Tuesday, March 13, 1890: Another matter requiring great caution: Grand Duke Michael [Nikolaievich], Field Marshal, President of the Council of State and His Majesty’s uncle, urgently asks that he be allowed to see the dispatches from Berlin concerning Prince Bismarck’s resignation. But the embassy, as was its custom, did not deliver any intelligible and official documents; we have only the strictly personal letters of Count Shuvalov, which cannot be shown to anyone because of the frank confessions and state secrets contained in them….This morning the Minister forwards the request of the Grand Duke Michael to the Emperor, but His Majesty tells him: “It is impossible to show the letters, I do not even tell Vladimir anything about them. The Grand Duke would be fine, but if Olga Feodorovna [Grand Duchess Olga Feodorovna, Michael Nikolaievich’s wide] finds out, she will blow her top.” In a word, as might have been foreseen, the Emperor is in no way disposed to inform even the most important Grand Dukes; however, His Majesty says: “It would be possible to draw up a secret statement and inform the Grand Duke Michael Nikolaievich.” They reach this agreement. The minister says that he has once again assured the Emperor that I am the only one in the ministry who is privy to these secrets. The Emperor said, “Well, yes, of course.” Thus, in the event of any immodesty on the part of the minister or Shuvalov, all blame will fall on me.

Monday, April 9, 1890: The commander of the Horse Guards Regiment, General Blok, told Giers some amusing details about the heir’s stay on March 25 at the regimental holiday. In view of the fact that this year this day coincided with Palm Sunday, the Emperor expressed the wish that the whole festivities should end before twelve o’clock at night. It was therefore decided to substitute lunch for dinner. The heir was present as a member of the Horse Guards but, carried away by the amusing and playful stories of the young officers around him, His Imperial Highness, in spite of General Richter’s [Adjutant-General Otto Richter, Commander of the General Headquarters] several reminders of the late hour, chatted and laughed with the officers until two or three o’clock in the morning, while the old Generals struggled to stay awake. This proves, on the one hand, the young man’s love of amusement and his sensual inclinations, and on the other, his great freedom and independence. A strange contradiction: on the one hand, he is kept like a child, he has no court or even an adjutant, his marriage is delayed, and they do not want to take him seriously as heir to the throne; on the other, they leave him to indulge in all his inclinations. He has complete freedom in terms of expenses, prowess, etc. The Naval Minister very confidentially informs Giers of the proposed route of the great voyage of the Heir and his brother Grand Duke George. Their Highnesses, set to sail in September, 1890, will not return until October, 1891. From Vladivostok they will go to San Francisco, New York, etc. This itinerary is poorly made: 40 days in India is not bad! In general, one gets the impression that they don’t think about time. And what an idea at this age to remove the heir to the throne for more than a year and send him to wander around overseas countries, when he still does not know Russia at all. Giers wants to talk to the Emperor about it tomorrow. He wonders how this journey can be explained: is there some kind of incipient love behind it? The young Tsesarevich seems to have shown a marked preference for his aunt Elizabeth Feodorovna. In the winter, in a close family circle, they staged some scenes from Eugene Onegin, but before that they looked at it more as an examination of the Russian language for the Grand Duchess.

The Tsesarevich and Elizaveta Feodorovna in Eugene Onegin. She was actually, of course, the chief promoter of his marriage to her sister Alix.

The heir also often visited the young Trubetskoys. The princess, née Dolgorukova, was very beautiful, and seemed to like him very much, but she was expecting her first child, and there was nothing to indicate that she was too tender with him. Such a good father as the sovereign, who adores his children, will, of course, be very sad to part with his eldest sons for such a long time. The Empress, perhaps without being aware of it, will console herself to some extent with the fact that, left with only the younger children, she will feel younger, since the presence of the older ones makes her feel her age. In any case, it’s all strange. Another question: Who can accompany the Grand Dukes? General Danilovich is reputed to be an old woman, a narrow-minded man who enjoys neither prestige nor influence….Looking through the lists of all the current adjutant-generals, one does not find anyone who had a worthy personality. Will the pitiful drunkard Cherevin, wholly uncultured, devoid of any moral sense, and mentally undeveloped, be entrusted with the leadership of this journey? Everything is possible in this way of looking at life as an operetta by Offenbach.

Tuesday, April 10, 1890: On the 7th after attending Grand Duchess Alexandra Georgievna [on the birth of her daughter Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna], the Minister returned to the city to attend the wedding of the Vorontsovs; he will stay in St. Petersburg until the 13th. The Minister’s report is at the Anichkov Palace, after breakfast at the Grand Duke Vladimir’s, as today is his birthday. The Emperor is tired and the Minister is not in a hurry either. Touching upon the plan of the Heir’s journey, Giers sees that this conversation is unpleasant for His Majesty, but remarks to the august monarch that forty days is too long for India: in the event of a solemn reception associated with great expenses, it would be indelicate and impossible to make the stay there so long. To reject it would be incompatible with the prestige of the heir to the Russian throne. As for the possibility of appearing there incognito, it could cause false rumors and in general would not be entirely clear. This journey across the ocean does not seem so strange to the Emperor as it does to Giers. However, His Majesty says that the route, of course, must be changed. I congratulated the minister, as today is his wedding anniversary. Then, not without difficulty, I decided to make the inevitable visit to Mrs. Giers. She receives me very cordially. As always, she speaks of her sorrows at the discourtesy of the Imperial Family, and especially of the Empress. At the wedding of Vorontsova and Shuvalov, Her Majesty limited herself to holding out her hand but said not a word. To think that this causes so much trouble, almost grief.

Sunday, September 9, 1890: The minister is concerned about the heir’s proposed journey to Constantinople and Jerusalem. In a note, Giers set forth to the Emperor his view of the inconvenience of His Highness’s appearance in Turkey at a time of patriarchal crisis in the Orthodox Church. The Turks would have used the Grand Duke’s visit to present it as proof of Russian approval. In addition, what will be the position of the Heir Tsesarevich in the event of the closure of churches and the legitimate demands of the clergy? His Majesty made the following note on the Minister’s note: “I fully share your opinion,” but the question of the plan of the voyage remained unclear.

Monday, September 10, 1890: The Minister sends for me quite early, as the Turkish Ambassador, Güsni Pasha, has given notice that he will come to answer the Sultan’s invitation to the Grand Duke; I advise the minister to tell the ambassador that he has not yet received an answer from the Emperor, and this does not surprise him in view of the attitude of the Turkish government towards the Orthodox clergy in Constantinople, and also to express to him my opinion on this matter. Having then given the Emperor an exact account of this conversation, the Minister would have had occasion to return to the delicate question of the plan of the Tsesarevich’s journey, and to furnish His Majesty indirectly with arguments to counteract, as they say, the rather insistent desire of his august son, whom he himself would not wish to grieve.

Monday, November 5, 1890: Excellent news from Athens concerning the Heir’s stay there. His Highness did not wish to prolong his stay in Vienna, to pay a visit to the Prince of Montenegro, or to visit the Italian court. Everywhere we referred to the impossibility of making any changes to the itinerary, in which every day was taken into account, and now he has two weeks of fun in Athens, without seeing even the most interesting sights of Greece. Always and above all, pleasures, without any constraints, in the family circle, in the bourgeois way. Bering’s London banking house was threatened with bankruptcy, but it seems that our deposits are perfectly safe. It is said that it is again the invincible power of the Rothschilds, crushing the only house of Bering, strong and solid enough to rival them. Meanwhile, the other day, agreeing to the urgent request of the Minister of Finance to bestow an order on one of the Rothschilds, the Emperor wrote, “Fine, but the last time for a Jew!”

Saturday, November 10, 1890: I don’t see the minister for long. He dined at the club yesterday with some of his colleagues and other dignitaries; interesting conversations and memories; some asserted that, strict as the Emperor Nicholas I was, he was less feared than Alexander II, who, in spite of his extreme kindness, was sometimes terribly hot-tempered.

Monday, November 12, 1890: By a very polite telegram, the Khedive notifies the Emperor of the safe arrival in Cairo of the Heir and Grand Duke George. After a fortnight of making merry in the family circle in Athens, without seeing anything in Greece, they took with them Prince George of Greece, a sailor, said to be tall, handsome, and very cheerful. Thus, from the point of view of representativeness, it is disadvantageous for our grand dukes, especially for the Heir, who is small in stature, ugly and not majestic. Queen Victoria decided that this young prince, though a sailor on active duty, would be treated in India and throughout the British dominions as a king’s son.

Tuesday, November 20, 1890: Demonstrations are being prepared in London to express sympathy for the Jews in Russia. The Rothschilds fear this lest it should lead to an increase in repression against their co-religionists. The Emperor writes on the margin of this report: “This is not true, but we will not pay any attention to their rallies.”

Wednesday, November 21, 1890: About eleven o’clock I see my dear Minister, who tells me about the evening at the British Ambassador’s and about the breakfast at Gatchina yesterday after his report. Their Majesties were exceedingly gracious. They have felt lonely since the departure of the young Grand Dukes.

Nicholas (right) with his brother George (left) and their cousin George of Greece in India

Friday, November 23, 1890: The Grand Duke Sergei is a simpleton, utterly irresponsible, but he is surrounded by petty, ambitious, and restless intriguers.

Wednesday, November 28, 1890: Yesterday at luncheon in Gatchina, after the Minister’s report…our august monarch made a vehement attack on his German colleague [Kaiser Wilhelm II] (I think he ought to have said “brother”), and he was so carried away that he argued in defense of the necessity of knowing dead languages, saying, “Look, all decent people known classic languages.” To which the Empress remarked, not without guile, to Giers: “Neither he nor any of his family studied Latin.” It was hilarious. Grand Duke Alexei has returned from his visit to The Hague, where he had gone to express his condolences, and was in Gatchina yesterday in full dress uniform. He stayed for luncheon and amused Their Majesties and Giers with his stories. He is intelligent, very good at storytelling, and has a high gift for making people laugh. The Emperor seems to be very fond of him. The little Queen Wilhelmina made a pleasant impression on the Grand Duke; he says she’s very pretty. On his way back he stopped for a few hours in Berlin and was most cordially received by the Emperor Wilhelm, who himself met him and then escorted him to the railway. A big luncheon was held in Potsdam, and then he rode around the park in a 1a russe carriage, drawn by a troika of horses presented to Wilhelm II by the sovereign. The bearded coachman was also dressed in Russian.

Tuesday, December 4, 1890: At about 10 o’clock my minister leaves for Gatchina with his report. He comes back around 6 o’clock and asks me to get up to hand me some papers to be executed. He tells us that Their Majesties were exceedingly gracious. At luncheon they talked about the dress rehearsal of Tchaikovsky’s new opera The Queen of Spades, scheduled for tomorrow. Learning that Giers had done nothing to obtain a loge, the Empress said to him: “In that case, I invite you to come with your family.” The Emperor adds an invitation on his own behalf, saying that there will always be a place….My excellent boss, an exemplary family man, seems very pleased with this courteous attention from Their Majesties, and with the pleasure it will give his family.

Thursday, December 6, 1890: My master, a man of humble origin, does not want to believe that the court was at the theater last night. “It is not Orthodox,” he says, “to do this on the eve of St. Nicholas’s Day. There is a solemn vigil, and all the theaters are closed.” The Holy Synod has recently established special prayers for the safe journey of the heir to the throne, which must be read at all services, and on the eve of the day of the patron saint of Russia, when the churches are filled with praying people, Their Majesties with the august family and those closest to them, must go to the theater in order to attend the dress rehearsal of Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades. My minister came back deeply impressed and could not sleep all night. The performance lasted from 7 to 11:30. Singer Figner was late and arrived 10 minutes after than Their Majesties. A stupid libretto; the music is inaccessible, prayers for the departed are sung several times on stage. The highest personages, as always in such cases, take their places with the retinue in the stalls; loges were distributed to some privileged invitees. The Prince of Nassau, Nicholas, who has arrived in the morning to announce the accession of his brother, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, is seated among the members of the Imperial Family; the Minister, however, remarks that Their Majesties have never spoken to him. The Emperor shook hands with Kapellmeister Nápravník and kindly thanked the artists. Yesterday we sent Their Majesties the first photographs taken in Cairo during the Tsesarevich’s stay there. Giers says it is touching to see the love and interest with which the Emperor and Empress follow their son’s journey.

Friday, December 14, 1890: Our ambassador in London proposed that, in the event of the arrival in Russia of the delegates from the meeting of Judophiles in London, we should single out persons worthy of respect, giving them a gracious welcome, but to refuse to see them as deputies and not to accept the petition which they had been instructed to deliver to the Emperor. Yesterday we prepared a telegram to our complaisant ambassador, in which it is said that “the separation of individuals from their delegate missions is inadmissible. In view of the fact that their mission is known to all, they could not be received by the sovereign.” Returning this message to the Emperor for his approval, he writes in the margin: “I find that...and the ministers ought not to receive them, as it would be a certain satisfaction to them, and that is not at all desirable.”

This is the last of the published diary entries in this series, which began with 1886.

Thursday, December 14, 1889: The Emperor, they say, is better, but this repetition of influenza was very painful, especially on account of the severe pain in his legs.

Saturday, December 16, 1889: This morning there was an extremely stormy meeting at the Academy of Arts, from which the conference secretary, Iseyev, has just been expelled for irregularities in the accounts. The august president, the Grand Duke Vladimir, was apparently beside himself; he shouted, tore his handkerchief, and demanded that a number of professor be expelled, based on the rumors that had reached him that they allegedly showed pernicious and socialist tendencies in their lectures….In order to know how much this severity is justified, it would be necessary to acquaint oneself with the nature of the whole matter, but at first sight it seems that the Grand Dukes ought above all to be more strict with themselves, in the interests of prestige and monarchical principle, for which they sometimes pretend to be such ardent defenders.

Wednesday, December 20, 1889: I am deeply moved when I am called upon to see my dear minister. The latter declares that he has something extremely interesting to tell me, asking only to keep it secret. Three days ago, Monday, December 18, Giers went to a meeting of the Council of State, completely unaware that an extremely important issue was to be discussed there. He sat between Pobedonostsev and Delyanov [Ivan Delyanov, Minister of Education]; both were crucified, persuading him to vote for the draft which was to be submitted to the Council by the Minister of the Interior, [Ivan] Durnovo. This draft law concerns the legal provisions that should establish the procedure for reviewing and cassation the sentences of district commanders. It is the wish of the Minister of the Interior that, in the event of a complaint against the actions of these new officials, the cassation shall be dealt with in camera in an administrative manner by a special authority represented by the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor and several other officials. It seems to be very difficult to translate this departure from public trial into a new interdepartmental institution. From the point of view of the law, it is a complete anomaly, leaving the landlords and the rural population at the mercy of arbitrariness, which will be all the more burdensome because in most cases their cases and complaints will be considered by officials without any legal training. Old Count Delyanov, who strives to sing in tune with the mood of the moment, and who for some time has been saying “we need a stick,” ardently advocates the Durnovo project. Pobedonostsev informs the Minister that the Emperor wishes this project to be passed, that His Majesty has taken quite definite decisions in this respect, and adds confidentially that he, Pobedonostsev, was anxious to take part in the meeting of the Council of State that day because he had been instructed to support the draft of the Minister of the Interior. The draft would have been transferred to the general meeting of the Council, because it could not have been adopted by a minority of votes of 9 to 13 when it had been previously considered by the departments. Giers sees Admiral Posyet disappear at the beginning of the meeting under the pretext that this is “a matter that does not concern him.” He tells his neighbors that he would prefer to follow this example or to abstain from voting because he is not sufficiently familiar with the question, but that if it is necessary to speak out, he can do so only in accordance with what his conscience and the impression he will make of the debate tell him.

Alexander III and Maria Feodorovna with their family, around 1889

After the Minister of the Interior has laid out his project, the former Minister of Justice, Count Konstantin Palen, who has recently arrived from his village for a few days, takes the floor and, despite his incorrect Russian language and purely German pronunciation, proves the folly of the project with fascinating eloquence: “I am a faithful subject of my ruler, yet cannot go against my conscience and the unspoken mass of complaints. It would take us back to the time when some secretary decided and submitted the case to the signatures of people who knew nothing about it. Such a law would be a stain on the sacred name of the ruler and on his reign.” In a word, with exemplary frankness and directness, the old statesman spoke like a true “lord.”

He was followed by Justice Minister [Nicholas] Manassein. In a very calm, very intelligent, logical and clear speech, he showed how difficult the project of the Minister of the Interior was to carry out; how it did not correspond to the spirit of our judicial regulations, which were one of the glorious pages of the reign of Alexander II; and was essentially useless. As a result of the restrictions imposed two years ago on the publicity of trials, the Government has the right to close the doors of the court whenever it deems it necessary in public hearings, as well as to admit only the number of witnesses it desires.

This speech makes a strong impression and clarifies the matter even for those who were not sufficiently familiar with it. Now comes the time to vote. It seems to Giers that when the Secretary of State approached the Tsesarevich, who was sitting between the President of the Council, Grand Duke Michael Nikolaievich, and the Grand Duke Vladimir, His Highness blushed slightly, thought for a moment, and voted without consulting or exchanging a word with his uncles. When it comes to my minister, he speaks for the opinion of the Minister of Justice, that is, on the side of the minority that voted against the Durnovo project in the departments. Pobedonostsev and Delyanov protest vehemently, but Giers remarks to them that he cannot vote in contradiction to the impressions he has from the debate he has just attended. When the result of the vote is known, it turns out that 21 people agreed with the minority in the departments, and only 20 voted for the majority that approved Durnovo’s project. In the general assembly, therefore, the project of the Minister of the Interior, which was known or supposed to be approved by the sovereign, could not pass by a majority of one vote, and it was perhaps the vote of the heir to the throne, because he voted with those who rejected the draft.

The effect is extraordinary! A strong impression. Grand Dukes Michael and Vladimir, the former Minister of Justice, [Dmitri] Nabokov, and even such men as Abaza [Alexander Abaza, former Minister of Finance] and Solsky [Dmitri Solsky, former Secretary of State and member of the State Council], saw fit to vote in favor. Upon learning of the Tsesarevich’s unexpected decision, some seem to be embarrassed and try to justify themselves by saying that the issue is not of great importance. To top it all off, at the end of the meeting, the heir approaches Count Palen and compliments him on his beautiful speech.

At this story, I am overwhelmed with excitement, so excited that I feel my throat tighten and tears come to my eyes. What a blessing it is if this young Grand Duke has character, already has his own opinion and the courage to defend it, and especially if he is open to that which is just, honest, bold and unselfish. Giers says that he positively regards him as such….Thank God! Giers admits that yesterday, when he went to Gatchina, he was quite worried. On more than one occasion when the votes in the Council of State were divided on issues of interest to the sovereign, the sovereign showed strong irritation against those who were in opposition. This time the minister found the monarch very sad, brooding, and almost despondent; His Majesty did not say a word about the meeting of the Council of State, but listened to the report with such a sad look that the Minister was simply distressed. It was in this mood that the Emperor listened very attentively to the report on the renewal of our secret treaty, and made a decision in accordance with our wishes. At the end of the report, when the minister wanted to take his leave, the Emperor hesitated for a moment, then invited him as usual, “Would you like to have luncheon with us?”

On the way to the dining room, Giers learns that there is absolutely no one except the Imperial Family and the aide-de-camp on duty, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich. The latter is usually cheerful and joking, but on this day he is uncomfortable: he seems to be bothered by something, and you can feel a thunderstorm in the palace. The Emperor enters and goes to the Empress’s apartments, who immediately comes out agitated and with a slightly flushed face. The children also look very upset. A little later, Grand Duke George arrives. They sit down at the table, but the Tsesarevich has not yet appeared. At last he enters, usually arriving on time, before Their Majesties appear; he takes a seat beside Giers, who sits at the right hand of the Empress. It seemed to the minister that Grand Duke George, who was leaving for a moment before sitting down at the table, followed the Tsesarevich. All the signs of a tumultuous family scene and the awkwardness it engenders prompt Giers to try to keep up the conversation, but the clouds do not dissipate and everyone is uneasy.

Suddenly, the Emperor begins to furiously bombard the Tsesarevich with bread balls (His Majesty is in the habit of throwing them at those sitting at the table during family dinners) and says: “Why? Well, here’s to you!” He makes fun of him in joking remarks. It is as if the ice has melted, the sun has peeked through, everyone present feels relieved. Everyone is in a good mood again. As soon as they get up from the table, the sovereign goes to his study, and the Empress also says goodbye to Giers, who sees the heir going to the study of his august father. He feels that this is being done for the purpose of reconciliation and asks himself what the result will be.

May God grant that the young man will not compromise his conscience in any way, and that the father, angry for disagreeing with him, will be able to respect the fact that his son is not afraid to have his own judgment. It is then in his power to decide the question according to his autocratic will.

Coin featuring the new German Emperor Wilhelm II, who believed that he had created a good impression on the Russian monarchs during their encounters immediately before his accession. The testimony here suggests otherwise.

At last the Emperor said: “I will see Shuvalov [the Russian Ambassador to Germany] and talk to him.” They’re late for luncheon; the Empress and the August children are already at the table. When the latter stand up at the entrance of the sovereign, His Majesty nervously says to them, “Sit down, sit down.” Lunch is not to his liking, everything is bad, he is dissatisfied with everything, and he runs his hand incessantly over the top of his head, as if to wipe his bald head, a common gesture of his in moments of great excitement. Seeing her August husband in such a state, the Empress also becomes sad and strained; she asked whether the news of the Shah’s arrival which she had read in the newspapers that day was true. The Minister replied that it depended on the progress of the affairs about which we were still negotiating with Persia. “How inconvenient it would have been if he had come at the time of [Grand Duke] Paul’s wedding. The Queen of England seems to be trying to discourage his coming to London, finding that he spoils the palaces, and that it is very costly to have him visit.” Giers remarks that if Queen Victoria is opposed to the arrival of Nasruddin Shah, the British government certainly considers his visit to London very desirable. The Emperor even suggested that the Persian monarch might have taken a different route and bypassed St. Petersburg, but Giers remarked to him that this would be very disadvantageous both to our prestige in the East and to our affairs with Persia to be settled. At luncheon, answering the Empress, the Emperor uttered something like, “I shall have to accept him if he continues to insist.”

Nasr-al di, Shah of Persia (1831-1896). He traveled fairly frequently to Europe, where he was viewed as an exotic figure and hence was often the butt of jokes or comment behind his back, as some of the material here demonstrates.

Sometimes it seems to me that such hostility on the part of our sovereign and empress is caused by a feeling of a kind of envy. They are not particularly pleased to see this little prince of Prussia, whom they thought it possible not to attach much importance to, an emperor and a king at the head of a power which is a real power, respected and almost ingratiated by the whole of Europe and the whole world! Giers is inclined to think that the Emperor is preoccupied with some family concerns connected with his august brothers, or with anyone else. Then, too, His Majesty was greatly impressed by the reports of the explosion of bombs being prepared near Zurich by our countrymen. He was lulled into the illusion that his reign, so “essentially national, firm and popular,” had destroyed all Nihilistic tendencies, even all traces of discontent, but now dynamite was reappearing in the form of improved projectiles.

Thursday, March 16, 1889: There is a strange contradiction with our Sovereign: the august and very autocratic monarch wants to polemicize with this miserable press, instead of simply ordering [the editors] on the right path….His Majesty has for many years bestowed upon our newspapers not very euphonious epithets, and has expended his energies in writing insults against them; in fact, he is hesitant to take any action – it’s a matter of popularity!

Friday, March 24, 1889: The Emperor returned Dolgorukov’s telegram with a note that the week’s stay was too long, and the Shah’s retinue was too numerous. The Persian monarch must confine himself to three days with part of his retinue. “He can take as much as he wants to Europe as much as he wants, but it’s too much for St. Petersburg.” It is not easy to communicate this decision to the poor Persian, who had spent a week in St. Petersburg during all his previous visits, and whom we had made wait so long for an answer. It seems to me that the minister is pale, tired, and that he is tired of everything. Yesterday’s meeting with the Grand Duke [Sergei Alexandrovich] also made a painful impression on him. Obviously, it is all a matter of personalities, of the [Grand Duke’s] desire to get rid of [certain officials on the Palestine Commission] and to attach greater importance to his unfortunate self. The Grand Duke, in fact, understands nothing but petty intrigues….Pobedonostsev, who has probably agreed beforehand, agrees to everything and, of course, supports what is desirable to His Highness. The Minister proposes that the affairs of the Palestine Commission be transferred not to the Palestine Society [under the Grand Duke’s control], but to the Council of the Palestine Society. The chairman and vice-chairman will be appointed by the sovereign, as will all the members of the council, among whom will be representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Holy Synod….At about 2 o’clock the minister leaves with a report to be held in the Anichkov Palace. The Minister returns about 3:30, when everyone is gathered at my place for tea….A conversation with the Minister of Palestine Affairs makes a strong impression on him. The Grand Duke’s course of action in his attempt to eliminate the two oldest members of the commission, in which he himself has been a member for no more than two or three years, is indeed insulting and unjustified. On a visit to the exhibition of fish farming, the Grand Duke Vladimir received from one of the organizers of the exhibition, Mr. Bazilevsky, a large fish (beluga), which His Highness, having given orders to make sure of its freshness, sent to the sapper battalion. On this occasion, a slightly comical order appears. Letter from the Chief of Staff to the battalion commander: “His Imperial Highness has been pleased to order this sacrifice to be presented to the lower ranks of the glorious battalion entrusted to you.” Then the battalion commander: “It is with feelings of sincere joy that I announce the above-mentioned sign of His Imperial Highness’s attention to our battalion, which the sappers have the good fortune to consider their august commander-in-chief, so dear to us.” Isn’t that great! And at the same time, such a general decline in prestige. Rumors about the dinner at Cubat’s and the alleged forced and final departure abroad of the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna are spreading more and more….Another detail, which is much talked about, is that when the Grand Duke Alexei, after a kiss given to his belle soeur and a slap in the face to his brother, considered it his duty to throw the actor Guitry out of the door, the mayor Gresser, who was in the corridor just in case, wanted to enter the room, but His Highness dumped a deep dish full of fresh caviar on his head. Picture it!

Saturday, March 25, 1889: A long conversation with my minister, who still has a bad impression of yesterday’s report. The Emperor is insistent on the question of the Palestine Commission, and in general His Majesty speaks in a spirit quite contrary to that of Giers. A rather coarse monarch by nature and a delicate, sensitive and gentle minister obviously cannot always act in unison, but today my boss is particularly burdened by this: “One or two more reports like the last two,” he says, “and I will have to leave. I can’t sacrifice the little I have left to live to such troubles, and to work in such conditions all the time. The relationship is ruined, and the former disposition is lost. I can see it in the faces of everyone close to me. The Empress has also changed, and for the last time at luncheon I had no illusions of a good attitude towards me.”

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Wednesday, November 1, 1889: Grand Duke Paul’s wife is already expecting a child; she is very kind and receives [Madame de Giers] very well. She complains a little about the cloudy and boring weather, remembering the wonderful sky of Hellas. From Greece, she is informed that our heir to the throne [Tsesarevich Nicholas was then in Athens attending the wedding of his cousin] spends his time there very pleasantly and cheerfully. The minister says that the Grand Duchess has a good influence on her husband. The other day, when the Grand Duke had lost his temper so much that he called one servant a “fool,” the young wife at once calmed him down and asked him not to indulge in such harshness. What’s next? Her modesty and charm are characteristic of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, as much as they are lacking in her husband, Grand Duke Sergei. [Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna] says that she envies the ability to receive and carry on a conversation, which is peculiar to her belle-soeur [meaning Grand Duchess Alexandra Georgievna], which her mother, the Queen of Greece, had accustomed to the life of the court, while she [Elizabeth Feodorovna], having been left an early orphan at the court of her father, the Grand Duke of Hesse, could not acquire such a skill.

Sisters-in-law Alexandra Georgievna and Elizaveta Feodorovna (Ella). Despite their apparently close relationship, society rumour had it that Ella enjoyed a mutual attraction to Alexandra’s husband Paul.

This, however, did not prevent her from receiving Madame Giers very well, and the Minister asserts that she speaks very sweetly, and being naturally endowed with grace and the ability to feel delicately, she might have developed very well in the reign of the holy and worthy Empress Maria Alexandrovna, but she is not at all made for the genre of the frivolous reigning Empress, the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, and the like. That poor woman must also sometimes feel strongly the intellectual, moral, and physical wretchedness of her wretched husband. The happiness of motherhood, which already awaits the Grand Duchess Alexandra, will arouse in her more satisfaction than the social and social talents of which, in her opinion, she is deprived.

Thursday, November 2, 1889: Prince Yurievsky [Prince George Yurievsky, son of the morganatic union between Alexander II and Princess Catherine Dolgoruky] continues to be my candidate [for the Bulgarian throne]….What would happen if this young prince, rich and son of the Tsar-Liberator, ever appeared in those parts? And what a relief it would have been if the son of Alexander II had not remained in Russia, and if this only son, having become Prince of Bulgaria, had lost the surname of Yurievsky, a sad reminder of the senility of the great monarch. That would mean removing a shadow that future generations in Russia will not fail to cast. The young man must be about eighteen-years-old, and he is to join us in the Navy. It is said that the Princess, his mother, had just dismissed a handsome doctor, whose presence in her house was beginning to compromise her; there had already been speculation that she would marry him.

Saturday, November 4, 1889: I meet Giers out walking. We go together to the Kazan Cathedral and back. He says he feels better. The Emperor expressed his pleasure at the weather; His Majesty prefers this dampness, these mists and rains, with their inseparable companions, darkness and miasma. At breakfast Their Majesties received a telegram from the Tsesarevich, announcing his departure on the morrow; in this telegram His Highness mentions the departure of the Empress Frederick for two days; he adds: “The weather is cold.” The matrimonial question remains shrouded in deep mystery. Giers confides to me that he found yesterday that the Empress, who, by the way, is quite a writer, has become very depressed. All the imperfections of her face stand out more sharply, and the eyes, which are her main adornment, lost their luster and former shape. Her Majesty’s forty-two-years are telling on her.

Alexander III and Marie Feodorovna, whom Lamsdorff seems to have disliked and found vulgar.

The Minister agrees that our Empress will not retain in her old age anything that was attractive about her; she won’t know how to grow old. We remember the late Empress, so perfect, so elegant, so majestic and, despite her years and illness, full of charm to the end. In Maria Feodorovna there was never anything but the advantages of youth, which, it is true, she retained for a long time: the charm of a grisette, the mocking, sly expression of a lively character, mobility rather than grace, but nothing that could impress, act on the imagination, ennoble what was felt in the presence of her unforgettable saint belle-mere. Her desire to captivate and be liked developed in her the ability to impress upon all who approached her that she was unusually kind and decidedly good to everyone; but this does not prevent Her Majesty from laughing at them afterwards, and speaking of them all with a snide manner, which excludes not only any benevolence, but often even the thought of charity. Alas, sweet smiles and sympathetic glances are in most cases fake; it’s just a habit, not an expression of a thought or feeling.

Tuesday, November 14, 1889: Giers informs me that yesterday in a meeting of the State Council, a small list of persons invited to Gatchina was circulated. Everyone was surprised that he [Giers] was not among them. He notices a change in the attitude of the Imperial Family, especially the Empress, towards him. He thinks that it has changed since the autumn of 1886, when we went to Brest. On his return from abroad after his meeting with Prince Bismarck at Fredericksruhe, he disapproved of the famous telegram sent by the Emperor in his absence to Prince Alexander of Bulgaria. The Minister, however, says that the Emperor himself has not changed, that he is still kind and continues to treat him with the same confidence and affection, but that the Empress does not have the same ease in her manner: she no longer speaks, as she once did, with friendly confidence. And in general, when he is admitted into the close domestic circle of the august family, the former intimacy is no longer there.

Friday, November 17, 1889: Taking luncheon with the Imperial Family after the report, Giers did not find the Empress particularly lively. She said she was sick. The Tsesarevich is very nice; his relationship with his parents is that of an adult young man. The Emperor jokes with him, but treats him like a grown man, no longer like a young boy. Rubinstein’s anniversary is to be celebrated. The celebration will take place at one o’clock in the hall of the Assembly of Nobility. Yesterday at luncheon the Emperor said to the Minister, “I hope you will not go,” and laughed at the ceremony. Nor did His Majesty spare those members of the Imperial Family who, in his opinion, had taken too big a role in the celebration. Sanny (the nickname of Grand Duchess Alexandra Iosifovna) instructed her son Konstantin to hand the Emperor a note in which she tried to prove that for Rubinstein a pension of 3000 rubles a year was extremely insufficient, since Tchaikovsky, his pupil, received the same amount. “I answered,” said the Emperor, “that in the first place Tchaikovsky was not a pupil of Rubinstein; secondly, I consider him superior to Rubinstein; thirdly, I don’t want to add to the assigned pension, and so, fuck, fuck, fuck, I tore up the paper!” The Emperor also laughs at Grand Duchess Catherine and her daughter, nicknamed “Tienchen,” who returned earlier than usual from abroad to take part in the jubilee of the great musician.

Tuesday, November 21, 1889: There are contradictory telegrams concerning the marriage of the heir. Recently it was telegraphed from Berlin that the betrothal of the Tsesarevich of Russia to the Prussian Princess Margaret would soon be announced in Venice, during his passage through that city, but then it was reported from Paris that this princess was to be the bride of the eldest son of the Crown Prince of Denmark. Yesterday by telegram, also from Paris, it was announced that the Tsesarevich was engaged to the Princess Maud of Wales, and now a telegram from Berlin has been received at the Stock Exchange, conveying as true and well-sourced the news of our Sovereign’s consent to the marriage of the Tsesarevich to Princess Margaret. This last news led to a rise in the price of our securities. If you just note this increase on the stock exchange without mentioning the reason, a downgrade will follow, and then an attack on our agency. I asked Giers what his decision on the matter was, to which he replied at once: “It is our duty to seize these telegrams, come what may!”

Wednesday, November 22, 1889: Danish partiality in the Imperial Family is increasingly visible. Forgetting the duty of hospitality, they all spoke Danish among themselves, and the kind and gentle Empress Augusta Victoria finally remarked to them one day that she did not understand the language well. On this occasion Giers remarks to me that in the family of our Emperor they have also begun to speak Danish sometimes in the family circle. Though our Empress is certainly more prudent than the members of her own family, she is precisely the most Danish, and holds in her heart all the grievances and hatreds of her little country. But the excesses of Danish patriotism in Athens seemed all the more incongruous and ridiculous because the whole Holstein-Glücksburg family, with a queen born the Princess of Hesse-Kassel, was essentially German, and had only recently been adopted by Denmark for want of anything better.

Sunday, November 26, 1889: [At a palace ceremony] the sovereign had dark circles under his eyes and a tired look. The Empress was in a dress with a train of golden fabric, trimmed with dark fur, studded with precious stones, and looked very good. Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, the only lady of the Imperial Family present besides Her Majesty, was extraordinarily beautiful and interesting in a dress with a pink embroidered train. Grand Duke Michael’s son, Grand Duke Sergei, took the oath [on reaching his majority].

Tuesday, November 28, 1889: His Majesty does not have much confidence in anyone at the moment. The autocrat in him becomes more and more apparent, and perhaps there is a growing confidence in his own infallibility, which sooner or later will fatally lead to major mistakes. And no one among those around him is able to instruct him at times, so that he can think, understand, and see at least a part of the truth. Their Majesties do not like conversation, nor do they like the beneficent intercourse of serious and educated people. Their sphere is commonplace: anecdotes, funny words, and jokes. In order to be liked at this court, to be close to it and to enjoy favor, a very special qualification is required….The Emperor is again very ill-disposed toward the German Emperor….A few days after we seized the telegraphic report announcing the engagement of the Tsesarevich to the Prussian Princess Margaret, the Emperor said, “Why, there is nothing of the kind in the works, and such a union would make the worst impression in Russia.”

Tuesday, February 7, 1889: The minister says that Pobedonostsev has told him a great deal about the Palestine Society, and that there seems to be a whole series of intrigues going on under the aegis of the poor Grand Duke Sergei, who tries hard but understands so little about business….He wishes to have one of his courtiers appointed to Jerusalem. I ask the Minister whether it is really necessary for him to nurse this unfortunate Society, which I think it would be better to leave as much independence as possible. Our Zinoviev [Ivan Zinoviev, Director of Asian Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs] has a passion for power, he strives to concentrate as much of it as possible in his hands and to interfere in everything. Would it not be a thousand times better to keep the Consulate as far away as possible from the intrigues and intrigues of the Palestine Society? The latter would probably soon become entangled and encounter insurmountable obstacles; then it would be the first to turn to us for help and protection, and the consul-general at Jerusalem would be able to act on legal grounds. No attempt at a direct agreement here with the rather stupid Grand Duke…will ever lead to anything. The Minister is of the same opinion and shares my opinion that the too active and onerous tutelage to which Zinoviev strives spoils and complicates relations between the Ministry and the Palestine Society, which operates under the chairmanship of the Grand Duke. The Emperor returns some of the papers sent to him yesterday. His Majesty kept the photograph of poor Mary Vetsera, which Prince Lobanov had sent him….[Giers] told me afterwards that when he was leaving the palace after a ball in the concert hall, General Cherevin walked in front of him, led by the arm. He was so drunk that he stumbled and risked falling every two or three steps. I cannot believe that the Adjutant-General, the Chief of the Guard, a favorite of Their Majesties, is not ashamed to show himself in such a state when leaving a court ball, at which about 800 guests are present, and among them diplomats, visitors from the provinces, and others. At the same time, it is said that Cherevin is the person close to Their Majesties.

Peter Cherevin, Alexander III’s notoriously arrogant and drunken confidant; he lived openly with the equally notorious Princess Catherine Radziwill, and was probably her source for much of her writing about court and society at this stage.

Wednesday, February 8, 1889: Going up to the minister, who, thank God, has completely recovered from his ill health, I find him in excellent spirits. He tells me that balls and outings do not tire him in the least; even Madame Giers visits them this year with some pleasure, as Their Majesties are gracious to her every time they meet her. Yesterday, at a ball at Morier’s the Emperor had told her that he was delighted that Nicholas Karlovich [de Giers] had such a healthy appearance, and that the merry mood in which the Minister had been all this time gave him pleasure. They say that the evening was a complete success. The Emperor left at about one o’clock. The Empress, who wore a splendid red dress, did not leave with the Tsesarevich until after supper. The celebration was attended by the German ambassador, who was invited with the entire staff of the embassy….We decide that the Grand Duke of Hesse will take the place of the Grand Duke Sergei, with the wife of one of the ambassadors and Princess Alix next to him, while the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, who will sit opposite him, will be seated by the two ambassadors, the German on the right side, and so on.

Thursday, February 9, 1889: The square between our ministry and the palace is filled with troops who have been assembled here in the morning for the parade scheduled for 12 o’clock. When the minister sends for me, I have to go through his bedroom, for though it is not yet 10 1/2 o’clock, the windows of the other rooms are filled with curious people who have been invited to watch the parade….We looked out of the window at the Emperor riding round the troops with his numerous and brilliant retinue. It is a pity that His Majesty always rides small, calm horses and wears a small black fur hat – all this together is so unspectacular that the figure of the sovereign is embarrassed and does not stand out enough.

Friday, February 10, 1889: After last night’s ball…people are beginning to praise the beauty of Princess Alix of Hesse so much that he [Giers] is inclined to think that her engagement to the heir to the Tsesarevich is going well. In general, she is considered less beautiful than her sister Elizabeth, but she has a more intelligent and more expressive face, a pleasant and friendly smile. Largely English, she speaks a lot of English, especially with her sister. There is no persistent and noticeable courtship on the part of the Tsesarevich. Many of those who are privy to the secrets of the court believe that no serious rapprochement will follow. This means that the efforts of Grand Duke Sergei will be in vain. Stenbock assured me at the time that His Highness was very well disposed towards my Minister; I told this to Giers when I gave him an account of our conversation, but he didn’t really believe it.

The young Princess Alix in St Petersburg, 1889

Saturday, February 11, 1889: On the small square near the Winter Palace, there is another parade….We see the Emperor arrive, accompanied by the Grand Duke of Hesse and a brilliant retinue, mounted on a small white horse, wearing a rather low black fur hat as usual; His Majesty stands out so little from the crowd that [people] take Grand Duke Vladimir as the sovereign. Vladimir keeps a little aloof, on a good horse and in a more elegant white fur cap of the Adjutant-General. The Empress arrives along the Millionnaya and goes to the right entrance in her small carriage, which is quite unspectacular, with undraped horses, with one Cossack at the rear. My friend and I remember the parades we went to see in the days of our youth, the elegance and charm of the late sovereign and charming Empress Maria Alexandrovna.

Sunday, February 12, 1889: I walk to Nevsky to buy sweets….As I approached the Anichkov Palace, I heard the guard replying: “We wish you good health, Your Majesty!” At the same moment, a huge four-seater sleigh without a Cossack on the rear rides out from behind the fence. Their Majesties, the Tsesarevich, and one of the younger children are going in this carriage to the arena of the Stables Department for the opening of the exhibition of fish farming, at the head of which is Grand Duke Sergei. All along the way, the crowd greets them with shouts of “hurrah!” I am struck by the expression of kindness and satisfaction on the face of the sovereign as he bows in all directions with a smile.

Tuesday, February 14, 1889: Going up about 10 1/2 o’clock to see my dear minister….He is delighted with yesterday’s dinner at Grand Duke Sergei’s. The guests were accommodated as arranged and everyone was satisfied. Giers says that everything is perfectly organized at this court, and he praises Hermann Stenbock very much.

Thursday, February 11, 1889: I feel out of sorts all day at the thought of having to go to a court ball in the evening; I decided to do this so as not to give the impression that I deliberately did not want to be there all winter. The very thought of having to be in society already causes me severe suffering, so I make a great effort to dress myself, and then at about 10 o’clock I go with Obolensky to the Winter Palace. As I walk into a concert hall where I have attended celebrations so many times for nearly a quarter of a century, I am struck by the dazzling, almost excessive lighting, the result of the refinement of this system. The hall is overcrowded. Instead of the 800 people invited now, there used to be no more than 300. Their Majesties and Their Highnesses leave the Malachite Hall just after 10 o’clock, and the ball opens with a waltz. A large and terribly loud orchestra; they say that this is due to the fact that the leader of the court orchestras, Baron Stackelberg, is almost deaf. Not a single beautiful melody, not a single fascinating dance: drums, bells, hellish noise and monotonous tempos….The Empress in a décolleté ball gown with a fawn train, with light green trim, a tiara and a necklace of diamonds with turquoise. Her Majesty has the appearance of a small, graceful and elegant young lady. She takes part in the dances, but I don’t really like the way she dances the mazurka. Marie Pavlovna, like Madame Beauharnais, is in orange; Both have a bit of a coquettish appearance. Elizabeth Feodorovna is colorless in her dress, appearance and manner of bearing; Elizabeth Mavrikievna seems more serious and clever than the others. The Grand Duchess Alexandra Iosifovna, gray-haired, in a white dress, with a splendid turquoise necklace, bears the stamp of high society more than any other—a fragment of the brilliant court of former times. Princess Alix, whom I longed to see, is missing. The sovereign retires to the malachite hall, where he plays cards. The heir dances, but without enthusiasm and fun. No matter what they say, His Highness has not grown up and matured. He’s a pretty officer; the white, fur-trimmed uniform of the Hussars of the Guards suits him, but in general he has such an ordinary appearance that it is difficult to notice him in the crowd; his face is expressionless. He carries himself simply, but there is neither elegance nor refinement in his manners. The Grand Duke of Hesse dances with enthusiasm….At this ball there is an innovation: although the masters of ceremonies are in uniform tailcoats, they carry with them the usual batons, apparently there was such a mess at the last feast that it was considered useful that they should appear with the emblems assigned to them. Just before the mazurka began, their efforts to yield the grand rods caused so much noise and shouting that…I became frightened….About half-past midnight, they go to dinner in the Nicholas Hall, which this time is decorated not with palm trees, as at the first two balls, but with laurel and orange trees. These trimmed trees are less flexible and less beautiful….Dinner is bad. The dishes are heavy and poorly cooked. After dinner, the dancing resumes. Everyone laughs at one young artilleryman, who makes all sorts of faux pas in the mazurka with hilarious gestures. The Emperor notes this manner of dancing and draws the attention of the Empress, who can hardly restrain herself from laughing. The Countess de Beauharnais, however, invites the dancer, although she does not know him. In the highest degree flattered, the unfortunate artilleryman makes the most splendid jumps, and tries to do it as close as possible to the door of the malachite hall, where the highest personages are located; the general gaiety reaches extreme limits, and the madly laughing Grand Duke Vladimir is forced to retire to the next room. Are they going to find out who this dancing officer is?

Friday, February 17 1889: When I went up to my minister at about 11 o’clock, I found him also tired and cold….The [Imperial Family’s] trip to the Crimea has been cancelled on account of the classes of the august children. It is strange that only two or three days ago, at the screening of a report from one of the diplomats to his government that the Court was leaving for Denmark at the end of March, His Majesty crossed out the last words and wrote at the bottom: “To the Crimea.” What is the reason for this sudden change of intention? At any rate, it is not a question of the occupations of Their Highnesses, which they could have continued just as well, if not better, in Livadia; perhaps this is the result of the impression still preserved from the railway accident in Borki. It is said that little Grand Duke Michael enters the railway carriage with horror even on the journey from Gatchina to St. Petersburg; But in such cases, the first step is difficult; It is possible that with a longer journey he would have felt bolder and the painful memories would have been erased….There is a rumor of a dinner at the restaurant of Cubat, in which Grand Duke Vladimir, Maria Pavlovna, Grand Duke Alexei, the Countess of Beauharnais, and Duke Eugene of Lichtenberg took part, with several people close to them, including the actor [Lucien] Guitry, a handsome fellow who enjoys success. A great deal of wine was drunk, after which Guitry allegedly went so far as to kiss Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna. Grand Duke Vladimir slapped him in the face, and the actor responded to His Highness in kind. The mayor was forced to inform the Emperor about this, and His Majesty is said to have forbidden the Grand Dukes to visit restaurants. All this looks very much like fiction, but the sad thing is the possibility of such fictions appearing and the fact that many people do not seem at all incredible. Prestige is declining more and more.

Sunday, February 19 1889: [Speaking of Alexander III] Giers said, “At times, indeed, he is admirable in his decisions, and shows remarkable correctness in his assessment of the situation.” The minister also heard a lot of stories and criticism about the evening at Naryshkins. He asks himself whether the Emperor will not blame him for declining the invitation, because he usually dined at His Majesty’s table, who was amused by his comical arguments with the lady of the house. I express my bewilderment at the fact that Their Majesties were present at a soirée to which the Grand Duke Vladimir and his wife, who live nearby, were not invited. This leads me to believe that the relationship between the two courts is not particularly good. The minister got the same impression. He tells me that Vladimir, despite the fact that he is a colonel and has the duties of only an Imperial knight, plays a very important role. He is entrusted with the whole of the court marshal’s part of the palace administration, and in the circle of Their Majesties’ courtiers he is definitely the closest person to them.

Monday, February 27 1889: Feeling very tired, I lay down for a moment on the ottoman in my blue study, but suddenly I heard shouts from the direction of the Bridge of Songs; I quickly go to the other end of my apartment and see a crowd that surrounds Their Majesties’ sleigh and runs after it with shouts of “hurrah!” The Emperor and Empress ride out from behind the fence, cross the bridge, and go to the square opposite my windows. They went to inspect a newly rebuilt chapel. They are in a large two-seater sleigh, without a Cossack, pulled by a pair of harnessed horses. The sovereign says something to his wife with a satisfied smile, and they bow to the passers-by. Their Majesties are to move to Gatchina tomorrow, and my Minister believes that his next report will take place there.

Tuesday, February 28, 1889: Early in the morning the Minister sends me a note which he has just received from the Emperor, in which His Majesty asks him “to report on Saturday, at 12 o’clock instead of today.” Since it doesn’t say “in Gatchina,” I assume that the move was postponed, and then it turns out that I was right. Today, the Grand Duke of Hesse, his son, and his daughter, Princess Alix, are being escorted to the railway station. They leave, and nothing is decided about the marriage of the Heir. In Moscow, they even say: “Alix will not return.” At 6:30, at the request of my Minister, I go to dine with him. It is said that the idea of a marriage between the Heir to Princess Alix seems to have been abandoned by both parties….We remember the terrible day of March 1 eight years ago [when Alexander II was assassinated]. Giers last saw him on Saturday, February 28, and gave a report. The Emperor treated him with particular kindness and courtesy. As he was leaving, the Emperor called him back to tell him that in a letter he had recently received from the Duchess of Edinburgh, the latter asked him to convey her greetings. The late Emperor was particularly cheerful and pleased….Upon learning of the assassination attempt, Giers immediately went to the palace. From the door all the way up the staircase to the door of the study, all along the path along which the martyred sovereign was carried, traces and drops of blood were visible. Giers found him lying in his study; his mouth was open and he was trying hard to get a breath. One leg was a mass of bloody and torn flesh clinging to the bone, and a boot was still visible at the end of it. Giers did not see the other leg, which had probably been carried away before he arrived. Everyone around was kneeling, awaiting the tragic moment of death….An interesting detail, which I did not know, is that Madame Giers says that the Emperor’s wedding ring from his marriage to Princess Yurievskaya was completely distorted by the explosion, although his hands remained unharmed. Poor sovereign! This ring, of course, did not bring him happiness, and now his widow receives guests, lives widely and makes merry in Paris, although she wears, they say, ostentatiously only black.

Princess Catherine Yurievskaia, Alexander II’s morganatic second wife, whose detractors accused her of leading a merry widowhood

Wednesday, January 4, 1889: Giers made the most pleasant impression in his report yesterday. The Emperor was extraordinarily gracious and friendly. The Minister touched upon the delicate issue of matrimonial projects, which are discussed in the British newspapers. His Majesty seemed surprised: “This is the first time I have heard of this. The Grand Duke is indeed going to be here with his daughter for Lent, but I haven’t thought of any marriage.” Then the Princess of Prussia, the younger sister of the Emperor Wilhelm, was mentioned, and the Emperor confirms to Giers that during the Tsesarevich’s passage through Berlin last November, at dinner at the Shuvalovs’ house, the German Emperor said loudly that he would very much like this alliance. The Tsesarevich did not hear this, but Countess Shuvalova had the tactlessness to tell him. Giers remarks that, in principle, the Emperor has nothing against this marriage, but His Majesty admits that he is a little frightened by the illness of his father, the Emperor Frederick. “I made inquiries; the Emperor himself was ill, and perhaps the blood of the whole family is contaminated, and that would be terrible; and, besides, it is painful and difficult for Nicky to think of marriage from a purely political point of view.” Here the Emperor cites a number of examples in which marriages contracted under similar conditions have failed, such as the union of the Danish Crown Prince with the Swedish Princess. The minister is very touched by the sovereign’s tender and cordial care for his son. He says: “Of course, I fully understand Your Majesty’s feelings: on the one hand, the family happiness of a son who is loved as a Tsesarevich; on the other hand, the interests of vast Russia, which are to some extent dependent on his choice. Here the decision is too difficult, and it is better to leave it to Providence, which will inspire Nicholas Alexandrovich with the most suitable choice.”

Princess Margaret of Prussia as a young girl around the time of the diary entries

Saturday, January 7, 1889: Grand Duke Sergei…may be capable of something, because he is interested in something serious, not like other grand dukes. He tells us various episodes of his journey to Jerusalem. The Grand Duke has shown much tact, great circumspection, and a certain endurance in all that he does; the pretty Grand Duchess Elizabeth gives the impression of a person who is undeveloped, pale and colorless. She hardly speaks and doesn’t seem to think much about anything.

Friday, January 13, 1889: Coming to the Minister after 11 o’clock, I suggest that he prepare two telegrams for his report tomorrow, one for the Emperor and the other for the Tsesarevich. Now, especially after the kind reception given to His Highness during his last stay in Berlin, and in view of the rumors about the Darmstadt marriage, it would make a good impression without obligation. Giers likes the idea. Breakfast is a little late; Immediately afterwards I write two drafts of telegrams and send them to the Minister; He shortened one of them and changed the other somewhat, but I don’t think he improved them. We are talking about the strange mores of our days. I tell how the young Prince Belosselsky, the same one who had recently stood in a drunken state in front of the box of Ober-Hofmeisterina Stroganova, and in front of a full theatre, where the regimental commander was also present, stuck out his tongue to her, tried the other day at the Giers to get a young girl who was leaving to go drink with him, and then boasted that when she was leaving with her governess, he followed her and kissed her….There are scandals that Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, the Countess of Beauharnais [Zenaida Beauharnais, wife of the Duke of Leuchtenberg], and some others indulge in. Grand Duke Alexei held similar scandalous meetings. Not long ago one of the gentlemen present admired the Countess de Beauharnais, and she asked him how much he valued her. “”800 rubles,” came the reply. “And the Grand Duchess?” “Oh, at 800, too!” “And my sister?” “Well, here’s another 10 rubles.” Princess Belosselskaya hears these speeches and faints. Great! Recently Grand Duke Vladimir entered the box of Princess Obolensky and Countess Shuvalova. Everyone was standing in the stalls, the men in the neighboring boxes too, but Platon Obolensky and another officer continued to sit when the Grand Duke got up, Countess Shuvalova confining herself to holding out her fingertips to him without even raising herself. Our decorum is falling more and more.

Platon Obolensky, 1850-1913, at the famous 1903 costume ball, some years after this diary entry (the only image I have been able to locate - JA). He was the father of the well-known soldier and socialite Prince Serge Obolensky.

Saturday, January 14, 1889: My minister soon returns, and at once sends for me. He is delighted with his report and tells me that he sent for me immediately, without even changing his clothes, because he wanted to tell me in detail what happened. When he presented the drafts of the telegrams to the Emperor, His Majesty seemed at first surprised that there was one for the Tsesarevich, but the Minister reminded him that he also received congratulatory telegrams from the heirs to the throne, and that after the particularly cordial reception given to the Grand Duke in Berlin in November, this courtesy would be timely and natural; His Majesty agrees, but does not know whether the Tsesarevich is on a first-name relationship with Emperor Wilhelm. Then they move on to the question of a celebratory lunch. The Emperor says that, having studied all the precedents, he is convinced that even the Emperor Nicholas I, who was married to a Prussian princess, never gave dinners on the King’s birthdays, but only invited the ambassador and the general specially attached to his person to a family breakfast. Giers suggests that we should follow this example….The Emperor accepts this proposal and informs the Empress about it at breakfast, who is delighted and warmly thanks the Minister for this, as he puts it, “brilliant idea.” The Tsesarevich, who was present at breakfast, declared that he was on good terms with Emperor Wilhelm, and that my projects were approved and signed….Zinoviev [Adjutant-General Vasili Zinoviev, attached to the court of Tsesarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich] arrives at four-o’clock tea after discussing with Hermann Stenbock the question of the orders to be distributed in connection with the Grand Duke’s [of Hesse’s] visit. He tells how he introduced himself to the Empress yesterday. Her Majesty said a few very warm words, and then again spoke at length of her experience in the catastrophe of October 17 [at Borki]. At first she was stunned, then she managed to get out through a hole; no longer seeing the Emperor sitting opposite her at the table, and no one else in the ominous silence that surrounded her, she wanted to go and see what had happened, but she felt that Countess Kutuzov [wife General Count Paul Kutuzov] was holding her by the shoulders. The first sound of a human voice was “Help!” from one unfortunate man whose legs had been blown off. The Empress says that the sight of the unfortunate victims was terrible, that the Emperor and she cannot remember without emotion how all complaints ceased at their approach, and the wounded thanked God that they had seen their sovereign and his family alive and well. Little Grand Duke Michael was so shocked in these terrible moments that he now refuses to ride in the railway carriage, as he did during the last journey from Gatchina to St. Petersburg. Everyone, however, is healthy. “The newspapers assure us,” added the Empress, “that we have sent for [Doctor] Charcot from Paris in order to consult him. What a fabrication!”

