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  She reacted. She began to dress up, to garb herself ‘with great magnificence’, as her principal waiting maid Martha Mouchanow remembered, from early morning until late at night. Disregarding the designs her court dressmakers proposed, she sketched gowns of her own design, ornate, elaborate ones, in sharp contrast to the simpler tailored gowns her mother-in-law favoured. If she dressed like an empress, Alix seems to have reasoned, she would be treated with respect.

  But the tactic achieved the opposite result. The ill-judged opulence in dress led to much smothered laughter, and unflattering comparisons between Alix and the undeniably more elegant, more simply dressed Dowager Empress. The dressmakers fumed, the servants sneered and complained to Minnie that Alix overworked them by asking them to bring out three or four different gowns, complete with hat, gloves, shoes, stockings and other accessories, each time she changed her clothes during the day so that she could choose from among them.6

  The complaints about Alix’s fussiness reached Minnie, and she chastised Alix, adding, with a hint of snobbery, that ‘when she [Alix] was at Darmstadt she would not have dared to display such a capricious temper’.7 The reference to her lower status and relatively modest upbringing wounded and offended Alix, who soon found herself barraged with criticisms.

  The whispering campaign on the part of the servants had only been the start of a much wider assault of censure that spread within the imperial family and among the courtiers. The empress was said to be capricious, extravagant, always avid for new gowns and especially new furs. Her bills from the Paris couturiers Worth and Paquin were said to be enormous – though in fact they were far smaller than Minnie’s – and Aunt Miechen dismissed Alix’s taste as that of a parvenue, unused to having costly things and shamelessly eager to acquire and flaunt them.8 And to an extent, Aunt Miechen was right.

  But the imputation of extravagance was only one of many reproaches. If the servants reported that the empress had a headache, and appeared pale, the family said it was because she was upset over something Minnie had said or done. If she smiled, she was assumed to be mocking others in the family. If she frowned, she was being disagreeable. If she was merely thoughtful, she was said to be angry. If she ordered English-style bacon for breakfast, she was said to be expressing scorn for Russian food. If her terrier snapped at the heels of a member of the family, Alix, and not the dog, was blamed.

  All but smothered under the avalanche of gratuitous opprobrium, Alix took a stand against it. She persuaded Nicky to take her away to Tsarskoe Selo for a week. While there, temporarily out of Minnie’s control and removed, at least a little, from the relentless condemnation of the immediate family, she stiffened her backbone and armoured herself, inwardly, to face the assaults. When she and Nicky returned from those few days away, Mouchanow noticed the change immediately. There was, she wrote, an alteration in the empress’s ‘manners and bearing, much of her former diffidence and shyness having disappeared’.9 She began giving orders, making decisions on her own, acting without consulting Minnie first.

  She summoned Mouchanow into her presence and instructed her that from now on, there would be new rules for the waiting maids to follow – rules which would protect her privacy and prohibit talebearing. When Mouchanow began to protest, Alix silenced her, telling her ‘most peremptorily’ to obey her instructions and not to offer any contradiction or advice.10 Stunned, Mouchanow set about implementing the new rules, knowing that they would create hostility among the servants where before there had merely been disrespect and ridicule.

  No doubt Alix too could predict the harshly disagreeable outcome of her new rules and firm attitude, but the former situation was untenable, and could not be endured. She had to assert herself – there was no other way, since Nicky would never stand up for her or defend her interests and peace of mind. He looked to her for constant support and reassurance, but she knew she could not look to him for protection in the maelstrom of court intrigue. To survive in its midst, she had to provide her own defence.

  Meanwhile Nicky, doing his best to meet his responsibilities as tsar, was suffering from what he called ‘terrible emotions’, knowing that he had soon to appear before a deputation of his subjects and make a brief speech. His natural diffidence made such an appearance a torment to him. He would have to enter a crowded hall, mount a dais, receive the worshipful greeting of those present, and then make his remarks – nothing lengthy, only a few sentences. Still the dread of it ate away at him, making him withdrawn and nervous.

