Alexandra

by Carolly Erickson

  Nicky trusted in his subjects’ loyalty – and left the rest to fate.

  It was time for the blessing of the waters. The bishop of Petersburg stepped forwards onto the blue-green ice where a hole had been made to expose the dark water. He dipped his gold cross into the water, and said the words of blessing. Almost a once a sharp report rang out from the Peter and Paul Fortress on the far side of the river. The guns were firing their salute.

  With a loud cry a policeman standing behind the tsar fell, wounded, his blood spreading out across the ice. Shots were fired into the palace, windows were shattered, other shots struck the Admiralty building and ricocheted off.

  The fortress guns, which were supposed to shoot blanks, were shooting live charges. Revolutionaries. Assassins.

  The tsar, hearing the whizz of bullets over his head and knowing they were meant for him, stood where he was, and crossed himself.

  ‘I knew that somebody was trying to kill me,’ he told his sister Olga later. ‘I just crossed myself. What else could I do?’1

  Around him, all was panic. Police and soldiers were running in all directions, shouting for help, attempting to take cover, trying to see whether the assassins had wounded the tsar. Armed guards from the palace ran out onto the ice, and from Nevsky Prospekt more police came, swarming down towards the dais where the tsar still stood.

  Within seconds, the shooting ceased. Whether soldiers in the fortress overpowered the revolutionaries as they fired, or whether, having made their attempt, the would-be assassins fled, is unknown. Out on the ice, police surrounded the stunned tsar and escorted him to safety. Inside the palace, the dowager empress, her daughter Olga, and several others had been sprayed with glass when a bullet struck a window near where they were standing. Their shoes and skirts were covered with glass splinters, but they were not injured.

  No more shots came. It was over. The platform on which the aborted ceremony had taken place was quickly dismantled, the bloodstains covered with snow. By late afternoon the only sign that the tsar had come near to being shot, possibly killed, was that there were more guards in evidence around the palace. The hole cut in the ice for the blessing of the Neva had quickly frozen over, and the marine police had resumed their methodical examination of the ice. As evening fell the cold deepened, mist rose above the river and the windows of the palace glowed yellow. At the headquarters of the secret police, activity quickened, and in the workers’ neighbourhoods, strikers met to discuss their demands.

  Frightened and worried, her worries increased by her increasing conviction that her husband’s advisers lacked good judgment and were giving him bad counsel, Alix ruminated on a prophecy attributed to St Serafim.

  ‘They will wait for a time of great hardship to afflict the Russian land,’ the prophecy read, ‘and on an agreed day, at the agreed hour, they will raise up a general rebellion all over the Russian land.’ Certainly it was a time of great hardship, certainly there was the threat of a great rebellion. The prophecy went on to predict that many soldiers would join the rebels, that ‘much innocent blood will be spilt, it will run in rivers over the Russian land’. The empress sent to the Sarov monastery for copies of Serafim’s prophecies. Deeply upsetting as the unrest was, it was reassuring to her to know that it had been predicted, that it was not merely random mayhem but part of a larger divine scheme that the saint had foreseen.

  On Sunday, January 9, 1905, the prophecy appeared to be coming true.

  Thousands of workers gathered in groups in different parts of the city to demonstrate, intending to converge on Palace Square to carry a petition to the tsar. They were disgruntled, angry, hungry and desperate – and yet hopeful, for the majority of them believed that Tsar Nicholas was well disposed towards them and cared for their welfare, and might respond with compassion when he heard their grievances and saw how many of them were suffering.

  They had composed a petition, under the guidance of their leader and spokesman Father Gapon, founder of the Gapon Society, which called on the tsar to aid them in their extreme distress.

  ‘We workers and residents of the city of Saint Petersburg, of various ranks and stations, our wives, children and helpless old parents, have come to Thee, Sire, to seek justice and protection.’

  They had become beggars, the petitioners said. They were overworked, grossly underpaid, forced to live as slaves. They had pledged themselves to die rather than endure any longer the humiliation and wretchedness of their condition. The tsar was their last hope.

