Believing that she, the Empress, had no need to explain herself, and trusting only Nicholas, Alexandra did nothing to counter the rumours. But her continuing absence from public life only fanned the flames. At the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo she had increasingly shut herself away from all but her closest entourage. Even her ladies-in-waiting hardly saw her and were bored and frustrated with so little to do. To a woman as comme il faut as the Duchess of Coburg, Alexandra’s reclusiveness was outrageous; she had a duty to her public. Yet during her visit for the Tercentenary in 1913, the Duchess had found the atmosphere at Tsarskoe Selo ‘exactly like living in a house with an invisible ghost in it’.10 ‘She never goes out now and lays most of the day on the sofa,’ the Duchess complained. Alexandra had made no attempt to talk to her and had lain there with ‘a suffering smile on her face’. For Alexandra’s relatives, their patience was being stretched to the limit. She was always playing ‘the victimized martyr’.11
But it was the welfare of Alexandra’s daughters in particular that concerned the Duchess. They seemed so neglected and hardly went out, spending their days forever at their mother’s beck and call. The sad reality of their lives was that, far from being out and about enjoying the company of people of their own age and social status, they had by now become carers and protectors of their ailing mother and haemophiliac brother. Alexandra had always disapproved of her daughters mixing in decadent St Petersburg society, as she saw it; a trip to the opera or ballet with their father before the onset of war had been a major event in their lives. And so their social circle was a tightly controlled one of a few close female members of Alexandra’s entourage, and the hand-picked officers of the Imperial Yacht or the elite Cossack Escort that guarded them. Pleasure, for all the children, was gained from small things – in particular, walking, cycling and boating with their father and enjoying the fresh air. Otherwise, the four sisters spent interminable hours sitting at home with their mother, sewing and knitting. ‘Does Mama ever read?’ the Duchess of Coburg had asked them, shocked at the girls’ narrow existence. ‘“Oh never,” they answered, “as she always has headaches.”’12 The Duchess was convinced that Alexandra had succumbed to some kind of internal disease for which she refused to be operated on and that she was mentally disturbed. ‘Uncle Serge [Ella’s husband], more than ten years ago, told me that he was persuaded of it then already, une douce folie as he called it. How right he was!’13
With his wife in retreat, and preoccupied always with the fragile health of his son, Nicholas seemed to have closed his mind to the ongoing dangers of political and social unrest. Even the foreign diplomatic community was warning him of the looming danger of revolution, if he did not capitulate to some kind of democratic reform. At court, Prince Volkonsky told the Duchess of Coburg that whenever he or ‘any well intentioned people who would like to open Niki’s eyes and save Russia’ tried to raise their concerns with him, Nicholas would avert his gaze, look out of the window and ‘so completely drops the conversation that there is no possibility to go on!’ Avoidance seemed to be his only, and perpetual, response. Every attempt to engage him in serious conversation was thwarted by the Empress: ‘He tells her everything, shows her every letter, discusses everything with her and she puts a stop to all good resolutions and we all feel the utter hopelessness of getting at Niki without his spouse spoiling everything.’ The only hope now, Prince Volkonsky suggested, was ‘if all the influential members of the family united in one big demonstration and came to tell the truth. That, he felt, ‘would impress him’.14
By December 1916 such was the mounting family hostility that even Alexandra’s sister Ella came especially from Moscow to plead with the Empress to remove Rasputin from his position of influence and to cease interfering in matters of state. But no amount of reason ever worked with the Tsaritsa; she had, as her cousin Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein recalled, ‘a strange impregnable obstinacy which nothing would overcome’.15 For her own part, Alexandra was paranoid that the Romanov family were all plotting against her and stirring up ill feeling with their relatives abroad. By now, respect for the Russian throne among its own aristocracy was at an all-time low, not helped by a series of scandals involving adultery, divorce and morganatic marriages among Nicholas’s uncles and cousins, all of which had dented Romanov prestige and family unity. Even his younger brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, had broken the Romanov House law. He had travelled abroad without permission, dodging the tsarist police who were tailing him, to marry a commoner, Natalia Wulfert.
