Niki “possessed an unfavorable reputation as a gossip.” To this news, Grand Duke Mikhail replied, “I know his faults and I especially hope that a good group of friends will help him correct them.”174 Niki was indeed admitted, and because he was a great younger friend of Empress Maria Feodorovna, this association led him to enter the Chevalier Guards Regiment in which she was an honorary colonel. His brother Alexander remembered, however, that his intellectual superiority to the other officers robbed him of all the enjoyment that might have come from his regimental contact.175 Niki’s developing political liberalism also set him apart from the other officers in one of the many times in his life that he would not “fit in.” His attempt to be close to the soldiers under him, an example of democratic

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comradeship not tolerated in the Russian army, earned him a sobriquet that would follow him all of his life: Nicholas Egalité.176 The first year in the Guard Cavalry, where he was placed in charge of recruits for the second squadron, was the happiest time of his military career. Writing his memories of the time, he noted that he “especially liked the sympathetic spirit of this regiment,”177 as it contained many old friends and officers he had known from childhood. He had wished to be in this regiment since he had arrived in St. Petersburg in June 1881, but “various circumstances prevented my doing this then.” Colonel A. N. Dubensky, the regimental commander, told Nicholas that a majority of the officers wanted him, but there was opposition resulting from “intrigue” because it was the first time they had had a grand duke in the regiment. What seems to have changed the “circumstances” was the intervention of his cousin Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich and his wife Maria Pavlovna, as well as that of Empress Maria Feodorovna, whom Nicholas had asked to intercede with her husband the tsar.178 Niki’s first meeting with the group was a breakfast in St. Petersburg at the Anichkov Palace, where the empress and emperor lived. Nicholas Mikhailovich arrived late as the officers were finishing their meal. The reception he received upon arrival was polite, but it turned “quickly cold,” and a number did not even greet him. After a frank discussion with the regimental commander, he learned that he had lost a nonbinding vote for his admission, receiving only fourteen votes out of thirty-two.179 Conditions must have improved, for he later wrote, “We all lived peacefully and happily [afterward],180 but then few officers who aspired to the rank of generalship would have been too openly hostile to a member of the imperial family. The grand duke remained in the unit until 1892, when there was a shakeup of some sort that resulted in the departure of many of his friends. He was renamed commandant that summer, but clearly he soured on the military after the change.181 There seems to have been a lot of double dealing and backstabbing in the unit, and to the blunt, outspoken, upfront Niki, this behavior was reprehensible. Moreover, he came into conflict with another officer over a death-penalty judgment, with which Nicholas Mikhailovich did not agree. Their relations ultimately had to be conducted with a go-between, who clearly favored the officer and sarcastically addressed Nicholas as “Your Highness.” On one occasion time the emissary left the room slamming the door.182 A conflict over promotions and awards regarding the grand duke the next year caused further trouble, and Nicholas Mikhailovich asked to leave the regiment so that he would not “cause further discord.”183 After taking a leave and going to Paris, he returned to the Caucasus to join the Caucasian Mingelskii Grenadier Regiment, which most certainly appealed to him, but whatever positive

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feelings he held for the military were definitely damaged.184 He remained in the army for about a decade longer, although he does not seem to have done much in it. By this time he was beginning to write history and to develop other interests. His unpopularity made promotion difficult. When in 1891 the post of commander for the Horse Guards’ Regiment fell vacant and the young grand duke’s candidacy was advanced, several major officers in the regiment “acknowledged the necessity of preventing the candidacy of Nicholas Mikhailovich.”185 He was denied the position, but what made it more unbearable was that Niki, a colonel, was passed over for the position of commander in favor of his cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Constantinovich, a mere captain. Polovtsov remembered that the insult was a great blow to Grand Duke Mikhail.186 We may be certain that it was to Niki as well. In 1894 he was finally given the command of the Mingelskii Regiment, a post he held until 1897, when he was promoted to his last position, commandant of the Caucasian Grenadier Division.187 By this time Niki, who was now a general, seems to have become throughly disgusted with military life. When he received a letter from his French friend the historian Masson early in the fall of 1902, he called it a “true ray of sunlight after the boring vicissitudes of my military life.”188 In December of the following year, he resigned his commission and left the army. “Before leaving St. Petersburg, I have definitely burned my boats in presenting my resignation from my division,” he wrote to Masson.189 He retained his rank in the army (that of general) and was an aide-de-camp to the emperor, but this unpleasant part of his life was to be forever behind him. Rumor had it that he had left the military so that he could devote his time to the study and writing of history,190 and he did indeed after 1903 become a historian full time, but he was leaving a life he had come to hate and for which he was not suited. During the Great War, he did follow his Caucasian unit’s activities with much interest and was proud of its success against the Turks in 1915, but he left the army with no regrets whatsoever. “My mood is excellent,” he wrote on leaving the army, and he never looked back on that part of his life. Indeed he became an antimilitarist of sorts. His nephew Prince Dmitri remembered that when he and his brothers would go walking in their uniforms, sometimes Uncle Bimbo would pass by in a taxi. Because he was nominally a general, not because he was their uncle, the young cadets would snap to attention and salute him. Instead of returning their salute as was proper military protocol, Uncle Bimbo would lean out of the vehicle and give them the high-sign (tip of the thumb on his nose with the waving of the four fingers) and yell, “Vy Bolvany! [You blockheads!].”191

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One characteristic Nicholas Mikhailovich acquired in his adolescence and young manhood that was to be a major force in his life was the deep, almost unfathomable love he held for France. That nation has so influenced thousands of people of all nationalities and races. For those affected, the French nation is a mecca, constantly luring them there. It has molded the lives of such diverse people as Frederick the Great of Prussia, who spoke German (a language for soldiers and dogs, he said) with a French accent until the day he died; Thomas Jefferson, who regarded it as his second homeland; and Eugene Bullard, the first Black American military aviator, who found equal acceptance there as a human being when it was denied him in his own country. France’s culture has lured millions to study it, to love it, and to hold it above all others. People without a drop of French blood in their veins have gone there to live the rest of their lives as French people. Three hundred thousand Americans alone live there now as these pages are written. How Nicholas Mikhailovich’s love affair with France began, we do not know. He received at age fifteen a history of France as a gift, and perhaps it was this work that planted the seed that grew into his devotion. France became to Nicholas Mikhailovich the wife he never had, indeed maybe even more like a mistress who is often loved with more fire than is a wife. As we have seen, the French language was one of the first that he learned, and he was completely at home in the language. His vocabulary was almost stupefying in its size and depth and was probably greater than that of most natives. Indeed, in a long letter to his cousin Tsar Nicholas II in 1916, he frequently wrote whole paragraphs in French, explaining, “I think it enables me to find more adequate expression for my thoughts.”192 He daily read the French newspapers Le Temps, Echo de Paris, Le Matin, and Le Figaro, and journals such as La Revue des Deux Mondes and Revue hebdomadaire were always with him and published many of his articles. Since he first saw Paris in 1885, the city had become the center of the world for him. At that first visit as a Russian grand duke, he was feted at dinners and luncheons by the French aristocracy, and he visited the tourist spots like Sacré Coeur and Montmartre, despite the fact that they were not “favored with the weather.” He also participated in a meeting of the Entomological Society of France, of which he was a member and which had given him a diploma when he was only eighteen.193 He made the customary side trips to Chartres, Orléans, and Chantilly, where he gloried in the history in which the chateau was immersed, and he spent much time in its library. On October 18 he wrote his mother, “I have been here two weeks and I am still far short of seeing all I’ve wanted to see in Paris.” Just the day before he had visited the headquarters of the prestigious

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Académie Française, of which he would one day be a member.194 The young grand duke returned to “ce chère [sic] Paris” in May of the next year and was just as enraptured. “My stay here is adorable,” he wrote, and unlike the song composer, he made comparisons of the seasons: “There is no comparison between Paris in the spring time and in the fall.”195 Thenceforth, he went to France for an extended stay at least twice a year, always going to Paris and to visit his sister in her home near Cannes. He felt perfectly at home in the French capital, where he was a habitué of the Collège de France while other grand dukes haunted the fleshpots of Montmartre. He lived modestly (for a grand duke, at any rate) in the Hotel Vendôme on the Rue de la Paix, and spent his time in the archives and libraries and in the company of college professors and writers, not politicians and courtesanes. His francophilia even assumed an anti-Russian flavor, both in his studies and his actions. His great historical hero was Emperor Napoleon I, who had invaded Russia and devastated Moscow in 1812. At a review of troops in 1912 during a commemoration of the centennial of the battle of Borodino during the French invasion in 1812, Nicholas Mikhailovich refused to sign the guest book.196 During the review he dismounted and strolled around smoking behind the members of the family who more patriotically did their duty.197 Later he left the festivities with a group of French journalists, saying, “Let’s leave this little family party and talk of something more interesting.”198 This love for France once caused him to be banished when, in a moment of indiscretion—one of the many in his lifetime—he said something that created an international incident. While returning from a butterfly expedition in Tenerife in the Canary Islands on the French ship Uruguay in the fall of 1887, he made a toast to France at a champagne party, adding indiscreetly, “I would consider myself fortunate to be fighting at the head of a French regiment.” A report of his speech appeared in the French paper Le Figaro, and the journal’s account, which may well have been true, had the grand duke exclaiming that he wished for war between France and Germany, and in such a war, he would like to lead a French force. The paper added, moreover, that the grand duke said that there was no influence at the German court like that during the reign of Alexander II and that Alexander III and his consort were anti-German. Several other papers such as Le Temps ran the story as well. At this point in time Russia and Germany were “friends” under the Reinsurance Treaty signed several months earlier in which both pledged to remain “benevolently neutral” in the event of war with Austria or France. The indiscretion caused a diplomatic explosion and a blizzard of diplomatic notes from the German foreign office. Baron Kotzebue, a prominent Russian businessman, was

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dispatched to the German embassy in St. Petersburg to smooth ruffled German feathers. The Journal of St. Petersburg published a denial without expressly mentioning the young grand duke’s name: “The speech attributed to the August voyager is a pure invention,” it told its readers.199 The Russian diplomatic corps rationalized to the Germans that because a toast had been made to Russia, the grand duke had to return the favor,200 yet there is little doubt that given his love for France and his dislike for Germany, he was most probably guilty. Alcohol seemed always to loosen his already overactive tongue. On reading the article in Paris, Nicholas Mikhailovich stormed over to the Russian embassy, but Ambassador Mohrengem was not there. He wrote letters and denied everything, or else he claimed that he had only said much milder things in private conversations with the captain and other passengers.201 Expecting trouble with Emperor Alexander III, who, we have seen, did not like him anyway, he wrote the tsarevich, the future Nicholas II, asking him if his father had gotten the truth about the incident and explaining that as there had been a toast to Russia, he was obligated to respond in some fashion and that Le Figaro had embellished the account.202 Nicholas Mikhailovich was finally informed by a Russian diplomat that the tsar had charged him to transmit to the grand duke “the wish to be quiet and continue your sojourn in Paris.”203 He returned to Russia in November and received an invitation to a hunt at the royal estate Gatchina, an event to which he was not usually invited, implying that all was forgiven, but then he was exiled to Borjomi for several months. Nicholas’s great love for France really manifests itself in his letters to Masson during the years of the Great War. They are replete with phrases such as “Vive la France!” “Your wonderful country,” “the great spirit of France’s people,” and “My thoughts are with France always.”204 He avidly followed the French retreat of 1914 to the victory on the Marne. He seemed to bleed with each dying French soldier, more so than with the Russian troops, who were piling up in hecatombs in East Prussia and Galicia. Like all of France, he breathed a sigh of relief when the Germans were stopped. In fact, well before the victory on the Marne was certain, he wrote Masson the optimistic words, “I no longer believe in the possibility of the siege of Paris.”205 His francophilia manifested itself in the thorough detestation of Germany and its kaiser. As early as January 1914, he spoke of the “obliteration of Germany” to Masson,206 and after the war began he wrote, “Damn the Kaiser, damn the Germans, oh how I hate them!”207 In his cups at a luncheon in May 1915 with Paléologue, the British ambassador James Buchanan and the Italian ambassador Marquis André Carlotti di Riparbella, celebrating Italy’s entrance into the war on the side of Russia

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and France, he several times exclaimed in a booming voice, “We’ve got Germany now. The wretch won’t escape us now!”208 His father had been a strong Germanophile, the last of the grand dukes to be so. One wonders what he would have thought of his son at this moment in 1915, the son whose lineage was almost totally German. This period of the grand duke’s life are the years when most young men and women fall in love and marry. Niki fell in love several times, but he never married. The reasons are rather complex and probably run much deeper than his failure to consummate his first love with marriage.209 Love is the only neurosis for which there is a complete cure, and whereas a person may always wonder about or be distantly concerned about his or her first love, the emotion does end. Moreover, Niki’s reason for not marrying was not an affinity for his own sex, as several historians have so cavalierly stated recently.210 There is no evidence that Niki was a homosexual. He even was given to mild homophobic remarks (he one time blasts the “pederast [in French, the word, often just called pédé, short for pédérast, is derogatory slang for “homosexual,” perhaps translatable as “queer” or “faggot”] Grand Duke of Hesse, the ignoble brother of Her Majesty”),211 something he would not likely have done had he been in some sort of homosexual clique. The first woman whom we know to have attracted his strong attention was his first cousin Princess Victoria of Baden, the child of his mother’s brother, Frederich, the grand duke of Baden. He seems to have gotten to know her well on a visit to Germany in 1879, when he was twenty years old. Enraptured, he wrote his brother Miche-Miche, “The most delicious of all here is certainly Vicky. She is charming and pleases one immensely.” Then he curiously adds, “She kisses you and makes you say a thousand things.” Then he goes on to describe Karlsruhe in the manner only someone in love would do: “Carlsruhe [sic] is beautiful. The lilies in flower, the sun shines throughout the day, and the nightingales sing a song.”212 In his next letter in June, he wrote his brother about the “adorable Vicky.”213 Three days later he wrote, “I am going to return from the grand duchess’s . . . with Vicky (the charming Vicky).”214 Vicky seems to have indeed been charming and an accomplished pianist besides, but there was a serious obstacle to the union: The Orthodox Church does not sanction marriage between first cousins. Dispensations can of course be gotten; his brother Alexander was permitted to marry his first cousin once removed. Yet Alexander III was strongly opposed to the union. As noted, he held the family on a tight leash, and to go against his will was to risk eternal banishment and the loss of grand ducal privileges. “It broke his heart,” his brother later remembered,215 and Niki

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vowed to the tsar that if he could not marry Vicky, he would not marry anyone. He never did, and indeed seems after that to have abandoned any notion of a permanent church-blessed liaison, and to quote his brother, “remained a bachelor and stayed alone in his very large palace, surrounded by books, manuscripts, and botanical collections.” 216 “Adorable Vicky,” for her part, eventually became the wife of King Gustav V of Sweden. She was never in good health and spent each winter on the Isle of Capri, where a doctor visited her each day whether there was any crisis or not.217 Her son William did marry into the Russian royal family when he took Maria Pavlovna, the daughter of Grand Duke Paul, as his wife.218 Niki did fall in love again, however. The second known love of his life was Amélie, the daughter of the Count of Paris, who was the son of King Louis Philippe of France of July Monarchy fame. Nicholas Mikhailovich met her at a dinner party at the home of the Duc de Montpensier. His interest must have been obvious because the duke invited him to his chateau, presumably for a party that included Amélie among the guests. Nicholas came home completely smitten, and unable to sleep after meeting her, he wrote his mother a breathless letter asking for her advice. Speaking of the “fire” he felt, he said, “In all cases she has the appearance of a good character, gay, fresh, but very eager to make my acquaintance.” Her physique, he rhapsodized on, was “beautiful and large of stature, beautiful eyes, but not very pretty—all the while a beautiful person.” She must have been rather intelligent and well educated, and this may indeed have been the attraction, because his conversation with her centered around politics and literature. “In any case,” he concludes, “I would like to know what you would think about a possible union.”219 To say that neither Niki’s father nor mother was pleased with the possible match is the most colossal of understatements. Grand Duke Mikhail told Polovtsov that his father (Tsar Nicholas I) would “turn over in his grave” at the prospect that his grandson would marry the granddaughter of King Louis-Philippe of France, besides the other monumental deterrent that she was a Catholic.220 Louis Philippe had come to the French throne in the Revolution of 1830, deposing his cousin King Charles X, the legitimate Bourbon monarch. Niki’s imperial grandfather was busily organizing a military force to remove him when he had to suppress a revolution in Poland within his own borders. Exactly what his mother replied is not known, but it appears to have been scorching and definitely negative. The twenty-six-year old wrote his mother back a most contrite letter, which speaks volumes about their

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relationship. “When I received your response this evening, . . . where you discourage my pursuing the project of marriage, I was very sad to have to abandon the idea for the conjugal union,” he wrote. Then almost pathetically he added, “I still thank you for . . . your energetic decisions. This grieves me very much. It is that [I] imagined that I had climbed to the top with Amélie.”221 At this point he immediately changes the subject, and with that show of his mother’s disapproval, he abandoned forever this woman whom he found so great a prospect for marriage.222 Nicholas Mikhailovich never came close to marriage again, but he did have “girl friends,” both platonic and otherwise, and it was generally believed in the family that he had fathered several children on the wrong side of the blanket.223 He seems, however, to have fallen in love again in middle age. He mentions in a letter to Masson in 1910 that he has fallen in love, saying, “Imagine that, in love at fifty-one.”224 He never indicated to Masson who this inamorata was, and nothing open seems to have come of it. Perhaps she never returned his attentions. At any rate, she is forever lost to history. The event that closed the final door on Niki’s youth was the death of his mother. It was, of course, a staggering blow to him. The last extant letter from her to him in effect summarized their unnaturally close relationship. In her increasingly doleful way, she spoke of “moments of profound sadness” that she had had, and she expressed the wish that she would go before her husband—and “without much suffering.” Then she added what came as no surprise: “If it will be of any consolation to you, my dear son, I have loved you more [underscore in the original] than my other children.” She expressed the belief that hell after death did not exist but “is here in us.” Then she added lugubriously, “It is essential to hope that we will meet in a better world . . . . . [ellipses in original].” The letter, curiously, ends with no signature.225 Olga’s health had not been good for some time, and her last letters are full of her usual complaints. She wired Nicholas several times in 1888 about health crises, especially about chronic weakness.226 She seems to have had heart trouble and went from doctor to doctor across Europe to find help, wandering aimlessly alone for some years from one European city to another. In October 1886 she had gone to Baden on her way to Cannes for the winter and was staying at the home of “my excellent Marie [?].” Here “my morale has gone up, a perfect calm, all besproken [sic] with her.” Her husband later came to visit.227 There are some indications that her husband did not approve of her long absences. In the summer of 1888 Niki wrote her, “You well know the human heart and you understand the miseries of our life. Unfortunately

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Papa [does not] understand it well [illegible word]. It is so sad that we are [illegible word] so different in so many things from Papa.” He then added, strangely, “but . . . there are many things to do to avoid all conversation.”228 Olga’s death when it came was still unexpected. Except for her servants, she died alone in the train station in Kharkov in southern Ukraine. She had been going to her Crimean estate, Ai-todor, one of the places where she could always find peace. She completely loved the place and had personally supervised the planting of every tree on the grounds. On March 28, 1891, the express train in which she was riding passed through Kharkov about noon, but it returned suddenly at about 7:00 in the evening because the grand duchess had taken ill with apparent heart trouble. Kharkov must have been the largest nearby city. It was told in the family that while passing through Kharkov, she had received a telegram informing her that her son Miche-Miche had made his unfortunate (in her mind) marriage, but this story is not true. Polovtsov had visited her on March 25 to say good-bye before her departure for the Crimea and found both her and her husband in tears. They had just received a letter from their son the day before informing them of his marriage to the Countess Merenburg,229 so she knew it well before she entered Kharkov. The shock, however, must have contributed to her death. Several doctors in Kharkov were invited into her train compartment, and they pronounced her problem was “serious inflammation of the lungs.” She was taken into the Tsar’s Waiting Room in the station from which, strangely, she was not moved until she died, after a priest had been summoned, on March 31. The next day, a mourning period of three months was declared in St. Petersburg, and a service in the Cathedral of St. Vladimir in Kharkov was held at 2:00 PM “with high military and civilian figures” present. On April 2 the local clergy performed a memorial liturgy and a requiem. Having been informed of her death by wire, Niki, Gogi, and Grand Duke Mikhail arrived that night at 8:30 PM by express train from St. Petersburg, and, oddly, they received well wishers in the train station.230 None of the other children was there. Sandro was on a naval cruise and received the word of his mother’s death while in port in Bombay. He caught a fast steamer and returned to Russia, but not of course, in time for the funeral.231 Anastasia came back as well, but likewise not in time for the services. She wired Niki, “God supports us, thoughts with you. I am coming to you. Anastasia.232 In Nicholas Mikhailovich’s archival collection in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow appears a telegram in German that is signed “M” and is probably from Miche-Miche, who not surprisingly did not return as he was in disgrace

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following his marriage, and had by his actions hastened his mother’s death. The telegram reads, “Deeply moved, I wish to express to you my heartfelt sympathy for the difficult loss, which we all have sustained.”233 On Thursday, April 4, her body was moved from the train station where it had been lying in state to the Petropavlovsky Cathedral in the city. A squadron of Constantinovsky Cadets from the local school escorted the body, and along the road various military units assembled in parade form. Olga Feodorovna’s remains were sent by a funeral train and dispatched to Moscow, arriving at 8:00 PM in the Kursk station. The body was then taken to the Nikolaevsky station for transference to St. Petersburg. The family interred her near the entrance of the cathedral of the Petropavlovsky Fortress,234 where her body still lies today next to her son Aleksei, who died four years later, and her husband, who outlived her by almost two decades. Very near her grave the present Russian government is constructing a crypt for the newly discovered remains of the last tsar and his family. After the funeral, all of the family, minus the errant Miche-Miche, gathered in the great palace on the Neva Quay in St. Petersburg. “The palace was in gloom,” Alexander remembered. His father walked aimlessly from room to room, not speaking for hours and chain-smoking thick black cigars. When he did speak, he chastised himself for letting his wife go alone to the Crimea.235 For the remainder of his life, he left her apartment in the palace unaltered, and no one was allowed to enter it. It constantly was decorated with fresh flowers, and the clocks were kept wound as though she were still there. When Grand Duke Mikhail traveled, he always took her parasol, one of her old hats, and a pair of her gloves, all of which he placed on his bedside wherever he was.236 Niki’s grief was the most severe and also the strangest. In his papers is a letter to his mother written after her death that demonstrates a grief that left the grand duke unbalanced. “Dear Mother,” it began, “there have been twenty days since you are no longer among us, and I feel the need to write down some of my impressions after your death.” The letter speaks of her suffering and the “empty void everywhere around me.” He speaks of Papa and George coming by his room and suffering with him. “They have taken you into this cold cell where you can no longer trap any [word illegible], but it must be horribly humid and ‘unfreundlich’ [here probably “unpleasant”].” Rambling on about people who have appeared in their conversations and their correspondence, the letter ended with, “Thank you from all my heart for the things that I have regarded as mine until the day when I will be able to be reunited with you.” It is signed “Your Nicholas.”237 The death of any parent is an important milestone in a person’s life. For Nicholas Mikhailovich it was a most important one. Now the force

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that had been so central to his life was gone forever. Subconsciously, however, he must have felt some strange relief. He was now free of that dominant person whom he had worked so hard all of his life to please, be it in schoolwork or in choosing a wife. Now he was on his own with no one to consider in building his future. Whether or not he realized it, he had for the first time a freedom he had never known. He was thirtytwo years old, and his mother’s passing was definitely the end of his youth.

Chapter 3

Imperial Scholar

The historian cannot claim to convince if he does not demonstrate two qualities: Independence of spirit and liberty of the pen. —Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov1 In any contest for sheer intellectual brilliance and depth of culture within the Romanov dynasty, Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich would be a leading contender for first place. —Paul Chavchavadze2

Only on one point is almost everyone in agreement on Nicholas Mikhailovich: He was the only real intellectual in the Russian imperial family.3 His close friend and associate Constantine Brummer explained that Nicholas Mikhailovich was “a true scholar in the medieval sense— he had a passion for all knowledge, be they literary or the natural sciences.”4 Indeed, his intellectual interests were catholic and extensive as is evidenced by his involvement in intellectual organizations. He was, at one time or another, president of the Imperial Historical Society, the Imperial Geographic Society, the Society of Pomology, and in what is one of the greatest honors that a scholar can receive, especially for a foreigner, he was elected a member of the French Academy.

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From his earliest years his letters are replete with sensitive, aesthetic comments on art, literature, architecture, and scientific matters, and it is obvious that he was a universal scholar in the making. This development may have been his intellectual mother’s greatest legacy to him. Typical are his remarks in the early days of the Great War when he wrote, “I am finishing these lines by a beautiful light of the moon and a warm evening where everything reflects the peace of nature.” Then he added, “What a contrast with the slaughter between men and the ruin everywhere.”5 Likewise is his lament at the changing of a theatrical performance of Gogol’s Dead Souls, which he called “a rich spectacle,” to a later date.6 Even when discussing with Alexander Kerensky, the first minister of justice after the February Revolution, the transfer of Romanov family lands to the Provisional Government, he worked into the discussion the Decembrist Revolt in 1825. His scholastic labors were much admired, even by the Soviet scholars, as is evidenced by the fact that he is the only one of three nonruling members of the imperial family to receive an entry in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia.7 Yet his greatest claim to intellectual fame was, of course, his historical work, and it was never far from his mind no matter what he was doing. His letters, especially those to the French historian Frédéric Masson, are endless reports on his current historical endeavors, which were never ending. While “stranded” in Petrograd in the spring of 1915, he typically utilized the time to research and write. “Here I have been able to bring a little order for the work of my two societies (history and geography),” he wrote Masson, “and I have finished the seventh volume of Relations Diplomatique [Les Relations diplomatiques de la Russie et de la France d’après les rapports des ambassadeurs d’Alexandre et de Napoléon, 1808–1912] . . . as well as the second Russian edition of Alexander I [L’Empereur Alexandre 1er, Essai d’Etude historique (2 vols.)] , . . . the first having been completely out of print.”8 He constantly informs his corresponder of what he is reading, and of course, what he thinks about it, usually giving more detail than the reader might wish to know. Whereas Nicholas Mikhailovich’s letters to almost everyone resemble lectures (except those to his revered mother), he eagerly sought Masson’s opinion (“I await with impatience your views,” he often wrote) and shared with him his ideas and the progress being made on his current project. Always there is a persistent impatience to return to his studies. When visiting his father and sister in Cannes in 1904, he wrote to Masson, “The sojourn here, in spite of the beautiful sun and the mass of roses, will be very monotonous and boring, but I have taken many interesting works with me and I count on giving myself over to reading [history].”9 His devotion to its study is no better exemplified than by his efforts to disobey

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one of his father’s last wishes. Grand Duke Mikhail had from his youth kept a diary, which, given his prominence in so many Russian events, was an invaluable source for the history of the late empire. For some unknown reason, the old grand duke had left a note stating that he wished the diary burned after his death. Niki the historian was horrified at the destruction of such a valuable source of history, and he seized on the fact that his late father had not signed the instructions to argue to his siblings that they not be obeyed, going so far as to say that to do so would be illegal. He even suggested that the whole question be placed before the emperor himself. Curiously, his brother George’s wife Marie postulated most stridently that the grand duke’s last wishes should be obeyed. Quite a row followed, and it is not clear whether the diary survived.10 Nicholas Mikhailovich possessed an almost childlike excitement about his research and new discoveries, and his enthusiasm knew no bounds. In 1910 he wrote upon receiving some unexpected materials in one of his collections of documents, “It’s a miracle! Yesterday the librarian . . . brought me a small packet and I found in this packet 9 letters from 1805, 6 from 1807, 1 from 1808, 7 from 1810, and 4 from 1811, and 1 from 1812.”11 Moreover, he was one of those people who wish constantly to live and breathe history, who are constantly trying to become close and indeed live with the historical past. In the grand duke’s case, he had the luxury of not having to make a living with the study of it. Mossolov, who, we have seen, had little good to say about Niki, did remember that he had “a taste and marked aptitude” for historical studies.12 The Russian diplomat A. Nekliudov, who would have had opportunities to hear of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s works outside of Russia, spoke of his writings as done “with extreme care” and a “luxe de bon aloi [extravagance of good quality],” and that his works were “well regarded abroad.” Nekliudov noted that Niki counted among his “intimate friends” some contemporary French historians.13 It was these fellow historians, both in Russia and abroad, whose opinion of his work he valued most highly. Because his education was not the most conventional, the grand duke’s work in history was dilettantish at first, as he usually dabbled in topics that interested him most, dealing with historical “might-have-beens.” Yet when he was called on by the Imperial Historical Society to write several articles for their bibliographic dictionary, he developed “a passion to write and publish the truth,” his friend Masson said after his death.14 From that point onward, Nicholas’s avocation became a vocation, indeed even a passion—an all-consuming fascination with the past and a desire to make it known. He had a remarkable memory that enabled him to bring together names, dates, and facts, remembering small, seemingly insignificant

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details, weaving them all together to solve historical problems. His writing, his brother Sandro observed, showed the work of “a brilliant stylist possessing the secret of harmonious prose.”15 History’s study was a holy grail that he would pursue literally to the last hours of his life. His historical method was to examine most closely primary sources— documents, letters, diaries, memoirs, and indeed even portraits of the individuals studied—to encapsulate all aspects of the subject studied. His position in the ruling family gave him access to archival materials inaccessible to mere ordinary historians. Yet not only could he obtain materials others could not acquire, he could have these documents located by the archival employees and then delivered from the state archives to his home, where he could work on them in the comfort of his own study.16 His sister-in-law remembered how he showed her papers he had taken home from the Imperial Archives and how interesting they were.17 When traveling in remote parts of his country, he haunted the local repositories and libraries searching for crumbs of Russian history. Like a child on Christmas morning, he wrote in 1908 from Dikanka, a small town in Poltava province made famous by the writer Nikolai Gogol, “Here I am in the backwoods of Poltava Guberniia [the largest administrative subdivisions of the empire] at Dikanka . . . [and] here are some marvelous archives.”18 When he was not working in St. Petersburg, where he had many distractions, he loved to go to Borjomi, where he would work undisturbed. On his estate in the Caucasian wilds, he had another fabulous library (by all accounts rivaling the one he had in St. Petersburg), and here, with few distractions, he immersed himself unmolested for months in his work.19 Many of his projects saw both their birth and completion in this quiet corner of the Russian Empire. Not everyone, however, was pleased with his writings. His own brother Mikhail, who appears to have dabbled in history, came to him on occasion for what seems to have been advice, which the younger grand duke never took, becoming angry when it was given. In 1889 Nicholas Mikhailovich wrote his mother that Miche-Miche “comes to me very often” with volumes of history. “I am very careful in what I have told him and if ever I suggest anything contrary to his views, he becomes quite angry and begins to say some impertinences [?].” According to the grand duke, he held his temper in these unpleasant encounters but was happy when his brother left.20 Countess Kleinmichel, whose memoir gives us a rather gossipy view of the last years of the imperial family, condemned the grand duke’s history itself for being “gossipy.” “He was a scandalmonger,” she wrote, “who ransacked history for the sake of gossip.” Noting that the eighteenth century was a “happy hunting ground” for

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such things, she added that he did not “neglect the 19th or the 20th either.” She noted, without much evidence, that he “felt very happy” when he learned that his great-aunt Elizabeth Alekseevna, wife of Tsar Alexander I, had had a lover, and he published “with loving care” every crumb of information he could find on the young officer that was her paramour.21 Kleinmichel was certainly no scholar and did not understand that historians should present the truth as the facts reveal it. Simply because he did not cover up his great-aunt’s indiscretion does not mean he was “very happy” about it. Professional historians admired his work, and nonhistorians to whom he sent copies of his books seem to have been most impressed, including Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who wrote a most glowing letter on Nicholas’s Portraits Russes des XVIII et XIX Siècles [Russian Portraits of the 18th and 19th Centuries].22 Indeed, he received copious amounts of fan mail from, mainly foreign, figures—French literary figures of the day, prominent politicians, and what not. His following in Russia does not seem to have been as great, but then Russia’s intellectual community in the grand duke’s day, while of very high quality, was not as large as that of better-educated France. His perceptive brother Sandro wrote that “his Gallicized thoughts would sound strange indeed in Russian,”23 and although his works were always found in Russian editions, and often written first in Russian, his French mentality indeed might not have been as understood in his own country. He does not seem to have had much rapport with the great Russian historians of his day, such as Vasilii Kliuchevsky, and the reason remains somewhat of a puzzle. Most probably there were few Russians who were professional historians of French history and culture, even if it did touch on Russia at the time. There must have been some association, for, as we shall see, Nicholas turned to these scholars to lead his country to the peace table if the Great War should ever end, and, as we shall also see, they likewise honored him at that time. Nicholas Mikhailovich’s great wealth enabled him to have a number of research assistants, a luxury not generally available to most historians. His most valuable helper with historical work was Constantine Brummer, his aide-de-camp, who seems to have done a great deal of the legwork often performed by historians themselves. Brummer had been assigned to him from the earliest years of his military career and had stayed with him after his military life came to an end.24 His memoir article written after the Revolution gives us almost the only view of Nicholas’s last months. He also was helped by M. Golombevsky, his secretary, who was himself the author of several biographies. Niki seems to have relied on him to write acknowledgments and handle nonpersonal correspondence.25 Prince Nikita Trubetskoi of the famous Russian noble family worked

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with him, and like Brummer, was a member of his task force. M. N. Molodovsky, his property steward, did not work in Niki’s historical research but managed all of his properties, relieving him of the distraction the job would have caused in his writing. The grand duke considered this assistant “very precious.”26 There were many other nameless people who searched for his documents in the archives and, in the days before photocopy machines, made handwritten copies of the papers he needed. As usual he displayed a sensitivity absent in most grand dukes toward those beneath him, insisting that these anonymous archival employees be paid additionally for the work they did, even though the drudges may already have been receiving a state salary. In 1903 Nicholas wrote to his friend Count Vladimir Lamsdorf, “The only thing that bothers me terribly . . . is the financial question. Truly I cannot feel that they are working for me darom [“for nothing; gratis”; suddenly the grand duke uses a Russian word in a letter otherwise written in French], and I beg you to fix me the sum that I would have to send as compensation to the persons who have made the numerous copies for me.”27 In addition to the grand duke’s historical writing, he made a major contribution to the study of social science with his presidency of the Imperial Geographic Society and then later the Imperial Historical Society. In 1892 the presidency of the former fell vacant, and the tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich (later Tsar Nicholas II) was recommended by the outgoing president Peter Semenov, but Alexander III interceded, stating that his son’s plate was too full as it was and recommended Nicholas Mikhailovich, who then became its president. He never published any scholarly works in the discipline, nor does he seem to have ever had the interest in it that he had in history, but it was his first involvement in a scholarly association.28 In 1909, upon the death of A. A. Polovtsov, who had been president of the Imperial Historical Society, Nicholas II, who held the post of honorary chairman, named Nicholas Mikhailovich, who had by this time become a well-published historian, to lead the organization. The appointment came as a surprise to Niki. The presidency had been offered first to his older cousin Constantine Nicholaevich, the poet, in keeping with familial seniority, but the elder grand duke had declined because he was “too busy.” The emperor then nominated Niki in a fourpage letter “in the most amicable terms,” and he accepted the offer “with thanks.”29 The Imperial Historical Society was founded in 1866 and had served to coordinate historical activities such as centennials, anniversaries, and publications. It convened several times a year. When Nicholas Mikhailovich presided over these assemblies, he made frequent reports to the emperor in which he must have told the tsar much more than he

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wanted to know about the activities of the society.30 Yet Niki was the type to take very seriously any job that he took, and this position was certainly no different. He also had the task of mediating between the partisan squabbles of the “incorrigible Right” in the society and the Left, who wanted to mix politics with the society’s work, a struggle not unknown in many historical organizations. To assist him he quickly installed his supporters in key positions. His friend Daskov became treasurer and his personal secretary Golombevsky he placed on the council of the society. He also quickly made three French historians honorary members: Of course his friend Masson, Gabriel Hanotaux, and Albert Vandal. Like most new leaders, Niki wished to show he was in charge by denigrating the former president, who, we have seen, did not think too highly of the grand duke anyway. “I dare not follow the example of the mad [?] Polovtsov,” he wrote to the tsar in July 1911,31 and he made it plain to all from the beginning that “this society is no longer the society of M. Polovtsov.”32 He put the work of the organization first, even to the point of asking for the former minutes of meetings in which he had never participated so that he could be fully informed of all past actions.33 Even in the war years, the business of the Historical Society was paramount in what Nicholas had to do. In March 1915 he rushed back to Petrograd to prepare for the annual meeting that month. The next year took even more of his time as the year 1916 was the Jubilee Year of the Society. The French members received, giving to the grand duke’s intervention, a snuffbox with the tsar’s portrait in miniature as a memento.34 The May 23 meeting celebrated the Jubilee, which was described in a report to the tsar by President Nicholas Mikhailovich in almost tiresome detail.35 One area in which Nicholas Mikhailovich’s historical work proved to be most valuable, and probably still has an impact today, was his creation of an Archival Commission in May 1914. Its purpose was to coordinate and give assistance to local history archives and coordinate their work into some sort of national all-union archival umbrella. The meeting that founded the commission took place at Nicholas Mikhailovich’s palace under his “August Presidency,” and it included six men, among them the noted historian S. F. Platonov. Its direction was placed in the hands of A. N. Kulomzin, the president of the special commission of the Imperial Russian Historical Society and one of its former vice presidents. The war effort after 1914 in no way prevented the grand duke from requesting money from the tsar for the support of the government archives of Nizhni-Novgorod and Saratov, although he noted that he was asking for money only for these two owing to “the difficult circumstances” brought

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on by the war.36 Like almost everything, the commission’s work was delayed somewhat by the conflict and was stopped completely by the Revolution of 1917, but it laid the groundwork for a national archival commission, on which postrevolutionary activities have been built. One other item of the society into which he vigorously threw himself was the preparation for the Jubilee celebrations of the birth of Tsar Alexander II, which were to take place in April 1918. Nicholas II asked Niki to begin planning the centennial of the birth of the “Tsar-Liberator” immediately after the Jubilee of the Historical Society was finished “to celebrate the day of my grandfather’s birth in Russia and prolong the memory of the Tsar-Liberator of the peasants.”37 In forming the committee, Nicholas Mikhailovich included Platonov, V. V. Sheglov, the director of the personal library of Nicholas II, and Baron M. A. Taube, a senator and doctor of international law.38 This additional chore did leave the grand duke feeling “pinched,” as it would be necessary to “work a great deal, to consult the representatives of all the ministries, as well as the survivors and collaborators of the decreed reforms in his [Alexander II’s] long reign.”39 Nicholas “convened the whole world,” as he put it, and they divided themselves into committees and subcommittees and immediately began their work. Yet with the arrival of summer, a time in Old Russia when the leisure classes tended to retreat to country estates and stop all useful work, everyone scattered, and to the great consternation of the grand duke, no one was working on this recent enterprise. Nicholas Mikhailovich had little patience with those who were not as enthusiastic about a project as he was, and in August he wrote the tsar, “The work [on the Alexander II Jubilee] proceeds slowly and with difficulty. Almost all the historians are . . . resting in different corners of Russia.” It frustrated him that “at the present moment only three are working usefully” and that “all the rest are sleeping.”40 Yet there was one part of the task that Nicholas Mikhailovich could do himself, the editing of a manuscript that was to be a book on the late tsar. Of course, he had no way of knowing that the revolution six months away would make pointless anything that had been done. A part of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s historical endeavors that sometimes seemed to interest him most was his collection of artifacts from history, mainly pictures and miniatures of historical figures. The grand duke truly felt that history was revealed through pictures. At the turn of the century, he wrote of one from his collection, “The prince [in the picture] is enchanted with his promotion and carries . . . the epaulets of a general. The more I see it, the more I know him.”41 He wrote Masson with glee from Tiflis that same year, “I have just made a new acquisition. It is a

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snuff box in oval form (in perfect repair), gold and in the middle a miniature of Emperor Napoleon I. The miniature is superb,”42 he wrote, and as though he were living on a college history professor’s salary, he added with delight, “The present Duc de Rivoli had asked 20,000 francs, but no one wanted it and I got it for a reduced sum.”43 As early as 1889 he prattled on in even his letters to his mother about his collecting, the bargains he had found, or the tableaux he had bought. This point in his life must have witnessed the beginnings of his collecting French objets d’art. It was the time of the construction of the Eiffel Tower, considered an abomination to many French people with artistic pretensions. In one of his letters to his mother, Nicholas took the French attitude calling it “une affaire de sport chez nos compatriotes [a sporting event in the country of our compatriots].”44 In 1898 he wrote, “The price [3,000 francs] of a tableau does not seem to me to be exorbitant, . . . but I would want to see it myself.” Later in the month it appears that he had somehow bought it. “So the tableau is mine. I consider it as such,” and then he goes on to describe how he will get the money to Paris to pay for it.45 The grand duke took special interest in the works of Jacques-Louis David, whose paintings of the First French Empire were even then beyond the wallets of most collectors. While endeavoring to assemble some of the artist’s works, he encountered David’s painting of MacDonald on the market in France, along with two pastels by two lesser-known artists, for the sum of 7,000 francs. Although he sent the sum of 6 million francs, which seems to have been the agreed upon price by the Crédit Lyonnais in Paris, someone beat him to it, for the paintings vanished.46 Nicholas’s greatest acquisition of the eminent painter was one of his portraits of Napoleon, which remained with him until after the Revolution. He first hid it somewhere in the basement wall of his palace and then smuggled it out of Russia through Finland to the West.47 His love for art objects was extended in the form of art shows of his works, sharing them with the population and other collectors. In 1905 as the country was plunging into the 1905 Revolution, he hosted an exhibit of 2,500 items, many of which had never been shown, in the palace of Catherine the Great’s lover Gregory Potemkin, the famous Tauride Palace,48 soon to be the house of the Russian parliament that the Revolution would force on the tsarist government. A few years before the outbreak of the Great War, Nicholas turned part of his palace into a permanent museum to display his many works, and it was open to the public. Nicholas Mikhailovich’s scholarly interests did not, however, stop with the study of history. In his eulogy of the grand duke in 1919, Masson

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said that had he not been so dedicated to the study of history, he would have been a “naturalist without equal,” citing as evidence his writings on butterflies and his collection of the insects, which he gave to the Imperial Museum, the experimental gardens that he planted in the Caucasus, and his work with and presidency of the Russian Society of Pomology.49 He might have added as well the grand duke’s introduction of scientific farming on his estates. His work was so well-known and respected that on the death of Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich in 1915, he was twice elected to the office of president of the Russian Academy of Science, although curiously he both times declined the elevation. He wrote to the tsar in June 1916, “Forgive me for having twice refused the honor of being president of the Academy of Science, but this business is definitely not for me. I feel very strongly about it.” He then went on to recommend “two men who are not grand dukes,” Count V. N. Kokovtsev and Admiral Alexeev, who are “appropriate for the post” because they are both “very cultivated.”50 Niki’s greatest scientific interest, however, was lepidoptery. His work on the subject, a nine-volume study on Asiatic butterflies entitled Mémoires sur les Lépidoptères [Memories of Butterflies], drew intense praise from the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, an outstanding expert on butterflies himself, and for whom a species was named.51 Nicholas Mikhailovich had gotten his early guidance in this field of natural history from two directors of the Museum of Tiflis, Doctors Gustave Radde and Gustave Sievers. By the age of eighteen, collection and observation of butterflies were already a passion for him. During the Russo-Turkish War, he wrote to his mother of a trip with one Oldenburg. “He was a very agreeable companion,” he wrote, “because he would sleep almost all the time and I could busy myself by observing the different butterflies which pass near the route. There are examples of such beauty and so rare.”52 In his late twenties he was still chasing the insects, and a trip to Borjomi in 1888 gave him ample time to pursue them. “I walk about all day making my search for butterflies as I have never been able to do before.”53 He actually exhausted himself at it. A week later he wrote to his mother that he had nothing to report, that he was spending his time going after butterflies, and that all this walking “makes my feet hurt everywhere,” and then he added humorously, “but that is reparable, despite my advanced age.”54 Several weeks later, he describes the weather as being “ideal for finding butterflies” and that the mountains contained many interesting species, “especially the Colis Olga [perhaps a species he named for his mother?].”55 In mid-summer, he was still at it, but this time so high in the mountains that there were “patches of snow in July in full sunlight.” He was elated

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at finding “some very good, very rare butterflies [and] having seen the high places that they inhabit.”56 Nicholas’s interest and study of butterflies led him to make a special voyage to the Canary Islands to seek several rare specimens. His large collection was one of the first in Europe, and he gave it (one source says “willed it”)57 to the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. So taken was he with lepidoptera that he adorned the gates to his palace at Borjomi with iron replicas of the colorful insects.58 Yet other natural scientific interests drew his attention. One was pomology, and it led, as we have noted, to yet another presidency, that of the Russian Society of Pomology. He developed a seedless tangerine, some of which his brother Sandro grew on his estate Ai-todor.59 In his book on hunting published during the war, Nicholas demonstrates a deep scientific interest even in geese and ducks, giving a discourse on the types and species of both, working easily with their scientific Latin names.60 One stunning work of a different nature is the grand duke’s five volumes of Russkie portrety (Russian portraits) from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With commentary written in both Russian and French, the work consists of portraits of figures from the reigns of Catherine the Great, Paul, and Alexander I. There is no systematic presentation of the subjects for, as he writes in the introduction, “The work will not be a dictionary of portraits.” Yet with the index to each volume and a cumulative one at the end, it might well serve as one. The originals, works photographed, are from palaces, museums, and galleries, and Nicholas gives a short biographical sketch of each person presented. Because so many of the originals may have been destroyed by war and the Revolution, the collection is invaluable for scholars wishing to trace personages from the period. It is beautifully done and is a monumental work. One other group of works of a rather unusual nature were designed to be biographical and genealogic guides: Moskovsky nekropol’ (Moscow Necropolis), Peterburgskii nekropol’ (Petersburg Necropolis), Russkii nekropol’ v chuzhikh kraiiakh (Russian Necropolis in Foreign Regions), and Russkii provintsial’nyi nekropol’ (Russian Provincial Necropol). These works are lists of those persons buried in Russian graveyards in the places indicated, although the one listing foreign graveyards contains only Paris and its environs. The entrants are listed in alphabetical order and are usually accompanied by their birth and death dates. The last work, the one on the provinces, published in 1914, was intended as a four-volume compendium, divided into four regions, but only the first, that on the northern region, appeared, the war and Revolution having presumably stopped the completion of the others. Although the grand duke’s name appears

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on the title page, the compilation was done by other people who are given credit in the work, and one suspects that much of the legwork for the document collections was done by someone other than the grand duke as well. We can be certain, however, that he was the major role in directing the assembly and editing of the documents and wrote by himself the introductions and provided any critical analysis. The grand duke was never without projects, and on the eve of the war he had enough planned to last for the remainder of a normal lifetime. “I am in the act of preparing several new books,” he wrote Masson in 1912, and they included studies of the aides-de-camp of Alexander I, the letters of Empress Marie, and additional work on Empress Elizabeth, as well as the grand duchess, daughter of Paul, to her demoiselle d’honneur, a collection of reports of diplomatic relations, and reports of Lebzeltern, an Austrian diplomat, who the grand duke felt the need to inform his reader was “a Jew.”61 The war erupted less than two years later, and the only work to appear was the collection of Lebzeltern. What made Nicholas Mikhailovich a well-known historian in the West was not only the fact that his subject was often Napoleon, a man who fascinates both the professional and the armchair historians, but that many of his works originally appeared in French because the documentation was originally in French. The French language was still the “international language” at the time of Tsar Alexander I, so it was widely used, especially by diplomats, and many works were originally written in it. Moreover, owing to Nicholas Mikhailovich’s association with Frédéric Masson, he had an entreé to the publishing world in France for his works, and that connection availed him of a broad readership. Among French intellectuals, it made him famous. One of his first Russian works to be published in French was his 1903 biography of Count Paul Stroganov, whose family led the opening and exploration of Siberia in the sixteenth century. Nicholas was furiously at work on it in the late spring of 1902, searching everywhere for pictures of the people who appeared in its pages. In January 1903 he wrote Masson with regret that he would be able to send him “only the Russian texts of Stroganov” when the first volume would appear around Easter.62 Was he hinting? He began searching for a French publisher in January 1904, but it seems that he was at first unsuccessful. For some reason, he did not send the works a volume at a time to Masson as he had promised, because in June the next year, he wrote that he would expedite the three volumes of Stroganov to Masson’s home.63 Yet within a few months he was asking Masson to locate a French publisher for him, indeed he gave him carte blanche to find one, suggesting Plon, one of the leading French publishing houses—then and now. Masson clearly acted as his

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agent64 and agreed to write an introduction to it. Masson’s help delighted Nicholas Mikhailovich because he was apprehensive about the reception his book would have with the French public,65 and the prominent French historian’s endorsement would be a great boost for it. Even with his powerful help, Nicholas Mikhailovich still had to face the maddening delays that writers often have to suffer at the hands of editors. Almost a year later, the work had still not appeared, although it was scheduled for publication. It did, however, come out before the end of the year. Masson was, not surprisingly, quite laudatory about the work in his introduction. He noted that the Russians were much ahead of the French in publishing documents from the early nineteenth century, and he especially praised the grand duke for the way he totally immersed himself in his historical writing, noting that his historical work included the collection of objets d’art and miniatures.66 The work reflects a scholarship of high quality. Most of the archival papers came from the Stroganov family collection deposited in their Petersburg palace and the archives of Prince P. P. Golitsyn, which had been preserved at the village of Marino. The grand duke, however, added papers from the archives of the Winter Palace, the foreign ministry, and assorted military archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The first chapter is an introduction to the Stroganov family. The remainder is a biography of Count Paul Stroganov, a close friend and advisor to Tsar Alexander I and a member of the tsar’s “unofficial committee,” which dabbled at writing a constitution for Russia. The book is liberally sprinkled with pictures of people from the period, and the text is thoroughly footnoted. Each volume concludes with an annex composed of documents. Although it is much in the form of what today is called a coffee-table book, it is a very solid work of history. The study was well received in France. Most of the feedback that we have comes from those to whom the grand duke sent copies, which included Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro, so the grand duke must have forgiven the paper for reporting his diplomatic indiscretion in 1885. Paul Deschaney wrote the grand duke in January 1906 thanking him for the “gracious present [envoi]” that he had sent. “This beautiful book, so rich in unpublished documents,” he added, “is a [illegible word] contribution to the history of Russia and France, and I am very honored to receive it from you.”67 Maurice Barrès, to whom Masson had recommended the study, wrote, “This work exists for the imagination like a novel of Tolstoy, . . .” adding that it “illuminated the origins of the liberal movement in Russia.”68 The French literary figure Ernest Daudet wrote in 1909 that with Portraits Russes, Stroganov, and L’Imperatrice Elizabeth [Empress Elizabeth], he had “marvelous documents on the most

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sensational years in the history of Russia.”69 The Stroganov biography, therefore, opened widely the French literary world to the grand duke. From this point on, he would be a part of it. Indeed, from his election to the French Academy, he would become one of its leaders. Nicholas Mikhailovich’s best-known works, however, were on his ancestor Emperor Alexander I. He seems to have become interested in the “enigmatic tsar” around the turn of the century when he wrote to Count Lamsdorf, the minister of internal affairs, about any evidence in the archives that would confirm a piece he had recently seen theorizing that Alexander might have died a Catholic.70 From that point, his interest in his great-uncle spread to the legend of Feodor Kuzmich. Russian history is replete with many characters who supposedly did not really die when history records that they did, and reappeared later. There were the numerous False Dmitris of the Time of Troubles (1598–1613), who kept popping up, several of whom were recognized as legitimate by the real Dmitri’s mother, whose credibility began to wear a little thin by number three. Emilian Pugachev claimed in the reign of Catherine the Great (1762–1796) that he was the murdered Tsar Peter III. In 1960 Pravda lambasted the naïveté of the contemporary Russian peasants for accepting as legitimate a young man who was going from village to village telling people that he was Nicholas II’s son, the tsarevich Aleksei, who had been murdered in 1918. They were bowing before him and receiving him as tsar despite the fact that he was clearly only fourteen or fifteen years old in 1960, the age Aleksei had been when he had been killed forty-two years before! Then there was the ongoing saga of the many Anastasias, the most prominent’s claim being laid to rest recently by modern science’s DNA testing. Among these tales is the story of Feodor Kuzmich, a wandering holy man in mid-nineteenth century Russia, who some believed was Tsar Alexander I. Alexander I died in the remote town of Taganrog on the Sea of Azov in 1825. He had increasingly become a religious mystic in the last years of his life, and in 1814, while visiting Great Britain, even flirted with the Quaker faith.71 When Feodor Kuzmich appeared after Alexander’s death, and stories began circulating that Alexander’s doctor had refused to sign the tsar’s death certificate, saying that the body was not that of the tsar (actually he had signed it), the myth, like the others, was born. Other stories, such as the departure of the yacht of a British family from Taganrog for the Holy Land, fueled the legend. Niki threw himself wholeheartedly into the question of Feodor Kuzmich, and he even wrote a short book on it entitled Legend o Konchine Imperatora Aleksandra I v Sibiri v obraz Staritsa Fedora Kos’micha (The legend of the demise of Emperor Alexander I in Siberia into the person

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of the holy man Feodor Kuzmich). The grand duke begins by reviewing the legends of the comebacks, and he even has pictures of Feodor Kuzmich, samples of his handwriting, Alexander’s death mask, and the samples of late tsar’s handwriting. Yet he states categorically that there is no truth to the story. His brother Sandro remembered that Niki spent several years in the family archives trying to find any evidence that Alexander I was indeed Feodor Kuzmich. Moreover, the diaries of Niki and Sandro’s grandfather, Nicholas I, make no mention of his having visited Kuzmich, which he is reputed to have done.72 Even Nicholas II asked the grand duke about it at breakfast once in 1914, and for the hundredth time, Niki explained the “total absurdity” (vsiunelenost’) of the legend, adding that the “public’s love for such” makes the legend believed.73 Helene Izvolsky states in her memoirs that Nicholas Mikhailovich had headed a committee to investigate the Feodor Kuzmich story, and that the committee had decided there was no foundation for the tale. Yet she added that he had no right to elaborate on the findings and was bound to silence. He had long conversations with her father Alexander Izvolsky, and he would “sometimes hint” that there was more to the business than had been revealed.74 Had Nicholas known more than he stood by in print, he would most certainly have told his brother, which de did not. Moreover, it is hard to imagine Niki’s being “bound to silence” about anything, given his penchant for telling everything on his mind. Even today, however, some members of the family still believe that he saw validity in the legend.75 From this beginning, he then published General-Ad”iutanty Imperatora Aleksandra Pervogo (Adjutant Generals of Alexander I), a short pamphlet with a seventeen-page introduction recounting events in the life of each general, and he then began work on a full-length biography of his great-uncle. In 1911 he wrote to Masson, “I have busied myself . . . by reading a lot. . . . I have [also] decided . . . to begin a new book . . . making Alexander I a historical study. . . .” He planned to work more with what his contemporaries said about him than what was said by “following generations.” He strove to deal more with the “psychology of the individual” than a rehash of his reign. Most of the work done on Alexander I to this point was hagiography, Nicholas Mikhailovich felt, and he wanted to take into account “his vices, his weaknesses and his consequences.”76 He hoped to bury once and for all the Feodor Kuzmich mystery, which had been recently resurrected by N. K. Schilder, a director of the Imperial Public Library and a biographer of Alexander I. In his work, he planned also to incorporate information on more persons from the time.77 By July his book had taken a more definite form, and not surprisingly, he planned to include a great deal on Alexander’s relationship

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with Napoleon. The period from his rise to the throne until 1807, Nicholas Mikhailovich called “the years of oscillation.” Then came “the period of alliance with the French emperor, 1807–1811,” and then “the years of conflict” until Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815. The next focus would be on the years of the congresses and the Concert of Europe, and finally the last years of his life, which Nicholas Mikhailovich called “the years of disappointment.” The work would liberally contain sections of Alexander’s correspondence with his contemporaries.78 The final product, which appeared in 1912 in both Russian and French, was L’Empereur Alexandre I: essai d’étude historique (Emperor Alexander I: A Historical Essay), a two-volume work that was not only a biographical study of the character and work of the tsar but an examination of his reign and the man himself. There were gaps in knowledge about his life because, the grand duke believed, Nicholas I, Alexander I’s brother, had destroyed papers relating to him. He stated in the preface that his goal was “to furnish materials for the historians of the future.” As ever, he thanked Masson. The work is solid and footnoted, although not liberally, and the usual appendix includes letters between Alexander and his philosophic tutor, César de la Harpe, important figures of the time, and even reports of Comte de Saint-Julien to Metternich, the host of the Vienna Congress. A copy of the manuscript appears in the grand duke’s inimitable penmanship (also, some pages are printed and perhaps are galleys) in his papers in GARF in Moscow.79 The work was well-received in both Russia and abroad. It was the major factor that led the History Faculty of the University of Moscow to award him an honorary doctorate in history in 1916.80 In France, his work caused major revisionism among scholars of the Napoleonic period81 and even resulted in a letter of praise from Raymond Poincaré, the president of France.82 In a bit of overstatement catalyzed by sibling loyalty, his brother Alexander wrote that the work “remains unsurpassed in the historical literature of Russia.”83 It was, however, an outstanding piece of historical work, and it resulted in an avalanche of invitations to speak to French historical societies. Moreover, the book was likewise the major factor that led to Nicholas Mikhailovich’s election to the French Academy. Given Nicholas Mikhailovich’s literary interests, it is not surprising that he came at least in a scholarly way to know Count Lev Tolstoy, the greatest writer ever to use the Russian language, and arguably the greatest writer ever to put pen to paper. Their acquaintance came late in the great writer’s life, after the turn of the twentieth century. Tolstoy had by then written countless small works and his three great novels, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and The Resurrection, the last of which resulted in his ex-

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communication from the Orthodox Church. In retaliation, the great writer donated all of the royalties from the work to the Old Believers, a persecuted Orthodox sect that had refused to accept some liturgical changes added by the Russian patriarch Nikon in the seventeenth century. With Tolstoy’s help, many emigrated to Canada, where they have over the years given the Canadian government no small amount of trouble. Tolstoy was, therefore, some sort of a pariah by the time he and Nicholas Mikhailovich became acquainted. The reason for the first contact was Nicholas Mikhailovich’s need to challenge a pamphlet written by Tolstoy denouncing Niki’s grandfather, Nicholas I. Niki had written the novelist to point out “the extreme absurdity of his accusations,” to quote his brother Sandro, and Tolstoy had responded, thanking the grand duke for his “interesting historical data,” adding that he had a “deep respect for the patriotic policies” of Nicholas I, but then continued to distribute his pamphlet.84 In the years that followed, they debated many issues, usually by mail, and although they strongly disagreed with each other on many points, they did so “without raised voices,” maintaining a mutual respect for each other.85 The two men became personally acquainted when in the fall of 1901 Niki discovered, when visiting his brother Sandro and his sister-in-law Ksenia at their estate Ai-Todor in the Crimea, that the great Tolstoy was staying nearby at Countess Sophia Panin’s dacha, where he was recuperating from scarlet fever. Nicholas Mikhailovich was as excited as a child in the presence of a famous rock or movie star. “Here I am . . . two steps from Count Léon Tolstoy,” he wrote to Masson. “I hope to see the great man and to make his acquaintance; he is a most genial man. . . . I would want to hear no less than the sound of his voice if he is not going to enter any long conversations with me.”86 Niki wrote the countess three days later to ask permission to visit and received a reply suggesting that he come later that very day. On the grand duke’s arrival, Tolstoy came down from his room on the second story and greeted Nicholas Mikhailovich warmly. He gave the younger Nicholas the impression at first of being an old man. The writer was dressed simply in the Russian peasant attire for which he was famous: baggy trousers held up with a leather belt, small boots, and a gray peasant shirt (rubashka). Niki was immediately struck by the author’s bright blue eyes that “peered into one’s very soul.” Tolstoy had a reputation of lacking personal hygiene, so Nicholas Mikhailovich felt the need to note that the writer was “rather tidy, well washed, [with] clean hands and feet.” His large beard was “in poetic disorder, but combed.”87 The grand duke recorded that they spoke about several topics. The first was the life of the Dukhobors in the Caucasus. On this subject he and

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Tolstoy disagreed, he noted, without telling exactly where their differences lay. Then they turned, curiously, to the subject of Feodor Kuzmich. Niki had just recently become interested in the question, but why he might have thought that Tolstoy knew anything on the matter is a puzzle. Perhaps he felt that because the man had lived through the past forty years of the holy man’s life, he may have heard something. If the great writer knew anything on the question, he does not seem to have told Niki, but he did say that he had wanted a long time ago to write something about the Feodor Kuzmich legend and added that he had been interested in the “soul” of Tsar Alexander I, which was “original, complex, [and] twofaced.” Tolstoy added that if indeed he had become a religious hermit, he would have gained atonement and would have been like “a figure out of Shakespeare.” The two men of letters went on to speak about “three personal things,” which the grand duke does not specify, and then they spoke of mutual acquaintances. Not wanting to exhaust the old man, Nicholas Mikhailovich finally terminated the conversation. Tolstoy accompanied him to the door and gave him a very warm farewell.88 Curiously, Tolstoy used proshchaite, a rather terminal form of “good-bye,” implying that the user is not likely to see the individual again after their parting. The next day, Nicholas Mikhailovich wrote Masson, “Yesterday I have seen the great man and remained at his home a good hour—most agreeable.” The grand duke went on to say that “despite his seventy-four years, he is a charmer of the first order [sic],” adding that his voice was “strong and agreeable” and that he had the general appearance of “a muzhik [a Russian male peasant] but very proper and very neat in all physical details.” He then returned once again to describe those “very clear blue and very expressive eyes.” Nicholas was totally overwhelmed by the great writer. He added in his note to Masson what must have been obvious: “This man has me charmed, interested,” he wrote the French historian, but he did not find himself “conquered by his philosophy.”89 On November 15 he wrote Tolstoy a thank-you note in which he addressed him as “Most dear [mileishii] Lev Nikolaevich.” For the grand duke, the penmanship is extremely neat yet still difficult to read. He thanked Tolstoy for the “rainbow reception which I will never forget.” He observed that they “loved one another, but . . . .” The remainder is still illegible, yet one can guess that he makes the point that their views on many things are different. At one point he makes a rare slip into English, writing, “That is the question.”90 The grand duke’s second visit to Tolstoy occurred several days later, and the air of the meeting seems to have been a little more relaxed. Nicholas Mikhailovich was invited upstairs to Tolstoy’s study, where the

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literary giant greeted him warmly. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said as the grand duke arrived. He then went into a lengthy apology concerning their first meeting. “Indeed I had scarlet fever, I had been excommunicated from the Church, . . . but you came to visit me anyway.” As if for emphasis, Tolstoy repeated, “I had scarlet fever, an infection, and you were able to come out [?] for my sake.” Then he added a little incongruously, “You are visiting a politically hopeless fellow.” Nicholas Mikhailovich replied that he was a forty-two-year-old bachelor who feared nothing, neither illness nor persecution.91 This initiatory banter over, the two men of letters settled into conversation on topics that interested them. They resumed their talk about the Dukhobors and went from there to the present state of Russia, agreeing about its lack of direction, the arbitrariness of the ministers, the insolence of Sergei Witte, the powerful minister of finance, and other such matters. The grand duke then turned the subject to the author’s views on religion by stating that in reading his works, he guessed that he believed in the immortality of the soul. Tolstoy then became a little uneasy and replied in neither a denial or confirmation with, “It is possible that no one understands and explains?” He noted that he was getting old and that the inspiration was no longer there, yet he still strove to help greater mankind. He told the grand duke that he was writing a swan song entitled On Religion, and he was about two-thirds finished. He expressed a hope that he would live to complete it, noting that “Often I am sick— here is the misfortune.” Having, of course, no idea that he would live for yet another nine years, he spoke often of death. The pair discoursed again on the subject of Tsar Alexander I and War and Peace. Niki noticed that the great author was totally natural during the two-hour conversation, and like anyone awed by the presence of a great person who behaved normally around them, the grand duke remembered that Tolstoy did not “pose or posture with me but spoke to me as an equal.”92 The third and final meeting of that year occurred in the late fall on the eve of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s departure for St. Petersburg. He went to Tolstoy’s to say a final farewell (the grand duke also uses, curiously, the Russian final good-bye that Tolstoy used at their first meeting), and the two men sat together for more than an hour. Lev Nicholaevich spoke about his Sevastopol memories in the Crimean War, possibly catalyzed by the fact that Niki’s father was there at the same time as the count, who immortalized his experiences there with a book on the subject. The conversation drifted to the current tsar, Nicholas II, who, Tolstoy felt, was “a kind man,” but who was surrounded by distasteful people. He had, strangely, good things to say about the very conservative Tsar Alexander III and offered the opinion that had he lived, Tolstoy would

