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

by Robert K. Massie

  Before the First World War, the Russian Imperial family had deposits abroad, and it is here that many glowing expectations have been focused. There were funds in a bank in Berlin, but after the war, with the collapse of the mark in runaway inflation, the sum became insignificant. Today, there might be $1,500, but the bank is in East Berlin. The remaining hopes center on the Bank of England, but these too appear groundless. During the war, Nicholas and Alexandra devoted their private fortunes to the war effort. Deposits in England were withdrawn and brought back to Russia to help pay for the network of hospitals and hospital trains under the Empress’s patronage. The money was transferred through the British Embassy in Petrograd; on August 26, 1915 (O.S.), Alexandra wrote to Nicholas: “I see [Sir George] Buchanan tomorrow as he brings me again over 100,000 p. [pounds] from England.” By the end of the war, there was nothing left.

  In 1960, the late Sir Edward Peacock, Director of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1924 and again from 1929 to 1946, discussed the question with a Canadian writer, Ian Vorres, who was collaborating with Grand Duchess Olga on her memoirs. Peacock had been personally instructed by King George V to look after his cousin Olga’s financial affairs. From this vantage, he wrote:

  “I am pretty sure there never was any money of the Imperial family of Russia in the Bank of England nor any other bank in England. Of course, it is difficult to say ‘never’ but I am positive at least there never was any money after World War I and during my long years as director of the bank.”

  Nevertheless, despite all evidence to the contrary, the alluring idea that a lost fortune exists has continued to stimulate extraordinary activity. As in every case of the death of royal persons in mysterious circumstances, rumors persisted that some or all members of the Imperial family were still alive. In 1920, the Tsar himself was said to have been seen in the streets of London, his hair snow white. Another story placed him in Rome, secretly hidden in the Vatican by the Pope. The entire Imperial family was said to be aboard a ship, cruising eternally through the waters of the White Sea, never touching any land.

  Over the years, dozens of claimants have stepped forward, proclaiming themselves this or that member of the Imperial family. The Tsarevich Alexis reappeared for the first time in Siberia soon after the murder. Gilliard saw him and found a young man who looked vaguely like Alexis but understood only Russian. Eventually, the boy admitted that he was an impostor. The pathetic story of Mrs. Anna Anderson’s lifelong attempt to prove herself the Grand Duchess Anastasia has become world famous. Nevertheless, she has been challenged by numerous other Anastasias living in far corners of the globe. It was the fate of Grand Duchess Olga, who had been closer to her niece Anastasia than any other Romanov survivor, to meet many of these women. Occasionally, she met them willingly, as in Berlin in 1925 when she interviewed Mrs. Anderson and, after four days at her bedside, sadly pronounced her false. More often, the pretenders pursued Olga relentlessly and flung themselves upon her, loudly crying, “Dear Aunt Olga!” Olga endured these intrusions, recognizing them as the inevitable consequence of public fascination with an exciting tale of miraculous escape from death. “My telling the truth does not help in the least,” she once said, “because the public simply wants to believe the mystery.”

  Infinitely more remarkable and more fatefully enigmatic than the riddle of Anastasia is the awesome, overwhelming drama of the Russian Revolution itself. The rise of Communism, brought by Lenin to Russia, its rooting there and the spreading of its doctrines and power around the globe are the pivotal historical events of our time. Ironically, the two great Communist nations, Russia and China, are the only world powers with which the United States has never warred. The current struggle dividing the world is not over trade or territory, but over ideology. This is the legacy of Lenin.

  And also the legacy of Rasputin and hemophilia. Kerensky once said, “If there had been no Rasputin, there would have been no Lenin.” If this is true, it is also true that if there had been no hemophilia, there would have been no Rasputin. This is not to say that everything that happened in Russia and the world has stemmed entirely from the personal tragedy of a single boy. It is not to overlook the backwardness and restlessness of Russian society, the clamor for reform, the strain and battering of a world war, the gentle, retiring nature of the last Tsar. All of these had a powerful bruising impact on events. Even before the birth of the Tsarevich, autocracy was in retreat.

  Here, precisely, is the point. Had it not been for the agony of Alexis’s hemophilia, had it not been for the desperation which made his mother turn to Rasputin, first to save her son, then to save the pure autocracy, might not Nicholas II have continued retreating into the role of constitutional monarch so happily filled by his cousin King George V? It might have happened, and, in fact, it was in this direction that Russian history was headed. In 1905, the Russian people had had a partial revolution. Absolute power was struck from the hands of the Tsar with the creation of the Duma. In the era of Stolypin and the Third Duma, cooperation between the throne and parliament reached a level of high promise for the future. During the war, the nation asked not for revolution but for reform—for a share of responsibility in fighting and winning the victory. But Alexandra, goaded by Rasputin, passionately objected to any sharing of the Imperial power. By giving way to his wife, by fighting to save the autocracy and denying every plea for responsible government, Nicholas made revolution and the eventual triumph of Lenin inevitable.

  Why Lenin triumphed, why Nicholas failed, why Alexandra placed the fate of her son, her husband and his empire in the hands of a wandering holy man, why Alexis suffered from hemophilia—these are the true riddles of this historical tale. All of them have answers except, perhaps, the last.

