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

by Robert K. Massie

  To an astonishing degree, the tercentenary succeeded. Huge crowds—workers and students among them—flooded the city boulevards to cheer Imperial processions. In the villages, peasants flocked to catch a glimpse of the Tsar as he passed by. No one then dreamed that this was the sunset of autocracy, that after three hundred years of Romanov rule no tsar would ever pass that way again.

  In February 1913, Nicholas and Alexandra prepared for the tercentenary celebrations by moving with their children from Tsarskoe Selo to the Winter Palace. None of them was fond of the palace. It was too large, too gloomy, too drafty, and the tiny enclosed garden was much too small for the children to play. Besides, Alexandra had a special reason for disliking the Winter Palace: it reminded her of the weeks she had spent in St Petersburg as a bride, going to the theatre, speeding along in a troika, having cozy suppers before a blazing fire. “I was so happy then, so well and strong,” she told Anna Vyrubova. “Now I am a wreck.”

  The official tercentenary celebration began with a great choral Te Deum in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan. On the morning of the service, the Nevsky Prospect, down which the Imperial carriages would pass, was jammed with excited crowds. Despite lines of soldiers holding the people back, the crowd, cheering wildly, burst the cordons and mobbed the carriage containing the Tsar and the Empress.

  Under its great golden dome, the cathedral was packed to capacity. Although most of those present were standing, seats in front had been saved for members of the Imperial family, foreign ambassadors, government ministers and members of the Duma. Shortly before the Tsar arrived, a dramatic squabble had occurred over the Duma seats. Michael Rodzianko, the President of the Duma, had with great difficulty secured these seats for his members. As he entered the church, a guard whispered to him that a peasant had sat down in one of them and refused to move.

  “Sure enough,” wrote Rodzianko, “it was Rasputin. He was dressed in a magnificent Russian tunic of crimson silk, patent leather top boots, black cloth trousers and a peasant’s overcoat. Over his dress he wore a pectoral cross on a finely wrought chain.” Rodzianko firmly ordered the starets out of the seat. Then, according to Rodzianko, Rasputin tried to mesmerize him on the spot. “He stared me in the eyes…. I felt myself confronted by an unknown power of tremendous force. I suddenly became possessed of an almost animal fury, the blood rushed to my heart and I realized I was working myself into a state of absolute frenzy. I, too, stared straight into Rasputin’s eyes, and, speaking literally, felt my own staring out of my head…. ‘You are a notorious swindler,’ I said.” Rasputin fell on his knees, and Rodzianko, who was bigger and stronger, began to kick him in the ribs. Finally the Duma President lifted Rasputin by the scruff of his neck and threw him bodily out of the seat. Murmuring, “Lord, forgive him his sin,” Rasputin slunk away.

  The days after the service were crowded with ceremonies. From all parts of the empire, delegations in national dress arrived to be presented to the Tsar. In honor of the sovereign, his wife and all the Romanov grand dukes and grand duchesses, the nobility of St. Petersburg jointly gave a ball attended by thousands of guests. Together, the Imperial couple attended a state performance of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar at the opera. “The orchestra was a mass of officers in uniform and the boxes were filled with ladies in jewels,” wrote Anna Vyrubova. “When Their Majesties appeared, the whole house rose and gave them tumultuous applause.”

  The strain of these activities, coming only four months after Spala, was intense. At receptions in the Winter Palace, the Empress stood for hours in the middle of the enormous crowds jamming the state rooms. She looked magnificent in dark blue velvet with a diamond tiara and diamond necklace; for one ball she wore white with pearls and emeralds. Several times, as a reminder of Russia’s past, she wore a long Oriental gown of silk brocade and the tall cone-shaped kokoshnik worn by Russian empresses before the court was Westernized by Peter the Great. Her daughters appeared in shimmering white gowns wearing the Order of St. Catherine, a scarlet ribbon blazing with diamonds. But Alexandra’s strength was fragile. At one ball, wrote Baroness Buxhoeveden, “she felt so ill that she could scarcely keep her feet … she was able to attract the attention of the Emperor who was talking at the other end of the room. When he came up it was only just in time to lead her away and prevent her from fainting in public.”

