The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (8 page)

“Dr.” Philippe now suggested the imperial couple step in on Seraphim’s behalf. Make him a saint, he urged. Then he bent down and whispered the rest of his instructions into Alexandra’s ear.

Eager to fulfill the mystic’s instructions, Nicholas called in church officials. He commanded them to declare Seraphim a saint. But the churchmen refused. Saints are not made simply because the tsar orders it, they said.

“
Everything
is within the Emperor’s province,” Alexandra replied in a steely voice. He could even send
certain
Orthodox officials to jail.

The officials understood. They hastily declared Seraphim a saint.

And so, in July 1903, Nicholas and Alexandra traveled to Seraphim’s hometown of Sarov in southeast Russia for the canonization ceremony. Publicly, they visited churches and marched in holy processions. But privately, in the dead of night, Alexandra followed
a winding path through the deep forest to a spring said to be the source of St. Seraphim’s healing powers. Following “Dr.” Philippe’s whispered instructions, she lowered herself into its moonlit waters and prayed for a son.

Just three months later, an overjoyed Alexandra learned she was pregnant. She was convinced it was because of “Dr.” Philippe. He had interceded with the Almighty on her behalf, and God had blessed her.

This event cemented her belief in mysticism. From now on, she would blindly throw open the palace doors to many a strange or shady character who claimed to have holy powers. “
Someday you will have another friend like me who will speak to you of God,” “Dr.” Philippe had also whispered to her that night in Nicholas’s study.

Alexandra looked forward to that day.

On August 12, 1904, as the imperial family was sitting down to lunch, Alexandra suddenly felt pains. She rushed to her bedroom. Just one hour later, she gave birth to an eight-pound baby boy. Wrote Nicholas in his diary, “
A great never-to-be-forgotten day when the mercy of God visited us so clearly.” The celebratory cannons began—three hundred salvos this time. Across Russia, bells rang and flags waved. In village churches and city cathedrals, special thanksgiving services were held where jubilant Russians packed the pews.

His Imperial Highness Alexei Nikolaevich, Sovereign Heir Tsarevich, Grand Duke of Russia looked like a healthy baby. Court official A. A. Mosolov recalled the first time he saw him: “
The baby was being given a bath. He was lustily kicking out in the water.”
Plucking the infant from the tub, the tsar dried him off and held him up. “There he was,” said Mosolov, “naked, chubby, rosy—a wonderful boy!”

But just six weeks after his birth, Alexei started bleeding from the navel. In his diary, a worried Nicholas wrote: “
A hemorrhage began this morning without the slightest cause.… It lasted until evening. The child was remarkably quiet and even merry but it was a dreadful thing to have to live through such anxiety.”

The bleeding continued on and off for the next two days. Then it stopped. But his parents’ fears continued to grow. What was wrong with their boy?

Hemophilia, the court physicians diagnosed.

Alexei’s blood did not clot properly. Even a minor cut could take hours or even days to stop bleeding. But the greatest danger came from minor blows that might—or might not—start a slow oozing of blood beneath the skin that flowed for hours (or even days) into surrounding muscles and joints. This internal bleeding caused big purple swellings that pressed on Alexei’s nerves. The pain from this pressure was so agonizing that he would scream out in pain for days on end, unable to sleep or eat. Relief came only when he fainted. This pressure, however, was his body’s way of trying to slow the bleeding enough for a clot to form. Once this happened, the process of reabsorption would take place, the skin changing from purple to yellow to a normal color once again. The disease was, and still is, incurable. There was no effective treatment for hemophilia’s symptoms as there is nowadays, and any episode meant weeks in bed. Far worse, every episode was life-threatening—if the bleeding did not stop, Alexei would die.

The only way to prevent internal bleeding was to keep Alexei from getting bumped or bruised. He would never be allowed to ride a bike or climb a tree, play tennis with his sisters, gallop on a horse, or wrestle on the ground with the tsar’s collies. Instead, he would
be watched carefully, kept from doing the things boys naturally did. His parents even appointed two sailors—Andrey Derevenko and Klementy Nagorny—to watch Alexei around the clock. Called the sailor nannies, the men stuck so close they could, claimed one historian, “
reach out and catch [Alexei] before he fell.”

Their son’s illness devastated Nicholas and Alexandra. “
Life lost all meaning for the imperial parents,” recalled Nicholas’s friend and cousin, Sandro. “My wife and I were afraid to smile in their presence. When visiting the palace, we acted as if we were in a house of mourning.”

Typically, Nicholas believed Alexei’s illness was God’s will, and so he accepted it passively. “
My own fate, and that of my family are in the hands of Almighty God,” he said.

But Alexandra blamed herself for the boy’s condition. Hemophilia—a genetic disease affecting only males but transmitted by their mothers—was widespread in her family. Not only did several of her nephews suffer from the condition, but her own brother had died of it as a child. She knew she’d passed the disease to her son. But after she’d waited so long and prayed so hard, why had God allowed this terrible thing to happen?

