She passed through the hospital wards, viewed the town monuments and attended a service in the cathedral, her attention drawn to the dozens of very old icons being restored there. The local nobility held a tea in her honour, and the members of Alix’s retinue felt a marked coldness in the reception given her, though Alix herself seemed unaware of it.9
She had heard of a celebrated starets living at the Dessiatin monastery, a holy woman, Maria Michaelovna, said to be one hundred and seven years old, and wanted to meet her and receive her blessing. She turned her visit into a pilgrimage, walking on foot through the wet snow to the small hermitage where the old woman lived.
The afternoon was cold, the sun had long since set as the empress trudged through the snow in the dark. The interior of the hut was dim, and only when a candle was brought was Alix able to make out the small, frail body of the starets, lying on her bed. She went nearer, and saw the old woman’s face surrounded by an aureole of scraggly grey hair, ‘a sweet fine, oval face with lovely young, shining eyes and sweet smile’.
The starets held out her thin hand in blessing. ‘Be joyous, uncrowned bride,’ she said softly. ‘Here is the martyr Empress Alexandra.’
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Alix was still feeling the comfort and consolation that followed her visit to the elderly starets Mother Maria when she learned, on December 30, 1916, that Father Gregory was missing.
And not only that he was missing, but that he might be dead, for there were rumours in Petrograd of gunshots fired in the middle of the night at the Yusupov mansion and it was known that Father Gregory had said that he intended going there the previous night.
‘I cannot and won’t believe he has been killed,’ Alix wrote to Nicky. ‘I still trust in God’s mercy that one has only driven him off somewhere.’1
Her heart was bothering her again and Dr Botkin had given her an exceptionally large dose of Veronal, which had made her sleep longer than usual the night before. Drowsy, lulled by the drug, she could not bring herself to believe that the rumours were true.
She was still basking in her memories of her encounter with Mother Maria, ‘so lovely and restful, warming to the soul’. In the old woman’s presence she had felt blessed and consoled, hearing Mother Maria say that the war would soon be over, that she need not worry about the children, that they would marry, that she should not ‘fear the heavy cross’. This Mother Maria had repeated several times, that Alix should not fear the heavy cross.
‘I thank God for having let us see her,’ Alix told her husband. She was sending Mother Maria a gift, three small lamps to light her dim hut, along with an icon. She much preferred to think about Mother Maria’s shining eyes and sweet smile than to confront the rumours from the capital.
But it soon became apparent that they were more than mere rumours, and again her intuition told her that something was terribly wrong. She had known that there were plots to kill the starets, and had given orders to Interior Minister Protopopov to make certain that Father Gregory’s guards did not allow him to go out at night.2 She had known that Felix Yusupov had been spending time with Father Gregory, and that Felix’s mother Zinaida Yusupov was among the starets’s most vehement adversaries.3
Bewildered, then frightened by the message from Father Gregory’s daughter, Alix did her best to compose herself and continued to receive her callers.4 But the news grew worse throughout the day.
By mid-afternoon the police investigators had discovered reddish-brown stains on the Great Petrovsky Bridge over the Malaya Nevka river, at a place where the river ice was thin and disposal of a body was possible. A brown boot was also found there, and when the boot was shown to Father Gregory’s daughters they said that it belonged to their father.5
To the elite of Petrograd, gathered at the Yacht Club to exchange information, these discoveries seemed to prove beyond doubt that the infamous Rasputin had at last been eliminated. Nothing else was talked of, the news was passed around with excitement and relish. By late afternoon congratulatory phone calls were being made and telegrams sent off saying that it was now certain that the Siberian was dead; and adding that Felix Yusupov and Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich had killed him.6
Alix sat, ‘very despondent’, with Anna Vyrubov, doing her best to calm Anna, and not to give up hope herself while waiting for definitive news from the police investigation.
