Nicholas II and the Prince of Wales, later King George V, at Cowes, 1909
Alexandra and her daughters arriving aboard the Imperial yacht Standart
Pierre Gilliard and Alexis
Nicholas and Alexandra aboard the Standart
Picnicking on the coast of Finland: Alexandra, Anna Vyrubova, and Olga, the Empress’s eldest daughter
Derevenko and Alexis
The Empress
The Tsar
Nicholas with his officers
Nicholas with Alexis, just before setting out on an all-day march to test the Russian private soldier’s uniform and equipment
Alexandra in her mauve boudoir
With Alexis
Nagorny pulling Alexis (third from left) and his friends
Derevenko and Alexis (third from right)
Livadia: Pierre Gilliard with Olga and Tatiana
At Spala: Alexandra
After Spala: Alexis.
The Tsarevich’s left leg is bent and a metal brace is attached to his shoe
Gregory Rasputin
In a hospital: (from left) Olga (partly hidden), Tatiana (foreground), Alexandra
Nicholas and Alexis inspecting a Cossack regiment during the war
The Tsar with Grand Duke Nicholas
Anastasia
Marie, Tatiana, and Olga (seated)
Nicholas, Alexis, and Tatiana, 1916
The Empress
Imprisoned at Tsarskoe Selo, 1917
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY
For the Defense of Holy Russia
THE next afternoon, August 2, 1914, the Tsar issued a formal proclamation of hostilities at the Winter Palace. It was a blazing-hot midsummer day. The palace square, one of the largest in Europe, was packed with thousands of sweltering, excited people carrying banners, flags and icons and waiting impatiently for the moment when they could pour out their emotion in the presence of the sovereign himself. On the Neva side, where the Tsar would arrive by boat from Peterhof, crowds of people swarmed along the bridges and quays, singing and cheering. The river itself was teeming with yachts, steamers, sailboats, fishing smacks and rowboats, all streaming flags and crowded with spectators.
When Nicholas and Alexandra stepped onto the quay at the Palace Bridge, wave on wave of cheers rolled over them: “Batiushka, Batiushka, lead us to victory!” Nicholas wore the plain uniform of an infantry regiment. Alexandra, in a pure white dress, had turned up the brim of her picture hat so that the crowds could see her face. The four young Grand Duchesses walked behind, but the Tsarevich, still unable to walk because of his injury on the Standart, remained at Peterhof, weeping in disappointment.
Inside the palace, the Tsar and the Empress slowly made their way through the crush of people lining the grand staircases and wide corridors. As Nicholas passed, bowing and nodding, men and women dropped to their knees and frantically tried to kiss his hand. The service was held in the great white marble Salle de Nicholas, where five thousand people had jammed themselves beneath the glittering chandeliers. An altar had been erected in the center of the hall, and on it stood the miraculous icon, the Vladimir Mother of God. The icon, brought to Moscow in 1395, was said to have turned back Tamerlane. Before the icon in 1812 the grizzled General Kutuzov had prayed as he was leaving to take command of Tsar Alexander I’s armies in the war against Napoleon. Now, at the beginning of a new war, Nicholas II invoked the icon’s blessing. Raising his right hand, he pronounced in a low voice the oath taken by Alexander I in 1812: “I solemnly swear that I will never make peace so long as a single enemy remains on Russian soil.”
After taking the oath, Nicholas and Alexandra went to meet the expectant masses waiting outside. When the two small figures appeared alone on a red-draped balcony high above them, the great crowd knelt. Nicholas raised his hand and tried to speak; the front rows hushed, but at the rear the excitement and commotion were too great and his words were drowned. Overwhelmed, Nicholas bowed his head. Seeing him, the crowd spontaneously began to sing the Imperial anthem whose chords make up the final crescendo of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”:
God save the Tsar,
Mighty and powerful,
Let him reign for our glory,
For the confusion of our enemies,
The Orthodox Tsar,
God save the Tsar.
