The Family Romanov

by Candace Fleming

  Pale, his voice shaking, he told them the news. Germany, allied with Austria-Hungary, had declared war on Russia.

  At the table, all four girls began to cry.

  As for Alexandra, she may have thought of the telegram she’d received from Rasputin earlier that day. “I say a terrible storm cloud hangs over Russia,” he’d written ominously. “Disaster, grief, murky darkness and no light. A whole ocean of tears, there is no counting them, and so much blood … Russia is drowning in blood. The disaster is great. The misery is infinite.” She, too, began to weep.

  “GOD SAVE THE TSAR”

  The next morning, everyone but Alexei, still in bed with his bad ankle, traveled by yacht to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. There Nicholas would formally declare war on both Germany and Austria-Hungary—a war that would one day be known as World War I.

  How different it was from the last time the family had appeared in the city. This day the streets teemed with people. In a patriotic frenzy, they packed roads, bridges, and the Palace Square, waving banners, singing, and cheering. When the tsar’s boat came into view, they shouted “Batiushka, Batiushka [Father Tsar, Father Tsar], lead us to victory!” In a sudden rush of loyalty to Russia and their tsar, the people had forgotten their bitterness and resentment. War had done what Nicholas could not. “For Faith, Tsar and Country!” shouted nobility and worker alike. “For Defense of Holy Russia!”

  The family arrived at the Winter Palace. Inside its packed corridors, people stretched out to touch them as they passed. They pressed kisses to their hands and to the hems of their dresses. Some dropped to their knees before them, bowed, or made the sign of the cross as they passed.

  In the vast white marble Nicholas Hall, a special altar had been set up. On it stood the icon known as the Vladimir Mother of God. At least six hundred years old, the icon was said to have the miraculous ability of turning back invaders. Now, at the beginning of this new war, Nicholas knelt before it and asked its blessing. Then raising his hand, he took the traditional Russian oath: “I solemnly swear that I will never make peace as long as a single enemy remains on Russian soil.”

  At last the family moved toward a balcony high above the crowded Palace Square. The grand duchesses hung back, pressing against the velvet curtains as their parents stepped out.

  At the sight of their tsar, the huge crowd fell silent. Then, as one, they dropped to their knees on the cobblestones.

  Overwhelmed by emotion, unable to make his voice carry that far, Nicholas could only make the sign of the cross. Then he lowered his head as tears ran down his cheeks.

  From below, five thousand voices burst spontaneously into song:

  God save the Tsar,

  Mighty and powerful,

  Let him reign for our glory,

  For the confusion of our enemies,

  The Orthodox Tsar,

  God save the Tsar.

  MARCHING TO WAR

  In the days after Nicholas’s declaration of war, hundreds of thousands of peasants were mobilized all across Russia. In Siberia and along the Black Sea, in the already chilly far north, and in the fertile Ukrainian steppe, where the crops stood ripe in the fields. Over and over, young peasant men kissed their sobbing wives, mothers, and sweethearts good-bye, before climbing aboard trains that carried them far from their villages. As in all Russian wars, it was the peasants who did most of the fighting and dying. They marched away, obediently answering the tsar’s call to defend Russia. But the expression on most of their faces, wrote one foreign correspondent, “was somber and resigned.”

  Many Russians believed they could beat the Germans within six months. “[They] don’t know how to fight,” scoffed one of Nicholas’s commanders. “All [we] have to do to annihilate their whole army is simply throw our caps at them.”

  To this end, the Russian High Command launched an invasion into the German territory of East Prussia (modern-day northeastern Poland). On August 26, just weeks after the war began, 250,000 Russian soldiers marched into Tannenberg Forest. And the Germans, lying in ambush, mowed them down. In just four days, the Russians lost every single man—an entire army either killed or captured—and vast amounts of badly needed military equipment.

  The Russians did better against the Austrians, taking the province of Galicia (between the borders of modern-day Poland and Ukraine) in mid-August, as well as several Carpathian Mountain passes before Christmas. They even toppled the Austrian fortress of Przemysl. But there they stalled. All they could do was hold their position.

