Alexandra Page 12

  The screams of the trapped, helpless and dying, were horrible, and those in charge could only stand by in confusion, watching the carnage, unable to arrest the onrushing multitude.

  Khodynka Field had become a deathtrap, but the authorities, including the Governor of Moscow, Grand Duke Serge, were so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the disaster that their first reaction was to try to cover it up.

  Instead of informing the tsar and his ministers of what had happened, Serge and his subordinates rounded up as many carts and wagons as they could find and attempted to remove all evidence of the carnage. Mangled bodies, severed limbs, bloodstained clothing were loaded onto carts, then covered with tarpaulins and hauled off to the mortuaries – and when the mortuaries were full, to be emptied into the river, into hastily dug mass graves, anywhere distant from the meadow itself.

  The ghastly procession of blood-stained wagons moved along streets gaily decorated with banners and flags hailing the newly crowned tsar. Onlookers became curious, then recoiled in horror. For in their haste the labourers who had endeavoured to clear away the human debris had been less than thorough; bloody arms and hands dangled down below the edges of the tarpaulins, and a terrible, unmistakable stench rose from the carts – the stench of blood and death.

  Then too there were the survivors, thousands of them, walking glassy-eyed and filthy towards their homes, limping and bleeding, some clutching their coronation gifts and mugs. Seeing them, and wanting to help, some aristocrats drove in their carriages to Khodynka, and took the wounded to hospitals.

  By ten-thirty in the morning news of the terrible catastrophe was spreading through Moscow, and it was no longer possible to keep it from the palace. The tsar was informed that many of his subjects were dead, though the estimates of the dead and wounded were much lower than the actual numbers.8 He was asked whether, out of respect for the victims, he would cancel the day’s activities, which included not only his appearance at Khodynka Field but a ball at the French embassy. Most likely influenced by his advisers, Nicky said no, that he would go ahead.

  When Alix learned, from one of her ladies, of the events at Khodynka she was shocked, and sorrowful. That the coronation should have occasioned such suffering and loss seemed a monstrous wrong. No doubt she could not help thinking, as many others did, of the ominous breaking of her husband’s diamond chain at the moment of his crowning. It had been a portent of calamity – and now the calamity had arrived.

  For the head of state to appear in public in the aftermath of the Khodynka disaster seemed to her a serious mistake; for herself, she would have preferred to spend the day visiting the hospitals. (Here, albeit under sad circumstances, was her opportunity to be of help.) But she could not go against Nicky’s official decision, and besides, she knew that that decision had a political dimension. Had she not shown herself at the French Embassy ball, it would have been said that her absence was due to her pro-German sympathies.

  Besides, the public did not seem, at first, to want the festivities to be cancelled. Throughout the morning, fairgoers continued to stream onto the meadow by the thousands, enjoying the warm sun, ignoring the sight of corpses being dug out of the trenches and laid out on the ground, and swarming around the pavilion where the tsar was to make his appearance that afternoon. It was a ghoulish spectacle, with bands playing, people milling about, eating and drinking, while quite nearby, improvised mortuaries were being created, with bodies hastily covered with tree branches, linens, banners torn down – anything to hide the grisly remains. It was not possible, however, to hide the crows that gathered over the meadow, eager for carrion, or to disguise the units of the fire brigade, small horse-drawn trucks, which continued to come and go all afternoon, carrying the dead from the field.

  The blaring of the National Anthem announced the arrival of the tsar, and when he appeared on the balcony of his pavilion, with Alix beside him, the crowd cheered lustily. He made a brief speech, but did not allude to the loss of life. (In his diary, however, Nicky conscientiously recorded noticing the presence of corpses near the pavilion.9) The pageantry went forward as planned, regiments of soldiers marching past in smart order, guns firing salute after salute, people singing, delegations of peasants coming before the tsar to pay their respects and receive his blessing. The parade of pageant cars bumped their way across the uneven plain, carefully avoiding the deep ditches and craters, and the long afternoon spun itself along, or so it appeared, towards a satisfactory ending.

