Chapter 21
1. According to Kokovtsov, the tsar demanded that ‘firm measures’ be taken ‘to bring the press to order’ and to prohibit any reporting about Rasputin, while acknowledging that no law existed to bring the press under government censorship. Nicholas accused Stolypin of ‘weakness’ in regard to the press but in the end, convinced otherwise by Stolypin’s arguments, the tsar backed down. Kokovtsov, pp. 291–2.
2. Pares, p. 236.
3. Buxhoeveden, pp. 128–9.
4. Ibid., p. 179.
5. Ibid., p. 180.
6. Lifelong Passion, p. 343. In May of 1911 Nicky wrote that Alix was ‘still unwell, sometimes better, then worse again’.
7. Kokovtsov, p. 312.
8. Mouchanow, p. 146.
9. The Last Diary of Tsaritsa Alexandra, ed. Vladimir A. Kozlov and Vladimir M. Khrustalëv (New Haven and London, 1997), pp. xv–xvi.
10. Lifelong Passion, p. 350.
11. Kokovtsov, p. 293, note.
12. Lifelong Passion, p. 373.
13. Kokovtsov, p. 290.
14. Greg King, The Last Empress: The Life and Times of Alexandra (New York, 1994), pp. 187–8.
15. Kokovtsov, pp. 296–7.
16. Ibid., p. 296.
17. Lifelong Passion, p. 351. Xenia’s diary records what Minnie told her of the conversation.
18. Ibid.; Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, p. 327.
19. Kokovtsov, p. 296; Lifelong Passion, p. 351.
20. Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, p. 327.
Chapter 22
1. Lifelong Passion, p. 351.
2. Buxhoeveden, p. 129.
3. Cited in Poliakov, pp. 152–3.
4. Maria Rasputin, My Father, Reprint edition (New Hyde Park, New York, 1970), p. 70. In 1912 Maria wrote, ‘the heir seemed to be in better health, his crises of illness became less frequent and he had fewer haemorrhages, so that my father went less often to the palace.’
5. George Buchanan, British ambassador to Russia, wrote in his memoirs that when he first met the tsar, they talked about hunting, and Nicholas bragged that on his best day’s pheasant shooting he had brought down 1400 birds. Such inflated claims were characteristic of him. Buchanan, My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memoirs (Boston, 1923), I, p. 168.
6. Maria Rasputin, p. 72 gives a different chronology from other sources for the exchange of telegrams. According to her recollection, the empress’s telegram from Spala was received on October 26, while her father was at dinner. His return telegram arrived at Spala October 27.
7. Petersburg in winter 1913 is described from memory in von Almedingen, I Remember, p. 161.
8. Mouchanow, p. 158.
9. Ibid., pp. 108–9.
10. Ibid., p. 123.
Chapter 23
1. Mouchanow, p. 181.
2. Buxhoeveden, p. 175.
3. Last Grand Duchess, p. 130; Kokovtsov, p. 361.
4. Salisbury, p. 233.
5. Lifelong Passion, pp. 377, 383, 392, 394.
6. Grand Duke Gavril Konstantinovich, In the Marble Palace (St Petersburg, 1993), p. 142.
7. The military review is described in detail in Meriel Buchanan, Dissolution of an Empire (London, 1932), pp. 77–8.
8. Paléologue, I, pp. 14, 24–5.
Chapter 24
1. Buxhoeveden, p. 187. Beginning in 1913, Sophie Buxhoeveden’s biography of Alexandra became a record of her personal experience at the court. Before 1913 she relied on information she was given by earlier ladies-in-waiting Elizabeth Obolensky and Marie Bariatinsky. The latter was among Alix’s closest friends; after Marie left the court, she continued to correspond regularly with the empress and to visit her at Livadia. Although Sophie was loyal and admiring, she was not an uncritical biographer, and she was an intelligent and shrewd observer. Her loyalty and admiration for the empress are evident throughout her long and detailed account.
2. ‘If people speak to you about my “nerves” please strongly contradict it,’ Alix wrote to Marie Bariatinsky in the fall of 1910. ‘They are as strong as ever, it’s the “over-tired heart” and nerves of the body and nerves of the heart besides, but the other nerves are very sound.’ Cited in King, pp. 176–7.