  ‘The tsar does nothing. He is a sphinx,’ one of the courtiers wrote, observing the new ruler. ‘He has no kind of personality.’ He was not often seen and, though affable enough on social occasions, he did not seek company outside of his family. Beneath his sphinx-like exterior Nicky was full of nervous dread; he smoked, he had a habit of stroking his beard in a preoccupied way, he sought release in physical activity. But the dread persisted.

  Grieving for his father, he laboured under the burdensome certainty that he would never live up to his example. He would try, of course. He would honour Alexander III’s memory by continuing his policies, by being diligent in controlling irresponsible tendencies towards self-government on the part of his people. He would keep ever sharp in his memory the terrible afternoon when he had watched his grandfather die, slain by revolutionary advocates of ‘the people,’ who were in truth enemies of the state. He would not listen to the views of any minister who discussed, even in the abstract, the idea that Russia might one day adopt a constitution, or that he himself might become a constitutional monarch, subject to legal restrictions.

  Nicky turned for advice to the man who had tutored and advised his father, and who had tutored him: the lawyer Constantine Pobedonostsev, head of the Church Synod. Pobedonostsev held strong views on the need to preserve inviolate the old political order: the absolute autocracy of the tsar, the absolute subordination of his subjects, the rejection of harmful Western ideas about constitutional reform. Pobedonostsev gave Nicky some notes to refer to when he made his speech; fortified with these notes, which he concealed in his lambskin hat, Nicky prepared to meet the deputation.

  In the Nicholas Hall, members of the nobility, representatives of the zemstvos and other city groups were waiting on January 17, 1895, to be addressed by Tsar Nicholas. Many in the audience were enthusiastic, eager for encouragement from the new young tsar. Their expectations reflected their circumstances; the harvest of 1894 had been good, the first adequate harvest in four years. It had helped to weaken their discontent and revive their hopes. Perhaps, after all, there was no curse on Russia, other than the curse of ill-advised ministers. And perhaps Tsar Nicholas, after reading the petitions they had sent him, would realize that his ministers were wrong and that he needed the advice of his people.

  They had urged him, in their petitions, to listen to their collective voice, the voice of the people, and having heard it, to protect them against the evils of poverty and overtaxation, punitive tariffs and low grain prices, to broaden their rights, consult with them, entrust them with more of their own decisions. There must be no more vast famines, no more epidemics, no more needless misery.

  Nicky took Pobedonostsev’s notes out of his hat and prepared to speak to his subjects. Though he trembled inwardly, his voice was unwavering, even harsh as he delivered his short message.

  ‘I shall maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly as it was preserved by my unforgettable dead father,’ he told them. Any other course would be unthinkable. As for their hopes, their expectations that he might include them in any fashion in the work of government, these were nothing but ‘senseless dreams’.

  It was his own phrase, and a memorable one. ‘Senseless dreams.’ What Pobedonostsev had written in his notes was ‘unrealizable dreams,’ but Nicky, either because of his nervousness or because, on the spur of the moment, looking out over the sea of upturned faces, he saw fit to amend it, spoke the words ‘senseless dreams’ instead.11

  The import o
f his words spread through the vast crowd, and almost in an instant their hopes were turned to dismay. The vision of a slow, orderly progression towards political reform that so many of them had imagined – increasing civil liberties, governmental efficiency, the advance towards constitutionalism – began to dissolve. Instead there came a vision of darkness, of monumental want, crushing misery, perpetuated indefinitely into the future. The tsar did not want to help them. He did not care that they were suffering. He was a man of iron, with a stone for a heart. There was indeed a curse on Russia, God’s curse, and nothing anyone could do or say would ever take it away.

  10

  A satirical drawing of the emperor and his mother was passed from hand to hand in the imperial court. Some laughed at it, but most were shocked – and even more shocked when they learned that the emperor’s wife had drawn it.

  The drawing showed Nicky as a naughty baby sitting in a high chair, refusing a plate of soup his mother was handing to him. Minnie, fierce and scolding, was reprimanding him. Both figures were exaggerated, caricatures of themselves, Nicky made comically infantile and Minnie made into a farcical nagging mother.

