Instead of information, she relied on her instincts; she prayed in her own chapel in the cavelike crypt of the cathedral at Tsarskoe Selo for divine guidance, she listened for the tinkling of the little bell attached to the icon Monsieur Philippe had given her years earlier, to warn her when evil threatened, and she turned, as ever, to Father Gregory.
She had always needed help from the occult, the divine, the Beyond. Now she needed it more than ever. Who better to give it to her than Father Gregory? But he had changed, and she saw that he had. He had grown fat, his previously gaunt face puffy, his nose the inflamed red of the alcoholic. The years of dissolute living were evident in his face, and he had long since exchanged the coarse cloth garb of a peasant for silken shirts and velvet breeches. He drank steadily, deeply, often uncontrollably. He staggered along the streets of Petrograd at midnight, calling out loudly to prostitutes, stopping to urinate against the side wall of a church or unbuttoning his trousers in public places and waving his penis at shocked onlookers, always drinking, ultimately passing out.4
He had always been indifferent to wealth, but in 1915 he was surrounded by money, gambling with it until the police closed the gambling house down, involved with lending it (or involved with those who were involved), flinging twenty-five-and fifty-rouble notes into the air and passing them out with abandon to casual acquaintances he met in night clubs. If not exactly venal, Father Gregory had become at least entrepreneurial; he obtained lucrative army supply contracts for friends, he arranged deferments from army service, he used his influence to obtain desirable billets for those who bribed him.5
Though supplicants and sycophants continued to crowd his apartment, and though he still performed remarkable healings, most notably saving Anna Vyrubov’s life after her near-fatal accident early in 1915, Father Gregory gave less attention to spiritual pursuits. Having given in to temptation and cynicism, he became self-destructive, and having survived two assassination attempts, the one in Pokrovsky in the summer of 1914 and the other in January of 1915, when assassins from Tsaritsyn tried to run him over with a troika, he became daring, even foolhardy. Perhaps he thought himself immortal. Perhaps he foresaw inevitable catastrophe, both for Russia and for himself, and no longer took care to avoid it.
Whatever Father Gregory had become, the empress continued to defend him when confronted with proof of his profligacy, and continued to be soothed and comforted by his blessings and reassurances. Because Alexei had no major attacks of bleeding, there was no need for her to send for Father Gregory as often as in the past, but the operators at the palace switchboard were ordered to put his calls through at once whenever he made them, and Alix knew that whenever she summoned him, if he was in Petrograd, he would come.
In March, 1915, she was ‘horribly weak’ once again, forced to curtail her personal visits to hospitals. She had only just recovered from the severe symptoms she had experienced the previous winter, and this new assault was dispiriting. She obeyed her doctors and went to bed, ‘heart a good deal enlarged’, suffering from a racking chest cough, unable to put on her clothes or put up her hair. But even in bed she kept herself occupied. Easter was coming, and she hoped for an Easter truce. Alix packed special parcels to be sent to the troops, boxes stuffed with decorated eggs and Easter bread, writing paper, tobacco, candles, clean linen, and a small icon to be hung around the neck.
She could not do her nursing, or say her formal goodbyes to those who were leaving the hospitals for the front, but she could still write long letters, and look through the papers her secretary sent to her, and meet with her household staff and her ladies-in-waiting who attended to her personal affairs.
Not until late April did she begin to return to her usual routine, and even then she was still taking ‘lots of iron and arsenic and heart drops [Veronal]’ to build up her strength, and suffering from sharp pains in her lower back, which she attributed to kidney trouble.6
She had received a ‘long, dear letter’ from Ernie in Germany – an important letter, in that it seemed to hold the promise of a possible end to the war. Ernie wrote that he felt certain Nicky understood him and that he had Alix’s empathy, that despite the enmity between their two nations, their personal feelings for each other were unchanged. ‘He longs for a way out of this dilemma,’ Alix told Nicky, ‘that someone ought to begin to make a bridge for discussion.’7 There were no formal peace talks under way, but Ernie proposed sending a secret envoy to Stockholm who could begin private talks between the belligerents. If only Nicky would send an envoy of his own, the secret communication could begin.