3. Education of a Princess, pp. 196–7.
4. Buxhoeveden, p. 232.
5. Iroshnikov, p. 140; Buxhoeveden, pp. 126, 293.
6. Buxhoeveden, p. 173.
7. Mouchanow, pp. 201–2.
8. Yusupov, p. 161.
9. Cited in Pares, p. 355. Marie Pavlovna the younger speaking to Paléologue. Nicky’s cousin Sandro wrote that Alix was ‘raised by her father . . . to hate the Kaiser,’ and that she had looked forward all her life to seeing Germany’s arrogance humbled in a war. ‘For me, for my uncles and cousins, for anyone who ever met or talked to Alix,’ Sandro wrote, ‘the very suggestion of her “German sympathies” sounded monstrous and ridiculous.’ Once a Grand Duke, p. 271.
10. Meriel Buchanan, Dissolution, p. 96.
11. Alexandra, Last Diary, p. xvii.
12. The Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar (London, 1923; Reprint edition Stanford, California, 1973), p. 26.
13. Buxhoeveden, p. 192. Though Alix and her daughters usually wore nurses’ uniforms, some hospital visits were made in more conspicuous attire. Meriel Buchanan, who disliked the empress, wrote that early in 1915 Alix and two of her daughters came to visit the military hospital on Vassily Island where Meriel herself was working, all wearing red velvet gowns. Meriel Buchanan, Dissolution, p. 125.
In her memoirs Marie Pavlovna, a critic of Alix, recalled that when the empress visited military hospitals, ‘there was something in her, eluding definition, that prevented her from communicating her own genuine feelings and from comforting the person she addressed.’ Marie thought that the men didn’t understand Alix – who often mumbled – or when they did understand her words, her meaning was obscure.
Marie noted how when Alix came to the field hospital where she herself worked, the soldiers watched her with ‘anxious, frightened eyes’, whereas the tsar, when he visited the same men, ‘uplifted’ them and made them rapt with contentment. ‘In spite of his small stature,’ Marie wrote, ‘he always seemed taller than anyone else in the room, and moved from bed to bed with an extraordinary dignity.’ Education of a Princess, p. 194.
14. Buxhoeveden, p. 174.
15. Letters of the Tsaritsa, p. 27.
16. Mouchanow, p. 171.
17. Letters of the Tsaritsa, p. 20.
18. Ibid., pp. 6, 14, 24.
19. Ibid., p. 8.
20. Mouchanow, p. 209.
Chapter 25
1. Buxhoeveden, p. 197 and note.
2. Letters of the Tsaritsa, p. 3.
3. Others in Alix’s confidence were Countess Fredericks, Lili Dehn and Countess Rehbinder. Sophie Buxhoeveden, Elizabeth Schneider, Martha Mouchanow and Baron Fredericks were trusted staff members. In 1914 and 1915 Grand Duke Paul came to the palace, and Alix was for a time on good terms with him, though how much actual information he brought her is hard to judge.
4. Lifelong Passion, pp. 373–4 citing police reports; Salisbury, p. 263; Brian Moynahan, Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned (New York, 1997), pp. 215–6. The police called him ‘sexually psychopathic’.
5. Moynahan, p. 212.
6. Letters of the Tsaritsa, pp. 82, 84.
7. Ibid., p. 75.
8. Pares, p. 335, thought that in the first ten months of the war nearly four million Russian soldiers were killed, wounded and missing – a number larger than the entire British expeditionary force. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Nicholas II: The Interrupted Transition, trans. George Holoch (New York and London, 2000), estimates that by early in 1915, 1.2 million troops had been killed, wounded or were missing or taken prisoner. Seven hundred thousand new recruits were raised. d’Encausse, p. 174.
9. Meriel Buchanan, Dissolution, p. 112; Buxhoeveden, p. 210.
10. Letters of the Tsaritsa, p.
128.
11. Ibid., pp. 86–7.
12. Ibid., pp. 91, 100.
13. Meriel Buchanan, Dissolution, pp. 127–9.
14. Letters of the Tsaritsa, p. 114.
15. Ibid., p. 68.
16. Ibid., p. 68.
17. Ibid., p. 104.
Chapter 26
1. Lili Dehn, The Real Tsaritsa (London, 1922; Reprint by Royalty Digest, 1995), pp. 68–9, 136–7.
2. Ibid., p. 138. Alix told Lili Dehn that she was ‘saturated with Veronal’. ‘Veronal is keeping me up,’ she said, meaning that it was buoying up her energy. ‘I’m literally saturated with it.’
