THE DIARY BEGINS
The author of the diary was born on May 6, 1868.
An old postcard: an angelic infant in long curls. Here Nicholas is all of a year.
Another photograph: a youth with his hair fashionably parted.
In 1882 Nicholas received a gift from his mother: a gilt-edged “book of souvenirs” bound in precious inlaid wood. This luxurious book became the first notebook of his diary. Nicholas was moved to begin keeping a diary conscientiously by a fateful date in Russian history: March 1, 1881.
On the dank night of February 28, 1881, in a Petersburg apartment, the light stayed on for a long time. All that day, from early morning, certain young people had been going in and out of the apartment. Since eight o’clock in the evening six had remained, four young men and two young women. One of them was Vera Figner, distinguished leader of People’s Will, the revolutionary terrorist organization. Subsequently she would describe that day in her autobiography.
The other woman was Sofia Perovskaya, who in the morning was going to take a direct part in the cause. They had convinced her to get some sleep.
Vera Figner and the four men worked through the night. Only toward morning did they fill the kerosene cans with blasting jelly. They now had four homemade bombs.
The cause was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, one of the greatest reformers in the history of Russia. That spring he had been preparing to give Russia its longed-for constitution, which would have brought his feudal despotism into the ranks of civilized European states.
But the young people were afraid that the constitution would create false contentment in society and distract Russia from the coming revolution. Also, the tsar’s reforms seemed to them too gradual. The young people were in a hurry.
By that time People’s Will terrorists had already made seven unsuccessful attempts on the tsar’s life. The price had been twenty-one death sentences. And now, once again, they were going out onto a Petersburg street—to kill Alexander II.
That day in the Pavlovsky Regiment barracks, which had a view on the Moika Canal and the Field of Mars, the young soldier Alexander Volkov was standing guard. From the direction of the Ekaterininsky Canal came two powerful explosions. Volkov saw the smoke disperse slowly over the canal and the police chief’s sleigh dash past.
Three Cossacks from the tsar’s escort were propping up the dying tsar: two standing to the side on the runners and one in front whose Circassian coat was black with Alexander’s blood. The savaged muscles of the tsar’s legs were gushing blood.
The sleigh was heading toward the Winter Palace. “I want to die there,” the tsar kept repeating. Alexander II had been mortally wounded by a bomb made in that same Petersburg apartment. The bomb that killed the Orthodox tsar had been disguised as an Easter cake, a fine-looking Easter gift—the young people had not overlooked the irony.
Then a coach under escort sped past Volkov. A huge, heavy, bald man and a thirteen-year-old boy were sitting in the coach—the new Tsar Alexander III and his thirteen-year-old son Nicholas, who that day became heir to the Russian throne.
The entire life of the soldier standing guard that day, Alexander Volkov, would be linked with this boy sitting in the coach. His life would rush by between two regicides.
——
Meanwhile Vera Figner and her friends had already learned of the mortal wounds to Alexander II. Their gruesome success evoked a strange exultation in the young woman: “In my agitation I could scarcely get the words out, that the tsar had been killed, and I wept: the terrible nightmare that had oppressed young Russia for so many decades had been broken off. All had been redeemed by this moment, this tsarist blood we had shed.” And they embraced for joy—the young people who had killed the tsar-reformer.
“The revolutionary is a doomed man.” This is a quotation from Mikhail Bakunin’s famous Revolutionary Catechism, according to which the revolutionary must break with the civilized world’s laws and conventions and renounce any personal life and blood ties in the name of the revolution. He must despise society and be ruthless toward it (and must himself expect no mercy from society and be prepared to die), intensifying the people’s misfortunes by all possible means, spurring them on toward revolution. He must know that all means are justified by a single goal: revolution.
They had resolved to smear the stalled Russian cart of history with blood. And roll on, roll on—to 1917, the Ekaterinburg cellar, and the Great Red Terror.
Tsar Alexander II passed away in the palace in agony.
This picture: the murdered grandfather bleeding profusely. It would not quit Nicholas his whole life long.
In blood, he became heir to the throne.
“A tsar’s blood shed” gave birth to his diary. Nicholas was the heir, and now his life belonged to history. Starting with the New Year he must record his life.
HIS FAMILY
As a result of countless dynastic marriages, by the twentieth century scarcely any Russian blood flowed in the veins of the Russian Romanov tsars.
But “Russian tsar” is a nationality in itself, and the German princess who ascended to the Russian throne and brought glory on herself in Russian history as Empress Catherine the Great felt truly Russian. So Russian that when her own brother prepared to visit Russia she was indignant: “Why? There are more than enough Germans in Russia without him.” Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, was in his appearance and habits a typical Russian landowner who loved everything Russian. The proud formula “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality” flowed in the non-Russian blood of Russia’s tsars.
Nicholas’s mother was the Danish Princess Dagmar; his grandmother, the Danish queen. He called his grandmother “the mother-in-law of all Europe”: her numerous daughters, sons, and grandchildren had allied nearly all the royal houses, uniting the continent in this entertaining manner from England to Greece.
Princess Dagmar was first engaged to the elder son of Alexander II—Nicholas. But Nicholas died from consumption in Nice, and Alexander became heir to the throne. Along with his title, the new heir took his deceased brother’s fiancée for his wife: on his deathbed Nicholas himself joined their hands. The Danish Princess Dagmar became Her Imperial Highness Marie Feodorovna.
The marriage was a happy one. They had many children. Nicholas’s father proved to be a marvelous family man: his main precept was to preserve the foundations of the family and the state.
Constancy was the motto of Nicholas’s father, the future Emperor Alexander III.
Reform—that is, change and quest—had been the motto of Nicholas’s grandfather, Emperor Alexander II.
His grandfather’s frequent enthusiasms for new ideas found a unique extension in his many romantic involvements. Alexander II’s love affairs followed one after the other, until she—the beauty—appeared: Princess Catherine Dolgorukaya. To everyone’s astonishment, Alexander II was faithful to his new mistress. Children were born. An official second imperial family appeared, and Alexander II spent nearly all his time with them. And when the revolutionaries began their tsar hunt, Nicholas’s grandfather took an extravagant step: for their safety he settled both his families in the Winter Palace.
