The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (5 page)

But Alix was a devout Lutheran. How could she abandon her faith? she sobbed. To toss it aside would, she believed, be an insult to God. Still, she adored Nicky. What should she do?

After hours of praying and sobbing, as well as discussion with her sister, Elizabeth, she found a solution. She wouldn’t really be changing faiths, she reasoned. After all, Christianity was Christianity. She would merely be changing the way she expressed that faith.

Joyously, she told Nicholas her decision.

“
Oh, God, what happened to me then,” Nicholas wrote to his parents. “I cried like a child, and she did too.… The whole world was changed for me.”

And Alix wrote poetically, “
I dreamed that I was loved. I woke and found it true.”

But her conversion was not casual. She embraced Orthodoxy, and an Orthodoxy of roughly the sixteenth century, at that. During a time when most modern, educated Russians looked upon their
religion with indifference, Alix developed a deep belief in the miraculous and mystical. Within months of agreeing to convert, she began collecting icons, images of holy beings and objects. Believing, as the Church taught, that God and the saints helped and healed people through these icons, she surrounded herself with them, then spent hours each day on her knees in prayer. She also began putting faith in so-called holy men—hermits, soothsayers, wandering monks, and faith healers. They were, she believed, a direct link to God.

Alix arrived in Russia at a gloomy time. Diagnosed with kidney disease, the once brawny Alexander III had wasted away almost overnight. Now he lay shrunken, sleepless, and spitting up blood in his palace in the Crimea. None of the doctors attending the tsar bothered to discuss his condition with Nicholas. Sweeping past the heir to the throne and his reserved fiancée, they reported only to Alexander’s ministers and his wife, Empress Marie.

Their behavior offended Alix. How dare the doctors treat the future tsar like a nobody! It could not be tolerated. “
Be firm and make the doctors come to you … first,” she scolded Nicholas. “Don’t let others be first and you left out.… Show your mind, and don’t let others forget who you are.” And then, in case he thought she was being too pushy, she added, “Forgive me, lovey.”

Nicholas thought there was nothing to forgive. Eager and grateful for her guidance, he called himself “
your poor little Nicky with a weak will,” and thanked her for her “reprimanding words.” He even promised “to do better … be firmer.”

Alix was pleased. “
Darling boysy,” she gushingly replied, “me loves you, oh so very tenderly.… You must always tell me every
thing, you can fully trust me, look upon me as a bit of yourself.… How I love you, darling treasure, my very own One.”

On the afternoon of November 1, 1894, Tsar Alexander died. The grief-stricken Nicholas suddenly found himself ruler of all Russia. Terrified, he pulled his cousin Sandro into his study. “
What am I going to do?” he cried once he’d shut the door behind them. “What is going to happen to me … to all of Russia? I am not prepared to be tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of how to even talk to the ministers.” Sandro worried, too. He knew Nicholas’s father had held the empire together with his forceful personality and iron will. Now, with timid Nicholas on the throne, what would become of Russia?

Proper etiquette required Alix to return to Hesse to wait out the official mourning period before marrying the new tsar. But Nicholas would not hear of it. He needed his fiancée’s forcefulness and strength of will. How else could he carry such a terrible burden? He insisted they marry as quickly as possible.

Alix agreed. “
My poor Nicky’s cross is heavy,” she later wrote, “all the more so as he has nobody on whom he can thoroughly rely and who can be a real help to him.” For now, Alix would become both wife
and
adviser. Reminding her future husband that beneath her long skirts she wore a pair of “
invisible trousers,” she vowed to “
be all, know all and share all” with him. “Beloved,” she would repeatedly say over the coming years,
“
listen to me.”

But the couple could not marry until Alix was officially a member of the Russian Orthodox Church. And so, the day after Tsar Alexander’s death, Nicholas and Alix, along with his mother, went to the palace chapel for the conversion ceremony. “
Alix repeated her
responses and the prayers wonderfully,” said Nicholas. Afterward, he issued his very first imperial decree, proclaiming his beloved’s new Russian name (as tradition demanded). Henceforth, the former Princess Alix of Hesse would be known as “the truly believing … Alexandra Feodorovna.” (The name Feodorovna was in honor of Fyodor Romanov, father of the first Romanov tsar, and therefore founder of the Romanov dynasty.)

Four weeks later, on November 26, 1894, the couple married in the chapel of St. Petersburg’s immense Winter Palace. Even though the court was still in mourning, black had been banished for the day, and Alexandra wore a silver brocade dress with a robe of gold cloth lined with ermine, and a sparkling diamond crown. “
Our marriage seemed to me a mere extension of the [funeral rites],” the bride wrote to her sister, “with this difference, that now I wore a white dress instead of a black.”

Meanwhile, the Russian people—Alexandra’s future subjects—viewed the marriage with fear and superstition. Calling her “
the funeral bride,” they shook their heads and crossed themselves. “
She has come to us behind a coffin,” one subject muttered darkly. “She brings misfortune with her.”

Before Alexandra’s marriage, her grandmother had given her an important piece of advice: win the love and respect of the Russian people. It was, counseled Queen Victoria, her first duty as the new empress. But reserved Alexandra found this task overwhelming. In private with her husband, she was warm and affectionate and “
lost her customary shyness,” remarked one court official. “She joked and laughed … played a lively part in the games, and became very nimble-witted in general conversation.” At public ceremonies,
however, she became a “different individual.” Because she felt awkward and ill at ease, she stood ramrod straight, with her lips tightly pursed. Said another courtier, “
She kept herself aloof and seemed unapproachable, unable to make small talk or to smile as a person in her position should.”

St. Petersburg society quickly judged her to be stuck-up, straitlaced, and utterly boring. They made fun of her taste in clothes, her dancing skills, her manners. She was, they claimed, “
perpetually unamused.”

