It all happened quickly, too quickly for careful calculation. Alix and Anna climbed into a boat, Nicky and the rest of the crew abandoned ship as well and in less time than Nicky had calculated, everyone was safely off the sinking vessel, which lay on its side in the calm water, still buoyant but gradually dipping lower and lower under the waves.
Tragedy had been averted. Before long the crew sighted a Finnish ship, hailed her, and the passengers and crew were taken aboard and delivered safely to one of the cruisers steaming towards the area from Kronstadt.
Recalling the incident later, one of the passengers, Princess Obolensky, was struck by how ‘resourceful and full of energy’ the empress had been. It was she, and not her husband, who had seen to the safety of the family and staff, who had mobilized everyone’s efforts, and who had managed to salvage the valuables from the cabins. Forgetting herself – she had been the last woman to leave the ship – and caught up entirely in the peril of the moment, Alix had acted as one born to command. This instinct to lead, to rescue, to take command in a crisis, would increasingly be called on in the years to come.
20
In autumn 1907, soon after the accident aboard the Standart, the empress once again fell ill, and took to her bed, this time staying there for months.
Her legs and back gave her so much pain that even the smallest movement hurt her, and the doctors came daily to give her injections in alternate legs. With the pain came weakness, fatigue, fever and headache. Week after week she lay all but immobile, insisting on getting fully dressed each day as if to go out – she disliked dressing gowns, with their air of idleness and languor – and waiting impatiently to improve.
She occupied herself with her everpresent embroidery and other handcrafts, wrote letters (often at night when pain kept her from sleeping), read, prayed, fretted over her inactivity. She was accustomed to being busy, indeed to feeling hurried, there was so much to do.1 It was not in her nature to lie back and rest, even though her weary body demanded it. ‘She was convinced,’ Martha Mouchanow wrote, ‘that every single hour of any man’s or woman’s existence ought to be consecrated to duty or occupation of some kind.’2 Obsessive occupation had always been her hallmark, and without it she felt useless.
She not only felt useless, she felt burdensome. The doctors, observing that any exertion made her tired, diagnosed heart trouble, and warned Nicky that his wife showed signs of becoming seriously ill, and this greatly increased the concern shown for her by everyone around her.3 To her sciatic pain and migraines was now added the strain and worry of a weak heart and, although Alix never complained, and rarely admitted to suffering, it was evident to her family and even to her ladies-in-waiting that she was struggling as never before with physical illness. It vexed her that others made what she called a ‘fuss’ over her, that her sisters were worried about her and Irene was contemplating making a special trip to Russia to visit her.
Christmas 1907 came, and Alix was still very ill, too weak to stand beside her husband when he received the diplomatic corps, too enervated to allow a performance of KR’s new play, The Bride of Messina, to be put on in the palace grounds.4 She was ‘being careful’, he said, avoiding fatigue by resting. She made an effort to read, and tried, no doubt, to read the intellectually stimulating, challenging books she had always preferred, books on astronomy, natural history and mathematics. (History she disdained as boring, having to do with ‘the sayings and doings of people long dead’.5) She may have tried to reread The Origin of Species, a book she had long admired, a copy of which she kept in her room, much to the horror of her Father Confessor who considered it dangerous. But reading made her head ache, even the light reading she normally disapproved of as frivolous; novels did not distract her or lift her spirits, and she soon wearied of the trivialities of the plots.
It did distract her, or at least it satisfied her need for orderliness, to keep a careful chronology of her days of illness, just as she kept careful track of her lace and of the garments in her own and her children’s wardrobes. ‘Today it is the forty-ninth day that I am ill,’ she wrote to her daughter Tatiana in January of 1908. ‘Tomorrow begins the eighth week.’ On that forty-ninth day, she lay in the dark a long time, her head pounding, her legs aching.