Hand in hand, the man in the khaki uniform and the woman in the white dress stood on the balcony and wept with the crowd. “To those thousands on their knees,” declared Paléologue, “at that moment the Tsar was really the Autocrat, the military, political and religious director of his people, the absolute master of their bodies and souls.”
It was the same throughout the empire: wild excitement, crowds filling the streets, laughing, weeping, singing, cheering, kissing. Overnight, a wave of patriotism swept over Russia. In Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov, Kazan, Tula, Rostov, Tiflis, Tomsk and Irkutsk, workmen exchanged their red flags of revolution for the icons of Holy Russia and portraits of the Tsar. Students rushed from the universities to enlist. Army officers, caught in the street, were happily tossed in the air.
In St. Petersburg, every day brought new demonstrations in favor of the Tsar and Russia’s allies. From his window in the French Embassy, Paléologue looked down on huge processions carrying flags and icons, shouting “Vive la France!” On August 5, as the German armies crossed the frontiers of neutral Belgium, a telegram from London to Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, announced that England had entered the war. The same day, the Union Jack was hoisted into line with the Tricolor and the Russian Imperial banner. With a fine Gallic sense of detail, Paléologue noted that “the flags of the three nations blend eloquently. Composed of the same colors, blue, white and red, they are a picturesque and striking expression of the coalition.”
At the German Embassy, an immense granite building surmounted on the roof by two huge bronze horses, the violent mob predicted by Count Pourtalès made a sudden vengeful appearance. Their rage was directed not at their own government, as Pourtalès had promised, but at his. Invading the building, they smashed windows, ripped tapestries and pictures and hurled into the street not only the Embassy furniture, china and glassware, but the Count’s own priceless collection of Renaissance marbles and brasses. Ropes were coiled around the equestrian statues on the roof, hundreds of hands pulled and tugged, and with a crash the Kaiser’s prancing horses toppled into the street.
In those early days, patriotism was closely tied to a deep-rooted fear of the Germans. “For Faith, Tsar and Country!” and “For the defense of Holy Russia!” were the calls that stirred the barracks, factories and villages. “The war with Japan,” wrote Kerensky, was “dynastic and colonial,” but “in 1914 the people immediately recognized the conflict with Germany as its own war … a war which meant that the destinies of Russia were at stake.” Rodzianko, walking in the streets of Petersburg, mingled with workers who a few days earlier had been chopping down telegraph poles, overturning streetcars and building barricades. “Now all Russia is involved,” they told him. “We want to rally to our Tsar to make certain of victory over the Germans.” Nobility and peasants burned with the same emotions. “This is not a political war,” said Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, widow of the Tsar’s uncle Vladimir. “It is a duel to the death between Slavism and Germanism. One of the two must succumb.” An old peasant from Novgorod told Kokovtsov, the former Prime Minister, “If we are unlucky enough not to destroy the Germans, they’ll come here. They’ll reign over the whole of Russia and then they’ll harness you and me—yes, you as well as me—to their plows.”
The Duma sat only one day, August 8, passing the government’s military budget without a dissenting vote. “War was declared and all at once, not a trace was left of the revolutionary movement,” declared Kerensky. “Even the Bolshevik members of the Duma were forced to admit—though somewhat sullenly—that it was the duty of the proletariat to cooperate in the defense.”
That Germany would
be defeated, few Russians doubted; Britain’s entry made the outcome certain. There was controversy as to how long the war would go on. “Six months,” said the pessimists, who argued that the Germans might fight, “The Germans don’t know how to fight,” replied the optimists. “They only know how to make sausages. All the Russians will have to do to annihilate the whole German army is simply to throw their caps at them.”
Ancient tradition prescribed that Russian tsars begin their wars by going to Moscow to ask the blessing of God in the historic seat of tsarist rule, the Kremlin. If anything, when Nicholas and his family arrived in Moscow on August 17, the city was more wildly enthusiastic than St. Petersburg. A million people lined the streets, jammed balconies, windows and rooftops or clung from the branches of trees as the Imperial procession wound through the streets to the Kremlin’s Iberian Gate. That night, inside the Kremlin, a private worry reappeared. “Alexis Nicolaievich is complaining a good deal of his leg tonight,” Pierre Gilliard wrote in his diary. “Will he be able to walk tomorrow or will he have to be carried? The Tsar and Tsaritsa are in despair. The boy was not able to be present at the ceremony in the Winter Palace. It is always the same when he is supposed to appear in public … some complication will prevent it. Fate seems to pursue him.”