Whether or not Alix was naive enough to believe that Ernie was writing entirely on his own is unknown, but she thought enough of his letter to pass on the suggestion to her husband. She sent Ernie a reply – indirectly, through family channels – to say that Nicky was away from the court and would not be able to send anyone to Stockholm soon.
She did not consult the war minister, or the interior minister, or, as far as is known, anyone else in the government about her brother’s letter. She mistrusted them; they were among the liars and enemies to be avoided. And besides, they were preoccupied with the new German offensive which coincided with Ernie’s letter, a sustained push eastwards that resulted in a series of major defeats for the Russian armies.
There was no resisting the German advance that spring. The heavy German guns shelled the Russian trenches with more than a thousand high-explosive shells a minute, ‘churning into gruel’, as one contemporary wrote, the waiting Russians, most of them unarmed, unprotected by helmets. Corps after corps were decimated, entire regiments swept away, or nearly so, by the relentless guns.8 In the air, the Russian pilots had no machine-guns, and were reduced to trying to ram the enemy at the cost of their own lives and planes. Reinforcements were sent to the ever-receding front, most of them unarmed raw recruits, destined for slaughter. Transport and supply lines reached new levels of inefficiency, and even the telephones failed to work when the exchange stations, located deep in the Polish forests, were demolished by wild boars.
Throughout the wet spring of 1915, as the Neva ice broke up and constant rain fell on Petrograd, a steady stream of refugees from the fighting sought shelter in the capital. They arrived at the Warsaw Station, hundreds of tattered families in dire need of food and rest, lining up at hastily organized feeding stations for rations of black bread and hot soup. There were not enough barracks to house them all, and so they lived under bridges, in abandoned warehouses, in sheds, any dry place they could find. Petrograd’s European community rallied to help the refugees, and Alix, once she began to resume some activity in late April, went to see for herself what was being done, inspecting the food distribution centre, the maternity home set up by the wife of the British ambassador, the stores of clothing and blankets and small coffins for the many infants and children too weak to survive their ordeal.9
It was said that for every homeless family in Petrograd, there were ten on the way, clogging the roads, crowding the soldiers going back and forth from the front. ‘One ought really to do something more for the refugees,’ Alix wrote to Nicky, ‘more food stations and flying hospitals – masses of children are homeless on the high road and others die – all returning from the war – one says it is bitterly painful to see.’10
The endless procession of refugees was disturbing to the citizens of Petrograd, not only because of their evident suffering but because they were an indicator of worse to come, harbingers of an ultimate German onslaught that might well reach the Russian capital itself. Only Warsaw stood between the Germans and Petrograd, and it was greatly feared that Warsaw would soon be in enemy hands. Was it time, people asked one another, to hide their valuables? To send precious things out of the country, or at least into the hinterlands of Russia, perhaps to Siberia, where they could be kept safe until the war ended?
The war had moved onto Russian soil, a large part of Russian territory was now occupied by the central powers. One high-ranking official openly made it known that,
in his view, only Russia’s enormous spaces and the difficulty of moving troops along roads turned to thick, clinging mud by spring rains could save the country from foreign occupation within a very short time.
In her ill, insomniac, fearful state, her brain ‘cretinized’, as she often said, Alix saw herself to be at the centre of the crisis. She was the hub around which all revolved, she needed to be the still centre at the heart of the chaos. It was up to her to act, to make the important decisions, and to urge her husband to follow them. Relying on divine inspiration, and perceiving that inspiration to come through Father Gregory – as in the past it had come through Monsieur Philippe and others – she listened to what Father Gregory told her, though his words were often cryptic and his advice came in spurts. She sought his advice, she listened, and she clung to her principles.
She fought to retain her emotional equilibrium, but felt it slip away, under assault from the irritations of daily living – the ‘odious humour’ of Anna Vyrubov, the close surveillance of the Alexander palace by her critics who harangued the servants and reported every minute detail of the imperial family’s life to the newspapers – her worries over daughter Olga, who was becoming overtired and thin from her war work, and over daughter Tatiana, who was so ‘awfully sad’ and feeling neglected, worries over Nicky’s heart, which ‘did not feel right’, and over the armies, now in full retreat.
