The Romanovs

emperor regarded Tolstoy’s War and Peace as a masterpiece but saw him as a ‘godless nihilist’ and banned his later socialistic works such as What I Believe. After Dostoevsky’s death in 1881, Tolstoy was the most famous man in Russia with huge moral authority, but he was increasingly hostile to the regime, embracing a puritanical Christian socialism with sanctimonious dogmatism.

While Russia surged towards industrialized modernity, the emperor tried to hold the state together by mobilizing Russian nationalism and repressing the empire’s minorities. In this multinational empire of 104 nationalities speaking 146 languages, according to the 1897 census, pure Russians (excluding Ukrainians) were a minority of 44 per cent.

Between 1890 and 1900, the production of pig iron, steel and coal all tripled, railway tracks doubled in length while textiles made Russia one of the world’s top five industrial powers. Oil was discovered in Baku, which soon produced half of the world’s supply.

Russia was still mired in depression. In 1891, thousands died in a famine, exacerbated by the policy to finance industrialization by borrowing, which in turn had to be paid for by selling grain abroad.

Created after the Crimean War out of Wallachia and Moldavia, the new state of Romania had appointed a Catholic cousin of the Prussian king, Karl von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen as its ruling prince and later king, Carol I.

Among his achievements, Bariatinsky gradually swallowed the last Georgian principalities. First was Abkhazia, ruled for forty years by the ex-Muslim Hamud Bey, who became Prince Mikheil Shervashidze; then Mingrelia was annexed from the Dadiani dynasty.

Bismarck hoped to settle the Balkans, fearing, as he put it prophetically, that ‘One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.’

On 19 February, Abdul Hamid signed the Treaty of San Stefano, which created a large Russian client-state, Bulgaria, dominating the Balkans, almost the size of the medieval Bulgar empire, recognized the full independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania, and granted Russia Bessarabia and conquests from Kars to Batumi plus territory in Anatolia and right of passage through the Straits.

No Russian princess had ever married an Englishman, Alexander had not forgiven Victoria for the Crimean War, and the empires were bitter rivals.

A student Nihilist named Sergei Nechaev, a charismatic psychopath, had been inspired by Chernyshevsky’s ‘Special Man’ to believe that only the assassination of the entire Romanov dynasty could free Russia.