Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (59 page)

While Nicholas was away at Stavka, Alexandra was determined to rule with a firm hand. In her letters, she was obstinate that Nicholas must rule harshly: “Play the Emperor! Remember you are the Autocrat. Speak to your Ministers as their Master.… Be like Peter the Great.… Crush them all. No, don’t laugh, you naughty child. I so long to see you treat in this way those who try to govern you, when it is you who should govern them.”
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Unlike Queen Mary’s and Empress Augusta Victoria’s influence on their husbands, which was sometimes encouraged, Alexandra’s attempts to govern Nicholas were misguided and faulty. Alexandra’s growing number of enemies claimed her meddling was the direct result of Rasputin’s influence. Rasputin actually had little to do with the appointments and dismissals of ministers that the empress was making at this point. Most of these decisions were now made by the tsarina alone. She even went as far as shuffling the tsar’s cabinet. According to one estimate, between 1915 and 1917, “Russia had four prime ministers, five ministers of the interior, four ministers of religion, four ministers of justice, three ministers of agriculture, three foreign ministers, and four ministers of war. Twenty-six men held these seven positions over a twenty-four month period.”
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Alexandra’s ineffective rule was not only damaging Russia; it was even beginning to hurt the Romanovs’ close relationship with the British royal family. Marie Feodorovna regularly sent updates to Queen Alexandra at Marlborough House about the situation in Saint Petersburg. The tsarina “is ruining both the dynasty and herself,” Minnie wrote around the time her daughter-in-law started shuffling ministers.
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Queen Alexandra, who was loyal to her sister above all else, later told King George, “I am sure she [the tsarina] thinks herself like their Empress Catherine [the Great].”
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This game of musical chairs in the government could not have come at a worse time for Russia. By 1916, the war had changed from a European conflict into a crusade, a holy war, against Germany. The name of Russia’s capital, Saint Petersburg, was deemed to be too German sounding and was changed to the more Slavic Petrograd. The London
Times
reported that “this war is holy to every one, and its motto is—getting rid of the German spirit of life.”
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German successes on the battlefield gave rise to fears that an invasion of Russia was imminent. Even Russo-Baltic aristocrats with German-sounding surnames and titles were forced to produce documents proving their Slavic ethnicity.

The Germanophobia in Russia struck particularly close to home for Alexandra, who was now not only accused of ineptitude and adultery but treason and insanity as well. Contemporaries claimed she was insane as a way of explaining her otherwise inexplicably bizarre decisions. One historian commented on the pitfalls of ascribing insanity to rulers: “A further problem arises from the fact that the ‘madness’ of sovereigns has sometimes been a political rather than a strictly medical category. As Janet Hartley has observed, British ambassadors and statesmen were prone to regard Tsar Alexander I of Russia as deranged, but generally only when they suspected him of acting against British interests.” Explanations for Alexandra’s behavior have been as varied as the years since her life have been long. More often than not, popular trends in society have influenced analyses not only of Alexandra but numerous other monarchs as well. In the 1890s, immediately before and after she married Nicholas, Alexandra was labeled as having bad nerves or nervous anxiety. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, when republicanism was on the rise after the First World War, Alexandra was the product of failing dynasties, corrupted and degenerate. Those who took on the task of examining her life in the 1920s filtered their analyses through newly popularized psychological paradigms established by experts like Freud or Jung. The tsarina, so went some arguments, must have suffered from neurosis or some repressed sexuality. With breakthroughs in science and medicine in the last thirty years, neurology and genetics became the focus of studying Alexandra and the Romanovs—inbreeding must have led to genetic mutations, diseases, and so on.
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Many Russians noticed striking similarities between the much-maligned empress and history’s most ill-fated German queen, the archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria, more famously remembered as Marie Antoinette of France. The parallels were undeniable. Both were German-born princesses, both married into the most extravagant monarchies in the world at that time, and both came to be the scapegoats for their nations’ problems. Even the way in which the tsarina and her family lived in semiseclusion at Tsarskoe Selo echoed “the simplistic charade enacted by Marie Antoinette in Le Hameau at Versailles before the Terror swept the Bourbons from their throne.”
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Alexandra was fascinated by Marie Antoinette and all deposed queens in general. She owned a number of items that had once belonged to the French queen, including a series of paintings and tapestries that had once adorned the walls of Versailles and Marie Antoinette’s private château, the Petite Trianon. It is doubtful Alexandra was aware of her similarities to Marie Antoinette, but the very notion of her being a German spy made her angry beyond words. Despite being a Hessian princess and a cousin of the most hated man in Europe, Alexandra was as anti-German as anyone could be. King George V said of her, “I have known her all my life, and pro-German that she is not.”
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Even when her brother, Ernie, tried to contact her through an old servant in Austria, she refused his communiqué. Nicholas II’s brother-in-law Sandro was one of the tsarina’s greatest supporters. He wrote that she “was far above all her contemporaries in fervent Russian patriotism. Raised by her father, the Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, to hate the Kaiser, she dreamed all her life to see the day of Prussia’s debacle, and next to Russia her admiration lay on the side of Great Britain.”
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Sandro’s comments also touched on another important point for Alexandra. After her loyalty to Russia, she was a fervent Englishwoman. Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador to Russia during the war, confirmed his belief in Alexandra’s patriotism in his diary: “Alexandra Feodorovna is German neither in mind nor spirit and has never been so.… In her inmost being she has become entirely Russian … I have no doubt of her patriotism.… Her love for Russia is deep and true. And why should she not be devoted to her adopted country which stands for everything dear to her as woman, wife, sovereign and mother?”
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Unfortunately—like with her nursing—most people never saw the tsarina’s patriotic side. Prone to glowering and infirmed with heart trouble and pain in her back and legs, she often retreated into her palaces at Petrograd or Tsarskoe Selo. This only added to the rumors swirling about her. Her charity work, her duties as a Red Cross nurse, and her role as a devoted Christian mother did little to help her. She was openly sneered as the
Nemka
.

