Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  In St Petersburg, a 301-gun salute sent the news of the birth of an heir to the throne thundering across the city as the Tsar, his mother and his daughters headed for church and a great Te Deum of thanks. Across Russia, church bells rang out all day long celebrating the news. Eleven days later the baby was taken in a gilded state coach drawn by six plumed white horses to his christening at the palace of Peterhof, his escort a phalanx of Chevaliers-Gardes in white and a detachment of scarlet-coated Cossacks. Lying on a cushion of cloth of silver like some sacred offering, Alexey was ceremoniously carried into the church by the Mistress of the Robes, Princess Maria Golitsyn. The Imperial Court had assembled in all their finery – the men in full dress uniforms and medals, the women in traditional Russian kokoshka headdresses and long gowns of silver and gold brocade encrusted with jewels – for a four-hour ceremony presided over by Metropolitan Anthony of St Petersburg. As an act of gratitude Nicholas had abolished corporal punishment in the army and navy. Far away in Manchuria, where Russia was fighting the Japanese, the entire Russian army was named as the baby’s godfather. The little Tsarevich was given the name Alexey – after Alexey Mikhailovich, the meek and mild tsar who had reigned in the seventeenth century – as a mark of Romanov hopes for reconciliation between tsar and state. But others shook their heads and saw the name as foreboding; it was an unlucky name. According to a seventeenth-century prophecy, the Romanov dynasty would end with an Alexey as heir.

  The Tsaritsa had no doubts that she had redeemed herself in the eyes of her husband, her God and her adoptive nation by finally producing a son and heir. Her many prayers to the early nineteenth-century mystic St Serafim of Sarov for a miracle had borne fruit; her years of religious devotion and self-castigation, of pain and sorrow at being vilified by the court – all that was behind her. Now the nation would love her at last. Her son Alexey came into the Romanov family’s lives as a ray of hope, a ‘Sunbeam’ as she called him. He was her ‘Baby’, and forever after, even when he was an adolescent, that would be the pet name she would call him by.

  But then, on 8 September, only six weeks after Alexey’s birth, the Romanov family’s world imploded and Alexandra’s delirious joy turned to implacable grief. Her baby started bleeding from the navel. It was the first unmistakable sign of the deadly condition of haemophilia – passed down unwittingly in the female line from Alexandra’s grandmother Queen Victoria to the royal houses of Germany, Spain and Russia. Privately, Nicholas and Alexandra were advised of the truth, but there would be no public pronouncements, not ever. Although the Imperial physicians understood something of the nature of haemophilia, science had yet to explain the realities of the defective gene that transmitted the condition, or its physiology, and it was 1936 before a clotting agent was developed to control the bouts of bleeding. The Tsarevich’s life-threatening condition would therefore be a closely guarded secret, even within the extended Romanov family. A pall of gloom descended over the royal couple and courtiers became afraid to smile in their presence, conducting themselves as though in a house where someone had died. Nicholas and Alexandra thereafter were forced to carry their grief over their son’s condition hidden inside them, for nothing could be said that might undermine his eventual ascent to the throne or indicate that he was in any way physically unfit to rule. But this also meant that all their hopes of regaining the nation’s sympathy and affection through the public promotion of their beautiful son after the debacle of the war with Japan and the political damage of the 1905 Revolution had to be sacrificed. The Tsarevich was too frail to parade in public and sooner or later people would have noticed that something serious was wrong with him.

  It was, for Alexandra, yet another terrible cross to bear; there might briefly have been the suggestion that she try for another son, but she was worn out with childbirth and the strain of another pregnancy might well have killed her. Perversely the slings and arrows life threw at her – even this terrible burden of grief over her only son – gave her something to live for. It was all part of the necessary road towards self-perfection through suffering, and ultimate redemption. And so she enveloped Alexey in a suffocating cocoon of love and the family withdrew to the protective bubble of their palace at Tsarskoe Selo. At Alexandra’s behest, the walls of the Imperial nursery and even baby Alexey’s cradle were festooned with icons and religious images; day by day her increasingly sickly fanaticism about her son’s health grew.

