Alexandra (42 page)

The simple funeral, held early in the morning at the graveside, was brief. Alix had chosen the site, on land where Anna Vyrubov planned to build a church, for its accessibility to the palace and
because it was easy to guard. Desecration of Father Gregory’s body was likely; the secret police were ordered to spread false rumours that it had been taken by train to his Siberian village
or to a monastery in the Ural Mountains.

It was a bitter morning, the morning of January 3, 1917. Frost rimed the grass in the palace park, fog swirled around the trees and obscured the ice-covered lake. Alix, Nicky (who had returned
from Mogilev the day before) and the children arrived by car and walked to the grave, looking down on the coffin, which had already been lowered into the earth. No choir sang, only a priest from
the cathedral. The imperial confessor and a monk from Anna Vyrubov’s infirmary said the prayers and celebrated the requiem mass.

All was done in quietness, in haste. Secret police kept watch from a distance, ready to rush in should any disturbance arise. They were prepared for anything – a coup, an assassination
attempt, an effort to kidnap the tsar and his immediate family. For it was now certain that Father Gregory’s murder had been a family undertaking, and
the
tsar’s relations formed a united bloc in asking, indeed demanding, that he show leniency in his treatment of the two young men upon whom suspicion fell.

A fresh wave of threatening letters had been arriving at the palace in the aftermath of the murder. Alix had received many.
¹²
No one in the
immediate family was safe.

The funeral passed without incident, and the tsar, having noted in his diary that the family had seen the coffin ‘with the body of unforgettable Grigory, who was killed by some
scum’, went for a walk with the children.

Alix had her obligations, and busied herself fulfilling them. There were the servants’ Christmas trees to decorate, gifts to prepare for the staff and for the wounded in her hospitals.
Activity was a palliative for grief. She worked on, until interrupted by Protopopov, who came to inform her of yet another plot to murder her. She received the information coolly, Sophie
Buxhoeveden noticed.
¹³
She did not flinch, or grow faint, or even turn pale. She took the news in her stride, and then returned to her tasks,
outwardly calm but feeling inwardly like an old woman, her grief like a heavy stone weighing down her heart.

T
he news of Rasputin’s death loosed an immense wave of popular rejoicing. People shouted aloud for joy, strangers embraced one another in the
streets.

‘The Nameless One! The Unmentionable! He is dead!’ they told one another, clapping and laughing.

It was as irresistible, as unstoppable a force as the spring thaw, this effusion of public jubilation, which went on for days and seemed to ignite a conflagration of excitement.

To the excitement were added other provocations in the early days of the new year 1917 – strikes, demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of protesters, commemorations of Bloody Sunday and
a huge rally to greet the opening of the Duma – plus the ever-present incitements of severe cold, lack of food and extremely high prices for what little bread and milk, what few eggs and
sausages were available. It was rumoured that prices would double or treble before spring came. Meanwhile many people were existing on soup and mouldy crusts, and shivering in their damp, icy rooms
for want of firewood.

When the weather turned milder early in March the numbers of strikers and demonstrators increased, and their daring expanded. Now the Cossacks that patrolled the streets on horseback, whips in
hand and sharp sabres hanging from their belts, were cursed and assaulted by volleys of stones. Vocal crowds shouted ‘Down with the monarchy!’ ‘Bread for the Workers!’ and,
on International Women’s Day, March 8, ‘Equality for Women!’

There was an exhilarating air of power amid the tumult. Hostile messages written on frozen walls were wiped away, only to reappear
again almost immediately, and
covering more walls than before. Hostile crowds, threatened by police and armed troops, dispersed only to form again enlarged in size. Workers carrying red flags, singing the
‘Marseillaise’, the triumphant song of the French revolutionaries of 1789, paraded around squares and along canals, skirmishing with police when the latter attempted to put a halt to
their marches. Groups of insurgents overturned cars and smashed the windows of trams. Shop windows were broken, looting began.

On the following day, March 9, it was as if the entire population of Petrograd took to the streets, a vast tide of humanity flooding every avenue, lane and alley. To some two hundred thousand
striking workers were added tens of thousands of former soldiers, students, government workers, ordinary citizens from a variety of social ranks. Drawing strength from one another, feeling more
forceful the larger their numbers grew, the crowds invaded the bakeries, confronted the police (who backed down) and called out to the soldiers – who, until that evening, were under orders
not to fire – to join them.

There was a sense of elation, of relief as more and more people joined the chanting, cheering crowds. Orators harangued the demonstrators, stirring up their fears, their hatred of privilege,
above all their sense of empowerment. At last all the corruption, the poor governance, the political puppets could be swept away, the speakers shouted. The people had only to seize power – it
was within their grasp.

And indeed it seemed to be within their grasp, as on March 11 anarchy was unleashed in the city. Warnings had been posted by the military commander General Khabalov that demonstrators would be
fired upon, but the warning posters were torn down and trampled underfoot as, once again, people poured into the streets and squares, forming living tides that ebbed and flowed around buildings and
monuments. From every section of the capital they surged towards the centre of the city, ignoring the guards stationed on the bridges and the armed troops brought in to replace the ineffectual
police. Though the secret police had been out in force before dawn, arresting hundreds of the previous day’s insurgents, the arrests seemed to have
no effect, for
the crowds were even more dense, more determined to bring all business to a halt in Petrograd.

Gunfire could be heard throughout the day, the steady sputter of machine guns, bursts of rifle fire and the crack of pistols. Along the margins of the crowds, men ran here and there, rifles
strapped to their backs, swords at their waists. Small groups of soldiers, police, ordinary citizens armed with revolvers or grenades encountered one another, skirmished, and ran off, leaving
bleeding bodies on the paving-stones.

