Great Catherine

Her name was Sophia Frederica Augusta.  She was a minor eighteenth century German princess of the minor eighteenth century duchy of Anhalt-Zerbst.  In the normal course of things she would have married a minor German prince, lived a minor German life and passed into history, minor and unnoticed.  But destiny had another path and another name for Sophia.  She became Ekaterina.  She became Catherine, Empress of all the Russias, known as ‘the Great’ even in her own lifetime.   

Catherine is one of those figures in history who has an enduring fascination for me.  I’m in Edinburgh at the present.  I came here specifically to visit the recently opened Catherine the Great – An Enlightened Empress exhibition in the National Museum of Scotland.  Marking the 250th anniversary of the coup d’état which placed her on the throne of Russia, it tells Catherine’s story through a collection of letters, diaries, jewellery, paintings, sculptures and dresses. 

Most of the items come from the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, including a recently restored giant coronation portrait, on show for the first time since the Revolution of 1917 which destroyed the Romanov dynasty.  The whole thing is a marvel, from the paintings, the porcelain, the grand dinner services and the intimate cameos.  It’s a story of Russia in peace and in war, a story of a Russia made even greater by a cultured, humane and civilized princess who took her adopted home to her heart. 

Catherine came to Russia to marry the Grand Duke Peter, the nephew of the reigning Empress Elizabeth.  If things had gone well she may have lived largely in her husband’s shadows and the shadows of history, like most other imperial consorts.  But they did not go well.  Peter and his new Grand Duchess developed a mutual loathing for one another, each taking a variety of lovers. 

Catherine was later to claim that her son Paul I, who succeeded her in 1796, was not the child of Peter but of Sergei Saltykov, one of her many paramours.  It’s almost certainly untrue.  Paul in character and attitude bore a striking resemblance to Peter, and was to fall from power for much the same reasons.  The two portraits on display in Edinburgh also show a remarkable physical similarity between father and son.

In the course of researching Catherine I came across an old movie called The Scarlett Empress, a 1934 historical drama directed by Josef von Sternberg, with Marlene Dietrich in the title role.  She’s really very good in the part, managing to catch the child-like simplicity of the young princess at one point and the scheming femme fatale at the next.  The movie has a marvellous Gothic cum expressionist quality.  The gargoyle thrones and the skeleton table decoration are really quite something.  The history, though, is as grotesque as the gargoyles, with Peter played as an inanely grinning imbecile by Sam Jaffe.

Peter III was, in truth, a competent and reforming emperor, but he managed to alienate just about everyone of significance in Russia, not just his wife.  With the support of the army and the leading Orthodox clergy, Catherine overthrew her husband in the coup of June 1762, after he had only been on the throne for a few months.  She went on to rule in her own right as Catherine II, while Peter was murdered. 

A black beginning did not presage a black reign; just the contrary.  Catherine was to prove herself the most cultured and civilized ruler ever to sit on the throne of Russia, the friend and correspondent of such luminaries of the Enlightenment as Denis Diderot and Voltaire.  I knew about this.  What I did not know is that she also had reason to be grateful to Charles James Fox, that old Whig bore.  His bust is one of the items on display! 

In the course of her reign, until the onset of the French Revolution introduced a note of caution, Catherine was instrumental in the pursuit of social and economic reform.  She was a great patron of the arts and sciences, encouraging all sorts of new enterprises.   In 1763 she founded Russia’s first College of Medicine.  Russia’s army and navy were hugely expanded, bringing success in war, particularly in successive conflicts with the Ottoman Turks.  Power, majesty and art; it was all a reflection of her glory. 

I loved it all; I spent over two hours in close examination of all sorts of marvellous things, walking in the footsteps of a remarkable woman, Matruschka, a petty German who became a great Russian.  I thought of her and her lovers, particularly of Prince Grigory Potemkin, the great passion of her life, shown here in portrait and sculpture.  

I loved Catherine’s formal paintings, pure expressions of power and majesty. But it was another kind of depiction altogether that wholly beguiled me.  Painted by Vladimir Borovikovsky, it shows Catherine, informally dressed, walking with her dog in the parkland of Tsarskoye Selo, a country gentlewoman, unremarkably remarkable.   The other remarkable painting is that entitled Catherine II in Travelling Costume by Mikhail Shibanov, formally accepted by the Empress though it is unflattering portrait, showing her as an old woman. 