In the meantime, Nicholas and Alexandra’s response to all appeals for political concessions had been to repeatedly meddle in the workings of the State Duma, while clinging ever more ferociously to their own stubbornly held values and moral principles.16 Alexandra’s response to her cousin Grand Duchess Kirill’s plea was typical:
‘Who is against us? Petrograd, a bunch of aristocrats playing bridge and understanding nothing. I have been sitting on the throne for twenty-two years, I know Russia, I have travelled around the whole place, and I know that the people love our family.’17
Diplomats in Petrograd recorded the sharp descent into crisis that winter of 1916–17, not just in the war, but within the Romanov family. Russia, having already endured catastrophic losses on the Eastern Front, was suffering the mass desertion of demoralised conscripts. Supply lines to the big cities were in disarray; the railways were in chaos, due to a chronic shortage of rolling stock; and much-needed food and fuel were not reaching the beleaguered populations of the major cities. People were tired of the war, tired of shortages, tired of a government that did not listen to their grievances about harsh working conditions, low wages and long hours. They despaired that they would ever see the introduction of a constitutional government. The rumble of dissent grew ever louder, with a succession of crippling strikes and workers’ protest marches bringing the life of the city to a standstill. The old, moribund tsarist regime was about to collapse, but still Alexandra refused to recognise the dangers, dismissing the disturbances as the work of disorganised hooligans; at the front, Nicholas’s right-hand man General Alexeev was, like Alexandra, underplaying their significance to the Tsar, who, in ignorance of the true gravity of the situation, thought it would all blow over.
In Petrograd, however, that was far from the case: with revolution at their door, members of the Romanov family were plotting a palace coup against an intransigent Tsar and Tsaritsa. Maurice Paléologue heard that Grand Duchess Vladimir’s three sons were ‘talking of nothing less than saving tsarism by a change of sovereign’. Another relative, Grand Duke Gavriil Konstantinovich, spoke of leading four Guards regiments in a march on Tsarskoe Selo by night and forcibly removing Alexandra.18 She, according to her brother-in-law Sandro (Grand Duke Alexander, married to Nicholas’s sister Xenia) – who had gone to plead with her at Tsarskoe Selo – was ‘in a state of complete and incurable delusion’.19 Alexandra had to be stopped: either sent away to a convent or locked up in a psychiatric hospital. A more outlandish plan involved luring her onto a destroyer, under some pretext, and transporting her off to England.20 Even the highly restrained British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, in later years admitted that he had come to the conclusion that the Tsar should disassociate himself from his wife and save himself.21 ‘Their hatred of the Empress has reached a terrible pitch,’ admitted one Russian officer in conversation with the Tsaritsa’s cousin Marie, Queen of Romania, ‘they consider her a misfortune for the country and there is no one today who would not gladly get rid of her by any means’.22 Even the Dowager could no longer contain her imperial discretion: her daughter-in-law ‘must be banished … I don’t know how but it must be done. Otherwise she might go completely mad.’ Shockingly, such was her contempt for Alexandra that Dagmar did not much care about her subsequent fate: ‘Let her enter a convent or just disappear.’23
As for the Tsar, the consensus was increasingly that if Nicholas refused to concede to a responsible, constitutional government free of interf
erence from himself and his wife, he should be deposed and his twelve-year-old son Alexey should take the throne under a regency of either Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich or Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich. But the situation had by now spiralled beyond all reasonable attempts at persuasion. Alexandra’s knee-jerk response to all and any suggestions of reform was as arrogant as it was dogmatic: ‘Nicky is an autocrat. How could he share his divine rights with a parliament?’24 The Romanov family railed and plotted, but all their plans to oust Nicholas and Alexandra from power shared the fatal flaw of ‘wishy-washiness’, in the view of Duma president, Mikhail Rodzianko. A coup against Nicholas and Alexandra would be successful only ‘with real force behind it’ – in other words, the involvement of the military.25
