Revolutions - 10.19- Nicky and Alix

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

When Nicky met Alix... Link to the Pax Britannica Interview Link to the Eastern Border Interview Sponsor: audible.com/revolutuions

And welcome to revolutions. Episode 10.19, Nikki and Alex. So we have done a top-line history of the Tsars. We saw the Principality of Moscow become the czardom of Russia, become the Russian Empire. We saw the founding of the Romanov dynasty in 1613 and saw that dynasty continue to produce the rulers of Russia in perpetuity. We saw them forge a multinational empire. We saw the emperor's western eyes under Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. We saw them rise to become a decisive great power in European affairs,

and then watch them scramble to keep up with a world that was moving much faster than they were. But now we come to the last Romanoff, the last Tsar, Nicholas II. 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 czar, Nicholas II. Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov was born on May the 6th, 1868.

His father was the Cesaravich 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 crowned 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 Alex and Uncle Bertie. Nicholas joined a generation of grandchildren slash cousins that included Kaiser Wilhelm I, who they all called Willie, George V 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 Land, 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 Alex and Uncle Bertie. So it's safe to say that Nikki 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 III 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, 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 I 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 Nicolasha, 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 grown your way through it. but since he was a high aristocrat and heir to the Russian Empire, it wasn't all cold baths and porridge. Nikki 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 first. hunt and he was a great writer. 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 Nikki 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.

Helping along this idea that he should learn something to know it, not abstract beyond it, with one of his most important tutors, who also happened to be one of the most important leaders of the empire through these years, Constantine Papanostov. If Sergei Vita, and it is Sergei Vita, not Sergei Vitt, I messed that up last week, I'm sorry about that, As Sergei Vita represented the advancing economic spirit of the age, Pabanaostov represented the retreating, traditional, conservative, political, and social spirit. Pabinanostov was an old, bald, humorless skeleton of a man with a dower 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. Pabinanostif 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 sure, man, go off. In addition to his positive admiration for the necessarily strong hand of autocracy, Pobinandinostiff was also a religious and ethnic bigot. He disliked Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims. Orthodox Christianity was the one true faith for the one true God, and that one true God had chosen the Tsar to rule. Pabinonostov tutored the future Tsar Alexander

the 3rd and in him found an eager receptacle for all these reactionary ideas. And when the time came, Alexander made sure that Papininov played a major role in his own children's education, most especially Little Nicholas. After Alexander III became Zahar in 1881, Papininoste 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 call the High Priest of stagnation. At the age of 12, Nikki'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-60s.

His father was the picture of robust health and in his mid-30s. Nikki himself was still just a kid. But then in 1881, obviously, shocking tragedy struck. Nikki was hanging around in the Winter Palace on March the 1st, 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, Nikki's father was czar. Nikki himself was suddenly the heir to the throne.

one more bomb, and he would be the Tsar. After the assassination of the Tsar Liberator, the new Tsar, Alexander III, took the advice of his security ministers and moved the whole family out of St. Petersburg permanently. They moved to the Gachina 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 III 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

angles are enthusiastic about the prospects of Zardom being toppled by radical revolutionaries, they refer to Alexander III 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, Nikki turned 16 and had his coming-of-age ceremony, where he officially stopped being a boy, though it would be some time 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 Nikki first met Alex, his future wife, and the future Empress of Russia. Princess Alex, Victoria, Helena, Louise Beatrice, Princess of Hesse, was born June 6, 1872. She was the daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse, Louis IV, and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, who was the third daughter of Queen Victoria and the now late

Prince Albert. Their little baby girl was named after her mother. And that name Alex 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 Alex 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, Hessa 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 Wilhelm I'm the second, was her first cousin.

Alex always had a lingering bitterness against the arrogant Prussians. Now, Alex's world was fundamentally changed in 1878. The scourge of diphtheria came through and her younger sister died, making Alex 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 effective, and Alex 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 Alex, and Alex 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 Quinn Victoria's evident delight. In 1884, the now 12-year-old Alex accompanied her older sister Ella, who was marrying the Russian Grand Duke Sergei, and she met her 16-year-old cousin Nikki 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, Nikki was not exactly in a hurry to grow up to be czar. Nor was anyone in a hurry to force him to grow up and bizarre. His father was still young and healthy. Alexander III expected to reign for at least 20 more years, maybe even 30. So rushing Nikki along the process of psychological, emotional, and political maturity was not a very high priority for anyone.

