Alexandra Page 11

  ‘As you know,’ she told Marie Bariatinsky, ‘I am of the preacher type. I want to help others in life, to help them to fight their battles and bear their crosses.’13 Her natural arena was the battleground of conscience, where scruples warred with temptations, and the impulse to fulfil one’s duties was at odds with the contrary impulse to seek pleasure and ease.

  This warfare of conscience – the product of a Protestant upbringing – though not unknown in Russia, was something of a rarity in court circles, where venality, ambition and vanity were pre-eminent, and self-aggrandizement the norm.

  Alix’s intellectuality too was unappreciated, but this was probably just as well, since, had it been known at court that she read and studied a good deal, and attacked problems analytically, this tendency would have been condemned as unfeminine and come under suspicion as a symptom of plotting and intrigue. In truth the empress dedicated herself not only to improving her Russian – something she evidently found easier than improving her French – but to translating Russian writings and studying Russian music. With Nicky, she read the novels of Tolstoy and other classics, as well as formal histories and historical novels. Her tastes were refined, her views thoughtful. Yet though there were intellectuals among Nicky’s relatives, notably Grand Duke Nicholas Michaelovich, Nicky’s ‘Uncle Bembo’, a historian and biographer who had written studies on diplomacy and genealogy, and ‘Uncle’ Constantine, ‘KR’, who was a poet, playwright and translator, Alix was not able to form any connection with them through her pursuit of learning, and in fact she counted Uncle Bembo among her severest critics.

  The servants who watched the empress closely in order to report everything she did to her mother-in-law were beside themselves with speculation late in December, 1894. At a church service during which she had had to stand for several hours, Alix fainted. It was the second time she had fainted in church; clearly her physical stamina was lowered. Could she be pregnant?

  By mid-January another symptom appeared – illness in the morning. Now they were certain. The empress was indeed pregnant. There was going to be an heir to the throne.

  Suddenly there was a change in the atmosphere. Alix might be mean-spirited, dominating, socially gauche and aloof – but she was going to be the mother of the next tsar. She was fulfilling her primary duty. She and her child had to be protected, hovered over, guarded against every possible harm. For a brief time, her critics were silenced, and there was rejoicing at the court.

  Winter settled in, and Alix gave herself the task of making the baby’s layette, sewing and embroidering tiny lace-trimmed gowns and caps and bibs and blankets. She enjoyed hard work; according to her chief maid of honour, Alix was ‘one of those industrious women whose hands are never at rest, and who require to be always occupied in someway or another, either mentally or with some manual work which keeps their attention’.14 As her body grew heavier her spirits began to lift, for her oppressive living situation was about to change. New apartments were being prepared in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, complete with a nursery for the baby, and Alix was sending away to England for furniture, along with chintz for curtains and cushions. She ordered that many of the paintings and bas-reliefs in the renovated rooms be removed, and replaced by mahogany woodwork, tall hutches and shelving. When complete the imperial apartments would be cosy, unpretentious, comfortable, with none of the outsize magnificence of the Winter Palace or the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, with its hundreds of immense rooms and monumental statues.

  Alix was attempting to re-create, within the vast, coldly palatial expanses of the Russian court, an oasis of charm and homeliness – a replica of her grandmother’s taste, in fact. Within the circuit of this homely refuge she and Nicky and their child would live, away from the hostility and machinations of the courtiers, away from Minnie and her spies, away from the drawing rooms of Petersburg.

  The baby was expected in October, and as the time drew near little was talked of but the coming birth. Calculations were made, reckoning from the first reports of morning sickness in January. When November began and still the empress had not given birth, dark rumours began to spread. It was said that the empress was very ill, and might not survive. There was another story that she had been unable to conceive, that the entire pregnancy was a sham. Still others said that she was indeed pregnant, but could not be delivered normally; the doctors would have to cut her open to remove the baby.15 On one thing alone everyone was agreed: the child, assuming there was indeed a child, was sure to be a boy.

