Alexandra

by Carolly Erickson

  ‘As if that mattered,’ Alix burst out to Mouchanow. ‘Even if I died . . . the Emperor would always find another wife who perhaps would be luckier than I have been, and able to give him an heir. No one would miss me, with the exception perhaps of these children.’ She broke down and wept, and her maid of honour, taken aback, tried to reassure her that she was wrong, that Nicky loved her as ‘no woman had ever been loved’.

  ‘Ah, my dear,’ Mouchanow remembered her replying, ‘what good does it do me to be loved by my husband when all the world is against me?’6

  That Alix and Nicky were bound by a very deep, enduring intimacy was beyond question. Later in the year, after Olga had recovered from her illness and the family had gone to Livadia to spend the autumn months, Nicky was suddenly summoned to Denmark, to attend the funeral of his grandmother Queen Louise.

  ‘My own precious Darling,’ Alix wrote to him on the day he left, ‘you will read these lines when the horrid train will be carrying you always further and further away from poor Wifie. Our first separation since the marriage – I am frightened of it, I cannot bear the idea of your going away so far without me.’ Bereft of her husband’s company, Alix felt the full force of her isolation, her dependency. ‘I cannot bear to think what will become of me without you – you who are my one and all, who make up all my life.’

  Her letter went on and on, covering many sheets of notepaper. She promised to sleep in Nicky’s cabin on the yacht Standart, moored at the foot of the steep whitewashed steps leading from the palace terraces to the bay below, so that she would feel nearer to him in his absence. She was, as always, anxious. She believed that she might be pregnant, but couldn’t be sure. ‘God grant it may be so,’ she wrote, ever convinced that the key to her restoration to favour in the eyes of her in-laws and her husband’s subjects lay in her finally giving birth to a son.7

  Her sister Irene had come once again for a visit, and she relied on Irene in Nicky’s absence, and on Martha Mouchanow and also on her maid of honour Marie Bariatinsky, who had become her ‘true and devoted friend’, as she called Marie, a valued ally in a poisonous court environment where Alix felt that all the world was against her.

  Not long after Nicky’s return from Denmark, late in 1898, Alix became certain that she was pregnant once again. Her morning sickness was severe in the early months and, when it subsided, she began having such crippling sciatic pain that she could not walk at all, and had to be in a wheelchair all day. Nicky insisted on pushing her himself, and took her out each afternoon in the hunting sleigh along the cleared sleigh paths at Tsarskoe Selo.

  Despite Nicky’s diligent efforts to care for Alix and raise her spirits, she became ill and gloomy and, as winter retreated and the first leaves began to appear on the trees in the palace park, she felt pessimistic, not only about the sex of the child she was carrying, but about her own future. The depression that had attacked her during her last pregnancy returned, with thoughts that she was replaceable, that another woman in her place might well be luckier, and even darker ruminations.

  ‘I never like making plans,’ she wrote to her oldest sister Victoria early in April, 1899. ‘God knows how it will all end.’8

  Her labour began in late June. Weakened by months of illness and immobility, Alix had a very difficult and painful time, wrestling for many hours with the arduous task of delivering her child. For a few hours the accoucheur seemed to lose hope, and his doubts alarmed the nurses, the waiting women, and the other palace servants. If Alix should prove unable to expel the baby, then Nicky would be faced with the terrible, and at that era all too common, decision many husbands had to make: should he save Alix, at the risk of having the child be stillborn, or should he tell the doctor to perform a caesarean delivery at great risk to Alix’s life?

  Fortunately Alix rallied; both mother and child were saved, and just after noon on June 26, 1899, the third daughter of Nicholas II and Alexandra came into the world. Whether, as at Tatiana’s birth, the accoucheur was instructed to give a secret signal indicating the baby’s sex, sparing Alix shock and disappointment, is unknown. Perhaps the sheer relief that both mother and child came through the ordeal alive was all that counted – at least for the moment. In any case, the word that another daughter had been born was spread from the birth room out into the corridors beyond, the courtiers informed one another, shaking their heads in frustration and disbelief, and a courier was dispatched to Petersburg to instruct the gunners in the Peter and Paul Fortress to begin their cannonade.

