The Last Tsar (20 page)

Another year passed. The years were slipping by. The English King Edward VII, one of the principal founders of the Russo-Anglo-Franco alliance, passed away. Nine monarchs and innumerable princes converged for the funeral. They thought they were burying the English king, but they were actually burying peaceful monarchical Europe. Only a few years remained until the great upheavals of world war. George, the same George who so strikingly resembled Nicholas, became King George V.

On the return trip Nicholas stopped at Uncle Willy’s residence in Potsdam. The arrow of the Russian political compass had to stand exactly halfway between England and Germany.

In December 1910 Tolstoy died. On learning of Tolstoy’s death, Nicholas wrote that Tolstoy was a great artist and that God was his judge.

In February 1911 they celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the freeing of the serfs. Only fifty years before, people in his country had lived as slaves. There were celebrations in Kiev and the unveiling of a monument to Alexander II.

During these festivities in honor of the slain reformer another great reformer was killed: Stolypin. The minister was shot before
Nicholas’s very own eyes. The mortally wounded Stolypin managed to make the sign of the cross over his tsar.

Thus his children witnessed murder for the first time. Once again the “police had failed to keep an eye out,” and again the assassin turned out to be a revolutionary enlisted as an agent of the Department of Police. The shadow of the omnipotent secret police?

An inquiry was made about this in the Duma on October 15: “It can be proven that in the last decade we have had a series of analogous murders of Russian officials that implicate the political police. They are everywhere setting up illegal publishing houses, bomb workshops, and terrorist acts.… [The political police] have become a weapon of internecine war between individuals and groups in governmental spheres.”

The tsar preferred not to think about these terrible surmises. He knew: life and death—everything was predetermined. Everything was God’s doing.

Evidently, Alix laid out these thoughts of his to Stolypin’s successor, Count Vladimir Kokovtsev: “There is no need to pity so much those who are gone. If someone is no longer among us, then that is because he has already played his role. Stolypin died to make way for you.”

The year 1913 began—the pinnacle of his empire’s flowering, the year of the great jubilee: his ancestors had ruled Russia for three hundred years, and Russian history was marked off by their names. God had willed that he greet the triumphal date in prosperity.

Prosperity? Yes, after Stolypin’s reforms an unprecedented upswing began. Europe watched in amazement as the giant picked itself up. The government of France sent to Russia the economist Edmond Terry, who in his book
Russia in 1914
wrote: “None of the European peoples is achieving these kinds of results.… By mid-century Russia will dominate Europe.” There was an intellectual explosion going on in the country. The homeland of Tolstoy and Chekhov became a laboratory for the future art of the twentieth century: Malevich, Kandinsky, Chagall, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold.

All these joyous changes scared Nicholas, though. Until very recently, Moscow, the ancient capital, had been permeated with the smell of the past he so cherished. But now, right before his eyes, the garden city had vanished: factory stacks puffed, huge new buildings
were threatening to become skyscrapers, money men now ruled in the capital of the Muscovite tsars. “Manchester has invaded the City of the Tsars,” as the Russian newspapers wrote in those days. Petersburg, too.

The greater his country’s prosperity, the lonelier he felt. Educated society amiably termed tsarist rule Asiatic and dreamed of uniting Russia and Europe. A troubled, worrisome future was upon them—and both Witte and Stolypin had created it. Could he love his own great ministers?

As before, he believed that all this was the intelligentsia’s error: the muzhik feared Europe. Distrust for the “mutes” (as foreigners had been called in Russia since way back when) and holy tsarist rule were in the people’s blood.

(Who turned out to be right? Yes, soon the people’s revolution would destroy tsarist rule. But ten years later, new revolutionary tsars would come, and for many decades Russia would cut itself off from Europe once again.)

On the day of the dynasty’s tricentennial,
Life for the Tsar
was performed as usual at the Mariinsky Theater. During the service in Kazan Cathedral, two doves circled under the cupola. Nicholas stood beside his son, gazing up at this beautiful omen. The Sarov saint had been right after all: the second half of his reign would see a flourishing.

Everything seemed so stable!

