The russian dagger, p.1
The Russian Dagger, page 1
The Russian Dagger
Virginia Cowles
© Virginia Cowles
Virginia Cowles has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published 1969 by Collins.
This edition published 2018 by Sharpe Books.
For my sister and brother-in-law
Mary and Carl Holtz.
Table of Contents
Preface
ONE - Philosophers at Court
TWO – The New Reign
THREE - Fishing in Troubled Waters
FOUR – Bitter Victory
FIVE – The Killers
SIX - A Cousin’s Vendetta
SEVEN - Poacher Turned Gamekeeper
EIGHT - Uneasy Lies the Head
NINE - Protectress of all the Slavs
TEN - Who Planned Sarajevo?
ELEVEN - The Red Czars
Acknowledgments
Preface
This is the story of Russia’s attempts to expand in Europe in the sixty years before the First World War, against a background of dynastic relationships which made the rivalries personal and acute. A love of conspiracy has always been part of the Russian character; and the author has tried to show how the rise of the revolutionary movement affected Russian techniques of expansion. In 1881 Count Leo Tolstoy was horrified by the assassination of Alexander II. He felt that the terrorists, descendants of Nihilists and Nechaevsti who preached the destruction of moral ethics, were spreading a poison that threatened the whole fabric of Russian society. He asked the new Czar to pardon the regicides as an act of Christian mercy, which might have the effect of jerking the country to its senses. Alexander III not only refused but allowed his officials to employ the same methods of violence and treachery in extending Russian influence in Europe. The two movements, subversion at home and subversion abroad, not only stimulated but fed one another. Although their aims were very different, one to overthrow the Czar, the other to increase the Czar’s power, both were revolutionary.
They flourished side by side and did not cease with the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. Nechaev’s belief, postulated nearly half a century earlier, that the end justifies the means, became part of Russian Communist policy, and the imperialism of the white Czars was copied and improved by the red Czars.
The similarity between the two Russias, past and present, is startling and depressing. Russia has produced many great writers and musicians, but very few great rulers. It is impossible to separate government and governed forever. Why is there always a new tyrant to take the place of the old? Does it spring from the Asiatic streak in the Russian character? Or, as Tolstoy prophesied, is it a natural consequence of the rejection of Christianity? This book does not attempt an answer but tries to show what happened.
VIRGINIA COWLES
April, 1969
19 Chester Square, London, S.W.1
ONE - Philosophers at Court
It was no secret, in the winter of 1839, that the romantic, twenty-year-old Grand Duke Alexander, eldest son of Nicholas I of Russia, was touring the German kingdoms in search of a wife. The tyrannical Czar doted on his heir and had given him permission to make his own choice, provided the lady was not a commoner and not a Roman Catholic. The Empress Alexandra, on the other hand, favoured one of the Baden girls and anxiously awaited news from the poet Zhukovsky, her son’s tutor and travelling companion. When the letter arrived, however, it was plain that the Karlsruhe visit had been a failure. The poet scarcely mentioned the Baden princesses, observing tactfully that he had “nothing to tell about the Grand Duke’s heart. It keeps its own secret.”
Darmstadt was not on the Grand Duke’s itinerary except as a place to change horses en route to Mainz, and to pay a brief courtesy call on the Grand Duke Louis II of Hesse-Darmstadt. But the Russian entourage arrived in the small, out of the way capital some hours behind schedule and the Grand Duke’s aide persuaded his master not to proceed farther until the morning. Louis was delighted to entertain such distinguished company. He took his guests to the opera and arranged a late supper at the palace. He presented to Alexander his three sons, the youngest of whom was the sixteen-year-old Prince Alexander of Hesse, and his only daughter, the fifteen-year-old Princess Marie. Marie had huge eyes and a delicate, oval face. Not only was she beautiful but “alarmingly intelligent.”
