Inside the coffin, before the lid was sealed, the Empress had two objects placed on Rasputin’s breast. One was an icon, signed by herself, her husband, her son and her daughters. The other was a letter: “My dear martyr, give me thy blessing that it may follow me always on the sad and dreary path I have yet to follow here below. And remember us from on high in your holy prayers. Alexandra.”
26
Last Winter at Tsarskoe Selo
During the dreary weeks of winter that followed Rasputin’s murder, the Tsar of all the Russias suffered something close to a nervous collapse. Utterly weary, craving only tranquillity and rest, he remained secluded at Tsarskoe Selo. There, in the bosom of his family, surrounded by a narrow circle of familiar figures, he lived quietly, avoiding decisions that affected ministers, munitions, his millions of soldiers and tens of millions of subjects. Rodzianko, who saw him twice during this period, recalled the audience in which Nicholas got up and went to the window. “How lovely it was in the woods today,” he said, looking out. “It is so quiet there. One forgets all these intrigues and paltry human restlessness. My soul felt so peaceful. One is nearer to Nature there, nearer to God.”
Nicholas remained all day in his private quarters. He converted his billiard room into a map room, and there, behind a door guarded by his motionless Ethiopian, he stood for hours over huge maps of the battlefields spread out on the billiard tables. When he left the room, he carefully locked the door and carried the key in his own pocket. At night, he sat with his wife and Anna Vyrubova in the Empress’s mauve boudoir, reading aloud. His public utterances were vague. He issued a manifesto to the army which, although written for him by General Gurko, was molded of Nicholas’s own continuing patriotic dream: “The time for peace has not yet come…. Russia has not yet performed the tasks this war has set her…. The possession of Constantinople and the Straits … the restoration of a free Poland. … We remain unshaken in our confidence in victory. God will bless our arms. He will cover them with everlasting glory and give us a peace worthy of your glorious deeds. Oh, my glorious troops, a peace such that generations to come will bless your sacred memory!” Paléologue, reading the manifesto and wondering at Nicholas’s meaning, decided that it “can only be … a kind of political will, a final an nouncement of the glorious vision which he had imagined for Russia and which he now sees dissolving into thin air.”
Visitors were shocked by the Tsar’s appearance; there were wild rumors that Alexandra was giving him drugs. On the Russian New Year, the diplomatic corps arrived at Tsarskoe Selo for its annual reception. Nicholas appeared, surrounded by his generals and aides, to exchange handshakes, smiles and congratulations. “As usual,” wrote Paléologue, “Nicholas II was kind and natural and he even affected a certain care-free air; but his pale, thin face betrayed the nature of his secret thoughts.” A private audience left the French Ambassador filled with gloom. “The Emperor’s words, his silences and reticences, his grave, drawn features and furtive, distant thoughts and the thoroughly vague and enigmatical quality of his personality, confirm in me … the notion that Nicholas II feels himself overwhelmed and dominated by events, that he has lost all faith in his mission … that he has … abdicated inwardly and is now resigned to disaster.”
Nicholas made a similar impression on Vladimir Kokovtsov, the former Prime Minister. Kokovtsov had always had a high regard for Nicholas’s quick, intuitive grasp of most subjects and his exceptional memory. Entering the Tsar’s study on February 1, Kokovtsov was deeply alarmed by the change in his sovereign: “During the year that I had not seen him, he became almost unrecognizable. His face had become very thin and hollow and covered with small wrinkles. His eyes … had become quite faded and wandered aimlessly from object to object…. The whites were of a decidedly yellow tinge, and the dark retinas had become colorless, grey and lifeless…. The face of the Tsar bore an expression of helplessness. A forced, mirthless smile was fixed upon his lips and he answered, repeating several times: ‘I am perfectly well and sound, but I spend too much time without exercise and I am used to much activity. I repeat to you, Vladimir Nicolaievich, I am perfectly all right. You have not seen me for a long time, and possibly I did not have a good night. Presently I shall go for a walk and shall look better.”
Throughout the interview, Kokovtsov continued, “the Tsar listened to me with the same sickly smile, glancing nervously about him.” Asked a “question which seemed to me perfectly simple … the Tsar became reduced to a perfectly incomprehensible state of helplessness. The strange, almost vacant smile remained fixed on his face; he looked at me as if to seek support and to ask me to remind him of a matter that had absolutely slipped his memory…. For a long time, he looked at me in silence as if trying to collect his thoughts or to recall what had escaped his memory.”
Kokovtsov left the room in tears. Outside, he found Dr. Botkin and Count Paul Benckendorff, the Grand Marshal of the court. “Do you not see the state of the Tsar?” he asked. “He is on the verge of some mental disturbance if not already in its power.” Botkin and Benckendorff both said that Nicholas was not ill, merely tired. Nevertheless, Kokovtsov returned to Petrograd with the strong impression “that the Tsar was seriously ill and that his illness was of a nervous character.”
