The Last of the Tsars by Robert Service
The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution by Robert Service Macmillan £25
Tsar Nicholas II has never been short of supporters. He was the batiushka, little father: a mild-mannered man whose love for his children was matched by a passion for his notably less-popular wife. He became the noble, tragic victim, brutally murdered alongside the Tsarina and their five beautiful children. In 2000 he was actually canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church.
But how to reconcile the image of this so-called Tsar-martyr with his alternative sobriquet ‘Nicholas the Bloody’? For his detractors, Tsar Nicholas was a villain, whose troops opened fire on hundreds of peaceful demonstrators on Bloody Sunday in 1905; an arrogant autocrat, who stubbornly refused to bring in reforms that might have averted revolution. He was so unpopular, even in Britain, that his meeting with King Edward VII, in 1909, had to be conducted off the Isle of Wight.
Robert Service explores these contrasts in a fascinating and harrowing portrayal of the Tsar’s mental state post-revolution. Which of these two mythic characters came to the fore during his last, turbulent sixteen months: martyr or tyrant? The answer, fascinatingly, is neither.
Imprisoned, first by the Provisional Government and then by the Bolsheviks, ‘Nicky’ remained the same pleasant, bland man he had always been. He was scrupulously polite, even to his captors; the sole chink in his sangfroid an unexpectedly virulent anti-semitism. Service writes drily: ‘In captivity, he had time to recognise mistakes and rectify his basic analysis. In fact, he did nothing of the kind.’ His Bolshevik guard, Vasily Yakovlev, made great efforts to save ‘Nikolashka’s’ life. This did not stop him deriding his former Tsar’s ‘phenomenal limitedness’.
On the day the Bolsheviks seized power, the Tsar had his own preoccupations: ‘Another excellent day with a light frost.’ He was genuinely upset by the Bolsheviks’ Treaty of BrestLitovsk, which ceded a large amount of Russian land to Germany. He suffered from haemorrhoids and was obliged to lie down, intermittently, with a compress. Otherwise he was curiously cheerful. He threw himself into the main part in a family production of Chekhov’s The Bear. He read voraciously. To the amazement of another of his guards, he was reading several Russian classics for the first time: not least Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace. It is impossible to know exactly what was behind his staggering calm. Was it his religious belief? He shared, to an extent, his wife’s fervent, almost hysterical, religiosity. Or was it his fixation with the weather?
Service expertly unravels confusing and fractious power struggles between ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’. There are dashed hopes. Vasily Yakovlev, for instance, tried to take the Tsar to Omsk rather than Ekaterinburg; Omsk was liberated by the Whites before Ekaterinburg – the family might have survived had he succeeded. Then there was the offer of an English exile, withdrawn by Nicky’s cousin Georgy (King George V). The King is not entirely exonerated, but Service stresses that it’s unlikely the revolutionaries would ever have allowed the Tsar to leave Russia: Georgy need not have felt so guilty. Over the years, Lenin and his deputy, Yakov Sverdlov, did their best to wriggle out of the blame for the killings. Service demonstrates that they almost certainly gave their approval at some point. They were culpable.
But what of Nicky? Service reveals, bafflingly, that he suffered almost no regrets. While no longer ‘little father’
to the Russian people, he was still the fond family man: protector of four young daughters, a haemophiliac son and a hypochondriac wife. His devotion to the Tsarina proved unstinting. He never fully acknowledged or perhaps even understood the extent of her baneful influence. It was she who was wedded to the idea of him as a tyrant: ‘Be Peter the Great, John [Ivan] the terrible, Emperor Paul, crush them all under you.’ She strengthened his resolve to resist the reforms that might have saved the dynasty, not to mention their lives.
Her limitations more than matched her husband’s. Service describes in detail the couple’s fateful journey to Ekaterinburg, three months before their deaths. The Tsarina haughtily refused to go to the washroom on the train if it meant passing a Bolshevik guard in the corridor. Almost her last words were, ‘What, no chair?’, as all seven Romanovs were lined up against a cellar wall to be shot.
The first to perish, the Tsar would not have had time to recognise this, his final, terrible failure. He never saw his wife and children riddled with bullets and bayonet wounds, or the horrific bloodbath that followed. He never knew that his adored fourteen-year-old son would suffer the most, being the last to die. To order from Wordery for £16.53 incl p&p, go to http://www.theoldie. co.uk/books