Alexandra

by Carolly Erickson

Yurovsky repeated his sentence, then gave an order to the men, who took out their revolvers and took aim.

  There was no time to react, only a confusion of sounds, cries of surprise, the gunning of an engine in the courtyard outside, a series of metallic clicks. Alix took a breath, murmured ‘Our Father – ’ and raised her hand to cross herself. Then the sound of firing, a sharp tap on the forehead as the bullet struck. She fell to the floor, aware of nothing more.

  Epilogue

  The solemn chants and eloquent words of the Panikhida, the Orthodox Requiem for the dead, filled St Catherine’s Chapel in the Peter and Paul Fortress on the afternoon Alexandra of Russia was laid to rest. The date was July 17, 1998, eighty years after her death, and a respectful congregation had gathered to commemorate her life and the lives of those who died with her.

  Her wooden coffin, draped with the yellow flag of the Romanovs, lay beside that of her husband. Three coffins, those of Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia, had been placed nearby. There were no coffins for Marie or Alexei, for their bodies have not been recovered. And there were some at the funeral mass who doubted that the bones in the coffins belonged to the former imperial family, despite the rigorous and conclusive scientific testing that had been carried out to identify them.

  ‘Give rest, O God, unto your servant, and appoint for her a place in paradise,’ the priest intoned, ‘where the choirs of the saints, O Lord, and the just will shine forth like stars.’ As the world watched via satellite, the coffins were lowered into the crypt, the fortress guns firing a salute of honour.

  Revered as she never was in life, Alexandra was revered now, with the others in her family, as a national symbol, an icon of suffering. Her relics – her rosary of cypress wood, her crystal bottles of eau de cologne, her wheelchair, her flasks of English perfume, her gowns, became venerable objects, to be put on display for viewing by a reverent, or at least a regardful, world – a world that has largely forgotten how Alexandra, as empress, was vilified.

  In death Alexandra has at last found honour, yet her stark, romantic and cross-grained nature continues to elude description. Something of her strength of will, her openness of heart, her sensitivity, always struggling towards refinement, lives on in the memoirs of those who loved her, but her deepest self remains concealed, buried with her in the dim candlelit crypt, as the solemn chants rise heavenwards and the faces in the gilded icons gaze down in infinite tenderness upon her.

  Notes

  Note on Dates and the Transliteration of Russian Names:

  Since Alexandra spent nearly half her life in Europe, where the Gregorian calendar was in general use, Gregorian dates have been used throughout the book. Russia did not adopt Gregorian usage until February 1918, which meant that the Russian calendar date was, until 1900, twelve days behind that of Europe; from 1900 on it was thirteen days behind.

  Russian first names are Anglicized (Alexander not Aleksandr, Eugene not Yevgeny), patronymics and family names are transliterated according to a modified version of the Library of Congress system. The soft sign [’] is omitted.

  Chapter 1

  1. Georgina Battiscombe, Queen Alexandra (London, 1969), p. 117.

  2. Advice to a Granddaughter: Letters from Queen Victoria to Princess Victoria of Hesse (London, 1975), p. 9.

  Chapter 2

  1. Letters of Queen Victoria from the Archives of the House of Brandenburg-Prussia, ed. Hector Bolitho (New Haven, 1938), p. 231.

  2. Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, The Life and Tragedy of Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia. A Biography (London and Toronto, 1928), p. 15.

  3. Ibid., pp. 16–7.

  4. Letters of Queen Victoria, ed. Bolitho, p. 249. Victoria defended her granddaughter’s choice against the rather arch negative reaction of her friend Empress Augusta of Germany.

  5. Poor Princess Maximiliane Wilhelmine seems to have spent her life under a cloud. Gossip attached to her the stigma of illegitimacy; after her marriage to Alexander II she grew sickly (worn out, no doubt, by her eight pregnancies) and during most of her life in Russia she was displaced, quite literally, by her husband’s mistresses, consigned to a life of obscure seclusion in a remote corner of the enormous Winter Palace in St Petersburg. A photograph of the tsarina taken in the late 1860s shows a prematurely aged, matronly woman with a sad face.

  6. In her memoirs Nicholas II’s sister Olga recalled that Queen Victoria was always contemptuous of the Russian ruling family. ‘She [Victoria] said that we possessed a “bourgeoiserie”, as she called it, which she disliked intensely . . . My father [Alexander III] could not stand her. He said that she was a pampered, sentimental, selfish old woman.’ Olga thought that Victoria ‘wasn’t really fond of anyone except her German relations.’ Ian Vorres, The Last Grand Duchess (New York, 1965), p. 40.