In spite of her critics, Alexandra continued to be adamant that Russia needed strength and resolve in order to be ruled. Though she was neither despotic nor a tyrant, she was not in favor of granting reforms that gave more power to the masses. As a by-product of Queen Victoria’s court, she believed that conservatism, traditionalism, and royalty remaining separated from the people were the proper ways to rule an empire. She failed to grasp the nature of Britain’s highly successful constitutional monarchy that was now being presided over by her cousin George.

Alexandra’s fierce determination was also fueled by a desire to see her son inherit the same empire that belonged to his father. She wrote to Nicholas in 1916, “I feel cruel worrying you, my sweet, patient Angel—but all my trust lies in our friend [Rasputin], who
only thinks of you
, Baby [Alexei] & Russia.—And guided by Him we shall get through this heavy time. It will be hard fighting, but a Man of God’s is near to guard yr. boat safely through the reefs—& little Sunny [Alix] is standing as a rock behind you, firm & unwavering with decision, faith & love to fight for her darlings & our country.”
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This type of thinking from Alexandra, coupled with her devotion to Rasputin, played right into the hands of her enemies. The political situation in Petrograd became especially precarious later that year when the tsarina’s new criteria for appointing government ministers was only “their ineptitude and for their association with Rasputin.”
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With Nicholas II away at Stavka and Alexandra playing musical chairs in Petrograd, disturbing signs hinted at the tempest gathering over Russia. Outcries against the monarchy in general became widespread as the accusations against Alexandra continued to mount. She refused to acknowledge any of it, however. Her lifelong obduracy made her myopic to the grim reality of the situation. French ambassador Maurice Paléologue met with Alexandra around this time. He recalled that she tried to be pleasant but “said little, as usual.” She struck Paléologue as a kind of “automaton. The fixed and distant gaze made me wonder whether she was listening to me, or indeed heard me at all. I was horrified to think of the omnipotent influence this poor neurotic woman exercised on the conduct of affairs of State!”
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She slowly became disconnected from reality, refusing to acknowledge the criticism directed at her and defending Rasputin against anyone who questioned him, including other members of the imperial family. Her greatest opponents within the imperial family were Nicholas II’s aunt and cousins—Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna and her children—who had long held ambitions for the throne. Even Alexandra’s mother-in-law, Minnie, was soon an unwelcome guest because of her criticism of her daughter-in-law and the
staretz
. Minnie and Alexandra had always been at loggerheads, but there was never so much animosity as after Rasputin came on the scene. The same was true for Nicholas II’s sister Olga Alexandrovna. A devoted friend to Alexandra and a loving aunt to the grand duchesses, Olga was stunned by the way Alexandra shut her out of her life when she began criticizing Rasputin.

The last straw came when Alexandra’s own sister Ella, the most respected royal in Russia, arrived at Tsarskoe Selo to try and talk some sense into the tsarina. Ella had been living in near seclusion at a convent since her husband’s murder in 1905. When the rest of the Romanovs heard that the highly respected Ella was venturing to Tsarskoe Selo, everyone held their breaths. Upon coming face-to-face with her sister, she cut straight to the point.

“Rasputin is exasperating society,” she said. “He is compromising the imperial family and leading the dynasty to ruin.”

“Rasputin is a great man of prayer,” Alexandra replied, unmoved by her sister’s plea. “All these rumors are slanders.”
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Sadly, the meeting went downhill from that point, and both sisters walked away angry and resentful. Ella later recounted the meeting to Prince Felix Youssopov, the tsar’s nephew. “She dismissed me like a dog,” Ella reported with tears in her eyes and trembling with emotion.
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Their meeting marked the last time Alexandra and Ella would ever see each other. The dowager empress soon joined the chorus of voices in the Romanov family speaking out against Alexandra. During an audience with the historian Paul Miliukov, she ominously predicted, “My unhappy daughter-in-law does not understand that she is ruining both the dynasty and herself. She sincerely believes in the holiness of some rogue [Rasputin] and we are all helpless to avert misfortune.”
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