Her spirits were very low. ‘When one feels ill, all seems harder to bear,’ she once wrote to Nicky. With illness, with weakness came a greater difficulty in ‘mastering herself’, she admitted. What had looked bright and hopeful now looked dim, and she became over emotional, too quick to give in to tears.6
She could no longer master herself. Mentally as well as physically, Alix now stood on uncertain ground.
She was depressed, ‘despairing’, as she wrote to her sister Victoria, about her life. Though she talked endlessly, especially to her daughters, about the power of prayer and the inevitability of miracles, about how nothing was impossible for God, her anxieties were not quieted by her faith.7 Instead, as she approached her late thirties, Alix entered a murky cognitive realm in which reason often tottered and balance was all but lost. She had veered off the path of common sense and sound judgment, and in an effort to regain clarity and peace of mind she clung to the religious certainties impressed on her in childhood and reinforced by men such as Philippe and Father Gregory. The more she struggled for understanding, the more she insisted that God ruled all; her constant need to reiterate the primacy of her faith underscored its insecurity. The inner conflict, the tension between trust and fearful doubt, preyed on the empress’s mind and increased what others perceived as her ‘air of suffering’.
Alix’s suffering was in fact more hidden from view than ever in 1908 and 1909, years when she spent more and more time in seclusion. She was very seldom to be seen on public occasions. She did go aboard the Standart – repaired and restored after the accident in Finnish waters – and made journeys to Livadia and Peterhof and even went as faraway as Stockholm and Cowes for vacations and family visits. But moving from place to place was painful, so much of the time she lay on her sofa in the mauve boudoir at Tsarskoe Selo, or on the terrace at Livadia, or even on a mattress placed on the ground in the open air of the garden, wincing every time she shifted her position and gritting her teeth when the pain in her back and legs was especially severe.
The imperial doctors suggested that she go to a spa, not only to ease her physical pain but to calm her overwrought nerves, but she resisted the idea. She tried to cultivate an attitude of acceptance. ‘Don’t think my ill health depresses me personally,’ she wrote to her sister Victoria somewhat disingenuously. ‘I don’t care, except to see my dear ones suffer on my account, and that I cannot fulfil my duties. But once God sends such a cross, it must be borne. Darling Mama also lost her health at an early age.’8
That she had, once and for all, ‘lost her health’ seemed clear. She did not expect to regain her full vigour. Yet there were times when she rose energetically from her bed or mattress and strode across the room or, if out of doors, climbed a hill, leaving those who watched her puzzled, and giving rise to whispers among the servants that she had never been truly incapacitated or in pain at all. Certainly she had appeared robust when giving orders and taking charge during the Standart disaster, and when nursing Anastasia through diphtheria, when she stayed by her daughter’s bedside through most of five long nights until her fever broke. In truth Alix could nearly always be counted on to get up out of her sickbed in response to the strong pull of others’ needs. All her rescuing impulses were triggered, and she responded, without hesitation, to whatever crisis arose.
But between crises, fatigue overcame her, and she succumbed to chronic pain and to the shortness of breath that indicated a weakened heart.
‘My darling Mama!’ Tatiana wrote to Alix early in 1909, ‘I hope you won’t be today very tired and that you can get up to dinner. I am always so awfully sorry when you are tired and when you can’t get up. I will pray for you my darling mama in church . . . Please sleep well and don’t get tired.’9
; With Alix in seclusion, resting on her couch or bed, and the children in the nursery wing of the Alexander Palace with their governess Sophie Tioutchev or their principal nurse Mary (about whom Olga complained, claiming that Mary got angry ‘without reason’), notes passed back and forth between mother and children during the day. Alix often sent them instructions and exhortations, reprimanding Olga (‘don’t be so wild and kick about and show your legs, it is not pretty’), telling them all to be obedient to Mary and Sophie, cautioning them against becoming overly fond of clothes or jewellery (as Tatiana was inclined to do), gently but firmly reprimanding Olga for her temper and Marie for her stubbornness. She was anxious about their delicate health, and very concerned about the formation of their moral character, repeatedly reminding them of their duty to help those in want and making every effort to keep all the children from becoming arrogant or haughty.10
All five of the children had an abundance of animal spirits. When their Aunt Olga took them out walking in the palace park, she had trouble controlling them. Freed from their nurse’s oversight they ran off in different directions, ‘lively and full of energy’.11 Alexei in particular was not only high-spirited and energetic, but undisciplined. Fearing that to curb his behaviour might cause him to have tantrums, during which he might bang his head or kick furniture, and knowing that any such violence could bring on an attack of bleeding, his parents chose to let him do as he liked, and told the household staff to do the same. As a result he was recalcitrant and ill-mannered, disruptive and thoroughly spoiled – in contrast to his sisters, who when others were present sat with their hands folded, or busy with needlework, spoke in measured tones and always remembered their table manners.
