Secret Lives of the Tsars (36 page)

“The days between the 6th and the 10th [of October] were the worst,” the emperor reported to his mother. “The poor darling suffered intensely, the pains came in spasms and recurred every quarter of an hour. His high temperature made him delirious night and day, and he would sit up in bed and every movement brought the pain on again. He hardly slept at all, had not even the strength to cry, and kept repeating, ‘Oh Lord, have mercy upon me.’ ”

So intense and unrelenting was the pain that the normally exuberant young boy began to see death as a welcome relief. “When I am dead, it will not hurt anymore, will it?” he whispered at one point. And at another, the child solemnly instructed his parents to “build me a little monument of stones in the woods.” Nicholas and Alexandra both believed that time was rapidly drawing near.

As her dying child struggled desperately, the empress remained where she always did—by his side, providing whatever poor comfort she could. “During the entire time,” recounted Anna Vyrubova, “the Empress never undressed, never went to bed, rarely even laid down for an hour’s rest. Hour after hour she sat beside the bed where the half-conscious child lay huddled on one side, his left leg drawn up.… His face was absolutely bloodless, drawn and seamed with suffering, while his almost expressionless eyes rolled back in his head. Once, when the Emperor came into the
room, seeing the boy in this agony, and hearing the faint screams of pain, the poor father’s courage completely gave way and he rushed, weeping bitterly, to his study.”

So there she was, the empress left all alone, her husband too consumed by his own grief, while the doctors shook their heads in despair. Not even Rasputin was present, but far, far away, on a visit to his homeland. Yet despite the vast distance, Alexandra cabled him anyway, begging for the holy man’s intercession. Hours later—as the public announcement of the tsarevitch’s death was being drafted and his funeral planned—a response arrived from Siberia: “The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much.” Alexis began to improve almost immediately, and with that Rasputin became invincible.

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated along with his wife in Sarajevo, precipitating the international crisis that ultimately led to World War I. That very same day, while visiting his home village in Siberia, Rasputin was stabbed in the stomach by a fanatic disciple of the monk Iliodor, his sworn enemy. “I have killed the Anti-Christ,” the crazed assassin screamed. As it turned out, she had only wounded him, albeit grievously. The attack was severe enough to have nearly gutted the
staretz
and left him powerless to prevent the looming disaster of war. Had he been able to see the tsar in person, Rasputin later said, peace would surely have been maintained.

While no one expected war in the immediate aftermath of Franz Ferdinand’s murder, it became increasingly likely as ultimatums were issued and alliances called upon. Russia began to mobilize to defend Serbia against possible attack by
Austria-Hungary and Germany, which prompted Rasputin to send Nicholas II a stern warning from his sickbed. “Let papa not plan war,” he insisted; “it will be the end of Russia and all of us, we shall lose to the last man.” The emperor angrily tore up the telegram.

Despite Rasputin’s dire prediction, there was no stopping Nicholas, and on August 2, 1914, he issued a declaration of war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. The emperor’s bellicose stance had a profound effect on his people. All strife seemed to vanish as the country came together in a surge of nationalism not seen in more than a century (and certainly greater than that which briefly accompanied the onset of Russia’s war with Japan a decade earlier). “Here was a Russia which I had never known,” wrote the British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart—“a Russia inspired by a patriotism which seemed to have its roots deep down in the soil.”

A massive, exuberant crowd gathered in front of the Winter Palace—the very place where so many had been slaughtered during Bloody Sunday years before. When the emperor and empress appeared on the balcony above, the people immediately prostrated themselves. “To those thousands on their knees,” wrote Paléologue, “at that moment the Tsar was really the Autocrat, the military, political and religious director of his people, the absolute master of their bodies and souls.”

It was a demonstration of loyalty of which the emperor had long been deprived. “Never in all Nicky’s twenty years of luckless reign had he heard so many spontaneous hurrahs,” wrote one of his cousins. Indeed, as one contemporary noted, he had never been “so beloved, so respected, so popular in the eyes of his subjects at that moment.… Portraits of the monarch were in all the principal shop windows, and the veneration
was so deep that men lifted their hats and women—even well-dressed, elegant ladies—made the sign of the cross [as they passed].”