  The imperial nursery was ready, the accoucheur Professor Ott and his assistants had installed themselves in the palace and made their preparations, as had the imperial surgeon Dr Girsh. Queen Victoria, much experienced in matters of childbirth, having had nine children herself, had sent a detailed list of instructions for the baby nurse, and these had been followed. As the empress was several weeks overdue, the baby was expected to be large, and Alix was slim and narrow in the hips; her delivery was sure to be difficult.

  At last the birth pains began. Alix was awakened by them at one in the morning on November 15, 1895, and could not get back to sleep. ‘All day she lay in bed suffering strong torments – the poor thing!’ wrote Nicky in his diary. ‘I could not help feeling for her.’

  Ella and Nicky sat beside the bed, the doctors and nurses watched the progress of the labour as, hour after hour, the pains continued to grow stronger and more frequent. At two o’clock Minnie arrived and took her place in the bedside vigil. By this time Alix had been struggling for thirteen hours, and her strength was waning. After another three hours of fruitless suffering, Dr Ott declared that forceps would have to be used; the baby was too large to come through the birth canal unaided.

  ‘At exactly nine o’clock a baby’s cry was heard and we all breathed a sigh of relief!’ Nicky wrote. ‘When all the anxiety was over, and the terrors had ceased, there was simply a blessed feeling at what had come to pass!’16

  Nicky was ecstatic, if exhausted. The doctors were relieved, Alix very tired but pleased. The servants, however, who were given the task of carrying the news of the birth to the gunners in the Peter and Paul Fortress, looked dismayed. And when the guns began firing, and the citizens of Petersburg stopped to listen, all held their breath. Three hundred shots were to be fired for a boy, one hundred and one for a girl.

  At the hundred and first volley a terrible silence fell over the city, and the joy went out of the faces in the street. It was a girl.

  11

  In the clear blue skies above Moscow crows drifted and circled in the warm May air, rising high over the gleaming golden domes, white stone monasteries and vivid blue and green and red rooftops of the vast and sprawling city. Their cawing was all but lost amid the noisy clamour of the city’s bells, ringing to herald the coming coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, and the sounds of hammering and sawing, the clatter of hoofs and the shouting of workmen carrying out renovations and decorating the houses and public buildings for the celebration to come.

  In a flowering meadow just outside the city walls, wooden stalls, reviewing stands and temporary stages for theatrical performances were being built, along with wooden bridges to span the deep pits in the meadow’s uneven surface and barricades to control the crowd of several hundred thousand Muscovites expected to attend the outdoor festivities. Here in Khodynka Field, the popular celebration would be held, and the tsar would come to watch the parade and greet his people.

  Alix too was preparing for the coronation, learning the order of the lengthy ceremony, being fitted for new gowns, readying herself mentally for the weeks of banquets, luncheons and other gatherings.

  She was a happy woman. Ever since the birth of her fair, fat little daughter Olga – named after the character in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin – her life had been full of contentment, despite the ongoing carping of her in-laws. At six months old, Olga was flourishing, breast-fed by Alix, occasionally bathed by Nicky, supervised by the rather grim English nanny Queen Victoria had sent �
� ‘a stubborn woman,’ Nicky thought, with ‘something hard and unpleasant in her face’ – and in general, growing into a healthy childhood. Far from being disappointed that Olga was not a boy, Alix and Nicky rejoiced in their daughter, and indulged shamelessly in what Queen Victoria would have called ‘baby-worship’. Behind her back, the imperial family called Alix ‘Mère Gigogne’ – the French equivalent of ‘the old woman who lived in a shoe.’1

  Alix was happy – in part because she believed herself to be pregnant again.2 This time, surely, the baby would be the son and heir the realm required. No one but Nicky, her waiting maid Martha Mouchanow, her doctor and possibly her brother Ernie, to whom she wrote daily, knew of this pregnancy, and she did not want it generally known just yet; she wanted to avoid for a while longer the scrutiny and avalanche of overconcern that had accompanied her last pregnancy.

