The emperor relinquished his crown with such calm and thoroughness of purpose as to be unsettling to some. “He was such a fatalist that I couldn’t believe it,” recalled General Dmitri Dubensky. “He renounced the Russian throne just as simply as one turns over a cavalry squadron to its new commanding officer.” Yet Nicholas’s apparent stoicism in the face of his profound and irrevocable decision masked something far deeper, touching his very soul. Abdication “was for him an immense sacrifice,” wrote historian Richard Pipes, “not because he craved either the substance of power or its trappings—the one he thought a heavy burden, the other a tedious imposition—but because he felt by this action he was betraying his oath to God and country.” The emperor stepped aside for one reason: to facilitate Russia’s ultimate triumph over Germany. “He chose … to give up the crown to save the front,” wrote Pipes.
The impact of Nicholas’s renunciation of his throne was seismic. To a nation that for centuries believed deeply that the sovereign was semidivine—an essential part of the equilibrium between heaven and earth*6—his absence was for many simply inconceivable. In the aftermath of the abdication, Paléologue visited several churches. “The same scene met me everywhere,” he wrote: “a grave and silent congregation exchanging grave and melancholy glances. Some of the moujiks looked bewildered and horrified and several had tears in their eyes. Yet even among those who seemed the most moved I could not find one who did not sport a red cockade or armband. They had all been working for the Revolution; all of them were for it, body and soul. But that did not prevent them from shedding tears for their Father, the Tsar.”
Among members of the royal family, the emperor’s decision had more personal repercussions. “The news of Nicky’s abdication came like a thunderbolt,” recalled his sister Olga. “We were stunned. My mother was in a terrible state. She kept telling me it was the greatest humiliation of her life.… She blamed poor Alicky for … everything.”
Alexandra was at Tsarskoe Selo, all but trapped, when she received the news from Nicholas’s uncle, Grand Duke Paul. Her friend Lili Dehn remembered the two spoke privately, after which “the door opened and the Empress appeared. Her face was distorted with agony, her eyes were full of tears. She tottered rather than walked, and I rushed forward and supported her until she reached the writing table between the windows. She leaned heavily against it and taking my hands in hers, she said brokenly ‘Abdicated!’ I could not believe my ears. I waited for her next words. They were barely audible. ‘The poor dear … all alone down there … what he has gone through, oh my God, what he has gone through.… And I was not there to console him.’ ” Then she sat down and sobbed.
While Alexandra wept, others were appalled by what the emperor had done. “Nicky must have lost his mind,” wrote his brother-in-law and cousin, Grand Duke Alexander, “Sandro,” who was married to Nicholas’s sister Xenia and happened to be the father-in-law of Yussoupov, one of Rasputin’s killers. “Since when does a sovereign abdicate because of a shortage of bread and partial disorders in his capital?… He had an army of fifteen million men at his disposal. The whole thing … seemed ludicrous.”
What was particularly galling to some was Nicholas’s decision to renounce the crown for Alexis as well. “I needn’t tell you of my love for the Emperor and with what devotion I served him,” the ex-foreign minister Sazonov said tearfully to Paléologue. “But as long as I live, I shall never forgive him for abdicating for his son. He had no shadow of a right to do so.… Fancy destroying a three-hundred-year-old dynasty, and the stupendous work of Peter the Great, Catherine II and Alexander I. What a tragedy! What a disaster!”
The former emperor was permitted one last public act after his abdication—to travel back to field headquarters at Mogliev and bid farewell his beloved armies. On the way, Nicholas gave vent to feelings in the diary he had kept since he was a young man. “For the sake of Russia, and to keep the armies in the field, I decided to take this step.… All around me I see treason, cowardice, deceit.” Upon arrival at Mogliev, he would also see some of the callous indifference and loss of respect that would plague him for the rest of his brief life.