  Alix, however, was tired and emotionally drained, and although she went to the French Embassy ball, and danced the opening dance with the ambassador, she and Nicky did not stay for the midnight supper and returned home relatively early.

  By now the long eventful days were catching up with her, the disappointing reception she had received, the tiring ceremonies and banquets, the hours of standing, the heat, the excitement – and the wrenching calamity on Khodynka Field. Her stomach churned, and she was often close to tears.10 She still did not disclose her pregnancy; there was too much turmoil in the family. Serge was blamed for having failed to forestall the tragedy, and when he offered to resign as Governor of Moscow, Nicky was blamed for refusing to accept his resignation.11 Rifts between Sandro and Serge, Aunt Miechen and Minnie resurfaced. KR noted in his diary that ‘muted antagonism’ arose between Minnie and Alix, and the latter, pale and ill, looked as though she was badly in need of rest.

  As the days passed, the mood in the city darkened. The workers’ strike continued. Muscovites dressed in black for the Khodynka victims, some twenty thousand of them, so it was believed, and blamed the police, the city officials, even the doctors for the huge loss of life. Serge was called ‘The Prince of Khodynka’, the tsar ‘Bloody Nicholas’. Alix became ‘The German Bitch’, and it was said that she had laughed and danced in heartless abandon at the French ambassador’s ball, heedless of the suffering of the people.

  Alix faded, suffered, and in the end, succumbed to her weariness and anxiety. Her body rebelled, and she miscarried her baby.12

  What had begun in joy and celebration was ending in a season of disaster, with the crown of the Romanovs tarnished by tragedy and the heir to the throne, the boy whose existence Alix had kept as her secret, lost in a swirl of blood.

  The warm June sun continued to shine down over the domes and rooftops of Moscow, but now it was a city in mourning, and the crows, bloated and sated, floated like dark wraiths in the cloudless blue sky.

  12

  In the summer of 1896, Empress Alexandra made a serious effort to launch a charitable project. She called it ‘Help Through Handwork’, and envisioned a vast number of workshops all across Russia where, under the leadership of aristocratic women, poor women would come to learn to sew and to do other handcrafts. A committee, of which she would be the head, would supervise this network of workshops and direct its operations.1

  It was an ambitious project, modelled on charitable enterprises in Germany and England and inspired by Alix’s own fine needlework, which she wanted to teach others to imitate, with the ultimate aim of raising money through the sale of embroidered garments, the money to be distributed to needy families. Her aims were high-minded and unselfish; she wanted no glory, only the chance to undertake a project that could improve the lives of the poor, and to satisfy her need to contribute to the alleviation of want.

  As soon as she announced the start of ‘Help Through Handwork’, many women, among them quite a number of aristocratic women, came forward to join the sewing guild. There were also women from the merchant class, living in the village of Tsarskoe Selo or nearby, who wanted to join, and soon the meetings were organized and the sewing began. Alix presided, offered guidance and correction to the sewers, and began making plans for the expansion of the guild and for the distribution of the first group of garments.

  She hoped to go further in her charitable efforts, to establish a school for nurses and housemaids, like the one founded by her Aunt Helena in England. She wrote to Helena’s school asking
for help in initiating her project, and anticipated beginning it soon, within months if possible.

  But Alix had no sooner launched her efforts than obstacles arose. In Russia, she discovered, there was virtually no private charity; all charitable enterprises were controlled by the government, and most government charities were headed, at least nominally, by the Dowager Empress. Wherever Alix turned, it seemed, Minnie stood, arms folded, barring the way.

  What was worse, she quickly discovered that the highborn women who joined her guild had done so in the expectation that in return they would receive her special patronage; they expected advancement to positions at court, or promotions or positions for their husbands or sons – some immediate, concrete quid pro quo. When they discovered that the empress had no expectation of rewarding them for joining her charitable enterprise, they withdrew – with many a bitter comment about ‘imperial ingratitude’.2 Some wives of merchants and tradesmen remained, proud to belong to an undertaking headed by the empress. But they too, Alix realized, were far from disinterested. They were seeking the social cachet of association with the court, and this mattered far more to them than any benefit their sewing might bring to the poor.

