The Last Tsar

by Edvard Radzinsky

  “It was at that time, my friend used to say, that the camarilla and the secret police carried out an entire series of dangerous intrigues against the tsar and society.

  “One of them was the Japanese war.”

  “COMFORT HEAVEN-SENT”

  The war began—and immediately the Russian bureaucracy’s steadfast rule went into effect: when something clever is conceived, the result will be its direct opposite. The war, contrived to avert revolution, encouraged it instead.

  This was when—in the aftermath of terrible defeats, in the confusion of advancing revolution—it happened.

  Alix’s sacred belief that Serafim would intercede with God in heaven had not been in vain.

  It happened at the Alexandria Palace, that small summer palace where he, the fourteen-year-old Nicholas, had heard the song of the old hag death and where once they—a boy and a girl in love—had etched their names in the glass. And so, on the afternoon of July 30, 1904….

  “The empress,” Anna Vyrubova recalled, “had scarcely gone upstairs from her little study when the heir was born.”

  Nicholas’s diary:

  “30 July. For us a great, unforgettable day on which God’s goodness was so clearly visited upon us. At 1:15 this afternoon, Alix gave birth to a son, whom in prayer we have named Alexei. Everything happened remarkably quickly, for me at least. There are not words to thank God properly for the comfort He has sent us in this year of hard trials.”

  General Raukh, who commanded the Cuirassiers, recalled his conversation with Nicholas: “The empress and I have decided to give the heir the name Alexei. We must do this to break the chain of Alexanders and Nicholases,” so the happy father and honorary chairman of the Russian Historical Society joked.

  Indeed, tsars with the names Nicholas and Alexander had ruled Russia for an entire century.

  But it was not all that simple.

  The name Alexei was out of favor in the Romanov family. Ever since Peter the Great had ordered his son and heir Alexei secretly murdered, the Romanovs had avoided giving this name to heirs to the throne. There was even a story about a curse on the Romanov line that the stricken Tsarevich Alexei managed to cry out before his death. But Nicholas was set on this name, since he had long been attracted by the image of another Alexei, the Romanov Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich.

  Shortly before the heir’s birth, several grand historical balls had been held. The halls of the Winter Palace had been filled with boyars and their ladies from the times of the first Romanovs. Nicholas appeared in a costume from Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich that glittered with gold and gems. Alix wore a jewel-strewn dress from Alexei’s wife, Tsaritsa Natalia Kirillovna. For Nicholas this was not simply a costume ball but a remembrance of his favorite tsar. By his religiosity, goodness, and exemplary behavior, Tsar Alexei had earned the sobriquet “the Quietest.” He had done a great deal for the state—not with cruelty or fierce will, as Peter the Great had, but with meekness and gradual reforms. So Nicholas gave his son this name.

  “Christening began at 11. The morning was clear and warm. In front of the house, along the sea road, appeared golden carriages, and in the convoy platoon—hussars and Cossack chieftains.”

  There was a convoy at Alexei’s birth—and there would be another at his death.

  ——

  The Swiss Pierre Gilliard, Alexei’s future tutor, was giving lessons to Alexei’s sisters. The tsaritsa brought the boy into the room where Gilliard was working with the girls. The heir was a month and a half old, a fairy-tale prince with platinum locks and big gray-blue eyes. Alexandra bathed the boy herself and had been inseparable from him since his birth.

  But after that the Swiss rarely saw the magical boy. Dark rumors about some sort of illness were roaming the palace.

  Once the boy ran into the classroom, and right behind appeared the sailor who watched after him. The boy was scooped up and carried away, and his indignant shouts were heard in the halls. Again he disappeared for months.

  The mystery was revealed to Gilliard when the tsar was hunting at Spala in Poland. The family was staying at the lodge. Hunting, endless entertainments. At one such celebration Gilliard walked out of the ballroom into an inner passageway.

  He found himself standing in front of a door where he heard desperate moans. A moment later the Swiss saw Alix approaching at a run, clutching her long dress, which was getting in her way. She was so upset she did not notice him.