Alexandra believed there could be only one explanation: God had found her unworthy. But if her unworthiness had caused Alexei’s suffering, didn’t it stand to reason that she could save him by becoming holier? And so she began to pray longer and harder, spending hours on her knees in the palace chapel. She covered the walls of the nursery, and even baby Alexei’s crib, with hundreds of icons and religious images. She begged God to heal her son.

Until God granted that miracle, however, she and Nicholas chose
to keep their boy’s condition a secret. There would be no public announcement. Instead, doctors and servants were ordered to remain silent, and the word
hemophilia
was banned from palace use. Life at court became even narrower. The family, fearing the heir’s condition would be discovered and talked about, rarely went out in public. And only a few family members and close friends were invited in. Convinced Alexei’s illness was a threat to the tsar’s regime, they withdrew completely into the protective bubble of Tsarskoe Selo.

Little did they know that the real danger to Nicholas’s throne was not Alexei’s hemophilia. It was the dark clouds of social unrest gathering across his empire.

What a pity that Nicholas sleeps!
—Carl Joubert, 1904
Russia As It Really Is

By 1905, the working class had begun envisioning a better life. And these visions began with books. “
When I came in from work, I did not lie down to sleep immediately,” recalled a weaver named Feodor Samilov. “Instead I picked up a book, lit a candle that I had bought with my own savings, and read until I could no longer keep my eyelids from closing.”

He wasn’t alone. The speed with which factory workers learned to read “
was little short of astonishing,” noted one historian. By 1905, six out of every ten laborers in Moscow were literate—an increase of twenty percent in less than ten years. And in St. Petersburg the number of working men and women who could read was three times greater than in the rest of Russia. Now the factory worker in St. Petersburg who could
not
read was the exception. The opposite was still true back in his peasant village.

These readers had almost no access to political writings. Censorship laws made such literature illegal, and newspapers faced stiff fines and forced closings if they included material considered offensive by the government. The result was that they steered clear of such writing. As for books, only those deemed appropriate by the tsar’s censors were allowed on library shelves. “
I read Jules Verne … and James [Fenimore] Cooper, and was captivated by their descriptions of journeys and discoveries,” said weaver Samilov. “Over a period of five to six years, I read through the most diverse assortment of books imaginable … but I never encountered one that could
have awakened my class consciousness.” Even so, he added, “Books taught me how to think.”

These literate workers were now able to picture a government more responsive to their needs; they had “
caught sight of a new life,” recalled factory worker Semën Balashov, “one very different from our life of servitude.” In January 1905, he joined ten thousand other men, women, and children who had abandoned their jobs. Taking to the streets, they refused to return to work until their demands were met. What did they want? A living wage, an eight-hour workday, affordable housing, and public education.

An energetic young priest named Father George Gapon led them. Gapon had devised a new and dramatic way of drawing attention to the workers’ demands. He would march them directly to the tsar and present him with a petition that began:

Gapon felt sure this would work. After all, most Russians still believed in the long-held Russian tradition of the
Batiushka Tsar
, the Father of the Russian People. While they cursed landowners, bureaucrats, police, and factory managers for their problems, they rarely blamed the tsar. It wasn’t his fault, they said. He lived so close to heaven, he didn’t know about his people’s suffering on
earth. But once they told him and handed over a petition, like a good and loving father the tsar would protect them from the greedy factory managers. He would help them win decent working and living conditions. Gapon saw himself at the head of a mass march to St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace, where the tsar, stepping out onto the balcony, would receive their request with loving benevolence.

On Saturday, January 21, Gapon informed government officials about the march taking place the next day. He begged for the tsar to receive their petition at two o’clock in the afternoon. He didn’t know that Nicholas was fifteen miles away at Tsarskoe Selo, or that the only people waiting for the marchers would be the soldiers Nicholas had ordered there after learning about the event. Now some twelve thousand bayonets and rifles stood ready.

The next morning, as snow swirled across the frozen rivers, workers organized themselves into processions. It was Gapon’s plan for them to march along different streets, meeting at the Winter Palace Square. Wearing their best clothes for their meeting with the tsar, 120,000 men, women, and children walked peacefully along. Some carried crosses or icons. Others waved Russian flags or hoisted portraits of Nicholas and Alexandra high above their heads. As they went, they sang hymns, laughed, and talked excitedly. More than once, they burst into the national anthem, “God Save the Tsar.”

But the marchers soon found their way blocked by soldiers. Unsure of what this meant, and not wanting to be late for their meeting, the workers pressed forward.

The soldiers fired.

Bullets shredded the flags, and icons, and portraits of Nicholas. Bodies fell to the snow-covered ground.

“
The tsar will not help us!” cried one of the stunned workers.

“
And so we have no tsar,” added another darkly.

When the shooting stopped, between 150 and 200 men, women,
and children lay dead. Between 450 and 800 were wounded. And the traditional ideal of the tsar as the people’s loving “father” was destroyed. No longer would Nicholas be held blameless for their troubles. Now he was a “
blood-stained creature” and a “common murderer.” The day itself became known as Bloody Sunday.