On August 5, Warsaw fell. “The Emperor, white and trembling, brought this news to the Empress as we sat at tea on her balcony in the warm autumn air,” wrote Anna Vyrubova. “The Emperor was fairly overcome with grief and humiliation. It cannot go on like this,’ he exclaimed bitterly.”
Three weeks later, Nicholas and Alexandra made an unannounced, private visit by automobile to Petrograd. They drove first to the cathedral in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where they knelt before the tombs of the tsars. From there they went to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, where they remained for several hours kneeling at the miraculous icon of the Virgin, praying for guidance. That night, the Council of Ministers was summoned to the Alexander Palace. Nicholas dined that evening with his wife and Anna Vyrubova. Before leaving for the meeting, he asked them to pray that his resolution remain strong. Silently, Anna pressed into his hand a tiny icon which she always wore around her neck. Carrying the icon, Nicholas walked out of the room and the two women settled down to wait. As the minutes stretched into hours, Alexandra grew impatient. Throwing a cloak around her shoulders and motioning Anna to follow, she slipped out onto a balcony which led past the windows of the council chamber. Through the lace curtains inside, they could see the Tsar, sitting very straight in his chair, surrounded by his ministers. One of the ministers was on his feet, arguing passionately.
Without exception, the ministers were aghast at the Tsar’s proposal. They pointed to the disorganization of governmental machinery that would come if the head of state were to spend all his time at Headquarters, more than five hundred miles from the seat of government. They declared that the unity of administration which Nicholas sought would merely become a concentration of all blame for military defeats and political turmoil on the head of the sovereign. In the last resort, they begged him not to go to the front at a moment when the army was defeated. Nicholas listened, his brows and hands covered with perspiration, until every minister had spoken. Then he thanked them and announced quietly, “Gentlemen, in two days I leave for Stavka.”
His public letter to the Grand Duke, explaining his decision, was characteristic of the Tsar. Eloquent and felicitous, it managed to spare the Grand Duke’s pride while gracefully easing him out of his post:
To Your Imperial Highness:
At the beginning of the war there were reasons of a political nature which prevented me from following my personal inclinations and immediately putting myself at the head of the army. Hence the fact that I conferred upon you the supreme command of all the military and naval forces.
Before the eyes of all Russia, Your Imperial Highness has during the war displayed an invincible courage, which has given me and all Russians the greatest confidence in you, and roused the ardent hopes with which your name was everywhere associated in the inevitable vicissitudes of military fortune. Now that the enemy has penetrated far into the empire, my duty to the country which God has committed to my keeping ordains that I shall assume supreme command of the fighting forces, share the burdens and toils of war with my army and help it to protect Russian soil against the onslaught of the foe.
The ways of Providence are inscrutable; but my duty and my own desires strengthen me in a determination which has been inspired by concern for the common weal.
The hostile invasion which is making more progress every day on the western front, demands above all an extreme concentration of all civil and military authority, unity of command during the war, and intensification of the activities of the whole administrative services. But all these duties distract our attention from the southern front, and in these circumstances, I feel the necessity for your advice and help on that front. I therefore appoint you my lieutenant in the Caucasus and Commander-in-Chief of the brave army operating in that region.
To Your Imperial Highness I wish to express my profound gratitude and that of the country for all your work in the war.
Nicholas
The letter was personally delivered to Grand Duke Nicholas at Headquarters by the War Minister, Polivanov. “God be praised,” said Nicholas Nicolaievich simply. “The Emperor releases me from a task which was wearing me out.” When the Tsar himself arrived at Stavka, he wrote: “N. came in with a kind, brave smile and asked simply when I would order him to go. The following day at lunch and dinner he was very talkative and in a very good mood.”
