The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia Read online

  That was how Alexander III held Russia together.

  No wonder the thought of one day taking his father’s place terrified mild-mannered Nicholas. He prayed for his father to live a long—very, very long—life.

  Nor was Alexander eager for his son to become tsar. The boy’s small size embarrassed him. (Nicholas would stand just five foot seven when fully grown, with narrow shoulders and short, stocky legs.) So did his high-pitched laugh and sloppy handwriting. “Nicholas is a devchonka—a bit of a girlie,” Alexander once cruelly and publicly declared about his then thirteen-year-old son.

  His opinion didn’t change as the boy grew older. When Nicholas was in his mid-twenties, it was suggested he chair a government committee. Alexander snorted at the suggestion. “Tell me, have you ever spoken to His Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke Tsarevich? Then don’t tell me you never noticed that the Grand Duke is a dunce!”

  Alexander did almost nothing to prepare his son for his future role as “autocrat of all Russia.” Nicholas never learned to deal with ministers or politicians. He never gave a speech, studied diplomacy, or grappled with national policy. In short, he never developed the qualities of a statesman. “It was my father’s fault,” Nicholas’s sister Olga later wrote. “He would not even have Nicky sit in on Council of State.… I can’t tell you why.”

  But living in his father’s bear-size, ridiculing shadow did teach Nicholas one thing: to conceal his real feelings beneath a falsely patient smile. “I never show my feelings,” he once admitted. During his lifetime, very few people would ever know how hurt, scared, or inadequate he truly felt.

  THE EMPRESS

  Most people agreed that Empress Alexandra was beautiful. She had flawless pale skin, golden hair, and clear blue eyes. But it was a sour kind of beauty. Alexandra’s sharp nose gave her face a cold sternness, and her tight, thin lips rarely curved into a smile. “When she did [smile],” recalled her cousin Queen Marie of Romania, “it was grudging, as though making a concession.”

  She hadn’t always been that way. As a child, the future empress—little Princess Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice of Hesse-Darmstadt (now part of Germany)—was full of laughter, her broad smile deepening the dimples in her rosy cheeks. For this reason, her family nicknamed her Sunny. But when she was six years old, her mother died. Overnight, “Sunny” turned aloof, serious, and withdrawn. “Her attitude to the world [became] perpetually mistrustful,” said Queen Marie, “strangely empty of tenderness and, in a way, hostile.… She held [people] at a distance, as though they intended to steal something which was hers.”

  She also became obsessed with God and the afterlife. “Life here [on earth] is nothing,” she later wrote in her diary. “Eternity is everything, and what we are doing is preparing our souls for the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  With her mother’s death, Alix’s maternal grandmother—Queen Victoria of England—stepped in to raise the child. The most powerful monarch in all Europe, Queen Victoria was a no-nonsense woman used to getting her own way. Brushing aside any objections from Alix’s father, Grand Duke Ludwig IV, the aging queen set out to mold her youngest and most favorite grandchild in her own image. Handpicked by Her Majesty, a string of English tutors and governesses traveled to Hesse with instructions to send detailed reports back to Windsor Castle. In return, they received a stream of orders from the queen: the princess must learn to speak proper English; high standards of taste and morality should be set; training in the avoidance of idle talk and gossip was imperative. And so, the German princess grew into a proper young Englishwoman. Duty to family and to country. Thrift and industriousness. Modesty and simplicity. And like Queen Victoria herself, Alix grew to be stubborn, iron-willed, and controlling.

  BEYOND THE PALACE GATES:

  A PEASANT BOYHOOD

  Before his experiences as a factory worker, Senka Kanatchikov lived in Gusevo, a village located just outside Moscow. Eleven years younger than Nicholas, Senka recalled his own, far different childhood in his autobiography:

  My early childhood was not accompanied by any particularly outstanding events, unless one counts the fact that I survived; I wasn’t devoured by a pig, I wasn’t butted by a cow, I didn’t drown in a pool, and I didn’t die of some infectious disease the way thousands of peasant children perished in those days.… For a village child to survive in those times was a rare event.… My own mother … brought eighteen children into this world … yet only four of us survived. I … view[ed] my presence on earth as a great stroke of fortune.…

  Our family consisted of nine or ten souls. There was no way we could live off the land alone, for our [acreage was] very paltry, and the earnings of my older brother [who went off to a factory in the winter] were inadequate. My father tried to sow more flax and get into commerce, but … nothing came of these efforts: the land was exhausted [from overuse], the price of flax was falling.… In this way we continued to struggle, year in and year out, barely able to make ends meet.… I tilled the soil. I harrowed, mowed, and threshed, and in the winter I went to the forest to gather wood.…

