Authors: Carolly Erickson
The fact that the terrorists were caught only hours before the intended massacre renewed the fears of the imperials. Surrounded as they were by detectives and guards,
virtually smothered by protectors, they had nonetheless come close to being annihilated.
Their daily life, in the spring and summer of 1905, had a surreal quality. Immured behind the iron gates of the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo or within the fortress of Gatchina, constantly
made aware not only of their own personal danger but of crop burnings in the countryside, assassinations, strikes, mutinies, and general mayhem, they continued insofar as possible to live as they
had in less troubled times. Nine-year-old Olga and eight-year-old Tatiana studied English and French, went riding, and, with their six-year-old sister Marie and little four-year-old Anastasia,
accompanied their father on long walks – always under heavy guard. On fine days baby Alexei, wrapped in puffy furs, was put into a basket strapped to a donkey and led down a garden path by a
top-hatted groom.
There were even family picnics, with food spread out on tables under the trees and leisurely strolls in the grounds after lunch.
It was on one such picnic, in fact, that news of the decisive sea battle of the war with Japan reached Nicky. The news could not have been worse; the Russian fleet, which he had sent from the
Baltic to the Sea of Japan to defend the Russian land forces, had met with overwhelming defeat by the Japanese fleet off Tsushima Island in the Korea Strait. The fleet was annihilated, just as a
great many Russian soldiers had been annihilated in March at Mukden, a battle that had cost nearly a hundred thousand Russian lives.
The tsar blanched when he read the terrible message, but said nothing. He was stoic about the course of the war, as he was about the social chaos and the threats to himself and his family. His
inherent fatalism came to the fore. He smoked a cigarette, stroked his beard, and went on with the picnic.
The war was lost, the grave weaknesses in Russia’s army and navy exposed. Nicky accepted the offer of the American president Theodore Roosevelt to oversee negotiations to end the conflict,
and by midsummer talks were under way.
Alix, made irritable and rebellious by the constant smothering surveillance, found a way to escape the secret police. Taking the children or a single lady-in-waiting,
she ordered a carriage and, dismissing the footmen who usually rode on the outside of the vehicle and the uniformed Cossack who customarily drove her coach (a conspicuous emblem of her status), she
went out into the woods, ordering the driver to keep to the unfrequented roads. She stopped from time to time and got out, shepherding the children to a beauty spot overlooking lakeside or
hillside, going into a shop or entering a small church to say a prayer.
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She liked to drive slowly through the village near the palace, passing
the villas and peering out of the carriage window to see what the people inside were doing.
These clandestine carriage drives, during which the empress eluded her bodyguards and the secret police, were dangerous, not only because of the very real possibility that her carriage might be
blown up by a bomb but because of the risk of accidents. On at least one occasion the carriage in which she was riding overturned after colliding with a bicyclist. No one was injured, but the
inconvenience was great, as there were no footmen to go for help and no soldiers to escort the empress and her companions home.
To outward appearances at least, Alix was in her prime in 1905. ‘The tsarina was still a beautiful woman at that time,’ wrote the grand duchesses’ French tutor Pierre Gilliard.
‘She was tall and slender and carried herself superbly. But all this ceased the moment one looked into her eyes – those speaking, grey-blue eyes which mirrored the emotions of a
sensitive soul.’
Which emotions her eyes revealed Gilliard did not say, but sternness and anxiety and a haunted sorrow were surely among them – and the anguish of keeping secret her worry over her son. She
was magnificent – but emotionally and physically overburdened, constantly disappointed in others and with a wilful side that showed itself in her occasional hectoring of her servants, her
defiance of the security guards and her increasing domination of her husband. Resigned and passive as Nicky was, he became accustomed to giving in to Alix’s will, in small things and large.
Their bond could hardly
have been deeper or more affectionate, frayed only very slightly by such minor irritations as Alix’s keeping her husband awake by
‘crunching her favourite English biscuits in bed’.
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Yet an important dynamic between them was shifting; more and more, when decisions
were to be made, it was Alix who made them.