The fall of the Grand Duke was a source of grim satisfaction to the Germans. “The Grand Duke,” Ludendorff wrote later, “was really a great soldier and strategist.” In the Russian army, officers and men were sad to see him go, but the summer of disaster had dimmed his hero’s luster. Within the mauve boudoir at Tsarskoe Selo, the change was hailed as a supreme personal triumph. When Nicholas left for Stavka, he carried with him a letter of ecstasy from Alexandra:
My very own beloved one, I cannot find words to express all I want to—my heart is too full. I only long to hold you tight in my arms and whisper words of intense love, courage, strength and endless blessings…. You have fought this great fight for your country and throne—alone and with bravery and decision. Never have they seen such firmness in you before…. I know what it costs you … forgive me, I beseech you, my Angel, for having left you no peace and worried you so much, but I too well know your marvelously gentle character and you had to shake it off this time, had to win your fight alone against all. It will be a glorious page in your reign and Russian history, the story of these weeks and days…. God anointed you at your coronation, he placed you where you stand and you have done your duty, be sure, quite sure of that and He forsaketh not his anointed. Our Friend’s prayers arise day and night for you to Heaven and God will hear them…. It is the beginning of the great glory of your reign, He said so and I absolutely believe it…. Sleep well, my Sunshine, Russia’s Savior. Remember last night how tenderly we clung together. I shall yearn for your caresses…. I kiss you without end and bless you. Holy Angels guard your slumber. I am near and with you forever and ever and none shall separate us.
Your very own wife,
Sunny
In France and England, the Tsar’s decision was greeted with a sigh of relief. Russian defeats had aroused fear in both countries that the Tsar’s government might be forced to withdraw from the war. By taking personal command, Nicholas was regarded as pledging himself and his empire once again to the alliance.
In the Russian army, it was clearly understood that the Tsar’s role would be that of a figurehead, and that the actual military decisions would be made by whichever professional soldier became his chief of staff. Nicholas’s choice for this post was reassuring. Michael Vasilevich Alexeiev was an energetic soldier of humble beginnings who had risen to the top by sheer ability and hard work. A former professor at the military staff college, he had served in the southwest against the Austrians and had commanded the Northern Front. Now, as Chief of Staff, he was in fact, if not in name, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian armies.
In appearance, Alexeiev compared poorly with the Grand Duke. He was short, with a simple, wide Russian face which, unlike most Russian generals, he chose to expose without a beard. He had trouble with an eye muscle, and Nicholas once described him to Alexandra as “Alexeiev, my cross-eyed friend.” At Headquarters, he was solitary, avoiding contact with the Imperial suite. His weakness was a failure to delegate authority; he tried to do everything himself, including checking map references on the huge war maps spread out on Headquarters tables. Nevertheless, Nicholas was delighted with him. “I have such good help from Alexeiev,” he telegraphed immediately after taking command. And a few days later: “I cannot tell you how pleased I am with Alexeiev. Conscientious, clever, modest and what a worker!”
In September 1915, soon after the change of command at Russian Headquarters, the German offensive began to lose impetus. Russian troops, fighting now on the soil of Russia itself, gave ground slowly, contesting every river, hill and marsh. By November, as winter closed down most of the front, Alexeiev had managed to stabilize a line which ran, on the av
erage, two hundred miles east of the front in May. Firmly in German hands lay all of Russian Poland and the lower Baltic territories. Indeed, the battle line at the end of 1915 became almost precisely the western frontier of Soviet Russia until 1939 and the outbreak of the Second World War.
There were no further great German offensives in the East during the war. Assuming that the losses of 1915 had broken the back of the Russian army, the German General Staff transferred its main effort back to the Western Front. Beginning in February 1916, all of the great mass of German artillery and a million infantrymen were hurled at the pivotal French fortress of Verdun. To the utter astonishment and intense dismay of the Kaiser’s generals, no sooner were they committed in the West than the Russians attacked again in the East. From May until October, the Russians pressed forward; by July, eighteen German divisions had been transferred from West to East and the assault on Verdun had been abandoned. But the cost to the Russian army of the 1916 campaign again was a terrible one: 1,200,000 men.
