Alexandra

by Carolly Erickson

  Worst of all, there were times when one migraine had hardly passed before another began, forcing her into another period of isolation and suffering.

  She was pregnant again. The visit to St Serafim’s shrine, the bathing in his holy pool, had had its result. But instead of bringing her joy, this pregnancy was overshadowed by anxiety, not only because of her physical distress and worry over the war, and Nicky’s frequent absences as a result of it, but because, according to Mouchanow, Alix was secretly apprehensive that her child might be another girl. She no longer enjoyed the peace that had emanated from the spiritual circle, the confidence that had been so evident during her false pregnancy. She still believed, she still trusted Philippe. But doubts had invaded her serenity.

  And not only doubts, but grief. In the fall of 1903, while she and Nicky were staying at the hunting lodge of Skierniewice, her young niece Elizabeth, daughter of the divorced Ernie and Ducky, fell ill of typhoid and died within days. Ernie had adored the beautiful little girl, his ‘sweet little sunshine’, and was overcome by his loss. Alix, exhausted from nursing her seriously ill lady-in-waiting Sonia Orbeliani, helped Ernie through the terrible first days after his daughter’s death, suffering along with him and looking pale and thin.

  In the first week of the Japanese war she had another shock. Her sister Irene’s youngest son, four-year-old Henry, died of the ‘English disease’, haemophilia, after falling and injuring his head. He bled internally, the bleeding could not be stopped, and death was inevitable – as it had been for Alix’s brother Frittie after his fall. (Irene had two sons with the bleeding disease, though the older one, Waldemar, continued to survive.) While mourning her sister’s loss Alix must have felt increased anxiety over her own pregnancy, for if her child was a boy he would be at risk of the disease.

  Was her difficult pregnancy a sign that her child would be diseased, or were her migraines and nervous tears merely the result of her concern over the war, and her long hours of work with the ladies of her guild? This question led to still more distress as the spring of 1904 advanced and the war continued to go badly for Russia. In May the forces of the mikado soundly defeated the Russian forces on the Yalu and shortly afterwards laid siege to Port Arthur. In Petersburg, the early patriotic fervour gave way to a grim realization that Japan was a powerful enemy and that the war was likely to be prolonged. Casualty lists grew longer. Now many families mourned lost sons, read the newspapers with sober faces, and prayed for peace.

  And, as might have been anticipated, the prolongation of the war stirred up social turmoil. On the gates of the Summer Gardens in Petersburg a large hand-lettered sign appeared: ‘Dogs, Beggars, all Lower Ranks of the Army and Navy Not Allowed.’ It was an insult to the fighting men, so many of whom were crowding into the city, their conspicuous presence a constant, disturbing reminder to Petersburgers of the war. They sat in cafes, milled in shops, occupied park benches, wandered aimlessly along Nevsky Prospekt, waiting to be called to the front or sent home.

  Anti-government forces were once again at work, stirring up ill feeling and spreading fear with their sudden attacks and secret plots. The Governor General of Finland was shot by a student revolutionary. Interior Minister Plehve was killed by a bomb thrown just outside the Warsaw Station in Petersburg, in a well planned attack carried out by a number of conspirators in defiance of Plehve’s secret police. Mayors, regional governors, officials were assaulted or threatened with assault, and spies sent word to the ministries of plots against the life of the tsar as he travelled from Moscow to Poltava to Tula to Suvalki to Vitebsk, reviewing the troops and encouraging them as they went off to the war, icons of St Serafim held before them to protect them in their holy cause.

  In the midst of all the turmoil Alix continued to do her part for the war effort, giving audiences to generals about to leave for the front, supervising her workshop, sewing and knitting. ‘I like following all and not to be a mere doll,’ she wrote to her sister Victoria in June of 1904. ‘Yes, it is a trying time, but one must put all one’s trust in God, who gives strength and courage. Unluckily I cannot get about at all and spend my days on the sofa . . . walking and standing causes me great pain.’4 She was advised not to walk, yet she got up anyway, ‘dragging herself through the park at Peterhof’, as Mouchanow remembered, ‘looking so ill that one wondered whether she would be able to stand the trial which was awaiting her’.