Even the much-derided empress enjoyed a brief respite from her subjects’ contempt. Princess Julia Cantacuzene, a granddaughter of President Ulysses S. Grant who married the emperor’s chief of staff, recounted a touching scene inside the Winter Palace when, as Nicholas and Alexandra made their way through a crowd after a prayer service, many of those gathered surged forward for closer contact with their sovereign:

“Our beautiful Empress, looking like a Madonna of Sorrows, with tears on her cheeks, stretched her hand in passing to this or that person, now and then bending gracefully to embrace some woman who was kissing her hand. Her Majesty that day seemed to symbolize all the tragedy and suffering that had come upon us; and, feeling it deeply, to give thanks to this group for the devotion their attitude implied. Her expression was of extraordinary sweetness and distress, and possessed beauty of a quality I had never seen before in the proud, classic face. Everyone was moved by Her Majesty’s manner in a moment when she must be tortured by thoughts of her old home.”

And so it was in the summer of 1914: a nation united behind its sovereign; revolutionaries dispersed, disheartened, and in hiding; and, as the empress called it, “a ‘healthy war’ in the moral sense,” to be waged against a malevolent enemy. “God is with us!” the emperor confidently declared (as did Kaiser Wilhelm).

“One breathes very easily in this pure atmosphere,” one member of the Duma wrote, “which has become almost unknown
among us.” But that was before the monstrous realities of war—all the misery, bloodshed, and despair—revealed themselves and soon drove Mother Russia to her knees. From the outset, Russian losses were staggering. In fact, just five months after the conflict started, one million soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured. Within a year, the war effort was on the verge of collapse. It certainly wasn’t due to a lack of fighting men; more than fifteen million eventually marched off as part of what the British press called “the Russian steamroller.” Nor was there any absence of valor. As early as October, the emperor was pleading with his troops to preserve themselves.

“I have not the slightest doubt about your courage and bravery,” he told a group of graduating cadets, “but I need your lives, because useless losses in the officer corps may lead to serious consequences. I am sure that every one of you will give his life willingly, when it becomes necessary, but do it only in cases of exceptional emergency. In other words, I am asking you to care for yourselves.”

The essential problem was Russia itself. As Massie wrote, “behind the massive façade of an enormous empire, the apparatus of government, the structure of society and economy were too primitive, too inflexible, and too brittle to withstand the enormous strains of a great four-year war.”

Russia’s railway system was entirely inadequate to efficiently transport men and supplies to the front: “The Supreme Command ordered, but the railroads decided,” as General Albert Knox, a British military attaché, put it. Furthermore, there were not enough factories to produce vital war materials, or, because of blockades, the ability to import them. Thus, without adequate arms or ammunition, “the
Russian steamroller,” was left helpless in the face of the enemy’s awesome weaponry. And in this vulnerable state, Knox wrote, brave men were “churned into gruel.”

“In recent battles, a third of the men had no rifles,” reported one general. “These poor devils had to wait patiently until their comrades fell before their eyes and they could pick up weapons. The army is drowning in its own blood.” In one instance, a private was bold enough to approach a general visiting the front. “You know, Sir, we have no weapons except the soldier’s breast,” he said. “This is not war, Sir, this is slaughter.” But it was an enemy general, Paul von Hindenburg, who perhaps best articulated the overwhelming extent of Russia’s human sacrifice:

“In the ledger of the Great War the page upon which the Russian losses were written has been torn out. No one knows the figures. Five or eight million? We, too, have no idea. All we know is that sometimes in our battles with the Russians we had to remove the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches in order to get a clear field of fire against fresh assaulting waves. Imagination may try to reconstruct the figure of their losses, but an accurate calculation will remain forever a vain thing.”

