Alexandra (45 page)

‘Those evenings were unspeakably sad,’ Sophie thought. ‘The empress [so Sophie continued to call her] was growing thinner and
thinner, and was
terribly aged in appearance. She sat almost in silence.’
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There was nothing to talk about; every topic raised painful emotions. And
besides, they couldn’t speak freely. The guards were listening.

They said little, sitting there beside Anna’s bed, but each could imagine the others’ thoughts: of the war, and how the Russian armies were faring, of the wounded in the hospital
nearby, of the stories brought from Petrograd of soldiers murdering their officers and of the noisy clamour of the palace guardsmen demanding that Nicky be tried and sent to Kronstadt to await
execution.

Alix confided to Sophie that one thought often preoccupied her. If, as she believed, the Russian people were still faithful to the tsar, then how long would it be before they rose up and
overthrew the Provisional Government and the Soviet, demanding his return to power? And when would foreign rulers take action against the revolution, as they had against the revolutionaries in
France in the time of Louis XVI? She waited for the revolution to falter, for the counter-revolution to begin. She trusted in a ‘sudden miraculous change’ that would sweep away the
nightmare of the abdication and its aftermath, and restore her husband to the throne.
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She took heart from the few letters of consolation and encouragement she received. When an unknown lady sent Nicky a small icon, along with a prayer, Alix was ‘cheerful for a whole
day’. The handful of letters that came from friends were cherished, and a warm letter from Nicky’s sister Xenia – the only letter from a family member that the soldiers did not
confiscate – was comforting, as were the phone calls from Petrograd with messages of sympathy, and the flowers and notes sent to Alix by Queen Olga of Greece.
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But for every comforting letter there were hundreds of insulting ones, accusing Nicky of treason, accusing Alix of everything from adultery to cruelty to sacrilege and crimes against nature. The
hatred in these venomous letters was extreme, the appetite for revenge chilling. Alix had not suspected that such deep reservoirs of hatred existed, and she was very troubled by the
letters.
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Each day Alix had further searing proof of the current upwelling of resentment and contempt. The soldiers who guarded her, loud,
ill-mannered, rowdy, truculent men,
openly and incessantly hostile, harassed her and tried to unnerve her by telling coarse jokes in her presence and blowing the smoke from their cigarettes in her face.
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They singled her out as the special focus of their animosity, calling her ‘the tyrant’s wife’ and scrawling obscene graffiti on walls and on the
benches in the garden where she would be certain to see them. They called out rude insults when she passed in her wheelchair, and threatened the servant who pushed the chair, swearing to kill him
if he continued to serve his vile mistress.

From morning to night, Alix was under siege from her jailers. When she dressed in the morning, a sentry was watching through the window; to preserve what modesty she could, she put on her
clothes in a corner of the room, facing the wall, still in full view of him. When she went to mass, soldiers stood behind the altar screen, observing her. When she walked along the palace
corridors, the guards shouted out rude greetings or snickered. She could never count on being alone, not in her private sitting room, her bedroom, even her bathroom. For the soldiers roamed at will
through the palace, bursting into any room they liked, on any pretext, knocking over tables and lounging on sofas in their dirty boots, shouting to one another and haranguing the servants. At night
she went to sleep with the sound of their raucous noise in her ears, knowing that even her sleep would be watched.

The constant malevolence of the guards wore Alix down, as did their petty meanness to her husband and children. Shouts of ‘Tyrant!’ or ‘Traitor!’ met Nicky wherever he
went (along with a few murmurs of ‘Good day, Colonel’). Though he tried to ignore the insults, he could not ignore outright attacks, as when, riding on his bicycle in the park, a
soldier stuck his bayonet through the spokes, making the bicycle swerve dangerously and nearly causing an accident. Such incidents, and the loud laughter of the soldiers who were looking on, were
maddeningly provocative.
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But it was the soldiers’ treatment of her daughters that angered Alix most. She had kept them sheltered, away from men. They had worked as nurses among soldiers, and had flirted with the
officers
of the imperial yacht, but the men had always been polite. The girls had never been subjected to anything like the barrage of leering, suggestive comments they
now heard every hour. Their innocence was outraged by the sight of the soldiers, stripping naked to bathe in the ice-cold ponds, knowing that they would be seen by the girls and anticipating their
well-bred confusion.

Alix was angry, watching such incidents, but she was more fearful than angry, for there was always the chance that the lurid remarks, the sly looks and smirks might lead to kisses or rough
fondling, and ultimately to rape. The girls’ very innocence was a provocation to men bent on revenge, men whose edgy meanness was barely kept contained by their officers. Often the guards
were bored and restless: they marched around in groups, singing the ‘Marseillaise’, they picked fights with the palace servants, they shot the tame deer and swans in the palace park for
target practice. Their pent-up aggression could not be controlled forever and, as the weeks passed, it seemed to be getting stronger.

Late one afternoon Alix was in the garden, sitting in her wheelchair under a tree, doing needlework. A soldier, a deputy from the Soviet, came and sat in a chair close beside her. Sophie
Buxhoeveden, who was nearby, began to protest – for none of the soldiers had come so close to Alix before – but Alix gestured to Sophie to be silent, fearing that the slightest fuss
could provoke the guards to order the entire family back indoors, and the girls and Alexei were enjoying their brief hour of fresh air.
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Sophie went off to find an officer.

Alix began to engage the soldier in conversation. He took the opportunity to accuse her, boldly and directly, of despising the Russian people. The fact that she had not travelled widely in her
adopted country (which was in fact untrue) proved that she hated the Russians, he said, and that she cared nothing about getting to know the country.

Without allowing her questioner to provoke her to contradiction, Alix calmly explained that there were reasons why she had not travelled more. In her youth she had had to look after her five
children, each of whom she had nursed personally, and this had
limited her ability to travel. Later on, her health had been too poor to allow her to make many
journeys.

