The Last Tsar (4 page)

Nicholas began his service in a mixed regiment of a Guards battalion. The first half company was commanded by the heir, and the second by Alexander Volkov, who was a noncommissioned officer by then. At Alexandria, the tsar’s dacha, Volkov taught the heir the art of marching.

Nicholas adored physical exercise, and he was indefatigable. During his trials with Volkov in the art of square-bashing, his middle brother George would watch from the bushes. George, chronically ill and painfully ashamed of his persistent weakness, followed his brother’s every move ecstatically.

“6 May 1888. Am twenty and becoming quite the old man….

“7 May. Liked this costume ball very much. All the ladies wore white dresses, and the men wore red.… Danced the mazurka and cotillion.”

Balls, the regiment, a life without care.

Then on October 17, 1888, for the first time, miraculously, Nicholas eluded death when the tsar’s train had a terrible wreck at Borki, not far from Kharkov (and for the first time in his life the number 17 appeared in conjunction with calamity).

“A fateful day for us all. We might all have been killed, but by the Lord’s will we were not. During breakfast our train jumped the rails. The dining car and coach were demolished, but we emerged from it all unscathed. However, 20 people were killed and 16 injured.”

So the holiday resumed: 1889.

“Returned from the ball at half past 1. Slept through my first lesson….

“A gay old time getting an eyeful of that gypsy. Returned home at 2….

“Surprised at awakening in Gatchina. The sight of my room lit by sunshine. After tea fenced at Mama’s.

“Couldn’t help myself and began to smoke, assuring myself this is all right….

“At midnight went with Papa after grouse. Sat in the cabin, the mating place was remarkable. Slept until 10….

“6 May.… Was made a member of Council of State and Committee of Ministers.”

The pleasure with which gentle, retiring Nicholas threw himself into the unruly world of the Guards was striking. Nicholas’s regimental superior was his father’s brother Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. A powerful giant, the peremptory and strict commander was the unhappiest of men. Profoundly religious, he suffered endlessly from what he felt were unnatural inclinations: Sergei Alexandrovich was a homosexual.

The Guards, a closed male fraternity, encouraged pederasty and heavy drinking.

The tradition of the hard-drinking Russian Guards! The poetry of that famous hero and hard drinker the hussar Denis Davydov was set to music and his ballads sung all through the Guards’ barracks:

“Yesterday [during training at Krasnoe Selo] we drank 125 bottles of champ[agne]. Was sen[try] for the division. At I took my squadron out on the battlefield. At 5 an inspection of military institutes under a pouring rain.”

But by that night he was draining the dipper again.

“Woke up and felt as if a squadron had spent the night in my mouth.” It was all as Davydov had devised: they drank “elbows” (filling a glass the length of a forearm and draining it at one draft), “the staircase” (setting glasses all the way up the stairs and emptying them one step at a time, ascending, but often falling down dead drunk before reaching the top), or “till the wolves” (stripping naked and jumping out in the savage frost, where an obliging barman carried out a tub of champagne for the gentlemen guardsmen, who sipped from the tub, howling all the while like wolves). People said this strange entertainment had been dreamed up personally by Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, who was famous for his remarkable, truly guardsmanly drinking.

“16 March 1892.… Have never seen such a profusion of gypsies. There were four choruses. We supped, like that time, with the ladies. Sojourned in vinous fumes until 6 in the morning.”

Amid these rather awful, noisy amusements Nicholas had the good sense to remain gentle, chaste, and lonely. There was the anticipation of love, ideal love.

“19 January 1890.… Don’t know how to explain it but a mood has come over me: neither sad nor happy. Almost over now, drank tea and read.”

Only
she
could break this loneliness.

A rather short young officer strides briskly with the crowd down Nevsky Avenue.

Meanwhile, the coach of Petersburg’s governor rolls down Nevsky as the governor searches the faces on the street.

Finally he spots the young officer, the carriage slows, and respectfully but firmly the governor transmits the father’s order to return to the palace.