  Another girl! The Petersburgers heard the guns go off, counted each boom eagerly, then groaned in discouragement when only one hundred and one shots were fired. The German bitch had failed again.

  The new baby, a rosy, robust child – the strongest Alix had yet produced – was named Marie, after her grandmother, and all the Romanovs went to church to give thanks for her birth.

  Telegrams of congratulation arrived from all over Europe, and Alix, as she began to recover her strength, addressed herself to the task of answering them. It was a bittersweet task, for she well knew that an unspoken disappointment lay behind every telegram, every good wish. The securing of the Russian succession was a matter of great concern to every court, the stability of Europe was affected by it; bound up with Alix’s private sorrow was a public problem of growing seriousness.

  And it became more serious when, two weeks after Marie’s birth, Nicky’s brother George succumbed to illness following a bicycle accident and died, making Michael heir and tsarevich.

  Almost immediately there was a change in the atmosphere of the court. Michael was now sought-after, his views solicited, his activities regarded and imitated. There was a tacit acceptance of the fact that he would become the next tsar; after three unsuccessful tries, Alix was not expected to have a son any time in the future.

  Michael’s new-found pre-eminence began to cause difficulties. To the existing rift between Minnie and Alix was added the complication of Michael’s probable succession, and Minnie’s preference for him. Old factions were strengthened, new factions formed. Michael was courted and supplicated and approached for favours, which undermined the already fragile support Nicky enjoyed among his officials and ministers.

  At foreign courts, queries were made about Michael, who began to be entertained by diplomats and invited abroad. Queen Victoria, shrewdly assessing the situation in Russia, invited Michael to visit her at Balmoral and, liking him, saw to it that he enjoyed himself while in the Highlands and went home with a favourable view of the English.

  She had sent Alix a telegram of congratulations when Marie was born, noting tartly, ‘I am so thankful that dear Alicky has recovered so well, but I regret the third girl for the country.’

  No one regretted the third girl more than the empress. She began to speak of herself as a ‘Pechvogel’, a ‘bird of ill omen’, who was bringing bad luck to Russia. Her tired mind, desperate for an explanation and worn out with analyzing and reanalyzing her unhappy situation, cast about for answers outside the sphere of reason. Her strong Lutheran upbringing had taught her to trust in Providence; her adopted Orthodoxy induced a deeper, more superstitious reverence for the power of the unseen. With all the fervour of her romantic nature she began to reach out, with expanding faith, into the realm of the occult.

  14

  In the dim interior of the tiny Kremlin church of the Exaltation of the Cross, the emperor and empress knelt before the iconostasis. All was quiet save for the shuffling of feet across the mosaic floor, as pilgrims passed in and out to kiss the wounds of Christ and prostrate themselves before the holy icons.

  The walls of the church glowed golden in the candlelight, their painted images of Saint Michael and Saint Sergius, of Christ the Redeemer and the Virgin Mary shining as if lit from within. The wide golden haloes of the holy figures, radiant bands in which were embedded flashing emeralds and rubies, their facets reflecting every shimmer of the flickering candles, gave the dark interior an unearthly quality, making the pale faces of the
painted saints look almost animate.

  It was Holy Week, the week before Easter, 1900, and Alix and Nicky had been observing the Great Fast, living on mushrooms, cabbage and fish, taking no food at all some days, attending two- and three-hour services every morning and evening and, between services, making the rounds of the ancient Kremlin churches. They watched reverently the rite of brewing the Holy Chrism, the fragrant oils stirred by priests in huge silver cauldrons while Biblical texts were read aloud by candlelight. They repeated the Eastertide prayers, joined processions, spent time in private devotions. They immersed themselves in the richness of medieval liturgies and traditional ceremonies, feeling, as the days passed, that in the words of the proverb, ‘there is nothing above the Kremlin except heaven’.

  With Ella, Alix had taken on a large sewing project, embroidering velvet hangings for a church of which Ella was patron. She felt ‘like an ancient Tsaritsa’, Alix told her biographer years later, ‘sitting in her rooms in the Kremlin with her sister and their ladies’, working away at the intricate designs, surrounded by heavy antique furnishings, dark stonework and crackling fires. In contrast to the classical austerity of baroque Petersburg, Moscow was intimate, mysterious, half-Asiatic, full of shadows and enigmas. It ignited the soul.