  But how could such an enchanting, elfish child be so sick? For those who did not know the truth, Alexey seemed the epitome of the beautiful baby, with a great tumble of golden-brown curls as a toddler that turned auburn as he grew up. Like his father, he had the most expressive eyes, blue-grey, set in a finely chiselled narrow face, and they grew even bigger and more plaintive when overtaken by pain and suffering.

  From the moment he was able to crawl and then walk, the Tsarevich’s life was highly circumscribed. Although small cuts could be controlled by tight bandaging and the application of pressure, such was the life-threatening nature of Alexey’s condition that any minor knock to his joints could set in train copious internal bleeding because of the absence in his blood of the essential clotting factor to control it. This was further undermined by a genetic weakness of the veins and arteries that made them rupture easily. Under the surface of the skin the blood would accumulate in the joints, causing inflammation of the vascular membrane surrounding them and creating large swellings that turned the skin purple. The swellings would press on the nerves and cause shooting pains so excruciating that Alexey would not be able to sleep for days on end. Each attack also brought with it irreversible degradation of the tissues and cartilage around the joint, causing lameness for weeks after; his left leg was particularly badly affected. This meant that he would never be able to ride a bicycle, climb trees, play tennis with his sisters and father, or indulge in any of the normal boyish rough games. He might be able to sit on a pony and be led around, but he would never be able to gallop off at will, and even the simplest of activities like climbing in and out of a rowing boat had to be carefully monitored in case he slipped and banged himself. It meant that such playmates as he had had to be closely vetted and watched in order to ensure their games were not too rough. Even though Klementy Nagorny, from the Imperial Navy, and Andrey Derevenko, a boatman on the royal yacht the Shtandart, were assigned as Alexey’s full-time dyadki (‘uncles’) when he was five, Alexandra found it hard to trust her son’s safety to anyone. She constantly watched over him. One young princess remembered being invited to the palace and how she was forbidden to play any games where Alexey might fall. Sometimes the Tsar would lift one or other of them on to his back for a ‘horse-ride’ round the room, but the Tsaritsa would always be there, hovering protectively in the doorway, watching, waiting, anticipating disaster.

  Such constant cosseting by Alexandra and the fussing round him of four loving sisters, all of whom allowed him to get away with naughtiness that would never be countenanced in a normal child, inevitably combined to create a little boy who was insufferably spoilt. Alexey was suffocated by so much female affection; he had a naturally boisterous nature that he found hard to contain. So instead acquired a taste for infantile pranks, such as head-butting people and crawling under tables and pulling off the shoes of lady courtiers. He derided his sailor attendant Derevenko as ‘fatty’ and was frequently bad-mannered and disruptive at table, licking his plate and rolling bread into pellets and throwing it at people. His childish and wilful behaviour was the despair of his tutors at times, and even his exasperated father dubbed him ‘Alexey the Terrible’, though with the tongue-in-cheek pride of a doting parent, confiding in his quaintly affected English to a British officer one day, ‘Lor, he does love ragging.’

  Alexandra tried half-heartedly to suppress her son’s capriciousness, but it was only to his father’s authority that Alexey ever capitulated. For while he had clearly inherited his mother’s streak of imperiousness and was aware of his regal importance thanks to her constant reminders,
he had a natural charm and empathy like his father that often shone through. He was a bright, inquisitive child with a quirky originality of thought that was never exploited, for his studies were frequently interrupted by attacks of haemophilia and his natural intelligence, when he did get down to his books, was dissipated by a lack of concentration. In one respect, however, he did outstrip his sisters; thanks to Pierre Gilliard’s diligent tuition Alexey learned to speak much better French than the girls and prided himself on being able to write notes to his father in that language. But like his sister Anastasia, whom he adored, he did not enjoy being sedentary and was always restless, preferring to be out of doors, playing games with his pet animals – a King Charles spaniel called Joy to which he was devoted, an elderly donkey called Vanka and a cat called Zubrovka; he also had a very good ear for music and was a gifted balalaika player.