  The baby was due in August, and once again the family gathered in order to be present at the baptism. There was no mystery about this pregnancy; Dr Ott had verified it, and the child appeared to be developing normally. Huge and all but immobile, Alix lay on her sofa in the final weeks, full of apprehension.

  One evening as her maids were dressing her for dinner, there was a bang and a splintering of glass. ‘Suddenly we heard a crash behind us, and were dismayed to see that a heavy-looking glass which hung upon the wall behind [Alix] had fallen to the floor, where it had been shattered into a thousand fragments. The Empress cried aloud in her emotion, and for one moment I believed that she was about to faint, so white did her features become.’5

  It was an omen, she said. She would surely die in childbirth. No one could persuade her otherwise.

  In this mood of doom the empress felt her labour pains begin. All her attendants were summoned, the family alerted. Nicky came from a meeting with his officers, expecting to have lunch with Alix, and instead found that the birth process was well advanced.

  The baby was delivered, and Dr Ott turned to Nicky. ‘I congratulate Your Majesty on the birth of a tsarevich!’ he announced.

  The news was stunning, unexpected, wonderful. The tsar beamed. Joyful murmurs spread through the assembled staff. The signal was sent on its way to Petersburg, where the gunners began firing their cannon. This time the citizens of the capital were gratified. Three hundred loud reports boomed across the river from the Peter and Paul Fortress. A boy! A tsarevich! Caps were tossed in the air, shouts rang out, toasts were drunk again and again. In her dark hour of war, Russia was given the boon of an heir to the throne at last.

  Alix, slow to recover from the effects of chloroform, came sleepily awake. ‘When she opened her eyes,’ Mouchanow wrote, ‘she looked so weak that no one dared to tell her the good news, but she seemed to read it in the face of her husband, because she suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, it cannot be true; it cannot be true. Is it really a boy?”’6

  She had feared that she would die; instead she was given that which she most longed for, a son. They named him Alexei, after Nicky’s favourite predecessor, the father of Peter the Great.

  All the family came in to see the new baby, his sisters, aged eight to three, crowding around and Nicky’s brother Michael, no longer the designated heir, announcing that he was happy to go into ‘retirement’. Everyone exclaimed how large and robust the baby was, how heavy at eleven pounds, how sturdy he looked, like his grandfather Alexander III.

  The family was satisfied. It had taken ten years, but Alix had finally done what she had been brought from Hesse to do.

  Alexei travelled to his baptism ceremony in a gilded coach, escorted by a troop of cavalry. He was borne to the font by the Robes Mistress, Princess Galitzine, on a cushion of cloth of gold, secured to her shoulder with a broad gold band. (To prevent her from slipping on the waxed floor, she wore rubber shoes.) His tiny ermine-lined mantle was held by the Grand Marshal of the court. A long procession of grand dukes and duchesses, ambassadors, and officials attended the ceremony, dressed in their full finery to honour the tsarevich. Every soldier in the Russian army was declared to be Alexei’s godparent, along with the Prince of Wales – the future George V – and the German Emperor. Ribbons and decorations were presented to the infant, and he was made honorary colonel of many regiments.

  The rejoicing went on for weeks, with banquets and ceremonies held in many cities and gifts and telegrams arriving from all over the world. The ‘baby tsar’ was thriving, taking milk from both his mother and a wet-nurse, growing fat and healthy
. He was a placid, contented child as he rode on his proud father’s shoulder or was carried in his mother’s arms.

  ‘He’s an amazingly hefty baby,’ Xenia wrote of Alexei, ‘with a chest like a barrel and generally has the air of a warrior knight.’7 He would not be puny like his father, but tall and strong like his grandfather Alexander III, a mighty tsar, robust and fearsome.

  Then one afternoon blood began to ooze from the baby’s navel in a bright red trickle. There was not much blood, but enough to be worrying, for it did not clot and continued to seep out for hours, all afternoon and into the early evening.

