Fifty-Seven Years of Russian Madness

By Joseph Howard Tyson

Few nations have undergone such agony as Russia experienced between 1896 and 1953. The Khodynka Meadow Disaster of May 30, 1896 killed 1,389 people, and ominously marred Tsar Nicholas IIs coronation. Eight years later the Russo-Japanese War (1904 - 1905) claimed 71,453 military servicemens lives, without bringing any benefit to Russia. Over 13,000 people died in the consequent Revolution of 1905. Roughly two million Russian soldiers and sailors, plus 400,000 civilians perished in the slaughter of World War I (1914 - 1918.)

Lenin kicked off his Bolshevik regime with a bloody civil war against the tsarist Whites, in which one million combatants lost their lives. During this same chaotic period at least three million people succumbed to the Spanish Influenza and typhus pandemics. Shoddy record-keeping obscured the death toll wrought by Lenins Red Terror (1918 - 1923). Estimates range from 250,000 to 1,000,000, with 400,000 probably being more accurate than the lowball guess.

Historians still debate the severity of Stalins purges (1928 - 1953.) The actual number of dead most likely falls somewhere between twenty and thirty million.

By a very conservative count, Adolf Hitlers Nazi war machine slew 15,700,000 Soviet subjects during World War II (8,700,000 military personnel and 7,000,000 civilians.) Another study has calculated the total at 25,850,000.

This book examines a fifty-seven year time frame of our enlightened modern age, during which at least forty million Russians were exterminated due to misgovernment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491746295

Joseph Howard Tyson

Joseph Howard Tyson graduated from LaSalle University in 1969 with a B.A. in Philosophy, took graduate courses in English at Pennsylvania State University, then served in the U. S. Marine Corps. He has worked in the insurance industry since 1972, and lives in the Philadelphia area. He and his wife have four children and three grandchildren. Tyson has contributed several articles to The Schuylkill Valley Journal. His previous nonfiction books include Penn’s Luminous City (2005), Madame Blavatsky Revisited (2006), Hitler’s Mentor: Dietrich Eckart (2008), The Surreal Reich (2010, World War II Leaders (2011), and Fifty-Seven Years of Russian Madness (2015).

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Copyright © 2015 Joseph Howard Tyson.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-4628-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-4629-5 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 11/26/2014

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Let the Mania Begin

Chapter 2 Reluctant Despot

Chapter 3 Serge & Ella

Chapter 4 The Holy Man

Chapter 5 Prophet Without Honor

Chapter 6 The Knockout Punch

Chapter 7 Regicide

Chapter 8 Eleven More Romanov Martyrs

Chapter 9 Romanov Refugees

Chapter 10 The Vladimirovichis’ Ordeal

Chapter 11 Lucifer Lenin, Creator of Hell on Earth

Chapter 12 A Pertinent Digression: The Legend of Sidney G. Reilly

Chapter 13 Satan Stalin: The Eager Despot

Introduction

I’ve used the slice of time concept as this book’s premise. Lopping off an irregular chunk of chronology from May 30, 1896 (date of Moscow’s Khodynka Meadow Disaster) to March 5, 1953 (day of Stalin’s death) enables us to study a period of unparalleled destruction, marked by wars, revolutions, and political terror.

Our purgatorial realm on earth can’t seem to get politics right. Hellish World War I unleashed the twin fallacies of Fascism and Bolshevism. Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin might all be termed Leninists, i.e. gangsters. Their ruthless pragmatism differed hardly at all from the age-old plagues of Caesarism and Machiavellianism. Note that Vladimir Illych Ulyanov and Josef Vissarionovich Dzjugashvili adopted the aliases Lenin and Stalin: very fitting, since both were criminals, more comparable to mobsters Al Capone and Lucky Luciano than statesmen such as Churchill or Roosevelt.

Finding historical abstractions too dry for a mass (ha, ha, ha!) audience, I always go for the human interest angle. The fifty-seven year section of eternity dissected here will be viewed through the prism of representative personalities such as Tsar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra, Lenin, Sidney Reilly, Stalin, etc., etc. How can world history really make sense without flesh-and-blood accounts of human achievement and folly? I’m with Goethe who argued that people in sync with Zeitgeist (Time Spirit) have more impact than impersonal economic forces.

Seven years ago I bought a genealogical service’s DNA kit, swabbed my mouth with a Q-tip, and mailed it back. Two weeks later the company sent me a print-out which identified my patrilineal Y-chromosome as being in Haplo Group G2A (The Caucasus Mountaineers.) Only 5% of European males fall into this class. As an amateur genealogist I’d discovered Dutch, German, English, and Irish, roots (along with one Midwestern grandmother who was Welsh, Cajun, and Cherokee.)

