Alexandra

by Carolly Erickson

  Late one afternoon Alix was in the garden, sitting in her wheelchair under a tree, doing needlework. A soldier, a deputy from the Soviet, came and sat in a chair close beside her. Sophie Buxhoeveden, who was nearby, began to protest – for none of the soldiers had come so close to Alix before – but Alix gestured to Sophie to be silent, fearing that the slightest fuss could provoke the guards to order the entire family back indoors, and the girls and Alexei were enjoying their brief hour of fresh air.15 Sophie went off to find an officer.

  Alix began to engage the soldier in conversation. He took the opportunity to accuse her, boldly and directly, of despising the Russian people. The fact that she had not travelled widely in her adopted country (which was in fact untrue) proved that she hated the Russians, he said, and that she cared nothing about getting to know the country.

  Without allowing her questioner to provoke her to contradiction, Alix calmly explained that there were reasons why she had not travelled more. In her youth she had had to look after her five children, each of whom she had nursed personally, and this had limited her ability to travel. Later on, her health had been too poor to allow her to make many journeys.

  As he listened to her, the deputy became less accusatory. He began asking her about her life, her children, her attitudes. He was particularly interested in knowing her attitude towards Germany, since it was so widely believed that her sympathies were all with the Germans. She told him, speaking simply and straightforwardly, that although she had been raised in Darmstadt among Germans, and was a German herself by birth, whatever feelings she had once had belonged to the distant past. The people she loved best, her husband and her children, were Russians, and she had become a Russian too, ‘with all her heart’.

  The conversation went on, eventually turning from politics to religion. At this point Sophie returned, having found an officer and bringing him with her. The deputy rose as they came nearer and took Alix’s hand, saying, ‘Do you know, Alexandra Feodorovna, I had quite a different idea of you? I was mistaken about you.’

  From then on, he was polite – no matter what his fellow guards said or did.

  But one man’s politeness was an oasis of civility in a waste of vulgar taunting and overt hostility. She had won over one man, yet there were a hundred who detested her and menaced her and her family. Meanwhile she heard nothing further about the family’s being sent out of Russia to safety. No one brought news, official or otherwise, from Petrograd. There were only whispers and rumours, nearly all of them alarming, and more guards being brought to watch their every move.

  Kornilov had told her that the present arrangements were only temporary. But as the weeks passed and the first green of spring appeared in the park, she began to wonder if that were true. When would they receive their orders to leave? Would they ever again find themselves among family and friends, free of surveillance and deprivation? When would the sudden miraculous change come about, the providential transformation that would bring their deliverance?

  31

  Family photographs from an album of Anastasia’s, taken in the spring and summer of 1917, show not a harsh captivity but a rustic idyll.

  Olga and Tatiana stand in the sun in a flower garden, wearing white dresses and white hats. Alexei sits on a stone jetty above the lake, his tutor beside him. Nicky poses beside the broad stump of a tree he has just felled, his arm resting possessively on its raw surface. Alix sits in a wooden chair opposite Nicky, holding a silk parasol, her face shaded by a wide-brimmed straw hat.

  Images of summer, of idleness and pleasure.

  Yet in actuality the family was far from idle in its captivity. As the spring advanced and the ground thawed, their captors allowed them to spend more hours outdoors, and they used the time to dig an extensive vegetable garden. Everyone but Alix took part, sometimes spending three hours at a time clearing away bushes and rocks, turning the earth with shovels and digging deep straight furrows for the young plants. After weeks of labour, the vegetable patch was finished. In the lengthening daylight the plants took root quickly, and flourished. Beans, turnips, lettuce, squash, cabbage – especially cabbage, five hundred plants – lifted their leaves to the sun and intermittent rain.

  And when the garden was finished, they began a second vegetable patch for the servants, everyone joining in, digging enthusiastically ‘with great energy and even enjoyment’, as Nicky wrote in his journal.1 Having received permission from the guards, the former emperor devoted himself to felling the dead trees in the park, lopping off the branches and cutting them into lengths for firewood, then loading the chopped wood onto carts to be stored in the palace basement. He threw himself into the work with zest, losing his sallowness and his melancholy and emerging from the wood at the end of the afternoon, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, a happy man.