Monday, January 16, 1889: I go up to my minister, as usual, about 11 o’clock…[we spoke about] a detailed account of a conversation with Ignatiev [Count Nicholas Ignatiev, 1832-1908, member of the State Council] of which he had spoken to me last night. Ignatiev…believes that the Bulgarian question [over who should be nominated to the throne] cannot be settled until a candidate is chosen to replace Coburg. The famous count names first Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich [Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich, 1861-1929, son of Grand Duke Michael Nikolaievich], (hinting that the latter might lose the title of Grand Duke by marrying his daughter) [the Grand Duke was attempting to contract a morganatic marriage with Count Nicholas Ignatiev’s daughter Countess Catherine Ignatieva, 1869-1914], then the young Prince of Oldenburg, the son of Prince Alexander and Eugenia Maximilianovna. It even seemed to him that he had come to his senses and seemed to be frightened that he had named this second candidate, who might turn out to be more serious. These reports made a strong impression on Giers; he does not want to say anything about them….The Minister intends to try to talk about these combinations with the Emperor, and asks himself whether he should not go tomorrow with a report for this purpose, although he has nothing new after Saturday….I find it very practical to have Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich imprisoned in Sofia, having previously made him renounce the title of Grand Duke by allowing him to marry the Countess Ignatieva, with whom he is in love. This would remove all the difficulties arising from the clause of the Treaty of Berlin, which forbids Bulgaria to choose a person belonging to one of the reigning dynasties of the Great Powers. However, we could come to terms with Germany and France, and if the others did not recognize the prince elected according to our instructions, they would have no choice but to recall their representatives from Sofia and the roles would be reversed….An interesting detail: in his previous conversations with Giers about the possible abdication, Prince Alexander of Battenberg always pointed to Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich as the best possible successor.

Friday, January 20, 1889: Lobanov [Prince Alexei Lobanov-Rostovsky, 1824-1896, statesman and later Minister of Foreign Affairs after the death of de Giers] telegrams that the Archduke [Archduke Rudolf of Austria-Hungary] has committed suicide. Giers asks me if I can have lunch at his place and adds that he always keeps a seat for me until the last minute. In view of my refusal on account of a severe cold, to which was added a gastric malaise, he asked me to invite one of the secretaries of the chancellery….My Minister returns from his report at 3 o’clock. He had breakfast with Their Majesties, who were both very gracious. The Emperor is convinced that the death of Archduke Rudolf was the result of a duel, not a suicide. “He stepped out a lot [meaning he engaged in numerous affairs], and he must have been caught. Why go to Mayerling with two witnesses two days before the hunt? And Emperor Franz Josef immediately telegraphed me about the blow in order to prevent rumors and stories.” In the meantime, Giers brings me a number of telegrams from the censor’s office, confirming the fact of suicide and giving me all sorts of details. It turns out that the deceased, despite the strictest prohibition of doctors, abused wine and especially champagne mixed with cognac. “This diabolical mixture was introduced to him by the Prince of Wales,” read one report. Of course, we do not hesitate to cross out this phrase, but it is so comical that, even despite the sad circumstances, it involuntarily causes a smile. My Minister is concerned about the decision apparently taken at Court to give a ball on Thursday next week. Only, they say, ladies must wear black. The Emperor says: “There have been examples.” Seeing that the question has already been settled, the minister no longer objects. He draws the Emperor’s attention, however, to the fact that the burial will take place only on Tuesday, and that the ball will therefore take place immediately after it. The Grand Duke of Hesse [Grand Duke Ludwig IV of Hesse, 1837-1892], his daughter, Princess Alix [later Empress Alexandra Feodorovna], and the Grand Duke’s heir [Prince Ernst Ludwig, 1868-1937, later Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig IV], who have come to St. Petersburg, took up their abode in the palace of Grand Duke Sergei, in the room usually occupied by the Court Marshal Hermann Stenbock, on the ground floor, to the left of the main staircase.

Monday, January 23, 1889: Madame de Giers asks me for lunch today; I accept the invitation without much displeasure….The question of the court ball has been settled; it will take place on Thursday, but not in the concert hall of the Winter Palace, but in Anichkov. Those present will be in mourning, and the diplomatic corps will not receive invitations due to the fact that the ball will be held in the Anichkov Palace….[In] my opinion this does not in the least mitigate the indecency of a dance evening during mourning. I dine at the Giers. As always, they are full of attention to me….Touching upon the court, the minister suggests that the heir to the throne will marry Princess Alix.

Thursday, January 26, 1889: The Minister touched upon the delicate question of the candidates who could be proposed for the title of Prince of Bulgaria. The Emperor does not like the candidacy of Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich: “He is insignificant, Ignatiev will act after him.” The candidacy of the Prince of Oldenburg also does not meet with his approval: “His parents will never agree.” Finally, the candidacy of the Prince of Weimar (Württemberg) is unsympathetic to him because he is a German. Thus, the question is still open. Giers gives me to read a short letter he has just written in his own hand to Shuvalov [Adjutant-General Count Paul Shuvalov, Russian Ambassador in Berlin], in which he asks the ambassador to give the details of the sad event at Mayerling which interest the Emperor, and expresses the wish that the Austrian Government will finally understand the necessity of not supporting the Prince of Coburg, or even of facilitating his removal from Bulgaria, if it is interested in maintaining good relations with us. I am handing over this letter to Obolensky so that he can have time to put it in the mail with the two-week courier departing today.

Friday, January 27, 1889: Thankfully, the exhaustion of last night didn’t hurt my beloved boss. He says that the ball was a great success: the black dresses were very beautiful, and the whole ensemble had an encouraging effect on him. Princess Alix of Hesse was not present at the party. Her sister, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, told the minister that she was ill; The Grand Duke, the father, on the other hand, danced a lot….The precious stones and ribbons distributed during the cotillion were very beautiful against the background of the black toilettes. The Empress wore a black tulle dress studded with diamonds in front. It seems that some compared her to the queen of the night, while others gave the impression of something gloomy.

Saturday, January 28, 1889: On another occasion, two years ago, during the incident with Martens, the Emperor again expressed to the Minister his conviction that judicial institutions were revolutionary and harmful. Thus, His Majesty is constant and consistent….The Minister tells me that the Grand Dukes, he, Vannovsky [Adjutant-General Peter Vanovsky, Minister of War], Vorontsov-Dashkov [Adjutant-General Count Hilarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, 1837-1916, Minister of the Imperial Court], Solsky [Count Dmitri Solsky, State Controller], and the greater part of the State Council, have spoken out against Tolstoy’s [Count Dmitri Tolstoy, Minister of the Interior] draft [to repeal Alexander II’s judicial reforms], and that the minority, consisting of a few ministers who voted in favor of the draft, has secretly intended to make it impossible to apply it during the subsequent discussion of individual articles. The Emperor approved the proposal of Count Tolstoy and supported the minority, and this was to be foreseen from the manner in which the Minister of the Interior behaved during the meeting; he ended his speech, which was delivered with great difficulty, with the statement: “I feel called, I must carry out this reform.”

Monday, January 30, 1889: Going up to the minister, I am glad to say that he was not too tired after yesterday’s ball. However, he is still not entirely healthy. He says that the ball was a success: the ladies were in semi-mourning. Princess Alix was present; she looks like her sister, but is ugly, her face red even under her eyebrows. Later, Obolensky [Prince Alexei Obolensky, Master of the Imperial Horse] tells me that her gait is not graceful, the middle part of the body is too thick. She danced the cotillion with the heir to the throne, but they did not speak. The Minister tells me that the British Ambassador, Morier, is engaged in a great deal of intrigue in order to secure the presence of Their Majesties at the ball which he is going to give in honor of the Grand Duke of Hesse.

Sir Robert Morier, formerly British Minister in Darmstadt, and an arch-opponent of Bismarck’s policies but paradoxically extremely popular at the more reactionary Russian court - possibly because of his enmity for Bismarck

Of course, their presence is more desirable to him than ever as a correction to his misunderstandings with Bismarck. In order to test the waters, he turned to Cherevin [Adjutant-General Peter Cherevin, 1837-1896, in charge of Alexander III’s security] and the latter came to consult with Giers; the Minister told him that this visit of Their Majesties would make a painful impression in Berlin at the moment, though there was really no definite cause for displeasure. Cherevin thought that it might be possible to arrange for only the Empress and the Tsesarevich to go, but when the matter was left to Their Majesties, they seemed willing to accept Sir Morier’s invitation with all the pleasure that an opportunity might give them to cause trouble to Bismarck. The British Ambassador spoke to Giers yesterday at the ball of his intention to invite Their Majesties, and asked how this should be done, to which Giers replied that the Minister of the Court should be consulted, but if it was a question of a big soirée, the German Embassy should at any rate be invited. Then, wishing to warn Count Vorontsov, Giers remarked that the latter must have known everything by now, and that he had not the slightest doubt of the full agreement of the Emperor and Empress. Whether from the joy which this success had given him, or from some other reason towards the end of the ball, it is said that poor Morier was so drunk that he stood and bowed in the malachite hall, even after the imperial family had retired and the hall was quite empty. Someone approached the British ambassador and drew his attention to the fact that the ball was already over. I take the liberty of expressing the opinion that, in fact, it would not matter if Their Majesties were to honor with their presence the ball given by the English Ambassador in honor of the Queen’s son-in-law, and that the quarrel between Morier and the Bismarcks, father and son, did not concern us. The most important thing was to avoid any political demonstration in this case, and after Giers’ insistence on inviting the German embassy (which Morier had not invited to less formal meetings all along), nothing could be said. The Minister tells me that the Emperor and Empress are more than ever opposed to Bismarck and even to the German Emperor. They call the latter “a swindler and a gentleman who imagines too much of himself and thinks that everyone adores him.” Giers does not know what to attribute to this increase in antipathy: perhaps there is some other displeasure on the part of the Danish family; but…he frankly told him that he did not understand how Prince Bismarck could have hurt national feelings in Russia and dug a gulf between us by a whole series of financial measures, such as had been adopted the previous year on the eve of the Emperor’s passage through Berlin, and especially by his so-called Peace League, which was definitely directed against us.

Tuesday, January 6, 1887: Once upon a time, the Russian autocrat placed himself above the rumors generated by the press; He himself gave the direction of policy he desired and forced public opinion to accept it. Not long ago His Majesty made the following remark about the complaint against our newspapers: “Is it the talk of the newspapers that is public opinion?” The dastardly intrigue of the vile Pobedonostsev or one of his kind is enough to lead the Emperor astray and make him suddenly throw himself into some risky enterprise. The Minister says that the responsibility falls to a large extent on the Empress as well. She hates Germany and systematically stirs up the Sovereign against it. Poor Russia: instead of crowned heads, there are now only crowned fools on the throne!

Sunday, January 11, 1887: [In the aftermath of the removal of Prince Alexander of Hesse from the Bulgarian Throne] The Emperor has more than once expressed how difficult these strained relations are for him, especially because of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, who is so nice, and he cannot yet allow her to visit Darmstadt. His Majesty hopes that by Easter Bulgarian affairs will be sufficiently settled to enable the Grand Duchess and Grand Duke Sergei to go to Darmstadt.

3/11: Friday, January 16, 1888: [Writing about a ball] The Emperor wore the uniform of a Guards Hussar Regiment with a helmet on departure and seemed huge in this costume, which suited him enormously. The Empress was dressed in white, all strewn with precious stones. Three rounds of the polonaise: with the Emperor, with the Tsesarevich, and with the German Ambassador as the doyenne of the diplomatic corps. In the morning, Grand Duke Nicholas [Nikolaievich Jr.] placed five officers and a colonel of cavalry guards under arrest for three days. They were released only for the ball. The Emperor seemed to be in a good mood. He talked to many ladies and diplomats. After the ball, the suite was invited to the malachite hall, where the Empress and the Grand Duchesses thanked them.

Sunday, January 18, 1888: His Majesty is very friendly to the Minister in an intimate circle, but for all his autocratic bearing, he does not dare to support him explicitly. I tell Giers that I think it’s extremely flattering to be able to work for the good of the country and millions of people while staying above all these troubles. He replies that it is, of course. All these peculiarly bestowed honors of our day are of no value whatsoever in his eyes, but the attitude of the Emperor in connection with the attacks [on de Giers] in the press, which he encourages, undermines his confidence, and even puts him in a false position before the diplomats with whom he has to do business.

Nicholas Karlovich Giers

6/11: Note [Greg]: The next entry follows a contentious session of the State Council in January 1889 discussing Alexander III’s proposal to roll back his father’s judicial reforms. Nearly all of the Council, led by Grand Duke Michael Nikolaievich, opposed this and asked that the issue to examined by jurists. The Professor Martens mentioned was a legal advisor. Lambsdorff writes: “Almost everyone is triumphant when Pobedonostsev arrives at the end of the meeting. When he learns of the results, he is enraged, tears out what is said to be the last of his hair, and seems ready to vilify poor Martens, whose work has brought about the whole incident.” (January 26, 1888)

Tuesday, January 27, 1888: I look forward to the Minister’s return. He arrives around 2 o’clock, but doesn’t send for me until half an hour later. As soon as I entered the study, Giers closed the door and said that he wanted to see me alone, to tell me what had just happened between him and the Emperor. He had never had a report like this before. When he entered His Majesty’s room, the Emperor was walking up and down the room, white with anger, with his lower jaw trembling with rage. In a highly irritated tone, the Emperor spoke of what had happened the day before in the Council of State. “I knew everything in half an hour and I had never been so angry in my life! Even Vladimir [Grand Duke Vladimir, Alexander III’s brother] came to inform me and said that there had never been such a scandal in the State Council. This is the conspiracy of this cabal of lawyers, and your Martens is in a conspiracy! He is severely reprimanded. All these judicial institutions know what they are getting at….You don’t know, but I know it’s a conspiracy, and when the measure was to be decided, a measure of internal order, the Foreign Secretary stops everything again to ask permission from Europe! Well, if after that the press attacks the ministry, so be it! The whole of Russia will curse you! Now the case has been transferred to the departments and will drag on for a month. There’s nothing I can do about it!” To the Minister’s objection that he could not, however, keep silent about the remarks made by our legal adviser, a professor of international law, and that it was he, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was obliged to guard foreign relations with Europe, which he had no right to ignore, and that he did not intend to postpone the matter for so long a period as decided by the Minister of Justice, Manassein, and the Grand Duke, The Emperor said: “Manassein had nothing else to do, and I soaped the head of Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich! He’s also trying to be liberal and follow that direction!” In a word, the sovereign makes it clear that he intends to nullify the judicial reform, that is, one of the reforms which glorified the reign of his late father. Giers says that His Majesty was in such a state of rage that he could have torn a man to pieces. The minister is sure that the result of this scene should have been his resignation. Keeping perfectly calm, he told himself that in the end it was better to fall victim to the service of justice and fidelity to duty. Without the slightest emotion, he listened to the raging Emperor to the end, and then said to him: “Your Majesty, allow me to say two words: I am deeply grieved at all that you deign to say to me, but I have not thought of doing anything contrary to your will; I thought and was convinced that I was doing my duty, and I confess that I do not know how I could have acted otherwise.” [Alexander III did not ask Giers to resign and he stayed in office]

Saturday, April 4, 1888: The procession in the palace yesterday was cold and cheerless. Their Majesties seemed very sad and anxious, and, contrary to all customs, immediately after the ceremony left again for Gatchina. The fact is that they were very afraid of a new assassination attempt. Only Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna and Princess Eugenie of Oldenburg were present at matins; all the Grand Duchesses were absent.

Lambsdorff never married; he was gay, and while his career demanded discretion everyone at Court and in society knew of his sexual orientation. His enemies sometimes tried to use this against him; even Nicholas II derisively referred to him as “Madame” behind his back. This occasionally got to Lambsdorff: his diary entries record his displeasures and disappointment over perceived court snubs and the fact that invitations to events were rarely extended to courtier Savitsky, his partner of more than thirty years. But Lambsdorff never let the gossip derail his work, and he was one of the most dedicated of Alexander III’s and Nicholas II’s officials.

Three different editions of Lambsdorff’s diaries have been published. The first volume, covering 1886-1890, appeared in Moscow in 1926. This did not contain the full diary entries for those years, but rather a selection. In 1934 a second volume of diaries appeared, this one covering 1891-1892, and again published in Moscow. In 1991 a third volume of entries, covering 1894-1896, was published in Moscow. The complete diaries, I believe, exist in GARF, and most likely cover 1866-1907.

Of these, I possess only the first volume, covering 1886-1890. I sought these out because Lambsdorff’s diaries were often quoted in works on the last two Romanov sovereigns. I have combed through these entries to find references to the Imperial Family. Those will form the bulk of these posts: Lambsdorff often wrote pages and pages about this or that foreign issue, and for the most part I have avoided giving these entries as they are detailed but dull.

I did these translations over a decade ago [i.e. pre-2013 - JA]; since then I have made some slight revisions in the texts when using quotations in books or articles, so there may well be a disparity between a few of the quotes presented here and those given in my other more recent works, but the essence is the same and nothing would seriously affect the information or tone.

Finally, I also note that I give these selected excerpts without any attempt at fact-checking or correction. Lambsdorff does frequently relate unflattering details and scandalous assertions about the Imperial Family. Many will be a bit controversial, but remember that Lambsdorff had regular access to the Romanovs and he is often drawing on his eyewitness observations in making his entries.

The selected excerpts all cover the years 1886-1890 and the reign of Alexander III. These come from Dnevnik V. N. Lambsdorf, 1886-1890, published in Moscow in 1926 by the State Publishing House.

I hope you will enjoy these posts – they are informative, sometimes provocative, and always insightful in offering an intimate look at the life of Alexander III and his family.

Count Vladimir Nikolaevich Lamsdorff, 1845-1907

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Saturday, December 6 1886: On my return home, taking advantage of the fact that the weather is at last clear and dry, I went for a walk along the new embankment, while my minister [Nicholas de Giers, 1820-1895, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1882-1895] has gone to the Anichkov Palace, where today there is a ceremony in honor of the heir’s Name Day. He comes back around 11:30 and calls me. We talk about the decline of the court. He recalls how solemnly this day was celebrated during the reign of Emperor Nicholas. Giers told me that lately he had even noticed a slight change in the relations between the Emperor and the Empress: there was neither the former ease nor the former credulity. During one of the minister’s last receptions, the Empress took from her desk several anonymous letters, in which the Emperor was strongly attacked, and showed them to Nicholas Karlovich [de Giers], saying: “But, my God, where do they get all this from, when there is not a word of truth here?” Meanwhile, Giers is inclined to think that Her Majesty is beginning to have doubts and that she is preoccupied with all this.

Monday, December 15 1886: I ask the Minister if he will not propose to the Emperor to telegraph to Baron Mohrenheim [Baron Arttur Morenheim, Russian Ambassador in Paris] to warn Princess Yurievskaya [Princess Catherine Yurievskaya, morganatic wife of Alexander II] that she must not receive a Bulgarian deputation if the latter, as they say, out of a desire to do something disagreeable to the Emperor, tries to offer the throne to the young prince [i.e., her son, Prince George Yurievsky]. The Minister writes this point on his paper but says that it is difficult for him to submit to His Majesty all that he has to say to him, as the report does not last long, and it is often necessary to interrupt it on account of breakfast. The Minister sometimes fears that he is invited to the table only out of habit, and that it is embarrassing for Their Majesties. The other day the Empress appeared with a swollen cheek. Often it seems to him that there are fights between the august spouses, and then he is very embarrassed. The Minister finds that it would very often be desirable to have a second report, but he is embarrassed to ask for one precisely because of the breakfast that would inevitably follow.

Wednesday, December 17 1886: In the evening, Hamburger’s [Andrei Hamburger, Russian Ambassador to Switzerland] concert….Grand Duchess Alexandra Iosifovna has come with her two sons to the concert and is terribly annoying to the Minister, who is strongly impressed by the recklessness of our representative in Belgrade.

Monday, December 22 1886: By 7:30 we arrive at the Warsaw railway station to go to Gatchina. The road is long; Thankfully, it’s not cold….[At Gatchina station] A carriage and a rider are immediately placed at our disposal, the horses are so anxious that they almost fly. The park is extremely beautiful, especially the large spruces and pines sprinkled with snow. The electrically lit palace is also a grandiose though somewhat gloomy and austere spectacle. As the train is a little late, we are invited to go to the theater immediately upon arrival. As we walked through the middle part of the building into the theater hall, which, as far as I could see, was in an arsenal square…I met Giers, who called out to me. We all enter together….As soon as we were ushered into the theater, where I was seated this time in the stalls, the Imperial Family entered….The first French play is rather boring….During the intermission, the Emperor and the Grand Dukes go out to smoke in the next room. The ladies remain in the hall. The Empress and Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna are very elegant in light blue dresses. Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna in crimson is much less beautiful than usual. She is the youngest, but in an extremely dark toilette that does not suit her. The second play, also one-act, in Russian and staged for this evening, is very funny….In the second intermission we notice that Grand Duke Vladimir is taking away Giers, who, after talking to him, comes up to me and tells me that the Emperor is going to the city tomorrow morning, so that his report cannot take place; he will spend the night in Gatchina and will return only tomorrow at 10 o’clock by the Imperial train. He will call at the Ministry, take everything that has been received and prepared, and then go with a report to be held at the Anichkov Palace….The Empress approaches some of the ladies, who do not leave their chairs. The Emperor returns, and the third French play, also in one act, begins….I again took my chair in the stalls….The performance ends around midnight, and we go to dinner in the large hall downstairs. Their Majesties occupied the front seats in the stalls, while the Tsesarevich and Grand Duke George sat in the more distant rows. The other Grand Dukes in the box on the left came out of the theater hall and bowed graciously to everyone. I notice that the Emperor lets the Empress go ahead and Maria Pavlovna immediately behind her, and walks beside Elizabeth Feodorovna, who passes third. He seems to have a great deal of sympathy for this belle soeur. Then comes the good, fat old Catherine Mikhailovna [Grand Duchess Catherine Mikhailovna, 1827-1894, third daughter of Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich, son of Emperor Paul] and after her, her daughter who is also beginning to lose her freshness, but whose appearance I like because there is a kind of innate greatness in her. Their Majesties and Their Highnesses are followed by the ladies in the front rows of seats, and then by us men. I see the ladies of state, all the ladies-in-waiting of the palace, and others from among the invitees. As we descend the stairs and enter the dining room, I see that almost all the tables are occupied. I went to a very beautiful gallery in the Gothic style, where I sat down at the second round table….Opposite me I notice the portrait of the Duke of Courland, Biron. In the middle of this long but very narrow room is a table at which the heir to the throne is seated; beside us at the first table sits Grand Duke Michael [Grand Duke Michael Nikolaievich, 1832-1909, fourth son of Nicholas I] and others. The Emperor appears for a moment, but comes only to this first table. After supper, the Heir very kindly shakes hands with me. At the door to the large living room we find ourselves in a mousetrap. Their Majesties are to pass through this door when they leave; they are talking, and in the meantime we stand huddled together like herrings in a barrel, unable to advance, and at the same time not daring to block the passage….As she left the hall, the Empress…passed close to us. I can tell you that her teeth are even more ruined than thought: black nubs are everywhere, and Her Majesty probably knows this, because she smiles a little unnaturally, but she cannot, however, hide her bad teeth. Her jaws are too big and so is her mouth. Her somewhat hoarse voice and nasal manner are also far from charming. With the loss of her long-preserved freshness, however, our Empress will lose all external attractiveness. The Heir to the Throne looks beautiful; apparently, there was no trace of his ill health. He hasn’t grown, but he’s matured somewhat. He has a lively and intelligent look, but despite the fact that he is already 19 years old, he still looks like a child. [In fact, he was still 18, but Lamsdorff’s description of him as childlike is consistent with others who knew him as a teenager - JA]

Tsesarevich Nicholas, circa 1888 (above) and 1885 (below right, with his brother George), capturing the very youthful look he had around the time of Lamsdorff’s description

Wednesday, December 24, 1886: The Minister tells me that Their Majesties gave him the most friendly and touching reception at the Anichkov Palace. The Emperor wished him to stay for luncheon at 3 o’clock. The Empress came out in a sort of bonnet, and after lunch took him to see the inner apartments, where changes had just been made. The bedroom will be on the upper floor. On this occasion the Empress asked her husband whether he was not sorry to part with the room which they had occupied for so many years, to which he replied, “Not at all.” In a word, the most cordial affection, but no visible manifestations of it towards my dear Minister! Admittedly, it’s a strange system. Meanwhile, Giers, thanks to his beautiful nature, always looks at things from their best side and seems to have cheered up somewhat. The Empress asked him what had become of his hair, and laughed very much when he told her of his intention to have a wig. But they did not dwell on this subject for too long: the Emperor is as bald as a knee, and the poor Empress, they say, is no richer than he is in this respect, but she packs what little is left and completes it with a very skillfully curled chignon piece….We must do her justice: she does not like to part with the sovereign and follows him like a shadow.

The new issue contains articles on:

** The Mdivani family of Georgia, whose father was a sometime member of the staff of Nicholas II, and who collectively took Hollywood and the artistic world of the 1920s by storm, earning the nickname ‘The Marrying Mdivanis.’

** The Imperial couple who are often known as ‘the first Nicholas and Alexandra,’ Emperor Nicholas I and his wife, the Prussian-born Empress Alexandra, who ruled 1825-1855, and whose family and reign became a model for the second couple of these names.

** The Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, the German-born Princess who transcended an unhappy Russian marriage to widely influence Russian politics and society; prior to her death in 1873, she was widely known as ‘the family intellectual.’

** Prince Artemy Nikolaievich Iskander, legitimized son of the scandalous Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich. This is the first part of an occasional series (released as research dictates) on the relationships and children of this most interesting and troublesome grandson of Nicholas I.

The issue also contains book reviews and an in-depth interview with the author Frances Welch, who talks about her approach to writing and her favorites among her many books. Frances has written seven books for Short Books on subjects associated with the Romanov Dynasty and late Imperial Russia.

Then you can also read our introductions and afterword, which include some thoughts about and some light-hearted memories of Greg as well.

An aside for those who might think that history is disconnected from modern life, here are some fun facts that tie topics in this issue of Atlantis to recent pop-culture:

During the mid-to-late 1920s, when the Mdivani family lived in Paris, a family in the same apartment house - Americans who had lived in both Italy and France for a number of years - had a small son, Robert, who enjoyed spending time in the lively Georgian household, and was there so often that the Mdivani parents joked that he was yet another son. This little boy grew up to be Robert Stack, actor and eventual host of ‘Unsolved Mysteries.’ He remembered the Mdivanis fondly.

And Frances Welch is a member of a very artistic family whose niece Florence is lead singer of the band Florence and the Machine!

We hope you will enjoy this issue and will look forward to future ones, as we hope to produce two substantial issues a year, each around 100 pages long and full of information and interest.

General Eugene Konstantinovich Klimovich, 1871-1930, was a military officer; in 1906 he was head of the Moscow branch of the Okhrana, and in 1909 was made head of the Special Section of the Police Department; in 1916 he was Director of the Police Department.

Klimovich: [in 1916] I was told that [Prime Minister Boris Sturmer] had asked Her Majesty to report to the Emperor about the necessity of removing me from the post of director of the police department.

Question: Did Stürmer ask the former Empress?

Klimovich: Yes. He claimed that I was insulting him….I was informed that Vyrubova was looking for a meeting with me. I had never seen or known her before. I then turned to Alexander Khvostov [Minister of Justice 1915-1916 and uncle of the previously interrogated Alexei Nikolaevich Khvostov] and asked if he would reproach me if I left. He said: “Please, please, and find out what is the matter.” I arrived at Vyrubova’s and said to her: “Did you want to see me?” She asked, “Were you the mayor of Kerch? The Empress asked about creating a sanatorium for soldiers there.”

Question: What was this conversation like?

Klimovich: It made an impression on me. It seemed as if Vyrubova was ordered to look at me, but absolutely nothing came of it. I said goodbye and left. After a while I was told “You need to see Gregory Rasputin.”

Question: Who told you this?

Klimovich: [Paul Gregorievich Kurlov, former Assistant Minister of the Interior]. He came and said: “You should meet him.” I said that I had no need to do so. “No, you have to reckon with him,” Kurlov said. “I know that you are not looking for anything, but he can make trouble for you. Please go see him.” Intelligence information warned me that it was Vyrubova’s show and that Rasputin should meet me and report to her. This offended me.

Question: And when was this?

Klimovich: When Khvostov joined the Ministry, it was during this period. I allow myself to draw a brief conclusion. Stürmer resigned from the post of Minister of the Interior. Against his wishes, I was retained as director of the police department. I had to be removed. Then the pressure against me began in Tsarskoye Selo….

Question: Did you personally know the former Empress?

Elizabeth (Yelizaveta) Feodorovna, as a nursing sister.

Klimovich: She never saw me. Probably she heard about me from Elizabeth Feodorovna, who loved me and treated me very attentively. Perhaps this made it necessary for her to check Stürmer’s words and decide whether to satisfy his request or not. So it came down to a personal impression, and Vyrubova and Rasputin were entrusted with investigating me.

Question: So did you meet Rasputin?

Klimovich: Yes, I did. I went first to see Vyrubova, and after that one of the people standing not far from Vyrubova said that I should see Rasputin….A few days later, Kurlov appeared and said: “You must see Rasputin.” I refused. Then he said: “Come with me to Badmaev’s. Think about and decide by tomorrow. I agreed. The next day I went to Kurlov and said: “You know, Peter Gregorievich, Stürmer does not like me anyway, and if he finds out that I have seen Rasputin, he will think that I am conducting some behind-the-scenes intrigue. It would be extremely unpleasant for me. Fire me, but I won’t go.” I returned home. A day or two later the phone rang. “Who is it?” I asked. “It is I, Gregory Rasputin.” “What do you want?” “I need to see you. People are investigating you.” “Thank you for wanting to help me, but I don’t need it.” “You come to me.” “No, I cannot.” “Put on a uniform and come to me.” “I don’t have a uniform.” “So you won’t come?” “No.” “Then I’ll come to you.” And he soon arrived in a car. He came in alone but I was told afterward that some Jewish-type gentleman was with him. It must have been Simanovich [Rasputin’s secretary Aron Simanovich]. But he came in alone. This was the first time I saw him. He crossed himself before an icon and bowed. I offered him an armchair and sat down in a corner of the room….I asked what I could do for him….”I was told that you are a beast,” he said. “Well, you never know what people say. All people lie….” Unfortunately Manuilov so stirred up the mood in Tsarskoye Selo against me that they told Sturmer I was against him.

Question: When you were director of the police department, did you receive instructions through Stürmer with reference to the will of the then Emperor or Empress that the person of Rasputin should be protected as a member of the Imperial Family?

Klimovich: Stürmer did not tell me this, but approximately, without mentioning the Imperial names, said this to General Globachev [Konstantin Globachev, Director of the Okhrana] who reported it to me. In general, Stürmer did not have any conversations with me about the protection of Rasputin….

Question: What circles of irresponsible people who influenced the ministers of that time and the direction of domestic policy do you know of?

Klimovich: It is very difficult for me to answer this question….It seemed to me that there was no organization influencing it; it was chaos, complete chaos. In my opinion, in the center of this chaos stood Madame Vyrubova. This is all my personal impression. Those who succeeded attached themselves to her….

Question: I will move on to another area. You mentioned that Elizabeth Feodorovna knew you from your activities in Moscow….Did you talk to the Grand Duchess about Rasputin’s influence on the course of state affairs?

Klimovich: I had to.

Question: Did she give you her opinion?

Klimovich: The Grand Duchess didn’t tell me directly, but I definitely felt that she had an extremely negative attitude. I would call it an almost mournful attitude toward the Rasputin situation….

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Next is the interrogation of General Sergei Semyonovich Khabalov on March 22, 1917. Born in 1858, Khabalov was Commander of the Petrograd Military District in 1917 during the February Revolution.

Khabalov: About nine o’clock on the evening of February 25, I received a telegram signed by His Imperial Majesty: “I order that tomorrow the disorders in the capital, which are inadmissible in the difficult time of war with Germany and Austria, be stopped. Nicholas.”

Question: Where is this telegram now, General?

Khabalov: I can’t tell you, because I handed it over to the Chief of Staff. Perhaps the Chief of Staff returned it to me, but I don’t remember. This telegram…how shall I tell you? To be frank and truthful, it was like being hit in the face. How was I expected to stop them tomorrow? The Emperor ordered that the disorders be stopped at all costs. What should I do? How was I to stop them? When they said, “Give me bread,” you could give them bread and end it. But when their flags said, “Down with the Autocracy,” what kind of bread would calm them down? But the Emperor ordered that we were to shoot. This killed me, absolutely killed me. Because that was a last resort, and I would not have used it….That evening all commanders of the military guards gathered to hear my report and orders for the next day….I announced: “Gentlemen, the Emperor has ordered that the riots must be stopped today. This is a last resort but we must use it. If the crowd is small and not aggressive or armed with banners, use cavalry divisions to disperse it. If the crowd is aggressive and has banners, then warn with three shots in the air, and after that, open fire….

Question: You reported the results to General Headquarters?

Khabalov: Yes, on the 26th. I reported: “I cannot carry out your orders, Your Majesty.” I said that the riots continued….I said that I could do nothing. In reply, the next morning I received a notification that General Ivanov [General Nicholas Ivanov] had been appointed in my place. So the next day I was not the commander-in-chief of the district troops….On the evening of the 27th, Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich went to the mayor and expressed his displeasure that he had not been informed of what was happening, and asked what to do with the Guards crew, of which he was the commander. To this I reported to His Highness that the Guards crew was not subordinate to me, that I had no right to dispose of them. The Grand Duke talked to me, then went to talk to the mayor; the conversation, in fact, did not lead to any definite results. In the end, he raised the question: what is to be done with his unit? I asked: “Your Highness, how is it in your unit? If you guarantee that it will act against the rebels, then you are welcome! Here are our reserves, let them come here. If they will not act against the rebels and declare that they will not shoot against their own people, then it is better for them to remain in their barracks.” The Grand Duke said that he could not vouch for how they would behave, but that he would send two companies of the training team, the most reliable….

Boris Vladimirovich Stürmer was born in 1848. After serving as a provincial governor he was appointed to the Ministry of the Interior as a department director before being named to the State Council in 1904. In 1913 he was named Mayor of Moscow.

In January 1916, Nicholas II appointed Stürmer as Prime Minister in place of the elderly Ivan Goremykin. Stürmer asked the Emperor to grant him a change of surname, as he feared he would be accused of pro-German sympathies, but Nicholas refused. Stürmer appointed the disreputable Rasputin protégé Ivan Manasyevich-Manuilov as his secretary. In March 1916 Stürmer also took over as Minister of the Interior. Stürmer’s tenure led to high inflation, food shortages, and political chaos. In November 1916 Nicholas II replaced him as Prime Minister with Alexander Trepov. Stürmer was arrested after the February Revolution and ultimately died of natural causes in September 1917 while incarcerated at the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.

Stürmer: In 1878 I was appointed to the Ministry of the Court and was in charge of the ceremonial part for 15 years. The Emperor began to pay attention to me from the day of the coronation of Emperor Alexander III. After the coronation of his father, he met me at court and he knew who I was, knew my name. Then, when I left the Ministry of the Court, I was governor of Novgorod during the coronation of Emperor Nicholas II. At this point, after the coronation, the Emperor thanked me personally, and I was convinced, as I was a modest man in my habits, that the Emperor knew me. In fact, when I was governor and introduced myself to the Emperor, he spoke to me not as a person he had just met but as a person who was remembered. At that time, I had no personal relations with him. But when I was governor of Yaroslavl the Emperor became interested. He was interested in the Yaroslavl province, which was absolutely exceptional in its abilities, enterprise, and wealth. He was especially struck by the fact that in this province, as early as 1900, very many districts were all literate….He asked why it was so here and not in other places. “There are people who are less enterprising and have less money,” he said. “How do we reach them?” I pointed out that if the Emperor did not release funds to help literacy the people could not make themselves literate with only their kopecks. This is a little thing but it established my relationship with the Sovereign…

Boris Sturmer

Question: You said that you investigated an attempt on the life of Gregory Rasputin?

Stürmer: Yes, it was necessary to find out how true this was.

Question: Why was it necessary for you to find out?

Stürmer: I received instructions.

Question: From whom?

Stürmer: Allow me not to name from whom.

Question: I don’t think it’s your right not to name them. We told you that we are interrogating you as a former official, did we not? Any prosecution will be handled by someone else and if you are accused you will then have the right not to answer questions.

Stürmer: If I say I cannot be sure that the name will not appear in the newspapers tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, that it will not be published at all.

Question: We can use whatever you say at our discretion. It was explained to you that you were obliged to name all persons who gave you instructions.

Stürmer: It was a confidential mission…[The actual order came from Tsarskoye Selo]

Question: As for confidential and secret, information, we have had occasion to point out to you several times the great significance, the national significance, of what is being done here. You are before the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry. We need to know the entire truth. Why are we having a discussion about minor formalities? I am surprised that we have to draw your attention to this again. You say “confidential” and “secret.” These terms must be discarded. You can do as you please, but we need to know why the Chairman of the Council of Ministers became interested in the question of a plot to kill Rasputin.

Stürmer: I was given a secret order to find out about it.

Question: So it turns out that as Chairman of the Council of Ministers you had a delicate assignment about a person of not particularly good reputation?

Stürmer: Yes….

Question: So as Prime Minister you had to watch over a person of doubtful reputation and protect him?

Stürmer: Both. It was like this. Rasputin had recently begun to carouse a great deal, and his secret police complained that there was no way to watch him, because various cars came for him at night and took him away. Where they were going was unknown. He did not want to be followed. He had a lot of people who came and went with him. Consequently, it was necessary to appoint a man who would know approximately which of the persons who came could be dangerous, undesirable, which the lower agents could not do. This was where Manasevich-Manuilov was needed. That was what was entrusted to him. He knew everyone at Rasputin’s….I know that Manuilov visited Rasputin, knew everyone there, knew the names, could keep an eye on them, warn if it was dangerous to deal with them, and so on.

This low quality image of Ivan Manasevich-Manuilov is one of the few available

Question: Did you have information that Rasputin purposely evaded the agents who guarded him?

Stürmer: Yes. There were many issues and I was glad that there was a person who could follow him, because it was painful, all the requests, telegrams.

Question: From whom?

Stürmer: From the Rasputin family, who feared for him, that he was being taken away, that he could not be guarded.

Question: Again, why does the anxiety of the Rasputin family matter to the Chairman of the Council of Ministers? After all, millions of families were worried.

Stürmer: It was not my concern; I left it to Manuilov….

Question: You mentioned that you received a secret order about this. Did you receive other secret orders?

Stürmer: From the same source?

Question: From the same source or from another.

Stürmer: On political issues, I can’t remember. There were many of them. What do you call secret? In the Ministry of Internal Affairs, everything is secret. I can’t call it anything other than secret. For example, the assessment of some outstanding official, who is directly related to the Sovereign Emperor, is again secret….

Question: You consider secret anything that came from those around the Sovereign. So what kinds of comments did those around the Sovereign make?

Stürmer: There were not many.

Question: It will be easy for you to tell us then, if there were not many.

Stürmer: Again I would ask again that it remains secret.

Question: You already know our decision on this. You know that keeping secrets from us is quite inappropriate.

Stürmer: I don’t want it to get into the newspapers.

Question: Excuse me, but we have already told you several times that you cannot withhold information. It is up to the Commission to decide what is made public….

Question: When the Manasevich trial began [for corruption], did you know that efforts were made to postpone or dismiss the case?

Stürmer: I know that this did not happen.

Sokolov: You know that case was scheduled for hearing, but then postponed?

Stürmer: Yes.

Question: Do you know that this came from the Minister of Justice after direct correspondence about it from the Minister of the Imperial Court [Count Vladimir de Freedericksz]?

Stürmer: I heard rumors. As chairman of the Council of Ministers, it did not concern me and I did not interfere in it.

Question: But can you, as the head of the government, explain to us why the legal action against a compromised official was either postponed or pressure was brought to stop it? Why does the trial of a compromised official arouse the interest of the Minister of Justice and the head of the Court? Who exerted this pressure on them?

Stürmer: Allow me not to answer that. You know perfectly well who exerted pressure….

Question: Who was behind trying to get Manasevich’s trial postponed or dropped?

Stürmer: It was Rasputin, but I don’t know how he managed it.

Question: You previously said you knew but that it was secret. We think you know what was behind it. Be kind enough to tell us.

Stürmer: Rasputin must have bothered someone about it.

Question: Who?

Stürmer: I’d rather not say.

Question: You are again referring to secrets. Why do you not want to answer us?

Stürmer: Because it was confidential. Allow me not to say who told me this. But I think it came from Tsarskoye Selo.

Question: From whom?

Stürmer: I think from Vyrubova.

Question: What was her attitude toward Rasputin?

Stürmer: She was completely under his spell. She thought he was some kind of miracle worker, a holy man.

Question: Who could Vyrubova influence?

Stürmer: Well-known persons at Tsarskoye Selo.

Question: Did she have influence on them?

Stürmer: Not influence, but she always asked.

Question: Asked who?

Stürmer: The Empress….

Question: Do you believe that Rasputin influenced the Empress through Vyrubova?

Stürmer: I only know the relationship Vyrubova had with him. She had reverence for him. But I don’t know what happened next.

Question: You have said that Vyrubova did not have a direct influence on the Minister of Justice, but did she use an intermediary?

Stürmer: That I cannot say, for it was not my business. I did not know what was going on in the palace.

Question: You’ve had a court rank for years, haven’t you?

Stürmer: Yes.

Question: What was your attitude to the Court, to Tsarskoye Selo?

Stürmer: I was never that close to the court. For fifteen years I was involved in the ceremonial part of it.

Question: You say that Vyrubova influenced the Empress. Who else at Tsarskoye Selo influenced the Empress?

Stürmer: Only Vyrubova.

Question: Do you know any other persons? Do you know any of the ladies-in-waiting?

Stürmer: No, I don’t….

Question: What was Madame Vyrubova’s character?

Stürmer: Madame Vyrubova was well disposed to the Empress. She is a very kind woman. I admit though that she could ask for a great deal from the Empress. At any rate, a friendship existed between them.

Question: Did you ask Madame Vyrubova how you should answer questions?

Stürmer: No, I never received any instructions like this…..

First some brief biographical background on Protopopov, who was one of the strangest and most disastrous Tsarist officials ever appointed to high office.

Alexander Dmitrievich Protopopov was born in 1866, the son of a wealthy provincial noble and industrialist. Protopopov served in the Horse Grenadier Life Guards Regiment before studying law and taking over as director of his father’s extensive business interests, which he soon ran into the ground through mismanagement.

In 1907 Protopopov was elected to the State Duma as a member of the center Octobrist Party and six years later he was appointed Vice-President under Michael Rodzianko. In the spring of 1916 Protopopov had headed a delegation of Duma deputies visiting England; on his way back to Russia, he stopped in Stockholm, where he met German industrialist Hugo Stinnes and German banker Fritz Warburg. Protopopov later admitted, as will be seen in his interrogation, that the idea of a peace proposal was discussed. When he returned he made a report to Nicholas II.

Unknown to his colleagues, Protopopov had secretly cultivated a friendship with Rasputin, having met the peasant through the mysterious Tibetan herbal doctor Peter Badmaev, who had treated Protopopov for some six months for what is believed to be syphilis. Empress Alexandra decided that Protopopov would make an excellent Minister of the Interior – in that role he would have control of press censorship and, she hoped, keep discussions of the increasingly notorious peasant out of the newspapers. Before even meeting Protopopov, she urged Nicholas to appoint him to the post. “He likes Our Friend [Rasputin] since at least 4 years, and that says much for a man....I don’t know him but I believe in Our Friend’s wisdom and guidance.”

Nicholas hesitated. “I must consider this question,” the Emperor wrote to his wife, “as it has taken me completely by surprise. Our Friend’s opinions of people are sometimes very strange, as you know yourself – so one must be careful especially with appointments to high offices....All these changes make my head go round. In my opinion they are too frequent. In any case they are not good for the internal situation, as each new man brings with him alterations in the administration.”

Alexandra refused to listen. “Please take Protopopov as minister of the interior,” she wrote to Nicholas on September 9, 1916, “as he is one of the Duma – it will make a great effect amongst them & shut their mouths.” And so, rather than face a prolonged battle, and against his own judgment, Nicholas gave in: “It shall be done,” he reported to Alexandra, although – probably owing to his doubts – he only made him Acting Minister of the Interior.

Alexander D. Protopopov, 1866-1918

Once in office Protopopov underwent a dramatic change from the pragmatic politician who seemed to favor liberal ideas. He openly boasted of his closeness to the Imperial couple as a warning to anyone who might oppose him. He wanted to impose stricter censorship and suppress the work of the various military committees; he even hinted that he would soon convince the Emperor to close the Duma. He scorned his former colleagues as beneath his dignity; ordered – and appeared – in an outrageously pompous police uniform complete with sword; and ignored his duties, refusing to attend meetings and pointedly dismissing reports warning of growing peril in the country. “At times,” Rodzianko recalled, Protopopov “gave the impression of not being quite normal.” He spoke in grandiose terms: “I feel that I shall save Russia,” he once insisted. “I feel that I alone can save her.” Protopopov’s behavior became increasingly erratic: he shouted, sobbed for no apparent reason, twitched uncontrollably, and alternated between outbursts of frenetic activity and near catatonic silence. American-born Princess Cantacuzene recalled a dinner party where Protopopov’s bizarre manner was on full display: “Tall, sender, of some elegance of carriage and dress, there was, however, at times a sudden shambing of the head and shoulders, which suggested the possibility of a collapse or degeneracy....Protopopov gave the impression of lacking strength and dignity, and after watching him a little one felt repelled, as if by something abnormal. His agitation was so great that I caught myself wishing dinner would end, and his fidgety presence be removed from my line of vision.”

As noted above, it is likely that Protopopov was in the last stages of a severe form of syphilis. And his reliance on Badmaev’s questionable treatments – mysterious “arousing powders” (possibly cocaine) and other remedies – apparently only exacerbated his startling outbursts.

During his time in office, Protopopov repeatedly consulted with Rasputin, Vyrubova, and the Empress. His increasingly retrograde policies and erratic behavior made him a laughingstock and, after Rasputin, probably the most hated man in Russia. When Nicholas II appointed Alexander Trepov as the new Prime Minister in November 1916, it was done with Trepov’s insistence that he would only take the post if Protopopov was dismissed. Nicholas promised to do so, but Empress Alexandra intervened. After her letters had no effect, she traveled to Army Headquarters and spent three days convincing Nicholas to keep Protopopov in place. The Emperor not only agreed but raised Protopopov to full Minister of the Interior. Over the next three months, Nicholas II ignored repeated warnings from military and cabinet officials that Protopopov was mentally unstable and could not be trusted.

After the Revolution Protopopov was arrested and interrogated. At first he was kept in the Peter and Paul Fortress but his hallucinations became so severe that he was admitted to a military hospital. After the Bolsheviks came to power, he was executed by the Cheka.

Interrogation of A. D. Protopopov, March 21

Question: How were you appointed?

Protopopov: When I returned from abroad [from the UK and a stop in Sweden], I saw the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sazonov, to whom I related all the remarkable incidents that had happened to us….I told him about my meeting with Mr. Warburg [German banker] in Stockholm. My whole story interested Sazonov, and he said it was important that I tell all this to the Emperor in detail. He then went to Headquarters and he must have reported this to the Emperor. When Sazonov returned, he handed me a letter saying that the Emperor wished to see me….The Emperor was very affectionate with me. I had rather long conversations with the Emperor, three times during the day….I also spoke to him in detail about the Jewish question….”We will have to speak again,” the Emperor said…because I put it quite broadly….Of course, it was no secret that Rasputin was often at the palace and was aware of everything going on there. When I was Minister of the Interior, I explained his influence by referring to the past influence of others at court. In my opinion, he was not quite normal. There was a strange look to him. He could influence some, especially women, perhaps hypnotically….

Question: You are skipping over your relations with Badmaev. You mentioned in passing that you were treated by him, you were really treated by him for a long time, but you did not visit him only for treatment….

Protopopov: I only saw Rasputin there a few times, four or five, but Stürmer actually assured me that he [Rasputin] had proposed me [as a minister]; but I did not trust this since the Emperor told me that I was his personal choice….Now, did Rasputin look out for me? Probably yes, because he always praised me to my face, and secondly, despite all the abomination in him, all the harm this man had done, I could not attribute it to him personally. It was his lousy circle of ugly, immoral people who sought personal gain, who pushed dirty deals through him. It seemed terrible to me. My goal was to eliminate this, so that there would be no scandal, no more public drinking and revelry….I must say that Badmaev also asked Rasputin to give up drinking….The first time I saw Rasputin was when I was ill and sick at Badmaev’s for six months. I could not get out of bed. Badmaev brought Rasputin to me. I was very surprised to see this man. I imagined him to be different, with gentle manners. I myself am a native of the Nizhny Novgorod province, and he reminded me of the Old Believers’ there. I did not think he was stupid, but I also thought he was not fully sane….

Protopopov: When I first came to the Emperor, I really reported to him that I had no experience in these matters; he told me that he wanted me to deal with this and believed that I would carry out these issues cleanly and honestly. I said that, of course, I would do everything to make the Ministry honest….At the time I did not realize to what extent the Ministry of Interior functioned or how it was set up….I never asked anyone to intercede for me, I have never made such a request to anyone, and I have troubled anyone with it. I thought that I might be appointed Minister of Trade because the Emperor had spoken about it, and I know that Sazonov [Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov] and Rodzianko [Chairman of the State Duma Michael Rodzianko] spoke about me to the Emperor….The Emperor was so affectionate and kind, so trusting of me, that it seemed impossible that a revolution could take place. He was a good, trusting man and he immediately agreed to pardon people. I mentioned some Jewish question and he agreed that I could pursue this. I issued a circular for Moscow which expanded residential rights of Jews…A broader framework was worked out for expanding Jewish rights but the Emperor said that it was not the time. “Now there is a war, and a certain kind of Antisemitism had developed among our troops, so it is best not to involve my name in this.” But I submitted five points to the Council of Ministers that would expand Jewish rights. It probably would have been done if I could have collected a majority of votes [Note: Protopopov actually did nothing to pursue this with his fellow ministers according to historians].

Protopopov: My program was as follows. I thought that during the war it was very important to bring the war to an end, and in such a way that by the end of the war it would be possible to give a different system than the one that existed. I thought of giving a responsible ministry by the end of the war, that was what I thought, but for the time being I would confine myself to something else: judicial responsibility for a vote of the Duma of Ministers to the Senate or to the Special Presence of the Senate. These ideas were set forth by me… and the Emperor approved but later said it had to be worked out legally. But then for a month and a half I became sick and did not work…Everyday at work was a real torment, life but hard labor. Then I began arguing with myself about what to do. My soul was conflicted on policies. Everything turned out so terribly that it was impossible to imagine any worse misfortune….All of my horrors, the roots of my misfortune, came in the newspapers. They began pouring out slop on me endlessly…Forgive me, I think very badly. I try to speak sincerely but my head doesn’t work well…

Question: At the time you were a Minister, how did you feel about the Emperor ruling the country without the State Duma?

Protopopov: When I first got there I thought it was impossible to given without the State Duma. But I changed my mind when I was appointed minister. They all treated me very badly. I was not their minister. They looked at me askance, and I thought the Duma would support me….

Question: The country demanded the existence of the State Duma and its work, and then the Emperor issued a decree dissolving the Duma. You countersigned this decree. What was your attitude?

Protopopov: I was put into a terrible position. As soon as the State Duma opened, it began to scold me terribly. It left a bad, personal aftertaste….I always tried to be a man of the middle but I was pushed further right. The State Duma was terrible; it was raising the unsettled mood in the country. I was frightened. I saw that we would not make it to the end of the war and that something would happen soon….

Question: The country wanted a Ministry of Confidence. But you proposed a different approach….

Protopopov: Yes, although it must be said that the Emperor understood perfectly well that it was necessary to make a move towards the wishes of the people, and he would have done this after the war….But I found out people went before the Emperor and called me mad. God knows what drove them to this slander….I asked the Emperor who had done this and he told me both Stürmer and Trepov [Stürmer’s replacement as Prime Minister Alexander Trepov]….

Question: When did you become close to Rasputin?

Protopopov: I had no intimacy with him.

Question: When did you begin meeting with him?

Protopopov: I saw him for the first time when I was sick at Badmaev’s. Badmaev brought him to me….

Question: When you returned from abroad, from Stockholm, did you go and see the Empress before you saw the Emperor?

Protopopov: I don’t remember that.

Quention: But that is of great importance, because you were appointed through Rasputin by Stürmer, perhaps through the Empress?

Protopopov: I remember that I was with the Empress when I was a minister, and I was not before my appointment.

Question: What kind of conversation took place between you and the Empress?

Protopopov: Nothing special. Just ordinary topics….She was a very educated person, and it was very interesting to talk to her….I had a fantasy: Michael Vladimirovich Rodzianko told me that I could be the Minister of Trade and Industry….

Question: Did you have any conversations with Badmaev about this?

Protopopov: Badmaev was always giggling and laughing that I would be a minister….I will say frankly that I did not believe what Rasputin told me. I thought he might advise but that he could not decide.

Question: Badmaev told you, and now it turns out that Rasputin told you that you would be a minister?

Protopopov: No, Rasputin didn’t tell me anything. He only said that I needed to see the Emperor, and then I would be appointed a minister….

Question: You insist that Rasputin did not repeatedly tell you to visit the Emperor and that you would be made a minister?

Protopopov: No, not that it was said repeatedly, but once.

Question: How many years have you known Badmaev?

Protopopov: 20-25 years.

Question: When did you meet Rasputin at Badmaev’s?

