There’s a mood of real excitement at the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Nothing arouses the enthusiasm of museum curators like the chance to put on a big exhibition, and the one to be staged there this summer promises to rival the Turkish exhibition that has just opened at the Royal Academy in London. It’s that ambitious. The subject is the last years of tsarist Russia, and it’s entitled simply Nicholas and Alexandra. And everything in this exhibition is coming from the treasure-house that is the great Hermitage museum in St Petersburg.
“They offered us a choice,” says Maureen Barry, one of the exhibition’s two curators. “They could provide us with a ‘custom-built’ exhibition like the one now on show in Amsterdam, or we could build our own, taking whatever we wanted from the Hermitage.
We’ve gone for the second option, and it’s been marvellous being able to explore the Hermitage and select items for the exhibition. The people there couldn’t have been more helpful or accommodating. We’re very grateful to them, especially to Dr Fedorov, who is the head of the Russian department there, and to the museum’s director, Dr Piotrovsky.”
As an example of this eagerness to help and be involved, she cites one case. The Hermitage has a huge panorama, nearly 500ft long, painted on oil cloth. It was made in celebration of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, which Nicholas and Alexandra (Victoria’s granddaughter) attended.
This was unrolled for Barry and her fellow curator Godfrey Evans. “They said, ‘We’re sure there’s something Scottish here, but we don’t know what.’
So they kept unrolling it, and we couldn’t find any Scottish scene”, says Barry. “I was praying, ‘Please God, let us recognise something’.
It would have been so disappointing if we hadn’t. Then, when they’d unrolled maybe 90% of it, we came upon Balmoral, where Nicholas and Alexandra had visited; and then there was a scene with a hazy sort of sky, and it was Edinburgh seen from Leith.”
This isn’t the only Scottish connection to tsarist Russia. Queen Victoria also made the tsar colonel-in-chief of the Royal Scots Greys, and there is correspondence between him and the colonel of the regiment.
The exhibition will portray both the public and private life of the last Romanovs — and the contrast between them. Their public life was gorgeous: a succession of grand occasions, state visits to France, Japan and even Siam, now known as Thailand.
There will be records of the tsar’s coronation, performed with all the splendour of the Orthodox church, and of the wedding of Nicholas and Alexandra. A huge dinner service, the wedding gift of Kaiser William II, the tsar’s cousin, will also be on display. European royalty were linked by numerous family connections, and it will be hard to view that wedding gift without reflecting on ill-judged policies that led to the terrible war in 1914 which destroyed the three great empires of continental Europe.
Tsarist Russia was a military empire, and this will be reflected by the many different uniforms on show, including a miniature version worn by the young tsarevich Alexei. The regime was so thoroughly military that the tsar himself took command of his armies when the war was going badly — a role for which he was quite unsuited, and a decision which perhaps helped to bring about the revolution.
Awareness of the revolution, the future and of the family’s fate will be inescapable in the part of the exhibition devoted to the private life of the tsar, tsarina and their five children — “we seven”, as they called themselves.
A bloodstained shirt on display is a forerunner of things to come, worn by the tsar when he survived an assassination attempt in the early years of his reign. However, the domestic life of the imperial family was, considering their status, not ostentatious. The tsar would have been better suited to life as a country gentleman than as ruler of a military empire, or heading a constitutional monarchy like his cousin, King George V, whom he so closely resembled.
Considering the fate of the imperial family, it is extraordinary that so many personal items have been preserve. They were all keen on photography, and the Hermitage is home to about 150,000 family snaps, a selection of which will be on show in Edinburgh. In his memoir, Palimpsest, Gore Vidal recalls Princess Margaret looking up from a biography of Nicholas and Alexandra and, “with a shudder”, saying: “They’re so perfectly ordinary. I mean, it could be us.”
You can see what she meant.
Not everything was ordinary. There was Rasputin, the holy man and faith healer, who gained an ascendancy over the tsarina because of his ability to treat and calm the haemophiliac Alexei. “I think he was a bit of a fraud, but not really the monster he’s been portrayed,” says Barry. At least he had the sense to argue against the war, which made Alexandra so distrusted as “the German woman”.
It’s impossible to think of the last of the Romanovs and of the Hermitage without thinking of Fabergé, the Russian-born jeweller and goldsmith of Huguenot descent who created such elaborate and fantastic objects for the imperial family.
None of the famous Easter eggs will be on display; they are all in private collections, but the exhibition will include many examples of his work, including a miniature copy of the imperial regalia, made for the children, and an icon studded with tiny Easter eggs.
The exhibition stops short of the killing of the family by the Bolsheviks. Towards the end, there is a film made while the family was under house arrest. It shows the young Alexei spinning happily around in the snow. Then there is darkness, until 1991, when the funeral and memorial service finally took place. And now this exhibition; its appeal will be historical, aesthetic, dramatic. It promises to be one of the finest cultural events of the year.
Nicholas and Alexandra, sponsored by Scottish & Newcastle, will open at the Royal Museum of Scotland on July 14
