Alexandra (38 page)

Worst of all, in Buchanan’s view, was the consequence he dared not speak of to her, the one most often whispered about and hinted at by everyone else concerned:
the dread that, with the tsar away from Petrograd, preoccupied with military affairs, the empress would in effect be regent.

And if the empress were to become regent, so it was supposed, then Rasputin would rule all. For it was assumed that the empress was nothing in herself, or nothing more than a cardboard figure,
haughty in appearance but, beneath her frosty carapace, a quivering mass of insecurities, incapable of purpose or direction. Her strength of character, her intelligence, her resilience were all
discounted; she was only a woman, a disagreeable German woman at that, and in 1915 everyone knew that women were innately childlike, overemotional, easily dominated, prone to hysteria. The rumours
about Rasputin’s strong influence over the empress were so deeply entrenched in the public mind as to be taken as fact. The presumption of her incapacity, coupled with the presumption of her
subordination to the Siberian starets, made it all but impossible for her true role to be accurately gauged.

In actuality, Buchanan was incorrect in believing that Alix had not thought through what would happen if Nicky took over as commander in chief. She had given it much thought – and prayer
– and she believed she had been guided to the right decision.

In her view, the benefits of having her husband replace Nikolasha as commander in chief far outweighed the disadvantages, though the benefits were as yet visible to only a few people –
herself and Father Gregory and those to whom God had revealed the splendid future.

‘It is the beginning of the glory of your reign,’ Alix told Nicky. ‘He [Father Gregory] said so and I absolutely believe it. Your sun is rising.’
¹⁴
She had become convinced that there was a divine purpose behind all the ugliness and suffering of the war. She called it a ‘cleansing of minds and
souls’, a sweeping away of old ideas, old misplaced loyalties, so that ‘a new beginning’ could emerge.
¹⁵
With the new
beginning would come new paths of thought, so that the misguided minds and souls could be ‘led aright and guided straight’.
¹⁶

Her words were vague and her meaning obscure, but she felt that she had been given confirmation that the cleansing was under way and that the new day would soon dawn. A
miraculous vision had been witnessed by many people on the feast day of St Tikhon the Miracle Worker, in the village of Barabinsk in Siberia, as the saint’s relics were being carried in
procession around the church.
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A cross appeared in the sky, and remained there for fifteen minutes. Bishop Varnava of Tobolsk had sent word of
the apparition directly to the palace.

Alix knew that crosses were not always good signs, that a cross could indicate disaster as well as blessing. But coming as it did, at this important juncture in the war, with the Russian armies
retreating amid such upheaval, the vision was surely a positive sign. God was sending her a message that St Tikhon the Miracle Worker was about to save Russia from the hands of its enemies. Eleven
years earlier, God had worked through St Serafim to give her a son. Now St Tikhon was to be the means of Russia’s deliverance. And the first step in that deliverance would be her
husband’s transformation from an amiable cipher into a magnificent battlefield commander, a great and glorious leader of men.

A
lix sat in her accustomed place next to the hearth in the salon of the Alexander Palace, listening to the melancholy, plangent music of
Goulesco’s Rumanian orchestra. She loved the wild gypsy music, full of heart-rending tremolos and sombre minor chords, the slow introspective passages giving way from time to time to
pulse-racing explosions of rapid dance music. The ululant violins, plaintive harmonies and impassioned rhythms suited her own quicksilver moods, and she had begun to invite the orchestra to play at
the palace every Thursday night for a roomful of guests.

When the guests arrived – the latecomers welcomed by the empress ‘with a gesture and a sweet smile’ – they found their hostess installed in her usual chair, wearing black
as had become her custom by the autumn of 1915, a sapphire cross around her neck and a ring set with an immense pearl on her finger. Her hair was always dressed simply in those wartime days, and
the nails of her soft hands were never painted, because her husband disliked women who painted their nails and even when he was away, she respected his preference.
¹
Her one indulgence was Atkinson’s White Rose perfume, which she wore to mask the clinging smell of her cigarettes; the scent of roses and of her verbena toilet water
filled the air around her.

While she listened to the music, she knitted or sewed, making winter masks for the soldiers or stitching cushions – she had set herself the task of completing a cushion or a pillow cover
each day to sell in her bazaar. The work quietened her, even as the gypsy violins stirred her emotions, moving her to tears. Her emotions were very near the surface, for her insomnia had become
chronic and she took
Veronal, a barbiturate, in a vain attempt to rest, and the barbiturate depressed her.
²

Her eyes were kind, but at the same time ‘infinitely tragic’, her friend and lady-in-waiting Lili Dehn thought, sitting nearby on those Thursday nights. The tsarina was sorrowful
about so many things, about the ugly Petrograd gossip that claimed that Anna Vyrubov was the tsar’s mistress and that the tsar was a drunkard and had the evil eye, about the rioters in Moscow
who shouted for the tsar to abdicate in favour of Nikolasha and for herself to be shut away in a convent, about the rumours that Ella was hiding Ernie and that Ernie was intriguing with the court,
on behalf of the German government, to make a dishonourable peace.
³

It saddened Alix that the citizens of Moscow and Petrograd, who had shown themselves to be fiercely patriotic and loyal to her husband at the outset of the war, had now turned cynical. They
suspected that German spies were everywhere, and spread rumours that spies lurked in the ministries, among the members of the palace staff, even in the imperial family itself. The city-dwellers
trusted no one, their loyalty had been corroded, they were hardened and disillusioned. But Alix took some comfort from her certainty that the real Russians, the millions who lived in villages,
retained their faith in their rulers. She often reminded Lili of a trip they had taken together not long before to a small village near Peterhof, and of how, when she got out of the car, she had
been surrounded by peasants who knelt down before her, saying prayers for her well-being, tears standing in their eyes.
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She had been praised,
idolized, mobbed by the crowd; she had barely been able to make her way back to her car. No one in that village had called her the German Whore, or had hurled scandalous accusations at her.