  Focused as they were on the old rites of the Moscow Easter, the tsar and tsarina gave scant notice to the swiftly changing contours of the old city, whose sprawling suburbs, greatly enlarged since the start of Nicky’s reign, were home to tens of thousands of factory workers newly arrived from the countryside. They had endured a hard winter, made harsher by food shortages and chronic unemployment; now, in Holy Week, they stood in long lines outside soup kitchens and shelters, waiting in the snow for small rations of food. Had Alix seen these long lines, and looked into the faces of the desperate, she would surely have done what she could to alleviate their distress. She had contributed to famine relief in the previous year, and she was tender-hearted and generous. But her attention was fixed elsewhere, on the dim, incense-filled churches with their rich atmosphere of hidden mysteries and infinite possibilities, and on her own fervent, heartfelt prayers.

  In particular, her attention was fixed on the wonder-working icons, those glowing holy pictures with their haunting lifelike quality, their almost speaking presences. They had been known to cure the sick, to bring rain or stop floods, even to turn back armies. Icons focused the power of God. Bearing the images of His saints and of Christ and the Virgin, they were more than slabs of wood and smears of paint; they were nothing less than fragments of the divine, and as such, they could be supplicated, and were capable of working miracles.

  Each day in Holy Week, Alix and Nicky watched the procession of priests and servants accompanying the icon of the Miraculous Virgin of Mount Athos, mounted in a carriage, wind through the Kremlin, on its way to the homes of the sick and dying. Many gravely ill people claimed to have been revived by coming near this holy icon. The sacred Icon of the Redeemer rose above them when they passed through the Spassky Gate; this icon too was believed to have brought about miracles. They kissed the wonder-working icon in the tower of the Church of the Annunciation, and knelt before the image of the Virgin of Vladimir, the Virgin of Tenderness, in the Church of the Assumption, that holiest of images, before which Tamerlane the Great, the Sword of Islam, had cowered and retreated in fear.

  They prayed to the icons for an heir for Russia.

  It was partly at Ella’s urging that they prayed, for Ella, having converted voluntarily to Orthodoxy, was undergoing a deepening of her piety and was convinced that God would hear and answer her sister’s and brother-in-law’s prayers.

  Because Ella and Serge lived in Moscow, Alix did not see Ella often. However, Ella had been sending her sister gifts, letters, and emissaries – in particular, nuns with whom she talked and prayed.1

  Partly due to Ella’s influence, partly because of the strong interest at court in mystical faith and occult experimentation, Alix and Nicky had begun inviting self-styled mystics and religious teachers to the Alexander Palace. Some of them, such as the Austrian healer Schenk and the French psychic Papuce, were Europeans, but most were Russians, for holy men with extraordinary spiritual gifts were a fixture of Russian religious tradition.

  It was as if there existed in Russia two streams of religious inspiration: the church, with its hierarchy of priests and higher clergy, and another more amorphous body of teachers and masters, bound by no community or discipline and answerable to no superior. To this body belonged the stranniki, the Holy Wanderers who roamed from village to village, casting spells and praying over barren fields and dying cattle, claiming to be able to see the future and to cure ills in the present. Holy Fools also wandered from place to place, and it was thought that the voice of God spoke through them. Startsy, or elders, were spiritual teachers or mentors gifted with clarity of vision; they offered guidance to the faithful who came to them and submitted themselves to the startsy’s will and insight.

  Russians held stranniki, Holy Fools and startsy in awe. Though they often had the appearance of dirty, deranged outcasts, their clothing threadbare, their hair filthy and uncombed, their manner wild-eyed and intimidating, still they were believed to possess a rare holiness – to be, by their very nature, channels for the divine. Many cures were ascribed to them, and they were believed capable of foreseeing the future. The credulous gathered around stranniki and Holy Fools with unreasoning fervour, but even the sceptical, among them educated, sophisticated people who questioned the existence of God, conceded that these shabby, half-incoherent holy beggars possessed authentic and inexplicable powers.