  The German and Austrian armies held their positions, too. Stalemate ensued. With neither side strong enough to push the opposing army back, the combatants resorted to defensive warfare. Digging trenches, they hunkered down inside them. Machine guns trained on each other, they waited, hoping to wear out the enemy’s resolve.

  But Russia was ill-prepared for a long, drawn-out war. The Ministry of War—run by the incompetent Vladimir Sukhomlinov—had counted on a short campaign, lasting no longer than six months. And so it had made no plans for the wartime production of guns and ammunition. Instead, Minister Sukhomlinov assumed the country’s existing weapons stockpiles would be more than enough.

  He was wrong. Just six weeks into the conflict, the chief of the Artillery Department warned Sukhomlinov that Russia would soon be forced to surrender if something wasn’t done about the situation immediately.

  “Go to the devil and quiet yourself,” the war minister snapped. He did nothing.

  By the following spring, the shortage had grown so severe that many soldiers charged into battle without guns. Instead, commanders told them to pick up their weapons from the men killed in front lines. At the same time, soldiers were limited to firing just ten shots a day. Sometimes they were even forbidden to return enemy fire. “Our position is bad,” one soldier wrote to his father, “and all because we have no ammunition. That’s what we’ve got to, thanks to our minister of war, making unarmed people face up to the enemy’s guns because we don’t have any of our own. That’s what they have done.”

  Those Russian troops stalled on top of the Carpathian Mountains now found themselves without enough ammunition to push forward. All they could do was hold the ground they’d taken. Their commander, Alexei Brusilov, repeatedly telegrammed the war ministry for ammunition. He also demanded warm clothes and boots for his men.

  But Sukhomlinov had not made plans for clothing the soldiers, either. When he finally looked into the possibility of manufacturing soldiers’ boots, he learned that all the country’s tannin extract (used for processing leather) was imported from Germany! And so Russia ordered boots from the United States. It took months for the order to be filled. In the meantime, recruits went barefoot. “They haven’t given out overcoats,” one soldier wrote home. “We run around in thin topcoats.… There is not much to eat and what we get is foul. Perhaps we’d be better off dead.”

  Back at Tsarskoe Selo, Nicholas knew very little about his soldiers’ plight. Daily reports from Sukhomlinov reassured him that both “morale and equipment are in splendid order.” When he inspected troops in January 1915, “[the commanders] prepared one company and collected all the best uniforms from the other regiments for it to wear,” recalled one soldier, “leaving the rest of the men in the trenches without boots, knapsacks … trousers, uniforms, hats, or anything else.”

  It was obvious that Russia’s war effort was on the verge of collapse, and everyone in the tsar’s government knew it … everyone, that is, except Nicholas himself.

  BEYOND THE PALACE GATES:

  VASILY’S DIARY

  Trainload after trainload of untrained military recruits found themselves swept from the countryside and onto the battlefield. One, Vasily Mishnin, was a twenty-seven-year-old furniture salesman from the sleepy town of Penza in Central Russia. He began his diary on the day he left behind his pregnant wife, Nyura, at the train station.

  25 DECEMBER 1914

  The third [train] whistle. Everybody breaks down. Loud crying, hyster
ics, whole families weeping. I kiss my Nyura for the last time and all of my family kiss me. I can hardly hold back the tears.… Beside myself I climb into the [train car] with the rest [of the men] and look out at the crowd. I can hear wailing, and a tumult of voices, but I’ve suddenly grown numb. My nerves are in shreds … my eyes fix on Nyura again and I want to jump out of the [car] and kiss her again, for the last time. Too late, the long whistle of our steam train screams out, it’s ready to separate us from our loved ones and take us—God knows where.

  5 JANUARY 1915

  We go to the depot to get our rifles. Good Lord, what’s all this? They’re covered in blood, black clotted lumps of it are hanging off them. All this horror is piled up in the yard, and we all have to rummage about looking for a decent one—a soldier with a bad rifle is like a teacher without a pencil.

