IT WAS with special care that Fate had selected Nicholas to be Tsarevich and, later, Tsar. He was not a firstborn son. An older brother named Alexander, who had he lived would have been Tsar Alexander IV, had died in infancy. Nicholas’s next brother, George, three years younger than the Tsarevich, was gay with quick intelligence. Throughout their childhood Nicholas admired George’s sparkling humor, and whenever his brother cracked a joke, the Tsarevich carefully wrote it down on a slip of paper and filed it away in a box. Years later when Nicholas as Tsar was heard laughing alone in his study, he would be found rereading his collection of George’s jokes. Unhappily, in adolescence George developed tuberculosis of both lungs and was sent to live, alone except for servants, in the high, sun-swept mountains of the Caucasus.
Although the palace at Gatchina had nine hundred rooms, Nicholas and his brothers and sisters were brought up in spartan simplicity. Every morning, Alexander III arose at seven, washed in cold water, dressed in peasant’s clothes, made himself a pot of coffee and sat down at his desk. Later when Marie was up, she joined him for a breakfast of rye bread and boiled eggs. The children slept on simple army cots with hard pillows, took cold baths in the morning and ate porridge for breakfast. At lunch when they joined their parents, there was plenty of food, but as they were served last after all the guests and still had to leave the table when their father rose, they often went hungry. Ravenous, Nicholas once attacked the hollow gold cross filled with beeswax which he had been given at baptism; embedded in the wax was a tiny fragment of the True Cross. “Nicky was so hungry that he opened his cross and ate the contents—relic and all,” recalled his sister Olga. “Later he felt ashamed of himself but admitted that it had tasted ‘immorally good.’ ” The children ate more fully when they dined alone, although these meals without their parents’ presence often turned into unmanageable free-for-alls, with brothers and sisters pelting one another across the table with pieces of bread.
Nicholas was educated by tutors. There were language tutors, history tutors, geography tutors and a whiskered dancing tutor who wore white gloves and insisted that a huge pot of fresh flowers always be placed on his accompanist’s piano. Of all the tutors, however, the most important was Constantine Petrovich Pobedonostsev. A brilliant philosopher of reaction, Pobedonostsev has been called “The High Priest of Social Stagnation” and “the dominant and most baleful influence of the [last] reign.” A wizened, balding man with coldly ascetic eyes staring out through steel-rimmed glasses, he first came to prominence when as a jurist at Moscow University he wrote a celebrated three-volume text on Russian law. He became a tutor to the children of Tsar Alexander II, and, as a young man, Alexander III was his faithful, believing pupil. When Alexander mounted the throne, Pobedonostsev already held the office of Procurator of the Holy Synod, or lay head of the Russian Orthodox Church. In addition, he assumed the tutorship of the new Tsarevich, Nicholas.
Pobedonostsev’s brilliant mind was steeped in nationalism and bigotry. He took a misanthropic Hobbesian view of man in general. Slavs in particular he described as sluggish and lazy, requiring strong leadership, while Russia, he said, was “an icy desert and an abode of the ‘Bad Man.’ ” Believing that national unity was essential to the survival of this sprawling, multi-racial empire, he insisted on the absolute authority of Russia’s two great unifying institutions: the autocracy and the Orthodox Church. He insisted that opposition to them be ruthlessly crushed. He opposed all reforms, which he called “this whole bazaar of projects … this noise of cheap and shallow ecstasies.” He regarded a constitution as “a fundamental evil,” a free press as an “instrument of mass corruption” and universal suffrage as “a fatal error.” But most of all Pobedonostsev hated parliaments.
“Among the falsest of political principles,” he declared, “is the principle of the sovereignty of the people … which has unhappily infatuated certain foolish Russians.… Parliament is an institution serving for the satisfaction of the personal ambition, vanity, and self-interest of its members. The institution of Parliament is indeed one of the greatest illustrations of human delusion.… Providence has preserved our Russia, with its heterogeneous racial composition, from like misfortunes. It is terrible to think of our condition if destiny had sent us the fatal gift— an all-Russian Parliament. But that will never be.”
For the same reason, and from his special position as—in effect—Minister of Religion, Pobedonostsev attacked all religious strains in Russia unwilling to be assimilated into Orthodoxy. Those who most strenuously resisted, he hated most. He was violently anti-Semitic and declared that the Jewish problem in Russia would be solved only when one third of Russia’s Jews had emigrated, one third had been converted to Orthodoxy and one third had disappeared. It was the pupil of Pobedonostsev speaking in Alexander III when he wrote in the margin of a report depicting the plight of Russian Jewry in 1890, “We must not forget that it was the Jews who crucified our Lord and spilled his precious blood.”