  One night at the Maryinsky Theatre, she appeared pale and silent in a white velvet dress with the pale blue ribbon of the Order of St. Andrew across her breast. From an adjacent box, Meriel Buchanan watched her closely: “Her lovely, tragic face was expressionless … her eyes enigmatic in their dark gravity, seeming fixed on some secret inner thought that was certainly far removed from the crowded theatre…. Presently it seemed that this emotion or distress mastered her completely, and with a few whispered words to the Emperor she rose and withdrew…. A little wave of resentment rippled over the theatre.”

  For Easter that year, Nicholas gave Alexandra a Fabergé egg which bore miniature portraits of all the reigning Romanov tsars and empresses framed in Russian double eagles. Inside, the surprise was a globe of blued steel with two maps of the Russian Empire inset in gold, one of the year 1613, the other of 1913. In May, the Imperial family set off on a dynastic pilgrimage to trace the route taken by Michael Romanov, the first of the Romanov tsars, from his birthplace to the throne. On the Upper Volga, where the great river curves north and west of Moscow, they boarded a steamer to sail to the ancient Romanov seat of Kostroma, where in March 1613 sixteen-year-old Michael was notified of his election to the throne. Along the way, peasants lined the banks to watch the little flotilla pass; some even plunged into the water to get a closer look. On this trip, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna remembered, “Wherever we went we met with manifestations of loyalty bordering on wildness. When our steamer went down the Volga we saw crowds of peasants wading waist-high in the water to catch a glimpse of Nicky. In some of the towns I would see artisans and workmen falling down to kiss his shadow as we passed. Cheers were deafening.”

  The climax of the tercentenary came in Moscow. On a brilliant blue day in June, Nicholas rode into the city alone, sixty feet in advance of his Cossack escort. In Red Square, he dismounted and walked, behind a line of chanting priests, across the square and through a gate into the Kremlin. Alexandra and Alexis, following in an open car, also were supposed to walk the last few hundred yards. But Alexis was ill. “The Tsarevich was carried along in the arms of a Cossack of the bodyguard,” wrote Kokovtsov. “As the procession paused … I clearly heard exclamations, of sorrow at the sight of this poor helpless child, the heir to the throne of the Romanovs.”

  Looking back on the tercentenary once it was over, the principals drew different conclusions. In Alexandra, it confirmed once more her belief in the bond between the Tsar and his people. “Now you can see for yourself what cowards those State Ministers are,” she told a lady-in-waiting. “They are constantly frightening the Emperor with threats of revolution and here—you see it yourself—we need merely to show ourselves and at once their hearts are ours.” In Nicholas, it aroused a desire to travel further within Russia’s borders; he talked of sailing again along the Volga, of visiting the Caucasus, of going perhaps even to Siberia. Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, writing in retrospect, knowing what was to come, declared, “Nobody seeing those enthusiastic crowds, could have imagined that in less than four years, Nicky’s very name would be splattered with mud and hatred.”

  Even Kokovtsov, who felt that the ministers and Duma had been ignored, admitted that the celebrations appeared successful. “The Tsar’s journey was to be in the nature of a family celebration,” he wrote. “The concepts of state and government were to be pushed into the background and the personality of the Tsar was to dominate the scene. The current attitude seemed to suggest that the government was a barrier between the people and their Tsar, whom they regarded with blind devotion as anointed by God…. The Tsar’s closest friends at the court became persuaded that the Sovereign could do a
nything by relying on the unbounded love and utter loyalty of the people. The ministers of the government, on the other hand, [and] … the Duma … both were of the opinion that the Sovereign should recognize that conditions had changed since the day the Romanovs became Tsars of Russia and lords of the Russian domains.”

  The Romanov dynasty was the fruit of a marriage in 1547. The bride was Anastasia, daughter of the Romanovs, a popular family of the Moscow nobility. The groom was the seventeen-year-old Muscovite prince Ivan IV, who had just proclaimed himself Tsar of Russia. Ivan’s technique of choosing a wife was in the grand manner: he ordered two thousand girls lined up for his inspection; from this assembly he chose Anastasia. Nevertheless, Ivan was deeply in love with his young wife. When she died ten years later, Ivan suspected that she had been poisoned. His grief turned to rage and perhaps to madness. His reign thereafter was such a crescendo of cruelties that he became known as Ivan the Terrible. He carried an iron staff with which he impaled courtiers who irritated him. When the city of Novgorod rebelled, Ivan surrounded the city and for five weeks sat on a throne in the open air while before his eyes sixty thousand people were tortured to death.

