The Last Tsar (12 page)

“26 January, 1904.… Went to the theater at 8—they were doing
Rusalka
. Very good. Returning home, received a telegram from Alexeyev with the news that that night Japanese torpedo boats had carried out an attack against the
Tsesarevich, Pallada
, etc., which
were at anchor, and put holes in them. Is this undeclared war? Then may God help us!…

“27 January. This morning a telegram arrived about the bombardment of Port Arthur. Everywhere there are manifestations of a unanimous upsurge of spirit.”

Calm entries. He was assured that the Japanese did not know how to fight. His ministers argued over how many Japanese soldiers it took to equal one Russian soldier—two or one and a half.

Very soon, though, he was writing in his diary: “It is painful and hard.”

There followed unprecedented defeats for the Russian army and the destruction of the fleet.

So, Nicholas was pushed into seizing lands in Manchuria. But who stood behind this unattributed “push”?

When Minister of Interior Affairs Plehve (the Department of Police was part of his ministry) was killed by a bomb, in his archives were discovered copies of
all
the papers relating to the Far East. “To hold back revolution, we need a small, victorious war.” This, it turns out, was a statement Minister Plehve had made to one of his high officials on the eve of war.

“We need.” … But who were “we”?

In his
Memoirs
Witte recounted a curious episode: during his tenure as prime minister he struggled against Jewish pogroms. Naturally, he had to help the Department of Police, and he did. Witte was shocked to discover from a department official that while fighting against Jewish pogroms the Department of Police was simultaneously preparing proclamations inciting the population … to Jewish pogroms! These proclamations were sent secretly, in bundles, to the provinces. The terrible pogrom of Jews in Gomel had begun with these very proclamations. Forces existed whose actions even the prime minister was not given to control.

Here is an amazing story from Vera Leonidovna Yureneva:

“My friend at the time [her pronunciation of ‘friend’ was captivating, and she smiled at the ancient memory] … he was very close to Count Witte.… He tried to prove that many of the events that occurred during Nicholas’s reign were connected with
the secret actions of the
camarilla
. This is a forgotten word now that Count Witte liked a lot.… a Spanish word referring to a group of influential court intriguers under the Spanish King Ferdinand. It became pejorative.… The camarilla in Russia involved distinguished but degenerate families.… They were afraid of losing their wealth and power and hated the new times—this incomprehensible capitalism. It was they who formed the inner circle, the court of Nicholas and Alexandra. My friend felt that in Russia, as in any country where age-old traditions of conservatism persist, a secret alliance had been formed a long time ago between the extreme right—that is, the camarilla—and the secret police. That is why when Alexander II was preparing the constitution the police failed to ‘keep an eye’ on him—and he was killed.… My friend used to talk about how back under Alexander III terrorists’ notes with threats against the tsar were always turning up at the carefully guarded Gatchina Palace. In this way they confirmed the tsar in his hatred for liberals, by planting these notes through the secret police.… My friend used to say that the Department of Police slipped the tsar’s leash at the end of the century, when the secret police began to place provocateurs in the revolution.… This allowed the police to shroud everything in the greatest secrecy. That was when the sinister practice began of provocateurs throwing the bombs of unsuspecting revolutionaries at tsarist officials the camarilla didn’t like.

“It was at that time, my friend used to say, that the camarilla and the secret police carried out an entire series of dangerous intrigues against the tsar and society.

“One of them was the Japanese war.”

The war began—and immediately the Russian bureaucracy’s steadfast rule went into effect: when something clever is conceived, the result will be its direct opposite. The war, contrived to avert revolution, encouraged it instead.

This was when—in the aftermath of terrible defeats, in the confusion of advancing revolution—it happened.

Alix’s sacred belief that Serafim would intercede with God in heaven had not been in vain.