Protopopov: When I was ill.

Piotr Badmaev, practitioner of Tibetan medicine and spy/agent provocateur for Russia in Central Asia. His acquaintance with Nicholas II went back to the start of the reign, and he was also a friend of Nicholas’s foreign policy mentor Esper Ukhtomskii, a strong believer in Russia’s divine mission in the east. After 1905 or so, Badmaev was known in St Petersburg, rightly or wrongly, chiefly as a quack.

Question: When was it?

Protopopov: About three years ago.

Question: You said that you met with Rasputin 12-15 times?

Protopopov: As I remember maybe 15 times.

Question: What conversations did you have with Rasputin during your meetings on political topics?

Protopopov: I did not touch on political topics, but, for example, he could not stand Khvostov or Beletsky [Stephan Beletsky, Director of the Police]. He would say: “They’re bad, bad.” I did not talk to him about politics - what kind of political conversations could there be with him? Lately, he indeed had given some advice, even of a practical nature: for example, in order to avoid food lines, to make sure that people are let in through one door and let out through another.

Question: You said that he told you about his influence at Tsarskoye Selo?

Protopopov: No, he didn’t say that exactly but it was clear. He apparently did not hide from anyone that he was close to them.

Question: To whom?

Protopopov: Close to the whole Imperial Family.

Question: With the former Empress, the Tsar’s daughters; and persons surrounding the Empress?

Protopopov: The closest person to the Emperor and the Empress was Vyrubova. She was one of his.

Question: Can you say that when you were the Minister of Internal Affairs, there were attempts to influence you on the part of Rasputin, Vyrubova, Andronikov and others?

Protopopov: Yes, that’s definitely true.

Question: For example did Rasputin ask you to make so-and-so a governor?

Protopopov: It happened all the time. There were a lot of notes from him. After all, God knows how many of them. It was absolutely impossible and ugly….He didn’t pressure me, he’d just send notes, writing, “My dear.” It was a disgrace.

Question: You say that he did not pressure you but this is evasive on your part.

Protopopov: I only fulfilled his requests when they seemed possible. The rest I did not fulfill.

Question: Let me ask what was considered possible. Would you have appointed someone had Rasputin not requested it?

Protopopov: If the right man had come in then perhaps I would have fulfilled it….

Question: In addition to the influence of Rasputin, did you have any requests and pressure from Vyrubova or Andronikov?

Protopopov: From Andronikov? No, no requests or pressure from him…

Question: There were cases when, before the appointment of persons to posts in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, you recommended that the candidates go see Rasputin.

Protopopov: No, I positively don’t remember that.

Question: You really don’t remember this?

Protopopov: Sending them to Rasputin before hiring them?

Question: Yes. We have names of people….

Protopopov: No, I definitely deny it. I may have asked if someone knew Rasputin.

Question: Why would that matter to the Minister of Internal Affairs?

Protopopov: I didn’t think it was wrong to ask anything about it…..

Question: When Rasputin was killed, there is a rumor that you came to his apartment on the same day.

Protopopov: Me, after the murder? Never, nothing of the kind.

Question: So you weren’t in Rasputin’s apartment after his murder and didn’t send anybody?

Protopopov: I sent the police.

Question: What did you report on this matter to Tsarskoye Selo, and what did you advise the Emperor and Empress?

Protopopov: It was like this: when he was killed, I was told in the morning that he had gone out and disappeared; the search began, and there was the testimony of a policeman who said that he had been summoned, that Purishkevich [Duma member Vladimir Purishkevich] and Felix [Prince Felix Yusupov] were in that room, and that they were both drunk. Then the search was carried out. Everybody was very worried, of course, everyone was alarmed by this event. Then, in the evening, a galosh was found, and the body was dragged out and was laid under the bridge; then he was taken to the almshouse. But I was not involved. I knew what was being done. I understand that everything must be done as quietly as possible to avoid a scandal. Then, after the autopsy had been performed, he was taken to a certain place.

Question: What interests me is that, at the time you, you told Tsarskoye Selo that this was an outrageous crime and that it was necessary for the Ministry of Internal Affairs to conduct an internal inquiry in parallel with the judicial investigation. Did you say this?

Protopopov: I put this all on a paper that was handed over at Tsarskoye Selo.

Question: You’re not answering the question. Did you tell Tsarskoye Selo that this was an outrageous crime and that it was therefore necessary to entrust you with a special investigation?

Protopopov: Yes….

Question: Orlov, the chairman of the Union of the Russian People in Moscow, submitted a memorandum to you in early 1917 on which he wrote, “To Anna Alexandrovna” [Vyrubova]….This was addressed to you as Minister of Internal Affairs. Why was Vyrubova included?

Protopopov: Because very often it was impossible to show the Emperor everything that might be of interest. Probably it concerned some interesting economic question.

Question: What connection did Anna Vyrubova have with such a question and with the Minister of the Interior?

Protopopov: She was constantly in the Palace.

Empress Alexandra (right), with Anna Alexandrovna Vyrubova, with whom she shared a close but frequently ambivalent bond, riven with impatience and bouts of mutual jealousy and suspicion

Question: So you, as Minister of the Interior, found it necessary to conduct official business through ladies-in-waiting?

Protopopov: Why not? There was nothing terrible about it, there were no secrets.

Question: Under the former laws the Minister of the Interior had the right to submit any reports to the Emperor. Why involve yourself with Anna Vyrubova?

Protopopov: She could read them and pass them on.

Question: Did this happen often?

Protopopov: Not very often, but it did happen, because very often it was awkward to send things. The fact is that sending a report as part of a humble report to the adjutant on duty was not as easy as sending it to Vyrubova, who could pass it along at any time.

Question: Have you ever had cases when, instead of officially sending a report to Tsarskoye Selo, you instead sent it privately to Vyrubova?

Protopopov: Well, she was always there on duty.

Question: To whom?

Protopopov: To the Empress.

Question: So you admit that you sent messages to the former sovereign through this lady-in-waiting Vyrubova?

Protopopov: If it was interesting. If she didn’t think it was interesting she could ignore it.

Question: So she decided when to inform the former sovereign?

Protopopov: Sometimes.

Question: What was the legal position of the Minister of the Interior to the Empress?

Protopopov: Do you mean how did I communicate with Alexandra Feodorovna?

Question: According to the law.

Protopopov: Was it illegal? It depends. For example, it might have been if I had shown highly secret documents. Perhaps I did not give enough thought and did not appreciate the full importance of what was sent. Perhaps I took the word of others that things were unimportant. If I knew something was important I probably would not have shown it to the Empress but to the Emperor.

Question: So what was in the note from Orlov that you considered important enough to pass to Vyrubova for the Empress?

Protopopov: It probably had something to do with the food supply.

Question: So you found it necessary to inform the former Empress about food issues through her lady-in-waiting?

Protopopov: I sent many such notes. It didn’t seem curious to me.

Question: What did you, as Minister of the Interior, recommend to the Empress?

Protopopov: Questions on food, for example. Alexandra Feodorovna was keenly interested in such matters as food….I must say that Alexandra Feodorovna’s attitude towards me was very affectionate, and perhaps that’s why I acted so simply.

Question: Tell me, did the former Empress talk to you about the food question during your meetings?

Protopopov: Constantly.

Question: What other questions did you talk about?

Protopopov: Everything.

Question: State issues?

Protopopov: Yes…..I often spoke to the Emperor, the Empress, Voeikov [Vladimir Voeikov, Palace Commandant] and the ladies-in-waiting about important topics….

Question: Please tell us all the cases when you, through Rasputin, submitted reports to the Emperor or Empress concerning state affairs?

Protopopov: I don’t know. I didn’t do that.

Question: You knew that Rasputin and Vyrubova were on close terms?

Protopopov: I don’t think so.

Question: This is true and you have already said it. You knew this.

Protopopov: Yes, I knew it.

Question: So knowing this, you say you submitted reports through Vyrubova. Did these include reports on state affairs with Rasputin’s recommendations?

Protopopov: Rasputin wouldn’t understand such issues. I wouldn’t talk to him about them. I rarely saw him.

Question: Do you think Rasputin was stupid?

Protopopov: Not stupid. He was intelligent but in an undeveloped way….

Question: Did you submit official reports to the Empress instead of to the Emperor?

Protopopov: Not official reports. Sometimes I made personal reports on big questions….

Question: For example?

Protopopov: Information about the amount of flour in the city and provisions needed. I also reported about the present state of affairs, not done in an official report. Lately it became quite clear that the Emperor didn’t want the Empress involved in these questions….

Question: You will recall that February 14 was the day on which the Duma was to reconvene. In view of the mood in the country and disturbances you say you expected, did you submit an official report on this?

Protopopov: No.

Question: Did you discuss this with the Empress?

Protopopov: Of course.

Question: Why do you say “of course?”

Protopopov: Because I saw her often. Every time after a report to the Emperor, and there were reports twice a week, I came to the Empress, and we talked….

Question: You already said that the Emperor, Empress, Vyrubova and Voeikov all discussed various questions with you. Did any other courtiers attend such meetings?

Protopopov: To be precise, it was only once at Headquarters, in the Empress’s railway carriage….

Question: Can you characterize the Empress’s views on the political system or internal reforms?

Protopopov: She didn’t have, I think, a program. In general she spoke about issues, though and gave good advice and instructions to me.

Question: How would you characterize her views?

Protopopov: They were very right-wing. She is a very firm person. If, for example, it was up to her to advise on a constitution she would say that she was a foreign woman. She speaks Russian very well, she speaks English very well, and the English strain is very strong in her.

Question: But her tendency was toward the political right?

Protopopov: The British would call her extremely conservative….

Question: Did you talk about whether the Emperor should grant a responsible ministry?

Protopopov: Yes. The Emperor may have thought it was not a bad idea but he only said, “Perhaps,” and never spoke of it directly.

Question: What did the Empress think?

Protopopov: I didn’t talk to her about it….

Question: How did the Empress regard the reconvening of the State Duma and the possibility of widespread worker demonstration in support?

Protopopov: With horror. She was afraid. “Oh, what will happen, oh, what will happen?” she asked….

Question: In a conversation with the Empress about February 14, you never said that it was necessary to issue a state act aimed at satisfying public opinion?

Protopopov: She understood.

Question: Did she consider this necessary?

Protopopov: She agreed that reforms would be needed, but only after things were calm. I said that calm and reforms were needed together, and she agreed….

Question: If you had plans for Jewish reforms why did you not announce them? Did you ask Stürmer to inform the Duma?

Protopopov: He didn’t know about them.

Question: The Prime Minister didn’t know about them? Was it a secret? How did you plan to carry out such a program while having people like Chaplinsky [the former prosecutor in the cooked-up “Jewish ritual murder” case against Mendel Beilis] appointed to the State Council?

Protopopov: I wanted to go through the Council of Ministers.…

[Here ends Greg’s translation of Protopopov’s testimony]

The commission was led by Moscow attorney Nicholas Muravyov and included several dozen additional lawyers, former prosecutors, and other judicial authorities all of whom had held responsible positions in Imperial Russia. The Commission began its sessions and interrogations within three weeks of Nicholas II’s abdication and continued until September. It was then temporarily suspended and, with the rise of the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution, never met to finish its work.

The Investigatory Commission interviewed and interrogated a total of 59 witnesses, including former Prime Ministers Prince Nicholas Golitsyn, Vladimir Kokovstsov, Boris Sturmer, and Ivan Goremykin; a host of Tsarist ministers and officials; former high-ranking officials in the Imperial Police Department and the Okhrana; military Generals Nicholas Ivanov and Sergei Khabalov; courtiers Baron Vladimir de Freedricksz and Vladimir Voeikov; Anna Vyrubova; and numerous others who played pivotal roles during the last years of Nicholas II’s reign.

Starting in 1924 and continuing to 1927, the stenographic records of these interviews and interrogations were collected into seven volumes and published as Padeniye tsarskogo rezhima (The Fall of the Tsarist Regime), edited by P. E. Shchegolev. The work has never been translated into English; a few selected excerpts have appeared in English over the years, principally quoted in books on the Russian Revolution.

My goal here is to for the first time present English-language translations of much of this material. That said, I must also admit to the boundaries I have set for myself. My translations will be selected excerpts of those interviews and interrogations which deal directly with members of the Imperial Family, the courtiers around them, and occasionally Rasputin. The latter, though, figures quite prominently in many of these interviews, and in ways unrelated to his direct interactions with the Imperial Family, so I have been judicious in translating only the most interesting and relevant materials where Rasputin is concerned.

Although I admit that this is a highly selective presentation of excerpts, it is still an immense task. The information can be tedious, but I have tried to focus only on specific items or comments of wider interest related to the Romanovs, and have not attempted to include ministerial, policy, or military arguments unless their discussion directly involves members of the Imperial Family or, in certain cases, important figures like Anna Vyrubova.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The first witness was Alexei Nikolaevich Khvostov (1872-1918). A former provincial governor, he came from a noble family and was extremely reactionary in his politics, being a member of the Antisemitic Union of the Russian People and the Black Hundreds. In 1911, Nicholas II sent Rasputin to interview Khvostov with an eye to making him a minister, but the impressions were apparently bad – not surprising given that Khvostov was as much a scoundrel as was Rasputin. In 1912 Khvostov was elected to the Duma and was Minister of the Interior from September 1915 to March 1916, when he was forced out of office after his involvement in an unsuccessful plot to kill Rasputin came to light. He was shot by the Bolsheviks in Moscow in 1918.

A. N. Khvostov: Alexandra called him “the Fat Tail”, a disrespectful pun on his name and weight

Translations from Padeniye tsarskogo rezhima:

I will be presenting these in the order in which they appear in these volumes; many times a witness was recalled after some time had passed, but to keep myself sane it’s easiest to follow the chronological path.

Interrogation of Alexei Nikolaevich Khvostov, March 18, 1917

Khvostov: The only time I had occasion to meet Rasputin was in Nizhny Novgorod, when I was governor. Rasputin, little known to me at that time, came to see me. Of whom I had heard of him in the form of rumors reaching the provinces. He offered me the post of Minister of the Interior. This, as far as I remember, was a week or ten days before the assassination of Stolypin. I was surprised at his appearance, and did not attach such importance to him as was later discovered. I was extremely surprised at the possibility of Stolypin leaving, because in the provinces it seemed to us that Stolypin was an indisputable force, it seemed impossible to us that he hesitated, staggered or left. Rasputin announced to me that he had to talk to me, since he had been sent, as he said, “to see my soul.”

Question: Who sent him?

Khvostov: He was sent from Tsarskoye. This seemed to me, at that time somewhat ridiculous, and I talked to him in a buffoonish way, and then, after a while, I sent the chief of police to take him to the station. Rasputin left….I considered him one of the spiritual amusements in Tsarskoye Selo, but I did not consider his offer serious or that he could be of any importance in the appointment of ministers. I knew that at that time I was treated in the highest degree favorably by the former Emperor Nicholas II. His good relations with me began for the first time when I was governor in Vologda and reported on the possibility of connecting the Vologda rivers with Siberia through the Urals. This interested him very much, and I often made him reports which were rosier in terms of economic prospects than anything else that was being done in Russia at that time. This is how I attracted his attention. On the penultimate occasion, before Rasputin’s arrival, I was received by the Emperor while sitting, which was considered the highest sign of benevolence. The conversation was about general subjects….When I came to Petersburg a month later, I noticed that the attitude toward me had changed completely. It was almost hostile….This was due to Rasputin. He had sent a telegram about me. It said, approximately, that he had a negative attitude toward me, and something like, “Although God rests in him, something is missing.”

Question: Did he tell you in whose name he came from Tsarskoye Selo, the abdicated Emperor or the Empress?

Khvostov: He said bluntly: from the abdicated sovereign.

Question: And who did he send the telegram to?

Khvostov: I didn’t see the address, but I think it was Vyrubova because the report was sent through her….Later I learned that the former Empress did not give her his consent to my appointment, in view of the fact that I had made a mistake at the time and had not had time to atone for my guilt regarding Rasputin….[In May 1915] I began to receive information that the Emperor was interested in me…I learned that, again, if I was not received at Tsarskoye it was Rasputin who prevented it, and that Alexandra Feodorovna did not agree to have me received. Later I managed to find out that there had been a conversation about me but Alexandra Feodorovna was not particularly sympathetic to my appointment. But after that the former Emperor told her to receive me, and after she had received me, she gave her consent to my appointment. As I later learned from third-hand sources near Rasputin, she gave her consent on the condition that Beletsky [Stephen Beletsky, Assistant Minister of Internal Affairs and head of the Police, 1911-1913; Assistant Minister of the Interior 1915-1916] should be appointed Assistant Minister of the Interior, head of the police and charged with protection of Rasputin. This became known to me later, when I became Minister of the Interior. At the very beginning I was summoned by the Emperor to talk about current affairs. He did not say a word to me about my appointment; he spoke about current affairs, said that he had read my Duma speeches, and he fully agreed with me, and he spoke about the general state of affairs for a long time. Then he said goodbye to me. When he spoke to me, he had already written a letter to Goremykin [Ivan Goremykin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers 1914-1916], because on the same day when I arrived home, Goremykin received an order saying that I had been appointed Minister of the Interior.

Question: When you introduced yourself to the former Empress, did she not tell you about the impending appointment and did not set you certain conditions?

Khvostov: No, she only said: ‘The Emperor praises you very much, he says many pleasant things about you.” Then she said, “I gladly see you appointed. But I would like, this is my wish that I hope you will satisfy it, for Beletsky to be your assistant minister.” She said it softly, in a circular way. She did not say: “If you do not agree, I will not agree to your appointment.” But this was what she said in a diplomatic way: “I will welcome your appointment, I will be very glad, but you, for your part, will please do this for me, and then we will be calm, because, as you yourself understand, we are in constant excitement and we would be pleased to have an experienced person to protect us. You are not particularly knowledgeable in the sense of security.” That was what she said, in a very mild form.

Stepan Beletsky, Khvostov’s assistant. Their attempt to murder Rasputin marked a new low in public life and shocked Russians, who were not, as Beletsky himself admitted, accustomed to ministers who behaved “like the Mafia”

Question: What did you understand of the German influence at Court?

Khvostov: I became interested in the circles that influenced Tsarskoye Selo, thinking to establish the connection you asked about. I managed to investigate several circles. One of the influential circles was the Badmaev [Dr. Peter Badmaev, doctor of Tibetan herbal medicine] circle.

Questionn: Who did that consist of?

Khvostov: There were different personalities there. It turned out that they wrote to him from Tsarskoye and that he wrote that he was close to the palace, had a connection.

Question: Who wrote to him?

Khvostov: I managed to find out that the court circles had constant correspondence with him. Of course, all this did not come from the former sovereign, but mainly from Alexandra Feodorovna. No one was interested in who was writing to Nicholas II, but was interested in who was writing to Alexandra Feodorovna, because she was in charge of this matter, and he was under her influence….I learned that Badmaev should not be touched.

Question: Why?

Khvostov: Because he was in contact with Tsarskoye Selo.

Question: And was Rasputin part of this observed circle?

Khvostov: Before Beletsky’s departure, Rasputin’s “observation sheets” produced by the Okhrana Department were not presented to me. I became acquainted with Rasputin’s observation papers, which were kept by the Okhrana Department, when I took over the post from Beletsky, when I was given the whole case of Rasputin, i.e., when I was to take over the whole affair.

Question: You were probably interested not only in the fact of correspondence, but also in the content of this correspondence?

Khvostov: That I didn’t touch. I couldn’t follow everything. One member of the circle was the financier Manus [Ignatius Manus, businessman and all around shady character; accused of being in touch with German financiers and of bribing Rasputin] was a very rich man. He has the Russian Transport Society and other Russian industrial societies under his thumb. And there was a lot of German capital involved. I was interested in whether there was any German espionage. Manus seemed to be a rather suspicious person. He had previously participated in the circle of Prince Meshchersky [Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, publisher of the newspaper Grazhdanin, influential advisor to Nicholas II]. He wrote telegrams to Tsarskoye Selo signed Zeleny. These were received by Vyrubova who passed them on to the palace. Manus kept a correspondence through an intermediary with Tsarskoye Selo, including Nilov [Admiral-General Konstantin Nilov, Fliegl-Adjutant to Nicholas II] and Sablin [Adjutant Nicholas Sablin, captain of the Imperial yacht Standard 1912-1915]. Nilov, as you know, influenced the sovereign, and Sablin influenced Alexandra Feodorovna….The way it worked was like this: Manus’s envoy was in touch with Sablin and Nilov and got instructions. Rasputin also got instructions on various matters through this channel.

Khvostov: Another influential circle I monitored was that of Prince Andronikov [Prince Michael Andronikov, a shady influence peddler and one of Rasputin’s intimates], which interested me more…Andronikov constantly told about what was going on at Tsarskoye Selo and knew all, which interested me as Minister of the Interior. He knew the intimate life at Tsarskoye Selo through friendship with a valet and another who held the rank of duty officer. He was also friendly with Voeikov [Major-General Vladimir Voeikov, Palace Commandant] and obtained information and orders from him….Andronikov also maintained relations with Rasputin. At first these were good, and Rasputin could influence him and he could influence Rasputin. Then there was a split in this circle: Andronikov was unable to control Rasputin. Both Andonikov and Sukhomilov [Minister of War General Vladimir Sukhomilov], having quarreled, influenced Rasputin separately, and Andronikov influenced Rasputin in such a way that Sukhomlinov was put on trial and that it was decided to investigate him; but then the same Rasputin obtained the release of Sukhomlinov…But Andronikov took part in softening Alexandra Feodorovna’s attitudes toward me which allowed me to take my position. I know that Andronikov visited old Goremykin, and I sometimes took advantage of it, because I needed to know precisely what was going on at Tsarskoye Selo…Through Andronikov I tried to get to know and come closer to Rasputin, to find out what was going on there. A special agency was created under Beletsky to monitor Rasputin: he was guarded by agents of the police department, Spiridovich’s [Alexander Spiridovich, head of Palace Security] palace agents, and various banking agencies….The guards of the police department were on the stairs to Rasputin’s apartment; and the commissar’s agents and his closest guards, those inside the apartment, were all under this umbrella. I managed to confiscate some of Rasputin’s letters. There were 20-30 of them representing the dirtiest cases, orders saying, ‘My Dear, do this!’ and others. Some concerned the pardoning of dentists in exchange for 100,000 rubles. But soon after I began these searches I was ordered to stop.”

Question: From whom did you receive this order?

Khvostov: I received a letter from Vyrubova in the name of the former Empress to stop the searches immediately. From my point of view, Vyrubova seemed to me at the time to be an unfortunate woman, hysterical, narrow-minded, who had fallen under the hypnotic influence of Rasputin. Undoubtedly, Rasputin was one of the most powerful hypnotists I ever met! When I saw him, I felt completely depressed; and yet, no hypnotist had ever been able to touch me….And he had a striking effect on this stupid hysterical woman Vyrubova: she kissed the hems of his caftan. He abused her in every possible way: for example, he brought to her a prostitute, his cook, some dishwasher, a dirty public woman, he brought everyone he liked, he brought everyone to visit her in order to tame her pride. He forced her to do everything he wanted to show her his strength! Vyrubova had many faces; she was overwhelmed with various petitions, which she had to convey to the palace and fulfill. I don’t know what she was doing there, since Rasputin had entangled her, and he was fond of base circles, the petitions were of a dirty nature….And all this she obediently fulfilled, obeying and submitting, blindly believing that Rasputin’s enemies were her enemies, and Rasputin’s friends were her friends.

Interrogation of Alexei Nikolaevich Khvostov, March 18, 1917, continued:

Khvostov: It seems to me that at court Vyrubova was the only person who was completely trusted....From my point of view, they were isolated from everyone and there was complete distrust of everyone, there was a suspicion that everyone approached the former emperor in order to get something…And here it seemed that she was a devoted woman who had been in the palace from the age of 17. Later they said that she was so stupid that she could not invent any lies about herself or hide what she had done, so no matter how serious a person called on her to explain some political theory, she supposedly could not repeat his words at all! And the simple things that Rasputin told her, that this one had a “bad soul” and the other had a “good soul,” she understood well, it was accessible to her mind, she could convey it... And the palace listened to her, not suspecting that she had her own views…Vyrubova’s father and mother had some independent influence on her. Moreover, it always seemed strange to me that Taneyev [Vyrubova’s father Alexander], who flirted with the liberal part of society, cursed her in society, saying that she was a disgrace to the family and a horror! He said that his daughter had disowned him. And yet behind the scenes I was told by various persons that he himself was constantly calling her on the telephone and visiting, constantly communicating with her, and was very nice and friendly….I tried to influence Vyrubova to somehow give Rasputin up. I tried to prove to her that it was necessary to do this, that she should find another monk who would be without filth, who would not lead to ruin. But nothing worked: every time I came across Rasputin’s influence! When, in the end, I lost all patience, I made a report about it to the former Emperor; he listened to the report and regarded it as reliable, but did not answer anything and did not react in any way. There were two such reports. After each report, he handed them to Alexandra Feodorovna, who immediately informed Rasputin by telephone. I did not even have time to return to my office before I was told that Rasputin was swearing at me: “How dare he? I will show him! I will drive him away: he was there, he scolded me.”…In spite of the fact that the Emperor had treated me well, I was not received again, at the insistence of Alexandra Feodorovna.

Images of Rasputin with society ladies helped consolidate the impression that he was Russia’s centre of power

Question: During this struggle with Rasputin, did Vyrubova act on orders from Alexandra Feodorovna or from the former emperor?

Khvostov: Alexandra Feodorovna. The struggle began with my reports. And after the arrest of the lady-in-waiting Vasilchikova [former lady-in-waiting Maria Alexandrovna Vasilchikova], the struggle took on a sharper character. Lady-in-waiting Vasilchikova arrived with a letter from the Hessian and Holstein princes: these letters did not represent anything serious, and the content was very simple (copies were made by the Ministry of Internal Affairs). There were several letters, one to Alexandra Feodorovna, the other to [Grand Duchess] Maria Pavlovna. They said that the war was all England’s fault; that Russia and German loved each other very much; that poor Germany was groaning under the weight of this war; that if not for England our two countries would have been reconciled long ago, etc. When I learned that Vasilchikova had arrived, I immediately went to Tsarskoye Selo, and immediately said that it was necessary to arrest Vasilchikova. The Emperor gave me the right to deal with her as I pleased. I personally searched her: I did not trust Beletsky, because I saw that he was guarding these circles all the time. I myself took her to the Astoria Hotel with Beletsky and personally conducted a search. I took these letters and on my orders she was first sent to the Chernigov province. And then, when she began to protest and continued to act, I proposed that she be sent to Vologda province….But after Vasilchikova was arrested, this whole company began protesting. I was told, “Grishka swears she is good.”

Question: Stop right there. Why did Rasputin stand up for Vasilchikova?

Khvostov: Apparently he was acting under pressure from someone who was dissatisfied with me.

Question: How did you sense the role of Rasputin?

Khvostov: He was a very convenient means for German espionage. Although I did not catch him in espionage, it logically seemed to me that he was a spy, not a conscious one, but a tool for espionage, because it was very easy to find out through him what was going on in Tsarskoye Selo. Obviously, the Germans are very clever people….It seems to me that he was in the hands of German agents. I tried to catch them, but failed. There were several suspicious persons around him, but I had no information to act on. I suspected Hartvig [Alexandra Hartvig, a nurse who managed the Empress’s war supply department]: an investigation was being conducted about her, which was later discontinued. She was suspicious. Then there was Dolgorukaya [Princess Olga Dolgorukaya], who lived at the Astoria and behaved suspiciously. She was some adventuress who had bought the title by marrying Prince Dolgoruky. Rasputin visited her…In my testimony on the Rubinstein [Dmitri Rubenstein, involved in multiple businesses, later arrested for his financial corruption] case I set forth in detail the reason why I believed that Rasputin was a spy. I found the following facts. Rubenstein gave Rasputin instructions to go to Tsarskoye Selo to find out about any military offenses that were planned, as Rubenstein said he needed to know in order to buy timber….Rasputin told me that he did as asked and related what he had learned to Rubenstein….Rasputin was extremely contemptuous of the former Emperor’s personality but he very much approved of the former Empress, said that she was clever, that she was Catherine II, and in general praised her terribly. He treated the former emperor in such a way that the detectives thought it inconvenient for them to write down what he said in their notes. He only referred to him as “Papa.” I heard him say: “I was at Tsarkoye and when I entered Papa was sitting there all sad. I stroked his head and said, ‘Why are you sad?’ He answered, ‘All the scoundrels are around! There are no boots, no guns. We have to advance, but we can’t advance!’…Rasputin asked him for details of the attack….Whether Rubinstein needed this information in order to buy timber, or in order to report to Berlin by radio telegraph…is difficult to establish...

Khvostov: In the case of Rubinstein’s espionage, Manasevich-Manuilov [Ivan Manasevich-Manuilov, former official in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, arrested for embezzlement but Rasputin arranged for the charges to be dismissed], as an experienced man, could divert any case like an old fox from its hole. It seems to me that this is why the Rubinstein case has not gone to trial….When I had the information against Rubenstein, I made a categorical report to the Emperor. He went to the window, did not want to listen, pretending that he was not interested. I asked him to listen to him. The report was so complete and finally he said, “Do what you want. I believe you.”

Question: You spoke about Rasputin’s circle and said that some secretaries handled property affairs, while others were of a political nature. I would like you to give information about the political essence of this circle: what did it achieve in foreign policy and in domestic policy?

Khvostov: The expressed one thing and wanted another. They claimed to support the Imperial House, in the person of Alexandra Feodorovna. But in reality they stole as much as he could.

Question: So it was not political but purely mercenary?

Khvostov: They supported the unity of Russia. But this was not, according to Rasputin’s point of view, the weak-willed Emperor, but rather the person of Alexandra Feodorovna, who they saw as another Catherine II.

Question: They considered the young Empress to be their leader. What were her views, what was her program?

Khvostov: She was extremely cautious with me but gave the impression of being very clever and brilliant.

Question: You say that Alexandra Feodorovna was clever and educated: did she talk to you as Minister of the Interior, did she touch on political and state topics?

Khvostov: It seems to me that she had some kind of hypnosis or strange relationship with this Rasputin.

Question: Was her religion reduced to Rasputin?

Khvostov: He was her religion. She said that he was “a prophet” who appeared from heaven. It was unquestioning obedience. It seems to me that she was under complete hypnosis. She hinted that she was waiting for me to turn from unbeliever to believer, but she never told me that.

Question: In conversations with you she avoided political questions and questions of war. And what did you know through other persons about her attitude to these questions?

Khvostov: That interested me. And through Vyrubova I tried to find out, in order to destroy the purely German character of the spiritual consistories. I suspected that she was hindering the implementation of this. I tried to say it. And when I asked if she supported the Germans, Vyrubova and others said that she was so conceited that she would not support Wilhelm, and wanted to preserve the throne for her son; that everything was being done for the son whom God had given and was kept with the help of Rasputin’s prophecies. There was something mystical in her love, besides the love of a mother for her son. And it seemed that she would not give up her own interests and the interests of Russia for the sake of the triumph of Wilhelm, who is far away and with whom the Hessians have their own scores. So, no matter how hard I tried to find any German sympathies in her, I did not. But this was the tragedy of the situation! Nicholas II’s will was suppressed. I assert that his will was sometimes suppressed hypnotically. It was only possible to bring him out of this state for a moment. I gathered all the arguments to shake this situation: I received all the papers but then Nicholas went to her [Empress Alexandra] with my information, and she told Rasputin, and so everything was known. Then came the retreat. I heard a person who was present at this decision that the Emperor called Rasputin to commune with him, and that they embraced, and the Emperor said: “We will never part with you.” I was told by Vasiliev [Father Alexander Vasiliev, Confessor to the Imperial Family].

Question: Rasputin had them under a certain religious influence. Probably there was also a circle of cultured, educated people around them, with whom they consulted? Can you characterize this circle?

Khvostov: Count Palen [Count Konstantin Palen, Court Chamberlain, dismissed from service 1916] was often there. I said to Vyrubova: “How can you say that the Empress is not for the Germans, when Palen is always here?” To this Vyrubova said that Palen just happened to be there. Voeikov also held on to Rasputin, and Andronikov was his informant on various political matters. Voeikov was involved. But I was interested in Freedericksz [Count Vladimir de Freedericksz, Minister of the Imperial Court] from the point of view of German influence: it seems to me that he had completely lost his mind. For example, at the General Headquarters, he once almost went out of the window instead of the door.

Question: What about the courtiers?

Khvostov: There was Voeikov, Freedericksz, Palen and Prince N. D. Golitsyn [Prince Nicholas Golitsyn, head of the Red Cross and later Prime Minister]. There was also the Lectrice Schnider [Mademoiselle Catherine Schneider]; there was the main lady-in-waiting Naryshkina [Princess Elizabeth Naryshina-Kuryakina, Mistress of the Robes], but she did not have any political associations although she could provide protection for those that did. Alexandra Feodorovna’s court party wanted to get one of its people promoted, but I did not want to take on anyone from this circle. I wanted to take a man who, from my point of view, would be respectable and narrow-minded to such an extent that he could not have much influence….

Question: Did any of this circle have a political influence on the Empress? Did she consult with them on political matters?

Khvostov: I don’t know. There were two or three young ladies-in-waiting. I had a conversation on this subject with the former Emperor. I said to him: “You are surrounded by various circles…” He said, “Everyone wants something, everyone obviously is out to get something.” I told him: “If this is true, is someone makes a petition, then that’s why I am here. I am Minister of the Interior. If you tell me to do so I will investigate. I would find out if anyone was trying to exert pressure on any of the Adjutants. I told him that these men might be under suspicion. He said: “Do you really think that anyone can influence me, that I can succumb to influences? The Empress and I do not see anyone, we do not consult with anyone: together we solve problems.” As I found out from the palace servants (who actually knew what was going on there), only three people were influential when it came to politics: Alexandra Feodorovna, Nicholas II and Vyrubova, although Sablin was mixed up in it sometimes.

Question: What is his position?

Khvostov: He was an adjutant. Vyrubova’s sister [Alexandra Pistolkors] used to be like her: she sang duets there with the former Empress, English romantic songs. She was not independent but functioned more or less under Vyrubova, and so under Rasputin. But he did not look upon her as a political figure and made no requests through her. But she asked me to promote an adjutant to a Provincial Vice-Governor….There was another person who was extremely close to them [the Imperial couple], Nilov [Konstantin Nilov, Fliegl-Adjutant]. He was a drunk, and known for his rudeness. They actually liked this, because they thought that rudeness meant truthfulness. They had a sincere desire to hear the truth but they always attacked it when it involved Rasputin or this stupid sea dog [Nilov].

Nicholas II and Konstantin Nilov aboard the Standart before the war

Then there was Sablin. It seems quite clear that he was devoted but he was poor. It was difficult to live at court without independent means….And so, if there was no money, he got in touch with Manasevich-Manuilov, or a gold mining company, or played on the stock exchange. That’s how it seems to me. Or perhaps Manuilov caught him.

Question: Did Sablin himself have a political program?

Khvostov: I don’t think so. He held their political beliefs and was loyal. That’s the sort of person they chose….There were sixteen or seven people at court, like Naryshkin [Adjutant-General Kirill Naryshkin], Dolgoruky [Major-General Prince Vladimir Dolgoruky], and Benckendorff [Count Paul von Benckendorff, Grand Marshal of the Imperial Court], who were terribly jealous and feared that one might receive a better rank or more attention….Sablin was considered more tactful. He never mentioned politics. In relation to Rasputin the court was divided. Everyone knew him. Some made his acquaintance and tried to use him and some did not. So, for example, Naryshkina said that she did not know Rasputin at all, that she was just at court to serve. “I don’t see him,” she said. “I close my eyes when he comes….” Freedericksz, who sees that Rasputin is leading them to ruin and admits it when you talk about it, protests, “No, I don’t know him. I don’t know this peasant.” Nilov tried to act against Rasputin but once or twice he was cut short and he stopped. He returned to conducting his business and his drinking. Voeikov was the only one who, it seemed to me, who could have done anything but he swore than he had tried to use his influence and that nothing had come of it. The last time I saw him before I was dismissed, he said, “Yes, we are all going to be ruined, but what can we do?”

Question: Did you know Colonel Loman [Dmitri Loman, courtier and rector of the Feodorovsky Cathedral]?

Khvostov: Yes, he was one of Beletsky’s friends.

Question: Was he close to Rasputin?

Khvostov: Yes he was.

Khvostov: I want to say a few words about Prince Putyatin [Prince Michael Putyatin, courtier]. He also did not dare say a word against Rasputin. He had no sympathy for him but he could not speak…I tried to find out if there was anyone else. I was curious about [Grand Duchess] Elizabeth Feodorovna. To test her, I put one of Vasilchikova’s letters in an envelope and mailed it to her in Moscow, as if Vasilchikova had sent it to her. There were rumors in Moscow that Elizabeth Feodorovna was a German spy. But it turned out that she refused to even accept the letter and returned it unopened with a letter to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, writing, “I learned from the newspapers that Vasilchikova had arrived. She sent me a letter which I am sending for review, because it is from a woman with whom I do not want to have anything in common.” In general, she was very critical of all this….

Question: What do you know about Rasputin’s desire to get General Belyaev [General Michael Belyaev] named as Minister of War?

Khvostov: I know of this from papers that I saw and documented conversations [the Okhrana notes kept on Rasputin]. In these Rasputin praised Belyaev very much. Scolding Polivanov [General Alexei Polivanov, Minister of War], he would say: “If only Belyaev was a minister, he is what Papa is looking for….” Later, as if he were telling me that he could do nothing with Polivanov: “Papa doesn’t want to dismiss him. I told Alexandra what God wants, but Papa stubbornly refused. What can I do?”

Question: How did Belyaev get along with Rasputin?

Khvostov: I explain this by his well-known careerism: Belyaev was a comrade, and he wanted to be a minister.

Question: Where do you get the conviction that Rasputin enjoyed the boundless confidence of both the abdicated Emperor himself and the Empress, that they conferred with him on the most important questions of state?

Khvostov: I got this impression because, for example, if Rasputin tells “Papa” to go to the Duma, he goes…

Question: So the appointments of ministers, in your opinion, depended entirely on Rasputin?

Khvostov: Rasputin, for example, said about [Prime Minister Ivan] Goremykin, “I’ll tell them to kick the old man [Goremykin] out, because the old man is not good anymore.”

Question: What other examples of Rasputin’s influence do you have?

Khvostov: I don’t remember now. Samarin [Director of the Holy Synod Alexander Samarin] and Shcherbatov [Prince Nicholas Shcherbatov, Minister of the Interior 1915] were expelled because of him….

Question: Was Trepov [Prime Minister Alexander Trepov 1915-1916] appointed through Rasputin?

Khvostov: I don’t know through whom; but he was a complete surprise to everyone. At that moment Trepov was provoked: he went to the General Headquarters and complained….This had a terrible effect on the Emperor, and he felt embarrassed….Then he consulted with Gregory, as Gregory himself said: “Papa consulted with me. He asked what to do next….”

Question: What is the basis for your assertion that Rasputin convened and dissolved the State Duma?

Khvostov: I think Komissarov reported that Rasputin said: “As I sit here I have to decide whether the Duma should be convened or not.”

Question: Did Rasputin know military and state secrets and talk about them?

Khvostov: I think that when he got into a drunken moment, he passed these right and left....And that he was not a conscious spy. I am convinced by the fact that if he were he would have kept silent. Only an unconscious spy can tell a cabman, a policeman, some merchant, a woman, a musician from Villa Rode, secrets. It means that he was not a conscious spy, because otherwise he would have kept it and told only to someone who should know what to do about it...

Question: And from what do you conclude that the appointment of Belyaev was made on the desire of Alexandra Feodorovna?

Khvostov: Her wish was constantly whispered about. Rasputin said that “She tried to do this, tried in this way and that way, but Papa doesn’t want to do it.” I’m sure it was some kind of hypnosis….

Question: Did you know that before his appointment Belyaev had visited the former Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and become a member of her intimate circle?

Khvostov: I was told that he had done so. I can’t remember who told me….But he was in charge of prisoners-of-war, and Alexandra Feodorovna constantly issued instructions about this…

Question: Do you know anything about Baroness Rosen’s salon?

Khvostov: I had a great suspicion about this salon. I heard rumors that there were types of various characters there, that she lived terribly (always drunk), and had no means of subsistence. Grand Dukes came there, various people close to the Grand Dukes, various ladies who moved with them, and the strangest element accumulated there….Imagine, Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich and his ladies sat there having lunch….When I asked Belyaev why he was often there, he said, “It is very interesting. You can learn a lot from the Grand Dukes...”

Boris Vladimirovich and his mistress, Zinaida Rashevskaia

[Here ends Greg’s translation of Khvostov’s deposition]

As always, a little background is useful. Alexei Sergeievich Suvorin was born in 1834 into a peasant family in Voronezh Province. His intelligence won him a spot at a military school and when he graduated he went to St. Petersburg. Eventually, he joined the staff of St. Petersburg Vedomosti, one of the most influential newspapers. Suvorin fit in easily with the paper’s liberal bent, as he fully embraced Alexander II’s reforms. Suvorin began publishing on his own and in 1876 he purchased the newspaper Novoe Vremya and became its editor. Under his control, Novoe Vremya soon became the most important newspaper in the Empire.

Suvorin underwent a metamorphosis at the end of the 1870s, abandoning his liberal ideas and embracing conservative, nationalistic and antisemitic views which he eagerly propounded in the pages of his government-sponsored newspaper. This probably had its genesis in a personal tragedy: in the early 1870s Suvorin’s wife took a liberal army officer as her lover; when the affair reached its end, the young man shot her and then himself. After this, Suvorin seems to have regarded any hint of reform as an inevitable invitation to violence.

He remained at the helm of Novoe Vremya until his death in August 1912.

Suvorin only began keeping a regular diary in 1893, although in entries he would refer back to earlier events. Two versions of the diary were eventually published, one a French translation and one in Russian. These differ slightly. My excerpts come from the Russian version, Dnevnik Alekseya Suvorina, published in 1923 in Petrograd by L. D. Frenkel Publishing House and edited by Michael Krichevsky.

I have gone through the diary and pulled out only those entries which deal directly with the Imperial Family or particularly important events like Nicholas II’s coronation.

Alexei Suvorin, by Kramskoi

November 7 1892: Romanchenko [Filipp Romanchenko, Special Agent for the Minister of the Interior] spoke at length about the life of the former Sovereign at Livadia. One day he, Romanchenko, was returning home to Livadia. Passing the palace of the Heir, he saw a carriage and recognized Yurievskaya [Princess Catherine, mistress and later morganatic wife of AlexanderII] in it. His first concern was not to get caught by the Sovereign, whose meetings with Yurievskaya took place in Ryleev’s [Adjutant-General Alexander Ryleev, Commandant of the Imperial Palaces] apartment, next to Romanchenko’s own apartment. He quickly walked down the path. Suddenly, the Sovereign’s dog, Milord, met him. He was taken aback. His first thought was to hide, as the dog barked, but where to hide? He rushed into the bushes, where he had to sit for about 5 minutes. At this time, the Emperor and Yurievskaya passed by and the Emperor said: “Lean more firmly on my hand.” The Emperor’s meetings with Yurievskaya took place daily in the evenings, when they sat down in the palace to play cards with the fifth. The Sovereign played one hand, then there was always a day off. Then he went to Ryleev’s apartment,where he was met by Ryleev’s lackey, Alexander, and then sat with Yurievskaya. They were served wine, fruit, and a cold supper. He escorted her to the carriage and returned, and in the meantime his partners all played without him.

December 23 1892: Verochka Mokrinskaya [daughter of A. N. Mokrinsky, chamberlain attached to the household of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaievich, Sr.] told the details about the meetings between Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaievich Jr. and his mistress. Burenina drove up to his mother Grand Duchess Alexandra Petrovna, gave her money, and for the money she would do everything. She wrote a letter to the Emperor asking for his consent for her son’s marriage to Burenina. In view of the request of the mother, the Sovereign agreed, telling the son that not only would the marriage be morganatic but also that she would have no position. The wedding was supposed to take place in the Tambov village. But before leaving, Burenina demanded that the Grand Duke get more information on what her position would be. He went to Vorontsov [Count Hilarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, Minister of the Imperial Court], who reported to the Sovereign. The Sovereign became very angry and forbade the marriage.

The Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich in youth

February 21 1893: Dined with Kolomnin [A. P. Kolomnin, attorney and relative of Alexei Suvorin, editor of Novoe Vremya]. He said that the Tsesarevich [the future Nicholas II] is fascinated by the dancer Kschessinska, who is 19 years old. She is not beautiful or graceful, but is somewhat pretty and very lively.....The Tsesarevich told her that he begged the Sovereign to be allowed to marry her for two years. She boasts about this to everyone, and tells everyone about her relationship with him [1]

February 8, 1893: I. N. Durnovo [Ivan Durnovo] was appointed a senator. The senators are indignant, saying that every scoundrel is put in the Senate. His mistress, Menchukova, is a nasty woman….They used to keep a policeman outside her apartment. Durnovo ordered the detective to track her down, and the detective went so far as to either act as a footman, or try with a footman to steal her letters from the Brazilian attaché. It is said that the English envoy revealed everything.. I. N. Durnovo wanted to conceal it, and for about a month the case was sewn and covered. The Emperor was angry with him for this, but he wept to the Empress, who protected him. That’s what they say.

The Heir visits Kschessinska and ___ her [this is left blank in my copy but I think we all know what he probably wrote]. She lives with parents who withdraw and pretend they don’t know anything. He visits them, doesn’t even rent her an apartment, and scolds the parent who keeps him as a child, even though he is 25-years-old. He is very talkative, generally gay, drinks cognac and sits at the Kschessinskys’ for 5-6 hours.

February 14, 1893: We don’t have ruling classes. Courtiers are not even aristocrats, but something petty, some kind of rabble. The aristocracy existed only under the old tsars, under Alexei Mikhailovich, that amazing, extraordinary, integral man who actually founded the new Russia. Peter began to recruit foreigners, various rogues, Portuguese jesters. From all over the world, all sorts of rubbish and scum came and owned Russia. Under the Empresses, singers were used, who were given good stallions, and under Alexander I, again Nesselrode, the Marquises de Traverse, all non-Russians, for whom Russia meant little. Even a bad Russian is better than a foreigner. Foreigners demoralize Russians by the very fact that the latter consider themselves humiliated, slaves, and lose their self-respect….

The Heir wrote to Kschessinska (she wanted to convert to Orthodoxy, perhaps considering it possible to become empress) that he was sending her 3,000 rubles, saying that he had no more, that she should rent an apartment for 5,000 rubles, that he would come, and “Then I will live with you like the generals.” He has a good idea of generals! He is said to have begged his father for two more years without having to marry. He has grown a beard and matured, but he is small, nonetheless.

March 26, 1893: I learned a lot of interesting things about Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich from his tutor of two years, Grigorievich. He said that his parents hated him [the Grand Duke]….The tutor used to strike the boy on the cheeks, which apparently hardened him. When he was a young man, he lived in the Marble Palace…and dozens of girls were brought in for him.

14 September, 1893: In Biarritz. A lot of Russians…Yurievskaya [morganatic wife of Alexander II] is called a fool; she has an “intimate” in Chetvertinsky….Botkin [Professor Sergei Botkin] told me that Alexander II, on his way to the review before his death, threw Yurievskaya on a desk and ___ her [again, those oh so delicate Soviet editors! But we know that he meant he had sex with her since Katya later spoke of how “roughly” Alexander had “taken” her that morning]. She told Botkin this herself.

5 October, 1893: It is said that the King and Queen of Denmark are trying to influence the Emperor in favor of Wilhelm II, for fear of Denmark being swallowed up by Germany. This information comes from England, and their son-in-law the Prince of Wales.

January 20, 1896 [He is summoned to meet Minister of the Interior Ivan Goremykin]: He took the January 1 issue of Novoe Vremya from a folder. At the top, the Emperor wrote in blue pencil: “I would like to draw your attention to the article ‘On the Border,’ which surprised me very much.” The article was underlined line by line in blue pencil in various places by him: where the new reign has been compared to spring in Russia; where the author has pointed to the literacy activities of the Zemstvo; where reference has been made to the sovereign’s remarks about the Zemstvo chiefs who, misunderstanding their position, flogged the peasants; where the author speaks of the necessity of depriving the Zemstvo chiefs of the right of justice, and so on. “Perhaps you haven’t read this article?” asked Goremykin. I replied that, on the contrary, I had worked on it, softened it, crossed things out, shortened it, changed its harsh expressions, that I did not like the article very much, and so on. Goremykin said that newspapers should not prevent events, prompt the government, or emphasize that this prevents the government from acting. It is as if he intends to act in a direction that must be considered a secret for the time being….He assured me that he had dissuaded the Emperor from giving the newspaper another warning.

April 19, 1896 [On meeting Kaiser Wilhelm II]: He is exactly the same height as our sovereign, but he wears double-heels on his boots. He looks fuller, thanks to the uniforms here customarily being padded. His hair ranges between medium and dark blonde, with the darker color at the front. It is always carefully combed. His mustache is slightly lighter and twisted up. The eyes are gray with dark eyelashes. His complexion is grayish-green, as if he is in pain, and sometimes the right side of his lips twitch with a spasm. He has a harsh tenor voice. He speaks in a slightly slurred manner, as do Prussian officers, abruptly cutting off his words. His left hand is shriveled and the arm shorter than the right. But it’s not especially noticeable. He always rests his left hand on the hilt of his saber, and has a habit of firmly shaking hands, as if to prove his strength. More than once the unprepared screamed in pain. He rides well and holds the reins easily. But to eat he has to use a special utensil, a knife and a fork on one handle. He always carries this with him, even to ceremonial dinners. He has a lot of strange habits: he changes clothing six times a day, and has up to 700 uniforms. He likes to eat, especially simple dishes. He likes to hear saucy anecdotes, especially about naval life. His greatest friend is Philip Eulenburg. This friendship causes much suspicion and many see echoes of Ludwig II of Bavaria. As for ladies, before his marriage he had a lot of scandalous adventures, and these cost a lot of money and trouble, but he has calmed down and played the role of an exemplary spouse. But, since last year (between us, for God’s sake, of course), he’s been having an affair with a Frankfurt Jewish banker, hence his penchant for Jews, whom he had previously hated. The lady’s husband lends him money, and the wife accompanies him on sea trips. The Empress has already noticed, is beginning to be jealous and to travel with him. It is of special note how he loves flattery to the point of absurdity.. His wife often blushes and walks away when she hears him being equated with Frederick the Great and Alexander the Great.

Wilhelm II, resplendent in his public image

May 5, 1896: Arrived in Moscow. I found myself a room in the Dresden Hotel for 450 rubles [2]. Separate apartments downstairs of 3-4 rooms cost from 300 to 600 rubles, a pair of horses with a carriage from 700 to 1200 rubles. I love the noise, the movement, the crowd. But the pleasure is poisoned only by the thought that perhaps it will be necessary to write, and what will I write? I’ve never liked to say no, and I don’t know how to say no. But there is not enough substantial information that’s impressive. All these processions are, of course, beautiful spectacles, but they are so exhausting and boring, and difficult for all those, or most of those, who take part in them. [3]

May 9, 1896: The weather is good; there are no clouds. Departure of the Emperor [from Petrovsky Palace for the State Entrance into Moscow]….I watched it myself from P. A. Shuvalov’s apartment. People began to gather at 5 o’clock in the morning. Everyone noticed that the Emperor was extremely pale and had a serious look. He kept his hand under the visor all the time saluting during the departure and looked as if consumed by inner thoughts. The Dowager Empress was especially warmly welcomed by the people. She almost burst into tears in front of Iverskaya [Chapel, marking the entrance to Red Square] when the Emperor got off his horse and went up to her to help her out of the carriage. In the house where she watched the exit, Krivenka’s daughter heard the Americans laughing at this pomp. They made venomous remarks and said it was fabulous….There were two fires in the governor-general’s house: one in the church, an hour before the Emperor appeared in front of the house on Tverskaya Street, and then one of the decorations caught fire during the illumination. Both were soon extinguished….Prince Henry of Prussia is very unhappy that no one met him on arriving at the railway station. The illuminations were magnificent. It was difficult not only to drive through the streets but even to walk along them as it was so crowded.

May 10, 1896: Anastasiev, a member of the State Council, said of yesterday’s ceremony [The State Entrance into Moscow]: “Well, what did you think? Did you feel the rise of the people’s spirit, the power?” It’s hard to say what I felt….I didn’t feel anything except that to think that everything was beautiful. I tried to write yesterday, but I couldn’t make it work….In the Cathedral of the Assumption, the Dowager Empress venerated the relics and icons first, then the Emperor and Empress. When the Emperor was in the Cathedral, Metropolitan Isidore led him to the wrong doors. Grand Duke Vladimir had to shout, “Go back! Go Back!”

Nicholas II’s State Entry into Moscow for the coronation

May 14, 1896: Crowning. I was in the Assumption Cathedral. I got there at half-past seven; it ended at 12:45 in the afternoon. In the evening I watched the illuminations. Thus, I spent 6 hours on my feet in church and two hours in the evening. I slept well and woke up more cheerfully today….In the Cathedral Grand Duke Vladimir was so aggressive in fixing the Imperial Mantle on the Emperor that he broke off part of the chain of the Order of St. Andrei, which the sovereign wore. The Emperor read the confession perfectly, but hurried and hesitated through the prayers. I sent Novoe Vremya [which he edited] a copy of the prayer said to have been used by Emperor Paul….I thought that the prayer would be the same, but it turns out that they shortened it, not wanting to make the Emperor kneel for too long. Many are dissatisfied with the awards and honors [in the Coronation Honors List], while many others are satisfied. Ratkov-Rozhnov is in despair that his sons were not made Kammer-Pages. [Minister of the Imperial Court Count Hilarion] Vorontsov-Dashkov said: “They should know that money isn’t everything.”…The most expensive dish [the presentation dishes given to the Emperor and Empress] came from the Kingdom of Poland and cost 24,000 rubles….Moscow gave a dish worth 5,000 rubles, the Tula nobility spent 3,000 on their dish….The Sovereign said he did not want to accept such expensive, useless gifts from village elders. He said it would be better for them to spend this money….There were riots over the distribution of Coronation announcements – a carriage was overturned by the crowds and someone was beaten. I turned out that some buyers gave 30 kopeks each to the rabble to jostle through the crowds and grab the announcements. Buyers them sold them for 5 rubles….[General] Evgeny Bogdanovich is an amazing rogue and a hypocrite. He has been to see the Queen of Greece today and been gossiping with her about the young Empress, saying that she did not know how to curtsey, etc. “Did Suvorin notice this?” she asked him. He tells me, “I confess I lied and said that you had also noticed it.”…I think that the Greek Queen sees through this “gentleman,” whose hypocrisy knows no bounds….