  7. Buxhoeveden, pp. 18–9.

  8. Ibid., p. 18. Alexandra’s principal maid Martha Mouchanow, My Empress: Twenty-Three Years of Intimate Life with the Empress of all the Russias from her Marriage to the Day of her Exile (New York, 1918), p. 80, gives an impression of Ella that is at variance with that of most other contemporary memoirists. Mouchanow described how, after her marriage to Nicholas, Alexandra was ‘set trembling’ whenever Ella ‘swept down upon her with a complaint or in an excitement of some kind or another.’ This would imply a degree of domination as well as a strong sisterly bond.

  9. Nicholas’s diary entry for May 31, 1884 (O.S.), cited in Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family of Tsarist Russia (New York, 1998), p. 269.

  Chapter 3

  1. Bernard Pares, My Russian Memoirs (London, 1931), p. 460. Pares thought this legend represented ‘the way in which the soldiers regarded Nicholas – a not unkind contempt.’

  2. Quoted in Peter Kurth, The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra (Boston, 1995), p. 31. Careless researchers occasionally write that Nicholas had brown eyes. His cousin Marie, Education of a Princess (New York, 1931), pp. 194–5, wrote that Nicholas had ‘grey and luminous’ eyes that ‘radiated life and warmth.’

  3. Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, p. 256, citing Nicholas’s unpublished diary. On March 1, 1914 (O.S.), Nicky wrote in his diary, ‘The thirty-third anniversary of Anpapa’s excruciating death. To this day I can still hear those two terrible explosions.’

  4. Alexander Michaelovich, Once a Grand Duke (New York, 1932), p. 57; Last Grand Duchess, p. 7. Alexander resented having to take refuge at Gatchina. ‘To think that after having faced the guns of the Turks I must retreat now before these skunks,’ Grand Duke Sandro recalled hearing him say. Once a Grand Duke, p. 65.

  5. Last Grand Duchess, pp. 38, 18–9.

  6. Once a Grand Duke, p. 166.

  7. In 1916, looking back over the course of their love, Alix wrote to Nicky that she had loved him for thirty-one years. According to her own memory, then, she had first fallen in love with him in 1885, at the age of thirteen.

  8. Buxhoeveden, p. 8.

  9. Ella wrote to her brother Ernie that Nicky was always writing to her, asking her for news ‘and feeling very lovesick and lost and having nobody except Serge and me with whom to talk.’ The news he sought was, presumably, about Alix. Edith von Almedingen, An Unbroken Unity: A Memoir of the Grand Duchess Serge of Russia (London, 1964), p. 35.

  10. Cited in Edith von Almedingen, The Empress Alexandra (London, 1961), p. 13.

  11. Cited in Mikhail Iroshnikov, The Sunset of the Romanov Dynasty (Moscow, 1992), p. 122.

  12. Buxhoeveden, p. 22.

  13. Apparently Queen Victoria was under the mistaken impression that Alix was eighteen in 1889, when in fact she was seventeen. In her letter of March 31, 1889 to Alix’s sister Victoria she wrote, ‘She [Alix] is not yet nineteen . . . ’ the implication being that she was eighteen. Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals: A Selection by Christopher Hibbert (New York, 1985), p. 315.

  14. Ibid., p. 317.

  15. Bertie told his mother Queen Victoria that ‘he knows Ella will move heaven and earth to get her [Alix] t
o marry a Grand Duke.’ And Ella wrote to Ernie, referring to a future marriage between Alix and Nicky, ‘God grant this marriage will come true.’ Advice to a Granddaughter, p. 108; von Almedingen, An Unbroken Unity, p. 35.

  Ella’s motives are a mystery. She claimed to be vastly content in Russia but, according to Kurth, Lost World, p. 66, her marriage to Serge was unconsummated because of Serge’s ‘curious tastes’. So Ella may have been lonely, and wanted Alix for company. Or, having rebelled against her grandmother’s marital plans for her, she may simply have wanted Alix to find the courage to follow her heart and defy their grandmother as well.

  16. Nicholas’s diary entries for January to March, 1890 (O.S.), give a detailed description of his and others’ activities during the social season. Iroshnikov, pp. 119ff.

