Secret Lives of the Tsars Read online

  A Random House Trade Paperbacks Original

  Copyright © 2014 by Michael Farquhar

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-8129-7905-3

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-8578-8

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Victoria Allen

  Cover illustration: John Holder

  v3.1

  “In the house of the Romanovs, a mysterious curse descends from generation to generation. Murders and adultery, blood and mud … the block, the rope, and poison—these are the true emblems of Russian autocracy. God’s unction on the brows of the Tsars has become the brand of Cain.”

  —DMITRI MEREZHKOVSKY (1865–1941)

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Family Tree

  INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER

  The Time of Troubles and the Rise of the Romanovs

  CHAPTER 1

  Ivan V and Peter I (1682–1696): One Autocrat Too Many

  CHAPTER 2

  Peter I (1696–1725): The Eccentricities of an Emperor

  CHAPTER 3

  Catherine I (1725–1727): The Peasant Empress

  CHAPTER 4

  Anna (1730–1740): “A Bored Estate Mistress”

  CHAPTER 5

  Elizabeth (1741–1762): The Empress of Pretense

  CHAPTER 6

  Peter III (1762): “Nature Made Him a Mere Poltroon”

  CHAPTER 7

  Catherine II (1762–1796): “Prey to This Mad Passion!”

  CHAPTER 8

  Paul (1796–1801): “He Detests His Nation”

  CHAPTER 9

  Alexander I (1801–1825): Napoleon’s Conqueror

  CHAPTER 10

  Nicholas I (1825–1855): “A Condescending Jupiter”

  CHAPTER 11

  Alexander II (1855–1881): “A Crowned Semi-Ruin”

  CHAPTER 12

  Alexander III (1881–1894): “A Colossus of Unwavering Autocracy”

  CHAPTER 13

  Nicholas II (1894–1917): “An Absolute Child”

  CHAPTER 14

  Nicholas II (1894–1917): “Gliding Down a Precipice”

  CHAPTER 15

  Nicholas II (1894–1917): A Bloody End

  CONCLUDING CHAPTER

  Aftermath

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  The Time of Troubles and the Rise of the Romanovs

  The live animals came hurtling through the air, tossed off a Kremlin tower by the knee-high tyrant-in-training who would one day rule as Ivan the Terrible. There were no consequences for the demented lad’s behavior then, nor would there be later when, as Russia’s first crowned tsar, he slaughtered almost the entire city of Novgorod—accentuating the massacre by shoving a number of his victims under the ice of the frozen Volkhov River. Ivan barely blinked when he personally gutted one nobleman after mocking his royal pretensions by dressing him like a king and seating him on a throne, or when he ordered hundreds of his perceived enemies skinned, boiled, burned, or broken in an orgy of retribution on Red Square. Yet while this savage monarch murdered with impunity (which, not surprisingly, made him the favorite tsar of the twentieth-century monster, Joseph Stalin) there was one act of homicidal rage that Ivan IV would deeply regret; a fit of pique that changed the course of Russian history.

  When, in 1581, the tsar’s eldest son had the temerity to object to his father’s kicking his pregnant wife in the stomach, Ivan became so incensed that he clobbered the younger man on the head with his iron staff. Rage instantly turned to regret, though, as the half-crazed sovereign cradled his dying heir in his arms. “May I be damned! I’ve killed my son! I’ve killed my son!” he cried. Indeed, he had. And with that bop on the head, Ivan had effectively destroyed the future of the ancient Rurik dynasty of sovereigns who had forged Russia into a nation.

  Less than three years after killing his son, Ivan the Terrible was dead as well—felled by a stroke while playing chess. And though Russia began to recover from his ruinous policies, the relief was only temporary. In fact, Ivan IV’s reign of terror turned out to be a mere prelude to a far more devastating era of famine, civil strife, and bloodshed known as the Time of Troubles. During this violently unsettled period, a succession of schemers, opportunists, and even an imposter occupied the Russian throne before young Michael Romanov was elected tsar in 1613 and began a storied royal dynasty that would endure for the next three centuries.