Alexandra was bowed by Rasputin’s murder, but, drawing on the same reserves of inner fortitude which were to sustain her during the pitiless months ahead, she did not break. Rasputin had often told her, “If I die or you desert me, you will lose your son and your crown within six months.” The Empress had never doubted him. Rasputin’s death removed the savior of her son and her link with God. Without his prayers and counsel, any disaster was possible. The fact that the blow had come from within the Imperial family did not surprise her. She knew their feelings and understood that she had been the real target of the assassins.
After the murder, she sat quietly for a number of days, with tear-stained face, staring in front of her. Then, she rallied, and the face she showed even to those in the palace was calm and resolute. If God had taken her Friend, she was still on earth. While life remained, she would persevere in her faith, in her devotion to husband and family, in her resolve, sealed now by Gregory’s martyrdom, to maintain the autocracy given to Russia by God. Touched by the same sense of earthly doom that afflicted the Tsar, she steeled herself for the shocks to come. From that point, through the months left to her to live, Alexandra never wavered.
It was the Empress who took matters in hand. Since the day of the assassination, Anna Vyrubova’s mail had been filled with anonymous threatening letters. By the Empress’s command, Anna was moved for greater safety from her small house to an apartment in the Alexander Palace. Although the Tsar was in the palace, the Empress continued to exert a predominant influence on political affairs. The main telephone in the palace was not on his desk but in her boudoir on a table beneath the portrait of Marie Antoinette. Protopopov’s reports at the palace were given to either Nicholas or Alexandra, whoever was available, sometimes to both of them together. In addition, with her husband’s knowledge, the Empress took to eavesdropping on the Tsar’s official conversations. Kokovtsov sensed something of this kind in his interview. “I thought that the door leading from the [Tsar’s] study to his dressing room was half open, which had never occurred before, and that someone was standing just inside,” he wrote. “It may have been just an illusion but this impression stayed with me throughout my brief audience.” It was not an illusion, but it was a temporary device. Soon afterward, for greater convenience, the Empress had a wooden staircase cut through the walls to a small balcony overlooking the Tsar’s formal audience chamber. There, concealed by curtains, the Empress could lie on a couch and listen in comfort.
In the conduct of Russia’s government, Rasputin’s death changed nothing. Ministers came and went. Trepov, who had replaced Stürmer as Prime Minister in November, was allowed to resign in January to be replaced by Prince Nicholas Golitsyn, an elderly man whom the Empress had known as deputy chairm
an of one of her charitable committees. Golitsyn was horrified by his appointment and unsuccessfully begged the Tsar to choose another. “If someone else had used the language I used to describe myself, I should have been obliged to challenge him to a duel,” he said.
It made little difference. Protopopov was the only minister in whom the Empress had genuine confidence. The rest of the Cabinet scarcely mattered, and Protopopov rarely bothered even to attend its meetings. Rodzianko refused even to speak to him. At a New Year’s Day reception, the Duma President tried to avoid his former deputy. “I noticed he was following me…. I moved to another part of the hall and stood with my back [to him]. Notwithstanding … Protopopov held out his hand. I replied, ‘Nowhere and never.’ Protopopov … took me in a friendly manner by the elbow, saying, ‘My dear fellow, surely we can come to an understanding.’ I felt disgusted by him. ‘Leave me alone. You are repellent to me,’ I said.”
Dependent, like Rasputin, solely on the favor of the Empress, the Interior Minister hastened to clothe himself in Rasputin’s spiritual trappings. As the starets had done, he telephoned every morning at ten, to either the Empress or Anna Vyrubova. He reported that Rasputin’s spirit sometimes came to him at night; that he could feel the familiar presence and hear the familiar voice as it gave him advice. A story making the rounds in Petrograd depicted Protopopov in the middle of an audience with Alexandra suddenly falling on his knees and moaning, “Oh, Majesty, I see Christ behind you.”
Although the Empress was resolute, she had no joy in her work. Every Thursday evening, a concert of chamber music was given in a palace drawing room by a Rumanian orchestra. The Empress’s chair always was placed near the fire burning in the grate, and she sat absorbed by the music, staring into the glowing flames. On one of these nights, only two weeks before the Revolution, her friend Lili Dehn slid into a chair behind her. “The Empress seemed unusually sad,” she wrote. “I whispered anxiously, ‘Oh, Madame, why are you so sad tonight?’ The Empress turned and looked at me…. ‘Why am I sad, Lili? … I can’t say, really, but … I think my heart is broken.’”
A British visitor calling on the Empress during these same weeks was struck by her air of sadness and resignation. General Sir Henry Wilson, visiting Russia with an Allied mission, had known Alexandra as a girl in Darmstadt. Now, “taken down a long passage to the Empress’s own boudoir—a room full of pictures and bric-a-brac …,” he reminded her of “our tennis parties in the old days, 36 years ago, at Darmstadt…. She was so delighted with the reminiscences, and remembered some of the names I had forgotten. After this it was easy. She said her lot was harder than most people’s because she had relations and friends in England, Russia and Germany. She told me of her experiences and her eyes filled with tears. She has a beautiful face, but very, very sad. She is tall and graceful, divides her hair simply on one side, and it is done up at the back. The hair is powdered with grey. When I said I was going to leave her, as she must be tired of seeing strangers and making conversation, she nearly laughed and kept me on for a little while.”