The Grand Duke Alexander could not take his eyes from her. The next morning, he sought out the faithful Zhukovsky and told him that he had fallen hopelessly in love. “Just where we least expected it to happen it has happened,” Zhukovsky wrote exultingly to the Empress Alexandra. “To call him happy would be hardly enough… I am convinced that it is God’s intention for him… The aim of all our travels is at last achieved… Now he will be waiting for your Majesty’s blessing and consent…’
The Princess had fallen just as deeply in love, for the tall, blue-eyed Alexander not only was gentle and thoughtful but the handsomest prince in Europe. He cancelled his tour, and the lovers spent idyllic days together until a special courier arrived from St. Petersburg with a shattering letter from the Czar. He forbade the engagement and demanded Alexander’s instant return to Russia, reminding him that he was due to visit the Court of St. James in two months’ time. No explanation was given. White-lipped, Alexander saw the Grand Duke Louis and told him that despite the Czar’s attitude he considered himself betrothed to Marie and would never marry anyone else. His father was fond of him, he said, and he was certain that in the end he would overcome his objections.
Not until he reached the Russian capital did he learn the reason for the Czar’s attitude. It sprang from stories concerning the unconventional behaviour of Princess Marie’s mother, the Grand Duchess, who had died some years earlier. Apparently this well-connected lady, whose four sisters had shared the thrones of Russia, Sweden, Brunswick and Bavaria, resented her husband’s many infidelities, and after bearing him three sons, decided to strike out on her own. She took as her lover the Court Chamberlain, the Baron Augustus von Senarclens Grancy. Fourteen years after the birth of her last child she became pregnant again; first came Alexander, then Marie. Tongues wagged furiously but the Grand Duke remained impervious, and his unruffled acceptance of paternity forced the Grand Duchess’s detractors to keep their indignation under control.
The Czarevitch was unmoved by this disclosure; if he had to choose between Marie and the throne, he said, he would prefer to relinquish the throne. Nicholas sympathised, for he had fallen deeply in love with Alexandra when, as the beautiful Princess Charlotte of Prussia, she had become engaged to him; and he continued to love her all his life. Within a few days he was defending the choice his son had made. “When the Emperor paid me the honour of discussing the probability of the marriage of his son to the Princess of Darmstadt,” the Austrian Ambassador wrote to Prince Metternich that April, “he told me he knew all that was said about the irregularity of her birth but as the Grand Duke took no notice of it, he found nothing to object to on that account.”
The Empress Alexandra was not so easy to win over. “I know that secretly this choice pains the Empress. She is very vexed by the doubts over the Princess’s birth, or at least by the rumours of it in Germany.” The Empress had other objections, for Marie’s mother had died of consumption and Marie herself was known to suffer from “a delicate chest.” The final decision was that Alexander must put aside all thought of an engagement for at least a year; at the end of the period his parents would reconsider the proposal. Then they packed him off to England.
The Grand Duke’s upbringing had been so thorough that he managed to conceal his agitation from the twenty-year-old Queen Victoria and to be a model of charm and attentiveness. He accompanied her to concerts and theatres and partnered her in lively mazurkas and German country dances which were quite new to her. “I never enjoyed myself more,” she wrote in her Journal. “… I got to bed by to ¼ to 3 but could not sleep till 5. I really am quite in love with the Grand Duke; he is a dear, delightful young man.” However, the sharp-eyed French nobleman, the Marquis de Custine, who met the Grand Duke at Ems on the return journey from England, noticed an “inward suffering.” Although he remarked on Alexander’s Grecian profile and described him as “one of the finest models of a prince I have ever met with” he observed “that he is under the influence of some cause of grief; his eyelids are cast down with a sadness that betrays the cares of a riper age.”
Alexander’s confidence in his father was not mistaken, and the wedding took place in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1841. Marie’s brother, the eighteen-year-old Alexander of Hesse, agreed to settle permanently in Russia in order to be near his sister. He was commissioned as a colonel in the Chevalier Gardes and given the Order of St. Andrew as a souvenir of the marriage. “Nobody has ever earned an Order more easily,” he wrote in his diary, “unless it can be looked upon as a merit to have participated at a wonderful wedding breakfast where the horseshoe table was loaded with gold plate and the ladies all sat on the left in Russian costume and the men in their gala clothes on the right.”
