Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  And now, today, Saturday 6 July, King George and Queen Mary (her official name) were celebrating 25 years of what had turned out to be a surprisingly successful marriage. That morning, after a carriage procession from Buckingham Palace to St Paul’s Cathedral and a service of thanksgiving, the royal couple had gone on to London’s Guildhall for their silver wedding celebrations, where they had been the recipients of a ‘humble address’ by parliament expressing warm appreciation of their Majesties’ ‘unfailing devotion to duty in this time of stress’. During his reign, George and his wife had, said the Times, ‘strengthened the bonds of affection binding them to the people’. At the King’s insistence, gifts of silver to celebrate the occasion would be donated to the Red Cross for the war effort.

  George and Mary were now at the height of their popularity as wartime figureheads. Such, too, ought to have been the role of their royal cousins, Nicholas and Alexandra. Still a year short of her own twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, how Alexandra must have wished her own bonds of affection with the Russian people could have been appreciated rather than so sorely misunderstood all these years. She was consumed by bitterness and anger at the ruination into which Russia was now being led. It was a wicked war and her cousin Kaiser Wilhelm was responsible. It was, she was sure, God’s punishment for the country’s sins, and she prayed fervently for his mercy and Russia’s redemption. She was tormented too by the invective that had been so unjustly hurled at herself and the Tsar – her husband’s sufferings she viewed as nothing less than Christlike, and such ‘black ingratitude’ at his self-sacrifice broke her heart. Her attitude to Russia was that of an indulgent but wise parent of a sick child, and she doggedly refused to abandon her loyalty to her adoptive country, in the naïve hope that one day it would recover its health – and its senses. God would save Russia, of that she remained certain. Discipline, order, faith – these were what was needed to put the country back on track; for they were, after all, the tenets to which she had long adhered in her own life.

  For months now the Tsaritsa had been living increasingly in the past and ‘in the hope of better days’. The earthly things of her former life had slipped away and the present had become a matter of endurance and giving thanks for each day as it came. But she felt so bitterly misunderstood. All she and Nicholas had ever wanted to do was to ‘live tranquilly, like an ordinary family, outside politics, struggle and intrigues’. Ironically, in captivity after the abdication, they had achieved precisely that. Alexandra had spent her time knitting socks, sewing and patching the family’s clothes and linen. But her eyesight was troubling her, as too were her many other long-term physical ailments. Her mental collapse in 1904 on discovering that her only son had the incurable disease of haemophilia – unknowingly passed down to Alix and on to him by Queen Victoria – had surrendered her finally and irrevocably to her accumulating neuroses. Thirteen years of living in false hope of Alexey’s miraculous recovery had utterly destroyed her. Her body was a wreck: five pregnancies in quick succession – all of them producing large babies and difficult births – plus a miscarriage and a phantom pregnancy would be enough to debilitate many women. But add to it heart pain and shortness of breath brought on by nervous anxiety, sciatica so bad that she often could hardly walk, facial neuralgia, cyanosis (blue lips), acute earache, swollen legs and severe headaches and it meant that she had for years spent hours if not days in bed, reclining on a couch, or sitting in a wheelchair.

  The Tsaritsa was now hopelessly addicted to a whole range of narcotics and sedatives, prescribed by Dr Botkin to control her various neuroses, her chronic headaches and insomnia. She had long since admitted that she was holding out physically thanks only to Veronal (a barbiturate-based proprietary drug), so much so that she was ‘saturated with it’. She also took morphine and cocaine for menstrual pain and a whole range of other complaints, and occasionally smoked French cigarettes – all in an attempt to dull her anxieties. But the compensations were few and the side effects only added to her overwhelming sense of physical exhaustion.