  Meanwhile, for Alexandra, her son’s fragile health had become a daily crusade, a battle for the Tsarevich’s survival and with it that of the dynasty. It changed her irrevocably, opening the door wide to the pernicious influences of every faith-healer, soothsayer, clairvoyant, charlatan, and miracle-worker who came offering a cure. Not the least among them was the ‘holy man’ Rasputin, whose appearance in 1905 and the Tsaritsa’s subsequent dependence on him set the doomed dynasty on its final one-way path to vilification and eventual annihilation. Trapped in a perpetual state of denial that her son was doomed to die young, Alexandra became hostage to endless self-torment for having been the unwitting conduit of his condition. Her escalating desperation, bordering on hysteria, to find a miracle ‘cure’ meant she was perfectly primed to embrace Rasputin’s powers as a bozhii chelovek – a man of God and healer. When Alexey had attacks of bleeding, Rasputin demonstrated an uncanny ability to calm, if not mentally ‘tranquillise’ him through the medium of hypnotism or autosuggestion of some kind, thus slowing down the bleeding by lowering the stress that raises blood pressure. No one could explain Rasputin’s power except the Tsaritsa; she put it all down to God’s intervention, and thus she would defend the man she called ‘Our Friend’ as her son’s last hope to the bitter end, no matter what odium it brought on her and the monarchy. She refused to listen to tales of Rasputin’s lasciviousness, drunkenness and womanising, or accusations about his meddling in political matters, at the risk of alienating her last few friends and closest relatives. As for the Tsar, he capitulated to his wife’s neurotic dependency on the man and kept his reservations about Rasputin to himself: ‘Better one Rasputin than ten fits of hysterics a day’ had been his weary comment.

  The Tsarevich’s haemophilia inevitably also transformed the lives of his four adoring sisters, pushing them irrevocably into the background in their mother’s heart, for Alexey now consumed her every waking concern. It fell to the Romanov girls to take on the role of carers and watchers – over both their brother and their increasingly sick mother. There were many times when both would be laid up in bed – Alexandra with one of her vast array of complaints; Alexey with bouts of haemorrhage and swelling to the joints. Physical suffering was now a constant in the Romanov household, and with it came the unending apprehension of what might happen to Alexey when he next had an attack. For when they came, there was little anyone could do for the suffering boy other than administer ice packs to counter the pain and his raging temperature, and sit and talk and amuse him in any way they could in order to distract him, his parents having vetoed the used of morphine. To compensate, Alexandra would sit for long hours by Alexey’s bedside, stroking his head and kissing him, tormented by the child’s pitiful groans as his body contorted in spasms of pain. For the boy, his mother became the constant light in his moments of darkness, just as he was the ‘Sunbeam’ who had brought light into hers.

  Through it all Alexey suffered his debilitating condition with extraordinary stoicism and never dwelled self-pityingly on it. He developed a precocious wisdom and dignity uncanny for his age, and this, combined with his transparent sympathy when confronted with the suffering of others, redeemed his often monstrously spoilt behaviour. But there were times when the face of the child seemed too old for its years, too exposed already to too much suffering. Yet for all that, Alexey’s simple, childlike acceptance of his own mortality remained uncoloured by his mother’s prevailingly morbid obsession with sickness and death. Whilst Alexandra could never face up to the possibility of her son’s death, Alexey himself lived his life fully aware that it could at any time be snatched from him. But it did not stop him from wanting to take risks and be like other boys. At times, such was his restlessness at being so restricted that he seemed almost deliberately to challenge his body by taking physical risks, sliding down stairs on silver salvers, climbing on tables, jumping in and out of baths and boats, tumbling in the snow when he knew he shouldn’t. At other times, when sick, he became thoughtful and contemplative and would lie outdoors on a couch, watching the birds and staring up at the sky, commenting that he ‘liked to think and wonder’ and enjoy the sun in case his health should one day prevent it. One day, when he became Tsar, he was determined that ‘nobody would be poor or unfortunate’. He wanted everybody to be happy, as he himself inherently was.

  The obverse of the doom and gloom around the palace when Alexey was sick was the transformative power of his good health when he did enjoy it, and he was often fortunate enough to do so for months at a time. When the Tsarevich was well, as Pierre Gilliard observed, everything and everybody at Tsarskoe Selo ‘seemed bathed in sunshine’. Alexey would take centre stage as the adorable, happy boy in a sailor suit – innocent, vibrant and lovable, Russia’s great hope for the future.

