It was on one such picnic, in fact, that news of the decisive sea battle of the war with Japan reached Nicky. The news could not have been worse; the Russian fleet, which he had sent from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan to defend the Russian land forces, had met with overwhelming defeat by the Japanese fleet off Tsushima Island in the Korea Strait. The fleet was annihilated, just as a great many Russian soldiers had been annihilated in March at Mukden, a battle that had cost nearly a hundred thousand Russian lives.
The tsar blanched when he read the terrible message, but said nothing. He was stoic about the course of the war, as he was about the social chaos and the threats to himself and his family. His inherent fatalism came to the fore. He smoked a cigarette, stroked his beard, and went on with the picnic.
The war was lost, the grave weaknesses in Russia’s army and navy exposed. Nicky accepted the offer of the American president Theodore Roosevelt to oversee negotiations to end the conflict, and by midsummer talks were under way.
Alix, made irritable and rebellious by the constant smothering surveillance, found a way to escape the secret police. Taking the children or a single lady-in-waiting, she ordered a carriage and, dismissing the footmen who usually rode on the outside of the vehicle and the uniformed Cossack who customarily drove her coach (a conspicuous emblem of her status), she went out into the woods, ordering the driver to keep to the unfrequented roads. She stopped from time to time and got out, shepherding the children to a beauty spot overlooking lakeside or hillside, going into a shop or entering a small church to say a prayer.1 She liked to drive slowly through the village near the palace, passing the villas and peering out of the carriage window to see what the people inside were doing.
These clandestine carriage drives, during which the empress eluded her bodyguards and the secret police, were dangerous, not only because of the very real possibility that her carriage might be blown up by a bomb but because of the risk of accidents. On at least one occasion the carriage in which she was riding overturned after colliding with a bicyclist. No one was injured, but the inconvenience was great, as there were no footmen to go for help and no soldiers to escort the empress and her companions home.
To outward appearances at least, Alix was in her prime in 1905. ‘The tsarina was still a beautiful woman at that time,’ wrote the grand duchesses’ French tutor Pierre Gilliard. ‘She was tall and slender and carried herself superbly. But all this ceased the moment one looked into her eyes – those speaking, grey-blue eyes which mirrored the emotions of a sensitive soul.’
Which emotions her eyes revealed Gilliard did not say, but sternness and anxiety and a haunted sorrow were surely among them – and the anguish of keeping secret her worry over her son. She was magnificent – but emotionally and physically overburdened, constantly disappointed in others and with a wilful side that showed itself in her occasional hectoring of her servants, her defiance of the security guards and her increasing domination of her husband. Resigned and passive as Nicky was, he became accustomed to giving in to Alix’s will, in small things and large. Their bond could hardly have been deeper or more affectionate, frayed only very slightly by such minor irritations as Alix’s keeping her husband awake by ‘crunching her favourite English biscuits in bed’.2 Yet an important dynamic between them was shifting; more and more, when decisions were to be made, it was Alix who made them.
Her war work went on. Though the last of the battles had been fought, and peace talks were under way, thousands of wounded men were still being sent to the capital, and the need for bandages, warm clothes and knitted stockings, medical supplies and blankets went on, and Alix described herself as ‘sewing away hard’. In addition to her workshop, she opened a home for disabled sailors in the park at Tsarskoe Selo, and a School for Nurses and Housemaids, whose day-to-day operation she delegated to others.3
She was kept busy, with her close supervision of her children, her overseeing of their lessons, her attention to their wardrobes – on which she spent as much time as she did on her own, making lists and inventories of garments, ordering new clothing made every six months, frequently going through the nursery closets and giving away what was worn – plus her time-consuming concern for servants and household members in need or ill. Letter-writing took much time as well. But then, in the midst of all her occupation, she would feel the onset of a severe headache, and would have to lie down on the chaise longue in her mauve boudoir, a lace shawl draped over her legs, silk curtains covering the windows to prevent the light from hurting her eyes. In the view of at least one family member, Alix’s health worsened after Alexei’s birth and the diagnosis of haemophilia. She became ‘troubled and apprehensive’, her ‘character underwent a change and her health, physical as well as moral, altered’.4
Having had to give up exercise after Alexei’s birth because of recurrent leg pains and shortness of breath, Alix returned to her earlier pastimes of singing and playing the piano. Every week Professor Kuendinger came to the palace to play piano duets with her for several hours, and Madame Iretsky, her singing coach, trained her voice. Alix was a contralto, and liked to sing duets with sopranos. Sometimes well known singers from the opera would join her, or members of her retinue. Her invalid maid of honour Sonia Orbeliani, whom she had taken to live in the palace, gave musical parties in her rooms where professional pianists and singers entertained; the empress was often to be found in the small audience, but she was far too uncomfortable and withdrawn to perform herself.
