White Crow: the Life and Times of the Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov, 1859
Based on material from Russian archives, this is the biography of Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov (1859-1919), the only in...
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White Crow The Life and Times of the Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov, 1859–1919 JAMIE H. COCKFIELD

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cockfield, Jamie H. White crow : the life and times of the Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov : 1859–1919 / Jamie H. Cockfield. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–275–97778–1 1. Nikolaæ Mikhaælovich, Grand Duke of Russia, 1859–1919. 2. Nobility—Russia— Biography. 3. Intellectuals—Russia—Biography. 4. Russia—History—Nicholas II, 1894– 1917. I. Title. DK254.N497C63 2002 947.08′3′092—dc21 2002025209 [B] British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2002 by Jamie H. Cockfield All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002025209 ISBN: 0–275–97778–1 First published in 2002 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

He would have been a Pericles in Athens; He would have been a Brutus in Rome; But in Russia he was only a hussar officer. —Alexander Pushkin

To Rose Bootle, Kathryn M. Brown, Janie Bushardt, Margaret Carter, Katherine Gause, Elizabeth Hunt, Gene Moore, and Ada Stackhouse and to the memory of Emily Askins, Edred Gowdy, Elizabeth Gravely, Elizabeth Rickenbaker, Eris Smiley, and Emera Williams.

Contents

Preface

ix

Chapter 1

Outsiders within the Family

1

Chapter 2

A Young Grand Duke

29

Chapter 3

Imperial Scholar

67

Chapter 4

Pariah in the Family

95

Chapter 5

The Grand Duke at War

133

Chapter 6

Revolt in the Palaces

159

Chapter 7

A Country of Savages, March–November 1917

191

Chapter 8

Stillborn Future

221

Imperial Legacy

247

Notes

251

Bibliography

291

Index

303 Photo essay follows page 158.

Preface

The Romanov dynasty provided the Russian Empire with its tsars for more than 300 years, and in that capacity, it has been one of the most powerful families in history. Yet blessed with virtually every opportunity, few of its members, including many of those who ruled, left a distinguished mark in history. One of them who did, however, was Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, the only Romanov who was a true intellectual. A historian, a biologist, and a political reformer who stood for unpopular causes that he felt were just, Grand Duke Nicholas had almost nothing in common with the other members of his clan. Most of his family, and Russian high society as well, considered him a belaia vorona, literally a “white crow,” Russian slang for a “misfit” or “oddball.” Educated people outside Russia would not have considered him so, but to his family, most of whom spent their time and vast wealth pursuing sybaritic pleasures and guarding their considerable privileges, he was always an outsider. Only his immediate siblings understood and admired him for the remarkable person he was: The scholar, the reformer, the defender of human rights, and the champion of a free society. Biographers tend to make either saints or villains of their subjects, telling tales of great heroes or detestable blackguards. My grand ducal subject was certainly no saint and probably not the most pleasant of people, but I have endeavored to be objective, showing his warts with his merits. The most outstanding and respectable Romanov in the twilight of the

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empire, Nicholas Mikhailovich too had his failings, most of them personality flaws, which made him genuinely, and perhaps deservedly, unpopular with many of those around him and estranged him from the society in which his imperial connection made him move. He talked too much, disparaging the views of others, and was often eager to repeat and show a fondness for gossip. He was overly caustic and unduly sarcastic about those whom he held in contempt, which meant anyone of his station or in a position of power who was not his intellectual equal. He tended to be negative, pessimistic, and viciously critical of those in power who failed. He was given to petty dislikes and long-standing feuds. Nicholas Mikhailovich’s intelligence and his positive accomplishments, however, are undeniable. His work in history and the sciences made major contributions to those fields, and he was a tireless fighter for positive change, both social and political, within the Russian State. Even after the February Revolution of 1917, he encouraged his brothers and cousins to relinquish their state lands and surrender voluntarily their imperial privileges, and he became a republican because he felt that republicanism would then serve his nation best. It was ironic that he was born on the eve of the Great Reforms of the 1860s, living almost sixty years through the most momentous six decades of Russian history and dying in the revolution that the reforms, had they not been deformed after their creation, could have prevented. At the center of power, he witnessed and tried to influence the great events of his time, yet like all liberal reformers of the Russian nation, he ultimately failed for myriad unalterable reasons as he struggled for change in the bizarre political alchemy of Russian politics. As a result of his and other reformers’ failure, the Russian people had to endure the Soviet nightmare for three-quarters of a century, an incubus more diabolical than any tyranny any of the tsars had ever fashioned. The writing of a book represents the work of numerous people beyond the author, and there are many who assisted in this study. I would first like to thank those colleagues and friends who read and gave me guidance on chapters of the manuscript. They are, in alphabetical order, Rollin Armour, Robert Good, John Dunaway, Wayne Mixon, and Dale Steiner. Each generously shared with me their insight and editorial skills, which vastly improved the manuscript. One other colleague who was not available to read part of the work but who was most supportive, both financially and morally, was my former dean, Doug Steeples. His encouragement and generous research grants were major stimuli in the completion of this work. I had always said that there was no such thing as a good dean, only varying degrees of sorriness. Doug proved me wrong.

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Three friends examined the work in its entirety and agreed to endorse it: Catharine Brozman, professor emerita of Tulane University, Warren Lerner, professor of history in the department at Duke University, and David MacKenzie, professor of the department of history of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Each gave me broad guidance and spent more time with the manuscript than was requested of them. They have by their efforts improved it considerably. Along with them, I would like to thank my editors at Praeger, Heather Staines and Nicole Cournoyer, whose support and faith in the project maintained my enthusiasm for it. I have never worked with two editors who have been so thorough and moved so quickly. Due to their efficiency, I never suffered the “maddening delays” of which I wrote in chapter 3. I must also thank Mr. Andrew Romanov, who courteously took my phone calls and tried to help answer my questions, and Mr. Nikita Romanov, who gave me permission to read collections of his family’s papers at the Hoover Institution. Princess A. Kourakine of the Bibliothèque Slave de Paris graciously allowed me to read the grand duke’s papers archived there and has given me much help over the years with this and other projects. I also owe a special note of thanks to Carol Leadenham of the archive of the Hoover Institution for her many kindnesses and help beyond the call of duty, a treatment for which she is famous and from which many researchers have benefitted. I first encountered my grand ducal subject in 1969 when I began researching a dissertation topic which I later abandoned. In that time, however, I received help on what became this work from three men who unfortunately I must thank posthumously: Gleb Botkin, the son of the last tsar’s doctor, who moved with members of the imperial family; Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich Romanov, who allowed me to interview him several times in London and promptly answered several questions by mail; and Princess Eugénie of Greece, whose father saved Nicholas II’s life in an assassination attempt in Japan and who was writing a biography of the Tsarevich Aleksei at the time I first began investigating the grand duke. She generously shared with me her research and her contacts. All three of these fantastic sources of oral history had me into their homes and gave a very young and naive graduate student much more help than he probably merited. At one point after I had been at Prince Dmitri’s apartment for a number of hours, he suddenly jumped up from his chair and asked, “What time is it?” Thinking that I had delayed his departure for another appointment and he was politely telling me that I should leave, I looked at my watch, said, “Five-twenty,” and immediately began gathering my papers and notes. His response quickly put me at ease: “I knew something was wrong,” he said, and then he asked, “What will you have to drink?”

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I fear that I can only thank anonymously the many overworked and underpaid librarians and archivists at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Bakhmetev Archive of Columbia University, the Bibliothèque Tourgenev in Paris, the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, the Bibliothèque National in Paris, the Public Record Office in London, the Bodleian Archive in Oxford University, the archives of the University of Leeds in Leeds, England, the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow, the Lenin Library in Moscow, and the Russian State Library in St. Petersburg, Russia. Many of these people cheerfully helped me. I am especially grateful for the help of the employees of GARF because they professionally performed their duties quickly and efficiently at a time when they probably had not been paid in months. Finally a word on the number of persons to whom I am dedicating this work. Except for one of them, they were all teachers that I had in my twelve years in the public school system of Lake City, South Carolina. Sadly time has taken a number of them from us. The school faculty of which the individuals were the backbone was exceptional for a small town in the rural South of that day, and these individuals represent those who most influenced my young life. They run from “Miss Lizzy” Gravely, who was state teacher of the year one year and an instructor who could make a non-mathematical student love algebra, to Gene Moore, a coach and teacher of many subjects, who gave me the last spanking I ever got (although not the last one I ever deserved). Unfortunately I never had Margaret Carter as a teacher, for she retired from the teaching staff as a young woman to work in her family’s business. Quite a bluestocking, she possessed a personal library that in that day rivaled the local public library’s holdings. I have included Ms. Carter because she read and appraised for me some of my early creative writing and gave me strong encouragement to pursue it. Her family’s gain was definitely our school’s loss. Finally, I need to thank Connie Epps Roberts, a classmate and adopted sister who tracked down the whereabouts of our former teachers or their siblings so that I could let them know of my desire to show them my gratitude and appreciation.

