The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (20 page)

In the days after Nicholas’s declaration of war, hundreds of thousands of peasants were mobilized all across Russia. In Siberia and along the Black Sea, in the already chilly far north, and in the fertile Ukrainian steppe, where the crops stood ripe in the fields. Over and over, young peasant men kissed their sobbing wives, mothers, and sweethearts good-bye, before climbing aboard trains that carried them far from their villages. As in all Russian wars, it was the peasants who did most of the fighting and dying. They marched away, obediently answering the tsar’s call to defend Russia. But the expression on most of their faces, wrote one foreign correspondent, “
was somber and resigned.”

Many Russians believed they could beat the Germans within six months. “
[They] don’t know how to fight,” scoffed one of Nicholas’s commanders. “All [we] have to do to annihilate their whole army is simply throw our caps at them.”

To this end, the Russian High Command launched an invasion into the German territory of East Prussia (modern-day northeastern Poland). On August 26, just weeks after the war began, 250,000 Russian soldiers marched into Tannenberg Forest. And the Germans, lying in ambush, mowed them down. In just four days, the Russians lost every single man—an entire army either killed or captured—and vast amounts of badly needed military equipment.

The Russians did better against the Austrians, taking the province of Galicia (between the borders of modern-day Poland and Ukraine) in mid-August, as well as several Carpathian Mountain
passes before Christmas. They even toppled the Austrian fortress of Przemysl. But there they stalled. All they could do was hold their position.

The German and Austrian armies held their positions, too. Stalemate ensued. With neither side strong enough to push the opposing army back, the combatants resorted to defensive warfare. Digging trenches, they hunkered down inside them. Machine guns trained on each other, they waited, hoping to wear out the enemy’s resolve.

But Russia was ill-prepared for a long, drawn-out war. The Ministry of War—run by the incompetent Vladimir Sukhomlinov—had counted on a short campaign, lasting no longer than six months. And so it had made no plans for the wartime production of guns and ammunition. Instead, Minister Sukhomlinov assumed the country’s existing weapons stockpiles would be more than enough.

He was wrong. Just six weeks into the conflict, the chief of the Artillery Department warned Sukhomlinov that Russia would soon be forced to surrender if something wasn’t done about the situation immediately.

“
Go to the devil and quiet yourself,” the war minister snapped. He did nothing.

By the following spring, the shortage had grown so severe that many soldiers charged into battle
without
guns. Instead, commanders told them to pick up their weapons from the men killed in front lines. At the same time, soldiers were limited to firing just ten shots a day. Sometimes they were even forbidden to return enemy fire. “
Our position is bad,” one soldier wrote to his father, “and all because we have no ammunition. That’s what we’ve got to, thanks to our minister of war, making unarmed people face up to the enemy’s guns because we don’t have any of our own. That’s what they have done.”

Those Russian troops stalled on top of the Carpathian Mountains now found themselves without enough ammunition to push
forward. All they could do was hold the ground they’d taken. Their commander, Alexei Brusilov, repeatedly telegrammed the war ministry for ammunition. He also demanded warm clothes and boots for his men.

But Sukhomlinov had not made plans for clothing the soldiers, either. When he finally looked into the possibility of manufacturing soldiers’ boots, he learned that all the country’s tannin extract (used for processing leather) was imported from Germany! And so Russia ordered boots from the United States. It took months for the order to be filled. In the meantime, recruits went barefoot. “
They haven’t given out overcoats,” one soldier wrote home. “We run around in thin topcoats.… There is not much to eat and what we get is foul. Perhaps we’d be better off dead.”

Back at Tsarskoe Selo, Nicholas knew very little about his soldiers’ plight. Daily reports from Sukhomlinov reassured him that both “
morale and equipment are in splendid order.” When he inspected troops in January 1915, “
[the commanders] prepared one company and collected all the best uniforms from the other regiments for it to wear,” recalled one soldier, “leaving the rest of the men in the trenches without boots, knapsacks … trousers, uniforms, hats, or anything else.”

It was obvious that Russia’s war effort was on the verge of collapse, and everyone in the tsar’s government knew it … everyone, that is, except Nicholas himself.

With the war, Alexandra “
became overnight a changed being,” recalled her friend Anna Vyrubova. Under her patronage, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo was converted into a hospital, as were eighty-five other mansions and palaces in the St. Petersburg area. Still, Alexandra wanted to do more. So she enrolled in nursing courses, and she took nineteen-year-old Olga and seventeen-year-old Tatiana with her. “
To some it may seem unnecessary my doing this,” she told Nicholas, “but much is needed and every hand is useful.”

