Authors: Carolly Erickson
‘God be with us!’ Nicky wrote in his diary on the night he heard the news of the attack. He had known that the Japanese ambassador had taken his leave of Petersburg two days earlier,
after six months of unsuccessful deliberations and ten failed attempts to draft an agreement over territorial rights. He was aware, for Kuropatkin had told him, that the Japanese actually had many
more fighting men in the region than the Russians had, and that their troops were better trained and better equipped. Yet he had not anticipated this sudden, treacherous attack.
More shocks arrived in the following days. Port Arthur came under bombardment. Seven more Russian ships were sunk or heavily damaged. The Japanese had mined the harbour, preventing what remained
of the Russian squadron from escaping. And Japanese torpedo craft were attempting to run the gauntlet of the fortress guns and land troops ashore.
Public sentiment was aroused, there were patriotic delegations and mass demonstrations. Crowds cheered and sang ‘God Save the
Tsar’. Every man who possessed
one put on his military uniform, even if he had seen no active service in decades, and wore it every day, parading through the streets of Petersburg as if in anticipation of a military review.
Money poured into the treasury to support the war effort, millions of rubles contributed by the nobility, wealthy industrialists, bankers and traders.
But no amount of money could suddenly awaken the dormant, under-prepared troops and crews, or make proficient the incompetent commanders. There was no forceful Russian counter-attack. Instead,
the flagship, the
Petropavlovsk
, was sunk with six hundred men aboard, including Admiral Makarov, and another battleship was badly damaged. And, with the navy unable to offer much
resistance, the Japanese began bringing tens of thousands of their troops ashore. Opinion in Petersburg, which had dismissed the Japanese venture as ultimately futile, now began to take the threat
to Russian interests more seriously.
The empress’s first response to the outbreak of conflict was to reinvigorate her charitable guild, Help Through Handwork, and to move it into larger rooms in the Winter Palace. Now instead
of making clothing for the poor she and her ladies sewed bandages and warm clothes and knitted stockings for the soldiers. The workshop became a collecting point for medical supplies and other
necessities to be readied for shipment eastward into Siberia. Hundreds of women volunteered to sew and knit and pack boxes, and Alix appointed her maid of honour Princess Obolensky
(‘Litty’) to oversee the workshop. (‘She has such a clear, practical brain and good memory,’ Alix wrote to her sister Victoria.)
Each morning after she had heard her children’s prayers, dressed, and eaten breakfast, Alix gathered her sewing things and, preceded by an attendant, entered the workshop where she looked
over what had been produced the day before, talked to the volunteers and discussed the present day’s efforts with Litty and the Robes Mistress Princess Galitzine, who also had a supervisory
role.
‘There is no end of work to be done, but it is a great comfort to be able to help one’s poor sufferers a little,’ Alix wrote. ‘All work hard. Litty manages it splendidly
. . . We work for the army hospitals (apart
from the Red Cross) and for the well who need clothes, tobacco . . . and then we furnish military
trains.’’
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Alix and her group could not supply garments or goods to the Red Cross, for that was among Minnie’s charities, and
any contribution the empress’s workshop made would have been considered a trespass on the dowager empress’s prerogatives.
The work and its urgency, the daily ritual associated with it gave Alix a welcome sense of purpose and direction, but the outbreak of war depressed her and brought on severe migraines; though
she encouraged Nicky and reassured him that ‘God and our dear Friend [Philippe] will help us’, the strain she was under showed in her pallor, the hours she spent weeping alone in her
room, her attacks of flu and her ‘air of suffering’.
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‘She had always been very delicate,’ Mouchanow wrote, ‘and developed violent nervous headaches which totally prostrated her and confined her to her bed in a dark room,
sometimes for two or three days at a time. These attacks left her terribly weak, and she would require care and quiet to get over them.’
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Nothing could be done for her when her headaches were at their worst. No one could go near her, not even the children, for her senses were so acutely attuned during these attacks that the slightest
sound, even the sound of a footfall in the next room, could redouble her pain.
Worst of all, there were times when one migraine had hardly passed before another began, forcing her into another period of isolation and suffering.