‘I had been praying and crying and feeling wretched,’ she told Nicky in June of 1915. ‘You don’t know how hard it is being without you and how terribly I always miss you.’11 She felt ‘very low’, hearing of ‘nothing but deaths’, soldiers dying, children and elderly people dying, death everywhere. Late at night, for consolation, she took out Nicky’s old letters, some written before they were engaged, and sought to ‘warm up her aching heart’ by rereading them.
Again and again, one solution to the military crisis, the threat of further invasion, all the heartache of loss and confusion presented itself: the tsar must rule alone, governing not only the country but the military. After all, he alone was master and sovereign of Russia, he had been set at the pinnacle of power by God himself. He alone was the font of wisdom, steadfastness, courage and strength. Now all that force needed to be exerted to reinvigorate the routed armies.
‘Nobody knows who is the emperor now,’ Alix wrote to Nicky, and it was all because of Nikolasha’s command – and his meddling, his ‘false position’. He hectored the ministers with his loud voice, he blundered into bad decisions, being ‘far from clever, obstinate and led by others’.12 He was nothing but a stumbling block, and a stumbling block that had to be removed.
Nikolasha had to go.
When she met with the British ambassador George Buchanan, Alix confided to him that in her view, her husband should have taken command of the armies from the start of the war – as in fact he had wanted to do. She knew that the ministers had been opposed to this, but she had no patience with ministers who tried to ‘prevent him doing his duty’. ‘The Emperor unfortunately is weak,’ she told Buchanan, ‘but I am not, and I intend to be firm.’
The ambassador saw from the set of her features that the empress would not listen to any contrary arguments.13 That she had not fully weighed the consequences of the proposed shift in command, consequences endlessly discussed by the governments of Britain and France as well as by the tsar’s own ministers. She had not considered, or adequately considered, the effect it would have if the tsar, as military commander, lost a major battle, or several major battles. His political authority would plummet as his military reputation declined. She had not given enough consideration to the sheer workload of keeping up with both political and military responsibilities – a workload no single man could reasonably carry, in Buchanan’s view, and do it well. She had forgotten to consider that, only ten years earlier, there had been a revolution in Russia, and revolutionary extremists still awaited their opportunity to take over the government.
Worst of all, in Buchanan’s view, was the consequence he dared not speak of to her, the one most often whispered about and hinted at by everyone else concerned: the dread that, with the tsar away from Petrograd, preoccupied with military affairs, the empress would in effect be regent.
And if the empress were to become regent, so it was supposed, then Rasputin would rule all. For it was assumed that the empress was nothing in herself, or nothing more than a cardboard figure, haughty in appearance but, beneath her frosty carapace, a quivering mass of insecurities, incapable of purpose or direction. Her strength of character, her intelligence, her resilience were all discounted; she was only a woman, a disagreeable German woman at that, and in 1915 everyone knew that women were innately childlike, overemotional, easily dominated, prone to hysteria. The rumours about Rasputin’s strong influence over the empress were so deeply entrenched in the public mind as to be taken as fact. The presumption of her incapacity, coupled with the presumption of her subordination to the Siberian starets, made it all but impossible for her true role to be accurately gauged.
In actuality, Buchanan was incorrect in believing that Alix had not thought through what would happen if Nicky took over as commander in chief. She had given it much thought – and prayer – and she believed she had been guided to the right decision.
In her view, the benefits of having her husband replace Nikolasha as commander in chief far outweighed the disadvantages, though the benefits were as yet visible to only a few people – herself and Father Gregory and those to whom God had revealed the splendid future.