  17. In 1894, Nicholas wrote that he had loved Alix ‘for a long time’ but that he had loved her ‘more strongly and tenderly since 1889, when she stayed six weeks at Petersburg.’ Vladimir Poliakov, The Tragic Bride: The Story of the Empress Alexandra (New York, 1927), p. 13. In April 1892 Nicholas wrote in his diary ‘I have loved Alix H[esse] for three years already.’ Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, p. 270.

  18. Buxhoeveden, p. 23.

  Chapter 4

  1. James Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary (New York, 1960), p. 183.

  2. Ibid., p. 183.

  3. Madame von Kolemine pestered Louis incessantly and may have threatened to blackmail him. The fact that she had his love letters in her possession made Queen Victoria anxious; she worried that there might be further legal complications or scandal. The queen recommended that Louis get as far away from Europe as possible – India was her suggestion. Advice to a Granddaughter, pp. 68–9.

  4. Poliakov, p. 11.

  5. Iroshnikov, p. 125.

  6. Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, pp. 270–1.

  7. Nicholas confessed in his diary to ‘very nearly falling asleep from tiredness’. Iroshnikov, p. 118. One afternoon in March of 1890 he wrote that he ‘looked at Nevsky Prospekt through the railings for something to do’.

  8. In winter 1891, Nicholas wrote that he was ‘madly in love with Olga Dolgorukaya’. Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, p. 270.

  9. Once a Grand Duke, p. 140.

  10. Once a Grand Duke, p. 140; Education of a Princess, pp. 17–8. Nicky’s cousin Sandro wrote of Serge, ‘Try as I might, I simply cannot find one redeeming feature in his character . . . Stubborn, rude, and unpleasant, he defied his own shortcomings, throwing complaints from anyone back in their faces, and thereby providing rich fodder for slander and calumny.’ Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, p. 245.

  11. Nicholas’s diary, in Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, pp. 264–8, and Iroshnikov, p. 120.

  12. Kurth, p. 40.

  13. Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, p. 268.

  14. Serge Sazonov, Fateful Years (New York, 1928), p. 110.

  15. Buxhoeveden, p. 33. Alix referred to the years between 1889 and 1894 as ‘five sad years’ in a 1894 letter to her governess Madgie.

  16. Iroshnikov, p. 125.

  Chapter 5

  1. Alix confided to her lady-in-waiting Sophie Buxhoeveden that her earliest recollections were of romping with her father. Buxhoeveden, p. 6.

  2. Andrei Maylunas and Sergei Mironenko, eds., A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra: Their Own Story (New York, 1997), p. 15.

  3. Ibid., p. 26.

  4. Alix prided herself on her sexual sophistication. As she wrote to Nicky in 1894, she sometimes felt ‘very old knowing things others don’t know until they are married’. ‘As a child I knew things others don’t till they are grown up and married,’ she wrote. ‘I don’t know how it came!’ Lifelong Passion, p. 86.

  5. Buxhoeveden, p. 31.

  6. Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, p. 271. This diary entry was written several weeks after Nicholas had been given permission to propose to Alix. A younger contemporary of Matilda recalled seeing the ballerina enter a drawing room in St Petersburg, ‘an elegant woman in deep rose velvet and a picture hat with pale ostrich feathers’. She looked, the younger woman thought, like an ‘exotic bird’. Edith von Almedingen, I Remember St Petersburg (London, 1969), p. 30.

  7. Lifelong Passion, pp. 32–3.

  8. Ibid., p. 33.

  9. Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, p. 272.

  10. Lifelong Passion, p. 33.

  11. Ibid., pp. 30–1.

  12. Ibid., p. 34.

  13. These internal preoccupations are recorded in Alix’s letters. Lifelong Passion, p. 67. It is worth noting that in all her reminiscences Alix did not mention her late mother.

  Chapter 6

  1. Lifelong Passion, p. 45.

  2. Ibid., p. 48.

  3. Ibid., pp. 48–9. Exactly what the compromise was that permitted Alix to retain, in her conscience at least, her fealty to Lutheranism is only hinted at in the surviving printed sources. After Nicholas left Coburg, he wrote to Alix from Gatchina, ‘Of course I told them [his parents] all of what you wanted me to say and they gave in at once and said you would not have to renounce the old belief, but that it would be like with Ella.’ Ibid., p. 60.

  4. Ibid., pp. 48–9.

  5. Victoria wrote to her namesake, Alix’s sister Victoria, on May 25, 1894, ‘Still the feeling that I had laboured so hard to prevent it [an engagement] and that I felt at last there was no longer any danger and all in one night – everything was changed.’ Advice to a Granddaughter, p. 124. A few weeks after leaving Coburg, Victoria quizzed Alix unmercifully about her change of heart about marrying Nicky. Alix told Nicky how ‘she [Queen Victoria] began by asking me so many questions, when, how, and where, and what made me change my decision and so on, till I no longer knew what to say.’ Lifelong Passion, p. 60.