  26 JANUARY 1915

  At 7 a.m. the division commander walks down the trench and orders us to oil and clean our rifles. “As soon as you see a German, shoot him!” (He is shaking, as if he has a fever.) “But don’t let him see you, and don’t leave the trenches.” [At] midnight I have to go and relieve the guard under the cover of fire that’s pouring on [our] trenches. My heart pounds, it is a terrifying thing to walk to your death. The seven of us climb out of our trench and go up to the barbed wire boundary. We find a hole and crawl through it like cats. Bullets and shells keep flying out of the German trenches.… We get to the guard post.… It is frightening even to sit or lie down here—the rifle is shaking in my hands. My hand comes down on something black: it turns out there are corpses here that haven’t been cleared away. My hair stands on end. I have to sit down.… All I can feel is fear.… I want the ground to open up and swallow me.… What next?

  27 JANUARY 1915

  Suddenly a screeching noise pierces the air, I feel a pang in my heart, something whistles past and explodes nearby. My dear Lord, I am so frightened.… One explosion follows another, and another. Two lads are running out shouting out for nurses. They are covered in blood. It’s running down their cheeks and hands, and something else is dripping from underneath their bandages. They are soon dead, shot to pieces. There is screaming, yelling, the earth is shaking.… And at that moment a shell flies right into our dugout.… [Then] we’re running, but God knows where. Our [Commanding Officer] has run off into the forest. I suppose he thought it was safer in there. As if. None of us can understand what’s going on.… We scramble into a peasant hut … press ourselves against a wall, sit down and wipe our eyes. Our eyes are full of tears, we wipe them away, but they just keep coming back because the shells are full of gas.… [We] lie facedown and we just want to dig ourselves into the earth. Under our breath we pray to our Lord God to save us from this, just for this one day. Dear [Nyura] … we will probably never see each other again—all it takes is an instant and I will be no more—and perhaps no one will be able to gather the scattered pieces of my body for burial.

  NURSES ROMANOVA

  With the war, Alexandra “became overnight a changed being,” recalled her friend Anna Vyrubova. Under her patronage, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo was converted into a hospital, as were eighty-five other mansions and palaces in the St. Petersburg area. Still, Alexandra wanted to do more. So she enrolled in nursing courses, and she took nineteen-year-old Olga and seventeen-year-old Tatiana with her. “To some it may seem unnecessary my doing this,” she told Nicholas, “but much is needed and every hand is useful.”

  Now Alexandra no longer stayed in bed until noon, complaining of headaches and back pains. Every morning, she and the “Big Pair” walked across the park to their nursing classes at the newly created hospital. Working in the wards, the students “washed, cleaned and bandaged maimed bodies, mangled faces, blinded eyes,” remembered Anna, who joined the Romanovs in their nurses’ training. It was gruesome work. “I have seen the empress of Russia assisting in the most difficult operations,” continued Anna, “taking from the hands of the busy surgeons amputated legs and arms, removing bloody and vermin-ridden field dressings, enduring all the sights and smells and agonies of the most dreadful of all places, a military hospital in the midst of a war.”

  After two months of intense training, Alexandra and her daughters earned their nursing certificates as well as the right to wear the Red Cross uniform. With its apron and nurse’s wimple, the gray uniform was extremely plain. Yet it made its wearers look “dignified and courageous,” said Anna.

  Fifteen-year-old Marie and thirteen-year-old Anastasia wanted to be nurses, too. But Alexandra said they were too young. Instead, she allowed them to be “patronesses,” establishing their own little hospital just across the pond from the Alexander Palace, in a cluster of buildings Nicholas had built years earlier. Called the Hospital of Grand Duchesses Marie and Anastasia, it had enough white iron beds for two dozen wounded officers. Because they were not noble-born, infantrymen were sent to separate hospitals. There were dominoes, chessboards, and even a pool table.