Vera Leonidovna Yureneva:

“He adored walking.… There was a rumor that he had met a beautiful Jewess on a walk.… And a romance had sprung up. There was a lot of gossip about that in Petersburg. But his father acted as decisively as ever: the Jewess was sent away along with her entire household. Nicholas was in her home while all this was going on. ‘Only over my dead body,’ he declared to the governor. Matters did not go as far as dead bodies, however. He was an obedient son, and eventually he was broken and taken away to his father at Anichkov Palace, and the Jewess was never seen in the capital again.”

That was how he referred to her then in his diary: Alix H.

I’m sitting in the archive. Before me is a stack of papers. All that remains from the life of Alix H.

They too have made a journey, and they bear the dust of the terrible Ipatiev house.

Endless letters from Nicholas, hundreds of letters. Her diaries—or, rather, what remains of them. Evidently she burned her diaries early in March of 1917, when the empire perished.

What survives are brief notes for the years 1917 and 1918, the last two years of her life.

Notebooks with excerpts from the works of theologians and philosophers, lines from favorite poems she had copied out: Maikov, Fet, Lermontov, Pushkin, Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov (a well-known poet from the first part of the century who wrote under the pseudonym K.R.), a certain Bronitskaya, and again Pushkin, and again Fet, and again K.R.—
her
poets.

But here is one other particular notebook. It is also a collection of utterances, true from a somewhat unlikely philosopher who ruled over the mind and soul of the brilliantly educated Alix H.: the half-literate Russian peasant Grigory Rasputin.

The English Alix, the daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, Louis IV, was born in Darmstadt in May 1872.

Hills grown up in forest descended into the misty valley of the Rhine, places beloved of Goethe. Here lay Darmstadt, the tiny capital of a tiny German state, the grand duchy of Hesse. At the season of Alix’s birth the town would have been drowning in flowers, and in the palace museum hung a tender Madonna of Hans Holbein.

Alix’s father, Louis IV, sovereign of Hesse, was married to Alice, daughter of the English Queen Victoria. The Exalted English Alice was renowned for her fanatical (albeit wholly platonic) passion for the famous German philosopher and theologian David Strauss. Her worship of Strauss was a deification reminiscent of her daughter’s future deification of Rasputin. Both the nerves and the dreadful headaches—everything that led Alice to an early grave—remind us very much of the portrait of her daughter Alix. The mother passed down more than just her name.

To this familial exaltation was added the dark memory of the ages. In the blood of Alix H. flowed the blood of Queen Mary Stuart.

Alix’s mother died at age thirty-five, leaving a large family, of whom Alix was the youngest. Her oldest sister, Victoria, married Prince Louis of Battenberg, who would become commander-in-chief of the British Navy; her second sister, Ella, would marry Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Finally Irène, the third sister, became the wife of Prince Henry, her first cousin and the brother of German Emperor Wilhelm II. Thus, by forging familial bonds, these Hesse princesses would unite the Russian, English, and German royal houses.

After her mother’s death, Alix’s grandmother took the child under her wing. Her grandmother, the English Queen Victoria, observed the constitution scrupulously. Power belonged to Parliament, sage counsel to the queen.

Alix H. was one of the liberal queen’s favorite granddaughters.

A pale blond little beauty. For her radiant nature her mother called her “Sunny.” For her mischief and recalcitrance, the German court had called her
spitzbube
(“scamp,” “troublemaker”). Was the orphan, taken away from her sisters, brother, and father, really so very lighthearted and gay? Or is that how her grandmother Victoria chose to see her? And did Alix, with the cunning of a child, make a point of playing up to her grandmother’s expectations?

She was a troublemaker, however.

Queen Victoria did not favor the German princes, especially Emperor Wilhelm. And Alix, who spoke and thought in English, must have smiled at the old queen’s caustic jokes. But she must have missed them as well—her father, her brother Ernie, and the blooming Hesse landscape. And her family. That large family that fell apart when she was six years old.

When she married she would attempt to re-create the same kind of large family.

The lonely girl made the circuit of the royal courts of her numerous relatives.

In 1884 twelve-year-old Alix was brought to Russia.

Her sister Ella was marrying Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Her cousin, the future German Emperor Wilhelm II (“Uncle Willy”) followed beautiful blond Alix’s debut at the Russian court closely. The wedding of Sergei Alexandrovich—the brother of the Russian tsar to a German princess—could have a reprise. The heir to the Russian throne was already sixteen, and the Hesse line occupied a special place in the history of the Romanov family. Emperor Paul’s first wife, who died in childbirth, had come from that line. And Empress Maria Alexandrovna, Nicholas’s grandmother, was also a princess of Hesse-Darmstadt.