Chapter 1

Outsiders within the Family

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy it its own way. —Leo Tolstoy1 It is true that none of them understands very much about Russia. But then who does? —Stavrogin in The Possessed 2 They are the blanket that smothers the struggling flame of civilization, these grand dukes, the tombstone that holds down the coffined soul of Russia. —Percival Gibbon3

In the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire was the world’s largest contiguous state ruled by one government. Sprawling thousands of miles from the plains of Poland in eastern Europe to the North American land boundaries of Alaska, the empire covered one-sixth of the dry land on this planet. Although recognized by its size as one of the great powers, it was easily the most backward. Its population of 70 million was almost totally illiterate, with 45.5 percent of it the “baptized

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property,” to use Alexander Herzen’s metaphor, of either the government or the quarter of a million nobles who owned most of the land and had virtually all of the rights and privileges. More than 92 percent of this population lived in rural Russia, isolated in small villages without any real contact with the outside world and oblivious to any life beyond perhaps the next village. Their ignorant isolation was encouraged by both the State and the Orthodox Church, the nation’s state religious institution, as a means of control, which both encouraged and taught racial and religious hatred as a means to hold peasant allegiance to the national state. The 8,000 national primary schools likewise taught the same bigotry, and their small numbers for so vast a population were unable to do little more than dent the stygian ignorance of the masses. Railroads, which were rapidly linking major cities and even rural hamlets with the outside world in such sprawling areas as the United States and Canada, had only recently appeared in Russia. This vast nation had only slightly more than 600 miles of track, the line between the “two capitals” Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the fifteen-mile long spur linking St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo, the cluster of palaces owned by members of the imperial family and some prominent nobles. This “third-world” state was governed by the Romanov family, the dynasty that had provided the Russian nation with a string of largely mediocre rulers since its installation in 1613. An Assembly of the Land, which had even included peasants, had chosen Mikhail Romanov, an insipid, weak-willed man, who on hearing that he had been elected tsar, had hidden in his mother’s closet rather than accept history’s destiny. He even asked the Land Assembly to remain and help him rule, thus creating the perfect condition for the grounding of a parliamental monarchy, which could have scripted Russia a very different history. Yet Mikhail ’s father, Filaret, who was at the time of his son’s election in prison in Poland, was not so weak-willed, and on returning to Moscow, he in effect assumed the reins of power, becoming the de facto tsar, and he sent the “parliament” packing. Whereas it was convoked a number of times in the seventeenth century, it never took root as a legislature that shared power with a ruler as Great Britain’s did, and it was never convened again after Peter the Great called a rump Land Assembly in 1697. The autocracy strengthened in the years following, and whereas various rulers were overthrown, the concept of political autocracy remained essentially unchallenged. In the process, the entire family became entrenched in power and privilege, feeding off of this nation they regarded as their personal property. At this time, all male members of the family carried the title of “grand duke,” although the distinction was to change in the reign of Alexander

Outsiders within the Family

3

III. The title guaranteed the holder the privilege of receiving a salary from the state, and by the time of the Revolution of 1917, that sum had grown to 280,000 rubles annually.4 Each grand duke also had enormous personal landed estates, either given to them or bought for them by the nation, and each had an army of servants, valets, coachmen, cooks, gardeners, and groomsmen at their beck and call to shield them from any real labor. As one journalist at the turn of the century wrote, “The country [Russia] is a money-making concern maintained for the benefit of the Romanovs, who give in return a little government, the glory of their countenance, and many foul examples of sensuality and extravagance to a king-worshiping people.” Noting that all monarchies have drones that live in idleness and add “no prestige to the throne,” he concluded that “none is sadder . . . [than] the Imperial House of Russia,” whose grand dukes live on the country like a “pillaging enemy.”5 The grand dukes’ lives were often one continuous excess. They lived in a boisterous, ruffianly fashion, with little regard for the feelings of others or the exercise of manners or politeness. Rudeness and drunkenness in public were often commonplace, as was sexual harassment of women around them, marriage on either side being no barrier. Moreover, they felt no obligation to those beneath them. One grand duke owed a haberdasher a considerable amount of money. When the businessman pressed the imperial creditor for the amount owed him, the government pulled his license and closed his stylish shop. An art student was arrested and disappeared because a grand duke fancied her. When her frantic relatives tried to learn her whereabouts, they were told that they need not fear for a grand duke “will take care of her.” That was the end of that.6 When a large amount of Red Cross money went missing during the RussoJapanese War and the investigation into its disappearance led to several grand dukes who had lavished it on French courtesans in St. Petersburg, the investigation was stopped. Soldiers died for lack of the supplies the money would have bought. Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich once struck a woman who had rebuffed his crude advances and fought a duel with her brother over the incident.7 Perhaps some of this swashbuckling behavior stemmed from the fact that in addition to being taught that they were demigods, as one grand duke observed, they learned never to show the smallest weakness in the presence of their inferiors. Each grand duke was always to maintain a “satisfied appearance, concealing his sorrow beneath a bright Russian shirt of blue silk.”8 Some of this behavior was curbed, at least openly, during the reign of the prudish tsar Alexander III (f. 1881–1894), who ruled the family with an iron hand. He felt that the royal family should set a moral example for the entire nation both in their private and their public lives, especially

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in foreign countries, where dissolute acts could reflect on the entire Russian Empire. Those who misbehaved were certain to incur the emperor’s strong displeasure.9 Yet with Alexander III’s death and the ascension of the rather timid Nicholas II, the family’s unsavory conduct returned in public, and instead of suppressing their unflattering lifestyles, the emperor and his Victorian wife Alexandra withdrew from their company, leaving them to behave as they would. When not living their dissolute lives in their palaces or on trips abroad, the grand dukes wasted away in idleness on their vast lands, either on their personal estates or the estates held for them by the government. At the middle of the nineteenth century, their government holdings alone consisted of 223,556,393 desiatins (one desiatin = 2.7 acres), an area more than four times the size of France (roughly the size of the Confederate States of America). Of this land, 116 million desiatins were arable, farmed and managed by an army of serfs and employees. Tsar Paul had established this privilege for his family to “insure forever their existence.” By the turn of the twentieth century, the holdings seem to have diminished considerably, but in 1896, the family still had an income of more than 50 million francs, 4 million of which was from the sale of its vineyards alone.10 Yet each grand duke owned his own personal lands as well. In Siberia alone, the tsar himself had 42.5 million desiatins and many mineral concessions. To the very end of the empire, they also held government “jobs,” some of great importance, but they usually did little with them, leaving the work to underlings. To the incomes from these estates and the grand ducal allowance were added the salaries they might have received for whatever government sinecures they might have held.11 Into this rarified yet sterile atmosphere, Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov, known to his family by the nicknames “Niki” and “Bimbo,” was born outside St. Petersburg at Tsarskoe Selo on April 26 (New Style), 1859,12 the eldest son of Grand Duke Mikhail Nicholaevich, the youngest son of Emperor Nicholas I, and his German wife Cäcilie (Cecilia) of Baden.13 He would stand out in the twilight of the Russian Empire as the most remarkable of his clan, garnering praise from contemporaries as well as historians of the political Left and Right. “Perhaps the most politically astute,” one recent historian would note as well.14 Another called him “the most intelligent, [and] articulate,” a frequent characterization. He was the only one of his family in the late empire who could even remotely be described as an intellectual, with perhaps a passing nod to his cousin, poet and thespian Grand Duke Constantine, who translated Hamlet into Russian and even acted in its performance. Even the Soviet historian P. A. Zaionchkovsky, who caustically describes the

Outsiders within the Family

5

imperial family as “for the most part rather stupid individuals,” who divided their time “between the barracks and the restaurant,” noted that only these two “were in any way exceptional.” Instructively, Nicholas Mikhailovich is the only nonpolitical grand duke to appear in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and the great Social Revolutionary Victor Chernov described him as “the only intelligent man in the dynasty.”15 Nicholas Mikhailovich did not grow up to be charismatically handsome like his younger brother Alexander, although the court chancellor described him as “fairly good looking.”16 He grew to be tall, like the siblings that followed him, and all of his life he sported a black beard, which turned iron gray with age. Virtually everyone described him, at least in middle age, as being fat, although extant pictures of him do not show him to be overly so. His face suggests a strength of character and gives the correct impression that the person behind it had little patience with nonsense. This unusual Romanov grand duke, this “white crow” within the imperial family, would strive all of his life to reform his nation and fight against its corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy. Niki’s father, Grand Duke Mikhail Nicholaevich, had been born at Peterhof, a palace outside of St. Petersburg, on October 25, 1832. He was a tall man with piercing blue eyes and a long, bushy beard,17 and in pictures he appears an anachronism even for the Russia of his day. He received the strict military education given to all grand dukes, and early on he developed an interest in artillery, eventually becoming Russia’s leading expert on the subject. He had begun his work in that field in 1852 when he was appointed general field marshal, and in 1855 he directed the artillery preparation for the defense of Nikolaev in the Crimean War. In 1856, Alexander II named him the general in charge of ordnance for the Russian army. He remained in this position until he left St. Petersburg to become the governor general of the Caucasus in February 1863. He remained in this post for two decades, and it would be in this remote part of the Russian Empire that his family would be reared.18 While the careers of his older brothers Constantine Nicholaevich and Nicholas Nicholaevich faded into obscurity, Mikhail’s grew. He remained in important places, in part because he was Tsar Alexander III’s favorite uncle, and in part because he was tactful and practical, a trait often lacking, as we have seen, in most other family members. His tenure as governor general of the Caucasus was a positive one. Taking command of the Russian armies there, he was successful in subduing the mountain tribes and was awarded the Golden Dragoon Saber on which were inscribed the words “For Bravery.”19 Moreover, he won allegiance of the region’s people to the Russian crown.