In 1880 Nicholas’s grandmother, Marie Feodorovna, Alexander II’s official wife, died, whereupon Nicholas’s grandfather married his mistress. Although the intelligent and punctilious Princess Catherine was quick to renounce all rights to the throne for her eldest son, who knew? Today, perhaps tomorrow, the impossible.… Alexander II was sixty-two years old, but he was at the dawn of his powers and health. Nicholas’s father took a marked step into the background. But now, just a few months after Alexander II’s shameful marriage, a bomb exploding on the Ekaterininsky Canal carried Nicholas’s grandfather to his grave. Naturally, Nicholas heard what people around him were saying: divine retribution for the sinful tsar!
In the fall of 1882 Nicholas sang a song which so impressed him that when he got home he wrote it out on the inside cover of his very first diary (“The song we sang while one of us hid”). This folk song about the old hag death combing out the curls of the slain lad opens his diary. Yet another mysterious portent.
“Began writing my diary on the 1st of January 1882. In the morning drank hot chocolate, dressed in my Life Guard reserves uniform.… Took a walk in the garden with Papa. We chopped and sawed wood and made a great bonfire. Went to bed at about half past 9.… Papa, Mama, and I received two deputations. Presented me with a magnificent wooden platter inscribed ‘The peasants of Voronezh to their Tsarevich.’ With bread and salt and a Russian towel.”
Games at Gatchina, visits with his cousins the grand dukes, who were his age. The large Romanov family.
“This morning the canaries were moved into a small wooden cage.… Sandro [Alexander] and Sergei … skated and played ball, and when Papa left we started a snowball fight.”
Boys at play. A carefree life. Sergei and Sandro were the sons of Grand Duke Michael, his grandfather’s brother.
Nicholas (or Nicky, as everyone called him) was especially friendly with Michael’s sons. Sergei, Sandro, and George Mikhailovich were his diary’s favorite characters, the comrades of his childhood games, his youth. The eldest was also a Nicholas, later the distinguished liberal historian Nicholas Romanov, who looked bemusedly on their play. He would always regard Emperor Nicky with gentle irony.
Later, outside at the Fortress of Peter and Paul, Nicholas Mikhailovich and George Mikhailovich would be executed, and Sergei Mikhailovich would lie at the bottom of a mine shaft with a bullet in his head.
“We worked in the garden. Cleared three trees that had fallen on top of one another. Then made a huge bonfire. Mama came to look at our bonfire it was so inviting.”
Burning, burning, a huge bonfire in the dark of night. Many years later this gray-eyed adolescent would kindle another bonfire in which an empire would perish.
THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF HIS LIFE
All this went on at Gatchina, where Alexander III shut himself in with his family after his father’s assassination. The tsar appeared in Petersburg from the New Year until Lent, during which time he gave royal balls whose Asiatic splendor stunned the foreign emissaries. But this was window dressing. The family’s real life was at Gatchina, where they lived in a magnificent palace whose formal rooms were empty. Alexander and his family occupied the mezzanine, once the servant’s quarters. His numerous family lived in small rooms so narrow one could scarcely bring in a piano. The shade of his murdered father haunted Alexander III. There was a chain of sentries along the fence, guards around the palace, and guards inside the park. The life of the young Nicholas began with a prison accent.
Meanwhile, the young soldier Alexander Volkov was beginning to make a career for himself: he was brought into the inner Palace Guard. After midnight he watched the emperor fish on the lake.
A moonlit night over the Gatchina park. Volkov stood all alone on the bank, demonstrating the guard’s small numbers. The real guard, comprising thirty men, was hiding in the bushes around the lake. Beyond the tsar’s boat was another guard with a convoy.
In the tsar’s boat the huntsman held up a lantern, the fish swam toward the light, and the huge, heavy tsar speared the surfacing fish.
Fishing and hunting at times even pushed back affairs of state. “Europe can wait while the Russian tsar fishes.” This aphorism of the powerful monarch, the master of one-sixth of the earth’s surface, circulated through the newspapers of the world.
Nicholas was taken hunting and fishing, but more often his father took Michael, the younger brother. The hardy rascal Michael was his father’s and mother’s favorite.
The tsar is drinking tea with guests on the balcony, and below Misha, as Michael is called, is playing. The father gets an idea for a bullyish prank: he takes a watering can and douses the boy from above with water. Misha is pleased. Misha laughs, the tsar laughs, the guests laugh.
But suddenly, an unexpected cry: “And now, Papa, your turn.” The tsar obediently presents his bald spot—and Misha douses him with the watering can from head to foot.
But the father’s iron will broke Michael’s childish independence. Both brothers would grow up good, gentle, and timid, as often happens with children of strong fathers.
This was when Nicholas grasped what is for an adolescent the bitterest truth: They don’t love me, they love my brother! His adolescent insight did not make him mean, sullen, or less obedient. He simply became reticent.
Alexander appointed the distinguished K. P. Pobedonostsev, chief procurator of the Holy Synod, Nicholas’s tutor.
Alexander III ascended to the throne with an understandable logic: there were reforms under my father, and what was the result? His murder. So Pobedonostsev was called to power. The desiccated old man with protruding ears had the dry wheeze of a grand inquisitor wasted away from fasting.
Pobedonostsev would explain that Russia was a special country where reforms and a free press would inevitably result in decadence and disorder. “Like frost he inhibits any further decay, but nothing will grow under him,” a Russian commentator pinpointed Pobedonostsev. But the frost-man was then already feeling the heat of the fiery luminescence advancing on the empire: revolution. Who was going to stand up to it? This kind boy whose nature was anything but that of a tsar? Pobedonostsev respected Nicholas as the future monarch, but he could not love him. Nicholas found no love in his tutor.
Instead of love he got—the army!