  The cartoon was clever, but had a malicious edge to it that was unmistakable to all who saw it. And as Alix’s chief waiting maid Martha Mouchanow pointed out, the empress was oblivious to the harm it was bound to do.

  For Alix, Mouchanow wrote, was ‘inclined to be satirical, and had a keen sense of humour, that was not destined to add to the pleasures of her existence’. She not only drew caricatures, of everyone from members of the imperial family to ministers and leading society figures, she was ‘fond of showing them’. Naturally, the people she drew were offended (except for Nicky, probably), and those who had not yet been the subject of her sketches feared that they soon would be. The public, meanwhile, was ‘scandalized to see the tsar made fun of by his own wife’, Mouchanow thought, ‘who ought to have been the first person to show him respect and deference’.1

  Disregarding, probably even welcoming, the unpleasant stir she was causing, Alix went on drawing her caricatures. She drew her in-laws: the matronly, authoritarian Aunt Miechen, who referred to her as ‘that stiff Englishwoman’; she drew the loud, hectoring Uncle Vladimir, who disliked her and had opposed Nicky’s marriage to her, and who was, due to the compulsions of protocol, her frequent escort on formal occasions, Nicky having to escort his mother.2 She drew Countess Lamsdorff, one of her maids of honour to whom she took a ‘violent dislike,’ and Minnie’s ageing, hypochondriacal, triple-chinned lady-in-waiting Countess Kutuzov, a descendant of the great Napoleonic Field Marshal Kutuzov, who complained that she had suffered a heart attack after seeing a mouse.

  There were so many characters at the imperial court who lent themselves to mimicry and exaggeration – eccentric old servants; Minnie’s muscular Circassian bodyguard Omar, a former bandit, with dark flashing eyes and a dishonest smile; the elderly gentleman who wore an old-fashioned white wig and claimed the right to live in the imperial palace by virtue of his descent from the poet Zhukovsky; the crippled Countess Marie Kleinmichel, among the leaders of Petersburg society, rich, haughty, and full of gossip.

  The more Alix showed her drawings to those around her the more she laid herself open to rebuke. It was said that she was not only unkind and spiteful, but domineering. When one night she and Nicky dined at the barracks of Nicky’s Hussar regiment, she found the company tedious, and was overheard to say to her husband, ‘Now come, my boy, it’s time to go to bed!’

  That she addressed her husband in the casual manner of a brisk English governess giving orders to a young child caused still more remarks to fly through the court, and Minnie, calling her daughter-in-law into her presence, lectured her on the proper way to address the sovereign – as ‘Sir’ or ‘Your Majesty’. Alix bristled; court protocol was one thing, but her relationship with Nicky was her own business, their own business.3 No one could dictate to her what the nature of that tender, intimate, jokey, deeply loving tie ought to be.

  Alix was retrenching, drawing her battle lines. Through her caricatures she was launching an assault, albeit a misguided and ultimately futile one, against the family and court that was rejecting her. The effort was emotionally costly. It meant that she had to become two selves: the warm, vulnerable self she liberated when with Nicky, and the hardened, flinty self she showed to others. It was noticed that the empress pinched her lips almost convulsively when under stress. Her voice when addressing servants or family members was low and constrained, her movements nervous and unsure.4 The flinty public self was fundamentally unconvincing, and frayed around the edges.

  A page in the imperial household described his first encounter with the empress. She was ‘beautiful and majestic’, but when she offered her hand for him to kiss, it was with ‘an awkward and embarrassed gesture’, he wrote. ‘A sense of unease was thus the first thing you noticed on meeting the young empress, and this impression she never managed to dispel. She was so obviously nervous of conversation, and at moments when she needed to show some social graces or a charming smile, her face would become suffused with little red spots and she would look intensely serious.’