Across from his room, two large red banners adorned city hall, while the town itself still celebrated the abdication with street parties. Outside Nicholas’s window, the staff and troops of his escort loudly swore allegiance to the Provisional Government and removed the insignia and adornments that distinguished them as members of the emperor’s suite. During the church service that followed, prayers for the tsar and the rest of the imperial family were omitted for the first time in centuries. Even Nicholas’s written message to the troops, in which he encouraged them to keep fighting bravely and to support the new government, was rejected by that very government and never delivered.
“My heart is full of grief and despair,” wrote the Dowager Empress Marie, who joined her fallen son for five days in Mogliev. “I don’t even know how I am still alive after seeing how my poor dear son was treated. I thank God I spent those terrible … days with him … when he was so lonely and abandoned by everyone. These were the most terrifying days of my life.… I can’t even begin to describe … the kind of humiliation and indifference that my poor Nicky went through. I would not believe it if I did not see it with my own eyes. He was like a true martyr.”
With his mother in such a state of anguish, the role of comforter fell upon the former tsar. As the American ambassador David R. Francis noted, “it was Nicholas, the son she had always lectured on behavior, who carefully steered his mother back to courage and self-control.” After five days, it was time for mother and son to part—forever, as it turned out. Nicholas “went quietly and calmly,” Ambassador Francis wrote, while Marie “was overcome with emotion.” Her Cossack companion, Timofei Yaschik, reported that the dowager empress “hugged, gently kissed and blessed him. She really cried—more than I have ever seen the strong Danish Princess cry at any time before or after this.” Then, as Nicholas’s train pulled away, his mother blessed him with the sign of the cross for the very last time.*7
The ex-sovereign returned to his beloved Tsarskoe Selo—“that charming, dear, precious place”—a prisoner in his own palace.*8 His degradation began immediately. Arriving by car, Nicholas was stopped at the locked gates by a sentry who inquired mockingly who was inside. The guard then proceeded to telephone an officer, who emerged from the palace.
“Who is there?” the officer hollered.
“Nicholas Romanov,” the sentry shouted back.
“Let him pass.”
After what Count Paul Benckendorff, Grand Marshal of the Court, called “this offensive comedy,” Nicholas and Alexandra were at last reunited. They grasped one another tenderly, as the once all-controlling empress gently reassured her husband that the throne meant nothing to her—just the love the two of them shared together. With that, the deposed tsar who had so steadfastly restrained his emotions over the past trying weeks “sobbed like a child on the breast of his wife.”
A fresh recruitment of unruly, disrespectful guards—like the ones at the gate—had arrived at the palace earlier and basically taken it over. They roamed the halls, bursting into bedrooms unannounced, and harassed the remaining staff for serving “the bloodsuckers.” Having already picked off all the tame deer that once roamed the palace park, the soldiers next turned their aggression toward Rasputin, whose putrefying corpse they dragged out of its tomb, tossed onto a pile of logs, and burned to ashes—just as the staretz had once predicted would happen.
The guards’ behavior toward Nicholas was only marginally better. On his first day home, the deposed emperor received permission to take his customary walk in the park—only now under strict watch. No sooner did he begin his stroll than he was confronted by six armed soldiers determined to bring him low. When the first stepped into his path, Nicholas tried to turn and walk in another direction. But a second soldier ordered him back.
“With their fists and with the butts of their guns they pushed the Emperor t
his way and that as though he were some kind of wretched vagrant they were baiting on a country road,” wrote Alexandra’s friend Anna Vyrubova. “ ‘You can’t go there, Mr. Colonel.’ ‘We don’t permit you to walk in that direction, Mr. Colonel.’ ‘Stand back when you are commanded, Mr. Colonel.’ The emperor, apparently unmoved, looked from one of these coarse brutes to another and with great dignity turned and walked back to the palace.”
Watching the degrading scene from a window above, Alexandra remained silent but gripped the hand of her friend Lili Dehn. “I do not think that until this moment we had realized the crushing grip of the revolution,” Dehn wrote. “But it was brought home to us most forcibly when we saw the passage of the Lord of all the Russias, the Emperor whose domains extended over millions of miles, now restricted to a few yards in his own park.”
