They came to the German capital at the end of May, dozens of relatives converging, meeting at the train station, embracing and kissing and chattering much as they had nearly twenty years earlier, when they had come together in Coburg for Ernie and Ducky’s wedding. Then Queen Victoria had been the matriarch of the clan. Now there was no matriarch, no single personality to whom all deferred. But the sense of a family bond was still strong. Alix was reunited with her sisters Victoria and Irene, Minnie with her sister Alexandra, dowager queen of England. Nicky, Willy and George met as cousinly equals, not as rivals; that the sovereigns of Russia and Great Britain were diplomatically allied in opposition to the German Emperor was easily overlooked as they toasted one another and the bride and groom, wore the uniforms of one another’s military services out of courtesy, and acted like the wedding guests they were.
If Alix was uncomfortable and anxious at the banquet in the imperial palace, amid a crowd of two hundred and fifty people, no one noted it. She was among friends and supporters and, though she disliked and distrusted Willy, there were many in the crowd whom she loved and looked forward to seeing. Just being away from claustrophobic Petersburg, with its vicious newspaper reports and mocking gossip, must have felt to her like a reprieve.
But the reprieve was to be brief. Soon enough the family was back at Tsarskoe Selo, and Alix was once again immersed in family affairs – the worrisome attachment of Xenia and Sandro’s daughter Irina to the dissolute, immensely rich young aristocrat Felix Yusupov (‘I would never let a daughter of mine marry him’), daughter Anastasia’s inconvenient and irritating efforts to ‘breed worms’, the worsening illness and invalidism of Alix’s long-time friend and maid of honour Sonia Orbeliani, who continued to live at the palace, quarrels with the ungrateful Anna Vyrubov (‘Here we gave our hearts our home to her, our private life even – and this is what we have gained! It is difficult not to become bitter’), Nicky’s sister Olga’s divorce, and the self-destructive deterioration of Father Gregory, whose lechery (he even pawed the startled divorcée Olga), brawling and heavy drinking expanded.5
‘My heart is heavy and sore,’ Alix wrote. She continued to stand by her spiritual mentor, denying what was being said about him, and denying to herself the evident worsening of the danger of war in the autumn of 1913.
Reports reached Nicky’s desk that the Austrian army was concentrating its forces on the Russian frontier in Galicia as a consequence of Bulgarian attacks on Serbia. Despite diplomatic efforts, it looked as though the fragile truce in the Balkans might give way to further aggression at any time. Meanwhile the newspapers were full of editorials about the suffering Serbs and the menacing Austrians, rousing the patriotic ire of the public. And the Duma leader Rodzianko was urging the tsar to take advantage of the weakness of Turkey to send Russian troops to conquer Constantinople, an imperial enterprise well suited to the celebration of the three-hundredth Romanov year.
Sore-hearted, Alix wanted nothing more than to be left in peace, yet peace, it seemed, was always denied her – except during the family’s excursions to Livadia in autumn and spring. Back in Tsarskoe Selo during the winter social season, as the new year of 1914 opened, she kept to her practice of avoiding the numerous parties and balls, uncomfortably aware that the best dinners and dances that year were said to be given at the stark new mansion of Count Pourtalès, the elderly German ambassador.
The only ball she attended was the one Minnie gave at the Anitchkov Palace for the four imperial grand duchesses, Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia. The girls were lovely, especially the slender, enchanting Tatiana. But their mother, though ill and middle-aged, eclipsed them. One observer thought that Alix ‘was the very picture of beauty’ with her stately posture, fine features and delicate manners. ‘There was something sad in her smile,’ he wrote, but that note of wistfulness only added to her charm. (Clearly the ‘haggard, middle-aged’ empress Martha Mouchanow had perceived was not evident to everyone.)6 Though the ball went on until four-thirty in the morning, Alix left at midnight, quite worn out.
A mild winter and sodden spring gave way to an unusually fair, cloudless summer. New leaves on the trees in the park grew dusty in the heat, peonies wilted in the flowerbeds and along the pavements of the capital, a fine yellow dirt accumulated, blown into piles by occasional gusts of warm air off the dark blue river.