The bizarre fact that ancient Tyson grandfathers lived in the Caucasus set my febrile imagination in motion. Our family’s male forebears must have been subjects of the Persian Empire, pressed into Alexander the Great’s service, circa 331 B.C. when he vanquished Darius III’s Babylonian kingdom. After Alexander died in 323 B.C. at age thirty-two, my male patriarch and his kinsmen could not return to Persia. Thus, they accompanied the withdrawing Greek army to Europe. Finding Macedonia and Greece inhospitable to foreigners from Asia, our clan of foraging war veterans moved further west, eventually settling among semi-barbaric Frisians on Holland’s Atlantic coast. 1,900 years later their descendants converted from Roman Catholicism to the Mennonite religion. After enduring years of persecution, they emigrated from Krefeld, Germany to William Penn’s colony in 1682, and helped found Pennsylvania’s village of Germantown (now part of Philadelphia.)

Did this Caucasian Y chromosome somehow produce the calling to render an account of those tragic cataclysms which engulfed my forefathers’ land between 1896 and 1953?

J. H. Tyson

Darby Free Library

Darby, PA 19023

July, 2014

Chapter 1

Let the Mania Begin

All Russia is a madhouse. Count Sergei Witte, Finance Minister of Tsar Alexander III.

At dawn on May 30, 1896, four days after Tsar Nicholas II’s coronation, a wagon train laden with tons of food, beer, and souvenirs rumbled into Khodynka Meadow, just outside Moscow’s city limits. Normally the army used this park-like venue for maneuvers. Although pock-marked with foxholes, trenches, and gullies, Khodynka was the only area with sufficient open space to fit hundreds of thousands of jubilant subjects. In a misguided attempt to discourage disorderly entrance and egress, soldiers dug trenches next to the compound’s flimsy gates.

Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, Governor General of Moscow, left the details for this event up to Count Illarion Ivanovich Voronzon-Dashkov and Police Chief Vlasovsky. They, in turn, delegated the planning of this beer bash to their underlings. Newfangled electric lights were strung around the park. Caterers brought in scores of food carts and set up over 150 buffet tables. The municipality of Moscow purchased truckloads of bread rolls, sausages, pretzels, and gingerbread cakes, plus more than a hundred kegs of beer. Servers prepared to distribute thousands of commemorative medals, monogrammed handkerchiefs, and ceramic coffee mugs emblazoned with the Romanovs’ two-headed eagle. Colonel Vlasovsky assembled 1,800 uniformed policemen and mounted Cossacks to maintain order.

By 6 A.M. a huge throng, some revelers already drunk, assembled outside Khodynka Meadow’s wooden gates. Sporadic pushing and shoving occurred. Then rumors that there wouldn’t be enough food and beer sparked a clumsy stampede. The unruly crowd broke through fences, past overwhelmed policemen, then rushed headlong onto the meadow’s treacherously uneven terrain. Hundreds stumbled, fell into ditches, then got trampled by those behind them. 1,389 people lost their lives; another 2,000 suffered serious injuries.

Grand Duchess Olga, en route to the celebration, saw a line of carts covered with tarpaulins, coming toward her carriage. Dangling hands spilled out of wagons. Olga wrote:

At first I thought people were waving at us. Then my blood froze. I felt sick. Yet I still stared on. Those carts carried the dead, mangled out of all recognition.¹

Tsar Nicholas and Empress Alexandra, horrified by this debacle, toured local hospitals, and tried to comfort those hurt in the riot. Grand Duke Serge did not accompany them. According to Grand Duke Konstantine:

On the day of the catastrophe, Serge arranged to have a group photograph taken his courtyard with the officers of … Prebrajensky Regiment…The officers, when they heard of the tragedy, began to disperse, thinking it was no time for photography, but Serge had them sent for and the session went ahead.²

To show sympathy for victims, Nicholas felt that the French government’s coronation ball, scheduled for that evening, should be cancelled. His uncles, Grand Duke Serge and Grand Duke Vladimir, wouldn’t hear of it. To preserve cordial relations with France, the Tsar must not call off the soiree. On the other hand, Nicholas’s liberal Mikhailovichi cousins, grand dukes Nicholas Mikhailovich, Alexander Mikhailovich, and Serge Mikhailovich, urged him to follow his instincts and send regrets to the French. Nicholas submitted to his father’s brothers Vladimir and Serge, and commanded the Mikhailovichi to attend. They dutifully showed up, then filed out together in protest less than an hour later. Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich exclaimed: there go the imperial followers of Robespierre!³

Tsar Nicholas’s agreement to pay a 1,000 indemnity to the family of each victim did not allay public outrage. Even though Nicholas’s uncle, Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, did not directly participate in the Khodynka party’s planning, he bore ultimate responsibility. As his cousin and friend Grand Duke Konstantine Konstantinovich commented:

Of course, Serge is not personally responsible, though he is to blame for lack of foresight’ however, it is his fault that he is being showered with accusations. Had Serge gone to the scene of the incident, instead of welcoming the Emperor at the … fete, had he put in an appearance at the funeral of the victims, (offered to resign), … or requested the most thorough investigation, no one would condemn him.⁴

Critics henceforth charged Serge with negligent supervision, and dubbed him, the Duke of Khodynka. Nine years later terrorists would exact revenge.

