Nicholas’s speech was a blunt dashing of liberal hopes and a renewed challenge to revolutionaries, who once again set to work to undermine the monarchy. Yet within the family he was widely congratulated. From Kaiser William II came a happy note: “I am delighted by your magnificent address. The principle of the monarchy must be maintained in all its strength.”
In foreign affairs, Alexander III had left a legacy of thirteen peaceful years, but he had not considered it important to acquaint his heir with even the most basic information concerning Russia’s international position. It was not until Nicholas’s accession, therefore, that the young Tsar learned the terms of the Franco-Russian alliance.”* Anxious to keep this peace and unwilling to trust it solely to a military alliance, Nicholas issued a dramatic appeal for disarmament and “universal peace” which led to the formation of the International Court of Justice. In August 1898, a Russian note lamenting the economic, financial and moral effects of the armaments race was delivered to all the governments of the world, proposing an international conference to study the problem. It has been suggested that the Tsar’s proposal stemmed wholly from the fact that Austria was re- equipping her artillery with modern field guns which Russia was unable to match, but this was not entirely the case. Another reason was the publication that year of a six-volume work by Ivan Bliokh, an important Russian Jewish railroad financier, who depicted in a massive array of facts, statistics and projected casualty rates the grim horror of any future war. Bliokh had an audience with Nicholas and helped persuade the Tsar to issue the appeal.
The strange proposal from St. Petersburg astonished Europe. From some quarters Nicholas was hailed as a tsar who would be known in history as “Nicholas the Pacific.” Sophisticated folk, on the other hand, dismissed it in the tones of the Prince of Wales, who described it as “the greatest nonsense and rubbish I ever heard of.” The Kaiser was instantly, frantically hostile. Imagine, he telegraphed the Tsar, “a Monarch … dissolving his regiments sacred with a hundred years of history and handing over his town to Anarchists and Democracy.”
Despite apprehensions, in deference to the Tsar and Russia a conference was convened at The Hague in May 1899. Twenty European powers attended along with the United States, Mexico, Japan, China, Siam and Persia. The Russian proposals for freezing armament levels were defeated, but the convention did agree on rules of warfare and established a permanent court of arbitration. In 1905 Nicholas himself referred the Dogger Bank incident between Britain and Russia to the World Court, and in 1914, on the eve of the First World War, the Tsar pleaded with the Kaiser to help him send the dispute between Austria and Serbia to The Hague.
Europe’s surprise that so unusual an idea as universal peace should come out of “semi-barbaric” Russia betrayed its lack of awareness of the richly creative culture which was flourishing there. The early years of Nicholas’s reign were a period of such glittering intellectual and cultural achievement that they are known as the “Russian Renaissance” or the “Silver Age.” The ferment of activity and new ideas included not only politics but philosophy and science, music and art.
In literature, Anton Chekov was writing the plays and short stories which would become world classics. In 1898, Constantine Stanislavsky first opened the doors of the famous Moscow Art Theatre, and its second play, Chekov’s
In philosophy, Vladimir Solov’ev, the preeminent religious philosopher and poet, had begun publishing his works in 1894. In 1904, the poems of Solov’ev’s famous disciple Alexander Blok began to appear. At the Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg, Ivan Pavlov, one of a group of Russian scientists making significant advances in chemistry and medicine, was conducting the experiments in physiology which won him a Nobel Prize in 1904.
Russian painting was in transition. Ilya Repin, then a professor of historical painting at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts, was crowning a career of painting the great historical scenes of Russia’s past. Victor Vasnetsov and Michael Nesterov had gone back even further and were attempting to re-create medieval religious art. Meanwhile, a rank of younger artists was responding excitedly to exhibitions in Russia of Cezanne, Gauguin and Picasso. Serov, influenced by the French Impressionists, painted evocative portraits of many contemporary Russians including, in 1900, the Tsar. In 1896, Vassily Kandinsky, a lawyer in Moscow, gave up his career and left Russia to begin painting in Munich. In 1907, Marc Chagall arrived in St. Petersburg to study with the famous contemporary painter Lev Bakst.
At the Imperial Ballet, Marius Petipa was in the midst of a half-century reign as choreographer which would last until he resigned in 1903. In richly magnificent succession, he staged sixty major ballets, among them Tchaikovsky’s
In the superlative music conservatories of St. Petersburg and Moscow, an unbroken succession of famous teachers passed their art to talented pupils. Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov was the conductor of the St. Petersburg Symphony. While writing his own magnificent
Across Russia, people flocked to hear music and opera. Kiev, Odessa, Warsaw and Tiflis each had its own opera company with a season of eight to nine months. St. Petersburg alone had four opera houses. In 1901, Tsar Nicholas built one of these, the Narodny Dom or People’s Palace. Believing that ordinary Russians should have an opportunity to savor the best in national music and drama, Nicholas had constructed a vast building which included theatres, concert halls and restaurants, with admission fees of only twenty kopecks. In time, the best orchestras and the leading actors and musicians appeared there. St. Petersburg society, enjoying the flavor of something new, trooped to follow.
During these years, the young Tsar’s family grew rapidly. At two-year intervals, three more daughters were born. In 1897, when Alexandra was pregnant a second time and feeling ill, the Dowager Empress advised: “She ought to try eating raw ham in bed in the morning before breakfast. It really does help against nausea. I have tried it myself, and it is wholesome and nourishing, too.… It is your duty, my dear Nicky, to watch over her and to look after her in every possible way, to see she keeps her feet warm.…” That June, Grand Duchess Tatiana was born.
A year later, in October 1898, Alexandra was pregnant again. “I am now in a position to tell you, dear Mama, that with God’s help we expect a new happy event in the family next May,” wrote Nicholas. “Alix does not go driving any more, twice she fainted during Mass.…” A month later, in November: “The nausea is gone. She walks very little, and when it is warm sits on the balcony.… In the evening, when she is in bed, I read to her. We have finished
Along with births, there were illnesses and deaths. In the summer of 1899, Nicholas’s brother Grand Duke George finally died at twenty-seven of tuberculosis, and in the fall of 1900, Nicholas himself came down with typhoid fever in the Crimea. Alexandra nursed him herself. “Nicky was really an angel,” she wrote to her sister. “I rebelled at a nurse being taken and we managed perfectly ourselves. Orchie [Mrs. Orchard] would wash his face and hands in the morning and bring my meals in always. I took them on the sofa.… When he was getting better, I read to him