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In 1881, he was appointed to the presidency of the State Council largely due to his popularity, and he and his family returned to St. Petersburg. A relative described him as a “venerable old gentleman,”20 and that opinion seems to have been universal among those who knew him. His daughter-in-law Marie, the wife of his son George, wrote that she had “rarely met so kind a man and such a perfect gentleman, a grand seigneur in every sense of the word.”21 His great-niece Maria Pavlovna spoke of him as a person of “unforgettable elegance” who “fascinated us by the perfection and harmony of his gestures, by his affability and his air of a grand seigneur of an epoch already vanished.” Unlike the young men of her time, he bowed “with touching grace” before the women when he kissed their hands.22 He appreciated perfect etiquette in others as well. When Barbara Dolgorouki passed through a receiving line where she had to kiss the hand of the dowager empress and then the empress and then shake the hand of the emperor, she performed her duties with consummate correctness. This execution elicited from the elderly grand duke a “Bravo!”23 His kindness and sensitivity to others is well and often recorded. Once, when Nadine Wonlar-Larsky, the aunt of the author Vladimir Nabokov, jokingly said in the grand duke’s presence that she would be a wallflower for lack of male attention, Mikhail Nicholaevich sent two of his officers to her the next day to invite her to be his dinner companion at a ball that evening (one rarely dined in Russian high society with one’s own spouse).24 Once, when giving a ball himself, the grand duke discovered that he had somehow omitted sending an invitation to a woman at whose wedding he had been a sponsor. Horrified that he might have hurt her feelings, he sent a general of the court to hand deliver one, and at the party he paid her a great deal of attention, even giving her an emerald brooch to compensate for the slight.25 His own son, Grand Duke Alexander, whose memoirs are remarkably objective, described his father in them as “one of the few men I had known who never wavered in his duty and lived up to the standards of Emperor Nicholas I.”26 Mikhail Nicholaevich’s gentleness and kindness extended even to those beneath him, behavior unusual for a grand duke. Francis Vogel, who directed a post and transport service in the Caucasus and who served the grand duke on many occasions, spoke highly of him in his manuscript memoir. Noting that the grand duke was a great equestrian and lover of horses, he added that he often encountered him on the highways around Tiflis. When he did, the grand duke nearly always cordially invited Vogel to accompany him.27 Vogel also often observed that the grand duke was much liked and respected by the Caucasian people, despite the fact that he was the representative authority of their conquerors. Vogel tells of the

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grand duke’s arrival at a camp one morning, where “the fields of the encampment were crowded with people gathered from the surrounding countryside, and again I observed with what great veneration the Caucasian people clung to the grand duke.”28 Yet not all shared the adulation of the many. Even though Mikhail Nicholaevich was his favorite uncle, Tsar Alexander III was exasperated at how the grand duke repeated much of he was told, including many things that he should not. He told State Secretary A. A. Polovtsov, a member of the State Council, how when he once reprimanded Nicholas Mikhailovich for talking too much, he defended himself by saying that “Papa said [this same thing] in the presence of others.”29 He also lacked the reputation for any great intelligence. Zaionchkovsky, a Soviet historian known for his objectivity and fairness, described him as “very limited” and quoted Empress Eugénie, the wife of emperor Napoleon III, who said after meeting the grand duke on a tour of the Caucasus, “This is not a man but a horse.”30 Count Michael Loris-Melikov, the very practical advisor to Tsar Alexander III, was even harsher, calling him “an egotist, envious and false in the full sense of the words.” The count also described the grand duke as a coward, saying that he was “frightened and timid as a rabbit, both on the battlefield and in time of peace.” He added that he was an “ignoramus” who does not trust his own abilities, who “readily deferred to those around him.”31 His children, however, admired him as a tower of gentle strength and an example of duty. He was a somewhat remote person to them, however, and when referring to him to other people, they called him “Mikhail Nicholaevich.” When they spoke to him, they weighed their words carefully and controlled their emotions. His son Grand Duke Alexander remembered that when his mother died, the distance between the children and their father made it difficult for them to express their sympathy or grief.32 They did not dare engage him in vague conversation on no particular subject, the mere thought of which was “something short of madness.” He seems to have largely remained for them “a cold and distant figure.”33 Yet this seemingly detached father came to their bedroom at night to tuck them in. He would appear shortly after midnight, the clicking of his spurs on the floor waking everyone. “This tall awesome figure would say a prayer over his children, invoking God’s help in making them good Christians and faithful subjects of the empire.”34 Curiously, this austere man provided the young grand dukes with what little parental coddling they received. Alexander III felt close to him, and it seems that he regarded his favorite uncle as a father figure. When he felt that it was time for his eldest son to marry, Alexander III deputized Mikhail Nicholaevich

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to broach the subject to him, which the grand duke dutifully did. Nicholas the tsarevich had already made his choice, Alix of Hesse Darmstadt, the woman he did indeed marry. He told his uncle of the selection, and Mikhail Nicholaevich dutifully reported back to the emperor. The future tsar’s mother, Empress Maria Feodorovna, was not pleased. Shy Alix did not make a good impression, and the empress had immediately disliked her, an opinion that would never change. What is more, hemophilia lurked as a potential problem in Alix’s family. Her grandmother, Queen Victoria, had passed it to one of her sons.35 Mikhail Nicholaevich supported the match, however, and whatever doubts that either the heir or his parents might have had were put aside, and Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich married her shortly after his father’s death. Grand Duke Mikhail’s relationship with his eldest son Niki seems to have differed little from his relationship with the rest of his children. There was always the respected presence, but there seems not to have been much contact, probably because the father was often away on family and governmental business. Yet Niki’s papers reveal a great reverence and almost hero worship for his father. His collection in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) contains a gargantuan number of materials relating to his father and his life and career—clippings from newspapers, letters, pictures, and so forth—the collection of which demonstrates a love and devotion. Still, his correspondence often shows a deference that demonstrates the formal distance, as if the son hesitated to show affection for fear that it would not be returned. Niki’s first extant letter to his father shows this remoteness. In absolutely perfect penmanship, a talent he was to later lose, he wrote, “Dear Papa, I’m very sad that you left. Mama is fine. Antie has put me down [?]. Mama has given me an egg. Misha and Gogi [brothers Mikhail and George] kiss you. Nikolai (Nicholas).”36 There seems to have been no response to that letter, but later that year the grand duke replied to another from his son, thanking him for his “kind letter” and asking him to thank Maria and Shaka (?) for their letters. “Papa is fine,” he wrote of himself in the third person. “I am still coughing. Here the weather is bad. Hug you. God be with you.”37 Another letter describing a wedding was equally as short and lacking in warmth and detail.38 A piece of correspondence the next year is a bit longer, but there is the same curious distance in it, like a letter an aunt or uncle might write to a niece or nephew to whom she or he is not close and rarely sees. Thanking Niki for his two previous letters, Mikhail commented on how happy he was that they were all in good health, although they were suffering from the heat. “I understand that you are going to Borjomi [a family estate in the Caucasus]. I will be glad when you are able to ride horseback like a cossack.”39

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On his eleventh birthday, Niki wrote to his father an account of what he had done that day, which essentially had been to visit an old castle in his mother’s native Baden. “We did not stay long because it was cold,” he wrote, adding, “We always eat with the children of Antie and with their friends.” The letter continued as a catalogue of banal information on the weather and other activities that might be included in a letter to someone when there is not much to say.40 Another letter, the date of which is unclear, was possibly from the same trip to Baden and was equally contrived and stilted, but it did end with, “I kiss you and the brothers strongly, strongly. Nicholas.”41 A letter written in November of that same year is suddenly much more sophisticated than his former ones, but its tone remains formal even though the writer is more chatty. The letter added a somewhat new dimension: a desire to please and even impress his father. “I am now riding on horseback without stirrups [like a cossack?] ,” he wrote, but added “rather badly.” He concluded the letter with “I will try to behave myself. Your Nicholas.”42 When in his late twenties, Nicholas Mikhailovich continued to show his devotion and duty to his father, visiting him often when his mother was away, as she frequently was in the latter years of her life. Apparently the grand duke had written her, telling her of his son’s attention and how it pleased him. His visit had “erased the monotony and boredom” he endured when Olga Feodorovna was not with him.43 Perhaps some filial bond did develop between them with the passage of time, but there remained an unusual formality between father and son. Niki’s relationship with his mother was totally different, in part because she was so totally different from her husband. Born Cäcilie Augusta in 1837, the youngest daughter of the reigning Grand Duke of Baden, she was descended from King George II of England and the Russian Rurikovich dynasty as well as from Anna of France, the daughter of the Kievan Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise. Her mother was SophiaWilhelmina, a princess of the Vasa dynasty, the reigning house of Sweden. Count gossip in Baden had it that Cäcilie was not really the grand duke’s daughter but the product of an adulterous affair her mother had had with an American Jewish banker named Haber. True or not, both Tsar Alexander III and his son Nicholas referred to her snidely as “our Antie Haber.”44 Niki’s suspected “Jewish lineage” was whispered all of his life. Hélène Izvolsky, the daughter of the Russian foreign minister and a tsarist ambassador to Paris, and who was in no position to know anything but worthless court rumor, wrote in her memoirs that he was descended from a Russian diplomat with the Jewish name Shapiro. She notes that Nicholas Mikhailovich was very proud of this Jewish connection,45 revealing that she certainly did not know the grand duke well. Aside from

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the unlikelihood that anyone of Jewish lineage would have ever become a prominent diplomat in tsarist Russia, it is even less likely that Niki would have been proud of it, given that as he became older, he became markedly anti-Semitic. If he had any Jewish lineage, it most likely came from the American banker. Moreover, by Jewish law, Cäcilie was not, of course, Jewish, yet the rumor followed Niki all of his life. In the dark months of late 1916, when the family was trying to avert the imminent revolutionary disaster by arguing for the removal of the Empress Alexandra from the political arena, the empress exploded on hearing of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s role in the effort, calling him a “bad man, grandson of a Jew!”46 On August 28, 1857, whatever her ancestry, Cäcilie Augusta became the wife of Grand Duke Mikhail Nicholaevich Romanov in St. Petersburg. She joined the Orthodox Church before the wedding, and in taking a Russian Orthodox name, she picked Olga Feodorovna. She was quite intelligent and something of a bluestocking. He letters to her son Niki frequently attest to this bent, and she may have been the guiding force that directed her eldest son into a life of a scholar. “Don’t forget to send the new books,” she wrote him in the late summer of 1888, “Also if [it] exists a small edition of Molière,”47 she added. Olga Feodorovna was, most certainly, the iron will of the family, the stern disciplinarian, a typical German matriarch, while her husband seems to have shown what little parental compassion and tenderness the children received. Her personality, however, does not seem to have been very pleasant, with her motherly instincts virtually nonexistent. She was sharp-tongued, very critical of others, and a rather neurotic hypochondriac who complained endlessly about her health.48 She dominated her family, and one gathers that she henpecked her rather mild-mannered husband. She was not warm to her children and was quite frank in her appraisal of them. She could be rather cruelly unkind, as she was to her son Mikhail, whom she repeatedly told was stupid.49 For this emotional abuse he would one day repay her in spades, intentionally or not. Her youngest son Alexander remembered that as he was departing for a three-year naval cruise she directed an ensign on his ship “to take care of the boy.” Alexander was surprised and touched, but he noted in the first volume of his memoirs that his mother had shown him very little love when as a child he needed it most.50 Once when her daughter Anastasia was at a dinner party celebrating her own engagement to the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, she said a trifling thing of which her mother disapproved. In front of all the assembled guests, she ordered her adult daughter from the table and forbade her to appear that evening at her own party. Recounting the

