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Now this week, we’re getting into Nicholas and Alexandra and there’s no shortage of books about their doomed family, the family Romanov by Candace Fleming or the Romanov sisters by Helen Rappaport, which is about the children’s lives and the lead up to world war one, the revolution, and then ultimately, well, spoiler alert.
It doesn’t end well for any of them. So start listening with a 30 day audible trial, choose one audio book and two audible originals. Absolutely free. Visit audible.com/revolutions or text REVOLUTIONS to 500, 500. That again, visit audible.com/revolutions. Or text REVOLUTIONS to 500, 500.
~dramatic music swells~
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
So we have done a top line history of the tsars. We saw the principality of Moscow become the tsardom of Russia, become the Russian Empire. We saw the founding of the Romanov dynasty in 163, and saw that dynasty continued to produce the rulers of Russia in perpetuity. We saw them forge a multinational empire. We saw the emperors westernized under Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. We saw them rise to become a decisive, great power in European affairs, and then watched them scrambled to keep up with a world that was moving much faster than they were.
But now we come to the last Romanov, the last tsar: Nicholas the Second. The full weight of history was about to come crashing down on his head, and if God had handpicked Nicholas to navigate Russia through the tumultuous turn from the 19th century to the 20th century, he could not have picked a worse man for the job. So let’s talk about the future last tsar, Nicholas the Second.
Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov was born on May the sixth, 1868. His father was the Tsarevich Alexander, and his mother was Maria, formerly Princess Dagmar of Denmark, before her arrival and conversion to Orthodoxy led to a name change. Now, given the way that the Romanovs had arranged their marriages and intermarriages, importing husbands and wives and then importing husbands and wives for the product of those imported husbands and wives, little Nicky was mostly German and Danish. Nicky was also the scion of a great extended royal family that had grown up under Queen Victoria in the later 19th century that included, like, half the crown heads in Europe, concentrated especially in northern Europe, Nicholas’s mother, Maria was the sister of Alexandra of Denmark, who was herself the wife of the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, though they were known to all as Aunt Alix and Uncle Berty. Nicholas joined a generation of grandchildren/cousins that included Kaiser Wilheim the Second, who they all called Willie, George the Fifth of England, and also the kings and queens of Denmark and Greece and Norway. Small principalities medium-sized kingdoms, enormous sprawling empires; when the rulers of Europe got together, it was quite literally a family reunion.
Now, unlike his father, who kind of kept the European family at arms length, Nicholas fit right in with this crowd. He was an active, welcome, and happy member of this extended dynastic clan. He went along on regular trips to Denmark to visit his mother’s relatives and was always running into English and German cousins and aunts, uncles, and grandparents. At the age of five, he spent two months at Marlborough House in England being spoiled rotten by Aunt Alix and uncle Berty. So it’s safe to say that Nicky was born at the top of every social, political, and economic pyramid in Europe. But his father had ideas about how kids should be raised, and pampered luxury was not the way to go. The future Emperor Alexander the Third was into getting up early, taking cold baths, hunting and fishing, manly stuff. And his children, of whom there were five more after Nicholas, lived in palaces, but they slept on cots. They ate porridge for breakfast. Things were meant to be hard and simple and cold. They were meant to grow up strong and durable, not soft and weak.
But the thing is though, Nicholas always held his father in an intense reverential awe. And he tried to live up to those hard expectations, he was not a hard boy. And he was not going to grow up to be a hard man. For better or for worse, he was soft. One of his relatives described his smile as tender, shy, and a little bit sad. And physically Nicholas did not measure up at all. Remember, old Peter the Great had been seven feet tall. Nicky’s great-grandfather and namesake Nicholas, the First had been six foot seven. His own father was a barrel chested six foot three. When Nicholas grew up, he was all of five foot seven in boots. His nickname growing up was Nikolasha, little Nicholas. So I’m just going to do the joke now about how he had literally big boots to fill and couldn’t do it, and just let you groan your way through it.
But since he was a aristocrat and heir to the Russian Empire, it wasn’t all cold baths and porridge. Mickey was extensively tutored in the ways of both Europe and Russia: history, geography, math, literature, and languages. And by all accounts, he was a good student and had an excellent memory. He spoke French and German very well, he spoke English flawlessly. He also only ever excelled at the other side of a princely education: he was an excellent shot on the hunt and he was a great rider. He was a good dancer and he loved to do it. So on the whole, even if he was small and sweet, he was coming up as an ideal prince and future emperor. But there is a sense early on that though Nicky was good at memorizing things and reciting them and remembering them, that more creative abstract thinking was never really his thing. He would learn something, and then he would know it, rather than turn it over in his mind, combine it with other things and see what new and possibly independent thoughts might appear. And helping along this idea that he should learn something to know it, not abstract beyond it, was one of his most important tutors who also happened to be one of the most important leaders of the empire through these years: Konstantin Pobedonostsev.