At the end of December 1916 the murder of Rasputin, and with it the removal of Alexandra’s perceived malevolent adviser, seemed to have defused a desperate situation. Prince Felix Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich had plotted his assassination, in the hopes that it would save Russia from imminent disaster. ‘A desperate situation had required desperate measures,’ Yusupov wrote later. ‘One can’t argue with anyone who is insane.’ ‘Everything was at boiling point,’ recalled Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich,’ … there was a heaviness in the air.’ The people did not need to agitate for revolution; the imperial house was doing the job for them.26
In Europe, none of Nicholas and Alexandra’s royal cousins had made any attempt to disguise their enormous sense of relief when Rasputin was killed. In Britain, Alexandra the Queen Mother wrote that Rasputin’s death was ‘only regretted by poor dear Alicky who might have ruined the whole future of Russia through his influence … she thinks herself like the Empress Catherine.’27 Grand Duchess Kirill agreed: Alexandra’s conviction that ‘on her depended the salvation and reconstruction of Russia … had created a tangled situation, out of which there was no exit’.28
‘What a blessing that R[asputin] is now out of the way,’ wrote Queen Maud of Norway to Dagmar on 27 January 1917.29* But for many in the Imperial Family the removal of Rasputin was not enough: ‘we must entirely rid ourselves of Alexandra Fyodorovna and Protopopov [the Russian Minister of the Interior],’ Grand Duke Nikolay Mikhailovich wrote to Dagmar, who, exasperated that her son and his wife would not listen to her advice, had removed herself to Kiev. ‘I put before you the same dilemma,’ he went on:
Having removed the hypnotiser we must try and disable the hypnotised … This is a matter of saving the throne – not the dynasty, which still stands firm, but the current sovereign. It will otherwise be too late … all Russia knows that the late Rasputin and A. F. are one and the same. One has been killed, now the other must disappear.30
A deadly atmosphere of hostility and recrimination continued to prevail at court. Nicholas and Alexandra had seemed ‘solely occupied with vengeance on all whom they think implicated’ in the murder, wrote Grand Duchess Kirill. ‘It’s so awful here now that we are living like in a mad house.’31 Nicholas’s response to Rasputin’s demise had certainly been harsh: the two perpetrators, Dmitri Pavlovich and Felix Yusupov, were sent to the Persian front and into internal exile respectively. The Romanov family wrote a collective letter of protest to Nicholas; his refusal to soften the punishment further galvanised some of them to talk seriously of the Tsar and Tsaritsa’s removal. At a dinner held at Prince Gavriil Konstantinovich’s home, the talk, as Maurice Paléologue recalled, was all about conspiracy. Other secret meetings to discuss the subject were held at Grand Duchess Vladimir’s palace. The family feared that once Nicholas returned to the front, the ‘Empress may make herself Regent’.32
By early 1917, the constant pressures from his family and his domineering wife, in addition to terrible worries over the Russian campaign, had aged Nicholas terribly. He seemed completely beaten down and was capitulating ever more to fatalism. ‘His hair and beard were streaked with white, his eyes were sunken,’ recalled the Russian ambassador to Stockholm, Anatoly Neklyudov. But that was not what had struck him most:
I noticed a kind of weariness, a kind of constant preoccupation which seemed to prevent him concentrating his whole attention on the conversation in hand; the vivacity of his manner and of his mind seemed to have vanished … it seems to me that in the manner and appearance of the emperor Nicholas II, there was more than preoccupation, more than worry. Perhaps he already saw the abyss opening at his feet and perhaps he knew that to stop was impossible, that he must pursue his way towards the inevitable and fatal crash.33