The memory of the visit was a consolation, and the empress sought consolation often, finding it when with her children, when visiting the wounded – her illness prevented her from doing any
real nursing any more – and when praying before an icon of Christ in the small dark chapel adjacent to her bedroom.

‘Faith, love and hope are all that matter,’ she was fond of saying. These were what sustained her, along with her Veronal and her iron
self-discipline. She
knew where her duty lay, and she was doing it, day after wearying day. She knew that she had to ‘take things personally in hand’, as she wrote to her sister Victoria. That she had to
continue to write to her husband, upholding him and advising him, so that he could do the work God had called him to undertake.

For, after much persuasion, he had at last taken on himself the command of the armed forces, relieving the ‘traitor’ Nikolasha of his responsibilities. It had taken her nearly two
months, from June to August 1915, to convince Nicky to do this, months of strain during which, to add force to her arguments, she had summoned Father Gregory from Pokrovsky to talk to Nicky.

It had been an uphill battle, for everyone had opposed the prospective shift in command. There had been a terrible scene between Nicky and his mother in the garden of the Anitchkov Palace, with
Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia present. For over two hours Minnie had argued with her son, trying to persuade him that if he took command, it would be assumed that Father Gregory had forced the
decision on him – which would so outrage all Russia that the monarchy would come under fatal attack. He had faltered under his mother’s barrage of argument, he had blushed and
stammered, and had emerged shaken, but in the end he had held firm. The fall of Warsaw to the Germans had helped to stiffen his resolve.

She herself had made him see how important it was that he take command, though she knew that he was ill and frightened, not of battle – for he was a staunch and courageous soldier –
but of the responsibility itself, and the mental labour it was certain to impose. He had never been a man to think things through, to analyze a situation creatively and find solutions to problems.
He had always turned away from complexity; it bewildered him and left him mentally prostrated.

But of course, as she told him, there was no need to exhaust himself in thought. All he had to do was listen to her advice, and Father Gregory’s divinely inspired wisdom, and all would be
well. He had to listen, and then he had to be forceful, decisive, and fearsome. He had to be angry, even violent, thumping his fist on the table, swearing
and making
threats. He had to be formidable, as his immense, commanding father had been, the father whose messages from the other world were brought to her by Father Gregory.
⁵

She had convinced her wavering husband that he was not alone, that he could call on irresistible psychic forces whenever he needed them. He carried an icon of St Nicholas blessed by Father
Gregory, a magic stick from Mount Athos also blessed by the starets, a talisman once touched by Monsieur Philippe, and a special little comb with which to comb his hair before all important
meetings and decisions, which would make him strong and ensure that his will would prevail. He was surrounded by divine magic. He could not fail.

Sitting by the warm hearth listening to the gypsy orchestra on that autumn night, her face pale against the harsh black of her gown, Alix had the severity of an ascetic. She had reached a point
in her life where she was living her principles, fully and without compromise. Insofar as she could, she had left behind the trivia and dross of daily existence, to expend her energy in pursuit of
a noble purpose. She was completely dedicated, completely engaged. Melancholy, depressed, weary and ill she might be, but she was fulfilled.

When in the autumn of 1915 Nicky assumed command of the armed forces from the newly designated command headquarters in the small town of Mogilev on the hills above the Dnieper River, the Russian
army was in full retreat. German forces were advancing along the coast of the Baltic Sea, moving without resistance through Lithuania, intent on capturing Riga. Once they took Riga, they would be
only three hundred miles from Petrograd.

The Russian forces were in disarray, severely beaten, demoralized, still some six million strong but no longer an army of young, vital soldiers; many of the men were middle-aged, others raw and
frightened young conscripts – among them Father Gregory’s simpleton son Dimitri – led by mediocre and inexperienced officers. Even six million were not enough men, for Serbia was
being overrun as well as Lithuania, and the Russians, perpetually short of weaponry, were reduced to fighting with sticks and stones, and with their fists. Casualties continued to be very high.

The War Minister Sukhomlinov, tainted by scandal, had been dismissed in June and his successor was inept. No one was attending to the desperate need for efficient
transport and adequate food supplies; even though it was harvest season, men and horses alike were growing thin from deprivation, the men tempted to eat the horses’ greatly reduced rations of
oats and hay. No one, least of all the tsar who believed that the peasants were loyal and patriotic, was forcing peasant speculators to disgorge the crops they withheld from the market in hopes of
driving up food prices.

The army needed a strong leader, just as Alix said. But Nicky, however sincere in his dedication, was not that man.

‘In the moment of danger the duty of a sovereign is to be with his army,’ he said, ‘and if need be perish with it.’
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No one doubted his sincerity, but the senior officers, knowing him as they did, and aware that he had no experience of large-scale command and no knowledge of strategy or weaponry, had no faith in
him. They knew that he was an essentially passive, weak-willed man, lacking in initiative, resigned rather than defiant or aggressive. With the soldiers, one of his generals wrote, ‘he did
not know what to say, where to go, or what to do’. The men felt his awkwardness. Far from heartening them, filling them with courage and hope for victory, he filled them with dismay.