The Russian Dagger: Cold War in the Days of the Tsars

337 Pages·2019·1.42 MB·English

by  Virginia Cowles

The Russian Dagger

Virginia Cowles
© Virginia Cowles

Virginia Cowles has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published 1969 by Collins.

This edition published 2018 by Sharpe Books.
For my sister and brother-in-law
Mary and Carl Holtz.
Table of Contents

Preface
ONE - Philosophers at Court
TWO – The New Reign
THREE - Fishing in Troubled Waters
FOUR – Bitter Victory
FIVE – The Killers
SIX - A Cousin’s Vendetta
SEVEN - Poacher Turned Gamekeeper
EIGHT - Uneasy Lies the Head
NINE - Protectress of all the Slavs
TEN - Who Planned Sarajevo?
ELEVEN - The Red Czars
Acknowledgments
Preface

This is the story of Russia’s attempts to expand in Europe in the sixty years
before the First World War, against a background of dynastic relationships
which made the rivalries personal and acute. A love of conspiracy has always
been part of the Russian character; and the author has tried to show how the rise
of the revolutionary movement affected Russian techniques of expansion. In
1881 Count Leo Tolstoy was horrified by the assassination of Alexander II. He
felt that the terrorists, descendants of Nihilists and Nechaevsti who preached the
destruction of moral ethics, were spreading a poison that threatened the whole
fabric of Russian society. He asked the new Czar to pardon the regicides as an
act of Christian mercy, which might have the effect of jerking the country to its
senses. Alexander III not only refused but allowed his officials to employ the
same methods of violence and treachery in extending Russian influence in
Europe. The two movements, subversion at home and subversion abroad, not
only stimulated but fed one another. Although their aims were very different,
one to overthrow the Czar, the other to increase the Czar’s power, both were
revolutionary.
They flourished side by side and did not cease with the Bolshevik seizure of
power in 1917. Nechaev’s belief, postulated nearly half a century earlier, that the
end justifies the means, became part of Russian Communist policy, and the
imperialism of the white Czars was copied and improved by the red Czars.
The similarity between the two Russias, past and present, is startling and
depressing. Russia has produced many great writers and musicians, but very few
great rulers. It is impossible to separate government and governed forever. Why
is there always a new tyrant to take the place of the old? Does it spring from the
Asiatic streak in the Russian character? Or, as Tolstoy prophesied, is it a natural
consequence of the rejection of Christianity? This book does not attempt an
answer but tries to show what happened.
VIRGINIA COWLES
April, 1969
19 Chester Square, London, S.W.1
ONE - Philosophers at Court