  Torn between good and evil, Ivan talked incessantly of leaving the throne. He did leave Moscow midway in his reign for a monastery, where he alternated between spectacular debauchery, bloody executions and abject remorse. Returning to the throne, he soon fell into a rage and stabbed his eldest and favorite son. When the young man died, Ivan tried to atone by reading the Bible and interminable prayers. He sobbed that his life had been ruined by the death of his beloved Anastasia Romanovna. Writing to his enemy Prince Kurbsky, he said, “And why did you separate me from my wife? If only you had not taken from me my young wife … none of this would have happened.” Toward the end, he was haunted by his victims. His hair fell out and he howled every night. When he died, supposedly in the middle of a game of chess with his courtier Boris Godunov, his last act was to call for a cowl and become a monk.

  Ivan was succeeded by his feeble second son, Fedor, who was succeeded in turn by the regent, Boris Godunov. Boris ruled as Tsar for five years. His death opened the door to a horde of claimants and pretenders—in Russian history, this period is known as the Time of Troubles. At one point, the throne was claimed by a son of the King of Poland. A Polish, army occupied Moscow, entrenched itself in the Kremlin and burned the rest of the city. Besieged by the Russians, the Poles held out in the Kremlin for eighteen months, fending off starvation by eating their own dead. In November 1612, the Kremlin surrendered. Russia, which had had no tsar for three years, convened a national assembly, the Zemsky Sobor, to elect a new tsar.

  The choice fell on another boy, 16-year-old Michael Romanov. By blood, Michael’s claim was weak; he was no more than the grand-nephew of Ivan the Terrible. But he remained the only candidate on whom all the quarreling factions could agree. On a cold, windy day, March 13, 1613, a delegation of nobles, clergy, gentry, traders, artisans and peasants, representing “all the classes and all the towns of Russia,” arrived at Kostroma on the Upper Volga to inform Michael Romanov that he had been elected Tsar. Michael’s mother, who was present, demurred, pointing out that all previous tsars had found their subjects disloyal. The delegates admitted that this was true, but, they added, “now we have been punished and we have come to an agreement in all the towns.” Michael tearfully accepted and on July 11, 1613, in the Kremlin, the first Romanov tsar was crowned.

  The greatest of the Romanovs was Michael’s grandson, Peter the Great. Peter became tsar in 1689 and reigned for thirty-six years. From boyhood, Peter was interested in Europe. As an adolescent in Moscow, he shunned the Kremlin and played outside the city with three older companions, a Scot, a German and a Swiss. In 1697, Peter became the first tsar to leave Russia, when, traveling under an alias, he toured Western Europe for a year and a half. His incognito was difficult to maintain: Peter was almost seven feet tall, he traveled with a retinue of 250 people including dwarfs and jesters, his language was Russian, his manners barbarous. Fascinated by the art of surgery being practiced at the Anatomical Theatre in Leyden, Peter noticed squeamish looks on the faces of his courtiers; instantly, he ordered them to descend into the arena and sever the muscles of the cadavers with their teeth.

  When he returned to Russia, Peter wrenched his empire violently from East to West. He personally shaved the waist-long beards and sheared the caftans of his boyars (nobles). To modernize their sleeping habits, he declared, “Ladies and gentlemen of the court caught sleeping with their boots on will be instantly decapitated.” Wielding a new pair of dental pliers which he had acquired in Europe, he collected teeth from the jaws of unwary and terrified subjects. When he considered that St. Petersburg, his European capital, was sufficiently finished to be inhabitable, he gave his boyars twenty-four hours to pack their belongings in Moscow and leave for the north.

