A people's tragedy

Less than sanguine about his son’s ability to learn the art of kingship from books, Alexander enrolled him in the officer corps of the Guards in the hope that the army would build up his character and teach him something of the world. Nicholas loved the military life. The comradely spirit of the officers’ mess, more like a gentleman’s club than a military barracks, would remain with him for the rest of his life as a fond memory of the days before he had been weighed down by the burdens of office. It was then that he had fallen in love with the ballerina Mathilde Kshesinskaia. His rank of Colonel in the Preobrazhensky Guards, awarded to him by his father, remained a source of immense pride. He refused to take a higher rank, even during the First World War when he assumed the position of Supreme Commander. This damaged his prestige in the army, where he became known as ‘Colonel Romanov’.

In 1890 Alexander sent his son on a grand tour of Siberia, Japan, Indo-China, Egypt and Greece. The journey was intended to broaden the heir’s political education. But the nature of his travelling suite (the usual complement of dim and hedonistic Guards officers) largely precluded this. During the tour Nicholas filled his diary with the same banal and trivial entries with which he usually filled his diary at home: terse notes on the weather, the distances covered each day, the times of landfall and departure, the company at meals, and so on. It seems that nothing in his travels had encouraged him to broaden his outlook and observations on life. The one lasting effect of the tour was unfortunate. At Otsu in Japan he narrowly escaped an attempt on his life by a deranged terrorist. The experience left him with an ingrained hatred of the Japanese (he called them ‘monkeys’, makaki), and it is often argued that this made him vulnerable to the influence of those at his court who promoted the disastrous war with Japan in 1904–5.

Had Alexander lived three score years and ten then the fate of the Russian Empire might have been very different. But as fortune would have it, he died from kidney disease in 1894 at the age of only forty-nine. As the crowd of relatives, physicians and courtiers gathered around the death-bed of the great autocrat, Nicholas burst into tears and exclaimed pathetically to his cousin, Alexander, ‘What is going to happen to me and to all of Russia? I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers.’18 Louis XVI, with whom Nicholas had much in common, made a strikingly similar remark when he first learned in 1775 that he was to be the King of France.

The reign of Russia’s last Tsar began disastrously. A few days after the coronation, in May 1896, a celebratory fair was organized on the Khodynka Field, a military training ground just outside Moscow. By the early morning some half a million people had already assembled, expecting to receive from their new Tsar gifts of souvenir tankards and biscuits embossed with the date and the occasion. Vast quantities of free beer and sausage were to be distributed. As more people arrived, a rumour went round that there would not be enough gifts for everyone. The crowd surged forward. People tripped and stumbled into the military ditches, where they were suffocated and crushed to death. Within minutes, 1,400 people had been killed and 600 wounded. Yet the Tsar was persuaded to continue with the celebrations. In the evening, while the corpses were carted away, he even attended a ball given by the French Ambassador, the Marquis de Montebello. During the next few days the rest of the scheduled festivities — banquets, balls and concerts — went ahead as if nothing had happened. Public opinion was outraged. Nicholas tried to atone by appointing a former Minister of Justice to look into the causes of the catastrophe. But when the Minister found that the Grand Duke Sergius, Governor-General of Moscow and the husband of the Empress’s sister, was to blame, the other Grand Dukes protested furiously. They said it would undermine the principles of autocracy to admit in public the fault of a member of the imperial family. The affair was closed. But it was seen as a bad omen for the new reign and deepened the growing divide between the court and society. Nicholas, who increasingly believed himself to be ill-fated, would later look back at this incident as the start of all his troubles.19