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never have been excommunicated. Nicholas Mikhailovich observed in his recollections of the meeting that Tolstoy had two personas: one as a writer but another as a person. He wrote that he was grateful “to have been able to see him eye to eye, just the man,” for that made it “possible to forgive the wonderful old writer.”93 Unfortunately, one element that is seriously lacking in Nicholas Mikhailovich’s account of the meetings was the nature and substance of their disagreements. As the grand duke was not overly religious, one wonders for what he felt the need to forgive Tolstoy. Whether or not they met again in 1902, Tolstoy did use his acquaintance with his imperial friend to send a letter to Tsar Nicholas II warning him that the country was headed for disaster. The letter was passed to the grand duke at some dinner meeting the two may have had. Possibly it was the last meeting of the fall of 1901. “I address you not only as a tsar,” the aging author appealed to the sovereign, “but as a brotherman.” His obsession with death was still evident as he added, “I write as if it were from the other world since I await death’s approach.” He called on Tsar Nicholas to give his country democracy, a free society, and to lead his people “from evil to good, from darkness into light,” in the process of serving both God and man. He also for some reason asked the tsar not to show the letter to any of his ministers. Nicholas’s only reply was that he would show the letter to no one.94 The grand duke, as intermediary, did not seem to want to push the question. In the spring of 1902 Nicholas Mikhailovich sent a telegram to Tolstoy, the contents of which we do not know. The author did not respond immediately because the weather had been cold, and he could not hold a pen in his arthritic hand. When he did reply, he wrote that he felt he had annoyed Nicholas Mikhailovich by writing the tsar and wished to apologize if he had indeed perceived the grand duke’s annoyance. “If I am mistaken,” he added, “then I am very glad.” He then began discussing Henry George and Russian politics, expressing great dismay at the assassination of the minister of the interior Dmitri Sipiagin (“This event is terrible”) by terrorists. The letter rambles on and on, for which Lev Nicholaevich apologized as well. He ended with a warm farewell: “Goodbye. From all my soul I wish you all good in your personal and, more important, in your spiritual life. Loving you—Lev Tolstoy.”95 The grand duke’s reply was even longer. He expressed delight at having received Tolstoy’s letter because he had been wondering about him and because the letter had let him know that Lev Nicholaevich was better. The grand duke chided the writer for being “too big and idealistic,” for he hoped to create in Russia “that which has not been thought of in Europe or America [italics in original].” Tolstoy’s reforms for the peasant

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were “idealistic but not practical” and would take a century to enact. Nicholas agreed that the “times demand reforms, and practical reforms, not half-baked [ones].” Tolstoy was only interested in peasant questions; the grand duke noted that there were problems with education and with the workers that were more important. He ended the letter most warmly, calling on the writer to “take care of yourself” and not to make “careless strolls either on foot or on horseback.”96 Tolstoy responded with much of the same and informed him that he had had a recurrence of malaria (did he mean scarlet fever?). It seems clear from the grand duke’s letters that he is not interested in the same concerns as the writer (e.g., the land reform question), but he delighted in being in touch with the famous writer. He told the venerable author that he was “not able to agree with him about much,” but he confessed that it was due to his ignorance about Henry George of whom he had only a “vague understanding [smutnoe poniatie],” and he asked Tolstoy if he might “be so kind” as to send him a translation of his work in either French or Russian. The land question clearly bored the grand duke, despite his protestations to the contrary, and he begged off responding in correspondence because he felt it would be better to do so in person.97 Tolstoy did not reply until August, blaming his frailness for his procrastination. He had just finished a work entitled To the Working People, calling for the abolition of the private ownership of land, which is rather curious as Tolstoy himself owned a great deal of it and lived off of its income, produced by the work of others. He was also writing his short novel Hadji Murat about a Caucasian tribesman who went over to the Russians, and he asked Nicholas Mikhailovich’s advice about where to find some information that might help him.98 Nicholas replied immediately with information from the Tiflis archive on the famous Georgian. “It is more than I expected,” Tolstoy wrote back, but then asked, “If you should find it possible” to send a number of reports and documents from the archive that today no archive in the world would let out of sight of the watchful incarceration of the reading room. “I would [sic] take care of them, read them and return them,” Tolstoy assured the grand duke.99 We can logically assume that the materials were sent. Nicholas seems to have taken more time to understand Tolstoy on the land question and when in 1905 he wrote, after reading his article “The Great Sin” on the futility of political reforms without land reforms, he was much in agreement. Tolstoy had been thinking about the grand duke and their relationship even before his letter arrived. At the time, Russia was in the grip of the 1905 Revolution, which pitted the imperial family against much of the country, and Tolstoy was musing that there was

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something “unnatural in our relations” and wondered if they should not discontinue their friendship. “You are a grand duke, a wealthy man, a close relation of the Emperor; I am a man who rejects and condemns the whole existing regime and its power, and declares so frankly.” Lev Nicholaevich felt that there was “something embarrassing” about this contradiction “which we skirt around.” Tolstoy hastened to add that the grand duke had always been especially kind to him and he had appreciated that fact, but he repeated that there was “something unnatural” and that he in his old age found it “particularly painful” not to be straightforward. He bid the grand duke farewell.100 Surprisingly, Nicholas Mikhailovich agreed in his reply to a termination of their relationship, and the grand duke’s letter revealed no anger, or even annoyance, but comprehensive agreement. The great idealist answered that he was especially grateful for the grand duke’s retention of his “kind feelings toward me.” He noted, however, that “although [and for some reason he slips into French at this point] vous avez beau être un grand duc [you are indeed a grand duke], you are a human being.” He added that the most important thing for him was to have “kind, loving relations with all people,” and he expressed pleasure that he was ending their association in the state of such civility.101 This exchange, however, did not end their epistolary friendship. In fact, five more letters passed from Tolstoy to Nicholas Mikhailovich before the great writer’s death in 1910. One written a few months after the letter severing their relationship was in praise and thanks for a copy of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s six-volume work Russkie portrety, which remains to this day in the library at Yasnaia Poliana, Tolstoy’s country home outside of Tula. The great writer’s praise of “this magnificent edition” could only have delighted the grand duke. The texts were “so beautifully, cleverly and skillfully composed,” the master of prose himself wrote, and in general the whole edition is “valuable material for the history, not only de la petite histoire, but for the real history of the time.” This usefulness was especially real to Tolstoy because he was at that point working on the period between the 1780s and the 1820s, and had had reason to call on Nicholas Mikhailovich’s works on Stroganov and the Dolgoroukis. He felt that Stroganov was especially underestimated (did the grand duke know this fact?) during the reign of Alexander I. He encouraged the grand duke to continue his “excellent and useful research and publications,” adding that he wished to thank the grand duke once again for the use he had so far made of them. The novelist concluded by touching on the tempestuous times. In October of the previous year the tsar had agreed, with his fingers somewhat crossed, to grant a constitution and allow the election of a legislature by

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universal manhood suffrage. Whereas Nicholas Mikhailovich favored a representative institution, he was probably considered by Tolstoy to be at least apprehensive of one. Just a month before he wrote the letter, government troops had bloodily suppressed a workers’ uprising in Moscow led by the Bolsheviks, the radical wing of Russia’s Marxist Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Tolstoy certainly knew that the grand duke was concerned about the disruption in the country, and he sympathized with him, thinking that he had suffered and “are suffering much that is painful during these recent times.” He did feel that these times might be useful for some inner spiritual awakening for all. He signed the letter, “Yours affectionately, Lev Tolstoy.”102 Tolstoy’s last letter to the grand duke was written in February 1908. It was in reply to a “kind letter” from Nicholas Mikhailovich, the contents of which remain unknown. The aged writer began by apologizing for his epistle of September 1905 “breaking off” their relationship. He had felt that because he had just written something “harsh and unkind . . . about people near your [the royal] family,” he thought the relationship was too ticklish. “I would not have written it now,” he added in this last bit of correspondence. Then he turned to his favorite subject of the moment: death. “I actually feel that spiritual growth is in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from death. . . . I hope you will live to see this and feel it.” He noted that now his greatest delight was his friendships with people, be they “tsars or beggars,” so his letter, which had canceled any bad feeling, was “particularly precious” to him. He invited the grand duke to send him any of the “exceptionally interesting materials” about which he wrote. He ended with the usual “Goodbye; I press your hand in friendship. Yours affectionately, Lev Tolstoy.”103 When Tolstoy died in that remote train station as he made his frantic death run, all the world mourned him, not least of all the grand duke. “He had a will of iron,” Nicholas Mikhailovich wrote Masson, and the grand duke suspected some “blunder on the part of our government” for his death.104 His funeral was an international event, and millions grieved at his passing. Thousands from all walks of life personally came to pay tribute. To paraphrase Voltaire’s comment about Isaac Newton’s funeral, “It speaks nobly of a people who would bury a novelist like an emperor.” A true and troubled giant had fallen, and one can say with certainty that he was one of the few men whom Nicholas Mikhailovich ever held in awe. Tolstoy’s imperial friend wrote after his death, “He has sought rest and [now] he has found it.”105 As we have seen, the driving force throughout Nicholas Mikhailovich’s intellectual life was his total love of anything French. He adored the French nation, the culture, the language, the literature, the history, and

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the people. We do not know if he had ever heard of Thomas Jefferson’s famous observation that everyone had two countries, his own and France, but he certainly would have agreed with it. He gloried in everything French, even French military successes. As the French nation struggled on the Marne in 1918, he exulted in their victory. “The French troops are keeping their heads with a tenacity and a magnificent art,” he wrote in delight as they halted and repelled the last German drive of the war. “They [the French] are truly a nation of heroes, and they are able to be proud to call themselves French.”106 What is more, he understood France. His love extended even to France’s political system, born in the Enlightenment, whose ideas were so hostile to his own native land. Although a constitutional monarchist most of his life, Nicholas remained forever intrigued with republics. His brother Alexander noted that he “hated to admit” that a constitutional system like France’s Third Republic would “prove a dismal failure” in his native land,107 yet it remained for him a dream. In exile in Vologda after the Russian Revolution, he wrote Masson that he reveled in the “glory and triumph of your dear country.” Then he added, “[Although] born in Russia, my heart and soul are French, and to my last breath my eyes will be turned toward adored France.”108 To paraphrase his brother’s observation, “Perhaps he had been born in the wrong country.”109 Nicholas’s adulation and devotion was returned by the French, at least among the intellectual community that knew well both him and his work. On visiting France, he was besieged with invitations to lecture before French historical societies, and Helene Izvolsky found him a frequent guest at the salon for French intellectuals that her father hosted.110 The grand duke’s greatest link to France was, of course, his intense friendship with Masson. Their association began in 1897, or at any rate their voluminous correspondence commenced at that point. These letters, more than 700 items on deposit at the Bibliothèque Slave de Paris currently at Meudon outside Paris, are the only real collection of his letters outside Russia. In their exchanges, the two historians “chatted” endlessly about history, discussed document finds, asked one another’s opinions, and discussed the value of historical artifacts that each had found. Nicholas held Masson and his opinions in the highest regard. Typical is his request for Masson’s view of the value of a portrait of Empress Josephine. “I rely completely on you—if the price is reasonable, buy it in spite of the dimension,” he wrote to his friend in 1900,111 and the grand duke frequently writes, “I await with impatience” his opinion of a book or an artifact. Moreover, he is ecstatic each time he receives a letter from his French friend. “Your good and so friendly lines touched me

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deeply,” he wrote often. The “sight of your signature has plunged me into immense joy,” he wrote in October 1914.112 One letter arrived during the Easter holidays, the most important religious festival in the Orthodox Church, and the grand duke called it “a true Easter egg.”113 This effusive delight is habitual, and Nicholas seemed to live for the arrival of Masson’s letters. The two exchanged presents, which must have been a problem for Masson: What can one give a Russian grand duke who has everything? Once Masson sent him cheeses, which made the grand duke a “devotée of Pont l’Evêque and led him to abandon Camembert.”114 Among his last correspondence with Masson, Niki outlined what the friendship had meant to him. Noting that the French scholar had been “an incomparable friend” for more than twenty years, the grand duke wrote that he would carry the tender affection for him “to the grave.” He observed that it had been four years since the two had seen one another and added “the desire to see you is such that if destiny allows me to live, in spite of all the obstacles I shall try to come to that delicious house at 15 rue de La Baume [the home of the Massons].”115 Despite the closeness of their friendship, however, the grand duke continued to address the historian, who was more than a decade older than the grand duke, as “Monsieur Masson,” never by his first name, although the grand duke himself signed his letters “Nicholas.” Masson addressed his friend as “Monsieur” and signed his missives “Frédéric Masson,” using both names. Sometimes he addressed Nicholas in the third person: “But I hope that when the grand duke will come to Paris, everything will be at the point that we will be able to show him several things.”116 Occasionally he addressed him as “Your Imperial Highness.” Although Masson did not write as often or such lengthy letters, he was just as enthusiastic about receiving those of his Russian friend. Masson was likewise interested in Napoleon I, but he also wrote a great deal about Napoleon III and the Second Empire. He was, curiously, a rather right-wing conservative, much farther to the right than the grand duke. He attacked the French parliamentarians, who were “those swine rolling in the dregs of their laws . . . with their bloody fangs disputing the quivering fragments of France’s divine flesh.”117 One crowning achievement of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s scholastic honors, and the one that must have given him great satisfaction, given its origin, was his election in 1912 to the Grand Seize du Bixio, a very select French club of men prominent in the world of letters. It had been founded in 1853 during the Second Empire by famous writers and painters and named for Jacques-Alexandre Bixio (1808–1885), founder of Revue des Deux Mondes. Membership had included Raymond Poincaré,

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the president of France, the composer Camille Saint-Saëns, and the mathematician-turned-politician Paul Painlevé. The only other Russian ever to have been admitted was the great nineteenth-century writer Ivan Turgenev, the author of Fathers and Sons, who spent the last years of his life in France and whose personal library became the nucleus of one of the two Russian libraries in Paris today. Nicholas Mikhailovich learned of his election by telegram from Masson and was understandably ecstatic. “How can I express my joy . . . from your telegram. . . . So I will be part of the Sympathique [italics in original] and illustrative dinner of the great sixteen.” “Rarely such things in this life here below made me so happy.”118 A letter listing the members of the group followed Masson’s telegram. Six names on the list were unknown to the grand duke, five of which would be unknown to most people today, but amazingly he had never heard of Saint-Saëns.119 The grand duke’s greatest achievement came the next year when on May 17, 1913,120 he was chosen for the Académie des Sciences, Morales et Politiques as an associate foreign member in consideration for his work in history.121 His election was not his first association with the Académie, however. A dozen years before he had campaigned for Masson’s election, when he was not himself a member. He felt at the time that he had secured it and was told as much by Gabriel Hanotaux, a prominent historian and member.122 He was therefore shocked when his friend did not the make it. “Deschanel left for a meeting of the Chamber and the measles of Albert Sorel resulted in inflicting on you a defeat. . . . Needless to say, I am furious and disconsolate,” he wrote, but then added in consolation, “However, you had a good first, fifteen votes.”123 Masson was elected the next year.124 The outbreak of the Great War of 1914 in no way diminished the grand duke’s interest in these two organizations, although he was separated from them for what turned out to be forever. When the Great War was less than three months old, he wrote Masson, “How I regret not being able to take part in your dinner of the Bixio with the excellent colleagues who have remained in Paris. Tell them a thousand amiable things from me.”125 In 1916 he wrote asking about several members and inquired about the elections and when they would be held. He observed that there were six vacancies at the time. “I can imagine the mass of candidates who are going to surface for all the openings!” he wrote sarcastically. He was interested in promoting only the candidacy of someone who had not been nominated, Monsignor Alfred Baudrillart, a cardinal in the French Catholic Church and a historian. “But with the Academy’s habits [sic],” he wrote, making a pun, “two habits in the Academy is an unaccustomed luxury.”126 The monsignor was finally admitted in 1918.

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One other academic recognition Nicholas Mikhailovich received from a community of scholars was an honorary doctorate from the University of Berlin. His dislike for the Germans did not prevent his accepting the degree, but he returned it shortly after the Great War began.

Chapter 4

Pariah in the Family

My brother [Nicholas Mikhailovich] had all the necessary qualifications of a loyal president of a civilized republic, which led him often to mistake Nevsky Prospekt for the Champs Elysée. . . . Like all irresponsible Russian liberals, he was caught between two fires. —Grand Duke Alexander1 Nicholas Mikhailovich detested everything that smacked of etiquette and formality. Official receptions were forced labor for him. —Constantine Brummer2 For unto whomever much is given, of him shall be much required. —Luke, 12:48.

With the advent of early middle age, Niki seems to have reluctantly settled into the social whirl that was expected of a grand duke. His life in the capital was an active one with frequent formal dinners, often with members of the extended family, and parties and balls that composed the general social landscape that engulfed St. Petersburg, especially in “the Season.” Yet even when he was a student, there is no evidence that he participated in the wild debauched parties that characterized so much of

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the non-public life of a young grand duke. While he was in the army, there were always the regimental socials that are an integral part of military male bonding, but he does not seem to have liked too much the convivial life expected of him as an officer. He must have found army social life sheer torture. The grand duke had always traveled, but this period in his life saw the development of an absolute passion for doing so, and although most travel, especially to foreign lands, was halted by the outbreak of the Great War, he never lost his lust for it. Each year was to find him in and out of St. Petersburg, with at least one prolonged stay at the estate at Borjomi in the summer. Yet he visited yearly such places as his mother’s home in Baden, Biarritz on the French Atlantic coast, “boring Cannes,” as he called it, on the Riviera, and always Paris at least twice a year and always for an extended stay. To Nicholas, the French capital was the center of the world. As he frequented it year after year, he did not indulge in the same sybaritic pleasures of the other grand dukes who passed time in the city. He stayed in the relatively inexpensive Hotel Mirabeau at 8 rue de la Paix, and passed his time, if not with historians, librarians, and archivists, then in strolling through the Paris Zoo or browsing in bookstores. Perhaps he did once become bored there, for in 1889, on leaving for the French capital, he wrote to his mother, “Actually Paris isn’t a sufficient attraction for me, and I hope to meet there a person who is not known to me.”3 Yet if he tired of the Parisian tourist attractions, he never tired of the people and the culture, and in the late 1890s he made his lifelong friendship with Frédéric Masson, and that acquaintance opened the door of the French historical community to him. Years later he would write that although he was once again “on the banks of the Neva,” he was carrying “a most agreeable memory [of Paris] . . . and the afternoons at the hospitable salon on the Rue de la Baume [Masson’s house].”4 In 1898 he hosted a luncheon at the Café Anglais whose guest list included Masson and Gabriel Hanotaux, as well as the duke and duchess de Rohan and other aristocrats. One wonders with such an eclectic mixture of guests what the table conversation must have been like. He later had a more intimate dinner with Hanotaux and the Russian ambassador, which was probably more to his liking.5 Yet he persisted in mixing his historians with nobility and royalty. In February 1904 he gave a dinner that had to be canceled because of the Russian declaration of war with Japan and whose guest list included his brother Alexander and his wife Ksenia, the sister of the emperor, and a number of friends of Masson.6 Occasionally Niki’s peregrinations led him to “take the cure” at Marienbad in Bohemia. He reported in 1907 that he had lost four and a

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a half pounds at the point at which he was writing and expected to lose more, predicting that on returning home he would be able to “smuggle into my dear country some bombs of six kilos or less.” The regime at Marienbad could not have been to his epicurean liking. He was allowed only one glass of Kreuzbrünnnen, which must have been either a local beer or the local mineral water, and no wine or liquor, and he was restricted to a “very severe diet.” He did visit tourist attractions in the surrounding countryside, such as the Wallenstein Castle, the Pilsen beer factory, and Kronigsmark, where there was a well-preserved castle of the famous Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich.7 Nicholas visited some other places less frequently. The fall of 1908 found him in the Vosges mountains; in December of the following year he was in Rome, which was “always charming to contemplate.” Occasionally he visited obscure places within his own country. August of 1909, for example, he toured the Russian province of Penza. As always, the artist in him rhapsodized about the natural surroundings in his letters to others. “The province is a contrast of prairies broken by oak forests,” he wrote in 1909. “The wheat is everywhere brilliant, . . . and I have been present as a spectator to all the vicissitudes of the rustic life.” He noted that the people there were still “uncultured and the microbe of civilization has affected them little.”8 The end of his youth saw an intensification of the indiscretion for which he had become so notorious in his youth. Frequently in correspondence with Masson he revealed military information that should never have been told to a foreigner, and even with his scholarly contacts in Germany before the war, he spoke too much. In 1908 the German ambassador to Russia, Count Friedrich von Portalès, reported to the German foreign minister, Bernard von Bülow, that at a breakfast at Princess Helene von Altenburg’s home, Nicholas Mikhailovich had held forth on the AngloRussian entente signed the year before. In his remarks he had revealed that he had written his opinions of the probability of war between Russia and Germany, as well as the possibility of a revolution in Russia to a certain German professor, who was apparently reporting the grand duke’s opinions to the government.9 Once again the grand duke should have held his tongue. This behavior hardly enhanced his popularity within the family and reinforced his reputation as a “white crow.” Moreover, it had the effect of blurring or even hiding what was a deeply sympathetic side of the young grand duke. When Archduke Rudolph of Austria committed suicide in 1889, killing his teenage lover in the process, Nicholas Mikhailovich wrote to his mother how “we are all under the blow of the horrible tragedy from Vienna,” referring to Rudolph as “the unfortunate grand duke.” He

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sympathized with the loss to “old father [Emperor Franz Joseph], for all the family, for all the country.”10 These are not the words of a total cynic. Frequently in his correspondence with Masson he apologized for his caustic nature and his pessimism. Undoubtedly he knew that he had a problem, but either he chose not to do anything about it, or was unable to do so. This period of Niki’s life saw the development of a closer relationship with his father. Always a dutiful son, he came to attend very carefully to his father’s needs, saw that he got out for rides in the country, and guarded his health. Typically, when his mother was on one of her hypochondriacal excursions, he also kept her informed of Mikhail Nicholaevich’s condition. “Papa seems to be in rather good humor,” he wrote in April 1899, and added that he would take him for an outing “one day when there is less snow in the woods.”11 He and his father also stayed in especially close touch during their separations after his mother’s death. The letters between them were chatty and full of news. “Thanks for your letter,” his father wrote in 1898. “Today opening a new military assembly. I hug you.” The letter is signed “Mikhail,” not “Papa.”12 A few days later his father wired him to say that Niki’s “poor Sivers” (probably a faithful family retainer or perhaps a pet of some sort) had died suddenly that evening, adding, “Understand your loss.”13 On August 1, 1903, Mikhail Nicholaevich left for Brest-Litovsk on some government business, and at 7:00 AM on August 6, he had a brain hemorrhage that left half of his body paralyzed. By noon, the paralysis seemed to have abated somewhat, and his heart activity and temperature were normal. Two days later he was conscious. As soon as he could be moved, he went to Mikhailovo, where the tsar and the tsarina visited him, as did the dowager empress and a great number of other family members. His health improved rapidly in the next few days, and he ate and slept well.14 Niki was probably at Borjomi when his father fell ill, and upon hearing the news, he left immediately for St. Petersburg,15 arriving there on August 20. By the time he reached his father’s bedside, the crisis had passed, and the elderly grand duke was much better and could speak somewhat. By September his progress was more evident from the physical side than the mental. He chatted about the love life of Prince Louis Napoleon (either Napoleon II or his cousin, Napoleon III, both of whom were by this time dead), and his affair with a married woman.16 He never completely regained his faculties, however, and this stroke at the age of seventy-one left him in a wheelchair. In September 1903 the elderly grand duke moved permanently to Cannes, presumably to escape the harsh Russian weather, and he never

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really lived in Russia again. He left his estate Mikhailovo in a special train, and he received a large family send-off, which included the tsar’s sister. Nicholas II sent a telegram wishing him well. His son Sergei accompanied him, asking for prayers for his father.17 The grand duke arrived in Cannes on October 12 and was much better on arrival, with the ability to move restored to much of his body. Mikhail Nicholaevich’s house in Cannes thereafter resembled a minicourt. It was furnished “with a wide foot,” his cousin Gavrill tells us, with valets running about in blue liveries, all of whom were Germans who had been former soldiers of the Prussian Guard. After dinner, guests played cards and billiards.18 Even in his invalid state, the grand duke remained the perfect gentleman he had always been. Niki visited his father in January 1904 and found him much better. His improved state gave Niki time to do some reading and work on a lecture he planned to give. He returned to Russia, but in April he was back in Cannes for the purpose of moving his father to Baden and then back to St. Petersburg for the summer. His doctors had felt that the elder grand duke needed to be in a cooler climate, under “the feeble sun of the North.” Niki planned to take his father to Baden by way of Paris.19 After being in St. Petersburg for much of the summer, his father returned to Cannes in October. He spent much of the rest of his life shuffling between Cannes and Baden. In May 1909 Niki visited his father in Baden on his way to Paris. It is unclear where the elder grand duke was staying in the Rhenish state, but Niki lived in a nearby hotel. His father had been so happy to see him that Niki did not have the heart to leave Baden as soon as he had planned.20 It was a good thing, since this visit was the last he was to have with the old grand duke. Mikhail Nicholaevich died in Cannes on December 18 that same year, quietly and without any suffering, at the age of seventyseven, the greatest age ever attained by any grand duke.21 Marie, George’s wife, remembered that Niki was with his father when he died,22 but this recollection is not correct. He did arrive at the death scene very quickly, however. On Christmas Day 1909 (on the Gregorian calendar) Nicholas Mikhailovich wrote Masson that he was on his way to Cannes. He had dealt with his grief, for he told his great friend, “My head is completely at rest.”23 The tsar sent the battleship Bogatir to return the body to Russia, and Nicholas Mikhailovich sailed with it. Anastasia went from Cannes and Miche-Miche from Fürstenstein, where he was with his wife. They were both met at the Polish border by Prince Jules Urusov, and he accompanied them the rest of the way to St. Petersburg.24 The rest of the family went from St. Petersburg to Sevastopol to meet Bogatir, and the grand duke’s coffin was taken to St. Petersburg

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by special train,25 which received full military honors in each town it passed on the way to the capital. Nicholas II issued a proclamation upon Grand Duke Mikhail’s death, stating that “According to the will of Almighty God, OUR IMPERIAL [sic] house has again suffered sorrow.” The proclamation, incorrectly stating his age as seventy-eight, bemoaned the loss of “our great uncle, whose life was dedicated to service to the throne and to the country.” The tsar called on all to join in a prayer for the soul of the deceased.26 The funeral mass was held in the Petropavlovsky Fortress on January 3, 1910. It was extremely cold, and snow was falling very hard as the family made its way to the fortress cathedral. The chapel was brilliantly illuminated, which made the gilt on the hundreds of official uniforms appear as a massive wall of gold. The women were dressed in black with long black veils, a stark contrast to the brilliant gold color around them. Outside, cannons boomed in military salute.27 The coffin, followed by an endless trail of generals, ministers, and clergymen, was borne on a gun carriage befitting the artillery in which Mikhail had served. After the service, one by one members of the imperial family lined up to kiss the picture on the coffin and to regard for the last time the exposed face of the grand duke.28 The burial was held on January 5, and in the ensuing days, family and friends returned twice a day to the fortress for prayers. The crown prince and princess of Denmark arrived on the eve of the funeral and stayed in what was now Niki’s palace. An impromptu party occurred when the grand dukes George and Sergei arrived, and there was surprising gaiety in the group. Niki, however, did not join them.29 At the funeral the next day, the tsar escorted the family into the cathedral, giving Anastasia his arm, with the brothers and other more distant family members following. After the service, they all kissed the deceased grand duke and exited the church in the order in which they had entered. Some stayed to see the coffin lowered into the ground. A new annex had been built to house only the grand dukes, but Nicholas II permitted his great-uncle to be buried in the main body of the cathedral, next to his wife and child.30 Deputations had come from as far away as the Caucasus, and Niki entertained them at dinner. Speaking afterward, he thanked them for their demonstrations of regard and was clearly moved by their show of devotion and affection. “Believe me,” he told them, “that in the days of tears and mourning, for us his sons, this has been to us a great consolation to feel the unanimous sympathy of our beloved country, expressed without the distinction of religion or nationality.”31

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Although each of the Mikhailovichi inherited immense wealth upon their father’s death, Niki was now the head of the family, and in that capacity he inherited all of the lands and houses of his late father: His beloved Borjomi, Mikhailovskoe outside St. Petersburg, the enormous palace on the Neva in St. Petersburg, and the gargantuan estate Grushevka in southern Ukraine. Borjomi seems always to have remained Niki’s favorite home, and he made a standard postcard of his house there and used it in correspondence with his friends. This place was a small bit of heaven to him, one place in the world in which he could find total tranquility. As early as 1888 he had written to his mother, “I’ve been here [at Borjomi] three days and am totally at peace . . . [and] thoroughly happy. . . . We are the sole inhabitants of this delicious spot. . . . I spend all day searching for butterflies.”32 Like the Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov before him, Nicholas found a fascination with the region. He eagerly recounted to his mother local stories that had a frontier flavor, of soldiers chasing brigands through the mountains, of shootouts with local mountain tribesmen, and of struggles with romantic local folk heroes such as Shamil and Hadji Murat.33 His cousin Grand Duke Kirill wrote about the estate with just as much enthusiasm. He remembered, “The scenery . . . was one of savage grandeur.”34 His primary home, however, would always be the palace on the Neva, which was so immense that Baroness de Stoeckl remembered that it would take days to visit it all.35 Mikhailovskoe, his father’s favorite, does not seem to have interested him much. Niki referred to it as his dacha (small country house, usually for summer retreats), although he seems to have rarely gone there. Between the two homes in the area around the capital, he had 400 servants and gardeners, overseen by his loyal caretaker Molodovsky. At fifty, Nicholas was the wealthiest of the grand dukes,36 and the paterfamilias of his branch of the family. He was now an established international historian with an ever-expanding reputation, and although his family considered him somewhat of an eccentric curiosity, he had largely gained their respect. He had the world by the tail. In these early years of the new century, Niki seems to have mixed more with the extended Romanov family. At Easter in 1900 he attended a large dinner that the emperor and empress were giving the Moscow nobility in return for a dinner they had given them. He accompanied Maria Feodorovna, the empress mother, to Gatchina and passed the day there.37 Nicholas Mikhailovich was with the imperial family in 1910 on their yacht Standart, where they received him “with open arms and unaccustomed grace.” He returned to the capital with them by train.38 There were many such events in which he took part. How much was protocol and how

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much his presence was wanted is impossible to say, yet he was often with the imperial family. With his immediate family, he remained genuinely close. The year after his mother’s death, Niki and all of his siblings visited Kronstadt, a Russian naval base in the Gulf of Finland, together in the steamboat Onega. Yet much of the time from the 1890s onward, Niki did not seem to have been with public family groupings. Russkii invalid, which chronicled his popular father’s activities in these years, tells of Niki’s brothers being with their father but never mentions the eldest grand duke. Since Niki had become closer to his father in these years, his absence in these public family gatherings is inexplicable. He always traveled more than the rest of his immediate family, and perhaps he was off on his own travels.39 Yet his individual brothers and sisters, who were making their own lives, seem to have been with their brother often in a nonpublic context. His sister, Anastasia, left the German winter every year for her house in Cannes, the Villa Wender, and her home was often the pied-à-terre for the rest of the family when on the Riviera. The outcast Miche-Miche had the Villa Kazbek, also in the vicinity, and they often saw him there when he was in residence.40 Once Anastasia spent three days with Niki in Paris, and her letter to him afterward demonstrates the closeness of their relationship. “Cher ami!” she began. “A few words in order to tell you that I have so very much enjoyed the three days spent with you in Paris that I regret not having been able to remain longer.”41 These were the years of Miche-Miche’s scandalous marriage and the aftermath of his exile. Before his elopement, he lived with Olga Feodorovna and Mikhail Nicholaevich. Olga’s letters to Niki always chronicle Miche-Miche’s activities with his father (billiards, cards, etc.), indicating a closeness between the two brothers. There seems, however, to have been some tension between Nicholas and Mikhail in the last years of their mother’s life. Probably the closeness of their birth produced a sibling rivalry, but one letter to his mother indicates that there was a chronic problem. In June of 1887 Niki wrote Olga Feodorovna, “The encounter with Misha at Mikhailovskoe was very much more cordial than is customary in these occasions. I find him very reasonable.”42 Yet when Miche-Miche began his love affair with Katia Ignatiev, Niki seems at first to have been somewhat hostile to him. Their father avoided discussing the problem with Niki whenever the elder brother brought it up, probably because Niki was too blunt and sarcastic about the matter for the gentle old man. To his mother, who was a more sympathetic audience, Niki cynically speculated that if Miche-Miche persisted in the matter, he should lose all grand ducal privileges and be called simply “Prince Romanov.” Writing to his mother, Niki noted that such a differentiation

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in his court position “would make Miche change his opinion!”43 To talk some sense into the love-smitten grand duke, his father and a priest had a talk with him.44 Yet for some reason Niki came to the side of his brother within a few weeks, and he gently encouraged his mother to be more sympathetic. “In spite of his faulty spirit,” he wrote her, “he is a very noble and good boy,” and he expressed his support for the union: “My heart, he has won it.”45 After Mikhail Nicholaevich and his son spoke to Tsar Alexander III, Niki felt that both the tsar and his wife were understanding, and a simple “yes” would seal the matter.46 His parents, however, would not agree, and Olga Feodorovna, unmoved, wrote a stinging letter to her son on what a miscreant Miche-Miche had been. “Thank you for all the details [?] you have given me on this . . . [word unclear] Misha,” she wrote the ever-loyal Niki. “He [Miche-Miche] is simply evil. . . . I regret the blow to Papa but find that you are shielding him.” Olga felt that the only thing to do was for her husband to speak to the emperor. “He has so openly provoked me,” she added and spoke of Miche-Miche’s general “lack of respect, affection, and attention,”47 so unlike the behavior of the devoted Niki. The parents decided that Miche-Miche should be sent abroad to cool off. Niki continued to try to console his mother, and he offered to write Mikhail, but he did not believe that he would have any influence on his brother. He did write, perhaps even before Mikhail had left St. Petersburg, but Miche-Miche returned the letter unread. “Micha [Miche-Miche] has a strong imagination,” Niki wrote his distressed mother, “and he had probably thought that I had written him a lecture.”48 The years before the turn of the century saw brother Sandro making his place in the Russian navy. He had gained the admiration of his eldest brother, who wrote their mother, “I am so happy for you that Sandro is with you. He is a boy with so much heart . . . [and] a petite-perle of a young man.”49 Early in the 1890s, Alexander visited America as a personal emissary of the tsar to thank President Grover Cleveland for the assistance that America had given Russia during the Russian famine of 1891–1892. Alexander fell in love with the United States and vowed to work for the “Americanization” of Russia,50 which probably meant in his mind the creation of an egalitarian class system, something America certainly did not have in the 1890s. Yet when the time came in 1905, he bitterly opposed the constitutionalization of his own country. His love of the United States remained, however, and after the Revolution, he repeatedly toured the country giving speeches and lectures. As a naval officer, Sandro championed a larger Russian fleet, of which his uncle Grand Duke Aleksei, the grand admiral of the Russian navy, still thought in terms of the eighteenth century. His uncle, probably not totally

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without justification, felt that Alexander was after his job and managed in 1896 to maneuver him out of the navy for a time. Alexander entered a four-year, self-imposed exile to his estate Ai-todor. In 1902 he achieved the rank of rear admiral and entered the cabinet as the minister of the merchant marine and ports. He continued his encouragement of an aggressive naval policy for Russia, even to the extent of twisting the British lion’s tail.51 In his memoirs he claimed that he opposed Russian adventures in the Far East because they might push Russia into a war with Japan,52 although there is some evidence to the contrary. When Russia did enter the Russo-Japanese War in February 1904, Alexander saw a major role for the navy, but when his uncle ordered the Baltic fleet to make its famous doomed voyage around Africa and southern Asia to relieve Port Arthur, he opposed the venture, or so he later said. Yet when this “fleet that had to die,” as one historian has called it, went to the bottom at the battle of the Tsu-shima Straits, he received part of the blame anyway.53 When the war helped create the 1905 Revolution, which forced a semiconstitutional regime on the empire, Alexander resigned rather than deal with the new legislature. Alexander and his wife Ksenia had seven children, one of whom, Irina, married a man who became internationally famous because of his role in the 1916 murder of the infamous Gregory Rasputin. Felix Youssoupov was one of the world’s richest men. When he and Irina married in 1913, The New York Times estimated his wealth at over 300 million dollars. Gleb Botkin, the son of the last tsar’s doctor, claimed that Alexander pushed the match with his daughter because of Youssoupov’s wealth, despite the fact that Youssoupov was a rather flagrant homosexual who even wore women’s makeup and appeared in some of the best restaurants in Moscow and St. Petersburg in drag.54 As Botkin never had a conversation with the grand duke, he could only be repeating court gossip. At any rate, the opening of Russian archives to Western researchers reveals a different story. Sandro’s wife Ksenia wrote in her diary in October 1913 that “Sandro has heard various things about him [Felix] in Paris and is terribly upset and he’s upset me also.” On November 4, 1913, she wrote, “Sandro had a talk with Felix and he convinced Sandro that none of it was true. I believe him completely . . . but it’s all extremely unpleasant.”55 The grand duchess could only have been alluding to the rumors of Felix’s homosexuality, of which they clearly had not heard until after the wedding. The fact that the couple had a child the following year must have eased the minds of the in-laws. Sergei by 1889, when Miche-Miche was causing so much trouble for his parents, had become “a charming boy” in the words of his brother Niki. He also found him “very pleasant.”56 Sergei had followed in his

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father’s footsteps and become an authority in heavy artillery. By 1904 he was a major general and in the Horse Guard Artillery Brigade of the suite of his imperial highness. His career was set. He replaced his father that year as the inspector general of artillery and held the position until he was removed under a cloud during the Great War. Anastasia seems to have had a happy life with her husband, and they spent most of their time on the Riviera. Ever since her marriage in 1878 to Friedrich-Franz, Anastasia had lived apart from the family, although her siblings saw her often in Cannes. There she and the grand duke, whom Daisy, princess of Pless, called “the dearest man on earth,” had the Villa Wender, a large airy home with big windows that let in much sun. It was on the side of a mountain and was bordered by an exquisite garden with roses that cascaded over the parapet facing the sea.57 The couple had three children: Alexandrine, who became the queen of Denmark; Cecile, who became the crown princess of Prussia, and Friedrich-Franz IV, who in 1904 married Alexandra, the duchess of Brunswick-Luneburg.58 During the Great War, Nicholas Mikhailovich, “Uncle Bimbo” to Cecile, encountered some captured Prussian officers in Poland. Learning who he was, one of the officers asked, “Dann sind Sie der eigene Onkel unserer Kronprincessen? [Then, are you the uncle of our crown princess?],” to which Nicholas Mikhailovich replied, “Jawohl [Yes indeed].”59 As for Anastasia, she became a young widow at the age of thirty-six in 1897. Daisy of Pless wrote that Anastasia’s husband died of typhoid fever,60 but in another place she mentions that he was ill for a long time,61 which was usually not the case with typhoid fever. Daisy rhapsodized about how he was “such a gentleman, so charming and serene and dignified.”62 His actual cause of death, however, was probably suicide. He was found unconscious by their coachman on the road below the rosefestooned parapet, which encircled the villa’s garden. The grand duke had obviously jumped in attempt to end his life. He was carried into the house, where he finally died.63 After her husband’s death, Anastasia kept a small apartment in Paris, where she led the life of the beautiful people, going to parties with the Rothschilds and the like, looking wildly for any distraction. She also gambled heavily at Monte Carlo—so intensely in fact that her oriental green eyes would turn opaque. Fascinated by her, the croupiers would roll the ball intentionally into her favorite section of the roulette wheel, the tier de sedan, to increase her chance of winning.64 She had also sought distraction through an affair with a member of her staff, by whom she became pregnant. When she began to show, she called it a tumor, a monumental euphemism, and when it was time to deliver, she claimed she had contracted chicken pox for which she must be quarantined. Afterward a

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small child was seen playing in her garden. He later became a prominent wine merchant in Paris.65 It was no secret that Tsar Alexander III strongly disliked his first cousin Nicholas Mikhailovich. We have seen many examples of his feelings on this point. Except for sharing the same DNA, the two men literally had almost nothing in common. Their respective politics were poles apart, which was a major factor, and the personalities and habits of the two could hardly have differed more. Alexander III was born the second son of Tsar Alexander II and therefore was not expected to rule. When his elder brother Nicholas died of tuberculosis, Alexander inherited as a result of his death not only the throne of the Russian Empire but his brother’s fiancée, Dagmar of Denmark, as well. The tsarevich was diligent but hardly bright. The reports of his tutors reveal someone not especially interested in his studies and given to inattention and tiresome pranks. He was a physical giant, a Russian bear of a man, with superhuman strength, which he often demonstrated at social functions by holding his diminutive wife out at arm’s length for a quarter of an hour. He hated pretension of any kind and lived a simple life. Many times he would turn his nose up at the elegant French cuisine prepared for him and his family by the palace kitchen and send instead for a bowl of the borscht cooked for the palace servants. He was straightforward and honest, and except for the consumption of alcohol, he was very Victorian in his personal life. It is said that he was a virgin when he married. He kept a very tight rein on all the Romanov family, and any behavior that was not proper for a grand duke was severely punished. It is not surprising that Nicholas Mikhailovich irked him. We have seen several incidents already where Niki’s actions had displeased the tsar, so Alexander was probably looking for any chance to reprimand this arrogant, liberal lover of the nation that was the hotbed of revolution. Moreover, he did so at the smallest opportunity. Once he happened to look out of the window of the Anichkov Palace onto Nevsky Prospekt to see Niki passing in a dilapidated taxi with his coat unbuttoned and a cigar clenched in his teeth. No member of the imperial family was to be seen in public in such an undignified state, so Alexander had his cousin arrested.66 He also seemed to delight in taking potshots at the errant grand duke. Once when State Secretary Polovtsov complained that the Mikhailovichi were ruining the character of their youngest brother Aleksei, Tsar Alexander added, “Especially the eldest one.”67 Niki did have some close contact with the tsar in the form of long conversations, and especially long ones with his wife, when Miche-Miche was having his marital problems. Apparently, Niki was quite tactful in speak-

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ing on his brother’s behalf. “I gave the necessary replies and had confidence that Misha [Miche-Miche] can continue to hope,” he wrote his mother, but he added that he had spoken to the tsar “with the sentiments of a brother,” showing that he could hold his tongue when he found it advantageous to do so.68 Alexander III passed away at the rather young age of forty-seven from a kidney problem that would be readily treatable today. He was ordered by his doctors to quit drinking, and his wife tried to keep alcohol from him, but he acquired a specially designed boot with a hollow heel in which he could smuggle vodka into the palace unbeknownst to the empress. With his health deteriorating rapidly in 1894, he went to his palace at Livadia in the Crimea. Always a lover of sweets, he died begging for ice cream. Niki was in the Crimea when the tsar was dying, and he went by the palace to be with the family, and especially his friend and benefactor the empress. He was present when the tsar died. His cousin Ksenia, the tsar’s daughter, noted in her diary that Nicholas Mikhailovich observed during that Romanov family crisis that they were a “holy family.” For all the obvious dislike that the emperor showed him, his death deeply touched Niki. His cousin observed that “never before have I seen Nikolai, who is often dry and sardonic, so touched and moved.”69 Perhaps he alone realized that the death of Alexander III was the passing of an age, and that the monarchy would never be as secure again. The open behavior of the family did change radically with the new tsar Nicholas II. He was almost the total opposite of his father, except in his political conservatism. Unlike Alexander III, Nicholas II was small in stature, although he was strong and did serious exercise daily. He was easily intimidated by others, however, especially by his Uncle Vladimir and his own wife Alexandra. He has often been dismissed as being unintelligent, and all of his biographers quote his diary entry at the age of eighteen in which he states that his education had ended. Yet the last tsar was a voracious reader whose literary taste ranged from history and literature to science, and simply because he had no aptitude for government does not mean that he was unintelligent. There are doubtless many superb politicians who could not score above the twentieth percentile on a reading comprehension test or Life Master bridge players who struggle with column addition. Nicholas II’s failure as a ruler stemmed from his feelings of personal inadequacy, which came not from a lack of intelligence but from the unintentional scars left on his personality by a domineering and ultrastrong father. Not infrequently the sons of strong parents are themselves weak and indecisive. This feeling of inadequacy led Nicholas Alexandrovich to choose advisors who did not threaten him, whose loyalty

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to the throne and to him personally were more important than their abilities. Frequently these people knew their inadequacies and were aware that their positions depended on telling the tsar what he might want to hear, and herein lay the crucial flaw in his character. Nicholas II would have made a perfect English monarch, reigning but not ruling, a monarch who did not have to make governmental decisions, choose ministers, or decide on legislation. Yet in every way, the Neva was light years from the Thames. After Alexander III’s death in 1894, the family came unglued without a tyrannical head. Despite his father’s 1893 decree forbidding morganatic marriages, Nicholas II watched helplessly as many occurred in his family, not least of which was of his own brother Mikhail’s marriage to “Countess” Brasova, a twice-divorced woman who had been married to commoners, one of whom was a lawyer. Some observers blame this unsettling on what they feel was the Nicholas’s loss of the grip his father had had on the family. Times had changed, however, and the new tsar’s complaint that “too many of us Romanovs had gone to live in the world of selfinterest where little mattered except the gratification of personal desire”70 was hardly by itself the answer. The members of the family had always followed their personal desire. The only difference was in lovemaking. Traditionally, both grand dukes and duchesses married whom they had to marry but had affairs, and even families, with their mistresses. By the twentieth century, however, the Romanovs were marrying the women and men they loved, whether they were politically suitable or not. Perhaps Alexander III’s decree in 1886 limiting the title and prerogatives of grand dukes to only sons and grandsons of tsars as a measure of economy weakened the bond that many would have had to the family. Nicholas Alexandrovich and Niki were rather close, both before the former became tsar and after. Nicholas Mikhailovich clearly loved and respected his cousin, another bit of evidence that the last tsar was not dimwitted as he is often presented, for one of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s most salient traits was his unwillingness to suffer fools gladly. The two carried on a correspondence, if somewhat erratically, all their adult lives, with Niki, as usual, doing most of the writing. Niki had been the first to suggest the marriage of the young tsarevich and his future wife Alix of HesseDarmstadt (Alexandra, as she came to be called after adhering to Orthodoxy).71 When Nicholas II’s brother died in 1899, the tsar chose Niki to accompany the body home. The tsarevich had died in Italy, and Niki found the trip there and back “very tiring and trying,”72 but Nicholas II’s choice of this grand duke, and Niki’s acceptance, speak highly of their devotion of one to the other. Niki was even responsible for the introduction into the family of one of the many quacks that surrounded the em-

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press. In their effort to have a male child, Alexandra employed all sorts of charlatans to help the process along, and one such was a French Doctor Papus (né Gerard Encausse), who dabbled in magic, alchemy, and the occult. Niki had met him somehow in France, and when the doctor came to Russia in 1901, he used the grand duke as an entrée to the tsar’s family.73 As Niki had no patience with such foolishness, we can assume that the “doctor” had presented some credentials other than his magical ones. Because a son was indeed born in 1904, he must have claimed credit, and in October 1905 he returned to St. Petersburg and served their majesties by holding a séance to call on the spirit of Tsar Alexander III, who, not too surprisingly, told his son to resist the revolution in which he found himself that year. Shortly after the turn of the century, the Russian Empire faced the greatest cataclysm in its history until that time: the 1905 Revolution. Yet from it the beginnings of what might have become a real constitutional regime were born. The events destroyed the autocracy, but by no means were all the historical powers of the tsar abolished. The ruling monarch still retained much more power than the English monarch had held after the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which was neither glorious nor a revolution. For the Russian monarchy, the 1905 Revolution was more of a wake-up call, a view that was nowhere comprehended in the conservative bastions of the entrenched power structure. Sir Bernard Pares, the first great British scholar of Russian studies, wrote that internal change within Russia had always come from a “jolt from the outside,” from some rough contact with the outside world, often resulting in Russian military defeat. Peter the Great’s reforms germinated from his fascination with the West, coupled with his need to strengthen his country for the continuous military struggle with its neighbors. Aristocratic army officers who had seen constitutionalism work in Western Europe launched the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 with the goal of bringing a constitution to backward Russia. The Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s were caused by defeat in the Crimean War, which made a thoughtful tsar realize the need to drag his primitive country into the nineteenth century. The Revolution of 1905 was much more serious, and the fact that tsarism emerged from it no more weakened than it did is a testament to the innate conservatism of the Russian people and the sheer dumb luck of the ruling family. Events would not be so kind to them twelve years later. The “jolt from the outside” in this case was the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, which had resulted from rather reckless Russian imperialistic ventures in the Far East. Russia’s perceived need for warm-water

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ports had led it to take advantage of the disintegration of the Chinese Empire and try to establish a protectorate of sorts over Manchuria, culminating in its “lease” of Port Arthur on the southern Manchurian coast. It was bad enough that Japan had won and then been forced by Western powers to disgorge Port Arthur in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. But in addition to taking in 1898 the port the Japanese had won, the Russians were using Manchuria as a base to infiltrate Korea, a nation under the “protection” of the Japanese Empire. Seeing the need to rid this part of the world of Russian presence, the Japanese struck at the Russian fleet at Port Arthur without declaring war, a tactic they would use more than once. Unprepared for the assault, the Russians were quickly besieged in the port, and the Japanese overran southern Manchuria. Nicholas II had held the Japanese in rather low regard ever since a would-be assassin made an attempt on his life while he was in Japan on a state visit when he was tsarevich. He bore a scar in his scalp for the remainder of his life as a result. He regarded the Japanese as “yellow monkeys” that would not be difficult to defeat and followed a reckless and adventuristic policy in the Far East that could only have provoked Japan, hence the war. It went badly for the Russians from the beginning, and the recently constructed Trans-Siberian Railway was not adequate to keep the Russians supplied in a war thousands of miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg. Port Arthur fell, and the Russians were defeated in a number of land battles in Manchuria. Niki, who was rarely optimistic, remained so throughout the early months of the war, rationalizing some sort of victory out of what were obviously Russian defeats. His letters to Masson would give the impression to anyone not knowing better that the Russians were winning the war. The besieged in Port Arthur “repulsed several attacks . . . while inflicting some very serious losses on the enemy,”74 he wrote his French friend, and noted that General Aleksei Kuropatkin, commander in chief of Russian Far Eastern forces, “receives his reinforcements daily,” although he added that he still could not go on the offensive. When the Russians were defeated the next month at Liao-Lian in southern Manchuria, he rationalized, “The more one learns of the details of the battle of LiaoLian, the more one realizes that it was scarcely a victory for the Nippons and well they have paid to advance so far.”75 He then wrote what units had arrived in the Far East and gave Masson all sorts of information that should not have been repeated outside regular military channels. Russia’s final act of desperation was the sending of its Baltic fleet on a quixotic mission to the Far East to relieve Port Arthur. The venture encountered trouble almost immediately. On entering the North Sea, the fleet stumbled into some English fishing boats, which it hysterically mis-

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took for Japanese naval vessels, blowing them out of the water and creating an international incident that nearly resulted in Britain’s entering the war. The grand duke tried to put the best face on the blunder to Masson, writing, “What are France, Germany and the United States going to do?”76 knowing full well that they were not going to do anything to extricate the Russians from their dilemma. The crisis was resolved short of war, and the Baltic fleet sailed on to its rendezvous with a watery grave. While some members of any society make a great deal of money from war, most of the population suffers. War invariably breeds inflation, even with wage and price controls, which Russia did not have, and inflation harms the poor more than the wealthy. By the turn of the century, Russia’s largest cities had begun to develop an urban proletariat, who unlike their rural brethren, could not raise their own food. Wages increasingly could not rise at the rate that food, fuel, and clothing prices did, and by late 1904, a situation that was not good before the war (a worker’s annual wage scarcely covered half a year’s living expenses), became impossible only half a year into the conflict. To the workers’ assistance came a rather mysterious priest named Father Gapon. This enigmatic figure had begun a ministry among the working poor of the capital and had organized a society for them called simply “the Assembly.” Its goal was to struggle peacefully, within the tsarist structure, for improvement of the working conditions of the city’s proletariat. At some point, Gapon was apparently bought in some fashion by the police, either as an informer or catspaw, to lead the workers in the direction that the police wanted them to go.77 Strikes at the giant Putilov Works in St. Petersburg in the fall of 1904 apparently changed Gapon’s allegiance from the police to the workers, or so his behavior gives the impression, and he concocted a scheme of leading a giant demonstration to the Winter Palace in the center of the capital to petition the tsar for a redress of their grievances. The motive was based on what Lenin called “naive monarchism,” the notion that the tsar was the God-sent protector of the masses. If the lower classes were living in misery or were being mistreated by the government, it was only because the tsar was not conscious of it. Aware or not, it would not have mattered with the reactionary last tsar, but Gapon and his followers felt that a large demonstration directly before his palace would bypass the insensitive, corrupt officials and inform the unaware tsar of their plight. Being enlightened as to their situation, he would, like a fairy-tale king, make everything right. Gapon and the Assembly informed the police of their intentions, and they felt that they had gotten some sort of go-ahead from them, but no number of minatory police broadsides affixed in the working-class sections of St. Petersburg in the days before the march could convince them otherwise.

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On Sunday, January 22, 1905, thousands of workers dressed in their Sunday best, taking along their children, carrying portraits of the tsar, and singing “God Save the Tsar,” began to converge on the city center. Nicholas II had left the capital the day before for a weekend of playing dominoes at his country palace at Tsarskoe Selo, and the only representative of the government that met the workers were the bullets of the soldiers and the police, causing a massacre that has gone down in history as “Bloody Sunday.” Some 400 men, women, and children were killed. The shock wave that swept Russia within weeks became the 1905 Revolution that rocked tsarism to its very foundations. The political situation in St. Petersburg was far from stable before this shocking incident. Although a moderate, Prince P. D. Sviatopolk-Mirsky in the fall of 1904 somehow had been named minister of the interior, the branch of government that controlled the police. He was a personal friend of Nicholas Mikhailovich, who felt him “sagely liberal” and not a “functionary bureaucrat [chinovnik fonctionnaire—a curious mixture of French and Russian].” Mirsky found himself, like any moderate or liberal minister, however, caught between two fires: the bomb-throwing radicals on one side and the reactionaries around the throne on the other. The grand duke wondered if Mirsky would “leave victorious from the engaged struggle?”78 As the labor tension grew, the government, made more apprehensive by police reports of worker unrest, acted more and more indecisively. Nicholas Mikhailovich was very disturbed by the absence of any strong individual “to take [the country in] a definite direction.” Exasperated, he wrote his friend Masson, “Things are decided in the evening and reversed the next morning and vice versa.” This lack of “character,” as he termed it, would place his friend Prince Mirsky in an intolerable position and drive him to “take his retreat in the new year.”79 This vacillation had led to the thought of at least having some member of the imperial family meet with the workers when their demonstration was announced, but then it was reversed. The indecisiveness gave the workers the go-ahead that ended so fatally. The grand duke was in Cannes when Bloody Sunday occurred, and he did not return to the capital until January 30. Within twenty-four hours of his arrival, he had evaluated the conditions and realized that the whole disaster was “due to the shortsightedness of the authorities and the police.” He did, however, buy what was obviously the government’s attempt to soften the calamity by believing official stories that some of the women killed were men dressed up like women, and two priests killed were really students disguised to look like priests. Mirsky had survived the explosion for now, but Nicholas was annoyed that no member of his family

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“had budged from here during these bloody days.”80 It was the same Romanov insensitivity shown in the aftermath of the Khodynka disaster. At some point in February, Count Aleksei Bobrinsky saw the grand duke at the Imperial Yacht Club next to the Hotel Astoria with his brother Sergei and Grand Dukes Nikolai and Peter Nicholaevich. If he talked to them, he did not say, but he described their mood as “dreadfully frightened at the approaching revolution,” and he noted that they were “throwing off all pride and reconciling themselves to the end.”81 Mirsky fell shortly afterward “with almost unanimous regrets,” in the view of the grand duke, and went to one of his country estates in Kharkov province. He was replaced by A. G. Bulygin, who Nicholas Mikhailovich felt was “a brave man,” who would be able to function if he would distance himself from Grand Duke Sergei, Nicholas’s cousin and the black reactionary governor general of Moscow.82 The tsar, Nicholas Mikhailovich felt, was “beginning to understand the situation” and had created a number of committees to study the press, working conditions of the workers, and rural problems, and he did receive a carefully selected deputation from the working classes. Nicholas felt that these actions were a sign that the government had finally decided to do something.83 Yet the circumstances had already gotten out of hand, and the revolution was spreading everywhere. That same month, a revolutionary group from the Social Revolutionary Party, the party that claimed to speak for the peasants, assassinated V. K. von Plehve, the head of the police, with a bomb, which left bloody bits of his body lying all over the snow. Nicholas feared that the government would react with repression, although he hoped that it would remain calm and “continue the road of reforms”;84 he must have been referring to the exploratory committees created after Bloody Sunday. Yet the revolutionaries did not give the government much of a reprieve. Shortly after von Plehve’s assassination, the bomb-throwers claimed a member of the imperial family, Grand Duke Sergei himself. His body was likewise blown to smithereens, and there was nothing larger found than his head, while some parts of his body such as the fingers were found on the snowy lawn of the Palace of Justice.85 The assassination of his relative in no way altered Nicholas Mikhailovich’s political outlook. He felt that the government should not react with repression but remain calm and continue to work for reforms as it had been doing before the ominous event.86 Yet within a few days, he sensed that the government was stagnating, and he saw no one coming to the rescue. “Crises [usually] bring out some new men, [but] I do not see them, neither on the side of the bureaucratic force, nor on the side of the opposition,” he wrote his French historian friend. He saw only

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“small passions, small characters, [and] persons of no consequence” on the horizon.87 The war continued to go badly in the Far East, and he with his uncanny ability to sense the future feared that the “frightful carnage in Manchuria” would have “some incalculable results, not only from the point of view in the resultant finish of this struggle, but also for the interior situation of this country.” His innate pessimism continued to cloud his view of the future, as he saw no one “to repair the bad,” and he could not imagine “a favorable result” from the imbroglio.88 By March the country had calmed down somewhat, and the strikes in the factories had more or less stopped and normal work had resumed. Perhaps the labors of the commissions for reform gave people some hope that something was really being done, but their expectations were far greater than the government was willing to fulfill. The most avid reformers wanted a democratic constituent assembly, whereas the government planned on giving them something considerably less. Meanwhile, both internal and military disasters continued to occur. In June the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin proved quite an embarrassment for the government (and gave Sergei Eisenstein a great topic for a movie) and in the Far East, the Baltic fleet had finally met its doom at Tsu-shima. Meanwhile, the country continued its “march toward the unknown,” as the grand duke called it, and by mid-summer, the entire country was watching the Council of Ministers, waiting to learn what sort of parliament would emerge from minister of the interior Bulygin’s efforts. When the decision was announced, it hardly pleased anyone. The so-called “Bulygin Duma,” proclaimed informally in July, was to have only a consultative role in creating legislation, not a legislative one. The only difference between it and the State Council, which Nicholas Mikhailovich’s father had chaired, was that it would be elected in some nondemocratic manner. The State Council was totally appointive. Nicholas Mikhailovich dismissed the new, undemocratic chamber as “an absurd component.”89 For him, the tsar had promised much but delivered little.90 Never completely quiet since the events of Bloody Sunday, the country erupted in the summer, largely at the tsar’s failure to give the country some decent form of political representation. The disturbances that had heretofore been largely in the industrial sector now spread to the countryside. Landlords were being burned out and estates were being seized. Nicholas Mikhailovich just made it to Borjomi that summer before a rail strike and other disorders occurred in the Caucasus. As he was passing through Tiflis, bombs were exploding in various parts of the city, generally targeting police officers and cossacks, and even the workers at his Borjomi water-bottling plant went on strike. Amazingly, with all of the disorder in the country, his correspondence with Masson continued to

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arrive.91 Fortunately, Nicholas Mikhailovich’s peasants had remained calm because, the grand duke believed, they had confidence in him. He decided that he would stay there as long as possible “to give a good example.”92 When he did finally leave in the fall, he had no idea that he would not be able to return for several years. The “Bulygin Duma” was formally announced in August 1905. The grand duke learned that the original plan had been subjected to “some large modifications in a liberal way.” The peasants, who it was believed would elect men who would support the tsar, became enfranchised, but so were the Jews given the vote in towns “where they will be masters.” The remainder of the country, Nicholas felt, would be polarized between the nobility and the “Third Estate,” what was to the grand duke, an allusion to the term for the “masses” from the French Revolution. His usual pessimism prevailed: “We will see a monstrosity created,” he wrote his French friend. When he finally received the detailed plan for the Duma, he could not believe it. “I have read and reread the innumerable paragraphs of the new reform of the initiation of the Duma,” he wrote Masson. “Rarely have I seen such an unvarnished imbroglio, and I ask myself if the people who have passed [it] . . . have truly understood what they have done.”93 The “reform” had fallen far short of a representative assembly, and Nicholas Mikhailovich was indignant. Any change, to be successful, had to remake the entire system, and he strongly wanted an assembly that had legislative powers, which the “Bulygin Duma” did not have. He also hoped that the new assembly would have the right to interrogate ministers and have the ministers responsible to it, not to the tsar.94 This half measure, he was certain, would not solve the problem of unrest in the country. In September he wrote, “The Duma which is going to meet in January in Petersburg—I doubt strongly that it will be able to make any large influence.”95 Again his pessimistic predictions proved uncannily correct. Nicholas Mikhailovich predicted, again correctly, that there would be new disorders in the fall, and he planned to try to return to the capital before the fall strikes disrupted the railroads, a development that was to bring major cracks to the tsarist system. Fearing that his house in Borjomi might be bombed, he decided to take his collection of miniatures and several portraits to St. Petersburg, where he felt they would be safer.96 One bright spot for the stability of society was the loyalty of the army. Whereas there were mutinies, especially among the troops in Siberia and Manchuria, those in European Russia remained fairly stable. It was the major difference between the events of 1905 and those of 1917, when the army deserted the tsar. Moreover, for a revolution to succeed, there

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has to be a coordinated, unified effort that cuts across class lines. Whereas there was much dissatisfaction with the tsar, the opposition was not as broad or as unified as it was to be in 1917, nor did it have its Kerenskys and Lenins to lead it. Its failure to topple Nicholas II, or to bring a truly constitutional regime, gave tsarism a reprieve and should have taught it a lesson. Tsarism did not learn it and faced a doomed fate because of its inability to learn from the events of 1905. Labor leaders throughout Europe had dreamed for decades of a “general strike,” a work stoppage where workers of all types would quit work and bring the establishment to its knees. Society having come to a complete halt, the working classes could then extract from their helpless masters better conditions. Yet such a strike had never been successful and had always fallen short of its goals. Just as it is ironic that the stereotypical Marxist revolution first occurred in the country that had the weakest proletariat, it is equally ironic that the first successful general strike occurred in that same country. It was not planned. Like the Revolution of 1917, it had no overall leaders, but to the tsarist establishment, it was almost as lethal. The crisis began early in October with Nicholas Mikhailovich’s feared railroad strike. The railroad workers’ walkout was followed by others until the entire Russian nation was paralyzed. The tsarist government was helpless in the face of the work stoppage. Nicholas Mikhailovich favored reforms, but like most liberals, he wanted them gradually, not forced from the street. The capital was gripped with demonstrations, and mobs with red flags passed the Winter Palace. Across the Neva River, crowds near the University of St. Petersburg were dispelled by cossacks and their nagaiki (whips). In those frightening days, the grand duke wrote, “The government (if there is one) continues to remain in complete inactivity, . . . a stupid spectator to the tide which little by little is engulfing the country.” Niki dreaded the opening of the “Bulygin Duma” in January, for he feared, as he mixed his metaphors, that “blood is going to roll,” and he questioned whether anyone would gain a victory.97 Faced with this nightmare, Nicholas II accepted the advice of his prime minister Sergei Witte and agreed to grant what was in effect a constitution. Named the “Manifesto of October 17” but better known as the “October Manifesto,” the decree, had it been fully implemented, would have given the Russian people a democratically elected legislature and all of the basic rights that belong to any citizen in any free society. It was a total capitulation, if Nicholas II had fully meant it, and the tsar felt so guilty about surrendering the powers that God had given him that he went to his confessor to beg absolution.

