The ground in between, the famous black-earth steppe of the lower Ukraine, was empty. Here, tall grasses grew so high that sometimes only the head and shoulders of a man on horseback could be seen moving along above the grass. In Alexis’ day, this steppe was the hunting and grazing ground of the Crimean Tatars, Islamic descendants of the old Mongol conquerors and vassals of the Ottoman sultan, who lived in villages along the slopes and among the crags of the mountainous Crimean peninsula. Every spring and summer, they brought their cattle and horses down to feed on the steppe grasslands. Often enough, they strapped on their bows, arrows and scimitars and rode north to raid and plunder among the Russian and Ukrainian villages, sometimes storming the wooden stockade of a town and leading the entire population off into slavery. These massive raids, bringing thousands of Russian slaves annually into the Ottoman slave markets, were a source of embarrassment and anguish to the tsars in the Kremlin. But there was nothing so far that anyone could do. Indeed, twice, in 1382 and 1571, the Tatars had sacked and burned Moscow itself.
Beyond the massive white Kremlin battlements, beyond the gilt and blue onion domes and the wooden buildings of Moscow lay the fields and the forest, the true and eternal Russia. For centuries, everything had come from the forest, the deep, rich, virgin forest which stretched as far as an ocean. Amidst its birches and firs, its bushes with berries, its mosses and soft ferns, the Russian found most of what he needed for life. From the forest came logs for his house and firewood for warmth, moss to chink his walls, bark for his shoes, fur for his clothing, wax for his candles, and meat, sweet honey, wild berries and mushrooms for his dinner. Through most of the year, the forest groves rang with the sound of axes. On lazy summer days, men, women and children searched beneath the dark trunks for mushrooms, or brushed through the high grasses and flowers to pick wild raspberries and red and black currants.
Russians are a communal people. They did not live alone deep in the forest, contesting the primeval weald with wolf and bear. Rather they chose to cluster in tiny villages built in forest clearings, or on the edges of lakes or the banks of slow-moving rivers. Russia was an empire of such villages: lost at the end of a dusty road, surrounded by pasture and meadowland, a collection of simple log houses centered on a church whose onion dome gathered up the prayers of the villagers and passed them along to heaven. Most of the houses had only a single room without a chimney; smoke from the fire burning inside the stove found its way outdoors as best it could, through cracks in the logs. Usually, as a result, everything and everyone inside was black with soot. For this reason, too, public baths were a common institution in Russia. Even the smallest village had its steaming bathhouse where men and women together could scrub themselves clean and then go outside, even in winter, to permit the wind to cool and dry their heated, naked bodies.
When the Russian peasant dressed, first combing his beard and hair, he put on a shirt of rough cloth which hung over his waist and was tied with a string. His trousers were loose and were stuffed into boots if he owned them, or, more often, into cloth leggings tied with heavy threads. “Their hair is cropt to their ears and their heads covered winter and summer with a fur cap,” wrote a Western visitor. “Their beards remain yet untouched…. Their shoes are tied together with bast. About their neck they wear from the time of their baptism a cross, and next to it their purse, though they commonly keep the small money, if it be not much, a good while in their mouth, for as soon as they receive any, either as a present, or as their due, they put it into their mouths and keep it under their tongue.”
Few people in the world live in such harmony with nature as the Russians. They live in the North, where winter comes early. In September, the light is fading by four in the afternoon and an icy rain begins. Frost comes quickly, and the first snow falls in October. Before long, everything vanishes beneath a blanket of whiteness: earth, rivers, roads, fields, trees and houses. Nature takes on not only a majesty but a frightening omnipotence. The landscape becomes a broad white sea with mounds and hollows rising and falling. On days when the sky is gray, it is hard, even straining the eye, to see where earth merges with air. On brilliant days, when the sky is a gorgeous azure, the sunlight is blinding, as if millions of diamonds were scattered on the snow, refracting light.