When in private, she liked to play one of her many grand pianos, by herself or with Olga, who had a precocious musical gift. She would sit down at the keyboard, take off her rings, and toss them on the nearest table or sofa, then begin to play. Long afterwards, missing her rings, she would summon her maids of honour and order them to find the rings – which were very valuable, as among them was her pink diamond engagement ring. ‘This sometimes caused considerable annoyance,’ Martha Mouchanow wrote, ‘as they could not always be found immediately, and a frantic search was made all over the palace, until at last they turned up in some impossible place or other.’5 Eventually the maids of honour must have learned to begin their search in the immediate vicinity of all the grand pianos.
In August 1905, Nicky journeyed to Pskov by train and took Alix and his sister Olga with him. Alix wrote to the children. ‘Papa and Auntie Olga have gone for a walk in the lovely woods; my old legs hurt too much to walk, so I remained at home,’ she began. ‘Now the train has at last stopped. We got quite soaked this morning; my new waterproof cape was wet through. We saw lots of soldiers; cavalry, infantry, and artillery. The country is very pretty.’
She described how, when they stopped at one village, many peasants crowded around them and one woman asked after the grand duchesses’ health and wondered why they were not on the train. The tsar and tsarina were greeted with bread and salt and flowers picked from the small gardens behind the wooden houses.
‘I wonder how you all are,’ Alix went on. ‘I feel so sad without my sweet little girlies. Be sure to be very good and remember, elbows off the table, sit straight and eat your meat nicely. I kiss you all very tenderly.’6 Alexei, or ‘Baby Tsar’, as she called him, was teething, and had been left behind in the care of his nurses and the court doctors. ‘I hope he is quite well and does not have pain,’ Alix wrote. Had he had an attack, she would have been summoned.
Violent disruptions in many parts of Russia continued into the autumn of 1905, and seemed to escalate as the year wore on. In the countryside around Pskov, at the time of the imperials’ visit, all was temporarily quiet, but the calm was deceptive, for in many provinces members of a recently formed Peasants’ Union burned crops, murdered their landlords, and assaulted government officials. In the Caucasus there was murderous street fighting, with rebels firing at troops from the windows of their houses. Weary soldiers returning from the war against the Japanese aboard troop trains found themselves under attack as they made their way home; having survived months of artillery fire, disease,
and scanty rations they faced a hostile Russian populace bent on forcing political change.
In the midst of the escalating chaos the imperial family went aboard the yacht Polar Star for a two-week vacation. The weather was exceptionally fair in September 1905, the Baltic blue and smooth, the clouds high and white, the breezes mild. Alix took pictures of the children with her box camera, made drawings for them with coloured pencils, and sat chatting with her favourite new lady-in-waiting Anna Vyrubov on the deck of the ship, wide straw hats protecting their faces from the strong sun. The yacht wove in among the islands off the Finnish coast, and the family went ashore to hike; Nicky hunted birds and the children swam, waded and collected bugs and fish.
Telegrams from the palace told of the rapidly deteriorating situation, with Moscow virtually shut down because of spreading strikes. Banks were not functioning, for the clerks refused to work; trains and trams were not running, no bread was baked, no newspapers published, no goods of any kind produced. There was not even any running water, because the engineers and maintenance workers had walked away from their jobs. The price of food was rising rapidly. After a few days the telegrams ceased, for the telegraph offices were deserted. Now the true seriousness of the crisis became unmistakably clear. Moscow had been all but shut down, and the massive paralysis was spreading to other cities – soon Petersburg would be without workers, without communications, without order of any kind.
