“To see that great man, always so respected, so dignified and yet so full of fun, tormented morally and physically by his cruel disease, was sad indeed,” wrote Prince Nicholas of Greece. “It was like seeing a magnificent building crumbling.”
Still, the emperor struggled to perform one last duty. His son Nicholas’s fiancée, Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt was due to arrive at Livadia, and he insisted upon getting dressed to greet her properly. That done, Alexander retired back to bed and prepared for the end. A priest came to help ease his passage—“an exceedingly gripping moment,” Empress Marie wrote, “in which my angelic Sacha’s whole wonderful, devout soul was revealed.”
Finally, on November 1, Emperor Alexander III sensed his final moments. “I feel the end approaching,” he whispered. “Be calm. I am calm.” He died with his head resting on the shoulder of his beloved Minnie.
* * *
*1 In the same correspondence with the queen, Vicky also wrote of Minnie: “I was pleased to see that she has not become grand—and does not give herself airs as all the Russian Grand Duchesses do. She has remained simple and unaffected; she has only been a short while in Russia since her marriage—but it does not seem as if the splendors of the Russian Court would dazzle her, and turn her head nor the servile flattery, which is the tone there, could spoil her. She seems so little occupied with herself.”
*2 So described by author Edvard Radzinsky in Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar (see Bibliography).
*3 Minister of War Peter Vannovsky was one such enthusiast. “He is like Peter the Great with his knout,” the minister exclaimed. Foreign Minister Nicholas de Giers was of a decidedly different opinion, however. “No,” he responded sorrowfully, “it’s just the knout without Peter the Great.”
Nicholas II (1894–1917): “An Absolute Child”
Show your mind and don’t let others forget who you are.
—EMPRESS ALEXANDRA TO NICHOLAS II
Having squashed most dissent with his meaty fist, Alexander III left his son a relatively safe and secure throne. But Nicholas II lacked his father’s muscle. The new emperor was essentially a gentle, passive soul, but fatally weak. And though he adored his domineering wife, Empress Alexandra, the rest of Russia thoroughly despised her. It was a toxic pairing that would end with Nicholas and Alexandra, along with the Romanov dynasty, hurtled into a bloody abyss.
The jeweled egg created by Fabergé for Tsar Nicholas II in 1913 was exquisite—just as would be expected from the master craftsman who had spent years making such whimsical objets d’art for the imperial family. The theme reflected the three hundredth anniversary of Romanov rule in Russia being celebrated that year, and featured on the surface eighteen miniature portraits of the dynasty’s sovereigns—each painted on ivory, set in diamonds, and connected by gold emblems of royal power. Inside the delicate masterpiece was a rotating globe with two golden insets indicating Michael Romanov’s domains in 1613 and those vastly expanded ones ruled by his descendant Nicholas three centuries later. The emperor presented Fabergé’s latest imperial egg to his wife, Alexandra, that Easter, no doubt unaware of the poignant irony that his gift—an homage to Russia’s monarchy—would within just four years become a splendid artifact of a bygone era.
The tercentenary celebrations of 1913 came on the eve of war and revolution that would ultimately sweep away Michael Romanov’s dynasty forever. That such a cataclysm could occur would have seemed almost absurd two decades before, when Nicholas II inherited a throne left strong and secure by his father Alexander III in 1894. Yet that’s precisely when the seeds of destruction were sown.
Nicholas dreaded the prospect of becoming sovereign, and indeed it was a role for which the slight, unassuming young man was entirely unsuited. “What am I going to do,” he sobbed at his father’s deathbed. “I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling.” Raised in the shadow of the mighty Alexander III, Nicholas had been left with little to do but play. “He’s an absolute child,” the emperor said of the twenty-five-year-old tsarevitch just a year before his untimely death. “His opinions are utterly childish.” The vacuous entries in Nicholas’s diary seem to confirm his father’s low opinion of his capacities.
