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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.25: Senseless Dreams

Over the last five episodes, we have introduced some of the revolutionary forces that will eventually combine to tear down the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty. Among them, moderate liberals and zemstvo constitutionalists, neo-narodists, socialist revolutionaries, and the Marxist Social Democrats. This week, we will return to the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty that all those revolutionary groups will be combining to tear down, because there’s a reason they will be able to tear it down. Revolutions are an extremely it takes two to tango affair. You don’t get a revolution without the ruling class making many, many mistakes for many, many consecutive years. And so now we return to Nicholas and Alexandra, who will be the authors of so many, many of those mistakes for so many, many consecutive years.

We left the couple on the day of the death of Tsar Alexander the Third on October the 20th, 1894. They were not even married yet when Nikki suddenly became Tsar Nicholas the Second; they had only even been engaged since April. Now Nicholas wanted to correct this immediately, and have a small private wedding ceremony to marry his beloved fiance and make her empress. But as would happen a lot in the first decade of his reign, his family steamrolled him into backing down. An imperial wedding, especially the wedding of a tsar, was simply too important a state affair to be hidden away in private. This was the considered opinion of Nicholas’s four uncles, Vladimir, Alexis, Sergei, and Paul. They were all confidently overbearing men, who believed it was their duty to tell their weak little nephew Nikki what to do. And so, for this very first decision Nicolas wanted to make as the absolute ruler of Russia — I want to marry my beloved fiance, Alex, right now — he backed down under a heavy salvo of what would become a routine barrage of condescending bullying. The uncles were careful never to do this in public, of course, but behind closed doors, they expected Nicholas to do as he was told, and Nicholas usually did.

So instead of a wedding, the imperial family focused on their dead patriarch, and escorted the body of the late tsar on a funeral train from the Sea of Azov to Moscow. The body lay in state in the Kremlin for an appropriate period, and then the funeral train moved on to St. Petersburg for another lying in state. The courts of Europe sent representative dignitaries for the official funeral, which was held on November the 19th, 1894, but the guest list was not quite as august as the guest list for that famous wedding in Coburg had been just six months earlier. Victoria, for example, did not come; she instead sent her son Berty, Prince of Wales and her grandson, George. Kaiser Wilheim the Second meanwhile sent his brother. Relations had never been great between these monarchs; Queen Victoria thought Alexander the Third disgracefully uncivilized, and could hardly stand talking about him, let alone to him. Meanwhile, as we’ll discuss in a moment, Alexander the Third despised the young Kaiser Wilheim, and treated him with deliberate contempt whenever they met. Willy was on much better terms with Nikki, and was not at all sad to see the mean old Russian bear gone off to heaven.

But though the death of the tsar initiated a period of official morning, this was temporarily suspended a week later for the state wedding of Nicholas and Alexandra. All these various dignitaries from the courts of Europe were already on hand, and so though Nicholas’s uncles wanted to quote unquote, wait, they just meant until we can do it publicly. So on November the 26th, 1894, the couple were married, and Alexandra became empress of Russia. Nicholas was 26. Alexandra was 22.

But though for a day they switched from black to white, they had to switch right back to black again. There would be no honeymoon, there wasn’t even a wedding reception.

For Alexandra, it was the worst possible way she could have become empress. She was a young princess of a minor German duchy. She had been engaged to Nicholas for only a few months. She had only converted to Orthodox Christianity a few weeks earlier. The Russians didn’t know her, and she didn’t know the Russians. Now what should have happened is that she would come to Russia, get married, start a family, make friends, acquire trusted, intimates, learn the language and the customs, be seen by the people at public events, mingle and grow in society. And then, after many years of just being a Russian princess, then step into the much higher and more important role of Russian empress. Her new mother-in-law, Nicholas’s mother and now former Empress Marie, had been just such a princess for seventeen years before she took that final great step.