  ‘Sire! Is this [their poverty] in accordance with God’s laws, by the grace of which Thou reignest? . . . Is it better to die – for all of us, the toiling people of all Russia, to die, allowing the capitalists (the exploiters of the working class) and the bureaucrats (who rob the government and plunder the Russian people) to live and enjoy themselves?’2

  Plaintive though the petition was, it was also, in the judgment of the imperial ministers, subversive, conducive to undermining the social order. And the demonstration the petitioners were planning to make was plainly illegal. The police and military, following the attempt on the tsar’s life at the Blessing of the Waters, had issued a prohibition against all large gatherings. They were not opposed to Father Gapon, in fact they encouraged and supported him and much preferred him to either the recently formed Marxist political parties – the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries – with their campaigns of violent disruption or the Constitutional Democrats with their demands for an end to autocracy and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. But in the volatile climate of Petersburg, with so many tens of thousands of workers idle and so much seditious rhetoric in the air, so much violence and so many incitements to violence, to permit any large crowd to gather for any purpose was to invite disaster.

  Illegal though it was, the gathering proceeded, on the morning of January 9, with large groups of marchers assembling in various parts of the city. Most were labourers, both men and women, but a number of the marchers had children with them, and there were old people in the procession as well, some of them feeble.

  Watchful police did nothing to break up the crowds, which swelled to many thousands. At the head of each group, held high on tall staves, were large portraits of the tsar and icons, crosses and pennons with religious symbols. Here and there a white flag was displayed, with the ominous message ‘Soldiers! Do not fire on the people.’

  It was nearly noon when the marchers set out for their destination, singing hymns as they went. They had not gone far when it became evident that they would not be allowed to reach the palace. Warning shouts were heard, ordering the marchers to turn back, to disperse, yet they went on, their momentum difficult to halt, their determination unwavering, their singing so loud, perhaps, that it drowned out the warnings.

  Suddenly bugles sounded and the marchers were horrified to see mounted grenadiers galloping towards them, sabres raised. Behind the cavalry came infantry, rifles at the ready.

  Quickly, efficiently, the soldiers went about their work, following their orders, the cavalry slashing at the unarmed marchers, the riflemen shooting them down. Disbelief soon turned to panic as, screaming in pain and terror, the petitioners scattered, many wounded, dozens lying dead. The confusion was terrible, the slaughter ghastly. To observers it appeared that a peaceful religious procession had met with an attack of calculated brutality. ‘A well-behaved, dignified, unarmed crowd walking into cavalry charges and the sights of rifles – a terrible spectacle,’ one of them wrote.3

  Yet the marchers, once they came under attack, were quick to resist. Seizing pushcarts, wagons, bits of furniture, they began to erect barricades in the streets. Some climbed onto the roofs of buildings and hurled bricks on the soldiers below. Others broke into gun shops and armed themselves. Cries of ‘Revolution!’ were heard, impromptu speeches were made in favour of armed revolt, red flags waved high. Some Petersburgers, who earlier in the day felt sympathy for the marchers, became frightened of them after the shooting began and, barring their doors and w
indows, retreated into their cellars for safety.

  For several hours there was chaos in the capital, with some areas disrupted by skirmishes and looting and others, such as the Alexander Gardens, remaining relatively calm, the gardens filled with casual strollers and children playing in the snow and skating on the ice. Volleys of gunfire erupted from time to time. Cossacks rode past, swords drawn, hunting for resisters. Bodies still lay in some streets, dark blood stained the snow in many places and, as the afternoon advanced, relatives of the dead brought coffins to carry them away. Eventually the clashes between military and demonstrators ceased, and the barricades were torn down by the soldiers. Yet attacks by squadrons of troops went on, the soldiers firing wildly into crowds of bystanders as if unable to stop themselves from continuing the slaughter.