Wilson was moved by this talk. “What a tragedy there is in that life,” he wrote. Nevertheless, when he left Russia a week later, he added, “It seems as certain as anything can be that the Emperor and Empress are riding for a fall. Everyone—officers, merchants, ladies—talks openly of the absolute necessity of doing away with them.”
The killing of Rasputin was a monarchist act. It was intended by the Grand Duke, the Prince and the Right-wing deputy to cleanse the throne and restore the prestige of the dynasty. It was also intended, by removing what they conceived to be the power behind the Empress, to eliminate the Empress herself as a force in the government of Russia. The Tsar, they thought, would then be free to choose ministers and follow policies which would save the monarchy and Russia. This was the hope of many members of the Imperial family, most of whom disliked the murder, but were glad the murdered man was dead.
The Tsar’s punishment of Grand Duke Dmitry and Prince Felix Yussoupov, mild though it was, disappointed these hopes. The family addressed a collective letter to Nicholas which combined a plea for pardon for Dmitry with a request for a responsible ministry. Nicholas, still outraged that members of his family had been involved in the assassination, was further offended by the letter. “I allow no one to give me advice,” he replied indignantly. “A murder is always a murder. In any case, I know that the consciences of several who signed that letter are not clear.” A few days later, hearing that one of the signers, the liberal Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, was going around his Petrograd clubs openly berating the government, the Tsar ordered him to leave the capital and remain in residence on one of his country estates.
The murder, far from closing the breach within the Romanov family, had widened it further. The Dowager Empress was greatly alarmed. “One should … forgive,” Marie wrote from Kiev. “I am sure you are aware yourself how deeply you have offended all the family by your brusque reply, throwing at their heads a dreadful and entirely unjustified accusation. I hope that you will alleviate the fate of poor Dmitry by not leaving him in Persia…. Poor Uncle Paul [Dmitry’s father] wrote me in despair that he had not even been given a chance to say goodbye…. It is not like you to behave this way…. It upsets me very much.”
From his home in Kiev, the Tsar’s cousin and brother-in-law Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich hurried to Tsarskoe Selo to plead that the Empress withdraw from politics and the Tsar grant a government acceptable to the Duma. This was the “Sandro” of Nicholas’s youth, the gay companion of his suppers with Kschessinska, the husband of his sister Xenia and the father-in-law of Prince Felix Yussoupov. He found the Empress lying in bed, dressed in a white negligee embroidered with lace. Although the Tsar was present, sitting and quietly smoking on the other side of their large double bed, the Grand Duke spoke plainly: “Your interference with affairs of state is causing harm … to Nicky’s prestige. I have been your faithful friend, Alix, for twenty-four years … as a friend, I point out to you that all the classes of the population are opposed to your policies. You have a beautiful family of children, why can you not … please, Alix, leave the cares of state to your husband?”
When the Empress replied that it was impossible for an autocrat to share his powers with a parliament, the Grand Duke said, “You are very much mistaken, Alix. Your husband ceased to be an autocrat on October 17, 1905.”
The interview ended badly, with Grand Duke Alexander shouting in a wild rage: “Remember, Alix, I remained silent for thirty months. For thirty months I never said … a word to you about the disgraceful goings on in our government, better to say in your government. I realize that you are willing to perish and that your husband feels the same way, but what about us? … You have no right to drag your relatives with you down a precipice.” At this point, Nicholas quietly interrupted and led his cousin from the room. Later, from Kiev, Grand Duke Alexander wrote, “One cannot govern a country without listening to the voice of the people…. Strange as it may appear, it is the Government which is preparing the Revolution … the Government is doing all it can to increase the number of malcontents and it is succeeding admirably. We are watching an unprecedented spectacle, revolution coming from above and not from below.”
One branch of the Imperial family, the “Vladimirs,” were not content to write letters, but talked openly of a palace revolution which would replace their cousin by force. Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna and Grand Dukes Cyril, Boris and Andrei—the widow and sons of the Tsar’s eldest uncle, Grand Duke Vladimir—carried resentments which stretched deep into the past. Vladimir himself, a forceful, ambitious man, always jealous of his older brother, Tsar Alexander III, had accepted with difficulty the accession to the throne of his mild-mannered nephew. A vociferous Anglophobe, he was infuriated when Nicholas chose as his consort a princess who, although born in Darmstadt, was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Vladimir’s widow, Marie Pavlovna, also was German, a Mecklenberger, and the third lady of the Russian Empire, rank
ing directly after the two Empresses. Socially, Marie Pavlovna was everything that Alexandra was not. Energetic, poised, intelligent, well read, devoted to gossip and intrigue, openly ambitious for her three sons, she turned her grand palace on the Neva into a glittering court which far outshone Tsarskoe Selo. In the lively conversations which dominated her dinner parties and soirees, amusement and scorn directed at the ruling couple were frequent themes. Never did the Grand Duchess forget that after the Tsarevich, who was ill, and the Tsar’s brother, who had married a commoner, the next in line for the throne was her eldest son, Cyril.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family Page 49