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The man behind the shake-up was Sergei Witte, probably the most competent minister Nicholas II ever had. He had inherited him from his father, under whom Witte had served as the minister of finance. Extremely shrewd, Witte had climbed over a number of people on the way up, and it is a testament to his abilities that he did so while married to a Jewish woman who had been divorced. He had a curious social problem in that he had contracted syphilis in his youth, and the disease had devoured his nose. He had it replaced with a wax one, and one member of the imperial family told this author that he would see Witte on the quay at Yalta wearing a cap with a long bill, presumably to protect the wax nose from the sun.98 He had been a major force in Russia’s industrialization, building thousands of miles of railroads with French loans, devaluing Russia’s currency to promote international trade, erecting high tariffs to protect Russian industry, and placing Russia on the gold standard, giving the country a stable currency for international dealings. He had been sent to negotiate the Treaty of Portsmouth with Japan in August 1905 with the sole instruction that he was not to agree to an indemnity. With a poker player’s bluff, Witte ceded to the Japanese, despite the horrific Russian defeats, only the evacuation of Manchuria, which was not Russian anyway, and half of the island of Sakhalin. For his success, Nicholas II made Witte a count. The Russian nobility did not fancy this bourgeois upstart with a Jewish wife in their ranks, and dubbed him “Count Half-Sakhalin.” He had become Russia’s first prime minister in August 1905, and it was in this capacity that he earned Nicholas II’s eternal hatred by talking the indecisive tsar into granting the creation of a legislative body. The day after the declaration of the October Manifesto, the grand duke had mixed feelings, given the way it was forced on the government. He would have preferred for the gradual reforms begun earlier in the year to have been allowed to work, beginning with the Bulygin Duma. Keeping Masson posted on events, he wrote on October 18, “There it is! (Cela y est.) We have today a homogeneous ministry under the presidency of Witte, freedom of speech, of conscience, and everything else. After twenty days of general strike throughout the country, the government has caved in to the mob.”99 The strikes had left the capital city without streetlights, streetcars, even Niki’s beloved taxis, and he was reduced to going about in his own automobiles. The streets were clear, however, owing to the energetic measures of General D. F. Trepov, the governor general of St. Petersburg. The grand duke regretted that the government had lost what he called “the initiative of reform” and had been “forced to give in under pressure of certain elements of society.” He fell back on his most unappealing bias, his anti-Semitism. He blamed all problems on “the Jews,” to whom he

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felt Witte had “delivered the country” and was thereby “buying calm at this price.” He wanted reform but not one from the streets. Russia was, he felt, taking a “leap into the unknown.”100 The October Manifesto did not have the immediate result of calming the country as Witte had hoped. In fact, in the days immediately after the decree, agitation intensified. The founding congress of the Constitutional-Democratic (Kadet) Party, Russia’s bourgeois-liberal party, was in session when word arrived that the government had made this major concession. Miliukov, the history professor who was the party’s leader, snapped back when he heard the news, “Nothing’s changed! The war [with the autocracy] still goes on.”101 The government continued to fumble its way about, and the tsar even sacked the loyal Trepov, who had brought a measure of order to the streets. The ominous appearance in October of a “soviet” (council) of socialist elements in both St. Petersburg and Moscow had given a leadership to the mobs in the streets, and even Witte himself must have had serious doubts about the wisdom of his concession. The new ministry stood its ground, however, and indeed even turned to reaction, using its time-honored antidote for internal problems: unleashing the masses on the Jews. Throughout the provinces, the grand duke learned, the new liberties had provoked a massacre of these unfortunate people.102 In the midst of the October crisis, Niki received word that his father was ill in Cannes, and because Nicholas II would not give his brother Sergei leave to go, the grand duke took his place. He left St. Petersburg on Saturday, November 5, on the Northern Express, arriving in Paris on Monday and going from there to Cannes. On the Riviera, the news Nicholas Mikhailovich received of Russian events was spotty, and he had learned nothing of the situation in the Caucasus since he left. Mail could not get through easily, and newspapers arrived only erratically. He was consumed with boredom. He had left Russia without thinking about the possibility of a telegraphy strike and found himself in the unfamiliar predicament of having run out of money, so he could not even indulge in, as he put it, “the charms of Monte Carlo.”103 In his absence, the situation changed in his homeland. By the end of November, the October Manifesto had begun to have the effect for which it was intended: the division of the opposition to the autocracy. Most liberals came to see it as the major concession it was and a basis from which reform could be built. As a result, they abandoned the revolution. By midNovember, the country was calming and the radicals of the Soviet were becoming increasingly isolated. The end of the Russo-Japanese War also had a soothing effect on the army. The government therefore felt confident enough by then to move against the Petrograd Soviet, which they

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disbanded, arresting its leaders. The Moscow Soviet, in which the Bolsheviks, the more radical wing of the Social Democratic Party, had greater influence, resisted. There was street fighting in the working-class sections of the city, with some of the buildings, if present-day tour leaders are to be believed, still bearing the scars caused by bullets. By the time the Duma elections began to be held after the first of the year, the government had started to extend its control over most of the country. The election for the First Duma, called the “Duma of Popular Hope,” took place over several months early in 1906. The party that received the largest number of seats, about 170, was the Kadet Party, the aforementioned liberal party, which favored direct universal manhood suffrage, wide-reaching land reform, and a constitutional monarchy. The hard Right and promonarchist groups had not fared well, electing only about thirty deputies. The Octobrists, the moderate conservatives, garnered about the same. Because the elections were not truly democratic, the radical parties, the Social Democrats (the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks) and the Social Revolutionaries, who claimed to speak for the Russian peasant, did not formally participate, thus contributing to the Kadet victory, as radical electors had no other place to cast their votes. A large number of the deputies were from the peasant class, bringing a sigh of relief from Witte, who mistakenly felt that given the traditional peasant loyalty to the throne, these deputies would give little trouble. On this point he would be sadly mistaken. In some places, as many as 30,000 people gathered to see their deputy off to St. Petersburg, expecting him to return with a major land reform measure, as well as other fundamental changes. Many deputies came dressed in their native costumes, and they presented a rather colorful assembly when they gathered at the Winter Palace in April to hear the tsar’s address. One senior official looked in horror at the motley assembly: “It was enough to take a look at this [group of deputies] to feel horror at the sight of Russia’s first representative body,” he wrote. “It was a gathering of savages. It seemed as if the Russian land had sent to Petersburg everything that was barbarian in it.”104 Nicholas Mikhailovich’s view of the body was not much different, since he shared the moderate liberal’s fear of the masses. He called the assembled “a public calamity,” which had “the vulgar heads of lawyers from the provinces, ignoble priests, a Catholic bishop from Vilna, . . . and a mass of peasants.” Noting that the largest group was young, between the ages of twenty and forty, he added incongruously, “but there are some imbeciles and some with moustaches with the heads of urchins and virtually all in peasant clothes and large traditional boots.” He feared that they had “no culture,” and he wondered out loud if they “will be able

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to be reasonable.” His greatest doubt about the assembly, however, was that it was only quasi-constitutional, with no control over the minsters. Yet he saw it as a start. He had never been a “partisan of samo [samoderzhavie: autocracy],” as he wrote later in the dark days of 1917, and felt that since the “memorable act of 17/29 [sic] October 1905, he “considered his sovereign a constitutional emperor.”105 He believed that there would be some big fights between the body and the government, “which will perhaps finish tragically for one or the other.” He felt that in any real struggle, however, the government would win out as it “still [his italics] had the army . . . and those caches of bombs.”106 Nicholas Mikhailovich was in Cannes with his ailing father during the first sessions of the Duma and in Paris for the weeks that followed, and he did not return to St. Petersburg until late in April. Despite his interest, it was not until the end of May that he attended his first of many Duma sessions. Whereas he was not present for the opening of the First Duma, he did attend the opening of all the others in the years that followed. He often sat in on the general debates, watching from the visitors’ gallery, and except for Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, the brother of Nicholas II, who made an appearance, and his cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, who came once, Nicholas Mikhailovich was the only grand duke ever to attend a session of the body. He seems to have delighted in the first opening of this new Russian institution, which occurred without a hitch. He wrote his French friend that the Duma had opened “with a pomp unisitée [?].” There had been a discourse from the throne, delivered in the Winter Palace with “calm dignity and much good grace.” He seems delighted that the man elected president of the assembly, S. A. Muromtsev, was an academician and a professor at the University of Moscow and had shown “moderation and tact.” The grand duke believed that he would be an “excellent president.”107 In the days immediately before the Duma met in April 1906, Nicholas II issued the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire, which outlined the relationship between the Duma and the monarchy. The document was either very sloppily written or else made very cleverly confusing so that it could be interpreted to the advantage of the tsarist government. The first article stated that all power resided with the emperor, which it clearly did not, given the fact that the document was being written in the first place. Moreover, in later articles specific powers were given to the Duma. As a further bit of protection for the forces of conservatism, the tsar placed the old State Council as the upper house through which any legislation had to pass in order to become law. Should any recklessly liberal legislation manage to emerge from this reactionary body, Nicholas II had the

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power to veto it, and the legislative houses had no authority to override him. Should the chambers not be in session, Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws gave the tsar the right to decree legislation. Supposedly for the decreed legislation to remain law, the legislature had to pass it within three months of its reassembly. Moreover, Article 87 could not be used to amend the Fundamental Laws. This autocratic legislative power was used by the tsar at a number of crucial times; however, the government ignored the two restricting provisions. Yet the factor that always gave the tsar the upper hand was the virtual absence of any legislative power over the budget. The Fundamental Laws gave the legislature some control over only 40 percent of any budget, and it was the least important 40 percent (the forestry ministry, for example). The legislature had no control over the budgets for the army, the court, or the police, or essentially any other important part of the government. Moreover, its authority over the 40 percent was only partial; should the legislature refuse to pass a budget for the part it “controlled,” the previous year’s budget for that sector automatically went into effect, so the government always had at least as much to spend as it had had the previous year. The system was certainly not a full-fledged constitutional monarchy and has often been denigrated by historians, yet the English Parliament did not have any power at all when it first assembled, but in time it bound the political (and in one case at least the literal) hands of the English monarch. By the time of the Revolution of 1917, the legislature had obtained quasi control over 60 percent of the budget. Even though it was made more conservative by a rewriting of the franchise laws, the Duma asserted its small powers in the years that followed. For example, in 1908 it removed by a majority vote the title of “Autocrat of All the Russias” in a reply to the tsar’s address from the throne. The more conservative Dumas even passed surprisingly progressive social and education legislation. There was, after 1905, clearly no returning to the absolutism of the past, and had the war not produced the peculiar bit of political alchemy that brought about the Revolution, Russia in time, like England, would have stumbled into a legitimate constitutional monarchy. The First Duma, however, got into an immediate conflict with the government. Witte had been fired the day before the Duma first met, and an undistinguished bureaucrat named Ivan Goremykin became prime minister. Had Witte remained in office, he might have forged some sort of partnership with the Duma. Goremykin would have none of it. The Kadet leadership passed a resolution on land reform, taking it directly to the tsar by bypassing the upper house. Nicholas II would not even receive the delegation. The lower house then passed a resolution calling for political

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amnesty, and on May 13 Goremykin replied that their action was “inadmissible.” The Duma retaliated with a vote of “no confidence” in the government, an action that the Fundamental Laws did not permit it, and war with the government was on. The remainder of its short history was stormy. The Duma passed a bill abolishing capital punishment, but it was strangled in the upper house. The Duma rejected the government’s land reform proposal and passed another, more radical, version. The Duma then went over the government’s head to the people, and on July 8 the government sent troops into St. Petersburg and disbanded the body. The only bill to pass both legislative houses and be signed by the tsar was a bill providing 15 million roubles for famine relief. There were periods of what Nicholas Mikhailovich called a “practical armistice,” but there was from the beginning no real cooperation. The grand duke attended the Duma session of May 26, when Goremykin addressed the chamber. Clearly siding with the legislature, the grand duke dubbed the prime minister’s speech a “ministerial tirade,” which was greeted with stony silence by the body. When the prime minister finished and started to leave, a number of deputies, including Vladimir D. Nabokov, the father of the novel Lolita’s author, showed “an air of dissatisfaction by a certain hand sign toward the minister.” Some walked out. This display disturbed the grand duke, however, and he regarded their actions as “pitiable” and “playing at parliamentarism.” He felt that the “constitution” had created an impasse as the ministers were not responsible to the Duma, and the Duma deputies were playing “for their personal popularity.” Nicholas Mikhailovich saw as the only solution the making of “some ministers” responsible to the Duma “as had been promised in the autumn with the manifesto of 17/30 October.” He feared that this change would not be made because of the “blindness in high places,” which did not realize that prolonging the uncertainty was risking the chance of a new revolution.108 On the whole, however, the pessimistic Nicholas Mikhailovich saw hope for the future. In other sessions, he was pleased with the behavior of the deputies, who refrained from catcalls and whistles, proving that they could “imitate the Palais Bourbon” and in the future continue this example. He liked the Duma president Muromtsev, a man he felt was “cultivated” and was able to “counterbalance the negative influences” and “to give wise counsel at Peterhof,” if anyone there had been willing to listen. Nicholas was more critical of the ministers, who were not cooperative, and he felt that what was needed were men who understood a constitutional system. He lamented Witte’s departure, for he would have understood how to “play the role.”109 Nicholas did not hold the Duma blameless, however, and condemned the deputies’ “chatter” and unwillingness to even meet

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the government halfway. This attitude would, he felt, make conflict inevitable. The Rubicon was crossed when the Duma appealed over the heads of the government to the people on the agrarian question. Although the language in the Duma debates had been moderate and noninflammatory, the tsar used this democratic action to dissolve the First Duma after a life of only 100 days, when it had a potential constitutional life of five years. Goremykin was removed after the dissolution of the Duma and a new prime minister installed, Peter Stolypin, one of the two or three most competent ministers ever appointed by Nicholas II. Nicholas Mikhailovich became one of the most militant supporters of the new prime minister in the imperial family110 because the new minister represented the type of progressive conservatism that typified the politics of the grand duke himself. Sometimes Stolypin could be benevolently despotic, but some of the grand duke’s positions had that flavor as well. Stolypin, however, found himself in a difficult spot. To the reactionaries, whom he saved from revolution, he was a dangerous liberal; to the liberals, he was a hopeless reactionary. Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, the sister of Nicholas II, remembered Stolypin as a person who realized Russia needed reform, but did so slowly, giving the country time to digest and become accustomed to the change.111 He extended taxes to the upper classes and inaugurated a policy of breaking up the large estates with compensation to all. Large landowners and many members of the imperial family hated him, including, she remembered incorrectly, her cousin Nicholas Mikhailovich.112 Her brother liked him, however, and excused his sometimes high-handedness, believing that he was “the best prime minister I have ever had.”113 Stolypin was most optimistic about his ability to establish order before the Second Duma would be elected. Nicholas Mikhailovich, who had talked with him, was perplexed at his “truly astonishing optimism.” Feeling that “the garbage is piling up here,”114 the grand duke continued to predict “trouble, murders, arson, and pillage,” although he added to his prediction in a letter to Masson, “I hope that I am mistaken.”115 Stolypin proved not to be as conciliatory as Nicholas Mikhailovich had hoped. Not wishing to appear to compromise before the new elections to the Duma could take place, the prime minister refused to concede to public opinion and appoint a liberal ministry. Moreover, he established his famous field courts-martial, literally rolling courts that traveled about the country trying figures who were causing disturbances and summarily hanging them on the spot. In fact, he made such liberal use of the hangman’s noose that it came to be called “Stolypin’s necktie.” His actions did, however, restore order to the countryside. Nicholas Mikhailovich spoke with the new prime minister and suggested that if the

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country could not have a ministry responsible to the Duma, it might at least have one made up of men who “enjoyed the public confidence.”116 No moves to a “ministry of confidence” were made, and in September an event occurred that must have hardened Stolypin in his position of repression. A would-be assassin entered his dacha in the environs of St. Petersburg and detonated a bomb, killing thirty people and injuring another thirty, including Stolypin’s daughter, who was crippled for life. Killings of police, soldiers, and public figures continued until they were stopped by the justice meted out by “Stolypin’s necktie.” This violence greatly disturbed the grand duke, who felt that human life “no longer had any place in Russia.” He even seemed to have developed a concern for himself, as he had been at Stolypin’s house only three days before the bomb exploded. Stolypin had entered the government as the minister of the interior in Goremykin’s brief cabinet. Nicholas Mikhailovich saw him then as “a young, excellent worker, not a reactionary,” who could “take responsibility.”117 He praised Stolypin’s first address to the Duma in 1907, calling it “a formidable success,” contrasting it to Goremykin’s “piteous performance in the first Duma.”118 The grand duke established a rapport with him, although the two men never seem to have become close friends, and Nicholas Mikhailovich’s support of Stolypin never wavered.119 The prime minister kept him informed about the meetings of the Duma,120 and Niki, the letter writer extraordinaire, wrote him praising his work.121 The multistaged elections to the Second Duma began in January 1907. Seeing the Kadets as the greatest of its enemies, the government threw its full weight in the election campaign against them, giving all the support it could to the parties of the Right and generally ignoring the extreme Left. Because the election was done in stages and at various levels, not by direct suffrage, it was sometimes possible to determine results in some areas earlier than others. In the first stages, it was obvious that the extreme Left, which had boycotted the elections to the First Duma, was making great gains in the Second. Before the end of January, Grand Duke Nicholas wrote Masson that the “Left is already triumphant” but that the “Right [still] hoped to take many seats in the provinces.” “The new Duma will be detestable,” he mourned to his friend Masson, “much worse than the first, and it doesn’t matter if the majority goes either to the right or left.”122 The grand duke seems to have thrown himself into the elections in some manner because he did not write Masson for some time, very unusual behavior for this prolific letter writer. When he did write, he blamed the elections for his failure to do so, for “the elections to the Duma . . . have absorbed all the attention of society.”123

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Nicholas Mikhailovich’s earlier prognostications had been correct. The extreme Right had gone from fifteen seats in the First Duma to sixty-three in the Second. The Trudoviks, a socialist yet democratic party led by the famous Alexander Kerensky, went from ninety-four seats in the First to 101 in the Second. The Social Democrats (both Bolshevik and Menshevik factions), who had officially boycotted the First Duma, entered the fray for the Second and elected sixty-five deputies. The Social Revolutionaries officially boycotted the elections to the Second yet somehow managed to elect thirty-four deputies. The Kadets, the bête noire of the government, fell from 179 seats in the First to only ninety-two in the Second. On the closing of the First Duma, the Kadets and the moderate socialists had crossed the border into Finland and met there in a rump session, issuing the so-called “Vyborg Manifesto,” which called on the citizens to refuse to pay taxes and serve in the army until the letter of the October Manifesto was fulfilled by the tsarist government. All those who had signed were forbidden to participate in the elections for the Second Duma, and the Kadets therefore lost some of their best candidates. What had occurred was an election of a Duma that was one-quarter Right and conservative and about 50 percent socialist, with little moderate-liberal or moderate-conservative center. Any chance of cooperation or completion of any productive work was impossible. Stolypin tried to bring into the government some of the Octobrists, a moderate conservative party, which Nicholas Mikhailovich saw as a hopeful sign, feeling that if the prime minister did not, “dissolution would be immediate.” His prescience was again on the mark: Stolypin was unable to do so, and the Second Duma lasted only seventy-two days. Yet the grand duke was horrified at the “menagerie,” as he called it, that constituted the Second Duma. “There are representatives of all the animal bipieds in Russia,” he fumed to Masson. “Two bishops, ten priests, a Catholic, a Mullah, some lawyers, some doctors, a Prince Kourakine,124 a Count Polvode, . . . some professors, some village mayors, many former soldiers, a few Jews, . . . and a pile of imposing socialist peasants and workers of a red [hue?].” He expressed further horror that two of the Duma vice presidents were socialists, and that among the Left, seventyfour members had been indicted for political and anarchist crimes. “It is with these personnel that Stolypin must work.” Again with uncanny correctness, he predicted the future of this bizarre body. “The disorder and the extremes will give the government a good order to dissolve it.” He spoke of the assembled as “rogues,” wondering how Stolypin could work with them, and despaired that there would result any meaningful reform. As usual, he hoped that his dire predictions were wrong.125 He attended sessions with some regularity and was generally disturbed by the crude

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behavior of several of the deputies who showed their displeasure with vulgar hand gestures. Priests, who by church rules were to offer prayers each Sunday for the emperor, had only to hold a sympathetic demonstration because party discipline would not permit the prayers.126 He became in these times an even more devoted admirer of Stolypin, who never lost his courage and continued to promote his agricultural reforms, which would begin the break-up of the communes and creation of individual, private farms for the peasants. The antics of the Duma were indeed appalling. When deputies of the Right rose to speak, the deputies of the Left would shuffle their feet or move their desks to drown out their speech. When a Leftist took the podium, the Rightists would take out noisemakers, creating a racket that made it impossible for him to be heard. Fights erupted on the Duma floor, and the “antics of the Duma” certainly did no credit to representative government. When certain members attacked the army, Nicholas II was furious, and a police claim that there was a plot to assassinate the tsar gave the government the excuse to dissolve the “Duma of Popular Anger,” as it had come to be called, on June 3, 1907. The institution was clearly going nowhere. While the Duma was out of session, Stolypin illegally used Article 87 to change the Fundamental Laws to make the institution even less democratic. When finished, his “Third of June System,” as it was called, gave 230 landowners the same voting power as 60,000 peasants and the equivalent of 125,000 factory workers. Nicholas Mikhailovich was not sorry to see the Second Duma disbanded, but he confessed himself somewhat perplexed about the new electoral law, which was the work of a bureaucrat Sergei Kryzhanovsky, who had “a talent and the privilege of making blunders.” He feared that the changes might create some unpleasant surprises. Moreover, he did not like the government’s running roughshod over the constitution, fearing that it was “bad precedent” and would give the opposition a cause by which it might profit in the future. Nicholas also feared that the change would bring the terrorists back in force. With their actions in conjunction with the still-sporadic army mutinies and “rural incendiarism, expropriations, [and] brigandage,” the “mess is complete.” He put much faith in Stolypin, however, to hold things together.127 The elections to the Third Duma, called by its detractors “the Master’s Duma,” took place in October 1907, and the body opened its first session on November 1/14. It had a right-of-center majority. The moderately conservative Octobrists became the largest single party with 131 seats, the Right had fifty-three, and the new conservative Nationalist Party elected ninety-two, for a conservative majority. This Rightist majority dis-

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turbed the grand duke, not so much because of its politics but because he saw it as a bunch of “blunderers.” He was troubled by the number of clergymen (forty-five priests and two bishops), which he felt “does not promise anything good.” He had hoped that Nicholas L’vov would be elected president of the chamber, for he was “moderate and intelligent,” but he felt that the Right would never accept him.128 When L’vov was not elected, the grand duke felt that it was a positive sign that Alexander Guchkov, the wealthy founder of the Octobrist Party, had been. Guchkov had even won the respect of Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s right-hand man, who called Guchkov “a liberal with spurs.” Nicholas Mikhailovich had hoped that Guchkov would be able to forge a rather powerful Center-Right coalition to dominate whatever other coalitions might be produced. As usual Nicholas Mikhailovich spent many hours “assisting,” as he called it, with the sessions of the Duma from the visitors’ gallery, and following the debates with the most lively concern.129 Given his intense interest, it most certainly must have occurred to him to be a candidate himself one day. Other than becoming agitated over politics, Nicholas spent a quiet summer in “empty St. Petersburg” researching the life of Aleksei Arakcheev, a prominent figure during the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I. Why he did not go to Borjomi is not clear. Probably the disturbances in the countryside and the Caucasus posed a danger to him. He was also worried about his father’s mental state and made a visit to see him in Cannes in late summer.130 The grand duke became heavily involved in one political imbroglio before the outbreak of the Great War, and in so doing probably saved Stolypin’s position. The roles some of the people played in this crisis that nearly caused the prime minister’s fall made it quite curious. The event was also a typical example of the bumbling that could be so prevalent in the last tsar’s government. It stemmed from Stolypin’s 1910 attempt to extend the zemstvo, elected local government, to the six provinces of western Russia, what was primarily Poland. The Zemstvo Law of 1864, which had created an elected local self-government for much of the empire, did not include Poland. The Poles had revolted in the years immediately before, and the Russians did not want to give them any forum, however small, from which they might direct anti-Russian agitation. By 1910, however, Poland had become rather stable as part of the Russian nation, and Stolypin wanted to extend local government to it. The law granting this area a zemstvo passed the Duma, with a curious minority coalition of Kadets (liberals) and the Right against it, by a vote of 165 to 139.131 Early in 1911 it came before the State Council, the upper chamber of the

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legislature. The conservative body usually waited for a signal from the tsar before passing any Duma legislation, and Nicholas II indicated that he wanted it passed. Yet two reactionary members of the State Council, V. F. Trepov and P. N. Durnovo, opposed it, and Durnovo sent a letter to the tsar claiming that Stolypin had misled him on the matter. Nicholas II then changed his order to pass the bill to giving the members of the council the right to vote their conscience. On March 4, 1911, the chamber defeated the bill by a vote of 92 to 68, and again in another vote a week later.132 Between the two votes, however, Stolypin offered the tsar his resignation, causing a ministerial crisis. Immediately, broad support for the prime minister appeared in both houses of the legislature, but equally important, support came from within the imperial family, led by Nicholas Mikhailovich. The grand duke, accompanied by Sandro, went to the tsar and convinced him that Stolypin and only Stolypin could save Russia from its internal and external enemies. A. N. Naumov, a member of the State Council and the minister of agriculture for a short time during the Great War, remembered that Nicholas Mikhailovich played the major role in Stolypin’s salvation: “But for the vigorous intervention of Grand Dukes Nicholas and Alexander Mikhailovich, and in the end, of the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna herself, . . . the latter’s resignation [i.e., Stolypin’s] would have been accepted.”133 This action to save the prime minister was his greatest political success. He would not be so fortunate in trying to prevent the 1917 Revolution. The tsar’s reversal of his decision to accept Stolypin’s resignation came at a cost to him. He had to concede to the prime minister’s demands for additional powers and promises of future cooperation. He also insisted on the prorogation of the Duma and inauguration of the Zemstvo Law of 1910 by imperial decree under Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws. Exactly why Stolypin wanted it this way is unclear, as the upper chamber would have reversed itself if the tsar so indicated. It was probably designated as a slap at the Right in the State Council, showing, as it did, the tsar’s full support before the public, as the State Council would have passed the law at the tsar’s urging. Yet it angered the Duma as well, and the move especially infuriated Guchkov, who resigned the Duma presidency in protest on March 15. In a show of further defiance, the Octobrists chose the newly resigned president as its leader, a choice that Nicholas Mikhailovich felt was “excellent.”134 Nicholas Mikhailovich’s position on these events was uncustomarily contradictory. Although he usually favored the Duma over the government, he felt that the prime minister had been absolutely right in his actions. Totally missing the point of Guchkov’s actions, he was puzzled at

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the man’s behavior as his party had always “supported the government to the limit” on the question of the extension of zemstvos but now seemed “to want to abandon it for this unfortunate decree where each sees itself as a representative of the people.”135 Stolypin agreed to be interpolated by both of the chambers on the question after Easter, for by then he felt that passions would have cooled. Nicholas Mikhailovich thought the move “intelligent and wise” and evidence that Stolypin “knows the Slavic mind.”136 After Easter the grand duke attended the State Council session in which Stolypin faced his adversaries and remained for the entire meeting. He felt that Stolypin’s defense of his actions was “superb but less brilliant than usual, having visibly some lead in his sails.”137 Siding with the prime minister, the grand duke totally blamed the State Council for the problem. Count Witte’s wife overheard him say at a gathering at Count Obolensky’s that had it been left up to him, he would not have just sent Durnovo and Trepov on a forced leave of absence, he would have dispersed the entire State Council as well.138 In the Duma ten days later, the session was, to use the grand duke’s word, “unparalleled.” All of the roles were reversed. Stolypin blasted the upper house “with unaccustomed vehemence,” accusing the members of systematic obstruction of the government’s program for the past two years. Vasilii Maklakov, a prominent member of the Kadet Party, uncharacteristically rose to defend the prerogative of the throne. Vladimir Purishkevich, an extreme Rightist who often showed his hostility to the Duma by appearing on the floor of the chamber with a carnation pinned in the buttonhole of his fly, attacked Stolypin for violating the constitution. A vote went against the prime minister by more than two to one,139 but the tsar continued to support him. Stolypin did not have long to enjoy his new power. Five months later, at a function in Kiev to commemorate the Tricentennial of Romanov rule in Russia, the prime minister was assassinated by a terrorist double agent who had a police pass into the building. Witte remembered at the time that in some circles in the capital people felt the assassin was not a double agent but the Grand Dukes Nicholas and Alexander Mikhailovich, without whose intervention in the zemstvo crisis, Stolypin would not have been in Kiev on that fateful day.140 Nicholas Mikhailovich was his usual pessimistic self when thinking about Stolypin’s successor, Vladimir Kokovtsev. He “admired him little,” he said on hearing of his appointment, and with his usual hedging, added, “It’s possible that I am mistaken and that he will be admirable,” but he felt that Stolypin’s shoes were large ones to fill. The last prime minister had been “a true statesman.”141 When Kokovtsev was removed early in

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1914, Nicholas Mikhailovich was not sorry to see him go, complaining that he was of no character and had no grasp on the government. When Nicholas II fired Kokovtsev, he offered him several hundred thousand roubles to console him. The former prime minister refused the gift and for some reason wanted his refusal kept a secret. Nicholas II told Nicholas Mikhailovich, however, and he promptly told everyone at the Yacht Club, which got the secret out all over town.142 One area of government in which the grand duke held special interest was foreign affairs. In another time or place he might have been a career diplomat, for from time to time he served in that capacity for his own country. His brother Sandro felt that diplomacy was Nicholas’s greatest forte and the field in which he could serve his country best. “I know of no one who could have surpassed him at the post of Russian ambassador to France or Great Britain,” Sandro wrote in his memoirs. “His clear mind, his cosmopolitan outlook, his innate dignity, his understanding of foreign mentalities, his broad tolerance and his sincere pacifism would have gained him love and respect in any capital of the world.”143 Niki’s letters to Masson frequently comment on foreign policy, whether it is the Boer War (“the English . . . continue to pile up defeat on defeat in the Transvaal”)144 or the Boxer Rebellion (“The Russians should occupy all of Manchuria and Korea”).145 He represented his country at certain minor diplomatic events such as the birthday in 1902 of the king of Denmark. In a private way he argued (and often revealed too much) Russian foreign policy with figures such as Professor Schliemann.146 He was a close friend of Alexander Izvolsky, Russia’s foreign minister and then ambassador to Paris, and was a frequent visitor in his home and at the Parisian embassy.147 He would hold long talks with the ambassador in his study or with Mrs. Izvolsky, while playing solitaire. He defended Izvolsky in the Bosnian Crisis, when the foreign minister was duped by Alois von Aehrenthal, the Austrian foreign minister, in the annexation to Austria of Bosnia from the Ottoman Empire. With his usual prescience, and his pessimism, the grand duke felt that there could be no favorable issue coming from the Balkan problems without war, and he felt that it would be a miracle if the powers were able to avoid it. Serbia, he felt, had the capacity to “set Europe on fire.”148 The fulfillment of his dire and clairvoyant diplomatic predictions would not be long in coming. One major diplomatic undertaking that Nicholas was to make for his government was a mission to Rumania in the fall of 1912. Essentially, his goal was to divine where that country stood vis-à-vis the two European alliance systems that would within two short years be at the other’s throats in a world war. The ostensible reason for the visit was to present King

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Carol I of Rumania with a field marshal’s baton from the Russian army for Rumania’s role in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Sergei Sazonov, Izvolsky’s successor as foreign minister after the Bosnia Crisis, felt that it would carry more weight if a member of the imperial family delivered it. Because Nicholas Mikhailovich’s works in history were so well known abroad, he seemed like an excellent candidate. The grand duke visited the foreign minister before his departure to get his instructions and was told only to convey a friendly and peaceful disposition of Russia to the Rumanians.149 In his usual revelation of too much, he told Masson that the real focus of his missions was to induce Rumania to enter the Balkan Alliance against Austria.150 The grand duke went by Russian train to the Rumanian city of Jassy, where he boarded the Rumanian royal train. King Carol himself received the grand duke at the station on his arrival at Bucharest, and there followed the usual luncheons, dinners, receptions, and teas, and the private meetings with various government officials such as Tito Majoresco, president of the council, and Ion Brattiano, a leader of the country’s liberal opposition and future prime minister.151 In conversations with the king and others, Nicholas repeatedly learned of hostility toward Serbia and the refusal of Rumania to join it in any alliance. The monarchs of Rumania were Germans, and there was also a great fondness for that country and a marked unwillingness ever to go to war with it.152 Nicholas summed up the situation with the idea that the king was pro-German and “does not hide it.” He felt that the politicians were “false,” except for Brattiano, a man he felt was “an individual of the first order [sic].”153 Nevertheless, N. N. Schebelo, a diplomat of the Russian mission, wrote that Nicholas Mikhailovich had made “a marvelous impression on the king, all his entourage, the Rumanian politicians . . . and on public opinion in general.” Moreover, his visit had contributed “to a new orientation of politics here.” Nicholas Mikhailovich sent copies of his study of the reign of Alexander I to the king and the major politicians, and the gesture “produced an excellent impression.” Rumanians seem to have gotten a bit too carried away with all of this good will, because there was spontaneous discussion afterward about a visit of a Rumanian princess to Livadia and a possible marriage with someone of the Russian royal house.154 When Rumania finally entered the Great War in 1916 on the side of the Allies, Nicholas Mikhailovich considered the act one of his personal diplomatic triumphs. Once again, however, his personality was to hinder the grand duke’s serving his country. His penchant for gossip and his inability to keep a secret were traits utterly unacceptable in a diplomat. His caustic intolerance of those whom he did not respect was an additional burden. His

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brother placed his finger on the problem: “Petty jealousies . . . kept him from taking a prominent place in the ranks of our diplomats. . . . He was condemned to political inactivity by persons who could not forgive him his talents and who would not forget his contempt for their ignorance.”155 Sandro does not seem to have realized that his brother’s personality was at fault and made the result inevitable.

Chapter 5

The Grand Duke at War

The faith and trust [you have in me for the common cause of peace] . . . I assure you is not misplaced. . . . The two alliances hold the peace of Europe and of the world in keeping in close touch with one another. —Kaiser Wilhelm II to Nicholas II1 Very grateful for your message. I hope that on other occasions we may always rely upon each other’s [word illegible] friendship and love of peace. —Nicholas II to Kaiser Wilhelm II2

Early in the afternoon of June 28, 1914, an adolescent terrorist named Gavrillo Princip assassinated the Austrian imperial heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand, while he was on a state visit to Sarajevo, the capital of the Austrian province of Bosnia. It is often said that the murderer was a member of the south Slavic nationalist organization the Black Hand, but in reality he was only trained by the group, being too young to be formally a member. Under the laws of the Austrian Empire, he was too young as well to be put to death for his crime, as heinous as it was. He died of tuberculosis in the Theresianstadt Prison near Prague in 1918.

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Except in the twenty-twenty hindsight afforded memoirists and historians, no one thought that the killing of the Austrian archduke would precipitate the most destructive war humankind had yet fought. The European powers had accepted the inevitability of “the next war” ever since the defeat of France by Prussia and its German allies in 1871, and as Germany and France acquired allies, their personal hatred acquired the composition of a general European conflict. However, the action of terrorists such as Princip, who had no formal link to any government, set in motion a bizarre political and diplomatic alchemy that brought within six weeks all of the major nations of Europe into a titanic struggle that toppled four monarchies, virtually bankrupted most of the great powers, and left at least 10 million dead on its far-flung battlefields. Its most destructive impact fell on Nicholas Mikhailovich’s homeland, for in Russia the war became the most salient cause of the Revolution that swept away the old empire and was the birth-mother of the horrific nightmare of Communist totalitarianism. The Roman historian Sallust once observed that a historian is a prophet looking backward. It is indeed a luxury bestowed solely on that species of scholar, and in few disciplines has the accuracy of rearview mirror prognostication been used with more certainty than in writing the history of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Because the Revolution indeed occurred, it then became inevitable, its chroniclers assert, as early as 1825, or 1861, or 1905, or whatever date one might choose. Nothing is inevitable until it happens, and the February Revolution as we know it (which took place in March on the Gregorian calendar) could have been prevented as late as the evening of March 11, 1917, when the government decided to prorogue the Duma, thus crossing the proverbial revolutionary Rubicon. Historians of the event, however, continue their sagacious, hindsight predictions. The threat of revolution had indeed been looming for some years before it happened, even as early as the last years of the previous century. In the days before the German declaration of war on Russia, the capital was gripped with strikes that some of these prescient hindsighters like to think were the beginning of a revolution. Yet on the declaration of war with Germany, the striking workers returned to their jobs in an explosion of patriotism, and Russia entered the Great War with a unity of all classes. Nicholas Mikhailovich observed, as have many others writing from the time, “from St. Petersburg to Tiflis and from Moscow to Tashkent, everyone is for the war and not one discordant note has been sounded to date.”3 In his diary he wrote, “Not only in Petrograd but in all of Russia, the general mood . . . was the certainty of victory. War with Germany was popular, not only in upper society but also among the masses.”4

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With the staggering losses and obvious incompetence of the government, however, the dreaded word “revolution” first began to be whispered again in 1915, and many politicians of both the Left and the Right struggled mightily in the months that followed to avert it, from the efforts to encourage the tsarist government to reform to the comic-opera assassination of Grigary Rasputin. The political blindness of the tsarist power structure, along with some incredible circumstantial occurrences, however, brought it about. The lack of a system that could truly manifest public opinion would have made no difference had the tsarist government been controlled by competent men who held the people’s trust. It was not, and adding the dime-novel imbroglio of the neurotic empress and her strange assembly of foolish confidants such as Rasputin, one wonders why it did not occur sooner. As the God of War stirred the kettle between the assassination of the archduke and the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia one month later, the president of France, Raymond Poincaré, visited Russia. Niki had been in France at the time of the incident at Sarajevo and arrived home in July about the time Poincaré appeared in St. Petersburg. Given Nicholas Mikhailovich’s many associations with Russia’s ally, he was invited to one of the state dinners that the French president hosted. The grand duke could not attend because he had a previous commitment to be a witness at a wedding in Moscow,5 but he did host in Poincaré’s honor, less than a week before Austria’s declaration of war, a dinner attended by the tsar and tsarina, two of their daughters, and several members of the cabinet, including the prime minister and the ministers of war, navy, and foreign affairs.6 After the president’s departure, Nicholas Mikhailovich planned to leave for his estate Grushevka for ten days in August.7 Fast-moving events, however, made that impossible. On July 28 the Austrian Empire, with Germany’s full backing, declared war on the small Slavic nation of Serbia. Russia’s mobilization to defend its little-brother Slavic nation caused Germany to set in motion the famous Schlieffen Plan, thereby declaring war on France and Russia. Germany’s invasion of Belgium on August 3 brought the British Empire into the war against the Germans by August 5. Finally Russia and Austria declared war on each other on August 6, and the “Great War” was on. No one realized it at the time, but it would mean the end of the world as any class of all societies had known it. Like so many of his other predictions, in the grand duke’s view the present war would end in victory for the Allies, but only after “such a fight and so much blood!”8 When in August 1914 all sides felt that they would be “home before the leaves fall,” Nicholas Mikhailovich alone, and correctly, believed that the conflict would be long, and that the defeat of

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Germany and Austria would be brought about only by “famine and lack of money.”9 As with most Russians, Nicholas Mikhailovich’s patriotism exploded with chauvinistic fury. He eagerly reported to any of his many correspondents any pro-Russian news or happenings, and his letters are full of nationalistic phrases such as “Matushkaia Rossiia” (Mother Russia). He began calling St. Petersburg by its nationalistic Russian name “Petrograd” well before the name was officially changed.10 His nationalism led him to romanticize the common soldiers as the “true heroes,” and he felt that they would be the ones to “decide the final outcome of this war,”11 a view that would never change. His patriotism manifested itself in a bitter Teutonophobia, despite the fact that he was almost totally of German blood himself. “The cursed Kaiser, the cursed Germans, oh how I hate them!” he wrote in November 1914.12 By 1916 Nicholas spoke of his German blood as “cooling and there is little left of it.”13 His correspondence is sprinkled with abusive epithets against the Germans (he frequently calls them cochons—“pigs”), and on hearing of their vandalism in Belgium, he refered to them as “barbarians,” “monsters,” and “apostates of civilization.” He believed that they were a “race without scruples” and told his aide-de-camp Constantine Brummer, “The only war in which I could want to take part, to risk falling on the field of battle, is the war against Germany.”14 His hatred of all Germans really waxed most vitriolic against Kaiser Wilhelm II. Nicholas Mikhailovich had met the kaiser for the first time in Berlin in April 1905. The grand duke was then quite taken with him and said that he had “produced the effect of a true sovereign.” After dinner, he and the kaiser spoke for a long time on a number of issues on which the grand duke, not a person easily impressed, felt he was well informed. “It is correct to say he is a charmer,” he observed at the time.15 By the outbreak of war in 1914, however, his view had totally changed. Wilhelm II had become a “monster.” Ambassador Paléologue recounted in his diary how Nicholas Mikhailovich hated the German emperor “with his whole soul.” He remembered that he never let pass an opportunity to scoff at him despite the fact that his niece, his sister Anastasia’s daughter, was married to the German crown prince. Nicholas Mikhailovich bombarded the French ambassador with stories of Wilhelm’s buffoonery, his cowardice, or his hypocrisy. When Paléologue himself told an unflattering story about the kaiser, Nicholas Mikhailovich began laughing even before he had finished, punctuating the story with expletives such as “What a miserable figure he cuts!” and “What a low comedian!” and “What a pompous puppet!” He added, “If he had not been born on the steps of a throne, he’d have no rival as the clown of a fair.”16

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The grand duke’s greatest demonstration of his hatred for things German came in his renunciation of the honorary doctorate given him by the University of Berlin. The Spanish ambassador Count Cartagena had become the neutral agent for German interests in Russia (just as the American ambassador to St. Petersburg served in that capacity for the Austrians until the United States entered the war), and Nicholas Mikhailovich wrote him to ask that he write the university of his renunciation. Informing the Spanish ambassador that he had received the doctorate, he added, “Under the present political circumstances, since the representatives of German Science have not at all hesitated signing a declaration which constitutes public support of the acts of vandalism committed during this war, I do not think it compatible with my dignity to maintain my ties with a German university.” He asked the ambassador to notify the university that he was renouncing the degree.17 Nicholas also asked that Masson have his letter renouncing his diploma published in Echo de Paris and Gaulois. When the 1916 edition of the Almanach de Gotha continued to list the grand duke as having the doctorate, he contacted the new Spanish ambassador Count Villisinda in August 1916 to reject the degree again, along with his numerous German military decorations from Baden, Bavaria, Hesse-Darmstadt, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Oldenburg, Prussia, and Würtemburg, which he would never wear again given the atrocities committed by German troops. He was even more vehement against the German intellectual community in 1916, calling them “odious filth.”18 This move was, to use the grand duke’s words, like a “thunderbolt” when it was announced in Russia. The story had been picked up by a Moscow newspaper, which, for some reason, had had some trouble getting it past the censor.19 Quickly, in one of the few displays of political common sense, the Romanov family was mobilized to serve, with Niki’s nemesis the Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich placed in command of the tsarist armies and given the most prominent position. Grand Duke Paul later commanded, or rather “miscommanded,” an army in the Galician offensive of 1916. Much is made of the work of Nicholas II’s wife and daughters in the hospitals, but the tasks of the empress consisted largely of appearances at hospitals, not emptying bedpans. The tsar’s sister Olga, however, did do a great deal of real work as a nurse among the wounded in Kiev. Yet most of the grand dukes and princes served their country largely by being seen in hospitals, paying visits to various headquarters, or distributing medals at the front. They were everywhere. The tsar wrote to his wife in April 1915, “No matter where I went, I was surrounded by members of the family—in Galicia, at Odessa and here [Sevastopol].”20 In 1915 even the

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empress encouraged the tsar to make the family more visible, sending them to factories and such places. She advised that “less able men” be sent to quieter and surer places. Among these “less able” she included Nicholas Mikhailovich.21 The outbreak of the war found the Mikhailovichi scattered about Europe and Russia. Niki was the only family member in the capital on the day of the German declaration of war. Sandro was in England as was his sister-in-law Grand Duchess Marie, the wife of Gogi, who was staying at the Claridges Hotel with her two daughters, beginning their trial separation, which was to become more permanent than any of them suspected.22 Miche-Miche was of course also in England in his semi-exile and denied the right to return to serve in Russia. Sergei was incapacitated out at Mikhailovo owing to a serious flare up of arthritis (by one account rheumatism). As soon as his health would permit, he resumed his duties as Russia’s chief officer of ordnance. Gogi, on his return from Germany, was made the tsar’s roving investigator, going from army to army assessing the general conditions, and because his family was abroad, he turned his palace into a hospital.23 He was consummately honest, and unhesitantly reported on those who were not; the tsar knew this trait and trusted him and even sent the grand duke on a mission to Japan in 1915. He exposed a lot of corruption and as usual made enemies as he did so. One bit of truth he told the tsar did no good. In November 1916 he reported in a letter that the Russian army fought “under terrible conditions” and called for “conversations” with the various political parties to gain their advice. Like the similar counsel he got from others, Nicholas II ignored George’s advice to his throne’s detriment.24 The communication from Gogi went unanswered, apparently, because George wrote the tsar again on January 14, 1917, reminding him of the November report. By this time the last tsar was responding to no one and was leaving reports unread. He had apparently caved in mentally and was awaiting the looming disaster. Gogi seems to have seen Niki with some frequency during the war at dinners or teas or on an occasional visit, although it appears he was with him less than with Sandro.25 The few encounters he had with his eldest brother he seems to have cherished. In 1916 he wrote his daughter Ksenia, “You know that I am very glad that Niki visits me all the time,”26 showing that his childhood devotion to his brother remained strong in adulthood. All of the belligerents on both sides came lacking in the area of artillery in the early days of the war, especially the Russian Empire. Until 1908 Russia had bought much of its heavy gunnery from the German firm of Krupp, and despite the shift to its own production after that year, it still had not created a satisfactory industrial base for heavy weapons.27 Whereas

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the other nations mobilized their industry quickly to make good their shortages, Russia did not, and it was 1916 before the Russian army was to have anything like parity in artillery with its enemies. By then the besttrained Russian troops had already been slaughtered in the barbed-wire entanglements before the German and Austrian lines that their weak artillery had not been able to destroy. The blame for the deficiencies naturally fell on Sergei Mikhailovich as he was in charge of Russian ordnance, and he was forced from his position in 1915.28 Given his membership in the Romanov “firm,” he was readily employed at headquarters as an artillery advisor, where the only thing he seems to have done was to grow a vegetable garden.29 He had by then become heavily involved with Mathilde Kschessinska, the ballerina who, as we have seen, was passed around among various members of the imperial family. She had utilized her connections with Sergei to influence the purchase of matériel through him from her various friends. Like a lapdog, he obeyed her, and his selling contracts was an additional factor in his removal.30 Sandro was easily the most militarily versatile of all the Mikhailovichi. His extensive service in the navy and as minister of the merchant marine was an asset to Russia’s war on the sea, but his interest in the development of the air force and indeed his founding of it was potentially his most important contribution. Even his ardent detractor Mossolov wrote that Alexander Mikhailovich “had successes which were not generally acknowledged.”31 He had seen early the value of the airplane as a new weapon, and when interest in it had not developed in the government, Alexander raised money on his own to build an air force in Russia.32 During the war he lived in his own train, which much of the time was parked on a railroad siding in Kiev, and his grateful sister-in-law Olga was able to utilize his shower as hot water was scarce even in the hospitals.33 Those members of the Mikhailovichi who were forced either by marriage or exile to live abroad also served the Allied cause. Gogi’s wife Marie and her two daughters, “trapped” in England by the war, lived outside Harrogate, a spa town in Yorkshire, where the grand duchess founded four hospitals for the British wounded.34 Anastasia gave a villa in Cannes as a hospital for wounded Russian officers from the Russian Expeditionary Force in France.35 Miche-Miche, having had his offer to return home to serve Russia denied by the tsar, worked for his native land in England as chairman of the commission to consolidate Russian orders abroad. In 1916 he felt that he was serving Russia by reporting to the Russian emperor that, on a visit to Buckingham Palace, King George V had informed him that British Intelligence was predicting the imminence of a revolution in Russia.36 As many people were giving Nicholas II the same warning by this time, Miche-Miche was ignored like all the rest.

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The first Russian military activities were of mixed success. The Russians had planned to throw their greatest force against the Austrian Empire in Galicia, which they did with great success, pushing by the end of the year to, and in one case through, the Carpathian Mountains into the Hungarian plain. Yet with the force of the German armies thundering through Belgium into northern France, French pleading led the Russians to launch a hasty offensive into East Prussia. It met with a terrible double disaster in the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, but failure that it was, it forced the Germans to remove two corps from the arm of their French offensive, sending them eastward. When the East Prussian battles were fought, these troops were somewhere on railroad sidings in Germany, arriving in East Prussia after the battles there in which they were not needed had already been won. They were absent from the Marne in France, where they were desperately lacking. The Franco-Russian Alliance had worked, fulfilling Otto von Bismarck’s nightmare of a two-front war. Yet through all the cheering on both sides, Nicholas Mikhailovich realized, as many of the joyous did not, that the victories of either side had failed to deliver a “knockout blow.” With his usual foresight, he predicted the immediate future would hold no great victories for either the Allies or the Central Powers, that there would follow only a war of attrition. Russian numbers would guarantee an eventual Allied victory, if morale could only be maintained,37 yet the grand duke did not feel that Germany could be defeated alone with “the sole force of our bayonets.” It would take “hunger, rage and the general lack of necessities for life and commerce.”38 The grand duke was right, as usual. These factors would defeat the German Empire, but it would take much longer than even the grand duke would have guessed. Nicholas Mikhailovich joined the war effort in 1914 with the formal title of aide-de-camp general, which seems to have been a title that was little more than a causa honoris. He had not been in active service in a decade so he would not be given a field command, but he could readily be used to “show the flag” for the family. He was returned to uniform and assigned to the headquarters of General Nicholas Ivanov, the commander of the Southwest front facing the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was stationed formally in Kiev to help organize the evacuation of the wounded and the assignment of ambulances and hospitals, and he also assisted in communications.39 He left St. Petersburg for Kiev for his duty post on August 20, 1914. He took with him his faithful aides Brummer, his ever-present helper in his historical pursuits, and Prince Nikita Trubetskoi, another aide-de-camp, who survived the Revolution and lived in Petit Clamart, a suburb of Paris.40 He also took a number of his personal servants, including Molodovsky, his French chauffeur Léon

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Reinhold, and his nameless “little cook.” In addition, he had two of his personal automobiles, as his favorite transportation, the taxi, was not available at the front. One was brought from St. Petersburg, the other from Grushevka. From Kiev he went 300 versts (about 200 miles) via car by way of Zhitomir to Berdichev, “a totally Jewish town” that was temporarily the headquarters of the Southwest front. Soon afterward he was transferred to Rovno, about sixty miles from the Austrian frontier.41 From there he went to Ivanov’s staff headquarters at Berdichev more than a hundred miles away by automobile. The staff headquarters moved to Rovno as the Russian armies prepared to move into Austrian Galicia, and Nicholas Mikhailovich followed there on August 17 (New Style). Here he encountered General Nicholas Ruzsky, commandant of the Russian Third Army. A blunt man who like the grand duke did not mince words (he was tapped in 1917 to convince Nicholas II that he must abdicate), Ruzsky apparently told the grand duke not to interfere in the army’s business. Nicholas Mikhailovich agreed not to “stir in things,” and he even agreed to eat alone. At least as far as Ruzsky was concerned, the grand duke’s reputation for giving gratuitous advice had preceded him.42 The grand duke’s first order came on August 20 to go to visit the hospital at Proskurov as well as a reserve battalion near there in the region of the VIII Army under the generalship of Aleksei Brusilov, easily Russia’s greatest general in the Great War.43 Ivanov was very pleased with the grand duke’s reports,44 which probably told the general much more than he wanted to know about the hospitals and reserve battalions the grand duke visited. Nicholas was usually some distance from the active front, but once, as he came into Ivangorod, he found himself in the midst of heavy fighting that included hand-to-hand combat.45 Yet in one “pleasant small town,” still untouched by war, he found sausages, tomatoes, plums, pears, and sardines to buy.46 Very quickly Niki the liberal began to be affected by the suffering of the common soldier. Seeing their misery must have revived in him memories of the Russo-Turkish War. Whereas his view of the wounded was at first upbeat (“they have but one idea in their heads: To recover very quickly and return to the ranks”),47 within just a few days at the end of August 1914, 6,000 wounded passed through Rovno alone, and his mood changed to one of horror. “I have seen such suffering, such abnegation,” he wrote, “that my heart has stopped, suffocated by the horrible spectacle of human suffering.”48 Yet his work as a “nomad,” as he called himself, going from hospital to hospital, continued throughout the fall, as the dead and wounded piled up. Before the end of September, the Russians had sustained in dead, wounded, and sick more than 400,000

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casualties.49 Yet on he plodded, from hospital to hospital, giving out medals and in the words of Meriel Buchanan, the daughter of the British ambassador who saw him there, “spreading an atmosphere of laughing good humor.”50 His work with the army, however, continued to have a profound impact on Niki. Always militantly intolerant of incompetence of any kind, the grand duke was horrified at the poor treatment given the wounded.51 The suffering of the injured “tears my heart,” he wrote his French friend shortly after arriving at the front.52 He tried to “seem pleasant” to those he was around, hence Meriel Buchanan’s assessment of his hospital work, yet deep within he was greatly disturbed. “On the outside I seem gay,” he assessed his own behavior, “and I seem pleasant with those who approach me, but on the inside I am suffering greatly.”53 He tried to steel himself against the horrible slaughter and misery, but he could not. He was, moreover, revolted by the bodies left unburied and the stench they created.54 Daily he visited the hospitals and “the masses of wounded” that had begun to arrive in the wake of the Russian invasion of Galicia. He was disturbed by the shortage of gauze, bandages, linens, and medicines. In many places the wounded had no water, and some had not eaten in days. In one place there were only two doctors and two nurses for 6,000 wounded. Many were moved on with no attention to their wounds, which had already become septic. Large numbers already had blood poisoning.55 Yet he would not leave the front. He vowed to remain active in the war effort to the end despite the fact that he found that “it so little conforms to my tastes.”56 Remain he did, until his hospital visits became less necessary and more of a luxury in the great retreat from the Polish salient in 1915. Yet it all left him embittered. In writing to Masson in the summer of 1916, he expressed horror at “the human lives [that] have disappeared into the void of this horrible carnage that they call war!” Then he added, “There is every reason to become [a] socialist after these massacres.”57 The mountains of dead had left him a changed man. He continuously felt grateful, however, to be making a contribution to the war effort, and he ecstatically recorded in his diary, “I am joyful that I am able to be of use to my country.”58 He was especially elated when he encountered from Grozny in the Caucasus near where he had been reared the Second Battalion of the Caucasian Eighty-second Dagistan Infantry Regiment, of which he was a patron. He went immediately among the lower ranks to speak a sympathetic word, then he performed the ceremonial greetings with the officers. He was delighted to see the men, but he thought that such patronage, funny in peacetime, was burdensome in war, as the unit had to take time to pay deference to him. Never a believer in pointless pomp, he wrote to his diary, “There is no use for these things.”59

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At the very end of August, the Russian high command was struck numb with the terrible news of Tannenberg. In a selfless effort to help their hard-pressed French ally, the Russians had rushed two armies into East Prussia. In a brilliant tour de force, the Germans feigned defeat and retreat at the hands of the northern-most army, then struck the unsuspecting southern force under General Alexander Samsonov, surrounding it and cutting it off from the outside world in the pine forest of southern East Prussia. To the Russians, the army vanished late in August and for several days there was no word of it. Nicholas Mikhailovich correctly surmised that “some sort of catastrophe has happened.” Word reached the Russian army headquarters that Samsonov’s army had been annihilated, with General Samsonov having committed suicide at the end of August. Untold numbers of Russian soldiers were dead, and the Germans had captured 90,000 Russian soldiers. Nicholas Mikhailovich was unable to sleep that night because of the shock. His mind swirled with the consequences of “this murderous war” and its possible result. He felt that “in all [Russian military] disasters comes a gigantic uprising [his italics],” which would bring to an end “many monarchies and the triumph of international socialism.”60 This prediction, we must remember, he made in 1914. Almost immediately after the war began, Nicholas Mikhailovich’s bent for criticism began to manifest itself, and as ususal no one was spared his sting, including the French. After the Eastern Prussian defeats in the last days of August 1914, the grand duke criticized the Russian high command for letting itself “be influenced by your [France’s] cries for an offensive.”61 He denounced the intrigues in Kiev of the Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich’s wife to promote her husband’s popularity.62 He unleashed on General Ivanov, his commander in chief, as “simple . . . but a friendly, kind old man, yet a cunctator in all his activities.” General Mikhail Alekseev was “an excellent worker but without a wide horizon.” When he could not question their competence, he attacked their physical shortcomings. “General [Nikolai] Ruzsky,” he wrote, “had a wide face, wears glasses, and is sickly and nervous.”63 Hospitals were not ready for the wounded, shortages were everywhere, and the leadership was incompetent. As usual, Niki divulged far too much information to Masson about troop movements, casualties, and leadership shortcomings, military intelligence that would have been censored from the wartime letters of ordinary people.64 To his journal, he was equally vitriolic: Field Adjutant Anatoli Bariatinsky was a “cockscomb,” General Danilov had “evil eyes,” Yanushkevich “stuck his nose in everything,” and so forth. He described the men around headquarters as generally being “disgusting company.”65 To the causes of his fury were added the shortages. All of the belligerents

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quickly experienced shortages of arms, especially shells, but for the Russians, who had stressed the bayonet over artillery, it was catastrophic as the enormous Krupp guns shredded Russian units that could not reply in kind. In his usual exasperated anger, he wrote early in September, “No shells! 25 per gun is what one needs and one needs a thousand guns! And this is emerging in September after [only] two months of war?!”66 His brother Alexander encountered the grand duke at headquarters and remembered dreading the meeting, for Nicholas Mikhailovich “was the very last man for me to see if I wanted to preserve an iota of optimism.” Being a top graduate from the war college, Niki could produce formulas and scientific expressions for his fears. “He bitterly criticized the whole lot of our commanding generals,” Sandro remembered, “beginning with our exalted cousin [the Grand Duke Nicholas] and finishing with the chancellery rats supervising the preparation in the rear.” He felt that his brother spoke “cynically and crudely” but “in nine cases out of ten justly.” Again, his uncanny knack for predicting the future struck home. He criticized Nicholas Nicholaevich’s “quasi-victorious” march into Galicia, feeling that the overextension would lead to “a disastrous defeat no later than the spring of 1915,” which is of course precisely what occurred. The grand duke observed that the regular army had been slaughtered, and what was taking its place were poorly trained reservists. “He talked for three hours, quoting figures, substantiating his conclusions and getting gloomier by the moment,” his brother recorded in his memoirs. Sandro’s head ached after the conversation. He appreciated the patriotic source of his elder brother’s pessimism, but he “trembled at the thought that they would be dining together twice a day.”67 Niki returned to Petrograd in November to rest, to handle some of his personal business, and to help with his brother Sergei’s serious bout with rheumatism (perhaps the “arthritis” mentioned above).68 He visited the dentist while there, got a pedicure, and had his automobiles repaired after their rough treatment on the bad roads at the front. He also dined with the tsar.69 December found him back at the front, but the weather had stalled much of the military activity, and the grand duke became quite bored. The days passed very slowly for him, and his only distraction was reading the historical journals that Masson had sent him. He also continued to brood over the price the war extracted in lives of the common soldier. His morale remained low because he was unable to pursue any of his usual interests such as hunting and historical work.70 Early in January 1915 Nicholas II sent the grand duke to thank the troops in the IX and the IV Armies on the Galician front, and he had to travel by car for more than two hundred miles over roads that were snowed under. One wonders how it was possible. Here he heard that

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Germans had hurled shells at churches just to amuse themselves, which only intensified his hatred of them.71 After Nicholas’s tiring trip, Ivanov gave him leave to return to Petrograd again to handle some of his personal affairs. He had to attend to some of the business of Grushevka and Borjomi as his overseer’s reserve unit had been called up, and he had to find a replacement for his steward. He also had some historical work to do, and he used the time in St. Petersburg to complete the seventh volume of his study on the diplomatic relations between France and Russia during the Napoleonic period Les Relations diplomatiques de la Russie et de la France d’après les rapports des ambassadeurs d’Alexandre et de Napoléon, 1808–1812 and bring out a second edition of his study of Alexander I, the first having completely sold out.72 He found it tough going. Because of the war, even a grand duke had things “held up,” which Niki found “aggravating and unbearable.”73 Nicholas Mikhailovich resumed his work at the front in February, distributing medals to the VIII and III Armies, going sometimes by train and sometimes by car over bad roads. Since the VIII Army under Brusilov had actually broken through the Carpathians, the grand duke found himself in western Galicia and the Carpathian foothills.74 He returned home in March on the “advice” of General Ivanov, because the Russians were planning an offensive and the conflict would be bad in this sector of the front. Since the planned attack was not to begin until the summer, it would appear that Ivanov wanted the critical grand duke out of his hair. Niki had become more and more depressed in his work with the wounded, which had caused “sadness to envelop his entire person.” We can be certain that his gloom intensified his criticism, which undoubtedly took an even harsher tone. We can likewise be certain that he expressed his opinions to anyone around him. Yet there was also a facesaving reason to return to the capital: He had to prepare for the March meeting of the Imperial Historical Society.75 Niki also used the visit to Petrograd, as the capital of the Russian nation was now called, to attend sessions of the State Council, the old body over which his father had presided and which was now the upper chamber of the legislature, as they debated an income tax that had been already passed by the Duma. He found the debates “very moving,” with the extreme Right most adamantly against the project. An eloquent speech by the former prime minister V. N. Kokovtsev swung the day, and the bill was passed by a vote of 90 to 53.76 Yet he felt that he was “vegetating there,” waiting for instructions to resume his duties. He continued to grieve for the wounded and their families, and in his words “suffered with them.”77 He had no way of knowing that his “military” role in the war effort had ended.

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The Schlieffen Plan having failed, the Germans decided to conduct a holding pattern in the West in 1915 and make a major offensive in the East against the Russian Empire. In all the campaigns of 1914, the Germans had perceived that Russia was the weakest of their opponents, and in 1915 they threw the bulk of their might eastward in hopes of knocking that nation out of the war. It would also give succor to their hardpressed ally Austria against whose armies the Russians had been so successful in 1914. They struck with a heretofore unknown fury at the Polish salient between Gorlice and Tarnow in eastern Silesia. The attack was preceded by a fierce artillery bombardment that the Russians were in no way able to counter. Russian units held their ground and were destroyed where they stood, being unable to resist their enemy. The Russians tried to regain daily losses with night bayonet attacks, and the troops fought heroically, but the sheer weight of the German artillery made it a pathetically unequal contest. Early in August Warsaw was surrendered to the Germans. By the time the mud and snow stopped the fighting in the early winter of 1915, the Russians had been driven from all of Poland and their entire 1914 gains in Galicia. In one logistic way, the retreat was a blessing. A salient is always hard to defend, as the French would learn at Verdun the next year. By the end of 1915 the Russians had a relatively straight front line running from Riga in Latvia to the Rumanian border. Nicholas Mikhailovich found it “distressing” (désolant) to surrender “our beautiful acquisitions,” the Russian advance that he had criticized the year before as being militarily unwise. He rightly attributed German successes to superior German artillery, and he even recognized the talent of the German General August von Mackensen. “But what cruel pain I have felt while reading our bulletins,” he wrote Masson, and as usual he was critical of those in charge,78 especially his cousin Nicholas Nicholaevich. He expressed the opinion that a “more courageous leader” would have been successful, when in reality no one could have done much more against superior German firepower. For once he somewhat muted his criticism (had he been called on it at Ivanov’s headquarters?). “That is all I will permit myself to say [about Nicholas Nicholaevich] because criticism is not considered good taste at the present time,” he wrote the French historian, but then added that at a future date “everything [his italics] will be told you in the greatest detail and indicating [his again] to you the responsibility [again his].”79 Such defeats always demand that heads roll, and the most logical one to go was that of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s cousin and enemy, Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich. Niki was one of the most vociferous in calling for his cousin’s removal, although without doubt his chief motivation was not his cousin’s military failure but the long-standing feud with him. His

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behavior was almost childish. Even when the Russian armies were advancing, Niki could not resist taking swipes at the generalissimo. In his correspondence with Masson, he sarcastically called him “the august supreme chief” and made the unfair comparison between his situation and that of the French commander in chief Joffre.80 He indiscreetly, and repeatedly, told Masson that he had no confidence in his cousin’s abilities, and cynically made fun of a thank-you note that the commander in chief had written him for his war work.81 He was most critical, and probably jealous, of his cousin’s popularity, which he felt was orchestrated by his wife. When the grand duke was removed from his position in September 1915 with the tsar taking his place, Nicholas Mikhailovich surprisingly made little comment on it to Masson,82 although he did write the empress of his approval of the move.83 It disturbed him that the Galician defeats did not diminish Nicholaevich’s popularity.84 After his replacement, Nicholas Nicholaevich was transferred to command the Caucasus front, where he distinguished himself in taking the Turkish fortress-city Erzurum and in a combined amphibious and land attack that resulted in the fall of the Turkish city of Trebizond. Yet his nemesis’s demotion did not assuage Niki’s petty dislike of his cousin. When these successes bolstered his popularity, Niki expressed fear for his adulation “in a dynastic sense,” for he felt that his favor would not “contribute to the benefit of the throne or prestige of the Imperial Family,”85 as though the grand duke would become a Russian Napoleon. He tried to stoke potential fears that the grand duke’s popularity would be a threat to the tsar personally and raised the idea that his wife Militsa, who “is not asleep in the Caucasus,” was orchestrating his celebrity. His constant backstabbing of his cousin is one of Niki’s pettiest displays in his life. In a move that was more politically detrimental than it was militarily, Tsar Nicholas II placed himself at the head of the Russian armies early in the fall of 1915. This shift in leadership placed the government largely in the hands of the unstable empress and her spiritual advisor the illiterate peasant Rasputin, who was already removing ministers and replacing them with incompetent toadies through his influence with her. With this move, Russia was placed on the path to destruction. Niki approved of the leadership change at headquarters, but we can be certain that his motives were more anti-Nicholas Nicholaevich than they were belief in the superiority of the tsar’s leadership. By November he felt that everything was functioning more smoothly, with better cohesion and fewer intrigues at army headquarters.86 This assessment may indeed have been correct, but from that point on, the Russian state did not have what might be called a government.