If Sergei Witte — and it is Sergei Vit-uh, not Sergei Vitt, I messed that up last week, I’m sorry about that — Sergei Witte represented the advancing economic spirit of the age, Pobedonostsev represented their retreating, traditional conservative, political, and social spirit. Pobedonostsev was an old bald humorless skeleton of a man with a dour disposition and a misanthropic view of the world. He began his career as a jurist and a legal expert, and by ideological and religious conviction was aghast at everything the Tsar Liberator had gotten up to in the 1860s Pobedonostsev was a staunch believer in orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. He tended to believe that the Russian people were inherently lazy and stupid. He thought political freedom was wicked. He thought constitutions the devil’s work. He said that parliaments were the instruments of ambition, vanity and self-interest which, I mean, you could maybe say the same thing about a family running a despotic autocracy, but, uh, sure, man, go off.
In addition to his positive admiration for the necessarily strong hand of autocracy, Pobedonostsev was also a religious and ethnic bigot. He disliked Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims. Orthodox Christianity was one true faith for the one true God. And that one true God had chosen the tsar to rule. Pobedonostsev tutored the future Tsar Alexander the Third and in him found an eager receptacle for all these reactionary ideas. And when the time came, Alexander made sure that Pobedonostsev played a major role in his own children’s education, most especially little Nicholas. After Alexander the Third became tsar in 1881. Pobedonostsev was then given a major hand in shaping the reactionary politics of the 1880s from his position as procurator of the Orthodox Church, and I have seen him called the high priest of stagnation.
At the age of 12, Nicky’s life was progressing pretty normally for an heir to the heir to the throne. Ruling the empire was at the end of the line, but that end of the line was still quite a ways off. His grandfather the Tsar Liberator was still pretty healthy and in his mid sixties, his father was the picture of robust health and in his mid thirties. Nicky himself was still just a kid. But then in 1881, obviously, shocking tragedy struck. Nicky was hanging around in the Winter Palace on March the first 1881, when an emergency clamor electrified everyone in the building and people started running this way and that. Then the dying body of his once pretty healthy grandfather was dragged into an office, where he died in a bloody heap. And just like that Nicky’s father was tsar. Nicky himself was suddenly the heir to the throne. One more bomb, and he would be the tsar.
After the assassination of his Tsar Liberator, the new tsar, Alexander the Third, took the advice of his security ministers and moved the whole family out of St. Petersburg permanently. They moved to the Gatchina Palace, a gargantuan 900 room palace in the suburbs that could be better policed and protected, and for the rest of his reign, Tsar Alexander the Third remained there, coming to St. Petersburg only to perform certain ceremonial functions. And if you read the 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels are enthusiastic about the prospects of tsardom being toppled by radical revolutionaries, they refer to Alexander the Third as the Prisoner of Gatchina. And this is what they’re referring to. We’ve got him on the run, he’s scared and in hiding, we just need to finish the job.
In 1884, Nicky turned 16 and had his coming of age ceremony where he officially stopped being a boy, though it would be sometime before he really left the mental trappings of childhood behind. But 1884 was a more significant year for another reason: his uncle grand. Duke Sergei, married the 25 year old princess Elizabeth of Hesse. Ella, as she was known, was another granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and on the occasion of her wedding, she brought along her 12 year old sister to serve as a bridesmaid. And it was in the activity surrounding the wedding of Sergei and Ella that Nicky first met Alix, his future wife and the future empress of Russia.
Princess Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice, Princess of Hesse was born June the sixth, 1872. She was the daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse, Louis the Fourth, and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, who was third daughter of Queen Victoria and the now late Prince Albert. Their little baby girl was named after her mother, and that name, Alix, was just the German approximate pronunciation of the English name, Alice, and it always makes me happy when other people butcher English names so that I know that it’s not just me going the other way. Little Alix was brought up a bright and happy kid, and she was so bright and happy that from a very young age, her nickname around the house was Sunny. When she was two years old — so, 1874 — Hesse was forcibly annexed into the recently proclaimed German Empire. And so, though she too was in the extended dynastic family and Willie — that is, Kaiser Wilheim the Second — was her first cousin, Alix always had a lingering bitterness against the arrogant Prussians.