On the following day, Gilliard continued: “When Alexis Nicolaievich found he could not walk this morning, he was in a terrible state. Their Majesties have decided he shall be present at the ceremony all the same. He will be carried by one of the Tsar’s Cossacks. But it is a dreadful disappointment to the parents who do not wish the idea to gain ground among the people that the Heir to the Throne is an invalid.”
At eleven, the Tsar, the Empress, their four daughters, the Tsarevich, in the arms of a huge Cossack, and Grand Duchess Elizabeth, wearing the gray robe of her religious order, appeared in the St. George Hall of the Kremlin. In the center of the hall, Nicholas proclaimed to the nobility and people of Moscow: “From this place, the very heart of Russia, I send my soul’s greeting to my valiant troops and my noble allies. God is with us!” Moving into the Ouspensky Sobor—the Cathedral of the Assumption—where eighteen years earlier they had been crowned, the Tsar and the Empress prayed before the lofty, jeweled iconostasis. In the flickering glow of hundreds of candles, through pungent clouds of sweet incense, they walked around the church to kneel and pray before the tombs of Russia’s patriarchs. The triumphant setting and the glorious display of pomp and piety seemed an eloquent dramatization of the basic principle of the Russian autocracy: “As it is God Himself who has given us our supreme power, it is before His altar that we are responsible for the destinies of Russia.”
The following morning, while Moscow still seethed with excitement, Gilliard and his young pupil slipped quietly out of the Kremlin for a drive into the hills outside the city. Returning through narrow streets clogged with workmen and peasants, their unescorted automobile was slowed and halted by the mass. Surging on all sides of the auto, the crowd suddenly recognized its young passenger. “The Heir! The Heir!” they shouted, struggling for a better view. As those nearest the car were crushed against its sides, the bolder of them thrust their arms inside and touched Alexis. “I’ve touched him! I’ve touched the Heir!” shouted a woman in triumph. Frightened and pale, the Tsarevich huddled back in the seat while Gilliard frantically tried to get the car moving. Eventually the auto was rescued by two large Moscow policemen who happened on the scene and moved the crowd back with much puffing and shouting.
When the Imperial family returned to Tsarskoe Selo on August 22, Nicholas was exhilarated. The two largest cities of his empire had given spontaneous, overwhelming demonstrations of affection and patriotism. Determined to be worthy, Nicholas issued a decree intended to expunge every blemish from the holy crusade on which Russia was embarking. Throughout the empire, the sale of vodka was banned for the duration of the war. The gesture, coming at a moment when military expenditures were soaring, was more noble than wise, for the sale of vodka was a state monopoly from which the Imperial government drew a substantial proportion of its revenue. Nor did the ban stop drinking in Russia; the rich drew from their well-stocked cellars, the poor made alcohol at home. In a second burst of enthusiastic patriotism, after returning from Moscow, Nicholas suddenly changed the name of his own capital. On August 31, 1914, the German St. Petersburg was changed to the Slav Petrograd.
In the opening days of the war, the same heady emotions surged through Paris, London and Berlin. But after the trumpets had sounded, the hymns had been sung and the men had marched away, then war began its stern testing of the nations. In the terrible years ahead, Britain, France and Germany each called up deep reserves of national purpose and strength. But in Russia, behind the massive façade of an enormous empire, the apparatus of government, the structure of society and economy were too primitive, too inflexible, and too brittle to withstand the enormous strains of a great four-year war.