  This was the secret the family was keeping: soon after their son’s birth the doctors established what Alix had feared most in the world—her child had inherited a disease that was in her maternal line and that was transmitted only through females almost exclusively to their male offspring (to the heirs to thrones—fate’s joke on kings). Terrible and incurable—hemophilia. When Gilliard was later entrusted with Alexei’s education, the heir’s physician, Dr. Derevenko, explained the symptoms in detail: the walls of hemophiliacs’ arteries are so fragile that any blow or intense pressure can cause the blood vessels to burst and can mean the end. A fall or a cut can be the beginning of that end.

  She had given birth to a son. She had dreamed of him for so long, yet she was the cause of his advancing, irrevocable death. Herein lay the reason behind her quickly progressing hysteria. Now they could only wait for a miracle, which Alix believed in with every fiber of her being: the disease would be cured. No one need know of this temporary illness. Because it was temporary. Saint Serafim would not abandon them. The Guardian would certainly send their family someone to save the heir to the great throne.

  The image of Serafim of Sarov hung in the sovereign’s office.

  ——

  The family left Petersburg and shut themselves up in the tsar’s residences on the outskirts of the capital, guarding the boy’s illness, which became a state secret. All their hopes were pinned on a Deliverer.

  At that time magical rumors began to reach her: somewhere in the backwoods of Siberia, on the broad river Tobol (Nicholas recalled his youthful journey), in the small village of Pokrovskoe, he lived—the Holy Man.

  Thus, on the threshold of the First Revolution, in the fire of a lost war, Grigory Rasputin appeared.

  Chapter 3

  DRESS REHEARSAL FOR THE COLLAPSE OF HIS EMPIRE

  The revolution began with a mysterious event known as Bloody Sunday.

  In 1881 the socialist Colonel Zubatov, shaken by the assassination of Alexander II, had rejected his socialist ideas and joined the police. During Nicholas’s coronation, Zubatov was already head of the Moscow secret police. The former socialist had devised a fantastic experiment: fight the socialists for influence over the workers with the aid of the police! So the police began to create workers’ unions.

  Now during strikes the police tried to support the workers, and Zubatov forced the capitalists to make concessions, which they did. In 1902 thousands of workers filled the old squares of the Kremlin chorusing “God Save the Tsar.” They prayed for the health of their sovereign emperor—on their knees, in silence, heads bared. The governor-general of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, thanked the workers for their loyalty to the throne. The newspapers of Europe wrote in astonishment of the unprecedented spectacle—police socialism. As always in Russia, the reformer Zubatov was eventually dismissed. His organization, however, lived on.

  In 1905, in Petersburg, in the midst of these Zubatov-inspired workers’ unions, Father Georgy Gapon appeared. During these difficult years of military defeats and shortages, Gapon called on the workers to take a petition to the tsar to tell him about the problems of the simple people and the oppressions of the factory owners.

  A workers’ march was slated for January 9. Carrying banners, portraits of the tsar, and holy icons, thousands of loyal workers under Gapon’s leadership went to their tsar.

  The very idea of this demonstration was the embodiment of Nicholas’s cherished dream—“the people and the tsar”—which had brought him to call upon Klopov. Now it had come true: the simple people themselves
were seeking protection from the autocrat. It had come true!

  And then suddenly, on the eve of the march, the tsar left the capital for Tsarskoe Selo.

  An unsettling event had occurred just three days before the planned march. It was Epiphany. “Jordan” had been erected on the Palace Embankment as the site for the annual consecration of the water. Under an elegant canopy—blue with gold stars topped by a cross—Nicholas assisted the metropolitan in the ceremony, after which, according to tradition, the cannon of the Fortress of Peter and Paul, located directly opposite the “Jordan” on the other side of the Neva, was supposed to fire ceremonial blanks. To the horror of those gathered, the cannon turned out to be loaded with live ammunition. By a miracle the tsar was not hit, but a policeman was injured, and his name was Romanov!

  The police, who would normally have exaggerated something like this, declared the incident an annoying accident. But someone’s intended effect had been achieved: Nicholas was reminded of his grandfather’s terrible end, and the policeman’s name resounded like an omen. The shot gave Nicholas a good scare.

