Avoidance became Nicholas II’s métier when faced with a stronger will than his own. And that included his wife. Alexandra was unendingly frustrated by her husband’s pathological timidity, his lack of moral courage. From the beginning she had recognised this fatal weakness and she spent her entire married life attempting to instil in her meek husband the magisterial demeanour of the great Russian tsars – Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great – who had gone before him. Traditionally Russians had long since seemed to respond best to ‘a touch of madness or magic in their rulers’, and Nicholas had neither. Marriage to the sickly and highly strung Alexandra, and with it capitulation to her baleful influence, dulled his natural gregariousness and he gradually ceased to engage with people in his normal way. Nevertheless, he remained confident that he had his own personal window on to what was best for the Russian people, refusing to face up to the many social and political problems confronting the country.
No doubt the seeds of Nicholas’s mistrustfulness of change, and with it a lifetime’s dread of assassination, had been sown when in 1881, at the age of 13, he had watched his horribly mutilated grandfather Alexander II die, the day they carried him into the Winter Palace after a bomb attack on his carriage on St Petersburg’s Ekaterininsky Canal. Nicholas’s own father’s reactionary response to the assassination and the threat of terrorism had been to govern Russia with a hard and retrogressive hand. He passed his autocratic policies on to his son and with them a profound suspicion of any form of constitutional government. Fearful of innovation and change, Nicholas shrank back, clinging to his Oriental fatalism and to the steadying rock of ‘Papa’s policy’. He had no wish to break the oath made at his coronation to maintain and transfer to his long-awaited heir the autocratic system he had inherited from his father. And so he resisted the guidance of strong-minded politicians such as his prime minister Petr Stolypin and finance minister Sergey Witte. When men such as they attempted to take the initiative and suggest reform, he dug his heels in, seeing their action as a usurpation of his power. He could not bear to lose control. He preferred instead the reassuring mediocrity of those who did not challenge him and who told him what he wanted to hear. In his social contacts Nicholas eschewed the company of modernisers and industrialists, court society and representatives of contemporary culture in a backward-looking preference for the rituals and etiquette of what seemed to him the safe old order. The Russian masses were incapable of dealing with any other form of government, of that he and Alexandra were certain, and none was more vocal than she in expressing it: ‘We are not a constitutional country and dare not be; our people are not educated for it.’
But after the 1905 revolution and the horrific debacle of the massacre of nearly 200 marchers by Cossacks on Bloody Sunday, the faith of the common people in their benign batyushka had been seriously undermined and a rapid alienation of tsar and people had set in, irrevocably damaged by the Rasputin scandal. A rising tide of insurrection in St Petersburg forced the Tsar reluctantly into a ‘constitutional experiment’, announced in a manifesto of 17 October 1905. It was the beginning of the end of the old autocratic regime that Nicholas had cherished. The inauguration of the Duma did nothing to quell growing unrest in the country and the resurgence of a revolutionary movement that Alexander III had so rigorously suppressed. Repressive measures introduced in the wake of a string of terrorist murders, including that of Grand Duke Sergey in 1905 and Stolypin in 1911, now earned the Tsar the epithet of ‘Nicholas the Bloody’. Noble, high-minded, conscientious, courteous, selfless, chivalrous towards women – in every possible way the Tsar had once been viewed as a true gentleman. But now there was blood on his hands and the testimonies to his fine personal qualities as a private individual that had poured from the pens of courtiers, friends, priests, diplomats and ministers alike could no longer counter the new propagandist images portraying the Tsar as the repository of all the despotism and brutality of a corrupt and antediluvian system. Between 1906 and 1910, 3,741 people were executed for political crimes and thousands more sent into forced labour, exile and prison. The wave of revolution continued to rise until 1914; then the war came and with it an almost overnight reunion of tsar and people in one cause – defence of the motherland. But this lasted barely a year before a massive loss of faith in Nicholas’s wartime leadership brought further troubles and prophecies of the imminent collapse of the monarchy.
If Nicholas had abdicated in 1905, as many in retrospect have felt he should have done, he and his family might well have lived out their lives in quiet provincial retirement somewhere abroad. But instead of confronting the turbulent issues that Russia faced, Nicholas and Alexandra retreated to their palace at Tsarskoe Selo, to where they felt safe and unthreatened. Nothing, however, could stem the tide of gossip about the true nature of the Tsarevich’s haemophiliac condition and the increasing hostility towards Alexandra after she invested all her hopes for Alexey’s survival in the hands of Grigory Rasputin. Gossip and rumour, crude propagandist cartoons in the papers of the most salacious kind, all stoked the fires of disenchantment with their monarch among the population at large. And with it, the Imperial couple increasingly became subject to nameless fears. They saw plotting and betrayal at every turn and withdrew increasingly into the selfish protectiveness of family life. It gave them a false sense of security, and like the court of the Sleeping Beauty they slumbered on at Tsarskoe Selo, in wilful ignorance of what lay outside, beyond the palace gates.