Her war work went on. Though the last of the battles had been fought, and peace talks were under way, thousands of wounded men were still being sent to the capital, and the need for bandages,
warm clothes and knitted stockings, medical supplies and blankets went on, and Alix described herself as ‘sewing away hard’. In addition to her workshop, she opened a home for disabled
sailors in the park at Tsarskoe Selo, and a School for Nurses and Housemaids, whose day-to-day operation she delegated to others.
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She was kept busy, with her close supervision of her children, her overseeing of their lessons, her attention to their wardrobes – on which she spent as much time as she did on her own,
making lists and inventories of garments, ordering new clothing made every six months, frequently going through the nursery closets and giving away what was worn – plus her time-consuming
concern for servants and household members in need or ill. Letter-writing took much time as well. But then, in the midst of all her occupation, she would feel the onset of a severe headache, and
would have to lie down on the chaise longue in her mauve boudoir, a lace shawl draped over her legs, silk curtains covering the windows to prevent the light from hurting her eyes. In the view of at
least one family member, Alix’s health worsened after Alexei’s birth and the diagnosis of haemophilia. She became ‘troubled and apprehensive’, her ‘character underwent
a change and her health, physical as well as moral, altered’.
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Having had to give up exercise after Alexei’s birth because of recurrent leg pains and shortness of breath, Alix returned to her earlier pastimes of singing and playing the piano. Every
week Professor Kuendinger came to the palace to play piano duets with her for several hours, and Madame Iretsky, her singing coach, trained her voice. Alix was a contralto, and liked to sing duets
with sopranos. Sometimes well known singers from the opera would join her, or
members of her retinue. Her invalid maid of honour Sonia Orbeliani, whom she had taken to
live in the palace, gave musical parties in her rooms where professional pianists and singers entertained; the empress was often to be found in the small audience, but she was far too uncomfortable
and withdrawn to perform herself.
When in private, she liked to play one of her many grand pianos, by herself or with Olga, who had a precocious musical gift. She would sit down at the keyboard, take off her rings, and toss them
on the nearest table or sofa, then begin to play. Long afterwards, missing her rings, she would summon her maids of honour and order them to find the rings – which were very valuable, as
among them was her pink diamond engagement ring. ‘This sometimes caused considerable annoyance,’ Martha Mouchanow wrote, ‘as they could not always be found immediately, and a
frantic search was made all over the palace, until at last they turned up in some impossible place or other.’
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Eventually the maids of
honour must have learned to begin their search in the immediate vicinity of all the grand pianos.
In August 1905, Nicky journeyed to Pskov by train and took Alix and his sister Olga with him. Alix wrote to the children. ‘Papa and Auntie Olga have gone for a walk in the lovely woods; my
old legs hurt too much to walk, so I remained at home,’ she began. ‘Now the train has at last stopped. We got quite soaked this morning; my new waterproof cape was wet through. We saw
lots of soldiers; cavalry, infantry, and artillery. The country is very pretty.’
She described how, when they stopped at one village, many peasants crowded around them and one woman asked after the grand duchesses’ health and wondered why they were not on the train.
The tsar and tsarina were greeted with bread and salt and flowers picked from the small gardens behind the wooden houses.
‘I wonder how you all are,’ Alix went on. ‘I feel so sad without my sweet little girlies. Be sure to be very good and remember, elbows off the table, sit straight and eat your
meat nicely. I kiss you all very tenderly.’
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Alexei, or ‘Baby Tsar’, as she called him, was teething, and had been left behind
in the care of his nurses and the court
doctors. ‘I hope he is quite well and does not have pain,’ Alix wrote. Had he had an attack, she would have been
summoned.
Violent disruptions in many parts of Russia continued into the autumn of 1905, and seemed to escalate as the year wore on. In the countryside around Pskov, at the time of the imperials’
visit, all was temporarily quiet, but the calm was deceptive, for in many provinces members of a recently formed Peasants’ Union burned crops, murdered their landlords, and assaulted
government officials. In the Caucasus there was murderous street fighting, with rebels firing at troops from the windows of their houses. Weary soldiers returning from the war against the Japanese
aboard troop trains found themselves under attack as they made their way home; having survived months of artillery fire, disease, and scanty rations they faced a hostile Russian populace bent on
forcing political change.