It was no secret, in the winter of 1839, that the romantic, twenty-year-old
Grand Duke Alexander, eldest son of Nicholas I of Russia, was touring the
German kingdoms in search of a wife. The tyrannical Czar doted on his heir and
had given him permission to make his own choice, provided the lady was not a
commoner and not a Roman Catholic. The Empress Alexandra, on the other
hand, favoured one of the Baden girls and anxiously awaited news from the poet
Zhukovsky, her son’s tutor and travelling companion. When the letter arrived,
however, it was plain that the Karlsruhe visit had been a failure. The poet
scarcely mentioned the Baden princesses, observing tactfully that he had
“nothing to tell about the Grand Duke’s heart. It keeps its own secret.”
Darmstadt was not on the Grand Duke’s itinerary except as a place to change
horses en route to Mainz, and to pay a brief courtesy call on the Grand Duke
Louis II of Hesse-Darmstadt. But the Russian entourage arrived in the small, out
of the way capital some hours behind schedule and the Grand Duke’s aide
persuaded his master not to proceed farther until the morning. Louis was
delighted to entertain such distinguished company. He took his guests to the
opera and arranged a late supper at the palace. He presented to Alexander his
three sons, the youngest of whom was the sixteen-year-old Prince Alexander of
Hesse, and his only daughter, the fifteen-year-old Princess Marie. Marie had
huge eyes and a delicate, oval face. Not only was she beautiful but “alarmingly
intelligent.”
The Grand Duke Alexander could not take his eyes from her. The next
morning, he sought out the faithful Zhukovsky and told him that he had fallen
hopelessly in love. “Just where we least expected it to happen it has happened,”
Zhukovsky wrote exultingly to the Empress Alexandra. “To call him happy
would be hardly enough… I am convinced that it is God’s intention for him…
The aim of all our travels is at last achieved… Now he will be waiting for your
Majesty’s blessing and consent…’
The Princess had fallen just as deeply in love, for the tall, blue-eyed Alexander
not only was gentle and thoughtful but the handsomest prince in Europe. He
cancelled his tour, and the lovers spent idyllic days together until a special
courier arrived from St. Petersburg with a shattering letter from the Czar. He
forbade the engagement and demanded Alexander’s instant return to Russia,
reminding him that he was due to visit the Court of St. James in two months’
time. No explanation was given. White-lipped, Alexander saw the Grand Duke
Louis and told him that despite the Czar’s attitude he considered himself
betrothed to Marie and would never marry anyone else. His father was fond of
him, he said, and he was certain that in the end he would overcome his
objections.
Not until he reached the Russian capital did he learn the reason for the Czar’s
attitude. It sprang from stories concerning the unconventional behaviour of
Princess Marie’s mother, the Grand Duchess, who had died some years earlier.
Apparently this well-connected lady, whose four sisters had shared the thrones
of Russia, Sweden, Brunswick and Bavaria, resented her husband’s many
infidelities, and after bearing him three sons, decided to strike out on her own.
She took as her lover the Court Chamberlain, the Baron Augustus von
Senarclens Grancy. Fourteen years after the birth of her last child she became
pregnant again; first came Alexander, then Marie. Tongues wagged furiously but
the Grand Duke remained impervious, and his unruffled acceptance of paternity
forced the Grand Duchess’s detractors to keep their indignation under control.
The Czarevitch was unmoved by this disclosure; if he had to choose between
Marie and the throne, he said, he would prefer to relinquish the throne. Nicholas
sympathised, for he had fallen deeply in love with Alexandra when, as the
beautiful Princess Charlotte of Prussia, she had become engaged to him; and he
continued to love her all his life. Within a few days he was defending the choice
his son had made. “When the Emperor paid me the honour of discussing the
probability of the marriage of his son to the Princess of Darmstadt,” the Austrian
Ambassador wrote to Prince Metternich that April, “he told me he knew all that
was said about the irregularity of her birth but as the Grand Duke took no notice
of it, he found nothing to object to on that account.”
The Empress Alexandra was not so easy to win over. “I know that secretly this
choice pains the Empress. She is very vexed by the doubts over the Princess’s
birth, or at least by the rumours of it in Germany.” The Empress had other
objections, for Marie’s mother had died of consumption and Marie herself was
known to suffer from “a delicate chest.” The final decision was that Alexander
must put aside all thought of an engagement for at least a year; at the end of the
period his parents would reconsider the proposal. Then they packed him off to
England.
The Grand Duke’s upbringing had been so thorough that he managed to
conceal his agitation from the twenty-year-old Queen Victoria and to be a model
of charm and attentiveness. He accompanied her to concerts and theatres and
partnered her in lively mazurkas and German country dances which were quite
new to her. “I never enjoyed myself more,” she wrote in her Journal. “… I got to
bed by to ¼ to 3 but could not sleep till 5. I really am quite in love with the
Grand Duke; he is a dear, delightful young man.” However, the sharp-eyed
French nobleman, the Marquis de Custine, who met the Grand Duke at Ems on
the return journey from England, noticed an “inward suffering.” Although he
remarked on Alexander’s Grecian profile and described him as “one of the finest
models of a prince I have ever met with” he observed “that he is under the
influence of some cause of grief; his eyelids are cast down with a sadness that
betrays the cares of a riper age.”
Alexander’s confidence in his father was not mistaken, and the wedding took
place in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1841. Marie’s brother, the eighteen-year-
old Alexander of Hesse, agreed to settle permanently in Russia in order to be
near his sister. He was commissioned as a colonel in the Chevalier Gardes and