Nicholas the Unlucky

Despite Nicholas II’s genuine desire to help others, a witches’ brew of corrosive elements combined to bring him down: his own ineptitude, rampant political unrest, economic upheavals, the advance of secular modernism, a sincere-but-deluded wife, two fruitless wars…

Nicholas’s father, Tsar Alexander III, saw his own liberal father murdered by a bomb-throwing anarchist in 1881. After ascending to the throne he moved his family from the luxurious Winter Palace to Gatchina Palace, the Citadel of Autocracy, which had been built like a military fortress by Tsar Paul I. Broad-shouldered Alexander resolved to crack down on anarchists. He issued an emergency decree on August 14, 1881 which suspended the civil rights granted by his father. In effect, he declared martial law to achieve reinforced security. The Interior Ministry and local police departments obtained sweeping extra-judicial powers of search, arrest, imprisonment, and deportation.⁵ People could be jailed for months on suspicion without trial. In May, 1882 the Tsar prohibited Jews from owning land, and authorized a series of pogroms against them. He devised a long-term plan of dumping all Jews into southwestern Russia’s Pale of Settlement. While spending more to beef up the secret police, Alexander economized by curtailing educational reforms on the presumption that too much book learning made the masses seditious. His education minister pointed out the dangerous folly of teaching the restive children of coachmen, servants, cooks, washerwomen, small shopkeepers, and persons of similar type.⁶

As a second-born son, Alexander had not been groomed to be monarch. Alexander II and Empress Marie pinned all their hopes on liberal-minded Tsarevich Nicholas, whom they entrusted to the best teachers in Russia. In April, 1865, Nixa challenged his cousin, Duke Nicholas of Leichtenberg, to a wrestling match. During the contest he hurt his spine. Nicholas neglected the painful injury. Physicians were called in ten days later when he became feverish. They diagnosed cerebrospinal meningitis and recommended that Nicholas be transported to a clinic in Nice for treatment. Meanwhile, the disease had spread to his brain, causing headaches, blurred vision, and partial paralysis. He died in France on April 24, 1865. Romantic legend has it that Nixa placed the hand of his fiancée, Princess Dagmar of Denmark, into that of brother Sasha and told him to take care of her. Alexander and Dagmar (subsequently known as Empress Marie) would marry a year and a half later, on November 9, 1866.

Tall and well-built Tsar Alexander III possessed legendary strength. To amuse his family and entourage, he performed circus strongman stunts, such as tearing thick pamphlets in two, bending iron fire tongs, silver plates, and coins with his bare hands.

Once, at dinner, the Austrian ambassador remarked that Austria might mobilize two or three divisions because of some Balkan problem. Alexander picked up a silver spoon and twisted it into a knot, (saying) ‘that’s what I’ll do to your two or three divisions!’⁷

In the Borki train wreck of October 29, 1888, which claimed twenty-three lives, the Imperial Family’s dining car collapsed. Alexander singlehandedly hoisted up its roof so his wife and children could escape.

The burly Tsar deeply loved his petite wife Minnie and their five children. Waspish St. Petersburg nobles asserted that Alexander was almost the only husband in the capital faithful to his wife.⁸ He liked to take his sons on hunting and fishing trips. The emperor thoroughly enjoyed vacations with his in-laws at Copenhagen, where he could temporarily live the life of a bourgeois paterfamilias—going on picnics, cooking breakfasts at big gatherings, playing games, shopping in stores, and engaging in horseplay (such as squirting strait-laced King Oscar of Norway with a hose.) (Bertie, future Edward VII of Britain, positively detested those forced vacations in the arctic, which his mother, Queen Victoria, required him to attend.) With the exception of hankerings for booze and rich victuals, Alexander had simple tastes. During leisure hours he relaxed in comfortable peasant tunics, pantaloons, and felt boots. Deploring waste, he insisted that his valet have ripped trousers sewn-up and old shoes re-soled.

Although physically courageous, Tsar Alexander had a mild case of horse-phobia, preferring docile mounts. Thus, in elaborate military parades, spectators saw cavalcades of Cossacks and Hussars riding spirited stallions, then their gigantic Sovereign would trot past on a meek gelding, suitable for pulling a junkman’s wagon. No one dared to speak slightingly of mild-mannered Dobbin, whom the Emperor loved, as much as he despised rebelliousness in all its forms.