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embarrassment years after, Anastasia still felt the humiliation inflicted by her insensitive parent.51 Whereas Mikhail Nicholaevich treated all of the children equitably, with possibly some favoritism for his only daughter Anastasia, Olga Feodorovna was openly partial. Niki was always unquestionably her favorite child, the one on whom she would bestow whatever maternal affection she was able to show, and her favoritism was generally known even outside the family.52 In 1883, when Niki was twenty-four, she wrote him, “Tomorrow evening Sandro [the Georgian nickname for Niki’s brother Alexander, mentioned above] came [sic], which pleases me. Frankly I would have preferred you.”53 As for Niki, the love for his mother reflected in his letters seems almost oedipal, and she undoubtedly controlled his life. His correspondence with her was voluminous: He wrote her almost every day that he was not with her, beginning with his teenage years.54 These interminable letters, reminiscent of those of Madame de Sévigné to her daughter, are full of court news and gossip about family and friends, and they also contain endless conversations that a young man might write to a sweetheart. For example, in 1882 he wrote, “I now await with impatience your arrival.”55 When he was almost thirty, he wrote, “ It is three AM, I have not slept and I am consoling myself by writing you. It is as if I cansais [?] with you in dear Borjom, . . . What a delicious memory that I hold of the three weeks spent with you. . . . Life is replete with unhappiness. I am crying now as I write you this, and I feel unhappy—unhappy because I must always run away from those I love.”56 In 1887 he wrote her that Mikhailovskoe, one of the family’s houses outside St. Petersburg, had “a very empty feeling without you.”57 Moreover, his letters show an overriding, almost groveling desire to please her. His eager reporting of his good academic performance was likely an attempt to win the approval of his erudite mother. Once when she had given him some cuff links and he had forgotten to thank her sufficiently, or at least thought that he had, he wrote, “My dear Mother, yesterday when you left, I did not fully grasp [what I had done]. Forgive me for not thanking you adequately for the cuff links. I will take them with me every day.”58 Olga Feodorovna’s letters to Niki are loving, yet full of challenges and demands. When he was nine, she admonished him about obeying his parents, adding, “I hope that you continue to be a pleasure to Papa, me, and those around you.”59 A decade later, she was issuing him the same challenge. After concluding one of her letters, she added a P.S., “Always try to please Papa in everything.”60 Niki’s letters to his mother conversely show his attempt to earn his parents’ devotion. They are always warm, effusively full of thanks for her

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letters and for anything she may have recently done for him. When writing in Russian, he addressed her with the familiar Ty (you), which he capitalized. He always ended his letters with, “I kiss you from all my soul.” In the early years he wrote to her in Russian, although he would sometimes break into French, a language in which he was to develop native ability. In later years, both wrote to each other in French, in which the grand duchess was apparently more at home than she ever became in Russian. Her correspondence to him gives ample evidence of the rather unpleasant person she was. Her letters, much shorter than his but almost as numerous, include endless complaints about people, the weather, how tired she is, and often about her health: headaches, sleeplessness, and even her constipation!61 Sometimes she would address him with the formal vy (you) and occasionally signed the letters “Olga,” not “Mama.” Several times she drew what seems to be a smiley face on the bottom. She usually kept him au courant about her husband’s activities, just as Niki would do for her in later years, even such small events such as “Papa killed a wood grouse” in a short telegram.62 Frequently her responses were simply telegrams, thanking him for a letter he had sent, always adding the prayer “God be with you” and telling him about the weather wherever she was. As he got older, Olga’s telegrams became longer, almost letters in themselves. She would report on the activities of his brothers as a group (she always referred to them as “les frères”), but rarely included detail about any one of them (e.g., “The brothers have been hunting some—killed a stag”).63 She also told him about the family pets, Bella and Jack. It is unclear whether these were cats or dogs, but they slept with her despite the fact that they disturbed her in the night, because “I can’t rest all alone and these two little ones give one such pleasure.”64 Her love for Niki took one typical maternal manifestation: that in the form of calories. When he was nine and was away from her, she sent him from Germany a “new type of bonbon by way of M. de Peters.”65 Olga Feodorovna seems to have been a most active consort to her husband and an asset to his career, always appearing with him at receptions, parties, and state occasions. Frequently she stood in for him at functions when he could not attend. She also included the children at these public events. Niki went with his mother when he was seven on what seems to have been a state visit to Novocherkask in December 1866.66 When Tsar Alexander II visited Tiflis in 1871, both Olga Feodorovna and her “august children” were very much in evidence,67 and upon his arrival at military headquarters, he was greeted by Olga Feodorovna and “his distinguished nephew Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich.”68

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The marriage and home life of Mikhail Nicholaevich and Olga seems to have been a stable one. Her frequent and detailed reports to her son on her husband’s activities confirm a caring interest, and she was most certainly a dutiful wife. In 1885 Olga Feodorovna spent so much time in the south of France, Mikhail Nicholaevich complained of being bored without her.69 In the last years of her life, when they were apart a great deal, Niki wrote letters replete with her husband’s activities, something he would not have done if his parents had been estranged. When Mikhail Nicholaevich was appointed viceroy of the Caucasus, the region was a wild, primitive area on the borders of Turkey that had been annexed by the Russian Empire in the reign of Grand Duke Mikhail’s father, Tsar Nicholas I. For thirty years, the Russians had fought the local tribes and especially their charismatic leader Shamil, who became quite a hero in western Europe for his valiant role in resisting Russian imperialism. The region would probably be today the equivalent of north-central Alaska, had there continued to be hostile denizens in that part of the world. Christian and Muslim groups fought each other as well as the Russians, as revolts still sputtered in the wilder regions. Into Tiflis (modern Tblisi), the capital of this colorful part of the Russian Empire, Grand Duke Mikhail, his wife, his eldest son Niki, and his daughter Anastasia arrived on April 16, 1863, in what the local newspaper Kavkaz (The Caucasus) described as a “triumphal entrance,” where he met with an association of local figures. The usual greeting followed, including a religious procession and a troop review. That night the city was ablaze as part of the festivities, which Kavkaz reported, more as propaganda than truth, were “a demonstration of popular ecstasy that continued through the night.”70 The next day four-year-old Niki celebrated his birthday with a liturgical mass in the Sionsky Cathedral in conjunction with one given for Tsar Alexander II, with whom he shared a birthday. At another festivity, in an open carriage despite the fact that a soft rain was falling and a strong wind was blowing, Olga Feodorovna entered the main square, where a large crowd had just sung “God Save the Tsar.” Niki and his sister were not there with her, probably due to the inclement weather.71 Mikhail Nicholaevich’s predecessors had advised him upon taking the position of viceroy to respect local customs, and he did. By 1864 he had also subdued the sporadic rebellions, and very quickly he enforced the new law abolishing serfdom. He traveled over much of the region, coming to know the tribal leaders and working hard to win their loyalty to the Russian tsar. All Russians seem to have agreed that Grand Duke Mikhail gave the Caucasus a “wise rule,” to use Russian diplomat Baron Roman Rosen’s description,72 and his success earned him the distinguished

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St. George Cross of the Second Class.73 He remained in the region until the early 1880s. More important for the family, however, was the fact that it was in the Caucasus, thousands of miles from St. Petersburg and the rest of the Romanovs, that Niki and his brothers and sister were reared. All agreed that their physical isolation had a profound effect on their lives and their outlook, and their view of almost everything would be profoundly different from that of the rest of their kin. The Mikhailovichi were called “liberals” by the rest of the family,74 and the development of their young lives far from the conservatism of the capital and the rakishness of the rest of the family set them more than physically apart from their relatives. Their Caucasian upbringing created a chasm between Niki and his siblings and their cousins, who grew up in the north. As brother Alexander put it, “We did not approve of everything going on in the palace. We spoke frankly and criticized constructively.” The “Northerners” called the Mikhailovichi “dangerous radicals” for their out-of-step views,75 and the “Caucasians” tended to remain largely aloof from the majority of the family. To further aggravate the situation, the “Northerners” suspected the “Caucasians” of getting special favors from Tsar Alexander II; the Mikhailovichi, for their part, accused the “Northerners” of “ridiculous haughtiness.”76 When the family finally visited St. Petersburg in 1874, they were quite awed by the city that was so much a part of their cousins’ lives, and their reaction tended to make the Petersburg Romanovs regard the Mikhailovichi as country bumpkins. Moreover, the latter had indeed been sheltered by their prudish German mother. When they finally left the Caucasus in 1880, they were informed for the first time of Tsar Alexander’s second “wife” and family. Alexander II had taken a mistress, Catharine Dolgorouki, by whom he had several children. Unable to marry her legally because his first wife was very much in evidence, he proclaimed her his “wife before God,” and even moved her into the Winter Palace (the Hermitage today) with him when his legal wife was an invalid dying of cancer. As she lay immobile in her bedroom, she could hear him romping on the floor above with his illegitimate children by this “wife before God.” When the empress finally died, he married this “other woman” shortly before his assassination, so on the arrival in St. Petersburg of the Mikhailovichi in 1880, he had only been married a short time. The Mikhailovichi children, who were quite good at arithmetic, could not comprehend how the emperor and his newly wed second wife could have children that were so old.77 A. A. Mossolov, the head of the court chancellery, remembered, however, a different view of the Mikhailovichi, who he felt had “no common trait of character,”78 but whose different upbringing could not have helped

