Royal Babylon (19 page)

By old age, Catherine's health and looks were wrecked by
hard drinking and burning the candle at both ends. Her hair, although still very long, was completely white, and her face was hidden behind an impenetrable mask of paste. She became so obese that she appeared grotesquely deformed, her massive legs swollen and ulcerated. She was so bloated that the palace stairs had to be replaced with ramps because her legs could no longer support her weight. She was just turned sixty when she took her last official lover, twenty-two-year-old Platon Zubov. By then she was a toothless, bloated, breathless old crone with a heart condition, but she refused to accept that she was anything but physically desirable. Her sex drive went marching on. It took a brave man or a blind man to stomach the climb upstairs to Catherine's bed.

Zubov was neither, but he was ambitious enough to continue pressing the imperial cellulite for the next seven years. The arrogant new lover strutted around the court giving out orders, shamelessly exploiting his new position. His private apartment was crowded with hangers-on who hoped to beg favors from the most important man in Russia. Under Catherine's very nose he tried to seduce a sixteen-year-old grand duchess, Elisabeth Alekseevna, wife of the future Czar Alexander I. It was the first time that one of the Empress's lovers had dared treat her so casually, but she was beyond caring.

In 1796 the old Empress fell off her toilet seat with a massive stroke and died thirty hours later in her sixty-seventh year.

         

The most spectacularly insane Russian monarch was Czar Paul, whose four-year reign saw Russia into the nineteenth century.
It is tempting to point to Paul as evidence of yet more mental instability in the Romanov line. He was, however, the issue of an illicit affair between his mother, Catherine the Great, who was German, and her first lover, Sergei Saltykov. Catherine successfully passed him off as the son of her witless, sterile husband. Paul, without a single drop of Romanov blood in his veins, was accepted as the legitimate heir.

Czar Paul was small and very ugly, with a disproportionately large head and a saddle nose typical of sufferers from congenital syphilis. The Empress Catherine did nothing to prepare him for rule. He was the archetypal prince without a role, pushed to the sidelines, a grand duke with nothing to do. The twisted heir cultivated a grievance against the mother he believed was keeping him from the throne for three decades, and nursed it into a pathological hatred. It wasn't until a few months after he became Czar at the age of forty-three that it became all too evident that he was dangerously insane—a Russian Caligula.

One of his first acts as Czar was to avenge the man he believed to be his father. Peter III was exhumed from a crypt at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. By this time Peter had been dead for thirty-four years, a fact that state-of-the-art Russian embalming technology was unable to disguise. The remains were dressed in one of Peter's elaborate military uniforms, robed in ermine, and taken to the throne room at the Winter Palace. The body was seated on the throne and the imperial crown was placed on its skull. Paul's courtiers and officials were then instructed to make obeisance to the “true Czar,” the rightful occupant of the throne, usurped by his evil wife, Catherine. There followed a double funeral, as the bodies of Peter III and Catherine were laid side by side so that their remains could mingle.

Czar Paul may not have been Peter III's true son, but he
was infected by his childlike devotion to Prussian militaria. Whereas his mentally infirm predecessor had spent most of his time abusing toy soldiers, Paul preferred the real thing. The entire army, of which he was now Commander-in-Chief, was forced to adopt the antiquated Prussian uniform of his hero, Frederick the Great, right down to the last detail of old-fashioned gaiters and powdered pigtails. It was a massive humiliation for the Russian military, but, as they would soon discover, this was the least of their problems. For no apparent reason, Paul once ordered an entire regiment on a 4,000-kilometer march which took two years to complete and killed hundreds of horses.

Paul became fanatically obsessed with his soldiers' uniforms at the expense of military efficiency. He made them wear costumes that were so tight-fitting they made breathing difficult and fighting practically impossible. Underneath they wore straitjackets to make them stand erect, and on their heads they wore thick, heavy wigs with iron rods inserted to make the hairpiece sit straight. To make his soldiers goose-step perfectly without bending their legs, he strapped steel plates to their knees. The night before a parade his men would labor until dawn to cover their wigs with grease and chalk. They all knew that even a hair out of place could mean arrest, a thrashing, or deportation. His officers grew to fear his unpredictability so much that they got into the habit of saying a final farewell to their wives and families before they went on parade.

