1913 Read online

  That summer, Tsar Nicholas and his family travelled down the Volga from Nizhny Novgorod to Kostroma and Yaroslavl, places intimately connected with the foundation legends of the Romanov dynasty. With a politician’s eye, premier Count Kokovtsov detected only ‘shallow curiosity’ amongst the crowds along the riverside, ‘handsomely ornamented descents’ of peasants to the shore to see the Tsar, thinned out by biting winds. But in Kostroma, where a Romanov monument was unveiled, the enthusiasm seemed genuine enough: ‘the return of warm weather had thawed out the crowd’.2 The imperial family experienced manifestations of Russian fidelity to the Tsar that they would never forget: ‘artisans and workmen falling down to kiss his shadow as we passed. Cheers were deafening’.3 In Moscow there were more processions, more speeches, more moments of high symbolism to invoke the identity of Russia’s national destiny with that of her imperial family, more rituals of power.

  Two rival films were made covering key episodes of Russia’s recent history, indistinguishable from that of the Romanov family itself. Commemorative mugs, biscuit tins and cigarette cases were produced, and postage stamps bearing the likeness of the Tsar were issued – though traditionalists feared that this risked his imperial visage being besmirched by Russia’s postmasters. In Orthodox churches across the empire a manifesto issued by the Tsar was read out, reconfirming his commitment to the development of Russia’s national life. In St Petersburg’s newly built mosque, the Emir of Bukhara, the Khan of Khiva and Muslim members of the Russian Duma were reminded that ‘devotion to the throne and love of the motherland are ordered by God himself and by his Prophet Muhammad’.4

  In the Russian capital, the city’s bankers demonstrated both their generosity and their lack of imagination by presenting the Tsar with a cheque for one million roubles to be cashed at the state bank, delivered on a golden platter.5 Government officials in remoter corners of empire sought to remind St Petersburg of their existence by organising the sending of more modest offerings to the Tsar, a token of their respect. In the south-west Siberian town of Tobolsk, once a centre of Russian colonisation but now sidelined by the construction of the trans-Siberian railway, it was decided to send local priest Dmitri Smirnov to Russia’s capital city to present the Tsar with a copy of the miracle-working Abalakskaya icon to which Nicholas had prayed as a young man in 1891.6

  The highlight of the tercentenary celebrations came in St Petersburg on 21 February 1913. The date was historically significant, and freighted with contemporary pertinence. It was on this date in 1613 that Michael Romanov had been acclaimed Tsar by an assembly of Russia’s nobles, the Zemsky Sobor. Acclaimed, not elected: the difference was important. According to the tercentenary committee set up to manage the commemorations, Michael Romanov had been raised to the position of Tsar by the Zemsky Sobor, with one voice and with one soul, to deliver Russia from domestic strife and from its foreign enemies. The contemporary implication was clear: in 1913, as in 1613, the Tsar was to be understood as bound directly and irrevocably to the Russian people, in a mystical union with them, acting as their father, their guide and the defender of their faith. Nothing should be allowed to bring this bond into question, or to take away from the wholeheartedness of faith and obedience that it implied. A Duma, for example, an elected parliament – as the Tsar had been forced to concede after the 1905 revolution – should aid the sovereign in his responsibilities, not undermine his autocracy. Nicholas did not like the title ‘Emperor’, which for him implied simply the grand figurehead of the state. He preferred the ancient Russian title ‘Tsar’, with its Byzantine connotations of absolutism and spiritual authority, of a leader at one with his people.7

  Although the signs and symbols of Orthodox Christianity would run through the celebrations from start to finish, the tercentenary committee had rejected the suggestion of the church elders of the Holy Synod that the highlight of the tercentenary be on July 11, the date on which Michael Romanov had been crowned Tsar in church. To raise this date above any other, it was felt, would appear to suggest that the Tsar derived his legitimacy from the Orthodox Church itself. Rather, the Tsar should be considered the defender of the Church, not its subject; anointed by God and the Russian people, not by priests.