Both Alix and Nicky wanted to raise their children simply – or as simply as possible amid surroundings of great magnificence. At birth each child inherited a very large fortune, but this endowment was never brought to their attention. Instead, the girls in particular were encouraged to be thrifty, not to waste anything, never to squander the small sum given to them each month for pocket money. The girls’ fine clothes, made by the Moscow couturier Lamanov, were worn for many years, Olga and Tatiana’s outgrown dresses handed down to Marie and Anastasia.12 The small silver ornaments, books and diaries they spent their money on were modest in cost and they were encouraged to save some of their monthly allowance to give to charity.13
With Alexei, as heir to the throne, always given pre-eminence and absorbing the majority of his parents’ care and attention, a situation his illness intensified, the imperial daughters had to be emotionally self-sufficient. They looked to one another for support, and seem to have formed a bond strong enough to overcome whatever personal conflicts arose among them. Like their mother, who had learned from the stouthearted, iron-willed Baroness Grancy ‘never to give in, either physically or morally’, they were taught self-discipline from an early age. But they did not all respond well to this harsh tutelage, which called for a great degree of self-sacrifice. And when Alix’s illness removed her for long stretches of time, at least two of the girls reacted emotionally. Tatiana wilted. In her notes to her mother there is a plangent tone, an underlying sadness. And Marie, whom her sisters called by the unkind nickname ‘Fat Little Bow-Wow’, became ‘wild and naughty’ and lashed out verbally, saying that nobody loved her, that she was only in the way, and keeping company with Xenia’s daughter Irina instead of her sisters.14
Alix noted all this, brooded over it, and did her best to guide and comfort her children while coping with her own physical wretchedness and low spirits. ‘Motherliness lay at the root of her character,’ Sophie Buxhoeveden wrote of Alix.15 But the empress’s idea of motherliness was idiosyncratic; it reflected, naturally enough, her own priorities. She saw herself in her motherly role as guide and protector, leading her children away from all that she condemned as ‘frivolity’ and towards a high-minded vision of self-improvement and duty, within the framework of a self-denying morality. She was suspicious of pleasure, mistaking it for self-indulgence.
Fortunately for the girls, Nicky’s sister Olga, who spent a good deal of time with the family during the years of Alix’s illness, offered her nieces a respite from their mother’s well-intentioned strictures. When the family was in residence at Tsarskoe Selo, once a week the imperial daughters spent an entire day in Petersburg with their cheerful, somewhat unconventional young aunt, lunching at the Anitchkov Palace with their grandmother Minnie (an ‘irksomely formal’ event, Olga recalled), then going on to Olga’s townhouse for a tea dance with other young people, at which they ‘all enjoyed themselves immensely’. There was much laughter and music, games and conversation, and the light-hearted presence of Olga, who seemed, in her spontaneity and jokiness, almost as young as the girls themselves.16 ‘These Sunday afternoons were great events in the girls’ lives,’ Sophie Buxhoeveden thought. It was always with regret that they heard a footman announce the arrival, at ten in the evening, of a carriage from the palace, waiting to take them home.
