Alexandra (25 page)

‘We workers and residents of the city of Saint Petersburg, of various ranks and stations, our wives, children and helpless old parents, have come to Thee, Sire, to seek justice and
protection.’

They had become beggars, the petitioners said. They were overworked, grossly underpaid, forced to live as slaves. They had pledged themselves to die rather than endure any longer the humiliation
and wretchedness of their condition. The tsar was their last hope.

‘Sire! Is this [their poverty] in accordance with God’s laws, by the grace of which Thou reignest? . . . Is it better to die – for all of us, the toiling people of all Russia,
to die, allowing the capitalists (the exploiters of the working class) and the bureaucrats (who rob the government and plunder the Russian people) to live and enjoy themselves?’
²

Plaintive though the petition was, it was also, in the judgment of the imperial ministers, subversive, conducive to undermining the social
order. And the demonstration
the petitioners were planning to make was plainly illegal. The police and military, following the attempt on the tsar’s life at the Blessing of the Waters, had issued a prohibition against
all large gatherings. They were not opposed to Father Gapon, in fact they encouraged and supported him and much preferred him to either the recently formed Marxist political parties – the
Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries – with their campaigns of violent disruption or the Constitutional Democrats with their demands for an end to autocracy and the establishment of a
constitutional monarchy. But in the volatile climate of Petersburg, with so many tens of thousands of workers idle and so much seditious rhetoric in the air, so much violence and so many
incitements to violence, to permit any large crowd to gather for any purpose was to invite disaster.

Illegal though it was, the gathering proceeded, on the morning of January 9, with large groups of marchers assembling in various parts of the city. Most were labourers, both men and women, but a
number of the marchers had children with them, and there were old people in the procession as well, some of them feeble.

Watchful police did nothing to break up the crowds, which swelled to many thousands. At the head of each group, held high on tall staves, were large portraits of the tsar and icons, crosses and
pennons with religious symbols. Here and there a white flag was displayed, with the ominous message ‘Soldiers! Do not fire on the people.’

It was nearly noon when the marchers set out for their destination, singing hymns as they went. They had not gone far when it became evident that they would not be allowed to reach the palace.
Warning shouts were heard, ordering the marchers to turn back, to disperse, yet they went on, their momentum difficult to halt, their determination unwavering, their singing so loud, perhaps, that
it drowned out the warnings.

Suddenly bugles sounded and the marchers were horrified to see mounted grenadiers galloping towards them, sabres raised. Behind the cavalry came infantry, rifles at the ready.

Quickly, efficiently, the soldiers went about their work, following their orders, the cavalry slashing at the unarmed marchers, the
riflemen shooting them down.
Disbelief soon turned to panic as, screaming in pain and terror, the petitioners scattered, many wounded, dozens lying dead. The confusion was terrible, the slaughter ghastly. To observers it
appeared that a peaceful religious procession had met with an attack of calculated brutality. ‘A well-behaved, dignified, unarmed crowd walking into cavalry charges and the sights of rifles
– a terrible spectacle,’ one of them wrote.
³

Yet the marchers, once they came under attack, were quick to resist. Seizing pushcarts, wagons, bits of furniture, they began to erect barricades in the streets. Some climbed onto the roofs of
buildings and hurled bricks on the soldiers below. Others broke into gun shops and armed themselves. Cries of ‘Revolution!’ were heard, impromptu speeches were made in favour of armed
revolt, red flags waved high. Some Petersburgers, who earlier in the day felt sympathy for the marchers, became frightened of them after the shooting began and, barring their doors and windows,
retreated into their cellars for safety.

For several hours there was chaos in the capital, with some areas disrupted by skirmishes and looting and others, such as the Alexander Gardens, remaining relatively calm, the gardens filled
with casual strollers and children playing in the snow and skating on the ice. Volleys of gunfire erupted from time to time. Cossacks rode past, swords drawn, hunting for resisters. Bodies still
lay in some streets, dark blood stained the snow in many places and, as the afternoon advanced, relatives of the dead brought coffins to carry them away. Eventually the clashes between military and
demonstrators ceased, and the barricades were torn down by the soldiers. Yet attacks by squadrons of troops went on, the soldiers firing wildly into crowds of bystanders as if unable to stop
themselves from continuing the slaughter.

No one counted the dead, but at the end of the day there may have been as many as three or four hundred, perhaps twice that many. At least a thousand more were injured, many of them
seriously.
⁴
Apart from the actual number of injuries, what shocked Petersburgers – and soon the rest of the world, for reports went out
immediately
to all the foreign capitals by phone and wire – was the inhuman cruelty of the assaults: the multiple sabre cuts, the merciless rifle fire, the
deliberate trampling of old people and the pitiless injuring of children.

The only possible conclusion was that the tsar, far from caring about his subjects, had ordered their massacre. This was the tsar of Khodynka Field, the tsar who had done nothing to alleviate
famine, and who had let his ministers impoverish the countryside. This was the tsar who had led the Russian armies into defeat at the hands of the Japanese. Now he had shown his true nature at its
most heartless.

Now truly, as St Serafim had predicted, much innocent blood had been spilt, and it ran in rivers over the Russian land.

As if to mark the significance of the bloodshed, a sign had been given, a vision in the heavens. Many people on the afternoon of January 9 had observed the apparition. Some described it as a
triple sun, others as a huge red circle surrounding the sun and blotting out its rays.

It was a portent of disaster, an indication, surely, that there was worse to come.