  My father was strict … and despotic.… He kept the entire family in mortal fright. We all feared him and did everything we could to please him. There were times when he would “go on a binge” … as they’d say in our village.… [Then] he spent his time away from home, in the circle of his drinking companions.… [Often] he would drink to the point where he was seriously ill, and there were even occasions when he was close to death. When his binges were over … Father would become … morose and demanding. [At these times], he fell upon my unfortunate mother; my father was her deathblow. I loved my mother intensely and hated my father with an animal hate.… I passionately took my mother’s side, and prevented him from beating her. This … usually ended up with Father beating me up as well, unless I managed to dodge his blows in time and run away.…

  When I reached the age of fourteen … my mother took ill … and died.… For whole nights through, holding a waxen candle over [her] corpse … I read aloud from the [Bible].… According to the popular belief … you had to read the entire Psalter forty times over to [send a soul to Heaven]. Great were my bitterness and suffering when, at the twenty-eighth reading … exhausted and worn out by sleepless nights, I [fell] asleep.… Without her, life in the village was unbearable. I wanted to rid myself of [it] as quickly as possible, to free myself from my father’s despotism.… After long arguments and discussion, [Father] decided to let me go to Moscow.

  A ROYAL COUPLE

  Nicholas and Alexandra first met in 1884, when he was sixteen and she just twelve. Alix had traveled to Russia for the wedding of her oldest sister, Princess Elizabeth of Hesse, to Nicholas’s uncle, Grand Duke Serge. Despite his small size, the future tsar of Russia was both handsome and charming. Smiling at the girl on the day she arrived at the Romanovs’ Peterhof estate, he introduced himself. “I’m Nicky,” he said.

  “I’m Sunny,” she replied stiffly.

  “Yes, I know,” he said. The two were second cousins, related through a royal tangle of relations. Plopping down beside the young princess, he spent the next few hours trying to break through her wall of reserve. He must have succeeded, because later that day he wrote in his diary, “I sat next to little … Alix whom I really liked a lot.”

  For the next four days, they enjoyed each other’s company, walking in the Peterhof gardens. They picked flowers for each other, shared secrets, and even scratched “Alix, Nicky” with a diamond on a window of one of the houses.

  The day before Alix and her family returned to Hesse, Nicholas gave her a small, jeweled brooch as a token of his affection. She accepted it, overwhelmed. But the next afternoon, worried about what her grandmother would think, she returned it. Offended, Nicholas gave the brooch to his little sister. Alix went home.

  Five years passed before they saw each other again. In 1889, Alix arrived in St. Petersburg for a six-week stay with her sister. This time, she was seventeen and Nicholas twenty-one—the perfect age for roma
nce. They saw each other constantly. He took her sledding and ice-skating, accompanied her to late-night suppers, ballets, and operas. He even hosted a dance in her honor. In the ballroom, which was perfumed with fresh roses and orchids, the couple danced in each other’s arms until the orchestra’s final note faded into the starry night. By the time Alix returned home, she was in love with Nicholas. And he was head-over-heels with her. Pasting her photograph in his diary, he later wrote, “My dream—one day to marry Alix H!”

  DREAMS COME TRUE

  Five more years passed. With no official responsibilities, Nicholas did little but attend the opera and ballet. He went to parties and dances and stayed out until the early-morning hours. “As always, I don’t feel well after a ball,” he confessed in his diary. “I have a weakness in the legs.… I am persuaded that I have some kind of sleeping sickness because there is no way to get me up.”

  He discovered a deep love for the army—its order and routine—after his father made him a junior officer, as Romanov tradition demanded. “[The army] appealed to his passive nature,” recalled his best friend and cousin, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, known as Sandro. All Nicholas had to do was follow orders, while his superiors dealt with any problems. Freed from decision making, Nicholas focused on what he enjoyed most—laughing and partying with his fellow officers. “We got stewed,” he confided in his diary. “The officers carried me out.” “Wallowed in the grass and drank.”

  He also embarked on a grand world tour that took him, among other places, to Egypt’s pyramids and India’s jungles. “Palaces and generals are the same the world over,” Nicholas wrote. “I could just as well have stayed at home.”

  He and Alix did not see each other once during this time. Still, they wrote to each other—little notes filled with hopes and dreams and words of love. At last, on a balmy April morning in 1894, the two met again at a royal wedding in Coburg, Germany. Nicholas seized the chance to propose. But as much as Alix longed to say yes, she hesitated. Russian law demanded that the wife of the future tsar be a follower of the official state religion, Russian Orthodoxy, a branch of Christianity.

  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.

  “WHAT WILL BECOME OF ME?”

  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?

  THE FUNERAL BRIDE

  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.”

  THE RESERVED EMPRESS

  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 l
aughed … 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.”