As Paul grew older he grew uglier and more paranoid. He was both snub-nosed and bald, but once had a soldier knouted to death for referring to his Imperial Highness as “baldy.” He issued a proclamation that the words “baldy” and
“snub nose” were banned and anyone heard using these words would receive a similar treatment. At mealtimes he splashed dessert around the room for the fun of watching his servants scrape up after him. Eventually the whole of Russia learned to tremble before him.

The Czar saw subversion everywhere, even in the way his people dressed. In 1797 he made a law that forbade his subjects to wear round hats, top boots, straight pants or shoes with laces—modern dress which had become associated in the Czar's mind with the French Revolution and progressive political ideology. To enforce this regulation, a couple of hundred armed troops were sent on to the streets of St. Petersburg with orders to randomly attack anyone who didn't conform to the Czar's dress code. People were stripped of clothing where they stood: shoes, hats, breeches and waistcoats were ripped to shreds or confiscated. The Czar censored his own family's mail, closed down all private printing presses and deleted from the Russian dictionary the words “citizen,” “club,” “society” and “revolution.” His police spies attended parties and concerts even in private houses. He had every cab driver in St. Petersburg banished because one of them had been found carrying a gun. He passed another law that required everyone to get out of the carriage they were in whenever he passed by. Most of the time people hid when they saw him coming. He imposed a nine o'clock curfew and blockaded all exits to the capital. It became almost impossible to move without being harassed by the Czar's police. St. Petersburg, which under Catherine the Great had become the third most fashionable city in Europe, was now a ghost town. Even his allies realized that it was time for him to go.

By Romanov standards it was a rather dull coup. Paul had
pulled down one of Russia's finest buildings, the New Summer Palace in St. Petersburg, and on the site built a new residence known as Michael Castle, an unsightly thick-walled fortress with battlements, a moat and a drawbridge. He had been living there for only a week when late one evening there was a knock on his bedroom door. In stepped a small group of officers with a proclamation of abdication which they asked him to sign. There was a scuffle, and minutes later Paul lay dead, strangled. The official announcement was that the Czar had died of “an attack of apoplexy”—a euphemism that the average Russian well understood by now. Even though they were supposed to observe a period of official mourning, the Russian people could not contain their joy at being released from the four-year nightmare.

         

Paul's great-grandson Czar Alexander III was a drunken and reactionary tyrant who persecuted anyone who didn't speak Russian or subscribe to the Russian Church, including Jews. He died in the Crimea as a consequence of his alcoholism on November 1, 1894, and his remains were carried 1,300 miles back to St. Petersburg. The funeral ceremony, which lasted four hours, was a desperate ordeal for his son Nicholas to endure. The deceased Czar, dead for nearly three weeks, had to be kissed on the lips. His face, reported one of the royal mourners, “looked a dreadful color and the smell was awful.” The color of the new Czar Nicholas II's face was more dreadful yet.

One mysterious quality of the House of Romanov was
that, although its foulest leaders had always been reviled by their own people, abroad they inspired great admiration and respect. Their unpopularity at home appeared to be in mathematically inverse proportion to their international status. So it was with Nicholas II. The Czar had the added cachet of lots of good-looking young children and close blood ties with the British royal family. The obvious facial resemblance to his cousin King George V appealed massively to popular sentiment in Britain. Surely someone who had such a nice family and looked so strikingly like our own King George must be a thoroughly decent sort of chap. Why, the Czar was almost British.

The British public were deceived on almost every count. Nicholas was as British as George V only in the sense that they both had Danish mothers and their paternal ancestors were almost exclusively German. Nor could he by any stretch of the imagination be considered an ordinary family man. This was someone for whom peasants would prostrate themselves in the fields as his train went by; a man many Russians still believed went to heaven once a week to talk to God. His image was so feared that in some parts of Russia post office officials were afraid to overstamp the Czar's head. His death, however, transformed him from brutal tyrant to royal martyr.

His reign was a disaster from the first day. At his coronation celebrations several thousand people lost their lives and many thousands more were seriously injured as men, women and children who were waiting for a glimpse of their new Czar were trampled to death. Nicholas was aware of the awful casualties but insisted that the celebrations continue as planned, a decision for which he was bitterly criticized at home and
abroad. Security on that day was handled by his uncle the Grand Duke Sergei. Years later, Nicholas's incompetent uncle became the first Romanov casualty of the Socialists when one February afternoon in 1905, as the Grand Duke's carriage passed through the Kremlin gates, a nitroglycerin bomb was lobbed directly into his lap, blasting Sergei so completely to smithereens that bits of him were later found on the roofs of nearby buildings.