  The failure of her scheme was disillusioning to Alix, and the scoffing of the women she had tried to recruit wounded her. In the aftermath of the Khodynka disaster, the brief lull in criticism had ended. The gossiping against the empress now grew more scurrilous. It was being said that she had been pregnant by a lover, and had deliberately aborted the foetus to hide her transgression – a malevolent distortion of the reality of her miscarriage.3 The members of her household were pestered for details of her private life in the hope that scandalous stories could be built upon them. It must have seemed to Alix as though a web of malice was being woven around her; everywhere she turned, she found petty meanness and spite. If she wore white on a festival day – as she had been told was the correct thing to do – all the other women wore dark gowns, so that she stood out awkwardly. If she gave one of her rare receptions, and struck off the invitation list married women she suspected of ‘loose manners’, all the invited women pointedly refused to attend.

  ‘The whole of Petersburg rose up in arms against its empress,’ Martha Mouchanow recalled.4 Hardly anyone would speak to her. Behind her back, court and society alike criticized her for being dull, for dressing badly, for having declared, with unpardonable hauteur, ‘that she was going to reform the morals of her empire’.5 Her tastes, her sensibilities were not theirs. She bored them – and she made it plain that they bored her.

  Thwarted and angered, and wounded to be, as she thought herself, so misunderstood, Alix prepared for a far wider social challenge. In August of 1896, she and Nicky left for a European tour.

  Despite all her reading and study about Russia, it is doubtful whether Alix had even a rudimentary understanding of her adopted country’s actual position among the European states, or of Russia’s vulnerability as a great power. No one in the Foreign Ministry attempted to instruct her – indeed the only message she received from the foreign minister before leaving for the West was that she must take along certain magnificent necklaces from among the Crown Jewels and wear them to impress the rulers and dignitaries at the foreign courts.

  Russia was in fact in a precarious condition as the nineteenth century drew to its close for, although it had traditionally been among the leading states of Europe, it no longer possessed either the wealth or the military strength to compete with the phenomenally expanding German Empire. Russia was advancing economically, its industrialization spreading but, compared to the Western European states, it was still a backward country with a medieval agricultural system where illiterate peasants lived in poverty and ignorance.

  And it was still overwhelmingly autocratic, ruled by the will of one man, the tsar. What movements there had been to promote constitutional government had been short-lived, and brutally suppressed. Observers in Europe watched with interest to see whether the new tsar Nicholas would finally bring his backward realm out of what they saw as its benighted, barbaric condition and into the light of modernity – or whether, as it seemed, he was intent on preventing change, which meant continued stagnation in the government and continued unrest among his subjects.

  Here Russia’s newly forged link with France, formalized by the signing of an agreement in 1892, was crucial. For there was increasing tension between Russia and Germany, with the German government imposing high tariffs on Russian goods and threatening to expand militarily into Russian territory; only the protection of an alliance with France – and the friendship of Britain – could hold the might of Germany at bay. Meanwhile the Russian treasury was being shored up by loans from French banks, French entrepreneurs were doing more business than ever before in Petersburg, and French investors were funding the growth of Russian industry, growth vital to the country’s viability as a great power with aims of its own in Asia and the Balkans.

  It was essential, if the path the Russian government had decided to pursue was to succeed, that the sovereigns aid in cementing the bond with France, while helping to prevent further deterioration of relations with Germany through preserving the tie of cousinage with the German emperor. Beyond this, the effect of press reports and public opinion on the relations between states was significant; if Nicky and Alix managed to make themselves liked and admired on their tour, if they projected magnanimity, confidence and majesty, and an aura of wealth and glamour, if they said the right thing at the right time, then the public would be favourably disposed towards Russia and would influence their governments accordingly.