Petersburgers shed their coats and scarves and basked in the fine weather, eating ice cream, staying out late in the light evenings, worrying that the heat might bring an epidemic, as it often did. The air stank of smoke from country fires, tinting the silvery light of early summer with a brown cast.
Those who could afford to left the city for their rural estates, or for resorts in Finland, not only to escape the heat but to escape the prospect of a worsening labour protest. Already by mid-June over a hundred thousand workers in the capital had gone on strike, and more were walking out of the factories daily.
They drifted through the city in groups, gathering at street corners in dozens, then hundreds, herded by police and patrols of mounted Cossacks armed with sabres. Many in the city remembered Bloody Sunday, nine years earlier, when the soldiers had been ordered to fire on the crowds and dozens had died in the snow. And they recalled hearing of a more recent, more terrible massacre in the Lena goldfields, when soldiers had fired on striking workers, killing hundreds.
The workers of Petersburg began building barricades, claiming portions of the streets as their own. As their numbers grew, their confidence expanded. They recruited others to their ranks. Hundreds of factories emptied. Before long, people said, half the workers in the country would be on strike.
In the midst of the heatwave, a series of thunderstorms broke over Petersburg. Sudden showers drenched streets and drowned gardens in full bloom. Wet through, the workers abandoned their half-built barricades and took shelter in halls and warehouses, watching as bolts of coloured lightning shot across the sky, burning like meteors, or struck spires and stone turrets. Thunder boomed out across the Neva, louder than any artillery in the tsar’s armies, loud enough to be heard at Peterhof, where the tsar and his family were staying in preparation for the arrival of an important visitor, President Poincaré of France.
It promised to be a significant visit, one that would strengthen Russia’s diplomatic ties with her French ally and further a settlement – without the direct military involvement of Russia – in the increasingly tangled and ominous crisis in the Balkans.
Towards the end of June an act of terrorism had entangled the situation further. A Serbian assassin had killed the heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife as they rode in a carriage through the streets of Sarajevo. The diplomatic after-effects were serious, and urgent; every foreign ministry in Europe was obliged to react, telegrams and telephone messages went back and forth, crucial decisions were being debated.
The tsar continued to feel, despite the mounting exigency of the situation, that peace would be maintained, and he told Poincaré so when they met. He could not believe that the Germans would start a war, that Emperor William would ‘launch his country on some wild adventure’. Nor would the bereaved, elderly Emperor Franz Josef of Austria be drawn into a massive conflict – for war, if it came, would surely involve all of Europe.
Poincaré disagreed. He gauged the mood of the other states of Europe more realistically than his host could. War seemed to him inevitable. The ubiquitous military culture demanded it. The massive build-up of weaponry, the immense navies, the diplomatic configuration that made it virtually impossible for any of the major states to act alone, the millions of men under arms, poised to take their places once battle lines were drawn, all pointed to conflict – and a conflict, he thought, that could not long be postponed.
During the French president’s visit two splendid military displays were carried out at Krasnoe Selo.7 Rank on rank of uniformed men marched past the reviewing stand, the dust raised by their marching feet rising in the warm air to make a golden halo around t
hem. Flags waved, bands played stirring patriotic marches, from time to time the watching crowd burst into song. High in the cloudless sky an airplane buzzed, circling the reviewing field again and again.
The pageantry, the feelings of loyalty stirred by the massed troops, the sight of magnificent young officers and valiant, limping old generals, veterans of long-ago wars, walking along between the lines of soldiers moved many in the crowd to tears.
And then, as the guests of honour watched, the tsar, riding on a white horse, rode past, looking tall and soldierly, no longer a man but a mythic leader of men, a symbol of power and greatness. The crowd cheered and cheered, as the imperial uncles and cousins rode along behind the sovereign, a parade of resplendent, stalwart figures, followed in their turn by the imperial family in open carriages, escorted by outriders in scarlet and gold.