The wedding breakfast was only an opening salvo, for the festivities lasted two weeks. The most elaborate party was the fancy-dress ball at the Winter Palace attended by 42,000 people. What delighted Prince Alexander even more, however, was the Czar’s military review in which 40,000 cavalrymen of the Guards regiments took part. The climax came when the squadrons massed together and rode at full gallop toward the Imperial stand. The Czar stood
*
If Marie had captured the most elegant prince in Europe, she had also acquired the most alarming father-in-law. Nicholas had an air of such freezing hauteur that people did not dare look him in the face. Long after his death, one of his generals entered a room and turned the sovereign’s portrait to the wall. “I had… such fear of the original,” he explained, “that even a copy with those terrible eyes fixed on me, frightens and embarrasses me.” What made the gaze so awesome, apparently, was that the left eye was slightly asymmetrical, “like a nail at white heat,” disconcerting even Queen Victoria, who welcomed Nicholas to England in 1841. “He is certainly a very striking man,” she wrote, “still very handsome, his profile is beautiful, and his manners most dignified and graceful… but the expression of the eyes is formidable and unlike anything I ever saw before…” The Queen was disappointed to find that he could talk of nothing but politics and military matters, felt that his education had been “neglected”, and came to the conclusion that he was “not very clever.” “His mind,” she wrote, “is an uncivilised one.
The truth was that Nicholas thought of himself as a soldier not a statesman. “I am,” he once confided to the Austrian Ambassador, “a sentry at outpost to see all and observe all. I must stay here until I am relieved.” Although God may have recognised Nicholas as a humble sentry, the Russian people saw him as a merciless drill sergeant. “I cannot permit that one single person should dare defy my wishes the moment he has become exactly aware of them,” he had written soon after his accession. He looked upon the fifty million people of Russia as troops to be drilled and bludgeoned for, as he once explained to the poet Pushkin, “Russia… does not yet stand as a whole: the elements composing her are not yet harmonised… Take away the limitless all-powerful will of the monarch and at the least shock she would crumble.” Unlike other autocrats, such as the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria, Nicholas did not have to share his power with the aristocracy, for riches and ancient names counted for nothing in the state hierarchy. Russia was divided roughly into two classes, forty million serfs on one side, ten million bureaucrats on the other; and the bureaucrats — church, military and civil service alike — were forced into the tschinn system, a ladder containing fourteen rungs, each one of which had a prescribed rank and salary. As promotions were dependent on the Czar’s pleasure, the bureaucracy grovelled, and Nicholas ruled. He was aided, of course, by his secret police, the dreaded Third Section, an institution established at the outset of his reign, which not only crawled with informers but contained an alarming number of blackmailers.
The “mighty potentate,” as Victoria called him, only relaxed in the bosom of his family. Although Marie and Alexander lived in the vast Anitchkov Palace and had their own court, they were summoned only too frequently to dine at the Winter Palace which stretched for a quarter of a mile along the Neva. Nicholas’s most human quality was his affection for his sons and daughters, and his passionate love for his wife, the still-beautiful, bird-like Alexandra. He called her “Mouffy” and she called him “Nicks.” If he was separated from her for more than a few days at a time he grew as homesick as a small boy. “Oh, I have thought of you and cried for you,” he wrote from Moscow, soon after the wedding of Marie and Alexander. “Tears are always coming into my eyes. Then we go to your room… I kissed your son there when he was born, and then we went together to pray in the chapel; there I could weep at my ease, for I could bear it no longer.” Nicholas heaped so many precious stones on Alexandra that her room looked like a jewellery shop; yet he himself lived the spartan existence of a soldier. He ate very little, occupied a small room decorated with army maps and icons, and always slept on a straw mattress on a camp bed. Indeed, when he visited Queen Victoria he startled the English courtiers by sending his servants to the stables to get straw for the canvas mattress he always carried with him.
