The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (19 page)

Many Russians would remember June 1914 as being glorious, with clear skies, a golden sun, and soft, cooling breezes. Feeling almost carefree, the Romanovs set off on holiday aboard the
Standart
. They cruised the coast of Finland. Here and there along their meandering route, the ship dropped anchor. Then Nicholas and the children rowed ashore to forage through pine forests for berries and mushrooms. Because of her back problems, Alexandra rarely left the ship. Instead, she reclined on deck, sewing and reading until her family returned for dinner. Afterward, there was dancing beneath the ship’s canvas awnings. In their white dresses, the teenaged grand duchesses bantered and flirted with the young officers as they whirled to the strains of the
Standard
’s brass band. Bored by all the mush, Alexei scrambled across the deck, climbing up ladders and swinging from ropes as his sailor nannies chased after him. At day’s end, the family gathered for evening prayers sung by the sailors’ choir. Alexandra especially loved this time of day, when the rays of the setting sun danced on the water, and the deep voices of the sailors, singing the Lord’s Prayer, echoed across the vast, watery silence. Retiring to their staterooms, they fell blissfully asleep to the waves’ gentle rocking.

But just four days out, terrible news shattered their idyllic days. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, prince and heir to Austria-Hungary, had been murdered.

Austria-Hungary was an empire made up of a group of provinces located in Central Europe. While its two largest ethnic groups were German and Hungarian, in 1914 there were also forty million Slavs—Poles, Croats, Bosnians, Serbians, Czechs, and Slovaks—living within the empire because their territories had been occupied by the Austrians. Most of these Slavic people hated being ruled by the Austrians. Burning for the day they would be free, some plotted to break up the empire and return the Slavic provinces to their rightful people.

The small Slav kingdom of Serbia supported these desires. Its government looked the other way as extremist groups, bent on using violence and destruction against Austria, organized within its borders. It was one of these terrorists, a nineteen-year-old named Gavrilo Princip, who calmly stepped out in front of Archduke Ferdinand’s car during the prince’s ceremonial visit to the city of Sarajevo (in modern-day Bosnia). Aiming carefully, Princip fired twice. The archduke’s wife, Sophie, instantly crumpled, and blood gushed from the archduke’s neck. Fifteen minutes later, both the future ruler of Austria-Hungary and his wife were dead.

Over the next two weeks, political tensions in Europe grew. Blaming the Serbian government for the assassination, Austria-Hungary moved to punish the tiny country. It began threatening war.

Fearing attack, Serbia turned to Russia for help. Years earlier, the two Slavic countries had signed a mutual defense agreement. This meant they were treaty-bound to defend each other.

Meanwhile, Germany—which had a defense treaty with Austria-Hungry—quickly let it be known that it sided
against
Russia and Serbia.

That was when France, because of
its
mutual defense treaty with the tsar, weighed in on the side of the Slavs.

And England? It, too, allied itself with Russia because of a treaty it had signed with France.

“
My God! My God! What madness!” exclaimed French Ambassador Paléologue. All of Europe tottered precariously on the brink of catastrophe. An Austrian attack on Serbia could mean the start of a war the likes of which the world had never seen.

On June 30, Alexandra cabled Rasputin from aboard the
Standart
. “
It is a serious moment,” she wrote. She begged him to pray for peace.

Her telegram arrived in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoe just hours later, and a messenger delivered it to Rasputin’s house (the
starets
was visiting his family for the summer). Rasputin ripped open the envelope and read the telegram while standing in the doorway. Realizing it required an immediate response, he went after the messenger. But as he stepped through his gate and into the street, an unknown woman appeared. “
Her mouth and face were veiled so I could only see her eyes,” he later recalled. “At that moment a dagger flashed in her hand and she stuck it once into my stomach.… I could feel the blood pouring out of me.”

“
I have killed the anti-Christ! I have killed the anti-Christ!” the woman screamed hysterically.

Clutching his wound with both hands, Rasputin stumbled toward the church. Dagger raised, the woman came after him. But a crowd, attracted by the commotion, stopped her. Pushing her to the ground, they held her until the police arrived.

Meanwhile, Rasputin was carried to his house, where he lay moaning and bleeding until a doctor from the town of Tyumen, forty-seven miles away, arrived eight hours later. Recognizing
the seriousness of Rasputin’s condition, the doctor chose not to move the patient. Instead, he performed surgery by candlelight in the
starets’
bedroom. Rasputin, who refused anesthesia, instantly fainted.

When he came to hours later, he did two things: he called a priest to pray for him, and he cabled Alexandra. “
That hunk of carrion stuck me with a knife,” he wrote her, “but with God’s help, I’ll live.”

He was barely conscious when her reply arrived. “
We are deeply shaken—praying with all our hearts.”

But Alexandra did more than pray. She sent a specialist to Siberia. He immediately transferred Rasputin to the hospital in Tyumen, where another, more delicate surgery was performed to repair the
starets’
internal organs.