‘We are sitting together – can [sic] imagine our feelings – thoughts – our friend has disappeared,’ she wrote to Nicky.7 ‘Such utter anguish (am calm and can’t believe it),’ she added. Her body languid, her mind agitated, she sent several telegrams as well as writing Nicky a long letter.
Every bit of news passed on to her seemed to confirm the fatal rumours. Grand Duke Dimitri, seen at the Yacht Club, had looked ‘pale as death’. Felix Yusupov was fervently denying any involvement in the alleged crime – an incriminating denial, sent in writing to the palace when Alix refused to allow him to come to her in person. She knew that he had been seeing a good deal of Father Gregory recently, that a connection between them had been established. Now it seemed that the purpose of that connection might have been murder.
Alix tried not to give up hope – but at the same time she took practical steps to protect herself and those she loved, for her common sense told her that the disappearance of Father Gregory might be only the first stage in a coup whose ultimate aim would be to eliminate her and replace the tsar with a regency. She protected Anna by moving her into the palace and securing her rooms with new locks. (‘They will get at her next,’ she told Nicky.) She ordered the guards to prohibit any of the young grand dukes from entering the palace. What precautions she took to protect herself and her children her letters do not reveal, nor do they reveal what she told her daughters about Father Gregory’s mysterious disappearance.
Nicky had told her that he planned to return to Tsarskoe Selo soon. (‘Oh, the joy, the consolation of having you home again,’ she wrote to him.) Until he arrived, she would do her best to hold on to her hopes and say her prayers. She ordered an all-night mass to be held in the palace chapel. She would insist that the entire household attend and pray for the safety of the starets.
‘We women are all alone with our weak heads,’ she told her husband, and her ‘weak head’ was spinning with questions. What had gone wrong? Why hadn’t Protopopov succeeded in protecting Father Gregory? Could it be that Protopopov himself was no longer to be trusted? And if so, was any safety possible for the family?
The same questions continued to disturb her on the following day, December 31, as word of the notorious Siberian’s presumed death spread throughout the capital and outward into the countryside. The police continued their interrogations, Alix continued to refuse to speak to Felix Yusupov, now universally presumed to be the principal conspirator and murderer. She clung to the hope that ‘God would spare her her comforter and only friend’, but the chances of his survival were diminishing, and she knew it.8
Early on the morning of January 1 Father Gregory’s body, frozen and mutilated, was found in the ice of the Malaya Nevka below the bridge at Krestovsky Island. The palace was informed.
The suspense was over; now her suffering began.
She mourned him. She mourned him, with all the force and depth of her Wagnerian soul. That he was gone seemed to her far more than an ordinary human loss, that he had been murdered was far more than a mere human crime. It was a catastrophe, a ruinous denouement, a deathblow for her and for Russia.
With Father Gregory gone, who would say prayers over Alexei when he was ill? To whom could she turn in a crisis?
She slumped under the weight of her sorrow, suddenly feeling old. She wrote letters, and signed them ‘An Old Woman’.9 She took more heart drops, which deadened her and enabled her to sleep. In her waking hours, she sent telegrams to Nicky at Mogilev, told her children that their friend Father Gregory had died, and, ever analytical, tearfully pondered the meaning of Father Gregory’s murder.
What had happened was grievous, yet even in
her worst moments she could not bring herself to believe that it was final. Had not Father Gregory been sent to her to replace Monsieur Philippe? And had not another messenger from the divine been sent to her only recently, just before Father Gregory’s death? Surely her encounter with Mother Maria was not merely fortuitous, but divinely ordained. The continuity of divine help was assured.
What was more, just as she had never felt that Monsieur Philippe was entirely gone, so now she sensed that Father Gregory was still with her. She still felt protected by Monsieur Philippe’s icon with its little bell, the warning bell that rang when danger was near. Father Gregory’s relics too would protect and warn her. Nicky had Father Gregory’s comb, and his stick from Mount Athos. She had his letters. She sent word to the police to send her everything removed from his body – his blood-stained shirt, a platinum bracelet he wore with the imperial monogram, the small gold cross inscribed with the words ‘save and protect’ which he wore around his neck.10
She had his relics, and she believed that his spirit lived on, and that she could contact it.
