Authors: Carolly Erickson
The noise, the crowd, the icy politeness and hostile stares directed towards her assaulted her nerves and made her long for escape. Her breathing became shallow, and she felt so ill, she
confided afterwards to Sophie Buxhoeveden, that she could ‘scarcely keep her feet’. Afraid she might faint, she soldiered on, suffering ‘tortures’ from dizziness. Had she
fainted, there would have been no end of fuss and talk. She had to stay alert. Finally she managed to catch her husband’s eye and he came over to her, ‘just in time to lead her away and
prevent her from fainting in public’.
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She left the ball early.
One cause of Alix’s apprehension was her bright-eyed, eager daughter Olga, who with her sister Tatiana had been allowed to attend the ball and who was happily
dancing every dance. Olga was seventeen, fresh and attractive in her simple pale pink chiffon dancing gown, and her cousins were eager to dance with her – sometimes three of them asking for
the same dance. Alix disapproved, wanting no inconvenient infatuation to arise between Olga and any of her more knowing cousins, whom she considered to be ‘unwholesomely precocious’;
like her sisters, Olga had always been sheltered and, apart from innocent crushes on Guards officers and
Standart
crew members, she had never had a romance. A change was bound to come,
indeed many at court were saying that it was time Olga was engaged. But her mother, who knew from her own experience how strong and enduring youthful attachments could be, was made uneasy at the
thought of Olga’s forming a romantic bond with any young man, and Olga’s delighted participation in the dancing was yet one more source of strain for Alix. She dreaded that her girls
might leave the high-minded path she had tried to keep them on, and give in to frivolity and even to sensuality. Like her other fears, this fear ate away at her and clouded her perception of Olga
and her carefree evening.
The elaborate tercentenary celebrations were dampened, literally, by constant rain. The expensive pageantry, the ceremonies, receptions and banquets passed in a blur of downpours, and even the
triumphal imperial tour of historic sites associated with the first Romanov was marred by a constant freezing wind that curtailed the tsar’s itinerary and disappointed the waiting crowds.
It was a flawed observance, the cheering throngs sparse at times, drawn more, one observer thought, by ‘shallow curiosity’ than devotion to the ruling house. There was no question
but that the name of Romanov had been tarnished and, while some of the tsar’s subjects fell on their knees and kissed his shadow as he passed, many others simply took the festivities in their
stride, sceptical of all government and, though outwardly deferential, were inwardly indifferent to the official goings-on in Petersburg and Moscow.
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The attention
of the public was drawn elsewhere in that spring of 1913, to the orgies at the Villa Black Swan, the palace of an erotomanic
millionaire, the craze for bridge-playing and cocaine, the escalating numbers of suicides and the details of a series of sensational criminal trials.
One thing the Russian public was not indifferent to: the threat of war. Self-regarding celebrations by the Romanov ruling house might be considered of little consequence, but the bellicose talk
and the build-up of weaponry in neighbouring Germany was a continual threat, to be taken seriously. Emperor William, with his swaggering, bullying oratory, his pompous vanity and evident craving
for domination, was an alarming figure on the European stage, his wild eccentricities exaggerated by the sensationalizing press. With his secretary of state for naval affairs, Admiral von Tirpitz,
the emperor had expanded the German navy by building a number of immense swift battleships – dreadnoughts – equipped with heavy long-range guns, in competition with British battleships
of equal size and firepower. Clearly the German aim was pre-eminence at sea; as for pre-eminence on land, though the Russian armies were much larger than the German, they were ill equipped, and
guided by an inexperienced, woolly-headed War Minister, General Sukhomlinov. In any test of arms, the German forces were bound to prevail.
But the tsar’s private opinion was that there would be no test of arms. Willy, though a ‘bore and an exhibitionist’, was not likely to start a war, Nicky thought. He had had
several opportunities, when Germany’s ally Austria clashed with Russian interests in the Balkans. Had he truly wanted war, he could have backed Austria in aggression against Russia’s
Slavic allies. But he had chosen to take no action. In recent months, in fact, the German Emperor had actually cut back his ship-building programme, causing cautious relief in Britain, and had met
with General Sukhomlinov, a successful meeting that left the emperor with a favourable impression of the general as ‘very nice and interesting.’