A band began to play the Evening Hymn, and almost at once, an observer wrote, ‘from across the entire wide, vast plain the men’s voices joined in, taking up the melody’, as the sky was filled with a blaze of sunset light. No theatrical spectacle could have been more majestic.
It was poignant, it was glorious. And it augured war.
Alix rode in one of the carriages, her immaculate white gown covered in dust, which made her cough. Her daughters rode beside her, all of them in large flower-trimmed hats to shade them from the sun. The empress had been present at the diplomatic dinners, the palace entertainments presented in the French president’s honour, forcing herself to play her appropriate role. She knew that much was at stake. But throughout the eventful days her thoughts were elsewhere.
Within hours of the assassination of the Austrian archduke, Father Gregory had also been attacked, in Pokrovsky, by a follower of his enemy, the monk Iliodor. Though his wounds were nearly fatal, a doctor from Tiumen had saved his life – Alix had sent the doctor a gold watch and a fervent letter of thanks – and he was recuperating.
The assault on Father Gregory, and the sudden turmoil over the Balkan situation, broke in upon what had promised to be a quiet summer for the imperial family, filled with picnics and games of tennis, long walks in the woods and yachting trips along the Finnish coast. Alix had been planning the next visit to Livadia, sending out letters to Ernie, Irene and Victoria, and to her old friend Marie Bariatinsky, instructing the staff to prepare the guest rooms and stock the larder. She had been looking forward to the warm autumn days in the Crimea, to visiting her gardens and sitting on the broad terraces overlooking the ocean, to visiting her sanatoria and helping out with the charity bazaars.
The commotion of recent days had interrupted all those plans. Too much was happening too quickly. Making plans had become impossible. The most she could do was take her place beside Nicky, and do her best to help while he coped with the difficulties.
By the final evening of the French president’s visit, after hours of dining followed by long speeches, she was worn out. She invited the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue to sit beside her, to keep her company as the evening drew to a close.
‘With a forced smile,’ Paléologue recalled, ‘she said in a tired tone: “I’m glad I came tonight . . . I was afraid there would be a storm.”’ She chatted about trivial things, the decorations for the dinner, the good weather to be expected for the president’s return voyage. Though making light conversation was always an effort to her, she made the effort, though Paléologue knew how hard it was. He had watched her for the past four days, and observed her discomfort, how in the midst of a crowd her smile would become set and the veins in her cheeks would stand out. How she bit her lip with tension, her breathing shallow, her eyes restless and on the edge of panic. He thought, at times, she was ‘obviously struggling with hysteria’, and she relaxed only when her husband was nearby, or when she could fix her attention entirely on him.8
As Alix chatted with the ambassador, the musicians suddenly began playing a loud, fast passage, complete with blaring brass and throbbing kettledrums. She winced, and put her hands up to cover her ears. ‘With a pained and pleading glance,’ Paléologue remembered, she timidly pointed to the band, and murmured, ‘Couldn’t you? . . . ’
It was all too much, the jarring noise, the din of voices, the exhausting socializing, the intrusion of disturbing events and the threat of still more disturbing events to come. Like a violent summer squall rising up to buffet the land, whirling all into chaos and confusion, the events of the past weeks had arisen out of nowhere to create mayhem and confuse her plans, leaving her once again on edge and lost, abandoned to chance, as weightless as the yellow dust of the fields blown about by the winds of chance.
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On the night of August 1, 1914, the empress’s lady-in-waiting Sophie Buxhoeveden received a phone call from her mistress.
‘War is declared,’ Alix said, her voice hoarse with suppressed sobs.
‘Good heavens!’ Sophie said. ‘So Austria has done it!’
‘No, no. Germany. It is ghastly, terrible – but God will help and will save Russia.’
It was after ten o’clock, but Alix was alert and active, telling Sophie that ‘we must work,’ and instructing her to begin at once to open the sewing workshop at the Hermitage.1 She had prepared a list of things for Sophie to undertake, despite the lateness of the hour, secretaries and staff members to contact, notes to write, telephone calls to make. As she read Sophie her instructions she grew calmer, her voice resuming its normal timbre.