  There was no side of Russian life that Peter did not touch. Along with the new capital, he built the Russian army and navy and the Academy of Science. He simplified the Russian alphabet and edited the first Russian newspaper. He flooded Russia with new books, new ideas, new words and new titles, mostly German. He wreaked such havoc on the old Russian culture and religion that the Orthodox Church considered him the Antichrist. For all his modern ideas, Peter retained the impulses of an ancient, absolute autocrat. Suspecting that his son and heir, the Tsarevich Alexis, was intriguing against him, Peter had the youth tortured and beaten to death.

  The other towering figure of the Romanov dynasty was not a Romanov or even a Russian. Catherine the Great was born an obscure German princess, Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst. At fourteen, she married Peter the Great’s grandson, Peter III. For eighteen years they lived together, first more as brother and sister, then as antagonists when Peter insulted her in public and lived openly with his mistress. In 1762, a conspiracy was organized on her behalf and Peter was forced to abdicate. Soon afterward, at a dinner party, he died in a scuffle. Prince Alexis Orlov, one of the conspirators entrusted with his custody, declared, “We cannot ourselves remember what we did.” Because it has never been established that Peter III fathered Catherine’s son Paul, there is a strong chance that the original Romanov line ended in this scuffle.

  Catherine’s reign brought classical style to the Russian autocracy. Diderot, Locke, Blackstone, Voltaire and Montesquieu were her favorite authors. She wrote frequently to Voltaire and Frederick the Great; she built the Hermitage to serve as a guest house if Voltaire should ever come to Russia, but he never did. Catherine herself wrote a history of Russia, painted and sculpted. She never remarried. She lived alone, rising at five to light her own fire and begin fifteen hours of work. Over the years, she took dozens of lovers. A few, such as Prince Gregory Orlov and Prince Gregory Potemkin, helped her rule Russia. Of Potemkin, she wrote that their letters might almost be man to man, except that “one of the two friends was a very attractive woman.”

  Catherine died in 1796, the year that Napoleon Bonaparte was winning his first military triumphs in Italy. Eighteen years later, Napoleon invaded Russia and entered Moscow only to see his army destroyed by winds and snows. Two years after that, in 1814, Catherine’s grandson, Tsar Alexander I, rode into Paris at the head of a Russian army. After Alexander I came his brother, Nicholas I. Nicholas II, descendant and heir to Michael Romanov, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, was the great-grandson of Nicholas I.

  Maurice Paléologue once did some idle arithmetic and calculated that, by blood, Tsar Nicholas II was only 1/128th Russian, while his son, the Tsarevich Alexis, was only 1/256th Russian, The habit Russian tsars had of marrying German and Danish wives was responsible for these startling fractions; they suggest better than anything else the extent to which the original Romanov blood had been diluted by the beginning of the twentieth century.

  As head of the family, Nicholas II presided over an immense clan of Romanov cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews. Although keenly jealous of name and rank, they were often cas
ual about duties and obligations. By education, language and taste, they were part of the cosmopolitan aristocracy of Europe. They spoke French better than they spoke Russian, they traveled in private railway coaches from hotels at Biarritz to villas on the Riviera, they were more often seen as guests in English country houses or palaces in Rome than on their family estates beside the Volga or the Dnieper or the Don, Wealthy, sophisticated, charming and bored, most of the Romanovs considered “Nicky,” with his naïve fatalism, and “Alicky,” with her passionate religious fervor, to be pathetically quaint and obsolete.

  Unfortunately, in the public mind, all the Romanovs were lumped together. If Nicholas’s inadequacies as tsar weakened the logic of autocracy, the family’s indifference to its reputation helped to corrode the prestige of the dynasty. Nicholas’s sister Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna recognized the family’s failure. Shortly before her death in 1960 she observed sorrowfully:

  “It is certainly the last generation that helped to bring about the disintegration of the Empire…. All those critical years, the Romanovs, who should have been the staunchest supporters of the throne, did not live up to their standards or to the traditions of the family. … Too many of us Romanovs had … gone to live in a world of self-interest where little mattered except the unending gratification of personal desire and ambition. Nothing proved it better than the appalling marital mess in which the last generation of my family involved themselves. That chain of domestic scandals could not but shock the nation … but did any of them care for the impression they created? Never.”