Nicholas had a nervous breakdown at the prospect of becoming Czar. He wept, “I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to ministers.” This was not false modesty. Like his cousins the Kaiser and King George V, he was a man of desperately limited abilities, dull, indecisive, and very easily led. Foreign ambassadors came away with the impression that the Czar always agreed with whoever spoke to him last. His German wife dictated most of what he did for the best part of twenty-five years.

Nicholas wrote in his diary on November 1, 1905, “We've made the acquaintance of a man of God, Gigorii, from the Tobolsk Guberniia.” Rasputin was only one of many quacks and charlatans whom Nicholas allowed to surround the royal family. The “mad monk” was neither mad nor a monk, but a talented debauchee who had somehow managed to talk his way into the beds of most of the bored noblewomen of St. Petersburg even though he smelled like an open sewer. Unsurprisingly, he was hated by Russia's male aristocrats, who helped encourage a widespread suspicion that the uncouth, hairy mystic was a malign influence on the royal family, especially the Czarina.

Nicholas's wife, Alexandra, was arrogant and extremely unpopular. When she ventured out into public she appeared
sullen and aloof. “Russia is not England,” she told Queen Victoria. “Here it is not necessary to make efforts to gain popular affection.” In a notorious incident in April 1915, Rasputin became roaring drunk in a Moscow bar and boasted loudly and publicly that he was the Czarina's lover. When Rasputin was challenged by the police to prove his identity, he dropped his pants and waved his private parts at them. The Czarina's failure to have Rasputin locked up immediately was seen by everyone as conclusive proof that they were indeed lovers. In truth, Rasputin owed his freedom to the fact that the Czar's family saw him as the only hope to cure their son's illness. Alexis suffered from the “royal disease” hemophilia, a condition that carried such a great stigma that there was little or no mention of it in the Czar's household. Consequently, the nature of the Czarevitch's illness was completely unknown outside the palace and even to the majority of palace insiders.

Rasputin was relatively successful in reducing Alexis's suffering, a feat which was attributed to his supposed mystical powers. The most plausible explanation is that Rasputin was simply taking advantage of a fact about hemophilia that was unknown to doctors until the 1960s—high blood pressure, often caused by tension and emotional stress, can aggravate hemophilia. Conversely, relaxation can reduce or even stem it completely. Rasputin's “mystic” powers were almost certainly nothing more than his ability to put the Czarevitch at ease, thus lowering the boy's blood pressure.

Two of Rasputin's eventual assassins were minor members of the Russian royal family. One, the Czar's dissipated cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, was an army officer who spent considerably more time in the St. Petersburg nightclubs than he did on army maneuvers. The other was Prince Felix Yusupov,
the transvestite husband of Nicholas's beautiful niece Irena. The assassination itself, grown in legend over the years, did not go quite to plan. Pavlovich, Yusupov and two coconspirators lured Rasputin to Yusupov's home using the Prince's wife as bait—playing upon Rasputin's known weakness for high-class women, they correctly gambled that he would find the prospect of sleeping with a member of the imperial family irresistible.

While Rasputin sat and waited for the arrival of the Princess Irena, Yusupov set up a gramophone and played the only record they had, “I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” over and over. A minor army medic, Dr. Lazovert, meanwhile was given the famous task of lacing cakes and wine with potassium cyanide. The popular version of the story, greatly enhanced by Yusupov himself as the years went by, is that while Rasputin waited he ate enough cakes to kill half a dozen men but because of his superhuman powers was largely unaffected. Lazovert, however, confessed on his deathbed that he had completely lost his nerve and hadn't in fact poisoned anything at all. This was how Rasputin was able to carry on gorging himself with food and drink while his terrified assassins sat around waiting for him to drop dead. Eventually they all lost their nerve and shot him once in the back. He lay motionless for a while, apparently dead, but then dragged himself to his feet and ran out of the house into the courtyard. Two more bullets and a kick to the head finished him off, after which they dumped the corpse in the river. There was easily enough evidence to convict both royals of murder but neither was charged because of the embarrassment it would have brought upon the Romanov family.