Quite apart from being Russia’s most successful ruler, Catherine was an avid collector of all sorts of objets d’art.  The Edinburgh showcase was but a small cross-section of her collection, antiques and sculpture as well as painting.  And all that sumptuous table ware, porcelain, ceramics, jewels, gold and silver! 

It was such a pleasure also to see some of the court costumes and regimental dresses that the Empress herself wore.  When I was in Moscow I saw the boots that Peter the Great made for himself on display in the Kremlin Armoury Museum.  He was a giant of a man, reflected in his footwear.  Catherine was of more modest stature, reflected in her own costumes.  But as I stood and watched, knowing that she had been there, I still felt myself in the presence of one of history’s giants.  If Russians knew how to read, she once said, they would write me off.  Russians know how to read; they will never write Catherine off.  Such a thing is impossible.  

Romanov Remembrance

Among the more notable items I saw on my tour of the Kremlin on a particularly memorable Christmas Day, several years ago now, was the Faberge Eggs in the Armoury Museum, those splendid jewelled creations made by the firm of Peter Carl Faberge for the last two Tsars to mark the Easter holiday.

There is one in particular that stood out - the Kremlin Egg, a gift from Nicholas to the Empress Alexandra in 1906. For me there was something almost magical in this, a trace from the past, a link with those long dead royal martyrs, the first drops in an ocean of martyrdom.

The Russian royal family has long been a subject of unique and compelling fascination for me, not just Nicholas and Alexandra but also Alexi, the Tsarevich, murdered when he was only fourteen years old, and his four sisters, the grand duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, who referred to themselves collectively as OTMA.

The murder of the royal family in July 1918 in the sinisterly named House of Special Purpose in Yekaterinburg was a hideous crime. Even at the time it was a source of some embarrassment to the Soviet government. It was over a year after the event before it was prepared to admit that Alexandra and the children had been killed alongside Nicholas, and even then the Social Revolutionaries, opponents of the Bolsheviks, were blamed for the atrocity.

The guilt has haunted Russia ever since, evidenced by the fact that no fewer than three official inquiries have been opened into the regicide since the fall of communism, opened and then closed again just as quickly.

Now the Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna Romanov, a descendent of the last Tsar who also claims to be his heir, has won an important victory in a Moscow court, obliging Russia’s Investigative Committee to hand over the eight hundred page dossier it holds on the killings and the aftermath. Her lawyer, who claimed it as a triumph over “legal nihilism in Russia,” says that she plans to publish the documents along with her own assessment of the investigation carried out by the state prosecutors.

Even after the fall of the Soviet Union the official line taken by the judicial system was that massacre had been a ‘crime’ rather than an act of state policy. The reticence here clearly goes beyond the legal system into the heart of Russian history and politics. There has never been a serious attempt to come to terms with the past, no truth and reconciliation committee to draw attention to the criminality of a huge part Russia’s recent history. After all Lenin, or what purports to be Lenin, the criminal in chief, still sleeps in Red Square, an object of idle curiosity.

I honestly don’t think these documents will tell us much that we don’t already know. The communist line that it was chiefly the work of the local Ural Soviet, backed by Yakov Sverdlov, then Party Secretary, was an obvious lie, an attempt at official distance. Perhaps we may learn a little more about the precise role of Lenin and the Bolshevik government. I said in a previous article (The Murder of the Romanovs) that Lenin was at least guilty by association. It will be helpful if the accusation can be made more exact.

The remains of the Tsar and his family were finally interred in the Cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Saint Petersburg. Now canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church, they stand as testimony to the crimes of communism. Transfigured in death, the triumph of the Romanovs has as been all the greater.

Imp

I often get asked about my name, my Christian name (I, at lest, still use that expression!). Am I Russian, have I some Russian influence in my background, am I named after the Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov? It's a measure, I suppose, of how unusual this name still is in England. Let me tell you how unusual. When the movie Anastasia was released, a movie I still love, I was asked by my classmates if it was about me! It's an illusion that my parents did nothing to dispel. The truth, as always, is wholly mundane. My grandmother, my mother's mother, was also Anastasia, though I have no idea why.

