Alexandra (24 page)

The doctor, Korovin, and the surgeon Fedorov were summoned. They applied a bandage to the baby’s navel, and watched over him as, that night, he continued to lose
blood.

What conversations took place during those interminable, alarming hours cannot be known with certainty, but the emperor and empress must have questioned the doctors urgently, perhaps
frantically.
⁸
Would there be haemorrhaging from the wound? Would the tsarevich die? Did he have the bleeding disease? What could be done to stop
the flow of blood? Alix must have recalled the shattered mirror, the omen of tragedy, with a frisson of horror. She and Nicky both must have prayed fervently for the healing of their son before the
crowded screen of icons in their bedroom and Alexei’s. They must have petitioned God and Jesus and Mary and all the saints, and Philippe as well, in a torrent of heartfelt appeal.

The following morning the bleeding continued, finally ceasing at noon. When the bandages remained free of blood for several hours, the tension began to ease – but only slightly. The
doctors, the wet-nurse and other servants, the family remained watchful, alert for a resumption of the bleeding. And watchful too for bruises or dark patches on the tiny body, evidence of internal
bleeding.

A son had been born, but with his birth had come an anxiety so overwhelming as to be incalculable. For the baby’s life to be preserved – and few babies with the bleeding disease
survived childhood in 1904 – he would have to be guarded and protected with extravagant care. And even then there was no certainty that he would live into boyhood, much less into manhood. A
fall, a jar, an accident of any kind could carry him off within hours.

What was more, Alix must have realized that if she had another child, and it was a boy, there was a strong chance that this second son too would inherit the English disease. So Alexei was to be
her only hope.

Meanwhile, the court and nation, and the public outside of Russia, who were still in a celebratory mood and sending gifts and congratulations, must not find out that the heir to the throne was
unhealthy. Those who knew were sworn to secrecy, and Alix and Nicky steeled themselves to hide their pain and worry.

‘Oh, what anguish it was,’ Alix wrote after the tsarevich’s first attack of bleeding, ‘and not to let others see the knife digging in
one.’
⁹
Dissimulation was not natural to her, yet she forced herself to adopt a closed expression; neither her apprehension nor her relief
must show. She continued to nurse her ‘little sunbeam’, and to show him off to visitors, busying herself making Christmas gifts for the soldiers and inspecting the products of her
workshop before they were sent east.

For of course the demands of the war had to take precedence over all else. The soldiers suffering in Port Arthur must not suspect that their tsarevich, whose godfathers they were, and in whose
birth they had rejoiced, could die at any time. They must be supported, encouraged, healed, kept alive so that they could fight on.

But as Christmas approached the soldiers were increasingly unable to fight. They had no ammunition left. They had little to eat. They froze at night and, in the daytime, sweated with typhoid
fever. Day after day they waited for a relieving force to arrive by sea, but none came.

They could no longer bury the dead in the frozen ground. The bodies, naked and pale, were heaped into piles and left to the elements, until the snow made them into white mounds, featureless and
stark against the grey sky.

Early in January, 1905, the Russian defenders of Port Arthur surrendered to the Japanese, and as the news spread throughout Russia there was disbelief, then lamentation, then churning resentment
and a resolute cry for revenge.

F
rost rimed the metal railings of the bridges over the frozen Neva, and the sky was low and heavy with grey clouds. Trams ran along Nevsky
Prospekt, passing the vast, many-windowed Winter Palace, then crossing the river to Vassily Island and going down Eight-Line Street towards the poorer quarters of the city. The streets were quiet,
few sleighs glided along the roads, bells jangling, and even fewer pedestrians were out amid the shops, their breath freezing in the harshly cold air. Only a handful of droshky drivers sat, huddled
in layers of wool and fur, their beards white with frost, waiting to be hired, for most of the drivers were on strike and only the most desperate came out in the cruel chill of the midwinter
morning in hopes of earning a fare.

Out on the icebound river, the marine police were patrolling in groups of two and three, examining the frozen surface for cracks and marking thin, dark patches of ice with poles topped with red
flags. Near Tushkov Quay, men had been at work since dawn, cutting huge blocks of ice to be loaded onto horse-drawn sleds and sold to householders to cool their cellars.

The hush that enveloped the snowbound city was deceptive, for Petersburgers had reacted to news of the surrender of Port Arthur to the Japanese only weeks earlier with alarm and dismay, and
factory workers, their determination to force change in their working conditions building over several months, were out on strike in record numbers.

The labour unrest had begun several weeks earlier, in the Putilov metals factory where railroad cars were being built. Four workers
were fired, and thousands of their
fellow workers came to their defence, one factory after another going on strike until nearly four hundred factories were idle, and a hundred and fifty thousand former employees had left their jobs.
With no pay and nothing to eat, shivering in the bitter weather, seething with grievances, they met to plan a joint strategy. To make their demands for higher pay and an eight-hour day known, and
to ask – perhaps even to insist – that they be represented in a national assembly.

But on this cold morning there were no meetings in the street or on the ice, only the sound of hammering as a wooden dais was erected on the river just below the palace, where the tsar was to
stand during the ceremony of the Blessing of the Waters.

Towards mid-morning the street lights went out as a pale sun shone intermittently through the veil of cloud. More trams passed now, along with horse-drawn omnibuses, the traffic in the street
increasing, the number of pedestrians growing. In Palace Square, weak sunlight gleamed on the high-piled snowdrifts, lit the roof of the army general staff headquarters, glinted on the cross atop
the Alexander Column. The thousand windows of the palace came alight, the river ice sparkled blue-green and, as the dignitaries assembled on the wooden dais for the opening prayers of the ceremony,
the gilded casements of the palace glowed with a warm burnish.