But there was no prolonged period of preparation for Alexandra, and it would be an awkward fit just jamming her into it like this. She was by nature, shy and uncomfortable around strangers, much preferring the intimacy of close family. She had also been raised with stiff and prudish Victorian manners. And now she was thrust into a very public role of being one of the centers of Russian high society, which was quite a bit looser than the courts that she was used to back in the west. And she wouldn’t fit in with that society, and they wouldn’t fit in with her. And because everything happened so fast, they never got the chance to warm up to each other. So right from the beginning, there would be an estrangement between the empress and her court. It didn’t help that when she converted to Orthodoxy, she dove into it with the fervor of a convert, and would be devoutly and sincerely religious, whereas the rest of the Russian aristocracy treated Orthodox Christianity as a ritual adornment, to be indulged in it at births and weddings and deaths, but it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.

It also didn’t help that she took motherhood seriously and was pregnant and caring for her children a lot through the early years of her reign. And the couple’s first child, Olga, was born in November of 1895. Alexandra would then give birth to three more girls over the next six years, which reduced her ability to be a society hostess. So to society, Alexandra came off as an aloof prude, and to Alexandra, society came off as a bunch of petty and immoral gossip mongers.

Meanwhile, out in the streets, they said that the young empress’s arrival had been marked by bad omens all around. That she had come to them, walking behind a coffin.

Meanwhile, her husband, the one person who she really loved, and who really loved her back, now had a million duties to attend to. And though he initially followed his father’s advice and kept on Sergei Witte, and let him do what he wanted to, since practically the last thing his father had said to him was Witte is the only one who knows what he’s doing, Nicholas followed Witte out of respect for the word of his dead father.

But in his heart, Nicholas mostly listened to the advice of his old tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who as senate [?] of the Orthodox Church during the 1880s, had been the principal architects of the reactionary return to orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality after the great reforms of the tsar liberator had resulted in revolutionaries assassinating him by way of thank you.

Nicholas had been raised with this lesson drilled into him, and he believed it. He believed in his heart and soul that he was God’s chosen ruler of the empire, and that his role as absolute autocrat had been ordained by God and was not answerable to or divisible with other men. This belief would underlie, and ultimately undermine, his entire regime.

Now, one of the other things that informed the governing worldview of the new tsar was that going back to the old westernizer/slavophile debates, Nicholas was a convinced slavophile. I mentioned that, for lack of a better term, his quote unquote ethnic heritage was mostly German and Danish, but he had been born and raised a Russian, and considered himself a Russian. So unlike the rest of the aristocracy, Nicholas actually preferred speaking Russian to speaking French, especially in matters of state. He read Russian books, he listened to Russian music. When it wasn’t a formal occasion, he habitually wore standard issue Russian peasant blouses and pants around. His favorite tsar was tsar. Alexei the Mild, who was the last quote, unquote pure muscovite tsar, and he had little good to say about Alexei’s son, Peter the Great who had done so much to turn Russian attention towards Europe, a mistake in Nicholas’s view. He even preferred the antiquated and technically inaccurate title of tsar to Peter’s title of emperor. Nicolas believed himself operating in the grand tradition of a mystical and divine muscovite tsardom, which was, historically, existing in its own special and unique realm between Europe and Asia. And to the extent that he would have preferred to take Russia anywhere, it would not be forward to the future, but backward to the past.

As often happens with the ascension of a new ruler though, especially a young ruler, hopes are raised and projected onto them. A new day dawning, reform, change, progress. This must be the beginning of a new era. Now for radical socialist revolutionaries, and anarchists, and Marxists, the idea of potential reform was greeted only with derision, and perhaps a moderate dose of fear that such reforms might temper revolutionary ardor. But for the democrats and liberals and zemstvo constitutionalists we talked about in episode 10.20, the ascension of Nicholas the Second was a moment of great hope and promise. The reign of Alexander the Third had been a dark time of reaction for them, and in the last years of Alexander’s reign, he had moved from simply halting the advance of the zemstvo’s role in governing the empire to turning it back. In 1890, he had signed a decree explicitly making centrally appointed governors all powerful in the provinces, as an explicit check against growing zemstvo power at the provincial level. The liberal constitutionalists hoped maybe the son would reassess the policy of the now dead father. And one zemstvo in particular, the one in the city of Tver, was led by some of the most powerful liberal minded members of the nobility. The kind of liberal nobles who would have fit in well with the Decembrists. So when the zemstvo in Tver sent a standard congratulatory address to Nicholas upon his ascension, the address said that they hoped he would take his reign as an opportunity to listen to his people more, and see the empire turn more towards the rule of law, rather than the rule of men.

