Alexandra (28 page)

She struggled, with all her considerable willpower, to cling to that belief as her thirty-fifth birthday approached. The face she showed to the world – a world now restricted, for the most
part, to the grounds of Tsarskoe Selo – was dour and closed, the eyes hooded, the mouth set and downward-turned. She looked like a woman under emotional siege, embattled against life. She
spoke of herself now not only as a ‘bird of ill omen’ but as ‘a great worrier,’ and she had much to worry about.
¹⁰

It was not just that her only son was fatally ill, spared only through the mercy of God, or that continuing social unrest and harsh repression threatened the future of Russia, or even that
foiled plots against the tsar’s life and her own were still coming to light despite extreme police and military precautions: it was that her kind, forbearing husband was proving to be more
and more ineffectual as a ruler, making it necessary for her to provide the strength and force of will that he lacked.

She saw no alternative. The new form of government brought into being in response to the ongoing social crisis was unstable, and, in her view, manned by mediocrities. The first Duma, convened in
April of 1906 and dominated politically by the inexperienced liberal delegates representing the Cadet party, was floundering and the imperial ministers were weak and
vacillating. The Romanov family, now split into factions with the overbearing Aunt Miechen speaking out forcefully against Alix and lobbying to have the tsar step down in favour of his brother
Michael, offered no practical advice or support, only criticism and complaints. Of Alix’s own relatives, her brother Ernie does not seem to have given her any meaningful counsel – and
in any case his standing in Russian eyes was low because his divorce from Ducky made it possible for Nicky’s cousin Cyril to marry her, resulting in Cyril’s banishment and disgrace.
Alix’s sisters wrote often and came to Russia from time to time, but neither the sympathetic Irene nor the more forceful and much older Victoria seems to have had any serious influence over
her, and Ella, her life shattered by Serge’s assassination, was in a process of personal transformation that ultimately led her further and further away from her youngest sister.
¹¹

Ella embraced the ascetic life, remaking her bedroom at Illinsky into a stark room like a nun’s cell, stripped of furniture, the walls hung with icons. She kept the bloody clothes worn by
her husband on the day he died and preserved them inside a large wooden cross hung on one wall. Ella and Alix were both finding new strength in their religious faith, but where Alix sought help
through a personal connection with a starets, Ella turned to the Orthodox monastic tradition. She gave away her jewels and finery, greatly simplified her life, and began modelling herself on the
sisters who had no connection to the world and devoted themselves to works of charity undertaken in the name of Jesus.

A distance was growing between Ella and Alix, and for Alix it only emphasized the fact that she was alone, or felt alone, in her responsibilities – alone, that is, save for Father Gregory.
And while her faith was strong, it was not unwavering. There were moments when her certainty was shaken, especially when she felt ill; there were moments when her anxiety rose and a panicky feeling
threatened.

The times were agitated, with accepted authorities toppling and established boundaries crumbling as political institutions were shifting and no steadying hand appeared
to be guiding the transition to a new era. Predictions of imminent apocalypse haunted literature, the theatre, drawing room conversation; some said that the approach of Halley’s comet, due to
appear in 1910, was a sign of the end, others that the recent discovery of a mammoth buried in the ice in Eastern Siberia, perfectly preserved for millennia, had a deeper meaning than mere
scientific interest.
¹²
Petersburgers, confronting the enormous shaggy beast unearthed from his resting place and installed in the newly built
rotunda of the Zoological Museum, awed by his size, his huge fearsome tusks, seemed to see in him an emblem of their own transitoriness, a reminder that all human institutions, however immemorial,
occupied but a fleeting moment in the long span of creation, and might well be swept away in a single awful instant of catastrophe.

In the aesthetic realm, to which Alix had always been sensitively attuned, old principles of order and meaning were being abandoned. In music and art, primal forces, even savage forces were
being unleashed; cacophony and chaos reigned, outraging audiences and museum-goers (and thrilling a small but appreciative group of music lovers and art collectors). To the empress, whose taste ran
to Wagnerian assertions of harmonic concord and mystical transcendence, the new directions in the arts seemed brutal and horrifying. ‘Twentieth-century culture’ was to her a culture of
inhumanity, and she used the phrase as a term of opprobrium.
¹³

In social relations the traditional proprieties were being abandoned, and nowhere more than in the imperial family itself, where the tsar’s weakening authority did nothing to counteract
the centrifugal effect of a prevailing current of permissiveness (the tsar called it selfishness) among the well-born. Alix observed with extreme disapproval the dissolving of marital and family
ties, the increasing number of divorces among the Romanovs, the disregard for loyalty and for the integrity of the succession.

With Alexei’s illness being kept a closely held secret, the expectation was that he would in time succeed his father. However,
he was the only son, and an
accident or an assassination (always, in these years, a genuine threat) could remove him suddenly. Those coming next in the line of succession (daughters being excluded by law from succeeding),
though quick to disparage their patriarch and ignore his authority, were casual about jeopardizing their own legal standing vis-à-vis the throne. The tsar’s brother Michael was in love
with one of the court ladies-in-waiting, Dina Kossikovsky, and begged Nicky to let him marry Dina morganatically. Nicky’s ageing, peremptory Uncle Vladimir, next in line after Michael, had
brought shame on the family by debauchery abroad, while of Vladimir’s sons, Cyril was in involuntary exile due to his marriage to Ducky, Boris was an irresponsible playboy and Andrew was
living with Nicky’s former love, the ballet dancer Matilda Kchessinsky; if he married her he too would be banished.
¹⁴

A number of others further down the line of succession were surrounded by scandal. Vladimir’s brother Alexis had had a series of disreputable relationships and was living with an actress
in Paris, and his brother Paul had been banished after marrying a commoner. Sandro’s older brother Michael had also married a commoner and had gone to live in England some years earlier.
Stana had divorced her husband and married Nicky’s cousin Grand Duke Nicholas, while Sandro and Xenia, until recently a model couple in every way, had abandoned their fidelity to one another
and were both romantically entangled with others. (They eventually found their way to a comfortable reconciliation and went on with their marriage.)