She was pregnant again. The visit to St Serafim’s shrine, the bathing in his holy pool, had had its result. But instead of bringing her joy, this pregnancy was overshadowed by anxiety, not
only because of her physical distress and worry over the war, and Nicky’s frequent absences as a result of it, but because, according to Mouchanow, Alix was secretly apprehensive that her
child might be another girl. She no longer enjoyed the peace that had emanated from the spiritual circle, the confidence that had been so evident during her false pregnancy. She still believed, she
still trusted Philippe. But doubts had invaded her serenity.
And not only doubts, but grief. In the fall of 1903, while she and Nicky were staying at the hunting lodge of Skierniewice, her young niece Elizabeth, daughter of the
divorced Ernie and Ducky, fell ill of typhoid and died within days. Ernie had adored the beautiful little girl, his ‘sweet little sunshine’, and was overcome by his loss. Alix,
exhausted from nursing her seriously ill lady-in-waiting Sonia Orbeliani, helped Ernie through the terrible first days after his daughter’s death, suffering along with him and looking pale
and thin.
In the first week of the Japanese war she had another shock. Her sister Irene’s youngest son, four-year-old Henry, died of the ‘English disease’, haemophilia, after falling and
injuring his head. He bled internally, the bleeding could not be stopped, and death was inevitable – as it had been for Alix’s brother Frittie after his fall. (Irene had two sons with
the bleeding disease, though the older one, Waldemar, continued to survive.) While mourning her sister’s loss Alix must have felt increased anxiety over her own pregnancy, for if her child
was a boy he would be at risk of the disease.
Was her difficult pregnancy a sign that her child would be diseased, or were her migraines and nervous tears merely the result of her concern over the war, and her long hours of work with the
ladies of her guild? This question led to still more distress as the spring of 1904 advanced and the war continued to go badly for Russia. In May the forces of the mikado soundly defeated the
Russian forces on the Yalu and shortly afterwards laid siege to Port Arthur. In Petersburg, the early patriotic fervour gave way to a grim realization that Japan was a powerful enemy and that the
war was likely to be prolonged. Casualty lists grew longer. Now many families mourned lost sons, read the newspapers with sober faces, and prayed for peace.
And, as might have been anticipated, the prolongation of the war stirred up social turmoil. On the gates of the Summer Gardens in Petersburg a large hand-lettered sign appeared: ‘Dogs,
Beggars, all Lower Ranks of the Army and Navy Not Allowed.’ It was an insult to the fighting men, so many of whom were crowding into the city, their conspicuous presence a constant,
disturbing reminder to Petersburgers of the war. They sat in cafes, milled in shops, occupied
park benches, wandered aimlessly along Nevsky Prospekt, waiting to be called
to the front or sent home.
Anti-government forces were once again at work, stirring up ill feeling and spreading fear with their sudden attacks and secret plots. The Governor General of Finland was shot by a student
revolutionary. Interior Minister Plehve was killed by a bomb thrown just outside the Warsaw Station in Petersburg, in a well planned attack carried out by a number of conspirators in defiance of
Plehve’s secret police. Mayors, regional governors, officials were assaulted or threatened with assault, and spies sent word to the ministries of plots against the life of the tsar as he
travelled from Moscow to Poltava to Tula to Suvalki to Vitebsk, reviewing the troops and encouraging them as they went off to the war, icons of St Serafim held before them to protect them in their
holy cause.
In the midst of all the turmoil Alix continued to do her part for the war effort, giving audiences to generals about to leave for the front, supervising her workshop, sewing and knitting.
‘I like following all and not to be a mere doll,’ she wrote to her sister Victoria in June of 1904. ‘Yes, it is a trying time, but one must put all one’s trust in God, who
gives strength and courage. Unluckily I cannot get about at all and spend my days on the sofa . . . walking and standing causes me great pain.’
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She was advised not to walk, yet she got up anyway, ‘dragging herself through the park at Peterhof’, as Mouchanow remembered, ‘looking so ill that one
wondered whether she would be able to stand the trial which was awaiting her’.
The baby was due in August, and once again the family gathered in order to be present at the baptism. There was no mystery about this pregnancy; Dr Ott had verified it, and the child appeared to
be developing normally. Huge and all but immobile, Alix lay on her sofa in the final weeks, full of apprehension.
