Nicholas and Alexandra

returned, planning an academic career, hoping to take up post-graduate study in criminal law. Before he had graduated, however, this “highly respectable pastime” began to pale for him—it “even, perhaps, repelled me a little. One does not want to attend to private interests when one dreams of serving the nation, of fighting for freedom. I decided to be a political lawyer.”

For the next six years, Kerensky would travel to every corner of Russia, defending political prisoners against prosecution by the state. But before he left St. Petersburg, in 1905, an extraordinary episode occurred:

“It was Easter and I was returning late at night, or rather in the morning, about four o’clock from the traditional midnight celebration. I cannot attempt to describe the enchanting spell of St. Petersburg in the spring, in the early hours before dawn—particularly along the Neva or the embankments.… Happily aglow, I was walking home … and was about to cross the bridge by the Winter Palace. Suddenly, by the Admiralty, just opposite the Palace, I stopped involuntarily. On an overhanging corner balcony stood the young Emperor, quite alone, deep in thought. A keen presentiment [struck me]: we should meet sometime, somehow our paths would cross.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Kaiser’s Advice

IN the early years of the reign, along with his mother, the tutor Pobedonostsev and his uncles, Nicholas was also taken in hand by his cousin Kaiser William II of Germany. From the first months, William peered over the Tsar’s shoulder, tapped him on the elbow, flattered him, lectured him and dominated him. William was nine years older than Nicholas and had become Kaiser in 1888, six years before Nicholas became Tsar. He thus had the advantage of experience as well as age, and he used it vigorously. For ten years, 1894–1904, the Kaiser manipulated Russian foreign policy by influencing the youthful, susceptible Tsar. Eventually, an older and wiser Nicholas shook off this meddlesome influence. But the harm was done. Urged on by William, Russia had suffered a military catastrophe in Asia.

In character, the two Emperors were totally unlike. Nicholas was gentle, shy and painfully aware of his own limitations; the Kaiser was a braggart, a bully and a strutting exhibitionist. Nicholas hated the idea of becoming a sovereign; William all but wrenched the crown from the head of his dying father, Frederick III. As Tsar, Nicholas tried to live quietly with his wife, avoiding fuss. William delighted in parading about in high black boots, white cloak, a silver breastplate and an evil-looking spiked helmet.

William II’s thin face, bleak gray eyes and light-colored curly hair were partially masked behind his proudest possession, his mustache. This was a wide, brushy business with remarkable upturned points, the creation of a skillful barber who appeared at the palace every morning with a can of wax. In part, this elegant bush helped to compensate for another physical distinction, one which William tried desperately to hide. His left arm was miniaturized, a misfortune believed to have been caused by the excessive zeal with which an obstetrical surgeon used forceps at William’s birth. William arrived in the world with his arm pulled almost from its socket; thereafter the arm grew much too slowly. As much as possible, he kept this damaged limb out of sight, tucking it into especially designed pockets in his clothes. At meals, the Kaiser could not cut his meat without the aid of a dinner companion.

In the military atmosphere of the Prussian court in which he grew up, William’s bad arm had a pronounced effect on his character. A Prussian prince had to ride and shoot. William drove himself to do both expertly and went on to become a swimmer, rower, tennis player as well. His good right arm became extraordinarily powerful, and its grip was as strong as iron. William increased the sensation of pain in those he greeted by turning the rings on his right hand inward, so that the jewels would bite deep into the unlucky flesh.

When he was nineteen and a student in Bonn, William fell in love with Princess Elizabeth of Hesse, the Empress Alexandra’s older sister. William often visited in Darmstadt with the Hessian family of his mother’s sister. Even as a guest, he was selfish and rude. First he demanded to ride, then he wanted to shoot or row or play tennis. Often he would throw down his racket in the middle of a game or suddenly climb off his horse and demand that everybody go with him to do something else. When he was tired, he ordered his cousins to sit quietly around him and listen while he read aloud from the Bible. Alix was only six when these visits occurred, and she was ignored. But Ella was a blossoming fourteen, and William always wanted her to play with him, to sit near him, to listen closely. Ella thought he was dreadful. William left Bonn, burning with frustration, and four months later he became engaged to another German princess, Augusta of Schleswig-Holstein. After Ella married Grand Duke Serge of Russia, the Kaiser refused to see her. Later he admitted that he had spent most of his time in Bonn writing love poetry to his beautiful cousin.