Now Alexandra no longer stayed in bed until noon, complaining of headaches and back pains. Every morning, she and the “Big Pair” walked across the park to their nursing classes at the newly created hospital. Working in the wards, the students “washed, cleaned and bandaged maimed bodies, mangled faces, blinded eyes,” remembered Anna, who joined the Romanovs in their nurses’ training. It was gruesome work. “
I have seen the empress of Russia assisting in the most difficult operations,” continued Anna, “taking from the hands of the busy surgeons amputated legs and arms, removing bloody and vermin-ridden field dressings, enduring all the sights
and smells and agonies of the most dreadful of all places, a military hospital in the midst of a war.”

After two months of intense training, Alexandra and her daughters earned their nursing certificates as well as the right to wear the Red Cross uniform. With its apron and nurse’s wimple, the gray uniform was extremely plain. Yet it made its wearers look “
dignified and courageous,” said Anna.

Fifteen-year-old Marie and thirteen-year-old Anastasia wanted to be nurses, too. But Alexandra said they were too young. Instead, she allowed them to be “patronesses,” establishing their own little hospital just across the pond from the Alexander Palace, in a cluster of buildings Nicholas had built years earlier. Called the Hospital of Grand Duchesses Marie and Anastasia, it had enough white iron beds for two dozen wounded officers. Because they were not noble-born, infantrymen were sent to separate hospitals. There were dominoes, chessboards, and even a pool table.

The “Little Pair” took their patroness duties seriously. Every few days, they hurried along the path that led from the palace to their hospital. Sitting at the wounded soldiers’ bedsides, they read to them and wrote letters for them. Sometimes they knitted little gifts—scarves and lap rugs. And if their patients felt well enough, they challenged them to a game of checkers or a few hands of bezique, their favorite card game. Upon their discharge, they gave the men little mementos of their stay—watches and medals inscribed with the girls’ initials.

Hospital work was fun at first, especially for girls who had lived so long in isolation. “
There was a concert [at our hospital],” Anastasia told her father. “There were singers and then dancers.… Everyone applauded at the end.” But the reality of war soon pushed its way into their little hospital. Every day, Red Cross trains brought hundreds of wounded and dying men from the front. Moaning and
bloody, their flesh burned and torn, they called out, “
Stand near me. Hold my hand that I may have courage.” The girls did. “
Two more poor things died,” Anastasia now mournfully told her father. “[I] sat with them only yesterday.”

In May 1915, after a long winter of being mired in the trenches, a combined Austrian-Germany force attacked the Russian troops still hunkered down in the Carpathian Mountains. A thousand shells a minute pounded the Russians’ trenches. Terrified troops “
jumped up and ran back weaponless,” recalled one German soldier. “In their gray fur caps and fluttering unbuttoned coats, they looked like a flock of sheep in wild confusion.” The Russians tried to make a stand, but without supplies or ammunition, they finally retreated, giving up the hard-won territory they’d spent the winter defending.

But the enemy kept coming, pushing the Russians farther and farther back. When it was all over, Russia had not only lost the territory it had earlier won from Austria, but all of Russian Poland as well. “
They’ve screwed it all up,” General Brusilov heard one of his soldiers grumble, “and we’ve been landed with cleaning up the mess.” Said another, “
A fish begins to stink from its head. What kind of tsar surrounds himself with incompetents? It’s as clear as day that we’re going to lose this war.”

The Great Retreat, as it came to be known, ended in September 1915, only after German forces got bogged down in Russian rain and mud. By that time, one out of every three men on the front line had been killed or captured. Thousands more deserted, returning to their farms, only to discover that in many cases the government had requisitioned all their crops and livestock. For many, it was the last straw, wrote one historian, “
the vital psychological moment … 
when [soldiers’] loyalty to the monarchy finally snapped. A government which had dragged them into a war which they could not hope to win, had failed to provide them adequate weapons and supplies … was not worthy of further sacrifices.”

With the continued defeat of its army, gloom and misery fell across the country. Gone were the cheering crowds, the merrily waving banners, the Russian people’s bravado. Now groups of bleak, shivering citizens gathered on snow-packed sidewalks to read the ever-lengthening casualty lists posted in shop windows. Wounded and dying soldiers filled hospitals. And the spirit of patriotism flickered out. It was replaced by anger, suspicion, and a hatred of anything German. Across the country, German books were burned, German businesses were looted, and music written by such German composers as Bach and Beethoven was banned from public performances. Even the name of the capital was changed from the German-sounding St. Petersburg to the Slavic Petrograd.