“He is said to be more ambitious, more designing and more tyrannical than his elder brother; his character being more violent like that of his uncle Konstantin and cold and politic like that of his father. In short he seems, far more than his brother, the legitimate successor to the half-barbarian Peter, the insane Paul and the vehement Nicholas.” So wrote one English author in 1855. [1] This was the popular reputation of the second son of Tsar Nicholas I at the time of his father’s death: an autocrat and despot, perhaps even a contender for the throne of his liberal brother Alexander II. [2]

Short-tempered and determined he certainly was to be, but Konstantin Nikolaevich was ill-served by the assumption that these traits made him natural heir to the hard men and disloyal siblings of the Romanov dynasty. He was a liberal by inclination, far more so than Alexander was, a sailor by education and a natural-born reformer in that sphere too. “From what I know of his character, I feel thoroughly convinced that he is destined to play a prominent part, both in Russia and in Europe,” one particularly shrewd observer put it at this same time. “He is not only a man of immense talent, but he is a man of genius, and depend upon it, the world will hear more of him than they have hitherto done.” [3]

Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, Alexander II's controversial brother 

Part One: Born in the purple.

The city of St Petersburg, where Konstantin was born in the late summer of 1827, exhaled slowly and carefully. It was a year and a half since the attempted revolution that had attended the accession of Tsar Nicholas I, and the iron rule of the young Emperor had by now restored some degree of stability to Russia. High society went about its summer season of visits, while the imperial family gravitated back and forth between the Winter Palace and the Alexander Palace to the south at Tsarskoe Selo, awaiting the birth of this fifth child.

To wary foreigners, there was something barbarous about Russia and even its westernised capital: stories held that wolves ran about the streets of neo-classical buildings and murders abounded. But the imperial family were somehow rather apart from all this: the stern Nicholas and his pretty, rather fragile Empress Alexandra were members of the pan-European aristocratic family, and their own family featured prominently in the domestication of their public image. For so many years the Romanovs had squabbled fratricidally and overthrown one another; those several monarchs who had no siblings at all counted themselves fortunate. But the large family of Tsar Paul, Nicholas’s father, began to set a new standard: they had ambivalent relations with their parents (Paul’s heir was complicit in his murder after all) but within their generation they were generally friends with each other, and Nicholas named his four sons after his father’s four, as if to repeat the happy pattern. For him, family life was the supreme exemplar of national values: love for and duty to family equalled love for and duty to nation, and if he adhered to a high moral standard so too was he entitled to demand similar standards and sacrifices from his subjects. His four handsome children - the nine-year-old Heir Alexander and three little girls named Maria, Olga and Alexandra – played a crucial role in promoting this image, receiving their fair share of public caresses from both parents, and often playing in semi-public palace gardens beneath the admiring gazes of both Russians and foreigners.

Konstantin's father, the young Nicholas I , already known as the "Iron Tsar" who did not tolerate dissent

On September 9^th (Old Style) at 6 in the morning, the Empress gave birth to her long-awaited second son [4], who was duly named for his uncle, his grandfather’s second son. “It is very kind of the Emperor to have given my name in remembrance of me to the little fellow…May the good Lord have that the new Constantine find the same protection and the same happiness with the new Alexander which the old one did with the older one who alas lives no more,” [5] wrote Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, the flattered namesake.

So the scene was set by name as much as by position in the family: Konstantin Nikolaevich was to be raised to help and support his elder brother the future Emperor.

The old Konstantin had been very much a junior partner to Alexander I, who was cleverer and more ambitious than he. In this new generation, the pattern was almost reversed: Konstantin Nikolaevich, though so much younger, was intellectually more gifted and had a stronger will than his elder sibling, and was to act at times as the guide who kept him on the right road. The popular press, particularly the foreign press, eagerly sought from the start for signs of scandal. Of all strong-minded second or third sons of monarchs the same stories are told: how as a child he would plot his brother’s death; how he would innocently plan his own succession, blithely assuming that his dominant character entitled him to override the laws of primogeniture. Where Konstantin Nikolaevich was concerned, there was the additional fact of his having been born, unlike his brother, to a reigning Emperor. Konstantin was born “in the purple.” This counted for something special even in the family; his sister Olga drew attention to “Kosty’s” special status in her memoirs, as did others at court. [6] So, with respect to the young Konstantin Nikolaevich, this tale was repeated: that he would lie on the floor of his nursery examining a map and drawing lines across it, dividing the Russian Empire into portions and assigning the European districts to his brother, the Asian ones to himself [7]. The story rested on this presumption: that Nicholas had called his son Konstantin because he hoped that the child would one day claim Constantinople from the Turks, as Catherine the Great had planned when she selected the name for the first Konstantin, her grandson, and was raising him accordingly. It seems unlikely: the second Konstantin was named for the man rather than the ancient mythical destiny - but who knows? perhaps he did play like this: most children like to mess about with maps and flags. And if he did, there was an element of prescience there; for although here was to be no Asian empire for Konstantin Nikolaevich, Siberia was one of his preoccupations as an adult and an important plank in his strategy as a Naval pioneer. Under Konstantin’s influence, Russia looked eastward, setting the tone for the last years of the dynasty.

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