  Her life at Tsarskoe Selo had settled into a comfortable routine of long morning and afternoon walks with Nicky, time spent with Olga, quiet family lunches and dinners – with time in between for writing long letters and meeting with her private secretary in an effort to find a cause to devote herself to, either a state charity or a school. She wanted to make a personal contribution; her rescuing instincts were unfulfilled. But so far no opportunity had emerged, and in the meantime life at Tsarskoe Selo was so pleasant, with the extensive gardens just coming into bloom and the inviting woods full of new spring green. It was gratifying to linger in the family rooms of the Alexander Palace, which Alix kept filled with orchids and white lilacs, to lie on the sofa in the mauve boudoir – her favourite room – surrounded by watercolours of English and Hessian scenes, photographs of family, dozens of icons and a striking painting of the Annunciation.

  Enjoyable distractions beckoned: embroidery, playing duets with Nicky on the wonderful Erard piano Minnie had given her for a wedding present – Alix’s favourite of all her pianos – visiting the nursery (though the nanny complained that Alix made too many unannounced visits).3 And there was the other fashionable distraction of the era, occultism.

  So many upper-class people were drawn into the pursuit of truth through metarational means, outside the Orthodox faith: attending seances, studying the Cabbala, reading journals called From There and The Spiritualist, visiting mediums and acquiring obscure books of hermetic wisdom. Self-proclaimed spiritual teachers sprang up in Petersburg, gathered worshipful followers into cultlike societies, and made fortunes offering advice, healing and the cachet of possessing hidden learning.

  Within the imperial family itself, Nicky’s relative Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich was, in the words of the highly sceptical Count Witte, ‘one of the chief, if not the chief initiator of that abnormal mood of Orthodox paganism and searching for miracles, into which they obviously strayed in the highest circles’.4 The desire to glimpse a world beyond the limits of ordinary reality, to know something of the unknown, tantalized many in the family, including Nicky himself, who was tempted to try to communicate with his late father.5

  These preoccupations interested Alix as well, though she was chiefly absorbed in Olga, and was beginning to be troubled with morning sickness – which she did her best to hide. Throughout the celebrations in Moscow, Alix continued to nurse Olga, while doing her best to control her nausea and appear self-possessed and regal at all times. The days preceding the coronation were long, and full of events: breakfasts for two hundred guests, meetings with special foreign envoys sent to Russia for the festivities, nightly banquets and balls, state visits and musicales, a visit to the Bolshoi Ballet where (against the Dowager Empress’s wishes) Matilda Kchessinsky was the featured dancer in a new ballet, The Pearl.

  There were touching displays of loyalty to the tsar – immense cheering crowds, banners proclaiming ‘God Save the Tsar’ and ‘Glory, Glory to Our Russian Tsar’, open-air concerts by massed choirs thousands strong, singing the National Anthem with heartfelt passion. But there were disturbances as well, notably a massive workers’ strike that spread from Petersburg to Moscow, with tens of thousands of wage earners refusing to go back to their machines unless their employers reduced the work day to ten and a half hours. The populace, thrilled by the coronation, particularly excited by the prospect of the carnival to be held on Khodynka Field, was stirred up and restive. Their sovereign was showering them with favours – money gifts for everyone, amnesty for unpaid taxes, freedom for prisoners and relief from many penalties and fines – yet these favours, far from having a pacifying effect, seemed to contribute to a sense of giddy assertiveness among those assembled in Moscow, a loosening of constraints in the relations between tsar and people.

  The crowds that gathered to watch each of the coronation events were volatile, now heatedly loyal, now expressing disapproval. And their disapproval, unfortunately for Alix, was in part directed towards her. On the day of the tsar’s formal ceremonial entry into Moscow, Alix rode in a coach of her own some distance behind her husband, and also behind that of her mother-in-law. Loud shouting greeted the tsar, vociferous hurrahs rang out when Minnie passed. But Alix’s coach was greeted with a hush – an eloquent silence that stung like a blow, reducing her to tears.6

  Silence – an ominous silence. Not open jeering, or insults, but the quiet of rejection. Among her husband’s subjects, as among his relatives, her efforts were unappreciated. The Muscovites, after all, knew nothing of her attempts to understand Russian culture, her hours of study of the Russian language, her sincere desire to devote herself to some charitable activity. Nor did they know that she was carrying the heir to the Romanov throne. Once they knew more about her, and once her son was born, their reaction would change. They would be grateful.