  Thanks to the family’s efforts, there would be plenty of wood for the fire and plenty of food to sustain them in the coming winter – if indeed they were to be in Tsarskoe Selo that long.

  Alix watched the exertions of her husband and children from a shaded bench near the lake, looking up from her embroidery to see her son swimming or playing on the ‘children’s island’. She worried about Alexei. He continued to suffer periodic haemorrhages in his abdomen, his skin turning yellow and his appetite diminishing; when the attacks came she sat beside him, holding his sore legs and saying her prayers.

  No doubt she thought often of Father Gregory at such times, how he had always been able not only to alleviate Alexei’s pain but to predict the outcome of each attack. Father Gregory had known the future. And he had often said, echoing the words of Christ, ‘where I go, you shall go also’. He had known that his fate would be a harbinger of the fate of the Romanovs. He was a martyr; would they be martyred too?

  The elderly Mother Maria had called Alix ‘the martyr Alexandra’. Was this too prophetic? Or was the martyrdom to be metaphorical, the psychological martyrdom of deprivation, mental suffering, strict captivity?

  Crucial to these ruminations was Alix’s absorbing interest in the course of political events. By May newspapers were being delivered to Tsarskoe Selo from Petrograd, and Alix and Nicky both read them avidly, well aware that the information they contained was heavily biased and controlled by the Duma yet valuing what news they provided.

  It was clear from the papers that the Duma was finding itself enmired in a quicksand of indecision, pressured by an increasingly pacifist public to end the war yet committed to prosecuting it, in conflict with the Soviet over the distribution of land to the peasants (who had begun to seize land on their own), and unable to keep order in Petrograd.

  The turmoil that had begun in the winter was increasing, with acts of violence, demonstrations and protests continuing. Meanwhile the German armies were close at hand, and might at any time take advantage of all the tumult to march on Petrograd.

  Again and again Alix turned recent events over in her mind, confiding to Sophie Buxhoeveden that in retrospect she realized that before the revolution Nicky, with her encouragement, had trusted the wrong people, ministers who had ‘mismanaged affairs’.2 It had not been this mismanagement that caused the revolution; the revolution had come about, she was convinced, as the result of the strident rhetoric of extremists. But she came to believe that there was another force at work, a powerful historical justice which demanded that her husband be made a scapegoat for all the errors and misjudgments of his imperial predecessors. For three hundred years the Romanov tsars had lived in great wealth and luxury, often ruling heedlessly, without taking sufficient thought for their people. Now a karmic retribution was under way.3

  But that time of retribution, as she envisioned it, would be relatively brief. When it was over, when the tsar and his family had suffered sufficiently, then the monarchy would be restored, and Alexei would become tsar.

  ‘She was ready to bear everything in order that [Alexei] might come into his inheritance,’ Sophie wrote. ‘His reign should be glorious; he should institute the reforms for which
his parents would slowly prepare.’4

  Alix was confident of this future triumph, yet in the interim there were more humiliations to be faced.

  In the first week of April the Justice Minister Kerensky had come to the Alexander Palace accompanied by an ill-assorted suite of deputies and delegates – ‘a mixed and ill-favoured crowd,’ Sophie remembered, ‘some dressed like well-to-do workmen in black shirts, with sheepskin caps pulled well back on their heads, and some soldiers and sailors, the latter with hand grenades, daggers and revolvers disposed all over their persons.’5

  The minister was ‘abrupt and nervous’, Benckendorff thought. With the others at his heels he walked quickly through all the many rooms of the palace, including the basement, talking very loudly and giving orders. He and his entourage searched most of the rooms in the palace thoroughly, looking in every corner, lifting up furniture and looking underneath, opening every drawer and cupboard.6 When they broke into Anya Vyrubov’s rooms, they found her burning her letters and other papers. She was arrested and taken away.