In the fury of war, and the crushing number of casualties that came with it, anti-German sentiment in Russia grew fierce. Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven were banished from orchestral programs, while rampaging mobs looted and burned stores owned by Germans. Even Christmas trees were legally banned. “I am going to find out about it and then make a row,” the empress announced in response to this assault on tradition. “It’s no concern of theirs nor the church’s and why take away a pleasure from the wounded men and children
because it originally came from Germany—the narrow-mindedness is too colossal.”

The most ferocious attacks were aimed not at Christmas trees, but rather at the German-born empress herself. Never popular to begin with, the war brought out the most latent hatred of her subjects, who falsely accused her of being an operative for her homeland and the worst kind of traitor. In one particularly vicious story that made the rounds, a general was supposedly walking through the palace when he encountered Tsarevitch Alexis weeping. “What is wrong, my little man,” the general reportedly asked, to which the boy was said to answer: “When the Russians are beaten, Papa cries. When the Germans are beaten, Mama cries. When am I to cry?”

Although Empress Alexandra was a thoroughly flawed individual, whose foolish decisions during the war would ultimately prove fatal, she was nevertheless a sincere patriot. “Twenty years I have spent in Russia,” she once declared, “half my life—and the fullest, happiest part of it. It is the country of my husband and son. I have lived the life of a happy wife and mother in Russia. All my heart is bound in this country I love.”

After years spent malingering in her mauve boudoir, Alexandra plunged herself into the war effort with uncharacteristic vigor and sense of purpose. She and her older daughters enrolled in a Red Cross training program for nurses, and soon enough she arranged to have the empty Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo transformed into a makeshift hospital.

“I have seen the Empress of Russia in the operating room,” wrote Anna Vyrubova, “holding ether cones, handling sterilized instruments, assisting in the most difficult operations, taking from the busy surgeons amputated legs and arms, removing
bloody and even vermin-infested dressing, enduring all the sights and smells and agonies of that most dreadful of all places, a military hospital in the midst of war.”

For Alexandra, working in the hospital in some ways had the immediacy of the front lines. “How near death always is!” she wrote to her husband. And in her chosen role, the empress served with distinction. Unfortunately, though, nursing wasn’t her only wartime occupation. Had it remained so, and Alexandra let affairs of state alone, perhaps a Romanov might still be sitting on the Russian throne. Instead, in her grab for power, she led the dynasty to total ruin—with Rasputin right by her side.

Historians have long been inconsistent about the nature of the relationship between the empress and the mystic peasant during the war years. Some have asserted that it was Alexandra who set the agenda, and that she used her guru merely to endorse with his blessing what she had already decided. Others maintain that Rasputin was in control, and that given his success in healing her son, the empress concluded that he could run the empire just as well. Perhaps the truth existed somewhere in between—that the ambitions of both merged harmoniously. Yet whatever the precise formula, it proved deadly.

Certainly the two shared a common enemies list of those who they believed threatened them. And topping the roster in 1915 was General Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, commander of all the police in the empire, who made the fatal error of informing the emperor of all Rasputin’s sexual shenanigans when he ripped off his mask of holiness outside the palace. It was quite a colorful indictment.

The
staretz
had gained so much influence because of his royal connections that people from all segments of society flocked to his St. Petersburg apartment seeking favors. “Three to four hundred people would call on Rasputin daily,” one witness reported; “one day it was seven hundred.… I saw uniformed guards, students, school girls asking for financial support. There were officers’ wives asking for favors for their husbands, parents asking for military exemption for their sons.”

The price was often monstrously steep for women seeking the holy man’s services, but there was no cash involved. In one instance, a woman sought Rasputin’s help in having her husband returned from administrative exile in Siberia. According to a police report, she paid dearly. “Neither her tears, her entreaties, her talk of her children had any effect,” the report read, “and taking advantage of her distraught condition and regardless of the fact that there were people in the next room, he took her by force, and then visited her several times in her hotel, constantly promising that he would arrange matters, and take a petition to the tsar from her.… She was eventually persuaded to return home. Rasputin did nothing about the petition because, as he put it, ‘she was insolent.’ ”