During the year she had occupied the office of lady-in-waiting, Sophie had come to know the empress well. She had become accustomed to her high-strung temperament, her eccentricities – her obsessive list-making and itemizing, her occasional sharpness and imperiousness with servants, her preference for white lilacs and orchids, her liking for cold rooms and her poor appetite and vegetarianism. She had grown accustomed to Alix’s craving for solitude and distrust of strangers, her headaches and fatigue and frequent attacks of anxiety and her fatalism about what she referred to as her loss of health.
The lady-in-waiting learned that her imperial mistress was sensitive on the subject of her ill health, that she became angry when people said she suffered from ‘nerves,’ and insisted that her nerves ‘were as strong as ever,’ and that it was only her ‘over-tired heart’ that gave her trouble.2
Sophie was well aware, as were others in the empress’s household, that her illness was more than physical, more than a perpetual over-anxiousness that brought on severe physical symptoms in the presence of crowds or strangers. That her mental compass was awry. As Nicky’s cousin Maria, daughter of his uncle Paul, put it, Alix had ‘lost . . . her mental equilibrium’ and showed an ‘increasing inner rigidity’ and a ‘fading sense of proportion.’3 She clung to those she perceived to be her friends and allies with an excessive loyalty. (‘When the empress thought well of a person,’ Sophie wrote, ‘in politics as in friendship, he had to reveal himself almost as a criminal before she would give him up.’4) Towards those whom she distrusted she became vindictive, and no one could persuade her – indeed, it would seem that few, other than Minnie, ever tried – that her judgment was askew and her knowledge of the world too narrow to lead her to sound opinions.
The deterioration was unmistakable. As Alix’s maid Madeleine Zanotti, who had served her since 1892, would later say of her, ‘in the last years she was not the same as she had been earlier,’ convinced that bad luck pursued her, and that ‘in the eyes of Russia’ she could ‘never do right.’5 Beneath her constantly reiterated assertions of trust and faith in a miracle-working God she was deeply distrustful, fearful of catastrophe, desperately unhappy.
Only in incessant activity could she find relief from the troubling thoughts that plagued her, and her preferred activity was rescuing and nurturing those in need.
‘It is my daily prayer,’ Alix affirmed, ‘that God should just send me the sorrowing.’ ‘After all, it is life’s greatest consolation to feel that the sorrowing need one, and it has been my daily prayer, for years that God should just sen
d me the sorrowing, and give me the possibility to be a help to them, through His infinite mercy.’6
The outbreak of war was certain to increase the numbers of the sorrowing, and the empress meant to take her place on the battle lines as a fighter in the war against sorrow and pain.
The sheer scale of the effort was certain to be overwhelming, for within a few weeks of the declaration of war the head of the zemstvo Red Cross calculated that Russia would need hospital space for a million wounded, and the hospital trains were bringing thousands of wounded men to Petersburg – now rechristened Petrograd, to avoid the former German-sounding name – and its surroundings each day. Minnie was the patron of the Red Cross, but Minnie was in England; she appointed Alix to take her place temporarily, and nothing could have pleased the empress more, until she began to encounter opposition and hostility from various officials in the organization.7 The improvements she suggested were criticized, the instructions she gave ignored; she was assumed to be pro-German, and to lack compassion for the Russian soldiers.
The opposition and accusation of being pro-German stung, for Alix had always disliked her cousin Willy and in her twenty years in Russia had become an ardent Russian patriot.
From the time, in the 1880s, when the youthful Willy had courted Ella and shocked the entire family of Grand Duke Louis by his arrogance and presumption, Alix had disliked him. ‘He thinks he is a superman,’ she once said, ‘and he’s really nothing but a clown. He has no real worth. His only virtues are his strict morals and his conjugal fidelity.’8 She called him the ‘monstrous Kaiser’ and was, as all her relatives observed, ‘passionately anti-German.’9 Her father, who had fought against Prussia in his youth, had raised her to hate all things Prussian, and the kaiser was Prussian to the core.
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