One evening as her maids were dressing her for dinner, there was a bang and a splintering of glass. ‘Suddenly we heard a crash behind us, and were dismayed to see that a heavy-looking
glass which hung upon the wall behind [Alix] had fallen to the floor, where it had been shattered into a thousand fragments. The Empress cried aloud
in her emotion, and
for one moment I believed that she was about to faint, so white did her features become.’
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It was an omen, she said. She would surely die in childbirth. No one could persuade her otherwise.
In this mood of doom the empress felt her labour pains begin. All her attendants were summoned, the family alerted. Nicky came from a meeting with his officers, expecting to have lunch with
Alix, and instead found that the birth process was well advanced.
The baby was delivered, and Dr Ott turned to Nicky. ‘I congratulate Your Majesty on the birth of a tsarevich!’ he announced.
The news was stunning, unexpected, wonderful. The tsar beamed. Joyful murmurs spread through the assembled staff. The signal was sent on its way to Petersburg, where the gunners began firing
their cannon. This time the citizens of the capital were gratified. Three hundred loud reports boomed across the river from the Peter and Paul Fortress. A boy! A tsarevich! Caps were tossed in the
air, shouts rang out, toasts were drunk again and again. In her dark hour of war, Russia was given the boon of an heir to the throne at last.
Alix, slow to recover from the effects of chloroform, came sleepily awake. ‘When she opened her eyes,’ Mouchanow wrote, ‘she looked so weak that no one dared to tell her the
good news, but she seemed to read it in the face of her husband, because she suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, it cannot be true; it cannot be true. Is it really a boy?”’
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She had feared that she would die; instead she was given that which she most longed for, a son. They named him Alexei, after Nicky’s favourite predecessor, the father of Peter the
Great.
All the family came in to see the new baby, his sisters, aged eight to three, crowding around and Nicky’s brother Michael, no longer the designated heir, announcing that he was happy to go
into ‘retirement’. Everyone exclaimed how large and robust the baby was, how heavy at eleven pounds, how sturdy he looked, like his grandfather Alexander III.
The family was satisfied. It had taken ten years, but Alix had finally done what she had been brought from Hesse to do.
Alexei travelled to his baptism ceremony in a gilded coach, escorted by a troop of cavalry. He was borne to the font by the Robes Mistress, Princess Galitzine, on a
cushion of cloth of gold, secured to her shoulder with a broad gold band. (To prevent her from slipping on the waxed floor, she wore rubber shoes.) His tiny ermine-lined mantle was held by the
Grand Marshal of the court. A long procession of grand dukes and duchesses, ambassadors, and officials attended the ceremony, dressed in their full finery to honour the tsarevich. Every soldier in
the Russian army was declared to be Alexei’s godparent, along with the Prince of Wales – the future George V – and the German Emperor. Ribbons and decorations were presented to
the infant, and he was made honorary colonel of many regiments.
The rejoicing went on for weeks, with banquets and ceremonies held in many cities and gifts and telegrams arriving from all over the world. The ‘baby tsar’ was thriving, taking milk
from both his mother and a wet-nurse, growing fat and healthy. He was a placid, contented child as he rode on his proud father’s shoulder or was carried in his mother’s arms.
‘He’s an amazingly hefty baby,’ Xenia wrote of Alexei, ‘with a chest like a barrel and generally has the air of a warrior knight.’
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He would not be puny like his father, but tall and strong like his grandfather Alexander III, a mighty tsar, robust and fearsome.
Then one afternoon blood began to ooze from the baby’s navel in a bright red trickle. There was not much blood, but enough to be worrying, for it did not clot and continued to seep out for
hours, all afternoon and into the early evening.
Alexei did not appear to be disquieted or in pain. He didn’t cry, but was alert and calm, though as he lost more blood he must have become pale.
When they saw that the bleeding from the tiny wound did not stop in a reasonable period of time Alix and Nicky were anxious. They knew the signs, and feared the worst. It might be the bleeding
disease, the English disease, the terrible disease that had killed Irene’s son Henry and that made her son Waldemar a virtual invalid much of the time.