The consequences of this ‘saturation’ can easily be imagined. Lewis Thomas wrote in Notes of a Medicine Watcher that, around 1910, many middle-aged and elderly women were hopelessly addicted to the barbiturate compounds widely prescribed for ‘nerves’ at that time.
3. Rumours that Ernie was in Russia, being kept hidden by Alix or Ella, were widespread. Sophie Buxhoeveden recalled that in 1916 she was asked ‘in all seriousness whether the Grand Duke of Hesse was not hidden in the cellars of the palace’. Buxhoeveden, pp. 224–5.
4. Dehn, p. 142. The incident with the villagers, which Dehn describes, took place early in 1915.
5. Alexandra’s letters to Nicky reassured him that ‘for sure your dear Father quite particularly prays for you’. Just as Nicky had attempted to contact his father in seances held soon after his accession, and would again believe, in 1916, that occult messages from his father were being relayed to him via Protopopov, so in 1915 he was probably seeking to contact Alexander III as he made up his mind to take command of the armed forces.
6. Meriel Buchanan, Dissolution, p. 129.
7. Iroshnikov, pp. 144–5.
8. Moynahan, p. 261.
9. Alexandra’s printed letters to her husband for the years 1914–16 consist mostly of daily happenings, news of herself and the children, and warm reassurances of her devotion. The amount of space taken up by political and military matters is small, the references to Rasputin even fewer.
Though urgent in tone and sketchy in composition – she wrote in extreme haste, which was not surprising, given her extraordinarily full days – the letters were far from incoherent or ‘hysterical’ – the word used most often to describe both the empress and her written messages. Her overemotional, overanxious state is evident, but the letters are far from being the work of a hysteric or a madwoman.
10. Letters of the Tsaritsa, p. 153.
11. Iroshnikov, p. 131.
12. Letters of the Tsaritsa, pp. 118, 122.
13. Dehn, p. 107.
14. Ibid., p. 51.
15. Letters of the Tsaritsa, p. 232.
16. Buxhoeveden, pp. 214–5.
17. Ibid., p. 215.
18. Ibid., p. 215.
19. Letters of the Tsaritsa, p. 246.
Chapter 27
1. Yusupov, p. 213.
2. Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, p. 355.
3. Letters of the Tsaritsa, p. 316.
4. Kokovtsov, pp. 478–80. Kokovtsov thought that the tsar was ‘on the verge of some mental disturbance’ if not ‘already in its power’. He appeared to be nervously ill, and ‘hardly knew what was happening to him’.
5. d’Encausse, p. 198.
6. It was common drawing room conversation in 1916 that the empress ought to be banished and that the emperor ought to be forced to send her to the Crimea. Education of a Princess, p. 265. Yusupov was told that hatred of Alix had reached such an extreme that her life was in danger.
7. d’Encausse, pp. 208–9.
8. Letters of the Tsaritsa, p. 451, describes Alix’s visit to Novgorod, including the encounter with the aged starets. Clearly the governor controlled every aspect of the visit, and may well have controlled the crowd that he ‘let come near’ the imperial party.
9. Buxhoeveden, p. 223.
Chapter 28
1. Letters of the Tsaritsa, p. 462.
2. Moynahan, p. 321. Rasputin’s crony, the moneylender Aaron Simanovich, told Alix about Purishkevich’s boast that Rasputin would soon be eliminated, giving the date of December 16 (December 29 in the Gregorian calendar).
3. In actuality Zinaida Yusupov had backed and encouraged another conspiracy in the fall of 1916 and most likely encouraged her son and Grand Duke Dimitri in their plan to kill Rasputin. Edvard Radzinsky, The Rasputin File, trans. Judson Rosengrant (New York, 2000), p. 425.
Zinaida Yusupov’s close ties to Alix’s sister Ella, Ella’s apparent foreknowledge of the plot to kill Rasputin on the night of December 16/29, and Ella’s congratulatory telegram to Dimitri after the crime was committed lend weight to the supposition that Ella was among those who sanctioned and approved of the event. It is conceivable that Zinaida Yusupov and Ella were the primary conspirators, urging the young men to undertake the murder of the starets. But in this they were hardly unique; most of the imperials were discussing, and many were plotting, the elimination of Rasputin in 1916.