William’s restless temperament, his vanities and delusions, his rapid plunges from hysterical excitement to black despair kept his ministers in a state of constant apprehension. “The Kaiser,” said Bismarck, “is like a balloon. If you don’t keep fast hold of the string, you never know where he’ll be off to.” William scribbled furiously on the margins of official documents: “Nonsense!” “Lies!” “Rascals!” “Stale fish!” “Typical oriental procrastinating lies!” “False as a Frenchman usually is!” “England’s fault, not ours!” He treated his dignitaries with an odd familiarity, often giving venerable admirals and generals a friendly smack on the backside. Visitors, official and otherwise, were treated to dazzling displays of verbosity, but they could never be sure how much to believe. “The Kaiser,” explained a dismayed official of the German Foreign Ministry, “has the unfortunate habit of talking all the more rapidly and incautiously the more a matter interests him. Hence it happens that he generally has committed himself … before the responsible advisors or the experts have been able to submit their opinions.” To witness the Kaiser laughing was an awesome experience. “If the Kaiser laughs, which he is sure to do a good many times,” wrote one observer, “he will laugh with absolute abandonment, throwing his head back, opening his mouth to the fullest possible extent, shaking his whole body, and often stamping with one foot to show his excessive enjoyment of any joke.”

William was convinced of his own infallibility and signed his documents “The All Highest.” He hated parliaments. Once, at a colonial exhibition, he was shown the hut of an African king, with the skulls of the king’s enemies impaled on poles. “If only I could see the Reichstag stuck up like that,” blurted the Kaiser.

William’s bad manners were as offensive to his relatives as to everyone else. He publicly accused his own mother, formerly Princess Victoria of England, of being pro-English rather than pro-German. Writing to her mother, Queen Victoria of England, the Princess said of her twenty-eight-year-old son, “You ask how Willy was when he was here. He was as rude, as disagreeable and as impertinent to me as possible.” Tsar Alexander III snubbed William, whom he considered “a badly brought up, untrustworthy boy.” When he spoke to the Kaiser, Alexander III always turned his back and talked over his shoulder. Empress Marie loathed William. She saw in him the royal nouveau riche whose empire had been made in part by trampling over her beloved Denmark and wrenching away the Danish provinces of Schleswig-Holstein. Marie’s feeling was that of her sister Alexandra, who was married to King Edward VII. “And so my Georgie boy has become a real, live, filthy, blue-coated Pickelhaube German soldier. I never thought I would live to see the day,” Queen Alexandra wrote to her son, later King George V, when George became an honorary colonel in one of the Kaiser’s regiments. When it came Russia’s turn to make the Kaiser an admiral in the Russian navy, Nicholas tried to tell Marie gently. “I think, no matter how disagreeable it may be, we are obliged to let him wear our naval uniform; particularly since he made me last year a Captain in his own navy.… C’est a vomir!” After another visit from the Kaiser, he wrote, “Thank God the German visit is over.… She [William’s wife] tried to be charming and looked very ugly in rich clothes chosen without taste. The hats she wore in the evening were particularly impossible.” The Empress Alexandra could barely be civil to William. She turned away when he made his heavy jokes, and when the Kaiser picked up her daughters in his arms, she winced. A mutual loathing of William was perhaps the point of closest agreement between the young Empress and her mother-in-law.

Nicholas himself was both repelled and attracted by the Kaiser’s flamboyance. From the first, William managed to restore the old custom of former monarchs who kept personal attaches in each other’s private retinues. This, the Kaiser pointed out, would enable Nicholas “to quickly communicate with me … without the lumbering and indiscreet apparatus of Chancelleries, Embassies, etc.”

The famous “Willy-Nicky” correspondence began. Writing in English and addressing himself to his “Dearest Nicky” and signing himself “Your affectionate Willy,” the Kaiser drenched the Tsar with flattery and suggestions. Delighted by Nicholas’s “senseless dreams” address to the Tver Zemstvo, he hammered on the importance of maintaining autocracy, “the task which has been set us by the Lord of Lords.” He advised that “the great bulk of the