Alix had not been in Petersburg on the day of the disturbances. At the insistence of the imperial ministers, she and Nicky and their children had taken refuge at Tsarskoe Selo, where the number
of soldiers, detectives and secret police was increased. Telegrams arrived at the Alexander Palace in record numbers, sent from Europe and America, expressing outrage at the carnage and condemning
the tsar for murdering his own subjects. In the eyes of much of the world Nicholas II had become a villain, and Alix felt obliged to defend him.

‘Don’t believe all the horrors the foreign papers say,’ she wrote to her sister Victoria in England. ‘They make one’s hair stand on end – foul exaggeration.
Yes, the troops, alas, were obliged to fire. Repeatedly the crowd was told to retreat and that Nicky was not in town (as we are living here this winter) and that one would be forced to shoot, but
they would not heed and so blood was shed.’’
⁵

The many deaths and injuries were ‘ghastly’, she admitted, but had the soldiers not fired and the cavalry not charged, the crowd
would have grown
‘colossal’ and even more deaths and injuries would have resulted from the crush of bodies. In effect, the attacking military had saved the crowd from itself.

In her letter Alix blamed the Interior Minister Prince Sviatopolk-Mirsky (‘all these disorders are thanks to his unpardonable folly’), the lack of good advisers available to the
court, political extremists, even Petersburg itself (‘a rotten town, not an atom Russian’). Casting her net wide, she blamed the late Tsar Alexander III; his policy of isolating himself
and his family had depleted the number of reliable public servants, she argued, which led to a lack of what she called ‘real’ men – those who were neither too weak nor too liberal
nor too narrow-minded to be of use to her husband.

In this, her first genuine political crisis, Alix showed her sympathies and her prejudices. She was, first and foremost, fiercely loyal and sympathetic to her husband, and firmly opposed to
anyone whom she perceived as a threat to his authority. That he lacked personal vigour, conviction and effectiveness she must have seen all too clearly, for she constantly urged him to be more
forceful and assertive. But she also saw that, as she put it, his ‘cross was a heavy one to bear’, that ‘he had a bitter hard life to lead’, and that he worked diligently,
if largely ineffectually, to bear it. Her sympathy towards him, and her contempt for all those who did not share her feelings, and who failed to give her husband credit for his efforts, were so
vast that they swamped her objectivity.

She saw that Russia was in need of reform, and believed that reforms could be made, ‘gently with the greatest care and forethought’. But she misjudged the gravity and intensity of
the upheaval caused by the stirring of the forces of reform: the widening disenchantment with the tsar himself and his autocracy, the harsh resentment at the harm done by ministerial economic
policies, the profound thirst for change, above all the deep wellsprings of bitterness among the working poor.

If Alix could not be objective about the events of January, 1905, it was partly because she was preoccupied with her son.

Baby Alexei, a beautiful child with pale skin and dark hair, was a source both of joy and of constant distress. Boys with the English
disease nearly always died very
young; however watchful Alix and others were, however often she prayed to the wall of icons by her bedside, Alix knew that the constant threat of death hung over her son. When she saw him bathed or
dressed, when she held him and rocked him and sang to him, she was always looking at his arms and legs, especially his elbows and knees, watching for the discoloured swellings that indicated
internal bleeding.

When the dreaded swellings developed, the tiny joints grew swollen and stiff, the gathered blood pressed on the nerves, and the baby screamed with pain. There was nothing to be done. The doctors
were helpless, and little Alexei’s suffering went on, hour after hour, until, exhausted yet unable to sleep or eat, he lay moaning, his face white, looking as though he would die.

Each attack, Alix knew, could be his last. Many babies whose blood did not clot properly died in their first year. Watching her son through each of his crises, trusting in the protection of
Philippe yet anxious and drawn, Alix suffered along with her son. It was hard for her to avoid giving in to despair.

Struggling with her own illnesses, dealing with the ongoing provocations from her antagonistic in-laws, ever more mindful of her husband’s difficulties and of the threat to the entire
imperial family from forces inimical to the throne, the empress had entered a dark season. Her mouth was set in a grim line, her lips pinched together tightly, her eyes sad. She was not yet
thirty-three, but her expression was that of a hardened middle-aged woman, a woman beset by ill luck – a woman, as she sometimes said, who carried ill luck with her.

As she sat looking down at her son, the son St Serafim had given her after so many years of waiting and disappointment, she prayed earnestly for him to be spared. Yet her reason told her that,
in human terms at least, Alexei was not likely to live very long. Unless help came from a divine source, and soon, he would surely succumb to one of the terrible attacks of bleeding, ending all her
hopes and those of the Romanov dynasty.

P
hilippe Vachot was dead. The message reached the palace in late July or early August of 1905, six months after the killings in Petersburg which
had come to be known as Bloody Sunday. He had died in Lyon, collapsing suddenly.

Philippe was dead, but the day of his death was significant: it was St Elijah’s day, and according to the Bible Elijah had not died, but had been taken up into heaven. Philippe had told
his admirers that he would not live much longer, that his mission on earth was drawing to a close. And that, once he laid aside his earthly body, his spirit would enter into another man, and live
on through him.

This comforting thought – that Philippe, or his spirit, might have found another embodiment – helped to assuage the dismay Alix must have felt at the news from France. For Philippe,
she believed, had protected her family from harm, and they were more in need of protection than ever.

In the previous February, assassins had thrown a bomb into Serge’s carriage, blowing his body to pieces. The secret police believed that this killing was only the first in a series of
planned attacks on the tsar and his relatives; the family did not dare to attend Serge’s funeral because of the danger to themselves. Only weeks later a much more sinister conspiracy was
uncovered. Two revolutionaries were arrested and forced to reveal that they had intended to masquerade as members of the court choir. It had been their plan to conceal bombs under their choir robes
and then, at the Easter Eve mass, throw them into the midst of the tsar’s family, killing them all.