Now Alix’s world was fundamentally changed in 1878. The scourge of diphtheria came through and her younger sister died, making Alix once again the youngest member of her family. Now this was of course gut wrenching, but then just a few weeks later, her mother, Princess Alice, all of 35 years old, also died. A six year old child who loses her mother is going to be profoundly affected, and Alix was. The sunniness became far more withheld, she became more serious, more withdrawn, more unsettled by company she did not know or trust. After this tragedy though, her grandmother, Queen Victoria, kind of adopted the whole family of her now widowed son-in-law, inviting them to come stay in England whenever and for as long as they wanted, Victoria took a special shine to Alix and Alix responded in kind. She always loved her granny, always loved England, and took on many of the habits and manners and tastes of English women of the time, much to Queen Victoria’s evident delight.
In 1884, the now 12 year old Alix accompanied her older sister Ella, who was marrying the Russian grand Duke Sergei, and she met her 16 year old cousin Nicky for the first time. But though the pair met for the first time at the ages of 12 and 16, 12 and 16 is not exactly the age of romance. But when she came back for a second visit five years later, she was 17 and he was 21, and this time some sparks started to fly.
In the intervening five years, Nicky was not exactly in a hurry to grow up to be tsar. Nor was anyone in a hurry to force him to grow up and be tsar. His father was still young and healthy, Alexander the Third expected to reign for at least 20 more years, maybe even 30, so rushing Nicky along the process of psychological, emotional, and political maturity was not a very high priority for anyone. And the tsar does not seem to have been particularly impressed with his eldest son, and so didn’t really feel much like bringing him into the daily practice of government.
So through the 1880s, Nicky is just a playboy. He sat in on council meetings from time to time, but was bored and got out of it as quickly as he could, and no one ever gave him anything interesting to do anyway. So he did what any other insanely rich and privileged teenager would do in these circumstances: he partied with his friends. They had dinners and dances, balls, concerts, lots of gambling and drinking and carousing. He very much liked all things, military. He loved a good parade, and a good regimental dinner. He really prized his rank as a colonel in the Russian army, and he dug drinking with the boys, to the point where his mother had to remind him that these were his subjects and his subordinates, not his friends, and he really shouldn’t be getting falling down drunk and needing them to carry him to his carriage at the end of the night, it was all a bit embarrassing. But Nicky was having a good time. And he wasn’t like a huge jerk or anything, he was predisposed to liking people, he was predisposed to wanting people to like him. He liked pleasing people, and being pleased by people. He wasn’t a let’s go throw rocks at the peasants kind of spoiled rich boy, but he was very much a spoiled rich boy.
Now during these years, Nicky enjoyed hanging out with his quote unquote aunt Ella, who was really just a few years older than he was. But when her little sister Alix came back for a second visit to Russia in 1889, Nicky was around all the time. And this is when we have him writing in his diary that one day he’s going to marry Alix. Now she was not so sure about this. She liked him, she maybe even loved him — he was handsome and charming and wonderful — but she was a devout Lutheran, and marrying Nicholas came with the price of conversion to Orthodoxy. But for now, no one was in a hurry, so they just flirted and enjoyed each other’s company. She came back to Russia again in 1890 and stayed out on an estate near Moscow. But this time Nicky did not come around, because he was preparing to depart on a world tour.
So the now 22 year old Nicky, his brother, George and their cousin, Prince George of Greece and marked on a world tour at the end of 1890. First they traveled to Egypt, then they moved on to India, then Singapore and Bangkok and Hong Kong, and every stop, he represented the Russian Empire to the various courts and dignitaries he encountered. The party finally wound up in Japan, where in April of 1891, Nicky was nearly killed before he ever got the chance to go down in history as the last tsar of Russia. While they were walking through Ōtsu Japan, a dude came at Nicky with the sword and tried to kill him. His first glancing blow left a deep cut in Nicky’s forehead, giving him a permanent scar, the second thrust was blocked by Prince George of Greece. Now, I have read multiple motives for this attack, one of them being this guy was a religious fanatic who was upset over the entourage’s desecration of a temple. I have also read that he may have been an angry husband whose wife Nicky had hit on. Either way, the assassination failed, and it went down as another near miss assassination attempt on a Romanov. But aside from the scar and the occasional headaches, the lingering after effects of this attack was a persistent racism towards the Japanese that Nicholas displayed for the rest of his life. Typically, he referred to them as monkeys.
