Another beautiful estate in that neighbourhood, which belonged to Gen. Leo Naryshkin, was laid out by Joachim Tascher, said to have been a natural half-brother of Josephine, the first empress of France. When Napoleon became emperor, Josephine offered Tascher a position suitable to his rank and relationship, but he declined and begged to be allowed to remain in obscurity, to follow his favourite pursuit of gardening.
Alexander III, emperor of Russia and father of the present czar, died October 20, 1894, in a pretty little villa near Yalta, on the southern coast of the Crimea, overlooking the Black Sea. It was his favourite residence, as it was that of his father, Alexander II, before him. At Livadia he could throw off those dignities which hedge about a king, and live like an ordinary man. A stately chapel of the Byzantine type of architecture, with five gilded domes, stands on the hillside near by as a memorial to this man whose piety and devotion were among his most marked characteristics. He was a stern, relentless, implacable autocrat, very different in character and disposition from his father and his son, men of amiable disposition and great forbearance.
It is a singular fact that every alternate czar has been a tyrant and every other one a broad-minded man of liberal views. But Alexander III was embittered by the assassination of his father, who was the most generous and benevolent of all the czars. He emancipated the serfs and gave them land and a draft of a constitution giving Russia a parliamentary government, which he intended to confer as a voluntary gift upon his subjects, lay upon his desk the morning he was assassinated. He was gentle and considerate and unselfish as McKinley, and died the same way. No assassination was ever less excusable.
Alexander III was naturally of a reticent, morbid disposition, without the slightest sense of humour, but lofty aspirations and a keen appreciation of his imperial prerogatives and power. He conceived it to be his duty to punish the entire 135,000,000 population of Russia for the crime of a few fanatics, and thus arrested the progress of Russian civilization during the entire period of his reign. He even went so far as to issue an edict forbidding the education of the peasants, because it made them discontented, closing all the schools in Russia to the children of the labouring class and permitting the attendance only of those whose parents had a certain income and paid a certain amount of taxes. This decree was revoked by his son Nicholas II, who has few of his characteristics, and is as different from him as one man can be from another.
Alexander III sent more poor creatures to Siberia than all the other czars. He was neither merciful nor just; his heavy hand fell upon the innocent as well as the guilty. No modern monarch has caused so much grief, so much suffering, or was guilty of greater cruelty and injustice in his administration.
No Oriental king of the Middle Ages was more fond of display, or more rigorous in his requirements concerning the ceremonies and the etiquette of his court, yet the man loved to escape his imperial splendour and seek rest and recreation in a cottage of not more than twenty rooms, with his wife and children and a few Tartar servants. There he lived the simple life and enjoyed it. There was no ceremony; there was no etiquette; there was no imperial prestige to maintain. There he became the husband and father instead of the king.
In the palaces of St. Petersburg he was always surrounded by Cossacks, policemen, and detectives, even in the family circle, and never crossed the threshold of his apartments without a military guard. At Livadia, fearless of anarchists, he wandered about the village with his wife and children, talked familiarly with the Tartar peasants, and often visited the villas of his friends. There was a guard at the gate and a sentinel at the door of the cottage, but he never had an escort when he went out for his walks or drives.
There are thousands of more spacious and pretentious country villas in Russia; there are hundreds of thousands in the United States more beautiful, more luxurious and better equipped than that in which he lived and died. Every village in America has homes equally elegant and comfortable, but Alexander III found it the most satisfactory and the most restful of all the places in the world. In the little red cottage, with its broad verandas and its walls half hidden with vines, he could forget the affairs of state that made his reign so stormy.
Alexander II, his father, fled to Livadia every winter for two or three months for relaxation from the stern and tragic life he was compelled to lead. The present czar has spent his happiest days there, also, and during his childhood was brought every winter to escape the arctic climate of St. Petersburg, with his governesses and tutors, and the rooms which he and his brothers occupied remain very much as they were in those days. They open immediately off a small hallway in the centre of the cottage on the ground floor, and the windows, which are only breast high from the lawn, overlook the garden. They are small and cosy, but very plain. Boyish traps are still hanging on the walls; tennis rackets, fencing foils and masks and rubber-soled canvas shoes.
There is an ordinary hat rack, a table and two plain chairs in the entrance hall. Two or three hats that belonged to Alexander III still remain where he hung them when he wore them last. The children’s schoolroom and the bedrooms of the boys occupy one half of the ground floor. On the opposite side is a dining-room, a very plain apartment, with a polished floor and a rug and sideboards, carving tables, high-backed mahogany chairs and a table that will seat twenty.