When Alexander III was passing through Moscow on May 18, 1894 on his way south, he wanted to see a performance of the Maly Theater….He was too hot and asked them to open a window, but it was sealed. A locksmith was called and began to take out the frame in front of the Sovereign. The Emperor watched him work and finally grabbed the frame himself and smashed it open….

There was a repetition of the illuminations tonight, but they were less spectacular. A wind was blowing, and where candles were used they flickered….

Yesterday a crowd of students walked along the Tverskaya singing “God Save the Tsar.”

May 18, 1896: Today, during the distribution of mugs and treats, they say, up to 2000 people were crushed. The corpses were carried out all day long, and people accompanied them. The place [Khodynka Field] is rutted with holes. The police did not arrive until 9 o’clock, and the people began to gather at two….More than 25,000 people came to Moscow that night on the Moscow-Kursk road alone. What a crowd it was, and what a horror it was! The distributors threw gifts into the air for the crowd to catch….There were a lot of children. They were lifted up and saved by being on shoulders….It is rightly said that nothing should have been distributed to the people. This is not the old days when a crowd of 100,000 people was a novelty. A crowd of half a million had gathered, and this should have been foreseen. At 20 minutes past 4 the Emperor and Empress drove back along Tverskaya, accompanied by shouts. As far as I could make out, there was no hostility in the crowd. Vorontsov, the Minister of the Court, himself at 9 o’clock let the Emperor know that 2,000 people had been crushed, according to rumors, and himself went to the place to check. It was said that the sovereign, influenced by the tragedy, would not appear at the festivities for the people. But he was there. I had just left Khodynka at about 2 o’clock when he was on his way to the Petrovsky Palace. This misfortune overshadows the festivities and darkens the Emperor….

What kind of bastards are these policemen and this bureaucracy who are only trying to excuse themselves? When high society passes, they prepare all the places in two or three hours, place the policemen in an unbroken line, the Cossacks, etc., but they do not think in the least about the ordinary public, about the people. How this outrages the soul! I have written about the coronation and got the proofs of my article here today, but after all this it is embarrassing to speak in the tone in which I wrote…..Several corpses were brought to the unit located on Tverskaya Square, opposite the Governor-General’s house. In Moscow, everything is done simply: they will crush you, beat you up and calmly deliver you, in daylight, in pieces! How many tears will be shed today in Moscow and in the villages!...In the last reign there was nothing like it. The days of the coronation were gray, and the reign was gray and calm. The days of this coronation are bright, bright, and hot. And the reign will be hot, probably….The Emperor gave 1,000 rubles for each orphaned family [this is incorrect but was widely reported]. To the chamberlain Durasov I gave a harsh talk today, when he said that it was in vain that they had reported to the Emperor about the dead. They announce 1,138 dead. Tomorrow a morgue will be set up at the Vagankovsky Cemetery and the corpses will be laid out there to determine their names and so on. The next coronations, if there are any at all, will do without mugs and Imperial gifts. This is the last free giveaway. Today, the distribution of souvenir tokens in churches has been canceled. At the last coronation in one of the churches, the people knocked down the altar, and the priest had to save himself in the embrasure of the window in the altar. Master of Ceremonies Dolgorukov is pleased with Vlassovsky [Chief of Moscow Police General A. A. Vlassovsky]. “In my opinion, he did a great job, but since a sacrifice is necessary, he will be a victim!” I think that Vorontsov-Dashkov will also get into trouble, although he has nothing to do with it. Many Moscow newspapers inflated the national holiday and its organizer Berr [Head of the Coronation Planning Committee in Moscow], printed his portraits, and promised something extraordinary. And it turned out to be extraordinary.. Yesterday the court censorship detained a stately article for Russkoye Slovo, where it is said that there is nothing to rejoice about, but one should grieve for the deceased…..Many wished that the Emperor should not go to the ball of the French Embassy, i.e., in other words, that the Embassy should postpone its ball in view of this misfortune. The commander of the cavalry guards, Shipov, said: “It is worth postponing the ball because of such trifles? Such things always happen at coronations.” G. P. A.. Shuvalov did not go to the ball….What is to blame for the misfortune? Mismanagement. The police believed in the people, in their silence, in their calm Vlassovsky said that 100 Cossacks and policemen were enough.

May 19, 1896: Today I was at the Khodynka Field. Pavilions had been set up everywhere, everything that was possible was illuminated, sailors were discharged to attach electric bulbs to the needle of the Spasskaya Tower, pavilions were made for delegations on the route of the Emperor’s state entry, but they did not even fill in the wells here, did not level the ditch around which the pavilions had been built to distribute the Emperor’s gifts….The ditches are sandy and full of deep holes. Two wells were sealed with half-rotted boards. One gentleman said that he told Belov, a member of the City Council, and the architect of the Duma, to fill up the wells, but they did not pay attention. Twenty-eight corpses were taken out of one well….This morning another 8 were taken out, and they say there are more….The whole blame is that they began distributing not at 10 in the morning, as was announced, but at 3-4 or in the morning. The rumor spread that the distribution started and people threw themselves forward, falling into the pits, wells, and holes. A bridge was made of the dead bodies over a trench….Hundreds of Cossacks, stationed on the other side of the pavilions, let those who did not want to take anything in; others climbed over the fence that separated one part of the field from the other….In the pits there were heaps of the dead….One man said, “People fell backwards and forward and rolled into ditches….They stood on shoulders, climbed onto the pavilion roofs, crawled away, tore off the walls. I heard screams and moans and ran away.”…At 9 o’clock the police came and began removing the bodies; they sprinkled them with water to see if they were alive. None were. They dragged them out and put them in three rows, like firewood….The mood today is gloomy and abusive. One man said, “The officials should be sent to Sakhalin! And that’s not enough! Bloodsuckers, they drank the people’s blood!” The stories are the same and reflect the moment of horror. “Now they will say,” said one peasant, about forty-five, “that the people are to blame. And what are we guilty of?” Now there are 1,282 corpses at the Vagankovsky Cemetery. And the whole cemetery was surrounded by troops, as if the dead needed it….There were a million people. They say there were drunks who were drinking vodka near the ditch….They blame Vlassovsky (yesterday they said that he shot himself, but the adjutant pushed his hand away and he shot at the painting – none of this happened)….There are three people to blame. Grand Duke Vladimir is at war with Vorontsov and refused to give him troops. [Grand Duke] Sergei also didn’t want to recognize Vorontsov’s authority and this is the result! People say, and not without reason, that this was all arranged on purpose!...Someone decided to order the souvenir mugs abroad and took a “business” trip to see how they were prepared….At Vagonovsky Cemetery corpses lay in coffins and on the ground. They are black and bloated and the stench is awful for the relatives coming to look at the bodies….During the coronation, [former Minister of Justice Dmitri] Nabokov, who held the crown, had diarrhea and it ran down his pant legs….If ever it was possible to say, “Caesar, the dead salute you,” it was yesterday, when the Emperor came to the public festival. In the square they shouted “Hurrah!” and sang “God save the Tsar,” and a few hundred yards away lay the bodies of hundreds of dead people who had not yet been removed.

May 20, 1896: Tonight a ball is held by Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich. The windows were open and brilliantly lit. Brilliant figures of ladies and gentlemen walked through the halls. It was very discordant, but from time to time shouts of “Hurrah!” could be heard….I spent 90 minutes talking to an American journalist who was received by Nicholas II.. He [the Emperor] said that Russia is not yet ready for a constitution for the reason that there is no unity and any collective opinion was either immature or outdated….Vorontsov-Dashkov had a meeting today, in which the investigator on the misfortune of May 18 participated. The Emperor inquired several times about the results….On May 18, some of the workers put shit in their caps and tossed them at the Emperor’s pavilion, shouting, “Here is a gift for you!”

May 21, 1896: The Emperor, they say, went up to Vlassovsky and told him that he was not angry with him, because Vorontsov had confessed that he alone was to blame for everything.

May 22, 1896: A lady heard two men in a carriage talking in English, saying that there would be many dead during a public holiday in Moscow….I’m in St. Petersburg. It seemed so eerie to me at home, as if I was dying. Strange as it may seem, but this was exactly the mood….Yesterday, before leaving, I saw d’Alheim, the correspondent of the Temps. He told me that on May 19 or 20 Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, the Prince of Naples [later King Victor Emmanuel], and others were amusing themselves near the Vaganovsky Cemetery by shooting pigeons, at a time when tearing scenes were taking place in the cemetery

May 30, 1896: Yesterday I came to Moscow again. I stayed at the Dresden Hotel….Yesterday I had breakfast [with] Michael Sadovsky. He said that his janitor had nearly died at Khodynka. He saw a man crying out for help, and stretched out his hand to help him climb from a pit, but at that time four people grabbed him by the waist and would not let him up. He [the janitor] had on a leather belt with a buckle, and he unbuckled it with one hand and held it down to the people who grasped at it. In the crowd he saw a dead girl. She stood in a crowd, her head leaning against her chest, rolling back and forth. There were many such dead.. When the crowd began its movement, they were carried along with it, for they had nowhere to fall. There was a police official sitting next to us. He said that Vlassovsky had refused to organize the people’s holiday with only his police and had asked for troops, but that Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich refused to send troops from the army, saying that during Alexander III’s funeral the people had not behaved in a rough manner, and that therefore they would not act in a bad fashion now. The architect Nikolin, who built the booths, said that the pits and ditches were not dug on purpose to hold back the people. Although this area was assigned to the jurisdiction of the palace department, the police still had the right to observe it and order the pits to be filled. E. V. Bogdanovich allegedly spoke to Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who told him that Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna had said to the Emperor that he could attend the French ball, but that he should not stay there for more than half an hour. But he did. Grand Dukes Vladimir and Sergei persuaded him to stay, saying that sentimentality for the dead should not be shown; that this was the time to show autocratic power; that 4,000 people had allegedly died in London at some festival and that nothing had been changed. It is said that an investigation has been appointed under the command of Count Pahlen. But also, it is said that it was canceled at the insistence of Grand Duke Vladimir and that the Emperor changed his mind three times in one day. He issued a manifesto stating that the feelings of “animated love and immeasurable devotion to him” by the people served as a consolation for him amid the misfortunes that, “in grief and in the midst of these bright days, befell many of the participants in the festivities” on Khodynka Field.

Victims of Khodynka

June 9, 1896: I was…at the Vaganovsky Cemetery a week after the disaster. There was still a smell from the graves. Crosses in a row, like soldiers in formation, for the most part six-pointed and of pine. A long pit was dug, and the coffins were placed next to each other. The beggar said that it was as if the coffins were placed on top of each other, in three rows. Crosses at a distance of 2 yards from each other. Pencil inscriptions indicating who is buried; a few written notes: “He lived 15 years, 6 months;” “He was 55;” “Lord, receive his spirit in peace;” “Victim on Khodynka Field….” In some places there are icons of the Mother of God, in others icons of the Savior. On one cross hangs a silver cross taken from around the neck of the deceased….There is a great movement of up to 30,000 workers from Moscow to St. Petersburg [in protest of Khodynka]. It is said that they managed to postpone the Emperor’s return to St. Petersburg. They are afraid that the workers will file petitions….The striking workers did not allow those who did not belong to their factories to enter. Police and Cossacks beat the workers. The mood was menacing.

June 25, 1896: [Writing of the official report on the Khodynka disaster written by Minister of Justice Nicholas Muravyov]: All blame is directed against Vlassovsky and Berr. [The following is written sarcastically] Thank God, the “guilty” have been found! When a train crashes, it’s always the signalman’s fault!

August 5, 1896: I sat at Sergei Witte’s for three hours last night….He read “The Investigative Proceedings of the Judicial Investigator in the Case of the Riots of May 18, 1896 on the Khodynka Field, During the People’s Festivities” and the “Note of the Minister of Justice” on this case. This “note” was reproached for partiality: it was said that [Minister of Justice Nicholas] Muravyov wanted to please the Grand Duke [Sergei Alexandrovich] and threw all the responsibility on the Minister of the Court, Vorontsov. It’s not true. The “note” was written thoroughly, and Vlassovsky, his assistant Rudnev, Moscow Police Chief Budberg, and the head of the special committee for the organization of coronation public spectacles and the festival, Berr, were thoroughly accused of “inaction on the part of the authorities.” Yesterday Witte rightly remarked that Vorontsov had appointed all sorts of high-society rubbish to the coronation commission and that, if anyone had tried to advise him, would have replied, like Vlassovsky: “That is not your business, but mine.” The consequences are very interesting. This was, indeed, a terrible drama in which the authorities were truly contemptible, worthy of the people’s reprisals.. It was in both its higher and lower representatives both insignificant and petty. As Vlassovsky did nothing, so too the police did nothing….Berr and Nikolin are truly blatant rubbish, who can only be kept in such a worn-out ministry as the Ministry of the Court. And how these superiors in their testimony lie, are hypocrites, slander others, and are cowardly! The testimony of ordinary people is both more truthful and more interesting. Here are a few excerpts that I dwelt on while reading. There were 100 booths at the 1883 coronation and 150 at the 1896 coronation “In the pathways between the tents (as the bourgeois Zernov calls booths) crowded a mass of people who raised their hands in the air, shouted, hooted and caught bundles thrown from the booths. The bundles were thrown out in a hurry. Anyone who could crawl back out of the crowd with the bundle they had received was all ragged and sweaty, as if from a steam bath. There were cries for help, screams of women and children; the latter were even passed over the heads of the public. People from the outside climbed over the booths and ran to the pathways….Both sides were crushing each other. Often fresh parties of men arrived and rushed to the aisles between the booths, and a still more vigorous stampede took place, as those who stood in a state of constraint from exhaustion could not resist the fresh men A special stampede was seen on the corner opposite the highway, since a lot of people were coming here from the Tverskaya. Many wounded were lying on the ground. Near the sheds lay many crushed to death. It was about 7 o’clock in the morning. Many climbed on booths, broke roofs and took bundles from the upper shelves. I asked one of the guards: Why did the distribution start at the wrong time? “The privileged groups arrived and began to give their bundles to acquaintances. When the people saw this, they began to protest and climb onto the booths and threaten the groups. They got scared and started giving it away. People fell in front of me, and I fell on them; the next ones fell on me. I fainted, maybe for half an hour, maybe for an hour. When I was brought to my senses and raised, there were 15 corpses above me and 10 corpses below me. I tripped over a dead man when the crowd carried me away, and several people fell on me. Then I felt people running over the ones that were lying on me.”

August 5, 1896, continued: [A witness to the Khodynka disaster is being quoted in the official report, from which Suvorin is recording excerpts] “There were a lot of people gathered the evening before. Some sat around the fire, some slept on the ground, some treated themselves to vodka, and some sang and danced. Many of them were dressed lightly: pants, an unbelted shirt and a cap, and many were barefoot [During the disaster] There was a boy next to me who was screaming a lot. Me and someone else lifted him up above the crowd and he went over their heads. My elbow was on a woman’s arm. I heard her arm crack and she fell to the ground. When [the head of the provincial palace guard] was placing soldiers in front of the Emperor’s pavilion, the crowd shouted, ‘Tell the Emperor that more than one hundred souls have perished here because of Vlassovsky!”…At about 3 o’clock in the afternoon the people said, “Why are you forcing us to die in a stampede?” For about 4 hours, people were handed over to authorities without any signs of life….[Suvorin includes a portion of the official report quoting one of the men who handed out gifts at one of the booths]: “I looked out and saw that in the place where the crowd was waiting there were already people on the ground, one on top of another, and people were walking on them to reach the pavilions. The people on the ground looked strange, as if they had been knocked down in rows. Often part of one body covered another body. I could see a row of dead bodies stretching at least 15 yards They were lying with their heads toward the booths and their feet toward the highway. Police went out to ‘guard’ them. At about one o’clock in the morning, a girl in an unconscious state and several teenagers were dragged out of the crowd. By 4 o’clock the people began to agitate at the booths, and the wood was splintering. The crowd was shouting, ‘Will the distribution start soon?’ In the inner square there were about 15,000 people. But as soon as the distribution began, the crowd rushed to the booths and were joined by those pushing from outside the area. It was an unimaginable stampede. People fell in the paths.”

October 31, 1896: [He asks a visiting official] “Does the Empress speak Russian?” “No, not yet. She knows it but does not dare to speak.” ….Bogdanovich says that the Government bought eight houses for 1.8 million Francs on rue Grenelle in Paris adjoining our embassy so that, when the Emperor stayed there [during his visit to Paris in the autumn of 1896] police could secure his safety and keep watch on all nearby tenants.

November 4, 1896: Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich returned to Moscow. On lampposts, the police tore down posters that said, “Prince Khodynsky is returning to guard the Vagankovsky Cemetery.”

September 8, 1897: [Writing of Alexander III] The Emperor once complained to Gurko [General Iosif Gurko, Governor-General of Warsaw] that it was difficult to find good tobacco. “I found one that I liked and have now purchased a large batch, but I am afraid that they might deceive me and put a different kind of tobacco in it.” Gurko told the Emperor that it was very difficult to take measures to prevent anti-Jewish riots, that the troops rejoiced when the Jews were beaten. The Emperor interrupted him, saying, “You know, I have to admit that I am glad when they are beaten.”

January 1, 1898: The two Empresses are at war with each other. One is drawn to the French alliance while the other favors a German alliance [4]. The Emperor awkwardly shifts between these two views.

February 14, 1900: Yesterday I was at the Hermitage Theater and watched “Hamlet” performed by Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich. But he doesn’t have much talent….His Hamlet can neither speak nor walk on the stage.. Often it’s just ridiculous. He pulls faces, imitates someone, and obviously thinks that he is someone gifted….He raises his voice, growls, and shouts, but in all of this there is not a drop of soul, not a single line from the heart. I was surprised that at the end he came out when the audience applauded, like an ordinary actor. But the applause was thin, although the theater was so full that many people were standing. It had been scheduled to start at 3 o’clock but only began at 3:10. It turns out that they didn’t have a makeup artist and, in general, everything was in a big mess….[Suvorin then met a friend who complained] “Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich invited me and so I couldn’t refuse, but I want to leave to go have dinner. I need to go but they won’t let me out. I went to another door; no one there knows French, and they just looked at me. I don’t know what to do. I’m terribly hungry….” I went back and watched the action on the stage. The Grand Duke was crawling along the stage. It was all stupid and childish. When the Emperor and his suite left, the Grand Duke began laughing, and it was even more foolish. What do these Grand Dukes want? Why do they play little tyrants like Nero and then make St. Petersburg applaud their service?

Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich as Hamlet

February 22, 1900: Grand Duke Peter Nikolaievich took 5 million rubles for a new foundation; shares were inflated to 700 rubles, but now they sell for 50 rubles. At a meeting of the Committee of Ministers, Witte said: “What we have reached is that the Grand Dukes are at the head of inflated enterprises….” The Toll brothers, sons of an important lady at the Court of the Dowager Empress, formed a fictitious enterprise in London, and have sent a certificate that three millions have been deposited in the Bank of London, and request that the shares be quoted on the St. Petersburg Stock Exchange….The Empress supported this fraud without understanding anything about it, but rather simply from the goodness of her heart….The Dowager Empress promised to pay 400,000 rubles of debts accrued by one of her ladies-in-waiting. Of course she wanted this paid by the Treasury. When this lady presented the letter to Witte, he saw that there was nothing to do but bargain with her, suggesting she be given 150,000 rubles. In the end he gave her 250,000 rubles. For an entire year and a half after this, the Dowager Empress refused to receive Witte. In our country such things are covered up.

March 13, 1900: Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich took a bribe of 200,000 rubles to postpone the imposition of a wine monopoly in Moscow. Witte had undoubted evidence for this and the Emperor was told. Sergei Alexandrovich came here the other day and stayed for only five hours. In one way or another, the Grand Dukes always take bribes and try to make money in every possible way.

March 14, 1900: A few years ago Burenin [a critic] took the liberty of speaking in unflattering terms about the poems of KR [Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich]. I was summoned to the press department over this and told [officials] were “very dissatisfied by his desire to write about the poems of KR. It is better for the Grand Dukes to write bad poetry than to beat the bastards..”

July 15, 1900: Pobedonostev says about the sovereign: “He is an educated man and can judge individual facts sensibly, but he does not see the connection between facts and events at all. He is full of pride and confidence that he can do anything because he is autocrat.”

July 19, 1903: The Emperor hates the Japanese and warns them not to take advantage….[He knows] that our fleet is bad. The Japanese have a fine navy and can eat us alive. The Baltic Fleet is not allowed out for fear that Germany will declare war on us. The Minster of the Marine [Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich] lives at Peterhof with his mistress and does nothing. As long as the Grand Duke is Admiral, we shall have no navy. The Grand Dukes never do anything, and the Ministers do everything so as not to disturb the Grand Dukes.

August 2, 1903: Our ruble is worth nothing thanks to Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, who insisted that a tax be imposed to favor a Danish company. Russia can perish if Denmark lives! The German woman [Empress Alexandra Feodorovna] hasn’t done the damage this Dowager does.

February 22, 1904: The Emperor agreed to receive a delegation of journalists on two conditions: that I be included, and that no Jews should be invited.

August 16, 1904: The purchase of new ships from Argentina did not take place, because Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich asked for a bribe of 500,000 rubles. Blood is shed in Manchuria, and the Grand Dukes take bribes! Russia is the estate of the Romanovs, and they are profiting in every possible way.

October 27, 1905: The Emperor has no real family ties and is therefore not obliged to reckon with his relatives….In the Caucasus Grand Duke Michael Nikolaievich and especially his wife took possession of the best lands, paying only 4 rubles per acre, and many injustices were done in their favor. Alexander Mikhailovich is one of the most mercenary Grand Dukes. People around Ai Todor [his Crimean estate] can’t stand him. He wants to be master of everything….There was yet another scandal surrounding Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich. As he was driving down the Morksaya a crowd gathered and shouted, “State thief!” and “Give us our fleet! Where is our fleet!”

June 12, 1906: Dubrovin writes private letters to the Emperor giving him advice, for example, to remove Baron [Vladimir] de Freedericksz, Minister of the Court, and [Alexander] Mossolov [Head of the Court Chancellery]….Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich wrote an article about the Navy. The Emperor read it and praised it, allowing it to be printed as a rescript and officially distributed to the Fleet. But after some time had passed, the Emperor told the Grand Duke, “I will have to punish you.” “Why?” the Grand Duke asked. “Because you violated naval hierarchy and discipline. You published your article and sent it out without asking for [Grand Duke] Alexei’s [Alexandrovich, the former head of the Naval Department]. This is a serious error. I am going to order you off to leave your ship and you will have to go to the Crimea and live there for a year.”

July 4, 1906: [Diplomat Evgeny] Shelking came this evening. He said: “Rachkovsky [General Peter Rachkovsky, former head of the Paris branch of the Okhrana and later Minister of the Interior] is now in the Emperor’s court. His story is connected to Philippe [French mystic Philippe Nazier-Vachot, who for a time had enjoyed the Imperial couple’s favor] and [Grand Duchess] Anastasia Nikolaevna of Montenegro [formerly married to the Duke of Leuchtenberg] (now the wife of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaievich, Jr.). She had become interested in table-turning in Nice and recommended Philippe to the Empress. He was sent for, and they engaged in table-turning, calling up the spirit of Alexander III, who gave advice to Nicholas II. Hesse [General Peter Hesse, Commandant of the Imperial Palaces] was very alarmed and instructed Rachkovsky to find out about Phillipe. He reported that he was a con man and a blackmailer who had served time in prison. The Emperor read the report, but under the influence of the ladies he treated Rachkovsky with contempt….The Emperor ordered him removed from his post and neutralized; he gave him a pension of 9,000 rubles and forbid him from traveling abroad. This went on for three years, then they allowed him to go and he left for Paris. Now they have summoned him back.”

Peter Rachkovsky

June 5, 1907: Yesterday an officer brought a copy of the Emperor’s telegram to [Dr. Alexander] Dubrovin, Chairman of the Union of the Russian People [a far right wing antisemitic monarchist organization whose armed militia was the terror group the Black Hundred]. The telegram was sent to the newspaper….Here it is: “Please convey to the Chairmen of the Departments and to all Members of the Union of the Russian People who have sent me expressions of animated feelings my heartfelt gratitude for their devotion and readiness to serve the Throne for the good of the dear Motherland. I am sure now that all truly faithful and devoted Russian sons, who selflessly love their Fatherland, will unite even more closely and, by constantly multiplying their ranks, held me achieve the peaceful revival of our Great and Holy Russia and improve the lives of its great people. May the Union of the Russian People reliably support me, serving as an example of law and order for everyone in everything. Nicholas.” I did not believe that this telegram was authentic, so much so that I ordered it not to be printed….I found…notes on events at Court which confirmed that it had been authorized by the Ministry of the Imperial Court….Today in the [antisemitic newspaper] Znamya [operated by Paul Krushevan, who first published the modern version of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Russia in 1903] the telegram is printed in full….Witte arrived….I showed him the Emperor’s telegram to Dubrovin, which provoked a long talk. “The Emperor is too self-confident [Witte said]. During the Japanese War, he thought that after every misfortune things would suddenly get better and that everything would work out for the best. He continues to think like that now. Having dissolved the Duma, he thinks that God’s blessings will come and will end any revolution.”

July 12, 1907: Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich lives in Tashkent. He is smart, and speaks humorously about his relatives. On Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, his brother, he says: “Kostya has an extremely ‘tender heart.’ When he came here to do an inspection I went to see him, but he fainted while waiting for me in his carriage so that he didn’t have to see me. All from his ‘tender heart.’ Our of their great love for me, my dear relatives has confiscated all of my collections as personal souvenirs. Mama [Grand Duchess Alexandra Iosifovna] even took the statue of my mistress, an American [Henrietta Blackford], which I had made in Italy modeled on the work Canova….” The Grand Duke asked the sovereign to allow him to build a theater in Tashkent with money sent for a palace on the Steppe. The Grand Duke asked to donate it to the city. “I would rather have a small box in the theater than a large palace in the Steppe,” he wrote to the Emperor. “But they love me so much,” he said, “that they will probably refuse my request.” He has two sons in the service. They bear the surname Iskander. He himself is tall, all shaved, almost without hair, like an antique mask.

[1] There is no evidence in Nicholas’s own writings of a desire to marry Kschessinska; but that she would tell people he wanted to, and boast about her relationship with him, is consistent with her later claims. - JA

[2] In 2014, writing our book on Nicholas II’s coronation, A Life for the Tsar, we calculated that this sum was equivalent to $6,000, or £4,500, in modern terms - JA

[3] For the coronation book, I translated the last two sentences as “A profound topic like this can’t just be covered by producing an effect. All processions are surely very lovely, but they still give an impression of constraint, and all, or most, who take part in them always seem a bit worried.” The slightly different wording gives an idea of the difficulty of such exercises. I used a 1999 UK published version of the Russian for this, in tandem with the 1923 French version, and I can’t recall which produced this translation. - JA

[4] This is unlikely. While the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna may indeed have favoured the French Alliance, there is no evidence at all that Alexandra would have preferred a German one, had she even the power to influence such a thing at a time when the French alliance was already a done deal. - JA

About a decade ago, it seems that I made a Facebook post about influential books, and I mentioned buying The Last Empress and Greg’s subsequent role in my life. So maybe that’s why.

“What a lovely tribute; it’s a shame he’s not on Facebook and can’t see it,” said a friend.

Instinctively I wanted to show this longer tribute to him now and ask what he thinks of the order and the opening; is there another way he’d arrange it? I wish he could see this one too. I hope he knew anyway.

Collecting my thoughts about Greg always starts at that same beginning: it all began with what was for me an unprecedented recognition of a kindred spirit in the topics he chose. Then I got to know him profoundly across the miles, which I think would have been impossible just a few years earlier. He probably became for me the perfect best friend we all want at the age we both were when our interest in history was awakening. He’s made me laugh like a drain - and “drain” is probably the mot juste, considering some of our humour - and howl like a baby. In the writing and research he gave me a place of perpetual escape, like kids retreating into play; he made my mind sing.

It’s the story of an interaction I’m writing here, not a biographical piece on him as such – because I want to write about the Greg *I* knew, without the sort of research, analysis or objectivity that goes into a biography or a conventional obituary. And yet…in almost a quarter of a century I learned so much about how he worked, about his thoughts and opinions and personality that this will be a kind of bio anyway - and the relationship he had with me will tell the world much about him as a writer and as a man.

So here we go….

Seattle, 2010: the best photo we managed to take, though Greg disliked it as he felt he looked “like the living dead”. He was certainly pale, but in person his face was full of life and expression. I don’t know why he was carrying my computer for me here, but he liked to do things to help, whether it was strictly needed or not. It smelled evocatively of clove cigarettes for a good while after it met him, as did all the books he ever sent me. Unlike tobacco, this is a nice smell. [Photo: Christophe Martyn]

Part one: “a man on the internet”

I grew up as a British child in Khartoum with a fast-changing circle of friends as people came and went. Houses were far apart, we didn’t just drop round and had to entertain ourselves. I started writing at 8, but from 12 or 13 vested my feelings and creativity in the family of Tsar Nicholas II, especially in telling the tale of his wife Alix. I had just one friend I knew constantly through all those years, and who is a writer too: we felt ourselves very unique; for a while we definitely didn’t quite “fit” back in the UK. The imprint of “not fitting” in my teens stayed on me through my student days and into young adulthood.

One day in 1995 I walked into a bookshop and found a book called The Last Empress, by Greg King, highlighted there on the table of new biographies. I skimmed the introduction and acknowledgements with the strange sensation that with more dedication I could or should have written it. I was reading of the author’s intention since the age of 12 or 13 to tell the story of this misunderstood woman…and the words were almost identical to an essay I’d written once.

Turning to the back flap, I was confronted by a photograph of an obviously young author, and I felt guiltier still: I didn’t even have the consolation of knowing that he’d spent a lifetime in writing it, though I hoped he had a few years on me. His acknowledgements section was fulsome in praise of his friends, “without whom no man would wish to live, though he had all other goods.” He was from Everett in the Seattle area and lived there still; presumably he had grown up with television and popular culture, and the things I had not had, and yet…his interests were just like mine, a point that became clearer over subsequent years as he wrote a biography of Ludwig II of Bavaria, another character I’d read about in teenage years, and another figure that imaginative – isolated? - kids often like to study. After that, it was the Duchess of Windsor – well, you guessed it – I’d an inclination to fight her side too, since her husband had been a fantasy crush of mine when I was 12.

Later, of course, I’d learn the obvious truth that Greg wrote about subjects that had an audience. But he told me he would never write a book that didn’t interest him – and those first topics were certainly close to his heart from early in life; there was no cynicism in his choice. Yet he was a real historian in his approach: I found him more critical of the Empress Alexandra than I might have been, and part of me resented him for that. So did I have an ambition then to meet him and discuss these people? Not really. I thought our shared interests a strange coincidence, but his attitude seemed more dispassionate than mine: he was even quite hard on Ludwig, the solitary, nocturnal, castle-building “Mad king” of Bavaria, who was a sort of alter-ego for him – and part of his email address.

Speaking of which….I think I found Greg’s email address on the website for Atlantis Magazine, in 2001. With the new millennium, I’d turned back to my own writing after a hiatus of several years dominated by early career concerns, music, social stuff, and restoring our Edwardian house in Leeds with my partner Christophe. This time I was determined to be published, and the book I embarked on was a grown-up version of the one I’d been writing as a child: a fictionalised autobiography of Russia’s last empress Alexandra Feodorovna. I read far more widely around it now, consciously adopted her writing style, and discovered a plethora of web resources as well as books, from the Alexander Palace site run by a group of amateur historians bent on restoring the Tsar and Empress’s favourite home, to Atlantis Magazine, which Greg had founded with Penny Wilson specifically about Russian and Romanov history. I also came across the Usenet newsgroup alt.talk.royalty (“a.t.r” to its regulars), and I signed up and had a few polite discussions. Greg was a past participant, slightly to my surprise (one didn’t see Robert Massie, Dominic Lieven, or other famous Romanov writers on the internet!), but it seemed he wasn’t around currently.

On July 16/17 2001, the anniversary of Nicholas II’s murder, he reappeared, and posted about his and Penny’s book project on that very murder, to a furore of indignation from people who read this announcement as claiming that the Grand Duchesses had slept with their captors, or simply thought he was exploiting the date for publicity.

I was among the people who reacted with cynicism, assuming he was creating a stir for commercial reasons, but in a short time I felt a bit uncomfortable about my reaction. Nothing I’d known of him to date suggested that this was his motive: the existence of Atlantis Magazine implied above all someone genuinely immersed in the topic, perhaps more so than I’d assumed from his firmly objective book on the Empress.

Next time I posted a comment on a.t.r., Greg threw out a line and reeled me in. It was an innocuous discussion about the marriage prospects of the Romanov daughters, and he told me about a potential proposal I’d not heard of – and then he posted the evidence he mentioned in a new thread headed “For Janet:…” Who wouldn’t be flattered? I noticed that we seemed to be the only people there, or at least the only ones saying anything on any thread. Many posters were in the U.S., still in bed, and I suppose the other European ones didn’t post from work during breaks, as I did.

A little later I emailed him with a newspaper story about Ludwig II. He answered at once, and he told me, “I’m on your time as I work from midnight to 8am”, which explained the coincident a.t.r. timings. “I get away with it by saying ‘I’m a writer!’”

I decided to subscribe to Atlantis, so I wrote him an email that may have included a question or two as well, sending it off as Christophe and I embarked on holiday. I told Greg when I was due back and there was no hurry to reply if he was busy, but the possibility of his reply made return to work palatable to me. The very day I came back to work (work was always the default email in those distant days of home dial-up), his reply was waiting, also apologising for being away doing research – but I kind of wondered if he’d chosen the day carefully to make sure it didn’t get lost in my inbox. Indeed, I would learn that nothing Greg did was ever unconsidered.

And we went on to talk about his and Penny’s forthcoming book, the misunderstandings over it, and about every related topic possible, from intra-family relationships among Nicholas II’s circle to Nicholas’s attitude to Jews, to what source claimed what about whom - all relevant to both his book and mine. He liked to drop a tantalising comment at the end of an email before he went to bed, leaving me impatient for the hours to pass so we could pick up the topic again. “I really enjoy our exchanges as you make me think,” he said quite early on. About the Empress he soon told me that he had struggled to be objective when writing his biography of her, and some of the criticisms were his attempt to get balance. But his views had changed since anyway.

I’d never had anyone to really fully talk to about this stuff before, still less someone of his stature in the field. In the early days he’d often ask me, “Do you know x; do you know y?” Nope. Only you, really. And then a few other writers from Atlantis, to varying degrees. After a couple of years I felt this wasn’t healthy, it wasn’t like any other friendship I’d had, with a circle of mutual contacts and conversations, so I went out and deliberately got to know other people with broadly overlapping interests, on a social basis – and found more information and assistance for him out there too. It was like having a social group, even if we were never in the same room all together.

This late 90s photo of Greg is pretty much the man who sat typing behind the screen when we first knew each other, before he lost so much weight and got so pale through work and stress and a nocturnal life style. I like how he looks dressed to go out in the snow, as if in a Russian great coat, though in fact it’s just the way he was sitting!

At that early point, though they flew to and fro, our emails were long, careful and usually politely phrased, his with considerable charm, like letters. He used almost archaic language at times: “most of my friends in the UK have a beastly time with the US mail”. It didn’t take me long to find out that he was 36, only three years older than me - yet already the author of five books - and his messages were cheery, full of what can only be called youthful verve and enthusiasm. I told him I liked how approachable he was to a reader.

“I appreciate very much what you say. Knowing how important these things were when I started, I feel a sense of obligation in writing back to people,” he told me. Then, carefully, “Not here with you, but you know what I mean.”

When the weeks of this all-consuming rapid-fire conversation were over, I still thought that might be it. And I was a bit sad about that. But after a brief hiatus, he was back in touch, out of the blue, with an apology for the short silence (he’d been dealing with an issue related to a previous book, his bio of Sharon Tate), as if I was to expect to hear from him regularly now.

I saw the lyrics to a song the other day, a tribute by Eric Church to Bruce Springsteen. I’d never heard it played, but the words struck such a chord:

“We - we were just getting started..

I was singin' to you, you were singin' to me
I was so alive, never been more free.”

No exaggeration: that’s totally what he did: his letters sang to me, he lifted my mind and spirit, inspiring with me with new purpose at work for a start. Within the first few months of our knowing each other, he pointed out that some manuscript letters from the Empress Alexandra to an English bishop were in the British Library – under my nose at work. “I’d be keen to have someone (hint, hint) write an article about them for Atlantis.” This grew into a look at her whole spiritual life, and after Atlantis it was reconfigured as an article for the Library’s own research publication, the electronic British Library Journal.

I then went on to write in Atlantis about Alexandra’s wartime political role, about my first trip to Russia in the wild west days of 1993, about the press magnate and Tsarist apologist WT Stead, and several other topics. I also did book and exhibition reviews. And how much validation and confidence I got from his reactions! – something I’d never felt on my Oxford history course, a foray into largely British political structures which didn’t engage me that much and had more luck producing Jacob Rees-Mogg and George Osborne.

“You have this…intellectual acuity…that I really admire,” Greg said to me one day on the phone – like that, words chosen very carefully and with emphasis. And in that conversation something else stuck with me too: “I only ever have three to four people in my life at any one time.”

During the writing of Fate of the Romanovs, the first book of many of his that I was involved with, I came to feel part of a tiny, insulated circle against the raging world, the small group that knew what the book actually said, but this statement wasn’t about literary and commercial confidentiality at a controversial time. Greg knew thousands of people, he corresponded with and helped many thousands more, and he certainly never forgot old friends even if he rarely saw or talked to someone while he was so busy - so on the face of things it seemed an odd thing to say – but it sort of signalled that I’d been Chosen; I had a genuine claim on his current time and attention, which was something he could only ever give a relative few for various reasons, and no matter if in future our paths diverged I would never cease to be a friend or to be noted and recalled.

“I'm not the kind of person who surrounds himself with a hoard of others, or with a lot of extraneous ties to people,” he’d tell me later. “When you reach a point in my life where you are important, you know, and you hear from me a lot.” Remembering his warm comments about his friends in his early acknowledgements, I privately admitted that maybe I’d always wanted to be part of that. The notion of extreme exclusivity totally sang to the introvert in me, though it frightened me as well. Despite his words, it took me a long time to believe that the intensity of this experience was truly real and I wasn’t deceiving myself.

Greg would claim not to like humanity in general, and would often say, “I’m not very social…I could easily live my life without leaving my house ever again”. Being friends with him was indeed nothing like a social friendship where you hang out a bit and then maybe don’t meet or even speak for months. I found that he was endlessly loyal if you were to him - but betrayals of different kinds hurt him deeply and led to a permanent rupture with a few past friends. He’d thank you in his books forever, apologise in them for being out of contact even when he wasn’t, and when he was in touch he’d never just disappear off the radar for a bit the way people do in lighter friendships. He was also, eventually, when you were trusted to take it as intended, also completely honest even to the point of bluntness where he felt it necessary - after first inviting the same openness in return. (In private, obviously. He didn’t have a lot of respect for public attacks and dramas, which seemed quite common in the Romanov history world. )

But I also saw him calmly shrug and move on from various public knocks and slights from acquaintances and colleagues in time too. He was always practical and good natured about transactional relationships in a field of history with so many emotional dramas associated, and was quite clear too that he would never retaliate against anyone who criticised or even attacked his work by trying to damage them in turn: “I may think they are a jerk, but I would never attack them back. I just don’t understand this meanness in people now.” He mainly got annoyed if any need to deal with public dramas took him away from his work.

Part two: “Let me have it”

In early 2002, Greg asked me to critique first the timeline and then the manuscript of his and Penny’s already-notorious new book, Fate of the Romanovs, aka “FOTR”, whose very title encompassed multiple levels of meaning. This title referred to the ostensibly Russian Orthodox cultural preoccupation with fate and predestination that led to Nicholas II’s fairly passive life, as well as to what actually literally happened both to the Romanovs and to their reputation before and after death. From the time I read the vast original manuscript – there were more than 70 chapters, much longer than what came to be published – I thought it was brilliant. I was supposed to argue and challenge – and I did – yet it profoundly changed my own thinking in multiple directions.

In that book I saw him transcend the general readership he had originally aimed for as a biographer and reach also for something more academic, with a lot of focus on ideas, which he had a real talent for explaining in laymen’s terms. He described it as the most important work he’d done yet, and thought it would remain so for a while. It was far more critical of Nicholas II and the imperial government than his early work had been. “These days I’ve more sympathy with the Bolsheviks” he told me, only exaggerating a bit. This was not a problem for his newer readership, or even much of the old one, many of whom welcomed this balance, and who probably made up the vast majority of buyers. Nevertheless, vocal parts of the audience still seemed obsessed with the idea that the book was simply a “prequel” to one “proving” that one of the family had escaped the Ekaterinburg massacre, and for them the issue always seemed to come back to questions about Grand Duchesses, soldiers, and sex. They read their own conclusions into things never said in the book, and then sought to prove that the evidence for it was in some way erroneous. And this one small question overrode anything else in the book for this section of its market.

The furore lasted years, through many of his subsequent books, encompassing everything from periodic waves of synchronised one-star Amazon reviews to abusive or threatening emails and phone calls. I always saw them as the dark downside of his making himself available to readers: people thought their views could impact him in a way that was not the case with most historians. Greg’s phone number and address were as freely available on the internet as his email was, but he simply unplugged his phone when he wasn’t expecting a call – and carried on working away, immersed in his latest topic and impervious to the dramas outside. “I’m never depressed by this stuff,” he said, meaning both the history and its attendant problems. The former absorbed him totally; the latter he ignored or – at its most ludicrous – laughed at. (for example, in one little group Penny and I came across, we were all referred to as a “coven”, and “minions” of a “Dark Master” – who was Peter Kurth, we gathered; I didn’t even know him yet - aiming to “destroy the imperial martyrs.” )

I discovered that if I got involved in trying to defend the book I would be readily accused of everything from this nonsense to being desperate to see my work in print – as if posting on an internet newsgroup would “buy” my place in Atlantis. Then I also had random people write to “warn” me to steer clear of him because he was being sued by the Romanov family (he wasn’t), etc . Originally Greg would laugh at the fiercest of my responses (“Dude…you rock!”) but on one occasion after a particularly spiteful verbal attack on me he came home from work in his break to contact me and check I was OK, which felt pretty nice. But then after a point he would remind me frankly that if I went out there and engaged I knew what to expect.

“People on the internet,” Greg said, “are like photographers – they enlarge things” – meaning they distort them and take them out of proportion. It was a quote from “To the Manor Born,” apparently.

Unfortunately, Greg’s own published information made it easy for people to locate his parents as well, and their phone line looked like an alternative way to get to him. In 2002 he told me that his mother was dealing with osteoporosis, he and his father divided helping and caring for her between them, “so I am not very free.” On at least one occasion people claiming to be from Greg’s publisher called his parents’ line and screamed abuse, which of course was “the last thing” his mother needed, and it made him somewhat angry – he who was usually so measured. Luckily none of them actually turned up at his house, though he must have wondered if they might. He was also bothered, despite his occasionally frank words on how ill-advised it was to engage with the unreasonable out there, that the internet dramas were spoiling Penny’s experience of publishing her first book.

When I first knew Greg, it was not that long since he’d returned from a research trip to various places in Europe, and he even spoke of another possible tour to Russia, something an Atlantis subscriber was hoping to arrange, with Greg and Penny as guides. He thought I might like to join it. During a light-hearted conversation about star signs he described himself as a typical Sagittarius in his love of travel. He told me all about his wanderings in the UK, everything from the vileness of some B&B breakfasts (who – aside from hungover students - serves fish fingers for breakfast?!) to his tours of architectural wonders, especially in the area I live, full of enthusiasm for Nostell Priory, Nunnington Hall, Newby Hall, Rievaulx Abbey, Byland Abbey, and Brodsworth. He always felt he might be happy living in Yorkshire, or Norfolk, and he wasn’t fond of the over-crowding of the southeast or even the West country (which I always found too rural). But Haworth, whose most famous residents had been my first inspiration as an eight year old, he definitely didn’t appreciate: “No wonder Branwell drank!”

If there was a local historic house I hadn’t visited before, I was off to see it now and report my opinions back…. We also found out that we’d been in Oxford at the same time in 1989, when I as a student attended a Russian Club presentation by George Gibbes of items belonging to George’s father, Sydney, the tutor of Nicholas II’s children. Greg met Gibbes that very same summer - even the same month, probably - and spent some time helping him sort and classify the material. How strange it would have been if he’d come along to the Russian Club and we’d unknowingly met so many years before…

Heck, we may also have walked past each other in Seattle in 1995, the first time I was there, but Greg was probably away in Europe then! From our respective homelands or towns, we kind of gravitated to each other’s when we were very young. And to Russia, and to Germany, of course.

By 2001, Greg had developed a strong dislike of flying, and he was less enamoured of the UK than he had been as a boy, but he still often talked of getting a cheap boat trip over the Atlantic someday. He even wanted to relocate – but to Ireland, because of its tax breaks for writers and its proximity to most of his research interests. However, as his mother’s health needs became greater this all faded into the background, and instead I found I was vicariously travelling for him, for work and for pleasure, heading off to Sezincote while staying at my mother’s nearby so I could get Greg a guidebook, because he’d said how much he admired the house.

Everywhere I went he would pull a curious connection – often a castle, palace or house - out of a hat. In early 2004, Christophe and I went to visit a university-era friend of mine in Switzerland. “Oh,” said Greg, “Ernie had a castle in Switzerland; let me look up the name.” This was Schloss Tarasp, and my friend Regula was easily able to locate it, so off we went. We’d been hoping to spend some time in the countryside in the snow during this visit, and this trip suited that purpose very well. Tarasp lies in the Lower Engadin valley, and we had a wonderful journey to it, staying first with Regula’s parents in their very traditional farmhouse as the snow began to fall, then taking a train in the small town of Scuol and hiking through the snow to the castle, which even in January was open to the public. “It looks so perfect lying there under the snow,” said Greg when he saw my photos. “I don’t know how Ernie could ever bear to leave it.” The castle’s story became an article for me in one of the specialist magazines, Royalty Digest Quarterly, (as Atlantis had by then entered its 15-year hibernation).

Scuol in Switzerland’s Engadin valley (Heidi land!) and nearby Schloss Tarasp, “perfect under the snow”, my first travel adventure for and by Greg [all photos by Janet Ashton/Christophe Martyn]:

“Ernie” was Ernst Ludwig of Hesse, the Empress Alexandra’s brother, a major patron of the arts and quite a character. At that time, Greg and Penny were considering a biography of him, and I had also been interested in him since re-starting my novel about his sister Alix. After Tarasp, I wrote an article about his trip to India for their uncle Edward VII’s Durbar of 1902, complete with photographs from the Darmstadt archives and translations of his poetry about the trip (unlike his sister, he used German as his primary language).

Then on Abebooks I found another book of his poetry, printed in Darmstadt for his Silver Jubilee as Grand Duke in 1917. I bought it, quickly read it (but my German isn’t up to translating poetry), and then gave it to Greg thinking it could be of future use as an insight into Ernst’s soul. “It comes with much love, as it’s something I’d have liked to keep myself,” I teased him.

Greg asked me to interview Lady Mountbatten on his and Penny’s behalf about her memories of Ernst, her great uncle, who she stayed with in Hesse as a child. I said I wasn’t a royal expert used to hanging out in these circles, but Greg was adamant I was the person to do this, as I wasn’t “a royal sycophant, afraid to ask delicate questions; not that we’ll be asking if she ever walked in on Uncle Ernie with a bevy of stable boys!” In fact, the more personal and potentially awkward questions they had focused on things such as family relationships after World War One, and whether Ernst shared his sisters’ leaning to mysticism in any way. They sent these questions to her in advance with my contact details, and one day my home phone rang, and I picked it up to hear a voice the other end say: “Hello, is that Janet? this is Patricia Mountbatten….can you come down and see me?”
Somehow I’d thought she might have a secretary or assistant do this; it was a big surprise that she rang personally.

Meeting her in London was a thrill to me: I was talking to a member of the Hesse family that I’d studied most of my life, hearing her pronounce the names of her great-aunts (A-LIX, they always say, with the emphasis on the second syllable, and Irène in the French style) and tell me her personal memories as well as so many handed down stories. Lady Mountbatten’s husband Lord Brabourne was also present, and he talked of being among the first soldiers to enter Bergen-Belsen after World War Two. He made it clear that he had no truck with the family’s frequent claim – promulgated by Mountbatten and others through their favoured biographers - that Prince Christopher of Hesse, married to Patricia’s cousin Sophie of Greece, had changed his mind about Hitler and been murdered for it. “He was a full-on Nazi. Make no mistake about that!”

Other members of Ernst Ludwig’s family also consorted with the Nazis, as did so many German aristocrats. He was a complicated character and may not have made as sympathetic a subject as he initially seems. Greg was the first person to mention to me that in 1902 he spent time in Capri with a notorious circle from Berlin high society centered on the steel manufacturer Friedrich Krupp, which exploited the local boys for sex. In 1902 the ensuing scandal was simply about homosexuality, but in the modern world remaining concerns and questions centre on the ages – and perhaps the economic status - of the youths involved.

Ernst’s involvement was later and independently confirmed to me by John Wimbles, an expert on the Coburg family of which Ernst’s first wife was a member. Greg had no contact with John and knew nothing of his research; there was no chance of “group think.” But John thought Ernst had been sent to India to get away from the scandal related to the Krupp affair, to his divorce and to the famous sexual shenanigans in Darmstadt with “stable boys” that his ex-wife complained of, as much as to indulge his own fascination with the country’s history and spiritual life. The million dollar question remains: what in Ernst’s context, were “boys”? Young men leaving adolescence? Or, in an era when work started so young, were they basically children?

Ernst, with his hyper-sensitive nature, his secrets and demons, would make an intriguing subject for sure, as long as readers did not expect a hagiography, but no major publisher thought him a good commercial proposition. Unfortunately, minor royalty also seems or seemed to attract audiences that don’t want to see their faults and can dismiss any revelations of flawed humanity as “gossip” or “tabloid writing”.

Still, while contemplating the subject, Greg named his brown Labrador “Ernie”, a perfect name for a large, mellow dog like that in my view. He was highly inclined to name this Ernie’s sister after the other Ernie’s first wife, “Ducky”, but luckily his parents objected since they were their dogs too, and the girl puppy’s name became Susie. Unsurprisingly, his original suggestions of Ludwig and Sisi had been rejected at the outset!

After Fate of the Romanovs, then, he turned not to Ernst but to The Court of the Last Tsar, a topic he’d worked on for years and in 2003 resolved to finally finish in preference to anything further related to Romanov murders, claimants, or other controversial topics. I was happy about this: I’d been back to Russia not so long ago gathering material and impressions, hunting down hidden places Greg pointed me to, such as the ruins of Nicholas II’s dacha on the shore at Peterhof, all crumbling then and covered in nationalist graffiti.

Hours spent in the British Library’s Rare Books Reading Room at work also paid off as I had plenty of material to send on to him if he wanted it, a particularly large tranche of it focusing on Nicholas’s coronation and on his trip to France in 1896. In fact, there was so much that he could only use a small part of it. And then we found still more in Leeds University.

“I wasn’t originally thinking of the BL’s collections in relation to the court book, “ Greg said one day as we discussed what I’d found, “but I am now!” So he sent me a list of chapters with the likely themes they would cover so I could trawl the collections for anything relevant. For some chapters I’d find lots and lots, though of course not for all: I don’t want to give the impression that he in some way leached on me, as the book was well developed when we met. But when I could contribute, it was a joy to hash through the detail and discuss this stuff.

Then before I read any of the book’s manuscript he cross-examined me on my thoughts about the structure of it, which he’d been considering for years. He wanted to create a sort of literary equivalent to the film “Russian Ark”, a huge swirling mass of impressions and images that could almost overwhelm the reader, and which, I thought, would also mirror the impressionistic art scene of the Silver Age contemporary with the book. We came out in agreement that the book would work best in doing this if the structure was thematic rather than overly chronological.

I had understood from our conversations that Greg usually preferred to write books solo; his work with Penny was at that stage seen as a special case (though he’d also written two extended Atlantis articles, as long as a small book, with Coryne Hall). But at some point, he said, “You want to write a book with me? Well, believe it or not, I’d be open to that.” Maybe that was the genesis of the idea of a book about Nicholas’s coronation, based on all the material I’d collected. And we played with plenty of other ideas over the years. He liked to sound things out; I was never sure when he first talked about something whether he meant it to be solo or a joint project with anyone else – I guess he wasn’t always sure at first either. One such idea was a Habsburg court book, which never happened but clearly influenced several things he came to write, and proved quite inspiring for me too.

He also considered Sultan Abdul Hamid II, which I think would have been a court book, and was a solo project of his he’d already worked on, Empress Elizabeth (of Russia) or even Vlad Dracula, as he had been to Romania for some research years before. Then there was his Anna Gould/Boni de Castellane project, which sounded extremely interesting and entertaining to me who’d studied the Third Republic at University (one of about three topics that engaged me), and was another solo one he didn’t get to realise.

Other ideas we discussed unequivocally involved both of us from the start – some originating with him and others with me. A Hohenzollern court book may have been one of my suggestions, but at this distance I can no longer even recall who brought it up first: I just remember that Greg loved this idea but feared that a major publisher would refuse it. Then there was a possible book on Queen Marie of Romania, which almost out of the blue he floated with his agent and publishers in 2013, and “which,” he said, “I’d do with you.” I thought this would make a decent court book, though Greg favoured a biography or joint biography (including her sisters), depending on what others might then be writing about her. But the publisher didn’t bite anyway.

When I first knew him, he had a serious interest in Nicholas I, which chimed with me. Nicholas I’s reign – like the French Third Republic - was one of the rare topics I studied at Oxford which actually engaged me (part of one of the few non-UK exam papers), and after related pieces of research and writing I told him directly in 2006 that if he ever wanted to pursue a book on this family, reign and court, I’d like to be in. “I know, and despite the horror of tackling such an immense subject it always ruminates in my head,” he replied. I tacked back and forth around this subject, writing chapters and articles and always keeping an eye open; our very last projects were related to it, and perhaps one day we’d have done it. If life had turned out a little different.

Meanwhile, his Russian “court book”, The Court of the Last Tsar, emerged as a magnificent evocation of palaces, gardens, uniforms, court dress, officials and ceremony, an entirely readable recreation of the projection of Nicholas II as a monarch. Greg truly loved architecture, had wanted to be an architect once, knew a lot about it and had a talent for bringing the sparkle and opulence of houses to life, often interspersing their story with those of the people who lived in them. So many articles of his follow this pattern. He was also very influenced by Richard Wortman, an academic historian who delves into the meaning and purpose of court and government ceremony, and from Fate of the Romanovs onwards this was always an element of his writing: nothing we know ever taken at face value as the truth about the grand person or family it focuses on, because even what we see of their private lives can be a deliberate construction of an image.

