Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family

by Robert K. Massie

  The people of the Crimea were Tartars of the Moslem faith, the residue of the thunderous Tartar invasions of Russia in the thirteenth century. Until they were conquered by Prince Gregory Potemkin for Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century, the Tartars were ruled by their own khans. Under the tsars, they lived in picturesque whitewashed villages scattered along the slopes and marked from afar by the delicately laced minarets of their Moslem mosques rising gracefully into the blue sky. Tartar men, sinewy and dark-complexioned, wore round black hats, short embroidered coats and tight white trousers. “To see a cavalcade of Tartars sweep by was to imagine a race of Centaurs come back to earth,” wrote the admiring Anna Vyrubova. Tartar women were handsome creatures who dyed their hair bright red and wore floating veils to hide their faces. At the summit of all fervent Tartar loyalties stood the tsar, successor to the khan. When the Imperial carriage passed through Tartar villages, it had first to be halted so that the ranking Tartar chief could exercise his duty and privilege of riding through his village before his Imperial master.

  The Imperial palace at Livadia was the special pride of the Empress Alexandra. Built in 1911 to replace an older wooden structure, it was made of white limestone and perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. Its columned balconies and courtyards were in an Italianate style admired by the Empress from her fond recollection of the palaces and cloisters she had seen in Florence before her marriage. The gardens, laid out in large, triangular flower beds, were studded with ancient Greek marbles excavated from Crimean ruins. On the ground floor, a white state dining room was also used—with tables and chairs removed—for dances. From the dining room, glass doors opened directly into the rose garden; at night, the sweet smell filled every corner of the palace. Upstairs, from her rooms furnished in pink chintz with mauve flowers, Alexandra had magnificent vistas. From her boudoir she could see the mountains, still glistening with snow in May; from her bedroom, she could see the sweeping sea horizon. Nearby was Nicholas’s study; down the corridor were rooms for the children and a private family dining room. On the day in April 1911 when the new palace was opened, it was blessed in the Orthodox fashion by priests going from room to room, swinging smoldering censers of incense and sprinkling holy water. When they finished, Alexandra hustled in to unpack and arrange her favorite pictures and icons on the walls and tables.

  For Alexandra and Alexis, the warm days at Livadia meant recovery from illness and renewal of strength. The Empress and her son spent their mornings together, she lying in a chair on her balcony, he playing nearby with his toys. In the afternoon, she went into the garden or drove her pony cart along the paths around the palace, while Alexis went swimming with his father in the warm sea. Once in 1906, Nicholas was swimming in the surf with his four daughters when a large wave swept over them. The Tsar and the three older girls rose to the crest of the wave, but Anastasia, then five, disappeared. “Little Alexis [aged two] and I saw it happen from the beach,” wrote the Tsar’s sister Olga Alexandrovna. “The child, of course, didn’t realize the danger, and kept clapping his hands at the tidal wave. Then Nicky dived again, grabbed Anastasia by her long hair, and swam back with her to the beach. I had gone cold with terror.”

  Despite this accident, Nicholas enjoyed the water so much and considered it so healthy for his children that he had a large indoor bath constructed and filled with warm salt water so that their daily swimming would not be affected by wind or rain or a drop in the temperature of the sea. When Alexis appeared healthy, Nicholas was overjoyed. In 1909, in the middle of writing to Empress Marie, the Tsar interrupted himself to report cheerfully, “Just now, Alexei has come in after his bath and insists that I write to you that he kisses ‘Granny’ very tenderly. He is very sunburned, so are his sisters and I.”

  At Livadia, Nicholas and Alexandra could live more informally than anywhere else. The Empress drove into Yalta to shop, something she never did in St. Petersburg or Tsarskoe Selo. Once, entering a store from a rainy street, she lowered her umbrella, allowing a stream of water to form a puddle on the floor. Annoyed, the salesman indicated a rack near the door, saying sharply, “Madame, this is for umbrellas.” The Empress meekly obeyed. Only when Anna Vyrubova, who was with the Empress, addressed her in conversation as “Alexandra Fedorovna” did the astonished salesman begin to realize who his customer was.