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  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

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  Against the monumental canvas of seventeenth - and eighteenth-century Europe and Russia, Robert K. Massie unfolds the extraordinary story of Peter the Great. A volatile feudal tsar with a taste for barbaric torture; a progressive and enlightened reformer of government and science; Peter the Great embodied the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Russia while being at the very forefront of her development.

  Part 1

  Old Muscovy

  1

  Old Muscovy

  Around Moscow, the country rolls gently up from the rivers winding in silvery loops across the pleasant landscape. Small lakes and patches of woods are sprinkled among the meadowlands. Here and there, a village appears, topped by the onion dome of its church. People are walking through the fields on dirt paths lined with weeds. Along the riverbanks, they are fishing, swimming and lying in the sun. It is a familiar Russian scene, rooted in centuries.

  In the third quarter of the seventeenth century, the traveler coming from Western Europe passed through this countryside to arrive at a vantage point known as the Sparrow Hills. Looking down on Moscow from this high ridge, he saw at his feet “the most rich and beautiful city in the world.” Hundreds of golden domes topped by a forest of golden crosses rose above the treetops; if the traveler was present at a moment when the sun touched all this gold, the blaze of light forced his eyes to close. The white-walled churches beneath these domes were scattered through a city as large as London. At the center, on a modest hill, stood the citadel of the Kremlin, the glory of Moscow, with its three magnificent cathedrals, its mighty bell tower, its gorgeous palaces, chapels and hundreds of houses. Enclosed by great white walls, it was a city in itself.

  In summer, immersed in greenery, the city seemed like
an enormous garden. Many of the larger mansions were surrounded by orchards and parks, while swaths of open space left as firebreaks burst out with grasses, bushes and trees. Overflowing its own walls, the city expanded into numerous flourishing suburbs, each with its own orchards, gardens and copses of trees. Beyond, in a wide circle around the city, the manors and estates of great nobles and the white walls and gilded cupolas of monasteries were scattered among meadows and tilled fields to stretch the landscape out to the horizon.

  Entering Moscow through its walls of earth and brick, the traveler plunged immediately into the bustling life of a busy commercial city. The streets were crowded with jostling humanity. Tradespeople, artisans, idlers and ragged holy men walked beside laborers, peasants, black-robed priests and soldiers in bright-colored caftans and yellow boots. Carts and wagons struggled to make headway through this river of people, but the crowds parted for a fat-bellied, bearded boyar, or nobleman, on horseback, his head covered with a fine fur cap and his girth with a rich fur-lined coat of velvet or stiff brocade. At street corners, musicians, jugglers, acrobats and animal handlers with bears and dogs performed their tricks. Outside every church, beggars clustered and wailed for alms. In front of taverns, travelers were sometimes astonished to see naked men who had sold every stitch of clothing for a drink; on feast days, other men, naked and clothed alike, lay in rows in the mud, drunk.

  The densest crowds gathered in the commercial districts centered on Red Square. The Red Square of the seventeenth century was very different from the silent, cobbled desert we know today beneath the fantastic, clustered steeples and cupolas of St. Basil’s Cathedral and the high Kremlin walls. Then it was a brawling, open-air marketplace, with logs laid down to cover the mud, with lines of log houses and small chapels built against the Kremlin wall where Lenin’s tomb now stands, and with rows and rows of shops and stalls, some wood, some covered by tent-like canvas, crammed into every corner of the vast arena. Three hundred years ago, Red Square teemed, swirled and reverberated with life. Merchants standing in front of stalls shouted to customers to step up and inspect their wares. They offered velvet and brocade, Persian and Armenian silk, bronze, brass and copper goods, iron wares, tooled leather, pottery, innumerable objects made of wood, and rows of melons, apples, pears, cherries, plums, carrots, cucumbers, onions, garlic and asparagus as thick as a thumb, laid out in trays and baskets. Peddlers and pushcart men forced their way through the crowds with a combination of threats and pleas. Vendors sold pirozhki (small meat pies) from trays suspended by cords from their shoulders. Tailors and street jewelers, oblivious to all around them, worked at their trades. Barbers clipped hair, which fell to the ground unswept, adding a new layer to a matted carpet decades in the forming. Flea markets offered old clothes, rags, used furniture and junk. Down the hill, nearer the Moscow River, animals were sold, and live fish from tanks. On the riverbank itself, near the new stone bridge, rows of women bent over the water washing clothes. One seventeenth-century German traveler noted that some of the women selling goods in the square might also sell “another commodity.”

  At noon, all activity came to a halt. The markets would close and the streets empty as people ate dinner, the largest meal of the day. Afterward, everyone napped and shopkeepers and vendors stretched out to sleep in front of their stalls.