Alexander III had the nickname “Peacemaker.” He avoided wars, but the army loomed over society as imposing as ever. The army, which had always made Russia strong. “Not by its laws, nor its civilization, but by its army,” as Count Witte, the powerful minister and adviser to both Nicholas and his father, wrote. “Russia as a state is neither commercial nor agricultural but military, and its calling is to be the wrath of the world,” said a Cadet Corps textbook. The army meant obedience and diligence above all else. Both these qualities, which the shy youth already possessed, the army would foster ruinously.
The heir to the throne did his service in the Guards. Ever since the eighteenth century Russia’s wealthiest, most distinguished families had sent their children to Petersburg and the Guards. The richest grandees, having retired to live out their days away from Petersburg in hospitable Moscow’s magnificent palaces, sent their children off to Petersburg and the Guards. Drinking, gypsies, duels—these were the Guards’ gentlemanly occupations. The Guards had been responsible for all of Russia’s palace revolutions. Guards had brought the Romanov empresses—Elizabeth and Catherine—to the throne and killed Emperors Peter III and Paul I. But the Guards had done more than plot against the imperial court. In all of Russia’s great battles, the Guards had been in the van.
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:
Old men! I remember you,
Draining dippers round the fire,
Your noses red and blue.
“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.”
“ALIX H.”
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.
The church still stands at Ilinskoe. Then candles burned there, singers’ voices rang out, and the two sisters stood in the sanctuary.
Nicholas continued his meek rebellion. He carried out Papa’s order, but.… He could be forbidden to see her but not to wait for her.
“21 December 1890. This evening with Mama we discussed the family life of today’s young society people. Unintentionally this conversation brushed a most vital chord in my soul, the dream and hope that carries me from one day to the next. Already a year and a half has gone by since discussed this with Papa at Peterhof, and nothing has changed in either the bad or the good sense. My dream is one day to marry Alix H. Have loved her for a long time, but even more deeply and strongly since 1889, when she spent 6 weeks of the winter in Petersburg. Have fought my feeling for a long time, trying to deceive myself with the impossibility of my cherished dream coming true.… The only obstacle or gap between her and me is the matter of religion. Other than that barrier there is no other, am nearly convinced that our feelings are mutual. All is up to God’s will, and am putting my trust in his mercy, calmly and meekly, looking to the future.”
He was sent away to travel and forget the whole business.
“The Mediterranean Sea, the Adriatic, Venice.… Life truly is a holiday! A ball! A ball!”
When Nicholas returned to Petersburg his father realized that nothing had changed—and it was time to act.
Soon in Nicholas’s diary yet another important character would appear: “Little K.”
“I’VE FALLEN MADLY IN LOVE … WITH LITTLE K.”
All the brilliant Guards officers, the imperial suite, and the imperial family belonged to the famous Yacht Club. It was in March 1890 that the name of Little K. was heard there for the first time.
All the club members were balletomanes. For a century the Rossi Street colonnade, where the Petersburg ballet school was located, had been a favorite spot for the dandies of the capital to take the air. It was an old tradition of the Petersburg elite to have a ballerina for a mistress.
Like the Guards, the ballet was closely linked with the court.
Grand Duke X. (various names could be substituted here) fell in love with a ballerina, lived with her openly, bought her a house, and fathered her children. The list of these scandalous tales was long. The director of the imperial theaters had to be a diplomat and strategist, always current on the complicated disposition of relationships between his wards and the members of the imperial family. Arriving at the ballet, the public first turned to notice the “imperial presence”: which member of the imperial family was sitting in the imperial box. This often determined a ballerina’s status.
——
Vera Leonidovna Yureneva:
“She wasn’t beautiful, her legs were too short. But her eyes! Two pools. She was enticing, a little temptress. She had studied with the Italians and was magnificent technically. She once danced thirty-two fouettés and, after a storm of applause, sweetly danced thirty-two more. Someone said about her: ‘She loved ballet in general and life in particular.’ On the contrary: she loved ballet in particular and life in general. All her life she aspired to become a great ballerina, but she never was considered great.… In society at that time it was fashionable to show one’s displeasure: she was doomed to the audience’s disfavor the moment the future tsar fell in love with her. My ballerina girlfriend tried to have her hissed off the stage.… This was duly noted.… And at her own performance my girlfriend received a huge bouquet of flowers and a note: ‘Mathilde Kschessinska thanks you very much.’ She could be splendid. Because of her eyes she was called the ‘fairy of the Parc des Cerfs’: the French King Louis XV had kept his harem at the Parc des Cerfs.”
It was a ballet family. Her father was the Pole Felix Kschessinski, who had taught all of Petersburg high society to dance the mazurka. He produced ballets and himself had danced with all the famous ballerinas of his day. By the end of the century, his children were already dancing on the imperial stage, Iosif and Yulia (or Kschessinska the First, as they would call her when her younger sister’s star skyrocketed).
Nicholas’s diary:
“23 March 1890. Took a carriage to Elagin Island to see a stable of young horses. Came back in a new troika. Had a bite to eat at 8. Went to a performance at the theatrical institute. There were some short plays and a ballet.
“We had a fine supper with the pupils.”
Behind this awkward sentence lies the beginning of the romance.
Mathilde Kschessinska was born in 1872. She would die in Paris in 1971, just shy of one hundred years. In Paris she would write her memoirs, the touching story of the love of a young ballerina for the heir to the throne. She would write about that evening of March 23, 1890, as well, about an evening in vanished Atlantis.
After the graduation performance and ball, which the emperor and the heir attended, the tables were set. Unexpectedly they stayed for supper. They were seated at a separate table and suddenly the tsar said: “And where is Kschessinska the Second?”
The young ballerina was brought to the tsar’s table; the sovereign paid her several compliments and added that he knew her father. The emperor-father himself seated the young ballerina next to the heir and added jokingly: “Only please don’t flirt too much.” To the young ballerina’s amazement, Nicholas sat by her the entire evening without saying a word. His tender blue eyes watched her helplessly.
Let us switch from Kschessinska’s romantic tale to prosaic narrative. So the tsar himself sat the girl next to his son and even offered some advice: “Just don’t flirt.” He could scarcely have made himself any clearer.
Vera Yureneva: “This was common. When young boys from wealthy families were coming of age, a beautiful and, even more important, pure servant would be brought into the house. This was a dangerous era.”
