Diary of a Wimpy Czarovitch

by JG Hampton

my bb gun at Sophie's heart. Mama listens calmly to her hysterics and tells her: "If the troops have mutinied; it's all up." Then calmly proceeds to dress. Looking at me with alarm the countess gives me a wicked look, so I put down my gun.

  I'm running a temperature and am covered with red patches and so are my sisters, except for Marie. Mama sends for the acting commander of the Palace Guard. The numbskull assures Mama that the garrison at Tsar Koe Selo is still in charge and will remain loyal if called upon to defend the palace if the revolutionaries charge the palace.

  By nightfall, the electricity was shut off and I was so sick that I could barely lift my head off my pillow. My temperature was one hundred and four degrees. Tatiana had abscesses in her ears and couldn't hear. Last word from Papa was that he was on his way home. I longed to telegraph him to remain where he was surrounded by his troops, but I also selfishly longed for him to be home with me. At that moment, I didn't realize that Papa was signing away his rights and then my rights to the throne. He gave them to Uncle Michael who then refused them. No Romanov would be able to save the throne. By then, I was out of my mind due to fever or perhaps I might have felt a disconnection.

  Mama and Marie were running around frantically like chickens with their heads cut off from bed to bed trying to nurse four ill patients while worrying whether the palace guards would desert or not. The two of them might be the only ones left defending the palace before morning came. Jim, our faux Ethiopian and our other black sentinel had long since tired of the war and returned to America. They weren't Russians, but I'd been dismayed when they left.

  Our water had been shut off and the only remaining phone line was connected to the Winter Palace in Petrograd. It became Mama's lifeline. Mama ordered the few remaining house servants to collect the large ice blocks which still floated on the lake and brought them on troikas to the palace for drinking water. As in times past, Mama's strengths always surfaced when the situation was bleak. I was amazed at her ingenuity.

  Donning her nursing uniform with its red cross, she put it on over her black silk dress, then she pulled out her blue sapphire cross on its platinum chain, so that it would show front and center and was now armed with two holy crosses. Rolling up her sleeves, she resolutely determined that all of us would float instead of sink as if we were on our yaught.

  Countess Buxhoeveden and Auntie Annya followed her example and rallied trying to decide had they or had they not already had the measles? Neither of them could remember having had them, but both hoped for the best since they'd certainly been exposed.

  Olga was the sickest with pericarditis and ear abscesses like Tatiana had; both my sisters were now stone deaf. Mama prayed that we'd all survive and made the sign of the cross above each of our heads. Bringing Father Grigory's relics near us, she placed them around her sick ones supplementing them with other cherished icons.

  Mama's nursing skills were quickly resurfacing as she diagnosed the afflicted ones as their temperatures continued to rise. Anastasia was stuck in the bottom of my bed with a hot water bottle so that she'd only have to go back and forth between two rooms. Calmly, she told Anastasia and I that we had "German" measles and that they could be fatal, but prayed that they would not be.

  "You have the best nurse in the entire world seeing to your needs." Both of us lamely smiled when she said this.Then she went into the big pairs' room and wrote out messages to them informing them of the dire situation and their condition. Cries and moaning echoed from my sisters' bedroom at the news and reverberated down the empty palace halls.

  Anastasia promptly turned over, groaned and said: "I'm too young to die. I've never been kissed." That comment made me laugh, but laughing made my stomach hurt. I appreciated her company. At least I would not die alone.

  What else could go wrong I wondered? When lightening struck, it hit with power; surely nothing worse had ever happened before to our family. But things did get worse, by mid afternoon, Auntie Annya had come down with the illness and had to be put to bed.

  Petrograd had fallen, a revolution was taking place, five of us were deathly ill, we'd recently lost my staretz, we'd lost contact with Papa, who was in the process of abdicating for himself and for me, and we had little food in the palace because fleeing servants had ransacked the place. Servants were absconding with whatever wasn't tacked down as their pay. Clearly we'd been buried by a carload of manure, but our invincible Mama was shoveling us out as rapidly as she could.