This was a crisis on a scale no one in Russia had ever faced, not even in the time of Catherine the Great when the great rebel Pugachev had taken over a third of the kingdom. Now there was not one rebel leader with hundreds of thousands of followers, but millions of independent subjects, working together in a common aim – to bring the country to the brink of irreversible chaos in order to compel reform.
The Polar Star returned from its odyssey and the imperial family was once again immured at Tsarskoe Selo, under heavy guard.
Alix compared the tumultuous weeks of October 1905 to a very difficult labour. A new order was coming slowly and painfully to birth, forced into the light by the harsh midwife of revolution. The tsar was in an agony of indecision; should he attempt to crush the unrest by force (a doubtful proposition given the mutinous mood among the soldiers), which might at best delay the granting of civil rights and citizen representation, or should he follow the urgent advice of his principal minister Witte and submit to the revolutionaries’ demands?
He felt keenly the weight of his responsibilities, the burden of carrying, in his person, the honour of the Romanov house. For centuries his ancestors had borne supreme, autocratic power; for him to suddenly break that tradition and decide to share the power of the throne, to however moderate an extent, would be, or so it seemed to him, to lose the crown itself. ‘You cannot imagine the anguish this has cost me,’ he wrote to his mother. Yet Witte pressed him almost hourly to see that no other course of action was feasible, that he must grant some constitutional rights, and cousin Nicholas Nicholaevich, strutting and fuming dramatically in the halls of the Alexander Palace, drew himself up to his great height in the tsar’s presence and threatened to shoot himself unless the necessary changes were made – and at once.
Guests at the palace that October, unsettled and full of fears, shivered when they entered the drawing room and saw, side by side on one wall, portraits of Empress Alexandra and Marie Antoinette. With anarchy in the cities, thefts of land and murder of landowners in the country, their thoughts naturally turned to the French Revolution and the ferocity it had unleashed. Marie Antoinette and her well-meaning husband Louis XVI had gone to the guillotine as a result of their subjects’ ever escalating political demands. If the tsar made concessions to his subjects, how secure would his throne be? How safe would his life be, and the lives of his family?
In such an environment, Alix’s efforts to maintain a facade of serene unconcern, presiding at dinner parties, could hardly succeed. She soon abandoned her futile social endeavours, said her prayers, did her best to say to Nicky what she thought he needed to hear – and waited for him to make his decision.
With the darkness of anarchy closing in around him, and clamorous voices in his ears, ever mindful of his increasing personal danger, on October 17, 1905, Nicky called for the papers Witte had drawn up and signed his name to them. He promised to allow an elected assembly, a Duma, to meet and, in the words of the manifesto, ‘to grant the people the unshakable foundations of civil liberty on the basis of true inviolability of person, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association’. He permitted the organization of unions and political parties.
In effect, Nicky was carrying forwards the reform begun by his grandfather Alexander when he freed the serfs and instituted the first significant body of reforms.
But like his grandfather, he instituted the changes – and then backed away from them. Within weeks of issuing his manifesto, he had authorized the military to punish revolutionaries, workers, anyone who had been vocal in his or her opposition to the government. Arrests, executions, the widespread destruction of homes and villages went on throughout the winter, along with brutal pogroms against Jews in many cities. In town after town, village after village, dragoons rode in and set fire to barns where food was stored, killed animals, burned houses. Mass executions were held, there was random slaughter and mayhem.
Thousands died in the bloodbath of reprisals – yet the revolutionaries had won. The rights had been granted. In a single year the tsar had been forced to surrender his absolute power and also to concede defeat to the Japanese, ceding to them half of Sakhalin, and to evacuate Manchuria.
The old order had collapsed. And instead of bringing calm and restoring peace, the advent of reform brought demands for further reform, and more violence.