  At a time when Freud’s methodology was in its infancy, Alexandra demonstrated all the classic psychosomatic symptoms of the recently described condition of ‘hystero-neurasthenia’. Its inexorable progress, through increasing levels of irritability, restlessness, fatigue, a lack of pleasure in ordinary things, a fear of impending calamity and a marked preoccupation with her mental and physical condition, had begun in Alexandra’s youth with a succession of family bereavements and had escalated ever after. A detailed report on his wife’s mental and physical condition had been presented to the Tsar in 1910 by a German specialist, Dr Fischer. What the eminent doctor had to say was, however, deemed too close for comfort and he had not been invited back to the palace again. Instead the biddable Dr Botkin had been appointed and told the Tsaritsa what she wanted to hear, she having come to the unshakeable conclusion that she had a serious heart condition. The discomforting truths of the 1910 report may well explain the Tsar’s saintlike tolerance of his wife’s increasing sickliness and paranoid behaviour over the last few years. Seeing her so physically and mentally vulnerable, he was desperate to protect her. But by then he himself was, as he admitted to his mother, ‘completely run down mentally by worrying over her health’.

  Unlike her husband, who clung to the few paltry pleasures and diversions allowed them in the garden at the Ipatiev House, Alexandra spent most of her time indoors, lying on her bed or the couch, lost in sober thoughts of Christian resignation and the afterlife. An unrelenting diet of biblical and scriptural texts read to her by one or other of her daughters filled the blank pages of her days. For she always kept one of the girls with her when the others were allowed their daily recreation, no matter how fine the weather. She was achingly tired and had aged terribly since the abdication. Her hair was grey and she was painfully thin. There was a perpetual look of strain and anguish in her eyes. Yet even though broken in health, she remained an indomitable woman, convinced that her necessary suffering and that of her family was but one trial on the path to Christian self-perfection.

  Alexandra Fedorovna seemed to have been born into sorrow, to look upon life as a battle of endurance, and yet that had not always been the way. For with her dimpled cheeks and her happy disposition she had been called ‘Sunny’ when she was a little girl. Her joylessness, for all the consuming marital love and devotion she received from Nicholas and their children, did not endear her to the Russian people. It was hard to fathom for those who did not know her, but the seeds of a melancholy temperament had been sown in early childhood. She had suffered the loss of her adored little brother Frittie, a haemophiliac, in 1873. Then, in a double tragedy in 1878 when she was only six, her five-year-old sister May and her 35-year-old mother Princess Alice of Hesse had both succumbed and died when the whole family went down with diphtheria. With their deaths the sunshine departed from Alix’s life for ever.

  Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter Vicky, the widowed Empress Frederick of Germany, did not much care for her niece. To Vicky’s mind, the death of her mother had meant Alix had been spoiled and indulged as compensation, and had grown up with a streak of obstinacy and an excessively high opinion of herself. Alexandra was burdened by the enduring sin of pride, her austere manner accentuated by her tallness and her straight-backed deportment (the result of a spinal condition which limited the flexibility of her upper vertebral column; early newsreel footage reveals this awkwardness of manner in her strange stiff nodding, from the neck up, at crowds during public ceremonials). She became withdrawn and difficult, reticent about showing affection and suspicious of strangers, fearful of giving love to someone who might be taken from her. Further traumatised by the premature death of her father when she was 18, Alix retreated to the protective wing of her grandmother Queen Victoria in a state of nervous collapse. She spent long periods in England – at the royal homes at Windsor, Balmoral and Osborne – and English soon became her natural language. The manners and morals of the strong-minded British Queen l
eft their indelible mark on her, everything from Victoria’s extraordinary tolerance of copious draughts of freezing cold air through open windows all the year round, to her morbid obsession with death and her perpetual state of mourning for her dead husband Albert. Such unhealthy preoccupations rubbed off on the impressionable young Alix, who was encouraged to pay regular visits to the crypt where her own dead mother and siblings lay.

  From Victoria, Alix also inherited an indomitable will and stubbornness, as well as her idiosyncratic brand of Victorian prudery and reserve. Duty to family and to the state (in which her grandmother was a devout believer) was ingrained in her – French ambassador Maurice Paléologue called it a ‘militant austerity’ of conscience – as well as her grandmother’s idiosyncratically unsophisticated bourgeois tastes. Alix grew up disliking modernity in all its forms, wedded instead to the limited, homely tastes of the conventional hausfrau. Everything she did was dictated by an attention to thrift and industriousness in that most English of ways – hence her later insistence that her own daughters never sat idle and always had something to sew. When she gave presents, they were not the usual ostentatious objects expected of an empress, but personal hand-sewn, painted or knitted items. Such un-Russian behaviour, down to Alexandra’s insistence on showing her maids how to black-lead the grates in the royal apartments, later made her the butt of jokes among the sophisticates at the St Petersburg court. Privately, however, she also had that most contradictory of her grandmother’s traits: an intense, impulsive sensuality and need for physical passion that ran absolutely counter to her prudish, censorious exterior. Tragically she did not, however, inherit the one abiding grace of her grandmother that might have saved the Romanov dynasty from collapse – a scrupulous observance of constitutional monarchy.