Though an unapologetic reactionary, whom Queen Victoria (with exaggeration) called a fat Asiatic filled with hate,⁹ Alexander painstakingly kept Russia out of conflicts with other nations. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 he’d served as a Colonel under Major General Mikhail Ivanovich Dragomirov, and participated in the June 27, 1877 Battle of Svishtov, which resulted in 812 Russian casualties, as well as the bloody Siege of Plevna (July to December, 1877.) Appalled by the carnage and wanton destruction of property he witnessed, the alternately brutal and gentle giant concluded: no person with a heart likes war.¹⁰

What he lacked in imagination, Alexander made up for with diligence and common sense. He assiduously read reports and kept ministers on the defensive with acute observations. Prior to the Russo-Japanese War his son Nicholas came under the spell of Tibetan healer Pyotr Badmaev, an exponent of eastward annexations. Badmaev wrote a lengthy treatise for Alexander in 1893, recommending expansion into Manchuria, Korea, Mongolia, and northern China—regions coveted by Japan. The Tsar, who thought his empire already too far-flung, rejected the medicine man’s flights of fancy as yet another manifestation of quackery which would put Russia on a collision course with Japan and possibly Britain. To Badmaev, Alexander wrote: this is all so new and fantastic that one can hardly believe in the possibility of success.¹¹ The Empire still hadn’t properly assimilated territories seized over fifty years ago. Why go looking for trouble in remote backwaters of east Asia?

Alexander always believed that bucolic peasant folk loved him, whereas St. Petersburg’s effete intelligentsia itched to overthrow Tsarism. He admired 17th Century Tsar Alexei the Pious, but not his son, Peter the Great, who idolized decadent Western Europe. Alexander didn’t think Russia should have an inferiority complex. Rather than westernize Russia, he wanted to create one huge Pan-Slavic nation from Serbia to Vladivostok—a strategy which alienated such restive minorities as the Ukrainians, Chechens, and Georgians.

In European politics Alexander preferred France to Germany, and let the Reinsurance Treaty concluded with Bismarck lapse in 1887, thus unraveling the Three Emperors’ Alliance of Russia, Germany, and Austria, which had been intact since the Napoleonic Wars.

One day at a regimental roll call in the mid-1880’s with the Tsar present Russian officers shouted out their names. The first three were German: Von Beckendorf! Koenigsberg! Von Pfefferwitz! When the next man sounded off Illynsky! Alexander interjected: and it’s about time already!

Empress Marie Feodorovna, formerly Princess Dagmar of Denmark, shared her husband’s antipathy toward the German Empire. She loathed Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who had invaded her homeland on February 5, 1864 in order to seize Schleswig-Holstein. Denmark suffered over 1,700 casualties during this four month war. Minnie never forgot visiting wounded Danish soldiers—young men maimed for life because of cruel Teutonic chauvinism. She taught son Nicholas to distrust both Germany and his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm.

Foreign relations remained peaceful and static under Alexander III, who tended to isolate Russia from the rest of Europe. He deeply resented British incursions into Persia, but never retaliated. At a banquet, circa 1884, the burly giant rather pathetically toasted Montenegro’s crooked King Nikola as my only friend.¹² After the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 France actively courted Russia in order to check German power. Most educated Russians spoke French as a second language. The Empire had long-standing cultural and commercial ties to Paris. Its industrial progress between 1890 and 1913 depended upon loans from French banks. Therefore, it surprised no one when the two powers became allies. In 1907 Nicholas II took his father’s Francophilia a step further by signing The Triple Entente.

Embryonic Nemesis

Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich was born on May 6, 1868 (Old Style), the Feast Day of Job the Sufferer, amid ringing church bells and twenty-one gun salutes. Old photographs show him as an adorable toddler with long blonde curls, clad in dresses. His nemesis Vladimir Illych Ulyanov (a.k.a. Lenin) would be born two years later, on April 22, 1870, in the Volga River port of Simbirsk (440 miles southeast of Moscow) to teacher Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov and his wife Maria. The midwife who delivered Vladimir asserted: He’ll either turn out very intelligent, or else very stupid.¹³ Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanov found Volodya more rambunctious and destructive than her other children. The baby’s habit of banging his head against walls and furniture when admonished made her fear he might be retarded. However, his precocity by age three allayed her anxiety. Volodya simply had a strong will. As a boy he developed a squint in his left eye, which made him look like a little pirate. She brought him to an ophthalmologist in Kazan who concluded that the problem could not be corrected.

Big Sasha and Little Nicky: The Tsarevich’s Upbringing

Not wanting to spoil Crown Prince Nicholas, Tsar Alexander made him sleep on an army cot, get up at 6 every morning, take a cold bath, eat porridge and black bread for breakfast. During Lent (Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday) he forbade any form of entertainment, and ordered all members of his household to abstain from meat and dairy products

By no means stupid, Nicholas spoke five languages fluently, and acquired an extensive knowledge of Russian history.

