The Russian Album (7 page)

While his Decembrist friends paid for their dreams in Siberia, Paul Ignatieff was showered with the Tsar's favour. Appointed aide-de-camp at twenty-eight, by his early thirties he was already commander of the Corps des Pages and in this post he remained for twenty-five years, the schoolmaster to two generations of the Russian military elite. He had former pupils in every ministry, in every corridor of the Winter Palace. By 1861, Paul Ignatieff had been appointed governor of Petersburg. It was he who ordered the Cossack detachments to charge down the Nevsky Prospekt to scatter the first student demonstrations against Tsar Alexander II with the flats of their sabres. It was Paul Ignatieff who ordered the imprisonment of hundreds – including the young Fyodor Dostoevsky – and the expulsions from the university of thousands more. In exile in London, the Russian essayist Alexander Herzen wrote of the February repression: ‘Give ear, for even darkness does not prevent you from listening, from all corners of our enormous land, from the Don and the Ural, from the Volga and the Dnieper, a moan is growing. This is the first roar of the sea billow which begins to rage.'

As far as Paul Ignatieff was concerned, Herzen wrote nonsense: there was no gathering storm, just a lot of spoiled and disobedient students who needed to be taught a lesson. He was a scholarly general, who knew his Latin and his Greek, a man of few words, sober, circumspect and watchful. After choosing to serve the Tsar against his Decembrist friends, he found the groove of power and followed it steadily, serving both Tsars, Nicholas I and the emancipator of the serfs, Alexander II. He was a sturdy and unquestioning bulwark of autocracy to whom the Tsar turned in the 1870s when he was looking for an unadventurously reliable chairman for his Council of Ministers.

Paul Ignatieff's first son – Nicholas – was born in 1832. The future Tsar Alexander II attended his christening and stood by the baptismal font. Educated at the Corps des Pages, and then made aide-de-camp of the Tsar, Nicholas was in his twenties during the Crimean War. Instead of winning glory at Inkerman or Sebastopol, he had to content himself with comic-opera service on board the first Russian submarine, a clumsy wood and iron experiment that capsized and threw him into the Baltic on its first trial. At twenty-three he was sent as military attaché to London, where the British Foreign Office found him a ‘clever, wily fellow'. In London he deepened his already profound hostility to British foreign policy.

Nicholas was only twenty-six when in 1858 he was despatched by the Tsar to central Asia to negotiate a trade treaty with the khans and emirs of Bokhara and Khiva. It was a two-month journey by horse and camel south and east from Orenberg, the southernmost border town of the Russian Empire, across the Barsak sands and around the northern shores of the Caspian Sea. The worst of the journey was the boat ride up the Oxus River, terrible days being dragged through the winding miles of reeds by Khivan boatmen, lying in the bottom stripped to the waist, tormented by thirst and flies. When Ignatieff and his party finally reached the red adobe palaces of Bokhara, standing in the dusty marketplace filled with filthy children, veiled women and traders with gold teeth, the pathway to the Khan's tent was flanked by blackened heads on pikes, trophies of justice and revenge. Ignatieff sat cross-legged on the carpets of the Emir, drinking tea, exchanging gifts, and learning the patience and ruthlessness of his hosts. There seemed some affinity between the Russian envoy and the Asian prince, some Tartar filiation in the hooded eyes, black moustaches, and the mixture of bravery and cunning. Before he departed he and the Emir had signed a treaty giving Russia free navigation of the Oxus for her steamers in the Aral Sea, reduction of tariffs on Russian caravans and liberation of Russians held captive by the Emir.

Ignatieff and his Cossacks set out for home in the blizzards of November, and when they stumbled back into Fort Number One at the southernmost Russian border in mid-December, they were wearing Khivan yashmaks over their lice-infested uniforms and their faces were burned black from the winter wind. They hastened to the first chapel and fell down on their knees.

The Khivan and Bokharan expedition made Nicholas a Petersburg celebrity, one of the builders of empire in Asia. Within a year, still only twenty-seven, he set off from Petersburg with a Cossack detachment and an ammunition train bound for Peking. Changing sleighs and coaches at every inn, fording the Siberian rivers on the spring ice and then forging ahead on horseback across the Mongolian plains, he had soon left his baggage train and ammunition wagons far behind. In May, as the cherry blossoms shivered in the wind, he rode through the gates of the Forbidden City, unkempt, unshaven and travel-worn, watched on every side by silent Chinese.