Indeed, syphilis carried away young men by the thousands. Heavy drinking, homosexuality, and brothels were a part of life in the Guards. But the heir’s health affected the destiny of the entire country. The affair with the Jewess had been an ominous warning, and the father of the family and the country had decided to take action. Kschessinska was a brilliant candidate: a romance with a future ballet star could only enhance the young man’s biography. But still, the main thing was to make him forget the Hesse princess. The visit to the institute had been devised for just that purpose.
Did the young ballerina understand the rules of the game? Or for her was it all, in fact, cast in a romantic light: the heir, the tsarevich! But then the game was being orchestrated by adults. Whatever the scenario, this was a game.
Only in the summer did the little girl with the big eyes manage to resume the romance. In June 1890 Mathilde Kschessinska was accepted into the troupe of the Mariinsky Imperial Theater. Guards training, in which Nicholas was taking part, went on at Krasnoe Selo, where the imperial ballet danced the summer season.
She knew it would happen during the intermission: the grand dukes liked to come backstage, and he would probably come with them, because she knew he wanted to come.
And he did. So they met backstage. He was talking incoherently, and she was still waiting. The next day he was backstage again, and again—nothing. Once during an intermission she was detained, and when she ran out onto the stage, flushed, eyes blazing, so afraid was she of missing her timid admirer, he had already left. When he did see her he burst out with a jealous, helpless “I’m certain you were only flirting!” And, flustered, ran out. Thus he declared himself.
The tsar’s family had the first box on the left, which was practically on the stage. Dancing nearby, the new ballerina Kschessinska the Second devoured the heir, who was sitting in the box alongside his father, with her huge eyes. What was most surprising was that she evoked no displeasure from the terrible emperor. From that moment the director of the imperial theaters took pains to ensure that any available parts went to this ballerina. In a very short time she would win the place of prima donna in the imperial ballet.
“17 June. Detachment maneuvers. Like Kschessinska the Second quite well.”
“30 June. Krasnoe Selo. The growing affair has heated up powerfully.… Was at the theater, talked with little K. at the window [of the box].”
In Paris she recalled how he stood at the box window and she onstage down front. And again the conversation ended in a delightful nothing. Later he came to say goodbye: he was leaving for a trip around the world.
“Went for the last time to the dear Krasnoe Selo theater to say goodbye to K. Dined with Mama until 1.”
She did not understand him. But it was all so simple: he was saving himself for Alix H.
Little K. read the newspapers daily—she was following his travels. News came that left Petersburg dumbfounded: a Japanese policeman had attacked the heir on the street of a small Japanese town and tried to behead him with a sword. By a miracle, Nicholas had survived.
The capital was full of rumors. Fantastic stories about inadmissible courting by a most adventuresome Nicholas. (Well aware of her timid admirer’s character, Little K. did not believe it possible.) Finally the attacker was declared an insane fanatic.
“27 April 1891. Arrived in Kyoto. My eyes didn’t know where to look first, such were the wonders. Watched archery and horseracing in ancient costumes.… At 9 set out with Georgie [the Greek Prince George, who had accompanied him on his travels] for a teahouse. Georgie danced, provoking gales of laughter from the geishas.”
“Even in my dreams the waters of the Gion [the teahouse quarter in Kyoto] flow under my pillow.… Hundreds of geishas filled Gion’s narrow streets. The teahouses’ residents are brocade dolls in kimonos woven with gold thread. Japanese erotica is more refined and subtle than the crude proffers of love on European streets.… The tea ceremony ends.… All that follows remains a secret.”
“29 April. Woke up to a marvelous day whose end I would not have seen had I not been saved by the Lord God’s great mercy.
“We set out from Kyoto in a jinrikisha for the small town of Otsu, where we went to the house of the little round governor. In his house, which was utterly European, he had set up a bazaar where each of us ruined ourselves on some knickknack. This was where Georgie bought his bamboo cane, which was to do me such a great service an hour later. After lunch we prepared to make the return trip, and Georgie and I were glad we would be able to take a rest in Kyoto before evening. We rode out in our jinrikishas and turned left down a narrow street crowded to either side. At that point received a strong blow to the right side of my head, above my ear. Turned and saw the loathsome scowl of a policeman, who was waving his saber over me in both hands a second time. Could only cry out: ‘What, what do you want?’ He jumped out over the jinrikisha onto the pavement. Seeing that the monster was headed toward me and that no one was attempting to restrain him, I ran off down the street, stopping the blood spurting from the wound with my hand. Wanted to hide in the crowd but couldn’t, because the Japanese themselves were terrified and had scattered in all directions.… Turning around once more as I ran, noticed Georgie chasing the policeman pursuing me.… Finally, having run an entire 60 paces, I ducked around the corner of a side street and looked back. By then, thank God, it was all over. Georgie, my savior, had felled the loathsome creature with one blow of his cane, and as I approached our jinrikishas, several policemen were dragging him off by the legs. One of them was holding a saber to his neck. What I couldn’t understand was how Georgie, that fanatic, and I had ended up alone, in the middle of the street, why no one from the crowd rushed to my aid.… No one from our suite could have helped, evidently, since they were riding in a long file. Even Prince Ari Sugava, who was third in line, didn’t see anything. Had to reassure everyone and stay on my feet as long as possible. Rambakh [the doctor] did the first bandage and, most important, stanched the blood. The people on the street were touching: most of them got down on their knees and raised their arms in a sign of regret. More than anything I was upset at the thought of alarming dear Papa and Mama and about how to write them of this incident.”
Nicholas’s outcry in this deadly moment as he himself recorded it is striking: “What, what …?”
Twenty-seven years later he would repeat this same cry, also at a deadly moment, as he stood in that cellar in Ekaterinburg—to be recorded by his assassin, Yurovsky.
So in 1891, for the second time in his life, he eluded death, and Nicholas began to feel that he was under His protection; He would not let Nicholas die. Did this mean he had another purpose?