  Alexei did not appear to be disquieted or in pain. He didn’t cry, but was alert and calm, though as he lost more blood he must have become pale.

  When they saw that the bleeding from the tiny wound did not stop in a reasonable period of time Alix and Nicky were anxious. They knew the signs, and feared the worst. It might be the bleeding disease, the English disease, the terrible disease that had killed Irene’s son Henry and that made her son Waldemar a virtual invalid much of the time.

  The doctor, Korovin, and the surgeon Fedorov were summoned. They applied a bandage to the baby’s navel, and watched over him as, that night, he continued to lose blood.

  What conversations took place during those interminable, alarming hours cannot be known with certainty, but the emperor and empress must have questioned the doctors urgently, perhaps frantically.8 Would there be haemorrhaging from the wound? Would the tsarevich die? Did he have the bleeding disease? What could be done to stop the flow of blood? Alix must have recalled the shattered mirror, the omen of tragedy, with a frisson of horror. She and Nicky both must have prayed fervently for the healing of their son before the crowded screen of icons in their bedroom and Alexei’s. They must have petitioned God and Jesus and Mary and all the saints, and Philippe as well, in a torrent of heartfelt appeal.

  The following morning the bleeding continued, finally ceasing at noon. When the bandages remained free of blood for several hours, the tension began to ease – but only slightly. The doctors, the wet-nurse and other servants, the family remained watchful, alert for a resumption of the bleeding. And watchful too for bruises or dark patches on the tiny body, evidence of internal bleeding.

  A son had been born, but with his birth had come an anxiety so overwhelming as to be incalculable. For the baby’s life to be preserved – and few babies with the bleeding disease survived childhood in 1904 – he would have to be guarded and protected with extravagant care. And even then there was no certainty that he would live into boyhood, much less into manhood. A fall, a jar, an accident of any kind could carry him off within hours.

  What was more, Alix must have realized that if she had another child, and it was a boy, there was a strong chance that this second son too would inherit the English disease. So Alexei was to be her only hope.

  Meanwhile, the court and nation, and the public outside of Russia, who were still in a celebratory mood and sending gifts and congratulations, must not find out that the heir to the throne was unhealthy. Those who knew were sworn to secrecy, and Alix and Nicky steeled themselves to hide their pain and worry.

  ‘Oh, what anguish it was,’ Alix wrote after the tsarevich’s first attack of bleeding, ‘and not to let others see the knife digging in one.’9 Dissimulation was not natural to her, yet she forced herself to adopt a closed expression; neither her apprehension nor her relief must show. She continued to nurse her ‘little sunbeam’, and to show him off to visitors, busying herself making Christmas gifts for the soldiers and inspecting the products of her workshop before they were sent east.

  For of course the demands of the war had to take precedence over all else. The soldiers suffering in Port Arthur must not suspect that their tsarevich, whose godfathers they were, and in whose birth they had rejoiced, could die at any time. They must be supported, encouraged, healed, kept alive so that they could fight on.

  But as Christmas approached the soldiers were increasingly unable to fight. They had no ammunition left. They had little to eat. They froze at night and, in the daytime, sweated with typhoid fever. Day after day they waited for a relieving force to arrive by sea, but none came.

  They could no longer bury the dead in the frozen ground. The bodies, naked and pale, were heaped into piles and left to the elements, until the snow made them into white mounds, featureless and stark against the grey sky.

  Early in January, 1905, the Russian defenders of Port Arthur surrendered to the Japanese, and as the news spread throughout Russia there was disbelief, then lamentation, then churning resentment and a resolute cry for revenge.