For the next forty-six days, Rasputin recuperated in the hospital. Feverish and weak from loss of blood, he read the newspapers and worried. What if war broke out? Germany, he believed, would defeat Russia. The kaiser would take Nicholas’s place on the throne, and when that happened, the pleasant life he’d built for himself would be swept away. His privileges. His influence. All would be gone. Rasputin couldn’t let that happen. In hopes of averting war, he began sending almost daily cables to Nicholas.

Surely, the diplomats “
should be able to keep the peace,” he wrote in one. In another, he said, “
We don’t have a war yet, and we don’t need one.” He even went so far as to advise Nicholas not to “
give [our enemies] a reason to start yelling again.”

On July 28, Austrian-Hungarian troops began bombing the Serbian capital of Belgrade. The next day, Nicholas—who had cut short his vacation and returned to his summer mansion at Peterhof—ordered his army to mobilize along the border his country shared with Austria.

According to some reports, when Rasputin heard this news, he thrashed about in bed so wildly that he ripped out his bandages. “
[Do] not plan for war,” he urgently telegrammed the tsar, “for war will mean the end of Russia and yourselves, and you will lose to the last man.”

When Nicholas received this telegram, he ripped it up in frustration. He felt so conflicted. His instincts told him that war could be “
a good thing, especially from the standpoint of morale.” An event like that would unite the Russian people, heal class divides. But Alexandra, who believed all Rasputin’s warnings, pleaded with Nicholas to maintain the peace and listen to Our Friend. He spoke, she insisted, for God. At the same time, Nicholas’s generals pressured him to prepare for a war they claimed was just one shot away.

Nicholas wavered, unable to decide on a course of action. But events soon made the decision for him.

On August 1, 1914, everyone except Alexei (who was bedridden because of a twisted ankle) attended vespers in the little Alexandria church at Peterhof. Standing before the altar in the candlelight, Nicholas wore, observed Pierre Gilliard, “
an air of weary exhaustion, [and] the pouches that always appeared under his eyes when he was tired [were] markedly larger.” Hands clasped, he prayed with all his might for God’s help.

Beside him, Alexandra’s face bore the same “care-worn … look of suffering so often seen at [Alexei’s] bedside.” She, too, prayed “fervently … as if she could banish an evil dream.”

The girls added their prayers to their parents’. Bowing their heads, the family chanted the familiar and comforting words:

When the family returned from church, Nicholas—promising he’d be only a moment—stepped into his study to read the latest reports. The others went into the dining room to wait for him.

As the minutes passed and the always-punctual Nicholas did not come, the family grew more and more uneasy. Finally, Alexandra sent Tatiana to fetch him. But before the girl could push back from the table, he appeared in the doorway.

Pale, his voice shaking, he told them the news. Germany, allied with Austria-Hungary, had declared war on Russia.

At the table, all four girls began to cry.

As for Alexandra, she may have thought of the telegram she’d received from Rasputin earlier that day. “
I say a terrible storm cloud hangs over Russia,” he’d written ominously. “Disaster, grief, murky darkness and no light. A whole ocean of tears, there is no counting them, and so much blood … Russia is drowning in blood. The disaster is great. The misery is infinite.” She, too, began to weep.

The next morning, everyone but Alexei, still in bed with his bad ankle, traveled by yacht to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. There Nicholas would formally declare war on both Germany and Austria-Hungary—a war that would one day be known as World War I.

How different it was from the last time the family had appeared in the city. This day the streets teemed with people. In a patriotic frenzy, they packed roads, bridges, and the Palace Square, waving banners, singing, and cheering. When the tsar’s boat came into view, they shouted “
Batiushka, Batiushka
[Father Tsar, Father Tsar], lead us to victory!” In a sudden rush of loyalty to Russia and their tsar, the people had forgotten their bitterness and resentment. War had done what Nicholas could not. “
For Faith, Tsar and Country!” shouted nobility and worker alike. “For Defense of Holy Russia!”

The family arrived at the Winter Palace. Inside its packed corridors, people stretched out to touch them as they passed. They pressed kisses to their hands and to the hems of their dresses. Some dropped to their knees before them, bowed, or made the sign of the cross as they passed.

In the vast white marble Nicholas Hall, a special altar had been set up. On it stood the icon known as the Vladimir Mother of God. At least six hundred years old, the icon was said to have the miraculous ability of turning back invaders. Now, at the beginning of this new war, Nicholas knelt before it and asked its blessing. Then raising his hand, he took the traditional Russian oath: “
I solemnly swear that I will never make peace as long as a single enemy remains on Russian soil.”

At last the family moved toward a balcony high above the crowded Palace Square. The grand duchesses hung back, pressing against the velvet curtains as their parents stepped out.

At the sight of their tsar, the huge crowd fell silent. Then, as one, they dropped to their knees on the cobblestones.

Overwhelmed by emotion, unable to make his voice carry that far, Nicholas could only make the sign of the cross. Then he lowered his head as tears ran down his cheeks.

From below, five thousand voices burst spontaneously into song: