The Last Tsar

by Edvard Radzinsky

  Russia was represented by a powerful phalanx of grand dukes. Even Father Ioann Yanyshev, confessor to the tsar’s family, attended. His presence spoke clearly to the very serious intentions of those who had come: Father Ioann was supposed to instruct Alix in the fundamentals of Orthodox teaching. Also arriving in Coburg was Ekaterina Adolfovna Schneider, who had taught Russian to Ella, Alix’s sister. Should the matter reach a favorable conclusion, she would teach Russian to the Hessian princess. And naturally, Alix’s favorite sister, Ella (Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna), came too.

  The engagement of Nicholas and Alix was to take place at the wedding of Alix’s brother Ernie. Everyone knew it.

  Nicholas’s diary:

  “5 April.… She has grown remarkably more beautiful, but she looked extremely sad. They left us alone, and then there began between us the conversation I have wished for and at the same time greatly feared for so long. We talked until 12, but with no result: she still objects to conversion. Poor thing, she cried a lot, and we parted more calmly.”

  Everything was drowning in lilac It was a chilly, magnificent spring. That is how those days began. Despite her refusal, he was joyously calm. He knew that all his people were now in favor of this marriage, and most of all he knew she loved him. He had discovered a rule for himself, having twice found himself on the brink of death: trust the Lord in all things. He would be governed by this rule all the rest of his life, but during those Coburg days, in violation of this rule, he was quite persistent. The girl he wanted for a wife was deeply religious, and he ached for her, understanding what a change of religion meant. Loving her for her despair and her tears, he helped her with his tender persistence to shift responsibility for the decision onto him.

  She, however, cried a lot during the interval. Subsequently she would write many times about how hard it had been for her to accept the idea of converting. Religion played an enormous role in her life. But her predecessor princesses of Hesse had set out for distant Russia many times and had converted. Even her sister Ella had accepted Orthodoxy and was happy in her new religion. No, something else was behind all this crying, but she could not put it into words. In decisive moments it is given to exalted, nervous natures to sense the future. Is that not why she cried so bitterly and, virtually terrified, did her utmost to tell him no?

  Nicholas’s diary:

  “7 April. Ducky and Ernie’s wedding day. It began with me being late for breakfast and having to walk like a cock past the crowd on the square. At 12 everyone gathered upstairs, and after the civil marriage act was signed, we went into the church. Ernie and Ducky make a fine couple. The pastor gave a good sermon, the point of which was amazingly apropos to the essence of what I am going through. At that moment had a terrible urge to look into Alix’s soul. After the wedding a family dinner.… The young people left for Darmstadt. Went for a walk with Uncle Vladimir, climbed the hill, and finally reached the castle. We viewed the weapons museum at length and had dinner with Aunt Marie, in our uniforms, because of the emperor [Wilhelm II], who will not wear civil dress. Then we went, or rather ran, to the theater in a downpour. They gave the first act of Pagliacci.”

  What a good time he had clambering up the hill to the castle and then running across the street in the evening and sitting in a wet uniform in the theater! He had a good time whatever he did then because he knew it would all work out—and by tomorrow for sure. He loved them all: dear Ernie, dear Ducky, dear Uncle Willy, and dear Uncle Vladimir.

  “8 April [he underscored the date three times in the diary]. A marvelous, unforgettable day in my life! The day of my engagement to my precious, beloved Alix. After our conversation we declared ourselves to each other. So joyful to be able to gladden dear Papa and Mama. Walked around the entire day in a haze, not fully conscious, actually, of what had happened to me.… Then a ball was arranged. Didn’t feel like dancing; walked and sat in the garden with my fiancée. Can hardly believe that I have—a fiancée.”

  In a letter to his mother he described in more detail Alix’s strange despair and tears:

  “She cried the whole time, and only whispered now and then: ‘No, I cannot.’ Still I continued to insist and repeat my arguments, and though this conversation went on for two hours, it came to nothing.… I gave her your letter [the letter of a Danish princess who had converted happily], and after that she could no longer argue.… She joined us in the drawing room, where we were sitting with Ella and Wilhelm, and then and there, right away, she agreed. God Almighty only knows what that did to me. I was crying like a baby, as was she. No, dear Mama, I cannot express how happy I am. The whole world changed for me in an instant: nature, mankind—they all seem so good, and dear, and happy. I cannot even write, my hands are trembling so.… She has completely changed—she is gay, amusing, and talkative.”

  He gave her a ruby ring and that brooch—the brooch he had given her at the children’s ball long ago. She wore his ring around her neck, along with her cross, and the brooch was always with her.

  From her letter on the twenty-first anniversary of their engagement:

  “April 8th, 1915. Tenderly do my prayers & grateful thoughts full of very deepest love linger around you on this dear anniversary!… You know I have kept the grey princesse dress I wore that morning. And shall wear yr. dear brooch.”

  On their twenty-second anniversary:

  “April 8th, 1916.… feel my longing to be held in your arms tightly clasped & to relive our beautiful bridal days.… That dear brooch will be worn today. I feel still your grey suite, the smell of it by the window in the Coburg Schloss.”

  A twelve-carat diamond would be found in the filthy campfire where their clothing was burned that morning of July 17, 1918. The remains of the brooch. It was with her until the end.

  How happy he was then! She too tried to be happy. Nonetheless, she continued to cry even afterward. The people around them could not understand it. Observing her tears, a simple-hearted lady-in-waiting wrote in her diary exactly what she could have been expected to write: Alix did not love her future spouse. She herself did not understand her tears—after all, she loved him very much, as she would recall in her letter on the twenty-second anniversary of their engagement: “those sweet kisses wh. I had dreamed of & yearned after so many years & wh. I thought, I should never get … & when make up for sure mind, then it is already for always—the same in my love and affections. A far too big heart wh. eats me up.”

  He, however—he was deliriously happy. All his life he would gaily recall the orchestra playing at Coburg Castle and his Uncle Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, worn out from dinner, dozing off during the wedding ceremony and dropping his cane. What faith he had in the future then! And all those uncles and aunts (queens, an emperor, princes, dukes), who were still deciding the fates of nations, crowding in the halls of Coburg Castle and also believing in the future. If only they could have looked into the future then.

  The newlyweds Ernie and Ducky, the “fine couple,” would separate soon afterward, and Alix’s sister Ella would perish at the bottom of a mine shaft. Uncle Willy, who was so fond of his military uniforms and was looking forward to a military alliance with Russia, instead would start a war with Russia. Uncle Paul, who was now dancing the mazurka, would be lying with a bullet in his heart, and Nicky himself….

  “Though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down, saith the Lord.”

  On April 9, Alexander Volkov was sent by his master, Grand Duke Paul, to deliver a present on the occasion of the engagement. He found Nicholas and Alix in the drawing room, sitting on the sofa, holding hands. So swallowed up were they in each other that Nicholas did not notice Volkov right away.

  “Oh, it’s you, dear friend Volkov!”

  Volkov, too, was “dear.” Everyone was “dear” (Nicholas’s favorite word).

  At that time Ekaterina Adolfovna Schneider was already tutoring Alix in Russian. They were conjugating verbs, and Alix was recording
them neatly in notebooks. She liked to study.

  I am leafing through her study notebooks. Alix learned the language by conjugating three verbs: forget, sing, and believe. The unconscious: forget! Forget all her inexplicable premonitions. And believe. And sing.

  Ekaterina Schneider would become the court reader in the imperial palace and in 1917 would voluntarily go into exile with her former pupil. In 1918, a thousand kilometers from Petersburg, en route to the disposal pits, they would kill the old court reader.

  These were their happiest days, after their betrothal. Poetic love à la Goethe: he and Alix riding in a charabanc to gather flowers in the countryside.

  Easter. On Good Friday singers from Petersburg revealed to the German-English princess all the triumphant goodness of the Orthodox service. With the singers came a courier from Petersburg, bringing presents, letters from the tsar and tsaritsa, and a medal—for Alix.

  “20 April.… Went with Alix to the station and there said goodbye to her. How empty it feels now to go home.… So, we will have to spend a month and a half apart. Wandered alone to familiar places now dear to me and gathered her favorite flowers, which sent in a letter this evening….

  “21 April. Had breakfast.… By my place stood my old picture of Alix surrounded by familiar pink flowers.”

  Alix went to Windsor to see Queen Victoria. A month and a half later, the Polar Star approached the English shore. This was Nicholas’s favorite yacht, and it would become the favorite of Alix and their children. The white yacht entered the Thames.

  “We spent entire days together, rode on the boat, had picnics on shore—a true idyll.… But then we had to go to Windsor. Although cannot complain—her grandmother was very kind and permitted us to go out without chaperones.… Admit I never expected that from her.”

  All this time she was writing her favorite sayings in his diary: “They live through happiness and want together—& from their first kiss to their last breath sing to each other only of love.” “Ever faithful & loving, devoted & pure, & strong, like death.”

  This word death, written in her hand, appeared in his diary.

  “21 July. A sad day of parting, separation after more than a month of heavenly bliss. Received a letter from Alix on the Polar Star. Quite tired and sad.”

  Parting, they agreed to write one another. A tale out of the Brothers Grimm: a yacht, a castle, a princess, and a tsarevich.

  The echo of this tale was preserved in the washroom—fouled by the guard and covered with obscene drawings—of their last home in Ekaterinburg. After their deaths in 1918, a little book was found in that washroom, behind the pipes. In it was a code and the inscription “For my own beloved Nicky to put to good use when he is far away from his spitzbube. From his loving Alice Osborne, July 1894.”

  This was the code book for their correspondence (she adored secrets), which “loving Alice” had given to him during their days of happiness in Osborne, the queen’s home on the Isle of Wight. “Nicky and Alice make a fine couple.” Separated, they wrote each other letters almost every day.

  These delicate sheets with small crowns—their letters. He wrote her from the castle at Spala, in Poland, where the Polish kings had had an ancient hunting lodge and where the Russian tsar loved to hunt. He wrote to her from the imperial train taking him to Livadia, where his father lay dying. Hundreds of his letters. And hundreds of her replies. Endless incantations of love.

  Early in October, in Darmstadt, Alix received a telegram calling her urgently to the Crimea: Alexander was dying. In Berlin, her Uncle Willy saw her off at the station. He knew the firm but charming Alix’s unforgiving nature and dear Nicky’s softness. He had no doubt who would lead in this union, and he believed she would not forget her little homeland and her Uncle Willy. But Uncle Willy did not know the Hessian princess very well.

  “Your people have become my people, and your God has become my God.” This was the lesson of the beautiful Hessian princesses who had departed for distant lands in the past.

  The emperor is dying.

  The eminent Dr. Zakharin walks slowly into the dying man’s bedroom. The doctor is short-winded and cannot take more than a few steps without sitting down. That is why chairs have been placed all through the hall leading to the bedroom.

  In the emperor’s bedroom is the tsar’s confessor, the renowned priest Ioann of Kronstadt, Father Ioann Yanyshev. And the doctors. They have gathered around the dying man: powerless medicine and omnipotent prayer, which eases his final sufferings.

  It is all over. The doors of the bedroom are opened. The dead emperor’s body is drowning in his huge Voltairian armchair. The empress has her arms around him. A short distance away stands a pale-faced Nicky. The emperor has passed away in his armchair.

  Chapter 2

  DIARY OF THE NEW TSAR

  “20 October, 1894. My God! My God! What a day! The Lord has called our adored, precious, fiercely beloved Papa to Him. My head is spinning. Don’t want to believe it. It seems so unlikely, this terrible reality! We spent all morning around him. At about half past 2 he took Communion. Oh, Lord! I stood at the head of his bed for more than an hour holding his head. The death of a saint….

  “21 October. In our deep sadness, the Lord gives us quiet, luminous joy. At 10 my Alix was consecrated. There was an office of the dead, and then the other.… The expression on precious Papa’s face was marvelous, as if he were about to laugh. It was cold and the sea howled.

  “There was a fuss about where to celebrate my wedding. Mama and I feel it would be better to do it here, while dear Papa is under our roof, but all the uncles are against it, they say I have to do this in Peter[sburg].”

  The uncles won out. No sooner had Alexander died than their voice was heard.

  As always, the ascent to the throne was attended by rumors. According to one version, the dowager empress wanted to replace Nicholas with her favorite son, Michael, and tried to force Nicholas to abdicate.

  But that was only a rumor. The renowned minister of her husband and, now, her son, Sergei Witte, recorded in his Memoirs his conversation with her about Nicholas before Alexander’s death:

  “You mean to say that the sovereign does not have the character of an emperor?”

  “That is correct,” replied Marie Feodorovna. “In the event that anything should happen, Misha must take his place, although actually he has less will and character.”

  Very soon something did happen. Alexander was younger than fifty when he died. This giant had seemed immortal, and when Nicholas suddenly learned about his father’s illness, he was overcome with fright. His friend Sandro recorded Nicholas’s exclamations of panic in his memoirs. So that, evidently, another rumor that emerged from inside the walls of the Livadia Palace was true: Nicholas begged to be allowed to abdicate. But Alexander was unbending: the law of succession must be observed. Nicholas must take the throne. And to his great joy, to strengthen his resolve, Nicholas was allowed to take the Hessian princess for his wife.

  Petersburg, a gloomy autumn day. The funeral train arrived at the platform of Nikolaevsky Station.

  Witte was among those meeting Alexander’s coffin.

  “The new emperor arrived in Petersburg with his fiancée, the future empress, whom they say he loves,” wrote Witte.

  Alix’s general forebodings were beginning to take specific form: she rode into Petersburg behind a coffin.

  The funeral lasted a long time. While the metropolitan was speaking, the dowager empress collapsed in a fit of hysterics, crying: “Enough! Enough! Enough!”

  She buried the emperor in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul. A year of mourning was proclaimed in the country, but the wedding had to take place within a week—on the dowager empress’s birthday. Before the wedding they lived apart: she with her sister Ella, at the palace of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich; he at his dear Anichkov with his mother.

  “My wedding was the continuation of the funeral, only I was dressed in white,” Alix would say later.

 
——

  “13 November, 1894. Anichkov. At 11 we went to mass in our dear church. It was both sad and painful to stand there … knowing that one place would always remain empty. Words cannot express how hard it was and how sorry I feel for dear Mama!… Saw my dear Alix at tea. Then said goodbye to her at 8. We are not to see each other anymore! Until the wedding! It still seems as if all this were leading up to someone else’s wedding. Odd under these circumstances to think about one’s own marriage.”

  But why were they in such a hurry with the wedding? Why were they not even waiting out the usual forty days after his father’s death?

  November 14 was the last day before the start of a fast that would continue until the beginning of January. So otherwise they would have had to postpone the wedding for quite some time.

  “14 November. My wedding day. After coffee with the others went to dress. Put on my hussar’s uniform and at 11.30 went with Misha to the Winter Palace. Troops all along Nevsky. Mama and Alix. We all waited while they completed her toilette in the Hall of Malachite.”

  Finally she appeared: she wore a silver dress and a diamond necklace, and over her shoulders lay an ermine-lined, gold brocade mantle with a long train. On her head rested a tiara blazing with diamonds. The new empress.

  “At 10 minutes after 12 the entrance into the Great Church began, whence I returned a married man.… We were presented with an enormous silver swan from the family. Alix and I changed clothes, got into a Russian carriage, and went to Kazan Cathedral. A sea of people in the streets.… An honor guard from the Uhlan Life Guard Regiment was waiting in the Anichkov courtyard when we arrived. Mama welcomed us with bread and salt.… All evening we answered telegrams.… Collapsed into bed early, since her [Alix’s] head had begun to pound.”

  This rather crude, guardsmanly “collapsed into bed” concealed his embarrassment and fear before the mystery of her virginity. And she? It is no accident that he noted her headache. On her wedding night she decided to write of her happiness in his diary, but strange words appeared in her entry: “When this life ends, we shall meet again in another world and remain together always.” She was tormented by the same sadness and odd fear. The young empress tried to explain it away by the recent funeral ceremonies—by this wedding mixed with grief.