“1 May. Tokyo. Am not so very angry at the good Japanese for the repulsive act of one fanatic. As before, their model order and cleanliness is a pleasure, and I must confess I keep on watching … whom I see on the street from afar. Received the Mikado at 11 o’clock.”
His father ordered him to return to Petersburg, and again all was joyous; life was a never-ending ball. In Vladivostok he helped lay the first stone at the eastern terminus of the great railway that was to cross all of Siberia. And there was a pleasant journey down the rivers of Siberia, with plenty of card playing and drinking—to celebrate death twice cheated.
On the return trip he visited Tobolsk.
“10 July 1891. At 7 arrived in Tobolsk in a dim, gray light. On the wharf, as always was met by the mayor with bread and salt, the citizens of the town of Tyumen, with platters by the craft guild, and an honor guard.… Took a carriage and rode up the hill to the cathedral—through the original wooden streets of the town. From the cathedral we went to view the vestry, where they keep most of the objects relating to the subdual of Siberia. Went to the museum; here I found most interesting the bell sent away from Uglich because it had been sounded as an alarm on the day Tsarevich Dmitry died.”
Subsequently he himself, like this bell, would be exiled to Tobolsk. As a prisoner he would climb an icy slope to look over a fence at the very edge of the streets and town he had admired in his happy youth.
——
He returned. Not stopping in Petersburg, he continued on to Krasnoe Selo to see his parents.
“7 August 1891. Strange not to have to go anywhere or have any more night lodgings with late arrivals and early departures.”
He resumed his old familiar life.
“15 December. This morning received an entire shipment of papers from the Council of State and Committee of Ministers. Simply cannot understand how anyone can read so many papers in one week. Always limit myself to one or two matters, the most interesting, and the rest go straight into the fire….
“31 December. Cannot say I have regretted 1891 coming to a close. It was definitely fateful for the entire family: the death of Aunt Olga [the mother of his friends Sergei and Sandro Mikhailovich],… the illness of and long separation from George [his brother], and finally, the incident in Otsu. All happened so fast, in such quick succession. Added to these great misfortunes has been the famine. I pray God that the year to come will not resemble the year just past.”
Again it was March.
“5 March 1892. Mama says she hardly sees me, I gad about so much, but I do not think so, it seems to me at my age that is the way it should be.
“8 March. Woke up just before Mass. Sleeping so soundly that it drives even me to despair.”
Thus passed this scattered life. Alix was far away, a myth, a dream, and nearby was this dear girl who was so well liked—by him, by Sergei, by his entire company of friends.
“25 March. Returned to Anichkov in falling flakes of snow. And this is spring? Dined with Sergei in my rooms, then went to visit the Kschessinskis, where I passed a pleasant hour and a half.”
That day Nicholas ventured a step that was surprising for the indecisive young man.
The bold decision must have been made during the dinner he mentioned. The wine and the talk with his childhood friend Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, who made no attempt to hide his own rapture over the young ballerina’s charms. One might even guess what they talked about—after all, exactly two years had passed since Nicholas had first seen Mathilde. One might easily imagine what the lady-killer, the brilliant Petersburg dandy Grand Duke Sergei, advised him.
Nicholas came to a decision.
Kschessinska recalled that March Petersburg day. She was sitting at home, ill, with a bandaged eye. The romantic K. had been suffering from a mundane stye. When her maid informed her that a certain Guards officer, a Mr. Volkov, wished to see her, the surprised ballerina, who did not know Mr. Volkov, nevertheless told her to show him into the drawing room. She could not believe her eyes: standing in the drawing room was Nicholas.
They were alone for the first time. They made their declarations and … nothing! To Little K.’s astonishment, after “a pleasant hour and a half,” he took his leave.
The next day she received a note: “Ever since our meeting I feel as if I am in a daze. I hope I shall be able to see you again soon. Nicky.”
Now for her he was “Nicky.” A charming (and what was amazing for the times) innocent game of love began. His fellows in the Corps brought flowers from her admirer, and the admirer himself was now a frequent visitor at Felix Kschessinski’s apartment. But each visit coincided oddly with the absence of the rest of the family. Notes when he did not visit followed without letup. Now he called her pannochka, Polish for “young lady.”
“Think of what Andrei, who adored a young pannochka, did.”
He brought up Gogol’s characters to no purpose: the story of the Cossack Andrei, who betrayed the behest of his father, the old Taras Bulba, for the love of his pannochka, was utterly inappropriate. Because the whole time, behind the scenes of his love story, stood the terrible Bulba—his father-emperor.
Actually, during his meetings with Mathilde he was always dreaming of another, whom his father opposed and with whom a union would indeed constitute a betrayal of the old Bulba. Kschessinska was merely the false pannochka. Hidden away as before in the depths of his soul was the true pannochka: Alix H.
In a strange way, he merged the two.
“31 March. Stopped in for a while at Uncle Misha’s.… He led us through the rooms of his deceased wife—nothing had been touched.” Here he is thinking about Alix. The touching love of the parents of his friends Sandro and Sergei—marital love—this is Alix H.
“Returned to Gatchina. Am in the most un-Lenten of moods. A good thing am staying at Gatchina and 49 versts [30 miles] from the capital.” This is Mathilde.
“1 April.… I note a very odd phenomenon in myself: never thought that two identical sentiments, two loves, could cohabit the soul simultaneously. Now it is over three years I have loved Alix H., and I constantly cherish the thought that God might let me marry her one day.… But ever since camp in 1890 I have loved little K. passionately. An amazing thing, our heart. At the same time do not cease to think of Alix, although it is true, one might conclude from this I am very amorous. To a certain extent, yes! I must add, though, that inside I am a harsh judge and extremely scrupulous—this is the mood that yesterday I called un-Lenten.”
But for now a merry company gathered almost every evening in Little K.’s room. Nicholas came with his friends, the brothers Sergei, Sandro, and George. The three grand dukes and the heir had a good time in the fashionable ballet teacher’s modest apartment.
Nicholas accompanied the emperor to Denmark, whence he sent Mathilde passionate letters. But simultaneously with these letters Nicholas cautiously resumed his discussion of Alix with his father.