Now, it was all incredibly mild language, and even that mild language was wrapped in enthralled devotional language, but the hint was there: constitutional government. Nudge, nudge. But Nicholas had no intention of allowing anything that would come between him and his people. So with help from Pobedonostsev, Nicholas drafted a definitive statement that would pour bleach all over the last remnants of the democratic weed that had been allowed to grow up in his pristine autocracy. It famously said that they must give up “senseless dreams of the participation of the zemstvo representatives in the affairs of internal administration. I shall maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly as it was preserved by my father.”

This is not what the zemstvo was hoping to hear. And the tsar was only 26. If he held true to his stated principles, then it would be a generation before hopes of constitutional reform could be raised again. This was incredibly worrisome and depressing. Because, look, these guys believed that liberal and constitutional reform was necessary, that the state apparatus for all its vaunted absolute power was actually a rickety and underfunded toothpick house badly managed by corrupt and inefficient bureaucrats and ministers. They believe that their work in the zemstvo was good and healthy and necessary and needed to expand and the tsar was just saying… nah.

Now in his, I don’t know, defense, Nicholas really believed he had been put on earth by God to be the father of his people. And he considered constitutions and parliaments to be literally sacreligious barriers standing between the people and their father, the tsar. But still, by not even pretending to be interested in reform or in asking for help governing the empire, Nicholas turned all those liberals and democrats and constitutionalists away from officially sanctioned channels that supported the regime, and into revolutionary channels that sought to overthrow it.

So, okay. Nicholas sees himself as an autocrat, bearing sole responsibility for the governing of the empire. What did this mean in practice? It meant, as it turned out, that he would spend a lot of time alone in his office, signing pieces of paper on the smallest and most inconsequential of details. He somehow believed that the work of an autocrat was to do all of this paperwork, and do it all himself. He refused to even have a private secretary help him sort through and prioritize things.

Now what his father had done and what frankly, any sane autocrat must do, is focus on big picture policy and long-term strategy while delegating the minutia of imperial administration. And Nicholas did the opposite. To the extent that he even had a vision for his empire, it was orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, and a kind of permanent inertia. And then he focused on being a busy little bee, signing paperwork and micromanaging ministerial affairs without really having the relevant experience to be a micromanager, and without ever giving anyone a clear idea of where they were going or why they were going there. So it’s true you can’t really accuse Nicholas of being an absentee ruler. He came into the office early, he stayed late, he was always doing official work. But it was like he was the captain of a ship, standing over midshipman telling them how to properly scrub the deck while paying no attention whatsoever to steering or navigation. And so the ship just kind of drifted along.

And as it turned out, Nicolas wanted to micromanage things while not being a particularly good manager of people. Both he and Alexandra tended to treat government ministers as if they were household staff, and he took his absolute hiring and firing privileges seriously. And he undermined the morale and practically every department by promoting favorites and ignoring things like seniority and talent, which do mean something to the internal functioning of a governmental ministry. The guys running those ministries were proud and they had their own egos, and they did not like the way they were being treated. Now it’s not like Nicholas yelled at them or abused them; he was somehow even worse than that. Nicholas was so personally conflict averse and pathologically nice to people that no one ever knew where they stood. In person, he agreed with everyone about everything. Then a few minutes later, he would agree with the opposite. So you’d leave a meeting thinking you had the tsar’s approval for something only to find out much later that the project had been canceled completely. Or even worse, you’d spend an hour having pleasant tea with the emperor only to find out by letter upon returning to your office that you were actually dismissed from service. Nicholas didn’t like doing things like that in person. He was nice that way.