Many members of the imperial family were gathered to witness the ceremony, watching from behind the palace windows. They had come into Petersburg with some trepidation, for the reports from the
secret police of increased revolutionary activity were unsettling and every day, it seemed, revolutionaries armed with bombs were discovered and arrested. The tsar’s uncles were known to be
among the plotters’ primary targets. Uncle Vladimir had begun to take the precaution of never planning his route of travel beforehand, lest the route become known to a revolutionary with a
bomb. Uncle Alexei, who according to the tsar was being ‘tracked like a wild beast, in order to be killed’, remained largely out of sight. And Serge, in Moscow, the most hated of the
imperial uncles, had moved out of his Governor General’s residence and slept in a different Kremlin
palace every night, under heavy guard, increasingly fearful that
one day his protection would fail – or that one of his protectors might become his assassin.

The tsar himself, despite the apprehensions of his relatives and his ministers, continued to maintain his dogged faith in the basic loyalty of his people. To be sure, there were abundant, even
unprecedented, signs of unrest among his subjects – peasants burning crops in the fields, labourers demolishing factories, most of the workers in the capital on strike and a mounting clamour
from among the educated, articulate professional classes for an end to autocracy and for a new form of government based on a constitution and popular representation. But despite all this, he
believed that he himself, Tsar Nicholas, was venerated and loved. When he appeared in public, his ecstatic subjects bowed in reverence. They saw him almost as one of themselves, or so he thought;
he imagined himself as the ‘peasants’ tsar’, shunning European-style living and eating borscht and kasha, dressing in blousy peasant shirts and Turkish trousers, always happy to
meet his peasant subjects in the course of his travels. He had made himself the friend of the workers too, and of the urban poor, recently building a theatre in Petersburg where for a few kopecks
students and factory workers could enjoy operas and plays of high quality thanks to an ongoing government subsidy.

Nicky trusted in his subjects’ loyalty – and left the rest to fate.

It was time for the blessing of the waters. The bishop of Petersburg stepped forwards onto the blue-green ice where a hole had been made to expose the dark water. He dipped his gold cross into
the water, and said the words of blessing. Almost a once a sharp report rang out from the Peter and Paul Fortress on the far side of the river. The guns were firing their salute.

With a loud cry a policeman standing behind the tsar fell, wounded, his blood spreading out across the ice. Shots were fired into the palace, windows were shattered, other shots struck the
Admiralty building and ricocheted off.

The fortress guns, which were supposed to shoot blanks, were shooting live charges. Revolutionaries. Assassins.

The tsar, hearing the whizz of bullets over his head and knowing they were meant for him, stood where he was, and crossed himself.

‘I knew that somebody was trying to kill me,’ he told his sister Olga later. ‘I just crossed myself. What else could I do?’
¹

Around him, all was panic. Police and soldiers were running in all directions, shouting for help, attempting to take cover, trying to see whether the assassins had wounded the tsar. Armed guards
from the palace ran out onto the ice, and from Nevsky Prospekt more police came, swarming down towards the dais where the tsar still stood.

Within seconds, the shooting ceased. Whether soldiers in the fortress overpowered the revolutionaries as they fired, or whether, having made their attempt, the would-be assassins fled, is
unknown. Out on the ice, police surrounded the stunned tsar and escorted him to safety. Inside the palace, the dowager empress, her daughter Olga, and several others had been sprayed with glass
when a bullet struck a window near where they were standing. Their shoes and skirts were covered with glass splinters, but they were not injured.

No more shots came. It was over. The platform on which the aborted ceremony had taken place was quickly dismantled, the bloodstains covered with snow. By late afternoon the only sign that the
tsar had come near to being shot, possibly killed, was that there were more guards in evidence around the palace. The hole cut in the ice for the blessing of the Neva had quickly frozen over, and
the marine police had resumed their methodical examination of the ice. As evening fell the cold deepened, mist rose above the river and the windows of the palace glowed yellow. At the headquarters
of the secret police, activity quickened, and in the workers’ neighbourhoods, strikers met to discuss their demands.

Frightened and worried, her worries increased by her increasing conviction that her husband’s advisers lacked good judgment and were giving him bad counsel, Alix ruminated on a prophecy
attributed to St Serafim.

‘They will wait for a time of great hardship to afflict the Russian land,’ the prophecy read, ‘and on an agreed day, at the agreed hour, they will raise up a general rebellion
all over the Russian land.’
Certainly it was a time of great hardship, certainly there was the threat of a great rebellion. The prophecy went on to predict that many
soldiers would join the rebels, that ‘much innocent blood will be spilt, it will run in rivers over the Russian land’. The empress sent to the Sarov monastery for copies of
Serafim’s prophecies. Deeply upsetting as the unrest was, it was reassuring to her to know that it had been predicted, that it was not merely random mayhem but part of a larger divine scheme
that the saint had foreseen.

On Sunday, January 9, 1905, the prophecy appeared to be coming true.

Thousands of workers gathered in groups in different parts of the city to demonstrate, intending to converge on Palace Square to carry a petition to the tsar. They were disgruntled, angry,
hungry and desperate – and yet hopeful, for the majority of them believed that Tsar Nicholas was well disposed towards them and cared for their welfare, and might respond with compassion when
he heard their grievances and saw how many of them were suffering.

They had composed a petition, under the guidance of their leader and spokesman Father Gapon, founder of the Gapon Society, which called on the tsar to aid them in their extreme distress.