  No one counted the dead, but at the end of the day there may have been as many as three or four hundred, perhaps twice that many. At least a thousand more were injured, many of them seriously.4 Apart from the actual number of injuries, what shocked Petersburgers – and soon the rest of the world, for reports went out immediately to all the foreign capitals by phone and wire – was the inhuman cruelty of the assaults: the multiple sabre cuts, the merciless rifle fire, the deliberate trampling of old people and the pitiless injuring of children.

  The only possible conclusion was that the tsar, far from caring about his subjects, had ordered their massacre. This was the tsar of Khodynka Field, the tsar who had done nothing to alleviate famine, and who had let his ministers impoverish the countryside. This was the tsar who had led the Russian armies into defeat at the hands of the Japanese. Now he had shown his true nature at its most heartless.

  Now truly, as St Serafim had predicted, much innocent blood had been spilt, and it ran in rivers over the Russian land.

  As if to mark the significance of the bloodshed, a sign had been given, a vision in the heavens. Many people on the afternoon of January 9 had observed the apparition. Some described it as a triple sun, others as a huge red circle surrounding the sun and blotting out its rays.

  It was a portent of disaster, an indication, surely, that there was worse to come.

  Alix had not been in Petersburg on the day of the disturbances. At the insistence of the imperial ministers, she and Nicky and their children had taken refuge at Tsarskoe Selo, where the number of soldiers, detectives and secret police was increased. Telegrams arrived at the Alexander Palace in record numbers, sent from Europe and America, expressing outrage at the carnage and condemning the tsar for murdering his own subjects. In the eyes of much of the world Nicholas II had become a villain, and Alix felt obliged to defend him.

  ‘Don’t believe all the horrors the foreign papers say,’ she wrote to her sister Victoria in England. ‘They make one’s hair stand on end – foul exaggeration. Yes, the troops, alas, were obliged to fire. Repeatedly the crowd was told to retreat and that Nicky was not in town (as we are living here this winter) and that one would be forced to shoot, but they would not heed and so blood was shed.’’5

  The many deaths and injuries were ‘ghastly’, she admitted, but had the soldiers not fired and the cavalry not charged, the crowd would have grown ‘colossal’ and even more deaths and injuries would have resulted from the crush of bodies. In effect, the attacking military had saved the crowd from itself.

  In her letter Alix blamed the Interior Minister Prince Sviatopolk-Mirsky (‘all these disorders are thanks to his unpardonable folly’), the lack of good advisers available to the court, political extremists, even Petersburg itself (‘a rotten town, not an atom Russian’). Casting her net wide, she blamed the late Tsar Alexander III; his policy of isolating himself and his family had depleted the number of reliable public servants, she argued, which led to a lack of what she called ‘real’ men – those who were neither too weak nor too liberal nor too narrow-minded to be of use to her husband.

  In this, her first genuine political crisis, Alix showed her sympathies and her prejudices. She was, first and foremost, fiercely loyal and sympathetic to her husband, and firmly opposed to anyone whom she perceived as a threat to his authority. That he lacked personal vigour, conviction and effectiveness she must have seen all too clearly, for she constantly urged him to be more forceful and assertive. But she also saw that, as she put it, his ‘cross was a heavy one to bear’, that ‘he had a bitter hard life to lead’, and that he worked diligently, if largely ineffectually, to bear it. Her sympathy towards him, and her contempt for all those who did not share her feelings, and who failed to give her husband credit for his efforts, were so vast that they swamped her objectivity.

  She saw that Russia was in need of reform, and believed that reforms could be made, ‘gently with the greatest care and forethought’. But she misjudged the gravity and intensity of the upheaval caused by the stirring of the forces of reform: the widening disenchantment with the tsar himself and his autocracy, the harsh resentment at the harm done by ministerial economic policies, the profound thirst for change, above all the deep wellsprings of bitterness among the working poor.

  If Alix could not be objective about the events of January, 1905, it was partly because she was preoccupied with her son.