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but produce a different mind-set. Yet aside from friction between individuals that can occur in any family, they seemed to have had a cordial and even warm relationship with some of their “northern” cousins. Mathilde Kschessinska, Tsar Nicholas II’s mistress in his bachelor days, remembered that when Nicholas, the future tsar, came to see her, he often brought along Niki’s brothers George, Alexander, and Sergei, and the three would sing Georgian songs that they had learned growing up in the Caucasus.79 Sergei was the best man in Nicholas and Alexandra’s wedding. Yet in the minds of the “Northerners” in general, the Mikhailovichi would always be apart, different, and regarded so. The relative absence of Mikhailovichi snobbery is best evidenced in the memoir of the director of the coach line, the above-mentioned Francis Vogel, who spent a great deal of time around the Grand Duke Mikhail and his sons. He wrote that the Mikhailovichi were always exceedingly friendly toward this nonaristocratic foreigner. He remembered that of all, Nicholas Mikhailovich was the “most cordial,” and Niki’s intellectual curiosity led him to take every opportunity to ask Vogel about America, where the German immigrant had lived. Before meeting the Mikhailovichi, Vogel wrote that he had formed an incorrect picture of the royal family, and from the grand duke and his sons, he “learned to have an altogether different view” of what the imperial family was like. He found them to be “friendliness and affability itself,” and their behavior toward him led him to “love the gand duke’s family.” Vogel added that “if every one of their [the Romanovs’] subjects felt toward them as he, a foreigner, did, there would not a disloyal subject in all of Russia.”80 For their common worldview and their “liberalism,” each of the Mikhailovich children was quite different. Niki’s only sister, Anastasia, was born the year after he was, and she was the object of devotion not only as her father’s “exclusive favorite,” but as all of her brothers’ favorite as well. One of her female friends described her as “very beautiful, tall and slight with Grecian features and a small head, which she carried haughtily. In fact, she seemed the ideal princess.”81 This tall, dark-haired, greeneyed beauty was “worshiped,” according to her brother Alexander, by all her brothers, who found in her a familial bond of affection that was so lacking with their parents. She was kept, however, from her brothers much of the time, and they were permitted to be with her only on Sundays when there were all allowed to take a walk together.82 As her brother remembered, “We liked to pose as the faithful knights ready and willing to execute the orders of this dame sans merci.” They found in her a repository for all the love “stored during months and years of dull military drills,” and as is often the case in such sibling devotion, these young grand dukes automatically detested her suitors. When Friedrich-Franz, the Grand Duke

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of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, came to the Caucasus to meet their sister, to whom he had become affianced, they all automatically hated him. They would probably have found fault with anything he did, but they especially found distasteful his elegant German manner, so admired by their father, of clicking his heels and kissing hands. Nicholas, as was his wont, felt particularly strongly about Friedrich-Franz when he learned of his mission, and his dislike turned to a very obvious hatred that never abated,83 even after their marriage in the fall of 1878. The German grand duke was the younger brother of Maria Pavlovna, the wife of Grand Duke Vladimir, Tsar Alexander III’s brother, who in no way deserved the disapproval of his brothers-in-law and indeed seems to have been a gentle and sensitive man. Kschessinska, who had a “deep friendship” with him, found him to be “a man of great charm.”84 To the Mikhailovich brothers, however, he was the person who had taken their beloved sister from them. Anastasia’s wedding was a stunning affair. This slim, beautiful bride cut a very striking picture in her silver dress, the traditional wedding gown of all Russian grand duchesses. Representatives of all the ruling houses of Europe attended, and she was given away by the tsar himself. In the span of forty minutes, they were married twice, first by an Orthodox clergyman, the second time by a Protestant minister. Two days of festivities followed, and at the end of the second day, Anastasia and Friedrich boarded a train to leave for their honeymoon. A saddened brother later wrote, “The whistle blew, the guard of honor presented arms, and we lost our Anastasia.”85 The brothers probably did not realize that this unhappy occasion was the last time that the family would ever be together under both their parents. Anastasia was making her own life, and the three younger brothers were leaving the nest to join their military regiments. They would all see each other again, but there was now an outsider in the family, and the three eldest boys had broken out of the protective cocoon in which they had been reared. Anastasia’s extant letters, always chatty and friendly, to her older brother Niki reveal a warm, caring person, who always seems to have been happy about life.86 Moreover, her correspondence as a young girl shows an intelligence well beyond her years. She also seems to have admired and especially loved Niki, and to him the intellectual side of her character seemed especially to shine. When she was thirteen, she wrote to her fourteen-yearold brother of her visit to the Hermitage. “I was in the Russian, Spanish, and Italian [sections],” she noted. “In the Russian section, I very much liked the picture of Ridel [?], in the Italian I saw sculpture of Raphael.”87 When many eagerly greeted the outbreak of war after the Austrian ultimatum in 1914, she wrote Emperor Nicholas, “I hope that the war will not happen and that we even can say ‘perhaps in a few days

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we’ll all be together again,’”88 It was, of course not to be. Anastasia lived most of her life outside of Russia, especially at her homes on the Riviera, the Villa Wender in Cannes, and later the Villa Fantasia in Eze, where Niki and her other brothers often visited and where their father died. Here she passed the time in the usual pursuits of royalty, including gambling at Monte Carlo. Not everyone found her appealing, however. One associate remembered that she was “completely indifferent to anything but her own desires.”89 Given the pedestal on which her father and her brother placed her, she would not have been human if she had been otherwise. Niki’s next youngest sibling and the oldest of his brothers was Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich, known in the family as “Miche-Miche.” He was born at the palace of Peterhof outside St. Petersburg on October 16, 1861. He loved the military life, something his older brother Niki came to hate, and served in the Chasseur Egersky Regiment of the Guards. Very handsome and in great demand on the social circuit in the capital, Mikhail resembled an officer in a Dostoevskian novel, with endless parties, dancing, and gambling.90 He seems to have been rather shallow and not very bright, as we have seen that his rather insensitive mother often observed. Tsar Alexander III once called him a “fool.”91 Whereas Niki and Miche-Miche were close during their childhood and adolescent years, they seem to have drifted apart somewhat later in life. Niki, however, continued to worry about his sibling. Within Nicholas II’s papers in GARF is a somewhat mysterious, caring letter, dated 1912, from Niki to the tsar, which expresses great concern about his brother.92 Mikhail Mikhailovich’s most salient talent seems to have been horsemanship. Francis Vogel often met him in his youth on the various highways of the Caucasus, and the affable young grand duke, emulating his father’s courtesy, always invited him to ride along. Once they rode from the station town of Mikhailovo to Borjomi by night, with the grand duke changing horses every nine versts, where the cossacks had replacements waiting for him.93 The fourth child, George, known as “Gogi,” was the first of the Mikhailovichi actually to be born in the Caucasus. His mother gave birth to him at Belyi Kliuch near Tiflis on August 23, 1863. He was eighteen before his family left the region, so the Caucasus was always home to him. Gogi was very tall, about six foot four, had brown eyes, no beard, but a large moustache. He became bald at an early age. In his youth he did some permanent damage to his leg, which prevented the active military career he wanted, although he served in some limited capacity in Her Majesty’s Lancers.94 He fell into the typical lifestyle of the rich noble Russian— drinking, parties, gambling, and women. Yet of all the brothers, Gogi came the closest to being the intellectual his oldest brother actually was.

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He was a painter of some ability and served as curator of the Alexander III Museum (today the Russian Museum) in St. Petersburg. Also a leading Russian numismatist, he wrote ten monographs on the subject of coins, one of which was recently reproduced in facsimile in the United States. He also accumulated an extremely valuable collection of Russian coinage, which was smuggled out of Russia during the Revolution. Some of it was stolen in the West, but his wife did receive part of it, which now resides in the Smithsonian Institution.95 His personality was unlike that of his eldest brother. Quiet and withdrawn, outside of his coins and art he held an interest only for his two daughters. He was good-natured and joked a lot when he did speak, often picking teasing fights with his friends. He had a voracious appetite and would often show up early for meals. Even his estranged wife Marie wrote that he was known “for his kindness of heart and his sound judgment.”96 Yet in the words of Mossolov, he was “not one who carried any weight” in the family and was entrusted only with ceremonial duties such as visiting troops and passing out medals.97 Personally, he was a stickler for protocol. Once, when Prince Gavrill Constantinovich sat uninvited in the tsar’s box at the theater with George and his brother Sergei, George felt the need to tell him “in quiet tones” that without the tsar’s express invitation, one did not enter the emperor’s loge.98 Niki’s third brother was Alexander, named for Tsar Alexander II, but known better in the family by his Georgian nickname “Sandro.” He was by far the most well-known of the Mikhailovichi because he held prominent governmental positions, survived the Revolution, lived in the West, made a number of lecture tours, and wrote three popular books on the Russian world he had left behind. Sandro was born on April 1/13, 1866, in Tiflis, and like his brother Gogi, grew up in the Caucasus. At the age of seven he was moved into the barracks bedroom with his older brothers and subjected to the spartan life imposed by their German mother, taking orders from the older brothers’ tutors. Over six feet tall with dark hair and brown eyes and a neat beard, he was blessed with a charismatic beauty, and one contemporary remembered “when he entered a room, he riveted attention.”99 His good looks were augmented by a charm and genuine friendliness, and he was extremely popular wherever he went, with the cadets with whom he served or the friends with whom he played bridge. He was something of a “ladies’ man,” and after losing his virginity to an American prostitute in a Hong Kong brothel while on a naval deployment, he became one of the greatest lovers in the Russian fleet.100 Sandro met his cousin Nicholas Alexandrovich, the future Nicholas II, when he was nine, and the two became lifelong friends. This friendship, coupled with the fact that he eventually married the tsar’s sister Ksenia,