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In the fall Bulgaria entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, attacking its old adversary Serbia, which was quickly overrun by the Bulgarians and the Austrians. Not surprisingly Nicholas Mikhailovich was furious at the Bulgarian treachery. He wished ill of the “Bulgarian pigs” and hoped that they would find themselves in the same impasses they had fallen into during the Second Balkan War of 1913. He also hoped that King Ferdinand would lose his throne.87 The grand duke wondered what 1916 would bring for him and for Russia. Nothing had been said about his returning to the front in the new year, yet he waited patiently for orders, his correspondence with Masson his only consolation. He hoped that 1916 would be a decisive year for Allied armies and would bring a “desired solution.” He felt that if “for once [the Allies] are intelligent,” victory would be assured.88 The early summer of 1916 gave the Russians some hope that the war might indeed end soon. In March General Ivanov was replaced with General Brusilov, who launched a broad offensive on the entire Austrian front, keeping the Austrians guessing about where they needed to send their reserves. In places the Austrian line totally collapsed, and tens of thousands of Austrian troops were taken prisoner in the first two weeks of fighting. Elated, Niki wrote the tsar that he “could not find words to congratulate you on the military successes,” which he hoped would lead to a definitive triumph.89 The Russian advance did indeed cripple Austria, and afterward that nation made only modest contributions to the military efforts of the Central Powers. Yet as the offensive ground down by mid-August, the grand duke’s old pessimism returned, and he even became critical of France. Writing to Masson he asked how they could hope to take the fortifications guarding Germany and “jump the Rhine” when they could not even expel “les boches” from their own country. “My brain is not able to comprehend the possibility of a successful invasion into Germany,” he wrote, adding that “it is necessary to finish them off by other means,”90 perhaps the strangulation he had suggested early in 1915. August of 1916 saw the Russians gain another ally, albeit one of dubious quality. Rumania, impressed by Russian successes in the Brusilov offensive, declared war on the Central Powers in hopes of gaining Transylvania, just as the Russian effort was bogging down. Queen Marie of Rumania had dangled Rumanian help before the tsar as early as 1915 when she had written Nicholas II that Rumania had not been promised what Italy had to enter the war because “no one thinks she’s significant.” She informed the Russian emperor that the Rumanian army could be a million men strong, grandiosely noting that Rumania and Serbia alone could slice up the Austrian Empire.91 Although Nicholas Mikhailovich had been a factor in Rumania’s rapproachment to Russia with his 1912 mis-

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sion,92 he always questioned the value of Rumania as an ally. He felt that flanked by Germany’s allies (the Bulgarians, the Turks, and the Austrians) on three sides, Rumania would be “crushed at the outset,” and that would give the Central Powers the chance to turn the flank of the salient Brusilov had at so dear a price pushed into Galicia.93 Once again the grand duke was absolutely correct. The Rumanian invasion of Hungarian Transylvania was soon put to rout, and by September the queen was begging the tsar for help as the Rumanian armies had fumbled, and she hoped to avoid “all the horrors of invasion.”94 Bulgaria then invaded Rumania from the south, and Russia’s new ally was overrun in short order, giving the Russians another 200 miles of front to defend and leaving Brusilov in a most precarious position. In the summer of 1915 Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich, one of the most popular members of the imperial family, passed away. He was the only member of the family other than Niki with any literary pretensions. He died on June 18 and was buried the very next day. He had been the son of Grand Duke Constantine Nicholaevich (1827–1892), who had played such an important role in drafting the 1861 law emancipating the Russian serfs. His son, whose life was celebrated on that June day in 1915, had been president of the Imperial Academy of Science. In 1913 he wrote and produced a play called King of the Jews, which was staged in the Hermitage. In the production of the work, he himself took the part of Joseph of Arimathaea.95 Constantine Constantinovich’s body was brought from Tsarskoe Selo, where he had died, and his coffin was accompanied by a cortege of the Imperial Guard. His funeral took place in the Kazan Cathedral on Nevsky Prospekt. The service lasted three hours, with only the dowager empress and the empress allowed to sit through the service. The American ambassador Thomas Marye found it all very boring and passed the time by ogling Grand Duchess Olga, the beautiful daughter of Nicholas II.96 From the cathedral the procession followed the funeral parade to the Petropavlovsky Fortress, where Nicholas II received it. Constantine had been his favorite uncle, and he made no effort to hide his tears of grief.97 None of them knew that this encounter would be the last time the family would ever be all together again. Paléologue noted in his diary that Nicholas II’s hair had thinned and that he had visibly grayed.98 The war hindered Niki’s historical work, but it did not stop it all together. The spring also saw him host the Jubilee of the Imperial Russian Historical Society, for which the tsar wrote him a note of thanks and commendation.99 He fretted about how much work there was to do, but he

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was confident that it would be completed before the Alexander II Centennial. Yet in one of the rare lapses of his phenomenal clairvoyance, he observed, after noting how much there was to do, “But we have some time before 17/30 April 1918.”100 After he became “superfluous” at the front, the grand duke devoted his time to his histories, but his main work came in his organization of the centenary celebration of the birth of Tsar Alexander II. As was usually the case, the grand duke’s appointment to captain the project brought opposition, this time from the State Council, the very body his father had headed. One of the mossbacks in the chamber had objected to the grand duke’s leadership on the grounds that he was “too liberal.” The critic had dragged up the old sobriquet “Nicholas Egalité” and had expressed the wish that the festivities could be directed by someone of the political Right. Nothing came of the matter, and the grand duke merely shrugged off the criticism, writing Masson, “But you know me and these miseries of my life anger me little.”101 As usual, he threw himself wholeheartedly into this project. In one of his detailed reports to the emperor, the grand duke complained that the work was going slowly because “the gentlemen of history” were almost all scattered in the “various corners of Russia.” He feared that all could not be convened until the late fall. Certain members were working, however, on parts of the project. A. N. Filipov was writing on the peasant question and the emancipation, N. V. Golitsyn on the tsar’s youth and adolescence, and Alexander S. Lappo-Danilevsky on the general work plan, although at that time even he was in England.102 Niki kept the tsar posted on meetings of various committees of the society, and he gave an account of the work of his latest project, the Archival Commission, which the government had continued to fund despite the staggering cost of the war effort.103 He also wrote him in detail about the upcoming annual meeting of the society to be held on March 23, 1916.104 In May he again wrote the tsar of the meeting, detailing plans for the society even into 1918, including the striking of the medal to commemorate Tsar Alexander II’s reign.105 Not being used at the front, the grand duke took a vacation on the Volga in June of that year to visit the cities Yaroslavl, Kostroma, and Rostov the Great to obtain a better feel (“to have an open mind and to have other impressions,” he wrote) for the coming historical celebrations.106 He sailed on the Alexander the Blessed, and his objective was to “have a clear head” and gain “other impressions” by investigating the interior of the country and seeing Russia’s treasures.107 Apparently never having been in that corner of Russia, he was taken by the beauty of the Volga and its banks, and he visited not only a number of “magnificent monasteries and churches,” but several factories as well. One was a boot

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establishment that had made 400,000 pairs of boots for the army. All the machines in it were American, and the workers labored with great diligence, giving an “encouraging impression.” Nicholas found the workers polite, obliging, and full of enthusiasm to perform their duties “to the glory of Russia.” He inspected a match factory of whose 911 workers, 700 were women. He visited a monastery hospital, where he was treated to a concert of the tower bells. He was so impressed that he gave each of the “musicians—veritable artists” five roubles each.108 The grand duke made a second “fact-finding vacation” in July, this time in the northern region around Archangel and as far east as Perm. Again he visited factories and monasteries, some dating from the time of Ivan the Terrible, and as he did everywhere he went, he bought antiques.109 He ended the summer at his estate Grushevka in August, where he engaged in his passion for hunting. “At dawn I hunt anything that comes along,” he wrote to the tsar. With urchins to beat the bushes and no hunting season restrictions to hamper him, he bagged six foxes and twenty-two birds.110 He continued to see to matters of his estate, duties that he now had to perform since his overseer had been called “under the flag.” His long absence from Paris made him quite nostalgic for his favorite city. He also worried about Masson’s health, as the famous historian had recently learned that he had developed a heart condition. Niki longed to visit his French friend, but the war had made him a prisoner within his own country. Central to the events of the imperial regime’s last few months were the relations of Nicholas II with his relatives. As we shall see, the tsar’s immediate family (his wife and children), always existing in some isolation from the remainder of the family, came to be almost totally alienated from their other relatives. The family with whom they had the most contact were three of the Mikhailovichi, Nicholas and his brothers Sandro and Sergei, and their uncle Grand Duke Paul. Sergei was in almost constant contact because he had a sinecure at headquarters, but he did not seem to have held any close association with the tsar as he tended his vegetable garden at Mogilev. Alexander was in touch in part because he held an important military position as commander of the air force, and in part because he was one of the few members of her husband’s family whom the empress liked. Niki maintained constant contact with the emperor, albeit regarding peripheral matters, throughout the war, although in Nicholas II’s archive in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow there are no letters dated before January 1916. Yet Niki wrote the tsar often, reporting what he had heard around and about the country, what he perceived was wrong, and various bits of gossip that were

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abroad in the land. Much of this correspondence dealt with his historical work. In June 1916, however, Niki’s letters began to report on the disturbing situation within the country: the shortages, the general dislocation in the rear, and the problems within the cities. His reports to the tsar on his excursions at that time include positive points (the beauty of the countryside, the quantities of goods shipped, etc.), and all given in the stupendous detail so characteristic of Niki’s accounts.111 The grand duke even followed up one of his reports with a visit to Stavka (army headquarters) in July.112 Apparently the tsar, probably just to make conversation, asked the grand duke to continue to report what he saw in rural Russia, and this request resulted in a lengthy, rather tedious account of the happenings at Grushevka, even giving statistics of the number of dushi (by then antiquated term for “peasant”) mobilized, killed, wounded, or missing. Of some interest, however, were the pro-German sympathies of the seven colonies of Mennonites on the grand duke’s enormous estate (they had on their walls pictures of Kaisers Wilhelm I, II, and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck).113 He also used the report to take swipes at certain members of the government close to Rasputin and to praise those ministers who opposed the empress’s confidant. He did so subtly, at that point, which must have for him required enormous restraint. He did not mince words on the subject again. The tsar did not always respond immediately to Niki’s missives. One wonders, in view of one of his later actions, how carefully, if at all, he read them. He did, however, occasionally write his grand ducal cousin, who took his reporting seriously. In April 1916 the emperor wrote, “Dear Nicholas, I heartily thank you for two letters and the three enclosures of the conversations . . . [on] Rumania from your mission in 1912. The letter from [Ambassador] George Buchanan is also interesting.” The tsar then continued to discuss Austrian perfidy before the war and speak in optimistic terms about the future.114 Niki was no soldier, as we have seen. The discipline simply did not suit him, but an area in which he could, and as we have seen once did, serve his country in an outstanding manner was in diplomacy. A career in that field, however, does not seem to have occurred to him, despite his interest in diplomatic history and his mission to Rumania, until the coming of the Great War. Before the war was only a few months old, he was already planning the peace conference. It was his first attempt to move into the realm in which he could probably have served so effectively. The first account that we have of his thoughts for the future peace treaty was in a piece of correspondence to Masson early in November 1914. In this letter he speaks of the creation of an international tribunal

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to regulate differences among nations after the war, that is, the idea of a League of Nations that predates President Woodrow Wilson’s suggestion by over three years.115 His active drive to become part of the peace process intensified in 1916. In March of that year, even before the victories of the Brusilov offensive, he was, as he expressed himself to Masson, “more confident than ever in the final success of our arms,” and turned his attention once again to the postwar peace. “But afterwards [the victory] ??! Who will dictate the preliminaries of the peace and who are the people who are going to concern themselves with the condition of future peace[?]!” he asked Masson rhetorically. Then, with his typical disdain for those around him, he noted, “I am looking, but I still do not find men in our country of valor, talent, and intelligence.” He felt that the Allies must be prepared in advance for the peace by agreeing among themselves on their positions “in order to concert and create a unity, without becoming angry with each other.”116 As a historian, he feared that Russia would win the war but lose the peace. It had happened in the past, he felt,117 probably remembering the Treaty of San Stephano of 1878 and the subsequent Congress of Berlin. In April, shortly after he expressed these sentiments to Masson, Niki wrote the tsar and bluntly suggested himself as the leader of the delegation.118 As usual, he was ahead of the others on what the future would hold. In his letter to the emperor he felt that at any future conference, it would be important to maintain the task of “always holding high the flag of our country” without ceding to Russia’s enemies “or our allies [italics mine]” the questions that will be able “to touch on the majesty of the tsar or the interests of Russia.” He perceived well before the other diplomats that there would be friction among the Allies, and that these differences should be resolved first. His motives were obviously not ones of vanity but rather the genuine desire to combine a good delegation and render help to his country and the dynasty. In leading the delegation, he offered to renounce the rights of his titles. Showing his independence, he told his cousin, “My tongue is free. . . . I have fear of no one; I can ignore calumnies. . . . I seek nothing for myself. I only want to be useful to you and our dear Russia.”119 Niki also suggested that the delegation should include General N. N. Golovin, author of scholarly works on the Russian army, Peter Bark, the Russian minister of finance, and N. N. Pokrovsky, the man who succeeded Sazonov as the minister of foreign affairs in 1916.120 Others also came to think that the grand duke would make a good leader of the Russian delegation to postwar peace negotiations. Paléologue had suggested in May, in a “vague and always pompous and theatrical conversation,” that he felt it would be wise to send a “high personage” to Paris and London for the purpose of negotiating the bases of a future

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conference “in case of the triumph of our arms.” Curiously, Nicholas Mikhailovich then found this action “premature.”121 In July Paléologue came to the grand duke and told him that “only you” would be fit to lead this delegation.122 Paléologue even suggested that if the grand duke wished, he would recommend him to the emperor. Showing a gift for diplomatic tact, Nicholas Mikhailovich thanked the French ambassador for the compliment but added that in the Russian government system, only the tsar could make that decision. He then said, however, that he would not object if the French diplomat dropped his name around,123 as he himself was already doing, he might have added. A similar idea came from the Italian ambassador, Marquis André Carlotti di Riparbella. In a conversation with the grand duke, the Italian diplomat, who was “very fine, very clear, and intelligent,” had extolled the idea of “my dispatch in the future, but he expressed the hope that at a future conference it is I who direct the orchestra of Russian representations.”124 Niki felt that Russia needed the “noble sons of the country” and not “just politicians.”125 Five days later, on April 22, 1916, Niki wrote the tsar again. Curiously his penmanship in this letter begins much neater than the terrible scribble in previous letters. In this missive he treated the tsar to a synopsis of Russian foreign policy (by the end of which his penmanship had become largely illegible) in the nineteenth century and again discussing those who should be in his delegation, and ruling out those he did not want (Kokovtsev, Izvolsky, his friend and the former foreign minister, and Polivanov, the minister of war in 1915 and one of the few competent ministers Nicholas II appointed that year).126 On May 5 he wrote the tsar yet again about what type of men should compose the delegation to the postwar peace conference. They should not be “bureaucrats, scribblers, or persons with the souls of routine officials,” he gratuitously advised the tsar, but “men of broad education, men with backbone and courage, who fear neither the newspapers nor the various cliques of our intriguing capital.” He again put himself forward. “I would like to be one of the men chosen for this work,” he added and again offered to “renounce in advance all special considerations, to which as grand duke I am entitled.”127 He clearly worried that his personality would cause him trouble, both with the Allied diplomats and in securing his appointment. He knew that he usually drew opposition, and he knew that the tsar knew it. “You know my abilities and my faults,” he told the tsar. “I am liable to flare up and say what I think, but I am not afraid of people and calumny.” He reiterated, without doubt great sincerity, that he sought nothing for himself but only the opportunity to “be of real service to you and our dear Russia.”128 To win the approval of the estab-

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lishment, he suggested that Sazonov, at that point still the minister of foreign affairs, should lead the delegation, and the grand duke had already written Sazonov that he would be “delighted” to work under his leadership “like any other person.”129 He recommended that the peace delegation should be appointed “without the loss of a minute,” because the members must at first get acquainted with each other. He felt that their work must start immediately because he believed that the leaders of Russian foreign policy had lost their “divine spark” and lacked “every flash of imagination.” The early start would even inspire the troops in the trenches, showing them that they were not dying “in vain” but were fighting for a peace that was “not only honorable but profitable.” Again he presciently noted that there would have to be dealings with the Japanese, and probably with the Americans. He again blasted the notion of sending Kokovtsev (“that well-known canary with his never-ending warbling”) or Izvolsky (with his “self-complacent snobbishness”), or Polivanov (who was guilty, curiously, of “venomous analyses”). He wished to see the delegation composed of men not linked to the mistakes already made. He reiterated that Bark, Golovin, and so on, would be ideal for the delegation. He hoped to avoid the errors of Russia’s past diplomats who were either “German, Jewish, senile, or colorless.” He concluded that letter with an apology that it was so long and the promise that “if I cannot contribute any mite of usefulness in fact, I shall grieve in silence.”130 Sazonov was not eager to have the grand duke in any delegation to the peace conference, but of course he could not directly say so. The Russian foreign minister politely replied on May 7 to the grand duke’s inquiry, but not with the enthusiasm the grand duke would have wanted. The two men met later. Sazonov told the grand duke, obviously trying to soften the blow, that he did not want him in the delegation, that it “does not behoove a grand duke to act in a subordinate capacity,” especially at a time when the grand dukes “do not enjoy the love and respect of the Russian public,” Nicholas Mikhailovich, of course, being the exception. Moreover, the Russian foreign minister had noted that the grand duke’s participation in the peace conference might damage his reputation as a historian, and that foreigners “would look askance” at his being at the congress.131 It was obvious, even to the grand duke, that Sazonov’s words were a polite way of telling him that he did not want him as a participant. Nicholas Mikhailovich was hurt, especially as he had always been “fond” of Sazonov and had hoped to find him “capable of a broader and clearer view.” He also rightly observed that his cousin (and nemesis) Nicholas Nicholaevich could bear an “immense responsibility but that I cannot bear any.”132

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The usual behind-his-back opposition to Nicholas Mikhailovich had clearly reared its head. It is not surprising, and it came not only from Sazonov but also from within the imperial family.133 The Vladimirovichi opposed him, and Nicholas learned of their resistance. He wrote Masson a letter in his defense in which he said that he would “speak not of the family jealousies,” such as those coming from Grand Duchess Vladimir (Maria Pavlovna), her sons, “her international band of queers [pédérastes],” and some “parvenus who are very furious of the successes of their habitual enemy [Nicholas Mikhailovich].” He then blasted “all the boche princes” in the imperial family, while “by-passing the horrible Greek offspring always seeking money,” or the “Montenegrins [wives of the grand dukes Nicholas Nicholaevich and his brother Peter Nicholaevich], [who are] traitors, cowardly and shady.”134 He felt that all members of the delegation should report directly to the tsar, not to “the Stürmers [the prime minister, a Rasputin toady] present or future,” and they should be given “clearly written instructions.” Moreover, they should have the freedom to pick the men who worked under them.135 The grand duke feared that perhaps his letters were annoying the tsar, most likely because the tsar was not answering every one of them. Yet Nicholas II was giving serious consideration to his cousin’s suggestions and to his candidacy for leadership of the Russian delegation. In August he told Peter Bark that he had only one individual in mind to lead the peace delegation, and that was Nicholas Mikhailovich.136 Yet to the grand duke the tsar replied somewhat indifferently to Niki’s observations. At the end of August Nicholas II wrote a casual note blaming Austria for causing the war. Nicholas Mikhailovich replied immediately on September 9. To him the real enemy was Germany, which had tried to bolster the disintegrating state of Austria. “It was hard for the Germans to revive a corpse that has been decomposing for a long time,” he wrote the tsar. He insisted, however, that Austria should be dismembered, while Germany should be crippled.137 “If Austria did not exist, it would be necessary to create her,” he once said, paraphrasing Voltaire’s view of God. It would be better, he thought, to have a weak Austria than a strong Germany in Central Europe. Germany could be weakened by stripping the country of its border territories: Schleswig-Holstein would go to Denmark; Alsace-Lorraine to France; Luxemburg (which was not German) should go to Belgium. Holland, which, like Denmark, had not fired a shot in the war, should gain part of the Rhine River valley, with part of Silesia and Bavaria going to Austria.138 Probably encouraged by this information, Nicholas Mikhailovich charged forward with plans for the conference. Stressing the necessity to begin its planning, on September 21 he wrote a set of designs and ob-

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jectives to be considered.139 First of all he wished to consider which territorial acquisitions would be useful to Russia in Europe and in the East. Also of great importance was the role of Russia’s alliance with its present allies and whether that alliance would be continued after the defeat of Germany. He felt it important to reestablish the territorial sovereignty of Serbia, Montenegro, and Belgium, and he asked rhetorically, “What of a post-war Poland?” Also important was the Armenian problem and the ultimate fate of Persia, a nonbelligerent, as well as the future of the lesser powers, such as Rumania, Bulgaria, and Greece. What of a postwar Austria and the demand of indemnities?140 On October 4, 1916, the grand duke again wrote the tsar about the necessity of preparations and stressed that he would be happy to head the delegation, noting that he would not be caught “unawares,” implying that others might. He again underscored the need to appoint people in whom the country had confidence, not members of the government who were not respected. He suggested as additional members to the delegation A. D. Samarin, the ober procurator of the Holy Synod in 1915, who had refused to bow to Rasputin; A. N. Naumov, the minister of agriculture; and V. V. Shulgin and N. N. L’vov from the Duma, both “of sterling character.” Then he called for adding one man each from the army, navy, ministry of finance, and the foreign office. He wanted as secretary Prince N. V. Golitsyn, the director of the state archives, or A. S. LappoDanilevsky, a historian. He apologized to the tsar if he was an annoyance by pushing this cause, but “Every man thinks his geese are swans.” He reiterated the many points he had enumerated earlier, adding a rather modern concept, the question of war crimes.141 Nicholas Mikhailovich was never tapped to lead the peace delegation, but then neither was anyone else. By the fall of 1916, the political situation in the Russian Empire was turning very nasty. No one could see the end of the war in spite of the millions of casualties Russia had sustained. Food shortages were becoming frightfully acute, and although bread was not yet rationed, the government was having to begin to requisition grain from a reluctant peasantry to feed the hungry cities. Moreover, desertion from the trenches had begun to assume grave proportions. More seriously, the population at large had begun to believe that the German-born empress and Rasputin were intentionally sabotaging the war effort. They were not, but in politics, the truth is not important: What is important is what people believe to be the truth, and the Russian people increasingly believed they were. The Russian Empire was racing on a dangerous collision course with a nightmarish destiny. Whereas Niki never attended the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, his brother Sandro did. He went as a quasi representative for the ghost of a

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Russia that had by then passed into history. No one wanted to see him. Georges Clemenceau, the premier of the country that had been saved by Russian sacrifices, was too busy even to shake his hand and sent instead his secretary out to talk with him.142 Sandro was understandably bitter: “Chunks of the Russian Empire” that had saved the West from defeat were given to Poland, Finland, Rumania, Estonia, and so on, who were represented by “small town lawyers now posing as ambassadors extraordinary.”143 “What if” history has been enjoying a certain currency of late, and it is indeed tempting to speculate what would have happened had not the Revolution led to Russia’s exit from the war before the Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain. Nicholas Mikhailovich, like Clemenceau, wanted to see the German Empire crippled, and on that point Clemenceau would have had a steadfast ally in the grand duke. Yet the major study of Russian war aims, although out-of-date due to newly available material of Russian archives heretofore unaccessible to Western scholars, shows Russian plans for Eastern Europe were not unlike those of Josef Stalin two-and-a-half decades later—minus the ideology, of course. The Russian insistence of a strong presence in Eastern Europe in 1919, however, would not have incurred the enmity in its allies that it had in 1815 and 1945. Indeed, France would have welcomed it, and Russian dominance of Eastern Europe would have prevented the war of 1939–1945. One wonders, however, what would have been the reaction of Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson to the appearance in Paris of the acerbic grand duke and his pack of historians and archivists in 1919 had they composed the delegation a victorious Russia would have sent to the great conference. It is, however, highly unlikely that Nicholas Mikhailovich would have headed the delegation, and all of his careful planning would have come to nothing. There was too much opposition from the numerous “petty bureaucrats” whom the grand duke held in such open contempt. He did not seem to realize, just as his brother Sandro did not, that “his contempt for their ignorance,”144 so openly shown, was the reason for their opposition and dislike, not the envy of his considerable talents.

Nicholas Mikhailovich (left) clowning around with his brothers Mikhail, George, and Sergei.

Nicholas Mikhailovich taking “the Cure” in Bohemia.

Miche-Miche (standing, third from right) with his wife Countess Torby (seated in front of him) at a house party near Inverness, Scotland.

Nicholas Mikhailovich in army uniform.

Grand Duke George Mikhailovich.

Chapter 6

Revolt in the Palaces

If the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the signal of the war, the murder of Rasputin was that of the revolution in Russia. —Maria Shevich1 Whatever the cause, the conspiracy of the grand dukes has missed fire. . . . Not one of them dares show the slightest initiative, and each of them claims to be working solely on his own behalf. They want the Duma to put a match to the powder. In other words, they are expecting of us what we are expecting of them. —Vasilii Maklakov2 He [Nicholas Mikhailovich] is the incarnation of all that is evil, all [italics hers] devoted people loathe him. —Empress Alexandra3

Almost from the beginning of the Great War, the government bungled badly. Whereas the Duma had met on August 8 for three hours to pass emergency war credits, it was not asked to remain in session because it would only be in the way. Nicholas II missed, as it turned out, an excellent opportunity to solidify his position with his people by asking their

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representatives to continue in session for the duration of the war. At the war’s outset he was more popular than he had ever been in his reign; if asking the Duma to assist him had ever occurred to him, he did not act on it. Nevertheless, the Duma, imitating the actions of France’s political parties, formed a Union Sacrée, a “sacred union” with the government to agree to put aside all political differences in unity for the war effort. With the exception of the five Bolshevik deputies, all political leaders spoke for cooperation with the regime until the war’s end. From the beginning, however, the partnership was one-sided, with the Duma doing the cooperating and the government ignoring the “people’s representatives.” Moreover, as the war effort faltered badly and the horrendous shortages that were to plague the Russian armies throughout became evident, the government refused their proffered help. Even in the late fall of 1914 when Duma president Mikhail Rodzianko tried to form a congress at the request of the generalissimo Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich to “get his army shod,” the minister of the interior refused to let him. It would be, the minister said, a public admission of governmental inadequacy. “Besides,” he added, “under the guise of making boots, you will make revolution.”4 What is more, the general ineptitude of the tsar’s cabinet, a ministry of mediocrities, headed by the indolent septuagenarian Ivan Goremykin, became increasingly evident. Goremykin made no effort to involve his government in military affairs, expressing the view that such matters were the bailiwick of the military, not the government. When corruption began to surface around the minister of war General Vladimir Sukhomlinov and his clique, initially nothing was done about it. The Union Sacrée essentially held during the three days in February 1915 that the Duma was allowed to meet, but the disastrous defeat of the Russian armies that year in the Austro-German offensive in Poland changed the political countenance of the Russian land. Despite the fact that the tsar replaced, if briefly, several of his more incompetent ministers in the summer of 1915, the situation deteriorated. Paul Miliukov, the history-professor-turned-politician and the major figure to form and lead the Union Sacrée, had held it together with the argument that any political agitation would impede the war effort. His policy brought a revolt from within his own Kadet Party. In the summer of 1915 he changed his argument from silence on governmental fumbling for the war effort to the idea that to agitate against the government would spark a revolution. Miliukov, being a historian, was perhaps more politically aware than most politicians, and he knew that a revolution, once unleashed, would be a “pitiless Russian riot,” sweeping away not just

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tsarism but liberal democracy as well. From this point until the fall of the Romanovs, the liberal Miliukov became one of the most stalwart defenders of the Russian monarchy, beliving it to be the only bulwark against the anarchy of the extreme Left. When in August 1915 the centrist parties of the Duma formed the so-called Progressive Bloc, a coalition with the goal of trying to encourage, not force, the tsar to appoint a ministry that held the confidence of the government, Miliukov only reluctantly assumed the leadership of it, but he feared that even this modest action might ignite a revolution of the lower classes.5 The year 1916 held at first some promise of better days. When the Duma opened in January for a six-month session, the tsar made a surprise appearance at the convocation. In June General A. A. Brusilov launched his highly successful offensive against the Austrian Empire, and once again the Russian armies were advancing westward.6 Yet the year 1916 had brought a new prime minister, Boris Stürmer, a colorless bureaucrat, who was if anything worse than the aged Goremykin. He had been picked by Rasputin, the probably apocryphal story went, because the “holy man” had liked his bass voice. In July the very competent minister of foreign affairs, Sazonov, a man trusted by the Allies, was removed, and his portfolio was given to Stürmer, who already had a plate too full for his diminutive talents. As the Brusilov offensive bogged down, the blood of a million casualties added to discontent with the government. Of great importance was, as we have seen, the growing belief that the empress, Rasputin, and several prominent political figures were intentionally betraying Russia’s military secrets by passing them on to Germany and otherwise sabotaging the war effort. This fiction came to receive much credence due to a strange coincidental mixture of political alchemy that, if written by a novelist, would not proverbially “sell”; and the empress’s German origins, as well as Stürmer’s, were enough to implicate her in the minds of the Russian people, who were looking for an explanation for Russia’s failures on the field of battle.7 Yet the events around the visit of a parliamental delegation to the West in the summer of 1916 added a new dimension to the already strange political climate. A group of Duma deputies toured the capitals of Russia’s allies, and the leader of the delegation was Ivan Protopopov, an Octobrist and one of the vice presidents of the Duma. Protopopov stayed behind in England to discuss a loan, and on returning alone through Scandinavia, he was contacted by a Swedish industrialist who arranged a meeting between him and an official in the German embassy in Stockholm. The purpose was to offer Russia a peace feeler. Protopopov scoffed at the idea, and on returning home told everyone of the meeting. Learning of it, the

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tsar invited Protopopov out to Tsarskoe Selo to report to him personally on his experience. Nicholas II liked the Duma deputy and decided to appoint him to the cabinet. He was after all one of the Duma’s own, a supporter of the Progressive Bloc, and a man they themselves had chosen to represent them in the West, where he had made quite a favorable impression. It would be an excellent way, the tsar thought, to extend a hand to the people’s representatives. Yet given the belief that “German influences” were already rampant at court, the appointment of a man shortly after he was known to have had contact with the enemy could only cause trouble. Moreover, according to rumors the new minister of the interior was just beginning to be victimized by syphilitic insanity. Shortly after taking his post in the government in the fall of 1916, Protopopov began exhibiting such weird behavior as holding séances to seek advice from Russia’s past leaders such as Alexander Nevsky, a Russian hero who had defeated the Germans in the thirteenth century. The combination of rumor and séances simply became too much. From one end of the Russian political spectrum to the other, politicians of all stripes began to demand desperate measures, and by the fall of 1916, the word “revolution” appeared on the lips of members of all social classes, in some cases in hope, in others, fear. The Russian Empire was clearly careening out of control. Not least among these disgruntled elements were members of the imperial family who had the most to lose in the event of a revolution. Old animosities seemed to die away in the crisis, and those Romanovs who had little in common, or even disliked each other, began working together. The Russian diplomat A. Nekliudov, who was serving in Stockholm, noted in his diary that someone had written him from Petrograd that Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, who had never been close to the family of Grand Duke Vladimir, had dined a few days before at the home of his widow, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna. To the diplomat, this event indicated that “henceforth anything is possible.”8 Conversation flowed freely among the family about the perilous conditions. Not surprisingly, the Mikhailovichi were in the forefront of trying to influence the tsar to create a government that would enjoy the confidence of the country. Grand Duke George Mikhailovich, whose letters to his daughter Ksenia in England show a growing apprehension about the situation, wrote Nicholas II from the front in the fall of 1916 that the “hatred of Stürmer is extreme,” and that “everyone asks for his dismissal.” He called for a responsible ministry (though not in the sense of being responsible to the Duma) “to protect you from the deceits of the ministers. If I had heard that from the Left and the liberals, I should

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have paid no attention to it,” he wrote the tsar, “but it is those who are devoted to you . . . who have spoken like that to me.”9 Sandro, who was probably the only one of the Mikhailovichi on friendly terms with the tsarina, invited his cousin Grand Duke Paul to lunch in Kiev to discuss the crumbling situation. Paul was hesitant to discuss it, because for a grand duke of his generation, such conversations bordered on treason. Alexander emphasized that given Paul’s closeness with the tsar, he might be able to get through to him about the gravity of the deteriorating conditions. He even suggested that the popular grand duke convene a meeting in Petrograd of the other grand dukes to plan some course of action, “for things will happen very soon and will drag us all down into the abyss.”10 In December Alexander himself wrote the tsar the warning that by now he had heard from all sides: “Strange as it may sound, Nicky, we are witnessing the unbelievable spectacle of a revolution being promoted by the government.” Noting that everyone feared revolution for myriad reasons “with the exception of your ministers,” he added that their “criminal actions [and] their indifference to the sufferings of the people will force the masses to revolution,” observing that “for the first time in history, a revolution is being engineered not from below but from above.”11 Even Miche-Miche expressed his fears from England. He wrote the tsar after learning during a visit at Buckingham Palace that King George V was most disturbed by the situation in Russia. Apparently the agents of the British Secret Service had reported to the king that there would be revolution in Russia “in the very near future.” Miche-Miche called on the tsar to do anything to satisfy the just demands of “our people” before it was too late.12 It is not surprising that, of all the Mikhailovichi, Nicholas Mikhailovich became disturbed first and that his discomfort was the most intense. We have seen how highly critical he was of the war effort as early as 1914 and 1915, and his criticism probably was a major factor in his having been limogéed from the front. In the fall of 1915 he turned to the events surrounding the imperial family. The Right and “the mystics” were making trouble “in disturbing proportions” and were upsetting “all the world [his italics] and me in particular more than the others” because he sensed a real danger in the future caused by their “absurd tendencies.”13 When five months later General Alexei Polivanov, the competent minister of war who had replaced Sukhomlinov in 1915, was fired, Nicholas Mikhailovich was further infuriated. Polivanov had, in his short tenure of nine months, gone a long way to ameliorate the supply crisis in the Russian army. By the time of his removal, Russia had essentially ended the serious shell shortage that had prevented its armies from effectively countering the

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German artillery. His changes would make General Brusilov’s 1916 summer successes possible. Nicholas Mikhailovich believed that “they” (at this point the evil in the regime was more general to the grand duke than it would become) had opposed Polivanov for his close work with the Duma as though he had been a parliamental minister. “I have known Polivanov for twenty-five years,” the grand duke fumed in one of his letters, “[and he] is a lucid spirit and a tireless worker, and the nine months that he has spent at his post, . . . he was able to put everything in order and reorganize everything from top to bottom.”14 By this time Rasputin’s antics were well-known and the empress’s reliance on mystics was guiding the government and the appointment of ministers. This bungling was just the type for which the grand duke had no patience. He felt that the danger to the dynasty lay in the occult influences, the absence of an organizational plan, and in the daily shuffling of cabinet ministers, not in the activity of a minister who had been known to go to the people, the army, and the Duma.15 Several months later, the tsar dismissed the highly respected Sazonov, whose portfolio, as we have seen, was assumed by the mediocrity Stürmer. At this point Nicholas Mikhailovich’s relations with the tsar were still cordial, but the grand duke wrote the emperor a not-too-gentle letter criticizing his removal of the foreign minister. “I don’t know for what reasons you dismissed S. D. Sazonov,” he wrote his cousin the emperor, “but here is what has happened. Almost the entire press . . . has put him on a pedestal, . . . all zemstvos, public organizations . . . have sent him their condolences on the occasion of his departure and made a hero of him.” He went on gently to tell the tsar that his action was a serious mistake.16 His annoyance at the misadventures of the regime was beginning to get to him. In a conversation with Rodzianko the grand duke said, “Goodness knows what they’re doing with their insane policy. They want to drive the whole Russian public to desperation.”17 Yet the grand duke never considered the empress any sort of traitor, as the general rumor mill had it. He simply regarded her as a pathetic but dangerous bumbler, and he never thought—and he was correct in his belief—that there was a “German party” at court, sabotaging the war effort or championing peace with Germany. When Paléologue had “the impudence” to read to the grand duke his ambassadorial reports to his government, reports that Nicholas Mikhailovich found “pitiful and false,” Niki made the point to the ambassador that Stürmer’s position was an “internal political question,” not a triumph of any “German party” at court.18 If hostile and acerbic, Nicholas Mikhailovich could usually be fair. In May 1916 the French ministers Albert Thomas and René Viviani came to Russia primarily for the purpose of negotiating to send more

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Russian troops to the West, and his French connections made Nicholas Mikhailovich an important figure for participating in their entertainment. The grand duke’s interests made him especially desirous of meeting Thomas, a prominent French socialist whose tongue was as viperous as the grand duke’s. He virtually invited himself to a luncheon for the ministers as he was “tremendously anxious to make the acquaintance” of the famous French politician. At the luncheon, Nicholas overwhelmed Thomas with attention.19 Viviani and Thomas then went to Moscow for several state functions, but on their return to Petrograd Nicholas Mikhailovich eagerly joined them again at Maria Pavlovna’s for another meal.20 Their friendship would be renewed when Thomas became France’s ambassador to Russia the following year. Empress Alexandra and Nicholas Mikhailovich would never have been fond of each other even in the best of times, given their respective personalities. Nicholas Mikhailovich was too practical and intelligent to tolerate her neuroses and her mysticism, and she would have always been threatened by his intellect and his cosmopolitanism. The two rarely saw each other, even before the troubles began. When Niki came to Tsarskoe Selo for breakfast with the emperor and empress in February 1914, Alexandra remarked in French, “God knows when I saw you the last time!”21 Actually they had been in the presence of one another only nine months before at a function for the Romanov Tricentennial, and she had not even remembered. Niki was certainly not a frequent visitor to the tsar’s palace nor any confidant to the empress. The only extant bit of correspondence from her to him among his papers is a telegram in French thanking him for a letter and a gift in 1911. “Very touched by your [familiar pronoun] letter and the idéale pendule [?],” she wired. “I thank you from the [bottom of my] heart. It is most friendly to have you think of me. Alix.”22 In the spring of 1916, however, the grand duke asked to speak with the empress alone. By this time, he was becoming concerned with the problems surrounding the throne and thought that he could do something to help. At this point he probably felt charitable toward her and hoped to coax her into staying out of politics. On April 30, 1916, she wrote her husband, “Nikolai has asked to see me—alone—can’t imagine why, so shall see him tomorrow—and Stürmer too.”23 Before she saw the grand duke the next day, she wrote the tsar again (she often wrote him several times a day) and, stating that she had nothing interesting to report, added, “perhaps after Nikolai M [her italics] has been—” then she repeated, “he asked to see me alone, cannot simply imagine why.”24 The empress did meet Nicholas Mikhailovich later that day, and according to what he later wrote Masson, he complained to her about the

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developing situation, but apparently did so with unaccustomed tact and gentility. In her report to the tsar, she said, “Well[,] I had Nikolai for an hour—very interesting about the letters [?] he wrote you, etc.[,] and he wants me to talk all over with you.” She does not seem to have been offended by anything that he had said, as he was probably not critical of her, but she was “very tired after it.” She was even charitable about his efforts, explaining to the tsar that “he meant well,” but then added “(tho’ I don’t like him).”25 She went to visit her husband at the front on May 3, so there is a break in their correspondence, and we do not know what conversations about the meeting, if any, transpired between them. Nicholas Mikhailovich’s account to Frédéric Masson, relayed as usual without discretion, indicates a slightly different turn of events. For some reason he told the French historian that he had met her “completely by chance,” but we know he did not. Perhaps he meant that he was trying to give her that appearance. From what both of them wrote about the meeting, he did talk to her in a gentle way about the political situation and the looming dangers. He seems to have spoken about the necessity of the success of Russian arms. He told Masson that he had said everything “in the most pleasant way, without her becoming angry while listening attentively to me without making an effort to protest against my assertions.”26 She might not have comprehended what he was saying. Without question, she did not understand that he was critical of her behavior. At first Nicholas Mikhailovich felt that she had grasped what he had said about the war and the diplomatic consequences of losing it, but she missed totally the veiled criticism of her and Rasputin’s dabbling in politics. He realized that she was abysmally ignorant of the plight of the masses, held a mark of revulsion for the nobility, and a distrust of the intellectual bourgeoisie (at this point the grand duke adds in parentheses, “On this point she is right”). He found her completely oblivious, as indeed she was, to the danger of her “perpetual meddling that is dangerous for the interests of her husband. What a mentality! The poor woman!” The grand duke was indeed pleased with himself. He felt that if he had somehow shaken her or imparted in her a “fear of the future,” he had “rendered a service to my country and to Him [the emperor].”27 He may have served his country, but he never imparted any fear of the future in the mind of the empress. Given her response, she does not seem ever to have understood what he was trying to tell her. The meeting had no salubrious effect. Nicholas Mikhailovich wrote the couple a friendly note on the occasion of Tsarevich Aleksei’s birthday in August that year,28 and the papers of Nicholas II in GARF include a strange, undated letter from the grand duke to the tsar inviting him to visit, in which he also seems to be invit-

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ing Alix.29 Was he planning to try again to awaken them to Russia’s plight and this time do it with both of them? These two epistolary contacts were the only friendly ones that he would ever have again with the imperial couple. The Duma, out of session since late in the summer, assembled again on November 1, 1916. One cannot say that it convened: It exploded, and for at least a month or two, the Union Sacrée was dead. The parties of the Left, the moderate Left, the Center, and the moderate Right erupted in fury at the government. The most momentous speech was that delivered by the liberal leader Miliukov. In fact, his speech was the most famous ever in the history of the Duma. This man who had constantly called on his colleagues to follow a course of moderation openly and furiously assaulted the “dark forces” surrounding the government. Enumerating the various failures and bunglings of the government, this normally mild history professor cried after each one he named, “Is this stupidity or is this treason?” Upon each rhetorical demand, one half the Duma would thunder “Stupidity!” while the other would shout “Treason!” He even criticized the empress by quoting an article written in a German newspaper.30 The public attacks on the cabinet by this man who had repeatedly championed moderation was devastating to the government, and Miliukov’s deadly assault partly contributed to Stürmer’s fall shortly afterward. Within a few days Nicholas II, having heard demands from everyone for the prime minister’s removal, including his own mother, dismissed Stürmer, replacing him with Alexander Trepov, a competent, honest conservative. Trepov accepted the premiership on the condition that Protopopov be removed as well, and apparently the tsar agreed. Learning of the changes, however, the empress rushed to headquarters and stopped Protopopov’s dismissal. She lamented to her confidant, Anna Vyrubova, that she had not gotten there in time to save “poor Stürmer” but had stopped all the other changes prepared by the “busybodies.”31 In the eyes of Nicholas Mikhailovich, the great villain in the entire imbroglio was the empress because of the control she had over her husband and in turn the control Rasputin had over her. By 1915 Rasputin was literally naming ministers and selling his influence to any who would purchase it. His actions were not evil calculations as some believed, for Rasputin was not intelligent enough for such diabolical manipulation. His moves were born instead of instinctual self-preservation and animal acquisitiveness. Whether calculated or accidental, the pernicious result was the same. Often his opposition to a minister was based merely on the fact that the minister opposed him, and Rasputin wanted his dangerous influence removed from court circles. The pattern that assured the

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victimized minister’s removal was repeated again and again. The empress would begin nagging the emperor to replace a certain minister or to appoint a certain minister because “Our Friend,” as she called Rasputin, had advised it. A series of letters would continuously make some reference to the change or the appointment, and finally the emperor would give in to stop her nagging.32 The incompetence of their appointees would have been laughable if it had not been so damaging. Moreover, the empress’s advice to the spineless emperor on other matters wore away at his resolve. “Russia loves to feel the whip—its [sic] their nature—tender love and then the iron hand to punish—How I wish I could pour myself into your veins.”33 The pathetic tsar was receiving frantic advice from all directions—the Duma, the opposition, members of his own family, and the empress as well. Given his personality, this abuse caused him to retreat into himself more and more until he probably welcomed a way out, even if that exit meant being removed from his throne. His fear of facing his wife if he should give in to his critics, however, was clearly his greatest worry. Nicholas Mikhailovich realized this fact and correctly saw that the removal of the empress from the capital and away from the government was the most pressing need to better the situation. Having failed in the spring to get through to the empress and having seen others fail to influence the tsar, Nicholas Mikhailovich decided in the fall of 1916 to go to the tsar himself. In a piece of correspondence from earlier in the year, the tsar had offhandedly suggested that Nicholas Mikhailovich report to him on conditions in the country, a suggestion that resulted in tedious reports on everything from local archives to wheat production on his estate. Now he decided to use this invitation to show the tsar the terrible situation around the throne. Moreover, he had been “begged” to do so by Grand Duke Mikhail, Nicholas II’s brother.34 Nicholas Mikhailovich had gone to Kiev in October and had met with the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna. She and the tsar’s sister, who was doing hospital work there, also had encouraged him to try to get through to the tsar about the damage the empress and Rasputin were causing. He decided to write the emperor “a letter, totally honest—to the end.” Because he wrote better than he spoke, he would read it to the tsar. Nicholas felt that he had nothing to lose, as he was older, had no ambitions, and sought nothing in return. He simply felt that he could not remain indifferent to the disaster he felt was looming. He decided to visit the tsar at army headquarters and deliver the letter personally, and he asked the tsar late in October for permission to come to Mogilev for just one day. The tsar agreed to a meeting and told his wife. Ever mindful of the influence others might have over her husband, she wrote him in her large

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scrawly hand on November 5, “Lovy, you will be careful not to get caught by Nikolasha [she wrote his name in the Cyrillic alphabet in a letter otherwise written in English] into any promise or anything—remember [words unclear] you from him and his evil people. Don’t let him go to the country but straight [her italics] back to the Caucasus.” She apologized for writing such strong language but felt “it must be so.”35 Nicholas Mikhailovich arrived on November 1, the very day of Miliukov’s “Stupidity or Treason” speech, with apparently not one but two letters, and that night he and the tsar had a long talk. For what was probably only the second time in his adult life, he eschewed his usual bluntness and just as had happened in his conversation with the empress in the spring, the recipient of his advice missed the point. Exactly how the conversation transpired is unclear. Shulgin remembered that the grand duke told him and L’vov after the event that he had read one of his letters to the tsar,36 and had given the tsar the other to read for himself. In fact, he apparently did not even mention the empress in the first letter, at least not directly. Shulgin also claimed that Nicholas Mikhailovich had told him that “she [the empress] is not to blame for everything of which she is accused, . . . but the country does not understand or love her, [and] views her influence on affairs as the source of all our troubles.”37 In light of what followed, one concludes that he did not say that either, or else the tsar tuned out the conversation. He confined his oral criticism to Stürmer, Protopopov, and the occult forces around the throne. Nicholas II continued mechanically striking matches to light the grand duke’s cigarette each time it went out or he took out a new one for him, and he seemed to listen only indifferently. Perhaps he was not listening at all. E. H. Wilcox, a journalist who was not present but reported part of the conversation, possibly told him by the grand duke himself, wrote the following: NM: Are you aware that they foisted Protopopov on you? The tsar: I know it. NM: And you consider that a normal state of affairs? To the last statement the tsar made no reply.38 The grand duke also later told friends that after his torrent of criticism, he half jokingly said to the tsar, “Now, call your cossacks. It is easy to kill me and I shall be buried in your garden and nobody will be the wiser.”39 The tsar only smiled and the conversation soon ended. Nicholas Mikhailovich departed, leaving with the tsar his second lengthy letter, unread. In the second letter he attacked the empress personally.

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Whatever the grand duke said was probably for whatever reason much milder than he later claimed. Perhaps he was somewhat intimidated upon entering into the presence of his cousin. That he did speak forthrightly about the ministers is certain. It is almost as certain that he did not directly mention the empress. In his conversation with L’vov and Shulgin, L’vov asked the grand duke if he felt that his mission had made an impression. Shulgin remembered that the royal cousin replied, “I don’t know—perhaps. I am afraid not— but no matter—I did it—I had to do it.”40 The next day, after the grand duke had returned to the capital, the tsar wrote to his wife, “Nicoli [sic] M has come for one day. We had a long talk together last night, of which I will tell you in my next letter—I am too busy today.”41 What the tsar then did is incomprehensible: He sent the empress both letters, the read and the unread second letter that the grand duke had handed him. Nicholas Mikhailovich began his second letter by observing that the tsar had often expressed the desire to win the war, but he then asked, “Are you quite sure that the present conditions of the country enable you to realize your intention? Do you sufficiently understand the internal situation of the Empire . . . ? Do you know that whole truth is . . . kept from you?” Then he asked and answered the damning question: “Wherein lies the root of the evil?” He said that as long as only a few people knew how he chose his ministers (i.e., through the recommendations of the empress and Rasputin), things could sort of go along “without much danger.” Yet because this method of picking ministers had become generally known, it could not continue. After reminding the tsar that he himself had often told the grand duke that he trusted no one and that he was frequently deceived, he unleashed his bomb: “If that is true, that applies particularly to your wife, who loves you,” he added, evidently trying to soften the blow, “but has nevertheless led you into error, because she is surrounded by people in whom the spirit of evil works powerfully.” The grand duke observed that the tsar would naturally believe in Alexandra, but then expressed the opinion that “dark forces” were manipulating her so that she did not report to her husband the truth. “If you are powerless to free her from those influences, at least be on your guard against the constant and systematic control of the schemers who use you wife as a tool.” He expressed the opinion that the tsar must have tried unsuccessfully to mitigate her ascendancy and reminded the emperor that he had the power to rid the country of these malicious influences. He then told the tsar what he must already have understood: that he was indecisive, that his first instincts were always right, but that these sinister influences often caused him to hesitate and change his mind. “If only you

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could stop this constant intervention of maleficent forces, the regeneration of Russia would immediately take a giant stride forward . . . and regain the confidence of . . . your subjects, who have ceased to believe in you.” The grand duke then opined that all would then be well, adding the wish, as though it were a logical progression, that the tsar could then proclaim a government responsible to both him and the legislative institutions (a rather glaring contradiction) before it was forced on him as the October Manifesto had been in 1905. The grand duke told the tsar that he had hesitated for some time to tell him the truth but that both his mother and his sister had urged him to do so. He warned the tsar that he would soon have fresh trials and perhaps even a threat on his life. He stressed also that his own actions were in no way personally motivated but were done solely in the “hope of saving you, and your throne and our dear country from the ghastly and irreparable misfortunes which threaten it.”42 The tsar did not take his advice, not because he knew of his cousin’s “liberal tendencies,” as a friend of the empress Sophie Buxhoeveden felt,43 but because at that point he was not taking anyone’s advice except that of the empress and Rasputin, and he was clearly becoming numb even to their fulminations. Those around the tsar described him in the last months of the empire as being in a daze. He seemed lost. He did not read reports. He did not listen to the discussions during meetings. Nicholas II was a fatalist, and he had clearly surrendered to his fate as Russia went spinning out of control. That mental numbness probably led him to do the incomprehensible act of forwarding to the empress unread the grand duke’s critical letter. Nicholas Mikhailovich never could hate his ineffectual cousin, however. “He infuriates me, but I still love him,” he told a member of his family after the crucial meeting.44 That probably expressed the attitude of most of Nicholas II’s relatives for the weakwilled emperor who was so unsuited for the throne he occupied. In her memoirs Anna Vyrubova remembered entering the empress’s rooms shortly after Nicholas Mikhailovich’s visit to headquarters to find her in such “a passion of indignation and grief” she was unable to speak. When she finally got hold of herself, she told Vyrubova that the emperor had sent her a letter from Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich that charged her “with the most mischievous political machinations.”45 Alexandra sent her husband a sulfuric reply in her usually disjointed string of sentence fragments and comma splices. “I read Nikolai’s and am utterly disgusted. Had you stopped him in the middle of his talk and told him that, if he only once more touched that subject or me, you will send him to Siberia— as it becomes next to high treason,” she wrote in her anger, adding that

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the grand duke had always hated her “since 22 years,” and in her purple rage she accused Nicholas Mikhailovich in effect of being envious of her popularity. “He is the incarnation of all that’s evil, all devoted people loathe him, even those who do not much like us are disgusted with him and his talks,” she wrote. Not knowing that the grand duke had not discussed the contents of the letter with the tsar, she was as much annoyed with the lack of respect the grand duke had shown her husband as for the disapproval of herself.46 “Bad man,” she wrote and then added, “and the grandson of a Jew!”47 dragging up the old rumors of Olga Feodorovna’s parentage. She permitted both Vyrubova and Rasputin to read her reply; the former attached a totally illegible note at the end to the tsar, and the empress also passed on Rasputin’s opinion, which generally was not to be concerned about the letter, dismissing the grand duke, and concomitantly Miliukov, as “brothers in evil.”48 Nicholas II received her letter that day and hastened to make amends with a telegram: “Best thanks. Am sorry that I sent you those two letters, not having read them myself. Gray and mild weather. Tender kisses from both [me and the tsarevich].”49 The next day he wrote the tsarina a full letter of apology. “I am so sorry that I have upset you and made you angry by sending the two letters of N,” the henpecked tsar wrote grovelingly to his wife, “but as I am in a constant hurry[,] I had not read them, because he had spoken exhaustively of the matter for a long time.” The tsar then noted that the grand duke had discussed only spies, factories, workers’ disorders, and the general internal situation. “Had he said anything about you,” the tsar assured his irate wife, “you do not really doubt that your dear hubby would have taken your part!”50 The empress replied the next day, obviously somewhat relieved that “N. M. did not speak as he wrote,—tho’ it wld. [sic] have given you reason to wash his head and tell him to mind his own business once in a say.”51 The Yacht Club in Petrograd was the ne plus ultra of the capital’s clubs. It had nothing to do with yachts and was not even on the water, but it was the club of those who aspired to climb to the highest rung of St. Petersburg’s social ladder. The Countess Kleinmichel described it as an “end-all” to join. “A young man who, the day before his admission to membership, was inoffensive, kindly, and modest, [would become] eight days later . . . self-important and abusive.” What made the club “the club” was the fact that there was a constant presence of grand dukes within.52 Outside of his home, the Yacht Club of St. Petersburg was Nicholas Mikhailovich’s pied-à-terre, and he habituated the place almost daily. His usual outrageous conversation and pronouncements always drew a crowd. After he had broken the ice with his criticism of the empress,

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he easily unleashed his anger on her regularly with a fury that knew no bounds, calling her “the Abominable Hessian,” “the Hessian Tigress,” “the Messaline de Darmstadt,” or “the woman who wanted to set Christ straight.”53 Alexandra learned of his indiscreet fulminations and immediately wrote to her husband on November 9 that someone had “said Nikolai Mikhailovich [her italics] speaks awfully, all are furious at what he says in the club, and he sees Rodzianko [again hers] and company continually.”54 Early in December she called her husband to “be hard” on Nicholas Mikhailovich “should he return [to headquarters] (wh. God forbid),” and “give it [to] him for his letters and goings on in town.”55 A few days later she was still on the grand duke’s case, having probably received fresh reports of his slashing tongue: “Please, make Nikolai Mikhailovich [hers] go away—he is a dangerous element in town.”56 She even warned the tsar against any advice from his own mother because “the Michels [Mikhailovichi] are behind her—don’t heed and take to heart—thank God she is not here.”57 A train accident in the Caucasus in December almost eliminated Nicholas Mikhailovich as an irritant to the empress. While traveling from a hunting trip to Baku on the Caspian Sea, the grand duke was in a train wreck at 5:00 in the morning several miles from the seaport. Twenty-nine passengers were killed and fifteen injured. Although none of his entourage was hurt, Nicholas Mikhailovich called the accident “a heart-rending spectacle of human misery.”58 Amazingly, he was surprised that he received no expression of concern from their majesties: “Not a word of sympathy for the catastrophe of the railroad when I miraculously escaped death, not a letter, not a telegram.”59 Nicholas Mikhailovich had been at army headquarters trying to enlighten the tsar when the Duma opened, but he was present at the Duma in the days that followed when another withering attack on the government was made by staunch monarchist and extreme Rightist Vladimir Purishkevich. This prominent supporter of the autocracy went even further than Miliukov by attacking Rasputin publicly on the Duma floor. Nicholas Mikhailovich attended the session and applauded the speech, an act that did not go unnoticed in the tsar’s palace.60 The grand duke was most impressed with the actions of this devoted monarchist, and wrote Masson, “Since the beginning of our semi-parliamentary regime, I have never witnessed in the Tauride Palace [where the Duma met] a similar session.” The grand duke was now completely convinced that Russia would soon be in total chaos61 and that something desperate had to be done. He was so impressed with Purishkevich’s speech that late in November, he asked to meet the Duma deputy.62 Purishkevich received a call

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from A. N. Glinsky, the editor of The Historical Herald, inviting him to a meeting at the grand duke’s house as soon as it was convenient. Purishkevich could not decide whether he should go. He did not like the grand duke’s historical works, feeling that he presented his royal forebears in “a most unattractive fashion, sullying their names [i.e., the grand duke told the truth].”63 The deputy finally decided to go, and conversed with the grand duke at his palace in his study. “I was met . . . by a decrepit old lion wearing the epaulettes of an adjutant-general,” as Purishkevich later remembered Nicholas Mikhailovich, and he was surprised that the grand duke spoke “with an eastern accent [?].” As was his wont, Nicholas Mikhailovich immediately began criticizing everything and everyone around the throne, and since Purishkevich had not heretofore known the grand duke, he was shocked by the candor of his speech. Nicholas talked continuously, permitting only an occasional “yes” or “no” from his guest. He told Purishkevich that the entire Romanov family had submitted a memo to Nicholas II on Rasputin and his evil influence on the empress, but that nothing had come of it. Purishkevich remembered that the grand duke told him that he had not even signed the memorandum “because it was useless . . . and would have deplorable results for those who did,” a statement that was not true, as we shall see.64 He told him that the tsar, however, had given him the task of reporting on conditions in the country, and he had done so in his November 1 meeting without mincing words. As a result, he told the Duma deputy, “I am in disgrace, out of favor, and treated with complete coolness.” The grand duke then read his memo to Purishkevich.65 Mossolov contends in his memoirs that in the fall of 1916 there was one last attempt to mend relations within the family and reopen contact with the emperor and empress, but the personalities of the participants were to kill it. The aged Count Vladimir Fredericks, the minister of the court, had suggested a détente to the empress, and she agreed to meet with Maria Pavlovna, who had always been the coagulant of opposition to Alexandra. Fredericks was to go to her as if it were of his own initiative, but he sent Mossolov instead. Maria Pavlovna recognized that reconciliation was necessary in the interests of the dynasty, yet the grand duchess refused the empress’s demand that she take the first step. “If that is so,” she told Mossolov, “then I am not ready even to discuss the subject with you.” Finally she relented and said that if Fredericks would come and invite her to Tsarskoe Selo in the empress’s name, she would relent and go. At this point Fredericks was ill and could not immediately do his part. Before he was able, the events of March 1917 overtook them all.66

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December brought an event that has easily generated the greatest interest and fascination of any in Russian history: the murder of Rasputin. It has been the favorite subject of an army of armchair Russian historians, and even under the Soviet regime it was a tsarist subject that intrigued everyone. Rasputin’s apartment in Leningrad, as well as the Youssoupov palace, where he was in effect killed, became unofficial tourist meccas that still draw large numbers of the curious, both Russian and foreign. Over the years the topic has been a frequent subject of movies. This opéra-bouffe, described cleverly by Leon Trotsky as resembling “a movie scenario for people of bad taste,” is well known, and an exhausting regurgitation of the details need not detain us here, although a brief outline would be helpful. The conspirators who committed the murder were an unlikely collection of assassins: Purishkevich, the clever Duma Rightist; Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, a rather irresponsible playboy; and Prince Felix Youssoupov, the husband of Niki’s niece and a notorious transvestite who often wore women’s makeup even when he was not impersonating the opposite sex.67 Instead of hiring professional hitmen, they decided to do the deed themselves. Using his wife as bait, Youssoupov lured the “holy man” to the basement of his house, where the cabal unsuccessfully tried to kill him by poisoning and shooting him. From this maltreatment, the conspirators saw the starets rise from what they thought was the dead, give the effeminate Youssoupov a good choking, and run out of the palace into the courtyard. He was finally shot there in the back by the rattled Purishkevich and then bludgeoned by the now hysterical Youssoupov. Hearing the shots, the police appeared, and Purishkevich told them that they had shot a dog, then divulged that the “dog” was Rasputin. He then swore the police to secrecy, a vow they must not have kept. Nicholas Mikhailovich learned of the assassination from two phone calls that came at about 5:30 AM on December 17, just hours after the deed had been done. One was from Princess M. A. Trubetskoi, the other from the English ambassador George Buchanan. The grand duke learned of Youssoupov’s role in the affair, but he was incorrectly informed that his nephews, Feodor and Nikita, sons of Sandro, were also involved. The grand duke immediately jumped into one of his cars, instead of his usual taxi, and sped though the early morning to his brother Alexander’s home on the Moika Canal to learn the complete truth.68 The police had already composed a list of 106 suspects, and the grand duke had no idea that he was one of them.69 Although a recent historian has cavalierly written that Nicholas Mikhailovich was one of the conspirators (he calls it “a homosexual vendetta”),70 the grand duke knew nothing of the scheme until the first

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phone call came in the early morning of December 17. He detested Rasputin for the harm he was inflicting on Russia,71 but he felt that to eliminate the peasant was pointless unless they got rid of Protopopov and the empress as well. He also was personally opposed to murder, although in his diary he wrote, probably tongue in cheek, that the assassins had not “finished the extermination which they had begun.”72 The grand duke immediately threw himself into the affair. Youssoupov remembered that he called incessantly, more than anyone else, and came by often. One does get the impression that his fascination with the titillating nature of the scandal was a motivation. He even helped search for the starets’s body.73 Youssoupov had been prevented from leaving Petrograd by the police on order from the empress, so he remained at home. Shortly afterward, Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich appeared. Youssoupov wrote later that he realized his appearance at such a late hour boded no good. Youssoupov remembered that on his first visit Nicholas Mikhailovich tried to bluff him into telling what had happened. Youssoupov denied all of the rumors and any involvement. He wrote that the grand duke replied, “Tell that to others, not to me! I know everything, every detail— even the names of the women who were at the party!” thus showing that he really knew absolutely nothing. He pretended to be very sympathetic in hopes that the young prince would heedlessly reveal something. Youssoupov told him the story of shooting a dog, hence the shots outside that had drawn the police, and he felt that the grand duke had come around to believing him, but on leaving, Nicholas Mikhailovich smiled knowingly, “to preserve himself from error.” He seemed visibly annoyed that he had been unable to extract any of the salacious details.74 On another occasion he recorded in his diary that he listened to Youssoupov’s denials until 1:30 AM on December 18 but never believed him innocent.75 Nicholas Mikhailovich also used the influence he possessed as a grand duke to force government ministers to tell what they knew, and he did so rather indiscreetly. On what was apparently the night of December 18, the grand duke was at the Yacht Club and as usual was the center of a cluster of people. Charles de Chambrun, the first secretary of the French Embassy, wrote later that he heard the grand duke’s voice booming out, “ I tell you he’s not dead. I have asked the minister of the interior [Protopopov, whom he detested] by telephone; he has affirmed that he is living.” He reminded the minster, he told his audience, that he was a grand duke “to whom you must tell the truth” and asked him to repeat his assertion. The minister repeated, “He is living, monsieur.”76 The conspirator Prince Dmitri was present, and Chambrun asked him if he felt that the starets was still alive. The young grand duke asserted

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that he was dead, but Nicholas Mikhailovich would not accept it. He went to the phone and called Youssoupov, who repeated his story about shooting the dog. He returned to the assembled company and said, “Now it is all explained. Youssoupov has avowed that last night he killed a black dog in the garden of his palace.” Chambrun believed that the grand duke thought Rasputin was still alive, although no one else in the room did.77 Nicholas Mikhailovich also called Alexander Trepov, the new prime minister, who denied knowing anything,78 and indeed probably did not. In a later conversation with the premier, Trepov had either learned something or had decided to come clean with the grand duke. He confirmed what the grand duke by then essentially knew: that the conspirators were Youssoupov, Dmitri, and Purishkevich. Uncle Bimbo was relieved that the group did not include his nephews Theodor and Nikita.79 Yet throw himself into the affair he did, and it was the grand duke who informed Youssoupov and company that the peasant’s body had been found.80 He also interrogated members of the imperial family, and those around them and reported to the conspirators that the empress was fully convinced of their roles and wanted them shot.81 From several other sources, however, a somewhat different story emerges. Meriel Buchanan, the British ambassador’s daughter, wrote that Youssoupov called Nicholas Mikhailovich, not the other way around, and volunteered the story of shooting the dog, but would not elaborate when pressed by his wife’s uncle.82 She does not reveal when she learned of Youssoupov’s call, but it undoubtedly came from the grand duke through her father, perhaps during the conversation during the 5:30 AM phone call, or perhaps in another conversation later that day. Three weeks later, Nicholas Mikhailovich wrote Masson that Felix had called him late in the night of the day of the murder and “begged” him to come to his house. He gives the Frenchman the impression that he was drawn into the ruckus against his will. Nicholas wrote that he responded immediately because he was Youssoupov’s only close relative in the city.83 Moreover, in Nicholas Mikhailovich’s papers in Moscow there are a number of mysterious telegrams from Youssoupov and Irina, Youssoupov’s wife and the grand duke’s niece. Grand Duke Dmitri’s sister recalled that the day after the assassination, she had lunch with her brother, Youssoupov, and Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich,84 indicating that Uncle Bimbo was early in close touch with the conspirators. In his diary, Grand Duke Nicholas wrote that he encountered Youssoupov at the apartment of Grand Duke Dmitri (probably the luncheon meeting that Marie remembered), who on entering said in French, “Messieurs les assassins, I salute you!” Seeing that there was no need to continue the charade, Youssoupov told the grand duke the entire story from his first meeting with the starets through