So everything I’ve just said about Nicholas’s style of governing will hold true as a general rule in the years to come. But to get back to the nuts and bolts of the narrative, Nicholas’s ascension to power and his wedding to Alexandra were overshadowed by the funeral of his father. But society now emerged from its mandated period of mourning, and it was time for Nicholas to have his official coronation, a celebratory moment that the emperor and empress could have all to themselves, all good and all happy. Put the bad omens to rest. The big day was scheduled for May the 14th, 1896, and as I briefly mentioned, a few episodes back, this coronation was accompanied by a grand display of generous benevolence, the kind of generous benevolence that often comes with such high royal occasions, as various sentences to prison and exile were commuted along with various amnesties and pardons. It’s a longstanding tradition, not just in Russia, but in monarchies across the world and throughout history. New king, here he comes, what a great guy, fresh start, and all that. And as I said, when we were talking about the socialist revolutionaries, many of those released really did tip their cap and disappear back into private life. But quite a few came out more determined than ever.

Now, the coordination itself in May of 1896 was meant to be a wonderful celebration of the emperor’s divine ascension to the throne. And it was, but as haunted these last Romanoffs, the day was immediately overshadowed by: tragedy.

A few days after the coronation itself, Nicholas’s Uncle Sergei hosted a public banquet out on the Khodynka Field, a military training ground. It was meant to be a great affair open to the public. Commemorative mugs would be given to everybody, and best of all, there would be… free beer! So people started congregating around dawn on the big day to make sure they were first in line, and I have seen the total numbers who gathered listed at a low of about a 100,000, with a high of 500,000. But for sure, whatever, the actual number was, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people.

When the carts with the barrels of beer showed up, a rumor ripped through the crowd that there wasn’t enough beer for everyone. It would be first come, first serve. And as can happen in times like this, people started pushing forward. And with various trenches and gullies marking the field, people stumbled and they fell, and then other people tripped over them and fell, but people kept pushing. People kept stomping, and then it turned into a tragic stampede as a mixture of fear and panic and desire caused the crowd to surge forward trampling the fallen underfoot. When everyone finally cleared out and the crowds dispersed, the carnage was horrific. The most common number I see cited is 1300 to 1400 dead, and about the same number of wounded.

So this is a horrible tragedy. It is in fact known to history as the Khodynka Tragedy, and Nicholas and Alexandra both wanted to cancel further banquets and balls and parties they were scheduled to attend. But there was one special ball that very night hosted by the French ambassador — and as we’ll discuss here in a minute, France and Russia had recently come into a critical alliance — and so Nicholas’s overbearing uncles insisted he attended the French ambassador’s party. And so he did.

Which turned out to be a big mistake. Because the tsar came off looking extremely callous. The people in the street took it as another bad omen. Educated public opinion was horrified how badly the public relations was mishandled. Partying while people lay dead? What are you doing? Radicals and revolutionaries took it as proof that the new tsar was a cruel and heartless monster. And it was the first origin of his future nickname, Bloody Nicholas.

But look, his first instinct was right. Nicholas didn’t think it was a good idea to go to the party. And he and Alexandra spent the next day touring hospitals and promising to take care of the injured and pay for the funeral arrangements of the dead. But the damage was done. More bad omens, to mark the outset of his ill-fated reign.

Now since Nicholas had just been forced to go to this banquet hosted by the French ambassador because it was so important not to offend the French, this is as good a time as any to talk about the new Franco-Russian alliance, because it’s going to be pretty important. Now I am going to massively oversimplify a very complex series of decisions and diplomatic events in the 1870s and 1880s, but, here we go.