During the writing of the court book I also went to Poland, a country which was to become almost by chance something of a persistent theme in our joint work. Greg had a book on the country houses of central Europe, many of which were in Poland and hugely fascinating to him, and he was interested to hear what I’d find out about Tsarist residences there. We were also putting together what became the (final, for the time being) “Konstantinovichi” issue of Atlantis. My chosen topic was Konstantin Nikolaevich (son of Nicholas I), the father of the dynasty, who had been Viceroy of Poland, so I wanted to see his homes, and understand the place of the Romanovs relative to contemporary Warsaw and Poland. Since childhood, a lot of my writing has been driven by place, which can inspire new works completely – but also change how you feel about and understand an existing topic. I came away from that first Polish visit with lots about Warsaw Castle, the Belweder (home of Konstantin and later of Polish Presidents) and the Łazienki palace. But most of all I brought back Białowieża with me.

This red brick Victorian hunting lodge, all pointy towers and finials, built by Alexander III as his ideal home but barely lived in, was in the far eastern part of present-day Poland, up near the border with Belarus. The Russian court knew it as Belovezh. When he first found a picture, Greg said, “that thing looked amazing!” and was desperate to know more. The main building was demolished after extensive damage in World War Two, but its park and outbuildings are intact, part of a research area dedicated to the primeval forest around.

My original idea was to go there by bus from Warsaw, but the journey was complicated, involving changes of bus in Białystok at least, and possibly elsewhere. I didn’t yet know the country, and was a bit worried about finding myself wandering round a faceless large city – or small village - where I couldn’t communicate with anyone, and ending up in the middle of nowhere after taking the wrong connection! So Christophe and I hired a car for a couple of days.

The journey was long and slow, following narrow, tree-lined roads across the countryside, sometimes behind a tractor or even a horse-drawn wagon, sometimes swerving to one side to avoid another driver coming fast down the wrong side in the opposite direction. Poland’s road casualty rate in 2004 was pretty high: this has changed a lot with tough drink driving laws and other things!

The Hofmarschal’s house at Bialowieza, one of a few buildings that remain from the original complex [Photo: Janet Ashton]

Białowieża was a very small town, basically two long roads with a church at each end (one Orthodox, one Catholic, epitomising the mixed affiliations of the area as well as its past), lined by small wooden houses and two western-style hotels, one, again, at each end. Some of the wooden houses were also small hotels, or offered rooms. In one of the large hotels, a big scientific conference was taking place, the suits, dresses and bright lights chinking on glass rather anomalous in the battered little village with its pot-holed roads and peeling paint. In the evening, groups of young men who were probably Polish squaddies came out onto the streets and wandered around noisily singing and drinking, but in the depths of the night all that could be heard were screeches, roars and rumbles from deep in the forest.

We walked the beautiful palace park with its blended shades of green, a perfectly-managed “English style” park maintained as Alexander III had commissioned, and went into the Forest’s strict reserve – the protected area where the bison and rare flora live - with a guide, as this is forbidden without one. Walks in the parts of the woods where you are allowed alone were a little intimidating: as the trees and silence close around, you start to feel like you’ll never get out again. Greg enjoyed this when I reported back: “I like dark and mysterious,” he said.

Bialowieza forest [photo: Janet Ashton]

There was an extensive exhibition with loads of exterior and interior photos inside the old palace gatehouse, and men with tables on the main street just outside the gate sold CD-ROMS that reproduced these pictures. When I got mine home I had trouble opening it, to my disappointment, until a colleague at work suggested replacing the Polish Ł in the title with an English L, and then it miraculously opened up, revealing its riches

.

The lost palace at Bialowieza

Nicholas II’s daughters at Bialowieza in 1903, one of the few occasions they visited

For Atlantis, I did an article on the Warsaw palaces; Greg had the Białowieża material, including some of the photos, for the court book. But of course he could only use a very small part of it. In due course, after Atlantis, we put together a pair of articles for the Royalty Digest Quarterly, published in Sweden by Ted Rosvall, on the Romanovs and Polish palaces: one focused on Warsaw and the other on the hunting lodges. I also set up a website, directarticle [which is no longer there as technology outpaced me] in which we re-used the Białowieża text and more, along with the many photos we had, to create a “virtual” palace, when entering a room would reveal a chapter of information related to a particular period on its history.

These days, there is loads of information out there on the web about the old palace and present-day site. The town has the inevitable boutique hotels with “the Tsar’s chambers” for rent, and the imperial station has been rebuilt, but in 2004 we had hit a real treasure trove at a time when most Romanov sources and enthusiasts had no idea even what the building had looked like.

The “court” book did well; the publisher, Wiley, was pleased. They wanted another one like it. Greg tried to sell them a book on Ludwig II as a court book (The Court of the Mad King), which I thought would work nicely, given that solitary monarch’s contradictory love of display and the figure he has become in literature and other cultural material. Greg really wanted to do a full reworked, massive biography, with this court book as compromise. But Wiley passed on it anyway, and the book that came about instead was on Queen Victoria’s court instead: Twilight of Splendor, focusing on the aging monarch’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

This one is perhaps one of Greg’s lesser-known books, and he was not particularly enamoured of it as a topic, but it’s special to me. The break from Nicholas II and accompanying vitriol was quite a relief, because despite its success, even the court book had its detractors in the intense world of Romanov and royal history, and Fate of The Romanovs was always in the background. There were ongoing, sometimes coordinated, personal attacks on his approach to his work. This really got to me and I couldn’t bear the thought of him even having to read the comments. He just called them “petty”; he always found personal attacks to be the most low-level irritating and pointless form of criticism of anyone’s work.

I don’t want to emphasise negativity, especially when it was such a small proportion of the response, but as an example of quite a few things, I’ll mention the portrait which was published as the frontispiece of his biography The Last Empress. Greg bought this portrait in Russia in the 1990s, and on the back of it someone had written “Alexandra Feodorovna, wife of Nicholas II,” and details of the materials used in the picture. It resembles both Alexandra and her sister Ella, who were tall and fair with similar faces.

In the 1990s images of these women were by no means so ubiquitous as they are post-internet, and even experts in their family history were not so versed in every nuance of their different faces as to be able to easily figure out which was which in cases of controversy. At the time of purchase and publication Greg had no reason to question what was written on the picture. In 2003 he gave the portrait to me after my work on the manuscript of Fate Of The Romanovs, and he repeated his conviction at the time that it was Alix. “She’s been hanging on my wall for years and I know.” Now she hangs on mine.

[Photo: Janet Ashton]

In fact, the portrait is one by Wilhelm von Kaulbach and was almost certainly Ella, and of course when more came to light we eventually revised our judgement of which sister is shown. But, naturally, at one point, the identification in his biography was touted by random people across the internet as a sign of Greg’s supposedly sloppy research.

In the end, who it is really doesn’t matter – for us, she remained Alix on some level - a mistake that did not originate with Greg - and just a symbol at bottom of the role this Empress had played in our lives and in our friendship. Whoever she was, the woman shown had meant something really important to him in his early days as a writer; he sent her to me for that reason and she will always hang there in his honour.

I didn’t consider myself any particular expert on Queen Victoria or the British royal family, but I can comment on how text reads, whether the evidence stacks up, so Greg had me critique the manuscript of Twilight of Splendor anyway.

“I've had a few readers of various books (not you) who apparently didn't believe me when I said ‘Let me have it’,” he once explained, “and so I got back a lot of ‘this is nice’ stuff that didn't help at all! I'd much rather have someone tear me to shreds if they explain why and what they think can be done.”

Of course I also plumbed the BL’s catalogue and electronic resources for anything that might be of use to him. Frequently – with this book and many others - I got an email at home or work: “Do you or the BL have a copy of…/can you find your copy of…as I think mine is under my bed somewhere..”

The timescale on this contract was incredibly tight, so during the year of writing he gave up his job at Half Price Books – with health insurance and generous leave conditions - in order to focus on history. He sometimes said he wanted to go back eventually, they were a good employer, but juggling his mother’s increasing care needs and his own writing consistently made this impossible.

Part three: “a bunker somewhere”

With our shared working hours, across the vast darkness of the American Continent and the Atlantic Ocean, we were in touch in real time, many times a week and even sometimes many times a day. I don’t want to give the impression that this was all I did at work! but he had long since become the first person I spoke to about my own professional frustrations and personal issues such as worries over Christophe’s parents (“Yeah, aren’t aging parents lovely!” said Greg, obviously well qualified to sympathise), effectively ignoring the more obvious outlet of my near colleagues, and devoting all my lunch and other breaks to our conversations. He heard of many ludicrous dramas related to our house, from collapsing ceilings to cisterns that overflowed in the night hours before a trip away: “Does this happen to everyone and is it just that we over-react?” I wondered. We seemed to do a lot of running around and shrieking.

Once or twice (with my permission) he even called me at work, no doubt to the puzzlement of anyone who overheard – because I wasn’t usually in the habit of taking personal calls there. On these rare occasions perhaps they were so fortunate as to overhear a conversation about merkins (OK, google it…), which cropped up in FOTR research as property of the Empress’s at Ekaterinburg. Greg asked me, maybe not too seriously, what I could dig up about why they would have been used. I thought it wise to draw the line at any internet searching of this from work since I wasn’t keen on losing my job for accessing porn – something which was really rather topical there at that moment! But then I had to tell him that my mother and her friends had taken to referring to “merkin weather”, wondering if the unusual accessory had been helpful on Russian winter days.

In connection with the Romanovs, I feel I should mention somewhere that Greg was adamant on not bringing emotions into historical writing; he so disliked the fury and hysteria surrounding Nicholas II and regarded his own approach as pretty dispassionate and evidence-based: “it’s an intellectual thing with me as I like to argue points.” He carried this over into his attitude to the contractual, practical side of work and life generally: “I couldn’t care less how I FEEL about something, I just want to solve it.”

Yet he freely admitted that as a biographer he tended to write about “victimised” or misunderstood women, to fight their corner. He had had an elder sister, Kathy, who killed herself over a boyfriend when she was 19 and he only just 10: after that he had been bullied at school, children being what they are. Or some children, anyway. I always wondered - was this the root of his concern to look after victims? It was soon after his sister’s suicide that he first became interested in Sharon Tate, whose life, he later said, he wanted to “reclaim from her death.”

And did Kathy’s sad history also account for his squeamishness about strong feelings?

Certainly he did his fighting for victims in a cool-headed way, deliberately adopting the perspective of people like Wallis Windsor to tell a new tale, the other side of the story, which he freely declared might be a one-sided story to redress the balance. But, then…over the years I’ve been subjected to numerous management courses through work, with personality assessments and the like. Some of these are quite intriguing and I liked to try the questionnaires and assessments out in personal life for fun. Given his emphasis on cool rationality I expected Greg to come out as Thinking in the Myers-Briggs types – but he was more strongly Feeling. INFJ was his type, I believe, and though I can’t find our correspondence about this any more so can’t swear to it the INFJ profiles I read sound a perfect fit for the Greg I knew. Regardless of anything he said about his supposed lack of emotion…

We always talked about politics a lot. Greg described himself as a “political junkie” and had his eye constantly on events in the US, Canada, the UK, Russia and many other parts of Europe. He used Canadian tv for keeping in touch with daily news, as he didn’t greatly like the US coverage. He voted for Hillary in 2016 but was the first person I heard mention Joe Biden as a possible future candidate, saying he found him genuine and had always liked him.

As long as I knew him, even back in what now seem like the halcyon days before about 2010, Greg was convinced that “Half the world - including half of the US -is turning into fascist states these days...I just want a bunker somewhere so I can hide out and have supplies dropped down a chute every month....” He squarely blamed Newt Gingrich for the polarisation of American politics, saying “you used to be able to have civilised disagreements,” and was “horrified and embarrassed” by the first Trump presidency, shocked when I told him of people I knew who seemed to be pivoting from the left to following him instead: “why is everyone turning into a fascist these days?” (When I went to the Library of Congress for work in 2018, Greg breezily suggested that a nice tourist activity for my spare time - as an alternative to visiting the Hillwood Museum or the Exorcist steps in Georgetown - would be to “go and spit at the White House.”) He was simply depressed by the second Trump election, but I miss hearing his take on the most recent events. I once told him that a UK journalist had described Seattle as “left leaning” and he joked with a typical architecture analogy, “yes, that’s us - if [Rasputin’s murderer] Purishkevich was so far right that the only thing further right was the wall, then I guess we're at the other end of the house in a separate wing!”

But he was really mainly a classical liberal, a strong advocate of freedom of speech and the right to make up one’s own mind, defending publishers who put David Irving’s works to the world, and saying he thought people should have the right to read Mein Kampf. I never fully shared his conviction that this would convince them it was wrong. Greg acted the cynic, saying he always expected the worst, but at times it could seem that he had too much faith in human nature and rationality, perhaps: thus he’d go back and forwards in his approach to history between ignoring argument and trying to convince people of his viewpoint. He also did not understand why some videos and films had been banned in the UK: watching hours of gory horror hadn’t turned him into an axe murderer, so he argued that the roots of psychosis lay elsewhere, possibly in family history. This is true, but what if someone with a kink in their brain already uses this sort of material for inspiration? An absolute favourite word of his was “nuance”: Greg was always bewailing its lack, and this feeling I understood perfectly, relating to both politics and history.

Greg also had calm and balance: he could be relied on to see things in perspective. After covid, it’s almost amusing to think of the panic that attended 2009’s swine flu pandemic, but Greg was pretty level-headed as I recall: “this will be something and nothing” - and he was right.

In 2008, work brought me a pleasant surprise: a new colleague in the tech department was setting up a small publishing house – his passion was books and design – and he wanted books. I’d actually stopped work on my Alexandra novel when reading the Fate of the Romanovs manuscript, partly because I had put lots of the research into my Atlantis articles instead, and partly because, next to the hard-hitting FOTR, it suddenly seemed childish to want to plead the Empress’s point of view. But five years later with a paying publisher basically begging for submissions – well, it was a work of fiction; what was the harm? This came out as The German Woman.

My covers, complete with the kind recommendation my friends wrote to promote me

Greg read the full novel before it was published, provided a kind recommendation to go on the cover, and commented, because I asked him to, though he wasn’t generally a fan of fiction, unless it was something he’d read in his slightly more leisured youth and already knew he’d enjoy. Totally immersed in his work, he wanted immediate impact when he read: facts, information, ideas; not the slow build of new fiction. I once recommended the Flashman novels to him, because I thought the combination of historical events he was interested in with pretty robust and vulgar “Victorian” humour would appeal. “Penny also tried,” he said – but he didn’t have the patience. Sadly, what this really means is that he couldn’t relax or switch off.

He did recommend one piece of fiction to me: this was "My Royal Past: The Memoirs Of Baroness Von Bulop As Told To Cecil Beaton, which featured Beaton in drag as a variety of royals from Mitteleuropa, and St Pancras station as the Baroness’s German palace. Since this is right next door to our BL “HQ”, where I work when in London, the visual humour was much appreciated by me.

So – this was Greg as I knew him. Nocturnal and workaholic, buoyed up on caffeine, eating just once a day; “I like to tell people I’m a vampire,” he said. Christophe was a bit less casual about this when they met in 2010, and said, “He doesn’t look very well.” Greg was very pale, and I also thought he was too thin. He would firmly protest that he wasn’t, that he could lose a further 15 pounds without harm, but he was no longer the well-built young man readers might have seen striding around his early t.v. shows about Rasputin or the Duchess of Windsor, for example, apart from in his expressive, unlined face.

From time to time he still went down to Seattle to appear as a talking head on a further tv show, often on the Romanovs (doesn’t anyone ever make shows about anything else? we wondered. How about Ludwig for once?!). But in general, after he gave up his job in 2006, he rarely left the house for many years except to walk dogs, go shopping or to a library, take one or other of his parents to a medical appointment. He did interviews by email or phone, and obtained primary sources by writing to archives for copies. I never knew him go on holiday in all the years I knew him, and although he once said he would like someday to go to Machu Picchu he couldn’t envisage this happening because it was nothing to do with work, and the past trips he’d taken were almost entirely research.

TV and film were hugely important to him, as art forms and as a backdrop to his working hours, but he never went to the cinema even to see films connected to his areas of interest, because it left him feeling guilty about neglected writing. He always waited for the DVD. We swapped recommendations and found pre-existing shared enthusiasms such as the succinctly perfect Day of the Jackal. He introduced me to the acting of Helmut Berger (mainly as Ludwig, of course…) and sharpened my perception of Dario Argento’s work, describing the psychological patterns woven through the set design of Suspiria….only to trash this intellectual impression moments later with a coyly hilarious remark about how he loved the arm severing scene in Tenebrae. I asked him if I needed to alert anyone that I’d been exchanging screeds of email with a man on the internet who liked watching people having their arms cut off.

Next I prompted him to search for a channel where he could find the searingly tongue-in-cheek UK soap opera “Footballers wives,” which we were always talking about at one time, and spurred him to watch his copy of Withnail, as he’d had it for ages but never got around to it.

With a sense of lightness and humour that was never far from the surface, Greg had a refreshingly rounded approach to historical films: he was not the sort of historian who likes to nitpit about “errors” or get upset over satire, and he took each as a work of art first and foremost. The 2020-23 comedy series “The Great: an occasionally true story” (about Catherine the Great’s rise to power) played fast and loose with facts and was a delight to both of us.

But we had a perennial problem with disappointing sequels…we both really liked season 1 of “American horror story” but didn’t think much of the subsequent series. “Arrested Development” and “The Riches” started well and sustained the quality a bit longer but eventually went off the boil. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat was hilarious, and to cap it off we heard that two Czech fans had been arrested for wearing mankinis in Kazakhstan, and Baron Cohen paid their fines. Thus Greg had high expectations of his new film Brüno, but in the event he found it “rather boring, actually,” and I agreed.

Oddly, he had never seen the classic Seattle sitcom “Six Feet Under”, but when I mentioned it he went out of his way to find it at work and borrow it from the shop’s collection.

Greg was always intrigued by my Eurovision descriptions, but it was a while before he acquired a channel that could see those either – or the personal show of its host Graham Norton, who Penny liked to watch and had also told him about, and who he really enjoyed when he got connected. When I told him some of Christophe’s family had moved to Chelmsford he was incredulous with delight at the possibilities for mocking me, because of the things Graham constantly said about the county (google “Essex girl” or put “Essex is crap” into Youtube if you aren’t familiar with this running UK joke). But then my own family lived in Gloucestershire, and one of my grandmother’s neighbours had a niece who was a victim of Fred West. Greg did not leave this part of the country unscathed by comment either: “is EVERYONE around the Forest of Dean sleeping with members of their family? I bet there's a whole freak show circus lost in there somewhere waiting to go on tour!” Well, yeah, Greg– that’s exactly what the rest of the county says about the Forest too!

All I can say is – he was always supremely well acquainted with the intricacies of culture – and humour - in many nations…

By the time he could see Eurovision itself I think the best was over anyway: no more Romanian Draculas or Belarusian wolves howling in the snow; no more Moldovan fairies on unicycles. Instead, almost everyone had reverted to taking themselves too seriously, and for some unknown reason Australia was participating.

Round about 2012 he got BBC America, but was disappointed to see that it was mainly old Star Trek episodes and Gordon Ramsey. On the tv chef front, thought, he *did* have a weakness for Nigella Lawson, and though he liked making ice cream and other things I don’t think his interest in her show was strictly about cooking.

Otherwise, he recalled with nostalgia older British tv shows that he had watched either as a child (“Doctor in the House” and “Fawlty Towers”) or during his time living or researching in the UK in the late 80s and 90s: “Jonathan Creek”; “Spooks” and “To the Manor born” (which will have been on about its 15^th repeat even then). Having met him on a number of occasions, starting when they were both teaching at London University in about 1989, he liked updates on Rupert Everett’s career, from my thoughts on whether his latest films were worth seeing to copies I sent of tv shows that the very versatile, amusing and bright Rupert (who I really enjoy – can you tell?) had done in the UK.

Established favourites were always a useful fallback: you may have seen the series of posts he did on Facebook about B horror movies and similar tv series dating back to his childhood. Every year, around Thanksgiving and his birthday, which usually fell in the same week, he would watch a whole string of the same films, a mixture of Ludwig, Wagner and Sisi (Empress Elisabeth of Austria) biopics, documentaries and series, and some real schlocky horror. He – we - called this his “Ludwigsfest”. One year very early in our friendship, he had snow on his birthday, which filled him with joy. “I might go out and twirl about in it.” We’d found another common enthusiasm, and from then on, we exchanged snow news all the time – our anticipation (“The dogs and I are keeping our paws crossed..” he said) or, very often in our temperate homelands, our frustration at the lack of it.

“Stay home and play in the snow,” he’d urge me when we finally got some and I had had to struggle into work.

At Christmas, staple viewing was “Black Christmas” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” But he did have gentler tastes, bordering on sentimental even, and would watch “A Christmas story” several times over every December. He also loved “The Sound of Music”, and started talking about Julie Andrews every time he saw a photo I’d taken in Salzburg or Slovenia. (But he appreciated the Slovenian band Laibach’s interpretation of the movie’s songs and imagery too, complete with Nazis as singers and undertones of repressed darkness: “that’s about right.”)

Greg also watched (or half watched while basically working) a lot of what he called “trash” reality tv that didn’t require concentration, saying he wished he could get the UK versions of “Big Brother” or “Queer Eye” or other shows as they tended to have darker humour and were harsher for the participants. This mirrored his more serious preference for European films, and the European versions of films remade in Hollywood: he preferred the more “downbeat” endings of “The Vanishing” and similar. I can’t remember if he was the person who first recommended that film to me, but it became a favourite, one of the few horror films that is genuinely disturbing to me.

Most of the reality tv he could see over there seemed to be UK spin-offs anyway, shows like “Changing Rooms” or “Ground Force”, and something whose title I never discovered about people having a horrible time on holiday. We were incredulous that someone in the US had apparently made a reality tv show called “Who wants to be a porn star?”, but this was only on cable, which he wasn’t paying for even if he'd had any particular yearning to watch this one. As reality tv scrambled to plumb still further depths, there was also a UK series I heard about named “Filthy homes from hell” which apparently featured a family with 80 dead animals in their house and a man who liked to collect used toilet paper. We didn’t make much effort to track this one down. “At least I only have books and documents under my bed!” said Greg.

He liked and paid more real attention to literate cartoons such as “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy”, and especially “King of the Hill”, which he claimed had furnished with him his philosophy in life: “It’s summed up by Hank's mean father Cotton-‘If you have any feelings, get in the kitchen and put 'em in a bundt cake...’” This made me laugh, “Oh, you’re so macho”, and Greg admitted, “Yeah, right!”

He smoked clove cigarettes and in private, once he knew me, he talked like a Seattle slacker, befitting someone who had briefly moved in circles that included Pearl Jam and even members of Nirvana, as well as the decidedly less cool (in my eyes) Queensryche, who had been at school with a dear friend of his. When a lot of Generation X were in our twenties Seattle seemed the pinnacle of everything amazing, home to all our cultural touchstones from “Frasier” to Mudhoney. But I’d never even seen Nirvana live; Christophe’s brother did as a student in Leeds’s legendary Duchess of York pub, but – being a student - was too drunk to remember any of it. Greg had seen them several times, and met them at parties. I also learned that “Twin Peaks” was filmed in his neighbourhood, and he often saw Margaret May “Peg” Phillips (Ruth Anne from “Northern Exposure”) shopping at Half Price Books when he still worked there.

Perversely, I was more impressed by this personal history of his than by the fact of his one time meeting with the Prince and Princess of Wales, Charles and Diana, on a UK research trip, when he was invited to a party with them because of his work on Alexandra, or even the time he’d stayed at Chatsworth as a guest of Deborah [Mitford], Duchess of Devonshire, who was apparently very taken with the letter he wrote her about his attempts to get to her house on the bus in the rain, and took him under her wing. This was the first time he’d been invited into a historic house by the owner, and since at that point “I was IN AWE of the feelthy rich and titled” he remembered every detail, “from the dogs running through the rooms to the food” – and also the trolleys of drinks in corridors, from which people could just help themselves. Greg genuinely liked “Debo” Devonshire, but described her alcoholic, philandering husband as “a wanker of the highest order.”

I always regretted that I hadn’t heard of the Mitfords until I was about 13, because as children they played fairly satanic games of torture with each other, and if we’d known about them when a little younger this was the sort of family my siblings and friend Bethany and I liked to pretend to be.

Greg was less nostalgic than I was about his own past on the fringes of the grunge scene: when he talked about rock music he said he sometimes thought he’d like to go back and relive the 80s instead: he mentioned Wire Train, the Sugarcubes, Echo and the Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs and the Cocteau Twins, but also Blondie and Big Country. The Replacements’ “Bastards of Young” he named as one of his all time favourite songs, and “Swinging Party” from the same (first) album, Tim, is one of mine. When recently “Left of the Dial”, yet another great and well known track from the same album, came onto the radio, I knew it would be a long time before I could hear this particular set of songs again without profound emotion.

On the other hand, he accused me of having “glam rock” tastes (because of Bowie? or because I admitted that Bryan Ferry’s More than this is a favourite ? - though much else leaves me cold..). I should certainly have had that out with him a little more than I did….

With his nocturnal habits, his fondness for stylised horror films and the ever-present clove cigarettes, he was like a lot of arty “indie” boys I knew in my student days – big contrast to most of the “royal” or high society authors I went on to meet, who were usually much older with a somewhat different personal style. He was also quite different to the people I encountered as a student at Oxford who like to imagine they were there to prepare for a future as members of the aristocracy: Greg didn’t dress in cricket whites or carry a teddy named Aloysius….But then, Greg with his profoundly egalitarian spirit was not a “royal” author as such and at various times he told me he wasn’t interested in them “and their narrow little lives” any more; I just first knew him writing about a particular royal family. Later, after the court and ship books, I’d say I saw him as a social historian, and that’s what it says on his agent’s profile page for him.

From 2004 to 2017, he was accompanied constantly in his working hours by the two Labradors Ernie and Susie – the former brown, the latter golden, collectively known as “the puppies” long after they ceased to be that.

Ernie and Susie, relaxing at home [Photos: Greg King]

My first cat’s tenure in our house coincided almost entirely, though we got her as an adult, and she died a few months before they did. Greg was overwhelmingly sympathetic over her death, being “pathetically attached” to his pets, as he put it. When Ernie and Susie were put to sleep a few months later he was openly devastated, telling me that he dreamed about them every night for a month – whereas he had always played down the importance of it when I expressed any sympathy or worries about attacks on his work.

He gave me the same warmly empathetic response as with my first cat a year ago when my next cat died of oral cancer misdiagnosed as a transient dental issue until the last minute. He’d heard all the detail and seen my attention scatter. By coincidence, she was called Hollie and his dog – his “secret” (from the other dogs) favourite among Penny and Tom’s dogs - was called Holly. He liked her the best because he felt she was the “bottom” dog among them, and he was running true to form in wanting to protect anyone or anything he felt was misunderstood or victimised.

Part four: Grand Tours and coronations

After the Queen Victoria book came a further “Court” book, A Season of Splendor, about the Gilded Age world of Caroline Astor. Greg was always researching all sorts of topics at once and had particular ways of deciding what to focus on next: he would line up possible subjects and score them according to his own levels of interest, plus likely commercial interest in them and topicality (was, there, for example, an important anniversary coming up that would sell the book, or could the theme be linked to a current event?). The cost and ease of research and time to likely completion were also factors. When he was very young and had more flexibility he seems to have focused on his chosen next topic until it sold, but after the The Court of The Last Tsar his approach changed, and he produced a number of concurrent ideas to be presented to his agent and editor, who would then pursue whichever one they considered best and most interesting for their markets. This could sometimes be a harrowing process, with idea after idea rejected as uncommercial, over months. He also became more flexible about co-authoring, saying he would work with anyone if he felt he could co-operate with them and they brought him a contract - though he didn’t really anticipate this happening. This attitude reflected changes in the publishing world but also in Greg’s own world, as his parents became more dependent on his help in every way and so he was more concerned to sell fast.

I will say though that he took a lot of the initiative in the writing partnerships he actually had – from proposing them to overseeing very closely what went out with his name on. When working on the coronation book I sometimes sent him some very roughly written material of mine which he hacked apart, but he was far more careful in what he revealed and would show me the chapters he’d worked on only when he was more or less happy with them. This had a lot to do with his method, which consisted of assembling and typing in a multitude of sources and then carefully considering what they told him and reshaping and writing around them. He never started actually writing with just with an idea, or shaped the evidence around that. Where the coronation book was concerned, we exchanged our chapters of research notes early on (luckily! because not long after this his computer crashed and took his originals down with it), but once we started actually writing I saw nothing of his style and conclusions until he was ready.

Nothing he wrote ever brought the huge rewards he deserved for his hard work: even when books sold well he seemed to have bad luck with publishers going bankrupt before they paid him, as had happened with his Duchess of Windsor biography. But in the end, after all that, he shrugged; he ultimately accepted it as the price he paid for being in control of his own schedule and only taking on topics that genuinely interested him.

”At least I don’t work for The Man!”

The court books all had certain themes in common, including the existence of a rival court. Greg and I had some discussions around the time he was writing them all on the possibility of “The Court of the Viceroy”, probably to focus on Lord Curzon of the grand imperial building projects and the Durbars, whose American wife Mary Leiter fit broadly with the research Greg had done on the Astors’ world. I thought it would probably sell very well in the UK, like his bestselling Duchess of Windsor bio. We got as far with Viceroy as outlining together such information as the rival court (Lord Kitchener) and other ways it would fit the conventional structure, and we began to collect books. Greg was a little more troubled than I expected from the author of books on pomp and ceremony by the idea of writing about European colonials in Asia; he was keen we ensured that the Indian perspective was heard. I thought this was likely to happen as a natural part of writing, with Indian staff members and civil service involved. It would have been a lot of learning for both of us, and didn’t go much further than this as he always had other topics more advanced that his agent could take forward quickly, or ones his publisher found more sellable.

But then he also helped me put together a proposal for what we always called The Grand Tour Book, which was an idea arising from an Atlantis article I did on Nicholas II’s far eastern travels as a youth. And that article in turn had its genesis in Greg asking me back in 2002 if the BL had a copy of Esper Ukhtomskii’s account of the tour and could find the date on which Nicholas had, in Tobolsk, come face to face with his future murderer. This book, when I saw it, captivated me with its poetic language about these events and countries, and I wanted to write on them too. Greg liked the different light my article shed on Nicholas: here we saw him as a young man, surrounded by the influences that led to the Russo-Japanese War, long before the famous Rasputin and haemophilia stories. And yet his ideas and behaviour were curiously the same: even at 22, Nicholas had his gurus, his religious preoccupations and a related determination to remain an autocrat, answering only to God. No Alexandra or Rasputin supposedly pushing him. I read a psychologist’s analysis of his character which posited that for all his apparent affability, Nicholas was a rigid and authoritarian type.

“This can be a completely different and interesting view of him” Greg urged me when I admitted that I thought the article could be expanded to a book. Readers seemed interested in having more books about Nicholas’s early life due to a general over-focus on the later stories, if their internet posts were anything to go by.

We sent the proposal into the UK history publisher Sutton, where to my surprise it was not actually binned unread: I received a reply which did decline it, but gave some useful pointers and showed real interest. I kept on working, expanding the outline chapters and finally completing a first manuscript. When my writing felt blocked, Greg would take sections of that manuscript and suggest how I might reshape them. If he had ever written or compiled anything on any topic I was covering in it he’d send me his text and advise “swipe anything you want”, for example of his information on the Emperor Franz Joseph. I returned the favour with some of my own Viennese ramblings, but all he said was about the style:

“God, I wish I’d written that!”

I couldn’t reply, like Oscar Wilde, “You will, you will,” because I knew he wouldn’t steal any of it.

(And maybe when I finally publish the book I’ll star that paragraph he loved like Stella Gibbons did in Cold Comfort Farm, to point out my especial literary brilliance to the reader…)

When it reached the right stage, I followed his example in allowing a number of trusted friends and colleagues to comment on the Grand Tour draft, and tried to carefully evaluate their reactions, objectively and without defensiveness, which isn’t always easy. In fact he and not I was the person who became irritated with one particularly opinionated commentor (an internet friend of mine), and told me, “there’s nothing wrong with what you wrote and I question if she’s the best person to do this.”
I didn’t have the experience to make that call, he did, but reading this again I ask myself if Greg was maybe a little too protective of me. With his reticent, thoughtful character, he didn’t appreciate pushiness or being forced into corners, and telling him what to do could illicit a direct response – often humorous, sometimes a retreat into contemplation, but occasionally quite clear. This particular friend of mine was rather forceful about grammatical style, and perhaps Greg’s reaction came from his own dislike of being told what to do. But she also challenged me to put my voice more into this work, a comment I found invaluable. It’s a case, in the end, of balancing what you find useful against those comments which don’t resonate with your intentions.

I submitted the manuscript to British Library Publishing too, but they also didn’t see a market at that point, when they were pivoting from more scholarly works to popular ones focussed mainly on illustration.

Despite repeated restarts and constant inspirations, I haven’t finished the Grand Tour book yet. I was often distracted by requests from editors and of course from Greg himself to write articles or chapters on particular topics, which grabbed my interest with more immediate promise of seeing them in print. Then it’s a niche topic indeed, and suitable publishers are harder and harder to find, but it’s also grown progressively more difficult to write, as the world around us seems to complicate by the hour. I am wary, as I said to Greg just a few months ago, that some of my early interpretations and views of these nineteenth century Europeans at large in Asia may now seems rather glib. But he believed in me and he believed in the book and he said over and over “it’s so good….it will be a great book.”

It will be dedicated to him when it finally sees the light of day. I am pretty sure I told him this at least once, and in my dreams that compensates to a tiny degree for the fact that he never saw it in print. There have been many times when I felt I should get on with it lest anything happen and he never see it, but my supposedly rational mind told me that I was just being superstitious.

The discovery of the remains of the final two Romanov children in 2007 made the Tsar’s murder topical again, and in 2009 Greg returned with Penny to a book on Anna Anderson, the most famous claimant of all. This was the book whose imagined conclusions had set off so many arguments on the internet during years before, and distorted the response to Fate of the Romanovs and even the court book. It said the opposite of what many readers had assumed long before it was written, and although I originally hated the vitriolic debates Anderson provoked and couldn’t bear to read them, it actually emerged in my opinion as one of his best books, a very clever explanation of how Anna Anderson had convinced so many people. It gave answers to many of the questions about evidence that had been raised over the years, and provided profiles of some of her believers and underlying reasons for their involvement that were never so crude as accusing anyone of actively lying. This book is Resurrection of the Romanovs.

Again, I read the manuscript and I found I could even rope in my colleagues to help, with one of my team at work happily giving some of her own holiday time to taking photos of Anderson sites in Berlin. Turned out that people love doing these things; it piques their interest and broadened their experience of the city involved, and Greg made sure that the colleague in question got a copy of the finished book as a thank you as soon as he had one to send.

Then he decided that the time had come to work on our long-mooted book about the coronation of Nicholas II. He had a cushion of money from the Resurrection contract, and he would carve out the time specifically to do it before he needed to make another sale. And so we finally started.

That autumn of 2010, I was invited to attend publisher Arturo Beéche’s “Eurohistory” conference in Oakland, California, and talk about the coronation. Art had published various articles of mine (usually on houses and the people who lived in them) in his European Royal History Journal, a book of Greg and Penny’s (Gilded Prism, derived from the Konstantinovichi Atlantis), and chapters by all three of us in his books on the Russian Grand Dukes. Since Art didn’t yet know me, my involvement in the Grand Dukes project was at Greg’s insistent instigation, but Arturo fast came to appreciate my work. He was interested in what might come next.

So Christophe and I flew to Seattle and from there we made our way gradually down the coast to San Francisco, hooking up firstly with Greg, then with my friend Will Lee (another Russian historian, researcher on Rasputin’s murderer Dmitri Pavlovich) in Portland, then finally with the conference delegates at Oakland –some I’d met before, but others I’d corresponded with but not actually met, such as Lisa Davidson of the Alexander Palace Association. This was all a lot of fun.

Everywhere we went Greg had a list of suggestions about what to see, of places to “run around and play and explore.” We went to Cashmere in apple-growing country in eastern Washington, and to Leavenworth, a former logging town which had addressed the decline in its traditional industry by transforming itself into a Bavarian mountain resort, complete with chequered blue and white flags and German-speaking newspapers. When Greg was a child, camping in the region with his parents, this had been his dose of Bavarian culture, back before he was able to go to find the real thing. We drove along the magnificent Columbia River, past the Maryhill Museum of Art, a mansion belonging to Seattle millionaire Sam Hill, which held various items belonging to Queen Marie of Romania.

Leavenworth, WA [Photo: Janet Ashton]

A little while after this trip, Greg and I wrote for Royalty Digest Quarterly about Marie’s visit to the US in 1929, and her relationship with the reclusive Sam Hill, who had been so desperate to get her to Seattle. He enjoyed this foray into local history, and a big star of the article was, of course, Sam Hill’s strange concrete house, and so was the river, with its waterfalls and dams, its broad sweeping expanse. Sam Hill harnessed this force in engineering projects to combat the Depression, the water power, as Woody Guthrie wrote, “bringing our darkness to dawn – roll on, Columbia, roll on!”.

Sam Hill and Queen Marie, Washington State or Oregon, 1926

As we set off down the west coast, in particular when we arrived in California, there followed warnings from Greg to be careful lest we fell into the clutches of a gang of neo-Mansonites and were murdered in our beds…He did this wherever in the world I went, the specific threats he was cheerfully warning about being adjusted by geography. He was convinced I’d end up in a snuff movie someday, and I said that if he ever got a severed finger in the post he’d have to work out if it was mine or if it was a threat from a deranged Romanov fan.

Instead of Manson, we encountered a manipulative cat in the Silver Falls Park, a tiny tabby who sat at our table at dinner and slept in the front part of our tent. I was very worried that he or she was a stray who was getting too attached, but in the morning we heard the site warden call, and the cat ran off eagerly to receive breakfast. It emerged that she was staying on the site temporarily and already had a new home lined up.

“That’s because cats are EVIL” said Greg when I told him the tale.

In San Francisco, I had to stay in the Majestic Hotel, a survivor of the 1904 earthquake. This was Greg’s favourite place and he’d mentioned it several times before, a slightly faded Victorian pile with turrets, vast rooms and four poster beds. It was quite a commute from there to the conference in Oakland, but definitely worth it.

When the conference was over, Greg rang me for a “full report” back on who might be researching what, on all the jokes and anecdotes, and who had had a few too many at lunch or dinner. He always sought the same sort of reports back when I went to the Royalty Digest Weekend organised by the fine team of Sue Woolmans and Richard Thornton in Ticehurst, Sussex, something I did between 2007 and their final conference in 2014.

While I was at the conference, Christophe revisited all his favourite record shops with delight, and in Portland and Seattle he discovered new ones. On some previous U.S. trips, even on shopping days in Leeds or London, I have had to hang around patiently while this was ongoing; but it is typical of Greg that he was immediately worried that Christophe might feel “left out” of our history talks, despite our amused assurances that he was more than happy disc hunting and would have been doing that anyway.

Then, in a Seattle café, while we were working on what I was going to say in my coronation talk at the conference, Greg was concerned that by drinking only coffee he was depriving a waitress of her tip, so he kept asking for top-ups he didn’t need. He would sometimes growl at me or roll his eyes in mock exasperation if he thought I was going soft on him, but here he was giving the impression of being almost painfully attuned to peoples’ likely feelings, and just anxious they be happy. Above all, he didn’t like confrontation, and in general, in more serious situations, would smooth things over as best he could until it became impossible any longer.

“You bottle things up until they explode,” Greg once observed of me, but I think he recognised this reflection of himself.

My favourite memory of him on this trip is of him when he began to talk about Joe Fuhrmann’s Rasputin projects, expounding his vision of what they could be. He was lounging across a bed, tired from being up during daylight hours, yet it was the most fluent, articulate, brilliant speech I have heard anyone give spontaneously, worthy of a conference hall.

Greg and I worked with Joe – Professor Joseph T. Fuhrmann - for years. When I was researching Alexandra’s life, I’d been thrilled to read Joe’s unusually careful examination of her wartime government role in his edition of her correspondence with the Tsar, and his respect for her organisational skills and intellect. I also had a copy of his biography of Rasputin (Rasputin, a life), picked up in a bookstore in New Hampshire in 1997: I don’t think it was published in the UK. This was similarly intriguing, with a different take on him, treating its subject as a human rather than a stereotype or just a foil for grand imperial personalities. As he would tell us before too long, and was open about to the world, Joe had a difficult life and career story with periods as an alcoholic; he was also a devout practicing Catholic who believed that Rasputin had genuine healing powers. All these demons and conflicts within himself gave him an instinctive sympathy with Rasputin as a man.

In 2004 Joe sought Greg out and asked for his assistance in a reworked biography of Rasputin, and Greg also put him in touch with me, precisely because of my interest in the Empress’s political role and religious views. We critiqued his new chapters in great detail, essentially in tandem, even commenting on one another’s comments to give him a full range of views. Both of us – as I learned later - were very flattered to have been asked to do this by an older, long-established historian whose work had influenced us starting out. We had in mind that Joe’s book could be rather like Fiona McCarthy’s work on Byron, Life and Legend, which encompassed the poet’s cult and cultural or artistic depictions of him after his death in addition to his own life.

Then Joe started reading and commenting for me in turn, and for Greg, and he tried to persuade us to write a biography of Anna Vyrubova together (Greg liked this idea more than I did as I could not get enthused by Vyrubova’s character) and even to form a conference panel with him presenting papers on Nicholas (this sadly would have been a logistical nightmare as it was in a southern US State). He was always so full of suggestions and enthusiasm.

Joe came to the UK in 2008 and I met him in London with his wife Mary, an artist who sketched us during our conversation. He was looking for an agent for a while, and I was surprised and pleased that when I suggested Andrew Lownie’s name – one I knew from other writers, though I’d had no direct contact - and they got in touch Andrew signed Joe up. Thanks to Greg and Andrew, Joe was then signed by Greg’s publisher Wiley, and his reworked Rasputin book (Rasputin, the Untold Story) appeared in 2013. In 2010 we were very much in the middle of all this. Greg was regularly exasperated by Joe’s approach to the manuscript and more, but running true to character he never gave up on him, pushed him and encouraged him, as long as there was a meeting of minds that could truly discuss ideas without conflict.

Joe’s generous acknowledgements page in “Rasputin, the untold story” (too generous, I feel, in his description of “Directarticle”!)

Around this time, Greg also began to consider the centenary of 1914, and he asked me various questions about Franz Ferdinand and my thoughts. I knew from our various meet-ups that our mutual friend Sue Woolmans, who has generously put several research or presenting opportunities my way, had a particular interest in the Archduke and especially his wife Sophie Chotek, and had always regarded them as a sort of Nicholas and Alexandra couple, devoted to the end. So I told him this, and that project became The Assassination of the Archduke, snapped up by St Martin’s Press because it was obviously topical. My oldest friend Bethany, living in Vienna and working as a journalist, the friend with whom I shared the Khartoum childhood of scribbled stories and historical games, and who was herself hoping to make a documentary on 1914, helped out with in various ways when Sue went there. I, for my part, challenged what I read at manuscript more than any of his books since FOTR, something which may surprise those who think this a simple love story. But the life of a political figure is never simple.

It takes so many people to make a book, nothing is ever just the work of the credited authors, and Greg constantly said so. He and I – with a plethora of comments from helpers who read it - worked on the coronation book for literally years, interspersed and simultaneous with the larger more commercial projects of his (next came Lusitania) – and the demands of my full-time job. We intended to sell it to a large mainstream publisher and tried with several before he attempted to sell anything else, thinking that the adventures of the participants and the beauty of its setting in imperial Moscow gave it almost a gossipy appeal in parts, as well as the thrill of travel writing. Despite its specialist focus, we didn’t intend that it be academic or inaccessible.

Over the time I knew him, Greg became more and more concerned about what he saw as the steady decline of serious history publishing. When Wiley was his publisher, he complained a little in private about having to re-write chapters in a more accessible style, but they still printed screeds of footnotes with his work – and FOTR was more than 600 pages long. Around 2012, Wiley stopped publishing history, and a lot of smaller history publishers went out of business.

He had a great reverence for footnotes, for the tracing back of sources and information. I never understood why some readers would think they’d scored a coup if they found an error in his notes – an incorrect page number or misquote, often the consequence of going over and over the manuscript, cutting and moving information – because…er… surely that’s the point? You can assess whether you think what the writer says actually checks out, and a dishonest author wouldn’t include them to begin with. Greg was distressed by the number of books now appearing without footnotes or attribution of any kind of source, and by the progressively shorter list of topics deemed acceptable to a general audience. Books themselves seemed to be getting shorter, as if readers immured to the gratification of social media were no longer thought capable of maintaining attention for more than a few minutes.

I often felt in a bind with our mutual projects, because everything we actually started seemed uncommercial, so as long as Greg had and needed big contracts we struggled to circumvent restrictions on selling “smaller” books. Meanwhile, some possibly commercial projects like the Viceroy one never got far because they hadn’t yet sold, but were such a time investment that they couldn’t be started properly until they did!

This was sometimes demotivating to me, but then again I would ask myself if I really wanted to be a full time writer dependent on contracts as Greg was, always juggling ideas and putting work into projects that might come to nothing. I never had the financial confidence to reduce my hours at work to do more on unsold projects, and sometimes felt that doing articles and smaller books with him was the ideal place to be, especially while I had so many resources to hand through my job. At least we had freedom in what we wrote and shaped it according to what we and the people who “read” for us felt would make a good book – no big commercial editors demanding rewrites and laying out oxymoronic dichotomies: “it’s about people not politics” and similar. While it was ongoing the coronation book was a delight to work on and I have never forgotten that it represented a huge commitment to me on his part.

I still have multiple versions archived at home as we went over and over it, and it certainly represents a nice coming together of all the themes we’d worked on together for ages in various ways, from architecture to court ceremony and clothes, to religious propaganda and politics, to emerging mass tourism and the role of writers and journalists, a particular interest reflected in earlier articles I’d done as well as in Greg’s own writing in several books about the way Alexander III and Nicholas II used the press, and about travellers’ perceptions of our characters and their milieu. Writers writing about writers. Back and forth our ideas and material went, from obscure sources to films to academic articles that prompted an idea or image or turn of phrase. I remember watching the film Black Swan and being struck at once by the ballerina doppelganger, then rushing home to say to Greg that wasn’t this Matilda Kschessinska, the Tsar’s ballerina former mistress, angrily haunting the coronation gala ballet like a doppelgänger to his wife? Later, the Russian film Matilda by Alexei Uchitel inserted her into the coronation in a ludicrous way; it was all very entertaining and naturally to save him the trouble of looking for one I was sending him a copy of Matilda for Christmas that year, and it actually became staple seasonal viewing.

Greg once said, “I tend to take everything with a fair bit of humour,” and he had a strong feeling for the weird, the ludicrous, the ironic, for slapstick events and awkward juxtapositions. We had so many exchanges that have me howling with laughter as I re-read them, and they are completely unprintable and unshareable with the rest of the world. But to mention some of the mildest, I knew I’d get a laugh in passing on stories I came across like one about a Chinese teenager who sold his kidney for an i-Pad. Working at the British Library was quite handy - never mind the books and articles, photos and manuscripts, it furnished plenty of corporate insanity, and he always enjoyed my work-related anecdotes about members of the public caught shooting up or soliciting in the toilets, in the supposed pinnacle of serious scholarship, or two elderly women successfully smuggling a hammer past security to attack the Magna Carta case in a recent free speech protest. One of my colleagues innocently sent an email around the Library offering, “Small number of portable guillotines going spare…be quick or lose out!” and Greg just looked at this and went, “What the HELL?!” – before realising that it meant guillotines for paper….We wondered if the BL might sell them as a souvenir for one of the exhibitions, perhaps the Russian Revolution one of 2017. A gothic exhibition just before that did feature a lot of dead crows and vials of poison in the gift shop, but implements of execution were obviously a step too far.

A reviewer (of FOTR) completely missed the point and accused him of wallowing in “salacious” detail about the murders, and at first this upset him. But then in a while he got a certain pleasure from referring to his “reputation” for the “dark side” (which of course he said I’d crossed to by association), and observed that if people could read some of our conversations it would only add to that. He also rather hoped the British royal family had a file on him because of his defence of Wallis.

Writing the coronation book he was immensely tickled by the plight of Vladimir Nabokov’s grandfather Dmitri, an imperial minister, who had explosive diarrhoea mid-ceremony while holding the crown, and wearing white trousers to boot. Greg was determined to keep the story of “shit dude” in the book at all costs “because it’s such a great image”.

There’s a serious point here, though. In the time I knew him I saw – and influenced - a change in emphasis when he wrote about ceremony. In both the Russian court book and in our discussion on the Viceroy idea he’d shown discomfort with grand ceremonial if it was at the expense of the population, but even in first coronation drafts he had a residual desire to project mainly the grandeur and display without the author’s opinion of this intruding. In the end after much discussion and the reinforcement of our “readers” who helped us focus on what we wanted to say he agreed that we needed to show also what lay behind it, and which isn’t the author’s opinion so much as that of participants: the anxiety, the uncomfortable humour, the vast and ludicrous cost, the anguished tension. Above all – and this would have been there anyway because it was a central plank of the story - there was the misery of spectators such as the unfortunate peasants crushed to death because they were present only as a trapping of loyalty, and no-one cared enough to ensure their safety. Poor Nabokov’s stained trousers as he stood with crown in hand are not there (only!) to satisfy some sort of infantile scatological humour on our part: they say exactly what we wanted them to say.

The coronation book, a kind of spin-off of the Russian court book, had its own spin-offs even before it was published. We wrote an article on Princess Catherine Radziwill for the European Royal History Journal, inspired by looking closely at her accounts of the coronation and other things. Often excoriated in the royal history world for her apparent lies or exaggerations, Catherine was a contemporary writer who churned out a range of material, much of it critical, about people in high society, and was infamous for blackmailing Cecil Rhodes. She used several names, and the reliability of what she wrote often depends on the name she was using, with those books in her own name representing something close to her honest opinions, even when she was factually wrong. Her later books are better researched; her earlier ones more a collection of gossip and impression. But many of the things she said even in earlier works started to seem quite reasonable when looked at from her perspective as a witness, including her claim that no-one cheered when Empress Alexandra appeared in public. Comparing accounts in his meticulous way, Greg said that the contrast between the way the two Empresses were received by the people standing nearest Catherine, with sympathy for the Dowager and uncertainty towards her daughter-in-law, may have led Catherine to this conclusion, even if other writers could hear actual cheers for Alexandra from general spectators, and said so.

When we first discussed Catherine, she was going to be a book, because there had only ever been one extremely inadequate biography (Leda Farrant’s posthumous and incomplete The Princess from St Petersburg), plus a book which focused on the Cecil Rhodes affair. Greg felt she warranted more. But in 2013, when we talked about this, we were hamstrung by big contracts, which precluded him selling anything smaller for fear of affecting future large sales. Instead we wrote a two-part article, published by ERHJ a couple of years later.

We also did another British Library academic article, “A Programme for the Reign: Press. Propaganda and Public Opinion at Russia’s last Coronation”, about the press response to the Khodynka disaster when so many ordinary people were crushed at the popular festival on a military training ground. It was published in the electronic British Library Journal in 2012. A few years later, for the centenary, the BL held an exhibition on the Russian Revolution, showing coronation albums and more, and we were cited in the publicity blogs for both our article and our book. This is the biggest most public role I’ve had in one of the hugely popular exhibitions, as previous work had included mainly such jobs as looking at subject categories behind scenes for a world war one event.

We were also involved in a 2019 tv series called “The Last Czars”. Greg was contacted as a consultant on this (they even flew to Seattle to film him, but didn’t use the footage) and he put them onto me too as they were asking detailed questions about the coronation and the location of the palace where the infamous Montebello Ball took place. I had managed to finally identify the Moscow building this happened in, often referred to vaguely as “the Sheremetiev Palace” (there were several). I am sure that Greg – who could have passed on this information to them himself – was just hoping I’d get credited for helping them.

We had such high hopes of this series, but when it appeared it was the opposite of what we’d hoped and assumed, a very general historical summary, and was lampooned in the Guardian as “the historical drama the whole of Russia is laughing at.” Albeit some of the Russian comments were fairly fatuous in themselves. Greg got a credit, and no doubt the usual suspects saw this a reflection on his work, but he had nothing to do with the content.

The same company also asked to read our Catherine Radziwill work, and talked of making a mini drama from it! Again, nothing remotely so specialised came out.

In the end, following lots of contractual issues and difficulties with St Martin’s Press, which asked for first refusal on it, but then declared it too “niche”, and placed restrictions on other possible sales, leaving us feeling we’d never even be allowed to publish it at all, we sold the coronation book to Arturo and his Eurohistory publications. They made a beautiful job of producing it: no mainstream publisher would have invested the money into the page decorations and embedded photos that they gave us, mirroring the original coronation albums published in celebration. We called it A Life for the Tsar in honour of the Glinka opera that was the coronation gala music. This title was supposed to hint at the deaths of the ordinary people who perished in a crush on the Khodynka field, almost unnoted for the sake of the ceremony, and at the way the events of the coronation determined Nicholas’s own life and future, both by his own active choice and in spite of it. Both of us used to struggle to find titles, but I am proud of that one and think it was quite inspired!

Our beautiful coronation book:

Greg did a phone presentation on the coronation and on Franz Ferdinand at the Eurohistory conference in 2014, as he couldn’t travel due to sudden changes in his next book’s editing schedule (something that seemed to happen regularly when a publisher decided it needed to be out earlier than planned). He also worked for a while as an editor for Eurohistory’s book publishing arm, and the associated European Royal History Journal (ERHJ) magazine, and we wrote a further coronation article for it.

Between 2014 and 2018 we were also both involved in a themed series of articles for ERHJ commemorating the centenary of the First World War, with Greg covering the outbreak from Russia’s point of view, as well as the Russian Revolution – and I guess he also edited everything, though he never had that many queries about anything I wrote. I worked on the convergence of Italy, Austria, Serbia and Montenegro in the area that became Yugoslavia, inspired by visits to Slovenia’s evocative Soča Valley, where much of the activity of the “Italian Front” took place.

I was also asked to write about the death of Franz Joseph and Hungarian Coronation of the Emperor Karl as part of this series, one of them an obvious link with our own coronation book but both also harking back to the days when Greg had toyed with ideas of a Habsburg court book and I’d borne this in mind while travelling in central Europe and collecting information and thoughts.