As he listened to her, the deputy became less accusatory. He began asking her about her life, her children, her attitudes. He was particularly interested in knowing her attitude towards Germany,
since it was so widely believed that her sympathies were all with the Germans. She told him, speaking simply and straightforwardly, that although she had been raised in Darmstadt among Germans, and
was a German herself by birth, whatever feelings she had once had belonged to the distant past. The people she loved best, her husband and her children, were Russians, and she had become a Russian
too, ‘with all her heart’.

The conversation went on, eventually turning from politics to religion. At this point Sophie returned, having found an officer and bringing him with her. The deputy rose as they came nearer and
took Alix’s hand, saying, ‘Do you know, Alexandra Feodorovna, I had quite a different idea of you? I was mistaken about you.’

From then on, he was polite – no matter what his fellow guards said or did.

But one man’s politeness was an oasis of civility in a waste of vulgar taunting and overt hostility. She had won over one man, yet there were a hundred who detested her and menaced her and
her family. Meanwhile she heard nothing further about the family’s being sent out of Russia to safety. No one brought news, official or otherwise, from Petrograd. There were only whispers and
rumours, nearly all of them alarming, and more guards being brought to watch their every move.

Kornilov had told her that the present arrangements were only temporary. But as the weeks passed and the first green of spring appeared in the park, she began to wonder if that were true. When
would they receive their orders to leave? Would they ever again find themselves among family and friends, free of surveillance and deprivation? When would the sudden miraculous change come about,
the providential transformation that would bring their deliverance?

F
amily photographs from an album of Anastasia’s, taken in the spring and summer of 1917, show not a harsh captivity but a rustic idyll.

Olga and Tatiana stand in the sun in a flower garden, wearing white dresses and white hats. Alexei sits on a stone jetty above the lake, his tutor beside him. Nicky poses beside the broad stump
of a tree he has just felled, his arm resting possessively on its raw surface. Alix sits in a wooden chair opposite Nicky, holding a silk parasol, her face shaded by a wide-brimmed straw hat.

Images of summer, of idleness and pleasure.

Yet in actuality the family was far from idle in its captivity. As the spring advanced and the ground thawed, their captors allowed them to spend more hours outdoors, and they used the time to
dig an extensive vegetable garden. Everyone but Alix took part, sometimes spending three hours at a time clearing away bushes and rocks, turning the earth with shovels and digging deep straight
furrows for the young plants. After weeks of labour, the vegetable patch was finished. In the lengthening daylight the plants took root quickly, and flourished. Beans, turnips, lettuce, squash,
cabbage – especially cabbage, five hundred plants – lifted their leaves to the sun and intermittent rain.

And when the garden was finished, they began a second vegetable patch for the servants, everyone joining in, digging enthusiastically ‘with great energy and even enjoyment’, as Nicky
wrote in his journal.
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Having received permission from the guards, the former emperor devoted himself to felling the dead trees in the park,
lopping
off the branches and cutting them into lengths for firewood, then loading the chopped wood onto carts to be stored in the palace basement. He threw himself into
the work with zest, losing his sallowness and his melancholy and emerging from the wood at the end of the afternoon, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, a happy man.

Thanks to the family’s efforts, there would be plenty of wood for the fire and plenty of food to sustain them in the coming winter – if indeed they were to be in Tsarskoe Selo that
long.

Alix watched the exertions of her husband and children from a shaded bench near the lake, looking up from her embroidery to see her son swimming or playing on the ‘children’s
island’. She worried about Alexei. He continued to suffer periodic haemorrhages in his abdomen, his skin turning yellow and his appetite diminishing; when the attacks came she sat beside him,
holding his sore legs and saying her prayers.

No doubt she thought often of Father Gregory at such times, how he had always been able not only to alleviate Alexei’s pain but to predict the outcome of each attack. Father Gregory had
known the future. And he had often said, echoing the words of Christ, ‘where I go, you shall go also’. He had known that his fate would be a harbinger of the fate of the Romanovs. He
was a martyr; would they be martyred too?

The elderly Mother Maria had called Alix ‘the martyr Alexandra’. Was this too prophetic? Or was the martyrdom to be metaphorical, the psychological martyrdom of deprivation, mental
suffering, strict captivity?

Crucial to these ruminations was Alix’s absorbing interest in the course of political events. By May newspapers were being delivered to Tsarskoe Selo from Petrograd, and Alix and Nicky
both read them avidly, well aware that the information they contained was heavily biased and controlled by the Duma yet valuing what news they provided.

It was clear from the papers that the Duma was finding itself enmired in a quicksand of indecision, pressured by an increasingly pacifist public to end the war yet committed to prosecuting it,
in
conflict with the Soviet over the distribution of land to the peasants (who had begun to seize land on their own), and unable to keep order in Petrograd.

The turmoil that had begun in the winter was increasing, with acts of violence, demonstrations and protests continuing. Meanwhile the German armies were close at hand, and might at any time take
advantage of all the tumult to march on Petrograd.

Again and again Alix turned recent events over in her mind, confiding to Sophie Buxhoeveden that in retrospect she realized that before the revolution Nicky, with her encouragement, had trusted
the wrong people, ministers who had ‘mismanaged affairs’.
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It had not been this mismanagement that caused the revolution; the
revolution had come about, she was convinced, as the result of the strident rhetoric of extremists. But she came to believe that there was another force at work, a powerful historical justice which
demanded that her husband be made a scapegoat for all the errors and misjudgments of his imperial predecessors. For three hundred years the Romanov tsars had lived in great wealth and luxury, often
ruling heedlessly, without taking sufficient thought for their people. Now a karmic retribution was under way.
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