The return trip from Japan to St. Petersburg was overland, and Nicky happened to be in Vladivostok in May, 1892, when they were getting ready to launch the east to west half of the Trans-Siberian railway project. And Nicky actually lay the first stone of the final Eastern terminus in Vladivostok. But the train was not yet built, and so Nicky had to endure the long and disjointed road and river and rail journey back to St. Petersburg.
After his return from the world tour, the newly-minted minister of finance, Sergei Witte, advised the tsar that maybe they should put Nicky in charge of the Trans-Siberian railway project. An idea at which the tsar scoffed. He said, he’s a child with childish ideas. To which Witte responded, well sure, but he’s got to grow up sometime, and this would be a decent way to ease him into it. But the tsar would not hear of it, and Witte resigned himself to watching the boy ominously drift irresponsibly, with so much responsibility looming in his future.
So when Nicky returned to Russia, he returned to his playboy lifestyle, which now added a new feature: a girlfriend. Mathilde Kschessinska was a 19 year old ballet dancer, and just getting going with a career that would make her one of the most famous and beloved ballet dancers in Russian history. She and Nicky had crossed paths multiple times since they first met in 1890, but when he came back, the relationship with Mathilde got serious on both sides. They spent as much time together as they could, often in an apartment that she kept in the city where they could be alone or just hang out in the company of a small group of friends. But both of them knew going into this, that even though their relationship was more than just some random fling — I mean, they were a couple — there was no way it was going to ever end in anything but Nicky going off to marry a proper princess. And for Nicky, that still meant Alix of Hesse, whatever anyone else said.
At first, his parents wanted him to marry Hélène, the daughter of the Count of Paris, that is, the grandson of the last King of the French Louie Philippe. But Hélène refused, because she was a staunch Catholic and would not convert to Orthodoxy as her position as Empress of Russia would require. So Nicky’s parents next looked to Princess Margaret of Prussia, who Nicky refused on the grounds that he was not attracted to her and she was boring, and then she refused on the grounds that she would also not convert to Orthodoxy. Now there were other options out there, but Nicky was still persistently insisting that he was going to marry Alix, even though his parents were opposed. Alix was a fine girl they said, but she was not a suitable match for an emperor. Meanwhile, she was off fending off her own promising proposals, most especially one from Prince Eddie, the eldest son of the Prince of Wales, who she refused saying that they just would not be happy together.
In 1893, Nicky went off to England to attend the wedding of his cousin, the future King George the Fifth, and moderate hi-jinks ensued, thanks to how much these two future monarchs resemble each other. They have the same face, the same vandyke beard, and they parted their hair the same way. And Nicky spoke such good English that they were often just straight up mistaken for each other, like random drunk uncles coming up and clapping Nicky on the back and saying, boy, how does it feel to be married? You know, that sort of thing. But Nicky wasn’t a married man yet.
Upon his return to Russia though, he found his insistence that he was going to marry Alix of Hesse suddenly finding greater acceptance from his parents. In early 1894, tsar Alexander the Third’s robust health had began to falter, and even if this was merely a brush with mortality, it was enough of a brush to make both the emperor and empress eager to see Nicky’s marriage settled. They needed him off producing more heirs to keep the Romanov dynasty going; I mean, god forbid Nicholas turned out to be the last Romanov.
So in April of 1894, Alix and Aunt Ella’s brother, Prince Louis of Hesse, was going to marry Princess Victoria Melita in Coburg. Everyone was going to be there. And when Nicky was added to the guest list as the principal Emissary of Russia, he brought with him permission from his parents to ask Alix to marry him. Nicky was over the moon. He believed this was his destiny. But it was going to take some convincing to get Alix on board.
So this wedding in Coburg in April of 1894 turns out to be a pretty famous affair. There were indeed tons of relatives who turned out, including Queen Victoria herself, everyone’s granny, Kaiser Wilheim the Second, Willie, the Prince of Wales, Uncle Berty, and a raft of grandchildren, aunts, uncles, and cousins. And there’s a pretty famous photograph that they all took at Berty’s suggestion, which is famous both for its single frame assembling of like half the rulers of Europe, but also for the fact that in about 10 years, they’re all going to be blowing the hell out of each other, and at least the Russian contingent would all be assassinated or executed or commit suicide. So it’s a very famous family portrait… a family portrait of a doomed family.