  It took five years of waiting and superhuman persistence on the part of the Tsarevich Nicholas to wear down Alix’s resistance to conversion to Russian Orthodoxy from Lutheranism in order for their marriage to take place. He had first been captivated by her when she was 12 and he 16 at the wedding of her sister Ella to Grand Duke Sergey of Russia in 1884. Puppy love turned to consuming passion on his part when he saw Alix again, now a radiant beauty, in 1889. Nicholas set his heart on marrying her. His parents had their own ideas about a suitable bride, preferring Princess Hélène of Orleans, daughter of the Comte de Paris, the pretender to the French throne. But he resisted; it was the one time the Tsarevich stubbornly and uncharacteristically refused to accede to parental wishes. When Alexandra declined the marriage proposal of Edward, Duke of Clarence, in May 1890, Nicholas renewed his addresses, despite Alix’s tearful protestations about the impossibility of giving up her faith.

  One of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Edith Lytton, wrote that what finally won Alix’s heart was probably Nicholas’s reappearance at a family wedding in Coburg in 1894, without his wispy adolescent moustache but with a full and manly beard. Alix finally melted in the face of the handsome Tsarevich’s persistent attentions, and after many hours spent in fervent prayer she made her peace with God and her conscience and finally agreed to convert to Orthodoxy. Queen Victoria declared herself to be ‘thunderstruck’ by such a turnaround in her devout and pious granddaughter. At the end of October 1894, as her poor ‘gentle little simple Alicky’ set off for Russia, the Queen worried terribly about her fragile granddaughter marrying into such a dark and unstable monarchy and a society with ‘such a want of principle’. Her blood ran cold at the thought of Alix being sacrificed to ‘those dreadful Russians’. Certainly Alix’s arrival was not auspicious, for it came in time for a sombre reunion with her fiancé at his father’s deathbed. Within three weeks she found herself a ‘Funeral Bride’ and Empress of Russia, under the new name of Alexandra Fedorovna. It was a gloomy start to her marriage, as had been that of her mother, Princess Alice, who had also married in front of a muted congregation drowned in black, only six months after devotedly nursing her father Prince Albert during his fatal illness.

  Nicholas the Silent Sufferer and Alix the Funeral Bride were thus united under clouds of gloom and much superstitious prediction about what fate had in store for them. And so they clung to each other, with an incredible tenacity and all-inclusive passion that demonstrated the deep inner needs each found fulfilled in the other. The intensity of Alix’s love as ‘Wifey’ to Nicholas’s ‘Huzy’ was smothering, oppressive, overheated; but Nicholas seemed to thrive on it, like a hothouse plant under glass. They knew each other ‘through and through’, Alexandra asserted, and only ever needed to be together, with their children, ‘utterly cut off in every way’. Fine aspirations for any modest, devoted suburban couple; only they were not ordinary, private individuals but Emperor and Empress of Russia, and they had a duty to their public.

  Queen Victoria’s affection for Alexandra and Nicholas grew after the couple visited her at Balmoral in 1896 with their first child, Olga. They were, she thought, ‘quite unspoilt and unchanged and as dear and simple as ever’. And within the very close circle of family and the handful of friends that knew them, indeed they were. Alexandra was after all very beautiful, with delicate features, lovely reddish-gold hair and fine blue eyes. But much like her mother Princess Alice, she had a severe kind of beauty, accentuated by the sharp nose, that lent an austerity and coldness. The thin, taut lips rarely mellowed into a smile in public; indeed they had a perpetually mournful expression that suggested a lingering sense of life’s disappointments rather than its pleasures. Such seriousness of manner spilled over into a remorseless religiosity – another inheritance from Princess Alice. Alexandra had surprised everyone with the speed and messianic fervour with which she had embraced not just the Russian faith, but Russianness itself. With her sister Grand Duchess Ella, who had also converted on her marriage into the Romanov family, she shared the same levels of ‘charitable exaltation’ that intensified as the years went by. She had no hesitation in pronouncing herself entirely ‘Russian’ in sentiments and displaying all the loyalty of a native-born patriot. Indeed, Orthodoxy became a consuming passion and a solace, the motor that drove Alexandra spiritually and emotionally. It also, indirectly, became her undoing.