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gave him a most-favored position at court. Mossolov noted that he was intelligent “but not as intelligent as his eldest brother” Nicholas Mikhailovich. He showed the family penchant for historical collecting, however, and on his first cruise in the Russian navy, he began to collect rare naval works, ultimately compiling a personal library of around 20,000 titles. Like Gogi, he was also a numismatist and amassed quite a collection of rare coins that he fortunately left in Paris, so it escaped the clutches of the Revolution. The sale of it gave him money on which to live in exile.101 Alexander had a prominent military career, but not in the army. Against his father’s wishes, he joined the navy and would later be the commander of Russia’s fledgling air force. He took a greater interest in the outside world than did any of his brothers, including the scholarly Niki, and he even traveled to America, visiting the Chicago World’s Fair. He went often to San Sebastián, Spain, making tourist excursions to obscure places into the interior that would not have interested most of his brothers.102 Alexander seems to have idolized Niki, yet only from afar. When he was eleven, he wrote his oldest brother a letter that was almost apologetic in tone: “I suppose you will find this letter not at all interesting. I am sure you will not answer me, though I hope to receive one day just a little bit of a letter from you.”103 Never one to leave a letter unanswered, Niki did write back, and very quickly, but the reply has not survived. It somehow, however, disturbed little Sandro, for he replied, “My dear brother-servant Nicholas! I thank you for your letter which does not please me. You can imagine why.”104 Alexander was probably his mother’s second favorite son, but as noted above, he was unaware of her love until he was in young adulthood. With age, he became a rather complicated man, a contradiction in qualities. In the preface of his book, Always a Grand Duke, an American friend described him as “opinionated and tolerant, belligerent and kind, sarcastic and romantic,” yet he notes one consistency: Alexander Mikhailovich was “an arch-foe of bunkum in all its forms and disguises.”105 Like anyone who is popular and powerful, he had his detractors. V. I. Gurko, a prominent general of World War I fame, implies that Alexander was “easily interested” in underhanded schemes.106 Gleb Botkin, the son of the last tsar’s doctor who grew up around members of the imperial family, told this author in 1969 that Alexander was a “lech.” When asked what he meant by that, as the conversation had nothing to do with sex, Mr. Botkin replied that he had pushed the marriage of his daughter Irina to the homosexual Felix Youssoupov because of the Youssoupov wealth, although this story probably has no validity. The Romanovs could certainly match the Youssoupovs ruble for ruble, and as we shall see,

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Alexander was profoundly disturbed by the rumors of Youssoupov’s homosexuality until Felix somehow managed to convince him that they had no basis in fact. Albeit a little more slowly, the other children kept coming. Three years after Alexander, Sergei was born at Borjomi on October 7, 1869. There was much ado about his arrival, including the firing of 301 cannons and the pealing of church bells. It was a raw, cold day, but thousands waited outside the grand ducal palace with the traditional Russian greeting of bread and salt to welcome the newborn when he arrived to be taken to his christening. Within two weeks he was enrolled in a military unit that was named for him, the 153rd Infantry Vakunskii Regiment of his Imperial Highness Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich. Kavkaz, ever ready to sprinkle glory on the imperial family, noted, “It was marvelous how these poor visitors and petty merchants of the locality gathered 150 rubles for this event to show respect for their ‘Imperial Borjomi master.’”107 A holiday was proclaimed after his christening. This child welcomed into the world with such pomp would in time become the sibling most like his father. Sergei loved the military and served during his life in a number of regiments,108 but like his father, he was drawn toward ordnance and artillery, becoming in 1904, the Inspector General of Artillery, a post he held until 1915. He had the family height, finally reaching six foot three, but he was the only one of the children to inherit his father’s blue eyes and blond hair. By all accounts he was the least handsome of the male children. Once when his older brother George asked him why he was so ugly, he replied, “It’s my charm.”109 He developed a defeatist, pessimistic nature, due, his brother Alexander felt, to treatment from a childhood tutor, a Colonel Helmerson. He had the habit of saying “Tant pis!” (So much the worse!) to any bad news, so that he got the secret nickname of “Monsieur Tant Pis.”110 Many described him as “clever,” and he was, unlike his brothers, interested in mathematics and physics, which coincided with his interest in artillery. Unlike his older brothers, history and art held no interest for him. His only artistic interest was choral singing, and he formed an amateur chorus of more than sixty voices, including some professional singers. They were directed by Kasatchenko, the master of the Imperial Theater. For a decade, the group met at Sergei’s palace every Monday evening from 8 to 10:30 before the Russo-Japanese War stopped it. During their breaks they were given a buffet of sweets and other foods.111 Possessing a tendency to be rude, Sergei does not seem to have had a very pleasant personality. His jokes could sometime be cruel, and he was quite moody.112 He never married, living in his father’s and later Niki’s palace on the Neva in an apartment and riding throughout the palace on

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a bicycle.113 He did form some sort of lifelong friendship with the everpopular Kschessinska, who was the lover of Nicholas II, and possibly of his brother George as well. Whatever may have happened in the bedroom, Sergei was an ever-faithful dog for her, running errands and posing as her protector. In 1894 he even bought her a villa on the sea. Sergei also carried letters of the tsar to her and many times acted as a go-between for them during their affair, according to Kschessinska.114 Nicholas II asked him to take care of her when he married Alexandra, and the grand duke dutifully fulfilled this obligation to the end of his life. As we shall see, his willingness to do her bidding got him into some serious trouble during the Great War and also probably cost him his life. In later years, he developed rheumatism while traveling near Lake Baikal just before the outbreak of war in 1914, and he suffered with it terribly, the illness being made worse by some of the medicine given him.115 He does not seem to have ever grown close to his oldest brother, although Niki clearly cared for him. Telling someone of this rheumatism, Niki called Sergei’s problems “a perpetual care on my heart,” and his health had given him some “anguish.”116 Sergei seems to have been much closer to George, whose letters to his daughter in England during the war are replete with references to “Uncle Sergei” and few about “Uncle Niki.”117 Six years after Sergei was born, the last Mikhailovich child came into the world, Aleksei Mikhailovich. He was what might be called an “afterthought” today, born when his mother was almost forty. He was the only grand duke to have both the name and patronymic (a Russian’s middle name, which is always the father’s name) of a Russian tsar. He was born on December 16, 1875, and died in February twenty years later of virulent tuberculosis. Because of his short life and his illness, which kept him isolated, little is known of him. He was tall, thin, intelligent, and quite good-looking in a uniform. Alexander III took an interest in him and suggested that he come to him with any marital questions. The second day after he was born, all of the older brothers were allowed to see him. They regarded him in silence. He came to be closest to Sandro, who seems to have had a special fondness for the young grand duke and remembered feeling sympathy for him, hoping that by the time he was ready for his education, the teachers who were such a torment to the older brothers would be gone. He must have been a sensitive, easily hurt child, judging from the cryptic comment Alexander wrote in his memoirs: “I never regretted his passing away,” he admitted in writing. “A brilliant boy of liberal heart and absolute sincerity, he suffered acutely in the atmosphere of the palace.”118 Polovtsov called him “an intelligent especially dear child” but felt, without explaining himself, that his association with his older brothers, “especially the elder [sic] Nicholas,” was ruining his character.119

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He probably meant that their attention was spoiling their youngest brother. Because of such remarks about him, and because he lived too short a time for us really to become acquainted with him, he remains the most mysterious of the Mikhailovichi. Aleksei died in San Remo, Italy, on February 22, 1895, and his body was returned to Russia by sea, followed by a funeral procession by train to St. Petersburg. Sergei seems to have arranged the funeral, which featured military units everywhere, especially those representing the artillery. Aleksei was interred in the cathedral in the Petropavlovsky Fortress, the only one of the Mikhailovichi to be so buried. His grave is still there today next to those of his parents. Curiously, there is no mention in accounts of the funeral of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s presence there, but it is highly unlikely that he was absent.120 All of the Romanov grand dukes received a military education, and all were expected to pursue a military career.121 For the Mikhailovichi, their daily education from their teenage years therefore resembled the training acquired in a military academy. They lived together as in barracks, sleeping on small, springless iron beds covered with only the thinnest mattresses on top of the wooden slats that were the basis for the springless bed. They were awakened at 6:00 AM, and if they were slow in rising, they were punished. They then said prayers in front of icons before taking a cold bath. Breakfast was only tea, bread, and butter. Nothing else was permitted lest the young grand dukes develop a taste for the soft life. Then they exercised and practiced with firearms, even artillery. Sandro remembered that at the age of ten, he would have been able to participate in the bombardment of a large city.122 From 8 to 11:00 AM and from 2 to 6:00 PM they had lessons with their tutors and did their homework. The three-hour break between the sessions was for lunch and a nap. The schooling of the young grand dukes at home resembles something out of Dickens. Alexander wrote that the smallest mistake in spelling of a German word was punished by denying the unfortunate child a dessert. The miscalculation of the meeting place of two trains on a collision course meant that the student had to kneel for an hour. “The unnecessary severity of our tutors,” Alexander wrote, “created considerable bitterness.”123 As often befalls the eldest child, the most rigorous treatment was Niki’s. All of the grand dukes had to study foreign languages, history, mathematics, literature, penmanship, and music. Nicholas and Mikhail were required to study Latin and Greek, a “nonsensical torture” not required of the younger children. There was also study of religion, including the study of comparative religions, the intensity of which would be adequate for