Alexander III entrusted the Tsarevich’s education to his own mentor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a dour law professor who condemned all liberal reforms as works of the devil. Opponents denounced him as The Black Tsar, and High Priest of Social Stagnation, … an obscurantist, pedant, and enemy of progress.¹⁴ He believed mankind inclined toward evil and therefore dismissed the ideals of freedom and independence as ‘dangerous delusions of nihilistic youth.’¹⁵ Democracy was no more than dictatorship of the mob. Misguided attempts at social improvement were crimes, … acts of violence.¹⁶ Pobedonostsev opposed public schools, representative government, women’s rights, and freedom of the press. Unchecked tolerance only fomented anti-monarchist agitation. Slavs needed a tight leash. Sparing the knout invited anarchy. To Pobedonostsev democracy produced the worst sort of demogogues: narodniki (populist rabble-rousers) with no concept of state administration who seduced the masses by promising fiscally unsound giveaway programs. Like fundamentalists of all sects, he promoted narrow-mindedness in the name of righteousness. As Ober-Procurator (Chief Lay Official) of the Holy Synod, he excommunicated Leo Tolstoy from the Russian Orthodox Church for impiety. Pobedonostsev encouraged Tsar Alexander to adopt anti-Semitic measures, such as the expulsion of Jews from major cities, and the May Laws, of 1882 which prohibited them from living in rural districts. A journalist once compared him to a frost"¹⁷ which inhibits both decay and fresh growth. Under his tutelage Nicholas swore to preserve Russia’s absolute (and obsolete) monarchy at all costs.

The Tsarevich’s education resembled that of his cousin and friend Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, who stated:

Our educational program… consisted of lessons in religion, foreign literature, history, … geography, mathematics, natural history, French, German, English, calligraphy, and music. On top of that we were taught the handling of all sorts of firearms, riding, fencing, and bayonet fighting.¹⁸

What teacher Pierre Gilliard wrote about his pupil Tsarevich Alexei could just as well been said about Nicholas when he ascended to the throne in 1894:

He (was) deprived of knowledge acquired out of the school room, (which) comes from life itself, unhampered contact with other children, the diverse and sometimes conflicting influence of environment, direct observation, and simple experience of men and affairs— … everything which in the course of years develops the critical faculty and a sense of reality.¹⁹

Indulgent father Alexander III worried about his eighteen year old son’s nights on the town with cousins Sandro (Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich) and Serge Mikhailovich. To wife Minnie the Tsar groused that Nicky must have gone somewhere else²⁰ after a performance of Faust for now it’s 1:30 A.M. and he’s not in yet! Nicky’s out to have a good time… doing I don’t know what! ²¹. Word got back to Alexander that the Tsarevich had attended a number of potato parties with his comrades. Those soirees—usually held at clubs—featured liquor, hors d’oeuvres, and high class call girls. The Tsar, who had been a young Guards officer himself in the mid-1860’s, knew exactly what transpired at such get-togethers. According to court gossip Alexander, not wanting his heir to contract venereal disease from some damned whore, paid ballerina Maria Labunskaya 18,000 gold rubles (after a gynecologist’s examination that ruled out syphilis) to school Nicky in the fine art of sexual intercourse. Shortly thereafter the Tsar matched his son with another cute dancer, Mathilde Ksesschinka.

Fairy Tale Romance

Sixteen year old Tsarevich Nicholas first met his twelve year old second cousin Princess Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1884 at the wedding of Uncle Serge, to Alix’s older sister Ella. Alexandra and Ella were daughters of Duke Louis IV of Hesse (1837 – 1892) and Princess Alice, Queen Victoria’s second daughter, who died of diphtheria in 1878. Surviving photos of young Alexandra show her as a pretty, but pensive girl. The premature deaths of her mother, sister May, and brother Frederick (of hemophilia) cast a pall over her childhood.

Nicholas took special interest in seventeen year old Alexandra in 1889 when she came to visit her sister, Grand Duchess Ella, on an extended vacation. Although bashful and overly serious, Alix had shining blue-grey-eyes, rosy complexion, coppery blonde hair, chiseled features, and slender but shapely figure. Moreover, she had an ethereal quality about her. Nicholas was so smitten that he requested his father’s permission to marry her. The Tsar and Empress refused, having heard through the family grapevine that Alix was a peculiar… hysterical, and unbalanced girl.²² When they tried to match him up with Kaiser Wilhelm’s younger sister Marie, Nicholas responded that he’d rather become a monk than marry her. Meanwhile, Alexandra declined the proposal of Albert Victor, Prince of Wales (son of Minnie’s sister, Queen Alexandra.)