‘It is the beginning of the glory of your reign,’ Alix told Nicky. ‘He [Father Gregory] said so and I absolutely believe it. Your sun is rising.’14 She had become convinced that there was a divine purpose behind all the ugliness and suffering of the war. She called it a ‘cleansing of minds and souls’, a sweeping away of old ideas, old misplaced loyalties, so that ‘a new beginning’ could emerge.15 With the new beginning would come new paths of thought, so that the misguided minds and souls could be ‘led aright and guided straight’.16
Her words were vague and her meaning obscure, but she felt that she had been given confirmation that the cleansing was under way and that the new day would soon dawn. A miraculous vision had been witnessed by many people on the feast day of St Tikhon the Miracle Worker, in the village of Barabinsk in Siberia, as the saint’s relics were being carried in procession around the church.17 A cross appeared in the sky, and remained there for fifteen minutes. Bishop Varnava of Tobolsk had sent word of the apparition directly to the palace.
Alix knew that crosses were not always good signs, that a cross could indicate disaster as well as blessing. But coming as it did, at this important juncture in the war, with the Russian armies retreating amid such upheaval, the vision was surely a positive sign. God was sending her a message that St Tikhon the Miracle Worker was about to save Russia from the hands of its enemies. Eleven years earlier, God had worked through St Serafim to give her a son. Now St Tikhon was to be the means of Russia’s deliverance. And the first step in that deliverance would be her husband’s transformation from an amiable cipher into a magnificent battlefield commander, a great and glorious leader of men.
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Alix sat in her accustomed place next to the hearth in the salon of the Alexander Palace, listening to the melancholy, plangent music of Goulesco’s Rumanian orchestra. She loved the wild gypsy music, full of heart-rending tremolos and sombre minor chords, the slow introspective passages giving way from time to time to pulse-racing explosions of rapid dance music. The ululant violins, plaintive harmonies and impassioned rhythms suited her own quicksilver moods, and she had begun to invite the orchestra to play at the palace every Thursday night for a roomful of guests.
When the guests arrived – the latecomers welcomed by the empress ‘with a gesture and a sweet smile’ – they found their hostess installed in her usual chair, wearing black as had become her custom by the autumn of 1915, a sapphire cross around her neck and a ring set with an immense pearl
on her finger. Her hair was always dressed simply in those wartime days, and the nails of her soft hands were never painted, because her husband disliked women who painted their nails and even when he was away, she respected his preference.1 Her one indulgence was Atkinson’s White Rose perfume, which she wore to mask the clinging smell of her cigarettes; the scent of roses and of her verbena toilet water filled the air around her.
While she listened to the music, she knitted or sewed, making winter masks for the soldiers or stitching cushions – she had set herself the task of completing a cushion or a pillow cover each day to sell in her bazaar. The work quietened her, even as the gypsy violins stirred her emotions, moving her to tears. Her emotions were very near the surface, for her insomnia had become chronic and she took Veronal, a barbiturate, in a vain attempt to rest, and the barbiturate depressed her.2
Her eyes were kind, but at the same time ‘infinitely tragic’, her friend and lady-in-waiting Lili Dehn thought, sitting nearby on those Thursday nights. The tsarina was sorrowful about so many things, about the ugly Petrograd gossip that claimed that Anna Vyrubov was the tsar’s mistress and that the tsar was a drunkard and had the evil eye, about the rioters in Moscow who shouted for the tsar to abdicate in favour of Nikolasha and for herself to be shut away in a convent, about the rumours that Ella was hiding Ernie and that Ernie was intriguing with the court, on behalf of the German government, to make a dishonourable peace.3
It saddened Alix that the citizens of Moscow and Petrograd, who had shown themselves to be fiercely patriotic and loyal to her husband at the outset of the war, had now turned cynical. They suspected that German spies were everywhere, and spread rumours that spies lurked in the ministries, among the members of the palace staff, even in the imperial family itself. The city-dwellers trusted no one, their loyalty had been corroded, they were hardened and disillusioned. But Alix took some comfort from her certainty that the real Russians, the millions who lived in villages, retained their faith in their rulers. She often reminded Lili of a trip they had taken together not long before to a small village near Peterhof, and of how, when she got out of the car, she had been surrounded by peasants who knelt down before her, saying prayers for her well-being, tears standing in their eyes.4 She had been praised, idolized, mobbed by the crowd; she had barely been able to make her way back to her car. No one in that village had called her the German Whore, or had hurled scandalous accusations at her.
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