But of course, nobody knew that yet. The immediate family drama that dominated this wedding was the fact that Nicky had shown up intending to propose to Alix, have you heard? This was a big deal, and Nicky wasted no time going to see her as soon as he could and asking her directly to marry him. But she did not immediately say yes. Again, she was a devout Christian, and she was a Lutheran. That was the faith she had been raised in and the faith she professed. She was like, look, I think I like you, I think I might even love you, but I can’t convert to Orthodoxy, that’s just not what I believe. So Nicky departed this meeting undeterred, but without a yes. This unaccepted proposal then dominated the chatter of the attendees of the wedding. The general consensus was that it was a great match and Alix should say yes. Victoria had been initially skeptical, but now that the match was at hand, she seemed thrilled by the idea. She loved Alix, she liked Nicholas, and Alix might be a good influence on Russia generally. Their cousin Kaiser Wilhelm impressed upon Alix that she simply had to do her duty and say yes. Alix’s older sister Ella’s voice probably carried the most weight because she said, look, I converted to Orthodoxy, it’s fine, it’s all of a piece, it’s not that big of a deal. You should do it. You like Nicholas, you’d be happy with him. So say yes. So Alix came around — she said yes. This then turned out to be the big news of the wedding, we have just joined the future emperor and empress of Russia. And I can only imagine what the actual bride and groom thought about all this. I mean, this is their wedding, it’s supposed to be their big moment, and it turned out to be the mere backdrop for like a season finale of the Bachelor.
After the engagement, Nicky had to go home to Russia, but was soon turning around and heading to England for a six week long rendezvous with his now fiance. At first, they got to spend three days basically alone together at a seaside resort, which in the future would go down in both their memories as like the happiest three days of their whole lives. Then they went up to London where they continued to spend a lot of time together but now they were under the closer scrutiny of both society and Queen Victoria.
After this glorious six weeks together, Nicky had to go home for the wedding of his younger sister. But that wedding was also overshadowed by momentous news. The pains and health problems that had started up for the tsar at the beginning of the year were getting worse, not better. And in the fall of 1894, there was real whispered concern among doctors, advisors, and family that something was, like, really seriously wrong. The tsar was diagnosed with a possibly fatal kidney disease.
The tsar tried to put all this off, pretend like nothing was wrong, but on October, 1894, he was finally prevailed upon to go south to recuperate. He was meant ultimately to go to the Island of Corfu, but he couldn’t get past Lavadia on the Black Sea Coast before the family decided he was too weak to travel further. Things got bad enough that Nicky summoned Alix to come join them. Things might be moving faster than either of us thought. Please come.
The chaos around the now very possibly dying tsar was such that the court secretary straight up forgot to arrange passage for Alix, and she had to book a seat as a private passenger. But when she showed up, Tsar Alexander the Third insisted on getting up and greeting her in full military regalia. She was, after all, the future empress of his empire. They all then spent a week and a half lingering in and around what was now distressingly becoming clear was the deathbed of the tsar. Alix took stock of the situation and concluded that Nicky was not being forceful and assertive enough in all this, that he was often being kept out of the loop of doctors and ministers and his mother Empress Maria. And in what marks probably her first real influence on her husband, she said, look, make them come to you, make them report everything to you, you are next in line for the throne. But Nicky was shy and tender and unprepared for all of this. He was sitting there like, I don’t want to make trouble. But he took her advice and tried to insist that he mattered.
Not that things were left in this confused state for long. On October the 20th, 1894, Tsar Alexander the Third suddenly stopped breathing. And then he died. He was just 49 years old. At the age of 26, Nicky was now Emperor Nicholas the Second. He was not prepared. He had almost no experience in statecraft beyond family diplomacy. He had never been asked to rise to a single occasion in his life. He had figured mentally he had about twenty more years to grow up and get settled, and now his father, who he had always considered something of a god on earth, was dead. And in talking to Grand Duke Alexander, Nicky famously let loose his concern, he said, “What am I going to do? What is going to happen to me and you? To Xenia, to Alix, to mother, to all Russia?”
Well my man, we’re about to find out, aren’t we? But I can tell you, the fact that you figure so prominently in a podcast about the great political revolutions in history that does not bode well for you.
So, as I said, last time, I am taking the week off next week, but if you need more Mike Duncan in your life, I did successfully complete interviews at Sound Education with my new friends at Pax Britannica and the Eastern Border. Both of those interviews have now posted, and I will include links in the show notes to both of them, but you’re looking for Pax Britannica and the Eastern Border. I am off now to delve even deeper into the Lafayette archives at Cornell, and will see you again in two weeks, as the reign of Nicholas the Second begins, and the old world prepares to end.