  With the coming of dusk, swallows began to soar over the Kremlin battlements and the city locked itself up for the night. Shops closed behind heavy shutters, watchmen looked down from the rooftops and bad-tempered dogs paced at the end of long chains. Few honest citizens ventured into the dark streets, which became the habitat of thieves and armed beggars bent on extracting by force in the dark what they had failed to get by pleading during the daylight hours. “These villains,” wrote an Austrian visitor, “place themselves at the corners of streets and throw swinging cudgels at the heads of those that pass by, in which practice they are so expert that these mortal blows seldom miss.” Several murders a night were common in Moscow, and although the motive for these crimes was seldom more than simple theft, so vicious were the thieves that no one dared respond to cries for help. Often, terrorized citizens were afraid even to look out their own doors or windows to see what was happening. In the morning, the police routinely carried the bodies found lying in the streets to a central field where relatives could come to check for missing persons; eventually, all unidentified corpses were tumbled into a common grave.

  Moscow in the 1670’s was a city of wood. The houses, mansions and hovels alike, were built of logs, but their unique architecture and the superb carved and painted decoration of their windows, porches and gables gave them a strange beauty unknown to the stolid masonry of European cities. Even the streets were made of wood. Lined with rough timbers and wooden planks, thick with dust in summer or sinking into the mud during spring thaws and September rains, the wood-paved streets of Moscow attempted to provide footing for passage. Often, they failed. “The autumnal rains made the streets impassable for wagons and horses,” complained an Orthodox churchman visiting from the Holy Land. “We could not go out of the house to market, the mud and clay being deep enough to sink in overhead. The price of food rose very high, as none could be brought in from the country. All the people, and most of all ourselves, prayed to God that He would cause the earth to freeze.”

  Not unnaturally in a city built of wood, fire was the scourge of Moscow. In winter when primitive stoves were blazing in every house, and in summer when the heat made wood tinder-dry, a spark could create a holocaust. Caught by the wind, flames leaped from one roof to the next, reducing entire streets to ashes. In 1571, 1611, 1626 and 1671, great fires destroyed whole quarters of Moscow, leaving vast empty spaces in the middle of the city. These disasters were exceptional, but to Muscovites the sight of a burning house with firemen struggling to localize the fire by hastily tearing down other buildings in its path was a part of daily life.

  As Moscow was built of logs, Muscovites always kept spares on hand for repairs or new construction. Logs by the thousand were piled up between houses or sometimes hidden behind them or surrounded by fences as protection from thieves. In one section, a large wood market kept thousands of prefabricated log houses of various sizes ready for sale; a buyer had only to specify the size and number of rooms desired. Almost overnight, the timbers, all clearly numbered and marked, would be carried to his site, assembled, the logs chinked with moss, a roof of thin planks laid on top and the new owner could move in. The largest logs, however, were saved and sold for a different purpose. Cut into six-foot sections, hollowed out with an axe and covered with lids, they became the coffins in which Russians were buried.

  Rising from a hill 125 feet above the Moscow River, the towers, cupolas and battlements of the Kremlin dominated the city. In Russian, the word “kreml” means “fortress,” and the Moscow Kremlin was a mighty citadel. Two rivers and a deep moat rippled beneath its powerful walls. These walls, twelve to sixteen feet thick and rising sixty-five feet above the water, formed a triangle around the crest of the hill, with a perimeter of a mile and a half and a protected enclosure of sixty-nine acres. Twenty massive towers studded the wall at intervals, each a self-contained fortress, each designed to be impregnable. The Kremlin was not impregnable; archers and pikemen and later musketeers and artillerymen could be made to surrender to hunger if not to assault, but the most recent siege, early in the seventeenth century, had lasted two years. Ironically, the besiegers were Russian and the defenders Poles, supporters of a Polish claimant, the False Dmitry, who temporarily occupied the throne. When the Kremlin finally fell, the Russians executed Dmitry, burned his body, primed a cannon on the Kremlin wall and fired his ashes back toward Poland.

  In normal times, the Kremlin had two masters, one temporal, the other spiritual: the tsar and the patriarch. Each lived within the fortress and governed his respective realm from there. Crowding around the Kremlin squares were government offices, lawcourts, barracks, bakeries, laundries and stables; nearby stood other pal
aces and offices and more than forty churches and chapels of the patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. At the center of the Kremlin, on the crest of the hill around the edges of a wide square, stood four magnificent buildings—three superb cathedrals and a majestic, soaring bell tower—which, then and now, may be considered the physical heart of Russia. Two of these cathedrals, along with the Kremlin wall and many of its towers, had been designed by Italian architects.

  The largest and most historic of these cathedrals was the Assumption Cathedral (Uspensky Sobor), in which every Russian tsar or empress from the fifteenth century to the twentieth was crowned. It had been built in 1479 by Ridolfo Fioravanti of Bologna but reflected many essential Russian features of church design. Before beginning its construction, Fioravanti had visited the old Russian cities of Vladimir, Yaroslavl, Rostov and Novgorod to study their beautiful cathedrals, and then produced a Russian church with far more space inside than any Russian had ever seen. Four huge circular columns supported the onion-shaped central dome and its four smaller satellite domes without the complicated webbing of walls and buttressing previously thought necessary. This gave an airiness to the ceiling and a spaciousness to the nave entirely unique in Russia, where the power as well as the beauty of the Gothic arch were unknown.