Shut away under guard at Tsarskoe Selo, besieged by frightening rumours, never knowing from one day to the next whether conspirators armed with dynamite might find a way to steal into the Alexander Palace and blow them all up, apprehensive about the tsarevich and without the comforting protective influence of Philippe, the imperials waited for news to arrive by courier from Moscow and Petersburg as the days grew short and darkness closed in around them.
In their worry and isolation they heard, from Bishop Theophan, Alix’s confessor and President of the Petersburg Theological Seminary, and from Nicky’s confessor Father Alexander, of a healer from Siberia, now living in Petersburg, called Father Gregory, said to possess extraordinary gifts of prayer and curative powers and the ability to read the future. Hundreds of miraculous healings had been attributed to him. In particular he was said to be able to ‘bewitch the blood’, to control the flow of blood from one part of the body to another, even to stanch the bleeding of wounds.
Militsa and Stana too knew of Father Gregory and his reputation for remarkable healings, and they told Alix and Nicky about him.
The Siberian was brought to court, and ushered past the battery of watchful guards into the presence of the imperials. He stood there, in their midst, a middle-aged peasant with long reddish hair and an uncombed beard, reeking of dirt, speaking in short bursts of nearly incomprehensible Russian – the heavily accented Russian of the Tobolsk region. His face was deeply scarred and weathered, his teeth blackened and neglected, and his gleaming eyes rolled like the eyes of a madman as he talked.
But there was a warmth in his presence, a radiance that was familiar to Alix and Nicky from countless other encounters with healers and psychics, most recently Philippe Vachot. As Father Gregory talked on, jumping rapidly from topic to topic, quoting from the Bible, making pronouncements about the future, he wrapped his hearers in the mantle of his charisma. They listened contentedly, then eagerly, for his presence was powerful, and his words seemed to carry the weight of the divine.
Had not Philippe promised that his spirit would enter into another man, and live on through him? Perhaps Father Gregory was that other man, the avatar of the powerful Frenchman who had protected the family for so long. Perhaps Father Gregory was s
ent from God, to continue the work Philippe had begun. Alix, seeing him and hearing his words, began to feel certain of this. And the more certain she became, the more hopeful she was for the future, for if only she and her family remained within the orbit of Father Gregory’s power, as they once had within that of Philippe, they might never have to worry again.
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When Nicky’s sister Olga first saw Father Gregory she was struck by how primitive he was. His guttural, uncouth voice, his uncontrolled gestures, his habit of tossing his head and rolling his eyes as he talked made him seem like something out of the Siberian forest, a man yet more than a man, more like a primal force, an eruption of nature with the raw purity of a waterfall or an avalanche.
And along with this raw natural vitality went another very arresting quality: a deep and unfeigned spiritual feeling, expressed through gentleness and piety.
‘When I saw him,’ Olga wrote, ‘I felt that gentleness and warmth radiated from him. All the children seemed to like him. They were completely at their ease with him. I still remember their laughter as little Alexei, deciding he was a rabbit, jumped up and down the room.’1
As Olga watched, Father Gregory took Alexei by the hand and took him into his bedroom, and the adults followed.
‘There was something like a hush as though we had found ourselves in church,’ Olga remembered. ‘In Alexei’s bedroom no lamps were lit; the only light came from the candles burning in front of some beautiful icons.’ Father Gregory bowed his head in prayer, and little Alexei, standing beside him, grew very still.
‘It was all most impressive. I also knew that my little nephew had joined him in prayer. I really cannot describe it – but I was then conscious of the man’s utter sincerity.’2
At the time he met the imperial family Father Gregory was one of a number of startsy, or stranniki, in Petersburg, many of them rough-spoken, uncultivated men who dressed in peasant garments and were coarse in their habits and tastes. Many were flagrantly dissolute, holding orgies, drinking heavily, brawling and making public nuisances of themselves; most were well known to the police. Their immorality and vulgar behaviour was part of their theology of ‘salvation through sin,’ which required them to sin lustily in order to attain the maximum salvatory effect.
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