Pobedonostsev’s virulent prejudice was not restricted to Jews. He also attacked the Catholic Poles and the Moslems scattered across the broad reaches of the empire. It was Pobedonostsev who wrote the document excommunicating Leo Tolstoy in 1901.*
The Russia described to Nicholas by Pobedonostsev had nothing to do with the restless giant stirring outside the palace windows. Instead, it was an ancient, stagnant, coercive land made up of the classical triumvirate of Tsar, Church and People. It was God, the tutor explained, who had chosen the Tsar. There was no place in God’s design for representatives of the people to share in ruling the nation. Turning Pobedonostsev’s argument around, a tsar who did not rule as an autocrat was failing his duty to God. Heard as a school lesson, the old man’s teaching may have lacked a basis in reality, but it had the compelling purity of logic, and Nicholas eagerly accepted it.
For Nicholas, the most dramatic proof of Pobedonostsev’s teachings against the dangers of liberalism was the brutal assassination of his grandfather, Alexander II, the most liberal of Russia’s nineteenth-century tsars. For his historic freeing of the serfs, Alexander II was known as the “Tsar-Liberator,” yet his murder became the preeminent objective of Russian revolutionaries. The assassins went to extraordinary lengths. Once, near Moscow, they purchased a building near the railway track and tunneled a gallery from the building under the track, where they planted a huge mine. The Tsar was saved when his train left Moscow in a different direction. Six other attempts were made, and on March 13, 1881—ironically, only a few hours after the Tsar had approved the establishment of a national representative body to advise on legislation—the assassins succeeded. As his carriage rolled through the streets of St. Petersburg, a bomb, thrown from the sidewalk, sailed under it. The explosion shattered the vehicle and wounded his horses, his equerries and one of his Cossack escorts, but the Tsar himself was unhurt. Stepping from the splintered carriage, Alexander II spoke to the wounded men and even asked gently about the bomb thrower, who had been arrested. Just then a second assassin ran up, shouting, “It is too early to thank God,” and threw a second bomb directly between the Tsar’s feet. In the sheet of flame and metal Alexander II’s legs were torn away, his stomach ripped open, his face mutilated. Still alive and conscious, he whispered, “To the palace, to die there.” What remained of him was picked up and carried into the Winter Palace, leaving a trail of thick drops of black blood up the marble stairs. Unconscious, he was laid on a couch, his right leg torn off, his left leg shattered, one eye closed, the other open but vacant. One after another, the horrified members of the Imperial family crowded into the room. Nicholas, aged thirteen, wearing a blue sailor suit, came in deathly pale and watched from the end of the bed. His mother, who had been ice-skating, arrived still clutching her skates. At the window looking out stood his father, the Heir Apparent, his broad shoulders hunched and shaking, his fists clenching and unclenching. “The Emperor is dead,” announced the surgeon, letting go of the blood-covered wrist. The new Tsar, Alexander III, nodded grimly and motioned to his wife. Together they walked out of the palace, now surrounded by guardsmen of the Preobrajensky Regiment with bayonets fixed. He stood for a moment, saluting, then jumped into his carriage and drove away “accompanied by a whole regiment of Don Cossacks, in attack formation, their red lances shining brightly in the last rays of a crimson March sunset.” In his accession manifesto, Alexander III proclaimed that he would rule “with faith in the power and right of autocracy.” For the thirteen years of his father’s reign, Nicholas saw Russia ruled according to the theories of Pobedonostsev.
Nicholas, at twenty-one, was a slender youth of five feet seven inches, with his father’s square, open face and his mother’s expressive eyes and magnetic personal charm. His own best qualities were gentleness, kindliness and friendliness. “Nicky smiled his usual tender, shy, slightly sad smile,” wrote his young cousin and intimate companion Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich. Himself prepared to like everybody, Nicholas hoped that people liked him. As best he could tell through the thickets of flattery and etiquette surrounding his rank, they did.
In many respects, his education was excellent. He had an unusual memory and had done well in history. He spoke French and German, and his English was so good that he could have fooled an Oxford professor into mistaking him for an Englishman. He rode beautifully, danced gracefully and was an excellent shot. He had been taught to keep a diary and, in the style of innumerable princes and gentlemen of that era, he faithfully recorded, day after day, the state of the weather, che number of birds he shot and the names of those with whom he walked and