The Franco-Prussian War left two great things in its wake, setting aside the Paris Commune: a humiliated France now taking the form of the Third Republic, and a triumphant and possibly overmighty Germany, now taking the form of the German Empire. And so as they picked themselves up off the mat, one of the foreign policy objectives of the French Third Republic was to make sure they didn’t get knocked down again. And that meant getting the Russians on their side. Germany would be loath to make further moves against France if millions of Russian soldiers were standing poised on Germany’s eastern border. And if the French played their cards right, they might even be able to box the Germans in and avenge the losses in the Franco-Prussian War, which in concrete terms meant getting back the lost territory of Alsace-Lorraine, which was now the physical symbol of Francis’ national humiliation.

Now the Russians, for their part, were none too thrilled about the emergence of a unified German Empire, but really ever since the Crimean War, their foreign policy had been to not get tangled up with the western great powers. Now, on the other side of all this, German foreign policy was also aiming at a Russian alliance, where the Russians would support German claims to Alsace-Lorraine, and in exchange, the Germans would support the Russians if they, for example, wanted to go in the complete other direction and start mucking around in the far east with China and Japan.

But Tsar Alexander the Third had been standoffish towards the Germans, and as I mentioned, he did not like young Kaiser Wilhelm personally. So by the late 1880s, the French and Russians were moving closer together. Now if the French were going to get millions of Russian soldiers poised on Germany’s eastern front, what were the Russians going to get? Well, the Russians were going to get: French loans. Because this moment right here in the late 1880s is the same moment Sergei Witte is being promoted and needs foreign financing for his aggressive state sponsored industrialization policy. So, here comes some French money.

Then in July of 1891, a squadron from the French navy visited Kronstadt and diplomats exchanged some letters of understanding. In April 1892, military conventions were signed, and then over the winter of 1893-1894, in one of the last major projects of his reign before the tsar got sick and died, the Russian Empire signed a formal military alliance with the Republic of France. If either were attacked by Germany, the other would declare war. Underscoring how out of the loop he was as heir to the throne, Nicholas knew none of the details about any of this until he became emperor just a few months later. So, whether he liked it or not, he was now in close alliance with a bunch of French republicans.

So getting back to it, after their coronation, Nicholas and Alexander embarked on a goodwill tour of Europe in the summer of 1896 to visit all their friends and relatives and new partners in alliance. They started in Vienna to visit the now aging Emperor Franz Joseph, who we last saw being installed as a young Franz Joseph back in the heat of the revolutions of 1848. Then they moved on to visit Willie up in Germany, who had never liked how dismissively he had been treated by Nicholas’s father, but now that he was the senior and more experienced monarch compared to Nicholas, he planned to use every form of flattery and cajoling to bring the Russians into alliance with the Germans. He had been horrified that Tsar Alexander the Third had signed a treaty with the blasphemous French republicans and was thrilled by Nicholas’s “senseless dreams” response to the zemstvo. Now in broad terms, the kaiser wanted to see Europe dominated by an alliance of absolutism. In more immediate and specific terms, he wanted to push Nicholas’s attention east towards Asia to ease Russia off Germany’s back.

Now, nothing would happen on this trip, but the kaiser would thereafter open up a non-stop correspondence with his dearest Nikki to bring the tsar over to his side. And he insisted that Nikki had a divine mission to turn back the yellow menace, because both of them were just racist as hell towards asians, we’ll talk about that more next week.

After leaving Germany, Nicholas and Alexandra then went up to Scotland to visit old Queen Victoria who still loved Alyx as one of her favorite granddaughters. While the women played with baby Olga, Nicholas and the men went out hunting in the cold Scottish rain.

Now, this was all family reunion stuff, but the most important leg of this tour was the last stop, and that was Paris. It was Nicholas’s first trip to Paris and was potentially fraught with diplomatic danger. The new Franco-Russian alliance was still very new, and here we have the most autocratic autocrat in Europe being hosted by the most democratic republicans in Europe. The French pulled out all the stops up to and including artificially refashioning fallen sprigs of chestnut blooms to the trees because the trees looked better that way, their own little potemkin villages for the tsar. But Nicholas and Alexandra had a wonderful time. The Parisians cheered the new imperial couple wherever they went, though, it probably helped that the French had police stationed every 20 feet along every route the couple traveled. Nicholas laid the foundation stone of what is now Pont Alexandre III, named for his father, and best known, at least by me, as being the bridge with the cool art nouveau streetlights. Then they went out for a visit to the palace at Versailles and stayed the night, and Alexandra slept in the bedchambers of Marie Antoinette, because why not toss just another bad omen onto the pile?