Everyone pitied Nicholas for his weakness; but they hated Alexandra even more for her morbid hysteria. ‘Her will is active, aggressive and restless,’ Grand Duchess Vladimir observed to Paléologue. Nicholas’s will, on the other hand, was ‘merely negative. When he ceases to believe in himself and thinks God has abandoned him, he does not try to assert himself, but merely wraps himself up in a dull and resigned obstinacy.’ Alexandra was becoming too powerful: ‘Before long she’ll be the sole ruler of Russia.’34 The Dowager was in despair at her son’s apathy. ‘I feel that we are approaching some disaster with relentless steps and that His Majesty listens only to flatterers,’ she confided to Prime Minister Vladimir Kokovtsov. Her son could not see ‘that there is something forming under his feet. Something he does not see yet, and I feel it, instinctively, but can’t make out what exactly we are in for.’35 A gathering tide of change was clearly heading Nicholas’s way, and within the State Duma, as Paléologue noted, even the most ‘ardent devotees of tsarism and reaction were now openly discussing the possibility of the emperor’s assassination’.36
The fate of Russia was, by now, the ‘one subject of discussion in diplomatic circles,’ recalled Maurice Egan. ‘It was the general opinion that the Empress was the great obstacle to the Emperor’s giving a liberal constitution to his people.’37 It was at this point that Nicholas’s brother-in-law Sandro composed a long letter to the Tsar in which he begged Nicholas to make political concessions and bring his autocratic wife under control. ‘You cannot govern a country without listening to the voice of the people,’ he wrote. ‘With a few words and a stroke of the pen, you could calm everything and give the country what it yearns for, that is a government of confidence and freedom to the forces of society.’38 Sandro was distraught; Nicholas’s advisers, most of whom had been put in place by Alexandra in his absence, were leading him and Russia ‘towards certain ruin’. In an uncompromisingly frank discussion with Mikhail Rodzianko, Grand Duchess Vladimir was now urging that Alexandra ‘must be annihilated’.39
At a secret meeting in the capital, key members of the Duma, the Council of the Empire and the Special Council discussed the possibility of a coup d’état.40 A group in the Duma, centring around Prince Lvov, talked of sending Alexandra to Crimea and forcing Nicholas to cede authority to his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich, but the Grand Duke rejected the idea.41 Instead ‘it was decided to force the boy [Alexey] to sign a document prepared in advance,’ recalled Duma deputy Boris Engelgardt, ‘and to form a ruling council around him’, made up of various Duma ministers.42 This was paramount in order to save the war effort from being further undermined. A coup was planned for early March; Mikhail Tereshchenko would travel to the front to recruit sympathetic officers. But as with so many of the various conspiracies against Nicholas and Alexandra at this time, it barely progressed ‘beyond salon talk’; and, like all of them, it came too late.43
* * *
In the National Archives at Kew there is an enormous, unindexed 573-page file marked ‘Russia and Siberia’, which comprises Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour’s papers for the war period. It is normally accessed for the extensive documents it contains on the Allied intervention of 1918, but also – and typical of the entirely eccentric organisation of Foreign Office documents of this period – the file contains key documents relating to the Romanov asylum and one of its key players, Sir George Buchanan, some of which have till now been largely overlooked and which will be drawn on in the course of this book. One such t
elegram from Buchanan in January 1917 sets the tone of his concerns about an imminent collapse of the regime in Russia; the official response to it is a significant indicator of how the British government, and the King, would respond throughout this affair.
* * *
Throughout the winter of 1916–17, at the British Embassy on Suvorov Square in Petrograd, Sir George Buchanan had been anxiously watching the escalating situation and begging permission from his government to make serious representations to the Tsar about the danger he was in. ‘Revolution was in the air’ and ‘the only moot point was whether it would come from above or from below,’ he recalled.44 Despite Buchanan’s repeated and urgent warnings that the Tsar must be made to confront the danger, the British government had been loath to meddle, advising him that it had ‘grave doubts whether diplomatic advice, however friendly, on such a matter would be well received, or whether, if well received, it would lead to any practical result. After all, the facts of the case are notorious, and cannot be unknown to the Emperor.’45
The Race to Save the Romanovs Page 5