  The transfer of power after the death of Ivan IV in 1584 had been peaceful enough; a deceptive lull, as it turned out. The bloody tsar was succeeded by his simple and uninspiring second son, Feodor I. “Of mind he has but little or … none at all,” a Polish envoy wrote of the malformed monarch, who was guided by a group of regents. Among them was Tsar Feodor’s brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, a shrewd politician and able administrator who emerged as the sole power behind the slow tsar’s throne.

  Early in Feodor’s reign, Godunov crushed a revolt by the family of one of Ivan the Terrible’s last wives,*1 Maria Nagaia, thwarting their effort to place on the throne the late tsar’s youngest son, Dmitri. The tsarevitch (tsar’s son) and his mother, Maria, were exiled to the small principality of Uglich, and there, in 1591, the eight-year-old boy died under mysterious circumstances, his throat slashed. While Maria and her family loudly blamed their enemy Boris Godunov for Dmitri’s death, inciting a deadly riot in the process, an investigative commission determined the child had been playing with a knife and fatally wounded himself with it during a seizure. Godunov was officially exonerated, but Dmitri would nevertheless loom large in his future.

  In 1598, the enfeebled Tsar Feodor died without an heir, thus ending with a whimper the once-mighty Rurik dynasty. Boris Godunov, who had served as Russia’s de facto ruler while Feodor merely reigned, was now selected to take his place. After a great show of reluctance, he was crowned amid general acclaim and seemed poised to bring Russia to greatness. Even with a severe economic crisis, crippling taxes, and an emerging policy that bound the majority of the population to the land against their will, Tsar Boris sat securely on his throne. But then the weather got really bad.

  Climatic upheavals wrought by the Little Ice Age caused horrific famines during Boris Godunov’s seven-year reign. “I swear to God that this is the truth,” one witness to the disaster reported. “I saw with my own eyes people lying on the streets, eating grass like cattle in summer and hay in winter. Some were already dead, with hay and dung in their mouths and also (pardon my indelicacy) had swallowed human excrement.… Many dead bodies of people who had perished through hunger were found daily in the streets.… Daily … hundreds of corpses were gathered up at the tsar’s command and carried away on so many carts, that to behold it (scarcely to be believed) was grisly and horrible.”

  In the midst of this unrelenting misery and deprivation, when nearly a third of Russia’s population perished, a pretender appeared in 1604, claiming to be Ivan the Terrible’s youngest son, Dmitri, miraculously rescued from Boris Godunov’s attempt to assassinate him. Another boy had been killed, the False Dmitri asserted, and now he had come to claim his rightful place on the throne and to rescue the Russi
an people from the darkness and chaos caused by the sins of the usurper Godunov.

  The true identity of the imposter remains a mystery. Some claimed he was a defrocked monk by the name of Gregory Otrepiev, who, backed by the Catholic king of Poland, had come to Russia to destroy Orthodoxy. Others have proposed that he may have been raised since childhood to actually believe he was in fact Dmitri. Whoever he really was, the pretender quickly gained a following among a disaffected populace desperate for relief and eager to believe that he was God’s chosen.

  In April 1605, while the rebellion that formed around the False Dmitri raged, Tsar Boris Godunov conveniently died, probably of heart disease. Two months later the pretender triumphantly entered Moscow, his path cleared by the strangulation of Godunov’s son and successor, Feodor II. “Dmitri” created a stirring spectacle when he visited the tomb of Ivan the Terrible. “Oh, beloved father!” he cried. “You left me in this world an orphan, but your saintly prayers helped me through all the persecution and has led me to the throne.” The next day he was crowned in the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Assumption. An imposter now sat on Russia’s throne, but he would rule for less than a year.

  No sooner had the False Dmitri been enthroned than a grasping boyar (noble) by the name of Vasili Shuisky began scheming against him. During the celebrations surrounding Dmitri’s marriage to the Catholic Marina Mniszech, the pseudo-tsar met a ghastly end. He was hacked to death by his assassins. Then, with ropes tied around the feet and genitals, his naked corpse was dragged out to Red Square and left exposed to scorn and ridicule for three days. Finally, the body was incinerated; the ashes were mixed with gunpowder and shot from a cannon toward the southwestern frontier, where the imposter first appeared.