‘My dear martyr,’ she wrote in a note placed in Father Gregory’s coffin, ‘give me thy blessing, that it may follow me always on the sad and dreary path I have yet to traverse here below. And remember us from on high in your holy prayers!’11
The note was slipped into the coffin by Sister Akulina, one of Father Gregory’s admirers and his sometime mistress, who laid the body out, with the aid of a hospital orderly, after the autopsy was performed. Alix did not see the corpse. It was not important. The body was only a hollow shell, something he had laid aside. But she gave orders that no one else was to see the body, besides Sister Akulina, the orderly, and the officials who performed the autopsy. None of Father Gregory’s relatives, nor any of his many followers, were allowed to pay their respects before the coffin was closed.
The simple funeral, held early in the morning at the graveside, was brief. Alix had chosen the site, on land where Anna Vyrubov planned to build a church, for its accessibility to the palace and because it was easy to guard. Desecration of Father Gregory’s body was likely; the secret police were ordered to spread false rumours that it had been taken by train to his Siberian village or to a monastery in the Ural Mountains.
It was a bitter morning, the morning of January 3, 1917. Frost rimed the grass in the palace park, fog swirled around the trees and obscured the ice-covered lake. Alix, Nicky (who had returned from Mogilev the day before) and the children arrived by car and walked to the grave, looking down on the coffin, which had already been lowered into the earth. No choir sang, only a priest from the cathedral. The imperial confessor and a monk from Anna Vyrubov’s infirmary said the prayers and celebrated the requiem mass.
All was done in quietness, in haste. Secret police kept watch from a distance, ready to rush in should any disturbance arise. They were prepared for anything – a coup, an assassination attempt, an effort to kidnap the tsar and his immediate family. For it was now certain that Father Gregory’s murder had been a family undertaking, and the tsar’s relations formed a united bloc in asking, indeed demanding, that he show leniency in his treatment of the two young men upon whom suspicion fell.
A fresh wave of threatening letters had been arriving at the palace in the aftermath of the murder. Alix had received many.12 No one in the immediate family was safe.
The funeral passed without incident, and the tsar, having noted in his diary that the family had seen the coffin ‘with the body of unforgettable Grigory, who was killed by some scum’, went for a walk with the children.
Alix had her obligations, and busied herself fulfilling them. There were the servants’ Christmas trees to decorate, gifts to prepare for the staff and for the wounded in her hospitals. Activity was a palliative for grief. She worked on, until interrupted by Protopopov, who came to inform her of yet another plot to murder her. She received the information coolly, Sophie Buxhoeveden noticed.13 She did not flinch, or grow faint, or even turn pale. She took the news in her stride, and then returned to her tasks, outwardly calm but feeling inwardly like an old woman, her grief like a heavy stone weighing down her heart.
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The news of Rasputin’s death loosed an immense wave of popular rejoicing. People shouted aloud for joy, strangers embraced one another in the streets.
‘The Nameless One! The Unmentionable! He is dead!’ they told one another, clapping and laughing.
It was as irresistible, as unstoppable a force as the spring thaw, this effusion of public jubilation, which went on for days and seemed to ignite a conflagration of excitement.
To the excitement were added other provocations in the early days of the new year 1917 – strikes, demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of protesters, commemorations of Bloody Sunday and a huge rally to greet the opening of the Duma – plus the ever-present incitements of severe cold, lack of food and extremely high prices for what little bread and milk, what few eggs and sausages were available. It was rumoured that prices would double or treble before spring came. Meanwhile many people were existing on soup and mouldy crusts, and shivering in their damp, icy rooms for want of firewood.