“21 February, 1913. Thursday. The day of the celebration of 300 years of rule was bright and very springlike. At 12.15 Alexei and I in a carriage, Mama and Alix in a Russian coach, and finally, all the daughters in a landau set out for Kazan Cathedral. Ahead was a company in convoy, with another company behind.”

During the ceremonies, Alix was persecuted by headaches and her ineffable, recurrent sadness.

“I’m a wreck,” she told Anya.

“There was a service at the cathedral and a manifesto was read. We returned to the Winter Palace the same way.… We were in a happy mood that reminded me of the coronation. We had lunch with Mama. At 3.45 everyone gathered in the Hall of Malachite. And in the concert chamber we received congratulations until 5.30. About 1500 people filed by. Alix was very tired and went to bed.… I read and sorted through the sea of telegrams.… I looked out the window
at the lights and searchlights from the Admiralty tower. A strong southwest wind was blowing.”

But “We were in a happy mood” is not what sticks in the mind. What sticks in the mind is “Alix was very tired and went to bed” and the silent, lonely man gazing out the window at the holiday lights.

“It made me so sad to see your lonely figure,” she would write him in a letter.

Loneliness. Only the family. Alix, the children, and he. The friends of his youth were rarely invited now. Sergei Mikhailovich was still with the aging Mathilde (that “awful woman”—a taboo theme in the family). Nicholas Mikhailovich, the liberal historian, was chairman of the Russian Historical Society (of which Nicholas himself was honorary chairman). Author of a monumental biography of Alexander I, he was especially interested in the mysterious legends surrounding the strange death of that emperor and in the holy man Feodor Kuzmich who appeared in Siberia shortly after the tsar’s burial. He tried to find clues to the puzzle in the Romanov family archives. The possible secret departure from the throne of his grandfather’s brother and the tsar’s transformation into a holy man were very disturbing to Nicholas himself, too, but it was hard for them to talk. Nicholas Mikhailovich was a mystic, a Mason, and a freethinker. In Petersburg he lived all alone in his palace among his books and manuscripts. He livened up only “at home”—in Paris, where he painstakingly tried to explain to his friends the principles of Nicky’s rule.

In the family he was called “Monsieur Egalité.” As the eighteenth century once called the liberal Duke of Orléans.

To complete the resemblance: the liberal Duke of Orléans was guillotined by the French Revolution; the liberal Nicholas Mikhailovich would be shot in the Fortress of Peter and Paul by the October Revolution. Meanwhile, this mysterious man predicted his own death and even described it: “one dark, raw night, a few paces from the ponderous graves of my ancestors.”

The year 1913 was drawing to a close. It was fall at the Livadia Palace. But the paths of the beautiful park were deserted. Once a frequent visitor, Dmitry no longer showed his face here. Now the favorite cousin was no longer allowed access to Livadia, but in Petersburg’s
salons the brilliant guardsman must have heard the wild gossip about his lost bride and the dirty Siberian muzhik. Nor was Nicholas’s brother Misha there on the Livadia park
allées
. He had persisted in his romance with the twice-divorced Mrs. Wulfert, a commoner, and had in fact defied Nicholas’s order that he not marry her. He had quit Russia to be with his beloved.

An encoded telegram to the Russian embassies in 1911:

“The bearer of this, Major-General of Gendarmes A. V. Gerasimov, is commanded at His Highness’s behest to travel abroad with the assignment of taking all possible measures to avert the marriage abroad of Mrs. Wulfert and Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich.”

Michael had done all he could to prevent his reigning brother’s learning about what had happened. He had gone abroad, he was circling Europe, in search of a secluded spot for a secret wedding.

Another encoded telegram in 1911: “In conducting my investigation, I have the honor to report the circumstances of and specific time at which the ceremony in which His Imperial Highness entered into marriage took place.… On October 29 he told his companions that he was going out with Mrs. Wulfert in his automobile through Switzerland and Italy to Cannes, and the individuals and servants accompanying them would travel by train through Paris to Cannes.… That day, October 29, they rode in the automobile only as far as Wurtzburg, where they boarded a train continuing on to Vienna, where His Imperial Highness arrived on the morning of October 30.… That same day in four hours and by midday the grand duke and Mrs. Wulfert drove to the Serbian church of Saint Sawa, where they performed the marriage ceremony.… For those individuals surrounding the grand duke and Mrs. Wulfert, their trip remained utterly secret.… During the grand duke’s sojourn, foreign secret service agents accompanied him everywhere in a special car.”