  Sadly for Alexandra, the perception of her at court and among the Russian people at large started off on a bad footing and never recovered lost ground. For she failed dismally to take on board that most important piece of advice given her by her grandmother: that it was her first duty in her adoptive country to win the love and respect of the people. Crippled by reserve, lonely and isolated, with her husband’s time taken up by affairs of state, Alexandra proved incapable of doing so. She lacked Nicholas’s great gifts: his charm, his engaging manner and his self-control. She seemed vain and self-willed, forever closed off and undemonstrative. From the day of her arrival she was viewed as a foreigner – as the nemka, ‘the German woman’. Her prudery and seriousness counted against her, as did her lack of taste in clothes, her poor dancing skills and her religious piety. Her response to the hostility she encountered was to retreat even further. She was reticent if not brusque with strangers, she spoke in a whisper, avoided coming down for meals, was picky and disdainful about food when she did, and frequently retired from them ‘indisposed’. She did everything she could to avoid being put on display in public ceremonials. Knowing she could not hold her own against what she saw as the decadent sophisticates of St Petersburg or the ‘spider’s net’ of the Moscow social set, in whose presence her whole face, neck and chest flushed crimson with nerves, Alexandra sought friends and companions among the upper middle classes and moneyed bourgeoisie. To friends such as these – her ladies-in-waiting Lili Dehn and Anna Vyrubova, who knew the extent of her many and distressing physical ailments kept secret from the public at large – the Tsaritsa was sweet, long-suffering, gracious and kind. They became her obedient, admiring poodles. Alexandra effortlessly dominated them, their lowlier social status ensuring an unquestioning devotion to her as a superior spiritual and moral being. But, being the clever woman she was, she
often found the toadying attentions of the intellectually challenged, immature Anna Vyrubova irritating. She frequently reviled Vyrubova in letters to Nicholas and was jealous of her doting affection for him, yet she never failed to exploit her as a captive audience for her interminable religious homilies, making of Vyrubova her almost constant companion during the war years when Nicholas was away at the Front.

  To the public beyond the palace gates, therefore, Alexandra remained an enigma. They saw so little of her that her almost permanent absence from view proved a fertile breeding ground for rumour, malevolent gossip and ultimately hatred. Alexandra failed to learn the one big lesson of her grandmother’s reign after Victoria had retreated from public view in 1861 with the death of Albert. Twenty years of reclusive life, refusing all public appearances, had brought upon the once popular and unassailable British monarchy the full brunt of public criticism and had aroused a great deal of republican dissent. A monarch could not afford to be invisible. In Alexandra’s frequent absences Nicholas worked the Romanov publicity machine hard with his five lovely children, but in the end it was not enough. Although the Imperial Family were frequently photographed and cartes de visite of them were widely available, in dozens and dozens of family photographs Alexandra is either absent or, if seen at all, sits solemnly in profile or looking away from the camera. Others show her reclining in her favourite environment – her mauve boudoir. This was her world: surrounded by varying shades of the colour of mourning, the walls smothered with hundreds of icons from floor to ceiling, and with the suffocating smell of lilac, lilies of the valley and violets sent daily from the French Riviera. Rarely upright and active, let alone vigorous, the Tsaritsa, for her husband and her children, became the woman in a wheelchair. She seemed to be always sickly, indisposed, struggling with her many demons, real and imagined; when she ventured outside, she hid herself under a parasol, always absorbed in her own thoughts, conscious of the watchfulness of others. True, she did her best to suffer her ailments stoically, and always revived in spirits when relaxing on board the royal yacht the Shtandart or at the family’s summer palace in Livadia, but the shades of Alexandra’s sick room followed the young family wherever it went and blighted all their lives.