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the shooting in the courtyard. Uncle Bimbo let Youssoupov talk, only rarely interrupting with a question.85 Quite probably the performance of his at the Yacht Club in the evening was an act, as now he was part of the conspiracy, and he wished to throw suspicion away from the conspirators. He wrote Masson that “from this moment I have directed the acts and movements of these young men . . . and I have handled it adroitly.” The grand duke then added, as if he were annoyed at being drawn into the fray, “And I was in the act of busying myself very seriously with a number of historical works! What an irony of fate!”86 There is another possibility. For all of his claims that Nicholas Mikhailovich had forced himself into the affair, Felix Youssoupov seems to have been quick enough to summon the grand duke when he needed help. To his diary, Nicholas Mikhailovich confided that when Youssoupov was arrested for his role in the murder, he called the grand duke at the Yacht Club, where he was still playing cards, to ask for help at about 10:30 PM on the night of December 18/31. This point has been confirmed above by Chambrun. Nicholas Mikhailovich joined the young prince at his father-in-law’s house, which was a block from where the murder had been committed. Nicholas stayed at Sandro’s palace listening to Youssoupov’s denials until about 1:30 AM on January 1. He recorded in his diary that he did not believe him innocent.87 Knowing that the grand duke got around town and spoke his mind on the hottest gossipy issues of the day, did Youssoupov try to convince the grand duke of his innocence so he would broadcast it? Whatever the original plan, once Uncle Bimbo was in on the truth, he became very active in the cover-up. Moreover, the grand duke also kept Youssoupov’s father informed on the breaking events (“I daily see Felix; calm, bearing up, for me he makes an excellent impression”) and even suggested that he come to Petrograd, which the elder prince did.88 Felix certainly kept Uncle Bimbo informed about his comings and goings. In the grand duke’s papers is a telegram sent to Nicholas Mikhailovich by Felix in the late afternoon of December 19, telling of his banishment by the tsar the next day to the Crimea. He added, “Your [familiar form] presence for us a great comfort.” 89 Youssoupov wrote in one of his works about the time the grand duke had wired his wife and parents, but he gives the impression that he had done this deed on his own as it “made his role official.”90 There is simply too much evidence to believe that the conspirators did not welcome his involvement. Felix’s accounts of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s peregrinations were written long after the event when his memory was not fresh, and he clearly was not overly fond of the grand duke. Moreover, if the grand duke was intruding, why did he thank him for his help? Yousoupov’s distress call to his wife’s uncle at the Yacht Club was genu-

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ine, for there would have been no reason for Nicholas Mikhailovich to lie to his diary. What is more, there are several mysterious telegrams from Felix’s wife Irina, who was in the Crimea, to the grand duke.91 In one she expresses the concern that she and her inlaws did not have the details of the murder and that they were “terribly agitated.” She asks that the grand duke continue to wire them news and adds that they will leave the Crimea for the capital the next day (December 20/January 2, 1917). In another sent the same day, she seems to ask the grand duke to come to the Crimea with her husband.92 In a telegram the following day she begins, “Answer quickly and don’t get angry.”93 As the grand duke’s telegrams are not extant, we cannot know to what she is referring. Was she asking for a quick reply to the invitation to come to the Crimea? If so, why would there be any question of his becoming angry? There are many other wires telling of their imminent departure and how they will probably be held up at certain points because of wartime traffic on the rails. She does not seem to know that her husband had been banished when she sent them. One thing the messages undoubtedly reveal is that she saw her “Uncle Bimbo” as the family’s point man in the capital for the whole business. Moreover, in his memoirs Youssoupov wrote that when he returned to Petrograd after the February Revolution, the grand duke was among those who suggested that he take the throne despite the fact that he was in no way in line for it. (“The throne of Russia is neither hereditary nor elective: It is usurpatory,” he advised the prince).94 Had he not encouraged the grand duke to intervene in his imbroglio, the grand duke would hardly have suggested him for such an important move. Uncle Bimbo’s involvement in the affair took its toll on him. “Since I am uncle by marriage to Prince Felix Youssoupov,” he wrote Masson, “I have had many worries, seen a bunch of people, and having seen my character, I see myself transformed into M. Lecoq [from the novel Slavery by Gaboriau], and I have also seen many things, which remain burned in my memory.”95 In late January he wrote that he felt “deep shame” from his experiences in the episodes that developed after the assassination of “the miserable Gregory.” “These things come home to roost.” Employing an uncommon discretion, he concluded with, “It is all that I am [now] able to tell you.”96 Nicholas Mikhailovich’s simple curiosity may indeed have been a factor in his involvement, but the scraps of evidence suggest that Uncle Bimbo’s role in the affair was encouraged by the murderers. His entanglement, however, was not as great as the empress supposed. The “Hessian Hussy” really believed that he had been the instigator of the whole affair.97 The family did rally to mitigate the reverberations from the starets’s death and to defend the plotters. Alexander Mikhailovich, “nauseated”

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by what his son-in-law and his associates had done, colorfully and accurately described the family’s frantic efforts. He wrote, “They ran around, they conferred, they gossiped, and they wrote a silly letter to Nicky [the tsar]. It almost seemed that they expected the tsar of Russia to decorate his two relatives for having committed a murder.”98 The first meeting, on December 19/January 1, does not seem to have included all of the family. Nothing much happened except that Nicholas Mikhailovich appeared to tell the news that Rasputin’s body had been fished out of the river. The second meeting, at which Nicholas Mikhailovich was for some reason not present, was called by Grand Duke Paul, now the patriarch of the family, at Prince Andrei Vladimirovich’s home. Maria Pavlovna was there with her sons Kirill and Boris. Nicholas’s brother Sandro was also there. Paléologue reported to Paris that their goal seemed to be to gain a collective audience with the emperor in order to plead with him for clemency for Felix and Dmitri,99 both of whom had by that time been exiled: Felix to the Crimea and Dmitri to Persia. Between the first and the second meeting on December 29/January 11, 1917, Paul prepared for the signatures of the participating family members a finished draft of the petition that had been discussed at the first meeting. It was signed by Paul, Kirill, Boris, Andrew, Nicholas Mikhailovich, Sergei Mikhailovich, all the sons of Constantine Constantinovich, and five grand duchesses, Queen Olga of Greece, Maria Pavlovna, Kirill’s wife Victoria, and curiously, Elizabeth Mavrikievna, Maria Pavlovna’s sister. The exact letter that reached the tsar is unknown, but several versions that are more or less the same have circulated. The document, which stressed the complete unity of the signatories, signed in round-robin fashion, called on the tsar to moderate his decision to exile Dmitri because he was “physically ill and deeply shaken, as well as morally distressed.” It mentions Dmitri’s deep love for the tsar, which was real. Nicholas and Alexandra regarded Dmitri as a second son, and they were close to his father Grand Duke Paul. The signatories asked that his exile be changed to one of the family estates as climatic conditions in Persia would result in his “complete demise.” They concluded by stressing their deep love and devotion to the tsar.100 The meeting, however, had much more ominous overtones. Chambrun happened to be at Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna’s home for luncheon on that day. As he was departing, he saw the family assembling and got a clear vision of a very agitated Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich in the drawing room as the door was closing. After the February Revolution had made all such meetings pointless, Chambrun had a conversation with Grand Duke Nicholas about this family convocation. Chambrun bluntly asked him if the sole purpose of the meeting was to sign the letter to the

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tsar, or was there “something else?” Nicholas Mikhailovich replied that the letter had only been a pretext for the meeting. Chambrun then asked if there had been any attempt to replay the assassination of Emperor Paul, who had been murdered with the collusion of members of his own family. The grand duke answered in the affirmative.101 By late 1916 virtually all of the Romanov family were in opposition to the empress, and therefore the emperor, except for the few who were neutral or indifferent. One Russian general wrote late in 1916, “Now all the Vladimirovichi and all the Mikhailovichi are in full protest against the empress.”102 The first part of the statement was correct, and for the most part so was the second, except that Sergei took Voltaire’s advice and “cultivated his garden” at headquarters and said nothing. The Vladimirovichi, however, were bound in great unity because of their position vis-à-vis the throne if Nicholas II and his siblings were out of the way. The driving force behind the Vladimirovichi was of course their matriarch Maria Pavlovna, “Aunt Miechen” to the family. The motives directing her actions were varied, her animus against the empress not being among the least of them. Under her direction, and that of Nicholas Mikhailovich, the actions of the family turned literally treasonous in the late fall and early winter of 1916. One of Maria Pavlovna’s first moves was to call Rodzianko at 1:00 AM one morning and ask him to come over to her house, offering to send a car for him. Rodzianko refused because the lateness of the hour would have given any meeting an air of conspiracy, but he did accept an invitation to lunch the next day. If meeting in the night could be seen as conspiratorial, what the grand duchess discussed when they did meet was treasonous. She bluntly criticized the empress and Protopopov, hinting that some parts of the government “must be removed” and even said, Rodzianko remembered, that the empress must be “annihilated.” At these words, the Duma president terminated the meeting, because to continue it would be a criminal offense.103 In these days the grand duchess frequently met with ubiquitous Paléologue to learn any scraps of information he might have obtained on the political situation. 104 Her eldest son Kirill approached Ivan Shcheglovitov, then minister of justice, about the rights to the throne of the Vladimirovichi. The minister replied that they had none, because for the line to pass through a marriage, the wife had to be Orthodox at the time of her marriage, and Maria Pavlovna had remained a Lutheran for some time after she had married Grand Duke Vladimir. Boris returned shortly with some sort of paper that “proved” his mother had indeed been Orthodox at the time of her marriage. 105 Kirill also approached Purishkevich in December 1916 and asked if his opposition to the imperial

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government “went any further,” an obvious feeler to see if the Duma Rightist was considering removing the empress.106 Yet even if Kirill could have ruled, his children could not. He had married Grand Duchess Victoria “Ducky” Melita, who was divorced from Alexandra’s brother Ernst of Hesse (another bone of contention with the empress). She was also his first cousin and not Orthodox, so the union had broken both church and imperial laws.107 Historians of the Revolution tend to make much of the fact that a number of the conspirators, both royal and otherwise, were Freemasons, the Masonic order having always been mysteriously (and tenuously) linked to revolutionary activities dating back even to the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. There have been specific efforts by some to tie the February conspirators to the order, and just as casually as Nicholas Mikhailovich is called a homosexual with no evidence, he was also believed, as we have seen, to have a Masonic affiliation,108 which is regarded as the source of his Leftist bent. In one of his letters to Masson, however, he expressed some hostility to the Masonic Order.109 He became damned, however, by association. The “evidence” is always given as his friendship with certain members of the order, as though Masons had only Masons for friends. For example, a prominent Mason and member of the Fourth Duma and the Progressive Bloc, Count Aleksei A. Orlov-Davidov, one of the wealthiest landowners in Russia, was one of the grand duke’s friends, and for some historians, that comradeship is sufficient to implicate him, no matter how much this smacks of historical McCarthyism.110 Yet even if he was a Mason, Masonic ties had nothing to do with his role in the palace plot. The meetings of the family to try to gain some sort of clemency for Dmitri became, as Nicholas Mikhailovich admitted to Chambrun, the genesis of a movement within the Romanov family of a plot to remove the tsar, and by extension, the empress and her sleazy clique. After the first of the year, some sort of plot definitely began to take shape. On January 9 the French ambassador Paléologue was at a dinner given by Prince Gavrill Constantinovich for his mistress, an actress. Several members of the imperial family were there as well as “a squad of elegant courtesans.” During the evening, the only topic of discussion was the conspiracy, “with all the servants moving about, harlots looking on, . . . gypsies singing and brut imperial flowing in streams.”111 Not surprisingly, the first meeting held for the sole purpose of discussing a coup took place at the home of Maria Pavlovna. Paléologue, who never seemed to have been far from the action, lunched there that day with the grand duchess and Chambrun. No dignitary from the household greeted the ambassador until he was halfway up the stairs. Maria

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Pavlovna, who was always punctual, appeared late and looked haggard. She also seemed distracted. After lunch, she asked the French ambassador to join her in a tête-à-tête. At that point, however, a servant approached, saying that Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich had arrived and was seated in the next room. The grand duchess excused herself, and as she opened the door, Paléologue saw the grand duke. He had a “high color,” he remembered, and his eyes were “burning and grave.” He seemed to be in a fighting mood. Chambrun had a slightly more dramatic account of his view of the grand duke. He remembered that the grand duke had tried to “hide his large body.” Chambrun recognized him anyway and saw him make a gesture of twisting the neck “of an absent prey.”112 The ambassador at some point during this confusing visit was left alone with Mademoiselle Olive, the grand duchess’s maid of honor. “We’re in the thick of a drama,” she said to the ambassador. “Did you notice how terribly upset the grand duke looked? What has the Grand Duke Nicholas come to say?” she asked somewhat rhetorically.113 Chambrun rightly wondered why Paléologue had been invited to lunch on a day when the family was having such an important convocation. Was it perhaps to enlist his aid in removing the emperor, just as the French ambassador La Chétardie had played a role in the removal of the infant tsar Ivan VI in 1741?114 At about 2:00 PM, the grand duchess returned in a state of confusion, which she tried to disguise by asking Paléologue about meetings he had had with the tsar. Paléologue did say that each time he mentioned Russia’s internal situation, the tsar would change the subject, but offered little else to the agitated grand duchess. Maria Pavlovna expressed horror about it all and observed that except for the empress, “who is the source of all the trouble,” no one had any influence on the emperor. Then she revealed that the bad situation was the reason for Nicholas Mikhailovich’s visit. “Will it be confined to a platonic action?” the ambassador asked, using a curious but diplomatic choice of words. The grand duchess did not answer the question but cried out, “Oh, God! Whatever will happen?” Then she asked the ambassador if she could count on him if she needed to do so. He replied in the affirmative. At that point, a servant arrived to tell the grand duchess that “the whole of the imperial family” had assembled and awaited her. Her last words were, “And now pray to God to protect us!” and she held out her violently trembling hand.115 The result of the meeting was a letter to the tsar couched in the most respectful terms calling his attention to the dangerous internal situation facing the nation. It also called for a pardon for Grand Duke Dmitri “lest

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worse evils befall.”116 No minutes of the meeting were kept, or a least they are not to be found, but Nicholas Mikhailovich told Chambrun that writing a letter on Dmitri’s behalf had only been a pretext for the meeting. The real purpose was to plan a coup, but “our courage failed us at the last minute,” he told Chambrun.117 Their plotting did not long remain a secret, however, as they discussed it with everyone, and it was common talk in the streets.118 Meanwhile, the tsar replied to the letter asking for clemency by saying that he did not allow anyone to give him unsolicited advice, and moreover, no one had the right to commit murder.119 Then he added, according to what Paléologue reported to Paris, “I know there is more than one of you who does not have a clear conscience, and I know that Dmitri is not the only one [of the family] to be compromised in this affair. I am astonished at your attempts on this matter.”120 Nicholas’s brother Sandro had been in Kiev at the headquarters of the Russian Air Service and had not been a part of the imperial conspiratorial activities. After the murder of Rasputin, given his son-in-law’s involvement, he returned to the capital to be of assistance if possible.121 He went in January to the office of Nicholas Dobrovolsky, the new minister of justice, to say that it was the will of the grand dukes that he drop the investigation into Rasputin’s murder. Vyrubova remembered, incorrectly as it turned out, that he then motored to Tsarskoe Selo with his eldest son, entered the emperor’s study, and in a heated voice “that could be heard up and down the corridors” warned that the investigation had to be stopped “or the throne itself will fall.”122 The evidence in letters proves that Sandro’s approach was much less confrontational. He was, after all, one of the few members of the Romanov family who was on respectable terms with the empress. This attitude, however, did not mean that he took her side. He wrote the emperor a lengthy letter, which he began on January 7 (New Style), resumed writing a week later on January 14, and finally finished it on February 7. His approach was, unlike the letter of the others, rather gentle. He observed that the tsar’s position must have been difficult as “we are going through the most dangerous moment in the history of Russia.” He warned of “certain forces within Russia that are leading the country to inevitable ruin,” and he obliquely warned the tsar about the “outside influences” swaying him. He criticized the quality of his appointments, “people who probably themselves wondered how they came to be named.” He told the tsar that for the grand duke to remain silent would be “a crime against God, against you, and against Russia.” He warned Nicholas II that disaffection was growing rapidly and stressed that a gulf was growing “between you and your people.” He expressed the idea that

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there was only one thing to do: imitate the Allies and summon “the most capable people to work for the salvation of the country.” He told the tsar that he did not want the truth and that the government itself was the organ that was preparing the revolution, describing it as the “unparalleled spectacle of revolution from above and not from below.” He signed it, “Your faithful Sandro.”123 When this letter gained no results, Grand Duke Alexander decided to meet with the empress, although Nicholas Mikhailovich doubted that she would receive him. He told Ambassador Buchanan that with Protopopov’s taking Rasputin’s place, the climate was becoming even worse. With his usual penchant for correct prophecy, he expressed doubt that the Duma would be allowed to meet at the end of January, and if it did meet, there would be scandal that would result in its immediate dissolution. He then felt that it would gather again in another town as it had in 1905 (actually the Vyborg meeting to which the grand duke is alluding took place in 1906) and issue a manifesto. He also predicted Protopopov’s assassination.124 Sandro ignored Nicholas Mikhailovich’s pessimistic appraisal of his attempts and did follow his letter with a visit to Tsarskoe Selo. By midFebruary, however, the empress had an us-or-them-take-no-prisoners mentality. Although she agreed to see him, she received him very coldly in her mauve sitting room, displaying one of her Sarah Bernhardt melodramatic poses. The tsar sat silently smoking. Alexander minced no words. “Remember, Alix,” he told her, “I [have] remained silent for thirty months! For thirty months I said nothing to you about the disgraceful goings-on in our government, better say your government!” He told her that he realized that both she and Nicky were willing to perish, but he made the point that she had no right to drag the remainder of the family down with her. He told her that she was incredibly selfish, and this blast ended the conversation.125 He did return the next day with one of his sons, and it was this meeting that Vyrubova remembered as so explosive. The grand duke visited the Youssoupovs before returning to Kiev, and Felix wrote Nicholas Mikhailovich that Alexander was at the end of his tether, feeling that talk was no longer possible as it was impossible “to reason with the insane.”126 Nothing more came of the palace plotting. It died in the womb through indecision, and as the grand duke Nicholas noted, a lack of courage. Everyone was waiting for someone else to bell the cat. Mossolov felt that it had not worked because the grand dukes were too scattered, with only Nicholas Mikhailovich in the capital.127 Indeed, if all had been assembled there, more decisive action might have taken place. What is amazing is that because the knowledge of the plot was so widespread, the

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emperor must certainly have known about it, yet he made no move to stop it.128 This inaction bears strong witness to the impotence of the regime in its final months. Dmitri’s exile became the chief rallying point of the Romanov family after their plots had come to nothing. Rather a lightweight and a degenerate playboy, he became for the first time in his life a respected member of the family. Until his departure from the capital, Nicholas Mikhailovich was always with him, whether it was lunching at his house,129 or seeing him off at the Nikolaevsky Station on January 5. The cold that night was piercing, with snow blowing about the deserted streets around the station, which the police had cleared so there could be no demonstration in his favor. Although the tsar had forbidden anyone to see Dmitri off, Nicholas Mikhailovich and his brother Sandro came to his house on the evening of the departure and followed his car to the station.130 Dmitri had tried to see the tsar, Meriel Buchanan wrote, recalling what must have been gossip, but Nicholas II had refused the request. So hasty had been his departure for his Persian exile, she recorded, that he did not have time to get food or drink, and because the train had orders not to stop, he was without sustenance for two days.131 He came to be plagued with tuberculosis and eventually died of it,132 but his exile to Persia probably prevented his execution at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Nicholas Mikhailovich had been Dmitri’s most consistent and outspoken supporter, and the young grand duke was grateful. On December 31 (Old Style), he wired his cousin, “From the depth of my soul, I thank [you for your] touching remembrance. I kiss you. Dmitri.”133 The next day he wired again, “Thank you for your understanding. . . . Greetings for the new year.”134 Niki’s open support for Dmitri, along with his indiscreet cracks about the empress, earned him exile as well. On January 11 (New Style), he dropped by Maria Pavlovna’s as she, her son Andrei, Paléologue, and Chambrun were just finishing breakfast, and told them that the day before while at the Yacht club playing cards, he received a phone call from Count Fredericks, which interrupted a winning game, he felt compelled to note. The minister of the court asked him to meet with him at the Yacht Club. The old gentleman was quite pleasant and lively, and he offered the grand duke a cigar. He then read a letter that the emperor wrote to Fredericks stating that he had learned “from a number of places” that the outspoken grand duke had been saying “unbecoming things,” obviously referring to his jabs at the empress. Niki told Fredericks to order him to stop these “conversations” or he would take “stern measures.” Fearing he would forget some points of the grand duke’s response, and probably wishing to avoid getting into the middle of the conflict, he took

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a telephone pad and asked the grand duke to write his response to the order. Nicholas Mikhailovich’s reply was, strangely, somewhat of a mendacious denial. He declared that he seldom visited or dined at the Yacht Club, although he did stop by to play cards occasionally. Moreover, he was never there after 11:30 PM, not that that was any defense against the charge. He then added his favorite phrase about his indiscretion: “My tongue is without bones.” Having said that, he noted that “maybe once, having had too much to drink,” he had written Nicholas’s mother, the dowager empress, a detailed letter about current events, “not sparing people or acquaintances.” Judging from what followed, Fredericks must have given the impression, and only the impression, that the tsar wanted him to leave the city, for he wrote, “If my presence in the capital will not be desired, then I will go to my estate.” He concluded the letter by saying that he considered himself innocent. Fredericks agreed to send the reply to the tsar that evening. It was obvious that the task was unpleasant for the old man as well, but the grand duke felt that the courtier had performed it “with great dignity.”135 Returning to his card game, he told the assembled of his predicament and predicted a dark future for the Russian State. He committed treason by observing that it was necessary “to forget family problems and unite.”136 Yet he did make one additional effort to contact the tsar. Fearing that, in view of the Count Fredericks’s advanced age, he might have gotten something wrong, Nicholas Mikhailovich wrote the tsar directly on January 11. He said that he would accept the order to leave the capital “if this is your wish [read: and not the empress’s],” but he would want to leave early in February as he had a lot of work on the Jubilee Commission and “other matters.” He also made a feeble promise to hold his tongue and to avoid any contact with the family except through the ministry of the court. He ended the letter with, “I extend to you for the beginning of the year the most heart-felt wishes in all endeavors, and I beg you to believe in my best feeling for you. Your Nicholas Mikhailovich.”137 The letter reached the tsar sometime that day, and that night Nicholas II sent a blunt response: “It is evident that Count Fredericks has totally mixed things up. He was supposed to transmit my verbal order to leave the capital and remain for two months in [your] property at Grushevka. I beg [sic] you to conform to my wishes and do not attend the [New Year’s Day] reception tomorrow.” In an order that would hardly have been necessary, the irate tsar told the grand duke, “Stop concerning yourself with the affairs of the future conference [on the jubilee]. I am returning to you the papers of the ministries relating to the Jubilee

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Commission of the centenary of Alexander II. Niki.”138 The grand duke was indeed puzzled that the tsar had used words such as “I beg you.”139 George Buchanan reported to London that Grushevka had been chosen because “it has not a suitable house for him to live in.”140 The house on the estate was indeed the least sumptuous of any of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s homes, but Nicholas II was not cruel or vindictive. This estate was most likely chosen because of its isolation. Niki felt that his exile was due primarily to the letter he had handdelivered to the tsar in November and its criticism of the empress. He had to find something amusing in the whole adventure. To Masson he made a joke at having to reach the age of fifty-eight to finally be exiled “without cause, without a shadow of an explanation.”141 The grand duke honestly felt that he was doing his duty in speaking frankly to the tsar. In January 1917, as the turmoil was raging, Nekliudov visited the grand duke, who received him in his magnificent study. Nicholas Mikhailovich predicted revolution as soon as the war ended, and then turned to his actions. “Alexander III did not like me very much; Nicholas II, while respecting me as an individual man, has a total horror of my ideas.” Noting that he had always, and would always, loyally serve the emperor, he felt that loyalty demanded that he not “hide from him my opinions.”142 Paléologue likened his expulsion to Louis XVI’s banishment of the Duc d’Orléans in November 1787 for stating that only the Estates General could grant the king additional taxes. He asked if Russia had reached 1787 (on the road to 1789, the year the French Revolution began) and decided that the country was now considerably beyond it. He felt that the tsar’s motive was to frighten the family, and he had succeeded, for the Romanovs were “terror-stricken.” Yet Paléologue felt that the grand duke deserved “neither this too great horror nor the indignity” because he was not really dangerous. “Nicholas Mikhailovich is a critic and a dilettante rather than a party man,” the French ambassador confided to his diary, and he added, “He is too fond of drawing room epigrams. He is in no way an apostle of adventure and the offensive.”143 The French ambassador’s diary entry shows just how misinformed he was of the developments within the Romanov family in the last few months. There had been no one more willing to rock the boat. After his departure, Nicholas Mikhailovich wrote the tsar another letter that does not appear in either Nicholas II’s papers or the published collections of the grand duke’s letters, but he quoted it verbatim to Masson. While on the way to Grushevka, he wrote his imperial cousin, “Having received your order in the night of the New Year [Old Style], I have immediately executed your demand and left for my property on the evening of 1/14 January.” He professed ignorance of why he was being

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expelled, adding that he had a clear conscience, but his letter reflects a defiance, albeit mildly expressed, that was not evident in his first letter after his meeting with Fredericks. “No longer having your confidence, . . . ” he wrote, “I therefore ask you to relieve me of the presidency of said societies [Imperial Historical and Geographic and the Jubilee Commission on Alexander II].” As though resigning his imperial appointments were not enough, the grand duke then asked the tsar’s permission “to enter the glorious troops of our Allies the French to fight the common enemy.”144 He did not wish to serve in the Russian army but then would serve with the French! Nicholas does not seem to have replied to his request, if he ever received it. Nicholas II did not stop with the exile of the grand duke. Youssoupov was sent to Crimea, Kirill was dispatched on an “inspection tour” of Murmansk in the far north, and his brother Boris was ordered to the Caucasus.145 These banishments reminded Nicholas Mikhailovich of the “vulgar Florentine nobles in the epoch of the Borgias and the Medicis.”146 The expulsions, however, had the desired effect: They stopped the palace plotters dead in their tracks. Not until the Revolution actually began almost two months later did any members of the Romanov clan stir again in Russian politics. Niki’s exile made him a hero, and he was flooded with telegrams and letters even as he meandered his way to Grushevka via Moscow and Kiev (most likely to avoid the congestion of military traffic on the railroads he would have encountered if he had gone directly south). He did not have his suite accompany him because “the steppe in winter is not a laughing matter [rigolo].” His departure left the populace of Petrograd “stunned,” Prince Andrei recorded. “The entire city speaks about him.”147 He spent “two delicious days” in Kiev with his great friend the dowager empress, who had wired him immediately on learning of his exile.148 He answered many of his letters of praise and wrote notes of thanks to various figures such as Maria Pavlovna.149 He also heard from Youssoupov, who had written “Dear Uncle Bimbo” to tell him that he had charmed his police interrogators into thinking he had had nothing to do with the Rasputin affair.150 The grand duke’s confinement at Grushevka was hardly arduous. He wrote Chambrun, “My mood is excellent. I’m working a lot, hunt, sleep, eat well and in general, I am scarcely bored.” He also continued to profess a “clean conscience.”151 The dowager empress wrote him that it was necessary “to let the rage of the moment pass” and told him, “I think often of you.” She stressed the necessity of believing that “the Good Lord will have pity on us and help us endure.”152 He replied to the old empress on February 1 from “Grushevka—les bains de niege [Grushevka—

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the baths of snow]” to say that he was passing the time “as if in Paris or Monte Carlo. Solitude has its charms.” The quiet gave him a chance to meditate “on the lack of stability” in the country, although the relative calm was often broken by news of events in the capital. With his usual perception, he predicted dire troubles ahead.153 Maria Pavlovna also wrote Niki of Dmitri’s trials. She had just received word that “the conditions of his existence” in Persia were even worse than they had all feared.154 He stayed in touch with her. There exist in his papers in GARF several drafts of a letter written in Grushevka to Nicholas II, which was probably never sent. It may be the one of which he wrote Masson. It is a chatty note on his work for the historical commissions, from which he seems to have forgotten that he had resigned. In one draft he used the formal “you,” in the other, the familiar. He ended it with “May God protect you.”155 There is no rancor or criticism. Was he trying to return to the tsar’s good graces? He did after all genuinely love his cousin. He wrote in his diary all the time, “He [Nicholas II] is against me, but I love him so much, because he is a kind soul, [and] is the son of his father and mother.”156 As February wore on, the grand duke was increasingly concerned about the deteriorating conditions within the country. He felt that the state of things could not continue much longer.157 Trepov had resigned at about the time Rasputin was murdered, and in the new prime minister, Prince Nicholas Golitsyn, who had headed the empress’s charities, Niki saw “a man of straw.” His hatred for the empress remained unabated. He wrote her mother-in-law, who was of course sympathetic, that Alexandra was so misinformed as to believe that the common people adored her. The reason for this misconception was that the minister of the interior Protopopov, who was “the right man for her bad desires,” was having the police write thousands of adoring letters to her.158 On leaving the capital for his punishment, he jotted down in his diary thoughts about the bumbling empress: “Alexandra Feodorovna has triumphed, but how long can the vulture hold power?” Then he mused, “How well will I meet the new year! What will it bring us? Nothing good.” He concluded with, “I am going to sleep, sleep, and sleep.”159 He had no idea how correct his prediction for 1917 would be, nor how soon would come the time when sleep for him would become essentially impossible.

Chapter 7

A Country of Savages, March–November 1917

The tsar has eight million men with guns and bayonets. Nothing can happen to the tsar. . . . Yet the tsar and his bodyguard of eight million vanished And the tsar stood before a little firing squad And the command to fire was given. —Carl Sandburg1 The Romanov dynasty is now overthrown. . . . There must be no returning to it. —Izvestiia, no. 3, March 15, 1917 I do not know what I am now—ex-grand duke, ex-general, exmuseum director, ex-faithful servant of my sovereign, briefly all the possible and impossible ex’s. —Grand Duke George Mikhailovich2 Russia is sick. She is gorged on something she has never known before—Freedom. . . . Will she recover? Yes, but god! What pain must she bear before she gets real freedom. —Rhetta Dorr3

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Few events have resulted in the spilling of more historical ink than the Russian Revolution of 1917. The developments in the eight months between March 8 and November 7, 1917, defined the remainder of the twentieth century, and they will continue to cast a giant shadow over the entire world for decades and decades to come. On its causes and results, historians are still at great disagreement. Sandro put it correctly when he said in one of his memoirs, “Nobody has yet written an unbiased account of the last weeks of the Old World. I doubt that anyone ever will.”4 The events of those momentous eight months began with what historians call the February Revolution, which was ignited by a strange combination of political and social alchemy. All of the discontent; the hatred of the empress and belief that she was selling Russia out to the Germans; the shortage of food, fuel, and consumer goods; the bumbling incompetence of the government and the commanders at the front; centuries of social grievances; and the crass imbalance of wealth exploded into Miliukov’s “pitiless Russian riot,” and within days the tsarist edifice collapsed into a pile of rubble never to be resurrected. The Revolution began on March 8, 1917, in the Gregorian calendar, with a women’s rights demonstration that turned nasty when thousands of workers who had been locked out of the Putilov Factory joined the demonstration to protest grievances. Bread shops were looted, and disorder erupted in the streets. Cossacks, who had always been a mainstay of the regime, showed little enthusiasm for controlling the crowds and indeed sometimes joined the demonstrators in attacks on the police. Other government attempts at crowd control were tepid, and the events became in a matter of a few days the February Revolution of 1917. The first member of the family to notice the development of events was the tsar’s brother Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, and even his diary contains no mention of events the day after the disturbances had begun.5 The next day, March 10, he came to town from Gatchina, his palace on the Gulf of Finland, on some business, had dinner with a friend Count I. I. Kapnist, a member of the Duma, and his brother-in-law A. S. Matveev, and then went to a performance at the Mikhailovsky Theater. On their return to the Kapnist apartment, he saw for the first time disorder in the streets and had Matveev phone the Petrograd garrison about the situation. He learned that there had been disturbances on Nevsky Prospekt, the major thoroughfare in the city, and that some people had been shot. At midnight he and his wife returned to Gatchina by automobile.6 In his diary entry for the day he recorded as usual the weather conditions (“gloomy, around 5 degrees”), but he mentioned for the first time the political disruption that had been going on for three days: “Today [Saturday] there were disturbances on Nevsky Prospekt. Workers went

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with red flags, threw hand grenades and bottles into police stations, forces arrived to shoot. Main cause of the disorders—the shortage of flour.”7 The grand duke came to Petrograd the next day after rising late, and he and Ksenia, Grand Duke Alexander’s wife, went to church at the Petropavlovsky Cathedral, where they were the only worshipers there. Afterward they went for tea at the Putiatin’s apartment at 12 Millionnaia, an address immediately behind the rear courtyard gate of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s palace, and an address that was to become most important in the next few days. Mikhail Alexandrovich returned to Gatchina at 4:25 PM. After his mundane accounting of the events of the day, the grand duke added with his usual string of comma splices, “Disorders in Petrograd have intensified, on Suvarov Avenue and Znamenskii [Square], around 200 people have been killed.”8 By Sunday, March 11, the streets had begun to calm down somewhat, and most observers, writing without the twenty-twenty hindsight of contemporary Russian historians, felt that the crisis had passed. So, apparently, did the government. Feeling that the existence of the Duma had helped catalyze the now-diminishing disturbances, the cabinet late on Sunday night, March 11, decided to prorogue the Duma until April. When word of the prorogation decree, one that the tsar had signed and left undated, hit the streets in the early morning of the next day, the result was as if gasoline had been poured on a dying fire. With this act, the streets exploded, and the Duma formed what was in effect a provisional government on the afternoon of Monday, March 12. More ominously the new government learned of the existence of a shadow government, the Petrograd Soviet of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Deputies, a socialist body dominated by the Mensheviks, the orthodox wing of the Social Democratic Party. Their ideology bound them to the belief that the events of March would be Marx’s “bourgeois” revolution. This action would destroy the old order and would be followed at some undetermined point in the future by the workers’ revolution, which would establish the socialist order. Meanwhile, they would see that the bourgeois leaders of the Provisional Government did not engage in counterrevolution. The engine of any revolution is the mob in the streets, and because the mob usually follows the most radical political leadership, the Soviet actually held power. The Mensheviks saw themselves at the time as being only the custodians of the events thus far, awaiting the magical time when the Marxist proletarian revolution would take place. The Soviet would not lead, only hinder. The result was largely eight months of political paralysis that enabled Russia to plunge over an abyss. Grand Duke Alexander, on learning in Kiev of the disturbances in the capital, wired the tsar at Stavka and suggested joining him there. He also

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somehow spoke to his brother Sergei by telephone at Stavka, apparently after Monday, March 12, and learned that the Petrograd garrison had gone over to the Revolution.9 Meanwhile, in Petrograd, the city dissolved into chaos, as symbols of the tsarist regime, both living and inanimate, were destroyed in an orgy of hate. The tsarist police disappeared, and the city streets were littered with fragments of the two-headed eagle, the symbol of the Romanov family, that had been ripped and broken from buildings in the city. One especially ominous sign was the desertion of the regime by Grand Duke Kirill. First in line for the throne after Nicholas II’s son and his brother Mikhail Alexandrovich, and ever the opportunist, he went over to the Revolution, removing the sailors who were guarding the empress and taking them to the Duma, pledging his support to the Provisional Government.10 He also purportedly flew a red flag over his palace. His reception at the Duma was not, however, as welcomed as he probably had thought it would be. When expressing his support to Mikhail Rodzianko, the president of the last Duma, the Octobrist politician informed the grand duke that “your place is not here.”11 This man, who proclaimed himself tsar in the 1920s, was also the first member of the family to flee Russia. He left in July 1917 with his two daughters, leaving behind, by his own admission, his pregnant wife.12 In the midst of this tumult, Nicholas Mikhailovich arrived in the city on March 14, his two-month exile having ended at the height of the disturbances.13 By one account he dismissed the car sent for him and walked home though the mobs, marveling at what he saw. By his own account, however, he could get “no cabs, no trams, no autos by order of the Sovereign People!”14 Mikhail Alexandrovich had come to town again from Gatchina on March 12 at 5:00 PM. With his secretary Mr. Nicholas Johnson, a Russian despite the English surname, he went to the Marinskii Palace opposite St. Isaac’s Cathedral to meet with Rodzianko and other Duma leaders. Nicholas Golitsyn, the now deposed prime minister, although he was probably unaware of his removal, appeared also, as well as several fossils of the old regime. The grand duke’s diary entry for that day accurately stated, “The old regime no longer exists.”15 Leaving the city by automobile proved impossible, nor could he get to the Warsaw station for a train to Gatchina. He went, therefore, to the ministry of war and then to the Admiralty, the last holdout of tsarist power. After assessing the situation, Mikhail decided not to defend the building, to the great relief of General Sergei Khabalov, the military governor of the capital. Instead he went at 5:00 PM across the palace square and down the street behind the Hermitage to the apartment of his friend

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Princess Olga Putiatin at the now well-visited address of 12 Millionnaia.16 For safety, the grand duke had gone there through the Hermitage and Nicholas Mikhailovich’s courtyard. The man next in line to the throne was hiding there when the mob broke into the building and murdered General Stackelberg, a prominent court figure, who was in the rooms immediately above those of Princess Putiatin. Assisted by his valet, Stackelberg put up a tremendous fight that lasted some time. His murderers never knew that a greater prize was in the apartment below.17 Chambrun, walking in front of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s palace, slipped in a sticky puddle on the quay and fell against the balustrade, getting some blood on his coat. Looking onto the frozen river, he saw Stackelberg’s lifeless body.18 George Mikhailovich came into Petrograd sometime in the night of March 11 before the government’s prorogation decree was known. His valet woke him the next day to tell him of the disturbances of the previous four days. The Revolution did not surprise him. He wrote to his family, “All this was to be expected . . . if things are allowed to go in this way, it will end in a formidable revolution.”19 Nicholas Mikhailovich, as was his wont, threw himself into the storm of events, but he went about the streets in mufti to avoid recognition, which might have led to dangerous predicaments. Chambrun remembered that he heard that Niki had also shaved his beard. He recorded that he “slinks around town (il sort en frolant les murs), he awaits his hour; will it come?”20 Niki quickly found Grand Duke Mikhail in his neighbor’s apartment and visited him on the evening of March 14. Mikhail Alexandrovich’s brother-in-law Matveev recorded the grand duke’s visit but noted nothing special about it.21 After listing in his diary all of the people who had come to see him that day, the grand duke Mikhail added in ink, apparently an afterthought, “In the evening N. M. [Nicholas Mikhailovich] stopped by.”22 In his entry the next day, he again noted a visit from the grand duke, observing that he was dressed “exceptionally plainly” and wearing galoshes, which the grand duke suspected had been placed on bare feet, bearing out Chambrun’s description of the grand duke’s revolutionary dress.23 In these disturbing days, Nicholas Mikhailovich, being the eldest brother, busied himself “night and day” with work for his family, especially his sister-in-law Ksenia. Ten days later he wrote Masson that he could write him only “by fits and starts,” specifying that all the world was swarming into his house. Moreover, in his two houses he had to care for his “400 souls,” curiously using the antiquated word dushi, for those four hundred servants. “Finally you are sensing a little of the hell I am going through,” he wrote by way of explanation for his erratic writing.24 .

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Nicholas II had ignored warnings about the disturbances in the capital (“That fatso Rodzianko has written me some rubbish. I won’t even bother to reply to it,” he had told a companion), and when the seriousness of the situation had finally gotten through to him, only because his wife told him of the disturbances, he sent General Nicholas Ivanov with “loyal” troops to restore order. He followed as well, most probably to reach his family, as there was no practical reason for his going. To give Ivanov unimpeded the most direct rail line to Petrograd, the tsar switched over to the Moscow line. When that proved to be blocked near the capital, he redirected his course to Pskov, wiring Rodzianko to meet him at Dno, an intersection of two rail lines south of the capital, the name ironically meaning “the bottom.” Realizing that the tsar was finished and that his own political fortunes were at stake in the capital, Rodzianko ignored the summons and did not leave Petrograd. After waiting fruitlessly for the Duma president for some time at this obscure railroad junction, Nicholas II decided to continue westward to Pskov. There he learned that the game was up. His army commanders had all suggested that he abdicate, and General Nicholas V. Ruzsky, one of the front commanders, came to Pskov to demand his abdication. After a stormy meeting with Ruzsky on the night of March 14–15, Nicholas II decided to abdicate in favor of his son, with Mikhail as regent. Meanwhile, a deputation from the Duma consisting of the Octobrist Alexander Guchkov and the Rightist V. V. Shulgin were already coming southward as representatives of the new Provisional Government to demand his abdication.25 Yet at some point in the course of the 15th, Nicholas II, realizing that he would have to leave the country when his son became tsar and that he would quite probably never see him again, decided to abdicate for his invalid son as well, passing the now near-worthless throne to his brother Mikhail. His brother learned of Nicholas’s decision after his abdication when he received a telegram addressed to His Imperial Highness Tsar Mikhail II. Had Nicholas Mikhailovich been consulted, he would have undoubtedly recommended abdication. Understanding as a historian the unstable position of a sickly child on the throne, he most probably would have approved of the tsar’s double abdication as well. Although he loved “Niki,” he could not tolerate his incompetence, made all the worse by the interfering neurotic empress, whose meddling had driven this disaster of logarithmic proportions. His brother Sandro did not share his view and was absolutely hostile to the idea. He also was as oblivious to the real problems as was his brother-in-law the tsar. Years later, he wrote in Once a Grand Duke, “Niki must have lost his head. Since when does a sovereign abdicate because of a shortage of bread?”26 Nicholas abdicated,

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and instead of making immediate moves to leave the country, as was planned, he stayed behind at Stavka to bid farewell to his staff and see his mother once again. The delay may well have been fatal. The duty of telling the empress of her husband’s surrender of the throne fell to Grand Duke Paul, Nicholas II’s favorite uncle. He learned himself about 4:30 AM on March 16, but for some reason he did not go tell the empress until late that morning.27 Lili Dehn, a confidant of the empress, remembered hearing loud, agitated voices through the closed doors of their meeting.28 With the old regime gone, the power of the Romanovs evaporated quickly. When the dowager empress returned to Kiev after visiting her deposed son, there was no one there to meet her at the station; to get home, she had to take a taxi,29 no doubt the first taxi ride of her life. When her son Mikhail had earlier requested a train to come to Petrograd from Gatchina, he was told by the Petrograd Soviet that “Citizen Romanov” could go to the station and purchase a ticket like anyone else. When George Mikhailovich tried to board a crowded train, he was told that there were no places and he had to wait for the next one, the conductor telling him that the Revolution had put an end to special cars for royalty.30 Yet all did not disdain the imperial family so quickly. In a church service in Moscow, when for the first time the emperor’s name was not mentioned in the mass, there was weeping in the congregation.31 When Grand Duke George Mikhailovich did finally obtain a seat on the train to Petrograd, an ex-soldier grabbed George’s hand and “kissed it over and over again without uttering a word.”32 In some Russian hearts, love for the imperial family would never die, even to this day. Yet curiously, in this most threatening of crises for the Romanov dynasty, the family did not try to contact or rally around Mikhail.33 Neither did they strive for a unified front or plan of action. Many pushed their own agenda, as the Vladimirovichi did, or else remained passively silent, as did most of the Mikhailovichi and the reigning patriarch of the family, Grand Duke Paul. The future chances of the Russian Empire now rested in “Mikhail II’s” hands. He was in this crucial time virtually alone except for members of his entourage; even his wife could not reach him from Gatchina by telephone. The only member of the Romanov family to be actively with Mikhail in these trying hours was Nicholas Mikhailovich, whose palace across the street from Mikhail’s hideaway apartment offered easy access. One suspects, however, that had Niki lived on the other side of Petrograd, he would have been there all the same. Niki spent the evening of March 15 with Mikhail, and the older grand duke was already au courant on the details of the abdication of the tsar earlier that afternoon. Princess Putiatin strongly implies that the grand

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duke was the first to give the news of the tsar’s abdication to Mikhail. Her memoir describes the encounter as “very moving.” On arriving, Nicholas Mikhailovich tenderly embraced the bewildered Mikhail and encouraged him in his assumption of the throne. “I am very happy to recognize you as sovereign since you are in fact already tsar! Be brave and strong and in this manner you will save not only the dynasty but the future of Russia,” the princess remembered Niki saying. Niki inquired as to when and where the grand duke would first appear publicly as tsar. Mikhail replied, “I will come out as tsar from the same house where I have been received as grand duke.”34 Historian George Katkov, who wrote an interesting yet somewhat spurious conspiracy history of the February Revolution, tries to tie Nicholas Mikhailovich to Kerensky as though they both were plotting together to overthrow the regime. He believes that both were Masons as “it is difficult to explain [their close association] otherwise than by a Masonic link.”35 We have seen, however, that Nicholas Mikhailovich was most likely not a Mason. Moreover, he was clearly at this point in favor of Mikhail’s taking the throne. Kerensky was militantly opposed. They could hardly have been partners in crime on this matter; their friendship developed later. Because Mikhail was in fact the new tsar Mikhail II, the members of the Provisional Government felt that they should meet with him. There was, however, strong disagreement among the ministers about the continuance of the monarchy. Kerensky, the only socialist then in the government, led the opposition to Mikhail’s assuming the throne. He wanted a republic, but being a shrewd politician, he argued that the Constituent Assembly, the democratically elected body that the Provisional Government promised to let the Russian people elect later in the year, should choose the form of government for Russia’s future. He knew full well that no democratically elected body would choose a monarchy, even a constitutional one. Miliukov, on the other hand, favored a monarchy, not because he wanted the autocracy or anything like it, but because he rightly felt that any government without the traditional symbol of tsarist authority behind it, however weak his authority might be, would fail. The masses, used to the semireligious figure of the tsar as their leader, simply would not respect it. The Provisional Government in tandem with that symbol of power, however, could survive and give a constitutional system a chance. The Russian masses would support that authority and any government tied with it. Without the symbol, the Provisional Government would be impotent and would be destroyed in the expected leftward drift of any successful revolution. In one of the many ironies of history, Miliukov, who had spent his entire political career fighting the Romanov dynasty, was in its last hours its most militant defender.

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That morning, before the Provisional Government’s ministers met Grand Duke Mikhail at the Putiatin apartment, Nicholas Mikhailovich visited him and told him of the general abandonment of the family.36 That news probably affected the grand duke’s later decision, but at the point that the ministers arrived, Mikhail had definitely decided to assume the throne. When Miliukov entered the room, he accidentally bumped into the grand duke, who cheerfully said, “Well, what do you think? It’s not bad to be in the position of the King of England! Well?”37 The meeting quickly turned argumentative with Miliukov repeatedly stressing the need for the symbol of tsarist authority behind their government. Kerensky stressed waiting on the election of the Constituent Assembly. Finally, Mikhail asked to speak in private to Rodzianko and the provisional government’s premier George L’vov. Alone with the two men, he asked if they could guarantee his safety. Rodzianko, who had no political position himself as the Duma was now defunct, said that he could not, and L’vov said nothing. With gunshots sounding in the streets, Mikhail returned to the assembled government and said, “Under the circumstances, I cannot accept the throne because . . .” His voice trailed off and he burst into tears.38 With that pathetic display, the Romanov dynasty passed into history. It is yet another irony in this dynastic demise that the Romanov dynasty, which began with a weak-willed Mikhail in 1613 should end with an equally weak-willed Mikhail. Mikhail signed a semi-abdication that day, stating that if the Constituent Assembly, when elected, should want him, he would take the throne.39 He was probably completely blind to the fact that that political scenario would never take place. Following the meeting, his sister Ksenia appeared at the Putiatin apartment, “her eyes full of alarm.” After telling her everything that had happened, Mikhail apparently summoned Nicholas Mikhailovich at his nearby palace and asked him to take his sister home.40 Whatever Nicholas Mikhailovich said to his cousin after his quasi abdication has not been recorded. We can only assume that he gave both his opinion and some advice. Several days later Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich wrote Niki suggesting that perhaps the dowager empress could talk Mikhail into reconsidering, 41 but the game was up. The Romanov dynasty had become the first major casualty of the February Revolution. There would shortly be others. In the days after the second abdication, Nicholas Mikhailovich remained active with his family and involved in political events. Much of his behavior, activities, and many of his political positions have been later embellished or totally misrepresented by various accounts, most of which are based not on eyewitness accounts but on hostile gossip. We have noted

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Chambrun’s remark about how he “slinks around town.”42 Countess Kleinmichel, who did not like the grand duke, encountered Nicholas Mikhailovich on the street. He immediately informed her of negative comments being made about her and of compromising letters that had surfaced in Sukhomlinov’s papers, which had been opened by revolutionaries. She said that he was reveling in his nickname Nicholas Egalité.43 Niki did become in the months that followed an “authoritarian republican,” but he was not one in the early days of the new regime. Protopopov testified that on the day he left office, he saw Nicholas Mikhailovich and his brother Alexander in the office of the president of the State Council.44 To have been in touch with this bastion of conservatism was hardly one of the activities of a republican in the early days of March 1917. Moreover, Niki insisted on maintaining the perquisites of his title. Whenever someone wrote him and addressed him as “The Former Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich,” he would return the letters “to their stupid authors who did not wish to understand that when one is born a grand duke, one dies with the same title.” He was surprised that none of the other grand dukes protested at the loss of their rank, but “It is Nicholas Egalité who had retrieved the glove.”45 Yet the grand duke did proffer his service to the new government in a letter, and offered the ministers “the use of my aptitudes and my special knowledge.”46 He also formally resigned from the army on March 20.47 Several days before he wrote of his actions in a letter to Masson, he secured from the grand dukes a renunciation to the new government of Romanov state lands. Kirill, Gavrill, and Igor Constantinovich gave in easily, Dmitri Constantinovich with some difficulty. Grand Duke Paul apparently refused, and Niki could not locate Boris Vladimirovich and Prince Constantine Constantinovich. He had met with Kerensky for what was probably the first time, and their many evenings’ conversations that followed had left in him “the brightest and [most] pleasant impression.”48 He came to like Kerensky very much as a “man of heart with a will of iron.” He even suspected that he might become premier and seemed to welcome that change from the “wishy-washy Girondins” such as L’vov. Kerensky would not hesitate to use force “for the triumph of an idea.”49 He almost daily saw the minister of finance Mikhail Tereshchenko, a neighbor and a friend from Cannes; the two had gambled together at Monte Carlo. He also had some “most instructive head to head conversations with . . . Guchkov.”50 In April the grand duke asked to visit the new prime minister L’vov, and on April 12 the new premier was able to give him an audience. Nicholas Mikhailovich had been in touch with him before the Revolution when L’vov had headed the Zemgor, a union of voluntary local governmental

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organizations that mobilized to help the war effort. The rising labor unrest had disturbed both the grand duke and L’vov in February, and for some reason L’vov wrote the grand duke, blaming the troubles on secret police provocation and “increasing propaganda.” The future prime minister had expressed the fear then that the tsarist government’s actions were bad and “we must avoid such a road, which will carry us into a predicament.”51 What they discussed in their April meeting is unknown, but on the day of the discussion, L’vov thanked the grand duke for sharing his opinions “in these difficult times” and wrote that it was “heartening to see the patriotic love toward Russia” that he had demonstrated. Apparently the grand duke expressed concern about the interference of the Soviet in Russian politics, for Prince L’vov agreed that times were grim and that Russia was in “an atmosphere of frustration,” suggesting that he did not know of another such situation in Russian history.52 Nicholas Mikhailovich also apparently told the premier to be firm in dealing with matters because after the meeting he wrote Masson that L’vov was like one of the Girondins in the French Revolution, who would never “risk anything, would not crack heads, and would rather have his throat cut than to make a fist.”53 The Provisional Government never called on Niki for any task, however, although the leaders at first were pleased with his support. After the Revolution Kerensky recalled, “When he [Nicholas Mikhailovich] went to the Tauride Palace to voice his support for the Revolution, he was welcomed, but no one took much notice of this historian with no forces at his disposal. Even the Soviet paid no attention to him.”54 Yet as the Revolution broadened and deepened in the weeks that followed, all members of the Romanov family, no matter how much sympathy they showed for the people, became political lepers to be shunned by the aspirants to power. Even Paléologue forbade members of the French embassy staff from having any commerce with the francophilic grand duke. Given his love of France, Niki was sorely hurt by the directive. One day when the grand duke encountered Paléologue on the quay before his house, he said to him, no doubt with a copious dose of his famous sarcasm, “I would be pleased to see you. If you are afraid, use the back stairs.”55 This snubbing would not be the last he would endure in the tempestuous year of 1917. An obituary of Nicholas Mikhailovich published in 1919 described the grand dukes as having “the calmness of Buddhas” during the Revolution, resulting in “the ruin of the empire and the dynasty.”56 Their political activity may have been largely sterile, but it was not nonexistent, and Nicholas Mikhailovich was not the only member of the family to stir in politics during and after the Revolution. On the eve of the Revolution,

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Sergei Mikhailovich asked the British observer Sir John Hanbury-Williams to write a letter to the emperor begging him to grant a ministry responsible to the Duma.57 On March 1/14, the day before the abdication of the tsar, Grand Duke Paul composed a manifesto proposing a constitutional monarchy after the war and a “government of confidence” immediately. He even showed it to the empress when he told her of Nicholas’s abdication.58 Sandro wrote about some sort of memo signed by a number of the grand dukes renouncing their dynastic rights (Sandro refused to sign).59 Some have even seen Grand Duke Kirill’s treasonous actions mentioned above as efforts to calm opinion in the capital and restore order, with the belief that by doing so, he would save the dynasty.60 None of these efforts amounted to anything, of course. The time for members of the family to save the situation passed with the Revolution, and their hapless efforts came, of course, to nothing, and usually do not merit a sentence in the basic Russian history textbook. Niki was the only one of them who had really tried in time, and he, like all others who attempted to move the tsar, had failed. The Revolution, however, did not leave the Romanovs unnoticed. Almost immediately the Soviet produced a plan to arrest all the members of the family. The pretender Mikhail was to be placed under house arrest. The women in the family were to be detained gradually, depending on their role in the old regime. Nicholas Mikhailovich was to be summoned to Petrograd (the Soviet obviously did not know he was already there) and then arrested.61 The plan was never implemented, but there quickly followed after the February events a change in attitude from virtually every quarter. Even the moderate Provisional Government exhibited alienation. By April, “Former Grand Duke Alexander” had become “Admiral Romanov,” and by June he was simply “Citizen Romanov.”62 After Mikhail’s abdication, the attention paid to the Romanovs became more aggressive. Mikhail had thought he would return to his post as inspector general of the cavalry, but on April 18 he received a notice from the Provisional Government that he was discharged from the army.63 Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich, who had been reinstated as commander in chief of the army immediately after Nicholas II’s abdication, was summarily removed. There was a great fear of “Bonapartism” among all political hues of the revolutionary politicians, and the Romanovs in charge of the military could direct a counterrevolution from such positions of power. The Provisional Government remained “as polite as possible” and “quite correct with us,” Grand Duke George Mikhailovich wrote his family in England, then he added humorously, “Up to now they have no intention of hanging us.”64

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Restrictions, however, did tighten as the weeks passed. The Romanovs’ letters were opened. Their income essentially stopped. George Mikhailovich had to fire some of his servants because he had no money with which to pay them. Even the Allies joined in the discrimination. We have already noted how the French ambassador forbade contact with Nicholas Mikhailovich. The English ambassador, soon to become a casualty himself of revolutionary international politics, prevented the Norwegian attaché from carrying Grand Duke George’s letters to England. “I thought he was a noble individual,” the grand duke wrote his daughter in a letter that did get through, “but he fooled me, the scoundrel!”65 Sergei was in a most delicate situation owing to his military position as head of artillery and because of his association with Kschessinska, whose house had been taken by the Bolsheviks as their headquarters, where “there they make a daily racket.”66 Yet despite the tightening noose, all the Mikhailovichi remained in the country when they could have at that point still escaped. Nicholas Mikhailovich even continued to “hold court” occasionally at the Yacht Club. If he had become a pariah as a Romanov, his staff still retained their loyalty. Molodovsky, his property manager, and Brummer, his aide-decamp, stayed with him. His personal valet de chambre, Yazenko, remained loyal, at least for a while, as did his hunter Basil. Their devotion touched him, and he felt that “all my people” were worthy of praise.67 Not so his relationship with his brother Sergei. Sergei had been the only one of his brothers not to write him in his exile at Grushevka. Probably his presence at Stavka made that very difficult. He certainly must have feared that any telegram or letter to his errant brother would have been made known to the tsar. Niki was never one to hide his feelings, and he let Sergei know of his disappointment in a letter. Sergei responded to his brother with what must have been mock surprise. “I am very distressed that you said . . . [that] I never wrote you anything at Grushevka. You must never think that I forgot you because I did not want to compromise myself,” he wrote. He expressed pain that his eldest brother could be so deceived and reminded him how close they had always been, especially in recent years. He then went on to describe, rather lamely, how his duties had consumed his time and had left him with no free moments to write. He ended the letter with “Hottest [warmest?] love to you, your brother Sergei.”68 Niki did shortly forgive Sergei this rather serious slight, probably because rising hostility toward the Romanovs placed them both into the same community of fate. Both expressed fear of the Soviet in later correspondence, and Sergei spoke of enjoying living peacefully and not wanting “to see or be with anyone.”69 Moreover, some sort of congress of

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official delegates from all military groups, both army and fleet, was meeting, and clearly, no good could come from it. This even led Sergei to fear that Kerensky, who although only the minister of justice, was the strong man in the Provisional Government, had “lost the grip” on the army, which Sergei referred to as “150,000,000 [15,000,000?] savages.”70 George seems to have been more aware of the possible dangers early on. He had arrived at Gatchina just before Nicholas II had abdicated and remained there with Mikhail and Natasha until at some point after the tsar’s abdication. He wrote his daughter soon after the February uprising that there were only three things to do now: First, try to escape, “which none of us has tried to do”; the second was to commit suicide; and the third was to recognize the Provisional Government, which he added, “We have done, instinctively, without ever consulting each other because there is no doubt that the old regime could not work any more.” His letters have a certain desperation in them: “My only wish is to escape this hell as soon as possible and rejoin you three, whom I have not seen for two [really almost three] years.”71 Both George and Mikhail soon decided to leave the country. George had become tired of Natasha’s tirades against the Romanov family, and he feared that Russia was becoming “a country of savages.”72 He wrote Prime Minister L’vov for permission to go to England, a request L’vov denied, noting that “the absence out of Russia of any member of the imperial family is undesirable at the present moment.” He also soon learned that England was not giving asylum to any members of the Russian imperial family, having even denied asylum to the tsar himself.73 Working-class politics and the general unpopularity of the Russian imperial family had led King George V to turn on his own cousins. George did successfully move to Finland, which was autonomous within the Russian state. Lenin was able to hide there safely from the government police later that same year. In June 1917 George contacted the Soviet through Kerensky, having gotten nowhere with the Provisional Government, and eventually he was allowed to leave for Finland. He rented a villa in a small, obscure town, and from there he hoped to pass into either Sweden or Norway. Had he remained there, he would probably have survived the Revolution.74 With this his return to Helsinki, however, his fate was sealed. Because of the cloud of corruption that hung over him as a result of the Kschessinska scandals, Sergei had been allowed to remain in voluntary exile at army headquarters after Nicholas II’s abdication. In June, however, he resigned from the army and returned to Petrograd. He moved into Nicholas Mikhailovich’s palace but spent much of his time at the home of “his beauty La Kschessinska.” By then she had managed

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to regain her house from the Bolsheviks, who had made it their pied-àterre until they expropriated Smolny Institute, the famous school for aristocratic young girls. Sandro saw Niki for the last time during the days of the February Revolution. After he returned to Kiev, Sandro’s subordinates begged him to flee, which he eventually did, taking his mother-in-law the dowager empress, his sister-in-law Olga, and her new husband Colonel Kulikovsky to his estate Ai-Todor in the Crimea and, as it turned out, to safety. They would have some harrowing experiences before reaching the safety of the West. In the first days of the Revolution, Nicholas Mikhailovich was at first uncharacteristically optimistic about the future. He opined that the Revolution would have been bloodless had it not been for the irresponsibility of Protopopov and his police,75 and to Paléologue he expressed great optimism at a meeting with the French ambassador at the grand duke’s palace early in April. Paléologue did not seem to favor the Revolution, probably because it had clearly weakened the Russian army, and by extension threatened the security of France. The grand duke had expressed the opinion that as long as sensible men such as L’vov, Miliukov, and Guchkov headed the government, he would be hopeful for the army and the country. If they fell, Russia would be in for a leap into the unknown. Paléologue reminded the grand duke that in the book of Genesis, the word for “unknown” was also the word for “chaos.”76 Given the grand duke’s annoyance at incompetence and disorder, he, too, was soon disturbed about the direction in which the country was drifting as the February Revolution receded into the background and the country lurched toward anarchy. Yet throughout much of the year, “Uncle Bimbo” visited the Youssoupovs. As Felix Youssoupov remembered, he was “always thundering against everything and everybody.”77 He came to worry about the end of the monarchy, and it was at this point that he suggested that he, Felix, use his popularity to assume power as the tsar. With the historian in him speaking, Nicholas Mikhailovich told his niece’s husband, “Russia cannot go on without a monarch, and the Romanovs are discredited.”78 He understood, like his kindred spirit Miliukov, that the restoration of a monarchy would restore order, for the Russian masses were used to obeying the godlike symbol of authority. Meanwhile, the army was seriously disintegrating. Without consulting the government or even the military, the Petrograd Soviet issued General Order No. 1, a new set of rules to govern the relationship between officers and men. Except for elected “soldiers’ committees” to oversee the protection of soldiers’ rights, there are not many provisions that would alarm a modern-day

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officer. Yet suddenly giving democratic rights to a military that had never even had basic civil rights (flogging had been, for example, still legal in the tsarist army) wreaked havoc. In the tsarist army, the soldiers feared their officers; in the revolutionary army, the officers feared their men. Mass desertion quickly became prevalent, and deserters (“shirkers in uniform”) were everywhere, commandeering buses and even trains. Officers were now often illegally elected by the units they led. Nicholas Mikhailovich was most disgusted with the Soviet’s general order, which had become law “while Guchkov [the minister of war] slept.” Because thousands of copies were dispatched immediately all over the place, the grand duke believed that it was a “coup from Germany,” for it would have to have been prepared a long time in advance.79 The order did appear very quickly after the fall of tsarism, and its origins seem somewhat obscure. Whatever its origins, it was the beginning of the end of Russia’s serious contribution to the war effort. The rural areas remained relatively quiet at this point. The peasants were paying little attention to March’s coup d’état and were simply working their land. Like any of the few other places in Russia where order remained, however, this condition would drastically change. Because of his respect for the ministers and because he felt that for the government he was “a confidence man,” Nicholas Mikhailovich still supported the Provisional Government in the spring and early summer, but he sensed that if “these gentlemen (courageous, intelligent, selfless men) fall,” he would fall with them.80 He had little patience for the apparently spinelessness of this caretaker government in its unwillingness to oppose the Soviet and the mutinies in the army and fleet, and when a gang of sailors invaded the house of the dowager empress in the Crimea and got her out of bed, he was furious with the government for doing nothing about it. He saw an optimism among the general population that he had trouble explaining except for the exuberance for “so-called liberty.” To his friend Masson, who would understand the slogan of the French Revolution, the “fraternity” was relative, and the “equality” was nonexistent, and from that truth was born the “anarchy.”81 Niki’s greatest fury was vented at the Soviet, which was composed of “Jews and Georgians.”82 By late April he was disturbed about the “pacifists coming from Switzerland by Germany,” referring to Vladimir Lenin and his famous “sealed train,” whereby the Germans imported what they knew would be a bacillus of a deadly political disease for the Russian nation. He felt that if this group ever came to power, its government would be “condemned to be a still-born child,” for being a historian of the French Revolution, he could see the appearance of a Russian Napoleon, a “General X on a white horse,”83 one of the few of his predictions that would not become