When Nicholas finally abdicated, on 15 March 1917, he took it with complete equanimity, as part of God’s greater plan for him. As he confided to Anna Vyrubova, the Tsaritsa’s closest friend, if a scapegoat were needed to save Russia, then God’s will be done, he meant to be that scapegoat. One thing became clear: even at such a moment of crisis, no one was allowed to cross into the forbidden territory of the Tsar’s inner thoughts. To the end Nicholas remained inscrutable, enigmatic, a riddle to those around him. That day, while his mother sat sobbing and his entourage contained their own distress, he signed the abdication document and then, as the train taking him back to Petrograd pulled out, stood calmly staring out of the window of his carriage, lighting one cigarette after another. Within a couple of months of giving up his throne, his empire, his power, Nicholas was confiding to his diary the pleasures of now being able to spend more time with his ‘sweet family’ than in ‘more normal years’. Rowing, walking, sawing wood, digging the garden, riding bicycles with his daughters around the park at Tsarskoe Selo – such for him was true happiness. The only thing he missed about his former life was contact with his dear mama. ‘But I am indifferent to everything else’, he wrote.
He had not always been so detached. Throughout his reign, the signs had been there of a constant inner battle in the Tsar to suppress his apprehensions and indifference when in the company of others: the deliberate slowing down of his speech, punctuated by pauses for thought, his unhurried movements, a scrunching of his toes in his boots or a shrugging of his shoulders – all signalled moments of insecurity or self-consciousness, as too did a nervous cough and the constant self-comforting stroking of his moustache and beard with the back of his right hand. His eyes, whilst warm and kind, never lighted for long on the person he was talking to but constantly flickered distractedly out into the distance. But of all the props Nicholas increasingly relied on to ease the anxieties and tensions of his burden as tsar, none was more important than cigarettes, which he chain-smoked, often using a pipe-shaped meerschaum cigarette holder. His smoking had become even heavier after the outbreak of the First World War. Cigarettes provided a literal smokescreen behind which Nicholas concealed his anxieties or lack of will to discuss issues or confront problems. He constantly lit one, stubbed it out half finished and lit another. Which was all very well all the time he was able to indulge his craving for nicotine with his usual Benson & Hedges bearing the imperial crest, or the delicious Turkish cigarettes sent to him by the Sultan just before hostilities with the Turks broke out in 1914. Even in Tobols
k a loyal member of his army staff, Major General Vladimir Voiekov, had managed to send the Tsar cigarettes. But by the time he arrived in Ekaterinburg, the fine cigarettes would probably long since have been exhausted and Nicholas was reduced to relying on his captors to give him cheap papirosy, with their cardboard tubes filled with the stinking makhorka tobacco so beloved of ordinary Russians. Nicholas hated the stuff and perhaps chose, as part of his road to Calvary, to suffer the agonies of nicotine withdrawal until occasionally the nuns from the Novo-Tikhvinsky Convent were able to bring him tobacco with the daily supplies of milk and eggs.
For it was in captivity that his great powers of self-control and restraint – till then seen as negative characteristics in a monarch – ironically became his strengths during the increasingly uncertain days of July. They impressed even the guards at the Ipatiev House, one of whom observed that the Tsar’s self-mastery was almost ‘supernatural’. The quiet inner force of the man was not like that of other mortals; it belied his appearance and the outward manner he had of an ordinary little colonel of the guards. Other more intriguing rumours had reached the ears of British ambassador Sir George Buchanan in Petrograd, from both Prince Felix Yusupov and also Grand Duke Nikolay: that Nicholas’s almost childlike indifference to the loss of his throne had been the result of his smoking narcotics – probably a blend of henbane and hashish – administered by a Tibetan doctor, P. A. Badmaev, recommended by Rasputin to counter stress and insomnia. Some courtiers in the know about this claimed that the habit had ‘seriously affected his mental powers’ and had produced in the Tsar ‘a state of callousness and complete insensibility to anything that befell him’. This seems unlikely, but the drug may well have had a sufficiently anaesthetic effect for Nicholas to endure the abdication crisis with such uncanny calm. Now, however, there were no palliatives left. They might take away his cigarettes, but in the end Nicholas had one last refuge, the most powerful narcotic of all – prayer.
As for his diary, he had nothing useful left to say in it, despite writing it being a lifelong habit. His thoughts and feelings were becoming increasingly internalised as the ‘intolerable boredom’ of having no physical work became an ever greater strain. Over the years his wife’s catalogue of ailments had become, as he had admitted to his cousin Konstantin, tiresome and depressing; it had taken all his superhuman tolerance and tact to remain loving and supportive but it was wearing him down and forcing him further in on himself. Commandant Avdeev at the Ipatiev House was of the opinion that Nicholas ‘feared his wife more than the devil himself’. The Tsaritsa openly berated him in English in front of people, both inside the house and outdoors, taking him to task for being friendly and talkative with the guards whilst she persisted with her ingrained autocratic manner. But it was all water off a duck’s back; Nicholas had for so long now learned how to inhabit his own profound loneliness and had developed such a blankness of mind that during these final July days he was merely riding the tide towards his inexorable fate. For the Orthodox faithful, such calmness is perceived as a mark of the Tsar’s Christlike resignation and meekness; for the more cynical Bolsheviks it seemed a kind of ‘idiotic indifference’ that ran counter to his natural intelligence. Such behaviour was incomprehensible in the ruthless logic of his captors. Each day now inside the Ipatiev House came and went for Nicholas in a state of self-induced mental anaesthesia; hiding his thoughts behind the books he read and re-read all morning and pacing relentlessly up and down the garden twice a day. Alone with his daughters on the frequent occasions that Alexandra did not go out into the garden, he was able to occasionally relax, to laugh with them and sit on the swing. But the nights were now increasingly welcome, ‘the best part of the day’, a time briefly to forget, as he himself had observed in Tobolsk in January.