“It is the diary—one is tempted to say the unamusing diary—of a nobody, of a man transparently immature and of patently insignificant interests,” wrote historian Richard Charques. “Two lines on this official audience, three lines on that, the bare mention of a shattering disaster … triviality piled on triviality. The entries stretch out into a succession of daily observations of the weather, linked by a record of outdoor occupations, from taking the dogs for a walk or gathering mushrooms to shooting, cycling, skating or rowing, and the smallest incidents of domestic life. Resounding events on the dominant issues of the day are noted with bored unconcern or are not noted at all.”
Some illustrative excerpts from the diary of a young man soon set to rule as an autocrat over a vast empire:
—“As always after a ball, I don’t feel well. I have a weakness in the legs.… I got up at 10:30. I am persuaded that I have some kind of sleeping sickness because there is no way to get up.”
—“Skating with Xenia [his sister] and Aunt Ella. We amused ourselves and ran like fools. Put on skates and played ball with all my strength.”
—“We danced to exhaustion … afterwards supper … to bed at 3:30 a.m.”
—“All day I found myself in a state of gaiety which has little in common with the period of Lent.”
While in pursuit of all the banalities that came with living the life of a playboy prince—the endless balls and late-night carousing—Nicholas did have one overwhelming preoccupation: his enduring love for a beautiful, golden-haired German princess, Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. “My dream is one day to marry Alix H.,” he recorded in his diary late in 1890. “Have loved her for a long time, but even more deeply and strongly since 1889, when she spent 6 weeks of the winter in Petersburg. Have fought my feeling for a long time, trying to deceive myself with the impossibility of my cherished dream coming true.… The only obstacle or gap between her and me is the matter of religion. Other than that barrier there is no other, am nearly convinced that our feelings are mutual. All is up to God’s will, and am putting my trust in his mercy, calmly and meekly, looking to the future.”
Although Nicholas did marry Alix—just weeks after his father’s death, the haste due to his refusal to face the daunting prospect of ruling Russia without her by his side—it was not simply a matter of overcoming the barrier of religion that the future tsar described in his diary. In fact, the subdued wedding ceremony at the Winter Palace, conducted amid the gloom of a court still in deep mourning for Alexander III, was the culmination of a long courtship that had triumphed over quite a few seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Both of Nicholas’s parents had been vigorously opposed to Princess Alix as a potential bride for the heir. Emperor Alexander rejected her because she was from an insignificant German duchy that offered Russia little in the way of a strategic alliance. The tsar preferred to strengthen ties with France by wedding his son to Princess Helena, a member of the deposed Bourbon dynasty. Empress Marie agreed, and with the all-pervasive influence his mother wielded over him, Nicholas was, as he wrote, “in an awkward position.… I am at the crossing of two paths; I myself want to go in the other direction, while Mama obviously wants me to take this one! What will happen?”
Marie had another reason for rejecting Alix. The German princess was undoubtedly lovely. (“Tall she was,” as one contemporary glowingly described her, “and delicately, beautifully shaped, with white neck and shoulders. Her complexion was clear and rosy as a little child’s. [She] had large eyes, deep and grey and very lustrous.”) But Alix was also painfully, almost neurotically shy and socially awkward, lacking that unique grace and appeal that Marie possessed in such abundance and which she believed was absolutely essential in a future empress.
Britain�
��s Queen Victoria, Alix’s maternal grandmother, was another formidable opponent to a match with the Russian tsarevitch. The queen had always been protective of the princess, whom she had essentially adopted as a surrogate daughter after the death of Alix’s mother, Alice, in 1878. The very idea of her precious “Alicky” being sacrificed to what Victoria viewed as the barbaric vagaries of Russia made the queen frantic with worry.