  Nicholas spent most of his days at Livadia outdoors. Every morning, he played tennis. He made horseback excursions with his daughters to neighboring villas, to the farm which supplied their table, to a mountain waterfall. As in Finland, the children and their father collected berries and mushrooms in the woods. Sometimes in the fall, Nicholas built a small fire of twigs and dry leaves and cooked mushrooms in wine, stirring the bubbling tidbit in a tin cup. In 1909, when the Russian Ministry of War was redesigning the clothing and equipment of the Russian infantryman, Nicholas decided to test it himself for lightness and comfort and ordered an entire kit in his size brought to Livadia. He put on shirt, breeches and boots, shouldered the rifle, cartridges, knapsack and bedding roll and, leaving the palace, marched alone for nine hours, covering twenty-five miles. He was stopped at one point by a security policeman who did not recognize him and roughly ordered him to leave the vicinity. Returning at dusk, Nicholas pronounced the uniform satisfactory. When the Kaiser heard about this exploit, he was vexed that the idea had not occurred to him and asked his military attaché for a full report. Later, the commander of the regiment whose uniform the Tsar had worn asked Nicholas to fill out a common soldier’s identity booklet as a memento. In the booklet, Nicholas filled in the form: Last name: “Romanov”; Home: “Tsarskoe Selo”; Service Completed: “When I am in my grave.”

  If possible, the Imperial family always spent Easter at Livadia. The celebration of Easter was an exhausting but exhilarating experience for the Empress. During the days of the great religious festival, she spent freely of the strength she had been carefully hoarding. In Imperial Russia, Easter was the climax of the Orthodox Church year. More profoundly holy and more joyous than Christmas, it brought an intense outpouring of emotion. Across Russia on Easter night, huge, reverent crowds packed into cathedrals and stood, holding lighted candles, to hear the great choral litany. Beginning just before midnight, they waited for the moment when the priest, the bishop, the Metropolitan, or all of them in procession, went in search of the Savior. Followed by the entire congregation, making a river of candles, they circled the outside of the church. Then, returning to the door, they reenacted the discovery of Christ’s tomb when the stone before it was rolled away. Looking inside, seeing that the church was empty, the priest turned his face to the crowd. His features lighted with joy, he shouted, “Khristos Voskres!”: “Christ is risen!” The congregation, the candles lighting their own glowing faces, responded with a mighty shout, “Voistinu Voskrese!”: “Indeed he is risen!” Everywhere in Russia—in Red Square before St. Basil’s Cathedral, at the doors of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan in St. Petersburg, in tiny churches in lost villages—this was the moment when the Russian people, peasants and princes alike, laughed and wept in unison.

  At the conclusion of the religious service, the Russian Easter festival began. It was an unbelievable surge of eating, visiting and exchanging gifts. Most Russians hurried from the church to begin, in the middle of the night, the sumptuous feasting which broke the long Lenten fast. Because butter, cheese and eggs had been denied, the climax of these meals was paskha, a rich, creamy dessert, and kulich, the round Easter cake, crowned with white icing and the symbol XB, “Christ is risen.” It was a tradition that any stranger who entered the house was welcome, and the table was set with food night and day. In the Crimea, the Imperial palace became a vast banqueting hall. Presiding over this gaiety, Nicholas and Alexandra greeted the entire household with the traditional three kisses of blessing, welcome and joy. Schoolchildren came the following morning from Yalta to stand in line and receive little cakes of kulich from the Empress and her daughters. To members of the
court and the Imperial Guard, the sovereigns gave their famous Easter eggs. Some were simple: exquisitely painted eggshells from which the yolks had been drawn through tiny pinholes. Others were the fabulous gem-encrusted miracles made by the immortal master jeweler Fabergé.

  Peter Carl Fabergé was a Russian of French descent. At the peak of his success, around the turn of the century, his workshops in St. Petersburg employed five hundred jewelers, smiths and apprentices. He had branch offices in Moscow, London and Paris, and he did an enormous business in silver and gold, especially in large dinner services. His lasting fame, however, rests on the extraordinary quality of his jewelry. It was Fabergé’s genius to ignore the usual flamboyant emphasis on precious stones and to subordinate gems to the over-all pattern of the work. In designing a cigarette box, for example, Fabergé’s craftsmen used translucent blue, red or rose enamel as the primary material, lining the edges with a row of tiny diamonds. The result was a masterpiece of restraint, elegance and beauty.