  At precisely eight that February morning, a thunderous twenty-one-gun salvo was fired into an overcast sky from the Peter and Paul Fortress. At this signal a number of processions, mostly religious but with nationalists and monarchists in support, began to converge on the city’s central Kazan Cathedral. Church bells rang, military bands played. St Petersburg’s streets, emptied of traffic, shop shutters drawn down, were decorated with portraits of the Tsar, flags, double-headed eagles and garlands of electric lights. ‘Lack of taste and poverty reigned’, leading Petersburg artist Mikhail Dobuzhinsky complained; but for most the impression was more positive. ‘Everything looked more smart, better and more brilliant than the day before’, reported a journalist from the local Petersburgskaia gazeta.8 Dmitri Smirnov, overwhelmed by the contrast with the quiet dirt tracks of his Siberian home town of Tobolsk, reported streets of ‘unprecedented movement’ as he hurried to arrive at the Kazan Cathedral at nine in the morning – hours before the main ceremonies were to begin – ticket clutched firmly in his hand.9

  Inside the cathedral a crowd of 4,000 assembled slowly, noisily, from all corners of the Russian Empire. Smirnov found himself ‘astounded and blinded’ by the reflections of candlelight on chandeliers, on swords and on gold braid. Equally overwhelmed, the reporter from Novoe vremia described ‘the brilliance of the ladies’ diamonds, the brilliance of the medals and the stars, the brilliance of the gold and silver of the uniforms’.10 Having found himself a place near the front of the cathedral, where he could command a view over the proceedings and over the arrival of the Tsar, Smirnov now waited diligently. Others were less pleased with their placement. Michael Rodzianko, the president of the Duma, protested vigorously that Duma deputies had been placed behind members of the appointed state council, seeming to suggest their secondary importance. He demanded this be reversed, a small political battle that he was able to win.

  As the congregation settled, a celebratory liturgy began, conducted by the Patriarch of Antioch, supported by priests from Russia and from other Orthodox countries, including Serbia, then in the midst of a Balkan war. The Tsar and his family made their way in open carriages from the Winter Palace down Nevsky Prospekt to the Kazan Cathedral, the most exposed the Tsar had been to a large mass of the public in years, albeit surrounded by a guard of mounted Cossacks keeping the crowds well back. Smirnov described the scene as the Tsar arrived:

  Everyone’s eyes moved to the south main entrance. Enthusiastic shouts of ‘Hoorah!’ could be heard from the streets as the doors opened, greeting the beloved monarch and his family … Then He entered – He who was wanted by all, awaited by all, adored by all … Him, whom you are used to respect with all your soul as the chosen one and the anointed one of God, for whom you feel the greatest reverence and boundless commitment, as the sole support, protection and hope of all Russia, as its Red Sun (to use a popular expression) …11

  The priest’s eyes filled with tears at the sight. ‘From time to time’, he wrote afterwards, ‘I have thought: have our values stumbled and weakened?’ The last years, he could recall, had seen industrial unrest, protests on the streets, a political revolution in 1905, military defeat by Japan, the diplomatic embarrassment of Russia over the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s annexation of Bosnia in 1908, the assassination of a prime minister in 1911, and ongoing war between Slavs and Turks in the Balkans. But at the sight of the Tsar, at the sight of his subjects assembled under the dome of the Kazan Cathedral, surrounded by the icons of the Holy Church, doubts about Russia’s unity and status evaporated, like a morning mist burnt off by the warmth of the sun. ‘Where has all the gloom gone?’ he asked. ‘It is as if it was never there at all’.

  Later that afternoon the police estimated that a quarter of a million St Petersburgers, approximately one in ten o
f the city’s inhabitants, attended popular fêtes in public parks, the crowds finely balanced between the steadily plummeting mercury of the thermometers, the effects of alcohol, and the promise of festivities to come. The Peter and Paul Fortress was now lit up, adorned with three massive portraits: of Tsar Michael, the founder of the Romanov dynasty, Peter the Great, the founder of St Petersburg, and their successor, Nicholas II.12 In the gilded hall of the St Petersburg conservatory, the whole bathed in light from crystal chandeliers, the twenty-two-year-old composer Sergey Prokofiev conducted a small concert in the Tsar’s honour (though not in his presence) including, inevitably, excerpts from A Life for the Tsar – performed two days later in full at the Mariinsky Theatre in front of the imperial family themselves.13

  At around seven-thirty in the evening, the sun having already sunk below the horizon, a barrage of fireworks was unleashed into the cold clear sky, lighting it up once more in an effusion of Romanov magnificence. Then darkness fell once more.