  But the realists in the Imperial entourage, such as the Tsar’s physician Dr Evgeny Botkin, were doubtful that the boy would ever live to become Tsar. They did their best for him, administering regular massage and electrotherapy during the prolonged enforced periods of rest that followed attacks, which left his leg muscles weak and atrophied. But sooner or later they anticipated his premature death. In October 1912 in Bialoveza in Poland, Alexey cheated it by a whisper. Showing off in front of his attendant Derevenko one day by jumping into a sunken bath, he stumbled and hit his groin. The ensuing swelling seemed to go down, but two weeks later when out with his mother for a carriage ride at the family’s hunting lodge at Spala, the jolts of the road caused him to cry out with pain in his back and stomach. A haemorrhage in his upper left thigh had spread, with blood from the injury seeping into his abdomen, the pressure of the swelling on the nerves of his leg causing agonising pain. Huddled on his side with his left leg drawn tightly up against his body, Alexey shrieked as the spasms came and went, his cries reverberating along the dark, damp corridors of the wooden hunting lodge. His temperature rocketed to 40 degrees; as the days wore on, he became too exhausted even to cry but simply moaned and kept repeating ‘O Lord have mercy upon me’. Thinking their son was dying, Nicholas and Alexandra capitulated to Alexey’s pitiful pleas for help and finally allowed the administering of morphine. With Alexey hovering between life and death, on 8 October the first of several official communiqués was released to the public about his perilous condition. Prayers were said across Russia and a flood of letters, telegrams and icons arrived praying for Alexey’s recovery.

  For II days Alexandra refused to leave her son’s bedside, rarely taking time to rest or eat and only occasionally allowing the Tsar to replace her. Privately, Nicholas wept for his son, his only way of dealing with the situation being to internalise his grief and carry on hunting. For four days Alexey drifted in and out of delirium; at one lucid moment entreating his mother in a whisper, ‘when I am dead build me a little monument of stones in the wood’. A priest administered the last rites and the whole of the Imperial entourage at Spala held their breath. As a last desperate act Alexandra begged Anna Vyrubova to send a telegram to Rasputin in Siberia. The message came back that the doctors should not attempt to intervene; ‘the little one will not die’. Within an hour the crisis was over and the haemorrhaging sto
pped. The combined medical specialists of Russia were baffled: they could find no explanation for this spontaneous recovery. So severe had been the attack that Alexey, now painfully thin and pale, was kept in bed for a month. He was not able to walk again properly for a year and had to have a metal brace fitted to his leg to prevent him becoming permanently lame. For Alexandra, Spala was final vindication of her faith in Rasputin, the absolute, incontrovertible proof she needed to silence his critics. She would not tolerate a word said against him thereafter – by anybody, including her own sister, Ella, whose words of warning about Rasputin’s destructive influence prompted Alexandra to turn her back on her for ever.

  Alexey’s slow recovery after the attack at Spala meant that during the crucial Romanov publicity campaign for the tercentenary in 1913 he had to be carried in public ceremonials, prompting people to ask themselves whether the future of Russia was to be in the hands of ‘a cripple’. Rumours went about that the Tsarevich was seriously ill with tuberculosis, but the lid was kept tightly shut on the true cause of his disability. Something changed in Alexey after 1912; he became more subdued, less childish in his behaviour and more considerate of others. He seemed finally to have grasped the seriousness of his condition. In October 1915 Alexandra allowed him to join his father at Army HQ at Mogilev. Alexey was delighted: he was glad to get away from all the women fussing round him at Tsarskoe Selo and the monotony of his closely monitored life there. The outbreak of war had at last allowed Alexandra’s ‘Sunbeam’ – her ‘Baby’ – to leave off the childish sailor suit and put on a soldier’s greatcoat. He wanted so desperately to be a man. Given the rank of an ordinary private (he was promoted to corporal the following June) and a made-to-measure army uniform and miniature rifle to match, Alexey loved the life at Mogilev with his father. They slept together on camp beds in the same simple room; Alexey accompanied Nicholas when he reviewed the troops and visited the wounded, and took great pleasure in talking with his father’s entourage of officers. The all-male environment matured him, even if his education suffered; his male tutors came with him but despaired at how far behind Alexey was falling with his studies. But the idyll at Mogilev did not last long. A fit of sneezing in December brought on a nosebleed and another attack of haemophilia. Alexey was rushed back to Tsarskoe Selo and the healing powers of Rasputin.