Still the association with the tragic Grand Duchess has always fascinated me. She was the youngest of the last Tsar's four daughters, who referred to themselves collectively as OTMA, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. I'm not quite sure why but Anastasia, possibly because she was the youngest daughter, the youngest of the Romanov children until her brother Alexi was born in August 1904, has attracted a particular romance, something that the Disney corporation, amongst others, exploited. The popular rumour was that she survived the massacre of her family by the communists in 1918, a rumour that allowed various pretenders to arise, the most notable of whom is one Anna Anderson. It's all rubbish of course; Anastasia, Saint Anastasia in the Orthodox Church, died with her parents, her sisters and her brother.

There is one small and competently unimportant coincidence, a connection between the Grand Duchess and myself, something that overwhelmed me when I discovered what it was. When I set up this blog in April of last year I decided to call it Ana the Imp. Ana is simple enough, just an abbreviation of my name. An imp is a mischievous little devil, which suited my character, so Ana the Imp it was. It was when I decided to write an article on the Grand Duchess that I discovered in my researches that her nickname within the family was Shvibzak. The thing is, you see, Shvibzak is the Russian word for imp.

Portrait of an Assassin

Peter Voikov was born in 1888. The son of a mining engineer, he became involed in revolutionary activity at an early age, and was expelled both from grammar school and later from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. He went into exile in Switzerland, where he graduated from the University of Geneva. On returning to Russia in August 1917 he joined the Bolsheviks, and was appointed People's Commissar for Government Supply for the Ural region in 1918, where he was known by his party code name of 'Intellectual'.

He subsequently became an important member of the Ural Soviet. He knew N. N. Ipatiev, and had visited his house in Ekaterinburg before it was selected as the final residence of the Tsar Nicholas and his family; his wife, Alexandra his son, Alexy and his four daughters, Olga, Maria, Tatiana and, my favourite, Anastasia. It seems to have been on the basis of information supplied by Voikhov that Ipatiev was summoned to the office of the Soviet at the end of April 1918 and ordered to vacate what was soon to be called 'The House of Special Purpose.'

Clearly party to the decision to murder the royal family, Voikov was given the specific task of arranging for the disposal of their remains, obtaining 150 gallons of gasoline and 400 pounds of sulphuric acid, the latter from the Ekaterinburg pharmacy. After the killings he was to declare that "The world will never know what we did with them." His role in the affair was fully investigated by the commission set up after the White Army captured Ekaterinburg from the Bolsheviks.

Voikov was appointed Soviet ambassador to Poland in 1924, and was assassinated in Warsaw in 1927 by a Russian monarchist for his part in the killing of Nicholas and his family.

The Murder of the Romanovs

The decision to murder the Russian royal family reveals much about the inner workings of the Bolshevik Party at the time. The official story given out was that the task had been delegated to the Ural Soviet, though the murder of the Tsaritsa Alexandra and the five children was kept secret for over a year after the event.

It is still not been proved conclusively just how the decision to kill the family was arrived at; if it was central, or if it was local; and, if central, who exactly was involved. However, I can offer you a reasonable amount of circumstantial evidence that points quite firmly at Moscow.

For the Ural Soviet the presence of the royal family at Yekaterinburg was a growing concern, especially as the Czech Legion and other White forces approaching the town from the east. Rather than risk moving them they decided on execution, though they were unwilling to act without the approval the Council of Commissars in Moscow. Ivan Goloschekin, a member of the Ural Soviet who also happened to be a friend of Yakov Sverdlov, a close political associate of Lenin, was sent to Moscow to take soundings on the matter. He was told by Sverdlov that the government was still considering putting Nicholas on trial, an idea favoured by Trotsky. However, the steady advance of the Whites towards Yekaterinburg changed this, and Goloschekin was able to return with the news that Moscow had delegated the whole business to the Ural Soviet.

With Lenin's permission Sverdlov formally announced the death of Nicholas at a meeting of the Executive Council on 18 July 1918. Nothing was said of the fate of the Empress Alexandra and the five children, though an official statement was issued that they had all been moved. However, both Lenin and Sverdlov knew that they were all dead. They had been so advised by telegram from Yekaterinburg. The statement was a lie.