  Having thus disposed of the False Dmitri, the unscrupulous Vasili Shuisky grabbed the crown for himself. His claim was shaky, however, and with discontent still roiling Russia, he occupied a very precarious throne. To bolster his regime, Vasili IV sought to discredit his predecessor by sowing incredible tales of the False Dmitri’s evil deeds (many of which have lingered over the centuries). He even went as far as to produce the fresh corpse of a young boy and declared it to be the real Dmitri, uncorrupted by decay because of his saintly qualities and the source of many miracles. The body was ceremoniously transferred from Uglich to Moscow and placed in the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Archangel where it lay as a revered relic—until “St. Dmitri” started to stink and had to be hastily buried.

  The cynical manufacture of the ersatz saint did little to placate the masses, or to discourage the appearance of a second False Dmitri in 1607. Like that of the first imposter, the identity of the second remains unknown. But such was the state of turmoil at the time that he gathered a significant following—his standing only enhanced when Marina Mniszech, widow of the first False Dmitri, “recognized” the new pretender as her miraculously saved husband and remarried him. (One Polish hetman wrote in his memoirs that about the only two things False Dmitris I and II had in common were that “they were both human and usurpers.”)

  Under threat from the second False Dmitri as he marched toward Moscow, Tsar Vasili ceded Russian territory to neighboring Sweden in exchange for a mercenary force. This, in turn, prompted Poland to seize the frontier town of Smolensk. “Russia’s neighbours were beginning moving in like jackals on a dying beast to dismember the Empire,” wrote historian Philip Longworth. “And still the chaotic civil war continued.”

  In July 1610, Tsar Vasili was forcibly removed from the throne by a mob and publicly shorn as a monk in Red Square. Then, the following December, the second False Dmitri was murdered by one of his own men. Now Russia was without a tsar—or even a fake tsar (although yet another False Dmitri would briefly gain a following before being killed)—and the descent into chaos rapidly accelerated.

  Lawlessness, disease, and famine overtook the land; villages and fields were destroyed by marauding brigands. And when Polish troops came to occupy the Kremlin, the very citadel of power and authority, it seemed Russia had reached its very nadir. Thus, by 1613, people were clamoring for a powerful central authority to restore order and to lead ruined Russia back to greatness. They wanted an autocrat.

  To elect a new tsar, a great assembly of the land, or zemsky sobor, was convened with representatives from all strata of society (except the enslaved serfs). There would be no more ambitious boyars, or duplicitous pretenders allowed to occupy the sacred throne; only a candidate who represented legitimacy, continuity, and true Orthodoxy would do. With these essential requirements, one name eventually emerged with near-total consensus: a teenager named Michael Romanov.

  The frail, unassuming sixteen-year-old was an unlikely choice to lead a devastated realm into a new era of peace and prosperity—but he certainly had the right pedigree. His great-aunt was Ivan the Terrible’s beloved first wife, Anastasia, who, with her gentle piety, had stood in such striking contrast to her homicidal husband. And Anastasia’s brother, Nikita, Michael’s grandfather, was one of Ivan’s closest advisors, winning near-universal respect and adoration for his refusal to participate in his brother-in-law’s most vicious assaults on his own subjects.

  Michael’s father, Feodor (who adopted the surname Romanov), had lost a power struggle with Boris Godunov after the death of his dim-witted first cousin Feodor I in 1598 and was exiled to the frozen outreaches of Siberia as a result. Although he and his wife Xenia managed to survive the brutal conditions there, both were forced to take religious vows and live apart—he as the unwilling monk renamed Philaret, she as the nun Martha. Feodor/Philaret’s fortunes improved in 1605 when the False Dmitri made him metropolitan (or bishop) of Rostov, but soon after he became a prisoner of the king of Poland while visiting the kingdom as part of a Russian delegation. There he rotted in a Polish cell as his son Michael became Russia’s new monarch.