The emperor was disturbed—his game had been to no avail. Was it not a direct consequence of this that the pannochka made her decisive thrust?
“At the time I was thinking more and more about intimacy,” Kschessinska would recall in Paris. “I adored the tsarevich and wanted only one thing—my happiness, however brief it might be.” Finally she was able to force Nicholas to come to a decision. He bought her a “ravishing palace” on the English Embankment, where their platonic love was finally to end. At one time Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich had bought this palace for the dancer Kuznetsova. Little K. left her home and openly became the tsarevich’s mistress. “This killed my father,” she recalled. “He asked me: Did I realize I could never marry him? And that our idyll would be very brief? I replied: I understand, but I don’t care. I want to experience all the happiness I am allowed.”
That is how the old Kschessinska described the scene.
But it could be done more prosaically. Her father simply apprised her of the condition upon which the other father, who stood at the head of both the country and the family, had permitted the liaison: the tsarevich’s marriage must mean an immediate finish to all their relations. In this game, too, the emperor remained a good family man.
——
So she had vanquished, but her victory was the beginning of the end.
“We arranged a housewarming.… The tsarevich gave me a water service—eight gold glasses encrusted with precious stones….
“He brought me gifts quite often. I used to refuse to accept them, but he grieved so … so I had to accept them.”
She had ceased to be a dream, and he pined more and more for his distant beauty. Life and dream: accessible Mathilde and the sublime, regal princess. Little K. disappeared from his diaries.
Yet another year of his life came to an end.
“31 December [1892]. Dear Anichkov sparkled with electricity. We went to mass at 7.30. At 12 the three of us, Papa, Mama, and I, greeted the New Year. God Grant it be just like this one.”
Little K. was dancing part after part. But that was as it should be: the premier young man of Russia should have the premier ballerina for his mistress.
When the great ballet master Marius Petipa chose her to dance Esmeralda, he asked: “Are you in love?” “Yes.” “Are you suffering?” “Certainly not!” Petipa explained to her that only an artist who has known suffering can dance Esmeralda. “I understood that later,” Mathilde recalled sadly, “and then Esmeralda became my best role.”
Her time would come to understand that. She was seeing Nicholas less and less often. But she still clung to her old ties: Nicky’s dear friend Sandro and Nicky’s sister Xenia held a merry engagement party in her home.
In April 1894 Nicholas went to Coburg to attend the wedding of Alix’s brother Ernie. Soon after, the newspapers were writing about the tsarevich’s engagement to Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. After his return from Coburg he never went to see Little K. again.
They exchanged letters. Farsighted, she asked his permission to turn to him if necessary. He replied that the days he had spent by her side would ever be the most beautiful memories of his youth. She could always turn to him.
At his request Mathilde named a place for their last meeting: the main road between Petersburg and Krasnoe Selo. She arrived from town in a carriage; he, on horseback, from camp. “As always in such instances, I found it hard to say anything—choked with weeping and lost for the right words.” She watched him recede into the distance, constantly turning around in the saddle. Thus she described the end.
——
But was this indeed the end? Although Kschessinska ceased to be Nicholas’s mistress once he became engaged to Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1894, she remained a presence in the Romanov family for the rest of her life, as she recounts in her memoir, Dancing in Petersburg.
Kschessinska very quickly turned to her longtime admirer Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, who as head of the Theatrical Society and the Russian ballet could secure her former position in the ballet. For of all her lovers she remained faithful to only one: the ballet.
Kschessinska’s shadow next crossed the palace threshold in May 1896 in conjunction with Nicholas’s coronation, which was to be followed by a brilliant gala concert. The dowager empress, the new tsar’s all-powerful mother, had no intention of allowing Little K. to perform, and her scandalous name was crossed off the list of performers. However, when the astonished public saw the program, there was the name: Mathilde Kschessinska, dancing the lead!
They had done everything—both his mother and the minister of the court—to convince Nicky not to permit this scandal, but Mathilde knew her old lover too well. She had gone to the aging Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, who pleaded her case with Nicholas. On Nicholas’s other flank, his dear friend Sergei stepped forward. Nicholas ordered her name written in. Little K. had shown everyone her power—as she would continue to do in the years to come.
Kschessinska would bid the stage farewell many times but would continue to dance until 1917, and all the while she would keep the Romanov family around herself by whatever means necessary. When Sergei Mikhailovich and Kschessinska were accused of accepting huge bribes in arms deals during World War I, Nicholas refused to betray her, even to Alix.
For many years Sergei Mikhailovich remained by Little K.’s side. But when the frivolous grand duke became involved in a serious romance, Little K. immediately took an interest in a new Romanov: Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich came into her life. They went to Venice and then Provence, where he bought her a house by the sea. When they returned to Petersburg, Sergei Mikhailovich was by her side once more. Then she bore a son, Vladimir. Did she know whose son it was? Yes, indeed: the Romanovs’!
In February 1917, Kschessinska gave her last reception on the eve of the revolution. The following morning, as her housekeeper was checking the tea service and silver, she saw a vast crowd turning onto the bridge—toward the Winter Palace. Then she got a call from the chief of police: “The situation is critical, save whatever you can.”
Vera Leonidovna: “In February 1917 I was in the apartment of a friend, the famous artist Yuriev.… That is where Mathilde hid out for a few days. She showed up dressed in a pathetic coat and some kind of kerchief with her little son, her dog, and a tiny reticule, which contained all that was left of her palaces and incalculable riches.”
With her trembling, age-spotted hands, she showed me how Kschessinska had held her reticule.
Kschessinska had no faith in the stability of the situation in the capital. She decided to leave Russia and take her son with her. After her departure, the Bolsheviks occupied Kschessinska’s palace. Cheap tobacco smoke permeated the upper rooms, endless people streamed up and down the trampled stairs, and sailors guarded the palace. In April 1917 a conference of Bolsheviks was held in her beloved hall, with its tall mirror over the mantel and its winter garden. And there, on her chairs, sat Filipp Goloshchekin, who was appointed to lead the Ural Bolsheviks. He would be the man to decide the fate of the two people who had been closest to her—Nicholas and Sergei.