He arrived at a decisive moment in the plunder of the Celestial Empire by the Great Powers. A British and French fleet, loaded with a landing force, were cruising up and down within sight of Shanghai. When he offered his services to the Chinese Emperor as a negotiator between the Chinese and their foreign enemies, the Chinese Emperor had him placed under house arrest. To escape, he got his valet to saw half way through the axle of his carriage and then they rode together into the middle of the main gate out of the Forbidden City. There the valet jumped on the axle to break it and they both leaped onto the coach horses and rode off to Shanghai, leaving the Chinese piled up behind the broken carriage. In Shanghai, he made contact with the British and French fleets, promised Russia's neutrality, and then sat peacefully on the deck of a Russian cruiser in the Yellow Sea while the British and French landed and marched on Peking. When the Europeans had the Forbidden City encircled, he renewed his offer of mediation to the Emperor and the Europeans, and this time it was accepted. By his negotiations, the Manchu dynasty and the Imperial City were saved from the sack, while the Europeans were granted the trading concessions they had sought. The negotiator then presented his bill for his services: definitive cession to Russia of the territory north of the Amur and east of the Ussuri. With this treaty in his pocket, Ignatieff and his Cossacks saddled up for Petersburg on 13 November 1860. Anxious that the Great Powers would bring pressure to bear on the Tsar to undo his work, Nicholas raced home across the snows of Asia to defend his treaty in person. When he arrived in Irkutsk in early December, the governor general of Siberia, Count Muraviev, ordered a street renamed in his honour and one of Muraviev's clerks, a bear-like political prisoner called Mikhail Bakunin, wrote a marvelling letter to Alexander Herzen saying he had just met a young Russian colonel who was the only living man in Russia: ‘He does not reason, he writes little, but, a rare thing in Russia, he
acts.
'

On 1 January 1861, rimed in ice, tottering with exhaustion, Nicholas Ignatieff stood in his father's house, having traversed the whole of Asia on horseback in six weeks. He backed away from his mother's embraces: his floor-length travelling coat was stiff with ice on the outside, swarming with fleas on the inside. Vassily took it off his back and sent it downstairs to be burned. The young master then subsided into a hot bath. Next morning he was received by the Tsar, decorated with the Order of St Vladimir, promoted to general and shortly thereafter made head of the Asian department of the Foreign Office. Without firing a shot, he had secured for Russia a wild terrain the size of France and Germany combined and the hinterland of Vladivostok, the new empire's port on the Pacific.

In June 1861, in the German spa town of Wiesbaden, General Nicholas Ignatieff, then twenty-nine, married Princess Ekaterina Galitzine, one of the beauties of her day, and great-granddaughter of Field Marshal Kutuzov, commander of the Russian armies in the War of 1812. She was nineteen, with a high forehead, black hair, large brown eyes and a very charming slightly dimpled upper lip. She was my grandfather Paul's mother. At the Sunday dinners at the Ignatieffs' house on the Gagarinsky Prospekt, she was nearly forty, mother of three boys, two girls and already expecting another child. One of her particular gestures was to crack a walnut between her teeth. She did so now and handed a kernel to her son Paul, while dabbing at his sailor's suit with her napkin to remove a splash of cranberry dessert.

At the end of Sunday lunch, everyone stood and Vassily helped old Count Paul to his feet: the grandchildren approached to kiss him on both cheeks and to receive a pat on their head. Young Paul watched his grandfather disappear down the long hallway on Vassily's arm, his old black boots squeaking on the wood, his bent silhouette framed for a second by the grey light streaming through the Neva-facing windows. The walnut doors closed behind his grandfather. The old man who had carried his regiment's flag down the Champs Elysées in 1815 sank into sleep on the divan in his study. Vassily guarded his peace in a chair by the door. It was the last time Paul was ever to see his grandfather. The Count died the following year and these ritual Sundays were to be no more.

*   *   *

My grandfather Paul was born in August 1870 in the cream-coloured summer house of the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, high on a cliff overlooking the Bosphorus. I have a photograph of him at his mother's feet, taken by a society photographer when he was just two years old. He is wearing flounced skirts, high button shoes and a little sash around his waist. His blond hair has been slicked down for the photograph. His mother is wearing a grand dark dress, a diaphanous curve of tulle and crepe, and she leans over him, her hand grazing the back of his head. He has inherited the pucker of her upper lip, and his gaze, like hers, shrinks back from this public sharing of the closed circle of their devotion. All his life, in moments of distress, he was to return to this serene presence whose dark skirts enfold his tiny shape and whose hand grazes the top of his head.