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a reality. One almost thinks that he subconsciously welcomed it as the only guarantor of stability. He was livid that “Lenin and his band” went around freely in Russia, “preaching the pacifist ideas,” while the Provisional Government had neither the “courage nor the authority nor the gumption to arrest them.”84 When the old anarchist Peter Kropotkin arrived in Russia in June, the grand duke was further infuriated that he was greeted by an honor guard of the Semenovsky Regiment, while Elihu Root (the grand duke thought his name was “Ruth”), an American Allied representative, had not received the same reception.85 By May, however, Nicholas Mikhailovich had lost what optimism he had had in the heady days of March when he was so cavalierly giving away Romanov state lands. Both Chambrun and Paléologue had noticed the change. He told Chambrun that the situation would get “even worse the longer it is prolonged.”86 To the French ambassador he made no attempt to hide his grief and anxiety. His voice even trembled as he spoke of the situation. “When we meet again,” he told the ambassador, who must have entered the back door of his palace, “where will Russia have got to? Shall we ever meet again?” Paléologue opined that the grand duke was in a “very gloomy mood,” to which the grand duke replied, “How can you expect me to forget that I am marked for the gallows.”87 When Albert Thomas briefly replaced Paléologue, Nicholas Mikhailovich immediately befriended him. He found the new ambassador “intelligent and active” and asked him to take some letters to Paris when he returned, after his short tenure in the Russian capital.88 From a long conversation with the grand duke, Thomas noted what he called “an air of counter-revolution.” By June the grand duke stressed to Thomas his misgivings about the leftward drift of Russian politics and his fear of the potential loss of the Revolution’s gains. He spoke of the virtues of “authoritarian liberalism” (the concept of benevolent despotism?), predicting such things as “democratic and authoritarian imperialism” in what the French socialist described as “the Napoleonic tradition of Frédéric Masson à la russe.”89 Again the expression of his views reveals his fear of a “Bonapartist” reaction, as well as a genuine fear of the masses. An authoritarian liberal would institute the reforms that the grand duke thought necessary, while avoiding the excesses of the Left. Yet for all of his sincere desire for a moderate liberalism, Nicholas was furious when the Provisional Government implemented a progressive income tax “to pacify the socialists.” For citizens making from 1,000 to 399,000 roubles, the rate of taxation was 30 percent. For those above that level, the rate rose from 60 to 90 percent on each 10,000 roubles of surplus. Given his income from his two large estates, the grand duke would have to pay more than

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300,000 roubles a year in taxes. He claimed to be in support of the measure to Masson, but questioned what would happen to foreign minister Mikhail Tereshchenko, whose family had made a fortune in sugar and whose mother had 6 to 8 million in reserves.90 For all of his forebodings about the future of Russia and his involvement in the development of events, Nicholas Mikhailovich still retained interest in his historical work and his publishing. His book on duck hunting appeared in May 1917, and he was unanimously reelected president of the Historical Society (which had now dropped the adjective “Imperial”) that same month. His election gained the approval of the Provisional Government, where he was popular, especially with the minister of public instruction Ivan Manouilov, a former professor at the University of Moscow with whom he had worked on the Alexander II Jubilee. He presided over the annual meeting on May 14, during which the board was chosen. Several “hard Rightists” stood for election but without success. A shortage of paper required the termination several society publications, although some were scheduled to be printed in Sweden.91 His love of history was always in tandem with his love of France and his association with the Académie Française, which honored him in August 1917.92 He eagerly sought out Joseph Noulens, the diplomat who replaced the short-lived ambassadorship of Albert Thomas, and doubtlessly plied him with information on the country. Nicholas Mikhailovich had not been to France in three years, and he longed for fresh news of his adopted country. In October he asked Masson if his old hotel still existed or if its name had changed. He wondered about the antique shops he frequented. “How I would want to see them again one day,” he wistfully wrote Masson, and then added with his usual prophetic accuracy, “Alas, that day seems farther away than ever.”93 From the standpoint of stability, the disintegration of the Russian army after the February Revolution posed the most serious threat to the new regime. By late spring, the desertion rate had turned into a tsunami as a peasant army abandoned the trenches and returned home to secure portions of the land that was being seized from the landlords and the state. General Order No. 1 had struck the first real blow to discipline and official control of the men, but rumors that peasants in the rear were expropriating land really sounded the death knell of the army of peasants, who feared that if they stayed in the trenches they would lose out in the redistribution. No Provisional Government promises that only those who stayed in the trenches would be awarded land at the war’s end could keep

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them there. Sergei wrote Niki that in March alone, 700,000 men had deserted.94 A political explosion generally called the “May Crisis” further accelerated the instability. The Petrograd Soviet had supported the war effort against German imperialism but had from the beginning called for a “peace without annexations,” a typical position of socialist anti-imperialism everywhere. In an effort to bolster Russian resolve, Miliukov, in his capacity as foreign minister, had made it public that the Allies had agreed to Russian annexation of the Turkish Straits at Constantinople, a geographic goal of Russia for almost two centuries. The Soviet erupted in fury, demanding the removal of “Miliukov-Dardanelsky” from the post of foreign minister, which it got. Miliukov’s resignation was followed by that of Guchkov and the transfer of General Lavr Kornilov, commandant of the Petrograd Military District, to the command of the Southwest Front. Nicholas Mikhailovich saw the shifting of the military figures as the result of the “impossibility of these gentlemen to conquer discipline,” which he incorrectly blamed on the now departed minister of war, whose resignation, he felt, would “fortify the Provisional Government.” The grand duke felt that Guchkov’s replacement should be someone “with energy,” and “if they are able to eliminate also the gossip of a professor who is called M. Miliukov,” it would give the government a stronger hand, for Miliukov “has made only gaffe after gaffe in the handling of our political affairs.”95 Miliukov had indeed made a “gaffe,” but the disintegration of the army was something that could not be stopped at this point by any one person. It would have taken a change in a number of conditions, including probably the negotiation of peace, to have stabilized the army. However, there had by May 1917 been too many needless sacrifices on the battlefields, and there was no authority in Russia powerful enough to bring stability. To discipline a riot, authorities must have an adequate force willing to shoot, but there was no such force in Russia in the spring of 1917. As the moderates surrendered to the will of the Left, the First Provisional Government Coalition, including a number of socialists from the Soviet, was born. The disintegration of military authority continued into the summer, even as the Russians planned another offensive against the Austrians for the summer of 1917. Sailors mutinied at the naval base at Sevastopol in June, a development the grand duke blamed on Lenin and the “pacifists.”96 By late June, the situation had declined to such a degree that the grand duke, who had been so optimistic in the early days of the Revolution, now saw the choices facing Russia as being either anarchy or dictatorship. At no time, however, did Nicholas Mikhailovich blame the common soldier for the army’s troubles. In fact, in 1917 he wrote an

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article praising the Russian infantryman, and 10,000 copies of it were distributed by a Moscow publisher.97 He continued to hope to the end that the new “revolutionary army” would somehow spring to life as it had in France during its Revolution. “Valmy [a victory of the French revolutionary army] does not leave my mind!” he wrote Masson, who would fully comprehend the analogy.98 The Provisional Government finally obtained the support of the Soviet for an offensive in the summer of 1917, and like the successful offensive of 1916, it was commanded by General Brusilov, who was now the commander in chief of Russia’s disintegrating armed forces. Like the attack of 1916, it was also directed against the Austrian Empire, whose armies were, like Russia’s, in a state of near collapse. Kerensky, now minister of war, remembered that he held his breath when the order to attack was given, for he did not know if the shaky Russian army would obey an order to advance. Yet Nicholas Mikhailovich, who had not had to deal directly with the lack of discipline in the army, was optimistic, perhaps dreaming of a “miracle of Valmy.” Early in June he believed strongly in the “spirits of our soldiers and our young officers,” adding that with Brusilov at the helm of the Russian armies, the offensive became “otherwise certain, at least probable [his italics]. . . . My optimism remains unshakable.”99 Given the shattered state of the Austrian armies, they quickly buckled under the Russian artillery attack that began on the first day of July 1917. Comparing the Russians to the revolutionary French soldiers after 1789, Nicholas Mikhailovich was delighted at the successes of “the free soldiers, citizen and republican” that “must rise under new and untried rules.”100 Yet the Russian revolutionary soldiers produced no miracle of Valmy. As the Austrian front began to sag, the Germans poured in reinforcements, and the Russian advance stopped cold. The check of the “revolutionary army” turned quickly into a retreat, which in turn became a pitiful flight. In many cases the Germans did not even bother to take prisoners. What was left of the Russian army was a joke, and until the point where Russia left the war, the Eastern front lay largely silent. Nicholas Mikhailovich wrote his friend Masson a very distressing report of the failure of Russian arms: “The offensive of General Kornilov [on whose front the assault had taken place] begun so brilliantly has been stopped almost since its beginning, thanks to the slackness of many regiments infected with the ideas of Lenin, who serves the enemy.” He lamented that some units had given “general flight,” making it easy for the Germans to “pierce our front.” He gave the impression in a letter to Masson that much of his early optimism was really bravado. Noting that it was necessary to “close one’s eyes to the sad reality,” he admitted that

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“the disorganization of our troops had attained these terrifying proportions. Errare humanum est.”101 The failure of the offensive resulted in a second major political crisis that nearly toppled the Provisional Government. Called the “July Days,” it was a spontaneous demonstration-turned-uprising of workers and Kronstadt sailors that came to be at least partially led by the Bolsheviks, who felt that if they did not assume leadership, they would lose worker allegiance.102 Whatever the extent of Bolshevik involvement, there were the usual cries for a “democratic peace” and “no annexations.” There was fighting all over the city, but finally the cossacks, who generally sided with the Provisional Government, restored order. The government then announced what it had known for a long time and had withheld for fear of repercussions from the Left: Lenin and the Bolsheviks had been receiving money from the Germans. Lenin, ever the physical coward, fled from town disguised in a red wig; many of his associates, including Trotsky, were arrested and incarcerated in the Petropavlovsky Fortress, and the Provisional Government seemed to have restored order. On the surface it appeared that the Bolsheviks were finished. The Right-wing press screamed its victory. One clever Rightist political cartoonist drew a man hanging from a gallows with the caption, “Lenin wants a high government post. Let’s give him this one.”103 Nicholas Mikhailovich’s historian’s curiosity led him to be out in the fray. Since the Bolsheviks had confiscated all the vehicles they could find, the grand duke’s transportation of choice, the taxi, had disappeared from the streets, and he dared not take out one of his own automobiles for fear that it, too, would be expropriated. He therefore went about on foot, dining at the Yacht Club, visiting the Youssoupovs, and generally wandering about town observing history in the making. Once, upon returning home, he passed a shootout at the Winter Palace.104 A new government was formed in the wake of the July disturbances with Kerensky as prime minister whom the grand duke saw as a great improvement over “the incorrigible utopian ‘Girondin’ L’vov,” as prime minister. Niki was delighted that Kerensky was master of the situation, but he wrote his friend Masson that the days of July 3 through 8 had been “worse than the first days of the revolution in February.” With his usual gift for prophecy, he felt that now the disorders would be the result of a move of the political Right, although he felt that it would have as its goal the installation of Mikhail on the throne. He doubtless remembered the French Revolution’s Thermidorean Reaction. He felt that the Russians were the “stupidest spectators of revolutions” as all the “cards of the players” were so shuffled that there was no foreseeable end to the mess.105 He had come to realize earlier that the people needed time “to

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digest the freedoms fallen from the sky after so many years of waiting.” The soldiers and sailors were the worst victims of this new freedom, especially as they were baited and egged on by “Lenin and his group, Russian Jews expelled for the most part, members of the Israelite Bund.”106 The Revolution had been slowest to spread to rural areas, but by the early summer of 1917, landlords everywhere had fled their estates, and peasants were burning their manor houses. Niki’s brother Sergei had had a hunting lodge on state lands sixty miles outside of Petrograd. The peasants became unruly and Sergei abandoned it. Always feeling that he had rapport with the lower classes, Niki assumed ownership and went there on weekends to hunt in the spring. During a visit in early April, the peasants came to interrogate him about his presence there. They asked him if he had permission to hunt, and he produced licenses from both the Soviet and the Provisional Government. He produced copies, however, and the peasants demanded the originals. He hunted and fished there all spring, but the peasants were hostile to his presence. One day while strolling, he picked and ate a few wild strawberries. Some peasants saw him, and he was berated for picking strawberries on their land. His intendant got into an argument with several peasants and ended up killing four or five of them. He appealed the situation, however, to the Social Revolutionary minister of agriculture, Victor Chernov, who we can be sure was not sympathetic to the grand duke’s position,107 as he had been issuing declarations to the nation’s peasantry to seize land and not wait for any legislation to that effect. We do not know how he ruled, if he ever did, but one cannot imagine that he was favorable to the grand duke’s cause. By the fall peasants and soldiers had taken over all rural areas, especially the forest, which to the grand duke’s dismay they stripped of game. Even in Borjomi they had ravaged the “beautiful woods,” leaving nothing.108 By this time, however, the grand duke as a historian most certainly had divined that the plundering of the forests by peasants and soldiers was the least of the Romanov worries. In the Second Coalition, born out of the July Crisis, one of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s liberal friends, Nicholas Nekrasov, entered the government as minister of finance and deputy prime minister, while another, Tereshchenko, retained his position as minister of foreign affairs. He felt good about these two men and was especially confident in Kerensky, who had become prime minister. That faith remained strong when a few weeks later General Kornilov, who had replaced Brusilov as army commander in chief, moved on the capital to arrest the Soviet and restore order in the army and then the country. The general was not very political, but he had deplored the state of disorder in the army and saw the Soviet as

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the leading cause of the problem. Thinking that Kerensky wanted him to establish marshal law in Petrograd, he led hand-picked troops toward the capital to restore governmental authority. Kornilov’s attempted coup failed almost immediately, and he was arrested. Expressing his usual fear of the Right, Nicholas Mikhailovich sided with the socialist Kerensky on this question, despite the fact that Kerensky had detained (then quickly released) several of the grand dukes, fearing that they might be part of the plot. The whole affair, however, so weakened Kerensky’s hand that after he defeated General Kornilov, the more conservative elements of Russian society abandoned Kerensky completely, remaining neutral in his struggle with the extreme Left. After Kerensky became prime minister and moved into the Winter Palace, sleeping in the tsar’s bedroom, Nicholas Mikhailovich often visited him at night and had long talks with him. He reported to the prime minister what was happening in the guards’ regiments and the aristocratic circles, stories he had heard at the Yacht and English Clubs. Kerensky later remembered that the grand duke never mentioned individuals’ names, as most of the stories involved men who were hostile to Kerensky. Nicholas Mikhailovich realized as their only hope the need of the moderate and conservative classes to support Kerensky. Once he said to the socialist premier, who was fast losing touch with the masses, “These brainy fellows [the guards’ officers and the aristocracy] are totally unable to understand [that] you are the last bulwark of order and civilization. They are trying to break it [the Provisional Government] down and when they do, everything will be swept away by the uncontrollable mob.”109 Nicholas Mikhailovich’s interest and involvement in the swirling politics of the new Russian Republic led him to take a singular step for a member of the former imperial family: He decided to run for election to the Constituent Assembly. He was apparently the only member of the Romanov family even to consider it, and his decision probably came from his interest in parliaments, constitutions, and Russia’s own Duma. When he had resigned his command in the army shortly after the February events, he had become an ordinary citizen with full electoral rights. The elections were then expected to be held in the summer, and Niki decided “bravely to present myself as a deputy at my place of Grushevka.” The choice of seats was probably a wise one. If he stood for a seat in Petrograd, he would not get any of the working class’s or soldiers’ votes and very few, if any, from the middle-class elements. At Grushevka, however, the voters were peasants and continued to hold the imperial family in some awe, even if they still hated the local landlords. Nicholas Mikhailovich had always been attentive to peasant needs and problems, especially during

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the war, when he often intervened in problems of war widows, helping them to get their pensions.110 Moreover, given the size of Grushevka and the number of peasants living on it, he would most likely be guaranteed victory. In March he was not certain what his platform would be, but he thought that probably it would be that of an “authoritarian republican,” not a monarchist or a moderate.111 He felt that it did not matter “what sort of assembly will come from the ballot boxes,” for he was certain that it would eventually create a government that would be “authoritarian republican.”112 As the weeks passed, Nicholas Mikhailovich became more and more of a confirmed republican because the “candidates” for tsar were so poor. Mikhail, the tsar-for-a-day, had disappointed him and was merely “another edition of his brother,” without Nicholas’s education or his character. Besides, he was married to a woman of nonroyal birth, an “intelligent but evil woman from the legal world of Moscow.” His cousin Kirill was a “pompous idiot,” while Grand Duke Boris was “a music hall lover.” Boris’s brother Andrei was “a gigolo, the lover of my brother’s mistress, the dancer.” He would have preferred the restoration of Nicholas II, but the tsar would never repudiate “the woman of Hesse.” “To Hell with them! No thanks!” he wrote Masson. He therefore saw a benevolent, authoritarian republic as the only answer, but just for four years. Seven years, which must have been the period discussed for the duration of the assembly, was too long “for us Russians with our changing tastes and varying appetites.”113 When he did advance his candidacy late in May, Nicholas’s brother Sergei, who had been so hesitant to correspond with him in exile, wrote him to say that he was totally surprised that he would run and expressed the belief that he would vote for a republic, which Sergei felt would be a bolshoi nyet [a big no-no]!”114 A week later Sergei again wrote his brother to say that he was “completely delighted” that he had advanced his candidacy for the Constituent Assembly and again ribbed his older brother about his politics. “I have no doubt that you will vote for a republican form of government—of course this is the ideal that all the country wants,” he wrote Niki, and he then showed himself to be quite poltically perceptive by adding, “But—and it’s a big ‘but’— the Russian up to now is uncultured. . . . How will he understand freedom?”115 In July 1917 Nicholas Mikhailovich assembled the “ticket” on which he would run. It would be the Union of Peasants and Landlords, a blanket that covered most of the voting public in Kherson, where part of Grushevka lay. The peasants were more conservative than the average voter in the country, and the grand duke felt that they were not so affected by Leninism and the new legal changes.116 In June he had gotten

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good news from his overseer that the peasants were completely behind him, as unbelievable as it seemed even to the grand duke, who must have known they were eyeing his land. They appeared to link their fate with him on the agrarian question, saying firmly that they would “defend to the teeth each acre of land” and pledging their votes for the grand duke for the assembly. The peasants’ support confirmed that he had not wasted his time there during his winter exile.117 If events did not force him to remain in the capital, he planned to go to his estate early in August to assist in the harvest and begin campaigning. He wanted to go for other reasons as well. The political climate in Petrograd was stifling, and it was hard to maintain one’s “moral equilibrium.”118 He also wanted to get a good position on the list of candidates because the elections were proportional. The percentage of the vote each party or group listed on the ballot received in a district determined how many of its candidates were chosen. Niki felt that he had to be in the top three on the list of his party or else his chances would be nil.119 Fear of a Romanov return to power, however, derailed Nicholas Mikhailovich’s infant political career. Early in August, before he could begin his campaign swing to the south, Kerensky asked to see him in the Winter Palace. The grand duke went the two blocks from his house to Kerensky’s Winter Palace apartment and found the premier exhausted after a very long cabinet meeting. Kerensky had supposedly originally encouraged the grand duke to run for the Constituent Assembly, but he now had to inform him that he would not be permitted to do so. One can, however, understand the potential danger for Russian democracy an elected Romanov could have posed for any future republican government, given the mystical adulation the masses held for the family. From the grand duke’s account it is unclear who had made the decision. Kerensky told him that the electoral commission had decided to deprive all the grand dukes of the right to vote (so much for democracy!), and this position naturally precluded permission to stand for parliamentary elections. The remainder of the discussion seems to have been carried on in the council of ministers, where the question, which had been instigated by the Social Revolutionary Chernov, had passed unanimously (à une voix) despite the arguments of Tereshchenko and the moderates. Kerensky told the grand duke that the vote had been taken when he had been out of the room, thus taking the heat off himself. Kerensky, for all the time he spent with the grand duke during the eight months of the Revolution, mentions the grand duke only in passing once or twice in his various books. Obviously the grand duke thought more of Kerensky than the premier thought of him.

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Nicholas Mikhailovich must have felt stung by this rejection, although in a letter to Masson, he tried not to show it. He expressed the belief that the action had been taken by the government because he was the only grand duke running, a rather hollow rationalization. Then he added a more realistic explanation to Masson: “Also the gentlemen fear me. So much the better.”120 Indeed, a grand duke, especially this grand duke, in the assembly might well be a loose cannon, yet Paléologue wrote in his diary that he “deserved neither this too great honor nor the indignity.” He felt that the grand duke was not at all dangerous for the Revolution, because he was “a critic and a dilettante rather than a party man,” adding that he was “too fond of drawing room epigrams.” He felt that he was in no way an “apostle of adventure and the offensive.”121 As it turns out, the denial of his right to run may well have saved him at least arrest and possibly an early execution; all seventeen nonsocialists elected to the assembly were subsequently detained by the Bolsheviks, if they could be found. Several were killed outright. As Nicholas Mikhailovich would not have fled, he would most certainly have found himself a guest of the Bolsheviks in the fortress across the Neva from his house a full year before he was incarcerated there. Would he have been elected? Possibly so, as the full depths of the Revolution had not plumbed to Kherson, but it is unlikely. He may well have been genuinely popular with and respected by his peasants, although we have only his word that he was. When he finally returned there early in August, planning to stay for six weeks, he found the peasants changed and argumentative, although they did not seem to have seized any of his land. They were “more than cordial to him” and daily they discussed “the burning questions together.” They seem to have been devoid of hate or bitterness, and they all awaited “with the most perfect serenity” the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, “despite the fact that our interests are contradictory.” Yet he saw a very bad omen: The peasant appetite for land was enormous, thanks to “the casual promises of Sieur Chernov,” who, we have seen, had encouraged the Russian peasants to expropriate illegally landlords’ land.122 A letter to Masson in mid-September strongly implies that the peasants no longer remained passive but expresses hope that he could still save his estate. He gave no clue as to how that might be accomplished. The grand duke blamed the rural problems again on the “criminal fantasies of M. Chernov and his band” and berated Kerensky for not standing up to him. Kerensky feared panic in the capital and wanted no discord with the Left.123 Yet Nicholas Mikhailovich remained on friendly terms with the peasants, and they with him, even to the point of supplying him with a cache of food on his return to Petrograd. He loaned the local soviet his auto-

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mobile to survey the harvest, and its chairman wrote him a note of thanks expressing admiration for his devotion “to the sacred and democratic cause of peasant Russia.”124 In September, despite the spreading chaos in the country, the situation remained relatively calm at Grushevka. The peasants had indeed shown a bit more independence than they had earlier, having formed “production committees,” with whom the grand duke remained in daily contact, but he never mentioned that any of his land had been seized. Although he dreaded returning to Petrograd, where he would “vegetate all fall and winter,” he wanted to be there because he felt some responsibility for his 400 house servants, who were more at ease when he was there.125 He would have left sooner but for the impossibility of getting a private coupé on a train.126 By the time he was finally able to return to Petrograd in mid-September, his optimism had evaporated as he for the last time left Grushevka, with its endless wheatfields. The grand duke arrived back in the capital shortly after the termination of the Kornilov affair. The journey home had been without incident, and the train arrived almost exactly on schedule. Had he stayed at Grushevka, he probably would have been safe. By now Grand Duke Mikhail had been arrested, and except for what Nicholas Mikhailovich believed to be his contacts in the Provisional Government, he had little reason to assume that a similar fate would not befall him. The remainder of the family, except for his brother Sergei, who was living with him, was scattered from Finland to the northern Caucasus and the Crimea. He did not, however, wish to become a desperate man, and he regained some of his old optimism that the future “if not sweet, would be better.” Although politics was in total disarray, he still had confidence in Kerensky and Tereshchenko, whom he saw daily. Yet he had no illusions concerning the potential danger that he faced. The Bolsheviks and the ever-unstable Kronstadt sailors had been energized by the Kornilov revolt, and Kerensky’s unauthorized proclamation of a republic had in no way calmed them down. Civil war had not yet started, but the situation was precarious. Now, for the first time, speculation had begun on the coming of a Bolshevik coup. By the first of October, the optimism that had revisited the grand duke on his return had become “chancy” (chancelant). Several new shake-ups within the Provisional Government had not helped, and Kerensky was being attacked by both the Right and the Left, his political base having largely disappeared. “And while I continue to love the man,” the grand duke wrote Masson, “in spite of his faults and his gaffes, he is a patriot and possesses elevated sentiments.”127 Kerensky had intervened for better conditions for the dowager empress and had received members of the imperial family. The grand duke felt that “exclusively to him [his italics] we owe our existence.”128

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He felt that the day “he is no more,” the safety of the family members in Siberia and the Crimea will be “doubtful.”129 In October, the chaos deepened as Russia lurched toward a second revolution. Describing the conditions to Masson, the grand duke wrote, “The balance sheet is heart-rending. Everyone has taken on a sense of vague madness, let’s hope a passing madness, after the collapse of a regime that has lasted more than three hundred years and which was quickly finished in forty-eight hours.”130 Foreigners were beginning to flee the impending storm, with many French and English leaving. One of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s letters to Masson was carried out by a fleeing French hairdresser, who had to shut his shop and leave the country because he “could not sate the appetite of his workers.” Nicholas Mikhailovich could sympathize with the “save-what-you-can attitude of foreigners,” for the anarchy now was complete, and there was no foreseeable end to it. The Bolsheviks were gaining ground everywhere, and the countryside was in total chaos. He had wanted to go to Moscow for a few days, for things were more stable there, but he did not dare because one was not safe on the trains.131 Yet despite his foreboding, the grand duke does not seem to have considered leaving the country, even to go to Finland as his brother had done. He told Masson that he was not even hiding his art objects because of “fatalism and boredom,”132 yet de Robien records that as the Germans threatened the city in the late fall of 1917, valuable works of art from the Hermitage, as well as expensive furniture and ministerial archives, were loaded onto barges at the Neva quay by lazy, indifferent soldiers, who transported Nicholas Mikhailovich’s collections at this time as well.133 Presumably they were from the museum he had in his home. Yet he told Masson as early as late November that he had hidden his “collections” in the wall of the basement of the house. He also entrusted some of his materials to Fabergé, who had a place outside Petrograd. He hoped that with a little luck they would be saved.134 Brummer wrote that the grand duke hid his portrait of Napoleon by David in the basement of his palace, and later it was smuggled out of the country through Finland.135 It is a pity that he did not leave with it. The last weeks of the Provisional Government had the air of a nightmare in a lunatic asylum where the inmates have taken over. The countryside was in the hands of unruly peasants and deserting soldiers who were looting and pillaging. Mutinous soldiers took over small towns. Everywhere workers were on strike, paralyzing cities. Because in many cases soldiers were responsible for creating the disorder, there was no one to assert control. Food disappeared from the cities and famine haunted the land.

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Incredibly, everyone knew that the Bolsheviks were planning to move; it was merely a question of when. Bookies were taking bets on what day it would happen, yet in the face of this open threat, the Provisional Government did nothing for weeks. In part it was powerless to do much, but also many members of the government felt that the Bolsheviks did not have sufficient support to be successful in a takeover. Nicholas Mikhailovich seems to have shared many of the ministers’ belief that a move on the part of the Bolsheviks would not be a bad thing, because then the government would have a perfect excuse to retaliate against them and “finish them off once and for all.”136 Indeed, on November 6 the Provisional Government did seize the Bolshevik press office and a few minor strongholds, but on the eve of their coup, the Bolsheviks’ power was greater than any other force in the city, and they quickly retook those places. Those people who might have supported the Provisional Government either had no wish to do so because of the unpopular Kerensky, or were content to let matters drift until the election of the Constituent Assembly late in November. Even the grand duke learned on November 2 that the Bolsheviks were going to seize power within a week. They had obtained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet in October, naming Lenin’s crony Leon Trotsky as chairman. With the second congress of representatives of soviets from all over the country convening on November 8, a seizure of power around this time would be logical. Nicholas Mikhailovich, like many of the elite Russians of his day, and members of the imperial family and the aristocracy since, equated the Bolsheviks with Judaism.137 “Everywhere the Jew is investing himself,” the grand duke wrote, expressing the anti-Semitism that was such an unusual component of his otherwise liberal character. “It is he who governs Russia. One sees them in the majority in the soviets, in the commissars of the Pre-Parliament, in almost all the municipalities and in all the political organization.”138 There were large numbers of Jews in the Bolshevik and Menshevik wings of the Social Democratic Party, but the entire party was not composed of Jews.139 Yet one wonders why any Jew would have had any allegiance to tsarist Russia. With his usual perception, even the antiSemitic grand duke understood the reason for their Social Democratic affinity. He wrote Masson, “They are going to avenge themselves of the miseries of former times, and they avenge themselves already in hoping to dismember my country.”140 Then on November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks struck boldly. In the early hours of that rainy Wednesday morning, the Bolshevik Red Guard, rearmed by Kerensky to defend the city against Kornilov, occupied major bridges, train stations, the post and telegraph exchanges, and surrounded the Winter Palace, where the ministers were assembled. The Provisional

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Government’s only defense was a squad of teenage cadets from a local military school and a most reluctant unit from the Russian Women’s Battalion, who had been sent there to guard the automobiles at the palace. Kerensky was not there. Having heard of Bolshevik actions early, he had left town to try to raise loyal troops. He was escorted out of town by a Ford from the American Embassy flying American flags, not riding in it as Cold War Soviet historiography would later claim. The dignified premier of “democratic” Russia was traveling in a Pierce Arrow. The Ford malfunctioned outside of town, and Kerensky continued unescorted. Annoyed that he had wasted their lives in July and had not then finished off the Bolsheviks when he had had a chance, the “loyal” troops he found were not willing to help. The forces that he managed to assemble were easily defeated near where the St. Petersburg airport is today. The members of the Provisional Government were arrested, not after a dramatic storming of the Winter Palace like the one depicted in the Eisenshtein movie, but after slow and deliberate infiltration. Soon those who had worked their way into the palace by various means outnumbered the defenders, who gave up and went home. The government ministers were taken on foot across the river to the Petropavlovsky Fortress and incarcerated there. With the Red Terror only a vague ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, the coup leaders released all of them the next day after promises that they would not oppose the Bolshevik regime. None of them did. With the usual convenient bending of history to suit its purposes, the Soviet regime instructed tourist guides to say that their incarceration was the last time the fortress was used as a prison. This narrative itself will prove that wrong.

Chapter 8

Stillborn Future

On the way here, I met a mad woman in the street. All she could say to anything said to her was, “Where is my home? Where is my home?” —Konstantin Balmont Why didn’t you bring her with you? She was Russia! —Marina Tsvetaeva1 Only blood can change the color of history. —Maxim Gorky2 I fear that we are entering an age of terror. . . . The beast of the people has smelt blood . . . and it will not forget in a hurry. —Louis de Robien3 People are living in Russia now as if in a hotel: They plan to leave at any moment; they only hope that it will last as long as they’re around. —Fyodor Dostoevsky4 However, this must have been assigned to him at birth! —Mikhail Lermontov5

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From his home in the neighborhood of the Winter Palace, Nicholas Mikhailovich observed that the streets the day after the fall of the Provisional Government were full of unarmed, drunken soldiers who had had their wicked way with the wine cellars of the imperial palace. These men did no actual harm but did everything else, according to the grand duke, things that he could not bring himself to describe to his friend Masson.6 That day he called Brummer and asked, “Are you still alive?” Brummer told him what had transpired at the Winter Palace, much of which the grand duke must already have known. Apparently, the Bolsheviks had cut off the electricity to the neighborhood to throw the occupants of the palace into darkness, and Nicholas Mikhailovich’s home was evidently on the same grid because his house lost power as well. The grand duke had to retire to a room on the courtyard in order to have some light.7 In the days immediately after the October Revolution, he lived as he always had in his palace on the Neva, daily receiving guests for dinner, including his brother Sergei, who was still in Petrograd trying to preserve Kschessinska’s house and furniture. Food soon became scarce, and white flour was almost impossible to obtain. Niki did better than most, however, as he had the remains of provisions sent “for his well-being” by the government of Kherson.8 Loaning his automobiles to the local government had stood him in good stead. Through all the chaos, somehow the grand duke’s letters continued to reach Masson. Whatever his sources were, he reported much accurate information to his French friend. He wrote in great indignation of how the Bolsheviks had confiscated the State Bank and its assets, how they had revealed the secret treaties with the Allies, how they had made an ensign commander in chief of the army, and how they immediately called for a truce with the Germans. “Infamy! Unnameable treason! . . . All in three days!” he wrote in horror.9 Later in the month he added famine, which was coming “in giant steps,” to the list of plagues that his “poor, poor country” faced. Trainloads of food going to the capital were plundered along the way by bands of deserting soldiers and hungry peasants. Nicholas Mikhailovich hysterically wrote that the situation was more “humiliating [a curious word choice] than The Terror [in France] with the guillotine.” Yet even with the impending doom, he would not consider of leaving the country. One would think that his knowledge of the French Revolution would alone have produced an adequate incentive to flee. He did in fact make the comparison often in letters to Masson: “Are we going toward a Convention, toward The Terror and the Committee of Public Safety, or other forms still more hideous?”10 he asked rhetorically.

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The reasons that the grand duke did not entertain trying to escape the Revolution are numerous. One consideration seems to have been that he had become some sort of guru to a hodgepodge of soldiers, sailors, lawyers, businessmen, and even socialists “of all stripes,” who came to him for advice in this political extremity. He probably did not want to abandon them. Also, the French government offered him its doubtful protection, as he was a member of the Institut de France. What is more, in some ways things might not have seemed so bad at the time. For example, the grand duke was even able to receive a telegram from Masson after the coup. He also obtained from both Grushevka and Borjomi reports revealing that the peasants were still calm and friendly, and they, “for the moment at least,” showed more political common sense than did the people in the capital.11 Moreover, no one thought that the Bolsheviks could possibly survive. Perhaps the grand duke always imagined that he could find refuge at either of his estates if the necessity arose, although he does not seem to have seriously entertained the idea of leaving Petrograd. Whatever his motives, he decided to remain in the capital and “drink the chalice to the dregs!”12 Unconcerned as he appeared outwardly to have been, however, Nicholas Mikhailovich immediately began taking precautions with his personal treasures. Many of his works and art objects were packed and stored in the cellar of a friend’s house near the Finnish border. His portraits of Napoleon by David and that of Prince Zubov by Lampi were detached from their frames and rolled up. At first they were hidden in his basement and then smuggled out to the West through Finland. The smaller works were left framed. Some of his porcelain and bronze objects were bricked into a niche in the wall of his palace basement, and the best wines were removed from the cellar and hidden. His beautiful Empire furniture was not moved because the grand duke could not decide what to do with it.13 Nicholas Mikhailovich never fully lost hope in the Constituent Assembly, but he felt that nothing short of a miracle from it could save the country. Observing that the elections for the new legislature were taking place within a few days, he wondered, given the disarray, how such a complicated process would be possible. In some regions the anarchy was total. How could organized elections possibly be held in such cases? The election results being based on the proportion of the vote for each party, the grand duke correctly predicted that in Petrograd, which was allotted fifteen deputies, list number 2 (the Kadets, the liberal party) and number 4 (the Bolsheviks), would lead the vote. He felt that the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison would vote overwhelmingly for the Bolsheviks, who had promised peace, and he was correct. They did so, as he put it,

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with an “unaccustomed gusto.” Farther from Petrograd, however, the peasant soldiers at the front voted for the Social Revolutionaries, the party of the peasants. Because the voting was officially allowed to take place over three days, counting the returns was slow; many of the totals did not come in for weeks. Women were allowed to vote in a national election in only the third nation in history (New Zealand and Finland had given women the vote earlier); it pleased the grand duke that they did so in large numbers. Because he felt that women were “all for order,” he saw their participation as a good sign.14 In Petrograd women voted largely for the Bolsheviks. One factor that may have influenced their vote was a Bolshevik election ploy of telling the women that because the Bolsheviks were the only party for peace, if they did not vote “Bolshevik,” their husbands would beat the hell out of them when the got home from the front. The grand duke rightly was amazed at the calmness and order of the elections, even in the cities where the Bolsheviks could have made trouble. He was also surprised at the turnout in urban areas, where stay-at-home voters seem to have been at a minimum. Nonvoting was higher in rural areas, where the citizens were less sophisticated and therefore less likely to vote. Moreover, snow and the impassability of roads would naturally have reduced the vote.15 The final result was not really a surprise. The Social Revolutionary Party, the party that claimed to speak for the Russian peasant, received about half of the 33 million or so votes reported as cast. The Bolsheviks received only about 25 percent of the total votes in the country at large, although they received a plurality in the two capitals, Petrograd and Moscow. They had been defeated in Russia’s first democratic election; almost immediately Nicholas Mikhailovich learned that the Bolsheviks were planning “violent measures” against the election results.16 Except for shortages of food, which were never very acute for him personally, life for the grand duke went on much as usual at first. Brummer was with him and doing well, as was Molodovsky. Leon, his French chauffeur, had resigned: The Government had confiscated the grand duke’s cars despite his careful efforts to hide them. Although Leon was technically no longer in the grand duke’s employ, he did not desert his master. Basil, the grand duke’s hunter, was still in great form and was awaiting his third baby.17 The grand duke even found time for his historical studies, and some days he never left his house and busied himself with various reading and his writing. He perused his past readings, especially the work of Albert Sorel on Hippolite Taine, the French historian, which “transported him into other spheres and eclipses desolate reality.” His thoughts on history always brought him back to Masson. He felt sure that he would

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one day see the great French historian again in good health and pass some time with him on the Rue de la Baumes in his “charming library.” As always, he asked in his correspondence to Masson to be remembered to Madame Masson and his friends of the Bixio.18 As openly and conspicuously as he lived, however, it is not surprising that Nicholas Mikhailovich eventually drew the attention of the Revolution. Shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power, some of their “representatives” visited the grand duke’s house for the first time in the person of “an émigré Jew,” who had been made prefect of police. The grand duke had been keeping some POWs in his house, and the prefect arrived one evening at 9:00 apparently to inspect them. The official said that the Bolshevik Red Guard would be at the grand duke’s disposal in the event that there were any “disorders and massacres,” intelligence that must have surprised the grand duke. Nicholas Mikhailovich felt that this conversation was “sheer Vaudeville all the while being reality.”19 One day in December, the grand duke was having lunch when the butler came into the dining room and announced that soldiers of the Preobrazhenskii Regiment had come to “visit” the basement. To refuse was pointless. In investigating the cellar, the soldiers discovered his wines, which had probably been the object of their search in the first place, given their rich find in the Winter Palace only a few houses away. Locking up their prize and taking the key, they returned later that day and had what Brummer called “a savage and disgusting [drinking] orgy” that lasted into the night.20 Of a more serious nature were the grand duke’s meetings with Moisei Uritsky, the head of the Petrograd Chekha, the political police that the Bolsheviks had wasted little time in creating. The purpose of these encounters, which took place at police headquarters at 2 Gorokhovaia Street, the street ironically on which Rasputin had lived, were to discuss what was to be done with this member of the imperial family who had remained so unconcerned in Petrograd as the political vortex that swirled around him. Images of Archimedes drawing circles in the sand as the Romans stormed Syracuse must have come to mind. Telling Masson of the first encounter, the grand duke dismissed Uritsky as simply “a Jew,” and “a small, fat man with curly brown hair, a ruddy face and thick lips,” as though these qualities were all that was necessary to condemn him. The grand duke thought him “a peasant who pretended to be a FouquierTinville [a radical figure in the French Revolution]”; following one meeting Nicholas Mikhailovich wrote his French friend that the fellow “quotes at every possible moment (impossible ones too!) the example of the great French Revolution.” Apparently, the Bolshevik’s knowledge of the French upheaval of 1789 was a bit wobbly, and at one point in his lecture to the

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grand duke, Nicholas Mikhailovich burst out laughing at some ridiculous analogy he had made.21 Of greater concern than the flaws in his historical knowledge, however, was the implacable hatred the prefect had for all members of the Romanov family. On Uritsky’s assertions of his being a potential threat to the new regime, Nicholas Mikhailovich asserted that being merely a historian and the president of several intellectual societies, he was not interested in politics. As the purpose of the encounter was to discuss the grand duke’s future, Nicholas Mikhailovich declared that he would like to emigrate to another country, preferably Denmark. Uritsky replied “with great pomp and circumstance” that the grand duke would be allowed to emigrate when the proletariat of that country had revolted and replaced the capitalist government. Uritsky was hardly convinced that the grand duke was no threat, but he did not detain him.22 These encounters were especially distasteful to Nicholas because of the realization that Russia was now governed by such “youpins [a derogatory term for Jew] from the lower levels!”23 In January 1918 a gang of drunken soldiers beat to death two prominent Kadet politicians in their hospital beds, showing an even greater potential danger for the grand duke. Yet he was determined not to leave “unless I would be chased from my house” by life’s becoming “personally impossible.” Three months after the October Revolution, he still did not feel that that moment had arrived; he continued to remain a spectator of this chaos around him.24 This man, however, who had been so hostile to the military, now decried the disappearance of the once-loyal Russian army, which brought to him “daily shame where I cry for rage.”25 His hatred of the Germans remained unabated, as though they had caused this nightmare, and that possibly diminished his desire to leave the country. Indeed, he remarked to Brummer once, “I would prefer to perish at the hands of the Bolsheviks than to be saved by the Boches.”26 In January 1918 the Bolsheviks confiscated Nicholas Mikhailovich’s house. One day about lunchtime, a Bolshevik officer arrived and told the grand duke that his palace was being confiscated by the Soviet for the Bolsheviks, but he would be allowed to remain in the chambers he now occupied. Guards were stationed at the door so no one could pass without being inspected. As the weeks passed, the Bolsheviks working there became more and more arrogant and disrespectful.27 A second meeting with the policeman Uritsky shortly afterward was more disturbing. Nicholas Mikhailovich was summoned to him to be told that the commissar of the grand duke’s house had reported that the grand duke had bribed his palace employees by giving them wines from his cellar. Nicholas had hidden some of his better vintages, which he would hardly have given to servants, and because the cellar had been ransacked in

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December, Nicholas Mikhailovich could hardly have been guilty. He denounced the story as a lie. Uritsky rejoined that he would believe a commissar before he would believe a member of the Romanov family, but he once again allowed the grand duke to leave.28 The grand duke had always been very good to his servants and had doubtlessly given them whatever help that he could, although not presents of wine. The Bolshevik “guests” were probably concerned because of the servants’ loyalty to the grand duke, and gifts of food or any clothing would not sound as ominous as gifts of alcohol, hence the embellishment. Finally, on February 17, 1918, the grand duke was expelled, even from that part of his house in which he had been allowed to live, because his palace was to become the offices of a revolutionary tribunal. The place was plundered: The soldiers displacing him either destroyed or stole almost everything. The grand duke had to leave knowing that valuable things were hidden in the walls of his basement, unbeknownst to the new tenants. At first, he moved into the apartment of his valet until he found an apartment for himself at 11 Moika Canal, very near his old house. Even here he was hounded by the police, who searched his abode several times for weapons and correspondence. Finding nothing, they usually helped themselves instead to money or, in one case, one of the grand duke’s watches.29 Ironically, the Germans in effect retrieved the grand duke’s house for him by marching toward Petrograd following one of the breakdowns in their peace negotiations with the Bolsheviks early in 1918. Fearful that the city would fall to the enemy, the Bolshevik government evacuated the capital in March, leaving at night in an unlighted train. With them went the revolutionary tribunal, leaving the grand duke’s palace empty, although in a filthy condition. He decided to remain where he was until he could have the place cleaned and disinfected.30 The German threat to the Bolsheviks also applied to the grand duke, or so he thought. He gave some consideration to trying to escape into Finland to hide in “a forgotten village,” but did not think it possible.31 Actually, at that point, when the Bolsheviks were obsessed with the preservation of their own skins, he probably could have left the city undetected. He was not even under house arrest then. He could not be of any help to his servants at this point because he had nothing himself, and he was certainly in greater danger than they were. In the absence of evidence we can only assume that the grand duke felt, as did almost everyone else, that the Bolshevik madness would pass. He was, after all, no threat to the regime: He was only a historian and a scientist. Yet matters were becoming more serious for members of the Romanov family. Their mail was suddenly restricted. The regular post therefore

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could not be utilized; letters instead had to leave the country with anyone who might take them on their departure. For example, George sent his daughter ten or twelve at one time when a group of Russian officers was leaving the country for England.32 Nicholas Mikhailovich himself smuggled out letters with diplomats, but even that was becoming difficult. In March he told Masson in one of his increasingly rare dispatches, “The occasion to write you becomes most rare, [sic] I don’t know when the next time I will be able to give you my news.”33 Grand Duke Paul was now the senior member of the family in the capital. After his arrest and incarceration at Smolny, he was “paroled” and allowed to return to his palace at Tsarskoe Selo, just in time to watch the local Soviet plunder his wine cellar.34 Paul was seriously ill with stomach ulcers, and from this point on he spent much of his restricted life in various hospitals, the last ones attached to prisons. He was arrested for the final time on August 12, 1918. He possibly could have escaped as his wife had already done, but he had stayed behind in order to pack the family’s belongings.35 All members of the Romanov family still in Petrograd were ordered on March 16, at the departure of the Bolsheviks, to register with the local police. Then it was decided that they would be exiled internally into Russia. Uritsky, who was always polite to them to their faces, gave them a choice of Vologda, Viatka, or Perm, all east of Petrograd in eastern Russia or western Siberia. One group comprised of the sons of Constantine Constantinovich (John, Constantine, and Igor), Vladimir Paley (Grand Duke Paul’s son by his second marriage), and the empress’s sister Elizabeth (Ella, who, after her husband’s assassination in 1905, had become a nun). They eventually found themselves in Alapaevsk in western Siberia. Niki and Gogi chose Vologda, the city only 400 miles east of the capital, or about twenty-four hours by train, because Niki knew the city and because it was the nearest to St. Petersburg. Their brother Sergei chose Viatka. He was accompanied there by his domestic servant who, despite knowing of the grand duke’s economic straits, promised to take care of him. He told the grand duke, “I have some small savings; I was paid them in your service; now we are going to spend it together.”36 On learning of his order to leave the city, Nicholas Mikhailovich went to Brummer’s house to inform him and to tell him of his choice of Vologda. Niki’s servants were not allowed to go, he said, only “the little cook who consents to come with me.”37 Brummer immediately agreed to share his exile as well. At first the grand duke refused, telling his faithful aide that he needed to be with his family in these trying times. Finally, due to the insistence of Mrs. Brummer, Nicholas Mikhailovich relented

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and agreed that Brummer would accompany him into exile.38 News of the grand duke’s expulsion spread like the proverbial wildfire and seems to have caused the greatest stir because of his many acquaintances from various societies and associations. Friends and associates came by, at some personal danger, to express their condolences and bid him farewell. Some felt that the order would not be executed. One such person, the editor of a journal with ties to the prominent Bolshevik writer Maxim Gorky, looked the grand duke in the eye and asked him if he wanted to go. Nicholas Mikhailovich replied that he had no desire to do so. The editor then replied, “Then I assure you that you will not leave.” He had spoken with such certainty that the grand duke and Brummer felt comfortable that he would be able to use his connections to block his departure. As the days passed, however, with no word of any change in his orders, he gave up hope, and nothing came of the assurance.39 Even a personal request by the grand duke to Uritsky, who must have remained in Petrograd, to delay the departure at least until April 7 so that he could bid farewell to some friends and get some of his papers in order, was denied. Sergei, who had chosen Viatka as his place of exile, was the first to depart. The night before he left, he went to see Brummer and Niki. He embraced him and said, “Adieu, Koté [probably Kostia, the diminutive of Constantine].” Brummer optimistically protested, correcting the grand duke, by saying, “Not adieu, but au revoir.” The grand duke looked at both of them and said, “No, I have an intimate [innate?] conviction. We will never meet again.” He then quickly left, and indeed Nicholas Mikhailovich and his circle never saw Sergei again.40 On March 30 at exactly 1:00 PM, Nicholas Mikhailovich, Brummer, and the “little cook” arrived at the station, where they were tiresomely harassed by the police and the Red Guard. One member of the French consular staff was there to see them off. Finally the three entered their compartment on the train, accompanied by a soldier who, at the last minute, had been sent to travel with them as a domestic servant. Nicholas Mikhailovich, who at the time of the Revolution had had 400 servants, was now reduced to two, and, as it turned out, the soldier was really a spy for the Bolsheviks.41 The grand duke left knowing that the books in his library were safe as he had parceled them out to friends. Except for what clothes he took, he left Petrograd with only a couple of prize bottles of Chablis, which had escaped Bolshevik expropriation. They were the only remnants left of the privileged life he would never have again. Vologda is a city situated on a river of the same name about 400 miles east of St. Petersburg. It is one of the oldest cities in Russia and was

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known for its sixty-two churches and convents, as well as its ceramics industry. It was also one of the first stopping-off places on the road to Siberian exile. Prerevolutionary society there was very conservative as many property owners belonged to the nobility. Needless to say, it was much more backward than the capital city. It had no sidewalks around the “detestable and absolutely primitive streets,” and the city boasted only one boulevard and no real parks. When the grand duke and Brummer arrived there on March 31, 1918, there was no one at the station to meet them, a condition to which the grand duke was most certainly not accustomed, so they had to untangle their own baggage and find porters themselves.42 This “unimperial” reception made the grand duke more “deeply offended” at having to leave Petrograd.43 The new arrivals found that food availability was more than sufficient except for white bread and sugar, which had become prohibitively expensive. Every two weeks, Molodovsky sent the chauffeur Leon, who as a foreigner could travel freely, with food, letters, and newspapers from the abandoned capital. Molodovsky had managed to scrounge some money for the grand duke and distribute it for safekeeping among his friends. He had also saved some of the grand duke’s mother’s jewelry. Nicholas Mikhailovich and Brummer were lodged with a “hospitable, loveable and touching” family, headed by a young nobleman of the community who had just married. The grand duke and his aide had two small rooms, plus a minute kitchen and a cramped hall that was also occupied by two domestics of the host family. Brummer wrote Masson that “comfort doesn’t exist,” which meant that they did not have either electricity or running water, and obviously no flush toilets, but asked rhetorically, “But does one speak of physical comfort [when] having a profoundly embittered soul?” Soon after his arrival, the grand duke made a number of official calls, as was the custom of his class. The first was obligatory, a visit to the president of the Vologda Soviet, one Eliava. It was a humiliating and painful encounter, but it passed relatively well. The Soviet boss gave him a pass to circulate freely in the city, including permission to visit his cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Constantinovich, who was living with his niece, the widow of Prince C. Bagration-Mukhansky, and her two children, on the opposite bank of the river. Because the river was still frozen over, it was possible to cross on foot for a visit. The grand duke also made official visits to the various ambassadors who had fled to Vologda, those of Russia’s allies as well as Denmark and Sweden.44 Wherever the grand duke was, he always attracted visitors. The French attaché Louis de Robien had come to Vologda as well, as he felt the need to flee the Germans. The grand duke received the diplomat in one of his small rooms, “furnished more modestly,” with a plain white cloth on the

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table. De Robien remembered that as he sat “in a shabby armchair in this miserable place,” he could not help but compare it to the grand duke’s vast palace on the Neva quay in Petrograd.45 The address given was the back entrance of the grand duke’s palace on Millionnaia, probably so as not to attract attention.46 Even with what Molodovsky sent from Petrograd, funds soon became a problem for Niki, for not only had his grand ducal allowance been stopped by the Revolution, but so had any income from his estates. Borjomi had been confiscated by the local Bolsheviks, and because Grushevka was largely in the zone of occupation of the Austrian armies, there was no news of it, and certainly no income. He learned that his silver at Borjomi had been seized and his wine cellar appropriated “in the name of the people” for the national lottery.47 The grand duke’s typical day began about 8:00 AM when he rose, shaved, dressed, and had his coffee. Until noon, he read, wrote, strolled on the banks of the river, or stopped by his cousin’s house. Often in midafternoon, he went into the city to visit a museum or an old church, or to browse in an antique shop. Sometimes he went by the French “embassy” to chat with the ambassador. He would return home about 6:00 PM, dine alone at 7:00, and would then join the young host couple in the apartment for cards and tea. He usually went to bed around 11:00 PM.48 The local soviet was “sweet and polite” and allowed him to do whatever he wished as long as it was in town. He was even able to write to Masson and receive word of the other family members as they were scattered around. The local Bolsheviks, who do not seem to have controlled the local soviet, more or less left him alone, but he had begun to fear for the future the Bolsheviks (the “cursed proletariat” and the “Jews who direct them”) were paying little attention to the local soviets in the region because they were moderate and would not take orders from the Bolsheviks. Apparently, the grand duke was not even under surveillance by the police. Once, however, he suspected that a man was following him, and so he reversed himself, walked past the tail, then past him again, and yet again, amusing himself at the perceived discomfort of his prey. He even asked him the time. Suddenly, however, a young girl exited a nearby house and greeted the man, who was obviously awaiting her, and they went off together.49 The grand duke claimed in his first letter to Masson from Vologda that he had been able to maintain his good humor, but that seems to have been bravado. He had quickly exhausted his reading material and was reduced to rereading books, mostly French authors, that he had brought from Petrograd. Joseph Noulens, the French ambassador, did give him

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three months of French newspapers, and that helped somewhat to reduce the “desperate monotony” of his new exile. He wrote to Masson, “If I had the patience, not having any books of history with me, I would reread all the Russian authors from Pushkin to Dostoevsky.”50 Niki was appalled at the absence of culture among the locals, the lack of which he found “striking.” He called them “true representatives of nichevo [Russian for “nothing,” which he spelled out phonetically in the Latin alphabet] Russia.” Politically they were totally out of touch with reality. They did not understand the enormous impact of the disaster that had engulfed their country and awaited some miraculous revival and the return of “little Nicholas II.”51 The primitive nature of the town further bothered the grand duke as he would flounder about the streets often in mud up to his knees.52 His greatest cause of suffering, however, was the inaction to which he was reduced; his one consolation was the correspondence he was able to receive through the chaos of war and revolution.53 Finally in the same series of letters (he might have written daily, but because mail was not leaving daily, his letters would go in clumps), he admitted his despair. “I desire that my cry of distress, of profound despair, of an incredible suffering get to you, get to France that I adore,” he wrote, pouring his heart out to his French friend. He felt that his nation had lost all dignity, loyalty, and good sense, and had acted traitorously to its allies by signing “a miserable, reprehensible separate peace” promoted by “a group of Jews and convicts.”54 Much of the grand duke’s depression was doubtlessly due to cabin fever caused by the winter’s isolation. As spring approached and the snow melted, his mood improved. At Easter, which came late in April that year, someone sent a basket of provisions to him, and the Easter festivities seem to have given this man, in whose life religion had never played an important part, somewhat of an uplift. The churches with their candles were magnificent, and the grand duke attended services. He commented to Brummer that he could remember only one Easter more beautiful, one in the Caucasus fifteen years before. It further lifted his spirits as many people visited him during the Easter holiday, as was the Russian custom.55 In May the weather turned quite warm, and Nicholas Mikhailovich and Brummer were given space to plant a garden. They also were allowed to use a small boat in which they could cross the river to a monastery on the opposite bank. For the first time the grand duke seems to have given some thought of trying to escape by sailing down the river, but he feared that such an action would bring bad repercussions against his brothers and cousins still in detention.56 His mood further improved when his brother George appeared in Vologda in mid-April.57 Had George stayed in the small Finnish village,

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he might have survived, but he had moved into Helsinki, gotten arrested by the Finnish Communists, and was sent to Petrograd and then to Vologda. Niki received a telegram announcing his brother’s imminent arrival and asking Niki to find him an apartment, which Niki was able to do across the river near Dmitri. George came to dinner the second day he was in town, and his older brother found Gogi “in a pitiful state of nerves.”58 George had one obsession: to get to England and find his children. He wrote them daily, whether the letters could be gotten out or not, a sad means of staying in touch with loved ones he would never see again. The three grand dukes were conspicuous as they moved about the small town. George was usually dressed in a civilian overcoat and a chauffeur’s cap, looking like a member of a yacht club. Dmitri Constantinovich wore a brown Austrian waistcoat, pants of the same color, and a kepi. Niki always wore a blue civilian jacket and a khaki cap without the military cockade.59 Nicholas Mikhailovich, like many others of all political stripes, continued in the certainty that the Bolsheviks would not last. It was indeed logical to assume that this strange, obscure political group that ideologically based its power on the proletariat could not survive in a nation composed mainly of peasants. He felt that they were on the verge of falling, if only there were someone to push them over. Everyone had had enough of the Bolsheviks, he felt, but he also wondered who might give them the final shove. He did not feel the Russians capable of it and looked to foreigners, Russia’s allies, to restore order. Almost daily he and the others awaited news that some force had come into Petrograd from Finland. In fact, he was so confident it would happen that he discussed with de Robien the prospects for the restoration of a tsar, when the position would be reinstated. In June the grand duke received a letter from his brother Sergei in which he learned that he and the Constantinovichi had been transferred from Viatka to Alapaevsk in the Urals. The letter was signed “Hermelsen,” a nom de plume that his brother often used, and it was written in code. It included a message to “greet M. Kofré and le Père Lustré.” “Kofré” meant “locked up” in French, and signified that they had been “locked up” in Alapaevsk, and “le Père Lustré” was really the word “perlustré,” which means “interrupted,” conveying the idea that their correspondence had been “interrupted.” In other ways the letter told of further persecutions at Alapaevsk. All references to Nicholas II were “the little colonel,” the army rank that his father had given him. The last tsar had never promoted himself, thus the nickname.60 Sergei had stayed too long in Petrograd trying to save Kschessinska’s house. She had tried to convince

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him either to come to Kislovodsk, where she was, or to flee to Finland, but he, like other family members, was afraid that leaving the country would only further endanger Nicholas II and his family.61 Once he was in the hands of the Bolsheviks of Alapaevsk, Sergei’s fate was sealed. Nicholas Mikhailovich had decided that he would emigrate to France if and when he was released. He wondered, however, if he would be welcomed given that Russia had deserted its ally. The grand duke asked Masson to tell him “frankly your opinion [his italics] in this delicate matter.” France was the sole country to which he would want to move, but if it proved impossible, he would (“this with no enthusiasm”) choose Denmark or Switzerland.62 It is difficult to imagine that, if Nicholas Mikhailovich had ever had the opportunity to leave Russia, he would not have gained easy entrance to France, given the fame and number of friends he had there. He most likely would have easily found some sort of job there. Without any doubt he would have felt at home. Even in Vologda Nicholas Mikhailovich’s close association with France stood him in good stead after the French ambassador Noulens transferred the embassy there. Noulens was in touch with the grand duke in the frequent visits that he made to the makeshift embassy, and in May the ambassador even felt it noteworthy to report to Paris Nicholas Mikhailovich’s activities. Noulens informed the French government that in his four-month stay in Vologda, the grand duke had not been mistreated (il n’est pas molesté). He added that in this time he had come to know him well and knew of his “sincere friendship for our country.” The French ambassador concluded that, given these factors, he felt compelled to help the grand duke.63 The opportunity to provide assistance came soon enough. Early in the afternoon of July 1, while Niki and Gogi were smoking after they had finished lunch, two cars approached the side of the house. Two men, one in plain clothes, the other in uniform, alighted from the first car and a number of soldiers exited from the second. They crossed the courtyard and knocked on the door. Brummer opened it, and the civilian demanded to see the grand duke. When admitted to the dining room, he treated the two grand dukes with the utmost respect and informed them that he had been ordered by Vetochkin, the now-acting president of the Vologda Soviet, to bring the three grand dukes to the soviet. Brummer’s account states that they were being arrested on order of Uritsky, which was most probably true, and were shown a telegram to that effect.64 Grand Duke George’s wife, who was not there, but who heard from her husband frequently, stated that they were not told until they were on the way to jail that they were being arrested.65 Brummer was not allowed to accompany them to the prison, so he embraced them and went with them to the automobile that was to take them

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there. Both grand dukes waved good-bye as their auto pulled out of the courtyard and crossed the bridge on the way to Grand Duke George’s house to get his effects. The car then drove to Dmitri Constantinovich’s, but he was not home and was brought in later. From there they went to the town prison, which was two and a half miles outside the city. When Nicholas Mikhailovich waved to Brummer from across the river, the grand duke’s aide-de-camp looked at his watch. It was 2:30 PM. Nicholas Mikhailovich had gone from being a relatively free man to a prisoner in only forty minutes.66 Word spread swiftly among the grand duke’s neighbors, many of whom assembled in the courtyard. Everyone was indignant, and the women and children cried.67 The layout of the prison was in the form of a long corridor with cells on both sides. Nicholas Mikhailovich’s cell was a large room with two windows that looked out onto the courtyard. In it there was only a camp bed, which he had brought with him, and a white table against the wall. The bed was placed in the middle of the room to guard against dampness and insects. He was allowed paper, pencils, pen, ink, cigars, cigarettes, toilette articles, and his books.68 The imperial prisoners were treated very well by their jailors. They were allowed to exercise together and sit outside on benches in the courtyard. They were permitted visits by Brummer, and they could attend church services. The prison authorities even implied to them that they would shortly be freed.69 Their detention was due most probably to the numerous reverses of the Red cause around the country, the Japanese and British intervention in the Far East and the north respectively, and the anti-Soviet rebellion of the famous Czech Legion strung out along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Uritsky must have felt that any member of the imperial family was a potential threat if he or she was able to escape the watchful eyes of the Bolsheviks, hence their detention. De Robien remembered that the grand duke, except for the smell of the toilets, had no complaints,70 a condition that was clearly a first. “He is in fact most courageous and bears his misfortune like a true gentleman,” the French diplomat recorded in his diary. He added the observation that his living conditions must be a terrible burden, as only a few short months ago he had been a grand duke.71 Immediately upon his arrest, the French government interceded on Nicholas Mikhailovich’s behalf because he was a member of the French Institute.72 Noulens contacted the French consul general in Moscow to ask the Swedish consul Harald Scavenius to intervene at the request of France. De Robien was delighted that Noulens would make the effort, as the French government had acted “like cads” regarding the imperial family, although French politicians had “crawled flat on their faces” when Nicholas II had been on the throne.73

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The Soviet government’s answer came from Georgii Chicherin, the new commissar of foreign affairs, and it was quick and to the point. The new foreign minister was not typical of the Bolshevik crowd in power. A former aristocrat, an intellectual, and a pianist of concert ability, he was less of a blind ideologue than his political bedfellows. He had known of the grand duke, as all intellectuals had, and had always held him in high regard. Even though France had not recognized the government in Moscow, Chicherin replied to the request of the French diplomat that the grand duke be released. He used the excuse that “public opinion” would not allow him to free a member of the imperial family, no matter how highly regarded he might be as a historian.74 The ever-faithful Brummer went on his own to Vetochkin to try to gain the grand duke’s release. Rather condescendingly, the president of the Soviet stated that he would not explain why the grand duke had been detained, because an order from Uritsky was not to be questioned. He did, however, express puzzlement that a man of his age who had not been in revolutionary politics had been arrested, and he did agree to wire Uritsky to ask that the incarceration be reduced to “house arrest” in the grand duke’s home.75 That same day at 4:00 PM Brummer was admitted to the prison to visit the grand duke. He was struck by the enormous size of the keys to the cells. When they opened cell number 13 for him, Brummer beheld the grand duke. He seemed totally unruffled, smiled quite elegantly, and seemed completely undisturbed by the state of events. “In truth the grandson of Nicholas I,” Brummer thought.76 The grand duke had been comfortable and had been sleeping well. He insisted that Brummer thank the cook for the “most appetizing” meals that he had been sending. They had been allowed a thirty-minute meeting, but the guards gave them an extra ten minutes. After visiting Nicholas Mikhailovich, Brummer made short visits to Grand Dukes George and Dmitri, both of whom seemed to be bearing up well.77 When he tried to return the next day, however, Brummer was not permitted to enter the prison. Orders had come from Moscow for a clampdown on the jail because the “collective ambassadors,” Brummer learned, had sent a note to Moscow asking for the grand dukes’ release. Brummer had most likely learned of the French protest, as it does not seem that any other legations participated in the action. The increased surveillance was due most likely to the assassination of the German ambassador Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, the firing shot for an anti-Bolshevik uprising in Moscow led by Social Revolutionaries. The scrutiny took on a ferocious intensity, where even the food sent to the prisoners was torn apart to learn if anything was hidden in the contents, and napkins were not permitted

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at all. On Tuesday, July 9, the cook taking breakfast was able briefly to see the grand duke, who told him to tell Brummer that he was doing well and not to worry.78 Brummer again tried to obtain some leniency from the local soviet but was refused. Yet as things stabilized in Moscow and other places, relaxation of restrictions still was not given; in fact, the imperial prisoners came to be treated more and more rudely by the prison officials. Brummer had not seen the grand duke since Saturday, July 6, when on July 15 he was suddenly permitted to visit him again. But this time a guard, a Latvian, remained with them the entire time. The grand duke seemed to be fine, and the morale of Nicholas Mikhailovich, as well as the other grand dukes, was excellent. Brummer felt, however, that their good spirits were an act to prevent their friends from worrying, as the latter could do nothing.79 Meanwhile, Brummer continued to try to gain the grand duke’s release, or at least a change to “house arrest.” On July 16 he went to the Soviet again because he learned that Eliava, the actual president, had returned from his trip, and Vetochkin was no longer in charge. The president seemed to regret the arrest of the grand dukes and said that had he been there, he would have agreed to house arrest, but as the grand duke was already incarcerated, he could do nothing. The next day the Soviet did agree to allow Nicholas Mikhailovich to change his location to the prison hospital, which must have offered more pleasant accommodations. They wired Urtisky three times for permission to allow the move. Yet only silence came from Petrograd until the 18th, then the president told Brummer that Urtisky had refused any change “until new orders” were issued. There was no clarification of what this directive meant.80 What Brummer had no way of knowing at that point was that in the early morning of the day before, the tsar, the empress, and all of their children, servants, and even the family dog had been slaughtered in a cellar in the Siberian town of Ekaterinburg. Nicholas Mikhailovich was becoming terribly uncomfortable, as it was rainy and cold for mid-July, and his only cover was a travel rug. It disturbed Brummer that the grand duke seemed a bit nervous, and he feared that his imperial friend was beginning to lose hope. Brummer returned to the prison on the 19th and was permitted to spend a long time with all of the grand dukes in the courtyard. There were those who suggested that the grand duke try to escape, but he always strenuously refused. To do so would necessitate penetrating the prison with some sort of armed force, overcoming the prison guards, many of whom had been nice to him, and escaping in a stolen automobile. It would be too risky and probably impossible.81 There is some indication that Uritsky visited the German Embassy in Moscow to discuss the emigration of the grand dukes