  The young man had not accepted the crown eagerly, having lived through all the tumult of “the troubles” since he was a five-year-old boy. It was then that his parents were dragged off to Siberia while he was sent to live in near poverty with an aunt. And later, during his father’s imprisonment in Poland, Michael and his mother were reduced to living as nomads, wandering from monastery to church and existing on whatever succor might be provided. So, when the representatives of the zemsky sobor arrived at the Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma to beg Michael to rule over them, the shy teenager at first refused. The throne was too unsteady, he insisted. Indeed, it was akin to asking a toddler to tame a wounded bear. Only when the delegation assured him that all the people wanted him as their sovereign, and that he would sit securely on the throne, did Michael at last relent. He was about to inherit a seemingly insurmountable mess.

  The young tsar saw the vast destruction all around him as he traveled from Kostroma to Moscow to accept the crown, and his dim prospects seemed all the more apparent at his coronation when the elaborate ceremonial robes all but consumed his slight frame. Nevertheless, Michael did enjoy near universal support from a strife-weary people desperate for his success. And with the help of the zemsky sobor, which met regularly during the early part of his reign, the tsar was able to achieve peace with his two most threatening neighbors, Sweden and Poland. The price was steep in terms of land concessions and indemnities, but at least it allowed Russia to focus on its slow recovery.

  While Michael’s early reign was accompanied by an unusual spirit of cooperation in the interests of the greater good, there were still elements of court intrigue and treachery that lingered after the Time of Troubles. This was particularly evident as the first Romanov tsar prepared to marry. His chosen bride, Maria Khlopova, was from an undistinguished aristocratic family, which left others of the boyar class seething with resentment over the bounty and privilege Maria’s obscure clan would enjoy as a result of her exulted status. So they poisoned her. The powerful emetic placed in her food one evening caused violent convulsions, which were duly reported to the tsar as symptoms of an incurable disease, knowingly concealed by Maria and her f
amily in their grasp for power. As a result of their “deception,” the Khlopovas were banished to Siberia.

  Six years into Michael’s reign, his father was freed from his Polish imprisonment and returned home to become patriarch of Moscow and of all Russia. It was a joyful reunion, and the tsar was happy to cede the power Feodor/Philaret had long craved. Now the son was free to live as shadow sovereign, rarely seen except for the formal court ceremonials that required his presence. Compared to some of the weighty personalities of the later Romanov dynasty, like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, he was about as bland as a Russian tsar could possibly be. His only real purpose was to sire an heir.

  To that end, Michael did eventually marry—twice. His first wife died within a year while giving birth to a stillborn child. The second was chosen in an oddly traditional way. All the realm’s eligible maidens—from the right families, of course, and with their virginity subject to verification—were assembled in Moscow for the tsar’s inspection. Out of this mass, Michael chose Eudoxia Streshneva, a squire’s daughter who, in 1629, bore the tsar an heir to carry on the fledgling dynasty.

  Meanwhile, Feodor/Philaret continued to rule Russia until his death in 1633, after which the reign of Michael, the mildest of tsars, continued relatively uneventfully for another twelve years. He died in 1645—a colorless sovereign, certainly, but the founder of a royal line that was anything but.

  Like his father, Alexis Romanov came to the throne at age sixteen. Unlike Michael, though, the second monarch of the dynasty presented the very image of power and majesty. A member of an English delegation later described the glory of Alexis seated on his throne:

  “The Tsar like a sparkling sun darted forth most sumptuous rays, being most magnificently placed on his throne, with his scepter in his hand and having his crown on his head. His throne was of massy silver gilt, wrought curiously on top with several works and pyramids; and being seven or eight steps higher than the floor, it rendered the person of the Prince transcendentally majestic. His crown (which he wore upon a cap lined with black sables) was covered quite over with precious stones, terminating toward the top in the form of a pyramid with a golden cross at the spire. The scepter glittered also all over with jewels, his vest was set with the like from the top to the bottom and his collar was answerable to the same.”