Having escaped to Paris, Little K. would finally fulfill her dream: Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich married her. His brother Kirill became the Russian emperor in exile, and she became his relative.
BY THE WINDOW IN COBURG CASTLE
Early in 1894 it became clear that Alexander III was going to die, evidently as a consequence of the train wreck at Borki six years earlier. The tsar had received only a bruise, but that bruise developed into a fatal kidney disease. Now the heir’s marriage had to be readied with all due speed.
The emperor’s sudden mortal illness put an end to the game with Little K.
The diplomats earned their pay. Constant negotiations were conducted back and forth between Petersburg and Darmstadt.
In April 1894, Alix’s brother Ernie was to marry his cousin the Saxe-Coburg Princess Victoria Melita, (“Ducky”), another granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Emperor Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria, and innumerable European princes were assembling in Coburg. One of the last brilliant balls of royal Europe was to be held at the brink of the terrible new century.
Russia was represented by a powerful phalanx of grand dukes. Even Father Ioann Yanyshev, confessor to the tsar’s family, attended. His presence spoke clearly to the very serious intentions of those who had come: Father Ioann was supposed to instruct Alix in the fundamentals of Orthodox teaching. Also arriving in Coburg was Ekaterina Adolfovna Schneider, who had taught Russian to Ella, Alix’s sister. Should the matter reach a favorable conclusion, she would teach Russian to the Hessian princess. And naturally, Alix’s favorite sister, Ella (Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna), came too.
The engagement of Nicholas and Alix was to take place at the wedding of Alix’s brother Ernie. Everyone knew it.
Nicholas’s diary:
“5 April.… She has grown remarkably more beautiful, but she looked extremely sad. They left us alone, and then there began between us the conversation I have wished for and at the same time greatly feared for so long. We talked until 12, but with no result: she still objects to conversion. Poor thing, she cried a lot, and we parted more calmly.”
Everything was drowning in lilac It was a chilly, magnificent spring. That is how those days began. Despite her refusal, he was joyously calm. He knew that all his people were now in favor of this marriage, and most of all he knew she loved him. He had discovered a rule for himself, having twice found himself on the brink of death: trust the Lord in all things. He would be governed by this rule all the rest of his life, but during those Coburg days, in violation of this rule, he was quite persistent. The girl he wanted for a wife was deeply religious, and he ached for her, understanding what a change of religion meant. Loving her for her despair and her tears, he helped her with his tender persistence to shift responsibility for the decision onto him.
She, however, cried a lot during the interval. Subsequently she would write many times about how hard it had been for her to accept the idea of converting. Religion played an enormous role in her life. But her predecessor princesses of Hesse had set out for distant Russia many times and had converted. Even her sister Ella had accepted Orthodoxy and was happy in her new religion. No, something else was behind all this crying, but she could not put it into words. In decisive moments it is given to exalted, nervous natures to sense the future. Is that not why she cried so bitterly and, virtually terrified, did her utmost to tell him no?
Nicholas’s diary:
“7 April. Ducky and Ernie’s wedding day. It began with me being late for breakfast and having to walk like a cock past the crowd on the square. At 12 everyone gathered upstairs, and after the civil marriage act was signed, we went into the church. Ernie and Ducky make a fine couple. The pastor gave a good sermon, the point of which was amazingly apropos to the essence of what I am going through. At that moment had a terrible urge to look into Alix’s soul. After the wedding a family dinner.… The young people left for Darmstadt. Went for a walk with Uncle Vladimir, climbed the hill, and finally reached the castle. We viewed the weapons museum at length and had dinner with Aunt Marie, in our uniforms, because of the emperor [Wilhelm II], who will not wear civil dress. Then we went, or rather ran, to the theater in a downpour. They gave the first act of Pagliacci.”
What a good time he had clambering up the hill to the castle and then running across the street in the evening and sitting in a wet uniform in the theater! He had a good time whatever he did then because he knew it would all work out—and by tomorrow for sure. He loved them all: dear Ernie, dear Ducky, dear Uncle Willy, and dear Uncle Vladimir.
“8 April [he underscored the date three times in the diary]. A marvelous, unforgettable day in my life! The day of my engagement to my precious, beloved Alix. After our conversation we declared ourselves to each other. So joyful to be able to gladden dear Papa and Mama. Walked around the entire day in a haze, not fully conscious, actually, of what had happened to me.… Then a ball was arranged. Didn’t feel like dancing; walked and sat in the garden with my fiancée. Can hardly believe that I have—a fiancée.”
In a letter to his mother he described in more detail Alix’s strange despair and tears:
“She cried the whole time, and only whispered now and then: ‘No, I cannot.’ Still I continued to insist and repeat my arguments, and though this conversation went on for two hours, it came to nothing.… I gave her your letter [the letter of a Danish princess who had converted happily], and after that she could no longer argue.… She joined us in the drawing room, where we were sitting with Ella and Wilhelm, and then and there, right away, she agreed. God Almighty only knows what that did to me. I was crying like a baby, as was she. No, dear Mama, I cannot express how happy I am. The whole world changed for me in an instant: nature, mankind—they all seem so good, and dear, and happy. I cannot even write, my hands are trembling so.… She has completely changed—she is gay, amusing, and talkative.”
He gave her a ruby ring and that brooch—the brooch he had given her at the children’s ball long ago. She wore his ring around her neck, along with her cross, and the brooch was always with her.
From her letter on the twenty-first anniversary of their engagement:
“April 8th, 1915. Tenderly do my prayers & grateful thoughts full of very deepest love linger around you on this dear anniversary!… You know I have kept the grey princesse dress I wore that morning. And shall wear yr. dear brooch.”
On their twenty-second anniversary:
“April 8th, 1916.… feel my longing to be held in your arms tightly clasped & to relive our beautiful bridal days.… That dear brooch will be worn today. I feel still your grey suite, the smell of it by the window in the Coburg Schloss.”
A twelve-carat diamond would be found in the filthy campfire where their clothing was burned that morning of July 17, 1918. The remains of the brooch. It was with her until the end.