Troops fired on demonstrators in Znamenskaya Square, and along Nevsky Prospekt. Units of the Preobrazhensky regiment mowed down many in the crowd that had gathered near Kazan Cathedral, leaving
hundreds dead and dying in the square.

But still the crowds did not disperse; the momentum that had brought people out in such numbers did not dissipate, but rather seemed to grow. The sun shone brightly down, the air was cool and
brisk but not harsh. And as they milled in the streets and kept watch from their windows, the citizens of Petrograd observed that something remarkable was beginning to happen.

Soldiers and police began firing on each other.

In the Pavlovsky regiment, soldiers turned against their officers and, refusing to fire on the insurgents, joined with them. In the Preobrazhensky regiment, men shot their own officers rather
than obey orders and shoot more civilians. Other regiments joined the trend, fearing to become the targets of the rebellious soldiery. What had begun as an intermittent clash between demonstrators
and the military became an ongoing battle between renegade soldiers and the dwindling number of police units that remained loyal to the titular authorities.

Word swept through the city: there was mutiny in the forces of the tsar! There was no longer anything to fear; the military was on the side of the citizens.

Now the police came under attack, individual officers murdered, thrown onto the river ice, shot down as they tried to reach safety – even burned alive on bonfires while jubilant crowds
collected to watch.

Seizing the initiative, on the following day, March 12, workers and soldiers captured the Military Arsenal and looted it, arming themselves for further acts of daring.
They burst into the Central Office of the secret police and ransacked it, burned the Law Courts with their records of property and privilege, and broke into the city’s largest prisons,
setting all the prisoners free. Finally the soldiers manning the capital’s principal bastion, the Fortress of Peter and Paul, yielded to the superior armed force of the revolutionaries
– for that is what they had become – and gave up their arms.

It was over, or nearly over. A few troops continued to defend the Winter Palace and the Admiralty against the victorious insurgents, a few more fired down into the crowds from isolated rooftops.
But long before midnight, the city was in rebel hands.

The noise and confusion went on all night, sounds of gunfire and shouting, cars and trucks roaring up and down the street, as here and there a skirmish broke out or a band of soldiers, drunk on
wine and victory, slouched along the broad quays. When the sun rose the next morning, March 13, Petrograd no longer belonged to the tsar.

Rodzianko, president of the Duma, sent a telegram to Nicky: ‘Situation grave. Anarchy in capital. Government paralyzed. Transport . . . has reached complete breakdown. Public discontent
growing. Disorderly shooting occurring on the streets. Military units are firing on each other. Vital to call on a figure trusted by the country to form a new government. No time to lose. Any delay
is as good as death. I pray God that in this hour the blame will not fall on him who wears the crown.’
¹

But the tsar, contemptuous of Rodzianko and assured by his commanders in Mogilev that the Duma president was exaggerating the crisis, ignored the telegram and did not send a reply. He did,
however, dissolve the Duma, leaving the country without any governing authority save his own – backed by those troops that remained loyal to him.

The gravity of the situation eluded him, but to others it was only too clear. In the space of a few days, the imperial government, faced
with an unprecedented upwelling
of popular resistance, had all but melted away.

Fourteen battalions of the guard, seven thousand police and mounted Cossacks, several hundred thousand armed troops stationed in the city and just outside it: of these defenders, only a token
force remained. And the capital had fallen.
²

Word had reached the Alexander Palace at nine o’clock on the morning of March 12 that the regiments had mutinied. Sophie Buxhoeveden, the empress’s lady-in-waiting, took the message
to her mistress, who was still in bed.

‘I told her everything,’ Sophie wrote. ‘She listened with perfect self-possession, only remarking that, if the troops had mutinied, “it was all up.”’

While she dressed Alix sent for the Acting Commander of the Palace guard, who assured her that the garrison in Tsarskoe Selo was still loyal and would defend the palace should revolutionaries
from Petrograd attack it. As for the situation in the capital, more troops were being sent in. The rebellion would soon be crushed.
³

All that day, Alix did what she could to preserve order among the staff and discourage panic. All the children but Marie were ill with severe measles, and she was preoccupied with nursing them,
keeping vigil by their bedsides. Their fevers were rising – Alexei had a fever of 104 degrees – and complications had begun to set in, with Tatiana developing abscesses in her ears and
Olga showing symptoms of pericarditis.
⁴

Preoccupied as she was with worry about Alexei and her daughters, and expecting Nicky to return the following day from Mogilev, Alix could not at first spare much energy for confronting the
crisis in Petrograd.

‘In the palace we had lulled ourselves into believing that no serious rising would take place during the war,’ Sophie Buxhoeveden recalled in her memoirs. No matter how grave
discontent might grow, no matter what political extreme might be reached, Russians would be loyal and patriotic, as long as there was a threat from a foreign enemy to be faced.

And the strength of the alliance against the German enemy had only recently been demonstrated, at least formally, when Alix received the members of the diplomatic corps
at the palace. For two days, while rioters (she called them ‘hooligans’) were marching through the streets of Petrograd, she had greeted all the ministers and secretaries of foreign
missions who had never before met her in person, holding out her hand to be kissed as each elaborately uniformed dignitary approached in turn.
⁵
It was a spectacle reminiscent of her grandmother’s court, a parade of supernumeraries worthy of an Italian opera – elaborately costumed masters of ceremonies, lackeys in tall hats with
sweeping plumes, liveried servants gleaming with gold lace, velvet knee-breeches and buckled shoes.