A year passed before the government admitted that they had all been shot, though the Social Revolutionaries were blamed. However, the real link between Moscow and the Urals was later made clear in a conversation between Sverdlov and Trotsky. Trotsky reports this in his memoirs thus;

"My next visit to Moscow took place after the fall of Yekaterinburg. Talking to Sverdlov, I asked in passing: 'Oh, yes, and where is the Tsar?
'It's all over,' he answered. 'He has been shot.'
'And where is the family?'
'And the family along with him.'
'All of them?', I asked, apparently with a touch of surprise.
'All of them,' replied Sverdlov. 'What about it?' He was waiting to see my reaction, I made no reply.
'And who made the decision?', I asked.
'We decided it here. Ilych [Lenin] believed that we shouldn't leave the Whites a live banner to rally round, especially under the present difficult circumstances.'
I did not ask any further questions and considered the matter closed. Actually, the decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of the summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar's family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks to show that there was no turning back, that ahead lay only complete victory or complete ruin...This Lenin sensed well."

Sverdlov was certainly implicated in the murder of the entire family. It is difficult to accept that he would not have cleared this with Lenin, who, in my estimation, is guilty by association. He certainly deserves part of the 'credit' for this atrocity.

Since I wrote this I now have sufficient leads to conclude that there was something else at work, an indication that the Tsar and his family were early victims of the forms of struggle that were to become commonplace among the Bolsheviks in years to come. Although approved by the Central Committee the projected trial of the Tsar was very much Trotsky's favoured project, one where he would have appeared as prosecutor-in-chief. It would have added greatly to his prestige, and Sverdlov knew this. You see, the ideological struggles of the pre-Revolution days were about to give way to struggles over power. Sverdlov understood this in the way that Trotsky did not; and it was Sverdlov-in collaboration with the Ural Soviet-who did his best to undermine the projected trial.

Take a look again at the exchange reported by Trotsky in his Memoirs-it shows his surprise and Sverdlov's gleeful defiance. It's almost as if he is inviting Trotsky to object, which clearly he could not do. He had been outmaneuvered, decisively so, and his subsequent gloss was little more than a feeble attempt to make the best of the situation. In this, Sverdlov, the administrator, represented the Party, the old Bolshevik core, against the mercurial Trotsky, the former Menshevik. Sverdlov died in 1919, but the challenge to Trotsky was soon to be taken up by an even more formidable opponent.

Anastasia Romanova

I’ve long had a fascination with Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanov for obvious reasons. It began when mother and father took me when I was about eleven years old to see Anastasia, the Disney movie, saying it was about me!

The real Anastasia was born on the 18 June 1901 in the Gregorian Calendar, the youngest of the four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Tsaritsa Alexandra. She had three older sisters: Olga, Tatiana and Maria. In time the four Grand Duchesses were to refer to themselves collectively as OTMA from the initial letters of their first names. Anastasia was to remain the youngest child until the birth of her brother, Alexi, in August 1904.

She was known by various names within the family, including Nastaya or Nastas but my favourite has to be Shvibzak, her nickname, the Russian word for ‘Imp’. Anastasia grew up to be a true Imp: lively, intelligent and vivacious, with a caustic wit, which often got her into trouble. Gleb Botkin, the son of the Romanov court physician, later wrote of her,

She undoubtedly held the record for punishable deeds in her family, for in naughtiness she was a true genius.

Less generously her distant cousin, Princess Georgievna, said that she was nasty to the point of being evil. But for all that she was, like her sisters, devoted to her brother, who suffered from hemophilia.

When her father was forced to abdicate in March 1917 Anastasia and the rest of the family went into captivity, less and less comfortable over time. While at Tobolsk she wrote an essay on Evelyn Hope, the poem by Robert Browning, which included the following melancholy passage in uncertain English;

When she died she was only sixteen years old. There was a man who loved her without having seen her but knew her very well. And she heard of him also. He never could tell her that he loved her, and now she was dead. But still he thought that when he and she will live their next life whenever it will be…

Anastasia herself was murdered by the Communists along with the rest of her family in July 1918, aged only seventeen. In 2000 the beautiful little princess, who was never to know love, was canonised with the rest of her family by the Russian Orthodox Church.