  The Department of Police was extremely well informed about the loyal inclinations of the march because Gapon, who had arranged the demonstration, was a department agent (he would be unmasked subsequently by the Socialist Revolutionaries’ terrorist group). The secret police was beginning to frighten the tsar. The police leaked dark rumors: during the demonstration there would be bloody riots prepared by the revolutionaries, perhaps a seizure of the palace. Grand Duke Vladimir, who commanded the Petersburg garrison, was talking about the beginning of the French Revolution.

  Nicholas left to join his family at Tsarskoe Selo.

  The night before the march they started to pass out bullets in the barracks. The route Gapon had devised made the march an extraordinarily convenient target. First aid stations were readied, and Gapon gave his final speech to the workers. The police provocateur called on the workers to go to the palace.

  Thus was readied Bloody Sunday.

  In the morning, thousands of people set out for Palace Square. Portraits of the tsar floated over the crowd, which included many children. In the lead was Gapon. Troops waiting on the approaches to the square ordered the march to disperse. But the people did not believe them. Gapon had promised that the tsar was awaiting them. So they stepped onto the square. Shots rang out. More than a thousand were killed and two thousand wounded. Children’s corpses lay in the snow. In the afternoon sledges dispersed throughout the city with corpses tied down by ropes.

  The night after the firing Gapon addressed the workers: “Blood brothers. Innocent blood has been shed! The bullets of the tsar’s soldiers … have riddled our portraits of the tsar and killed our faith in him. We must take revenge for our brothers on the tsar, cursed by the people, and on all his wicked breed, the ministers, and all the plunderers of the unhappy Russian land. Death to them….”

  “The tsar, cursed by the people”—this is what the Police Department provocateur had written. Bullet-riddled portraits of the tsar.

  At Tsarskoe Selo the police reported to Nicholas that he had been spared mortal danger, that the troops had had to fire in defense of the palace, as a result of which there had been casualties—two hundred people.

  That is how the police version of the event and official figures were created for the tsar. He recorded in his diary:

  “9 January, 1905. A difficult day! In Petersburg there were serious disturbances … as a consequence of the workers’ desire to get to the Winter Palace. The troops had to fire, and in various places in the city many were killed and injured. Lord, it is so painful and hard!”

  Later two dozen workers were brought to Tsarskoe Selo. They spoke loyal words to the tsar. Nicholas uttered a speech in response, promising to satisfy their needs and wants. He was very distressed over the two hundred victims on Palace Square.

  He never did find out what happened.

  In a single morning a new image of him was created: Nicholas the Bloody. From then on, that is what lovers of freedom would call him.

  “Any child’s cap, or mitten, or woman’s scarf pitifully abandoned that day in the Petersburg snows became a reminder of the fact that the tsar must die, the tsar would die” (the poet Osip Mandelshtam).

  Bloody Sunday was one of the chief causes for the future vengeance of the revolution, a prologue to the murder of the tsar’s family.

  What had happened?

  ONE VERSION

  Vera Leonidovna:

  “Everything in those days was mixed up with politics.… It was fashionable.… Everyone used to talk about how dissatisfied they were. I’ve had the thrill of recalling everything my freethinking friend who was close to Witte explained to me.… To understand Bloody Sunday you have to understand the situation.… Russia was on the verge. Everyone knew that.… And the ‘rights’ were nervous.… They’d tried to play the Japan card. It hadn’t worked out. The Jewish card got tossed in then, of course. They had always looked on the Jews as a pressure valve for popular tension, by organizing pogroms.… At our estate outside Kiev we had a servant.… She had come to us after a pogrom: the crowd had burst into her house and ripped open her master’s stomach, all the while laughing and joking.… They had tied his wife to his bloody corpse and heaped them with feathers. She recounted all this while crossing herself incessantly and muttering, ‘God will punish them!’ And He did: the stupid anti-Semitic policy not only was vile but also proved dangerous. The revolution was advancing. Only for a short period—under Alexander II—had Russian Jews felt like human beings.… Nicholas’s father had brought back state anti-Semitism. Jews had been driven into the Pale of Settlement and encouraged to emigrate. Tens of thousands of highly enterprising people had left Russia. My father had a brilliant physician’s assistant working for him who left for America, where he became a celebrity. But millions remained. My husband, the Jew Koltsov, used to say, ‘The non-suckling breasts of their own mother’—that is how they perceived their homeland. The Jews were a vast, underutilized store of intellect, energy, and obsessiveness. The revolutionary party took that reserve into their service. My sister was a terrible revolutionary, and we were daughters of a general. But her friend underground was the daughter of a poor Jewish tailor.… My friend used to say that Witte frequently tried to explain to Nicholas’s father the danger of the Jewish situation for the country’s future.”