This was how they came to meet for the first time: Alix and Nicky. It was an idyll: he fell in love with her at first sight. And there was a day when they found themselves in Peterhof, at Alexandria, the small imperial dacha.

Much later, a year after their marriage, Nicholas and Alix would come back to Alexandria, and Nicholas would write in his diary, “Rained the entire day, after coffee we went upstairs … we saw the window we had both cut our names into in 1884.” (She liked to draw on glass with the precious stone on her ring. One can see her signature on the grand windows of the Winter Palace.)

Subsequently they would come to love old Alexandria, which preserved a precious memory.

A window and a couple. They were looking out at that day in 1884. Standing at a window at the inception of their destiny.

It was after this that Nicholas spoke with his sister Xenia, the only one with whom the not very sociable English-Hessian princess had become friendly. And Xenia gave him her advice.

He asked his mother for a diamond brooch, which he gave to Alix. She accepted it. Nicholas was happy, but he did not know Alix H. Her consciousness had been formed in the puritanical English court. Uncompromising, militantly stern, and proud—these were the necessary attributes of an English princess. Alix decided she had acted improperly. The next day, while dancing with him at a children’s ball in Anichkov Palace, she stabbed the brooch into his hand. Silently, without a word.

Also without a word, Nicholas gave the brooch to his sister Xenia.

Only to take it back ten years later.

This brooch would know a terrible fate.

It would be five years before Alix H., now seventeen, would appear at the Russian court again. Ostensibly she had come to see her sister Ella. In fact, she was being inspected as a prospective bride. All those years he had clung to his memory of the young beauty, and now he had got his way.

“Devoid of charm, wooden, cold eyes, holds herself as if she’d swallowed a yardstick”—this was the court’s obliging sentence. It was made known that the empress-mother did not like the princess. The voice of the empress-mother always rang out when the emperor-father did not want his own heard.

It was all a simple matter of politics. Alexander’s policy was alliance between Russia and France. The princess from the house of Orléans, the daughter of the Comte de Paris—that was the desired party right now. Moreover, Alix’s English upbringing (England, the eternal symbol of liberalism) might revive the hopes of the liberal party, which Alexander and Pobedonostsev had smothered.

No one in the country or the family dared cross the powerful emperor. Especially the soft-spoken Nicky, who hated conflict. Father and son had a serious talk at Peterhof, and Nicky meekly agreed not to insist on marrying Alix, but.… But he adamantly rejected the Orléans princess. He chose a third path: to wait, silently, without
complaint or hope. To wait until the Lord joined him to Alix. That was the only possible way: very quiet and meek—but rebellious.

His diary of 1889 opens with a photograph of the young Alix, which he pasted in after she was gone. He had begun to wait.

Her sister Ella (after her conversion to Orthodoxy, Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna) helped him out of his unpleasant situation with the rejected Alix. It was announced that there could be no question of any prospective marriage: Alix had no intention of converting.

Alix returned to England. But what was most surprising was that she did so with a strange relief. She told herself: My sister is right, I cannot convert so simply. Faith occupied too great a place in her life.

On the blond princess’s next visit, a year later, the unhappy Nicholas was not permitted to see her.

Alix H. stayed with her sister Ella at Ilinskoe, Ella’s estate outside Moscow.

“20 August 1890. Lord! Am dying to go to Ilinskoe.… Otherwise, if not now, then I might have to wait an entire year to see her, and that is hard!!!”

Ilinskoe exists to this day, outside Moscow. Alix stayed at the estate a few weeks and watched with astonishment. The ties between Darmstadt, London, and Petersburg were too close not to know the details about each other: Ella’s marriage was fictitious because of her husband’s inclinations, and she was never to have a child. At the same time Sergei Alexandrovich tormented her with his drinking bouts and groundless jealousy. Alix was astonished to see that her sister nonetheless was happy; her eyes shone. Ella loved her husband because the Lord so ordained. Her love for her unlucky husband was the fulfillment of the Lord’s commandments. The transitory joys of life and the eternal joy of serving God.