Now, given that we’ve got Alexandra sleeping in Marie Antoinette’s bedchamber, I thought it might be fun to leave off today comparing and contrasting the two great couples of our two biggest revolutions: Nicholas and Alexandra versus Louis the 16th and Marie Antoinette. Because there are similarities and differences between the two that are worth highlighting. Like for example: Nicholas and Louis were both nice and genial in person. They didn’t like confrontation. They were personally generous and pretty laid back. And as I said of Louis back in the French Revolution series, under normal circumstances, he would have been a fine and forgotten king. And Nicholas was kind of the same way. Neither of them were, like, psychotic tyrants. Both of them just faced a similar great crisis that neither of them were really equipped to handle. And even those crises manifested in similar ways, because both Nicholas and Louis sat atop absolutist monarchies breaking down under stress and facing the need to reform; reform that would have to be handled carefully and with a great deal of intelligent savvy; intelligent savvy both Nicholas and Louis lacked. And they both shared that very bad habit of following the advice of the last person to speak.

But there is a little contrast between them that’s worth pointing out: Louis really wanted nothing to do with statecraft. He would have much rather been hunting or tinkering with clocks. Nicholas on the other hand was a busy little bee, he was always working on matters of state. So Louis didn’t like showing up for work; Nicholas thought showing up for work was his duty. But the results were the same: a couple of weak willed, too nice, moderately oblivious monarchs perched atop absolutist regimes at a moment of great political, economic, and social stress. The problem is not that they were bad men, the problem is that they were the wrong men.

Now as for Alexandra and Marie Antoinette, they too had much in common, not the least that they were both young German princesses — or Austrian, in Marie Antoinette’s case — who came to a foreign land and had difficulty fitting in. But where Marie Antoinette was a frivolous party girl, Alexandra was a straightlaced joykill. To put it another way, Marie Antoinette was disdained for self-indulgent vice. Alexandra was disdained for self-indulgent virtue. But both of them wound up estranged from many at court, and both wound up personally hurt by the disdain and the estrangement. Though in Marie Antoinette’s case, it manifested as a kind of bitter disdain of her own, and to the extent that she thought about French peasants at all…

… she didn’t think about French peasants at all.

Meanwhile, Alexandra remained sublimely confident that the people of Russia loved her and her husband, that aristocratic society and liberal public opinion and radical revolutionaries may hate her, but the vast majority of Russia was composed of good, hardy, pious peasants who loved the emperor and empress as their father and mother. She would believe that to the last. And she would believe that to her ruin.

But a further thing that Marie Antoinette and Alexandra had in common is that they were both stronger willed than their husbands, and exerted a great deal of influence over them. And, were pretty equally terrible wielding that influence. Both of them wanted to prop up an uncompromising will that they feared their husbands lacked, and this too was a course followed to ruin.

As for their respective married relationships, that was almost all contrast. Louis the 16th and Marie Antoinette were hardly a couple at all, until the final stages of tragedy and confinement brought them together as a shadow of doom spread over their family, Nicholas and Alexandra meanwhile were very much in love from the start, and both very much would have preferred to just be a simple family, husband and wife, father and mother. And if Nicholas had been, like, the fourth son of the tsar, they would have been very happy indeed. But that was not to be.

Next week, the emperor and empress will return home to the east, and then we will keep moving east for another couple of thousand miles, because as the Trans-Siberian Railroad neared its completion, the Russian empire would be put on a collision course with something it really couldn’t handle at this great moment of political, economic, and social stress: a catastrophic military defeat.