  (The matter was actually somewhat more subtle than this. Witte reports this interchange in his Memoirs:

  “Are you right to stand up for the Jews?” asked Alexander III. In reply Witte asked permission to answer the question with a question: “Can we drown all the Russian Jews in the Black Sea? If we can, then I accept that resolution of the Jewish question. If not, the resolution of the Jewish question consists in giving them a chance to live. That is, in offering them equal rights and equal laws.”

  But Witte was a brilliant courtier if he responded to the despot-tsar so boldly; it means he sensed that the tsar wanted to hear that kind of answer from him. Evidently, the zealous master Alexander III was considering how best to make use of the state’s four million Jews. But he never went beyond thinking, and Witte recorded the terrible result on the eve of the revolution: “From among the phenomenally cowardly people that nearly all Jews were thirty years ago, people have appeared who are sacrificing their lives for the revolution, who have made themselves over into bombers, assassins, and rioters. No one nation has given Russia such a percentage of revolutionaries as the Jewish nation.”)

  Vera Leonidovna:

  “So, in response to the actions of the Jewish revolutionaries, on the eve of the revolution, the camarilla decided to play the Jewish card a different way. In Europe the ‘Will and Testament’ of Peter I was going around. This was a forgery created, apparently, by the French during the time of Napoleon.… From this document it followed that Peter the Great, dying, left to the Russian tsars his will and testament: conquer the world. Following this model, the Russian secret
police started to publish books, only instead of the words ‘Russian threat’ they substituted ‘Jewish threat.’ This is how the Protocols of the Elders of Zion saw the light of day. The book was written like a mystery: the story of mankind as a series of calamities attributable to the Jews and the Masons, whom they controlled.… The charm of it lay in the fact that in Russia the most distinguished Russian families belonged to Freemasonry. In their day Field Marshal Kutuzov, Alexander I, and Tchaikovsky had all been Masons. Nicholas II’s friend Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich and his older brother Nicholas Mikhailovich were Masons. I myself was interested in Freemasonry. My idols—Mozart and Goethe—were Masons. Masons were always liberals. There was a constant struggle in Russia between the liberals and the nobility, and the nobility was an obstinate, dark force.… The camarilla was trying to discredit the liberal segment of the nobility by associating it with the Jews. By the way, my friend … he too was a Mason and belonged to a glorious noble family. He was incensed by the baldness of their intentions….

  “The Protocols were presented to Nicholas. Everything had been calculated faultlessly: Nicholas had been raised since childhood in ‘state anti-Semitism.’ … ‘Those abominable Jews,’ ‘enemies of Christ’—that was the vocabulary of the court.… In his book, my husband Koltsov wrote a devastating portrait of Nicholas, but he didn’t understand him. I called the tsar a man from a Chinese play in which the evildoer lies to the good man—who for a moment believes. The intrigue builds on this. That is how they dealt with Nicholas. To the tsar, the pogroms organized by the police seemed like a holy outburst of popular indignation against the revolutionaries. A mob of coachmen and ignorant rabble, the Union of the Russian People was proclaimed a national movement—simple people defending their tsar. And he believed it. Childlike faith is an enchanting quality in an ordinary person—and a fatal quality in a ruler. What was even more amazing, the tsar didn’t believe in the Protocols! And that disappointed them greatly.”