  Fabergé was officially the court jeweler to the Tsar of Russia, but his clients were international. King Edward VII was a regular customer, always demanding, “We must have no duplicates,” to which Fabergé could always reply with serene assurance, “Your Majesty will be content.” In a single day in 1898, the House of Fabergé played host to the King and Queen of Norway, the Kings of Denmark and Greece, and Queen Alexandra of England, Edward VII’s consort. In Russia, no princely wedding, no grand-ducal birthday, no regimental or society jubilee was complete without a shower of Fabergé brooches, necklaces, pendants, cigarette cases, cufflinks, writing sets and clocks. To satisfy his eager patrons, Fabergé produced a breathtaking array of imaginative jewelry. In an endless, gorgeous stream, his craftsmen turned out jeweled flowers, a menagerie of tiny animals, and figures of Russian peasants, gypsy singers and Cossack horsemen. His miniatures included tiny parasols, garden watering cans ornamented in diamonds, an equestrian statue of Peter the Great done in gold and less than an inch high, a gold Louis XVI cabinet only five inches tall, and three-inch sedan chairs made of gold and enamel with interiors of mother-of-pearl.

  The supreme expressions of Fabergé’s art were the fifty-six fabled Imperial Easter eggs which he created for two Russian tsars, Alexander III and Nicholas II. Alexander began the custom in 1884 when he presented a Fabergé egg to his wife, Marie. After his father’s death, Nicholas continued the custom, ordering two eggs each year, one for his wife and one for his mother. The choice of materials and the design were left entirely to Fabergé, who surrounded their construction in his workshops with enormous secrecy. From the first of these commissions, Fabergé hit upon the idea of using the egg only as a shell which would open, revealing a “surprise.” Inside, there might be a basket of wildflowers made with milky chalcedony petals and gold leaves. Or the top of the egg might fly open every hour on the hour to elevate a jeweled and enameled cockerel which crowed and flapped its wings.

  Fabergé’s problem was that every year’s masterpiece made his task that much more difficult in the year that followed. He never really excelled the Great Siberian Railway Easter Egg which he made in 1900. Because Nicholas as Tsarevich had been chairman of the railway committee, Fabergé created an egg of blue, green and yellow enamel on which delicate inlays of silver traced the map of Siberia and the route of the Trans-Siberian. The top could be lifted from the egg by touching the golden double-headed eagle which surmounted it, revealing the “surprise” within. It was a scale model, one foot long, five eighths of an inch wide, of the five cars and a locomotive of the Siberian express. “Driving wheels, double trucks under carriages, and other moving parts were precision made to work so that, given a few turns with the gold key … the gold and platinum locomotive, with a ruby gleaming from its headlight, could actually pull the train,” wrote an observer. “Coupled to the baggage car are a carriage with half the seats reserved for ladies, another car for children, … still another car for smokers … [and a] church car with a Russian cross and gold bells on the roof.”

  Fabergé himself survived the Revolution, but his art did not. With his workshops broken up and his master craftsmen scattered, Fabergé escaped Russia in 1918 disguised as a diplomat and lived his last two years in Switzerland. An artist and purveyor to emperors, he had created works of art that survive as symbols of a vanished age, an age of opulence but also of craftsmanship, integrity and beauty.

  Along with the palaces and villas of the Russian aristocracy, the seaside hills of the Crimea were dotted with hospitals and sanatoria for tuberculosis. Alexandra often visited these institutions; when she could not go herself, she sent her daughters. “They should realize the sadness that lies beneath all this beauty,” she said to a lady-in-waiting. The Empress herself founded two hospitals in the Crimea, and every year she sold her own needlework and embroidery at a charity bazaar in Yalta to raise money for these institutions. The bazaar was held near the Yalta pier, with the Standart, tied alongside, used as a lounge and stockroom. Sometimes Alexis appeared at his mother’s table. When this happened, a crowd gathered and men and women begged that the boy be lifted up high so they could see him. Smiling, Alexandra placed the small Tsarevich on the tabletop, where he sat cross-legged and, at her whisper, made a courtly bow.