And the czar 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, Nikki 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 Nikki 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. During these years, Nikki 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 Alex came back for a second visit to Russia in 1889, Nikki was around all the time. And this is when we have him writing in his diary that one day he's going to be. going to marry Alex. 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 a state near Moscow. But this time, Nikki did not come around because he was preparing to depart on a world tour. So the now 22-year-old Nikki, his brother George and their cousin, Prince George of Greece, embarked 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 czar of Russia. While they were walking through Outsu, Japan, a dude came at Nicky with a 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 attention.

I have also read that he may have been an angry husband whose wife Nikki 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 Nikki 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 Nikki 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 Vita, advised the Tsar that maybe they should put Nikki 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 Vita 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 czar would not hear of it, and Vita resigned himself to why. watching the boy ominously drift irresponsibly, with so much responsibility looming in his future.

So when Nikki returned to Russia, he returned to his Playboy lifestyle, which now added a new feature, a girlfriend. Matild Kraschinska 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 Nikki had cross paths multiple times since they first met in 1890, but when he came back, the relationship with Matild 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. Nikki going off to marry a proper princess. And for Nikki, that still meant Alex of Hesse, whatever anyone else said. At first, his parents wanted him to marry Alain, the daughter of the Count of Paris, that is, the grandson of the last king of the French, Louis-Philippe. But Elen refused because she was a staunch Catholic and would not convert to orthodoxy as her position as Empress of Russia would require. So, Nikki's parents next looked to Princess Margaret of Prussia, who Nikki 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 Nikki was still persistently insisting that he was going to marry Alex, even though his parents were opposed. Alex 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, Nikki went off to England to attend the wedding of his cousin, the future King George V, and moderate hijinks ensued, thanks to how much these two future monarchs resemble each other. They had the same face, the same Van Dyke beard, and they parted their hair the same way.

And Nikki spoke such good English that they were often just straight up mistaken for each other, like random drunk uncles coming up and clapping Nikki on the back and saying, boy, how does it feel to be married? You know, that sort of thing. But Nikki wasn't a married man yet. Upon his return to Russia, though, he found his insistent that he was going to marry Alex of Hesse, suddenly finding greater acceptance from his parents.

In early 1894, Tsar Alexander III's robust health had begun 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 Nikki's marriage settled. They needed him off producing more heirs to keep the Romanoff dynasty going. I mean, God forbid Nicholas turned out to be the last Romanoff. So in April of 1894, Alex and Aunt Ellis' brother, Prince Louis of Hesse, was going to marry Princess Victoria Melita in Coburg. Everyone was going to be there. and when Nikki was added to the guest list as the principal emissary of Russia, he brought with him permission from his parents to ask Alex to marry him.

Nikki was over the moon. He believed this was his destiny. But it was going to take some convincing to get Alex 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 Wilhelm the second Willie, the Prince of Wales, Uncle Bertie, at a raft of grandchildren, aunts, uncles, and cousins. And there's a pretty famous photograph that they all took at Bertie'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 first thing. 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 Nikki had shown up intending to propose to Alex, have you heard? This was a big deal, and Nikki 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 Nikki 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 Alex should say yes. Victoria had been initially skeptical, but now that the match was at hand, she seemed thrilled by the idea. She loved Alex. She liked Nicholas, and Alex might be a good influence on Russia generally. Their cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, impressed upon Alex that she simply had to do her duty and say yes. Alex'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 Alex 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, Nikki had to go home to Russia, but was soon turning around and heading to England for a six-week-long rendezvous with his now fiancé. 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, Nikki 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 Nikki summoned Alex 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 Alex and she had to book a seat as a private passenger. But when she showed up, Tsar Alexander III 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. Alex took stock of the situation and concluded that Nikki 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 Nikki 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 III suddenly stopped breathing. And then he died. He was just 49 years old. At the age of 26, Nikki was now Emperor Nicholas II. He was not prepared. He had almost no experience in second. 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 20 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 happened to me and you, to Zinia, to Alex, 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 Lafayette archives at Cornell, and we'll see you again in two weeks as the reign of Nicholas the second begins and the old world prepares to end.