  The long ordeal of coronation day began very early in the morning, with cannon booming from the Kremlin walls and bells ringing ceaselessly. Inside the Cathedral of the Assumption, its twilit interior aglow with shimmering gold and gleaming gems from the wall paintings, the icons, the uniforms and gowns of the glittering spectators, the endless ceremony droned on, and Alix, feeling faint, had to struggle against dizziness. She watched as her husband, his face expressive of ‘piety and supplication’, received the crown and the imperial purple mantle was fastened around his shoulders. With the other onlookers she was startled to see his diamond-studded chain break and fall with a clatter to the tiled floor, just at the climactic moment in the ceremony. Then it was her turn to kneel before him and receive, with a kiss, her own crown.

  The mass, the long sermon, the sung psalms and prayers – in all the formalities took nearly five hours, and were followed by another several hours of banqueting in the Palace of Facets, where a feast of meats and piroshki, borscht and pickled cucumber was spread out on long tables.

  The heat of the day, the smell of food, the maddening cannonades and incessant peals of bells, the crowds of people everywhere must have made Alix feel dizzy and weak. Long before evening she must have been exhausted, and by the time the illumination of the city began, at ten o’clock, and thousands of glowing lights outlined the houses, shops and public buildings, even the trees in the park, she must have long since gone to her bed.

  Three days later, the public celebration, the outdoor fair for the Muscovites, was to take place. The night before, tens of thousands of people began arriving on the outskirts of Khodynka meadow, camping out in the open, waiting for dawn, when the turnstiles would open and they would be allowed to enter the designated area of the fair to claim their gifts and food and begin their merrymaking.

  The last time there had been a public festival on this meadow, thirteen years earlier on the occasion of Alexander III’s coronation, two hundred thousand people had attended; now, however, there were at least twice that many, and a rumour began to spread through the immense throng that there would not be enough gifts or food to go around. They had been promised sausage, bread rolls, sweets, nuts, gingerbread and a precious keepsake – a pink enamel mug bearing the arms of the city of Moscow and the words ‘In memory of the Holy Coronation’, all wrapp
ed together in a coloured kerchief stamped with the tsar and tsarina’s pictures.7 They had also been promised as much free beer and mead as they could drink, along with entertainment to last all day.

  Throughout the brief night hours, people waited anxiously, made uneasy by the rumours of shortages, and made increasingly uncomfortable by the pressing in of the crowd itself, as more and more people came and pushed their way towards the barricades that guarded the entrance to the meadow in order to be first in line when the turnstiles opened.

  A reporter for the Russian Gazette, Vladimir Giliarovsky, was among the waiting fairgoers, and he wrote afterwards of the terrible crush that resulted from so many massed bodies.

  ‘Steam began to rise,’ he recalled, ‘looking like the mist over a swamp . . . Many felt faint, some lost consciousness.’ All around him people were fighting for breath, vomiting, succumbing to the irresistible pushing and jostling. There was no wind, no moon. Only the suffocating congestion, which worsened as dawn approached.

  Just when the barriers began to fall no one was ever certain, but it was very early in the morning, long before the officially scheduled opening of the meadow. The patrols designated to control the crowd – a hundred mounted Cossacks – could not begin to hold the people back, and within minutes a vast dark wave of humanity poured out across the meadow, trampling the flowers, knocking over fences, rushing towards the wooden stalls where the gifts and food were kept.

  ‘A mass of people half a million strong,’ wrote a survivor of the surge, ‘staggered with all its unimaginable weight in the direction of the buffets. People by the thousand fell in a ditch and ended standing literally on their heads at the bottom. Others fell straight after them, and more, and more . . . ’ People fell into abandoned wells, trenches, muddy troughs. Those behind them, unable to stop their forward progress, simply walked or ran across the mounds of writhing bodies towards the next set of deadly cavities in the earth, into which they themselves fell.