After 160 days of winter, spring lasts only for several weeks. First the ice cracks and breaks on rivers and lakes, and the murmuring waters, the dancing waves return. On land, the thaw brings mud, an endless, vast sea of mud through which man and beast must struggle. But every day the dirty snow recedes, and soon the first sprouts of green grass appear. Forest and meadows turn green and come to life. Animals, larks and swallows reappear. In Russia, the return of spring is greeted with a joy inconceivable in more temperate lands. As the warming rays of the sun touch meadow grass and the backs and faces of peasants, as the days rapidly grow longer and the earth everywhere is coming to life, the glad feeling of revival, of deliverance, urges people to sing and celebrate. The 1st of May is an ancient holiday of rebirth and fertility when people dance and wander in the woods. And while youth revels, the older people thank God that they have lived to see this glory again.
Spring races quickly into summer. There is great heat and choking dust, but there is also the loveliness of an immense sky, the calm of the great land rolling gently to the horizon. There is the freshness of early morning, the coolness of shade in groves of birches or along the rivers, the mild air and warm wind of night. In June, the sun dips beneath the horizon for only a few hours and the red of sunset is followed quickly by the delicate rose-and-blue blush of dawn.
Russia is a stern land with a harsh climate, but few travelers can forget its deep appeal, and no Russian ever finds peace in his soul anywhere else on earth.
* Except Peter II, whose body is in the Kremlin, and Nicholas II, the last tsar, whose body was destroyed in a pit outside Ekaterinburg in the Urals.
* When the English Parliamentarians cut off the head of King Charles I, in 1649, Tsar Alexis was so shocked and personally outraged that he expelled all English merchants from the interior of Russia, a move which gave great advantage to Dutch and German merchants. While King Charles II remained in exile, Alexis sent him money and his tenderest wishes for “the disconsolate widow of that glorious martyr, King Charles I.”
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Illustrations
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Nicholas and Alexandra in 1910, on board the Imperial yacht, the Standart. This photograph is one of the few known that captures Alexandra’s smile: perhaps occasioned by the informal nature of life aboard Nicholas’s favourite yacht.
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Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children in a formal portrait of 1914. From left to right: Olga, Maria, Nicholas, Alexandra, Anastasia, Alexis and Tatiana.
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Alexandra in a formal portrait of 1906, taken at Tsarskoe Selo. This was her daughters’ favourite photograph of her.
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Nicholas with Kaiser Wilhelm, aboard the Standart in 1907. For an oft-repeated bit of fun, the cousin-Emperors have dressed in the uniforms of each other’s countries. Nicholas is dressed as a German admiral, Wilhelm as a Russian admiral.
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Alexandra in bed at the family’s home at Livadia, Crimea. Built in 1911, the Imperial palace at Livadia was the pride of the Tsarina. Here each year, the family celebrated Easter: the most important ceremony in the Russian Orthodox Church. In this photograph, taken in 1913, she is joined by her son in a twin bed surrounded by religious icons.
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1911: The Tsarevich Alexis feeds an elephant in the imperial menagerie at Tsarskoe Selo. The elephant was a gift from the King of Siam, who donated it from his own stables along with a mahout and a further aide, who were now expected to spend the rest of their lives in the cooler climes of northern Russia.
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1913: The Kremlin, Moscow. Nicholas, followed by his wife and daughters, descends the staircase of the Palace of the Facets: home to the main banqueting hall of the Tsars. The family are attended by men in court dress that has hardly changed in centuries.
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1913: The Tsarevich Alexis is given a mud-bath treatment for haemophilia in Livadia, Crimea, overseen by his mother whose back faces the camera. Behind Alexis stands his moustachioed “nanny”: the sailor Derevenko, who became a Bolshevik after the Revolution. Leaning forwards behind Alexis is the court doctor, Vladimir Derevenko (no relation), who escaped execution in Ekaterinburg, but was murdered by the NKVD in 1930. To the right stands the Tsar’s personal doctor, Eugene Botkin, who was shot along with the Imperial family in Ekaterinburg.