After the war, Hindenburg paid tribute to the bravery and sacrifices of his Russian enemies: “In the Great War ledger the page on which the Russian losses were written has been torn out. No one knows the figures. Five or eight millions? We too have no idea. All we know is that sometimes in our battles with the Russians we had to remove the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches in order to get a clear field of fire against fresh assaulting waves.” Ten years after Hindenburg wrote, a careful analysis of Russian casualties was made by Nicholas Golovine, a former general of the Imperial army. Weighing all the evidence, he estimated that 1,300,000 men were killed in action; 4,200,000 were wounded, of whom 350,000 later died of wounds; and 2,400,000 were taken prisoner. The total is 7,900,000—over half of the 15,500,000 men who were mobilized.
Thus, the military collapse of 1915 played a major part in all that was to happen afterward. For it was the tragic and bloody defeat of the army which weakened the grip of Grand Duke Nicholas and persuaded the Tsar to take personal command of his troops. By going to the army, hundreds of miles from the seat of government, the Tsar gave up all but a vague, supervisory control over affairs of state. In an autocracy, this arrangement was impossible; a substitute autocrat had to be found. Uncertainly at first, then with growing self-confidence, this role was filled by the Empress Alexandra. At her shoulder, his “prayers arising day and night,” stood her Friend, Rasputin. Together they would finally bring down the Russian Empire.
* Not surprisingly, those Russian soldiers who survived this maelstrom came to regard artillery as the God of War. Thirty years later, in April 1945, when Marshal Zhukov began the Red Army’s final assault on Berlin, his attack was preceded by a barrage from 20,000 guns.
23
The Fateful Deception
The Empress had thrown herself heart and soul into the war. Burning with patriotism, filled with energy and enthusiasm, she forgot her own illness to plunge into hospital work. Alexandra was happiest when immersed in other people’s problems, and the war gave endless scope to this side of her nature. “To some it may seem unnecessary my doing this,” she said, “but … help is much needed and every hand is useful.” Nursing became her passion. The huge Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo was converted into a military hospital, and before the end of 1914 eighty-five hospitals were operated under her patronage in the Petrograd area alone. This activity, although on a grand scale, was not unique; many Russian ladies at this time established themselves as patrons of hospitals and hospital trains. But only a few followed the Empress’s example by enrolling in nursing courses and coming daily in person to tend the wounded.
Life inside the Alexander Palace was transformed. The Empress, who had stayed in bed nursing her ills until noon, now was up for Mass at seven. Promptly at nine, dressed in the gray uniform of a nursing sister, she arrived at the hospital along with her two eldest daughters, Olga and Tatiana, and Anna Vyrubova for her nursing course. The hospital atmosphere was brutal and pathetic. Every day, Red Cross trains brought long lines of wounded and dying men back from the front. Most had had only first aid in the trenches and front-line dressing stations. They arrived dirty, bloodstained, feverish and groaning. Under the direction of trained nurses, the students washed and bandaged the ripped flesh and mangled bodies. “I have seen the Empress of Russia in the operating room,” wrote Anna Vyrubova, “… holding ether cones, handling sterilized instruments, assisting in the most difficult operations, taking from the hands of busy surgeons amputated legs and arms, removing bloody and even vermin-ridden field dressings, enduring all the sights and smells and agonies of the most dreadful of all places, a military hospital in the midst of war.” Nevertheless, wrote Anna, “I never saw her happier than on the day, at the end of her two months training, she marched at the head of the procession of nurses to receive the Red Cross … diploma of a certified war nurse.”
After a morning in the operating room, Alexandra ate a hurried lunch and spent the afternoon visiting other hospitals. Moving through the aisles between hospital beds, the tall figure of the Empress in her nurse’s uniform stirred the wounded men. They reached out bandaged hands to touch her; they wept as she knelt beside their beds to pray. Officers and peasant boys alike, facing amputations, cried from their beds, “Tsaritsa, stand near me. Hold my hand that I may have courage.”