It happened at the Alexandria Palace, that small summer palace where he, the fourteen-year-old Nicholas, had heard the song of the old hag death and where once they—a boy and a girl in love—had
etched their names in the glass. And so, on the afternoon of July 30, 1904….

“The empress,” Anna Vyrubova recalled, “had scarcely gone upstairs from her little study when the heir was born.”

Nicholas’s diary:

“30 July. For us a great, unforgettable day on which God’s goodness was so clearly visited upon us. At 1:15 this afternoon, Alix gave birth to a son, whom in prayer we have named Alexei. Everything happened remarkably quickly, for me at least. There are not words to thank God properly for the comfort He has sent us in this year of hard trials.”

General Raukh, who commanded the Cuirassiers, recalled his conversation with Nicholas: “The empress and I have decided to give the heir the name Alexei. We must do this to break the chain of Alexanders and Nicholases,” so the happy father and honorary chairman of the Russian Historical Society joked.

Indeed, tsars with the names Nicholas and Alexander had ruled Russia for an entire century.

But it was not all that simple.

The name Alexei was out of favor in the Romanov family. Ever since Peter the Great had ordered his son and heir Alexei secretly murdered, the Romanovs had avoided giving this name to heirs to the throne. There was even a story about a curse on the Romanov line that the stricken Tsarevich Alexei managed to cry out before his death. But Nicholas was set on this name, since he had long been attracted by the image of another Alexei, the Romanov Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich.

Shortly before the heir’s birth, several grand historical balls had been held. The halls of the Winter Palace had been filled with boyars and their ladies from the times of the first Romanovs. Nicholas appeared in a costume from Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich that glittered with gold and gems. Alix wore a jewel-strewn dress from Alexei’s wife, Tsaritsa Natalia Kirillovna. For Nicholas this was not simply a costume ball but a remembrance of his favorite tsar. By his religiosity, goodness, and exemplary behavior, Tsar Alexei had earned the sobriquet “the Quietest.” He had done a great deal for the state—not with cruelty or fierce will, as Peter the Great had, but with meekness and gradual reforms. So Nicholas gave his son this name.

“Christening began at 11. The morning was clear and warm. In front of the house, along the sea road, appeared golden carriages, and in the convoy platoon—hussars and Cossack chieftains.”

There was a convoy at Alexei’s birth—and there would be another at his death.

——

The Swiss Pierre Gilliard, Alexei’s future tutor, was giving lessons to Alexei’s sisters. The tsaritsa brought the boy into the room where Gilliard was working with the girls. The heir was a month and a half old, a fairy-tale prince with platinum locks and big gray-blue eyes. Alexandra bathed the boy herself and had been inseparable from him since his birth.

But after that the Swiss rarely saw the magical boy. Dark rumors about some sort of illness were roaming the palace.

Once the boy ran into the classroom, and right behind appeared the sailor who watched after him. The boy was scooped up and carried away, and his indignant shouts were heard in the halls. Again he disappeared for months.

The mystery was revealed to Gilliard when the tsar was hunting at Spala in Poland. The family was staying at the lodge. Hunting, endless entertainments. At one such celebration Gilliard walked out of the ballroom into an inner passageway.

He found himself standing in front of a door where he heard desperate moans. A moment later the Swiss saw Alix approaching at a run, clutching her long dress, which was getting in her way. She was so upset she did not notice him.

This was the secret the family was keeping: soon after their son’s birth the doctors established what Alix had feared most in the world—her child had inherited a disease that was in her maternal line and that was transmitted only through females almost exclusively to their male offspring (to the heirs to thrones—fate’s joke on kings). Terrible and incurable—hemophilia. When Gilliard was later entrusted with Alexei’s education, the heir’s physician, Dr. Derevenko, explained the symptoms in detail: the walls of hemophiliacs’ arteries are so fragile that any blow or intense pressure can cause the blood vessels to burst and can mean the end. A fall or a cut can be the beginning of that end.