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1913: Nicholas takes his son Alexis for a boat ride on the canal dividing the Catherine Palace from the Alexander Palace in the imperial town of Tsarskoe Selo.
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1915: Nicholas plays with Alexis on the beach at the edge of the Dniepr river, near to Mogilev.
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1917: The events of the last few months weigh heavily on the features of the ex-Tsar, who has recently been forced to sign his abdication papers. Here “Citizen Nicholas Romanov” sits on a tree stump in the garden at Tsarskoe Selo - once his palace, now his prison. He and his family were held here by Bolshevik troops for six months as he planned to take up the British government’s offer of asylum. After this was overruled by his cousin King George, Nicholas and the former imperial family were taken first to Tobolsk in the Urals and later to Ekaterinburg in Siberia, where they were held in various requisitioned houses for just under a year. In July 1918, in the basement of their final place of imprisonment, they were executed by a Bolshevik firing squad.
Acknowledgments
In writing this book I worked in and drew material from the New York Public Library, the Butler Library of Columbia University, and the Beinecke Rare Book Library of Yale University. I am grateful to the staffs of these institutions for their courtesy and efficiency. I especially appreciate the assistance of Miss Margery Wynne for making available the unique collection of Romanov albums and papers at the Beinecke Library. Without the help of Mr. Richard Orlando, who painstakingly traced numerous volumes, my research would have been thinner and more difficult.
I am greatly indebted to Mr. Dimitry Lehovich and to Professor. Robert Williams of Williams College, each of whom read the entire manuscript and offered numerous helpful suggestions. Neither is responsible for any errors of fact or judgment which may appear in the book. On specific points, I drew on the knowledge of Father James Griffiths of the Orthodox Church, Mrs. Svetlana Umrichin, and Mrs. Evgenia Lehovich. These three also gave their constant encouragement to the project as a whole.
My understanding of the medical problems of hemophilia has been guided by a succession of interviews and conversations with Dr. Kenneth Brinkhous, Dr. Martin Rosenthal, the late Dr. Leandro Tocantins, Dr. Oscar Lucas, Dr. David Agle and Dr. Ake Mattson. For specific questions relating to this book, and for their devoted support over the years, I am profoundly grateful to Dr. Leroy Engel and Dr. Herbert Newman.
Among those who by word and deed gave me steady encouragement during the many long months of writing were Suzanne and Maurice Rohrbach, the late N. Hardin Massie, Simon Michael Bessie, Alfred Knopf, Jr., Robert Lantz, and Janet Dowling, who, along with Terry Conover, typed the manuscript. My children have sustained me with their unfailing optimism and with dozens of cheerful drawings.
The contribution made by my wife, Suzanne, is immeasurable. Along with her own career in journalism, she produced a constant flow of research for this book. At nights and on weekends, she read and edited every line. Her ideas and suggestions, carefully recorded by me on hundreds of hours of tape, provided a constant environment of creative stimulus. Without this help, the book would never have been written. Now that it is finished, it is hers as much as mine.
ROBERT K. MASSIE
Notes
Four primary sources are cited in abbreviated form throughout these Notes. Nicholas II’s Journal Intime is cited as “N’s Diary.” The Letters of the Tsar to the Tsaritsa 1914–1917 is cited as “N to AF,” and Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar 1914–1916 is cited as “AF to N.” The Secret Letters of the Last Tsar: The Confidential Correspondence Between Nicholas II and His Mother, Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna is cited as “N to MF” for letters from Nicholas to his mother, and as “MF to N” for letters from the Empress to her son.
CHAPTER 1 1894: IMPERIAL RUSSIA
1 “This curious conglomeration”: Paléologue, I, 93.
2 “Cleaving the city down the center”: Kennan, 3.
3 River breezes and salt air: Paléologue, I, 348.
4 “Fashionable décolletage”: Dehn, 44. “Nobody thought of leaving”: ibid., 44.