While in Germany to attend the wedding of Alexandra’s brother Ernst to Princess Victoria Melita (daughter of Queen Victoria’s son Alfred and Alexander II’s only daughter Marie,) Nicholas again petitioned his father, who reluctantly assented. The Tsarevich proposed on April 8, 1894. Alix astounded him by bursting into tears and exclaiming I cannot! A devotee of Protestant theologian David Strauss, Alix did not want to endanger her soul by converting from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy. Then Alexandra’s sister Ella and Kaiser Wilhelm got involved. Ella thought highly of Nicky and had recently been baptized into the Russian Church. She pleaded with her little sister not to pass up the opportunity of a lifetime. Peremptory Wilhelm also did his best to persuade her, and brought in other relatives to do likewise, including Alix’s future adversary Miechen, Grand Duke Vladimir’s pushy German wife.

Alexandra finally yielded to her feelings and accepted. Despite reservations about Russia’s very unsafe throne, Queen Victoria permitted her hypersensitive granddaughter to marry Russia’s crown prince. She proffered so many instructions about Alicky’s care and handling (mainly don’t overtax the delicate flower,) that Nicholas felt Granny barked more orders at him than her two Indian ‘slaves.’

Once committed, Alexandra’s love knew no bounds. In Nicky’s diary she frequently wrote baby talk love-notes. One declared: Darling, Boysy, me loves you oh so very tenderly and deep!²³ She urged him to insist that Tsar Alexander’s physicians consult with him daily. Then begged forgiveness for being so bossy. As Virginia Rounding noticed, this affectionate-yet-didactic missive established the formula Alix would follow for the next twenty-three years in letters to her husband: an assurance of love, combined with a slightly hectoring tone, a determination… to bolster her man, to give him added strength… and at the end, the note of apology.²⁴

Their ample correspondence enabled shy Alix and Nicky to communicate intimate feelings. Nicholas acknowledged that he often could not express his emotions via the spoken word. I feel very deeply and then I cannot get the words out; it’s stupid and tiresome, but so it is.²⁵ The Emperor and Empress developed their own slang terms: girlies (their daughters), Sunbeam (Tsarevich Alexei), our Friend (Rasputin), Mme. Bekker (Alix’s period), Boysy (Nicholas’s penis), and Lady (Alexandra’s vagina.) When Nicholas traveled, without Alix, to Copenhagen for his maternal grandmother’s funeral in September, 1898, he wrote to her:

Boysy’s so sad that he’s alone, that it’s made me forget about his very existence. He sends his respects to Lady.²⁶

Nicholas was not a virgin on their wedding day. As mentioned earlier, Big Sasha paid ballerina Labuskaya to tutor his callow eighteen year old son in effective copulation techniques. Around the same time Nicky began attending fetes with officers of his regiment which invariably included the five C’s: champagne, caviar, cognac, cigars, and courtesans. While on a tour of Japan, the Tsarevich and his Greek cousin Prince George paid more than one visit to Yokohama’s famous waterfront brothel, where patrons repaired to get screwed, stewed, and tattooed.

Subjects in Russia proper generally disapproved of St. Petersburg as a den of iniquity. Most aristocratic salons there hired mediums to conduct séances. The capital’s bordellos offered the services of girls from every part of Asia, South America, Africa, and Europe. X-rated nightclubs featured pornographic exhibitions. Masked porn stars’ disrobed on stage and engaged in every depraved act known to man. One pantomime depicted a schoolteacher who instructed young pupils" how to have sex. Others featured homosexuality, sadism, and bestiality.

In such an atmosphere no one batted an eyelash in 1890 when Nicholas took ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska as his mistress, while fully realizing that he could never marry a commoner. Just prior to his betrothal to Princess Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt Nicky sadly broke up with Mathilde, giving her a jewel-studded potato pendant as a parting gift. He entrusted his pretty little girlfriend to the care of cousin, Grand Duke Serge Mikhailovich, who became her lover. Things became complicated later, when Mathilde carried on a ménage a trois with two grand dukes. She fell for handsome Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich circa 1900, and probably had son Vova by him in June, 1902. Serge initially believed he’d fathered the boy, and remained devoted to him. Most observers thought the child resembled Andrei more than Serge. Vova himself claimed not to know his paternity, because his mother had no clue. Although Mathilde seems to have favored Andrei as a lover, she definitely preferred the braver and more responsible Serge as her protector.

Besides his well-known intolerance for monitories, Emperor Alexander III’s also succumbed to the vices of gluttony and intemperance. Big Sasha had legendary appetite for caviar, beef Stroganoff, sturgeon, and pork roast smothered with pickled purple cabbage, as well as prodigious capacity for wine, brandy, and vodka. At his Crimean estate, Livadia, he planted vineyards which eventually yielded one of Russia’s best Madeiras.