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the average clergyman today. French and German were required, as was English. Years later in his correspondence with the great Tolstoy, the writer quoted Henry George in English. Nicholas Mikhailovich asked for a French or Russian translation. “Although I read English,” he wrote the famous author in his reply, “many words do not compute for quick reading.”124 Even his younger brother Alexander, whose English came to be native in time, wrote him in English because he felt that his older brother “needed the practice.” Throughout his life, Niki would inject English words or phrases into his writing and general correspondence (e.g., when writing in his diary about Rasputin’s murder, he described it as being “Exceedingly funny!”),125 but he never seems to have become proficient in it. The available sources on Niki’s early education are somewhat contradictory. Some of the sources state that he attended the Lycée in Tiflis, studying in the classical gymnasium there.126 There are, however, other indications that he studied privately but took the standard exit exams at the Lycée. Whatever the case, he received a comprehensive liberal education before the entered the military academy in St. Petersburg, which was merely a continuation of what had already been a thorough military education. All of the brothers seem to have been able to survive relatively unscathed the rigors of their somewhat spartan education, and Nicholas seems to have thrived on it. Perhaps academic excellence was the only way to gain recognition from their cold, intellectual mother. If indeed it was, Niki certainly gained it. He seems to have always tried to impress her with his grades, and his letters to her always included reports on his academic performance. When he was fourteen he wrote her, “Here are my grades: algebra 4 [B], history 5 [A], penmanship 5 [A] . . . and Latin 5–4½ [A– B plus].” The next day he finished the letter adding that he had made a 4½ [B plus] in French.127 Less than a week later, he reported proudly of receiving a “5 plus” in German,128 his mother’s native tongue. In the rare cases that his grade slipped below A–B plus, he would make 5 the next time he reported on it. In time almost all of his grades became 5 pluses. His use of French, despite grammatical errors, curious spelling, and labored syntax, became essentially native, with the use of slang and a comprehension of shades of meanings of someone who had spoken the language in an educated environment from childhood. Yet he had not. At fourteen he wrote his mother, whose French was obviously much better than her Russian, “I will now try to write several lines in French. I am sure that I will make some mistakes, but nevertheless I must try it.”129 Yet he made no mistakes in that letter nor in the ones that followed. From this point on, part of every letter was written in French. By the time he

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was in his twenties, it was the only language he and his mother used with each other. In correspondence with others, he would frequently wander from Russian into French and back to Russian again, apparently not realizing that he had done so.130 And he frequently used French words as though they were Russian (e.g., otel for “hotel,” shance for “chance,” motor for “motor,” and even at least once he used a Latin word as a Russian one (kunktator for “cunctator,” meaning “delayer”). Nicholas seems to have had some knowledge of music, but all educated Europeans grew up with some knowledge and a great respect for it. It was almost unavoidable, yet music does not seem to have been a great passion in his life. In his collected papers in GARF appears one musical notebook entitled simply, “Notebook with notes.” It is not clear even whether or not he copied it, but it contains musical score and handwritten songs.131 The young children seem to have had little contact with other children outside of their immediate family, and Sandro felt that this deprivation had a bad effect on them. He wrote that they were “love starved.” Their father’s position kept them from other children, and they suffered from “extreme loneliness.” Curiously, they were too proud to complain of their sufferings to one another. Behind this isolation seems to have stood their Teutonic mother who “dedicated all her efforts to the ungrateful task of suppressing even the slightest exterior signs of tenderness or affection.” Sandro felt that this austere quality in her was the result of the “far-fetched ideas of her notions of a spartan education advocated in her native Germany.”132 As we have seen, the children all seemed to have admired their eldest brother, perhaps because they sought a parental figure in him they did not find in their parents. They wrote him chatty letters such as the one from Alexander quoted above. Like Niki’s efforts to discuss academics with his mother, Sandro seems to have felt the same need with his eldest brother. “I just finished a very interesting book, ‘The Channings,’ [quotes in original] by Henry Wood,” he wrote. “It is a good book and without much nonsense in it.” He added, “I have read your book ‘Les Memoires du duc de Montpensier,’” adding that he had found it “very interesting.”133 Even the children’s conversations were controlled. There were certain set responses to certain questions from guests, who seem to have been always present in the Mikhailovich household, especially at mealtimes. Once at lunch when a family friend asked George what he wanted to be, he forgot that all grand dukes were slated for a military career and replied honestly that he wanted to be a painter of portraits. This reply, not being the programmed response, silenced the table, and the young grand

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duke had to watch in humiliation as a dessert was brought to everyone at the table but him.134 Yet there is some indication that the young grand dukes’ manners were not always so well controlled and that their discipline was not always so strict. One family custom that was not typical of their station and time was the presence of the children with their parents at meals. Most royal families do not dine with their children, yet the Mikhailovichi were always at the table, even when there were guests. Grand Duke Alexander remembered that the children had to remain silent and listen to such things as “a pompous general commenting on the folly of Disraeli’s latest undertaking.”135 Yet sometimes they did not. State Secretary Polovtsov, who dined frequently with Grand Duke Mikhail while attending to business of the State Council, wrote with some annoyance that once on being invited to breakfast at the unusual hour of 12:30 PM, “All the children and all persons occupied in their upbringing were there,” noting that in the confusion, “anything like reasonable conversation was impossible.”136 Another time he wrote that at a meal the “five sons” dined with them “as always,” with the youngest Aleksei running around the table and generally wreaking havoc.137 He noted another time that the brothers were pelting each other with bread at the dinner table, “with their parents and guests present.”138 Their discipline, therefore, must not have always been quite as rigid as Alexander later remembered it. The only free time the Mikhailovichi seem to have had to play was one hour after lunch and twenty minutes after dinner. During this time the children were allowed to romp in their father’s study, of all places. They spent much of it looking down on Golovinsky Prospekt, the main street of Tiflis, at the locals passing in their strange costumes and with their jewel-decorated daggers.139 Outside of their immediate family, the only associations other than with their tutors was with a few members of their extended family, yet distance precluded much contact. Moreover, there were often strained relations with many of them. The Mikhailovichi had been raised differently for the most part, and it appears that their mother at any rate was not eager for her sons to be contaminated by association. One commanding presence in the Romanov family, until his death in 1919, was Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, the second son of Alexander II, who intimidated almost everyone in his presence, especially his nephew Tsar Nicholas II. A gourmet and a great hunter, Vladimir was a boisterous, loud, overbearing, take-charge type, always ready to give gratuitous advice on any subject, no matter how unqualified he was to give it. He somehow became president of the Academy of Fine Arts,140 and once, while watching a ballet rehearsal from the imperial loge, he stopped

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the music, came on stage, and started giving directions to the performers, even to the point of showing the dancers himself how the ballet should be performed.141 He treated the young grand dukes with contempt, and they never talked to him unless they were prepared to discuss art and French cuisine.142 He was next in line for the throne after Alexander III and his children, and he apparently always gave the impression of feeling himself the heir apparent, ready to assume the throne should something befall the Alexandrovichi. Kschessinska wrote that he was Alexander III’s favorite brother, 143 but this statement is probably not true. When Alexander III and his entire family survived a serious train wreck in the 1870s, the tsar commented sarcastically on learning that all were unharmed: “Imagine Vladimir’s disappointment when he hears that we all escaped alive.”144 Vladimir’s wife Maria Pavlovna, a princess of the German principality of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and as we have noted, the sister of Anastasia’s husband, was no less a presence than her husband. Known in the family as “Aunt Miechen,” she amazed everyone: Her “extreme amiability and her use of language bordered on perfection, since she could always find the precise word for the occasion.”145 Her relative by marriage, Marie Pavlovna, the daughter of Grand Duke Paul, felt that she was the “only grand duchess at the time who liked and knew how to entertain.”146 Once on a trip to Bulgaria, she talked for three hours at a reception and never forgot one person’s name. When someone expressed amazement, she casually replied, “One ought to know one’s job,” and then snidely added, “You may pass that on to the grand court.”147 An outgoing, dynamic woman, she eagerly rushed to fill the void created by the shyness of the Empress Alexandra. Maria Pavlovna’s dislike for the tsar and his wife came from more than simple dynastic rivalry. In 1913 she had written to Nicholas II the suggestion that her son Boris, a dissipated wastrel of the first water, might be a possible husband for the tsar’s daughter Olga. The empress was reduced to “mortified tears,” her confidant Anna Vyrubova recalled, and the suggestion was rejected out of hand. For this insult, Maria Pavlovna would repay the empress.148 In the last years of the monarchy, she maintained what was in effect a rival court to that of Nicholas and Alexandra, and she gave balls and parties that competed with those of the emperor. Although he never seemed to have liked her, Nicholas Mikhailovich became in time a steadfast ally of the grand duchess in their joint attempts to save the Russian throne. A cousin who would influence the Mikhailovichi was Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, the youngest son of Tsar Alexander II. He was the handsomest of Alexander III’s brothers, and he looked especially good in a

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uniform. He was also the most pleasant. His first wife was Princess Alexandra of Greece, who died in 1891. He then married a divorced commoner, one Olga Pistolkors, the ex-wife of a colonel, and this indiscretion forced his exile to Paris. Returning to Russia later, he disastrously led the Guard Army during the Brusilov offensive in 1916 and was removed from command afterward. Sandro wrote that Paul was “by far the most democratic one” of Alexander II’s sons, generally attributing his exile in Paris after his morganatic marriage to that fact.149 This man, like Niki, was a prime mover in the family during the last days of the monarchy. The Mikhailovichi as a family, apparently without Niki, went to St. Petersburg in the spring of 1873. On Easter Sunday they all attended mass together and had dinner afterward with the emperor. The next day they attended a theater performance and joined “a big family dinner” with musical accompaniment.150 The trip seems to have been a rare event. Even when separated from Niki, Olga kept him in close touch by mail and with telegrams. Her correspondence radiates with the love she feels for him that must have been lacking or muted for the other children. Typical was the telegram she sent in April of the year before: “Thank you for your letter. How do you feel? Sorry [désolé] to be so far from you. May God protect you. Olga.” No matter her distance from him, however, she tried to run every aspect of his life. From Naples she wrote that same year, “I hope that you understand, dear Nikolai [she suddenly wrote his name in Cyrillic letters], . . . that you should try more and more to give effort to your studies,” adding that to do so would “build character.” She then added that God had given him the ability “to do well, as small as you are. You have your duty and it is with God [both italics in original] that . . . you will be able to fulfill it.”151 She unceasingly hammered away on his morals and always with a heavy dose of religion: “God has blessed you, my dear son, [and] given you the strength always to do everything to see the proper life and to guard you toward good principles and morality . . . [along with] the sentiment to resist evil and remain honest as one must.”152 Even in his late adolescence she tried to form his personality, particularly and unsuccessfully, to redirect a developing part of his makeup that was not very pleasant. “I hope that you don’t tell any foolishness to Papa, by foolishness you know that I mean something bad about people—that changes nothing, and it can only bother Papa, who has enough [to bother him] already.”153 Even as she tried to run his life when he was an adult, she continued to address him in childish terms such as “my dear child” and “my dear boy.” Such was the family and the early years of Niki-Bimbo, Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov, the most singular member of the

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Romanov family in the twilight of the empire. His stern isolated upbringing, his intellect, and the abnormally close relationship with his mother were to combine with the somewhat dysfunctional nature of his family to produce a rare creature, this imperial belaia vorona, who would strive to reform his native land and wage war all his life against its backwardness.