When the weather turned milder early in March the numbers of strikers and demonstrators increased, and their daring expanded. Now the Cossacks that patrolled the streets on horseback, whips in hand and sharp sabres hanging from their belts, were cursed and assaulted by volleys of stones. Vocal crowds shouted ‘Down with the monarchy!’ ‘Bread for the Workers!’ and, on International Women’s Day, March 8, ‘Equality for Women!’
There was an exhilarating air of power amid the tumult. Hostile messages written on frozen walls were wiped away, only to reappear again almost immediately, and covering more walls than before. Hostile crowds, threatened by police and armed troops, dispersed only to form again enlarged in size. Workers carrying red flags, singing the ‘Marseillaise’, the triumphant song of the French revolutionaries of 1789, paraded around squares and along canals, skirmishing with police when the latter attempted to put a halt to their marches. Groups of insurgents overturned cars and smashed the windows of trams. Shop windows were broken, looting began.
On the following day, March 9, it was as if the entire population of Petrograd took to the streets, a vast tide of humanity flooding every avenue, lane and alley. To some two hundred thousand striking workers were added tens of thousands of former soldiers, students, government workers, ordinary citizens from a variety of social ranks. Drawing strength from one another, feeling more forceful the larger their numbers grew, the crowds invaded the bakeries, confronted the police (who backed down) and called out to the soldiers – who, until that evening, were under orders not to fire – to join them.
There was a sense of elation, of relief as more and more people joined the chanting, cheering crowds. Orators harangued the demonstrators, stirring up their fears, their hatred of privilege, above all their sense of empowerment. At last all the corruption, the poor governance, the political puppets could be swept away, the speakers shouted. The people had only to seize power – it was within their grasp.
And indeed it seemed to be within their grasp, as on March 11 anarchy was unleashed in the city. Warnings had been posted by the military commander General Khabalov that demonstrators would be fired upon, but the warning posters were torn down and trampled underfoot as, once again, people poured into the streets and squares, forming living tides that ebbed and flowed around buildings and monuments. From every section of the capital they surged towards the centre of the city, ignoring the guards stationed on the bridges and the armed troops brought in to replace the ineffectual police. Though the secret police had been out in force before dawn, arresting hundreds of the previous day’s insurgents, the arrests seemed to have no effect, for the crowds were even more dense, more determined to bring all business to a halt in Petrograd.
Gunfire could be heard throughout the day, the steady sputter of machine guns, bursts of rifle fire and the crack of pistols. Along the margin
s of the crowds, men ran here and there, rifles strapped to their backs, swords at their waists. Small groups of soldiers, police, ordinary citizens armed with revolvers or grenades encountered one another, skirmished, and ran off, leaving bleeding bodies on the paving-stones.
Troops fired on demonstrators in Znamenskaya Square, and along Nevsky Prospekt. Units of the Preobrazhensky regiment mowed down many in the crowd that had gathered near Kazan Cathedral, leaving hundreds dead and dying in the square.
But still the crowds did not disperse; the momentum that had brought people out in such numbers did not dissipate, but rather seemed to grow. The sun shone brightly down, the air was cool and brisk but not harsh. And as they milled in the streets and kept watch from their windows, the citizens of Petrograd observed that something remarkable was beginning to happen.
Soldiers and police began firing on each other.
In the Pavlovsky regiment, soldiers turned against their officers and, refusing to fire on the insurgents, joined with them. In the Preobrazhensky regiment, men shot their own officers rather than obey orders and shoot more civilians. Other regiments joined the trend, fearing to become the targets of the rebellious soldiery. What had begun as an intermittent clash between demonstrators and the military became an ongoing battle between renegade soldiers and the dwindling number of police units that remained loyal to the titular authorities.
Word swept through the city: there was mutiny in the forces of the tsar! There was no longer anything to fear; the military was on the side of the citizens.
Now the police came under attack, individual officers murdered, thrown onto the river ice, shot down as they tried to reach safety – even burned alive on bonfires while jubilant crowds collected to watch.
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