5 Receptions and balls: Meriel Buchanan, 13; Vorres, 99.
6–7 Imperial balls: Mosolov, 192–202; Vorres, 100–1; Alexander, 55–6, 161–2.
8–9 “That is what I’m going to do to your … army corps”: Alexander, 67.
10 Alexander III: Mosolov, 4. “A sovereign whom she does not look upon”: Bainbridge, 13.
11 “On the point of striking you”: Kaun, 130.
12 The bassoon: Pares, 30
13 Dagmar engaged to Alexander’s brother: Vorres, 21.
14 Empress Marie: Alexander, 73; Mosolov, 65; Vorres, 53, 57.
15 “They danced the mazurka for half an hour”: MF to N, 44.
16 “He is feted, he is stuffed”: MF to N, 45. The Imperial train derailed: Alexander, 168; Vorres, 29.
CHAPTER 2 THE TSAREVICH NICHOLAS
1 An older brother, Alexander: Alexander, 165; Vorres, 21.
2 Nicholas admired George’s humor: Vorres, 34. George’s tuberculosis: Alexander, 120.
3 Gatchina, 900 rooms: Vorres, 24. Alexander III up at seven: ibid., 26. Simple army cots: ibid., 23.
4–5 “Nicky was so hungry”: ibid., 36. Pelting each other with bread: Mosolov, 5.
6 Dancing tutor: Vorres, 35.
7 “The High Priest of Social Stagnation”: Mazour, 36. “The dominant and most baleful influence”: Charques, 51. Coldly ascetic: Vorres, 38.
8 “Abode of the ‘Bad Man’”: Alexander, 188.
9–10 “Among the falsest of political principles”: Pobedonostsev, 32. “Parliament is an institution”: ibid., 34–5. “Providence has preserved our Russia”: ibid., 49.
11 Pobedonostsev’s philosophy: Pares, History, 426–7. The Jewish problem: Harcave, 21. “We must not forget”: Florinsky, 1119.
12 Pobedonostsev excommunicated Tolstoy: Introduction to Pobedonostsev, ix.
13 Anna Karenina: Paléologue, I, 314.
14 “It is too early to thank God”: Pares, History, 403. “To the palace, to die there”: ibid., 403.
15 The death scene: Alexander, 59–61.
16 “Their red lances shining brightly”: ibid., 61.
17 “With faith in the power and right of autocracy”: Pares, History, 407.
18 A slender youth, five feet seven inches: Alexander, 173. “His usual tender, shy, slightly sad smile”: ibid., 77.
19 Languages: Alexander, 165.
20 N’s Diary: Pares, 15. The cryptic, emotionless style of Nicholas’s diary often is cited as evidence of a shallow character. “It is the diary of a nobody,” writes Charques, “of a man of transparently immature and of patently insignificant interests … triviality piled on triviality.”
Nevertheless, this kind of diary is not universally condemned. In certain circumstances, these terse, monotonous Edwardian diaries have been found admirable and praiseworthy: “On May 3, 1880 … [he] began to keep a diary,” begins one account of a royal diarist, “and from then onward he continued it without intermission until three days before his death. For fifty-six years, in hi
s clear handwriting, he recorded daily the moment at which he got up, the times of his meals, and the hour when he went to bed. He acquired the nautical habit of registering the direction of the wind, the condition of the barometer and the state of the weather throughout the day. He would take careful notes of the places which he visited, the people whom he met, or the number of birds and other animals which he shot. Seldom did he indulge in any comment upon personal or public affairs; his diary is little more than a detailed catalogue of his engagements. He was not one of those to whom the physical act of writing comes easily and with pleasure; his pen would travel slowly across the page. Yet only when he was seriously ill would he allow his mother, his sisters or, later, his wife, to make the entries for him. His diaries swelled to twenty-four bound and locked volumes, each opening with a small golden key. They became for him part of the discipline of life.”
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family Page 69