Alexander’s chronic overindulgence gradually weakened his constitution. The head, neck, back, and internal organ injuries he sustained in the 1888 Borki train accident never completely healed. During the summer of 1894 he suffered from fatigue and loss of appetite. Physicians diagnosed nephritis, a serious kidney disease. By mid-September he’d lost weight and taken on a sickly pallor.

He could not eat nor even finish a cigarette, and his feet were so swollen he couldn’t ge his boots on.²⁷

Without dialysis, doctors of that time could not stem nepthritis’s relentless advance toward uremia, organ failure, and death. To everyone’s shock, Alexander died on October 20, 1894 at age forty-nine. In their final conversation the dying Emperor solemnly enjoined Nicky to continue his conservative policies.

The Fatal Enemy’s Parallel Experiences

Vladimir Illych Ulyanov of Simbirsk had lost his own father eight years earlier. On January 10, 1886 fifty-five year old school official Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov woke up with flu-like symptoms: a bad cough, headache, and stomach pains. His condition quickly deteriorated. At midday on January 12th, Maria Ulyanov went into their bedroom to check on him. He shivered convulsively under the covers and babbled incoherently. She sent a servant to summon the family doctor. Within fifteen minutes delirious Ilya ceased shaking, sunk heavily into the mattress, and stopped breathing. Dr. Legcher attributed his death to a brain hemorrhage. (Years later a peasant seer predicted that Lenin, due to his short neck, would also die of a stroke before the age of sixty.)

Ilya Ulyanov advocated universal education, as the most effective means of improving the Russian Empire’s prospects. During Tsar Alexander II’s reign he supervised the construction of several new public schools in Simbirsk province. Ilya wanted to offer government-subsidized education to girls as well as boys. A mathematician and meteorologist himself, he sought to include more science and math in the curriculum and less religious studies, but didn’t press the issue for pragmatic reasons. The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 shook Ilya’s world. On the advice of Konstantin Pobedonotsev, Alexander III veered right, under the assumption that religion fostered patriotism, whereas political philosophy spawned revolution, and material sciences fostered atheism. He believed that too much book-learning made people both physically unattractive and troublesome.

Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanov and her eldest son Sasha felt that the new Tsar’s retrograde prejudices stressed Ilya out and hastened his demise. Following her husband’s untimely death she received a one hundred ruble per month government pension. Maria owned her home, and made ends meet by taking in lodgers. Ilya’s death traumatized fifteen year old Vladimir, who frequently took out his frustration on her. His schoolmaster father always kept Volodya in line, but Maria found it difficult to control him. Robert Service has described adolescent Vladimir’s mounting sociopathy.

One of Maria’s problems was the worsening behavior of Vladimir. … Ilya had not been a parent to be disobeyed and… paternal disapproval had usually been a sufficient deterrent to disrespect. All this changed after Ilya’s death. Vladimir became cheeky to his mother. Matters were made worse by his elder brother’s residence in St. Petersburg: there was no one in the house whose disapproval he feared.²⁸

Endnotes (Chapter One: Let the Mania Begin)

1 Tamar Anolic, The Russian Riddle: Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, Kensington House Books, East Richmond Heights, CA, 2009, p. 118.

2 Ibid., p. 119.

3 David Chavchavadze, The Grand Dukes, Atlantic International Publications, New York, 1990, p. 120.

4 Anolic, p. 118.

5 Ibid., p. 40.

6 Lars T. Lih, Lenin, Reaktion Books, London, 2011, p. 23.

7 Chavchavadze, p. 90.

8 John Curtis Perry & Constantine Pleshakov, The Flight of the Romanovs, Basic Books, New York, 1999, p. 38.

9 Ibid., p. 52.

10 Ibid., p. 30.

11 Ibid., p. 78.

12 Marc Ferro, Nicholas II: The Last of the Tsars, trans Brian Pearce, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, p. 60.

13 Robert Service, Lenin, A Biography, Pan Books, London, 2000, 31.

14 Wikipedia, Konstantine Pobedonotstov, p. 2.

15 Ibid., p. 3.

16 Ibid.

17 Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, trans. Marian Schwartz, Doubleday, New York, 1992, p. 17.

18 Perry & Pleshakov, p. 18.

19 Pierre Gilliard, Thirteen Years at the Russian Court, Hutchinson & Co., London, 1921, pp. 86-87.

20 Perry & Pleshakov, p. 55.

21 Ibid.

22 Wikipedia, Empress Alexandra, p. 5

23 Brian Moynahan, Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned, Da Capo Press, New York, 199, p. 63.

24 Patricia Rounding, Alix & Nicky: The Passion of the Last Tsar & Tsarina, op. cit., Joseph T. Fuhrmann, The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra, April, 1914 to March, 1917, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1999, p. 98,.