Although Nicholas liked to spend the evening playing the cornet or listening to readings from Sir Walter Scott, the morning always found him as imperial and glacial as ever. He had come to believe in his own omnipotence and there was no department in which he did not feel qualified to interfere. He countermanded military plans and upset financial policy. If the St. Petersburg fire bells rang, he ran out and told the firemen what to do. He banished Prince Yussupov to the Caucasus because he was having a love affair of which his mother did not approve; and when the daughter of a courtier was treated badly by her husband he had the marriage annulled and wrote majestically: “This young person shall be considered a virgin.” In the morning he worked at his desk; in the afternoon visited the parade ground or rode through the capital in a carriage drawn by a magnificent Orlov trotter, pulling up unexpectedly at schools, barracks or hospitals as the fancy took him. If he noticed the slightest infraction of the rules the culprit would be given thirty days’ imprisonment or dismissed from his job. And there were plenty of rules to observe. No one was allowed to smoke, not even on the streets, as Nicholas did not like the smell of tobacco; only Guards officers were allowed to wear moustaches, but the moustaches had to be black, dyed if necessary, because that was what Nicholas preferred. Once, he dismissed the head of a school because pupils in the sick-bay stared at him out of the window with unshaven faces. Occasionally he committed an act of kindness. When he saw a poor unattended hearse making its desolate way through the streets he walked behind it until he had collected a crowd of 8,000 people. And when he entered a building and found the porter asleep at his desk over a half-written letter — “I am in despair. Who will pay my debts?” — he leaned over and wrote: “I, Nicholas I.”
One of the worst features of the Emperor’s character was his tendency to declare people insane if he did not agree with them. When Peter Chaadaev, the darling of the Moscow intellectuals, produced a Philosophical Letter, published in the Telescope in 1836, arguing that Russia floated in space, belonging neither to West nor East, he gave instructions that the writer must be kept under medical supervision as he was “mentally unbalanced.” Later he grew even more stringent. He dispatched a young student, the grandson of a Minister, to a lunatic asylum for organising opposition inside the University and sent a Professor of French, M. Rigaud, to the same institution for remaining seated during Divine Service in the Orthodox Church.
Nicholas laboured under the belief that ruling Russia was simply a matter of example and discipline. Yet foreigners who visited the country during this period were horrified by the poverty and backwardness, the corruption and deceit, that permeated every corner of life. The French nobleman, Custine, was disconcerted to find the hotels swarming with vermin, and to learn that not even the Winter Palace was free from the scourge; and the German doctor, Mandt, found it curious that cows were kept at the top of the Palace near the rooms of the Maids of Honour in order to provide the kitchen with milk. English travellers remarked on the appalling roads and the fact that there were only twenty miles of railway line in the country; this particular track had been constructed to connect the royal palaces at Tsarsko Selo with St. Petersburg. The Russian middle class, they noted, was practically non-existent. The merchants, architects, engineers, were German, French, English or Levantine. There was scarcely a Russian doctor, and not a single Russian apothecary, in the whole Empire; even the professors were foreigners. The peasants lived in the utmost wretchedness and were so primitive that some of them believed that the Czar went to Heaven once a week to hold a consultation with God.
But what dismayed tourists most of all was the venality and ineffectiveness of the supposedly educated bureaucracy. It was impossible to get a passport, or a travel permit, without days and sometimes weeks of delay. The grandest officials were not above accepting a bribe, while the lesser officials, impressive in velvet collars and gold buttons bearing the imperial crest, were so poor that their feet were wrapped in rags. The veneer of western civilisation that displayed itself in French furniture, elaborate entertainments, over-polite conversations, only served to worsen the impression. An English traveller was astonished to see his cosmopolitan host reprimand his servant in the middle of dinner for passing the wrong dish by felling him to the ground; while the Marquis de Custine discovered sadly that ladies frequently wore Paris dresses over unwashed bodies and that beds were often merely status symbols; even rich nobles frequently rolled up for the night in carpets on the floor to save the bother of removing their clothes. But these were trifles compared to the deficiencies of character. “They have a dexterity in lying, a natural proneness to deceit which is revolting,” wrote the Marquis de Custine. “In Russia fear replaces, that is paralyses, thought. This sentiment when it reigns alone can never produce more than the semblance of civilisation… it is not order but the veil of chaos.”