  The family waited nervously for the searching to be over. At last Kerensky summoned them into the schoolroom, where he addressed them, calling the former tsar ‘Nicholas Alexandrovich’ and Alix ‘Alexandra Feodorovna’.

  ‘I am the Procurator-General, Kerensky,’ he said, shaking hands. ‘The queen of England asks for news of the ex-tsarina.’7

  At the words ‘ex-tsarina’, Alix’s cheeks grew red. She had not been addressed that way before. She told Kerensky that her heart was troubling her as usual.

  He explained that he had come to the palace in order to see for himself how the family was living, ‘to verify everything’, so that he could make his report to his colleagues in Petrograd. ‘It will be better for you,’ he said. He then took Nicky aside and into another room. The others, waiting, became more nervous, assuming that the Justice Minister was delivering bad news. In fact he was telling Nicky that he still expected to be able to make arrangements for them to leave Russia, though he could not say when.

  Before Kerensky left he took his entourage into Alix’s apartments, intending to search them, but then thought better of it, and decided not to go in after all. Turning abruptly around and barking orders to the others, he left the palace.

  Had the Justice Minister entered Alix’s rooms, he would not have found anything he could use to discredit her, for she had burned all her private correspondence except her husband’s letters. Her diaries, her letters from her father and her grandmother, Nicky’s letters written when they were first engaged, and especially every scrap of writing about Father Gregory: everything had gone into the fire.8

  Alix knew that in Petrograd it was being said that she was instigating a counter-revolution. Kerensky came again to the palace, this time specifically to question her about any political activities she was suspected of engaging in, and she answered his every question, her precision and straightforwardness impressing him. Kerensky’s tone was restrained, not hectoring. Nicky, pacing up and down in the next room, listening for raised voices and fearing that any heated argument would lead to Alix’s imprisonment, was greatly relieved when Kerensky emerged and told him, ‘Your wife does not lie.’9

  She had been in great danger, and she knew it. Had Kerensky concluded that she was communicating with outside governments, or with right-wing factions within Russia, he would surely have taken her away to be tried – as many others that spring were being tried – and executed as an enemy of the revolution. Had she faltered in response to his questions, or been evasive, or panicked – as many in her position would have panicked, facing Kerensky’s forceful, focused interrogation and high intelligence – she would have been lost. But she came through the ordeal courageously, and survived.

  It had been a time of testing. Yet in her own view, the time of testing came, not from the revolutionaries, but from God. ‘Once He sent us such trials, evidently He thinks we are sufficiently prepared for it,’ she wrote to Lili Dehn. ‘It is a sort of examination – it is necessary to prove that we did not go through it in vain. One can find in everything something good and useful.’10 She continued to believe in ‘better times’ to come, that ‘the bad will pass and there will be clear and cloudless sky’.

  Alix’s letter to her friend was smuggled out of the palace. No letters were being allowed in, and the guards searched every package that was delivered to make certain it contained nothing written. When Alix’s dressmaker sent her a blouse, the officers insisted that the lining be opened at the seam to reveal any hidden message. Chocolates were bitten into to expose their centres, yogurt was stirred with a finger to make sure there were no lumps which might turn out to contain carefully wrapped notes or valuables.

  The scrutiny grew more intense as the political situation in Petrograd deteriorated. The arrival in Petrograd in April, 1917, of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who for years had led the radical Bolshevik party from exile, aroused fresh conflict for, unlike the moderates in the Provisional Government, Lenin advocated immediate action to end the war, distribute land to the peasants, end food shortages and bring all factories and farms under direct control of the workers and peasants.

  Lenin’s Bolsheviks were few in number – perhaps twenty thousand in Petrograd and Moscow, and a similar number in the countryside. But their message soon spread. The populace had lost confidence in the Provisional Government, and were weary of the strikes and the constant hunger and the armed clashes in the streets. Lenin seemed to offer a clear and attractive alternative. He was blunt and decisive, his message simple and powerful. ‘All Power to the Soviets,’ the Bolshevik banners proclaimed. ‘Peace, Land and Bread.’ The radicalization of the revolution was under way.