25 Ibid. p. 129

26 Ibid. p. 134.

27 Anolic, p. 110.

28 Service, p. 50.

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Chapter 2

Reluctant Despot

Alexander III died on October 26, 1894 at his Crimean estate. It took three days for the Tsar’s funeral cortege to travel 1,400 miles by railroad to Moscow. As Nicholas’s fiancée, Alexandra had to follow the deceased Tsar all over Russia for endless requiem masses. In that era Russian embalming methods were primitive. Morticians concealed the blackness of Alexander’s hands first with gloves, then a silk sheet pulled up to his chest. When dark patches appeared on the deceased Emperor’s face, they resorted to pancake make-up, but could do little about his alarmingly shrunken head.

In those days a maxim held that only dead derelicts and Tsars remained unburied longer than two weeks. Nearly a month after death, Alexander’s discolored cadaver exuded the stench of corruption. Nevertheless, on multiple occasions, beautiful Alix had to march forward, hold her breath, and plant a kiss on the black lips of his decomposing face. Despite perfume sprayings, his corpse stunk worse than rotting crab tankage on an August afternoon.

Tsar Alexander III allowed Tsarevich Nicholas to chair a famine relief program in 1891. Agreeable Nicky performed well in this charitable endeavor. However, when Count Serge Witte suggested two years later that the twenty-five year Tsarevich attend a few privy council meetings to get his feet wet, Big Al flatly rejected that idea, exclaiming: my son’s a mere child! In November, 1894 inexperienced Nicky stepped out of his powerful father’s shadow to become Autocrat of All the Russias — one-sixth of the earth’s land mass— with four supercilious uncles ever-ready to second-guess him. The grand dukes regarded their nephew as an amiable-but-clueless pipsqueak with sad blue eyes. Nicholas’s cousin Sandro wrote:

Nicky spent the first ten years of his reign sitting behind a massive desk … and listening … to the well-rehearsed bellowing of his towering uncles. He dreaded being left alone with them.¹

In November, 1894 English cousin Bertie (the Prince of Wales) offered terse advice to Nicky: bury your father, and get rid of the uncles (especially Anglophobic Vladimir.) Alexander III followed rigid protocol with respect to favor-seeking relatives. They had to call his secretary, state their business, and request an appointment. Under no circumstances were they to barge into the palace unannounced. To his own disadvantage, obliging Nicholas let this rule fall by the wayside.

Young Tsar Nicholas felt so unsure of himself that, on the advice of Montenegrin Princess Militsa, he hired French occultists Philippe Vachot and Dr. Gerard Encausse (Papus) to provide spiritual counsel. Monsieur Philippe temporarily relieved Alix’s anxiety with a combination of hypnosis and clairvoyance. When advisors pointed out that he had no medical qualifications, Nicholas awarded him a physician’s diploma. According to St. Petersburg’s rumor mill Papus conjured up Tsar Alexander III at séances. During those sessions the indecisive young monarch supposedly beseeched his father’s ghost for guidance. On one occasion Alexander’s shade sadly revealed that revolutionaries would depose the Autocracy. Encausse promised to employ occult arts to protect Nicholas, but he died at the age of 51 on October 26, 1917 (21st anniversary of Alexander III’s demise, and exact Julian day of the Second Revolution.) Papus encouraged Alexandra to adopt the swastika as her lucky charm. She had this Sanskrit symbol inscribed upon her diary, and ordered jewelry laced with swastikas. Shortly after arriving at Ekaterinburg’s Ipatiev House in April, 1918, Alexandra etched the mystical logo on her bedroom window frame to ward off evil spirits.

With the exception of Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich and the Crows, most Romanovs disapproved of Monsieur Philippe. Grand Duke Konstantine Konstantinovich, who always enjoyed friendly relations with Nicholas and Alexandra, wrote in his diary that Phillipe was:

… a man of about fifty, small, with black hair and terrible southern French accent. He talked about the fall of religion in France and the west… As we were parting, he tried to kiss my hand, and it was only with difficulty that I managed to snatch it away.²

On August 24, 1902 Konstantine wrote:

Serge (Mikhailovich) claims that their majesties have fallen into a mysticism, that they pray with Philippe at (Grand Duchess Militsa’s) Znamenka (Palace)… spend long evenings there… and return in a rapturous state, as if in ecstasy, with gleaming eyes and shining faces… My opinion is that it’s more ridiculous than dangerous. The bad thing is that they cover their visits… in secrecy.³

Princess Elena of Serbia reported that her brother heard Philippe tell the Empress that he would die soon, but return in the form of another.⁴ Though Philippe’s prophecy may have been borne out in the person of Grigori Rasputin, Konstantine remarked: what nonsense!

Nicholas knew Russia’s bloody history all too well. Mafia-like hits perpetrated by his forebears appalled him. He felt dragged toward peril by the undertow of Romanov bad