In his early childhood, she was more absent than present, an ambassador's wife with official duties and a huge establishment to run, who left the children to the nursemaids, and who would lean over his cot to give him a goodnight kiss. If he crept down the hall to the top of the landing, he could see her in the great hall below, receiving guests beside his father in his dress uniform, flanked by Bosnian and Montenegran doorkeepers with their hooked knives.

Paul's father Nicholas, a tall heavy-set man with drooping brown moustaches and a round domed forehead, was now Russian ambassador to the court of the Turkish Sultan. As such he was also defender of the Orthodox minorities under Ottoman rule, intriguer and fomenter of every revolt in that senescent empire and master of a tentacular network of Bulgarian, Bosnian, Rumanian, Turkish and Cretan informers. His sons could watch him from the nursery window in the embassy garden, strolling up and down the alleys of azaleas, hands behind his back deep in thought, as men with thick black beards and moustaches, priests, fiacre drivers, seamen, chandlers – men of all descriptions – muttered their reports into his ear. They made him the best informed ambassador on the Bosphorus, the spider at the centre of the web, the master of all Balkan intrigues. The British ambassadors, Lord Lytton and his successor Henry Elliot, thought him a jocular and amusing mountebank, and the French ambassador referred to him as Mentir Pasha. But none of them was able to stop him from making Russia the dominant power in the Balkans. At the Constantinople Conference of 1877, as Turkey and Russia stood on the brink of war, Lord Salisbury teased him about his network of spies. Ignatieff replied that he had thousands of them: every Christian in the Balkans who had lost someone in the Turkish massacres was his voluntary informant. During the same conference, Salisbury watched with amazement while Ignatieff, thinking Salisbury's back was turned, erased and re-drew the proposed treaty boundaries to enlarge Russian gains in Bessarabia by several thousands of square miles. When Salisbury ventured to point out this legerdemain, Ignatieff smiled and shrugged his shoulders: ‘
Monsieur le Marquis est si fin, on ne peut rien lui cacher.
' Salisbury reported home to the British Cabinet that Ignatieff was a ‘brilliant and fluent talker who adorns his conversations with fictions so audaciously unconvincing as to become a constant source of amusement'.

Salisbury did not make the mistake of underestimating his man: indeed he came under his spell. Ignatieff's temperament was a puzzling blend of theatrical bluff, blunt candour, high Slavic emotion and lawyerly cunning. When Ignatieff arrived in England in 1876, Salisbury invited him and his wife to Hatfield House for a country weekend, much to the irritation of Queen Victoria who believed that neither Salisbury nor her ambassador in Constantinople was doing enough to prevent the Russians from gaining control of the Dardanelles. When Disraeli reported back to the Queen about the Russians' weekend at Hatfield House, his note concentrated almost entirely on Countess Ignatieff: ‘a great lady, pretty, and they say, very agreeable, except when he recommended to her some Apollinaris water. Not the custom of Russian ladies. When they offered her wine, sherry or Manzanilla, she always answered “Any one,” but never took any one. But [she] is very calm and collected and must have therefore had an early training at it. The fine ladies who had heard that Madame Ignatieff was even finer than themselves and gave herself airs, determined not to yield without a struggle. Lady Londonderry staggered under the jewels of three united families.'

Back in Constantinople, she told her son Paul that Hatfield House had been a vast, cheerless place where at night, when they were about to retire, a retainer handed them a lighted candle at the foot of the stairs and left them to find their own way down the damp corridors to their frozen beds. England, she told her children, was a barbarous place compared to Russia.

By the mid-1870s, Paul's father was the most powerful figure on the Bosphorus, Sultan Abdul Aziz's main foreign confidant, while his mother was the cynosure of the diplomatic corps. At the embassy receptions, she wore a necklace made of dozens of turquoise stars encrusted with diamonds, a gift of the Sultan, and not a few foreign ambassadors admitted they were under her spell. Her husband charmed the Sultan, while fomenting revolt behind his back. He was not above using blackmail to attain his ends. Deft allusion to what his spies told him about the sexual tastes of the Sultan's brothers did much to make the Sultan pliable.