4. Buxhoeveden, p. 243.
5. Radzinsky, p. 459.
6. Ibid., pp. 454–5.
7. Letters of the Tsaritsa, pp. 461–2.
8. Lifelong Passion, p. 508.
9. Buxhoeveden, p. 244. Buxhoeveden wrote that the news of Rasputin’s murder was a ‘shattering blow’ to the empress.
10. Lifelong Passion, p. 512; Moynahan, p. 333.
11. Lifelong Passion, p. 509.
12. Buxhoeveden, p. 244.
13. Ibid., p. 243.
Chapter 29
1. Iroshnikov, pp. 185–6.
2. It should be noted that the regiments of Petrograd had for many months been alerted to the probability of a coup, and their loyalty had been compromised. Officers and men alike had been overheard talking of ‘changing tsars’. Nicholas had been cautioned by the British ambassador and other Allied ambassadors, and by his own foreign minister Pokrovsky, but he took no action.
Conspirators within the imperial family contacted regimental officers in secret to ensure their cooperation in a palace revolution. Indeed, high-ranking officers knew of so many plots that they were unsure which coup to support. d’Encausse, p. 216.
Both Rodzianko and his brother Michael had been urging Nicholas for months to avert catastrophe by exiling himself to Livadia, and especially removing Alix from the capital so that she would have no further influence on the government.
3. Buxhoeveden, pp. 249–50. Buxhoeveden herself was alarmed, having been cautioned in January by General Ressine, in command of the regiment that mounted guard inside the palace, that morale among the men was low as ‘revolutionary propaganda had been active among them’. Ressine added that the police had given him ‘serious warnings’ about the unreliability of his men.
4. Buxhoeveden, p. 251.
5. Ibid., p. 247.
6. The following account is based on Buxhoeveden, pp. 252ff.
7. Ibid., pp. 263–4.
8. d’Encausse, pp. 229–30, gives a concise summary of Michael’s difficult decision and the forces influencing it.
9. Paul Benckendorff, Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo, trans. Maurice Baring (London, 1927), p. 16.
10. Buxhoeveden, pp. 261–2.
Chapter 30
1. Buxhoeveden, pp. 264–70, gives many details of the conditions in Tsarskoe Selo during the days following the tsar’s abdication.
2. Ibid., p. 269, dates Alix’s arrest March 21. In his memoirs Benckendorff gives March 20 as the date.
3. Buxhoeveden, pp. 275–6.
4. Immediately after the abdication, Nicholas told Count Grabbe that he could now follow his lifelong dream of being a working farmer, perhaps on a farm somewhere in England. Kurth, p. 147.
5. Buxhoeveden, pp. 277–8. The attitude of the soldiers sent by the Soviet, Buxhoeveden wrote, ‘became threatening, and they were ready to use their machine-guns’.
6. d’Encausse, p. 233.
7. Lifelong Passion, p. 579.
8. Buxhoev
eden, p. 264.
9. Ibid., p. 277.
10. Ibid., p. 275.
11. Ibid., p. 268.
12. Ibid., p. 288–90.
13. Details of the guards and their hostile behaviour are in Buxhoeveden, pp. 283–4, 294–5, 298–9, 301–2; Benckendorff, pp. 37–8, and Education of a Princess, p. 310.
14. Buxhoeveden, p. 299.
15. This encounter between Alix and the soldier is described in Buxhoeveden, pp. 300–1.
Chapter 31
1. Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family, p. 361.
2. Buxhoeveden, p. 293.
3. Ibid., p. 293.
4. Ibid., p. 293.
5. Ibid., pp. 278–9.
6. Benckendorff, pp. 54–5. Kerensky’s visit is described in Buxhoeveden, pp. 278–9.
7. Poliakov, pp. 262–3. The record of what was said at Kerensky’s interview came from Alexei, who recounted what he remembered of it to his tutor Gilliard.
8. Although in January, 1916, Alix had asked her husband to burn her letters ‘so that they should never fall into anybody’s hands’, he preserved them; they were found at Ekaterinburg in a black box, along with his diaries and correspondence. Letters of the Tsaritsa, p. 255.
9. Buxhoeveden, pp. 281–2.
10. Ibid., pp. 291–2.
11. Lifelong Passion, p. 578.
12. Buxhoeveden, pp. 303–4.
13. Ibid., pp. 303–4.
14. Ibid., pp. 306–7.
15. Ibid., pp. 305–6.
Chapter 32
1. Buxhoeveden, p. 308. Alexandra, Sophie Buxhoeveden wrote, was ‘utterly exhausted in both body and mind’ on the journey, and lay all day in her carriage.
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