One reason for these failures, Michael believed, was that Russian strategy was wrong, as events would prove. The war was not about holding or taking territory, he told Natasha, but about destroying the enemy’s army.
What’s happening is that they are trying to achieve the opposite. All high commanders panic over every inch of land captured by the enemy instead of taking a huge fist and punching the enemy where it hurts. This simple and, one would think, reasonable tactic has not so far been used. They want to be strong everywhere, along the entire frontline, which of course is impossible and as a result, we are everywhere equally weak.13
Over the past three weeks the advancing Germans had captured Warsaw, then the string of Russian fortresses which in theory should have barred an enemy advance into Russia proper. Millions of shells had been locked up in them, along with hundreds of guns and tens of thousands of men. Now they had all gone with nothing to show for them.
In the first year of the war the Russian army had lost one and a half million men, the equivalent of the whole of its peacetime army; whereas it had been fighting until the spring beyond its own borders, now, for the first time since Napoleon, an enemy was advancing deep inside Russia’s homeland, driving back not only the army but hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding west in flight from homes and crops burned behind them.
Something had to be done and that something was firstly the dismissal of the disastrous war minister Sukhomlinov; he was not only incompetent but corrupt, supporting his high-spending and pretty young wife — at thirty, half his age — with bribes taken from army contracts.
For very different reasons the Supreme Commander, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich — ‘Uncle Nikolasha’ — was to be brought down. The Grand Duke was well regarded by both the British and the French, and by the Germans no less, and his great height and soldierly bearing had impressed foreign correspondents. He was also more victim than villain in the scandal of an army without enough shells, rifles, and boots. Neither the public nor the army sought him as scapegoat. Nevertheless he was removed.
But what shocked Russia, and its allies, was the name of his successor. The new Supreme Commander was to be a man who had never been on the battlefield, and whose last military command had been almost a quarter of a century earlier and then only as an officer in a squadron of the Hussar Life Guards.
The Tsar appointed himself.
Few approved. Michael’s cousin and friend Grand Duke Andrew observed that ‘thoughtful people believe that this step will cause general ill-feeling and discontent and have serious consequences’.14 The British military observer, Colonel Alfred Knox, who saw the army reaction at first hand, concluded that the misgivings ‘were almost universal’.15 The French ambassador Paléologue wrote that ‘the news has produced a deplorable impression.’16 Michael’s commander-in-chief Brusilov judged that Nicholas has ‘struck the last blow against himself’.17
But if Nicholas was to take himself off to Stavka, then who would represent him in the capital and handle the day-to-day affairs of state? The man who knew nothing about war answered that by appointing someone who knew nothing about politics. He gave the job to his wife.
The move was made almost casually within days of his arrival at headquarters and after a letter from her in which she wrote: ‘Do not fear for what remains behind…don’t laugh at silly old Wify but she has “trousers” on unseen…’18 His reply was as she had hoped. ‘Think my Wify, will you not come to the assistance of your hubby now that he is absent? What a pity that you have not been fulfilling this duty for a long time, or at least during the war!’19
The invitation was eagerly accepted. ‘Oh, Sweetheart, I am so touched you want my help. I am always ready to do anything for you, only never liked mixing up without being asked…’20 Since there was no formal announcement that Alexandra was now effectively Regent on the home front, it took some time before the public realised that henceforth Russia was to be ruled by a domineering, neurotic and hysterical Empress and behind her, hiding in her shadow, by the scandalous and hated figure of her hypnotic ‘holy man’, Grigory Rasputin.
THE power of Rasputin had grown massively over the past ten years as again and again he appeared to demonstrate that only he could save Alexandra’s son from the ‘bleeding disease’. When Alexis lay at the point of death in 1912, after injuring himself while jumping into a boat, an anguished Alexandra sent Rasputin a telegram begging his help, and received back a cable to say that ‘the Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much.’21 Shortly afterwards the crisis passed. A man who could save her son even by telegram was surely a man sent by God and she would ever after be utterly dependent on him.
A distracted and desperate mother vulnerable to a charlatan? Rasputin was not, in fact, the first mystical figure to influence affairs at Tsarskoe Selo. His most notorious predecessor was a hypnotic French quack, a former butcher’s assistant from Lyons and a man well known to the French police. Calling himself Dr Philippe — his real name was Philippe Nizier-Vachod — he appeared on the scene in 1901, long before the birth of Alexis. As with Rasputin he was known as ‘our Friend’ by both Nicholas and Alexandra.
Indeed, Alexandra’s references to Dr Philippe could easily be confused with her later references to Rasputin: ‘how rich life is since we know him and everything seems easier to bear’, she would write that year. Grand Duke Konstantin would note disturbingly that, after sessions with Dr Philippe in the nearby villa of Alexandra’s long-time companion Anna Vyrubova, Tsar and Empress would return ‘in an exalted state, as if in an ecstasy with radiant faces and shining eyes’.22
It was Dr Philippe who convinced Alexandra that she was at last, after four daughters, going to give Nicholas the son and heir she so obsessively sought. In August, 1902, as St Petersburg eagerly waited for the bells to ring and the cannon to roar, there was an unexpected disappointment. It was a phantom pregnancy,23 although Russia could not of course be told that. Even so, ‘our Friend’ survived that embarrassing setback; it was another eighteen months before Nicholas, with regret, felt it would be wiser to dismiss him. He died shortly afterwards, in 1905, in France.
Someone was bound to step into his shoes and so it was with the arrival of a new ‘Friend’ with hypnotic eyes — Rasputin. By 1915, Paléologue concluded that Alexandra ‘lives in a kind of hypnosis’; whatever Rasputin’s opinion or desire ‘she acquiesces and obeys at once. The ideas he suggests to her are implanted in her brain without provoking the slightest opposition.’24
Because few people outside court circles knew about the carefully guarded secret of Alexis’s haemophilia, wider society did not understand why Rasputin — a notorious womaniser and drunkard — was tolerated at all by Tsarskoe Selo. In the spring of 1915, British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart witnessed a disgraceful scene in an exclusive Moscow restaurant. From one of the ‘cabinets’ came wild shrieks, a man’s curses, the sound of broken glass and the banging of doors. ‘The cause of the disturbance was Rasputin — drunk and lecherous and neither police nor management dared evict him’.
It was only after a direct order from the assistant minister of the interior, General Dzhunkovsky, that Rasputin was arrested and taken away, ‘snarling and vowing vengeance’. Although released next day on ‘instructions from the highest quarter’,25 the public clamour was so great that Nicholas felt impelled to send him back to his Siberian village. Two weeks later Alexandra prevailed over her husband, and Rasputin was back as before. Three weeks later the general who had dared to arrest him was sacked.