  The Russian Empire gloried above all in the extent of its territory, secondly in the size of its population, and thirdly in the diversity of the peoples which fell under Romanov rule. All three were prodigious, all three had increased constantly from the crowning of Tsar Michael to the tercentenary celebrations of Tsar Nicholas II.

  The empire might yet increase in size. To the north, the Russian Empire’s border was the icy seas of the Arctic. Here, exploration left open the possibility of the discovery of more islands. To the east, Russian expansion had been checked by defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905, a loss of prestige that Russian patriots found hard to bear (including the Tsar himself, who had toured Japan as a young man, was nearly assassinated there, and who persisted in calling the Japanese makaki, ‘monkeys’).14 But even this military defeat was not necessarily a permanent barrier to Russian growth into northern Manchuria or into Mongolia, where a government under Russian protection had recently been set up, suspected of being little more than a Russian puppet. Further west, in the borderlands of Central Asia and the Middle East, where Britain and Russia had long vied for influence, holding agreements had been reached. But competition between the two imperial powers remained in the shadows – neither side imagined that the last move of diplomatic and military chess had been played. Finally, along the uncertain borderlands between the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire there reigned mistrust – the Russians were, after all, long-time sponsors of the Slav nations against which the Turks were fighting for their lives in 1913. The Russians had long coveted Constantinople itself (both a seat of Christian Orthodoxy and a gateway to the Mediterranean), and might yet use the defence of Christian Armenians as an excuse to extend itself into central Anatolia.

  It was not known with any great precision how many lived within the Russian Empire. But the Central Statistical Bureau estimated the population to have increased by some thirty per cent between the last census in 1897 – riddled with inconsistencies, in which Tsar Nicholas had characteristically listed his occupation as ‘landowner’ – and 1913.15 In the tercentenary year, therefore, the published figure amounted to no fewer than 175,137,800 souls – nearly double the population of the United States, and more than the populations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, German Empire and France combined.16 (The majority of these were in European Russia, on the near side of the Urals, but that still left perhaps forty-five million subjects of the Tsar in Siberia, Central Asia and in the Far East, closer to Peking and Tokyo than to Paris or London.) Such a population translated into a standing army larger than any other – well over a million-strong in 1913 – and reserves of manpower far in excess of those available to any other country.

  Russia’s vast population was ethnically and religiously mixed, Russians themselves constituting less than half the total. Adding the Poles, Belorussians (White Russians) and Ukrainians (who the Austro-Hungarians called Ruthenians, and who the Russians diminutively called Little Russians) took the proportion to just under three-quarters. The remaining share comprised Armenians and Azeris, Kazakhs, Kirghiz and Kalmyks, Latvians and Lithuanians, Estonians, Finns and Germans. Some of these groups were assimilated to Russian society, others grudgingly accepted its predominance, others were suppressed. (Russia’s Jews formed another still more problematic group, not considered yet a ‘nation’, and subject to laws which restricted their rights even beyond those of other Tsarist subjects.) In 1913 the Russian Empire published books in forty-nine different languages.17

  So massive was Russia, so diverse: but how well understood? Even those responsible for ruling over a part of the empire recognised the limits of their information about it. ‘We knew as much about the Tula countryside’, admitted a local nobleman responsible for the area’s affairs in the 1890s, ‘as we knew about central Africa’.18 No one could deny the success of the Romanovs in assembling such vast domains – but did they or anyone else truly rule Russia? Did the Romanov regime simply provide cover for a mass of Russian contradictions, a barely managed chaos?

  In his novel Petersburg Andrei Bely neatly captured both the self-importance of St Petersburg’s chinovniki (bureaucrats) and their impotence to control the sprawling reality of the Russian Empire, by acidly observing that the imperial capital existed, above all:

  – on maps: as two little circles that sit one inside the other with a black point in the centre; and from this mathematical point, which has no dimension, it energetically declares that it exists; from there, from this point, there rushes in a torrent a swarm of the freshly printed book; impetuously from this invisible point rushes the government circular.19

  In truth, many Russians had long considered St Petersburg an artificial city, the capital of the Russian Empire, but not truly the capital of Russia. Bely was not the first to depict the city as a phantasm, almost as an apparition.