In 2013, while Greg was waiting to hear if St Martin’s Press was interested in his proposals for new biographies of Alexandra or Ludwig (he was always wanting to rewrite his earliest books and correct some errors or misapprehensions), I had also wanted to write about Trieste. Greg had a special admiration for the castle of Miramar, and he was keen to do articles while he awaited news on the books – he hated being without something concrete to work on. But he was contractually barred from doing anything remotely about the Habsburgs until Assassination came out. This and much more was an education for me in the way that publishers work. We did Queen Marie and Sam Hill then, and enjoyed writing about his local area for once. I kept my Austrian ideas for later.

I have always forged ahead with articles, ideas, on my own or at editorial request, but Greg’s influence and presence have been pervasive, and his feedback – the knowledge that he knew what I was up to and where I was going - has always been vital, even when it’s sometimes been as sparse as “oh, man - you don’t need editing.”

The war articles were a joy to write, despite their gloomy subject matter; this topic was so very interesting, full of ideas and scenery and disparate people. I had to put royalty at the heart them because of the magazine, but they were inspired by poets and peasants and soldiers, and the descendants of those living in those ravaged territories. Luckily, some minor royals such as George V’s cousin Helena Gleichen turned out to be fascinating people with solid war work to claim: she worked as an anaesthetist with the Italian Army when the British wouldn’t have her due to being a woman.

Something else that Greg and I shared in approaching history was a love of the coincidental links between things and interests; the “degrees of separation”, so we followed skeins and pulled threads, running off at angles from the main topic. We might trace the Russian connections of a person who pops up in our own local environment, for example, or follow the work of an actor who once starred as a historical character we write on. We both “collected” local buildings with Russian connections. Greg had to be ruthless in his mainstream books about not including excess detail, but specialist publications allow more flexibility. Such links helped massively in the war articles; I really wanted to include the Labour Minister Hugh Dalton in one of them for his poetic ruminating on his war experiences in the Julian Alps, so I just shoehorned him for his links to the British Royal family, for whom his father had a been a chaplain. Tenuous? Moi?

When we were writing the article about Sam Hill and Marie of Romania, Greg wrote to me:

“I do want to include what I think is an odd factoid in the article....

[Marie] sailed for America aboard the America liner SS Leviathan, which was

the former Hamburg-Amerika line liner Vaterland, and which Wilhelm

christened and launched in 1913, and she returned to Europe on the

Berengaria, which was the former Hamburg-Amerika liner Imperator, which

W. launched in 1912....and she occupied the former Imperial Suite with its Kaiser's Study (at least until 1914), so odd she went on two ships her cousin had launched

and stayed in the suite formerly named for him.”

Sorry, folks, but this is us. Read some of Greg’s film posts and even some of the substack articles, for much, much more of this type of thing, long skeins linking two characters from fields apparently far apart!

The majestic Columbia river gorge, on the border between Washington and Oregon, one of the things which inspired our work on Queen Marie. [Photo: Janet Ashton]

I even have a pet castle in eastern Slovenia (Grad Borl) which appeared in the ancient version of the Arthurian legend as written by Wolfram von Eschenbach, where it was the family seat of Parzifal, the Grail Knight. It looms over the river Drava, and local friends of mine are active in its ongoing restoration, even making a “Nicholas and Alexandra” type story from its last aristocratic owner. I loved it by chance before I knew its story – yet it is conceptually linked to Greg’s alter ego, Ludwig II, the self-conceived Parsifal and patron of Wagner’s opera of that name as well, who dedicated his throne room at Neuschwanstein to the Grail legend.

When you think like this, of course, it’s difficult to find anywhere that will leave you unmoved with memories and connections.

In 2016, I went to the Hague and promoted A Life for the Tsar at the Eurohistory/van Hoogstraten conference there, a collaboration between publisher and bookseller. It was a huge pleasure to see our books in van Hoogstraten’s window, on The Hague’s grandest street near the seats of government, courtesy of Annet Bakker and her family business – another friend and contemporary who has gone far too soon.

Promoting the coronation book at the Eurohistory/van Hoogstraten conference in The Hague, 2016, and in van Hoogstraten’s wonderful shop. [Photos: Katrina Warne]

Greg also went on working with Joe Fuhrmann after the Rasputin book was done. This time Joe – or his publisher - was paying him to ghost write a book on Nicholas II (I again helping with comments on the manuscript), though Joe’s real preference was to have Greg co-author it formally. Greg understood Joe’s desire for a more rounded and sympathetic biography of Nicholas in the name of historiographical diversity, and knew exactly how to suggest that this be done, but it did not really accord with his own views on the last Tsar, so he preferred to stay in the background and not put it out with his own name on it.

This book (Nicholas II, the enigmatic Tsar) never appeared since sadly Joe died in 2018 at the age of 77, after battling with cancer and other health problems for several years. I do think, though, that Greg’s work on Joe’s book influenced his approach when he came to write his own book Nine Days that Shook the World on the abdication of Nicholas II, a work I critiqued during his last months in Seattle, and which finally appeared in 2023 as an Atlantis /King and Wilson Books publication. Still much less personally sympathetic to Nicholas than Joe was, he nevertheless produced a book which gives a rounded picture in considering the Tsar’s own perspective on the events of 1917.

Part five: Locked down

The covid lockdowns had little impact on Greg’s lifestyle, since he called himself a “hermit” anyway, but the whole period was tied up in deep problems in his personal life, and these did have an impact on him. He lost his mother Helena, of whom he was extremely protective after the emotional traumas and health problems she’d been through in life, in late 2013, following her years of worsening suffering with osteoporosis and later with congestive heart failure. He missed her terribly. His dad, Roger, was generally in very good health until 2018 and even went hunting for a last time that year, but he did have some of the problems of getting older, including the need for several joint replacements and occasional bouts of pneumonia in winter. Greg nursed him through the recoveries. When I once told him I had visions of him looking after his parents all day and working all night, with dog care thrown in, subsisting on cigarettes and caffeine, he said, “That’s about the sum of it, bad though it sounds!”

In 2019, Roger began showing the symptoms of dementia, later compounded by leukaemia, all of which came to a head and were Greg’s biggest anxiety in covid days. As anyone who has ever dealt with a parent or other relation with dementia will know, this period was terribly hard on him. For the first time he admitted to me that he feared he might be clinically depressed, and was having trouble getting out of bed every day or writing emails. From a distance, unable to do the least thing to help, this was hugely upsetting: he had always been so stoic in the past, always that ostensibly sanguine, sunny spirit who buried himself in his beloved work for its own sake and used it as consolation too for whatever else was going on. On the occasions he could be persuaded to talk about feelings he’d say, “I *hate* talking about stuff like this, and that I’m talking to you about it should tell you something.” Mainly, he liked to laugh things off. If I got bogged down in overthinking something, “enlarging it” as he might have said, and then protested that I wasn’t as weird as my message might seem, he replied cheerily with something like, “Ah, but you ARE a weirdo!” or “You’re so funny – if you think it sounds nuts, why say it?” – or even, “Oh my GOD could you sound more girlie?!” and then he went straight on with the business of the day, my own mood generally hugely lifted by these explosive opening one-liners.

Yet he always seemed so vulnerable. I’d seen how pale and round-shouldered he was from sitting constantly over a computer. Since I first knew him I have always been aware when things weren’t right. Often I was concerned simply because he went quiet for a few days, but my instincts were usually correct and it was rarely just too much work – the sudden quietness was often caused by one of his mother’s health crises; or occasionally he himself was unwell. Greg once said he had a single long cold all winter every year, and he had an ongoing shoulder issue (a rotator cuff tear) stemming from a sports injury back when he was a kid, which caused him a lot of pain and flared up periodically. He gave me periods of sometimes quite extreme anxiety, when the geographical and technological distance between us felt like a wall. Once in 2004 or 5, when he was finishing the court book, I remember him saying he was sleeping all day, which went on for quite some time - and I asked him to call me. When he tried, his phone battery was dead – not an unusual occurrence, but it freaked me out completely and I really felt I’d never hear from him again; he’d just sort of fade away into the dark…. He soon went out and got a new one and then he did call, and “No, no, I’m not depressed,” he said, “just tired and a bit bored with this book.”

That was a lesson for other situations too: no matter what paranoid fears I had in the darkest hours of night, when the residual teenager in my brain told me he couldn’t truly want to be my friend, something must be amiss and soon he’d just vanish, he always got in touch; he always came back.

“I do only ever have a small number of people in my life,” said Greg, when the situation was serious enough to wring such expressions of feeling from him, “but one of them happens to be you, and I’d hate for anything to deprive me of that.”

However: “You might be the last people who ever see me,” he said in Seattle in 2010, with his usual small teasing smile. “It all starts to fall apart from here.”

When I first knew Greg, he was possibly even ahead of me technologically. He used a newsreader to access the newsgroup we met on, while I had only recently got connected to the web and went crudely through the Google index. He had software that could create architectural drawings. He knew how to derive footnotes from Word documents, and laughed because I couldn’t: “I can’t believe there’s something technical I can do that you can’t!” Also, he could touch type; I’ve never been able to do that.

Over the years, we diverged, not because he was a technophobe per se, but because he had other priorities and ways to spend his money than always having the latest computer or speediest connection. In my house, connections were always determined by Christophe’s music activities (composing and publishing online with a friend), which needed cutting edge stuff and high speed connections – and later by working from home and remote connections to the BL. Greg rather took his stripped-back style to extremes, though, and at times ended up almost unable to work at all, hampered by frequent computer crashes (always coinciding with a book deadline!) or unsuitable software. I often got an email asking if I had a copy of a particular chapter or article he’d lost, and there was a phase when some clock issue meant that all his emails were dated 1956! Once he typed a book proposal on something called QuarkXpress because he had no word processing software of any kind on a temporary computer he was using after his own had conked out. I always had to save photos extra-small when I sent them or crash his email, and he could never even view a Youtube video.

I can’t envisage a time when Greg would have allowed himself to be at the beck and call of internet notifications on a smart phone, but phone lines, as it were, got all tied up in what was a financial priority, and the priority was always making sure that his parents were OK. The days when he’d hoped to be able to leave them comfortable enough for him to move to Ireland were long gone. Eventually he couldn’t even call the UK, as his phone contract didn’t allow overseas lines; but when I was in the US for work or pleasure he called me in hotels in places like Washington DC, because he knew it mattered to me (who also usually calls no-one if I can help it). By 2020, with the domestic demands on him and his endless tight book contracts, he barely used a phone at all.

And yet he was working hard through it all. It troubled my spirit that in his current situation with his father and with the world outside so weird and out of sorts he should be writing a dark book on two psychotic murderers (Leopold and Loeb), but he was as professional as he always was in getting through it, even if he admitted that it was a struggle at times to focus in a world gone haywire. In between times he was working on The Romanovs in film, on Nicholas’s abdication (Nine days that shook the world), and also on hundreds of pages of translation of primary sources, everything to keep his mind occupied even when he was too tired to actually write. He mentioned often for many years how tired he was; how he wanted to sleep. When I decided to join a running club, Greg just had the usual flippant reaction that he could only see himself running away from an axe murderer who would surely catch him, or towards his bed.

“You’re a better man than I am, Charlie Brown!” he said.

I thought his tiredness was from endless work and caring responsibilities without a break; in retrospect I do wonder if it was partly an unsuspected problem with his heart, though he never mentioned any other symptom. Whereas he’d tell me every detail of lesser ailments!

Part six: Just getting started

After his father died, Greg spent months clearing the house and told me he would be moving to California to rent a room from Penny and Tom for at least the foreseeable future. He was glad that they now lived in a mountainous part of the state that had cold winters, as he loved Seattle’s temperate climate (including the rain) and would not have fared too well moving to Los Angeles. I was so relieved that finally he had freedom and company that made no demands on him. And he had dogs around him again! A cheerful environment…In a few months he had relaxed there and said, “Things are pretty good.”

Suddenly too he had a proper internet connection, and “we can Zoom,” he told me. In 2010 he’d never even seen a Facebook page and wanted to look at mine, reluctantly curious about the potential for publicity and promotion. He had finally joined in 2017, concurrent with plans to restart Atlantis and begin publishing small works on the Amazon platform, but he couldn’t even see photos properly, so his participation was pretty theoretical beyond a few text posts on his own profile. Penny set up a group called the King and Wilson History Group around then, and in the lockdowns (it was a valuable outlet when I couldn’t write at length because I couldn’t get books and hated the screen) and even before we were both regular posters of Russian or Russian-adjacent thoughts, links and material, but Greg never really took part.

From 2023, he was actually able to do so, aware of Facebook’s potential for “keeping my name out there” while he did smaller specialist projects and worked on proposals for a future big sale. He had calculated that he could actually make as much money from doing two or three smaller books through a self-publishing platform as he could from one larger one with a mainstream publisher – such was state of publishing these days. And if I posted castle or other photos on my personal page and let him know, he could actually go and look and really see them! “It feels as if life is all about Facebook now,” he said, a little bewildered, a little rueful. Following instructions to like peoples’ posts and gather an audience, he even got suspended for 24 hours because the algorithms thought he was spammer or a bot!

He worked out how to post to the blog page I’d set up for “A Life for the Tsar”, adding reams of primary information he’d translated from the memoirs of the press baron Alexei Suvorin.

Then came the Atlantis Substack, which I think I was the first other person to see, testing and critiquing the look, the links and chat functions before it went live. He tried to post regular articles to keep the interest up, many of them based on work he’d been playing with for years (I recognised many things I’d read before in different contexts), but which still required a schedule of him, finishing and prepping them for publication. Atlantis magazine itself finally came back in printed format after more than fifteen years, and Greg and I finished an article we’d started back in 2017, about the scandalous marriage of the Grand Duke of Hesse and Alexandrine de Kolemine. To write again was a shift of gear for me, as I’d actually struggled over the last few years to do something which had once been as necessary to me as breathing.

The reasons were many.

In lockdown my working life and much more seemed to be entirely limited to a screen, epitome of all our lost freedoms - and then two years later a massive cyber attack took out the entire Library and all its functions, sending us back to paper and rendering everything unbelievably complex and slow and – once back online - behind multiple frustrating levels of verification. In both situations, I was cut off from access to the collections, my working days dominated by multiplying admin and staff support, all through little boxes online, it seemed. Between 2020 and 2024 I could barely write. I spent my free time in a sort of frenetic battle to stay away from the screen, travelling often once we could again, running in the evenings. Part of me wonders if it was also because he wasn’t overseeing what I did or collaborating on mutual projects (I was critiquing the abdication book, and then the antisemitism book, but we had no active projects with both our names on as there was no time and few facilities). Perhaps I need Greg to keep me at it.

Greg sympathised about my queasiness with tech dominance. He said something about the irony of “ranting” on a laptop he used to work and communicate, but he still felt that, “It should slow down. They try to farm everything out and eliminate waste and end up creating nightmare situations for everyone….one network down and no one can work. I don’t like being at the mercy of tech stuff which is out of my hands.”

But when he asked me if I had time to finish our Kolemine article I finally sat down and again made space for writing. And then I started to think about how I could cut my work time to make more room for my research, for all I’d been able to do back before the workloads doubled every few months. For things I’d once even been given space to do in work time.

In the end, it is his death that has finally unleashed my writing entirely again, has brought the words pouring forth, in grief, in celebration, with love.

The Alexandrine article we did in Atlantis last year was the latest project which seems now to underscore the somewhat “Polish” slant to our joint work: first the Polish palaces of the Tsars, then Catherine Radziwill (whose family background was in the old Polish-Lithuanian aristocracy, though she considered herself Russian), then this Madame Alexandrine de Kolemine, also a relation of Catherine Radziwill and member of the literary Rzewuski family from Pomerania.

At the time one of my own more recent trips to Poland, this time to the western region of Silesia, Greg suddenly started talking about the English-born Prussian socialite, “Daisy” of Pless, who lived there and whose Ksiaz/Furstenstein castle I went to, and wondering if we might consider a book on her, as it was a good while since one had been done. A little digging soon revealed that someone else was working on a biography that plumbed all the new sources. I talked to her on the phone and she told me all about her intentions to analyse the much-revered Daisy and to try to present a more realistic view of her. It sounded like exactly the sort of approach Greg and I might take, but we at once shelved any thoughts of writing on her if there was someone there in the region for whom it was a lifetime project and could make so much more of it than we would. I was happy to continue checking out Daisy’s houses; maybe we would write on those at some stage.

This incident is one of the many times I saw how careful Greg was always careful not to walk into a project that clashed with anyone else’s. He was altruistically concerned not to “steal” anything, but he also, very practically, could see that moving in on a topic which someone else had researched for years might lead to critical and well-informed reviews from that person which might damage the book. He always preferred to work with rather than against people if he could, and he was fiercely against the idea that any one person could be considered THE expert on a topic, set above all others.

Still, no Daisy book had appeared by 2023, and Greg was thinking no mainstream publisher would buy anything like that now, from us or anyone else.

Meanwhile, however, Atlantis/King and Wilson Books was successfully morphing into a small publisher, and so many of the smaller King and King/Wilson projects that a commercial publisher didn’t want started appearing, from the Romanovs in Film book, to the “Abdication” book, Nine Days that Shook the World, and finally what Greg called “the Jews book”, about Nicholas and antisemitism. I had critiqued multiple versions of this one over the years, since the days when it was an extended chapter in Fate of the Romanovs which never made it past the first cut. Greg was also mooting our Catherine Radziwill book finally being a possibility, and we considered how it should be expanded to add new material.

And now there were even monthly group “King and Wilson History Zooms” with speakers (the first was my friend Will Lee), quizzes, designated discussion topics and book information for interested parties. I loved to see him looking relaxed and speaking with confidence as a host through this new medium, but although I myself already had several years’ worth of experience of Zoom and Teams at work, as participant, chair, trainer etc, at first I found it weird, a bit awkward, to talk to Greg with other people there too! Exposing what had always been almost entirely private and one to one. It was the first time we’d really hung out in something resembling a social group. And the sound can be odd on Zoom anyway. After a bit it got easier for everyone, especially when the time-honoured Zoom tradition of pets appearing on screen became established, and the core of regular participants got used to each other. He and I discussed doing a joint talk on exploring Polish ruins and palaces.

The first time he attempted to join a Teams call – to watch me doing an online talk on the Romanovs in Siberia – Greg was hit by a power cut, worryingly redolent of the bad old days of tech issues. Or so he said! I wondered if he was actually struggling with the technology still. But next time I did one (Russia/Prussia relationships) I joined the call ready to begin and with a rush of pleasure I saw him there at once; he had made it; probably his first Teams call and his first online talk as a spectator. We then arranged with the talk’s host Marten to do a joint one (on Catherine Radziwill) in a few months. We’d all just agreed the date – November 24^th, 2025, the day after Greg’s birthday, joking that with his ascetic lifestyle there’d be no chance he’d have a hangover – and I was looking forward to practicing it with him over the summer as we worked on content.

Catherine, a long-standing project

The last chats we ever had were some of our usual nonsense about my possible electrocution while sanding a wooden floor, an exchange about a wonderful Titanic exhibition in Leeds, and discussion about the deadline for the next Atlantis, as I was now finishing an article on the first Nicholas and Alexandra and their Berlin connections. This was not unconnected to our conversations 15 to 20 years ago about a book on this couple’s world. Recently he’d been posting his translation of their daughter’s memoir on Facebook while we discussed it on and off that public screen, and contemplated annotating it for publication. He was very happy with the enthusiastic response to this memoir, because he’d assumed people were only interested in endless iterations of the second Nicholas and Alexandra. He thought the response boded well for my article too.

And then out of the blue he was gone, the last cluster of fifty million and one emails from madking@seanet.com still in my inbox with his words coming through in his own voice, warm and slightly rueful about never getting to exhibitions; his last fragments of translation and film comment and a reminder about a public Zoom still waiting on Facebook, a few hours old.

Mad King, Maerchenkoenig, Swan King, Grail Knight seeker after truth(s) - all the other identities you did adopt or could have adopted from Ludwig for good reason, and often with a laugh and ambiguity, half hiding from the world. My brilliant friend. You were intellectually precocious; you did everything early; but surely that didn’t have to include leaving us so soon?

I always told you I wanted a lifelong friendship, because I worried that the intensity of it might one day mean we truly fell out. And you said in turn: “all I ever wanted was a true friendship”. I knew that we could firmly disagree on ideas or facts, we’d bicker lightly over wording or the basis of an opinion, and also that I’d be overwhelmed by things that happened because of publisher decisions and this and that pushing in from the sidelines, and at times we’d both briefly run for cover – but I could always hook you back with history, castles, ideas; just give it a little time and shove down the feelings or channel them elsewhere and in time they’d be profoundly acknowledged. I could see the way we would continue our interplay down the years, growing and learning in the best tradition of such relationships.

I’ll go on with what I can of the castles we’d been building of late, and then I’ll see how it goes. I’ll go through the world with the boundless blessings your belief in me gave me; the enhancements to a career that had quickly gone stale - but without you to report back to, without your inspiration and your feedback, without your company.

Gentle kind soul who just quietly fell asleep and didn’t wake up, I hope that your spirit forever runs free now in the Allgau, between those castles and the lakes and on the snowy alps, in all the places that were so easy for me while you could never get to them.

Farewell, Dream King.

After twenty four years, “We were just getting started.”

But long before Greg was looking after his parents, he came to London with Penny researching what ultimately became “The Fate of the Romanovs”. This was back in the 1990s – and I have known Greg so long that I don’t know when we actually first started corresponding – he has been a part of my life forever it seems. He emailed asking if I would be willing to help them whilst in London with research, and access and just general knowledge of London. I willingly did so, and we also held a Greg Fan Club dinner in a Russian restaurant. It was very well attended with lots of his readers coming along to meet him. I remember a lovely long evening, Greg signing lots of books. After extensive research trips around Europe, I also remember seeing Greg and Penny off at Heathrow airport on an Air India flight to NY. I can only assume it was the cheapest they could get as I don’t remember Greg being a fan of inflight curry.

Dinner in London, 2000: Sue Woolmans and Coryne Hall at left. [Photo: Penny Wilson]

Greg holding court, London, 2000 [Photo: Penny Wilson]

Our email friendship continued apace and I did little bits of research for Greg and Penny, and helped ship items to them back in the States. Greg asked me to write for “Atlantis” and I happily did an article on the Crimean architect Nikolai Krasnov for him. “Atlantis” was a super publication, digging into the Russia of our favourite Tsars – exploring the culture of Imperial Russia. And in Greg’s case the architecture. He really knew his architecture – he was brilliant at describing ceilings, pillars, corniches with all the right nuance of colour and technical terms. He could have made a living writing palace guidebooks.

And then one day, Greg said he was thinking of doing a book on the Archduke Franz Ferdinand to coincide with the centenary of the assassination in Sarajevo. Greg knew that Franz Ferdinand was my pet subject, that I had been researching him for years and perhaps planned one day to write about him. I thought it was very decent of Greg to tell me his plans upfront – many another author would not have done. But the reason he was telling me was not to poach my ideas, but to suggest we work together on this. I was stunned, flattered and frankly a bit terrified as I had a full-time job and not that much time. Greg brushed all this aside, in what I thought was a rather cavalier way at the time – not understanding my concerns I thought. I should not have doubted Greg as he was a total rock when time was tight. We embarked on this project: Greg started to write the book, I started to research. I took unpaid leave and did several research trips to Austria and Bosnia – which would have been so much more fun with Greg in tow. Our mutual friend, Karen Roth, helped with so much of the German translation in Vienna. And in Sarajevo, I am proud to say that we were able to get into the Konak to see the room in which Franz Ferdinand and Sophie passed away – the only Habsburg researchers to have managed that in recent years. Greg and I developed a really strong sense of the injustice done to Franz Ferdinand’s children, who had their home, Konopiste outside Prague, stolen from them by the Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919. We made sure that we included all the details about the wrongs that were done to Sophie, Max and Ernst in the hopes that we might be able to support the claim of Princess Sophie Hohenberg, as she fought through the courts to have the castle returned to the Hohenberg family. Sadly, this has not happened but “Assassination” has been published in Czech and is sold in the Konopiste giftshop!!!! I call that a small triumph for the Hohenbergs.

The Habsburg shelves in the Mladinska Knjiga bookshop in Ljubljana, 2017 [Photo: Janet Ashton]. Assassination (here called Umor Franca Ferdinanda) may have been Greg’s most translated book, making it into all the languages of the former Empire. Twilight of Empire and The mad King are also much translated into many languages, and his Romanov titles into Russian.

Working with Greg was a joy. There were no rows – we had a few disagreements over interpretation of facts but we made sure that if we really disagreed about something, it went into the notes so the reader had a chance to see both sides. There were simply deadlines I couldn’t make – proof reading ones before publication where we had to revise the MS in 3 days whilst I was doing 3 x 10 hour shifts. Greg just took over making sure my job was not impacted. Picture research – Greg was suitably stunned when I presented him with my Franz Ferdinand collection of images. And then PR when the book was published. Greg was modest, shy, didn’t really like doing the PR, so that was my job. We both felt we worked well as a team, we both said we hoped that one day we would work together again. Sadly, that is not to be.

Writing “Assassination” has been one of the best experiences of my life and has led to many other opportunities – book festival appearances, pod and vlog casts, and lectures. Without Greg I would never have appeared at the Edinburgh Festival. I owe Greg big time for his generosity of spirit in including me in his Franz Ferdinand plans. I am proud to use the words “co-author Greg King” whenever I talk about “our” book. Lucky me to always have my name linked with that of Greg King.

Sue lecturing on Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, accompanied by a photograph of her flowers on Sophie’s tomb on the centenary of their deaths. [Photo: Janet Ashton]

Sorting out my files after a recent house move I came across a large one marked GREG, filled with letters, Christmas cards and all sorts of other jottings. Looking through it has brought back many wonderful memories.

My friendship with him dates from the time when I was an unknown writer working on my first book in between a full-time job. He could not have been more helpful. Over the years we swapped information, sources, useful contacts, all the things that keep writers going.

My first letter from him dates from December 1991, before we were all on the internet. I had written to him with a question about Empress Marie Feodorovna. He was so interested to hear that I was researching her and in the course of correspondence over the next few weeks pointed me in several directions which helped my research. An acknowledgement to him appears in the book.

Around the time that Little Mother of Russia was being published in 1999, he and Penny asked me to write something for Atlantis. I was delighted to do so, and this collaboration continued.

When he was working on his book about the Court of Nicholas II, I was about to travel to Crimea with a tour group made up exclusively of good friends. I photographed fire plans in some of the palaces to give him the lay-out and, along no doubt with others, answered his many questions about the area. I was delighted to repay some of the earlier help he had given me.

I only met Greg once, when he and Penny came over to London in the summer of 2000. It was a lovely evening with friends in a London restaurant.

Coryne and Greg to the left of the picture, London, 2000 [ Photo: Penny Wilson]

…and a clearer image of Coryne enjoying the same dinner, with Sue Woolmans, who arranged the event. [Photo: Penny Wilson]

In 2017, Greg, Penny, Sue Woolmans and I wrote Imperial Crimea; Estates, Enchantments and the Last of the Romanovs. Greg and I collaborated on two of the articles, one on Harax, and one on the Crimean captives in 1917/18. This entailed a lengthy correspondence drafting, redrafting and swapping ideas. He was always happy to change anything I disagreed with!

Greg was a lovely person, always helpful and with a vast knowledge of Imperial Russia and connected subjects. His sudden death was a dreadful blow to us all and he will be sorely missed. RIP Greg.

The Grand Duke

            Like nearly every member of the Romanov Dynasty, Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich was taught from an early age to keep a regular diary.  The content and quality of such journals varied greatly.  Some diarists, like Nicholas II, almost exclusively confined their observations to recording meetings, meals, walks, and hunting; only rarely did they offer commentary on the important events of the day.  Andrei was a more exhaustive and critical diarist.  He, of course, recorded the usual events of his life but he also, with a keen mind and observational skills, ventured insightful opinions on his experiences and developments of the day.  If his entries do not quite match the exhaustive details and lyrical tone to be found in the diaries of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, they nonetheless provide an unusually literate account of the last few years of the Romanov Dynasty.

            The diaries encompass many pages and will be presented in chronological segments.  The diary covering events of 1914 is the shortest, and is thus given here, in the first installment, in its entirety.

            Before turning to the translations, it is helpful to have some very brief biographical information on the diarist himself.

            Grand Duke Andri Vladimirovich was born on May 2/14, 1879, at Tsarskoye Selo, the youngest son of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, son of Alexander II and brother of Alexander III, and his wife Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, a former Princess of the German Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.  Together with his older brothers Grand Dukes Kirill and Boris Vladimirovich and his sister Grand Duchess Elena Vladimirovna, Andrei was brought up in an extraordinarily lavish Florentine-style palace facing the Neva River in St. Petersburg.  Summers were spent at Tsarskoye Selo, where the family owned a neoclassical palace.

            Educated by private tutors, Andrei Vladimirovich grew up speaking the English he had learned from the children's British nannies; he soon added Russian, and later became fluent in German and in French.  The Vladimirs were noted for their sophistication and artistic tastes, and Andrei studied painting under artist Leon Bakst.(1)

            Tradition dictated that Andrei followed a military career.  Starting in 1895 he attended St. Petersburg's Mikhailovsky Artillery Academy and joined the Horse Guards Artillery Regiment as a 2^nd lieutenant in 1898.  After graduating from the Mikhailovsky Academy in 1902, he was promoted to lieutenant in his regiment.

            As soon as he graduated from the Mikhailovsky Artillery Academy, Andrei enrolled in the Alexandrovsky Military Law Academy to study military judicial law.  He graduated with honors and took a post in the Military's Judicial Department.  In 1906 he had been promoted to Captain and in 1910 was made a colonel.  Later that same year, he was appointed Commander of the 5^th Battery of the Imperial Horse Guards Artillery Regiment, and in 1911 he took command of the 6^th Don Cossack Artillery Battery of the Imperial Life Guards.

            In February 1900, Andrei attended a dinner party given by Mathilde Kschessinska, the Prima Ballerina Assoluta of the Mariinsky Theater's Imperial Ballet.  Known for her brilliant capabilities on stage, Kschessinska was also notorious for her private life.  For several years she had been mistress to the future Nicholas II and, as her recently discovered diary records, even became pregnant by him, though she lost the child in a miscarriage.  This relationship ended when Nicholas became engaged to Princess Alix of Hesse, but the then Tsesarevich asked his second cousin Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich to look after her and soon he was sharing her bed.  She was still seeing Sergei when she first met Andrei.  By that summer of 1900, Andrei and Mathilde had begun their own relationship.  Apparently, Sergei Mikhailovich, being in love with the ballerina, tolerated this situation, much to the amusement of St. Petersburg gossips.

            Things took a more complicated turn in 1902, when Mathilde gave birth to a son, whom she named Vladimir (known as Vova).  Although Kschessinksa later insisted that “Sergei knew for certain that he was not the father,” this seems to have been a bit of later, retrospective whitewashing, as both Grand Dukes believed that Vladimir was their son. (2)  The boy was christened Vladimir Sergeievich, suggesting that Sergei Mikhailovich was indeed the father, and he certainly assumed financial responsibility for his upbringing.  Only after the Revolution, and Sergei's 1918 murder by the Bolsheviks, did Mathilde claim that Andrei was the father.  No one would ever know the absolute truth of the situation.

            In 1903 Andrei bought a Florentine-style palace from the Von Dervitz family.  Located at No. 28 English Embankment in St. Petersburg, this was an extravagantly ornate building, with elaborately decorated rooms finished in marble, rare woods, and much gilding.  It was far too large for the bachelor Grand Duke, and he eventually rented out half of the building to the American Embassy.  Occasionally Andrei and Mathilde would preside over private dinners here, but they began spending much time in Europe, where they did not have to conceal their relationship.  It was during a visit to Cap-d'Ail on the French Riviera in 1913 that Andrei purchased a villa overlooking the Mediterranean, which he called Alam, an anagram of Mathilde's nickname, Mala. (3)

            With the outbreak of World War I, Andrei was appointed to Headquarters as a member of the General Staff.  In 1915 he was named Commander of the Horse Guards Artillery Brigade and made a Major-General in the Imperial Suite.  In August 1915, he was named Commander of the 130^th Kherson Infantry Regiment, and a month later was also appointed Commander of the Don Cossack Artillery Brigade.  In these various positions, the Grand Duke traveled widely along the Front, and several times he came under enemy fire.  In November 1916, Nicholas II awarded him the Order of St. Vladimir, 2^nd Class, for his service.

            Andrei was one of the more discerning observers of the Imperial regime's increasing spiral toward chaos.  Two bits of gossip, from the rather unreliable French Ambassador in Petrograd Maurice Paleologue and from Countess Lili Nostitz, suggest that, by the autumn of 1916, Andrei was openly promoting a coup against the Emperor which would replace him on the throne with his young son Tsesarevich Alexei under the regency of Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich.  Certainly, his brother Kirill and his mother Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna spoke of a possible change of rulers, which would place the Tsesarevich on the throne, but Andrei's diary makes it rather clear that he attempted to avoid such discussions.  Indeed, he disapproved of what he considered disloyal talk, even if it came from his brother and mother.

            In early 1917, after rumors reached Nicholas II that Andrei was somehow involved in plotting against him, the Grand Duke temporarily left the capital, taking up residence in the resort town of Kislovodsk in the Caucasus.  Within a few weeks his mother joined him.  They were in Kislovodsk when the February Revolution erupted.  Within a month, the Provisional Government dismissed him – along with other serving Romanovs – from all of his military posts.

            In July Mathilde arrived in Kislovodsk with her son Vladimir. Andrei obtained an apartment for them: his mother refused to allow her son's mistress and the son of questionable paternity into the house she now shared with Andrei and his brother Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich, who also arrived at the resort in late summer.  Local Cossacks provided protection for the Imperial visitors, but by the summer of 1918 the situation had deteriorated.  The Provisional Government had fallen to Lenin's Bolsheviks, and seventeen members of the extended Romanov Family, including Nicholas II, his wife, and their children – along with Mathilde's one-time lover Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich – had been murdered in the Urals under Soviet captivity.

            In the first week of August 1918, Bolsheviks in Kislovodsk arrested Andrei and Boris, and transferred them to Pyatigorsk, where they were imprisoned in a hotel to await execution.  Ironically, the local Bolshevik Commissar had once been a fledgling painter, and before the war Boris had purchased several of his paintings.  This saved the two Grand Dukes from death. (4)  Realizing that the reprieve was likely temporary, Andrei and his brother fled the town and lived in hiding under the protection of some Cossacks.

            When the White Army took Kislovodsk from the Bolsheviks in September, Andrei and Boris returned only long enough to collect their mother, Mathilde, and young Vladimir before fleeing to Anapa on the Black Sea coast in November.  Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna proudly refused to leave Russia, although Boris did so – accompanied by his mistress and future wife Zinaida Rashevskaya – in March 1919.  There was a brief return to Kislovodsk but as the Bolsheviks regained ground Andrei, his mother, his mistress, and Vladimir escaped to the Crimean port city of Novorossiysk in January 1920.  By this time everyone knew that the Civil War was nearing a victory by the Bolsheviks, and Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna finally agreed to leave Russia.  On March 3, 1920, the quartet boarded the Italian liner Semiramisa for Venice.  They became the last Romanovs to leave the country. (5)

            A life of exile now began.  Andrei, Mathilde, and Vladimir took up residence in Villa Alam in Cap-d'Ail, while the elderly Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna continued on to Contrexéville, where she died in September 1920.  Her death freed Andrei to marry Mathilde: he asked his brother Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich – as the most senior, surviving male member of the Romanov Dynasty – for permission to do so, and also requested the blessing of Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna for the union.  Both Grand Duke and Dowager Empress agreed and, on January 30, 1921, Andrei and Mathilde were married in the Russian Orthodox Church of St. Michael the Archangel in Cannes. (6)  Andrei promptly claimed paternity of Vladimir, and in 1924, after Grand Duke Kirill had declared himself Emperor in exile, Mathilde and her son were given the morganatic titles of Prince and Princess Romanovsky-Krasinsky, with the style of Serene Highness.

            None of the exiled Romanovs had much of a head for finances, and they spent as lavishly as if the Revolution had never occurred.  Andrei was eventually forced to sell the jewels he had inherited from his mother and to mortgage the villa on the Riviera. (7)  The couple's taste for gambling in Monte Carlo did nothing to improve their situation, and the crash of 1929 wiped out most of what they had managed to accumulate.  Andrei was forced to sell Villa Alam and move to a smaller house in Paris. (8)  Mathilde opened a ballet academy, where she trained, among others, Alicia Markova and Margot Fonteyn.  The income generated allowed the couple to live comfortably.  While Mathilde taught, Andrei spent his days working with a number of emigre organizations.

            World War II again sent the couple into flight, this time running from the Germans before finally returning, out of financial necessity, to Paris so that Mathilde could continue her ballet lessons.  Prince Vladimir was less fortunate: the Nazis arrested him as a suspected Soviet sympathizer and imprisoned him with other emigres in a Gestapo camp.  It took Andrei nearly four months of constant interviews with the Germans before they finally released him.

            Andrei's health, never particularly strong, began to falter in the early 1950s.  Desperate finances forced him to sell his Paris house, and he relied on the financial assistance of his nephew Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, head of the Imperial House in exile, as well as his wife's former pupil Margot Fonteyn.  On October 30, 1956, he complained of dizziness and went to his bedroom to take a nap.  He died that afternoon at the age of seventy-seven. (9)  Mathilde survived him by fifteen years, dying in Paris in 1971 at the age of ninety-nine.  Her son Vladimir died, unmarried, three years later.

Source Notes

1. Hall, 71.

2. Romanovsky-Krassinsky, 89.

3. Hall, 161.

4. Korneva and Cheboksarova, 212; Hall, 206.

5. Perry and Pleshakov, 231.

6. Hall, 224.

7. Perry and Pleshakov, 262-64.

8. Hall, 238.

9. Perry and Pleshakov, 340; Hall, 284.

Bibliography

Hall, Coryne.  Imperial Dancer.  Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2005.

Korneva, Galina and Cheboksarova, Tatiana.  Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna. East Richmond Heights, CA: Eurohistory, 2014.

Perry, John and Constantine Pleshakov.  The Flight of the Romanovs. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Romanovsky-Krassinsky, Princess (Mathilde Kschessinska).  Dancing in Petersburg.  London: Gollancz, 1960.

*****

Information on the Diary

            Grand Duke Andrei's diaries were discovered by the Soviets in Piatygorsk and deposited in the Central Archives of the October Revolution (now the Archives of the Russian Federation) in Moscow.  It remains there, and can be found in F.650, Op. 1, D. 2-3.  In 1926 portions were published under the title Dnevnika Andrei Vladimirovich Romanova, edited by Vladimir Semennikov and produced by the State Publishing House in Moscow and Leningrad; additional excerpts were published as “Iz Dnevnika A.V. Romanova za 1916-1917gg” in Krasni Arkhiv No. 26, 1928.

            The diaries translated and annotated in this, and following installments cover the years 1914-1917.  They are most concerned with military matters and the Grand Duke's experiences in the war, but they also frequently comment on the Emperor and Empress and members of the Imperial Family, as well as addressing important and controversial developments as the country lurched toward disaster.

            Brief explanatory information on names mentioned have been included in the text, for the ease of readers, rather than as end notes, which involves toggling back and forth.

            All dates are given according to the Julian Calendar used in Russia until 1918.

*****

The Diary, 1914

Undated: On July 18, 1914, mobilization was announced, and on July 20, a manifesto announced the declaration of war on Germany.  Thus, a general European war has begun.  On the one hand are Russia, France, England, Serbia, Montenegro, Japan, and Belgium, and on the other are Germany and Austria.  I will not try to give the history of individual events. Let me just say that in Russia the war was greeted with great enthusiasm, but without excessive boasting.  Everyone soberly looked at the coming conflict and clearly realized that the war would be difficult.  The solemn prayer service and the reading of the manifesto in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace left a deep impression on everyone.  In the middle of the hall were the icons of the Savior from the house of Peter the Great and the Kazan Mother of God.  When the choir sang “Lord, Save Thy People,” everyone joined in and most had tears in their eyes.  The Emperor's speech lifted the mood even more.  With his simple words, and like the Apostles inspired by Heaven, it seemed as if the Lord Almighty spoke to us through him, and when he said, “I bless you for the military battles,” all knelt down.  He was especially strong when he announced, “I solemnly swear before you that as long as at least one enemy remains on Russian soil, I will not make peace.”  These words resulted in a “Hurrah!” such as had never before been heard.  It was unceasing.  From the Nicholas Hall, the Sovereign went to the balcony overlooking Alexander Square.  It was entirely filled with people, from the palace back to the General Staff buildings.  When the Sovereign appeared, everyone knelt down.  In these short minutes, Russia was reborn.  Everyone felt a new consciousness and sense of duty.  The entire mobilization was unexpectedly smooth.  Minister of War V. A. Sukhomlinov [General Vladimir Sukhomlinov, 1848-1826, Minister of War from 1909 until June 13, 1915] told me that he was amazed by how precisely it went, and without any delay.  The influx of reserve soldiers exceeded expected numbers; recruits enlisted every day; and the railway workers were beyond praise.  Not a single drunk – everyone was sober.  I was sad to see all of my comrades off to war.  I saw off the 5^th Battery and also the 6^th and suddenly I was alone.  I have been in service for sixteen years and spent much effort on these units before feeling like I had failed in February [when he turned over command to younger officers].  Had I been able to foresee events!  But what could I do?  All vacancies were filled, and it is impossible to intrude into alien areas.  So I waited.  Asking to go to Headquarters and sitting idly there seemed stupid.  But time passed, and the war has already been underway for two months, and my position is unbearable.  No matter how hard it is to ask to join Headquarters and not the ranks of soldiers, I decided to do so and wrote to Kirill [Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, 1876-1938, eldest son of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich and brother of Andrei Vladimirovich] who was at Headquarters.  I had previously asked Nicky [Emperor Nicholas II] for his blessing.

September 23, 1914: I received a telegram from Nikolasha [Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaievich, Jr., 1856-1919, Supreme Commander of the Russian Armed Forces from July 20, 1914-August 23, 1915]: “You have the Highest Permission to be at General Ruzsky's disposal [Adjutant-General Nicholas Ruzsky, 1854-1918, then Commander of the Northwestern Front]. Leave as soon as you are ready.  Call me first.  Nikolasha.”  The prayers were short, and I drove with Mama [Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna the Elder, Grand Duchess Vladimir, 1854-1920, a former Princess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin who in 1874 had married Alexander II's son Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich] to Papa's grave [Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, 1847-1909; he was buried in the Grand Ducal Vault in the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul in St. Petersburg].  I said goodbye to Aunt Minny [Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, 1847-1928, a former Danish Princess and widow of Alexander III], and to Nicky and Alix [Empress Alexandra Feodorovna} and received a small icon as a blessing.  My mother blessed me with a cross.

September 28, 1914: From Petrograd I drove to Tsarskoye Selo to see Mama.  I had breakfast with her and at 1:38 pm I left the Alexandrovskaya Station for the war.  Kube [Colonel Feodor Kube, 1881-1920, Adjutant to the Grand Duke] joined me, along with my valet Bondarenko and a Cossack, Dmitri, for Kube.  Horses and cars were sent ahead.

September 29, 1914: At 10:20 am I arrived in Vilna and met General Yermolinsky [Major-General Nicholas Yermolinsky, 1869-1919] at the station.  On learning of my arrival, he came to tell me that near Vitebsk, Oleg Konstantinovich [Prince Oleg Konstantinovich, 1892-1914, fourth son of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Mavrikievna.  He was the only Romanov to be killed in action in World War I] had been seriously wounded yesterday near Wroclaw.  I immediately got a car and drove to the infirmary.  Igor [Prince Igor Konstantinovich, 1894-1918, fifth son of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Mavrikievna] was already there.  He had brought the best surgeons, Professor Zeige von Manteuffel [Professor Zeige von Manteuffel, 1857-1926, Court Doctor] and Martynov [Professor Alexei Martynov, 1868-1934, surgeon to military hospitals].  I spoke with them for a long time.  They seemed to harbor hopes of saving him, but the wound was terrible and the loss of blood significant, which greatly weakened him.  I wanted to visit Oleg but he was sleeping.  I took Igor to my rooms for breakfast and at 2 o'clock we went back to the infirmary.  Oleg awoke.  I went to him, and he said, “How glad I am to see you.  How are you doing?”  I told him.  He then asked, “Are you glad to be in the war?”  Then he asked again in French (apparently not wanting the others to hear).  When I told him, “Yes,” he said, “Thank God,” also in French.  The nursing sister was right there.  He asked for food.  A saucer of ice cream was on the table, but it had melted.  The sister wanted to bring a fresh serving, but he said he would eat the melted ice cream.  When he tasted it, though, he said it tasted bad, and the sister brought him a fresh saucer.  “This is delicious,” he said, but having eaten very little, he said, “Enough.”  He took a handkerchief and wiped his mouth, looking at me sadly then leaned back, gazed at the ceiling, and took a deep breath.  The doctor standing next to him grabbed his wrist and took his pulse.  Oleg seemed to awake and asked, “How is my pulse?”  “Good,” the doctor said.  “Sister, sister!” Oleg called and addressing me in French, said, “I'm sorry but I think I'm going to vomit.”  Seeing that my presence embarrassed him, I went out for a few minutes and returned.  “He will soon be fine,” said the doctor. “He is doing well now.”  Oleg smiled.  I had to leave and said goodbye to him.  “God bless you,” he said in French, “thank you for stopping by to see me.  All the best.”  Wishing him a speedy recovery, I left.  In the next room I found General Yermolinsky.  We looked at each other in silence, not saying a word about Oleg.  No matter how much the doctors assured us it was enough to look at him.  He was pale, a waxen, white color as if his face was drained of blood.  Despite the terrible wound, he was not suffering.  Temperature 36.8, pulse 160.  Professor Zeige said that it would be better if he was suffering [presumably as this would indicate recovery].  He was injected with morphine the day before, but this proved unnecessary.  Not only did he feel no pain, but he was also unaware of the seriousness of his situation.  There was such simplicity in his smile and in his conversation, that it seemed that he did not want to admit he was about to die for the fatherland.  It was as if he considered his act in this vast war to be such an insignificant fact that it was not worth talking about.  He never even mentioned the George Cross which he had been awarded just that morning by the Sovereign.  He died a modest Hero.  I only learned of his death at 8:10 that night about six hours after I saw him, two days later.  His mother and father came to him at 5 o'clock.  He was still alive and died in their arms.  I left Vilna at 3 pm for Lida, where I arrived at 5:45 and after 10 minutes left for Baranovichi [where the Russian Army had established its Headquarters or Stavka].  In Lida, I said goodbye to Kube, who went to Volkovysk to rent horses and a motor.  At 9:30 pm I arrived in Baranovichi.  Prince Lieven [Captain Prince Karl Lieven, 1884-1941, Adjutant to Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich] met me at the station and took me in a motor to Kirill in railway carriage No. 11.  I sat with him for about an hour, then we went to Nikolasha.  He asked about Oleg for a long time.  I drank tea with him and at about 12 o'clock at night I returned to Kirill, where I drank his health on the occasion of his birthday tomorrow. After that we went to the station together.  At 1:30 am he left for Dvinsk to meet Ducky [Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna, 1876-1936, daughter of Queen Victoria's second son Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna, only daughter of Alexander II.  From 1894-1901 she was married to Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse, brother of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna.  In 1905, she wed Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich.] and I was to leaceve at 7 in the morning for Bialystok.  I visited the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. The train in which Kirill lives stands in the forest. Since I arrived late in the evening in Baranovichi, it was completely dark, and there was no way to navigate. Prince Lieven escorted me to Nikolasha's train.  We walked along the sleepers for about five minutes through the forest, and in the distance, we could see the illuminated windows of his train. Nearby stood a booth with a guard of Gendarmes and Life Cossacks.  Shcherbatov [Prince Nicholas Shcherbatov, 1868-1948, Minister of the Interior and Commander of the Separate Corps of Gendarmes] led me to the carriage.  Nikolasha and Petyusha [Grand Duke Peter Nikolaievich, 1864-1931, brother of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaievich, Jr.] sat in the salon reading newspapers.  After greeting us, Petya left the salon.  Nikolasha had the St. George Cross of the 3^rd Degree hanging around his neck.  He seemed to be tired, but still cheerful. The first thing he told me was that his nightmare was to serve 36 years.  Since all information from the front is very late, and indeed cannot help but be late when the front stretches for 400 versts, all orders cannot be timely.  Then he talked about the arrival of Nicky, how he was initiated into military matters.  Then we went to the dining room to drink tea.  There were a lot of people here: Dimka Golitsyn [Adjutant-General Prince Dmitri Golitsyn, 1851-1920, Ober-Jägermeister of the Imperial Hunt], French General Laguiche [Marquis de Laguiche, French military attaché at Headquarters], and other adjutants and doctors.  So, I left early in the morning for Bialystok with Kube via Bagrationovo and, beyond, Vylkovysk.

Undated: At 1 pm on September 30, I arrived in Bialystok.  My journey was connected to Mama's ambulance train.  I went to look for friends on it, and found the senior doctor, Kozhin [Professor Alexander Kozhin, Court Surgeon] and Countess Ignatieva [wife of Count A. I. Ignatiev, Governor-General of Mogilev Province].  Kozhin led me to look at the new carriages and the operating room.  There were 560 wounded.  The train did not move for a long time. This happened because 10 seriously wounded were carried out of the train, but the stretcher was not returned.  Only at 3 o'clock did the train set off for Grodno, having stood in Bialystok from 8 o'clock in the morning.  I went to drink tea in the dining room. I found there the commander of the guards crew Count Tolstoy [Count Nicholas Tolstoy, Rear-Admiral in the Imperial Suite], his wife and adjutant. Suddenly, from the depths of the corridor, the sleepy figure of Yuri Belyaev [George Balyaev, Commander of the 5^th Don Cossack Artillery Division] came out.  He had fled from Warsaw, but soon disappeared, apparently to sleep.  The train was terribly quiet.  Long stops all the time. From Bialystok to Grodno was 86 versts.  We arrived at Kuznitsa, 24 versts from Grodno, at 6 o'clock and moved on at 7 o'clock in the evening.  About this time, we dined with the sisters.  After this, the second shift came and Kube and I went to the compartment of Yuri Belyaev, who treated us to Grevs' cognac [apparently the bottle belonged to Colonel Alexander Grevs of His Majesty's Hussar Life Guards Regiment].  He told us about Warsaw, the Siberian Cossacks, his amorous exploits, etc. Time passed, and we again stood 4 versts from Grodno at 8 o’clock in the evening.  We only arrived there at 12:30. There I learned about the death of Oleg Konstantinovich. My carriage was uncoupled to a siding, and I soon went to bed.  The next morning, it was already October 1.  At 10 o'clock I went to appear to the Commander-in-Chief of the 2^nd Army, General Ruzsky.  He lived in a small wooden house guarded by the Kuban Cossacks. The whole room was lined with tables covered with maps.  General Ruzsky is a man clearly devoid of any outward beauty.  He is stooped, of medium height, with sparse gray hair, and a thin, ascetic face.  Only his sparkling eyes, hidden beneath rather large glasses, give a hint of energy.  He greeted me very kindly and showed me the location of the armies and corps on the map.  I saw the chief of staff Vladimir Oranovsky [Vladimir Oranovsky, 1866-1917, Chief-of-Staff at Northwestern Army Headquarters].  Then I visited Dmitri [Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, 1891-1942, eldest son of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich] and Sandro [Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, 1866-1933, fourth son of Grand Duke Michael Nikolaievich and brother-in-law to Nicholas II].  They lived in the city in Prince Drutsky-Lyubetsky's house after he was killed at Baspingom. In another room lived General Adam Zamoysky [General Count Adam Zamoysky, attached to Headquarters].  I sat with them.  At 1 o'clock there was a general luncheon at the headquarters. The photographer took pictures of us. I dined at Dmitri's: it was very tasty, with lots of vodka and wine.  At about 10 o'clock B. Ogarev [Boris Ogarev, Commander of the Life Guards Horse Artillery] burst in straight from the battery with Count Sheremetiev [Major-General Count Alexander Sheremetiev, 1859-1931, chief of the Aviation Squadron].  We sat and spoke.  At 2 am, the entire staff left for Sedlec. General Ruzsky was given the Warsaw Front, where the situation is troubling, and he had to move south.  At about 11 am we arrived in Sedlec but sat at the station for a long time.  Some went to the city to look for apartments, and the rest shared their impressions. Dmitri and Sandro had breakfast in my carriage.  They both moved into an apartment, but I stayed in my carriage. Sedlec is not bad for a former provincial town: beautiful station, cobbled streets, stone buildings, etc. Everyone dined again in my carriage.

October 3, 1914: I went off on business to inspect the rear lines of the 2^nd Army Corps.  I left at 10 pm for Warsaw.  They sent Lieutenant Colonel of the General Staff Sergei Karlovich Segerkranets to help me.  At 12 o'clock at night we arrived in Warsaw.  The army headquarters was on a train at the Brest railway station, and the attached locomotive was under steam.  Segerkrantz and I went straight to the operations department, where we found Colonel Vyalov [Colonel Stepan Vyalov, attached to the General Staff] in a very stuffy carriage.  The only light came from candles, and the smoke made it difficult to breathe.  Some time later the Chief of Staff, Major-General Postovsky [Major-General Peter Postovsky], Quartermaster and Chief of Staff of the 2^nd Army Corps, came with General Sheidemann [General Sergei Sheidemann, Commander of the 2^nd Army Corps].  He took a map and explained all Warsaw operations from September 28, including how difficult it was in the early days to defend the city with a small force.  But with the approach of new corps, things got better, and at the present time the battle is taking place some 10 versts from the city.  They waited for the 2^nd Siberian Corps and 23^rd Corps to start a general offensive.  The Germans principally attacked our right flank of Pruszkowo-Blonie, but all attacks were repelled by artillery fire. From the south they were waiting for the approach of the 5^th Army of General Plehve [General Paul Plehve, 1850-1916, Commander of the 5^th Army Corps].  General Sheidemann has clearly gone through difficult days.  Once the enemy overran one brigade, which retreated to the ramparts but, having regrouped, returned to the front.  This panicked the city, though fortunately this soon subsided.  The telephone was ringing all the time with reports that day.  At 2 o'clock I left headquarters and went to bed.  The next morning at 8 o'clock I went by motor to the headquarters of the 1^st Siberian Corps in the village of Sluzhevitsy. The cannonade began early in the morning and intensified.  On the horizon, the village of Piasechko was on fire from our heavy artillery.  The whole sky was filled with smoke from TNT bombs.  The commander of the 1^st Siberian Corps, General Pleshkov [General Michael Pleshkov] was in a very good mood.  His Siberians fought desperately, and they took the famous Mashdlovsky Forest, which was considered difficult to pass, with bayonets.  From Pruszkowo and Blonie the cannonade continued to develop.  The din was unrelenting.  Returning to Warsaw, the Siberians built temporary fortifications, with wire fences, which were used to dry clothing, and field artillery, on the sides of the road.  The fight was almost exclusively by artillery, and the wounded were carried a short distance away.  In the city, at the infirmary there was a steam train of the wounded.  The Polish Free Squads gave them cigarettes and food, and those who had bad bandages were again bandaged in a neighboring house.  These Polish organizations worked all the time under fire, and did so much for the wounded, who were evacuated from positions in narrow gauge trains.   My travels in the rear are of little interest. I had to get out of the car at every step, question the convoys, determine the unit positions on the map and see if they were correctly deployed.  There was a lot of confusion, and General Ruzsky was right when he sent me to check the rear.  The rear routes were being tightened, and if not checked, this could have had a bad effect on the timely supply of the front. And retreating is a disaster.  Met a few German airplanes. In the village of Vavera, the convoy guards opened rapid fire without needing to reload (which was strictly prohibited), but, of course, to no avail.