In the midst of the escalating chaos the imperial family went aboard the yacht
Polar Star
for a two-week vacation. The weather was exceptionally fair in September 1905, the Baltic blue
and smooth, the clouds high and white, the breezes mild. Alix took pictures of the children with her box camera, made drawings for them with coloured pencils, and sat chatting with her favourite
new lady-in-waiting Anna Vyrubov on the deck of the ship, wide straw hats protecting their faces from the strong sun. The yacht wove in among the islands off the Finnish coast, and the family went
ashore to hike; Nicky hunted birds and the children swam, waded and collected bugs and fish.
Telegrams from the palace told of the rapidly deteriorating situation, with Moscow virtually shut down because of spreading strikes. Banks were not functioning, for the clerks refused to work;
trains and trams were not running, no bread was baked, no newspapers published, no goods of any kind produced. There was not even any running water, because the engineers and maintenance workers
had walked away from their jobs. The price of food was rising rapidly. After a few days the telegrams ceased, for the telegraph offices were deserted. Now the true seriousness of the crisis became
unmistakably clear. Moscow had been all but shut down, and the
massive paralysis was spreading to other cities – soon Petersburg would be without workers, without
communications, without order of any kind.
This was a crisis on a scale no one in Russia had ever faced, not even in the time of Catherine the Great when the great rebel Pugachev had taken over a third of the kingdom. Now there was not
one rebel leader with hundreds of thousands of followers, but millions of independent subjects, working together in a common aim – to bring the country to the brink of irreversible chaos in
order to compel reform.
The
Polar Star
returned from its odyssey and the imperial family was once again immured at Tsarskoe Selo, under heavy guard.
Alix compared the tumultuous weeks of October 1905 to a very difficult labour. A new order was coming slowly and painfully to birth, forced into the light by the harsh midwife of revolution. The
tsar was in an agony of indecision; should he attempt to crush the unrest by force (a doubtful proposition given the mutinous mood among the soldiers), which might at best delay the granting of
civil rights and citizen representation, or should he follow the urgent advice of his principal minister Witte and submit to the revolutionaries’ demands?
He felt keenly the weight of his responsibilities, the burden of carrying, in his person, the honour of the Romanov house. For centuries his ancestors had borne supreme, autocratic power; for
him to suddenly break that tradition and decide to share the power of the throne, to however moderate an extent, would be, or so it seemed to him, to lose the crown itself. ‘You cannot
imagine the anguish this has cost me,’ he wrote to his mother. Yet Witte pressed him almost hourly to see that no other course of action was feasible, that he must grant some constitutional
rights, and cousin Nicholas Nicholaevich, strutting and fuming dramatically in the halls of the Alexander Palace, drew himself up to his great height in the tsar’s presence and threatened to
shoot himself unless the necessary changes were made – and at once.
Guests at the palace that October, unsettled and full of fears, shivered when they entered the drawing room and saw, side by side
on one wall, portraits of Empress
Alexandra and Marie Antoinette. With anarchy in the cities, thefts of land and murder of landowners in the country, their thoughts naturally turned to the French Revolution and the ferocity it had
unleashed. Marie Antoinette and her well-meaning husband Louis XVI had gone to the guillotine as a result of their subjects’ ever escalating political demands. If the tsar made concessions to
his subjects, how secure would his throne be? How safe would his life be, and the lives of his family?
In such an environment, Alix’s efforts to maintain a facade of serene unconcern, presiding at dinner parties, could hardly succeed. She soon abandoned her futile social endeavours, said
her prayers, did her best to say to Nicky what she thought he needed to hear – and waited for him to make his decision.
With the darkness of anarchy closing in around him, and clamorous voices in his ears, ever mindful of his increasing personal danger, on October 17, 1905, Nicky called for the papers Witte had
drawn up and signed his name to them. He promised to allow an elected assembly, a Duma, to meet and, in the words of the manifesto, ‘to grant the people the unshakable foundations of civil
liberty on the basis of true inviolability of person, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association’. He permitted the organization of unions and political parties.