  Mama ordered Shura to pack our trunks in case it was necessary to flee the palace. Elderly Count Buxhoevedon thought that we needed to leave and that our lives were in danger. What was Mama to do? How could she possibly flee with five sick ones? She couldn't. The move would kill us so she turned it over to the Lord. The decision was out of her hands and we stayed put in our beds. By evening, Mama had things well under control and had thought of a plan. She and my beautiful sister Marie chaperoned by old Count Buxhoeveden would entreat the remaining guards to remain loyal to me, the czarovitch, and defend our palace against the revolutionaries.

  Word had come that the soldiers stationed at Tzar Koe Selo garrison had mutinied and were joining those from Petrograd and were going to march on the Alexander Palace and seize Mama, who was their primary target.

  Mama and Marie recoiffed their hair, freshened their faces, put on warm coats over their nurses uniforms and went out and cajoled the troops to remain loyal to us while serving them coffee, tea, and hot soup. Speaking positively in the frozen night air, she assured them how much we valued them and that the future of Russia, namely me, was depending on them.

  Marie implored them with her saucer sized eyes looking totally defenseless standing alongside Mama and the old count who had already been proven in battle who vowed to defend them to death. The three of them worked their magic casting a spell on the remaining guards.

  By the time Mama finished her speech, all the czars' men: three battalions of guardsmen, two patrols of Cossacks dressed in red, one company of railway soldiers and one set of field soldiers pointed their guns and artillery towards the palace gates waiting for mutineers. One soldier climbed the roof ready to gun down with his machine gun, whatever or whomever, dared enter the palace gates. And Mama always thought that she was an ineffective speaker.

  I could hear gunfire going off all around the palace. Marie came in and told us that now the guards were all willing to lay down their lives for me, their czarovitch. How proud I was to be Russian. Little did I know how short would be my reign.

  That night, Sophie Buxhoeveden and Lili Dehn, camped outside Mama's boudoir ready to defend her if necessary with their lives from the "hooligans" who were running wild throughout our land. Mama had few friends, but the ones she had -remained loyal through thick and thin. I loved and admired them for their steadfastness. Didn't they know that Madame Lamballe, Marie's Antoinette's best friend's head had been severed and put on a pike the night French madames stormed their palace? I tried to put the thought from my mind and prayed for our preservation.

  That night I vowed that when I was crowned czar, I would give them medals of Honor for their bravery. Papa had been correct when he'd given Mama her order of St. Michael during the first year of their reign. She was the most courageous woman I have ever known. In my humble opinion, she far surpassed St. Joan d'Arc and by midnight I knew that she'd earned her sainthood.

  As steadfast as any of my tin soldiers, these brave women including Marie, defended me. Women were not as weak as Grandmama always insisted they were. These friends of Mama along with my sisters joined my mother as amazing Amazons.

  Two of Papa's devoted aides had made it from Petrograd and now joined the women in defending my mother and I. The Winter Palace with its green stone floors and vast treasures had been taken. Mobs were carting off heirlooms which had been in our family for three hundred years.

  At the bottom of my bed, I felt Anastasia's comforting form next to mine as I prayed and asked Father Grigory to help me and Mama as I held onto his bloody shir
t. As I prayed, my fever broke. I knew that I would live and was able to sleep. Father Grigory had answered my prayer and healed me, wherever he was.

  14 March 1917 - 27 March 1917 - The next morning, the sun peered through my bedroom window awakening me. Where was I? Then I recognized my bedroom when I saw my bear General dressed in his long red Cossack coat and black hat with his drawn sword. I was still alive in the Alexander Palace being roughly kicked by my sister Anastasia who was fidgeting at the bottom of my bed. I'd survived that dreadful night and a new day dawned. I'd aged considerably through the past week, but why did I feel as old as Methuselah or Father Adam, the Ancient of Days? Was this a complication of measles? My muscles were stiff and my knee even stiffer.

  Anastasia fought for her share of the covers and Lili Dehn arrived with our breakfast of porridge and maple syrup. I was so hungry that I wolfed it down. When my stomach pains were satiated I asked Lili: "Where's Mama?"

  "Poor Marie succumbed to the illness and was placed alongside Auntie Annya in Anastasia's bed. Your Mama and Dr. Botkin are tending her. Usually the last to come down with the illness is hardest hit and your Mama fears for her life.

  "We all need to pray for her