“The state of Russia is so bad, so rotten, that at any moment something dreadful might happen,” Victoria wrote to Alix’s sister (quite presciently, as it turned out); “the wife of the Heir to the Throne is in a most difficult and precarious position.… [The marriage] would have the very worst effect here and in Germany (where Russia’s not liked) and would produce a great separation between our families.”*1
Alexander III hoped to distract his son from his obsession with Alix by sending him away on a tour of the East (during which Nicholas survived an assassination attempt in Japan after a crazed man struck him in the head with a sword). The emperor also thought a little romance with a buxom ballerina by the name of Mathilde Kschessinska might be just the tonic his son needed to overcome his infatuation with the unsuitable German princess. The emperor arranged the tryst, and was proven right—at least to some degree.
“I note a very odd phenomenon in myself,” Nicholas recorded in his diary early in 1892: “never thought that two identical sentiments, two loves, could cohabit the soul simultaneously. Now it’s over three years I have loved Alix H., and I constantly cherish the thought that God might let me marry her one day.… But ever since camp in 1890 I have loved little K. passionately. An amazing thing, our heart. At the same time do not cease to think of Alix, although it is true, one might conclude from this I am very amorous. To a certain extent, yes!”
In the end, though, Mathilde Kschessinska proved to be merely a temporary diversion for Nicholas, albeit a heated one. (As a consolation prize for her loss, the ballerina with imperial ambitions took up with Nicholas’s first cousin, Grand Duke Andrei.) And, as Alexander III began to ail from kidney disease, parental opposition to the tsarevitch wedding the bride of his choice began to dissipate as well. The only obstacle that now remained was Alix herself. Although Nicholas repeatedly declared his love for her, and she reciprocated it, the princess was a confirmed Lutheran, unwilling to cast off her faith to become Orthodox, as would be required of Russia’s next empress. “I live and die a Lutheran,” she once declared. “Religion isn’t a pair of gloves to pull on and off.”
But desire competed fiercely with spiritual conviction, and, in the spring of 1894, the heart prevailed—with a little push from Alix’s odious cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany,*2 who was then seeking closer ties with Russia (although the two nations would eventually be engaged in the monstrous world war that would see both Nicholas and Wilhelm knocked off their thrones), and reassurances from her sister Elizabeth (“Ella”), who had earlier married Nicholas’s uncle Serge and recently converted to Orthodoxy. The differences in doctrine were negligible, Ella maintained, while assuring her sister that there was great spiritual comfort to be found in the Russian church’s ancient rituals and traditions.
For the tsarevitch, a cherished dream had finally been fulfilled. “God Almighty only knows what that did to me,” Nicholas wrote to his mother. “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 [Alix] has completely changed—She is gay, amusing, and talkative.”
Queen Victoria seemed to be the only one less than thrilled by the engagement, pronouncing herself “quite thunderstruck” by the unwelcome news. Yet though the queen had long (and correctly) foreseen nothing but danger for her granddaughter in Russia, she had no choice but to accept the situation. “Alicky had tears in her eyes,” Victoria recorded in her diary after meeting with the couple, “but she looked very bright and I kissed them both.”
Nicholas II ascended the Russian throne with the bold pronouncement that he would “safeguard the principles of autocracy as firmly and unswervingly as did my late, unforgettable father.” But the reserved, gentle young emperor—just twenty-six when he succeeded—was hardly the Goliath Alexander III had been. Alix saw this vulnerability in her new husband and was determined to stand firmly by his side—not only as a loving spouse, but as a twin pillar of imperial might. Yet before she could exercise the disastrous influence she eventually wielded over her husband, the new empress (called Alexandra after her conversion to Orthodoxy) first had to contend with the old one: Nicholas’s “dear, darling mother,” Marie.
Far from retiring after the death of her husband, Marie (now dowager empress) emerged from her grief as dazzling as ever. And she held absolute sway over her son. “Ask my mother,” Nicholas would often respond to questions about important government matters, or, “I shall ask my mother.” Having successfully served as Russia’s empress for thirteen years, Marie felt herself uniquely qualified to guide and counsel her often hapless son. As Maria von Bock (daughter of Prime Minister Peter Stolypin) wrote of her: “How could anyone of such small stature exude such imperial stateliness? Kind, amiable, simple in her discourse, she was an Empress from head to toe, combining an inborn majesty with such goodness that she was idolized by all who knew her.”