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and the Grand Duchess Ella. At least some buzzing about this possibility circulated in Vologda, but nothing came of it.82 Whatever hope the captives might have entertained received a serious jolt when on July 20, word reached Vologda that the imperial family had been murdered. Brummer learned it when he bought a newspaper and the headlines screamed out the news in enormous letters. On the road to the prison to see the grand duke, he contemplated how to tell him this dreadful news. When Brummer finally saw his friend, he began breaking the information gently by saying that he had some sad news, and softly began telling Nicholas Mikhailovich in a roundabout way of the slayings. The grand duke looked at him fixedly, not seeming to comprehend. “What did you say?” he said, “Speak loudly. What has happened? Do you take me for an old woman?” Nicholas Mikhailovich snatched the newspaper from Brummer’s hands, read the headlines, and burst into tears. “My God! My God!” he exclaimed. “Is it possible that they have committed this crime?”83 Niki’s grief was most certainly real, but as his mind became less focused on the tragedy, he must have realized the probability that he would share the same fate. His brother George even wrote to his family in England, “I cannot be sure they will not do the same to us.”84 What he still did not know was that Mikhail Alexandrovich, the “Tsarfor-a-day,” had already been shot in the night of June 12 outside Perm.85 There followed the inevitable rumors that the family had not died, or that some of the family had survived.86 One had the tsarevich being shot after having been told that his father had been killed. Another had the imperial family in Spain, and so forth.87 These tales must have given some hope to which the grand dukes might cling. The rumors may well have kept them going. Yet unknown to Niki when he received the terrible news of his cousins was that his own brother Sergei had been killed two days after the tsar when he was shot and thrown down a sixty-foot mine shaft with other members of the family at Alapaevsk.88 When Sergei was finally detained by the Bolsheviks, he had chosen Viatka, not Vologda, as his place of exile along with three of the Constantinovichi: John, Constantine, and Igor, and the young Prince Vladimir Paley, the son of Grand Duke Paul by his second marriage. He had even been able to write Niki postcards from his exile, but in mid-May, they were all transferred to Alapaevsk near Ekaterinburg in the Urals, where they were joined by Ella, who, upon the death of her husband, had become a nun. Housed in a school outside of town, they were given a measure of freedom, even including permission to mix with the locals and check out books from the public library.89 Yet two days after the murder of Nicholas II and his family, they

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were all taken to the isolated mine shaft and thrown in. Timbers were thrown in after them. Many of them took days to die from injuries suffered in the fall, as well as from thirst and hunger. Sergei resisted and was shot in the head before being thrown into the shaft.90 Other reports had it that Sergei had merely been thrown in while conscious.91 In either case, Sergei was the first of the Mikhailovichi to die in the Revolution. It is doubtful that his eldest brother ever learned of his fate. While Brummer was comforting the grand duke about the death of the tsar, a jailor arrived to announce that Uritsky had ordered the grand dukes to return to Petrograd, and that their departure had been fixed for noon the next day. They were given no details except that the servants would be allowed to accompany them. Brummer spent most of the night packing Nicholas Mikhailovich’s belongings, and the cook prepared food for the journey. After going to bed at 4:00 AM, Brummer was already at the prison at 8:00 AM to give the grand duke his belongings and some money. He met the grand dukes again at the Vologda train station at 11:00 AM. They were already confined to their compartment with their escorts: four soldiers and the secretary of the Vologda Soviet. To see the grand dukes off to Petrograd on Sunday, July 21, were de Robien, a number of the French “embassy” staff, Brummer, and Léon, who could hardly keep back the tears. De Robien was able to approach the window of the grand duke’s car and shake his hand. He felt that Niki’s time in prison had greatly aged him and that he looked very tired. A commissar, whom de Robien described as “one of the most unsympathetic people I have ever met,” approached the carriage and drove him and others away. When the crowd showed sympathy for the grand dukes, the commissar relented and allowed the well-wishers to approach the train again. De Robien told the grand duke that Noulens was doing all that he could. Nicholas Mikhailovich asked him to keep Masson informed of his whereabouts. He also spoke of the assassination of the emperor, which was clearly a terrible blow to him. Because of that horror, Nicholas Mikhailovich had few illusions about his own future.92 Writing in his diary that night, de Robien described their concern: “We all had heavy hearts. . . . What is going to become of them?!”93 Brummer embraced his master and friend for the last time and watched the train as it departed from the station. The imperial prisoners arrived in Petrograd that same day. The secretary of the French Embassy, M. Gentile, was able to have a few words with Nicholas Mikhailovich before he was whisked away to the Kresty Prison, an institution that remains in full vigor to this day. The prisoners were put six to a cell.94 On the day after the grand dukes’ departure from Vologda, Brummer received permission (he calls it a “passport”) to follow

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the grand duke to Petrograd, and he arrived there in the early afternoon of Tuesday, July 23. By that time the grand dukes had been transferred to Spalernaia Prison, where they would remain for most of the remainder of their incarceration.95 They were eventually told that they had been detained for their own protection and as hostages for Karl Liebknecht and Victor Adler,96 prominent German and Austrian Social Democrats respectively, the latter of whom, curiously, was not under arrest but serving quite openly in the Austrian Reichstag. Here each had his own private cell, if only seven feet long and three feet wide. Their only furniture was a hard iron bed. They were permitted to exercise a half hour to forty-five minutes twice a day, although the personal contact allowed in Vologda was denied them here at first. Their warders, all of whom were soldiers, treated them well; they even helped the grand dukes smuggle out letters. Shortly after their imprisonment, Grand Duke Paul was brought to join them in this place. Gavrill Constantinovich also joined their company. After several days they were all allowed to gather in the courtyard and were permitted some provisions from the outside such as fresh linens, cigarettes, and in the case of Niki, his favorite cigars. At 4:00 PM they were all allowed to assemble in the hall where there were windows facing the street. Brummer came each day to the street opposite the windows, and from there he could greet the grand duke, who waved at him with the omnipresent cigar in his mouth.97 Their day began at 7:00 AM when they were awakened by the steps in the hall of their jailors and the clank of the keys in the door. Lunch was served at 12:00 noon, which consisted of dirty hot water with a few fish bones in it. They were given only black bread, white bread having become a thing of the past.98 The small electric light was turned on in the cells at 7:00 PM, although as the winter approached, the prisoners had to sit in darkness until that time. The grand dukes’ whereabouts were generally well known to the world at large, even if the details were often incorrect. A French newspaper, apparently dated August 2, 1918, told of the grand dukes’ imprisonment, stating incorrectly that they were being kept in Smolny Institute, the headquarters of the Bolshevik Party, probably confusing Spalernaia with Smolny. The article told its readers that they “had been treated with great deference,” had been given “the right [?] to eat,” and had been allowed reading material. The paper reported that there was some great legal procedure against them that could be heard by the Council of War, whatever that was supposed to have been.99 The meetings of the grand dukes during exercise continued, giving them the opportunity to exchange a few words. Gavrill Constantinovich

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thought it strange to see his relatives in prison garb because he had all his life seen them in military uniforms, and now they were almost unrecognizable to him.100 On the day Gavrill arrived as a prisoner, he went at the first opportunity to see Nicholas Mikhailovich. The grand duke was surprised to see his younger relative because he had thought that Gavrill had escaped. The two did not see as much of each other as they might have because they were incarcerated on separate floors.101 Niki seems to be the only one to leave his cell for reasons other than exercise. He would use the excuse to go to the toilet to stop at the windows and chat and joke with the guards.102 An officer told Brummer “a thousand details” on the captivity of the grand duke, which generally stressed the serenity with which the grand duke accepted his prison life.103 Brummer virtually worshiped Nicholas Mikhailovich, however, and his view was most likely somewhat clouded. Princess Paley, who came often to the prison to see her husband Grand Duke Paul, developed some sort of working relationship with Treulieb, the commissar of Spalernaia. Paul gave his wife a different story, which frankly has a truer ring to it. He told her that of all the grand dukes, Nicholas Mikhailovich was the only one who was difficult to manage. When they took exercise, he kept shouting out and misbehaving, and in the evenings when there were orders to extinguish lights, the grand duke relit his lamp to read and write. When Treulieb said something to him about it, the grand duke called him a durak (fool). His behavior, she felt, did not help the situation of the grand dukes, an opinion shared by Grand Duke Paul.104 One unexpected source of hope came from the great Russian writer Maxim Gorky. Although a Bolshevik sympathizer, he was opposed to senseless killing and had come to see the Revolution not as a true revolution but as a “zoological outburst of violence and destruction” that was bringing the country to “a new age of barbaric chaos.”105 He saw the Romanovs as victims who were “poor scapegoats of the Revolution, martyrs to the fanaticism of the times.”106 Moreover, he knew of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s scholarly work and admired it. In addition, Gorky’s second wife knew personally Grand Duke Sergei Nicholaevich. Princess Paley visited Gorky’s luxurious apartment on Kronverksky Prospekt to plead for his help. The great writer was sick and received her while in bed. He promised to intercede for her husband but did not conceal the difficulties that he would face. He assured her that he would travel to Moscow in mid-January to put their plight before Lenin,107 and true to his word, toward the end of January, Gorky left for Moscow to try to gain the release of the hapless grand dukes. Nicholas Mikhailovich learned of the great writer’s efforts, and mentioned them in his last letter to Masson. The grand duke was hopeful,

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saying that there was a “glimmer of a chance” of getting out of prison because some influential people, “among others Maxim Gorky,” were working with ardor for their cause. He was surprised at Gorky’s efforts because the grand duke did not personally know the writer. He even allowed himself to muse about where he would go on being released. He felt that he would first visit his niece at Amalienborg near Copenhagen, and perhaps go from there to Paris.108 There are several, probably incorrect, versions of Gorky’s visit to Lenin to ask for clemency. The one most frequently quoted is that Lenin replied, when Gorky pled for the life of Nicholas Mikhailovich the historian, “The Revolution has no need for historians.”109 Actually, Gorky apparently succeeded in gaining Lenin’s signature on an order saving the grand dukes. The account is secondhand, but it is more authoritative than much of the information on the actual execution. The wife of a Dr. Manukhin, who had befriended Gorky in the past, recorded that Gorky told Manukhin that, after getting Lenin’s signature on the document, he rushed to the train station to return to Petrograd. On the platform, however, he picked up a newspaper whose headlines rang out: “ROMANOVS SHOT!” Gorky was stunned. He boarded the train and remembered nothing that followed. When he awoke in the middle of the night, he was alone in the car on a siding in Klin.110 Did the Chekha, suspecting that Lenin would save the grand dukes’ lives, act before they could get the order not to kill them? Did Lenin change his mind? It is a question that is likely to remain forever unanswered. In February 1919 Sandro, who had escaped from southern Russia with his mother-in-law and other relatives, was staying at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, awaiting the beginning of the Paris Peace Conference. He was to be, in effect, the representative of tsarist Russia, the position his brother had sought to fill. One morning he came down to the restaurant in the hotel and noticed that a hush fell over the dining room just as he entered. He wondered if something was wrong with his clothing. He read his mail at the table thinking that it might indicate something, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. He then turned to his newspaper. A badly smudged picture of men wearing the uniform of the Imperial Guards caught his attention. He could not recognize their faces, but then his eye caught the headlines: “Four Russian Grand Dukes Shot.” The subheadline read, “Grand Dukes Nicholas, George, Paul, and Dmitri, two brothers and two cousins of the Grand Duke Alexander, who is at present here, were executed by the Soviets in St. Petersburg Yesterday.” The article was brief, only adding that the grand dukes’ place of internment had “not

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been disclosed by the Soviet government.” Sandro sat in stunned silence. He had just lost two brothers.111 He had also lost two lifelong friends. That night Grand Duke Alexander attended a dinner party at the home of the Duchess de Broglie. All the other guests were surprised that he had come, and some were tactless enough to ask, “You here?” To this question this grand duke replied, “Why not?” and let it go at that. He felt that there would have been no point in explaining to them that no firing squad in the world could “extinguish that spark of immortal energy and eternal human effort” that was known as Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich of Russia. He came under some criticism that he had “drunk champagne and danced” while his murdered brothers were being buried in a potter’s field. The grand duke found his critics pitiful. They felt him a savage.112 A contemporary Russian historian of the imperial family has written, without giving his source, that Nicholas Mikhailovich had predicted that he would die “one dark, raw night, a few paces from the ponderous graves of my ancestors.”113 If indeed the grand duke did make the statement, it was merely another one of his many predictions to come true, for on the freezing night of January 27–28, Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, his brother George, and his relatives Grand Dukes Paul and Dmitri Constantinovich were taken from their cells in Spalernaia to the Petropavlovsky Fortress, ironically within perfect view from the window of the grand duke’s study in the palace across the river. Exactly why they were executed is unclear. It was probably partially in retaliation for the killing of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in the Spartakist putsch in Berlin earlier that month.114 Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party newspaper, expressing righteous indignation on January 18, 1919, had announced in large headlines the deaths of the German Communists in the failed Spartakist uprising.115 Brummer had heard rumors that the grand dukes had been condemned to death. Yet he also heard that A. V. Lunacharsky, the first Soviet commissar of education (euphemistically called “commissar of enlightenment”), had gone to Moscow to obtain their pardon from the government and that the Soviet government had wired the authorities in Petrograd to spare them. Gregoryi Zinoviev, chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and party boss of Petrograd, was opposed to any clemency, Brummer learned, and he held the telegram and ordered their execution anyway.116 Possibly the only pardon was the one obtained by Gorky. Whatever political alchemy resulted in their executions, it was, to quote Sandro, “a useless slaughter.”117

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Neither the rather ineffectual George nor the hawkish, misogynist theologian Dmitri had ever played any role in politics. Paul, a handsome, kindhearted gentleman cared only for his happy marriage and his private life. His health was so poor that he was probably going to die soon anyway, certainly given the conditions under which he was jailed in the Gorokhovaia Prison hospital, which lacked decent air and any medicine. At the time of the murders, he was so weak that he could not even stand.118 Princess Bariatinsky recorded in her memoirs, incorrectly as it turned out, that “it was said” that Nicholas Mikhailovich was in such poor health that he had to be carried to his place of execution.119 No known eyewitness has left an account of the executions. The history given here is based on versions that are derived from rumor and secondhand information, and some have an overly dramatic air about them. They all, however, have a similar ring. Brummer wrote that it was not until some years later in Paris when he encountered the grand duke’s bailiff did he get the truth. The man had succeeded in fleeing from Petrograd and claimed to have learned what happened from “reliable sources.” At 11:30 PM on the night of January 28 (probably the night of January 27–28), the grand dukes were awakened and told that they would be leaving Spalernaia and to take their baggage. They assumed that they were being transported to Moscow. Niki even thought that they might be set free and said so to George, to which George replied that it was also possible that they may be taken somewhere to be shot. Niki expressed the opinion that he did not think so as no one was interested in their death. George was not so certain, and upon leaving he told a prison guard who had been rather suitably disposed to them that if he ever encountered any members of George’s family, tell them that he kissed them. Niki took with him a cat he had acquired in prison with which he shared the meager rations given to him three times a week. By some account, the cat was a Persian he had taken with him to prison, but there is no mention of a cat by anyone before that night. The grand dukes were taken outside, loaded into a truck that already held four common criminals and six Red Guardsmen (by one account, six bound sailors and four guardsmen), and at 1:20 AM on January 28, they left the prison, having been ordered to leave their baggage. They drove toward the river by the Field of Mars, where the truck stalled. While the driver was trying to restart it, one of the convicts tried to run and was simply shot in the back as he fled. The truck eventually began running again, and they drove across the Troitsky Bridge to the Petropavlovsky Fortress, directly across the river from the grand duke’s house. They were rather roughly pushed from the truck into the Trubetskoy Bastion. They

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were then told to remove their shirts and coats, despite the fact that it was almost twenty degrees below zero. By then they had no doubt what was about to occur, and the grand dukes embraced each other for the last time. At this point Nicholas Mikhailovich began speaking to his executioners. Brummer’s informant did not hear what he said, but it was clear that it affected the soldiers. Some different soldiers appeared carrying another person, whom the grand dukes finally recognized as their cousin Paul. He had lost so much weight and looked so bad that they almost did not recognize him. They were then each escorted arm-in-arm with a soldier on each side toward a trench that had been dug in the courtyard. One of the soldiers cruelly said, “What an honor for us! Here we are arm-in-arm with some grand dukes.”120 As they passed the Petropavlovsky Cathedral, where so many Romanovs were interred, the grand dukes removed their hats and crossed themselves. At that point one of the soldiers said to them, “All of your mannerisms do not change the fact that we are going to shoot you, and we are not going to bury you under slabs of marble, but under some slabs of wood.”121 The prisoners were lined up before the ditch in which there were already thirteen bodies, with Nicholas Mikhailovich still carrying his cat. As the preparations were being made, the cynical Niki was cracking oneliners with his executioners. He asked one of the soldiers to please care for the cat, hugged it one last time, and released it, saying to its new owner, “Take care of it well in memory of me.”122 All of the grand dukes faced death with the greatest of courage. George and Dmitri quietly prayed, Dmitri for the forgiveness of his murderers. Niki, Gogi, and Dmitri were killed with the same blast. Paul was shot on a stretcher (by one account lying on the ground) because he was unable to stand. We have no clue what Niki’s last thoughts were. Being the cynic that he was, he probably just dismissed it as a rotten piece of luck. He certainly died courageously, defying his captors as he had defied his enemies all of his life. As payment for their service, the executioners received a book and half a loaf of bread. One of the men boasted of having removed George’s boots.123 The execution was not kept a secret. An announcement even appeared in Pravda under the title “Execution of the Romanov Grand Dukes.” The article, published on page three, was short and can be fully quoted here: “Under the order of the Supreme Commissar for the Struggle against Counter-revolution and Speculation, the following grand dukes were shot: Paul Alexandrovich, Nicholas Mikhailovich, Dmitri Constantinovich, and George Mikhailovich.” No date was given for their execution. In a curious

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piece of irony that would probably have made the grand duke himself roar with laughter, the article in Pravda that announced the grand dukes’ execution appeared, certainly by chance, under an article entitled, “Our Struggle with Unemployment.”124

Imperial Legacy

I’ll never again be alone as I’ve been all these years. I’ll always have my idea at my side! I’ll never betray it! —Fyodor Dostoevsky1

Almost none of the prominent Romanovs who fell into the clutches of the Bolsheviks survived the Revolution, Prince Gavrill Constantinovich being the sole exception. Not only did he escape a Bolshevik firing squad, he lived to write a book about the family.2 Yet those who where identified and captured were not so fortunate. Fourteen were killed in the six days between July 13 and July 18, all dying gruesome deaths.3 Prince Constantine, thrown into the mine shaft with Sergei’s body, died an agonizing death from wounds, thirst, and starvation. When his body was removed, Constantine’s mouth and stomach were full of dirt he had eaten to try to assuage his hunger.4 Some obscure descendants of illegitimate lines and relatives with names other than Romanov survived, however, and lived during the Soviet period in great fear of being discovered. A few still reside in Russia today and are celebrities because of their lineage, since there has been some revival of interest in the Romanovs after glasnost’. Several monarchist societies now openly exist in Russia, where some sound history is being written on the former imperial family.5

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Sandro was able to get his mother-in-law and sister-in-law Olga to the Crimea, where they and the Youssoupovs were first proffered evacuation by the retreating German troops in 1918. When a German colonel came to extend the offer to save them, no member of the family at first would even go speak with him.6 They ultimately declined the German invitation and were eventually transported from Russia by the British navy, the dowager empress departing in HMS Marlborough.7 Of their vast wealth and holdings in their native land, they escaped with only some of the dowager empress’s jewelry, with which she steadfastly refused to part, some jewelry of Irina Youssoupov, and two of the Rembrandts from the Youssoupov collection. Short of cash on their arrival in Marseille, the Youssoupovs had to travel to Paris with the hoi polloi in a second-class railway carriage, carrying their jewels and their Rembrandts.8 The two Youssoupov Rembrandts, The Man in a Large Hat, and Woman with a Fan, eventually became part of the collection of Joseph Widener and now are part of the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The Vladimirovichi all escaped. Kirill, the first Romanov to go over to the Revolution, had also been the first to flee. Maria Pavlovna and several sons left from the south in 1920. She passed away shortly afterward of natural causes in the south of France, the first Romanov to die in exile. Kirill proclaimed himself tsar in the 1920s, and then various pro and con factions developed within the family, the most prominent being the one around Niki’s old nemesis, Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich. The various Romanovs sometimes found sinecures in the West because various establishments wanted to boast having a member of the Russian imperial family on their staffs. None was able to live as well as they had in Russia, and many lived in straitened circumstances. Youssoupov sold his Rembrandts for about a half million dollars and then tried to live on the money more or less as he had in Russia. Needless to say, it did not last. When he died, he was living in an apartment over a stable in Paris. He and his wife did get an occasional taste of their former life when they now and then received an invitation to dine with the duke and duchess of Windsor. The descendants of the first Romanov immigrants, however, adjusted well to life in the West, becoming businesspeople, naval and army officers, stockbrokers, bankers, and generally productive members of society. Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, the playboy assassin, had a son in immigration who at this writing is the elected mayor of Palm Beach, Florida. Sandro, the only one of the Mikhailovichi to survive the Revolution, wrote two volumes of memoirs (one may have been ghosted), made lecture tours in Europe and the United States, and left his wife Ksenia for another woman, whom he never married. He has many de-

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scendants around the world. His son graciously agreed to two interviews with this author on his family, and his grandson Prince Andrei Andreevich has been helpful in several telephone interviews. It is proverbial that a prophet is an outcast in his own country, and one is hard pressed to demonstrate a better example than our subject Nicholas Mikhailovich. In 1981, when the Orthodox Church canonized as “new martyrs” members of the Romanov family who had been killed by the Bolsheviks, it denied the honor to Uncle Bimbo. The ecclesiastical reason was that the grand duke had been “a socialist, an atheist, and a Mason.” He was indeed liberal, but he was no socialist. He may have been a Mason or even an atheist, but there is no real evidence that he was either, and usually Masons are not atheists. In obtaining its “evidence” of these grand ducal shortcomings, the church could only have relied on sixty-year-old gossip. Moreover, the reasoning in this decision violated the church’s own rules, which state that martyrs are to be forgiven their earthly sins.9 Even six decades after his death, his country’s national church denied him his honor. The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin once observed that he would live forever through his writings. Nicholas Mikhailovich could well make the same claim. His histories of early nineteenth century Russia, based on their wealth of archival materials, became indispensable for the period until the collapse of the Soviet Empire opened the long-sealed archives of the Russian nation. They remain even today extremely valuable sources for historians of the period. What is more, his encouragement of the national development of local historical collections provided the genesis of the vast provincial archival network in Russia today. When contemporary Russians eat mandarini (tangerines) from the Caucasus and the Crimea, they are enjoying the fruits, both literally and figuratively, of the grand duke’s interest in pomology. His work on butterflies still today remains an important, respected source book and has received praise from the eminent, and very critical, lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov. Where he tried but left no permanent mark was in politics, but then almost no Russian reformers of any time can say that they have. Nicholas Mikhailovich’s suggestions for liberal political change, had they been adopted, however, would have spared Russia the Revolution and its horrible aftermath. His prescience—his uncanny ability to see the future— was wasted on the country he tried to reform, no matter how hard he hoped to guide, or even force his reforms. In a monarchy whose legal system was based on human rights with a government chosen by democratic means, he would have been a giant, probably outshining the monarch himself. Yet he sadly achieved his greatest lifetime glory and acclaim

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not in his native Russia but in France, a nation that tends to idolize its own. In his lifetime this belaia vorona was regarded as such an oddity that he was shunned and even ridiculed by his family, somewhat like the clubfooted Roman emperor Claudius, also a historian. Yet Nicholas Mikhailovich is the only member of his contemporary family to leave behind an admirable legacy: his considerable body of scholarship that has been respected ever since his death, even by Soviet intellectuals. It was the fate of this “white crow,” however, not to be born in enlightened France or democratic England but in the backward Russia of his day, where his scholarly talents went largely unappreciated in his time by his own people and his political ideas were met with scorn. Yet he and he alone among the Romanov family left a mark that will live even beyond this present day. As an interesting postscript to the grand duke’s life, and perhaps the beginning of a recognition by his own people, Tatiana Bobyleva, a spokesperson for the the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office officially announced in June of 1999 the formal rehabilitation of Nicholas Mikhailovich and the three other members of the Romanov family executed in the Petropavlovsky Fortress on that “dark, raw night” in January 1919. The pronouncement stated that a document on their rehabilitation would be given to Leonida Gregorievna, the wife of the late “Grand Prince” Vladimir Kirillovich Romanov.10 Presumably by now it has been done.

Notes

ABBREVIATIONS AMAE ARR

Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères Arkhiv russkoi revoliutskii

BSP GARF

Bibliothèque Slave de Paris Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Russkoi Federatsii

KA

Krasnyi arkhiv

MFA MN

Ministry of Foreign Affairs Mikhail Nicholaevich

MM N II i V. K.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Nikolai II i velikie kniaz’ia

NM OF

Nicholas Mikhailovich Olga Feodorovna

CHAPTER 1 1. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1946), 15. 2. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed (New York: New American Library, 1962), 230. 3. Percival Gibbon, “What Ails Russia?” McClure, 24 (November 1905), 615.

252

Notes

4. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov in his London home, May 1971. 5. Gibbon, 613. 6. Ibid., 615. 7. Ibid., 613–614. 8. Alexander, Grand Duke, Once a Grand Duke (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1932), 21. 9. Sergei Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte (London: Fertig, 1921), 40 (ed. Yarmolinsky). 10. “Appanages de la Maison impériale des Romanofs, E:URSS, Z, 819: 2– 3, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, France. 11. Ibid., 3–4. 12. Russia was still on the Julian calendar, which was twelve days behind the Gregorian in the nineteenth century, thirteen days in the twentieth. Dates in this work are given in both forms, depending on the situation. Occasionally both will be given at once (e.g., April 14/26, 1859). 13. Prince David Chavchavadze, The Grand Dukes (New York: Atlantic International Publications, 1990), 171; A. A. Mossolov, At the Court of the Last Tsar (London: Methuen, 1935), 271. 14. W. Bruce Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 317. 15. Peter I. Zaionchkovsy, The Russian Autocracy under Alexander III, trans., David R. Lane (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1976), 23; Victor Chernov, The Great Russian Revolution, trans. and abridged by Philip E. Moseley (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936), 13. 16. Mossolov, 92. 17. Chavchavadze, 73. 18. Ibid., 73–74. 19. Clipping of a book page entitled “K stoletiu voennago ministerstva,” n.d., Nicholas Mikhailovich fond, f. 670, op. 1, d. 1, 58, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Russkoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), Moscow; see also a clipping from Kavkaz, 7 April 1863, f. 670, op. 1, d. 1, 58. 20. Gavrill Konstantinovich, V mramornom dvortse. (New York: Chekov, 1955), 38. 21. George, Grand Duchess (Marie Gregorevra), Memoirs (New York: Atlantic International Publishers, 1988), 136. 22. Grand Duchess Marie, The Education of a Princess (New York: Viking, 1931), 50–51. 23. Memoir, Princess Barbara Dolgorouki Collection, 41, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. 24. Nadine Wonlar-Larsky, The Russia That I Loved (London: MacSwinney, 1937), 94. 25. Ibid. 26. Alexander, Once, 238. 27. Francis Vogel, “The Pampas and the Caucasus,” 126. I am indebted to Ms. Jesse Sherrer of Macon, Georgia, for giving me access to her grandfather’s memoir manuscript. The original was written in German in the old script and

Notes

253

was translated and typed by Vogel’s daughter Hildegard Vogel. The German original and a copy of the typed translation were given by Ms. Sherrer to the Bakhmetev Arkhive at Columbia University. 28. Ibid., 144–145. 29. A. A. Polovtsov, Dnevnik gosudarstvennogo sekretaria A. A. Polovtsova (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “nauka,” 1966), 1: 181. 30. Zaionchkovsky, 21–22. 31. Ibid., 21–23. 32. Alexander, Once, 119. 33. Ibid., 20. 34. Ibid. 35. Ivor Livingstead, “The Downfall of a Dynasty,” 13–16, Ivor Livingstead Collection, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. 36. Nicholas Mikhailovich (hereafter NM) to Mikhail Nicholaevich (hereafter MN), 3 May 1866, f. 670, op. 1, d. 124, GARF, Moscow. 37. MN to NM, 26 October 1866, f. 670, op. 1, d. 147, GARF, Moscow. 38. MN to NM, ? October, 1866, f. 670, op. 1, d. 147, GARF, Moscow. 39. MN to NM, 10 May 1867, f. 670, op. 1, d. 149, GARF, Moscow. 40. NM to MN (Papa), 21 April/3 May, 1870, f. 670, op. 1, d. 124, GARF, Moscow. 41. NM to MN (Papa), 24 March 1870 (?), f. 670, op. 1, d. 124, GARF, Moscow. 42. NM to MN (Papa), 25 November 1870, f. 670, op. 1, d. 124, GARF, Moscow. 43. Olga Feodorovna (hereafter OF) to NM, 5 January 1887, f. 670, op. 1, d. 152, GARF, Moscow. 44. Sergei Witte, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Gos. Izdat., 1960), 1: 304; Alexandre Tarsaidzé, Katia, Wife Before God (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 52. 45. Helene Izvolsky, No Time to Grieve (Philadelphia: Winchell, 1985), 97. 46. Alix (Wify) to Niki (Nicholas II), 4 November 1916, Nicholas II Collection, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1157, reel 4, GARF, Moscow. 47. OF to NM, 4 September 1888, f. 670, op. 1, d. 156. 48. See her letters to her son in f. 670, passim; Chavchavadze, 74. 49. Chavchavadze, 183. 50. Ibid., 190, quotes Alexander, Once, giving no page number. 51. Agnes (Barrow) Stoeckl, Baroness de Not All Vanity, ed. George Kinnaird (London: Murray, 1950), 56–57. 52. Polovtsov, 1: 321. 53. OF to NM, 1 September 1883, f. 670, op. 1, 156; on her general favoritism, see Polovtsov, 1: 343. 54. “I write Mama every day,” he wrote to his father, NM to MN (Papa), 19 March 1872, f. 670, op. 1, d. 124. 55. NM to OF, 10 October 1882 (?), f. 670, op. 1, d. 120. 56. NM to OF, 27 August 1888, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121. 57. NM to OF, 27 May 1887, f. 670, op. 1, d. 120. 58. NM to OF, 16 February 1873, f. 670, op. 1, d. 118.

254

Notes

59. OF to NM, 26 September 1868, f. 670, op. 1, d. 150. 60. OF to NM, 29 July 1877, op. 1, d. 150. 61. “I’ve ceased to be constipated, or not so bad,” she wrote in 1884, OF to NM, 5 September 1884, f. 670, op. 1, d. 151, GARF, Moscow. 62. Telegram from OF to NM, 13 April 1866, f. 670, op. 1, d. 155, GARF, Moscow. 63. OF to NM, 31 August 1886, f. 670, op. 1, d. 152, GARF, Moscow. 64. OF to NM, 26 September 1868, f. 670, op. 1, d. 150, GARF, Moscow. 65. OF to NM, 14 September 1868, f. 670, op. 1, 150, GARF, Moscow. 66. Kavkaz is quoting an article in Donskoi Vestnik about the visit, 5 January 1867, f. 670, op. 1, d. 60, GARF, Moscow. 67. Kavkaz, 1 October 1871, f. 670, op. 1, d. 62, GARF, Moscow. 68. Ibid., 26 September 1871, GARF, Moscow 69. OF to NM, 5 January 1887, f. 670, op. 1, d. 152, GARF, Moscow. 70. Copy of Kavkaz article, 18 April 1863, f. 670, op. 1, d. 58, GARF, Moscow. 71. Ibid. 72. Baron Rosen, Forty Years of Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 1922), 2: 141. 73. Chavchavadze, 74. 74. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 75. Alexander, Once, 146. 76. Ibid., 41. 77. Ibid., 49. 78. Mossolov, 92. 79. Mathilde Kschessinska, Dancing in St. Petersburg (London: Gollancz, 1960), 30. 80. Vogel memoir, 125. 81. Stoeckl, 56. 82. Ibid. 83. Alexander, Once, 21. 84. Kschessinska, 40. 85. Alexander, Once, 43. 86. See her correspondence with the tsar, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1154, and that with her brother, f. 670, op. 1, d. 158, GARF, Moscow. 87. Anastasia to NM, 3 March, 1873, f. 670, op. 1, d. 158, GARF, Moscow. 88. Anastasia to Nicky (Nicholas II), 22 August/4 September 1914, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1154, GARF, Moscow. 89. Charles Graves, Royal Riviera (London: Heinemann, 1957), 88. 90. Alexander, Once, 149; Chavchavadze, 177. 91. Chavchavadze, 177. 92. NM to Nicholas II, 16 November 1912, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow. 93. Vogel memoir, p. 126. 94. Chavchavadze, 183. 95. Chavchavadze, 183; one source states that he donated it to the

Notes

255

Alexander III Museum in St. Petersburg. Serge Smirnoff, Autour de l’Assassinat des Grands-ducs (Paris: Payot, 1928), 91. 96. Marie (Grand Duke George), 175; Alexander, Once, 88. 97. Mossolov, 93. 98. Gavrill, 124. 99. Russian Court Memoirs, 1914–1916 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916?), 113. 100. Ibid.; Chavchavadze, 190. 101. Chavchavadze, 198. 102. Cyril, Grand Duke My Life in Russia’s Service—Then and Now (London: Selwin and Blount, 1939), 31. 103. Alexander to NM, 28 May 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 159, GARF, Moscow. 104. Alexander to NM, 5 June 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 159, GARF, Moscow. 105. Alexander, Always a Grand Duke (New York: Farrar and Reinhart, 1933), see Preface. 106. Vladimir I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1939), 260. 107. Clipping from Kavkaz, 13 September (Old Style), 1869, f. 670, op. 1, d. 61, GARF, Moscow; see also the September 25 clipping. 108. Vladimir Mikhailovich Bezobrazov, Diary of the Commander of the Russian Imperial Guard, 1914–1917 (Boynton Beach, FL: Dramco Publishers, 1994), 58 n. 109. Chavchavadze, 203. 110. Alexander, Once, 150. 111. Jacques Ferrand, Romanoff: Un album de Familie (Paris: n.p., 1989), quotes General Spiridovich, no footnote, 184. 112. Chavchavadze, 203. 113. Marie (Grand Duke George), 80. 114. Kschessinska, 53, 56, 77. 115. NM to Masson, 21 October/3 November 1914, Bibliothèque Slave de Paris (hereafter BSP), France. 116. Ibid. 117. Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Romanov Papers, passim, The Hoover Institution, Palo Alto, CA. 118. Alexander, Once, 24. 119. Polovtsov, 2: 59. 120. Russkii invalid, nos. 44 and 46, February 22 and 27, 1895, f. 670, op. 1, d. 70, GARF, Moscow. 121. Alexander, Once, 40. 122. Ibid., 15. 123. Ibid., 16. 124. “L. N. Tolstoi i N. M. Romanov,” Krasnyi arkhiv (hereafter KA), 21 (1927), 238. 125. Nicholas Mikhailovich, “Zapiski N. M. Romanova,” KA, 49 (1931), 103. 126. Constantine Brummer, “Les derniers jours du Grand-duc Nicholas Mikhailovich,” Revue des Deux Mondes, 6 (November 15, 1921), 241; Grand

256

Notes

Duc Nicholas Mikhailovich, La Fin du Tsarisme: Lettres inédites à Frédéric Masson (Paris: Payot, 1968), 8; Ferrand quotes Spiridovich, 184. 127. NM to OF, 16 February 1873, f. 670, op. 1, d. 118, GARF, Moscow. 128. NM to OF, 24 February 1873, f. 670, op. 1, d. 118, GARF, Moscow. 129. NM to OF, 11 March 1873, f. 670, op. 1, d. 118, GARF, Moscow. 130. As in his correspondence with Vladimir Lamsdorf, the minister of the interior, especially the letter dated 20 April 1902, Lamsdorf Papers, f. 568, op. 1, d. 662, GARF, Moscow. 131. “Tetrad s notami,” n.d., f. 670, op. 1, d. 482, GARF, Moscow. 132. Alexander, Once, 21. 133. Alexander to NM, 8 September 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 159, GARF, Moscow. 134. Alexander, Once, 18–19. 135. Ibid., 17. 136. Polovtsov, 1: 81. 137. Ibid., 187. 138. Chavchavadze, 190, quotes Polovtsov, giving no page number. 139. Alexander, Once, 18–19. 140. Mossolov, 76. 141. Kschessinska, 33. 142. Alexander, Once, 137. 143. Kschessinska, 57. 144. Olga, Grand Duchess, The Last Grand Duchess: Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna (New York: Scribner’s, 1964), 45. 145. “Sans retour,” 60–61, Mariia K. Shevich Collection, Bakhmetev Arkhive, Columbia University, NY. 146. Marie, Education, 278. 147. Mossolov, 79. 148. Anna Vyrubova, Memoirs of the Russian Court (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 86. 149. Alexander, Once, 41, 140–41. 150. Telegram of OF to NM, 17 (?) April 1873, f. 670, op. 1, d. 155, GARF, Moscow. 151. OF to NM, 31 March/12 April 1872, f. 670, op. 1, d. 150, GARF, Moscow. 152. OF to NM, August (?) 1878 (?), f. 670, op. 1, d. 150, GARF, Moscow. 153. OF to NM, 7 August 1878, f. 670, op. 1, d. 150, GARF, Moscow.

CHAPTER 2 1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Adolescent. Trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 29. 2. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 316: 38. 3. OF to NM, 13 April 1881, f. 670, op. 1, d. 150, GARF, Moscow.

Notes

257

4. Catherine Radziwill (Vassili), Behind the Veil at the Russian Court (New York: Lane, 1914), 122. 5. NM to Misha (Mikhail), 2/21 (sic) May 1879, Mikhail Mikhailovich Romanov Papers, f. 667, op. 1, d. 18, GARF, Moscow. 6. Telegram from OF to NM, 20 June 1888, f. 670, op. 1, d. 156, GARF, Moscow. 7. MN to NM, 9 July 1885, f. 670, op. 1, d. 149, GARF, Moscow. 8. Alexander to NM, n.d., f. 670, op. 1, d. 167, GARF, Moscow. 9. F. 670, op. 1, d. 173, passim, GARF, Moscow. 10. NM to Nicholas II, 16 April 1898, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow. 11. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 12. Chavchavadze, 171, quotes his mother. 13. Polovtsov, 2: 209. 14. Ibid., 412. 15. See his letters to Mikhail collection, f. 670, d. 18. 16. Vogel memoir, p. 145. 17. Ibid., 152. 18. Ibid., 146. 19. NM to OF, 18 March (?) 1873, f. 670, op. 1, d. 118, GARF, Moscow. 20. NM to MM, 16 April 1878, f. 667, op. 1, d .18, GARF, Moscow. 21. Telegram no. 336, from NM to MN, 4 October 1877, f. 667, op. 1. 22. Mariia K. Shevich, “Sans Retour,” 12, Shevich Collection, Bakhmetive Archive, Columbia University, New York; Mossolov, 93. 23. Stoeckl, 54. 24. Graves, 90–91; Gavrill, 407; Rosemary and Donald Crawford, Michael and Natasha: The Life and Love of Michael II, the Last of the Romanov Tsars (New York: Scribner’s, 1997), 147–155. 25. Stoeckl, 66. 26. Chavchavadze, 178; Crawford, 147, 148, 155, 387; Stoeckl, 71. 27. NM to Nicholas II, 16 November 1912, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow. 28. Raleigh Trevelyan, Grand Dukes and Diamonds (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991), 211. 29. George to NM, 27 June 1876, f. 670, op. 1, d. 163, GARF, Moscow. 30. George to NM, 4 July 1876, f. 670, op. 1, d. 181, GARF, Moscow. 31. Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Papers, The Hoover Institution, passim. 32. Radziwill, 248. 33. Chavchavadze, 184. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 75–76. 36. Marie (Grand Duchess George), see Foreword, n.p. 37. Graves, 89. 38. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 321.

258

Notes

39. Kschessinska, 63. 40. His letters from Nicholas Mikhailovich consist of only twelve pages for the years 1881 to 1893, whereas to Mikhail there are 200 pieces for roughly the same period. 41. Alexander to NM, 6 June 1878, f. 670, op. 1, d. 167, GARF, Moscow. 42. Alexander to NM, 28 May 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 159, GARF, Moscow. 43. Ibid. 44. Alexander to NM, 20 August 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 159, GARF, Moscow. 45. Alexander, Once, 130, 133. 46. Ibid., 129–30. 47. Olga, 47; Marie (Grand Duchess George), 47. 48. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 49. Russkii invalid, passim, f. 670, op. 1, d. 68, GARF, Moscow. 50. Ferrand, 192, quotes Spiridovich, giving no page number. 51. Chavchavadze, 204. 52. “Iz perepiski S. M. i N. M. Romanovov V 1917,” KA (1932), 142. 53. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 81. 54. Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia (New York: Praeger, 1967), 253–254. 55. I tried to visit the palace several times during the Soviet period, but I was always unceremoniously shown the door. I returned in May 2000 and was received most courteously and given a tour by Professor Sergei Astakhov, a research archaeologist. 56. Chavchavadze, 75. 57. Nikolai II i velikie kniaz’ia (hereafter cited as N II i V. K.), ed. V. P. Semennikov (Leningrad-Moscow: Gos. Izd., 1925), 75–76; Frank Golder, Documents in Russian History, 1914–1917 (New York: Century, 1927), 179. 58. Chavchavadze, 75. 59. Nicholas Mikhailovich’s nephew told me that the grand duke received a million roubles a year from the estate, but the grand duke told his friend Frédéric Masson that he got only $500,000 to 600,000 a year; Chavchavadze, 75. 60. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 61. NM to Masson, 18 June/1 July 1910, NM Papers, BSP. 62. Virginia Cowles, 1913: An End and a Beginning (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 126. 63. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 64. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 81. 65. Pauline Gray, The Grand Duke’s Woman (London: Macdonald, 1976), 129. 66. Alexander, Once, 41–42, 143. 67. Chavchavadze, 171. 68. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 69. Alexander, Once, 41. 70. NM to Masson, 2/15 June 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France.

Notes

259

71. Nicholas Mikhailovich, Nabliudeniia po okhote na dukikh gusei (Petrograd [?]: Ekspeditsiia zagot, Gos. Bumag, 1917), 1. 72. Andrei Maylunas and Sergei Mironenko, A Lifelong Passion (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), 109. 73. Kavkaz clipping, no. 116, 28 May 1881, f. 670, op. 1, d. 66, GARF, Moscow. 74. Kavkaz clipping, no. 117, 29 May 1881, f. 670, op. 1, d. 66. 75. Kavkaz clipping, no. 117, 20 June 1882, f. 670, op. 1, d. 67. 76. Russkii invalid, no. 261, 28 November 1886, f. 670, op. 1, d. 68, GARF, Moscow. 77. Russkii invalid, passim, f. 670, op. 1, d. 67, GARF, Moscow. 78. OF to NM, 19 May 1888, f. 670, op. 1, d. 156, GARF, Moscow. 79. Vogel memoir, 123–124. 80. Ibid., 122–125. 81. Alexander, Once, 271. 82. Vogel memoir, 133. 83. Russkii invalid, no. 174, f. 670, op. 1, d. 68, GARF, Moscow. 84. Vogel memoir, 145. 85. Ibid., 150. 86. This portrait was among those in the Nicholas and Alexandra Exhibit, Mobile, Alabama, January 2000. 87. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 83; Izvolsky, No Time, 97; Mossolov, 92. 88. Gavrill Konstantinovich, 48, 281; Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 89. See Polovtsov, 2: 121 and passim. 90. Ibid., 2: 121. 91. NM to OF, 14 June 1887, f. 670, op. 1, d. 120, GARF, Moscow. 92. NM to Masson, 27 March/9 April 1911, NM Papers, BSP, France. 93. Felix Youssoupov, Rasputin (Salisbury, NC: Documentary Publications, 1976), 207. 94. NM to Masson, 3/18 May 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 95. N II i V. K., 3–4; Golder, 64. 96. Alix to Niki, 4 November 1916, f. 601, GARF. 97. Polovtsov, 1: 187; Mossolov, 92–93. 98. “Maia sluzhba,” f. 670, op. 1, d. 7, GARF, Moscow. 99. Sir Bernard Pares, The Fall of the Russian Empire (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 390. 100. Countess Kleinmichel, Memoirs of a Shipwrecked World (London: Brentano’s, 1923), 161. 101. D.C.B. Lieven, Nicholas II: Twilight of Empire (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 212–213; see H. Rogger, “The Skolelev Phenomenon,” Oxford Slavonic Papers, 9 (1976), 46–47. 102. Polovtsov, 1: 181. 103. For one of many examples, see his letter to Masson of 17/30 June–29/ 12 July 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France.

260

Notes

104. Maurice Paléologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs (New York: Doran, 1930), 3: 260. 105. OF to NM, 15 August 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 155, GARF, Moscow. 106. Telegram from OF to NM, 20 June 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 155, GARF, Moscow. 107. Vogel memoir, 125. 108. Brummer, 242. 109. James Houghteling, A Diary of the Russian Revolution (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1918), 49. 110. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 111. Alexander, Once, 146. 112. The Masson article in Le Gaulois, 8 February 1919. 113. Houghteling, 49. 114. Charles Rivet, The Last of the Romanovs (New York: Dutton, 1918), 40. 115. Meriel Buchanan, The Dissolution of an Empire (London: Murray, 1932), 49. 116. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 117. Youssoupov, Rasputin, 207. 118. Nathan Smith [pseud.], “The Role of Russian Freemasonry in the February Revolution: another Scrap of Evidence,” Slavic Review, 27 (1968), 605. 119. Ibid. 120. See his letters to Masson of 14/26 May and 4/16 June 1899 and 29 September 1900, NM Papers, BSP, France. 121. Ferrand, 184, cites Spiridovich, giving no page number. 122. George Katkov, Russia 1917: The February Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 171. 123. A. Nekliudov, En Suède pendant la Guerre Mondiale (Paris: Perrin, 1926), 193. For a short bit on Russian Masonry, see Gregory Aronson, Rossia nakanune revoliutsii (New York, 1962), 138–142. 124. Alexander, Once, 172. 125. Gavrill, 160. 126. Russkii invalid, no. 81, 10 April 1891, f. 670, op. 1, d. 69, GARF, Moscow. 127. Golder, 180; N II i V. K., 76. 128. See f. 670, op. 1, d. 475. 129. See his correspondence with Masson, especially during the war, and his letter to Masson on 14/27 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 130. Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 78. 131. See his letter to Masson 29 October 1900, NM Papers, BSP, France. 132. Golder, 66 and 68; see also his reference to a “Teutonic-Jewish” newspaper, NM to Masson, 9/22 December 1914; 14/27 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 133. NM to Masson, 14/26 May 1899, NM Papers, BSP, France. 134. NM to Masson, 23 June/5 July 1899, NM Papers, BSP, France. 135. NM to Masson, 18 April/1 May 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France.

Notes

261

136. NM to Masson, 6/19 January 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 137. NM to Masson, 21/3 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 138. NM to Masson, 6/19 April 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 139. Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Romanov Papers, The Hoover Institution. 140. Marie (Grand Duke George), 185; she quotes one of his letters. 141. Ibid. 142. Maylunas and Mironenko, 532. 143. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 144. In the vilification of Lenin, it is now frequently mentioned that he was a Jew. His mother’s father was indeed a baptized Jew, but that does not, by any law, make him a Jew. 145. Quotes Stavrogin in The Possessed (New York: New American Library, 1962), 234. 146. NM to OF, 4/16 October 1888, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 147. NM to Masson, May 13/6 June 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 148. NM to Masson, 5 March 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 149. Polovtsov, 1: 25; 2: 75. 150. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 151. NM to Masson, 18 April/1 May 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 152. See his book Nabliudeniia po Okhote na Dikikh Gusei. (Petrograd (?): Elespeditsiia zagot Gasud, Bumag, 1917). 153. Draft memoir, f. 670, op. 1, d. 8, GARF, Moscow. 154. NM to Masson, 7/20 January 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 155. Marie (Grand Duke George), 113. 156. NM to Masson, 24 January 1906, NM Papers, BSP, France. 157. NM to Masson, 19 March 1898, NM Papers, BSP, France. 158. NM to Masson, 21 January 1901, NM Papers, BSP, France. 159. Graves, 87–88. 160. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 161. Brummer, 241. 162. NM, La Fin du Tsarisme, 9. 163. Madame Olga Novikoff, The MP for Russia: Reminiscences and Correspondence of Madame Olga Novikoff (London: Andrew Melrose, 1909), 1: 387. 164. NM to OF, 16 August 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 119, GARF, Moscow. 165. NM to OF, 19 September 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 119, GARF, Moscow. 166. NM to OF, 20 June 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 119, GARF, Moscow. 167. NM to OF, 17 August 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 119, GARF, Moscow. 168. NM to OF, 19 June 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 150, GARF, Moscow. 169. NM to OF, 13 (15?) June 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 119, GARF, Moscow. 170. NM to OF, 6 (?) September 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 119, GARF, Moscow. 171. Alexander, Once, 27. 172. Polovtsov, 1: 366. 173. Ibid., 1: 294. 174. Ibid. 175. Alexander, Once, 146.

262

Notes

176. Ibid., 168. 177. “Maia sluzhba,” 29–30. 178. Ibid., 1–2. 179. Ibid., 2–3. 180. Ibid., 30. 181. Ibid., 41–42. 182. Ibid., 44–45. 183. Ibid., 46–47. 184. See Prikaz, 8 February 1894, f. 670, op. 1, d. 5, GARF, Moscow. 185. Polovtsov, 2: 349. 186. Ibid., 2: 459. 187. Bezobrazov, 84 n; Brummer, 241. 188. NM to Masson, 5/18 September 1902, NM Papers, BSP, France. 189. NM to Masson, 1 January 1904, NM Papers, BSP, France. 190. Mossolov, 92. 191. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 192. Alexander, Once, 148. 193. Diploma, 26 October 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 1, GARF, Moscow; see also the letter to his mother, 3/15 October 1884, f. 670, op. 1, d. 120, GARF, Moscow. 194. See the letters to his mother dated 3/15 October, 6/18 October, 11/ 23 October, 13/25 October, 1885, f. 670, op. 1, d. 120, GARF, Moscow. 195. NM to OF, 10/22 (sic) May 1886, f. 670, op. 1, d. 120, GARF, Moscow. 196. Konstantinovich, 164. 197. Ibid., 166. 198. Rivet, 45; Konstantinovich, 166. 199. “Der Verhält deutsch. Zu Russland (Toast des Grussfürstes),” vol. 1, series 1, October 1887, Germany, Auswärtiges Amt, Deutschland 131, reel 266. 200. German ambassador to Bismarck, 9 October 1887, Deutschland, 131, “Der Verhält deutsch. Zu Russland,” vol. 1, series 1, Oct. 1887, reel 266. 201. “Maia sluzhba,” 19–20. 202. NM to Nicholas II, 6 October 1887, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1301, GARF, Moscow. 203. “Maia sluzhba,” 20. 204. NM’s letters to Masson after 1914, passim, NM Papers, BSP, France. 205. 27 August/9 September 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 206. 5/18 January 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 207. 21 October/3 November 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 208. Paléologue, 1: 342. 209. Alexander, Always, 88. 210. John Curtis Perry and Constantine Pleshakov, The Flight of the Romanovs: A Family Saga (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 41; Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Viking, 1996), 289. Figes states in his much-acclaimed history of the Revolution that the murder of Rasputin was a “homosexual vendetta,” which included Nicholas

Notes

263

Mikhailovich, who, the evidence shows, was not at all involved in the assassination. Because his footnote source in no way gave him the right to say it, I wrote and politely asked the author where he had gotten his information, because if the grand duke was indeed gay, I should pursue the fact. Mr. Figes has not at the time of this writing replied to my letter. In his recent biographical study of Rasputin, Edvard Radzinsky makes way too much of a probable homosexual link between Youssoupov and Rasputin, and Nicholas Mikhailovich’s fascination with and supposition of such a link. See his The Rasputin File (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 478 ff. 211. NM to Masson, 7/20 June 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 212. NM to MM (his brother), 2/21 May 1879, f. 667, op. 1, d. 18, GARF, Moscow. 213. NM to MM, 25 June 1879, f. 667, op. 1, d. 18, GARF, Moscow. 214. NM to MN, 16/28 June 1879, f. 667, op. 1, d. 18, GARF, Moscow.. 215. Alexander, Once, 148–149. 216. Ibid., 148–149. 217. Marie, Education, 119. 218. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 83. 219. NM to OF, 13/25 October 1885, f. 677, op. 1, d. 120, GARF, Moscow. 220. Polovtsov, 1: 343. 221. NM to OF, 21 October/2 November 1885, f. 670, op. 1, d. 120, GARF, Moscow. 222. Curiously, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (Minney), who had a very close relationship with Nicholas Mikhailovich, supported the young man’s intentions and remonstrated with his parents over the matter; Polovtsov, 1: 344. 223. Chavchavadze, 171. 224. NM, La Fin du Tsarisme, 9. 225. OF to NM, 4 February 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 153, GARF, Moscow. 226. Telegram from OF to NM, 3 October (?), 1888, f. 670, op. 1, d. 156 and passim, GARF, Moscow. 227. OF to NM, 5 January 1887, f. 670, op. 1, d. 152, GARF, Moscow. 228. NM to OF, 28 July (a continuation of a long rambling letter begun on the 27th), 1888, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 229. Polovtsov, 2: 354. 230. Russkii invalid, no. 75, 3 April 1891, f. 670, op. 1, d. 69, GARF, Moscow. 231. Alexander, Once, 119. 232. Telegram from Anastasia to NM, no. 303, April 6(?), 1891, f. 670, op. 1, d. 157, GARF, Moscow. 233. Telegram from MM to NM, 195, April(?), 1891, f. 670, op. 1, d. 157, GARF, Moscow. 234. Clipping from Russkii invalid, no. 77, 5 and 6 April 1891, f. 670, op. 1, d. 69, GARF, Moscow. 235. Alexander, Once, 119. 236. Stoeckl, 86.

264

Notes

237. NM to OF (Mama), 22 April 1891, f. 670, op. 1, d. 122, GARF, Moscow.

CHAPTER 3 1. Nicholas Mikhailovich, Le Comte Paul Stroganov (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1905), 1: vi. 2. Chavchavadze, 172. 3. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), 56; Robert D. Warth, Nicholas II: The Life and Reign of Russia’s Last Monarch (London and Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 229; Chavchavadze, 172. 4. Brummer, 241. 5. NM to Masson, August 27/September 9, 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 6. NM to MM, 27 April 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 7. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (New York and London: Macmillan, 1978), 18: 213. 8. NM to Masson, 18 April/1 May 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 9. NM to Masson, 9/22 April 1904, NM Papers, BSP, France. 10. Stoeckl, 84–85. 11. NM to Masson, 10 May/27 April (sic) 1910, NM Papers, BSP, France. 12. Mossolov, 92. 13. Nekliudov, 193. 14. NM, La Fin du Tsarisme, 11. 15. Masson in the introduction of NM’s Stroganov, vii; Alexander, Once, 148. 16. E.g., he notes to Count Lamsdorf that he had written the archives to locate some documents to which he had found reference. 17. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 83. 18. Postcard to Masson, 6 September 1908, NM Papers, BSP, France. 19. Brummer, 242. 20. NM to OF, 22 January 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 21. Kleinmichel, 161. 22. Guilliam (Wilhelm II) to NM, 6 June 1905, f. 670, op. 1, d. 257, GARF, Moscow. 23. Alexander, Once, 148. 24. Smirnoff, 100. 25. NM to Felix Nader, n.d., item 246–77, Papiers Nader, 25001, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France. 26. NM to Masson, 18 April/1 May 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 27. NM to Lamsdorf, 24 May 1903, f. 568, op. 1, d. 662, GARF, Moscow. 28. Polovtsov, 2: 424. 29. NM to Masson, 12/25 October 1909, NM Papers, BSP, France. 30. See his report to the tsar in 1916 as a good example, N II i V. K., 71–72.

Notes

265

31. NM to Nicholas II, 14 July 1911, f. 601, op. 1, 1310, GARF, Moscow. 32. NM to Masson, 28/10 January/February 1910, NM Papers, BSP, France. 33. NM to Prince Volkonsky, 28 November (date unclear), f. 1146, op. 1, d. 707, GARF, Moscow. It is possible that this reference is not to the Historical Society, yet it shows the grand duke’s diligence in such matters. 34. NM to Masson, 3/16 April 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 35. Lettres des Grands Ducs (Paris: Payot, 1926), M. Lichnevsky, ed. 108–111. 36. Ibid., 91–92. 37. NM to Masson, 17/30–29/12 July 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 38. N II i V. K., 69–70. 39. NM to Masson, 17/30 June–29/12 July 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 40. N II i V. K., 81; Lettres des Grands Ducs, 131. 41. NM to Masson, 1 May 1900, NM Papers, BSP, France. 42. NM to Masson, 16 June 1900, NM Papers, BSP, France. 43. Ibid. 44. NM to OF, 29 (?) October 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 45. NM to Masson, 11/23 January 1898, NM Papers, BSP, France. 46. See corresondence with Masson on 2/20 April 1897, 22 April 1897, NM Papers, BSP, France. 47. I have been unable to determine which of David’s Napoleons he owned. My search included contact with several David authorities. 48. NM to Masson, 14/22 March 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 49. See his article in Le Galois, 3 February 1919. 50. N II i V. K., 75; Lettres des Grands Ducs, 115–119. 51. Vladimir Nabokov, “Conclusive Evidence,” The New Yorker, December 28, 1998, 130; Nabokov, Speak Memory (New York: Wideview/Periyes Books, 1979), 122. 52. NM to OF, 3 July 1877, f. 670, op. 1, d. 119, GARF, Moscow. 53. NM to OF, 21 May 1888, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 54. NM to OF, 1/13 (sic) June 1888, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 55. NM to OF, 30 June 1888, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 56. NM to OF, 16 July 1888, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 57. Brummer, 242. 58. Ferrand, 184, quoting Spiridovich, giving no page number; Cyril, 109. 59. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 60. See NM’s Nabliudeniia. 61. NM to Masson, 19 September/2 October 1912, NM Papers, BSP, France. 62. NM to Masson, 21 January 1903, NM Papers, BSP, France. 63. NM to Masson, 23 May/5 June 1904, NM Papers, BSP, France. 64. NM to Masson 21 July/8 (sic) August 1904, NM Papers, BSP, France. 65. NM to Masson, 16/29 November 1904, NM Papers, BSP, France. 66. Le Grand Duc Nicholas Mikhailovich de Russie, Le comte Paul Stroganov, 1774–1817 (Paris: n.p., 1905), see Introduction, vi.

266

Notes

67. Deschaney to NM, 13 January 1906, f. 670, op. 1, d. 221, GARF, Moscow. 68. Maurice Barrès to NM, 24 January 1906, f. 670, op. 1, 221, GARF, Moscow. 69. Daudet to NM, 26 (no month given) 1909, f. 670, op. 1, d. 221, GARF, Moscow. 70. NM to Count Lamsdorf, 15 June 1901, f. 568, op. 1, d. 662, GARF, Moscow. 71. See Janet Hartly’s excellent biography of Alexander I, Alexander I (London: Longman, 1994), especially pp. 127, 147, and 185 ff. 72. Alexander, Once, 9–10; see also Smirnoff, 90; recently, a historian Edvard Radzinsky noted that Nicholas Mikhailovich believed it and “tried to find the pertinent documents in the family archive.” Radzinsky, File, 54. The grand duke never did accept the legend, but like any good historian he exhaustively researched the question as it was widely believed. 73. NM, “Zapiski,” KA, 47–48 (1931), 143. 74. Izvolsky, No Time to Grieve, 98. 75. Chavchavadze, 172. 76. Masson, 17/30 April 1911, NM Papers, BSP, France. 77. Ibid. 78. NM to Nicholas II, 14 July 1911, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow. 79. F. 670, op. 1, d. 9, GARF, Moscow. 80. Istoricheskii vestnik, no. 3 (1915), p. 1038, cited in C. E. Brancovan, “Grand Duke Nikolay Mikhailovich on the Ministerial and Parliamentary Crisis of March–April 1911,” Oxford Slavonic Papers, new series, 6 (1973), 66–81. 81. Chavchavadze, 172. 82. R. Poincaré to NM, 9 April 1913, f. 670, op. 1, d. 221, GARF, Moscow. 83. Alexander, Once, 147. 84. Ibid., 192. 85. “L. N. Tolstoi i N. M. Romanov,” 231 ff. 86. NM to Masson, 23 October/6 November 1901, NM Papers, BSP, France. 87. “L. N. Tolstoi,” 231. 88. Ibid., 232–233. 89. NM to Masson, 23 October/6 November 1901, NM Papers, BSP, France. 90. NM to Lev Tolstoy, 15 November 1901, f. 670, op. 1, d. 140, GARF, Moscow. 91. “L. N. Tolstoi,” 234. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., 235. By one account they met again in 1902. See P. I. Biriukov, Biografiia L. N. Tolstogo (Berlin: n.p., 1921–1923), 4: 53 ff. 94. Byloe, July 1912, 12–21, cited in Harrison Salisbury, Black Night White Snow: Russia’s Revolutions, 1905–1917 (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 131. 95. “L. N. Tolstoi,” 236. 96. Ibid., 237–38.

Notes

267

97. Then he goes on a great length about it. See ibid., 239. 98. Tolstoy’s Letters (New York: Scribner’s, 1978), 2: 623. 99. Ibid., 2: 624. 100. Ibid., 2: 650. 101. Ibid., 2: 650. 102. Ibid., 2: 655. 103. Ibid., 2: 674–675. 104. NM to Masson, 3/16 November 1910, NM Papers, BSP, France. 105. NM to Masson, 13/26 November 1910, NN Papers, BSP, France. 106. NM to Masson, 26 June–1 July 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 107. Alexander, Once, 147. 108. NM to Masson, 7–12 April 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 109. Alexander, Once, 147. 110. Izvolsky, No Time, 97. 111. NM to Masson, 5 June 1900, NM Papers, BSP, France. 112. NM to Masson, 22 September/5 October 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 113. NM to Masson, 13/26 April 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 114. NM to Masson, 14/27 March 1911, NM Papers, BSP, France. 115. NM to Masson, 7–12 April 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 116. Masson to NM, 17 April 1914, f. 670, op. 1, d. 343, GARF, Moscow. 117. Quoted in Peter Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against (London, 1964), 177–209, in Brancovan, 67–68. 118. NM to Masson, 27 November/10 December 1912, NM Papers, BSP, France. 119. NM to Masson, 3/16 December 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 120. Brummer remembered March 17. Brummer, 243. 121. See Le Matin, 10 March 1919. A clipping is in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs archive, E: URSS, Z, 819: 79. 122. NM to Masson, 18/31 March 1901, NM Papers, BSP, France. 123. NM to Masson, 27 May/9 June 1901, NM Papers, BSP, France. 124. See f. 670, op. 1, d. 221. 125. NM to Masson, 22 September/5 October 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 126. NM to Masson, 7/20 January 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France.

CHAPTER 4 1. Alexander, Once, 148, 299. 2. Brummer, 242. 3. NM to OF, 18 September 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 4. NM to OF, 23 April/6 May 1907, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 5. NM to OF, 16 April 1898, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 6. NM to OF, 3 February 1904, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 7. NM to OF, 11/24 April 1907, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow.

268

Notes

8. NM to OF, 16/29 August 1909, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 9. Klaus Meyer, Theodor Schiemann als politischer Publizist (Frankfurt: Rutten and Loenig, 1956), 184; see also Germany, Auswärtiges Amt, Die Grosse Politik der Europischen Kabinette, 1907–1914 (Berlin: Deutsch Verlagsgesellschaft, 1924), 25: 455 and 465 (nos. 8808 and 8814). 10. NM to OF, 22 January 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 11. NM to OF, 17 April 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 12. MN to NM, 22 March 1898, f. 670, op. 1, d. 161, GARF, Moscow. 13. Telegram from Mikhail to NM, 28 March 1898, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 14. Russkii invalid, nos. 180 (17 August) and 181 (19 August), 1903, f. 670, op. 1, d. 76, GARF, Moscow. 15. Telegram from NM to Masson, no date on the telegram in the 1903 packet, NM Papers, BSP, France. 16. Telegram from NM to Masson, 8/21 September 1903, NM Papers, BSP, France. 17. Russkii invalid, nos. 208 and 209, 23 and 24 September 1903, f. 670, op. 1, d. 76, GARF, Moscow. 18. Konstantinovich, 152–153. 19. NM to Masson, 9/22 April 1904, NM Papers, BSP, France. 20. NM to Masson, 23 May 1909, NM Papers, BSP, France. 21. Chavchavadze, 76. 22. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 136. 23. NM to Masson, 25 December 1909, NM Papers, BSP, France. 24. Stoeckl, 81. 25. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 136. 26. Proclamation of Nicholas II, f. 601, op. 1, d. 2142, GARF, Moscow. 27. Stoeckl, 82. 28. Ibid., 83. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. Their graves lie today near the crypt being prepared for the remains of Nicholas II and his family. 31. Newspaper clipping attached to a card to Masson, 5/18 January 1910, NM Papers, BSP, France. 32. NM to OF, 21 May 1888, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 33. NM to OF, 5 July 1888, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 34. Cyril, 109. 35. Stoeckl, 78. 36. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 37. NM to Masson, 3 May 1900, NM Papers, BSP, France. 38. NM to Masson, 28/10 January 1910, NM Papers, BSP, France. 39. See Russkii invalid, 1892 ff; sections in f. 670, op. 1, d. 70, GARF, Moscow. 40. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 112. 41. Anastasia to NM (?), 1901, f. 670, op. 1, d. 160, GARF, Moscow. 42. NM to OF, 14 June 1887, f. 670, op. 1, d. 120, GARF, Moscow.