Chapter 2

A Young Grand Duke

There is such a thing as the purity of youth, and that must be protected. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky1 A boy’s will is the wind’s will And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. —Longfellow from “My Lost Youth”2

In the 1880s, the family seems often to have been scattered by their various careers and interests. Also, Olga and Mikhail Nicholaevich appear to already have been living apart a great deal, although not because of any marital problems, but as a result of Olga’s declining health and the grand duke’s duties as president of the State Council, a body of aristocrats and bureaucrats established by Tsar Alexander I to advise the tsar on legislation. When possible, Niki kept Olga posted on his father’s activities if father and son were together, and she seemed to miss him. For example, in 1881 she wrote to Niki, “Papa will leave perhaps next week” but expressed hope that “his absence will be of short duration!!!”3 Mikhail Nicholaevich seems to have been very visible if his wife was not. One close observer of the imperial scene in the 1880s noted that Niki’s father was the only grand duke not to disappear “from both the political and social

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horizons of St. Petersburg.”4 He was the type of man who did his duty, and if doing his duty called for visibility, he would be visible. As Niki grew older, he began to correspond more regularly with his father, although he never wrote with the daily regularity that he exercised with his mother. His handwriting was still neat but less childish, in fact it was very adult for someone who was only twelve years old. So was his language and his use of language. His letters also became longer and more detailed, and he always used the familiar “you” with both parents. With his father, his letters were always in Russian, although he sometimes broke into French. One element absent from his correspondence with his father that was ever present in his letters to his mother were reports on his academic work, reflecting perhaps his father’s lack of interest in it. Niki clearly loved Mikhail Nicholaevich, and his letters frequently are concluded with “I kiss you with all my soul” or “I kiss you strongly, strongly.” When he was twenty, he reported a hunting trip with his father to his brother Miche-Miche. “Yesterday morning . . . I was hunting with Papa. . . . Papa mortally wounded a stag, and I have killed with one shot a couple [italics in original] of young stags with my new gun.”5 The outing with his father seems to have been most important to him, and perhaps such excursions gave him his lifelong passion for hunting. His father also seems to have shared a great undemonstrative affection for his eldest son. In 1888 his mother wrote him, “Papa returned yesterday, sad not to find you.”6 Even when Niki was in his thirties, his father expressed an almost guilty reaction for not having written sooner to his son. “My dear Nicholas!” he wrote in 1895, “Forgive me! It has been so terribly long [italics in original] since I wrote you.”7 Niki’s childhood reverence for his father seems to have turned into a less distant relationship as Nicholas Mikhailovich became an adult. After his mother’s death, the two became even closer. Niki’s relations with his sister and younger brothers also remained close as they became older, and his mother seems to have encouraged the younger children, not surprisingly, to look up to him. His brother Sandro wrote Niki, “Yesterday Mama read us part of your letters [“your” is in the singular, but “letters” is in the plural],”8 and because Niki was her favorite child, we can be certain that the readings were laced with adulation and admonitions to be like their oldest brother. They called him by his nickname “Bimbo.” His sister regularly used it in letters to him,9 and to his nieces and nephews he became universally “Uncle Bimbo.” He even once made a reference to his sobriquet in a letter to his cousin Tsar Nicholas II.10 As he grew older, he was most attentive to his younger siblings, writing them often, especially Miche-Miche, and sending them presents.

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Niki always loved small children, and “Uncle Bimbo” as an older uncle spent much time in later years with his nieces and nephews, playing with them, showing them great affection, and teasing them as a loving uncle would. His nephew Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich remembered that when he would come by their house to visit, he would terrify his young nephew, so on learning of his arrival at their palace, young Dmitri would run and hide from him. Knowing that his nephew was somewhere in the palace, Nicholas Mikhailovich would hunt up and down the long halls of his home and into the cavernous rooms until he found him, and grabbing him amid his squeals of delight, he would tell him in a ferocious voice, “I’m going to eat you niania [nanny],” and then he would enumerate the various vegetables he would have to accompany his cannibalistic meal.11 Although he never married, it was told in the family that he fathered several illegitimate children of his own. He does not seem, however, to have been close to any of them, if this tale is true.12 Tsar Alexander III’s marriage laws complicated, but did not make impossible, Nicholas Mikhailovich’s marriage chances. In June 1889 the tsar decreed that members of the family could marry only women of the Orthodox faith (if not christened Orthodox, the bride would have to convert before marriage), and in 1893, he forbade morganatic marriages. Niki’s father was terribly disturbed by the decree, given that he had six sons. “My children can’t marry except Orthodox and of equal stations,” he is said to have exclaimed. “Where then would they find such fiancées? Or should they put a bullet to their head?”13 His brother Nicholas Nicholaevich, the father of the famous son by the same name who led the Russian armies in the Great War, opined that the new law “dooms grand dukes to bachelorhood, with all the troubles [?] resulting from it.”14 Of all his siblings, Niki seems to have been in time closest to his first brother Miche-Miche, which is not surprising as they were closest in age. His correspondence with Miche-Miche is far more extensive than with any of his other brothers.15 Miche-Miche seems to have grown up to become a most affable and friendly young man. Francis Vogel, who, as we have seen, spent some time with him, was often invited to play cards with Miche-Miche and other grand dukes at the palace, despite the fact that he was not only a foreigner but a commoner. During the summer of 1887 he became “more intimately acquainted” with all of the Mikhailovichi, especially Mikhail and his brother George. Vogel was often invited to their palace to play “Skat” and was “received as a true colleague by them,” but he quickly adds in his reminiscences that he was never invited to dine with them.16 When the tsar visited the region and Vogel was to transport his baggage, he had all sorts of problems with the “advance men” until Mikhail, at his request, intervened. Mikhail even invited Vogel to one of

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the parties as his guest.17 Once when Vogel came to the palace to make plans for a hunting party, Grand Duke Mikhail, while waiting for his brother George to join them, noted that “Mr. Vogel” was not smoking, and when informed that he had “nothing to smoke,” gave the man not only a number of cigars and cigarettes, but a silver cigarette case complete with silken cord for lighting “to keep as a remembrance” of the young Grand Duke Mikhail.18 Niki’s life remained close to Miche-Miche until the latter married and moved abroad. Niki noted in a letter to his mother how they had played billiards after lunch. “Mikhail won despite the fact that I was much more [advanced, accomplished?—word illegible] than he.”19 In 1878 Niki sent Easter greetings to his brother, beginning with the traditional Russian Easter greeting, “Christ is Risen!” He then added, “Just returned from the Winter Palace. Greetings from everyone.”20 He sent birthday greetings to his brother on his sixteenth birthday. Mikhail was serving at the time in the army, and Niki combined the natal day greetings with a general congratulations on a Russian military victory that had come on his birthday. “From my soul I greet you on your birthday and on your glorious victory over the Turks,” he wired Miche-Miche, adding “Seven of ours defeated six battalions [of theirs].”21 As a young man Mikhail Mikhailovich had, for a royal, a great deal of trouble getting married. In 1886 at twenty-five, he made efforts toward Irene, the daughter of Ludwig IV of Hesse, but nothing came of it. The next year, he made an effort to gain the hand of Princess Louise, the youngest daughter of King Edward VII, but he was rejected, a family account says, because he told her that he did not really love her and was not expected to do so, given his position. Several attempts to marry commoners followed, as did the concomitant conflict with his parents over such unfavorable matches. One of his great loves was Countess Catherine Ignatiev, but Alexander III blocked the union because she was not a princess of royal birth. Mikhail was sent abroad to overcome his disappointment, but instead quickly discovered another prospective wife, who was also unsatisfactory, Countess Sophie Merenberg, the daughter of the Prince of Nassau, and granddaughter through her mother to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.22 One story has it that he met Sophie in Biarritz when he dramatically stopped her bolting horse. She was then, according to one source, the morganatic wife of Prince Nicholas of Nassau and was visiting Biarritz at the time with her daughters. A divorce followed, and Mikhail and Sophie were finally married in the Russian church in San Remo, Italy, in 1891.23 Stripping Miche-Miche of his military rank for embarrassing the family, Tsar Alexander III banished him from Russia, and he subsequently lived

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rather comfortably in Great Britain and on the Riviera, where he came to be known as the “Uncrowned King of Cannes.” He built the Russian church there and was often called on to lay the cornerstone for hotels and casinos in the vicinity. Miche-Miche became an excellent golfer, and he and his wife were fixtures at house parties of the great and the neargreat.24 Always attempting to be a comic, Mikhail Mikhailovich once ordered a chocolate soufflé in a restaurant, and when it arrived, he sat on it.25 Initially not permitted to return to Russia, he continued to see members of his family on their visits to the West. He was allowed to visit Russia for his father’s funeral in 1909 and for the festivities around the centennial of the battle of Borodino in 1912. Even from exile, however, he continued to serve his c