To Alexandra, this was Russia, bleeding and dying. She was the Russian Empress, the matushka of all the brave men and boys who had given themselves for Russia. “Very bad wounds,” she wrote to Nicholas on October 21, 1914 (O.S.). “For the first time, I shaved one of the soldiers’ legs near and around the wound….” Later, the same day, in a second letter: “Three operations, 3 fingers were taken off as blood poisoning had set in and they were quite rotten…. My nose is full of hideous smells from those blood poisoning wounds.” And again: “I went in to see the wound of our standard bearer—awful, bones quite smashed, he suffered hideously during bandaging, but did not say a word, only got pale and perspiration ran down his face and body….” On November 19 (O.S.): “An officer of the 2nd Rifles, poor boy, whose legs are getting quite dark and one fears an amputation may be necessary. I was with the boy yesterday during his dressing, awful to see, and he clung to me and kept quiet, poor child.” On November 20 (O.S.): “This morning we were present (I help as always giving the instruments and Olga threaded the needles) at our first big amputation. Whole arm was cut off.”
Alexandra spared herself nothing, not even terrible, shattering wounds in the groin: “I had wretched fellows with awful wounds—scarcely a man any more, so shot to pieces, perhaps it must be cut off as so black, but hope to save it—terrible to look at. I washed and cleaned and painted with iodine and smeared with vasoline and tied them up and bandaged all up…. I did three such—and one had a little tube in it. One’s heart bleeds for them—I won’t describe any more details as it’s so sad, but being a wife and mother I feel for them quite particularly—a young nurse (girl) I sent out of the room.”
To Nicholas, at Army Headquarters, death was remote, a question of arithmetic, as regiments, brigades and divisions shriveled away and then were restored by new recruits. To Alexandra, death was familiar and immediate. “During an operation a soldier died … hemorrhage,” she wrote on November 25, 1914 (O.S.). “All behaved well, none lost their heads [Olga and Tatiana] were brave—They and Ania [Vyrubova] had never seen a death. But he died in a minute…. How near death always is.”
In November, she formed a special attachment to a young boy, mentioning him repeatedly in her letters: “A young boy kept begging for me … the little boy begged me to come earlier today … I find the young boy gradually getting worse … in the evenings he is off his head and so weak … He will pass away gradually. I only hope not whilst we are away.”
Early in March, he died. She wrote: “My poor wounded friend has gone. God has taken him quietly and peacefully to himself. I was as usual with him in the morning and more than an hour in the afternoon. He talked a lot—in a whi
sper always—all about his service in the Caucasus—awfully interesting and so bright with his big shiny eyes…. Olga and I went to see him. He lay there so peacefully covered under my flowers I daily brought him, with his lovely peaceful smile—the forehead yet quite warm. I came home with my tears. The elder sister [nurse] cannot either realize it—he was quite calm, cheery, said felt a wee bit not comfy and when the sister 10 minutes after she had gone away, came in, found him with staring eyes, quite blue, breathed twice—and all was over—peaceful to the end. Never did he complain, never asked for anything, sweetness itself—all loved him and that shining smile. You, lovy mine, can understand what that is, when daily one has been there, thinking only of giving him pleasure—and suddenly—finished…. Forgive my writing so much about him, but going there and all that, had been a help with you away and I felt God let me bring him a little sunshine in his loneliness. Such is life! Another brave soul left this world to be added to the shining stars above. It must not make you sad what I wrote, only I could not bear it any longer.”
The Empress’s letters to the Tsar were never meant for any eyes but his. In all, 630 letters were found in a black leather suitcase in Ekaterinburg after her death; of these, 230 were written over the period from their first acquaintance to the outbreak of war in 1914. The other 400 were written during the war years 1914–1916. They were written with no inkling that anyone else would ever read them, far less that they would one day be published and become key historical documents used to explain events, personalities and decisions on the eve of the Russian Revolution. Today, they offer this and even more: an intimate window into a soul, a unique portrait of a woman which none of her contemporaries in Russia could possibly have seen.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family Page 41