How well Alix bore her poor health and unwelcome seclusion is impossible to say. To her children she showed a stoic fortitude. ‘When God thinks the time comes to make me better, He will, and not before,’ she wrote to daughter Olga. ‘He knows why He sent the illness, and we must be quite sure it’s for some good.’17 One thing was certain: she took great comfort from Father Gregory, whose visits to Tsarskoe Selo became more frequent in these difficult years 1908 and 1909.
Unlike Philippe Vachot, who had been the teacher and master for an entire group of devotees, Father Gregory came to offer his spiritual gifts to the imperial family alone. He was their ‘dear friend’; Nicky and Alix were his ‘Little Father’ and ‘Little Mother’. With the children he was on the most affectionate terms, Alexei trusting him and turning to him when in pain and Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia always happy to see him in the nursery and admitting him eagerly to their bedrooms – sometimes secretly, for they knew the governess Sophie Tioutchev did not approve. He sat on their beds, talking familiarly with them as a close relative might, exuding, no doubt, the gentleness and warmth Nicky’s sister Olga had been aware of in him, putting the girls completely at ease. With his shaggy long hair and childlike genuineness, his simplicity and constant talk of divine love and the sweetness of the natural world, he must have seemed to the children like a creature out of a fairy tale, real yet touched with the surreal, and no doubt they were much in awe of his often demonstrated power to heal.
‘My dear pearl M!’ he wrote to Marie in 1908, ‘tell me how you talked with the sea, with nature! I miss your simple soul. We will see each other soon! A big kiss.’ His words were those of a rapturous innocent, a holy fool. ‘My dear M! My little friend! May the Lord help you to carry your cross with wisdom and joy in Christ. This world is like the day, look it’s already evening. So it is with the cares of the world.’18
This blithe, elemental lyricism was Father Gregory’s trademark, an ability to dwell mentally in a realm beyond the ordinary, on a higher plane of existence where the cares of the world were overshadowed by an ecstatic joy in the knowledge of God’s omnipresent, benign power. Trusting in the goodness of creation, fearful of nothing, seeing the future and knowing that it too was good gave the Siberian a radiant optimism that drew the beleaguered imperials to him.
‘When I can see our dear friend, I shall be very happy,’ Alix told her daughter Olga.19 In his presence her doubts receded, her faith increased. And her headaches (and Nicky’s too) were cured – at least for a time. Father Gregory had only to shout, ‘Be off!’ and the terrible blinding pain ceased.
Beneficial as he was to the tsar and his immediate family, Father Gregory struck others as not only odd but threatening. Xenia thought him ‘sinister’.20 Ella, remembering how Alix had been led into delusion by Philippe Vachot, sent warnings to her sister cautioning her against drawing Father Gregory too deeply into her family life and relying too much on his ministrations.21 Few among the household staff held the Siberian starets in awe,
rather the reverse.22 He continued to attract a large number of followers to his Petersburg apartment, and word of his cures was spread through the capital. But he also aroused distrust. His true nature eluded comprehension. He made people uneasy. His surreal, fey quality was taken by some to be something else entirely: the evasive cunning of the trickster. Indeed even those who admired him admitted that he was ‘like a chameleon, whose words and actions changed their colour according to the varied needs of the people he met, the environment and, finally, his own moods’. And while this chameleon-like adaptability made Father Gregory a sympathetic guide and teacher, it also allowed him to slip with disarming ease into intimacy with people, intimacy that could, or so it seemed to those who were suspicious of him, prove to be dangerous.23
By 1909 the imperial doctors were amazed that Alexei was still alive. Chronic bleeding in his stomach threatened to turn into a fatal abscess. Pain from internal bleeding in his back made him scream, sometimes for days, his hoarse cries so piteous that the servants, hearing them as they passed along the corridor outside his room, had to cover their ears. His legs grew stiff with engorged blood, the left leg so distorted that for a long time he could not use it at all and had to be carried everywhere by his constant companion, the burly sailor Derevenko.
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