Nicholas’s model of the autocracy was almost entirely Muscovite. His favourite Tsar was Alexei Mikhailovich (1645–76), after whom he named his son the Tsarevich. He emulated his tranquil piety, which it was said had given him the conviction to rule Russia through his own religious conscience. Nicholas often liked to justify his policies on the grounds that the idea had ‘come to him’ from God. According to Count Witte, one of his most enlightened ministers, Nicholas believed that ‘people do not influence events, that God directs everything, and that the Tsar, as God’s anointed, should not take advice from anyone but follow only his divine inspiration’. Such was Nicholas’s admiration for the semi-Asiatic customs of the Middle Ages that he tried to introduce them at his court. He ordered the retention of the old Slavonic forms of spelling in official documents and publications long after they had been phased out in literary Russian. He talked of Rus’, the old Muscovite term for the core lands of Russia, instead of Rossiia, a term for the Empire which had been adopted since Peter the Great. He disliked the title Gosudar Imperator (Sovereign Emperor), also introduced by Peter, since it implied that the autocrat was no more than the first servant of the abstract state (the gosudarstvo), and much preferred the older title Tsar (derived from the Greek term kaisar), which went back to the Byzantine era and carried religious connotations of paternal rule. He even toyed with the idea of making all his courtiers wear long caftans, like those of the ancient Muscovite boyars (it was only the cost that discouraged him). The Minister of the Interior, D. S. Sipiagin, who had given him the idea, had his own offices decorated in the Muscovite style. On one occasion he received the Tsar, who came dressed as Alexei, with all the rituals of the seventeenth-century court, complete with a traditional Russian feast and a gypsy orchestra. Nicholas encouraged the Russian courtly fashion — which had begun in his father’s reign — for seventeenth-century costume balls. In 1903 he himself gave one of the most lavish. The guests appeared in replicas of court dress from Alexei’s reign and danced medieval Russian dances. Photographs of all the guests, each identified by their respective court ranks from the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, were published in two richly produced albums. Nicholas appeared in a replica of the processional robe worn by Alexei, and Alexandra in the gown and headdress worn by his Tsarina Natalia.4
Nicholas made no secret of the fact that he much preferred Moscow to St Petersburg. The old ‘holy city’, with its thousand onion domes, stood for the Eastern and Byzantine traditions which lay at the heart of his Muscovite world-view. Untouched by the West, Moscow retained the ‘national style’ so favoured by the last two Tsars. Both considered Petersburg, with its classical architectural style, its Western shops and bourgeoisie, alien to Russia. They tried to Muscovitize it by building churches in the Byzantine style — a fashion started under Nicholas I — and adding archaic architectural features to its cityscape. Alexander III, for example, commissioned a Temple of Christ’s Resurrection, which was built in the old Moscow style, to consecrate the site on the Catherine Canal where his father had been assassinated in 1881. With its onion domes, colourful mosaics and ornate decorations, it presented a bizarre contrast with the other great cathedrals of the city, the Kazan Cathedral and St Isaac’s, which were both built in the classical style. Nicholas refashioned buildings in the neo-Byzantine manner. The School Council of the Holy Synod was remodelled as the Alexander Nevsky Temple-Monument by embellishing its classical façade with Muscovite motifs and adding to its flat roof five onion domes and a triangular steeple. More buildings were built in the old Russian style to mark the Romanov jubilee. The Tercentenary Cathedral, near the Moscow Station, for example, was built in explicit imitation of the seventeenth-century Rostov church style. The Fedorov Village, built by Nicholas at Tsarskoe Selo, just outside the capital, elaborately recreated a seventeenth-century Kremlin and Cathedral.5 It was a sort of Muscovite theme park.
Nicholas and his father Alexander visited Moscow often and used it increasingly for ritualistic displays of homage to the dynasty. The coronation of the Tsar, which traditionally took place in Moscow, became an important symbolic event — much more so than it had been in the past. Nicholas made a habit of visiting Moscow at Easter — something no Tsar had done for more than fifty years. He convinced himself that only in Moscow and the provinces would he find his spiritual communion with the ordinary Russian people. ‘United in prayer with my people’, he wrote to Moscow’s Governor-General in 1900, shortly after his first Easter visit to the old capital, ‘I draw new strength for serving Russia, for her well-being and glory’.6 After 1906, when St Petersburg became the seat of the Duma, Nicholas looked even more towards Moscow and the provinces as a base on which to build his ‘popular autocracy’ as a rival to the parliament. With the support of the simple Russian people — represented increasingly by Grigorii Rasputin — he would reassert the power of the throne, which for too long had been forced to retreat before the bureaucracy and society.
The tercentenary jubilee marked the culmination of this Muscovite heritage industry. It was a dynastic celebration, centred on the symbols of the Tsar, with those of the state pushed firmly into the background. The squabble between Rasputin, the scandalous peasant ‘holy man’ whose influence had come to dominate the court, and Mikhail Rodzianko, President of the Duma, during the service in the Kazan Cathedral was symbolic in this respect. Rodzianko had taken offence because the members of the Duma were to be seated at the back, far behind the places reserved for the state councillors and senators. This, he complained to the master of ceremonies, was ‘not in accordance with the dignity’ of the parliament. ‘If the jubilee was intended to be a truly national rejoicing, it should not be overlooked that in 1613 it was an assembly of the people and not a group of officials that elected Mikhail Romanov Tsar of Russia.’ Rodzianko’s point was taken and the Duma places were duly exchanged for those of the senators. But when he arrived to take his own place he found it occupied by a dark bearded man in peasant dress, whom he immediately recognized as Rasputin. The two men confronted each other in a heated exchange, the one insisting on the sanctity of his position as President of the country’s elected parliament, the other claiming the support of the Tsar himself, until a sergeant-at-arms was called to restore the peace. With a heavy groan, Rasputin slunk away towards the exit, where he was helped on with his sable coat and shown to a waiting carriage.7