Alexandra, by contrast, was deeply introverted and nervous—new to Russia and entirely unfamiliar with the language and customs of that often bewildering country. “She was not born to be Empress of one of the largest countries on the face of the earth,” Maria von Bock noted. It was natural, then, that the far more experienced dowager empress would assume such a position of authority. But the fact that she dominated Nicholas, and unwittingly reduced him to apparent insignificance, inevitably caused deep resentment.
Even before she married Nicholas, Alix tried unsuccessfully to loosen Marie’s firm grip on affairs. It was during the waning days of Alexander III, when the bride-to-be arrived at the imperial retreat at Livadia in the Crimea, only to find her fiancé, the future tsar, being completely overlooked as the emperor lay dying. All reports of Alexander’s condition were delivered to Marie, and all important decisions left to her. Nicholas merely stood by, impotent. Alix was appalled.
“Sweet child,” she wrote in Nicholas’s diary, “pray to God. He will comfort you. Don’t feel too low. Your Sunny is praying for you and the beloved patient.… Be firm and make the doctors come to you every day and tell you how they find him … so that you are always the first to know. Don’t let others be put first and you left out. You are father’s dear son and must be told all and asked everything. Show your mind and don’t let others forget who you are.”
Nicholas, however, seemed unable, or unwilling, to heed his Sunny’s advice. As the horror of his encroaching succession overwhelmed him, it was “Mother dear” to whom he turned. This recipe for discord was only exacerbated when Nicholas and Alexandra moved into Marie’s home at the Anichkov Palace after Alexander III died. Though they were now Russia’s new emperor and empress, it was Mama who still ruled. As if to punctuate Marie’s dominance, royal tradition held that a dowager empress took precedence over a reigning one. So, at all ceremonials, it was Marie who stood beside her son, while Alexandra was left behind them on the arm of some random grand duke. And, as if this wasn’t symbolic enough of the state of affairs, Marie refused at first to relinquish the imperial jewels that came to her daughter-in-law by right.
Essentially, though, the mounting tension between the two empresses came down to personalities. “They tried to understand each other and failed,” wrote Nicholas’s sister, Olga. “They were utterly different in character, habits, and outlook.”
With the emperor busy ruling Russia—and his mother ruling him—Alexandra was left with little to do but fret. “I feel myself completely alone,” she confided to a friend in Germany. “I weep and worry all day because I feel that my husban
d is so young and so inexperienced.… I am alone most of the time. My husband is occupied all day and spends his evenings with his mother.”
Tensions between the empress and her mother-in-law extended to other members of the Romanov family as well—particularly with the Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna (“Miechen” to the family), wife of Nicholas’s uncle, Vladimir. (See family tree.) Miechen took an almost instant dislike to Alix and, according to Countess Kleinmichel, a leading hostess, “consistently used her powerful influence in Petersburg society to promote anything that could harm the Empress. She incited ladies holding high positions to give [bad] advice to the Tsarina, applauded their courage when they criticized her adversely, and made public the contents of their letters or the gist of their conversations.”
Yet while Miechen’s campaign against Alexandra was as ruthless as it was relentless (and would later intensify dangerously), the empress inadvertently assisted it with her own, often misunderstood, behavior. Socially she was a disaster. At court ceremonials and entertainments, where she was expected to shine, Alexandra instead became flushed with discomfort and embarrassment. She “felt absolutely lost,” recalled Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, and yearned “to disappear under the ground.” This extreme reticence was cruelly misconstrued. “Society did not know her,” concluded Baroness Buxhoeveden, “and her timidity was ascribed to haughtiness, and her reserve to pride.”
The withering criticism, which served to make the empress all the more insecure and to retreat further into herself, soon spread far beyond the gossipy parlors of St. Petersburg when a horrific tragedy took place in May 1896, just after Nicholas and Alexandra were formally crowned in Moscow.
Secret Lives of the Tsars Page 22