As for Alexandra, society’s excessiveness shocked her. She disapproved of what she considered the aristocracy’s idle and listless lives—sleeping until noon, then rushing off to hairdressers or gambling clubs before returning home to dress for yet another late-night party. Most of all, she was repulsed by the foolish and vicious gossip that swirled through their drawing rooms, as well as society’s “
unwholesomely precocious outlook on life.” The higher classes, she determined, were “
corroded by a lack of [religious] faith and marked by depravity.” In disgust, she began striking names from the list of people welcome at the palace. Members of the extended imperial family—aunts, uncles, cousins, even Nicholas’s brothers and sisters—suddenly found themselves scratched off. “
Oh, these young men of the family with … love of pleasure instead of duty,” she grumbled to her husband. “They drag [in] so much dirt.”

“
I trust you to always know best, Lovey-mine,” Nicholas would say.

Alexandra was relieved. Closing herself off, she grew gruff with strangers, avoided coming down for meals if there were guests, and often left social events early with the excuse that she felt ill. More and more she stayed in her private rooms. When she did venture out, she hid herself under a parasol so no one could see her face. All she wanted, she confessed, was to escape the “
spider’s net” of
society and be alone with her “
own Huzy.” And so she begged him to abandon the Winter Palace (where most Romanovs had lived and reigned since the 1700s) and move to the country. Eager to please his “
sweet Wifey,” Nicholas agreed. Just six months after their wedding, the couple moved to the Imperial Park at Tsarskoe Selo, or “the Tsar’s Village.”

Located fifteen miles south of St. Petersburg on eight hundred acres of thick green lawn, the Imperial Park at Tsarskoe Selo was “a world apart, an enchanted fairyland,” recalled one visitor. Ornate bridges crossed ponds and canals. Footpaths wound between rows of fruit trees and lush flower gardens. On warm spring days, bowers of lilacs perfumed the entire park.

Among the place’s many wonders was a man-made lake that could be drained and refilled. On one shore stood a marble folly shaped like a Turkish bath, its gilt-tipped minaret stretching toward the sky. Nearby, an exact replica of a Chinese village glimmered exotically in the sunlight, while the tower of a medieval castle built intentionally to look like a ruin peeked above the treetops. Past the rose meadow crouched a granite pyramid, as well as the stone-turreted Elephant House. On warm days, the elephant—a gift from the king of Siam (modern-day Thailand)—bathed in a nearby pond while tame deer brought from faraway Mongolia wandered freely.

There were also two palaces within the Imperial Park. The first was the immense Catherine Palace, sprawling across the landscape in an extravagant profusion of blue, white, and gold. The second, located in a wooded corner of the park, was the simpler, yellow-and-white Alexander Palace.

Around all of it—palaces and park—ran a tall iron fence protected
by Cossacks with sabers and pointed spears. Additionally, five thousand Imperial Guards patrolled both the gates and the footpaths inside the park, while hordes of plainclothes policemen kept an eye on the army of servants who worked on the grounds or in the palaces.

Just beyond the gates stood the town of Tsarskoe Selo with its stylish shops and mansions. A graceful, tree-lined road stretched from the train station to the Imperial Park’s front gates. It was this road the imperial couple took the day they moved to the country.

Alexandra had already picked the smaller palace with its mere (by royal standards) one hundred rooms for their new home. Declaring it a “
charming, dear, precious place,” she began creating her own private world. In the palace’s left wing, beyond the columned ballroom and the ornate reception halls adorned with carved pilasters and gilded moldings, Alexandra chose two dozen ordinary rooms to serve as her family’s living quarters. She decorated them to her taste, replacing the crimson carpets and velvet curtains with chintz upholstery, wallpaper with flowered prints, porcelain knickknacks, and potted palms. “
It is incredible,” said one visitor, “that these people can live surrounded by such bric-a-brac when they could have the most beautiful things in the world.” Still, there was a cozy drawing room in maple and shades of green, a music room with two grand pianos, a library, two studies, and a large dressing room for Nicholas. There was also an indoor saltwater swimming pool.

But the room most gossiped about was Alexandra’s lilac drawing room. Almost everything in it was a pale purple, her favorite color—the wallpaper, the curtains, even the furniture was purple and white. People who saw it were aghast. They accused the empress of having common tastes and called her a hausfrau. But Alexandra loved her room. It was, recalled one courtier, her “
opal-hued” world, the one place where she felt completely safe. Here, she could
recline on a low sofa beneath a large painting of the Mother of God, delighting in the scent of the fresh flowers brought in daily by the servants, while gazing happily at the jumble of family photographs that crowded her shelves, tables, and mantelpiece.

Double doors led to the imperial couple’s bedroom. Here, too, lilac was the dominant color, but the walls, instead of displaying family photographs, were covered with more than seven hundred icons. Each had been hung on the silk wallpaper by the empress herself.

Once settled in, Alexandra did not want to leave. Nor did she want Nicholas to leave. They knew each other “
through and through,” she told him, and only needed to be together, “utterly cut off in every way.”

Nicholas agreed.
“It’s inexpressibly wonderful to live here quietly, without seeing anyone—all day and night together!” he said. And so while the ministers, the treasury, and other government offices remained in St. Petersburg, the ruler of it all retreated to the country. He still read reports and spoke with advisers who came to him regularly from the city. He still signed orders and settled disputes. But secluded as he was in the country, tucked away from the happenings in the capital, Nicholas quickly lost touch with people and events. His and Alexandra’s life together was “
a sort of everlasting cozy tea-party,” remarked one historian, fine for an ordinary private citizen, but not for the ruler of Russia.