Two shrewd and cunning Russians sensed this danger immediately. From the beginning, although their voices were drowned in the gush of war excitement, Rasputin and Witte opposed the war. Still close to the villages, Rasputin sensed what war would cost in peasant blood. Once before, in 1908, he had argued against fighting Austria over the annexation of Bosnia: “The Balkans are not worth fighting for,” he had said. In 1914, still lying in bed in Siberia recovering from his stab wounds, he telegraphed, “Let Papa not plan war, for with the war will come the end of Russia and yourselves and you will lose to the last man.” Anna Vyrubova, who delivered the telegram to the Tsar, reported that he angrily tore it to pieces before her eyes. Rasputin was undeterred. Taking a large piece of paper, writing in almost illegible letters, he scrawled this ominous prophecy:
Dear friend, I will say again a menacing cloud is over Russia lots of sorrow and grief it is dark and there is no lightening to be seen. A sea of tears immeasurable and as to blood? What can I say? There are no words the horror of it is indescribable. I know they keep wanting war from you evidently not knowing that this is destruction. Heavy is God’s punishment when he takes away reason that is the beginning of the end. Thou art the Tsar Father of the People don’t allow the madmen to triumph and destroy themselves and the People. Well, they will conquer Germany and what about Russia? If one thinks then verily there has not been a greater sufferer since the beginning of time she is all drowned in blood. Terrible is the destruction and without end the grief.
Gregory
Witte, abroad when the war broke out, hurried home to urge that Russia withdraw immediately. He spoke bluntly to Paléologue: “This war is madness.… Why should Russia fight? Our prestige in the Balkans, our pious duty to help our blood brothers?… That is a romantic, old-fashioned chimera. No one here, no thinking man at least, cares a fig for these turbulent and vain Balkan folk who have nothing Slav about them and are only Turks christened by the wrong name. We ought to have let the Serbs suffer the chastisement they deserved. So much for the origin of the war. Now let’s talk about the profits and rewards it will bring us. What can we hope to get? An increase of territory. Great Heavens! Isn’t His Majesty’s empire big enough already? Haven’t we in Siberia, Turkestan, the Caucasus, Russia itself, enormous areas which have not yet been opened up? Then what are the conquests they dangle before our eyes? East Prussia? Hasn’t the Emperor too many Germans among his subjects already? Galicia? It’s full of Jews!… Constantinople, the Cross on Santa Sophia, the Bosporous, the Dardanelles. It’s too mad a notion to be worth a moment’s consideration. And even if we assume a complete victory, the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs reduced to begging for peace and submitting to our terms—it means not only the end of German domination, but the proclamation of republics throughout central Europe. That means the simultaneous end of Tsarism. I prefer to remain silent as to what we may expect on the hypothesis of our defeat.… My practical conclusion is that we must liquidate this stupid adventure as soon as possible.”
Paléologue, whose job it was to do everything possible to
keep Russia in the war fighting on France’s side, watched Witte go and mused on the old stateman’s character: “an enigmatic, unnerving individual, a great intellect, despotic, disdainful, conscious of his powers, a prey to ambition, jealousy, and pride.” Witte’s views, he reflected, were “evil” and “dangerous” to France as well as to Russia.
Nowhere was Nicholas’s optimism more keenly shared than among the officers of the Russian army. Those unlucky enough to be stationed with regiments far from the frontier were frantic with worry lest it all be over before they had a chance to see action. Guards officers, fortunate enough to be leaving immediately for the front, asked whether they should pack their dress uniforms for the ceremonial parade down the Unter den Linden. They were advised to go ahead and let their braid and plumes follow by the next courier.
Day after day, the capital trembled to the cadence of marching men. From dawn until nightfall, infantry regiments marched down the Nevsky Prospect, bound for the Warsaw Station and the front. Outside the city, other regiments of infantry, cavalry squadrons and batteries of horse artillery clogged the roads leading toward the Baltic provinces and East Prussia. In motion with only casual organization, the soldiers walked rather than marched, followed in no particular order by long columns of baggage carts, ammunition wagons, ambulances, field kitchens and remount horses. So dense were the moving columns that in places they left the roads and spread out across the dry summer fields, swarming in a jumbled confusion of dust, shouts, horses’ hoofs and rumbling wheels, recalling the Tartar hordes of the thirteenth century.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty Page 36