The entire Romanov edifice was tottering and Alix, seeing clearly that her husband would not be capable of preventing its collapse, increasingly took on herself the uneasy task of helping to
shore it up. It was not a new task; it was, in fact, an extension of the role she had undertaken when she married Nicky, to be his encouragement and support, to help him when he faltered. Only now
he was faltering much more conspicuously, and her ability to act as his brace and prop, indeed to do what he could not, might make the difference between life and death.

The clear, cold waters of the Gulf of Finland were calm on the afternoon of September 11, 1907, as the yacht
Standart
cruised slowly among the rocky islands
off the Finnish coast. Though it was late in the season, the air still held a faint touch of warmth, and Alix, lying on a couch on deck as she usually did, with Alexei and her companion Anna
Vyrubov nearby, was alternately occupied with embroidery and sketching.
¹⁵

It was noticed that the empress was more at ease on the yacht than almost anywhere else, perhaps because she could be certain that within its confines her family was safe from would-be
attackers, more likely because the atmosphere was informal, the family having been on comfortably familiar terms with the crew members for many years.
¹⁶

Alexei and the girls were as much at home on the immense yacht, with its comfortable state rooms, chapel, and extensive staff quarters, as they were in the Alexander Palace, running up and down
the teak decks in their navy-blue sailor suits, heavy pea coats buttoned to the neck, the girls with their long hair flying out behind them. Olga, now nearly twelve, looked eagerly out over the
rail, across the transparent waters towards the empty horizon. With her considerable intelligence and outgoing nature she sought fun and stimulation, unlike ten-year-old Tatiana, whose
affectionate, emotional nature drew her close to her mother and made her more reserved. Marie, at eight the most active of the quartet of daughters and the one most avid for parental attention, ran
and jumped with noisy abandon while six-year-old Anastasia teased the crew members and played hide and seek with her sisters. The empress watched Anastasia closely, for she had become more
cherished following an accident the previous summer; she had nearly drowned when a freak high wave swept her under and pounded the air from her lungs.

The quiet of the lonely landscape was what drew Nicky and Alix to it every fall, the expanse of dark firs on the deserted islands, the silence broken only by the lapping of small waves on the
pebbled shoreline and the cries of birds flying overhead. Now and then a fisherman could be glimpsed, or a small hut in among the trees, but
for the most part no other
humans were visible, only the wide expanse of sky and blue water, dense woodland and grey beach.

A sudden lurching of the ship startled the passengers, followed immediately by a violent shudder, a wrenching of the hull, and the terrifying sound of rock scraping against metal. The ship
listed sharply leewards, throwing passengers and crew off their feet and sending them reeling, arms outstretched, to catch hold of some support.

Within seconds sirens began blaring, though there was no one for miles around to hear them. Crew members ran back and forth along the sloping deck, making their way from one handhold to another.
The ship had struck a rock, the passengers were told. A large hole had been torn in its side beneath the water line. It was filling with water, and would sink.

A radio message was sent to Kronstadt, but it was only a formality; even if ships from the imperial navy were dispatched to rescue the
Standart
’s passengers, they could not
possibly navigate the narrow, shallow waters between the islands, nor could they arrive in time to help, for the ship was sinking rapidly.

Nicky occupied himself, stopwatch in hand, in watching the rising water line, as crew members rushed to ready the lifeboats and supply them with water and food. He called out his observations.
The
Standart
would sink, he thought, in twenty minutes or less.

Alix, by contrast, began giving orders to the crew. Grabbing Alexei, and calling her daughters, she herded them to the nearest lifeboat and gave orders that the children and the female staff
members be lowered away first, keeping only Anna Vyrubov behind with her. Having watched the lowering of the first boats, she and Anna made their way into the cabins, their progress slow because of
the increasingly sloping deck, the ceaseless screaming of the sirens adding to the general confusion. Alix flung the counterpanes off the beds and began emptying jewellery boxes, medicine chests
and drawers onto the sheets. Icons stripped from the walls were added, along with warm coats and blankets. Tying the corners of the sheets together to form bundles, she and Anna managed to drag the
bundles out on the deck and heave them into the remaining lifeboats.

It all happened quickly, too quickly for careful calculation. Alix and Anna climbed into a boat, Nicky and the rest of the crew abandoned ship as well and in less time
than Nicky had calculated, everyone was safely off the sinking vessel, which lay on its side in the calm water, still buoyant but gradually dipping lower and lower under the waves.

Tragedy had been averted. Before long the crew sighted a Finnish ship, hailed her, and the passengers and crew were taken aboard and delivered safely to one of the cruisers steaming towards the
area from Kronstadt.

Recalling the incident later, one of the passengers, Princess Obolensky, was struck by how ‘resourceful and full of energy’ the empress had been. It was she, and not her husband, who
had seen to the safety of the family and staff, who had mobilized everyone’s efforts, and who had managed to salvage the valuables from the cabins. Forgetting herself – she had been the
last woman to leave the ship – and caught up entirely in the peril of the moment, Alix had acted as one born to command. This instinct to lead, to rescue, to take command in a crisis, would
increasingly be called on in the years to come.