Such was the picture—motor races at the beginning of the century. A car with agents of the secret police following a car whose driver was a grand duke and whose passenger was his mistress. The entire journey was recorded by the agents his brother had sent.

Nicholas received the news of the “shocking marriage” during a particularly acute attack of his son’s illness.

Alix demanded that Nicholas remain implacable, as his father had known how to be. Taking pity on his brother would have meant allowing the further collapse of the Romanov family.

September 3, 1911. The embassy in Paris. More telegrams: “According to information received, the sovereign emperor’s aide-de-camp
appeared in Cannes to inform the grand duke in the name of His Highness that he was prohibited to enter Russia.… The grand duke is very depressed and does not go out anywhere.”

After the birth of the tsarevich Alexei, Michael had lost the title of heir and had received that of state regent. Now he was deprived of that as well.

Of those who witnessed the inception of Nicholas and Alexandra’s happy marriage, Ella was one of few who remained. Still a beauty, she walked through the park dressed in a gray nun’s habit. After mourning her husband, Sergei, Ella had disbanded her court, moved into rooms on Ordynka, and founded a religious community, the Cloister of Martha and Mary. The order was named for the Gospel’s Martha and Mary, sisters who lived in the house of Lazarus and were friends of Jesus. The nuns of the cloister cared for sick and abandoned children, the poor, and the dying.

Wise Ella understood that speaking about Rasputin with Alix meant sundering relations and leaving her sister completely isolated. All that remained for Ella was to pray for her. And be patient.

Also next to Nicky was his childhood friend Prince Peter Alexandrovich of Oldenburg—Petya in Nicholas’s diaries.

The Oldenburgs came from an ancient line famous for its savage cruelty. European chroniclers wrote with horror about them. In the eighteenth century this line merged with the Romanovs. So here was Petya, a descendant of those horrible Oldenburgs—a very good and very ungainly, tall man. In his spare time he wrote sweet, sentimental stories about nature. He was married to Grand Duchess Olga, the sister of his reigning comrade. But Petya was a homosexual, and unhappy Olga could not decide whether to leave him.

Petya would survive the terrible revolution and the companion of his childhood games. After the revolution, at an émigré party, he would meet the writer Ivan Bunin. Bunin later would recount with a smile how Peter of Oldenburg, having listened to a conversation among old revolutionaries, exclaimed: “Oh, what dear, charming people you all are and how sad that Nicky never was at your parties! Everything, everything would have been different had you known one another.”

The pages of the diary were turning quickly. Life went on.

“6 May, 1913. It seems strange to think I have turned 45.…
The weather was marvelous, unfortunately Alix felt poorly [this was often the case now]. Mass, congratulations, just like in the old days, only with the difference that they were all daughters.”

This was his forty-fifth birthday, the saint’s day of Job the Long-Suffering. From her letter: “You were also born on the day of Job, my long-suffering darling.” He was calling himself Job more and more often.

From the memoirs of the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue:

“One day Stolypin proposed to the sovereign an important domestic policy measure. Nicholas II listened to him thoughtfully and made a gesture, skeptical, offhand, as if to say: that or something else, does it really matter. Finally he declared in a sad voice: ‘Nothing I undertake ever works out. I am unlucky … and moreover the human will is so weak.… Do you know when my birthday is?’

“ ‘How could I not know?’

“ ‘May 6th. And what saint is celebrated on that day?’

“ ‘Forgive me, sovereign, I do not recall.’

“ ‘Job the Long-suffering.’

“ ‘Glory be to God, Your Highness’s reign shall culminate in glory, just like Job, who endured the most terrible trials and was rewarded by God’s blessing and prosperity.’

“ ‘No, believe me, Peter Arkadievich, I have more than a premonition. I am profoundly certain of this. I am doomed to terrible trials, but I will not receive my reward here, on earth.… How many times have I applied to myself Job’s words: “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me”’ [Job 3:25].”