  The “Little Pair” took their patroness duties seriously. Every few days, they hurried along the path that led from the palace to their hospital. Sitting at the wounded soldiers’ bedsides, they read to them and wrote letters for them. Sometimes they knitted little gifts—scarves and lap rugs. And if their patients felt well enough, they challenged them to a game of checkers or a few hands of bezique, their favorite card game. Upon their discharge, they gave the men little mementos of their stay—watches and medals inscribed with the girls’ initials.

  Hospital work was fun at first, especially for girls who had lived so long in isolation. “There was a concert [at our hospital],” Anastasia told her father. “There were singers and then dancers.… Everyone applauded at the end.” But the reality of war soon pushed its way into their little hospital. Every day, Red Cross trains brought hundreds of wounded and dying men from the front. Moaning and bloody, their flesh burned and torn, they called out, “Stand near me. Hold my hand that I may have courage.” The girls did. “Two more poor things died,” Anastasia now mournfully told her father. “[I] sat with them only yesterday.”

  THE WAR GRINDS ON

  In May 1915, after a long winter of being mired in the trenches, a combined Austrian-Germany force attacked the Russian troops still hunkered down in the Carpathian Mountains. A thousand shells a minute pounded the Russians’ trenches. Terrified troops “jumped up and ran back weaponless,” recalled one German soldier. “In their gray fur caps and fluttering unbuttoned coats, they looked like a flock of sheep in wild confusion.” The Russians tried to make a stand, but without supplies or ammunition, they finally retreated, giving up the hard-won territory they’d spent the winter defending.

  But the enemy kept coming, pushing the Russians farther and farther back. When it was all over, Russia had not only lost the territory it had earlier won from Austria, but all of Russian Poland as well. “They’ve screwed it all up,” General Brusilov heard one of his soldiers grumble, “and we’ve been landed with cleaning up the mess.” Said another, “A fish begins to stink from its head. What kind of tsar surrounds himself with incompetents? It’s as clear as day that we’re going to lose this war.”

  The Great Retreat, as it came to be known, ended in September 1915, only after German forces got bogged down in Russian rain and mud. By that time, one out of every three men on the front line had been killed or captured. Thousands more deserted, returning to their farms, only to discover that in many cases the government had requisitioned all their crops and livestock. For many, it was the last straw, wrote one historian, “the vital psychological moment … when [soldiers’] loyalty to the monarchy finally snapped. A government which had dragged them into a war which they could not hope to win, had failed to provide them adequate weapons and supplies … was not worthy of further sacrifices.”

  DARKNESS DESCENDS

  With the continued defeat of its army, gloom and misery fell across the country. Gone were the cheering crowds, the merrily waving banners, the Russian people’s bravado.
Now groups of bleak, shivering citizens gathered on snow-packed sidewalks to read the ever-lengthening casualty lists posted in shop windows. Wounded and dying soldiers filled hospitals. And the spirit of patriotism flickered out. It was replaced by anger, suspicion, and a hatred of anything German. Across the country, German books were burned, German businesses were looted, and music written by such German composers as Bach and Beethoven was banned from public performances. Even the name of the capital was changed from the German-sounding St. Petersburg to the Slavic Petrograd.

  Ugly stories began to circulate about the country’s unpopular German-born empress. The people accused Alexandra of being a spy, and of supporting the kaiser’s army. The mood grew so dark that in Moscow a mob gathered in Red Square to demand her imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress as a traitor to her country.

  Nicholas now realized something extraordinary needed to be done to quell the nation’s anger.

  COMMANDER TSAR

  When the war began, the tsar had put his cousin Grand Duke Nicholas, known in society as Nikolasha, in charge of battlefield operations. But by the summer of 1915, with the mood of the country darkening and the army in retreat, Nicholas considered firing Nikolasha and taking command himself. Many of his ministers advised against it, fearing that any military failures would be tied to him. In addition, he lacked war experience and knew almost nothing about military strategy. Still, Nicholas believed he was the people’s Batiushka Tsar, and just his presence—symbolic and emotional—would spur the soldiers to even fiercer fighting.

  But could he walk away from the day-to-day governing of the country?