Such ugly episodes would recur often during the family’s five-month captivity at Tsarskoe Selo, and Nicholas accepted them all “with extraordinary serenity and moral grandeur,” as Gilliard wrote. “No word of reproach ever passed his lips.” Such fortitude was no doubt grievously tested, as on one occasion when a soldier thrust his bayonet into the spokes of a bicycle Nicholas was riding, causing him to come crashing to the ground. Young Alexis, his face burning with shame, witnessed his father’s humiliation. But the boy also endured some equally discomfiting situations himself.
Derevenko, one of the sailors who had been assigned to protect the tsarevitch from injury—and did so for ten years with all the apparent love and tenderness of a father*9—now viciously turned on his young charge. Anna Vyrubova witnessed a most distressing scene: “I passed the open door of Alexis’s room and … saw lying sprawled in a chair … the sailor Derevenko. Insolently, he bawled at the boy whom he had formerly loved and cherished, to bring him this or that, to perform any menial service.… Dazed and apparently only half conscious of what he was being forced to do, the child moved about trying to obey.”
Yet despite the monstrosities unfolding all around him, Alexis remained essentially the same good-natured boy he had always been, a child who managed to revive his family’s flagging spirits with his own inherent exuberance. “He is very intelligent, has a great deal of character and an excellent heart,” Count Benckendorff noted. “If his disease could be mastered, and should God grant his life, he should one day play a part in the restoration of our poor country. He is the representative of the legitimate principle; his character has been formed by the misfortunes of his parents and of his childhood. May God protect him and save him and all his family from the claws of fanatics in which they are at present.” Alas, there would be no such bright future for Alexis Romanov.
Alexandra suffered with the rest of her family, both their traumas and her own. The empress who had once filled the palace with fresh flowers imported from the Crimea was now reduced to tears of gratitude when handed a measly sprig of lilac. When she ventured outside, she was often greeted with the gawks and jeers of crowds gathered at the park fence to observe her like a zoo animal. And the press remained merciless, depicting her in cartoons as a promiscuous ogress who bathed in the blood of her own people.
Yet Alexandra’s true humanity gradually began to reveal itself to some of those who reviled her most. One day, as she sat quietly in the park, a soldier rudely plopped down next to her and began to harangue her as a hater of the Russian people. The former empress answered him calmly, relating her story and the deep feelings she had for the nation she once ruled. The soldier continued to bombard her with accusations, but after some time, the angry man began to see another side to the woman he had learned to despise. When the conversation was over, the soldier stood up, took her hands in his, and said to her, “Do you know, Alexandra Feodorovna, I had quite a different idea of you. I was mistaken about you.”
Even the ardent antimonarchist Kerensky, who once shouted for the violent removal of the tsar and his wife, adopted a different view of Alexandra when he came to the palace to interrogate her about what he believed were her treasonous activities throughout the war. The former empress’s assured and persuasive responses soon convinced Kerensky that she had been unfairly demonized. “She does not lie,” he remarked to Nicholas. Later he wrote: “I had imagined her differently. She is very sympathetic. She is an admirable mother. What courage, what dignity, what intelligence and how beautiful she is!”*10
Yet as impressed as he may have been with Alexandra, it was nevertheless Kerensky who ordered the arrest of her dear friends and faithful companions, Lili Dehn and Anna Vyrubova*11—a loss that left her utterly forlorn. “With a tremendous effort of will, she forced herself to smile,” Lili Dehn wrote of the farewell before she and Anna were taken away; “then, in a voice whose every accent bespoke intense love and deep religious conviction, she said: ‘Lili, by suffering, we are purified for Heaven. This goodbye matters little. We shall meet in another world.’ ”
Perhaps what was most agonizing to Nicholas and Alexandra throughout their imprisonment at Tsarskoe Selo was the uncertainty of what would happen to them and their children next. “At best, they might be permitted to live abroad in exile,” wrote historian W. Bruce Lincoln; “at worst, they faced the frightening prospect of a humiliating public trial and execution in the tradition of England’s Charles I and France’s Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. In large measure, their fate depended upon which course the revolution might follow. In mid-March [1917], no one even dared predict what that might be.”