Notes

269

43. NM to OF, 9 March 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 44. NM to OF, 25 February 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 45. NM to OF, 20 March 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 46. Ibid. 47. OF to NM, 14/27 March 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 152, GARF, Moscow. 48. NM to OF, see letters May 27 and 28, 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 49. NM to OF, 25 February 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 50. Chavchavadze, 192. 51. Gibbon, 610. 52. Alexander, Once, 206 ff. 53. Chavchavadze, 194–195. 54. Interview with Gleb Botkin in his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the fall of 1969. In his memoirs Lost Splendor (London: Cape, 1954), Youssoupov admits dressing in his mother’s clothes. 55. Maylunas and Mironenko, 384, quotes the diary. 56. NM to OF, 25 February 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 57. Daisy, Princess of Pless, Princess of Pless (New York: Dutton, 1931), 42, 93; Stoeckl, 59–60. 58. Stoeckl, 57; Daisy of Pless, 211 n. Stoeckl wrote that he had married a princess of Cumberland. 59. NM, “Zapiski,” KA, 47–48 (1931), 174. 60. Daisy of Pless, 56, 160. 61. Ibid., 56. 62. Ibid. 63. Stoeckl, 60. 64. Graves, 88. 65. Ibid.; Daisy of Pless, 93. 66. Konstantinovich, 129. 67. Chavchavadze, 207. 68. NM to OF, 4 April 1889, f. 670, op. 1, d. 121, GARF, Moscow. 69. Ksenia’s diary entry, 29 October 1894, quoted in Maylunas and Mironenko, 101. 70. Crawford, 31, cites Olga, 115. 71. Ferrand, 184. 72. NM to Masson, 5 August 1899, NM Papers, BSP, France. 73. Warth, 154. 74. NM to Masson, 21 July/8 August 1904, NM Papers, BSP, France. 75. Ibid. 76. NM to Masson, 14/28 October 1904, NM Papers, BSP, France. 77. See Walter Sabinsky’s The Road to Bloody Sunday (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). 78. NM to Masson, 16/29 November 1904, NM Papers, BSP, France. 79. NM to Masson, 10 January 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 80. NM to Masson, 18/31 January 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 81. Bobrinsky diary, KA, 26 (1928), 132, quoted in Salisbury, 129.

270

Notes

82. NM to Masson, 1/14 February 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 83. Ibid. 84. NM to Masson, 9/22 February 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. NM to Masson, 13/28 February 1897 (sic), he obviously meant 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 88. Ibid. 89. NM to Masson, 4/17 July 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 90. NM to Masson, 19 July/1 August 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 91. NM to Masson, 4/17 July 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 92. Ibid. 93. NM to Masson, 14/27 August 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 94. Ibid. 95. NM to Masson, 13 September/31 August 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 96. NM to Masson, 14/27 August 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 97. NM to Masson, 6/19 October 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 98. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 99. NM to Masson, 18 October/1 November 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 100. Ibid. 101. Michael Karpovich, “Two Types of Russian Liberalism: Maklakov and Miliukov,” Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, ed. J. Simmons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 136. 102. NM to Masson, 28 October/10 November 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 103. NM to Masson, 3/16 December 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 104. S. E. Kryzhanovskii, Vospominaniia (Berlin: Speer and Schmidt, 1938), 81–82, cited in Figes, 217. 105. NM to Masson, 16/29 January 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 106. NM to Masson, 11 May/28 April (sic), 1906, NM Papers, BSP, France. 107. Ibid. 108. NM to Masson, 15/28 May 1906, NM Papers, BSP, France. 109. NM to Masson, 18 May/1 June 1906, NM Papers, BSP, France. 110. A. V. Zen’kovskii, Pravda o Stolypin (New York: n.p., 1956), cited in Brancovan, 69. 111. Olga, 120. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. NM to Masson, 25 July/7 August 1906, NM Papers, BSP, France. 115. NM to Masson, 13 July/26 July 1906, NM Papers, BSP, France. 116. Vladimir Kokovtsov, Out of My Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1935), 150. 117. NM to Masson, 13/26 July 1906, NM Papers, BSP, France.

Notes

271

118. Ibid. 119. Zen’kovskii, cited in Brancovan, 69. 120. Stolypin to NM, 28 February 1907, f. 670, op. 1, d. 220, GARF, Moscow. 121. See Stolypin’s reply, Stolypin to NM, 7 March 1907, f. 670. op. 1, d. 220; see also his letter to NM 6 September 1908, f. 670, op. 1, d. 220, GARF, Moscow. 122. NM to Masson, 7/20 January 1907, NM Papers, BSP, France. 123. NM to Masson, 9/22 February 1907, NM Papers, BSP, France. 124. His daughter, Princess Kourakine, has been for years a major figure in the Bibliothèque Slave de Paris. 125. NM to Masson, 14 March/27 March 1907, NM Papers, BSP, France. 126. NM to Masson, 13/26 May 1907, NM Papers, BSP, France. 127. NM to Masson, 11/24 June 1907, NM Papers, BSP, France. 128. NM to Masson, 26 October/8 November 1907, NM Papers, BSP, France. 129. NM to Masson, 8/21 May 1908, NM Papers, BSP, France. 130. NM to Masson, 13/26 August 1907, NM Papers, BSP, France. 131. E. Chmielewski, “Stolypin’s Last Crisis,” California Slavic Studies, 3 (1964), 105. 132. Brancovan, 72. 133. A. N. Naumov, Iz utselevskikh vospominanii (New York: Chekhov, 1955), 2: 176; see Maria von Bok, Vospominaniia o moem otse P. A. Stolypina (New York: Chekhov, 1953), 325; Chmielewski, 95–126; A. Ia. Avrekh, “Vopros o zapadnom zemstve i bankrotstvo Stolypin,” Istoricheskie zapiski, 70 (1961), 61– 112. 134. NM to Masson, 10/23 March 1910, NM Papers, BSP, France. 135. NM to Masson, 14/21 March 1911, NM Papers, BSP, France. 136. NM to Masson, 27 March/9 April 1911, NM Papers, BSP, France. 137. NM to Masson, 17/30 April 1911, NM Papers, BSP, France. 138. Witte, 3: 548, cited in Brancovan, 69. 139. Brancovan, 79. 140. Witte, 3: 547–548, cited in Brancovan, 69. 141. NM to Masson, 14/27 October 1911, NM Papers, BSP, France. 142. Kokovtsov, 425–426. 143. Alexander, Once, 148. 144. NM to Masson, 9/22 August 1900, NM Papers, BSP, France. 145. Ibid. 146. NM to Masson, 8/21 May 1908, NM Papers, BSP, France. 147. Izvolsky, No Time, 68, 97–98. 148. NM to Masson, 30 September/12 October 1908, NM Papers, BSP, France. 149. Sergei Sazonov, Fateful Years (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 108; for a report on his mission, see Golder, 71–72 and N II i V. K., 82–84. 150. NM to Masson, 27 November/10 December 1912, NM Papers, BSP, France.

272

Notes

151. N. Schebelo to NM, 25 November 1912, f. 670, op. 1, d. 220, GARF, Moscow. 152. NM to Nicholas II, 20 August 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow. 153. Ibid., quoting his report. 154. N. Schebelo to NM, 12/25 March 1913, f. 670, op. 1, d. 220, GARF, Moscow. 155. Alexander, Once, 148.

CHAPTER 5 1. Willy to Nicky, November 1902, Russland, no. 82, Die russische Kaiserfamilie, series 1, reel 90, vol. 1, Auswärtiges Amt, Germany. 2. Willy to Nicky., 22 November 1902, Russland, no. 82, Die russische Kaiserfamilie, series 1, reel 90, vol. 1, Auswärtiges Amt, Germany. 3. NM to Masson, 17/30 July 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 4. NM, “Zapiski,” 144. 5. NM to Poincaré, n.d., obviously July 1914, Raymond Poincaré Papers, 20 (16011), p. 47, Bibliothèque Nationale, nouvelles acquisitions, Paris, France. 6. Newspaper clipping, Papiers Maurice Paléologue, 1: 17, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, France. 7. NM to Masson, 14/27 July 191, NM Papers, BSP, France. 8. NM to Masson, 6/19 August 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 9. Ibid. 10. See his letters to Nicholas II, 14 July 1911 (sic) and August 1914, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow, and his correspondence with Masson in July and August 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 11. NM to Masson, 2/15–6/19 October 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 12. NM to Masson, 21 October/3 November 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 13. N II i V. K., 90; Golder, 76. 14. Brummer, 241. 15. NM to Masson, 4/22 April 1905, NM Papers, BSP, France. 16. Paléologue, 3: 288–289. 17. NM to Masson, copy of the letter, 22 September/5 October 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 18. NM to Masson, 6/19 August 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 19. NM to Masson, 20 September/3 October 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 20. Nicky to Wify, 17 April 1915, in The Nicky-Sunny Letters: Correspondence of the Tsar and Tsaritsa, 1914–1917 (Hattiesburg, MS: Academic International, 1970), 50. 21. Wify (Alix) to Nicky, 5 September, 1915, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1157, GARF, Moscow. 22. See their wartime correspondence at The Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace: Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Papers.

Notes

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23. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 175–177; Alexander, Once, 285; Chavchavadze, 185. 24. George (Mikhailovich) to Nicholas II, 11 November 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1222, GARF, Moscow. 25. George to Ksenia, passim, Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Papers, The Hoover Institution. 26. George to Ksenia, 11 June and 1 August 1916, Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Papers, The Hoover Institution. 27. Robert Wilton, Russia’s Agony (New York: Dutton, 1919), 211. 28. Mikhail Rodzianko, The Reign of Rasputin: An Empire’s Collapse (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1973), 142. 29. Alexander, Once, 276. 30. Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (London: Hodder and Staughton, 1975), 153; Rodzianko, Reign, 130. 31. Mossolov, 94. 32. Lescelle de Basily, Memoirs of a Lost World (Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution, 1975), 4. 33. Olga, 146–147. 34. Michael Occeshaw, The Romanov Conspiracies (London: Chapmans, 1993), 172–173. 35. Le Gen. Cmdt. En Chef to Gen. Comdt IV Army, 24 September 1916, Etat Major de l’Armée, 7N390, d. Brigade Russe, Archives de l’Armée, Chateau Vincennes, Paris, France. 36. Chavchavadze, 178. 37. NM to Masson, 18 April/1 May 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 38. NM to Masson, 5/18 January 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 39. NM to Masson, 6/19 August 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 40. Kschessinska, 67. 41. NM to Masson, 6/19 August 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. In the early fall, Brummer returned to St. Petersburg on the orders of Ivanov because Nicholas Mikhailovich’s suite was deemed too large. To Masson, 22 September/ 5 October 1914; on 21 October/3 November 1914, the grand duke wrote that Brummer’s return was due to the fact that his family had returned from England. 42. NM, “Zapiski,” KA, 144–145. 43. NM to Masson, 6/19 August 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 44. NM, “Zapiski,” KA, 146. 45. Bezobrazov, D. 19. 46. NM, “Zapiski,” 150. 47. NM to Masson, 16/29 August 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 48. NM to Masson, 19 August/1 September 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 49. NM to Masson, 11/24 September, 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 50. Buchanan, Dissolution, 127. 51. NM, “Zapiski,” 148. 52. NM to Masson, 16/29 August 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France.

274

Notes

53. NM to Masson, 19 August/1 September 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 54. NM to Masson 3/16 September 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 55. NM, “Zapiski,” 148–149. 56. NM to Masson, October 2/15–6/19 (sic) October 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 57. NM to Masson, 17/30 July–18/31 August 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 58. NM, “Zapiski,” 145. 59. Ibid., 150. 60. Ibid., 149–150. 61. NM to Masson, 27 August/9 September 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 62. Golder, 243; N II i V. K., 69. 63. NM, “Zapiski,” 145. 64. See the letters to Masson after 1914, passim. 65. NM, “Zapiski,” 147. 66. Ibid., 161. 67. Alexander, Once, 268. 68. NM to Masson, 21 October/3 November and letter dated 3/16 November 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 69. NM to Masson, 3/16 November 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 70. NM to Masson, 9/22 December 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 71. NM to Masson, 5/18 January 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 72. NM to Masson, 18 April/1 May 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 73. NM to Masson, 6/19 January 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 74. NM to Masson, 1/14 March 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 75. Ibid. 76. NM to Masson, 19 February/3 March 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 77. NM to Masson, 12/25 May 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 78. NM to Masson, 25 May/7 June 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 79. NM to Masson, 5/18 August 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 80. NM to Masson, 13/26 August 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 81. NM to Masson, 13/26 August 1914 and 11/24 September 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 82. NM to Masson, 25 August/7 September 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 83. Letters of the Tsar, 77. 84. Golder, 243; N II i V. K., 68–69. 85. Golder, 242–243. 86. NM to Masson, 9 November 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 87. NM to Masson, 1/14 October 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 88. NM to Masson 4/17 January 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 89. Lettres des Grands Ducs, 114. 90. NM to Masson, 14/27 August contains the letter of 17/30 August 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France.

Notes

275

91. Marie of Rumania to Nicholas II, 3/19 May 1915, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1290, GARF, Moscow. 92. See a copy of Brattiano’s letter to the grand duke in NM’s letter to the tsar, 17 August 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1313, GARF, Moscow. 93. NM to Masson, 6/19 August 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 94. NM to Masson, 24 September 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 95. Cowles, 111. 96. George T. Marye, Nearing the End in Imperial Russia (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1929), 187. 97. Sergei Zavalishin et al., Gosudar’ Imperator Nikolai II Aleksandrovich (New York: Vseslovianskoe izdatel’stvo, 1968), 231. 98. Paléologue, 2: 16. 99. NM to Masson, 17/30 June–29/12 July 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid. 102. N II i V. K., 81. 103. NM to Nicholas II, 14 January 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow. 104. NM to Nicholas II, 16 March 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow. 105. NM to Nicholas II, 26 May 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow. 106. NM to Masson, 17/30 June–29/12 July 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 107. Ibid. 108. Lettres des Grands Ducs, 115–119. 109. NM to Masson, 17/30 June–29/12 July 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 111. NM to Nicholas II, 15 June 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow; N II i V. K., 74. 112. Niki to Alix, 4 July 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1157, reel 4, GARF, Moscow; Letters of the Tsar, 226. 113. N II i V. K., 75; Golder, 179–180; and NM to Nicholas II, 26 July 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow. 114. Niki (N II) to Nikolai (NM), 24 April 1916, f. 670, op. 1, d. 197, GARF, Moscow. 115. NM to Masson, 21 October/3 November 1914, NM Papers, BSP, France. 116. NM to Masson, 15/28 March 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 117. Golder, 64; N II i V. K., 163–164. 118. Lettres des Grands Ducs, 94–95; N II i V. K., 63–64; Order no. 127, f. 670, op. 1, d. 127, GARF, Moscow. 119. Lettres des Grands Ducs, 93–96. 120. Golder, 65–66. 121. NM to Masson, 21 July/3 August 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 122. Ibid.

276

Notes

123. Ibid. 124. NM to Masson, 21 July/3 August 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 125. Lettres des Grands Ducs, 152. 126. N II i V. K., 65; Lettres des Grands Ducs, 96–104; NM to Nicholas II, 28 April 1916, f. 670, op. 1, d. 127, GARF, Moscow. 127. Golder, 64; N II i V. K., 63–64. 128. Ibid. 129. Golder, 67. 130. Ibid., 66–68. 131. Ibid., 67. 132. Ibid. 133. His suggestions for a planning committee interestingly drew the empress’s support. Alix to Niki, 20 June 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1157, reel 4, GARF, Moscow. 134. NM to Masson, 21 July/3 August 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 135. Ibid. 136. NM to Masson, 14/27 August 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 137. Golder, 73–74. 138. Iu. N. Danilov, Velikii Kniaz’ Nikolai Nikolaevich (Paris: Imp. de Navarre, 1930), 96. 139. N II i V. K., 88 ff. 140. NM to Nicholas II, 21 September 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow; Lettres des Grands Ducs, 151–152; he covered in his extensive list most of the problems that would face the conference in Paris in 1919 and showed likewise a practical perception and himself a believer of Realpolitik. 141. Golder, 76–77; N II i V. K., 91–92. 142. Alexander, Once, 319–320. 143. Ibid., 315–316. 144. Ibid., 148.

CHAPTER 6 1. “Sans retour,” 90, Shevich Collection, Bakhmetev Archive, Columbia University, New York. 2. Paléologue, 3: 167–168. 3. Alix to Niki, 4 November 1916, f. 601, op. 1. d. 1151, reel 4, GARF, Moscow. 4. Mikhail Rodzianko, “Gosudarstvennaia duma,” Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, 6 (1926), 20. 5. Jamie H. Cockfield, “The Union Sacrée: Tsarism and the Constitutional Democratic Party, 1914–1917” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Virginia, 1972). 6. See my article, “Brusilov’s Immortal Days: The Russian Offensive in Galicia of 1916,” Military History Quarterly, 14, no. 1 (Autumn 2001), 24–33. 7. The empress had indeed been against the war “up to the last minute,”

Notes

277

as she was a German “at heart,” Sazonov told Nicholas Mikhailovich. See NM, “Zapiski,” 166. Yet once the war began she supported it wholeheartedly (she personally disliked the kaiser) and proved to be a more loyal Russian than Vladimir Lenin. 8. Nekliudov, 252. 9. N II i K. V., 122–224; Golder, 247–248; Alexander, Once, 195. 10. Princess Paley, Memories of Russia (London: Jenkins, 1924), 18–19. 11. Alexander, Once, 184–185. 12. Ibid., 185. 13. NM to Masson, 1/14 October 1915, NM Papers, BSP, France. 14. NM to Masson, 11 and 24 March/4–5 April 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 15. Ibid. 16. Golder, 243–44; N II i V. K., 75–79. 17. Rodzianko, Reign, 250. 18. NM to Masson, 13/26 July 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 19. Paléologue, 2: 261. 20. Paléologue to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 19 May 1916, p. 58, Papiers Paléologue, Archives Ministire des Affaires Estrangères, Paris. 21. NM, “Zapiski,” 143. 22. Alexandra Feodorovna to NM, 12 July 1919, f. 670, op. 1, d. 199, GARF, Moscow. 23. The Nicky-Sunny Letters, 331. 24. Ibid., 332. 25. Ibid. 26. NM to Masson, 3/16 April 1916, NM Papers, BSP, France. 27. Ibid. 28. NM to Nicky, 8 August 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow. 29. NM to Nicky, date unclear, probably late 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1310, GARF, Moscow. 30. Thomas Riha, A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 264. The speech was stripped from the Stenographic Records of the Duma, but it circulated in hectographed copies and has been saved in various forms. 31. Princess Julia Cantacuzène-Speransky, Revolutionary Days (London: Chapman and Hall, 1920), 94–95. 32. See The Nicky-Sunny Letters, passim. 33. Wify to Nicky, 13 December 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1151, reel 5, GARF, Moscow. 34. Gray, 71; on his plans, see V. V. Shul’gin, The Years: Memoirs of a Member of the Russian Duma, 1906–1917 (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1984), 267. 35. Alix to My Darling, 5 November 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1151, reel 4, GARF, Moscow. 36. Shul’gin, The Years, 267. 37. Ibid.

278

Notes

38. E. H. Wilcox, Russia’s Ruin (New York: Scribner’s, 1919), 141. 39. Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 70. 40. Shul’gin, The Years, 267. 41. The Nicky-Sunny Letters, 290. 42. There are several versions of the letter, all basically the same. N II i V. K., 145–47; also in the French abridged edition, Lettres des Grands Ducs, see Appendix; Golder, 244; it also appeared in the Kadet Party newspaper Rech’, no. 58, 22 March 1917; it is quoted also in full in Rivet, 198–99. 43. Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, The Life and Tragedy of Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia (London: Longmans, Green, 1928), 238. 44. Radzinsky, The Last Tsar, 170. 45. Vyrubova, 145–146. 46. Alix to Nicky, 4 November 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1151, reel 4, GARF, Moscow. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Alix to Nicky, 5 November 1916, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1151, reel 4, GARF, Moscow. 51. The Nicky-Sunny Letters, 435. 52. Kleinmichel, 132–133. 53. NM to Masson, 7/20 January and 16/29 January 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 54. The Nicky-Sunny Letters, 438. 55. Ibid., 444–445. 56. Ibid., 430. 57. Alix to Nicky, 4 December 1916, quoted in Radzinsky, 159. 58. NM to Masson, 21 December 1916/3 January 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 59. NM to Masson, 16/29 January 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 60. NM to Masson, 7/20 January 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 61. NM to Masson, 20 November/3 December 1916. 62. V. M. Purishkevich, The Murder of Rasputin (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985), 10, Introduction. 63. Ibid., 157. 64. Ibid., 157–158. 65. Ibid. 66. Mossolov, 99–100. 67. Youssoupov’s homosexuality is well known. The story of the makeup was told to me by Gleb Botkin, the son of the last tsar’s doctor, at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the fall of 1969. Radzinsky quotes a long passage from the grand duke’s diary (I assume he is referring to his “Zapiski”) in which the grand duke expresses the opinion that Felix and Rasputin were having an affair. He also states that he wondered if in the two hours before the conspirators killed Rasputin, while Felix was alone with him, if the two did not have sex. See Radzinsky, File, 437; 478–79. If indeed they did, Felix certainly put a new

Notes

279

dimension to the concept of “black widow spider sex.” I was unable to find the passage he quoted from “the diary” in the printed version in Krasnyi arkhiv. A diary is listed in the papers in GARF in Moscow, but the microfiche holding has only one illegible page. Where the printed diary was derived, I do not know. 68. NM, “Zapiski,” 97. 69. “K istorii poslednikh dnei tsarskogo rezhima (1916–1917 gg.),” KA, 14 (1926), 246. 70. Figes, 289. 71. Youssoupov, Rasputin, 207. 72. NM, “Zapiski,” 102–103. 73. Youssoupov, Rasputin, 213. 74. Ibid., 184–85, 208; see his Lost Splendor, 257. 75. NM, “Zapiski,” 98. 76. Charles de Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, Petersbourg-Pétrograd, 1914– 1917 (Paris: Plon, 1941), 29–30. 77. Ibid., 31. 78. Maylunas and Mironenko, 508. 79. NM, “Zapiski,” 98. 80. Youssoupov, Rasputin, 217; Lost Splendor, 192. 81. Ibid. 82. Buchanan, Dissolution, 149. 83. NM to Masson, 7/20 January 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 84. Marie, Education, 265. 85. NM, “Zapiski,” 99. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., 98. 88. “K istorii,” KA, 14: 240. 89. Youssoupov to NM, 19 December/1 January 1916, f. 670, op. 1, d. 179, GARF, Moscow. 90. Youssoupov, Lost Splendor, 265. 91. Prince Dmitri, who was her brother, told me that they knew that the murder was to be attempted and that they received a cryptic telegram from Felix informing them that the deed had been done. 92. Irina to NM, 19 December 1916, f. 670, op. 1, d. 177, GARF, Moscow. 93. Irina to NM, 20 December/2 January 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 177, GARF, Moscow. 94. Youssoupov, Lost Splendor, 271. 95. NM to Masson, 21 December/3 January 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 96. NM to Masson, 7/20 January 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 97. Ibid. 98. Alexander, Once, 278. 99. Papiers Paléologue, Paléologue to Ministry of Foreign Affairs (hereafter MFA), 10 January 1917, vol. 4, no. 45, Archive du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris. 100. Maylunas and Mironenko, 517; Konstantinovich, 312–313.

280

Notes

101. Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia (New York: Praeger, 1967), 37. 102. Aleksandr Blok, ed., Poslednie dni imperatorskoi vlasti: po neizdannym dokumentam (Petrograd: Alkonost, 1921), 10. 103. Rodzianko, Reign, 246–247. 104. Paléologue, 1: 198–199. 105. Golder, 246–247. Golder, quoting the same diary, remembered that it was Kirill’s brother Boris who had inquired. 106. Golder, 246–247. 107. Crawford, 30. 108. Radzinsky, Last Tsar, 78; Hasegawa, 194–195; Katkov, 171. 109. See his letters to Masson dated 14/26 May 1899, 4/26 June 1899, and 29 September 1900; see also Brancovan, 68 n. 110. Katkov, 171. 111. Paléologue, 3: 157. 112. Chambrun, 38–39. 113. Paléologue to MFA, 11 January 1917, Vol. 4, no. 56, Papiers Paléologue, MFA. 114. Chambrun, 38–39. 115. Paléologue, 3: 161–162. 116. Ibid., 162–63. 117. De Robien, 37; curiously Chambrun does not mention this statement in his memoirs. 118. S. V. Zavadskii, “Na velikom izlome,” Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, 8 (1923), 41–43, cited in Hasegawa, 190. 119. Paléologue, 3: 164. 120. Note attached to dispatch no. 56, 11 January 1917, vol. 4, Papiers Paléologue, MFA. 121. Youssoupov, Rasputin, 238; Alexander, Once, 279. 122. Vyrubova, 183–84. 123. Golder, 248–253; N II i V. K., 117–122. 124. Buchanan to Foreign Office, 9 January 1917, vol. 3002, p. 333, F. O. 371, General Correspondence, Public Record Office, London, England. 125. Alexander, Once, 316. 126. Maylunas and Mironenko, 533–534. 127. Mossolov, 71. 128. Mossolov felt that the emperor knew through the Okhrana, the secret police. Mossolov, 27. 129. Marie, Education, 265. 130. Ibid., 273–274; Chambrun, 34. 131. Meriel Buchanan, Petrograd: The City of Trouble (London: Collins, 1918), 86. 132. Crawford, 174, 390 n. 133. Dmitri (Pavlovich) to NM, 31 December 1916, f. 670, op. 1, d. 212, GARF, Moscow.

Notes

281

134. Dmitri (Pavlovich) to NM, 1 January 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 212, GARF, Moscow. 135. “Iz dnevnika A. V. Romanova za 1916–1917 gg,” KA, 26 (1928), 189– 190. 136. Ibid. 137. “Iz dnevnika,” 192. 138. Ibid. 139. NM to Masson, 16/29 January 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 140. Buchanan to Foreign Office, 14 January 1917, Foreign Office, 371, General Correspondence, vol. 3002: 257. 141. NM to Masson, 16/29 January 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 142. Nekliudov, 194. 143. Paléologue, 3: 167. 144. NM to Masson, 16/29 January 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 145. S. S. Oldenbourg, Last Tsar: Nicholas II, His Reign and His Russia (Gulf Breeze, Florida: Academic International Press, 1978), 4: 118–119; Paléologue, 3: 170; “Iz dnevnika,” 194. 146. NM to Masson, 7/20 January 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 147. “Iz dnevnika,” 192. 148. Minney to NM, 1 January 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 190, GARF, Moscow. 149. “Iz dnevnika,” 192–193. 150. Maylunas and Mironenko, 533–534. 151. Chambrun, 50–51. 152. Minney to Bimbo, 12 January (Old Style), 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 192, GARF, Moscow. 153. NM to Minney, 1 February 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 125, GARF. This letter is on the grand duke’s stationary in his paper, so perhaps it was never sent if it is not just a copy. Nevertheless, it clearly reveals the grand duke’s thoughts, ideas, and feelings. 154. Marie (Maria Pavlovna) to NM, 25 January 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 211, GARF, Moscow. 155. NM to Nicholas II, 11 January 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 128, GARF, Moscow. 156. NM, “Zapiski,” 102. 157. NM to Masson, 7/20 February 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 158. NM to Minney, 1 February 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 125, GARF, Moscow. 159. NM, “Zapisti,” 102.

CHAPTER 7 1. Carl Sandburg, The People Yes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), 221– 222. 2. Marie (Grand Duke George), 180. 3. Rheta Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 9.

282

Notes

4. Alexander, Once, 261. 5. Mikhail Aleksandrovich diaries, Friday, 23 February/9 March 1917, Forbes Collection, American Heritage Building, New York. 6. A. S. Matveev, “Velikii kniaz’ Mikhail Aleksandrovich v dni perevorota,” Vozrozhdenie, 24 (1952), 141–145. 7. Mikhail Aleksandrovich diaries, 25 February 1917 (Old Style), 1917, Forbes Collection, New York. 8. Mikhail Aleksandrovich diaries, 26 February/11 March 1917, Forbes Collection, New York. 9. Alexander, Once, 286. 10. Paléologue, 3: 233; Lili Dehn, The Real Tsaritsa (Boston: Little, Brown, 1922), 162. 11. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 12. Cyril, 213–214. 13. Some accounts say that it was March 15: [The Hon. Albert Stopferd], Russian Diary of an Englishman (London: Heinemann, 1919), 123; Crawford, 299, misquoting Matveev’s diary. 14. NM to Masson, 12/25 March 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 15. Mikhail Aleksandrovich diaries, 27 February/12 March 1917, Forbes Collection, New York. Apparently the grand duke wrote the entries for 27 February–3 March all at one time. 16. Ibid. 17. Poutiatine (no page given); Crawford, 274; Dehn, 195–196. 18. Chambrun, 63. 19. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 177–178. 20. Chambrun, 62. 21. Matveev, 144. 22. Mikhail Aleksandrovich diaries, 1 March/14 March 1917, Forbes Collection, New York. 23. Mikhail Aleksandrovich diaries, 2 March 1917, Forbes Collection, New York. 24. Ibid. 25. Ironically, Shul’gin was to live to be about a hundred years old, and in the mid-1970s he served as an advisor to the Soviet regime’s making of the movie Agoniia, a surprisingly sympathetic account of Nicholas II’s life. 26. Olga, 149. 27. Paley, 61, cited in Crawford, 298. 28. Dehn, 165. 29. Olga, 151. 30. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 183. 31. Memorandum to Ambassador Francis from Moscow, 15–23 March 1917, Francis Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, MO. 32. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 183. 33. Mossolov, 69. 34. Olga Putiatine, “Les derniers jours du Grand-duc Michel Alexandrovich,” Revue des Dux Mondes, 18 (November 1, 1923), 70.

Notes

283

35. Katkov, 404–405. 36. Putiatine, no page no. given, cited in Crawford, 302. 37. Miliukov, Vospominaniia, 2: 316–317; Political Memoirs, 1905–1917, ed. Arthur Mendel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 410. 38. Ibid., 317; English ed., 410; Alexander Kerensky, The Catastrophe (New York: Appleton, 1927), 67–70. 39. For the full story, see Crawford, 302 ff. 40. Putiatine, 76. 41. Sergei to NM, 19 (?) March 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 185, GARF, Moscow. 42. Chambrun, 62. 43. Kleinmichel, 162, 237. 44. Vremennoe pravitel’stvo. Chrezvychainaia sledstvennaia komissia. Padenie tsarskogo rezhima( Leningrad and Moscow: Gosizdat., 1924–1927), 4: 102. The deposed minister of the interior was, however, mistaken about Grand Duke Alexander’s being with Niki. He was at that time in the south, probably there with another one of his brothers. 45. NM to Masson, 19 July/1 August 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 46. NM to Masson, 21 March/3 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 47. NM to Masson, 12/25 March 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 48. NM to Kerensky, 9 March (Old Style) 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 489, GARF, Moscow; “Romanovy v pervye dni revoliutsii,” KA, 24 (1927), 209. 49. NM to Masson, 12/25 March 1917 and 14/27 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 50. NM to Masson, 21 March/ 3 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 51. L’vov to NM, 15 February 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 335, GARF, Moscow. 52. L’vov to NM, after 12 April 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 335, GARF, Moscow. 53. NM to Masson, 14/27 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 54. Kerensky, Catastrophe, 282, cited in Crawford, 282. 55. De Robien, 34–35. 56. 25 February 1919, in the archives of Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, The British Library, no. 54436, packet 2.df 25/7–17, cited in Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 309. 57. John Handbury-Williams, The Emperor Nicholas As I Knew Him (London: Humphries, 1922), cited in Chavchavadze, 204, no page no. given. 58. Alix to Niki, 2 March 1917, quoted in Crawford, 275. 59. Alexander, Once, 88. 60. Mossolov, 69. 61. Golder, 299. 62. Alexander, Once, 300. 63. Crawford, 318, quotes Mikhail’s diary. 64. Marie (Grand Duke George), 182–183. 65. George to Ksenia, 1 July 1917, Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Collection, The Hoover Institution.

284

Notes

66. NM to Masson, 21 March/3 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 67. Ibid. 68. Sergei to NM, (?) March 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 185, GARF, Moscow. 69. Sergei to NM, 19 April 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 185, GARF, Moscow. 70. Sergei to NM, 3 May 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 185, GARF, Moscow. 71. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 182. 72. Ibid., 185. 73. Ibid., 187. 74. Ibid., 213. 75. Rech’ (the Kadet Party newspaper), 7/20 March 1917. 76. Paléologue, 3: 283. 77. Youssoupov, Lost Splendor, 276. 78. Ibid. 79. Typescript journal of Albert Thomas 1917, 28 April/11 May 1917, 82– 83, Albert Thomas Papers, 94 AP, Carton 176, Archives Nationales, Paris, France. 80. NM to Masson, 6/19 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 81. NM to Masson, 14/27 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 82. The president of the Soviet Nikolai Chkheidze was a Georgian. NM to Masson, 6/19 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 83. NM to Masson, 14/27 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 84. NM to Masson, 7/20 May 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. Kerensky did eventually order Admiral Alexander Kolchak to investigate the disturbing of the dowager empress. NM to Masson, 10/23 May 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 85. NM to Masson, 31 May/13 June 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 86. De Robien, 54. 87. Paléologue, 3: 259. 88. Entry for Wednesday, 13 June 1917, in his journal, Albert Thomas Papers, carton 176, Archives Nationales, Paris. 89. Albert Thomas Papers, 28 April/11 May 1917, p. 82, carton 176, Archives Nationales, Paris. 90. NM to Masson, 18 June/1 July 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 91. NM to Masson, 2/15 May 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 92. Quartier General des Armées du soudouest, 13–24 August 1917 (?), clipping in Masson’s letter of 23 September 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 344, GARF, Moscow. 93. NM to Masson, 12/25 October–15/28 October 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 94. “Iz perepiska,” 53: 145. 95. NM to Masson, 1/14 May 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 96. NM to Masson, 10/23 June in 7/20 June 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 97. NM to Masson 19 July/1 August 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 98. NM to Masson, 23 June/6 July in 18/1 July 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France.

Notes

285

99. NM to Masson, 17 May/9 June 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 100. NM to Masson, 20 June/3 July 1917 in 18/1 July 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 101. NM to Masson, 12/25 July 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 102. Some historians feel that it had more Bolshevik involvement from the earliest days. See Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana Unversity Press, 1968). 103. Rabinowitch, Alexander, The Bolsheviks Came to Power (New York, 1976, picture section, n.p.). 104. NM to Masson, 29 June/12 July 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 105. NM to Masson, 12/25 July 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 106. NM to Masson, 27 May/9 June 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 107. NM to Masson, 29 June/12 July 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 108. NM to Masson, 12/15–15/28 October 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 109. Alexander Kerensky, Russia and History’s Turning Point (London: Cassell, 1965), 327. 110. Golder, 180; N II i V. K., 76. 111. NM to Masson, 14/27 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 112. NM to Masson, 21 March/3 April 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 113. Gray, 82–83. 114. Sergei to NM, 10 May 1917, f. 670, op. 1, d. 185, GARF, Moscow. 115. “Iz perepiska,” 147. 116. NM to Masson, 29 June/12 July 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 117. NM to Masson, 27 May/9 June 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 118. NM to Masson, 12/25 July 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 119. NM to Masson, 21 June/4 July in the letter of 18 June/1 July 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 120. NM to Masson, 19 July/2 August 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 121. Paléologue, 3: 167. 122. NM to Masson, 5/18 August 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 123. NM to Masson, 30 August/12 September 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 124. NM to Masson, 22 August/4 September 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 125. NM to Masson, 3/16 September 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 126. Ibid. 127. NM to Masson, 20 September/3 October 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 128. NM to Masson, 22 August/4 September in 30 August/12 September 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 129. Gray, 90–91. 130. NM to Masson, 22 September/5 October 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 131. NM to Masson, 5/18 October 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France.

286

Notes

132. Ibid. 133. De Robien, 116. 134. NM to Masson, 13/26 November 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 135. I have consulted several David experts in this country and in Europe, but I have been unable to learn which of David’s Napoleons he owned or where his portrait is now. 136. NM to Masson, 16/29–20 October/2 November 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 137. Prince Dmitri told me in one of our conversations, “Of course, you know it was the Jews who shot the tsar.” 138. NM to Masson, 12/25 October–15/28 October 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 139. One of the unpleasant components of the “New Russians” today is an open anti-Semitism that was not apparent in Soviet times. The official line now is that even Lenin was a Jew, which he was not. His maternal grandfather was a baptized Jew, but that fact in no way makes him one. 140. NM to Masson, 12/25 October–15/28 October 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France.

CHAPTER 8 1. A paraphrase of a conversation between Tsvetaeva and Balmont told in Harrison Salisbury’s Black Night White Snow (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 597–599. 2. Maxim Gor’kii, Pis’ma k E. P. Peshkovoi, cited in Figes, 179. 3. De Robien, 280. 4. Dostoevsky, The Adolescent, 65. 5. Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), 194. 6. NM to Masson, 27 October/9 November 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 7. Brummer, 244. 8. Ibid. 9. NM to Masson, 11/24 November 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 10. Ibid. 11. NM to Masson, 11/24 December, 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 12. NM to Masson, 3/16–14/27 November 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 13. Brummer, 244–245. 14. NM to Masson, 12/25 November 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 15. Oliver Radkey, The Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1950) and his update Russia Goes to the Polls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1990). 16. NM to Masson, 24 November/7 December 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France.

Notes

287

17. NM to Masson, 13/26 November, 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France. 18. NM to Masson, 9/22 January 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 19. NM to Masson, 11/24 November 1917, NM Papers, BSP, France; Marie (Grand Duchess George), 185. 20. Brummer, 245. 21. This incident took place in a meeting in April 1918. NM to Masson, 7/28 April 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 22. Brummer, 247. 23. NM to Masson, 7/12 April 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 24. NM to Masson, 9/22 January 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 25. Ibid. 26. Brummer, 252. 27. Ibid., 246. 28. Ibid., 247. 29. Ibid. 30. NM to Masson, 17 March 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. One change enacted by the Bolsheviks with which Nicholas Mikhailovich agreed was the adoption of the Gregorian calendar. From this point on, the grand duke uses only New Style dating. 31. NM to Masson, 5 March 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 32. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 182. 33. NM to Masson, 17 March 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 34. Marie, Education, 339–341. 35. Paley, 51. 36. Brummer, 249. 37. Ibid., 248. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 249. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 250. For the grand duke’s version of his departure, see his letter to Masson of 7/12 April 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 42. Brummer, 250. 43. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 220. 44. Brummer, 251. 45. de Robien, 253. 46. Liste des français restés en Russie, November, n.d., p. 4, F713488, dossier “Novembre 1919,” Russie 1919, Archives Nationales, Paris, France. 47. NM to Masson, 7/12 April 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 48. Brummer, 252. 49. Smirnoff, 91. 50. NM to Masson, 13 May–6 June 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 51. Ibid. 52. NM to Masson, 7/12 April 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 53. Brummer, 252. 54. NM to Masson, 7/12 April 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 55. Brummer, 253–254.

288

Notes

56. Ibid., 254. 57. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 220. 58. NM to Masson, 13 May–6 June 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 59. Smirnoff, 91. 60. Ibid., 97, 105, 110. 61. Kschessinska, 176. 62. NM to Masson, 26 June–1 July 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 63. Noulens to MFA, no. 295, 31 May 1918, Z, Europe: URSS, 15: 3, AMAE. 64. Brummer, 255. 65. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 228–229. 66. Brummer, 256. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 257–258. 69. Ibid. 70. de Robien, 279. 71. Ibid. 72. Noulens to MFA, no. 492, 1 July 1919, Z, E: URSS, 15: 11, AMAE. 73. De Robien, 277. 74. M. Gentil to Masson, 21 July 1918, in the NM-Masson correspondence, BSP, France. 75. Brummer, 256. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., 258. 79. Ibid., 259. 80. Ibid., 260. 81. Ibid., 258, 260. 82. Smirnoff, 258. 83. Brummer, 261. 84. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 229. 85. Crawford, 356–363; P. M. Bykov, Poslednie dni romanovykh (MoscowLeningrad, Gos. Izd., 1930), 84–85. 86. Newspaper clipping, E: URSS, Z., 819: 22, AMAE. 87. Ibid., passim. 88. Kschessinska, 176. 89. Crawford, 353; de Robien, 265; Bykov, 102. 90. “The Alapaevsk Tragedy,” 6–8, typescript in I. S. Smolin Collection, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. 91. Paley, 313. 92. De Robien, 281. 93. Ibid. 94. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 230. 95. Brummer, 262; he did not come to Petrograd with the grand duke as Princess Paley states in her memoir. See Paley, 216.

Notes

289

96. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 230. 97. Brummer, 262. 98. Marie (Grand Duchess George), 237. 99. Unidentified newspaper clipping, 2 August 1918, E: ERSS, Z, 819: 22, AMAE. 100. Gavrill, 366. 101. Ibid., 363. 102. Ibid., 366. 103. Brummer, 264. 104. Paley, 245–246. 105. Figes, 398. 106. Novaia zhizn, 27 April, 9 May 1917, cited in Figes, 400. 107. Paley, 241–242. 108. NM to Masson, 24 December 1918, NM Papers, BSP, France. 109. Alexander, Once, 334. 110. David Shub, “Maksim Gor’kii i komunisticheskaia diktatura,” Most (Munich), no. 1 (1958), 243. 111. Alexander, Always, 87–88. 112. Ibid. 113. Radzinsky, The Last Tsar, 123. 114. Ibid., 328–329. 115. Pravda, no. 12, Saturday, 18 January 1919, p. 1. It may also have been a delayed result of the assassination of Uritsky; Smirnoff, 150. 116. Brummer, 263. 117. Alexander, Always, 88–89. 118. Paley, 295; Paley to Poincaré, E: URSS, Z, 15: 89–91; Delavaud to MFA, no. 280, 13 February 1919, E: URSS, Z, 15: 95, AMAE; Alexander, Always, 88–89. 119. Princes A. M. Bariatinsky, My Russian Life (London: Hutchinson, 1923), 329. She obviously has confused him with Grand Duke Paul. 120. Brummer, 266. 121. Ibid., 265. 122. Le Temps, 10 March 1919, E: URSS, Z, 319: 79, AMAE. 123. Brummer, 264–266; Youssoupov, Lost Splendor, 296; Masson’s article on NM in Le Gaulois a week after the murder is quoted in NM’s La Fin du Tsarisme, 285; Gray, 129–130 copies the other accounts; Paley, 300. 124. Pravda, no. 23, 1 February 1919, p. 3.

IMPERIAL LEGACY 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Dostoevsky, The Adolescent, 16. Gavrill, V mramornom dvortse (New York: Chekov, 1955). Perry, 196. For general details, see this work. Ibid., 195. For example, see Edvard Radzinsky’s and Olga Beliakova’s works.

290

Notes

6. Interview with Prince Dmitri Romanov. 7. I am grateful for an interesting correspondence in early 1971 with Sir Francis Pribham, the captain of the HMS Marlborough. I terribly regret that acute jet lag caused me to oversleep and miss my bus to his home on the only day during my 1971 stay in Great Britain on which I could visit him. 8. Interview with Gleb Botkin. 9. Chavchavadze, 174. 10. Moscow Times, 10 June 1999.

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Index

Academie Française, 59, 92, 208 Adler, Victor, 240 Ai-todor, 36, 39, 42, 64, 83, 104 Aleksei Alexandrovich, Grand Duke, 49, 103 Aleksei Mikhailovich, Grand Duke, 21 Aleksei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich, 80, 166 Alexander I, Tsar, 29, 71, 78, 80, 85, 88 Alexander II, Tsar, 5, 12, 13, 22, 26, 34, 59 Alexander II Centennial (Jubilee), 74, 189 Alexander III, Tsar, 3–4, 5, 7, 9, 17, 21, 26, 32, 36, 50, 59, 85, 103, 106, 129, 163, 184–85; NM and, 31, 60, 61, 106, 107, 188 Alexander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke, 3, 6, 10, 11, 15, 18–19, 35, 95, 139, 246; NM and, 96, 144; revolution and 193, 200 Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress, 4–8, 26, 108, 159, 171–72; NM and, 159, 165, 169, 171–73 Alexandra of Greece, Princess, 27

Alexandrine, Queen of Denmark, 33, 105 Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, 34 Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. See Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress Almanach de Gotha, 137 Always a Grand Duke, 19 Anastasia Mikhailovna, Grand Duchess (Stassie), 10, 15, 16, 33, 52, 53, 99, 105 Andrei Vladimirovich, 37, 180, 189 Arakcheev, Aleksei, 127 Archival Commission, 73, 150 Article 87, 121 Assembly of the Land, 2 “Aunt Miechen.” See Maria Pavlovna, Grand Duchess (Grand Duchess Vladimir) Bagration-Mukhansky, Prince C., 230 Balmont, Konstantin, 221 Bariatinsky, Field Adjutant Anatoli, 143 Bark, Peter, 153 Barrès, Maurice, 79 Baudrillart, Alfred, 92

304

Index

Belaia vorona, i, 5, 28, 45, 97, 250 Bimbo, Uncle, 30, 31, 47, 53, 57, 178, 179, 189 Bismarck, chancellor Otto von, 140, 152 Bixio, Jacques-Alexandre, 91, 92 Black Hand, 134 Bloody Sunday, 112, 114 Bobyleva, Tatiana, 250 Bolsheviks, 89, 117, 211 Boris Vladimirovich, Grand Duke, 3, 26, 181, 189 Borodino, battle of, 33, 59 Botkin, Gleb, 19, 104 Brattiano, Ion, Brattiano, Ion, 131 Brusilov, General A.A., 141, 148, 161, 164, 210, 212 Brusilov offensive, 27, 148, 153, 161 Brummer, Constantine, 46, 71, 95, 222, 228–50 Buchanan, Ambassador George, 46, 152, 175, 188 Buchanan, Meriel, 46, 142, 186. Bulygin, A.G., 113 “Bulygin Duma,” 115, 116 Cäcilie (Cecilia) of Baden, 4, 9, 10. See also Olga Feodorovna Calmette, Gaston, 79 Carlotti di Riparbella, Marquis André, 60, 154 Carol I, King of Rumania, 131 Catherine the Great, Tsarina, 39, 77, 80 Cecile, Crown Princess of Prussia, 105 Cecilia of Baden. See Cäcilie (Cecilia) of Baden Chambrun, Charles de, 176, 178, 180, 183, 186, 195 Charles X, King of France, 62 Chavchavadze, Nina, 34 Chavchavadze, Paul, 40, 67 Chernov, Victor, 5, 212, 216 Chétardie, Marquis Joachim de la, 183 Chicherin, Georgii, 236 Christian X, King of Denmark, 33 Clemenceau, Georges, 158 Colis Olag, 76 Constantine, Grand Duke, 4, 36

Constantine Constantinovich, Grand Duke, 76, 149, 238 Constantine Nicholaevich, Grand Duke, 5, 72, 149 Constituent Assembly, 198, 199, 214– 16, 223; NM and, 214–15 Constitutional-Democratic Party. See Kadet Party Council of Five Hundred, 38 Council of State. See State Council Council of the Empire. See State Council Crimean War, 5, 85, 109 Czech Legion, 235 Dagmar of Denmark. See Olga Feodorovna Daisy of Pless, 105 Danilov, General Yurii, 143 Dashkov, 73 Daudet, Ernest, 79 David, Jacques-Louis, 75, 218 Decembrists, 47, 109 Dehn, Lili, 197 Dmitri Alexandrovich, Prince, 31, 40, 47, 51, 53, 57 Dmitri Constantinovich, Grand Duke, 57, 230, 233 Dmitri Pavlovich, Grand Duke, 175, 176, 183; exile of, 186–88 Dolgorouki, Barbara, 6 Dolgorouki, Catherine, 14 Dorr, Rhetta, 191 Dostoyevsky, Feodor, 17, 29, 51, 22, 247 Dowager Empress. See Maria Feodorovna, Dowager Empress Dubensky, Colonel A.N., 56 Dukhobors, 83, 85 Duma, First. See First Duma “Duma of Popular Anger.” See Second Duma “Duma of Popular Hope.” See First Duma Duma, Second. See Second Duma Duma, Third. See Third Duma Durnovo, P.N., 128–29 Echo de Paris, 137 Elizabeth Alekseevna, Empress, 71

Index L’Empereur Alexandre I: essai d’étude historique, 82 Encausse, Gerard, See Papus, Dr. Etlinger, Maria (Erestova), 43 Eugénie, Empress Napoleon, 7 False Dmitris, 80 February Revolution, 48, 192 Le Figaro, 59, 79 Filipov, A.N., 150 First Duma, 119, 121–23 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 133 Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria, 98 Fredericks, Count Vladimir, 174, 187 Friedrich-Franz III, Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, 10, 15 Friedrich-Franz IV, Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, 105 Fundamental Laws of the Russia Empire, 120, 126 Gapon, Father G.A., 111–12 GARF (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv russkoi federatsi), 8, 82, 166, 190 Le Gaulois, 137 Gavrill Constantinovich, Prince, 18, 99, 240, 247 General-Ad”iutanty Imperatora Aleksandra Pervogo, 81 General Order No. 1, 205, 208 Gentile, M., 239 George, Henry, 86, 87 George I, King of Greece, 34 George V, King of England, 139, 204 George Mikhailovich, Grand Duke, 8, 33, 34–35, 138, 162, 191, 202, 203, 204, 232–33, 195, 197; exile of, 228 Glinsky, A.N., 174 Glorious Revolution of 1688, 109 Gogi. See George Mikhailovich, Grand Duke Gogol, Nikolai, 68, 70 Golitsyn, N.N., 190 Golitsyn, Prince N.V., 150, 157 Golitsyn, Prince P.P., 79 Golombevsky, M., 71, 73 Golovin, General N.N., 153 Goremykin, Ivan, 121, 123

305

Gorky, Maxim, 221, 241–42 Graf Paul Aleksandrovich Stroganov (1774–1817), 78 Grand dukes (life style), 2–4 Gray, Pauline, 39 Great Reforms, 1861–1881, i Great Retreat, 1915, 146 Great War (Russia), 140–158 Guchkov, Alexander, 128, 196, 20 Gurko, V.I., 19 Gustav V, King of Sweden, 62 Haber, 9 Hadji Murat, 87 Hanbury-Williams, John, 202 Hanotaux, Gabriel, 73, 92, 96 Harpe, César de la, 82 Helmerson, Colonel, 20 Herzen, Alexander, 49 Hesse, Ernst, Grand Duke of, 61, 182 The Historical Herald, 174 HMS Marlborough, 149 Horax, 35 Ignatiev, Countess Catherine, 32 Ignatiev, Katia, 102 Igor Constantinovich, Prince, 238 Imperator Aleksandr I: opyt istoricheskago izsledovaniia, 82 (French ed.) Imperial Academy of Science. See Russian Academy of Science Imperial Geographic Society, 72 Imperial Historical Society, 52, 69, 72, 145, 149, 189 Irina Alexandrovich, Grand Duchess, 19, 104 Ivanov, General Nicholas, 140, 148, 196 Izvolsky, Alexander, 154, 155 Izvolsky, Helen, 9, 81 Jefferson, Thomas, 90 Joffre, General Joseph, 149 John Constantinovich, Prince, 238 “July Days,” 211 Kadet Party, 118, 119, 160 Kasatchenko, 20 Katkov, George, 48, 198

306

Index

Kavkaz, 13, 20, 41 Kerensky, Alexander, 116, 125; NM and 48, 198, 200, 201, 211, 215, 217 Khabalov, General Sergei, 194 Khodynka catastrophe, 48 King, Martin Luther, 45 Kirill Vladimirovich, Grand Duke, 101, 180–81, 189, 202, 248; revolution and, 194 Kleinmichel, Countess, 44, 70, 172 Kliuchevsky, Vasilii, 71 Kokovtsev, Count Vladimir, 76, 129, 145 Kornilov, General Lavr, 209, 212–313 Kschessinska, Mathilde, 15, 16, 21, 26, 35, 37, 139 Ksenia Alexandrovna, Grand Duchess, 18, 26, 96, 104, 193, 195 Kulikovsky, Colonel Nikolai, 205 Kulomzin, A.N., 73 Kuropatkin, General Aleksei, 110 Kuzmich, Feodor, 80–82, 84 Lamsdorf, Count Vladimir, 72 Lappo-Danilevsky, Alexander S., 150, 157 Legend o Konchine Imperatora Aleksandra I v Sibiri v obraz Staritsa Fedora Kos’micha, 80 Lenin, V.I., 116, 206 Lermontov, Mikhail, 101, 221 Liebknecht, Karl, 240 Lloyd George, David, 158 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 29 Loris-Melikov, Count Mikhail, 7 Louis XVI, 49, 188 Louis Napoleon, Prince, 98 Louis-Philippe, King of France, 62 Lunacharsky, A.V., 243 Luther, Martin, 45 Luxemburg, Rosa, 240 L’vov, George, 199, 200–201, 204, 211 L’vov, N.N., 157, 170 Mackensen, General August von, 146 Majoresco, Tito, 131 Maklakov, Vasilii, 129, 159 Malechka. See Kschessinska Mathilde Manouilov, Ivan, 208

Manukhin, Dr., 242 Maria Feodorovna, Dowager Empress, 8, 55, 101, 106, 168 Maria Pavlovna, Grand Duchess, 6, 26, 62 Maria Pavlovna, Grand Duchess (Grand Duchess Vladimir), 16, 26, 56, 156, 162, 165, 174, 180–83, 189, 190, 248 Marie, Grand Duchess George, 6, 18, 34, 69, 138, 139 Marie of Greece. See Marie, Grand Duchess George Marie of Rumania, Queen, 148–49 Marye, Ambassador Thomas, 149 Masson, Frédéric, 45, 57, 63, 68, 78– 79, 114, 194, 231; relations with NM, 90–92, 96, 166 Masurian Lakes, battle of, 140 Matveev, A.S., 192, 195 “May Crisis,” 209 Mémoires sur les Lépidoptères, 76 Mingelskii Grendadier Regiment, 56, 57 Mensheviks, 193 Merenberg, Countess Sophie, 33, 64 Metternich, Klemens von, 82, 97 Michael I, Tsar, 2, 199 Miche-Miche. See Mikhail Mikhailovich, Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke, 108, 120, 192, 193–200 Mikhail Mikhailovich, Grand Duke (Miche-Miche), 3, 10, 13, 17, 30, 31, 32–33, 54, 61, 64, 99, 139, 163 Mikhail Nikolaevich, Grand Duke, 4–8, 20, 22, 29, 31–32, 41, 62, 69, 118; death of, 99–101 Mikhailovichi, 13, 15, 22, 24, 25, 27, 31, 49, 151, 163 Miliukov, Paul, 47, 50, 118, 160, 167, 173, 199, 209 Minny. See Marie of Greece Mirbach, Count Wilhelm von, 236 Misha. See Mikhail Mikhailovich, Grand Duke Molière, 10 Molodovsky, M.N., 72, 101, 140, 230, 231

Index Moskovskii nekropol’, 77 Mossolov, A.A., 14, 44, 69, 174, 185 Muromtsev, S.A., 120, 122 Nabokov, Vladimir D., 6, 76, 122 Napoleon I, 59, 75, 82 Napoleon III, 7, 98 National Convention, 46 Naumov, A.N., 128 Nekliudov, A., 48, 69, 188 Nekrasov, Nicholas, 212 Newton, Isaac, 89 Nicholas I, Tsar, 4, 6, 62 Nicholas II, Tsar, 4, 8, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 86, 107, 147; relationship with NM, 108, 168–69, 171–72 Nicholas Alexandrovich, Tsarevich. See Nicholas II Nicholas Mikhailovich, Grand Duke, 12, 22, 52, 96, 112; Academie Française and, 92–93; Alexander II: Centennial, work on, 187; Alexandra, relations with, 159, 165, 169, 171–73; anti-Semitism, 10, 50– 51, 117–18, 212, 219, 232; Archival Commission and, 73, 150; birth, 4; Constituent Assembly and, 214–15; diplomacy and, 97, 130–32, 153–55; the Dumas and, 115–16, 119–20, 122–27; execution of, 242–50 ; France, affinity for, 59–61, 71, 90– 93, 96; French language and, 12, 23; his gambling, 52–53; Germany, hatred of, 60–61, 136–37; Great War and, 134–47, 140–52; historical work, 67–93, 145, 149, 208; hunting and, 52; imprisonment of, 234–250; Intellectual pursuits, 4, 67, 75–76; Jewish heritage of, 9–10; liberalism of, 46–50; lovelife, 61–63; in Marienbad, 96; Masonic ties, 47– 48, 182; military and, 53–54, 55–57, 96; Paris Peace Conference and, 153–57; personality of, 7, 43–44, 55; physical appearance, 5; plot against the tsar and, 179–86; Rasputin’s murder and, 175–78; rehabilitation of, 249–50;

307

relationship with Empress Alexandra, 10, 44; relationship with MicheMiche, 7, 8, 9, 30–33, 98; relationship with Olga Feodorovna, 9, 11, 12, 27, 45, 54, 62–66; relationship with siblings, 14, 16, 17, 21, 24, 30, 31–32, 70, 102, 103; relationship with Tolstoy, 83– 89; religion and, 51; Revolution of 1917 and, 194–219, 222–28; Rumanian mission in 1912, 130–32; Russo-Turkish War and, 53–55, 76, 141; travels of, 97, 102, 150; Vologda exile of, 187–90 Nicholas Nicholaevich, Grand Duke (elder), 5, 31, 52 Nicholas Nicholaevich, Grand Duke (younger), 40, 137, 146, 160 Nicholas of Nassau, Prince, 32 Noulens, Joseph, 208 Nuremburg Laws, 50 Obolensky, Prince V.A., 48, 129 October Manifesto (Manifesto of October 17), 88–89, 116, 118, 171 October Revolution, 219–20 Olga Alexandrovna, Grand Duchess, 149 Olga Feodorovna, 9, 12, 13, 29, 41, 42, 54; her death, 63–66. See also Cäcilie (Cecilia) of Baden Orlov-Davidov, Count Aleksei A., 48, 182 Painlevé, Paul, 92 Paléologue, Ambassador Maurice, 45, 60, 136, 182, 183, 186, 188, 201, 205 Panin, Countess Sophia, 83 Papus, Dr., 109 Pares, Sir Bernard, 44, 109 Paris Peace Conference, 157 Paul I, Tsar, 4 Paul Alexandrovich, Grand Duke, 26, 137, 163 Peterburgskii nekropol’, 77 Peter Nicholaevich, Grand Duke, 42, 113 Petrograd Soviet, 118, 193

308

Index

Philippe Egalité, 188 Pistolkors, Olga, 27 Platonov, S.F., 73 Plehve, V.K. von, 113 Poincaré, Raymond, 82, 91, 135 Pokrovsky, N.N., 153 Polivanov, General Alexai, 163, 164 Polovtsov, State Secretary A.A., 7, 25, 38, 44, 52, 57, 62, 64, 73, 106 Pomology, Russian Society of, 76 Portalès, Count Friedrich von, 97 Port Arthur, 110 Portraits Russes des XVIII et XIX Siècles, 71, 77, 78 The Possessed, 1, 51 Potemkin, Gregory, 75 Pravda, 80, 245, 246 Princip, Gavrillo, 133–34 Progressive Bloc, 161 Protopopov, Ivan, 161–62, 167, 169, 205 Provisional Government, 50, 193, 198, 207, 209 Purishkevich, Vladimir, 46, 173–74 Pushkin, Alexander, 32, 47, 249 Putiatin, Princess Olga, 195, 197 Putilov Works, 111 Radde, Gustav, 76 Rasputin, 104, 135, 161, 166, 167, 168, 171; his murder, 175–77 Reingold, Leon, 140, 230 Relations Diplomatique [Relations diplomatiques de la Russie et de la France d’apès les rapports des ambassadeurs d’Alexandre et de Napoléon 1809–1812], 68 Revolution of 1905, 75, 87, 104, 109– 17; NM and, 112, 113–18 Revolution of 1917, 116, 192 Rivet, Charles, 46 Robespierre, Maximilien, 49 de Robien, Louis, 218, 221, 230–31, 235, 239 Rodzianko, Mikhail, 160, 164, 173, 181, 194, 199 Romanov, Filaret, 2 Romanov dynasty, 2, 3, 405, 137–38;

elimination of in the Revolution, 228–50, 247–49 Romanov Tricentennial, 247–49 Root, Elihu B., 207 Rosen, Baron Roman, 13 Rothschilds, 105 Rudolph von Habsburg, 97 Russian Academy of Science, 76 Russian Society of Pomology, 76, 77 Russkie nekropol’ v chuzhikh kraiaikh, 77 Russkii invalid, 41, 102 Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, 20, 104, 109 Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, 53– 55, 77, 131 Ruzsky, General Nicholas, 141, 143, 196 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 92 Sallust, 134 Samarin, A.D., 157 San Stephano, Treaty of, 153 Sandburg, Carl, 191 Sandro. See Alexander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke Sazonov, Sergei, 131, 155, 156, 164 Scavenius, Harald, 235 Schebelo, N.N., 131 Schilder, N.K., 81 Second Balkan War of 1913, 148 Second Duma, 124–26 Sergei Alexandrovich, Grand Duke, 113 Sergei Mikhailovich, Grand Duke, 15, 20, 37, 104–5, 118, 139, 144, 199, 203, 204, 209, 239 Sévigné, Madame de, 11 Shamil, 13 Sheglov, V.V., 74 Shulgin, V.V., 157, 169, 170, 196 Sievers, Gustava, 76 Sipiagin, Dmitri, 86 Social Democratic Party, 89, 119, 125, 193, 224 Social Revolutionary Party, 5, 119, 125, 224, 236 Spartakist putsch, 243 Spiridovich, General A.I., 37 Stackelberg, Baron G.K. von, 195 Stalin, Josef, 158

Index Stassie. See Anastasia Mikhailovna, Grand Duchess State Council, 6, 25, 29, 114, 126, 145, 200 Stolypin, Peter, 123, 125; Zemstvo Crisis of 1910 and, 127–30; NM and, 123, 124, 125, 127–29 “Stolypin’s necktie,” 123 Stroganov, Count Paul, 78, 79, 80 “Stupidity or Treason” speech, 167, 169 Stürmer, Boris, 161 Sukhomlinov, General Vladimir, 160, 163 Sviatopolk-Mirsky, Prince P.D., 112 Tannenberg, battle of, 140, 143 Taube, Baron M.A., 74 Le Temps, 46, 59 Tereshchenko, Mikhail, 200, 208, 212, 217 Third Duma, 126–27 “Third of June system,” 126 Thomas, Albert, 164, 165, 207 Tolstoy, Leo (Lev, L.N.), 1, 79, 82–89 Torby, Countess, 32 Trepov, Alexander, 167, 190 Trepov, D.F., 117 Treulieb, 241 Trotsky, Leon, 175 Trubetskoi, Prince Nikita, 71 Trubetskoi, Princess M.A., 175 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 221 Turgenev, Ivan, 92 Uncle Bimbo. See Bimbo, Uncle

309

Union Sacrée, 160, 167 Uritsky, Moisei, 225–28, 237 Urusov, Jules, 99 Vandal, Albert, 73 Vetochkin, 236 Viazemsky, Prince N. M., 38 Victoria, Queen of England, 8, 34 Victoria of Baden, 61–62 Villasinda, Count, 137 Viviani, René, 164, 165 Vladimir Alexandrovich, Grand Duke, 25–26, 56, 107 Vogel, Francis, 6–7, 15, 17, 31, 41, 42 Voltaire, 89 Vyborg Manifesto, 125 Vyrubova, Anna, 26, 167, 171 White Crow. See belaia vorona Wilcox, E. H., 169 Wilhelm I, Kaiser of Germany, 152 Wilhelm II, Kaiser of Germany, 33, 71, 133, 136, 152 Wilhelm, Crown Prince of Prussia, 33 Wilson, President Woodrow, 153, 158 Witte, Sergei, 116, 117, 122 Wonlar-Larsky, Nadine, 6 Youssoupov, Felix, 19, 44, 47, 104, 175– 78, 189, 205, 248 Zaionchkovsky, P.A., 47 Zemstvo Law of 1864, 127 Zinoviev, Gregoryi, 243 Zubov, Prince, 223

About the Author JAMIE H. COCKFIELD is the Willis Borders Glover Professor of History at Mercer University.