October 8, 1914: I drove along the Vienna road to Prushkovo station.  There I met the commander of the 4^th Corps, General Aliyev [General Sultan Eris-Khan Aliyev].  The station itself was hit by a so-called “suitcase” bomb of TNT, which did great damage in destroying the center of the station.  Went on foot and found a house completely destroyed, and four corpses of Germans in the yard.  Nearby in our trenches lay rifles, a lot of cartridges, many covered in blood, and visible traces of dressings, dropped boots, shirts, ammunition, etc.  The trenches were abandoned only yesterday.  Ahead is a row of trenches, and some 200 paces away, are Germans.  We got to them, too.  The enemy trenches are deeper than ours and are connected to the rear by ditches of 2 arshins deep.  No traces of blood were found there, but a lot of straw, cartridges, canned food tins, and a stretcher.  Hundreds of our shrapnel glasses lay around. But everything that could have been collected was removed by the inhabitants.  Further in the forest, they said, there were still many bloody corpses.  But it was a long way off, and we returned to the station and to Warsaw, where we crossed the Kalisz Road and drove to the station at Blonie, arriving safely at Zharovo Station, where they said it was only possible to go another 5 versts, because the line had been blown up.  We went on foot.  Sappers were already at work.  We took a hand car and drove off.  Often, I had to stop and carry the rail car through a destroyed area.  It was especially difficult to cross a blown-up bridge, whose middle had collapsed.  Somehow, we got to Blonie Station.  What could be blown up, the Germans blew up.  Arrows, rails, water tap, telegraph poles, etc.  For some reason, the station was turned into a stable, and it is clear that the horses stood there for quite a long time.  There was a lot of shit.  They even managed to put a horse in the smallest room, apparently backwards, because it was impossible to turn it around.  The shit indicated that it was put in backwards. All cabinets with papers are overturned, scattered, destroyed.  Even the watchman's house was destroyed.  Found a lot of bottles of wine.  Apparently, they drank a lot.  Even a soldier's flask, which smelled of cognac.  An officer of 2^nd Battalion was buried in the garden opposite the station on October 3/16, and a helmet lies on his grave.  On the way we met four corpses.  All pockets turned inside out, boots removed.  One was covered with an overcoat.  A woman was walking by with a child.  She looked at the corpse for a long time, then tried to lift the overcoat with a stick.  The overcoat parted, and she threw it aside as if frightened.  Then she raised the overcoat with the end of the stick, put the stick on her shoulders and went on with the child.  In the village of Blonie itself, at the barracks of the fire brigade, we met two sisters of the Red Cross.  They asked me to help take out 6 wounded. There were no horses, and there was no way to take them out. I promised to send our motors, which has been done.  These sisters were decorated with St. George medals.  They worked during the battle, collecting the wounded, and General Danilov [General Vladimir Danilov, 1852-1914] Commander of the 23^rd Army Corps, gave them the award.  They spoke of him with admiration.  Immediately we learned that not far from Blonie, at the estate of Count Pototsky, occupied by the Germans, a mortally wounded officer had been brought in.  Those who carried him took steps to remove curious onlookers, and apparently treated him with great respect.  He died, and his body was also mysteriously taken out, and for one day the officers wore mourning on their left arms.  Now we have learned by guesswork that it was, in all probability, Prince Eitel, son of the Emperor, who was killed [the Grand Duke was wrong about this].  Now back to a monotonous life in Sedlec.  Nothing to do but walk, read, write, sleep, and eat.

October 22, 1914: Our commander-in-chief decided to go to the 10^th Army of General Sievers [General Fadei Sievers, Commander of the 10^th Army Corps] in the region of the Suwalki province, to find out why the advance in East Prussia was going so slowly.  We left at midnight on October 20 and by 7 in the morning had arrived at Grodno Station.  There was 4 degrees of frost and a blustery wind.  Ruzsky and I got into the closed Ford motor belonging to Governor-General Shebeko [Major-General Vadim Shebeko, 1864-1943, Governor-General of Grodno Province] and drove for about an hour to 10^th Army Headquarters about 30 miles from the Krasnostok Convent.  On the way we saw hasty fortifications around Grodno: trenches, fences, and cut-down trees.  The 10^th Army Headquarters is located conveniently in the monastery school.  I was not present at the meeting but on the way back General Ruzsky told me that the main problem in the offensive was the 1^st Army under General Rennenkampf [General Paul Rennenkampf, 1854-1918], which after retreating had lost its morale, just as many commanders have lost their morale.  Also, as Ruzsky told me, some corps commanders, like Mishchenko [Adjutant-General Paul Mishchenko, 1853-1919, Commander on the Western Front], were incompetent in military affairs, always waiting for others to move but not making any moves themselves.  More and more they see new German reinforcements and therefore constantly justify their lack of action by saying an offensive is impossible in the face of the enemy's superior numbers.  Ruzsky had to sort it all out and indicate a plan of attack while giving them some enthusiasm.  As a result, on October 22 their offensive took Bakalarzhevo.  We were back at Headquarters in Grodno for breakfast and arrived back at Sedlec at half-past ten that night.  During our absence new instructions had arrived from the Supreme Commander, which contradicted Ruzsky's views, and he decided to speak by telegraph to the Supreme Commander's Quartermaster General, Danilov [General Yuri Danilov, 1866-1937].  The new directive boiled down to the suspension of the offensive, in light of the advancing armies beyond the Vistula and the delay with the 10^th Corps in East Prussia and the 3^rd in the South, until the 10^th Army Corps reached lower Vistula and the south reached Pelz.  The Northwestern Front's objections boiled down to the fact that, in the original war plans, there were two army groups, the Northern one in East Prussia and the Southern one in Galicia, which both advanced rapidly.  When the enemy moved on Warsaw, corps were taken from the North and South to strengthen the line. As a result the enemy was driven back 150 versts from Warsaw in a very intense offensive as the enemy rapidly retreated, and within 2 or 3 weeks would be in Poznan.  But weak flanks meant that the Northern and Southern groups were forced back to Neman and Sanz.  If we carried out this new plan by the Supreme High Command and strengthened the flanks, it would be done at the expense of protecting the center and once the flanks reach the intended lines, the center will be pushed back to Warsaw, to the Vistula.  General Ruzsky thinks this plan is extremely risky.  The telegraphic negotiations apparently shook Danilov's confidence, and it was decided that General Ruzsky should personally go to Headquarters to negotiate.  And so, at 9 pm on October 21 we left for Baranovichi....We arrived at Baranovichi at 10 am.  It was a warm autumn day, about 2 degrees, but fog obscured the horizon and the air was damp. We learned at the station that they were waiting for the Sovereign's arrival at 5 o'clock. We went to Stavka from the station by motor.  General Ruzsky immediately disappeared into the Chief of Staff's carriage and I remained in the garden in front of the train.  Petya Oldenburg [Prince Peter Oldenburg,1868-1924, then married to Nicholas II's sister Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna] came out to me. He had recently arrived from 3^rd Army in the south.  Then Uncle Nikolasha came out and went to church for the Feast of Our Lady of Kazan. I also went to the church service in the barracks of the railway battalion. Protopresbyter of the naval clergy Shavelsky [Father George Shavelsky, 1871-1951, Head of the Military and Naval Clergy] said the liturgy.  At 12 o'clock we were all invited to luncheon in the Supreme Commander's carriage of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. This dining room is a simple carriage with small tables. 1^st table: Nikolasha, General Panteleev, Protopresbyter Shavelsky and Chief of Staff Yanushkevich [General Nicholas Yanushkevich, 1868-1918]; 2^nd was Petyusha, General Kaulbars [General Baron Alexander Kaulbars, 1844-1929, Commander of the Western Air Forces], Dimka Golitsyn, and General Ruzsky. 3^rd was Petya Oldenburg, I, Adjutant-General Trotsky [Adjutant-General Vladimir Trotsky, Commander of the Kiev Military District] and Danilov, etc. They gave zakushki, vodka, wine, and excellent food. Nikolasha's mood was sublime. News was received about the capture of Sandomierz in the south, Bakalarzhev in the north, and about the retreat along the rest of the enemy's front.   After luncheon, I wandered around the garden and the train, visited Petit, and went to Mengden [Count George Mengden, 1861-1917, attached to the Suite of Nicholas II].  At 4 o'clock they drank tea.  At half-past five it was already completely dark when the Emperor's train approached. Nicky received General Ruzsky, and gave him the Order of St. George, 2^nd degree. I stayed outside to wait for the general. I saw only Drenteln [Adjutant-General Alexander Drenteln, 1868-1925, attached to Nicholas II's Suite] and Naryshkin [Major-General Count Kirill Naryshkin, attached to Nicholas II's Suite]. Didn't get on the train.

Undated: At half-past six we left for the station, dined in the carriage, and returned to Sedlec at 8 o'clock on the morning of October 23.  The result of the trip was successful, in the sense that the operations in the north and south were recognized as independent, with the center a separate entity, and the offensive kept without delay.  The question of adding the 4^th Army to the front was unanswered because they are afraid to offend General Ivanov [General Nicholas Ivanov, 1851-1919, Commander-in-Chief of the Southwestern Front] by taking this army from him. Danilov refused the famous directive, claiming that he did not understand. Apparently, he was afraid of his own stupidity. Regarding this incident, the following should be noted, which sheds light on many things. When our Quartermaster-General Bonch-Bruyevich [General Michael Bonch-Bruyevich, 1870-1956, attached to Northwestern Headquarters] told Danilov that the last directive required that all actions stop beyond the Vistula, Danilov replied, “I wrote this to the General.”  The telegram with the directive was signed by Chief of Staff Yanushkevich, and repeatedly used the phrases, “His Imperial Highness the Supreme Commander-in-Chief demands, finds, indicates, etc.”  The impression is that the directive was given personally by the Supreme Commander. And Danilov says, “I write just like this.”  He probably wrote the directive without instruction from the Supreme Commander, else how can one explain how he says, “I wrote this, but you did not understand me, it's not true, etc.,” and he agreed to change it.  If the directive expressed the will of the Supreme Commander, it would be easy for General Danilov to say that he could not change anything without permission from his will.  We all know this secret, that he writes in the name of the Supreme Commander and if he asks for his opinion, he is probably hiding information and changes reports that would influence the Supreme Commander.  This discovery greatly saddened out headquarters.  Danilov is dry, pedantic, intimidating and doesn't know anything of life.  He does not understand the moral elements which form the main success of any battle, and so takes no account of it.  After all, he sees no people on the maps he uses, just empty symbols.  There is a distance between them, and each success costs the lives of thousands of victims, which are reflected only when a new circle is drawn on the map to replace the old mark.  They print in the newspapers that such and such a city is taken, or fallen, and that it was worth the effort and losses, but he doesn't understand this.  After all, what did the strategic withdrawal of armies around the Vistula and Sanz cost us?  How many victims and most importantly the moral suffering of the troops, which had to retreat back along the same places they had taken with their blood?  Who will compensate for this moral torment?  Without moral faith there is no victory.  I saw for myself the poor chaps of former 1^st Army Corps, and now the 108^th and it must be hard to believe in themselves.  How much faith have they lost in their superiors?  And their retreat is the fault of the Supreme Commander's Chief, Danilov.  He decided they should be withdrawn for strategic reasons.  And this humorless man does not understand that he is inflicting a greater blow on our troops than the enemy.

October 25-26, 1914: On October 22 General Ruzsky was at Headquarters, where he spoke, convinced, and forced agreement, and now, on the evening of October 25, three days have passed and no directive from Headquarters.  That's how they work!  Another small insight to this larger picture.  When at the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, our Quartermaster-General Bonch-Bruevich spoke with the chief of staff Yanushkevich about the considerations of the front headquarters regarding future plans. Yanushkevich answered him, “Well, in terms of strategy, you should contact Yuri Nikiforovich (Danilov), this is his business.”  In this state of affairs, of course, all strategic considerations are developed by Danilov personally and without the participation of Yanushkevich, who has completely entrusted this responsibility to him.  The fact is that when Yanushkevich was appointed Chief of the General Staff he was much younger than Danilov, and as a very sensitive person, he granted Danilov complete independence in his field, not wanting, as the younger one, to arouse distrust with his actions or, rather, did not want to exercise official control over Danilov, which he, Yanushkevich, would have to implement. During mobilization at the headquarters of the supreme commander, the relationship was the same, thanks to which Yanushkevich completely tries to take a back seat and, instead of being a link between the supreme commander and Danilov, lets Danilov draw up all telegrams without verifying them. With all the same personal negotiations, Yanushkevich tries not to touch the strategic issues.  As a result, all telegrams from the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander, in which the main directives are given, are different than the established general plan of the war. I personally read many of these telegrams, but it is absolutely impossible to understand what they want. They talk about the need to repair railways, bridges, highways. But even without them, the front headquarters knows this, and work in this direction is underway. And about the general plan, it is only dully said that it is supposed to enter the borders of Germany. But about the direction in which it should be done, when, there is nothing.... Ten days have passed and the entire front is standing still. The Germans are taking advantage of this time, and we know from intelligence reports that they are strengthening their borders. And to take these fortifications is an extra sacrifice. Instead of invading Germany on their shoulders, we are waiting, waiting. Why is unknown. No matter how much they asked the headquarters of the supreme commander, the answers were received, as mentioned above, regarding bridges, etc. We all here came to the deep conviction that Danilov was operating not only in addition to the chief of staff Yanushkevich, as I wrote above, but also in addition to the Supreme Commander. Comparing all the little things, the picture becomes clear that the supreme commander is up to date, does not have a general plan – as a result, there is no general will, no goal, no idea. The directives of the headquarters of the supreme commander, at best, when ideas flicker in them, are only a solution to the problem based on the results of the battles, but these instructions never go deep, but are limited to instructions on which line to reach. These lines are very small, between 60-100 versts.  But no further word.  Then the painful time passes, and suddenly the task is given again, short, and often without connection with the previous period.  The current visit of the Sovereign to Headquarters has completely atrophied the headquarters of the Supreme High Command. On the first visit, the Emperor showered favors on the headquarters. Well, they got ready for this arrival, and indeed they were again covered with favors. But mercy is mercy, and business is business. But from the day the Sovereign arrived at Headquarters, on October 22, everything froze. No more instructions are given, and telegram after telegram about awards, about nominations for awards, but the war seems to have been forgotten. All this is very sad, because as a result there were unnecessary victims.  When the Sovereign was with us in Sedletsy...it was clear from conversations at the table and then a private conversation between Ruzsky and the Sovereign that he was completely unaware of the matter. Much surprised him, much interested him. Ruzsky presented him with a map with a combat schedule. When Ruzsky left, the Sovereign returned the map to him, to which Ruzsky said: “Your Majesty, would you like to keep this map?” The sovereign asked: “Is it possible?” This is a trifle, of course, but it is characteristic that he was at Headquarters for three days and there they did not indicate to him the general plan of the war (was there any, that's another question?)  And they didn’t even give him a combat schedule, otherwise he wouldn’t have been so happy when Ruzsky gave him the map. What the Sovereign was told at Headquarters was, it seems, nothing. And they don’t say anything to him alone, nor to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief.  The Sovereign, as always, was infinitely affectionate with everyone, and everyone was fascinated by him, but his complete ignorance of the situation of the war deeply embarrassed everyone. Two or three questions asked at the table to General Ruzsky and Oranovsky clearly indicated this. Everyone was deeply convinced that the Sovereign knew everything, and the disappointment was heavy, and involuntarily everyone asked himself the question of how they could orient him so badly at Headquarters. Of course, everyone knows that the Supreme Commander himself knows nothing, and under these conditions, what could he say to the Sovereign?  Absolutely nothing. Who is to blame for all this, we are unlikely to ever know, but, according to the general opinion, Danilov is to blame. I have already given a general description of his activities above. From the inquiries of various people, it is clear that Danilov has one desire, to wage the entire war on his own. Ask no one, consult no one, and reduce all the glory and valor of our troops to their strategic talents. Oh, those armchair strategists!  A few words about the arrival of the Sovereign in Sedlec.  On Sunday, October 26, at breakfast, Oranovsky told me that the Emperor was expected to arrive that evening. In the afternoon, Kube tells me the same thing, but from the words of the barman. We saw an intensified cleaning of the station and they brought flags. There was a visible hustle and bustle. I decided not to go meet the train, because there was nothing to do. I was sitting in my carriage and having lunch when a gendarme ran up (it was at half-past seven in the evening) and said that General Ruzsky was demanding I come to the station, where he had arrived to wait for a train.  I got dressed and went. It turns out that General Ruzsky asked me to come talk to him. The point was that after breakfast Oranovsky told me that General Ruzsky had presented me for an award by telegraph. To this, the headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief asked if I was in the sphere of fire.  Ruzsky asked Colonel Segerkrantz, who was with me on a business trip in Warsaw, about this, and he replied that I was in the field of artillery fire. So Oranovsky wanted to know from me whether this was so. I answered him that I had not been in any sphere of fire. The only thing is, when I was at the headquarters of the 1^st Siberian Corps, we were 12 versts from the German batteries, and not at all 5 versts, as Segerkrantz claimed. The range of artillery fire does not exceed 8 versts. Oranovsky asked what to do. General Ruzsky has already answered that I was in the sphere of fire. I remarked to Oranovsky that it was impossible to let me down like that, and if they ask me whether I was fired on, I will answer that I was not. Oranovsky was embarrassed, pointing out that then I would let Ruzsky down. It's none of my business, I answered, and added that I begged him to stop the presentation for the award, for I do not wish to be a hindrance at all. He promised to talk to Ruzsky.  Here at the station, Ruzsky tells me that Oranovsky told him everything, but that it’s too late, the medal has been sent, and he begs me not to let him down, and promised to bring me under fire in the future in order to justify the reward. I begged Ruzsky by telegraph to return the medal, but he did not want to. I told him that he let me down terribly with this. Then he took a map and wanted to prove that the point where I was, the village of Sluzhevets, was in the sphere of artillery fire, and if shells did not fall into this village at the time I was there, then they could have done. This story was very unpleasant for me, and I decided to write about this Uncle Nikolasha with a request not to reward me, to which I received the following day from him by telegraph: “Your right desire will be fulfilled. Uncle Nikolasha.”

October 27, 1914: Thanks to this, I was at the station by the time the Emperor's train arrived, passing from Kholm back to Baranovichi. At 8:30 am the train approached the Sedlec station. Although no one was supposed to know about the arrival of the train, nevertheless the station was filled with officers. As soon as the train stopped, General Ruzsky was invited aboard. We all lingered on the platform until we were invited to dinner. Generals were invited from the headquarters. With the Sovereign arrived: Minister of War Sukhomlinov, Admiral Nilov [Adjutant-General Admiral Konstantin Nilov, 1856-1919, attached to Nicholas II's Suite] Voeikov [Major-General Adjutant Vladimir Voeikov, 1868-1947, Commandant of the Imperial Palaces] Prince Orlov [Major-General Prince Vladimir Orlov, 1868-1927, Head of the Imperial Camp Office] Drenteln, Naryshkin, and Sablin [Rear-Admiral Adjutant Nicholas Sablin, 1880-1937, former commander of the Imperial yacht Standart]  After dinner, Nicky retired to his room with Ruzsky, and they let us go. I walked along the platform for a long time,chatting with Voeikov, with the Sovereign's driver [Adolphe] Kegress.  After that, he left.

October 29, 1914: General Ruzsky caught a cold and has been in bed for three days. Today, October 29, Quartermaster-General Bonch-Bruyevich fell ill. Apparently, influenza is in the area.

October 31, 1914: Today, October 31, General Oranovsky announced that we were moving to Warsaw in order to be closer to the front, because on November 1, a general offensive would begin.

Undated, probably third week of November 1914: On November 1, in the evening, the entire headquarters moved to Warsaw and settled in Lazienki, in the building of the former school of cadets. Both the premises and the facilities for headquarters are excellent. You can't wish for better. But we all expected, namely, that the presence of the headquarters in such a big city, which is in addition the political center, would cause a lot of inconvenience. Firstly, everyone who needed to and those who didn’t need to begin to go to the headquarters to introduce themselves to General Ruzsky. The old man already has a lot to do, and besides, he is disturbed.  In addition, the presence of the headquarters caused a lot of gossip and talk in the city, which, no doubt, originated from headquarters.  There was another inconvenience, namely, that it was not so easy to move back from Warsaw if necessary. Forward, of course, as much as you like, but going back will cause panic. And when exactly it will be necessary to leave time will reveal.  By the time of our arrival, things at the front were presented in the following form. According to the general directive on November 2, both fronts were to launch an offensive on the lines around Czestochowa, Krakow, and in the Carpathians. For a long time, our Northern Front waited for this day, and asked that it be sped up, indicating that the delay would give the enemy the opportunity to dig in and withdraw the main forces and then transfer them. But the headquarters of the Supreme Commander remained deaf to our pleas, referring mainly to the Southern Front which was late in its operations and did not reach the intended line. Our front objected that the operations of the Southern Front should be divided into a completely separate operation, not connected with the Northern Front, otherwise both would only interfere with each other. But nothing changed, and we stood against each other for two weeks.  The 3^rd Corps appeared, marching along the Vistula, sweeping along the road of our weak lines of the 1^st Army on the right flank. By November 3, the enemy was already 60 versts behind our right flank. I had to hastily transport the 2^nd Corps of the 1^st Army to the left bank of the Vistula. And then, which was the most difficult thing, to turn north to the 2^nd and 5^th Armies. Without railroads, it was difficult to quickly complete the entire break-up of the front, and the whole drama consisted in whether the troops would have time to take their places by the evening of November 4 to fight.  It was on this day that I left for Petrograd, and Oranovsky gave me a map for the Sovereign, which showed how the troops stood for the offensive, and how they had to be turned to forestall the offensive from Thorn. I arrived in Petrograd only on November 6, and the joined the Sovereign for breakfast on November 7. Nicholas Mikhailovich [Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, 1859-1919, eldest son of Grand Duke Michael Nikolaievich] who had returned from the Southern Front, was also invited to breakfast. It was evident from his face that my appearance was very unpleasant for him. He probably wanted to talk a lot at the table and, as usual, to criticize everything, but all the time he was silent or said things that had nothing to do with the war. After breakfast, I handed Nicky the map and explained to him the location of the army. In the corner of the office stood the banner of the Austrian regiment, brought from the Southern Front.  On November 15 I left for Warsaw and on November 17 I arrived there with my mother at 11:40 am. The situation at the front has changed greatly in these 14 days. There was a breakthrough at Bruin, the right flank was pushed back, and there was desperate fighting all the time on the whole front. The losses are huge. There have also been big changes in the personnel. On November 16, General Ruzsky went to Sedlec to meet with the Supreme Commander and Ivanov, and there it was decided to replace the commander of the 1^st Army Rennenkampf for his old errors to everyone's joy, and the commander of the 2^nd Army Scheidemann for a number of failures to obey orders, extreme lack of discipline and even panic.  General Litvinov [General Alexander Litvinov] was appointed commander of the 1^st Army, and General Kuropatkin [General Alexei Kuropatkin, 1848-1925] was proposed for the 2^nd Army. He himself very much asked for at least a corps. But General Kuropatkin, with his past, decided to wait for Nicky's arrival at Headquarters. The answer was negative, without explanation. Temporarily appointed General Aliyev, commander of the 4^th Corps.  Before my departure, I agreed with Oranovsky that I would be with him every day at half-past nine in order to read the telegrams and keep abreast of the situation. So, on November 18, I came to him. They read the summary, noted the location of all the troops, then had the latest reports.  The enemy eventually assembled eleven-and-a-half corps on the right bank of the Vistula. The force, of course, is enormous, but we are not small either, with 12 corps.  But that's where the drama is. The composition of the entire front (about 18 corps) was equal on November 16 to 175,000 instead of 600,000, in other words, only a quarter of what was needed. The question now boils down to holding our positions until the reinforcements arrive, putting the troops in order, and then only thinking about the offensive. That is why the order was given to reinforce the entire front, put up wire barriers and hold on. Every day the enemy attacks our positions at Łowicz and Łódź intensively and tries to outflank our left flank. A detour came today, November 22, putting us in a vise, and we are waiting for the retreat of the detour column. On the very right flank, in the Plov area, there were partial retreats, but with a return to the old places. Of course, if our corps were at full strength, the situation would be different and we could go on the offensive, but, having only a quarter of the entire composition, it is difficult to do anything. We should not forget that the enemy also suffered heavy losses and his corps is not in a brilliant state. He is still advancing in dense columns, while suffering heavy losses.  And so, we are now standing still, digging in, and only the left flank will have to be withdrawn beyond Lodz to the Toglashov line. But this last assumption of ours depends on the Headquarters, and we are very afraid that they will not give it.  And this is extremely necessary, because the 5^th Army has a terribly broken line, due to which the corps are stretched. Draft back reduces the battle line by one third, which, taking into account the weak composition of the corps, is extremely necessary and, most importantly, beneficial. The line of the proposed withdrawal is strengthened strenuously.  Our guards cavalry had a brilliant job near Petrokov, where they had to hold back the advance of a whole corps, which was done. Unfortunately, the commander of the infantry grenadiers was seriously wounded and brought to our hospital. Today, November 22, his situation was hopeless. Regarding the vacancy for the post of commander of the 2^nd Army, we had an assumption that Alexeyev [Adjutant-General Michael Alexeyev] the chief of staff of the Southern Front, could be appointed there, and Danilov (black) could be appointed to Alexeyev's place. All this confirms the assumption that they want to get rid of Danilov in the Headquarters. For a long time, he had a lot of complaints, and even Nicky knows about it. I have already written a lot about him above, but lately such facts have been repeated again, and, most importantly, he interferes with all operations.

November 23, 1914: Today, when examining papers, there was a message from General Sievers, commander of the 10^th Army, that recently there had been mass surrender, even by entire companies in the 84^th Infantry Division. In one case, as many as three companies surrendered. General Sievers, giving an assessment of this sad case, asks to pass a law through legislation, according to which every prisoner loses the right to return to his homeland in the future and by the fact of surrender is considered to have abandoned Russian citizenship. I objected to Oranovsky that it is difficult to substantiate such a measure legally. It is possible to punish one for surrender, including up to the death penalty, but indiscriminately recognizing all those captured as having abandoned Russian citizenship will entail many injustices, because not everyone is voluntarily captured. Mixing them all together is not the solution to the problem. The situation at the front during the day is calming. The attacks have ceased, and the retreat of the enemy is even noticeable along almost the entire line. The enemy suffered very heavy losses. In some regiments in companies there were no more than 20-40 people, and the 25^th Corps was almost completely destroyed. There can be no talk of any offensive actions on our part. We need to make up for the loss, refresh materiel, and replenish stocks, and all this will take a lot of time.

November 24, 1914: The battle at the front has died down. Only in some places there was light artillery fire. There were no attacks anywhere. The withdrawal of the left flank was carried out safely. Only the guards cavalry near Petrokov had a hard time, but even then, by the end of yesterday, the Germans withdrew. The reconnaissance department complained greatly about the unrest in the city of Warsaw and attributed this to the weakness of the military governor, General Turbin [General Alexander Turbin, 1858-1922] and proposed to replace him with Engalychev [General Prince Paul Engalychev, 1864-1944, Chief of the Academy of the General Staff]. The conversation was also about sequestration of the Warsaw gas plant, which is entirely in the hands of the Germans. In other cities, departments of this society were sequestered. It will probably do so.

November 26, 1914: During these two days, according to undercover information, the arrival of the 4^th German Corps was noticed. In total, on the left bank of the Vistula, they captured as a result thirteen positions. The enemy intensified attacks on our right flank, but to no avail. On the left yesterday, our guards cavalry was successful, not allowing the enemy to advance, and our 5^th battery especially distinguished itself. We all expect fierce attacks from the enemy in the center and right flank, where the presence of heavy artillery has been detected. We are also bringing 120-pound guns from Novogeorgievsk to Lvov.  The movement of the corps to Tsekhanov-Mlava was suspended. In the 10^th Army, siege warfare is going on more noticeably in trenches and mines. Recruitment is progressing, but very slowly.

December 4, 1914: During the past week our affairs on the left bank of the Vistula have assumed a very undesirable aspect. The extended front line of the 1^st, 2^nd and 5^th armies, with broken fronts, poses a very difficult task for the armies. The front line goes from the Vistula through Lvov to the southeast of Łowicz, bends around Łowicz from the west, forming here an outstanding semicircle.  Further, the line stretches southwest to Glowno-Zgerzh, turns south, west of Lodz to Rzgov, Tuszyn. As a result, the right flank is 100 versts from Warsaw, and the left flank is more than 200 versts. The enemy concentrated the main blow on our right flank of the 5^th and 6^th Siberian Corps, who, having suffered heavy losses, leaned back a little. Having no reserves at hand, the 1^st Siberian Corps had to be pulled from the left flank, but the path was long, and in cases of further embedding of these corps, the left flank was unable to help. In view of this, it was decided to pull the left flank back, starting from Strelkov, to stretch the front straight south to Volborzh. True, by this we gave Lodz to the enemy, but by reducing the front we gained in the strength of the line of fire. This reduced the line by about 30%. Petrokov thus remained ahead of our left flank at the junction of the northern and southern fronts. To ensure a breakthrough, the Guards Cavalry Corps under Gillenshmidt [Major-General Yakov von Gillenshmidt, Commander of the Life Guards Horse Artillery] and Novikov [Lieutenant-General Alexander Novikov, Commander of the 1^st Cavalry Corps] were sent there with others. Despite the more advantageous front line, we were still unable to provide assistance to the right flank. The 5^th and 6^th Siberian Corps withstood fierce attacks for 10 days, and finally moved beyond the river Bzuru. This placed the left flank in a very abnormal position, and the entire front had to be withdrawn behind Bzura and Ravka. Here a position has been prepared.  Of course, it is not yet very strong, and the hope of holding on to it for a long time is doubtful. Why, everyone asks? The answer is simple. The composition of the corps is only a quarter of the normal numbers, and replenishment is slow. In addition, there are very few artillery shells, which does not allow for intense fire. Of course, both replenishment and people and shells will happen, but this will take time, and therefore it is very likely that we will have to retreat further back to the fortified area of Warsaw, where a small front will allow units to be withdrawn to the reserve for replenishment and refreshment, and when all the corps are brought to full strength, go on the general offensive. All this, of course, is very sad, but necessity forces us to take refuge under the protection of fortresses. As a result, we delay the company for two months, at least.  Our extreme right flank of the 10^th Army of Sievers is waging a siege war on the Masurian lakes, slowly moving forward. The fortified region of Mlawa successfully drove the Germans out of the borders to Soldau. I am personally inclined to think that the Germans, as they always do, withdrew on their own at the sight of superior forces. The southern front also retreated to the line of the river. Here is the overall result. By December 1, the front headquarters again moved to Sedlec. Our commander-in-chief was very tired. A mass of people visited him, but it was unproductive. Sedlec is very calm. Warsaw was embarrassed by the departure of the headquarters, but, in general, endured it more calmly than many expected.  It was quiet at the front yesterday. There was no German attack, which is why the retreat to the Bzura-Ravka line was carried out calmly. On December 8, the troops safely retreated beyond Bzura-Ravka and began to strengthen their positions, reinforcing them with artificial obstacles. The enemy nevertheless forced crossings near Sokhachev but was repulsed. According to a report from the reconnaissance section, the enemy began to regroup their forces. At first, a grouping against our extreme right flank was noticeable, but now, the agents report, the concentration is going against the center, i.e. south of Sokhachev, approximately at the confluence of Bzura and Ravka. Enemy attempts to press on our left flank of the 5^th Army failed. Also, attacks at the junction between the Northern and Southern fronts failed, between the 5^th and 4^th Armies. A strong cavalry screen, operating in the flank of the advancing columns, successfully helped repulse the onslaught. On the Mlavsky direction, the enemy withdrew to Soldau beyond the border. The line around the Masurian Islands, in general, is without changes. Sievers slowly leads the offensive with purely siege work.  Last night Adjutant-General Ruzsky left to inspect the fortified area of Warsaw.  At dinner, G. Skalon [General George Skalon, Governor-General of Warsaw and Commander of the Warsaw Military District] told me from the words of the captain Yanov (1^st Chita Regiment) that, driving on a locomotive from December 2 to 3 between the stations Radom-Skarzhinsk with cornet Skosyrsky (Life Guards of the Grodno Hussar Regiment) and captain Usachev (1^st Infantry Battalion), the driver complained to them that the head of the Privislinskaya railway, Major-General Gesket [Major-General Alexander Gesket] does everything possible to delay the movement of echelons. To this end, trains stand idle for several hours at stations, and in Lublin, during the construction of a swing bridge, several tracks were littered with working material that interfered with movement. In addition, by reducing the income of machinists from 90 rubles to 40 per month, it is as if he wants to cause a strike on their part, which they will not do due to the war and the general patriotic spirit, but after the war such a strike is possible, because the actions of Major-General Hesketh are intolerable and clearly harm military operations. The three officers named above would like to be heard and are ready to confirm their testimony.  Having listened to this, nothing less than a clear accusation of treason against Major-General Hesketh, I decided to talk to Oranovsky the next day. Of course, he considered the accusation of treason too strong, but, taking into account that in general a big disorder was noticed on the Privislinskaya railway, he took note and said that he would investigate.

December 10, 1914: Yesterday, in the Mlava direction, the Germans again launched an offensive against Tsekhanov-Mekhov from the direction of Mlava. The 1^st Turkestan Corps located there under the command of General Scheideman (former commander of the 2^nd Army) began to repel the onslaught, but, according to Quartermaster-General Bonch-Bruevich, Scheideman, imbued with eternal panic, is not able to take proper measures and very undesirable results can be expected from minute to minute. Mlava saw the outstanding heroic deed of two ensigns, who crawled up to the artillery bivouac at night and, starting to shoot their rifles, caused a panic, and one gun in full harness moved in their direction without riders who fled. Having caught the horses, they mounted and brought the gun to the headquarters of the corps. The gun turned out to be a 4.5-inch howitzer.   On the rest of the front, the Germans carried out desperate attacks, suffered huge losses, but were not successful. And our losses are considerable. In one of the regiments of the 5^th Corps, only 4 officers remained. Few prisoners were taken. According to the report, it is clear that no prisoners are taken. Against the 10^th Army, a German officer appeared at the outposts at night and surrendered. According to the prisoners, the staffing of the German units comes from volunteers. This indicates that the stocks of people are exhausted, and it is necessary to appeal to volunteers.

December 13, 1914: During these days there were no significant changes at the front. The Germans moved forward a little in the outgoing corner of the front, at the confluence of the Bzura and Ravka, and we retreated, straightening this line, which is more advantageous in terms of shortening the front and, in addition, the outgoing corner exposed our front to flanking fire. On the left flank, the Germans did not advance, but we were not successful either. In the 10^th Army, the assault on Letzen began. The results are not yet known.  Of the little things, one can note the recent distribution of pamphlets and appeals to the Poles and Germans against Russia. There were many cases of catching spies in Warsaw. Particularly suspicious people were seen at the Apollo Hotel and at No. 18 in Krakow Street. Observation established. In general, espionage is highly developed. A lot of trouble centers on Hotel Bristol. Everyone there eavesdrops on conversations, and there were many cases that it was from the Bristol that information of a very secret nature was taken out. They even wanted to close the restaurant at the Bristol, but Oranovsky, the chief of staff, opposed this.

December 14, 1914: I was sitting in my carriage after breakfast when I received a letter from Oranovsky with a telegram addressed to Adjutant-General Ruzsky from Yanushkevich with the following content: “His Majesty is waiting at the Headquarters for Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich to issue an order.” The telegram was sent from Baranovichi at 12.40 pm, and I received it only at 2.45 pm. I immediately went to General Ruzsky to say goodbye, received a package to hand over to General Yanushkevich, and at 4:40 o'clock left for Baranovichi on an emergency train. At 8 o'clock in Brest I met Nicholas Mikhailovich, who was driving from Kholm, called by the same telegram. Why we were needed at Headquarters, we could not understand, and no matter how we tried to figure out what the matter was, we did not agree. We arrived in Baranovichi at 4:45 pm and went by motor to the Sovereign's train. He did not seem to expect our arrival and did not even say anything about the reasons for the call. From there I went to Yanushkevich, gave him General Ruzsky's package and returned home by the car.

December 15, 1914: At 11:45 am Nicholas Mikhailovich and I went to Nicky's train for lunch. There were 26 people at the table. After this, Nicky called me to his study and gave me instructions to go around the 1^st, 2^nd and 5^th Armies and thank everyone for their service in the corps. The sovereign ordered to thank in the following terms: “I burn with gratitude for your valiant military service.”  To carry out this assignment, it is necessary to get to the headquarters of the corps, and if possible, then to the units.  George Mikhailovich will be sent to the 10^th Army, Nicholas Mikhailovich to the 4^th and 9^th, and Petya Oldenburg to the south. At 5 o'clock we drove back to Sedlec.  Upon my return to Sedlec, General Ruzsky, to whom I informed about the highest commission I had received, asked me to collect information on artillery along the way.

Undated, probably December 30, 1914: On December 16, I took a detour through Warsaw. Without going into details of my travel impressions, I will give here in general terms what I reported to the commander-in-chief after the trip. Artillery: the average state of ammunition in the corps of the 1^st, 2^nd and 5^th Armies and the fortified area is indicated in the attached table (this table was attached to my report), from which it can be seen that about a quarter of the light guns and artillery remain in the divisions, with a normal ratio between shrapnel and grenades.  In heavy artillery, the balance ranges from one-fifth to one-sixth of the normal supply, but the ratio between shrapnel and bombs is broken.  According to the norm, bombs should be about one third, but there are only about a tenth of them and some 6-inch guns.  According to some corps, it is possible to determine the average daily consumption per gun of 5 rounds. This norm should be recognized as the average maximum. For the first period of the war, i.e. until the day when the need to economize on shells was announced, artillery fire was carried out very intensively and very often without a specific task. Due to this, mobile supplies were quickly depleted and replenishment from local armories could not keep up with consumption. At this time, local armories are almost empty. At present, the entire front receives only a quarter of what is needed each month which, accounting for the entire front, will amount to artillery each day for about 1800 3-inch guns and one round a day for 2.2-inch guns.  We could allow 3 cartridges, but many guns are under repair. Such replenishment of supplies, subject to a certain, reasonable economy, fully provides light artillery. In the most difficult position, our best guns have only about 42 long-range artillery shots. According to private information, the preparation of high-explosive bombs is also difficult. This is very hard on the success of our fire in the fight against enemy long-range guns. Light artillery is powerless to fight them.  Almost all corps artillery inspectors pointed to the desirability of increasing the number of machine guns in divisions, or at least bringing them up to the norm. Recently, many machine guns have been put out of action and not replaced by new ones. By reducing the strength of artillery fire when repelling attacks, due to the forced savings in the expenditure of shells, this deficiency should be made up for by increasing machine-gun fire.  The artillery inspector of the 1^st Army Corps 129, Prince Masalsky [General Prince Vladimir Masalsky] asked for piston cannons if they were provided with a sufficient number of shells. With the current positional warfare, the trenches are brought together at very short distances and piston cannons could well shoot with success. This would make it possible to save shells even more and accumulate a complete combat set by the day of the offensive.  The materiel for all brigades is quite serviceable. Supply copes with this task with great success, replacing damaged and broken items with new items. In the 2^nd Cavalry Corps, the rifling in almost all the guns has been torn off and has not yet been replaced with new ones, as reported to the supply. The park brigade of the 79^th Artillery Brigade was handed over to the city of Dvinsk by order of the commandant of the Novogeorgievskaya fortress, General Bobyr [General Nicholas Bobyr] in August, and the brigade cannot carry its combat kit in full.  Carts containing replacements do not reach the goal. The same fate befell the 77^th Artillery Brigade.  The number of officers in almost all infantry regiments does not exceed 10-15, and only in rare cases does it reach 25 in some regiments. There were regiments with one officer. This question is of great concern to all corps commanders and army commanders. It is almost impossible to conduct attacks without officers. Even sitting in the trenches without officers has a detrimental effect on people. The commander of the 1^st Army Corps told of an incident when a non-commissioned officer came from a trench to ask them to give them an officer to stay with them, otherwise, as he said, “We will run away.”  The commander of the 1^st Army proposed disbanding the 67^th and 76^th Infantry Divisions as having shown insufficient valor, and pouring them into other divisions, which would increase the composition of officers. As a last resort, they suggest taking officers from the various headquarters. The commander of the 2^nd Army would have thought it better to take officers from the cavalry, where there are many in excess.  The general opinion: if the last officers are knocked out of action, then no matter how much they send to staff the lower ranks it will be impossible to form a regiment.  The sappers are working, according to the reviews of all corps commanders, beyond all praise. Ahead of the trenches are wire fences. The trenches were brought to full profile and arranged in two rows. Night in front, day in the back. For reserves, shelters with furnaces were made. Siberians even managed to arrange baths underground. The shovel, which used to be treated very casually, considering it as an extra load, is now valued by soldiers, and everyone takes care of his shovel like a rifle.  The sanitary condition of the troops is excellent. Cholera in the 1^st Army is localized, and in the 2^nd there were only isolated cases (8).  A great help for the troops would be a normal release of firewood. With the onset of cold weather in the trenches, it is impossible to do without fires. We have to cut down the forest, which, quite naturally, causes a lot of criticism from the landlords, but it is impossible to forbid cutting. The general enthusiasm of the troops was roused by a bath train. Those corps that had the opportunity to use it are full of praise. Everyone was washed and given clean new linen. Outerwear was passed through the sterilization chambers. Then everyone was given tea.  The rear in the 2^nd and 5^th Armies is excellently arranged. The rear paths are worked out in detail. Road signs are posted everywhere. Lanterns are lit at night. At the milestones, there are detailed signs at all corners indicating where the milestone commandant is. The convoys really move along their own tracks and in great order. The cleanliness is great everywhere. There are no wandering soldiers. The replenishment teams go in order and strictly follow their own paths. All villages are guarded by guards and the streets and exits are patrolled.  In the 1^st Army, the rear is not so good. The lack of signs on roads and intersections leads to wandering teams. I personally met a lost battalion from the 2^nd Caucasian Corps, which was going to the 6^th Siberian Corps. It was difficult to understand how the troops got so lost, but it was even more difficult to indicate the further route due to the lack of signs on the roads. At the same time, night fell, and the team could hardly reach the 6^th Siberian Corps before morning.  On all roads, uncleaned dead horses are lying around, which are gnawed and pecked by crows. The corpses of some horses seem to be lying around for quite a long time. In some places I saw dogs tearing up the buried corpses of horses. The entrails after the slaughter of livestock are lying in the fields.  There is a mass of wandering individual soldiers. The cavalry was even tasked with rounding up strays in forests and swamps. Over 600 people were caught in one day. In some villages, although there were patrols, they did not reach their goals. The carts clutter up the roads, and sometimes it is impossible to pass through this thick line of wagons. Having finished this, I gave this report to the chief of staff, General Oranovsky on December 23, and on December 24, General Ruzsky had a rather long conversation with me about this. The main concern was the issue of artillery cartridges.  In view of the fact that I was going to the headquarters of the supreme commander, he asked me to talk about many things with the supreme commander, which I was unable to do due to lack of time. On December 24, I left for Headquarters and on December 25 I only had time to report on the proposed change of commander of the 23^rd Corps, General Sirelius [General Leonid Sirelius]. The Supreme Commander-in-Chief suggested appointing General Olokhov [General Vladimir Olokhov], commander of the 1^st Guards Infantry Division, to this post. After breakfast, I had a talk with Oranovsky on the [Hughes] apparatus, and the matter ended with the appointment of General Olokhov. In the evening of the same day I left for Petrograd, arriving on the night of December 26.  On December 29, I reported to His Majesty on, among other things, the question of awards, which is handled so badly raised that so far almost no one had received anything. I proposed the idea of establishing a St. George Duma committee.  Nicky liked this idea, and he instructed me to write to Prince Orlov about this, so that he would develop this project and report to him.  On the same day I wrote Orlov the following letter: “Having traveled around part of the Northwestern Front on the highest command, I had the opportunity to personally interview all the commanders of the armies, corps commanders and most of the chiefs of divisions, commanders of brigades and regimental commanders and lower chiefs about the status of officer awards. There are many reasons for the delay: frequent regrouping of units of the troops, and the units moved many times not only from one corps to another, but from army to army and even from one front to another, so that it often takes a very long time, and is difficult, to deliver documents to units in combat.  In addition, the convening of the St. George Duma committee, it is difficult to put this into practice. The main contingent of the Knights of St. George, whose number should be seven in the Duma, is in the ranks, and it is not always possible to tear them away without obvious damage to the battle. The convocation of the Duma from among the members of the same army very often influences the decision of the Duma, where the younger ones have to judge the older ones, and the older ones, with personal scores, influence the fate of the younger ones.  As a result, all of the above reasons dragged out the award cases to the extreme. There are cases where the submission for the award has remained unanswered since the very beginning of the war.  This question is of great concern to all leaders. Timeliness of awards is of great moral importance. The feat must be rewarded without delay.  A large loss in the officer corps, up to 80% in the infantry, already testifies to their unparalleled acts but there are almost no awards.  I am talking here only about the St. George Crosses and arms since the awarding of the rest of the orders has now been transferred to the hands of the commanders-in-chief and army commanders and is proceeding almost normally.  Discussing the question of how to speed up the process of awarding officers with the St. George Cross and arms, the idea arose of creating a Duma committee with a composition independent of the active army, in order, on the one hand, to speed up the process of awards, to concentrate representation in the hands of persons not employed in the army, and moreover, to ensure the decisions of the Duma with greater impartiality.  The number of mobile Duma committees depends on the availability of the Knights of St. George being free of business at the current time in the Sovereign's retinue and in the army in general. But it would be desirable to have at least one Duma committee for the front. Each Duma committee should have appointed at least one adjutant-general.  This would give the Duma greater authority. From 4 to 5 persons could be appointed to each Duma committee, so that the missing number of Knights of St. George would be dealt with locally. It is not difficult to summon two or three persons to the Duma.  Ideas about awards should be sent directly from the headquarters of the corps to these Dumas, which, being not busy with anything else, can quickly and easily analyze the ideas and, if necessary, obtain additional data on the ground or instruct one of the members of the Duma on the spot to investigate the heroic cases mentioned in the presentation. deeds.  The other day I had the opportunity to personally report to His Majesty on the above project, and His Majesty instructed me to communicate this project to you in order to report to His Majesty your opinion on this issue.  I hasten to now fulfill the highest will.”  Until January 6, 1915, I heard nothing more about this.

To be continued...

Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich was born on January 2/14, 1850 in St. Petersburg, the fourth son of the future Emperor Alexander II and his wife Maria Alexandrovna, a former Princess of Hesse.  His godparents included his uncles Grand Dukes Konstantin, Nicholas, and Michael Nikolaievich, as well as his aunt Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaievna.¹ Called Seichik by his family, he was a happy, slightly reserved child, with an unexpectedly thoughtful streak.  He was educated by private tutors and was brought up speaking German and French as well as Russian; he also learned English, although his grasp of the language was negligible until around the age of twenty-one.

Alexei was just six when his father became Emperor in the wake of Nicholas I's death.  Like all Grand Dukes, Alexei was enrolled in many regiments at birth, but his own inclination was for the sea.  At the age of ten he began training as a naval cadet along with his academic studies.  Although he did well at sea, his formal education suffered.  At the age of twelve he began keeping a diary, as was expected of all members of the Imperial Family.  He was intensely honest in its pages.  “I study a lot, but very badly,” he wrote.  “What can I do?  I have such a stupid nature and am terribly lazy.  I know this, but it’s difficult to overcome.”  His education was extremely strict, and Alexei was often berated by his parents for his academic failures; his father, especially, told his son how ashamed he was of his poor marks, telling the young boy that only through education and service could he justify his privileges as a Grand Duke.  “I am terribly tired,” he admitted, “of both reprimands and punishments, with the result that I become completely apathetic about all around me.  I’ve had so much trouble with my lessons lately, but I’m tired of it and wish I could send everyone to Hell!”²

Only interested in the sea, Alexei threw himself into his naval training.  In 1868 he joined the crew of the frigate Alexander Nevsky.  In September the ship ran aground off Jutland; during the rescue an officer and three sailors died.  Alexei refused the offer to be first evacuated.  By 1870 he had risen to the rank of Staff Captain.

Alexei formally came of age at twenty.  He was now entitled to some 143,000 rubles a year.  One general called him “a good-hearted person” who “showed little seriousness in life and work.”³ He was tall and generally considered to be the best looking of Alexander II’s sons.  Alexei, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich wrote, “was admitted to be the best looking man in the Imperial Family.”  He called him “a Beau Brummel and a bon vivant hopelessly spoiled by women.  He was tall, standing six-feet-three-inches, which helped alleviate the impression that his uniform successfully molded and concealed a rather corpulent body as he aged.  According to Alexander Mikhailovich, Alexei was “not interested in anything that did not pertain to lovemaking, food and liquor…. His was a case of fast women and slow ships.”⁴

Women, in fact – and especially scandalous women – proved to be a constant feature in the Grand Duke’s life.  When he was nineteen, Alexei fell in love with the beautiful, fair-haired Alexandra Zhukovskaya, daughter of the famous poet Vasili Zhukovsky, who had once served as a tutor to the future Alexander II.  Alexandra was not only a Maid-of-Honor to Alexei’s mother Empress Maria Alexandrovna but also eight years older than the Grand Duke.⁵ He first seems to have developed a sort of schoolboy crush, but this soon grew into romantic infatuation.  They met at receptions and balls, where they shared innocent dances.  The Grand Duke was genuinely in love, and Tsesarevich Alexander and his wife Marie Feodorovna encouraged the romance, inviting the couple of Anichkov Palace so that they could meet in private.

“I wandered about wondering what you are doing and thinking, and whether you think of me as often as I think of you,” Alexei wrote to Alexandra.  “I remembered your little room, where we used to sit so often, and it became hard for me to again be alone.  I wanted to write to you at all costs, but then I remembered it was impossible…. Bored and sad, I went to bed, but could not sleep as I only want to see you, to forget the whole world except for you.”⁶

The Grand Duke was genuinely in love, and Tsesarevich Alexander and Marie Feodorovna encouraged a romance although both knew that nothing could come of the relationship.  As a Grand Duke, Alexei would never be allowed to contract a morganatic marriage.  At some point – even the year is uncertain, variously said to be 1869 or 1870 – Alexei took Zhukovskaya with him to Europe, where they were allegedly wed in a secret union, perhaps in Italy or Switzerland.  If such a marriage took place all evidence was later erased, but in his letters Alexei to his parents referred to Alexandra as his “wife,” which certainly suggests that the union did indeed take place.⁷

The couple returned to Russia where Alexei pleaded his case to his father, who at the time was engaged in his own affair with Princess Catherine Dolgoruky.  Alexander II was less than sympathetic.  Whether Alexei confessed to an actual marriage or merely expressed his desire to wed Alexandra is not known, but the Emperor apparently declared that the relationship was to end.  But there was a complication: by this time Alexandra was pregnant with Alexei’s child.  When her brother Paul Zhukovsky learned of this, he confronted Alexei and challenged him to a duel, but Alexander II refused to allow such a spectacle.  Instead, he sent Alexandra off to exile in Austria.⁸

American President Ulysses S. Grant had previously extended an invitation to Alexander II’s court for one of his sons to visit the United States.  The Emperor decided that this was an ideal opportunity to send Alexei away from danger.  A trip was arranged which would last for a year, and take the young Grand Duke around the world, with planned stops and stays in America, Canada, Cuba, Singapore, Hong King, and Japan before a lengthy return journey across Siberia.  Alexei was distraught by these plans.  “I do not feel that I belong to myself,” he wrote to his father about Alexandra and his unborn child on the eve of his voyage, “or can abandon them.”⁹ When Alexander II refused to reconsider, the Grand Duke turned to his mother: “For God’s sake, don’t ruin me!  Don’t sacrifice your son, forgive me, love me, don’t toss me into an abyss from which there is no escape…. Do you not understand what feelings are?  To have a wife, to have a child, and to leave them.  To love this woman more than anything in the world, and to know that she is alone, forgotten, abandoned by everyone as she suffers and waits from minute to minute for childbirth.  And I must remain a vile, disgusting creature who is called the Grand Duke, which no one dares say.  Give me some ray of hope, I cannot live like this, I swear to you.”¹⁰

Once again, this heartfelt plea fell on deaf ears, and on August 20 Alexei found himself aboard the frigate Svetlana, bound for America.  He visited New York, Washington D.C, Philadelphia and Boston before temporarily heading north to see Niagara Falls, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal.  Returning to the United States, he arrived in Chicago, which had recently suffered from its devastating fire, before heading to Omaha, where he joined General George Armstrong Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody for a bison hunt.  He concluded his American stay with a call at New Orleans, where he participated in the Mardi Gras festivities and inaugurated the first Rex Parade.  The trip was considered a success: everywhere he went the Grand Duke was feted and made favorable impressions.

Throughout the tour Alexei seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself but his thoughts were never far from Alexandra.  On November 26, 1871, while he was in America, Alexandra gave birth to his son in Salzburg.¹¹ The boy was named Alexei, after his father.  On his return to Russia, the Grand Duke implored his father to allow him to recognize the boy and to grant him a title, but the Emperor refused.  The exiled Zhukovskaya was finally granted the title of Baroness Seggiano by the tiny republic of San Marino, with the right to pass this on to her son.