  Baby Alexei, a beautiful child with pale skin and dark hair, was a source both of joy and of constant distress. Boys with the English disease nearly always died very young; however watchful Alix and others were, however often she prayed to the wall of icons by her bedside, Alix knew that the constant threat of death hung over her son. When she saw him bathed or dressed, when she held him and rocked him and sang to him, she was always looking at his arms and legs, especially his elbows and knees, watching for the discoloured swellings that indicated internal bleeding.

  When the dreaded swellings developed, the tiny joints grew swollen and stiff, the gathered blood pressed on the nerves, and the baby screamed with pain. There was nothing to be done. The doctors were helpless, and little Alexei’s suffering went on, hour after hour, until, exhausted yet unable to sleep or eat, he lay moaning, his face white, looking as though he would die.

  Each attack, Alix knew, could be his last. Many babies whose blood did not clot properly died in their first year. Watching her son through each of his crises, trusting in the protection of Philippe yet anxious and drawn, Alix suffered along with her son. It was hard for her to avoid giving in to despair.

  Struggling with her own illnesses, dealing with the ongoing provocations from her antagonistic in-laws, ever more mindful of her husband’s difficulties and of the threat to the entire imperial family from forces inimical to the throne, the empress had entered a dark season. Her mouth was set in a grim line, her lips pinched together tightly, her eyes sad. She was not yet thirty-three, but her expression was that of a hardened middle-aged woman, a woman beset by ill luck – a woman, as she sometimes said, who carried ill luck with her.

  As she sat looking down at her son, the son St Serafim had given her after so many years of waiting and disappointment, she prayed earnestly for him to be spared. Yet her reason told her that, in human terms at least, Alexei was not likely to live very long. Unless help came from a divine source, and soon, he would surely succumb to one of the terrible attacks of bleeding, ending all her hopes and those of the Romanov dynasty.

  18

  Philippe Vachot was dead. The message reached the palace in late July or early August of 1905, six months after the killings in Petersburg which had come to be known as Bloody Sunday. He had died in Lyon, collapsing suddenly.

  Philippe was dead, but the day of his death was significant: it was St Elijah’s day, and according to the Bible Elijah had not died, but had been taken up into heaven. Philippe had told his admirers that he would not live much longer, that his mission on earth was drawing to a close. And that, once he laid aside his earthly body, his spirit would enter into another man, and live on through him.

  This comforting thought – that Philippe, or his spirit, might have found another embodiment – helped to assuage the dismay Alix must h
ave felt at the news from France. For Philippe, she believed, had protected her family from harm, and they were more in need of protection than ever.

  In the previous February, assassins had thrown a bomb into Serge’s carriage, blowing his body to pieces. The secret police believed that this killing was only the first in a series of planned attacks on the tsar and his relatives; the family did not dare to attend Serge’s funeral because of the danger to themselves. Only weeks later a much more sinister conspiracy was uncovered. Two revolutionaries were arrested and forced to reveal that they had intended to masquerade as members of the court choir. It had been their plan to conceal bombs under their choir robes and then, at the Easter Eve mass, throw them into the midst of the tsar’s family, killing them all.

  The fact that the terrorists were caught only hours before the intended massacre renewed the fears of the imperials. Surrounded as they were by detectives and guards, virtually smothered by protectors, they had nonetheless come close to being annihilated.

  Their daily life, in the spring and summer of 1905, had a surreal quality. Immured behind the iron gates of the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo or within the fortress of Gatchina, constantly made aware not only of their own personal danger but of crop burnings in the countryside, assassinations, strikes, mutinies, and general mayhem, they continued insofar as possible to live as they had in less troubled times. Nine-year-old Olga and eight-year-old Tatiana studied English and French, went riding, and, with their six-year-old sister Marie and little four-year-old Anastasia, accompanied their father on long walks – always under heavy guard. On fine days baby Alexei, wrapped in puffy furs, was put into a basket strapped to a donkey and led down a garden path by a top-hatted groom.

  There were even family picnics, with food spread out on tables under the trees and leisurely strolls in the grounds after lunch.