  In June and July, 1917, the Bolsheviks continued to advocate an end to the Provisional Government, amid scenes of upheaval and violence. Troops loyal to the government fired on rioting crowds, which gathered to protest against mounting inflation, severe food shortages and the collapse of the army. Kerensky succeeded Lvov as prime minister of a reorganized coalition cabinet, but his hold on authority was tenuous, and the downwards slide into chaos seemed irreversible.

  Kerensky came to Tsarskoe Selo in the last week of July and told Nicky that he was in great danger. ‘The Bolsheviks are after me,’ the prime minister said, ‘and then will be after you.’11 The family was too close to Petrograd, they needed to go far away, where they would be out of reach.

  They would go to Livadia, to the warm south. They would live in their beautiful white villa on the cliff, walk in their flower-filled gardens amid the scent of ripening fruit from the orchards nearby. The Bolsheviks had not overrun Livadia. They would be safe there.

  But by mid-August all had changed. It would not be Livadia, after all. They would be going east, not south, to a remote town in the Urals, or even further. They were not told exactly where, but were cautioned to take their fur coats. It would be a cold place.

  Alix, who had been longing for the warmth and peace of Livadia, was discouraged.12 With an effort she gathered herself together and began to supervise the packing.

  Her wardrobes and chests were full of gowns, splendid satin court gowns, light summer gowns in fine white lawn, the black gowns she had worn since the outbreak of the war. But none of them fitted her any more. She had grown gaunt in the five months since the revolution began. All her dresses hung limply on her thin frame, the long skirts sweeping the ground. She ordered the chambermaids to bundle up most of the gowns, along with her many dozens of hats and pairs of gloves and silk stockings, and sent them – once they had been inspected by the soldiers – to Polish refugees living in the village of Tsarskoe Selo and to friends in need.13

  So many of the accoutrements of her former life seemed gratuitous now, the cabinets of fine lace that she had so carefully catalogued, the crystal bottles of Atkinson’s White Rose perfume and verbena toilet water, the creams that had kept her face smooth, the lotions that had softened her limbs. She needed none of these things, only what was most p
recious to her: her sapphire cross, the icons and keepsakes she had from Father Gregory, mementos of her father, her brother and sisters and of Sonia Orbeliani, the pictures of Windsor from her childhood, the grey dress she had worn the day she and Nicky became engaged, photographs and drawings by the children. All else she could dispense with.

  It was part of the divine test, this discarding of what was unnecessary; part of her purging in the refiner’s fire, so that she could be cleansed and purified of all that was dross.

  To be sure, she did take a quantity of jewels, not for adornment but to be used as currency if needed, or to be sold to fund a new life abroad should they find themselves in England or elsewhere in Europe. She had to be practical, to think ahead. There was no telling what they would find when they arrived at their new quarters. She ordered the maids to pack sheets, pillows and feather beds, dishes, pans, table linen and storage jars. Chest after chest of household goods were filled, all the packing done quietly, out of sight of the guards whenever possible, for Kerensky had not told the soldiers (or his colleagues in the government) that the family was leaving, and they knew that if the jailers found out, there would be an uproar.

  Finally on the night of August 13, everything was ready for the departure. All the chests and boxes were assembled, all the staff and servants who were to accompany the family were packed and ready to go. It was a large party. Besides General Ilya Tatishchev, who was taking over as marshal of the court, and Prince Dolgorukov, there were the two doctors, Botkin and Derevenko, and Dr Botkin’s two children, the tutor Pierre Gilliard, Mademoiselle Schneider and Anastasia Hendrikov, and a staff of chambermaids, footmen, valets, kitchen boys, and other servants – nearly three dozen in all. The elderly Count Benckendorff was to stay behind, as was Sophie Buxhoeveden, who had been ill and who was about to undergo an operation.