Something different was now in the air at the Ipatiev House; even Nicholas had, since June, noticed a change in the guards and their reluctance to talk when the family were outside. He had taken this as an affront, uncomprehending of the true significance of this distancing. But that Friday, as Nicholas worried about the safety of his possessions, the net around the Romanovs, and the threat to his very existence, was tightening.
For in Moscow, Lenin was now facing a major crisis, with armed insurrection brewing among the Bolsheviks’ political rivals the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (several of whose leaders had taken important roles in the provisional government and who had broken away from the party in December 1917). At the 5th All-Russian Congress of Soviets which had opened the previous day as a showcase for Lenin’s new Bolshevik government at a Bolshoy Theatre packed with 1,164 delegates, there had been a violent quarrel between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs (as they were known) about the peace treaty with Germany. Workers and soviet deputies had crowded the gangways and stood on their seats amidst the chandeliers, plush and gilding of the Bolshoy’s opulent Imperial interior, gesticulating at the Grand Duke’s box occupied by Ambassador Mirbach and other representatives of the German government and hurling abusive shouts of ‘Down with the Germans’ and ‘Down with Mirbach’. This fine building, that had once echoed to the voice of the great bass singer Chaliapin singing Boris Godunov and where the newly nationalised Imperial Ballet provided a final dying vestige of Imperial culture, now resounded with angry shouts of condemnation of the Bolsheviks for their perceived sell-out of Russia to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk.
The most vociferous critic that afternoon was the 32-year-old Left SR Mariya Spiridonova, now back in Russia after 11 years of exile in one of the harshest prisons in Siberia for murdering a brutal tsarist official. Small, sober-faced, dressed in black with a stiff puritanical white collar, she was the archetypal fanatical female revolutionary, her big grey eyes full of anger behind her pince-nez as she took to the stage. From here she virulently condemned Lenin and the new regime for using the ‘toiling peasantry’ to their own ends and allowing the martyred Ukraine to be occupied and despoiled by the Germans. It made her ‘burn with shame’ that the Bolsheviks, with whom she had fought ‘behind the same barricade’, had now betrayed the Revolution. The auditorium was quickly in uproar; Chairman Sverdlov’s attempts at tinkling the bell on his table to call the meeting to order failed dismally.
Holed up in the backwater of Vologda – a railway junction halfway between Moscow and the northern port of Murmansk, where the foreign diplomatic corps had been evacuated to safety from Petrograd after the Revolution – US ambassador to Russia Richard Francis seized news of the conflict at the Congress of Soviets as a welcome justification for his continuing arguments to President Wilson for American intervention in a Russia that he felt was about to collapse in turmoil. Germany he sensed was ready to step in for the kill, and this must be prevented at all costs.
That morning, the calendar on the wall in Nicholas and Alexandra’s bedroom had been changed, with its usual regularity. The ‘amazing’ aroma of Ekaterinburg’s summer gardens was one of the few lingering pleasures left to the Tsar during his now increasingly brief periods of recreation, an evocative memory perhaps of hot summers at his palace in Livadia in the Crimea. The smell of blossom, the summer sun overhead and the warmth on his face, exercise in the outdoors: these were the things he most valued, next to his family. Everything else had long since been exorcised from his shuttered mind. But now even the consolations of the weather were not enough. After Friday 5 July, time in the Ipatiev House stood still. The calendar would not be changed again.
4
The Woman in a Wheelchair
SATURDAY 6 JULY 1918
If Queen Victoria had had her way, her granddaughter Princess Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice of Hesse and by Rhine would one day have been Queen of England and Empress of India. Alix (as she was known in the family, rather than by her official name, Alexandra) was not a particularly eminent candidate, coming as she did from a relatively minor German principality. Nevertheless, the Queen, in her insatiable drive to keep control of the dynastic marriages of her vast extended family, earmarked her as a su
itable bride for one or other of her two grandsons, Eddy or George, the next two in line to the British throne after their father the Prince of Wales.
But the wilful Alix would have none of it. Much to the Queen’s disgust, she turned down the proposal of Edward, Duke of Clarence, who seemed genuinely infatuated with her. Acknowledging her granddaughter’s strength of character – not without much surprise and a little offence – the Queen observed that ‘she refuses the greatest position there is’. George, the next in line, never even made it into the frame, for Alix by then had fallen for the handsome young Russian Tsarevich Nicholas. The unimaginative George settled instead for a rather poor second best after Eddy died unexpectedly in 1892. He married his dead brother’s fiancée, Princess May of Teck, yet another minor German princess.
Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg Page 9