  The city had not emerged naturally at the crossroads of ancient trade routes. It had been commanded into existence by imperial diktat, Peter the Great decreeing that the capital should be pulled from Moscow to a still-empty plot on the Gulf of Finland, where the smell of Baltic sea air would encourage Russians to look west and free them from the stench of incense in the churches of Muscovy. St Petersburg was thus the symbol of the absolute power of an autocrat or, as he preferred it, an enlightened despot. For much of its life the city was viewed as Peter’s folly, a city of impeccable classical façades built on marshland at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian lives. But the city was also intended as a political project: the advance guard of Russia’s modernisation, its window on the world and the world’s window on it, a city dedicated to the proposition that Russia was and must be European. ‘Petersburg’ and ‘Moscow’ became slogans dragooned into the service of different visions of Russia’s future.

  Everything about the Russian capital bespoke the Europeanising ambitions of its founder, starting with its name: German Peters-burg rather than Russian Petro-grad. (The locals themselves referred to the city simply as ‘Piter’, the Dutch version of the Tsar’s name, recalling time spent in Holland in Peter the Great’s youth.) While the city’s first building had been a fortress – the Peter and Paul Fortress from which the opening salvo of the Romanov tercentenary was fired, now converted from military use to be Russia’s most exclusive prison – St Petersburg had no traditional raised ‘kremlin’, as did more ancient Russian cities such as Moscow, Smolensk or Nizhny Novgorod. Instead, the city fronted on to the magnificently broad Neva river, frozen solid in winter, a site of ice-skating and markets. The city’s networks of canals, semi-circles radiating outwards from the shoreline of the Neva, called to mind the layout of Amsterdam, where Peter the Great had lived and worked as a young man, learning the basics of ship construction. The rectilinearity of St Petersburg’s grand central thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt, evoked the rationalistic mindset of the European enlightenment rather than Russian spirituality. The city called one of its grandest quaysides the English Quay, and one of its islands was given the name New Holland.

  The city’s architect
ure – the Admiralty Building, the Tauride Palace, even the Orthodox Kazan Cathedral – reflected European models. Some of the city’s grandest buildings had indeed been designed by European architects. The Tsar’s Winter Palace, and many other famous St Petersburg edifices, were the work of Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, born in Florence, Italy. Many of the city’s statues, too, were by foreign sculptors. The most famous was that of Peter the Great, commissioned long after his death by the German-born Empress Catherine the Great in the hope that Petersburgers would recognise her as the inheritor of his imperial mantle, and executed by the Frenchman Etienne Maurice Falconnet. Bursting with national pride, Louis Réau, director of the French Institute in St Petersburg, wrote that: ‘if the capital of Peter the Great must necessarily earn the admiration of any cultivated European, this must particularly be the case for the French, for they alone have done more for it than all the rest of Europe’.20

  In 1913, some found St Petersburg’s northern elegance a little cold, a little too European, as intricately symmetrical as a snowflake but deprived of Russian warmth. They yearned rather for something more Slavic, redolent of a deeper past. (Nicholas II had himself a seventeenth-century style village built at Tsarskoe Selo, not far from St Petersburg, where he could imagine himself cast back to an earlier age.21) Alexander Benois, a leading figure in the city’s cultural elite, told them to get out of their ‘Slavophile nappies’ and look on St Petersburg as something uniquely beautiful because it was both Russian and European, rather than carping that it was neither.22 He co-edited Starye gody (Bygone Years), a highly successful magazine dedicated to the art and elegance of old St Petersburg. In the pages of the art journal Mir iskusstva (World of Art) – founded with Petersburg impresario Sergei Diaghilev – Benois disseminated an architectural vocabulary of classical harmony, emphasising open spaces (without people, some said) and panoramas. (Some suggested clearing the area around the Kazan Cathedral of lavochki, petty traders, in order to purify its aspect.) Together with like-minded Petersburgers – the so-called Preservationists – Benois set up a Museum of Old St Petersburg in 1912, and dedicated himself to protecting the city’s classical unity from Muscovite or modern encroachments.