  So when Alix and Nicky welcomed the holy Matrena, a wandering fortune-teller, and Vasya Tkachenko, another strannik, and Antony the Wanderer to the palace they were following an established Russian custom, which called for well-off people to provide charity to ‘God’s slaves’, as the wanderers were sometimes called. And when they took in the Holy Fool Mitya Kozelsky, a mute simpleton with deformed legs who ‘talked’ by means of hand gestures, they were seeking a blessing, a glimpse of God, a message of comfort.

  For there existed at court, as the new century opened, a tight circle of seekers into hidden teachings, explorers of occult mysteries, and the emperor and empress were among their most eager members.

  Organizers of this circle were Nicky’s cousins by marriage, Militsa and Anastasia of Montenegro, daughters of King Nicholas of Montenegro, Militsa married to Grand Duke Peter Nicholaevitch, younger son of Emperor Alexander II’s brother Nicholas, and Anastasia married to Duke George of Leuchtenberg.2 Alix had a family connection to the Montenegrin sisters also. Her cousin Prince Francis Joseph of Battenberg was married to Militsa and Stana’s sister Anna, and Francis Joseph and Anna lived in Darmstadt.

  The two vivacious sisters, of whom Militsa was the more colourful and unconventional, galvanized the thirst for supernatural explorations and the excitement that arose whenever a psychic or spiritual healer was brought to court. Anastasia, or Stana, held spiritual meetings in her mansion at Znamensky, and Militsa gathered the devotees in a secluded tower in her garden at Sergeyevsky.

  Alix, alternately tearful and depressed over her lack of a son and expansively hopeful and prayerful, saw more and more of Militsa and Stana, drawn to Militsa’s formidable intellectuality as well as to the promise of secret learning.3 For the first time since she came to Russia, Alix felt welcomed and accepted. The group of fellow seekers brought together by the Montenegrins provided Alix with the sense of community she had long looked for in vain. She took her place in the circle, not as a German outsider, nor as empress, but merely as a pilgrim among pilgrims, a spiritual explorer, one in need of divine help. It must have come as an immense relief to her to be able to sit quietly in the group, relaxed and expectant, forgetting herself in the collective hush and anticipation of revelations to come.

  In the early months of 1901, Alix had several reasons for participating in the spiritual circle. First, she had lost two peo
ple who were dear to her: her closest friend Juju Rantzau and her grandmother Queen Victoria, both of whom had died at the beginning of the year.

  Along with her friendship, Juju had served as a sort of confessor to Alix, a moral guide. ‘She was a rare flower, too delicate for this world,’ Alix wrote of her friend, ‘but rejoicing others with her fragrance and cheering them on the way. She understood the difficulties of this world and the different temptations, and always encouraged one in the right, and helped one to fight one’s weaknesses.’

  The weekly diary that Alix and Juju exchanged had been a valued psychological anchor to the empress. Now that it was discontinued, she felt adrift.

  ‘It came so naturally to speak about one’s faith to her, that now I feel her loss greatly. Only her dear writings have remained to me. I pray to God to make me as worthy, as she was, of a new and more perfectly happy life in yonder world.’4

  The afterlife was much on Alix’s mind that winter, with Queen Victoria also in ‘yonder world’. The great queen, who had been a seemingly eternal fixture in Europe for three generations, died on January 22, 1901, and Alix’s first reaction was to make plans to go to England with Ernie for the funeral. She regretted not having gone to visit Victoria in England the previous year; she had had the feeling then that she would never see her grandmother’s ‘dear old face’ again, and, now that she was dead, Alix wanted one more glimpse of her.

  ‘How I envy you,’ Alix wrote to her sister Victoria after abandoning her initial impulse to make the journey to Windsor, ‘being able to see beloved Grandmama being taken to her last rest. I cannot believe she is really gone, that we shall never see her any more. It seems impossible.’5 Alix told her friend Marie Bariatinsky that the queen had ‘been as a mother to me, ever since mama’s death’. Even though a distance had grown between Alix and her grandmother on her last visit to Balmoral, Alix’s underlying affection remained very strong. According to Nicky’s sister Xenia, when Alix learned of Queen Victoria’s death she was ‘in despair’. ‘She did so love her grandmother!’6