Willy’s personal messages to Nicky were warmly familial. ‘I sincerely hope and believe that 1913 will flow peacefully as you telegraphed me on New Year’s day,’ he wrote
in early January. ‘I
think that we can both look on the future quietly.’
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To encourage the peaceful flow of
events, Willy invited many of his relatives, including Nicky and George V, to Berlin to celebrate the wedding of his daughter Victoria Louise, known in the family as Sissy.
They came to the German capital at the end of May, dozens of relatives converging, meeting at the train station, embracing and kissing and chattering much as they had nearly twenty years
earlier, when they had come together in Coburg for Ernie and Ducky’s wedding. Then Queen Victoria had been the matriarch of the clan. Now there was no matriarch, no single personality to whom
all deferred. But the sense of a family bond was still strong. Alix was reunited with her sisters Victoria and Irene, Minnie with her sister Alexandra, dowager queen of England. Nicky, Willy and
George met as cousinly equals, not as rivals; that the sovereigns of Russia and Great Britain were diplomatically allied in opposition to the German Emperor was easily overlooked as they toasted
one another and the bride and groom, wore the uniforms of one another’s military services out of courtesy, and acted like the wedding guests they were.
If Alix was uncomfortable and anxious at the banquet in the imperial palace, amid a crowd of two hundred and fifty people, no one noted it. She was among friends and supporters and, though she
disliked and distrusted Willy, there were many in the crowd whom she loved and looked forward to seeing. Just being away from claustrophobic Petersburg, with its vicious newspaper reports and
mocking gossip, must have felt to her like a reprieve.
But the reprieve was to be brief. Soon enough the family was back at Tsarskoe Selo, and Alix was once again immersed in family affairs – the worrisome attachment of Xenia and
Sandro’s daughter Irina to the dissolute, immensely rich young aristocrat Felix Yusupov (‘I would never let a daughter of mine marry him’), daughter Anastasia’s inconvenient
and irritating efforts to ‘breed worms’, the worsening illness and invalidism of Alix’s long-time friend and maid of honour Sonia Orbeliani, who continued to live at the palace,
quarrels with the ungrateful Anna Vyrubov (‘Here we gave our hearts our home to her, our private life even – and this is what we have gained! It is
difficult
not to become bitter’), Nicky’s sister Olga’s divorce, and the self-destructive deterioration of Father Gregory, whose lechery (he even pawed the startled divorcée Olga),
brawling and heavy drinking expanded.
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‘My heart is heavy and sore,’ Alix wrote. She continued to stand by her spiritual mentor, denying what was being said about him, and denying to herself the evident worsening of the
danger of war in the autumn of 1913.
Reports reached Nicky’s desk that the Austrian army was concentrating its forces on the Russian frontier in Galicia as a consequence of Bulgarian attacks on Serbia. Despite diplomatic
efforts, it looked as though the fragile truce in the Balkans might give way to further aggression at any time. Meanwhile the newspapers were full of editorials about the suffering Serbs and the
menacing Austrians, rousing the patriotic ire of the public. And the Duma leader Rodzianko was urging the tsar to take advantage of the weakness of Turkey to send Russian troops to conquer
Constantinople, an imperial enterprise well suited to the celebration of the three-hundredth Romanov year.
Sore-hearted, Alix wanted nothing more than to be left in peace, yet peace, it seemed, was always denied her – except during the family’s excursions to Livadia in autumn and spring.
Back in Tsarskoe Selo during the winter social season, as the new year of 1914 opened, she kept to her practice of avoiding the numerous parties and balls, uncomfortably aware that the best dinners
and dances that year were said to be given at the stark new mansion of Count Pourtalès, the elderly German ambassador.
The only ball she attended was the one Minnie gave at the Anitchkov Palace for the four imperial grand duchesses, Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia. The girls were lovely, especially the
slender, enchanting Tatiana. But their mother, though ill and middle-aged, eclipsed them. One observer thought that Alix ‘was the very picture of beauty’ with her stately posture, fine
features and delicate manners. ‘There was something sad in her smile,’ he wrote, but that note of wistfulness only added to her charm. (Clearly the ‘haggard,
middle-aged’ empress Martha Mouchanow had perceived was not evident to everyone.)