She had given birth to a son. She had dreamed of him for so long, yet she was the cause of his advancing, irrevocable death. Herein lay the reason behind her quickly progressing hysteria. Now they could only wait for a miracle, which Alix believed in with every fiber of her being: the disease would be cured. No one need know of this temporary illness. Because it was temporary. Saint Serafim would not abandon them. The Guardian would certainly send their family someone to save the heir to the great throne.

The image of Serafim of Sarov hung in the sovereign’s office.

——

The family left Petersburg and shut themselves up in the tsar’s residences on the outskirts of the capital, guarding the boy’s illness, which became a state secret. All their hopes were pinned on a Deliverer.

At that time magical rumors began to reach her: somewhere in the backwoods of Siberia, on the broad river Tobol (Nicholas recalled his youthful journey), in the small village of Pokrovskoe,
he
lived—the Holy Man.

Thus, on the threshold of the First Revolution, in the fire of a lost war, Grigory Rasputin appeared.

T
he revolution began with a mysterious event known as Bloody Sunday.

In 1881 the socialist Colonel Zubatov, shaken by the assassination of Alexander II, had rejected his socialist ideas and joined the police. During Nicholas’s coronation, Zubatov was already head of the Moscow secret police. The former socialist had devised a fantastic experiment: fight the socialists for influence over the workers with the aid of the police! So the police began to create workers’ unions.

Now during strikes the police tried to support the workers, and Zubatov forced the capitalists to make concessions, which they did. In 1902 thousands of workers filled the old squares of the Kremlin chorusing “God Save the Tsar.” They prayed for the health of their sovereign emperor—on their knees, in silence, heads bared. The governor-general of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, thanked the workers for their loyalty to the throne. The newspapers of Europe wrote in astonishment of the unprecedented spectacle—police socialism. As always in Russia, the reformer Zubatov was eventually dismissed. His organization, however, lived on.

In 1905, in Petersburg, in the midst of these Zubatov-inspired workers’ unions, Father Georgy Gapon appeared. During these difficult
years of military defeats and shortages, Gapon called on the workers to take a petition to the tsar to tell him about the problems of the simple people and the oppressions of the factory owners.

A workers’ march was slated for January 9. Carrying banners, portraits of the tsar, and holy icons, thousands of loyal workers under Gapon’s leadership went to their tsar.

The very idea of this demonstration was the embodiment of Nicholas’s cherished dream—“the people and the tsar”—which had brought him to call upon Klopov. Now it had come true: the simple people themselves were seeking protection from the autocrat. It had come true!

And then suddenly, on the eve of the march, the tsar left the capital for Tsarskoe Selo.

An unsettling event had occurred just three days before the planned march. It was Epiphany. “Jordan” had been erected on the Palace Embankment as the site for the annual consecration of the water. Under an elegant canopy—blue with gold stars topped by a cross—Nicholas assisted the metropolitan in the ceremony, after which, according to tradition, the cannon of the Fortress of Peter and Paul, located directly opposite the “Jordan” on the other side of the Neva, was supposed to fire ceremonial blanks. To the horror of those gathered, the cannon turned out to be loaded with live ammunition. By a miracle the tsar was not hit, but a policeman was injured, and his name was Romanov!

The police, who would normally have exaggerated something like this, declared the incident an annoying accident. But someone’s intended effect had been achieved: Nicholas was reminded of his grandfather’s terrible end, and the policeman’s name resounded like an omen. The shot gave Nicholas a good scare.

The Department of Police was extremely well informed about the loyal inclinations of the march because Gapon, who had arranged the demonstration, was a department agent (he would be unmasked subsequently by the Socialist Revolutionaries’ terrorist group). The secret police was beginning to frighten the tsar. The police leaked dark rumors: during the demonstration there would be bloody riots prepared by the revolutionaries, perhaps a seizure of the palace. Grand Duke Vladimir, who commanded the Petersburg garrison, was talking about the beginning of the French Revolution.