As it turned out, exile to Britain—the most practical and desired place—was no longer an option after the English king, Nicholas’s maternal first cousin and friend, George V, turned his back on the man he once referred to as “my dear Nicky.”*12 Then came the event that would ultimately answer the question of the now-helpless family’s fate. Germany, aiming to sow further discord and rebellion within its enemy’s borders, secretly arranged for the return from exile of the man Churchill called “the most grisly of all weapons”: Vladimir Lenin. It was the reemergence of this most vicious of Bolsheviks, who once declared it “necessary to behead at least one hundred Romanovs,” that would ensure the family’s slaughter just over a year later.
Desperate to avert such a massacre, Kerensky quietly arranged to have the family moved to the Siberian town of Tobolsk—“an out-and-out backwater,” as he described it, with “a very small garrison, no industrial proletariat, and a population which was prosperous and contented, not to say old-fashioned.” It was in this remote place, Kerensky believed, that the Romanovs would be safe and “could live with some measure of comfort.” Nicholas readily acceded to the plan. “I have no fear,” he told Kerensky. “We trust you. If you say we must move, it must be. We trust you.”
On August 12, 1917, Nicholas and Alexandra, along with their five children, spent their last day at the place they had called home over two decades—most of their married life. It was Alexis’s thirteenth birthday, and to celebrate a special service was arranged at the palace with a blessed icon from a nearby church. “The ceremony was poignant, all were in tears,” recalled Count Benckendorff. “The soldiers themselves seemed touched and approached the holy icon to kiss it. [Afterward, the family] followed the procession as far as the balcony, and saw it disappear through the park. It was as if the past were taking leave, never to come back.”
Setting aside the irony of a Russian emperor consigned to Siberia—that forbidding wasteland to which so many of Nicholas’s ancestors had banished their enemies (and from which Rasputin had emerged)—conditions at Tobolsk were tolerable—at least during the early period of the family’s eight-month imprisonment there. The Romanovs were housed in the recently refurbished governor’s mansion, amid a populace fairly well disposed toward them. Gilliard, who still remained with the exiles, recalled that “on the whole, the inhabitants of Tobolsk were still very attached to the Imperial family, and our guards had repeatedly to intervene to prevent them standing under the windows or removing their hats and crossing themselves as they passed the house.”
“I then for the first time heard the Tsar regret his abdication,” Gilliard wrote. “It now gave him pain to see that his renunciation had been in vain and that by his departure in the interests of his country, he had in reality done her an ill turn. The idea was to haunt him more and more.”
Though Lenin’s reemergence assured the destruction of the Romanovs, for now they were still safe in Siberia. That December provided snapshots of the doomed family in their final period of relative calm. There was Anastasia, bored and peering through a window, watching the passersby; Nicholas, huddled with his family around a small fire, reading aloud while his wife and daughters did their needlework, passing the time together on a long winter night. And then there was Alexis—once set to rule over a vast empire—rummaging around the fenced-in yard collecting old nails and pieces of string. “You never know when they will be useful,” he wrote to Anna Vyrubova with a perspective that could only come from a boy eagerly exploring his environment—no matter how limited it was.
“One by one all earthly things slip away,” Alexandra wrote in one of her last letters, “houses and possessions ruined, friends vanished. One lives from day to day. But God is in all, and nature never changes. I can see all around me churches … and hills, the lovely world.… I feel old, oh, so old, but I am still the mother of this country, and I suffer its pains as my own child’s pains and I love it in spite of all its sins and horrors.”
Secret Lives of the Tsars Page 30