  17

  Frost rimed the metal railings of the bridges over the frozen Neva, and the sky was low and heavy with grey clouds. Trams ran along Nevsky Prospekt, passing the vast, many-windowed Winter Palace, then crossing the river to Vassily Island and going down Eight-Line Street towards the poorer quarters of the city. The streets were quiet, few sleighs glided along the roads, bells jangling, and even fewer pedestrians were out amid the shops, their breath freezing in the harshly cold air. Only a handful of droshky drivers sat, huddled in layers of wool and fur, their beards white with frost, waiting to be hired, for most of the drivers were on strike and only the most desperate came out in the cruel chill of the midwinter morning in hopes of earning a fare.

  Out on the icebound river, the marine police were patrolling in groups of two and three, examining the frozen surface for cracks and marking thin, dark patches of ice with poles topped with red flags. Near Tushkov Quay, men had been at work since dawn, cutting huge blocks of ice to be loaded onto horse-drawn sleds and sold to householders to cool their cellars.

  The hush that enveloped the snowbound city was deceptive, for Petersburgers had reacted to news of the surrender of Port Arthur to the Japanese only weeks earlier with alarm and dismay, and factory workers, their determination to force change in their working conditions building over several months, were out on strike in record numbers.

  The labour unrest had begun several weeks earlier, in the Putilov metals factory where railroad cars were being built. Four workers were fired, and thousands of their fellow workers came to their defence, one factory after another going on strike until nearly four hundred factories were idle, and a hundred and fifty thousand former employees had left their jobs. With no pay and nothing to eat, shivering in the bitter weather, seething with grievances, they met to plan a joint strategy. To make their demands for higher pay and an eight-hour day known, and to ask – perhaps even to insist – that they be represented in a national assembly.

  But on this cold morning there were no meetings in the street or on the ice, only the sound of hammering as a wooden dais was erected on the river just below the palace, where the tsar was to stand during the ceremony of the Blessing of the Waters.

  Towards mid-morning the street lights went out as a pale sun shone intermittently through the veil of cloud. More trams passed now, along with horse-drawn omnibuses, the traffic in the street increasing, the number of pedestrians growing. In Palace Square, weak sunlight gleamed on the high-piled snowdrifts, lit the roof of the army general staff headquarters, glinted on the cross atop the Alexander Column. The thousand windows of the palace came alight, the river ice sparkled blue-green and, as the dignitaries assembled on the wooden dais for the opening prayers of the ceremony, the gilded casements of the palace glowed with a warm burnish.

  Many members of the imperial family were gathered to witness the ceremony, watching from behind the palace windows. They had come into Petersburg with some trepidation, for the reports from the secret police of increased revolutionary activity were unsettling and every day, it seemed, revolutionaries armed with bombs were discovered and arrested. The tsar’s uncles were known to be among the plotters’ primary targets. Uncle Vladimir had begun to take the precaution of never planning his route of travel beforehand, lest the route become known to a revolutionary with a bomb. Uncle Alexei, who according to the tsar was being ‘
tracked like a wild beast, in order to be killed’, remained largely out of sight. And Serge, in Moscow, the most hated of the imperial uncles, had moved out of his Governor General’s residence and slept in a different Kremlin palace every night, under heavy guard, increasingly fearful that one day his protection would fail – or that one of his protectors might become his assassin.

  The tsar himself, despite the apprehensions of his relatives and his ministers, continued to maintain his dogged faith in the basic loyalty of his people. To be sure, there were abundant, even unprecedented, signs of unrest among his subjects – peasants burning crops in the fields, labourers demolishing factories, most of the workers in the capital on strike and a mounting clamour from among the educated, articulate professional classes for an end to autocracy and for a new form of government based on a constitution and popular representation. But despite all this, he believed that he himself, Tsar Nicholas, was venerated and loved. When he appeared in public, his ecstatic subjects bowed in reverence. They saw him almost as one of themselves, or so he thought; he imagined himself as the ‘peasants’ tsar’, shunning European-style living and eating borscht and kasha, dressing in blousy peasant shirts and Turkish trousers, always happy to meet his peasant subjects in the course of his travels. He had made himself the friend of the workers too, and of the urban poor, recently building a theatre in Petersburg where for a few kopecks students and factory workers could enjoy operas and plays of high quality thanks to an ongoing government subsidy.