  The page was particularly struck by Alix’s eyes, which ‘promised kindness, but instead of a bright spark, they contained only the cold embers of a dampened fire. There was certainly purity and loftiness in the look, but loftiness is always dangerous; it is akin to pride and can quickly lead to alienation.’5

  Others noted the same unease, the same tell-tale physical signs of nervousness, the same chilliness in the empress. ‘One could not say that the superficial impression she produced was favourable,’ wrote a court observer. ‘Despite her wonderful hair which lay like a heavy crown on her head and large dark-blue eyes beneath long lashes, there was something about her exterior that was cold, even repellent.’ If only she had kept still, her marmoreal beauty would have remained fascinating. But she broke its spell as soon as she moved. ‘Her majestic stance gave way to a maladroit bending of the legs resembling a curtsy at greeting or parting. When she was conversing or grew tired, her face became covered in red blotches; her hands were red and fleshy.’6

  Many memoirists who met Alix in her first months in Russia recorded similar impressions, of a beautiful young woman, stiff and ill at ease, who mumbled in a barely audible voice and was physically awkward, even clumsy. She seemed to know nothing of the art of putting others at their ease. Instead she infected them with her own self-conscious uncertainty, and made them recoil with her unsmiling aloofness. The odd blotches on her skin, and her beet-red hands, embarrassed others and added to their discomfort.

  Unlike her vivacious mother-in-law, whose girlish face was full of smiles on social occasions, Alix appeared never to smile in public. Her expression often conveyed a discontented impatience.

  ‘As she was easily embarrassed,’ Ernie wrote about his sister, ‘and honest to a fault, she would unsmilingly tilt her head to one side if something displeased her, with the result that people often thought that she was unhappy, or bored, or simply capricious.’7

  Aware that there was a strong current of anti-German feeling in Russia, and that the aristocracy was steeped in French culture, Alix knew that if she were ever to be accepted, she would have to present herself as a cultivated, French-speaking German. French was the language of the Russian court, but Alix rarely spoke it, since she and Nicky spoke English with one another. Alix’s French was full of mistakes, and though Nicky tried to help her improve it by reading French novels aloud to her, she never mastered the idiom, and the courtiers laughed at her efforts, and criticized her for pretending to be something she was not.8

  She dreaded social functions, knowing in advance that her linguistic errors would lead to laughter and censure, and that her nervousness would itself make her tongue-tied and worsen her command of the language. When it came time to circulate among the guests, she froze; she could hardly speak. She began to blush and look uncomfortable and to ‘long to disappear into the
ground’.9 She managed to get through the suppers at the Winter Palace by seeking out the Turkish ambassador Husny Pasha and sitting beside him. He was a dull, prosaic old-fashioned diplomat, with no pretensions to wit or social prestige. He did not criticize her French, and she found his leaden conversation a relief.10

  That the new empress was in actuality a complex person with high ideals who held herself to an elevated standard of conduct (with a few exceptions, as in the drawing of unkind caricatures) was not at all apparent to her detractors. They would have been very surprised to learn how empathetic she could be, how, when any of her servants suffered a loss or an illness, she responded immediately with kindness and solicitude.11 They would never have guessed, from her reserve, that her capacity for friendship was very great and that, as her lady-in-waiting Sophie Buxhoeveden wrote, she was always ‘ready to do literally anything for her friends’. Their interests became hers; she assumed their burdens. ‘She would take up things and people with violent enthusiasm,’ according to Buxhoeveden. ‘The first enthusiasm might wane with time, but her friendships were lasting.’12

  The empress was in fact a baffling combination of warmheartedness and reserve – the latter seeming to mask the former. The paradox of her nature could not be understood unless one got to know her well, or spent time with her alone.

  ‘I must have a person to myself, if I want to be my real self,’ Alix wrote to a member of her household, Marie Bariatinsky, who in time became her friend. ‘I am not made to shine before an assembly – I have not got the easy nor the witty talk one needs for that. I like the internal being, and that attracts me with great force.’

  Alix’s deep capacity for aesthetic enjoyment, and for religious feeling, qualities of little account in the public sphere, went unappreciated.