  Nicholas and Alexandra preferred to live quietly at Livadia, but the inhabitants of the neighboring estates followed a lively existence of picnics, sailing parties and summer balls. As they grew up, Olga and Tatiana were invited to these parties, and occasionally, well chaperoned, they were allowed to attend. Even the Tsar’s household life was more active than at Tsarskoe Selo. The palace was usually filled with visitors—ministers down from St. Petersburg to report to the Tsar, local residents or guests from neighboring palaces, officers of the Standart or one of the army regiments stationed in the Crimea—and unlike the procedure at Tsarskoe Selo, visitors were always invited to lunch. The children’s favorite guest was the Emir of Bokhara, the ruler of an autonomous state within the Russian Empire, near the border of Afghanistan. The Emir was a tall, dark man whose beard flowed down over a robe topped with a Russian general’s epaulets encrusted with diamonds. Although he had been educated in St. Petersburg and spoke perfect Russian, the Emir followed the custom of Bokhara, and when he spoke officially to the Tsar, he used an interpreter. When the Emir arrived, escorted by two of his ministers wearing long beards dyed bright red, he gave extraordinary gifts. The Tsar’s sister remembered receiving from the Emir “an enormous gold necklace from which, like tongues of flame, hung tassels of rubies.”

  At Livadia in 1911, to celebrate the sixteenth birthday of her oldest daughter, Grand Duchess Olga, the Empress gave a full-dress ball. Before the dance, Olga’s parents gave her a diamond ring and a necklace of thirty-two diamonds and pearls. These were Olga’s first jewels, intended to symbolize her coming into young womanhood. Olga was dressed in pink in her first ballgown. With her thick blond hair coiled for the first time in womanly style atop her head, she arrived at the dance, flushed and fair.

  The ball was held in the state dining room of the new white Livadia Palace. The glass doors were thrown open and the fragrance of the roses in the garden filled the room. The lights in the chandeliers blazed in clusters, catching the gowns and jewels of the women and the bright decorations on the white uniforms of the men. Afterward, a cotillion supper was served and the dancers strolled in the garden and along the marble balconies at the top of the cliffs. As they stood watching from the palace of the Tsar, a huge autumn moon came up and cast its silver light across the shining waters of the Black Sea.

  14

  “The Little One Will Not Die”

  On August 19, 1912 (O.S.), Empress Alexandra wrote a letter from Peterhof to her old tutor, Miss Jackson, who was retired and living in England:

  Darling Madgie:

  Loving thanks for yr last letter—forgive me for being such a shockingly bad correspondent. I had Victoria’s visit for a week wh. was delightful, and Ella came also for 3 days, and I shal
l see her again in Moscow. Ernie and family we had in the Crimea, Waldemar came for 3 days on the Standart in Finland and Irene will come at the end of September to us in Poland, Spala…. Next week we leave for Borodino and Moscow, terribly tiring festivities, don’t know how I shall get through them. After Moscow in spring, I was for a long time quite done up—now I am, on the whole, better…. Here we had colossal heat and scarcely ever a drop of rain.

  If you know of any interesting historical books for girls, could you tell me, as I read to them and they have begun reading English for themselves. They read a great deal of French and the 2 youngest acted out of the Bourg. Gentilhomme and really so well…. Four languages is a lot, but they need them absolutely, and this summer we had Germans and Swedes, and I made all 4 lunch and dine, as it is good practice for them.

  I have begun painting flowers, as alas, have had to leave singing and playing as too tiring.

  Must end. Goodbye and God bless and keep you.

  A tender kiss from Your fondly

  Loving old P.Q. No. III

  Alix

  Despite the stream of visitors, the summer of 1912 was peaceful for the Imperial family. The girls were getting older: Olga was seventeen, Tatiana fifteen, Marie thirteen and Anastasia eleven. Alexis, who was eight, was a source of pride and relief. He was cheerful, mischievous and lively; he had been so well that year that Alexandra had begun to hope her prayers had been answered and he might be getting permanently better.

  At Spala, six weeks after this letter was written, this hope disintegrated. That autumn, in the depths of the Polish forest, Nicholas and Alexandra were plunged into a crisis that seared them both forever.