By this time, though, the relationship was over.  During Alexei’s tour, his brother Grand Duke Vladimir wrote a forthright letter to Alexandra, saying that he had spoken to his parents about the romance and child but that they refused to countenance the relationship.  “Do you remember when I visited you after seeing off my brother?” he wrote to her.  “When we parted, I took both your hands and looking straight into your eyes asked if you really loved my brother.  You replied that you did.  I believed you; how could I not believe you?  You now know the situation he is in.  You also know the firm will of my parents.  If you really do love my brother, this makes me pray to you on my knees not to destroy him, but to give him up, voluntarily and unequivocally.”¹²

Alexandra did as asked, and Alexei reluctantly abandoned any hope of resuming their relationship.  He did, though, give her a substantial financial settlement as well as 25,000 rubles a year for the rest of her life.¹³ In 1875, Zhukovskaya married a wealthy baron and lived in Germany until her death in 1899.  In 1884 Alexander III gave his illicit nephew the title of Count Belyevsky-Zhukovsky, and the boy spent his youth in Russia, where unspoken Imperial connections helped advance his career.  He later served as an Adjutant to his uncle Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, married Princess Maria Trubetskoy, and had four children.  Although his wife and children fled Russia after the Revolution, the Count remained, becoming a rather prominent biologist until he fell victim to a Stalinist purge in 1932.¹⁴

Over these years Alexei’s career advanced.  In 1873 the Grand Duke was given command of the Guards Naval Crew, and during the Russo-Turkish War he commanded Russia's naval forces along the Danube.  He was awarded Russia's highest military honor, the Cross of the Order of St. George, for bravery, and in 1882 he named Head of the Naval Department in place of his uncle Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaievich and was promoted to Vice-Admiral of the Russian Navy.  In 1883 Alexei was named Admiral-General, and in 1888 he was named Admiral and Head of the Naval Department and Ministry.  Despite this, as Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich – one of Alexei’s main rivals – complained, “his knowledge of naval affairs could not have been more limited.  The very mention of the pending naval reforms brought a hostile frown on his handsome face.”¹⁵

Now settled into his thirties, the Grand Duke decided he needed his own home.  He wanted to build his own palace, not remodel an existing structure.  This presented certain problems.  By 1882, most of the prime locations in St. Petersburg were already taken.  Palace Embankment was home to the Marble Palace as well as the recently completed New Mikhailovich and Vladimir Palaces, leaving no room for another prominent structure unless existing buildings were purchased and torn down.  The fashionable English Embankment, too, was crowded with existing structures, and there was little open space available in the city center.

Finally, a site along the Moika Canal was selected.  While the stretch along the Moika Canal from St. Isaac’s Square to the immense Yusupov Mansion at No. 92 was quite fashionable, the western section could boast few impressive houses.  But there was land the further one moved away the city center.  After investigation the lot at No. 122 Moika Canal seemed the most promising.  It was situated squarely in the old maritime district, near the former shipyards at New Holland.  This, at least, was fitting for the sailor Grand Duke.  The site was large, although it already had an existing mansion.  But this could be razed or, to save money, incorporated into any new structure.¹⁶

In March 1882, the Ministry of the Imperial Court purchased one lot facing the Moika; a few months later, a second adjacent plot was bought along the English Prospekt.  A third adjoining parcel, looking out onto the Moika, was added the following year, creating a large space suitable for construction of the new palace.¹⁷

The existing house had formerly been the estate of Major-General Konstantin Albrecht.  In the early 1840s it had been purchased by a merchant named Petrov, who built a larger stone mansion atop the foundations of the previous building.  In 1846 this was purchased by A. I. Saburov, who served as a Master of Ceremonies at the Imperial Court.  He wanted a more impressive residence to suit his position and hired architect Nicholas Efimov to enlarge the structure.  One of the service wings was demolished and replaced with a larger structure housing several ceremonial rooms.  In 1849, Saburov hired fashionable architect Harold Bosse to enlarge and reconstruct the building.  Bosse added a new entrance on the southern side of the building and built new service rooms along the western side of the house.  In 1872 factory owner Isaac Malkiel purchased the mansion and added a second story to the central section, topped with a neoclassical balustrade set with decorative urns.  It was on his death in 1882 that his widow sold the property to the Ministry of the Imperial Court.¹⁸

Alexei Alexandrovich selected forty-year-old architect Maximilian von Messmacher to design and build his new palace.  Born in St. Petersburg to a family of German descent, Messmacher had graduated from the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1866, where he trained under architect Konstantin Ton, whose greatest works were rebuilding of the Grand Kremlin Palace and the design of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, both in Moscow.  Messmacher soon developed a reputation as an energetic, imaginative architect.  In 1879 he was appointed director of the Baron von Stieglitz Central School of Technical Drawing and Arts.  A tall, imposing man with a mess of unruly hair, he was, recalled a student, “strict and demanding, but with an ease and simplicity.”  Another declared: “His energy is enormous and indefatigable.  He throws himself into everything he does, from the great project to the most petty detail.”¹⁹

Messmacher would later become an Imperial favorite, designing interiors for Anichkov Palace and the Palace of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich.  In 1885 he began work on a St. Petersburg palace for Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich on Admiralty Embankment, and five years later 1890 Alexander III would ask him to enlarge and complete the former Vorontsov Palace of Massandra in the Crimea.  In 1882, though, Messmacher was best known as the official architect to St. Isaac’s Cathedral.  This was far removed from residential design, but Alexei Alexandrovich may have been influenced in his choice by the fact that his older brother Grand Duke Vladimir had just hired Messmacher to decorate the interior of his immense new Florentine-style palace on the Neva River.  It seems likely that it was this connection which led to the Moika commission.²⁰

It was a time of eclectic historicism, when architects frequently designed neo-Baroque palaces and crammed them full of neoclassical, French Renaissance, Gothic, Moorish, and Chinese interiors in efforts to surprise and delight.  In Russia, the trend also encompassed the increasingly popular Slavophile-style, which looked back to medieval Muscovite models for inspiration.  The effects could sometimes be characterized as abrupt and too dreamily romantic, creating not a sense of cohesion but rather a disparate succession of slavishly copied period details that struggled against each other for primacy rather than forming a unified vision.

Although Alexei was not an artistic or architectural connoisseur like his brother Vladimir, he had definite ideas when it came to his new palace.  Messmacher delivered preliminary designs for the Grand Duke’s approval in 1883.  At some point architect and client decided that Bosse’s existing mansion should be incorporated into the new building as a cost-saving measure.  But Messmacher’s original plans were not picturesque enough for the Grand Duke and he demanded more ornate exterior decoration.  Always enamored of all things French, he wanted a curious mélange of Gothic and Renaissance on the deliberately asymmetrical exterior.  If there was a surface, he wanted a pilaster, a carved panel, a pediment, or some other detail, with steep roofs and tall towers in imitation of the chateaux of Chambord, Blois, and Chenonceau.  Within, Alexei envisioned period rooms copied from Sixteenth Century Flemish and English models, with the addition of halls evoking the Versailles of Louis XV as well as Chinese and Moorish décor.  Thus, Messmacher was charged with creating a unique building, one designed from the inside out.²¹

These demands also dictated the rather curious arrangement of rooms within: Alexei decided that the former service wing stretching north toward the Moika should be rebuilt to house a series of elaborate ceremonial halls.  These would serve as adjuncts to the formal rooms in the existing mansion to the south.  The only problem was that the Grand Duke wanted his own private apartments placed between the two suites, on the southern side of both structures.  This caused endless problems: it not only interrupted any spatial flow by essentially creating two separate sets of halls, but with the Grand Duke’s own rooms placed between them, it made ease of communication difficult.  Messmacher suggested several alternatives, but Alexei Alexandrovich was adamant.  In the end, he got his wish, but to pass from one series of halls to another, guests had to proceed along a small, dimly lit corridor that separated the Grand Duke’s bedroom from his dressing room and bathroom.²²

It took three years before the palace was ready for the Grand Duke.  The entire plot along the Moika was surrounded by an elaborately worked wrought-iron fence set atop a stone base and adorned with acanthus leaves and rocailles; at intervals the fence was set with the Grand Duke’s monogram and crowns in gold.  The magnificent gates opening from the canal, set between rusticated pedestals topped with ornate wrought-iron lamps, were made in Paris, and alone cost some 50,000 rubles.  A high stone wall fringed the southern side of the property, enclosing the private garden.  This included walks, a fountain, and statuary marking the burial places of the Grand Duke’s favorite dogs.²³

Within these fences and walls stood not only the Grand Duke’s palace but also an entire complex of additional buildings.  There was a stable, designed by Messmacher with an ornate Florentine-style rusticated façade; a separate mansion for guests; and a greenhouse.  The site also housed a laundry building and a separate power plant.²⁴

The completed palace, shaped roughly like an L, was a strange mix of styles and architectural details.  Not only was it completely asymmetrical but each of the four façades was treated differently – indeed, sometimes the same front had several contrasting deigns elements, leaving a slightly confused impression.  The southern façade, facing onto the English Prospekt, was the most restrained, incorporating as it did Bosse’s existing mansion, with its neoclassical detailing.  This side contained one of three principal entrances to the palace.  A wide flight of stairs ascended to the southern entrance portico, flanked by Ionic columns, and by panels set with foliate and arabesque designs.  Above the entrance doors was a panel carved with the Grand Duke’s coat-of-arms.  This was the only section of the palace to rise two stories in height.  The southern side of the second floor featured arched windows separated by pilasters, while the end facing the Moika, also set with three arched windows, was set back from the first floor.  The northern side, facing the Moika, was a mixture of rusticated stone, with heavily carved window frames, and blank walls adorned with quoins.  The eastern wing, containing the private entrance, was a single story atop a raised ground floor; it abruptly butted up against the original mansion, and was notable for its four-story tower, banded in rusticated stone, at the southeastern end, capped with small dormer windows.  The western service wing, in contrast, was larger than the rest of the structure, rising three stories.  Projecting wings, bay windows, and balconies gave the façades a panoply of shadow and light.  Throughout Messmacher employed a bizarre mixture of curved volute pediments that were almost Mannerist in design, alongside arched and oval windows, carved columns, panels decorated with foliage designs, neoclassical balustrades set with urns and statuary, niches filled with classical busts, and contrasting bands of smooth and rusticated stone picked out in light and dark tones.  Mansard roofs alternated with cupolas topped with domes and gables crowned with a variety of carved chimneys.  The effect was certainly picturesque, though the finished building more closely resembled a disparate collection of different heights and design than it did a unified structure.²⁵

The interior decoration of the palace varied greatly between cohesive design and confusing chaos.  But the materials used were the finest.  Messmacher designed nearly all the interiors and his pupils at the Baron Stieglitz School undertook the execution of paintings, decorative tiles, and carved panels.  By the time the palace was completed Alexei had also amassed a treasure trove of valuable paintings, tapestries, furniture, porcelain, and arms, along with souvenirs from his travels, model ships, and maritime banners from the vessels on which he had served.  All of these items were incorporated into the final decoration.²⁶

The southern entrance opened to a neoclassical vestibule, designed by Bosse with a hooded marble fireplace and niches containing statues of Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, and Erato, Muse of Poetry.²⁷ Directly to the west of the vestibule was the Reception Room, followed by the Red Drawing Room and the State Dining Room, all facing out onto the English Prospekt.  On the opposite side of the main, facing the Moika, was the Ceremonial Entrance, situated in a projecting wing and marked by two immense wrought-iron lanterns designed by Messmacher which sprouted from the rusticated pilasters supporting a cartouche carved with the Grand Duke’s coat-of-arms.²⁸ A wide flight to marble stairs ascended beneath a vaulted arcade of low domes to a hall which in turn connected both to the Reception Room and to the Ballroom in the northwestern corner of the main block.

The Reception Room retained most of Bosse’s original decoration, an elaboration of the Louis XV-style in white and gold.  The Ballroom, too, was largely original.  Bosse had executed it in the rococo style, again in white and gold, with an elaborately inlaid parquet floor.  The ceiling held a vast painting depicting the story of Cupid and Psyche, with corner insets based on the works of Francois Boucher.  Pilasters set with gilded sconces framed mirrors reflecting light from the shimmering crystal and ormolu chandeliers.²⁹

The Red Drawing Room, on the southern side of the palace, was decorated in the Louis XV-style, with elaborate boiserie framing panels of crimson silk.³⁰ This opened to the State Dining Room.  Here, Messmacher eliminated Bosse’s neoclassical decoration in favor of the Gothic style.  The lower third of the walls were ringed by carved oak paneling; above this, carved panels alternated with tiled insets made by the students at the Baron Stieglitz School; brackets and shelves displayed pieces of silver and porcelain.  Above these were ten canvases, modeled after Seventeenth Century Dutch genre paintings, by Ernst Liphart.  The frieze, of carved oak set with painted details, circled the room, which was lighted by two bronze chandeliers and tall candelabra of lapis lazuli with ormolu ornaments.  The immense oak doors were carved with garlands and the Grand Duke’s monogram.  A tall fireplace continued the Gothic theme, with a tiled surround surmounted by twisted columns framing two carved panels beneath a pediment.  The fireplace was topped with a hood resembling a shingled roof, which reached to the ceiling.  A large, three-tiered oak sideboard matched the dining table and its thirty-six chairs covered in tooled and gilded leather.³¹

The main block’s second floor held the principal library, an armory, and rooms for the Grand Duke’s adjutant, while the ground floor was largely given over to service, with the kitchens connected to pantries above by stairs and dumbwaiters.  There were rooms equipped with tanks for keeping fresh fish; a confectioner’s office; cold storage rooms; vaults holding gold and silver plate; and an immense wine cellar.³²

The ground floor also held the Grand Duke’s private dining room.  Because of the low ceiling, Messmacher ringed the room with alcoves and niches to visually open the space.  Again, he deployed carved oak wainscot on the lower walls, while above panels of embossed leather reached to the carved cornice.  Decorative tiles covered the floor, while the wooden ceiling was hung with chandeliers made from antlers.  Used by the Grand Duke for his more intimate, private, and often scandalous evenings, the room was comfortably furnished in the Turkish style with overstuffed chairs and divans, ottomans, and hookahs.³³

The new northeastern wing housed the Grand Duke’s Private Entrance as well as three additional ceremonial rooms.  The Private Entrance, set at an angle at the end of the wing, was marked by a squat tower rising above the roof, which in turn was crowned by a small cupola, giving it a slightly religious appearance.  The Private Entrance was situated on a slightly concave wall, into which the double doors were set.  The façade was treated in rusticated stone with heavy quoins at the corners.  Tuscan columns flanked the doorway, which was topped by a semicircular arched pediment adorned with the Grand Duke’s initials.  The walls of the vestibule, decorated with panels adorned with bas reliefs depicting naval scenes, were circled by rusticated pilasters supporting a heavily molded cornice.  A marble fireplace stood directly opposite the doors, topped, perhaps appropriately given the building’s owner, by carved cherubs surrounding a satyr’s head.³⁴

From the Private Entrance, marble steps ascended to a vestibule.  A doorway on the western wall opened to the Flemish Drawing Room and the Chinese Drawing Room, while the one to the south led to the English Hall.  These were the three principal ceremonial apartments created by Messmacher in this new wing, each of which was executed in a different historical style.

Messmacher designed the Flemish Drawing Room to evoke Sixteenth Century Dutch and Burgundian interiors.  A wooden wainscot circled the lower walls; above this were hung specially woven tapestries, while the ceiling, resting atop a frieze of red marble, was adorned with stucco emblems, foliage, fruit, ribbons, and cartouches.  The fireplace was flanked by Tuscan columns of black marble with white veining.³⁵

The Chinese Drawing Room was decorated with dark rosewood wainscotting carved with Oriental motifs, above which was hung a decorative silk fabric woven with images of trees, birds, lotus blossoms and dragons in blue, silver, gold, green and red.  The ceiling was painted with similar designs and hung with a lantern in the shape of a pagoda.  The room was decorated with Japanese cabinets and screens and displayed a number of jade and porcelain miniatures that the Grand Duke had collected on his travels.  An immense mirror, fringed by two carved columns and topped with a carved and gilded pagoda, concealed a doorway.³⁶

The English Hall was the largest room in the palace, and the most spectacular of Messmacher’s new interiors.  The stucco strapwork ceiling copied Jacobean and Elizabeth geometric tracery designs depicting immense intersecting rose petals surrounded by floral reliefs.  The cornice was heavily molded with supporting brackets supporting a shelf on which pieces of porcelain were displayed.  The walls were covered with carved oak panels.  The doors were also of carved oak, with panels adorned with geometric ornaments and flanked by carved columns supporting equally expressive lintels.  Set in a corner, the immense marble fireplace was crowned with a pediment flanked by carved columns above a cartouche depicting Neptune with his trident.  A bronze clock designed in the form of a Gothic cathedral stood on the mantle.  The furnishing here were sparse: heavily carved, Gothic-style oak chairs covered in leather or tapestry.³⁷ But the historical efficacy of the interior was ruined by the three immense bronze chandeliers, set with very Victorian-era frosted globes between arms holding candles.

Beyond these rooms lay the Grand Duke’s private apartments, situated in the southeastern corner of the palace.  The Study was executed in a vaguely Renaissance style, lined with carved oak wainscot whose details were picked out in silver.  Above this hung panels of tooled leather embossed with gilded designs.  The coffered ceiling was also of oak.  A sandstone fireplace was decorated with Grand Duke’s initials, and a corner doorway, extending into the room, was set within a canopied portal flanked by carved columns, and surmounted by open fretwork.  Messmacher designed a suite of Gothic-inspired furniture: ornately carved armchairs and a desk adorned with intricate motifs.  Bronze chandeliers hung from the ceiling, matching the sconces on the wall pilasters.  An oak archway separated the study from a smaller reception room, whose cabinets displayed busts of Catherine the Great and Alexander I.  Beyond was the small library, lined with oak cabinets holding books on maritime history.³⁸

A small corridor behind these rooms circled back to the original block and gave access to the Grand Duke’s personal rooms.  In contrast to the ceremonial apartments, his bedroom was rather simple, with painted walls above oak wainscoting.  A Japanese screen concealed the brass bed; in one corner hung a number of icons, illuminated by a bronze lamp.³⁹ To reach the dressing room, lined with mahogany wardrobes, the Grand Duke had to cross the interior corridor.  Beyond this was his bathroom.  This was one of the more extravagant rooms in the palace, designed by Messmacher in a distinctly Moorish style.  The walls were lined with blue tiles interrupted at intervals by decorative majolica insets depicting mythical sea creatures.  Columns separated the main part of the bathroom, with his marble tub, from a small sunken bathing pool reached by a short flight of marble stairs.⁴⁰

The finished palace was starkly at odds with the majority of baroque and neoclassical buildings gracing St. Petersburg.  From the first it attracted attention, not all of it favorable.  State Senator Alexander Polovtsov visited the completed building in November 1885 and left a scathing account: “We explored the palace of Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich, which Messmacher has just finished.  There is no unity in it: the individual parts are good, and the garden is vast and pleasant, but there is almost nothing tolerable about it.”⁴¹

But Alexei was pleased with the result, and he used the palace to great effect, entertaining on a lavish scale to show off its rooms.  According to Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, Alexei’s chef “was a real artist,” and supplied gluttonous, multi-course meals to his employer’s guests.⁴² These dinners were served on silver and gold plates – the Grand Duke possessed some 500 pieces in his collection.  Fish and fowl, game and roasts, soups and entrees, pastries, and ices – it all appeared in waves, washed down with the prized contents of Alexei’s wine cellars.  He had more than forty varieties of vodka, along with magnums of vintage champagnes, hundreds of bottles of fine dinner and dessert wine, and rare liqueurs to tempt his guests.⁴³

No sooner had Alexei taken up residence than he became involved in an even more scandalous liaison, when he fell in love with the wife of his first cousin Duke Eugene Maximilianovich of Leuchtenberg, a collateral member of the Imperial House.  In 1878 Eugene had married, morganatically, the young Zinaida Skobeleva, sister of the famous General Michael Skobelev of the Russo-Turkish War.  She was created Her Serene Highness Duchess of Leuchtenberg in 1889.  Zinaida was a famous beauty – Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich later insisted that it was impossible “even remotely to convey the physical attributes of that woman.  I have never seen anyone like her in all my travels throughout Europe, Asia, America, and Australia, which is extremely fortunate because women of her maddening pagan appeal should really not be permitted to roam at large.  Her entrance into the room always sent me running out of it.  I knew of her habit of coming close to people, when talking to them, and I felt I could not be responsible for my actions.”⁴⁴

That beauty inevitably attracted attention, especially from Alexei Alexandrovich, who made no secret of his amorous interests.  One night, as the gossip went, Eugene returned home and went to his wife’s room only to find the door locked.  After repeated knocking, it was finally opened by a somewhat disheveled Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich, who beat the husband over the head, and kicked him down the staircase.  When he complained to Alexander III, Eugene was sent away with the warning that if he couldn’t make his wife behave, he should not expect that someone else – even the monarch – could.  Thereafter, Eugene regularly slept on a sofa in his study and left his bedroom to the Grand Duke.⁴⁵

Eugene came not only to tolerate this situation but used it to his benefit.  According to the diary of official Alexander Polovtsov, he became “an obliging husband and was almost constantly drunk.  Always greedy, he took advantage of the fact that Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovitch was madly in love with his wife, and together with her he extracted as much money as possible from the Grand Duke.”⁴⁶ For her part, Zinaida openly paraded around St. Petersburg in an array of lavish jewelry showered on her by the enamored Alexei Alexandrovich.⁴⁷ She acted as the Grand Duke’s semi-official hostess at his parties and enjoyed her position as an Imperial favorite.  This liaison lasted until Zenaide’s death from throat cancer in 1899.  Alexei was crushed: he kept her portrait prominently displayed in his palace until the end of his life.⁴⁸

Despite his mourning, Alexei soon discovered a new passion: Elisabeth Balletta, a rather mediocre dancer but a great beauty who enjoyed a brilliant career at St. Petersburg’s Michael Theater.  The Grand Duke repeated his usual pattern, showering his mistress with jewels and attention that caused much gossip in the Imperial capital.  This became an even greater scandal during the Russo-Japanese War.  The Grand Duke, it was said, was not only immoral but also corrupt, stealing millions of rubles from the Russian Navy under his command and using the money to fund his lavish style of life: his palace in St. Petersburg; his mansion in Paris; his extensive wine cellars; his yacht; and his mistresses.  It was well known that he opposed all naval reforms, which resulted in a rather backward fleet whose serious shortcomings were revealed in the war.  Corners were cut in the construction of ships, and vessels that put to sea were plagued with leaks from popping rivets, instability on the water, and defects in their armor plating.⁴⁹

The last straw, for much of the public, was the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of rubles solicited for the Red Cross to care for wounded soldiers.  Alexei was foolish enough to appear at the Michel Theater one night in the middle of war, with Balletta at his side wearing an especially extravagant necklace of diamonds with a ruby cross.  The crowd turned to the Imperial Box and began shouting, “The Red Cross!  The Red Cross!  Give back the money!”⁵⁰ When the final defeat of the Russian fleet came at Tsushima in 1905, Alexei was widely blamed.  Angry crowds surrounded his palace on the Moika, hurling rocks through the windows and shouting for the “Prince of Tsushima” to appear.  Thoroughly rattled, the Grand Duke resigned his posts and declared that he would retreat into private life.⁵¹

The Grand Duke made himself scarce in St. Petersburg, fleeing to Paris to live with Balletta in extravagant style and only occasionally returning to Russia over the next few years.  He was a regular fixture in Monte Carlo, Biarritz, and Cannes, spending thousands at roulette wheels and on enormous, champagne-drenched suppers.  He continued to shower his mistress with gifts: numerous pieces of jewelry, boxes, stone carvings, and miniature animals by Karl Fabergé.  Yet he considered his life a wasted existence: “I have often thought lately and in my head looked back at my past,” he wrote in his diary, “and indeed, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that I live like a machine, monotonously, according to a strict routine, so that I have little purpose in life.  Nothing really interests me; I am bored, never have found much enjoyment.  Of course, there are pleasant days, but they are an exception.”⁵²

In autumn 1908, Alexei fell ill with influenza, and on November 1 he died in Paris.  His body was returned to Russia, where he was given a lavish state funeral followed by burial in the new Grand Ducal Vault attached to the Cathedral of the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.  Somewhat surprisingly, given Alexei’s rather scandalous life, Nicholas II was distraught: “My favorite uncle is dead,” he wrote in his diary.  He called Alexei “a noble, honorable, courageous soul,” an assessment starkly at odds with most public opinion.⁵³

Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich left no will.  A family council decided that the palace should be inherited by his surviving brother Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich; apparently his younger brother Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, then living in exile following his morganatic marriage, was also granted a share of the estate.  The contents – hundreds of paintings, tapestries, furniture, books, porcelain, silver and gold plate, and the cellars full of vintage wine, vodka, liqueurs, and champagne – were inventoried and liquidated.  No one knew quite what to do with it; Nicholas II agreed to fund its continued maintenance until May 1909 while the heirs decided on a course of action.  When Vladimir died a few months later, his widow Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna inherited the property.⁵⁴

Marie Pavlovna wanted to keep the property, at least temporarily, but she decided that the plot was large enough so that portions could be sold off without damaging the palace.  In 1909 Georges Bormann, owner of a candy factory, purchased the plot holding the greenhouse and a few service buildings.⁵⁵ Two years later, another portion of the plot was sold off to the owner of a rubber factory.⁵⁶

Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna offered to sell the palace to Nicholas II’s brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, but he decided against this, citing the cost of maintaining the property.  And this proved to be a crucial factor: in a report to the Grand Duchess, an official reported, “The very upkeep of such a luxurious house, with its huge stables and household services, must entail enormous expenses, which are absolutely unbearable for a private person in Russia.”  Given this assessment, the Grand Duchess mulled over dividing the property: new tenement houses would be built in the garden, while the palace was to be converted into “luxurious apartments.”⁵⁷

It was at this point that wealthy businessman M. V. Katsnelson offered to purchase the entire property.  He, too, wanted to build tenement houses and divide up the palace.  Nicholas II, though, rejected the idea – apparently Imperial permission was needed when disposing of even privately-held, inherited Romanov property.⁵⁸ In April 1911, and with their hands tied when it came to actually selling the property, Marie Pavlovna and Paul Alexandrovich decided to lease the vacant palace to the German Embassy.  This was to be temporary: at the time, a new German Embassy was being built on St. Isaac’s Square, but it would not be ready for occupancy until the fall of 1912.⁵⁹

Shortly before the German Embassy was to vacate the palace, its fate again became the subject of renewed negotiations and proposals.  Marie Pavlovna declared that she was willing to sell it to the city; there was discussion that the park might be opened to the public and the palace used to house the Commission on Public Education’s Library or a similar education institution.  But the city opted not to purchase the property, declaring that it would be too expensive to maintain.⁶⁰

In November 1914, Marie Pavlovna finally sold the palace to aristocrat Konstantin Reshko for 2.5 million rubles; as part of the purchase, the Grand Duchess received Reshko’s Crimean estate.⁶¹

After the Bolshevik Revolution the palace was nationalized and given over to several organizations.  In World War II, the palace was used as a warehouse, and somehow managed to survive the Siege of Leningrad intact.⁶² After the War, part of the palace was given to the Young Pioneers while another housed a driving school.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Moscow Publishing house Modus Vivendi rented the palace for its St. Petersburg operation.⁶³

Under the publishing house’s occupancy, the palace deteriorated.  Maintenance was neglected, and mildew and mold played havoc with the woodwork.  St. Petersburg authorities decided to evict Modus Vivendi, although this involved a lengthy court battle.  In 2005, the Russian Government stepped in: the publisher was evicted, and the palace became federal property.  Shortly after this, it was announced that the palace was being given to the new St. Petersburg House of Music.  Sergei Roldugin, former chief of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and the man who headed the organization, also happened to be a childhood friend of President Vladimir Putin, and it is likely that this connection played a large part in the decision.⁶⁴

Extensive restoration work began in 2006.  The palace façades and roof were repaired.  The interiors demanded extensive attention: in some cases, portions of the carved and paneled woodwork had to be recreated, and missing or damaged tiles in the Grand Duke’s former bathroom were recreated by the Intarsia Company.  The original budget was placed at 400 million rubles; by 2009, this had doubled.⁶⁵ “It’s expensive,” explained one of the directors behind the project, “but of course it’s worth it.”⁶⁶

In April 2011, the restored palace finally opened its doors, and a celebratory concert was given in the English Hall.  Although the building continues to be occupied by the House of Music, tours are regularly given, allowing the public an opportunity to explore and experience one of St. Petersburg’s most curious and interesting former palaces.

Source Notes

1. Belyakova, 117.

2. https://dzen.ru/a/X8CLCBCAcyNgDFMS.

3. Belyakova, 120.

4. Alexander Mikhailovich, 157-58.

5. Pazin, 178.

6. https://dzen.ru/a/X8CLCBCAcyNgDFMS.

7. https://www.svoboda.org/a/1903099.html.

8. Ibid.

9. Belyakova, 124.

10. https://dzen.ru/a/X8CLCBCAcyNgDFMS.

11. See Ferrand for details.

12. Belyakova, 124.

13. Ibid., 125.

14. Pazin, 179.

15. Alexander Mikhailovich, 157-58.

16. Malinina, 62; Frolov, 61.

17. Citywalls.ru; Romanov News; Malinina, 64.

18. Citywalls.ru; Malinina, 63; Frolov, 62; Andreev, 68; Vasilieva, 332.

19. Malinina, 95.

20. Malinina, 91; Tyzhnenko, 163; Frolov, 63.

21. Malinina, 62; Vasilieva, 334-35.

22. Malinina, 66.

23. Citywalls.ru; www.spdm.ru; Malinina, 70-72; Frolov, 63; Vasilieva, 335.

24. Malinina, 71.

25. Malinina, 66-72; Citywalls.ru; Frolov, 64; Vasilevskaya and Vasilieva, 142-43; Vasilieva, 334.

26. Malinina, 83, 94; Vasilieva, 336.

27. Andreev, 65.

28. Malinina, 68.

29. Ibid., 75-76, 83-84.

30. Ibid., 75-76.

31. Malinina, 86-87; www.spdm.ru; Vasilieva, 335-36.

32. Malinina, 75-76.

33. Malinina, 85; Frolov, 65; Vasilieva, 335-36.

34. Malinina, 68-69, 76; Vasilevskaya and Vasilieva, 142-43; Vasilieva, 336-37.

35. Malinina, 82-83; Vasilieva, 336-37.

36. Malinina, 79-80; Vasilieva, 336.

37. Malinina, 77-78; Frolov, 65; Vasilevskaya and Vasilieva, 142-43; Vasilieva, 337.

38. Malinina, 88-89; Vasilieva, 336-37.

39. Malinina, 89-90.

40. Malinina, 89; Frolov, 67.

41. Malinina, 93.

42. Alexander Mikhailovich, 158.

43. Malinina, 86.

44. Alexander Mikhailovich, 172.

45. Brayley-Hodgetts 2:229-30.

46. Polovtsov, 2:365.

47. Witte, 177.

48. Pazin, 181.

49. Ibid., 183.

50. Ular, 96.

51. Pazin, 185.

52. https://dzen.ru/a/X8CLCBCAcyNgDFMS.

53. Maylunas and Mironenko, 466.

54. Malinina, 103-04.

55. Ibid., 104-05.

56. Ibid., 105.

57. Ibid., 106.

58. Ibid.

59. Malinina, 107; Citywalls.ru.

60. Malinina, 107-08.

61. Malinina, 108; Citywalls.ru.

62. Malinina 109; Vasilieva, 338.

63. Malinina, 109.

64. Kommersant, January 16, 2009.

65. Interfax, January 15, 2009.

66. Kommersant, January 16, 2009.

Bibliography

Books

Alexander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke of Russia.  Once a Grand Duke.  New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932.

Andreev, V. I. Harold Bosse.  St. Petersburg: Kolo, 2009.

Belyakova, Zoia.  “Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich.”  In The Grand Dukes.  East Richmond Heights: Eurohistory, 2010.

Brayley Hodgetts, E. A.  The Court of Russia in the Nineteenth Century.  Two volumes.  London: Methuen, 1908.

Ferrand, Jacques.  Descendances naturelles des souverains et grands-ducs de Russie, de 1762 à 1910.  Paris: Répertoire Généalogique/Jaques Ferrand, 1995.

Frolov, A.  Velikogertsogskiye dvortsy.  St. Petersburg: Glagol, 2008.

Malinina, T. A.  Dvorets Velikogo knyazya Alekseya Aleksandrovicha.  St. Petersburg: Almaz, 1997.

Maylunas, Andrei, and Sergei Mironenko.  A Life Long Passion.  London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994.

Pazin, Mikhail.  Zapretnyye strasti velikikh knyazey.  St. Petersburg: Piter, 2009.

Polovtsov, A. A.  Dnevnik.  Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2005.

Tyzhnenko, T. E.  Maximilian Messmacher.  Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1984.

Ular, Alexander.  Russia From Within.  New York: Henry Holt, 1905.

Vasilevskaya, N., and Ye. Vasilieva.  St. Petersburg: A Guide to the Architecture.  St. Petersburg: Bibliopolis, 1994.

Vasileva, M. E.  Pamyatniki arkitektura Leningrada.  Leningrad: Stroyizdat, 1976.

Witte, Sergei.  The Memoirs of Count Witte.  Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990.

Internet Resources

Citywalls.ru

https://dzen.ru/a/X8CLCBCAcyNgDFMS

https://www.svoboda.org/a/1903099.html

www.spdm.ru

Other Media

Interfax

Kommersant

Romanov News, By Paul Kulikovsky, August 2015, No. 89.

                Chagin's suicide came at an especially difficult time.  Nicholas and Alexandra were with their family at Spala in Poland, where Tsesarevich Alexei lay near death, suffering an internal hemorrhage after a previous fall.  A bulletin released the previous day had warned the public to expect the worst.  As they prepared for their son to die, the Imperial couple received word of Chagin's suicide.  “As deeply as the Emperor mourned his death,” recalled Anna Vyrubova, who was present at Spala when word of Chagin's death arrived, “he was even more indignant at the manner of it.  Russians, I know, are inclined to morbidity and suicide with them is not an uncommon thing.  But Nicholas II always regarded it as an act of dishonor.”  To Vyrubova, Nicholas complained, “How, in the midst of the boy's illness and all our trouble could he have done such a thing?”(2)  And Nicholas Sablin, who served under Chagin on Standart, later wrote: “Their Majesties were very saddened but, as deeply believing Christians, they very much condemned this act, and the Sovereign expressed in very sharp terms that such an end was an offense to the soul.”  Empress Alexandra told Sablin, “The Sovereign and I consider this to be desertion from life.” (3)

                In the wake of Chagin's suicide all manner of rumors swept through St. Petersburg, the Imperial Court, and Navy.  In trying to seek out some answer to the enigma of his death, many turned their thoughts back to the August 1907 accident with Standart.  The inquiry held by the Imperial Navy had initially blamed Chagin for the near disaster, reprimanded him, and removed him from his command.  Nicholas II appointed an entirely new second court to hear the case again a month later; this time, and no doubt aware of the outcome the Emperor desired, the members acquitted Chagin of all charges of negligence or culpability. (4)

                Chagin returned to the helm of the Imperial yacht.  Two years after the accident, Nicholas II reconfirmed his confidence in the captain, promoting Chagin to Rear-Admiral and giving him a position in the Imperial Suite.  But while the Emperor seemed to bear the Captain no ill-will, the same could not be said of much of the Naval administration and even those who comprised the yacht's crew.  Many adopted a negative attitude toward Chagin; they not only blamed him for the accident but resented the fact that a second inquiry had been held specifically held to clear him of responsibility.  It smacked of a violation of the code of ethics.  While Chagin carried on as before, he now faced barely disguised scorn and sometimes open antagonism from his comrades.  And this, it was said, left him depressed and led him to shoot himself. (5)

                Police were immediately called to Chagin's apartment and began an investigation.  “The scattered parts of the head,” Novoe Vremya told its readers, “were collected with some difficulty.  The corpse of the deceased was placed in a coffin, and the bedroom and adjoining study were locked until the higher judicial authorities could arrive.  The Assistant Police Prosecutor found a note on a table in the study.  In it, the deceased asked that no one be blamed for his death; another note requested that a particular acquaintance be looked after.” (6)

                This second note was addressed to one of Chagin's friends and read: “Send 50,000 rubles to Volodya [Chagin's brother Vladimir] if he hasn't shot himself yet, and ask him to pass on to Lola 10,000 rubles.” (7)

                The investigation revealed that Chagin had spent the previous evening at his apartment.  He had entertained guests for dinner, and no one noticed any peculiar behavior or marked depression.  After his guests left, Chagin asked for a glass of tea, and retreated to his inner rooms.  His two servants waited for the usual summons to help him undress, but instead there was only silence, until the gunshot at seven the following morning. (8)

                Some accepted that Chagin had simply been depressed over the 1907 accident and the scorn with which many naval authorities continued to treat him.  But soon there were other accounts, hinting at a more scandalous explanation.  Alexander Mossolov, head of Nicholas II's Court Chancellery, did not know what had led to the Admiral's death but he reported that, according to rumor, Chagin had become involved with an unnamed woman who belonged to a terrorist group.  When the Captain discovered this, he shot himself. (9)

                Vice-Admiral George Tsyvinsky, one of Chagrin's comrades in the Imperial Navy, later asserted that this mysterious paramour had somehow managed to conceal a printing press used for revolutionary literature on the lower decks of Standart when it was berthed for the winter in St. Petersburg. (10)  This seems absurd.  The yacht was always guarded, and with the constant presence of its crew it would have made for a very unlikely spot to serve as headquarters for some anarchist group.

                Stories spread in the press which hinted at something far more sinister.  On October 29, 1912 (New Style), the London Daily Mail reported that a mysterious woman with whom Chagin was said to be involved “had forced him to accept a Nihilist in the presence of the Tsesarevich, and that the ruthless Nihilist shot at the Tsesarevich and the latter ran away in horror.” (11)  Chagin thus supposedly committed suicide because he had been responsible for an attempt on the life of Tsesarevich Alexei Nikolaievich.

                As bizarre as this story was, it was later picked up and elaborated upon by Aron Simanovich, who acted as a kind of informal secretary to Gregory Rasputin.  Simanovich wrote that Chagin recommended that two sailors be assigned to duties at Tsarskoye Selo to work in the garden.  “No one could have imagined that both sailors had the task of killing the Tsesarevich.  One day the boy was playing in the presence of one of the valets in the palace garden, where both sailors were busy trimming the bushes.  One of them rushed with a large knife at little Alexei and wounded him in the leg.  The Tsesarevich screamed.  The sailor ran.  A nearby valet overtook the sailor and strangled him immediately.  The second sailor was also caught and, by order of the sovereign, was hanged without trial.  It was established that both sailors ended up in Tsarskoye Selo on the recommendation of Chagin.  This incident so shocked Chagin that he committed suicide, since the thought of being suspected of participating in an attempt on the heir was unbearable for him.” (12)

                Needless to say, this imaginative and melodramatic account bore no resemblance to the truth.

                What does seem certain is that Chagin's suicide was somehow tied to a mysterious woman in his life.  In one of his two notes, he specifically asked that she be provided for.  Was this simply a case of depression after the end of relationship?  The story becomes difficult to follow, but it is possible that Chagin became involved in what would have been a scandalous and prohibited relationship.  Vyrubova, who was certainly close enough to the Imperial couple to hear their views, thus wrote that Chagin “shot himself on account of an unhappy love affair.” (13)  Sergei Timirev, who also served on Standart, also recorded that Chagin's suicide was “purely romantic.” (14)

                A Crimean newspaper published in early November 1912 actually named the woman in question as Elena Sokolova.  She was born on May 6/18, 1897, to Arseny Sokolov, grandson of a former serf.  Sokolov had become friendly with industrialist Peter Gubonin, who founded the Black Sea resort of Gurzuf, and in the early 1890s moved his family to the town to supervise its hotels.  Known as Lola in the family, Elena was sent with her sister to St. Petersburg to complete her secondary education.  Perhaps she met Chagin in the capital, although the precise details are lost to history.  The relationship had apparently begun at least a year before the Admiral's death, at a time when she was fourteen – literally a schoolgirl – and he was forty-nine.  According to family rumor, Lola may also have been pregnant with Chagin's child at the time of his suicide. (15)

                As Novoe Vremya noted, news of Chagin's suicide “flew across St. Petersburg with the speed of lightening.” (16) Sokolova learned of it that same morning, and ran to Chagin's apartment, demanding that she be admitted and crying, “I know everything!  I want to die with him!”  When police refused her request, she pulled out a small bottle of vinegar and gulped it down before smashing the container and using a piece of the broken glass to cut her own throat.  She was immediately taken to a nearby hospital, where her wound was successfully treated. (17) This was also reported in the London Daily Mail.  Writing of Chagin, the newspaper noted the “self-mutilation of his lover, who attempted suicide after finding the Admiral dead.” (18)

                Chagin's relationship with Sokolova presented a unique set of difficulties.  Although it was not unusual for a sixteen-year-old girl to marry, here the affair began when Lola was fourteen, lending an unseemly aura to the relationship.  Not only did the difference in their ages suggest an older man in a position of power taking advantage of a young girl, but her rumored pregnancy as well as her recent descent from serf ancestors all worked against a successful outcome of the romance.  Chagin faced serious obstacles if he wanted to marry her.  First, he was bound by the Code of Military Regulations, which required that he seek permission from an Honor Court for any marriage.  The Court would consider the bride's background and morals as well as determining whether her social position corresponded with that of the Captain.  Obviously in this case, the possibly pregnant teenage daughter of a hotel manager descended from serfs and already embroiled in a relationship with a much older man would likely never have won official approval.

                But Chagin faced a second obstacle as well.  As a member of the Imperial Suite, he was required to seek the direct permission of the Emperor himself for any marriage.  And here he would have faced the same hurdles posed by the Military Court of Honor.  It is impossible to imagine that the censorious Empress Alexandra would ever have let her husband agree to such a union.  In short, had Chagin been pursuing marriage, he would almost certainly never have gained official sanction.  The only way he could marry Sokolova would be for him to resign both his naval and his court posts and retreat into the life of a private citizen.

                This, of course, would have been the only honorable course of action for the former hero of the Russo-Japanese War, but he had already compromised himself by embarking on an affair with a fourteen-year-old girl.  If she was indeed pregnant, he had created a situation where the only possible outcomes would be a shameful end to his storied career and a future as a social outcast at the side of his teenage wife.

                Does this finally offer an explanation for this seemingly inexplicable suicide?  As Nicholas Sablin wrote, “The investigation carried out by the authorities found out that the reasons for the suicide were of a purely personal nature.” (19) If Chagin indeed killed himself because he was denied permission to marry Sokolova, this might also explain why – after the deed – Nicholas II, perhaps suffering from guilt, proved to be so accommodating when it came to the funeral.

                The burial of suicides in religious cemeteries was forbidden.  Yet Nicholas II ordered that Chagin be given a military funeral with full honors and that he be interred in the Nikolsky Cemetery of St. Petersburg's Alexander Nevsky Monastery.  The Church was not exempt from Imperial pressure: Nicholas II could point out that canon law allowed the burial of suicides who were found to be suffering from a mental strain and did not fully possess their reason at the time of their deaths.

                Nicholas II ordered the entire Standart crew to attend the funeral.  Chagin's awards and medals were displayed on pillows, and a guard-of-honor stood by the coffin.  The only unnerving aspect was the corpse itself: because the coffin is open during an Orthodox service, the mourners would have no choice but to observe the mutilated stump that remained in place of Chagin's head.  Thankfully someone came up with a solution: what was left of the head rested atop a pillow but was covered by a large cloth. (20) At the end of the service, the coffin was closed and buried beneath a large black marble cross, inscribed, “Retinue of His Imperial Majesty Rear-Admiral Ivan Ivanovich Chagin.”

                As for Elena, she returned to her parents in the Crimea: she bore a scar on her neck for the rest of her life from her abortive suicide attempt.  At some point during World War I she married an army officer named Slansky but he disappeared during the Revolution.  Presuming him dead, she decided to travel north.  Russia was in chaos, and with the Bolsheviks gaining ground, she decided to leave the country.  Sometime between April and May 1919, she apparently joined a number of other would-be emigres in Latvia, boarding the new British destroyer HMS Seafire which had been dispatched as part of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.  By June 1919, Seafire was back in England.

                A new chapter opened for Elena.  It was presumably while aboard HMS Seafire that she met its then Lieutenant, John Garland.  Born in 1894 (ironically on the same day that saw Nicholas and Alexandra's engagement in Coburg) in Worcestershire to Captain of the Highland Light Infantry Ernest Garland and his wife Augusta, John – called Jack – came from a well-connected and prominent Worcester family.  He'd joined the British Navy as a thirteen-year-old cadet in 1907 and rapidly advanced through the ranks, being promoted lieutenant in 1916 and serving aboard the destroyers HMS Cameleon and then HMS Plucky before joining Seafire. (21)

                A romance with Garland began, and the couple married.  He continued his naval career, eventually rising to the rank of Commander before his retirement in 1939.  The couple lived a comfortable life in Devon.  It was here, at her home in Yelverton, that Elena died on February 8, 1972, at the age of seventy-five. (22)  She left a personal estate of £11,400 – approximately $90,000 today. (23) Jack outlived her by nine years, dying in 1981.  He left an estate of considerably more: £85,660, again suggesting the relatively comfortable life which, after so much turmoil, Elena enjoyed in Devon.

                With thanks to Penny Wilson for additional research.

Source Notes

1. Novoe Vremya, October 12, 1912.

2. Anna Vyrubova, Memories of the Russian Court, New York: Macmillan, 1923, 95.

3. Nicholas Sablin, Desyat' let na imperatorskom standarte yakht, St. Petersburg: Petronivs, 2008, 177.

4. https://tsushima.su/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7392.

5. Ibid.

6. Novoe Vremya, October 12, 1912.

7. Information posted by user Vovas (Vladimir Sokolov) at https://tunnel.ru/post-ivan-ivanovich-chagin-samoubijjstvo, November 1, 2022.

8. Sablin, 178.

9. Alexander Mossolov, At The Court of the Last Tsar, London: Hutchinson, 1935, 261.

10. https://tsushima.su/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7392.

11. Daily Mail, London, October 29, 1912. 

12. https://tsushima.su/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7392.

13. Vyrubova, 95.

14. Sergei Timirev, Chetyre goda na yakhte Standart, manuscript, 1924, 43.

15. Information posted by user Vovas (Vladimir Sokolov) at https://tunnel.ru/post-ivan-ivanovich-chagin-samoubijjstvo, November 1, 2022.

16. Novoe Vremya, October 12, 1912.

17. Information posted by user Vovas (Vladimir Sokolov) at https://tunnel.ru/post-ivan-ivanovich-chagin-samoubijjstvo, November 1, 2022.

18. Daily Mail, London, October 28, 1912.

19. Sablin, 178.

20. https://tsushima.su/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7392.

21. www.dreadnoughtproject.com.

22. The Times, London, February 10, 1972.

23. National Probate Calendar for England and Wales, 1972.

It stands along the Neva River in St. Petersburg, a small, neoclassical building with a rounded corner topped by a small dome. There is nothing about it that suggests it was once an Imperial residence: indeed, it looks absurdly small. Yet No. 2 Petrovskaya Street, poised along the north side of the Neva River and looking south to Palace Quay, was indeed home to a Romanov, being the last palace built by a member of the Dynasty in the Imperial capital.

The Palace is bold, severe, and solid, in fitting with the character of the man for whom it was built. Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich Jr., born in 1856 to Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich and his wife Grand Duchess Alexandra Petrovna, was a soldier by vocation and character. Having graduated from the Nikolaev Engineering School and the Academy of the General Staff, he had risen through the military ranks, becoming Inspector-General of the Cavalry; Commander of the Guards; Commander of the St. Petersburg Military District; and Chairman of the Defense Council. Stern, intimidating, and blunt, he was feared more than respected, even within the Imperial Family.

It was odd that such a pivotal figure in the Romanov Dynasty did not have his own palace in the Imperial capital until midway through Nicholas II’s reign. The Grand Duke, though, cared little about such matters, and usually stayed at either his suburban palace of Znemenka on the Gulf of Finland or at the apartment he shared with his brother Grand Duke Peter Nikolaevich and his family. But in 1907 the Grand Duke married Anastasia, daughter of Nicholas I of Montenegro and recently divorced from her first husband the Duke of Leuchtenberg. It was this marriage that finally convinced the Grand Duke to build his own residence in the Imperial capital.

Nearly all grand ducal residences in St. Petersburg were situated in the main part of the city, south of the Neva; for his own palace, Nicholas Nikolaevich selected a site along the Neva’s northern Petrovskaya Embankment, near the new Trinity Bridge and a granite landing flanked by stone figures depicting lions. The plot of land had come to Nicholas Nikolaevich and his brother Peter Nikolaevich in 1893, when they settled their late father’s estate. At some point, Peter sold his interest in these two sites to his brother. On the first site, located at No. 3, the Grand Duke built a six-story apartment block, which was completed in 1909. The second plot, at No. 2, was to be the site of the Grand Duke’s new palace.¹

The Grand Duke commissioned architect Alexander Sergeievich Khrenov to build both the apartment block and his new palace. Born in 1860, Khrenov had graduated from the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1884 and in 1888 he became the chief architect assigned to preservation of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Most of his work in the Imperial capital consisted of residential apartments. In 1903 he had built a mansion for M. F. Tetzner, wife of a wealthy merchant, at No. 5 Tverskaya which today houses the consulate of the Czech Republic. The Grand Duke’s palace was his only other private residential commission.²

Work on the new palace began in 1910 and took three years. The finished building was a square structure of three-stories, its exterior executed in pale white limestone. Neoclassical in style, it was restrained in its details. A stringcourse separated the ground floor from the two main floors. While the ground floor was severe to the point of austerity, the upper stories carried the building’s decorative details. The façades facing the Neva and Trinity Square were adorned with central, triangular pediments, each supported by four Corinthian pilasters. The southeastern corner was curved, centered on a half-rotunda topped by a pediment carved with the Grand Duke’s coat-of-arms and crowned by a low bronze dome. Elaborate wrought iron gates opened to the side courtyard. Here, the façade was quite different, executed in a sort of vaguely Art Nouveau style, with plain pilasters flanking the main entrance.³

The palace interiors were executed in a variety of materials, including red and gray Finnish granite and marble, with ormolu and Karelian birch used for decorative details. A monumental staircase, its railing insets of sculpted steel and bronze, ascended to the main floor beneath a leaded glass dome. There were few ceremonial rooms: a drawing room fringed by a stucco cornice; a dining room lighted by semicircular windows; a library ornamented in carved oak; and a delicate, almost Rocoo-style reception room overlooking the Neva. The Grand Ducal apartments filled most of the third floor and were furnished with Art Nouveau-style pieces ordered from the firm of Roman Meltzer.⁴

The Palace was completed in 1913. But the Grand Duke was not to live within its walls for more than a year. In 1914, on the outbreak of World War I, Nicholas II named the Grand Duke Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armed Forces, and Nicholas Nikolaevich took up residence at General Headquarters, located in the town of Baranovichi, living in his train. Anastasia, busy with war relief work and organizing hospital trains, continued to live in the palace during her infrequent stays in the Imperial capital.

In the late summer of 1915, Nicholas II decided to assume Supreme Command; Nicholas Nikolaevich was named Governor-General of the Caucasus and Commander of the Caucasian Front and, with Anastasia, moved to Tiflis. They never returned to live in their palace, instead taking up residence after the Revolution at Anastasia’s Crimean estate of Tchair before finally moving to Dulber, the Crimean palace owned by the Grand Duke’s brother Peter Nikolaevich. In April 1919 they, along with Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna and other members of the Romanov Dynasty who had sought refuge on the peninsula, were evacuated by British warships. The Grand Duke and his wife spent the rest of their lives in exile in France.

The Palace of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich Jr. was one of the first Romanov residences to be taken over for state use, housing the Investigative and Legal Commission of the Central Executive Committee following the October Revolution. Suspected counterrevolutionaries were brought before tribunals here before being either released or sent to the Cheka. In 1918 the building was given to the State Institute for the Study of the Brain, which occupied the premises until 1954, when it was supplanted by the Institute of Semiconductors and then the Institute of Lake Studies. In 1985, the building became Leningrad’s Wedding Palace No. 3; to accommodate the thousands of brides and grooms who passed through its rooms, the main entrance was moved from the courtyard to the Neva Embankment. But most of the interior was preserved intact, and so the building remained much as it was in 1913. In 2000, it was transferred to the Federal Government and now serves as the offices and residence of the Northwestern Federal District’s Representative of the Russian President.⁵

Source Notes

1. Citywalls.ru; http://sergekot.com/dvorets-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego/; https://dzen.ru/a/Z0r9Cok53jcigsXS; https://spbinteres.ru/dvorec-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego.html; Vasilevskaya and Vasilevskaya, 306; Frolov, 289; Kirikov, 273.

2. Kirikov, 273; Vasilevskaya and Vasilevskaya, 307; Frolov, 373.

3. https://stavnistavim.ru/raznoe/dvorec-velikogo-knyazya-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego-dvorec-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego-v-sankt-peterburge-dvorec-velikogo-knyazya-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego.html; Citywalls.ru; http://sergekot.com/dvorets-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego/; https://spbinteres.ru/dvorec-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego.html; https://dvorspb.ru/sights/architecture/palaces/nikolay-nikolaevich-palace/; Vasilevskaya and Vasilevskaya, 306.

4. Citywalls.ru; http://sergekot.com/dvorets-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego/; https://dzen.ru/a/Z0r9Cok53jcigsXS; https://spbinteres.ru/dvorec-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego.html; https://stavnistavim.ru/raznoe/dvorec-velikogo-knyazya-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego-dvorec-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego-v-sankt-peterburge-dvorec-velikogo-knyazya-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego.html; Frolov, 292; Kirikov, 274.

5. https://dvorspb.ru/sights/architecture/palaces/nikolay-nikolaevich-palace/; https://spbinteres.ru/dvorec-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego.html; https://dzen.ru/a/Z0r9Cok53jcigsXS; Citywalls.ru; http://sergekot.com/dvorets-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego/; https://stavnistavim.ru/raznoe/dvorec-velikogo-knyazya-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego-dvorec-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego-v-sankt-peterburge-dvorec-velikogo-knyazya-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego.html; Vasilevskaya and Vasilevskaya, 307; Frolov, 293.

Bibliography

Frolov, A. Velikogertsogskiye dvortsy. St. Petersburg: Glagol, 2008.

Kirikov, B. M. Arkhitektura Peterburga kontsa XIX-nachala XX veka: eklektika, modern, neoklassitsizm. St. Petersburg: Kolo, 2006.

Vasilevskaya, Nina, and Yelena Vasilevskaya. Saint Petersburg: A Guide to the Architecture. St. Petersburg: Bibliopolis, 1994.

Internet Resources

Citywalls.ru

http://sergekot.com/dvorets-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego/

https://dzen.ru/a/Z0r9Cok53jcigsXS

https://spbinteres.ru/dvorec-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego.html

https://stavnistavim.ru/raznoe/dvorec-velikogo-knyazya-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego-dvorec-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego-v-sankt-peterburge-dvorec-velikogo-knyazya-nikolaya-nikolaevicha-mladshego.html

https://dvorspb.ru/sights/architecture/palaces/nikolay-nikolaevich-palace/