  Alix went to great trouble over her clothes for the trip, sending detailed instructions to Worth in Paris, who supplied her gowns. Worth sent a team of seamstresses to Petersburg for the final fittings. It was an era of excess in dress, when upper-class women wore wide hats piled a foot high with swathes of gauze and luxuriant clusters of artificial flowers and curling ostrich feathers, parasols with many flounces, long draping feather boas and gowns and mantles in delicate, perishable white crepe and pink satin and pale mauve velvet. There were layers upon layers of ornament, rows of lace, frills, ribbon bows and beadwork. Collars and mantles were embroidered in silver and gold thread, ball gowns were trimmed with sequins and thickly encrusted with pearls. Flowers and fur were heaped generously upon garments already overdecorated with adornments of other kinds, and long ropes of pearls were worn looped many times around the neck or dangling from neck to ankle.

  Alix, who had a weakness for beautiful clothes, and wore them to striking effect, being tall and having a stately posture, indulged her pleasure in finery when ordering her travelling wardrobe. The trunks arrived from Worth, and were loaded onto the imperial train, along with dozens of cases and boxes filled with linens, lace and bed sheets, jewels and lingerie, and Alix’s large heavy gold toilette service, which filled several large trunks in itself. There was an entire travelling nursery for baby Olga, along with her nursery staff – minus the sour English nurse, who had recently been sent away – and hundreds of servants and officials, among them doctors, cooks, laundresses, waiting maids and valets.

  It quickly became apparent, once Nicky and Alix arrived in Breslau for the start of their tour, that Alix was not prepared to play her part in promoting Russian diplomatic interests. Partly out of nervousness, partly because she was still aggrieved over the failure of her handcrafts project and the ugly rumours in Petersburg that she had a lover, she was defensive and oversensitive; her focus was not on acting with discretion and tact but on herself and the respect due her as the newly crowned empress of Russia. She became touchy, moody, demanding; she was peremptory with her servants, insisting that they go to much extra trouble to change the costly Argenton and Brussels lace trimmings on her dressing table everyday, just as they did at home, and that it match exactly the lace on her bed sheets and nightgowns. She argued with Martha Mouchanow, and told her curtly to be quiet and do as she was told. Worst of all, she clashed with her cousin Wi
lly.

  Alix had never liked her imperial German cousin, and had always responded to his overbearing, domineering personality with mockery and disdain. She could not bring herself to establish a more mature relationship with him, as their formal positions now demanded. When Willy provided Alix with an antique silver toilette service that had once belonged to Queen Louise of Prussia, instead of accepting it graciously she took offence, feeling slighted instead of honoured. Only her gold service would do for an empress; she put the silver one aside.

  Willy, highly insulted, responded with a cutting remark to the effect that in lending Alix the silver service he was ‘paying her a great compliment’.

  Alix, incensed, retorted that ‘it seemed to her that her cousin William still thought her the little Hessian princess of as little importance as she had been before her marriage’.6

  Egos were bruised, feathers ruffled. Willy’s grandmother, the Dowager Empress Augusta, turned her back on Alix and pronounced her ‘frivolous’, and no doubt she wrote a letter to her great friend Queen Victoria criticizing the Russian Empress for light-mindedness and vanity. Soon the entire German court had made up its mind to dislike Alix, and when she appeared at a state dinner wearing a fortune in sapphires and pearls, and in a gown strewn with gold threads, it was whispered that she cared for nothing but impressing others with her wealth.7

  When Alix and Nicky sailed aboard the new yacht Standart from Copenhagen to Scotland, her mood did not soften, even though she must have been aware, in the presence of her aged grandmother Victoria, that this would probably be the last time she would see her. For ten days rain poured down and a cold wind wrapped itself around the draughty castle of Balmoral, confining the family to the chilly interior with its eccentric decoration of animal heads, mounted antlers and tartan-covered furniture. Alix, Victoria declared, was changed; she had become distant and all but unapproachable. When the queen attempted to talk to her about her tactless behaviour in Germany, and her conflicts with her Russian court and relations, Alix became noticeably cool. In Scotland, as in Germany, press and public reacted badly to the Russian Empress’s costly gowns and were affronted that she did not choose British tweeds.8