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Though the ball went on until four-thirty
in the morning, Alix left at midnight, quite worn out.
A mild winter and sodden spring gave way to an unusually fair, cloudless summer. New leaves on the trees in the park grew dusty in the heat, peonies wilted in the flowerbeds and along the
pavements of the capital, a fine yellow dirt accumulated, blown into piles by occasional gusts of warm air off the dark blue river.
Petersburgers shed their coats and scarves and basked in the fine weather, eating ice cream, staying out late in the light evenings, worrying that the heat might bring an epidemic, as it often
did. The air stank of smoke from country fires, tinting the silvery light of early summer with a brown cast.
Those who could afford to left the city for their rural estates, or for resorts in Finland, not only to escape the heat but to escape the prospect of a worsening labour protest. Already by
mid-June over a hundred thousand workers in the capital had gone on strike, and more were walking out of the factories daily.
They drifted through the city in groups, gathering at street corners in dozens, then hundreds, herded by police and patrols of mounted Cossacks armed with sabres. Many in the city remembered
Bloody Sunday, nine years earlier, when the soldiers had been ordered to fire on the crowds and dozens had died in the snow. And they recalled hearing of a more recent, more terrible massacre in
the Lena goldfields, when soldiers had fired on striking workers, killing hundreds.
The workers of Petersburg began building barricades, claiming portions of the streets as their own. As their numbers grew, their confidence expanded. They recruited others to their ranks.
Hundreds of factories emptied. Before long, people said, half the workers in the country would be on strike.
In the midst of the heatwave, a series of thunderstorms broke over Petersburg. Sudden showers drenched streets and drowned gardens in full bloom. Wet through, the workers abandoned their
half-built barricades and took shelter in halls and warehouses, watching as bolts of coloured lightning shot across the sky, burning like meteors,
or struck spires and
stone turrets. Thunder boomed out across the Neva, louder than any artillery in the tsar’s armies, loud enough to be heard at Peterhof, where the tsar and his family were staying in
preparation for the arrival of an important visitor, President Poincaré of France.
It promised to be a significant visit, one that would strengthen Russia’s diplomatic ties with her French ally and further a settlement – without the direct military involvement of
Russia – in the increasingly tangled and ominous crisis in the Balkans.
Towards the end of June an act of terrorism had entangled the situation further. A Serbian assassin had killed the heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife as they rode in a
carriage through the streets of Sarajevo. The diplomatic after-effects were serious, and urgent; every foreign ministry in Europe was obliged to react, telegrams and telephone messages went back
and forth, crucial decisions were being debated.
The tsar continued to feel, despite the mounting exigency of the situation, that peace would be maintained, and he told Poincaré so when they met. He could not believe that the Germans
would start a war, that Emperor William would ‘launch his country on some wild adventure’. Nor would the bereaved, elderly Emperor Franz Josef of Austria be drawn into a massive
conflict – for war, if it came, would surely involve all of Europe.
Poincaré disagreed. He gauged the mood of the other states of Europe more realistically than his host could. War seemed to him inevitable. The ubiquitous military culture demanded it. The
massive build-up of weaponry, the immense navies, the diplomatic configuration that made it virtually impossible for any of the major states to act alone, the millions of men under arms, poised to
take their places once battle lines were drawn, all pointed to conflict – and a conflict, he thought, that could not long be postponed.
During the French president’s visit two splendid military displays were carried out at Krasnoe Selo.
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Rank on rank of uniformed men
marched past the reviewing stand, the dust raised by their marching feet rising in the warm air to make a golden halo around them. Flags
waved, bands played stirring
patriotic marches, from time to time the watching crowd burst into song. High in the cloudless sky an airplane buzzed, circling the reviewing field again and again.
The pageantry, the feelings of loyalty stirred by the massed troops, the sight of magnificent young officers and valiant, limping old generals, veterans of long-ago wars, walking along between
the lines of soldiers moved many in the crowd to tears.