  6. Ibid., p. 49.

  7. Poliakov, pp. 26–7.

  8. Lifelong Passion, pp. 52, 55.

  9. Buxhoeveden, p. 34.

  10. Poliakov, p. 27; Lifelong Passion, p. 61.

  11. Buxhoeveden, pp. 35–6.

  12. Lifelong Passion, p. 67.

  13. Ibid., p. 67.

  14. Ibid., p. 83.

  15. Poliakov, pp. 42, 46, 48, 49.

  16. Ibid., pp. 50ff.

  17. Ibid., p. 47.

  18. Lifelong Passion, p. 72.

  19. Ibid., p. 80.

  Chapter 7

  1. Nicky referred to his becoming tsar as ‘the worst . . . that which I feared all my life!’ Lifelong Passion, p. 118.

  2. Last Grand Duchess, pp. 9–10, 38; Once a Grand Duke, p. 69.

  3. Lifelong Passion, p. 86.

  4. Nicky’s sister Olga, in Last Grand Duchess, p. 55, erroneously states that Alix arrived in Livadia two days after Alexander III’s death, having made the journey in the company of Bertie. Other sources make it clear that Alix did not travel with Bertie, but with her sister Victoria and others, that Ella met them en route, and that Nicky was waiting for them all at Simferopol. Bertie arrived two days after the death.

  5. Iroshnikov, p. 19.

  6. Poliakov, p. 60.

  7. Once a Grand Duke, p. 168.

  8. Lifelong Passion, p. 99.

  9. Ibid., p. 100.

  10. Ibid., p. 87.

  11. Last Grand Duchess, p. 55.

  Chapter 8

  1. Mouchanow, pp. 15–6.

  2. Ibid., p. 117.

  3. Buxhoeveden, p. 44.

  4. Lifelong Passion, pp. 110–1.

  5. Cited in Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, pp. 280–1.

  6. Ibid., p. 279.

  Chapter 9

  1. The Empress Frederick Writes to Sophie: Letters 1889–1901, ed. Arthur Gould Lee (London, 1955), p. 281.

  2. Cited in Suzanne Massie, Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia (New York, 1980), p. 277.

  3. Iroshnikov, p. 132.

  4. Ibid., p. 132.

  5. Alexander Moss
olov, At the Court of the Last Tsar (London, 1935), p. 72.

  6. Mouchanow, pp. 21, 23, 131.

  7. Ibid., p. 24.

  8. Ibid., pp. 25, 28.

  9. Ibid., p. 22.

  10. Ibid., p. 22.

  11. Harrison Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow: Russia’s Revolutions 1905–1917 (New York, 1978), p. 62; Iroshnikov, p. 131.

  Chapter 10

  1. Mouchanow, pp. 50–1.

  2. Last Grand Duchess, p. 61.

  3. Mouchanow, pp. 87–8.

  4. Iroshnikov, p. 138.

  5. Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, p. 18.

  6. Iroshnikov, p. 123.

  7. Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, p. 250.

  8. Mouchanow, p. 34.

  9. Buxhoeveden, p. 58.

  10. Ibid., p. 58.

  11. Mouchanow, pp. 43–4.

  12. Buxhoeveden, pp. 166–7.

  13. Ibid., 166. In this preoccupation Alix was joined by her dear friend Juju Rantzau in Germany who, Alix wrote, ‘understood the difficulties of this world, and the different temptations, and always encouraged one in the right, and helped one to fight one’s weaknesses’. Alix and Juju exchanged weekly letters which either have been lost or, if still in existence, have not been published. Buxhoeveden, p. 167. What a treasure these letters would be to a biographer!

  14. Mouchanow, pp. 39, 141. Alix embroidered beautifully; Mouchanow thought that cloths she decorated for use in church ‘would easily have won a prize at any exhibition’. Mouchanow, p. 143.

  15. Lifelong Passion, p. 131.

  16. Ibid., p. 130.

  Chapter 11

  1. Mouchanow, p. 68.

  2. Mouchanow, p. 68, refers to ‘some hopes of maternity she [Alix] was nursing’ at the time of the coronation. Later on, after she miscarried the child, ‘her doctor said that the expected child would, in all probability, have been a boy’.