How happy he was then! She too tried to be happy. Nonetheless, she continued to cry even afterward. The people around them could not understand it. Observing her tears, a simple-hearted lady-in-waiting wrote in her diary exactly what she could have been expected to write: Alix did not love her future spouse. She herself did not understand her tears—after all, she loved him very much, as she would recall in her letter on the twenty-second anniversary of their engagement: “those sweet kisses wh. I had dreamed of & yearned after so many years & wh. I thought, I should never get … & when make up for sure mind, then it is already for always—the same in my love and affections. A far too big heart wh. eats me up.”
He, however—he was deliriously happy. All his life he would gaily recall the orchestra playing at Coburg Castle and his Uncle Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, worn out from dinner, dozing off during the wedding ceremony and dropping his cane. What faith he had in the future then! And all those uncles and aunts (queens, an emperor, princes, dukes), who were still deciding the fates of nations, crowding in the halls of Coburg Castle and also believing in the future. If only they could have looked into the future then.
The newlyweds Ernie and Ducky, the “fine couple,” would separate soon afterward, and Alix’s sister Ella would perish at the bottom of a mine shaft. Uncle Willy, who was so fond of his military uniforms and was looking forward to a military alliance with Russia, instead would start a war with Russia. Uncle Paul, who was now dancing the mazurka, would be lying with a bullet in his heart, and Nicky himself….
“Though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down, saith the Lord.”
On April 9, Alexander Volkov was sent by his master, Grand Duke Paul, to deliver a present on the occasion of the engagement. He found Nicholas and Alix in the drawing room, sitting on the sofa, holding hands. So swallowed up were they in each other that Nicholas did not notice Volkov right away.
“Oh, it’s you, dear friend Volkov!”
Volkov, too, was “dear.” Everyone was “dear” (Nicholas’s favorite word).
At that time Ekaterina Adolfovna Schneider was already tutoring Alix in Russian. They were conjugating verbs, and Alix was recording them neatly in notebooks. She liked to study.
I am leafing through her study notebooks. Alix learned the language by conjugating three verbs: forget, sing, and believe. The unconscious: forget! Forget all her inexplicable premonitions. And believe. And sing.
Ekaterina Schneider would become the court reader in the imperial palace and in 1917 would voluntarily go into exile with her former pupil. In 1918, a thousand kilometers from Petersburg, en route to the disposal pits, they would kill the old court reader.
These were their happiest days, after their betrothal. Poetic love à la Goethe: he and Alix riding in a charabanc to gather flowers in the countryside.
Easter. On Good Friday singers from Petersburg revealed to the German-English princess all the triumphant goodness of the Orthodox service. With the singers came a courier from Petersburg, bringing presents, letters from the tsar and tsaritsa, and a medal—for Alix.
“20 April.… Went with Alix to the station and there said goodbye to her. How empty it feels now to go home.… So, we will have to spend a month and a half apart. Wandered alone to familiar places now dear to me and gathered her favorite flowers, which sent in a letter this evening….
“21 April. Had breakfast.… By my place stood my old picture of Alix surrounded by familiar pink flowers.”
Alix went to Windsor to see Queen Victoria. A month and a half later, the Polar Star approached the English shore. This was Nicholas’s favorite yacht, and it would become the favorite of Alix and their children. The white yacht entered the Thames.
“We spent entire days together, rode on the boat, had picnics on shore—a true idyll.… But then we had to go to Windsor. Although cannot complain—her grandmother was very kind and permitted us to go out without chaperones.… Admit I never expected that from her.”
All this time she was writing her favorite sayings in his diary: “They live through happiness and want together—& from their first kiss to their last breath sing to each other only of love.” “Ever faithful & loving, devoted & pure, & strong, like death.”
This word death, written in her hand, appeared in his diary.
“21 July. A sad day of parting, separation after more than a month of heavenly bliss. Received a letter from Alix on the Polar Star. Quite tired and sad.”
Parting, they agreed to write one another. A tale out of the Brothers Grimm: a yacht, a castle, a princess, and a tsarevich.
The echo of this tale was preserved in the washroom—fouled by the guard and covered with obscene drawings—of their last home in Ekaterinburg. After their deaths in 1918, a little book was found in that washroom, behind the pipes. In it was a code and the inscription “For my own beloved Nicky to put to good use when he is far away from his spitzbube. From his loving Alice Osborne, July 1894.”
This was the code book for their correspondence (she adored secrets), which “loving Alice” had given to him during their days of happiness in Osborne, the queen’s home on the Isle of Wight. “Nicky and Alice make a fine couple.” Separated, they wrote each other letters almost every day.
These delicate sheets with small crowns—their letters. He wrote her from the castle at Spala, in Poland, where the Polish kings had had an ancient hunting lodge and where the Russian tsar loved to hunt. He wrote to her from the imperial train taking him to Livadia, where his father lay dying. Hundreds of his letters. And hundreds of her replies. Endless incantations of love.
Early in October, in Darmstadt, Alix received a telegram calling her urgently to the Crimea: Alexander was dying. In Berlin, her Uncle Willy saw her off at the station. He knew the firm but charming Alix’s unforgiving nature and dear Nicky’s softness. He had no doubt who would lead in this union, and he believed she would not forget her little homeland and her Uncle Willy. But Uncle Willy did not know the Hessian princess very well.
“Your people have become my people, and your God has become my God.” This was the lesson of the beautiful Hessian princesses who had departed for distant lands in the past.
The emperor is dying.
The eminent Dr. Zakharin walks slowly into the dying man’s bedroom. The doctor is short-winded and cannot take more than a few steps without sitting down. That is why chairs have been placed all through the hall leading to the bedroom.
In the emperor’s bedroom is the tsar’s confessor, the renowned priest Ioann of Kronstadt, Father Ioann Yanyshev. And the doctors. They have gathered around the dying man: powerless medicine and omnipotent prayer, which eases his final sufferings.
It is all over. The doors of the bedroom are opened. The dead emperor’s body is drowning in his huge Voltairian armchair. The empress has her arms around him. A short distance away stands a pale-faced Nicky. The emperor has passed away in his armchair.