Alexandra Read online

  It was not in Alix’s nature to be envious of Minnie’s pre-eminence, and besides, her own happiness at the prospect of marrying Nicky overshadowed any prickings of envy she might have been tempted to feel. Her good sense told her, however, that there was a potential danger to her caused by the courtiers’ strong allegiance to her mother-in-law; it would be easy for them to perceive her, Alix, as an interloper, an outsider bent on supplanting the Dowager Empress, vying with her for power and influence. Should that perception become widespread, it would lead to factionalism, and to a poisonous prejudice against her, reinforcing the natural prejudice felt by Russians against all foreigners. So it must have been with some trepidation that Alix took note of the primary attention accorded to Minnie, and the primary place she was given in the wedding procession.

  Once the ceremony began, however, the focus shifted back to the bridal pair, and to the wedding liturgy itself. Bride and groom held lighted tapers in their hands, the priest swung the gilded censer, filling the chapel with pungent incense. The rings were exchanged, the vows were repeated. ‘The servant of God, Nicholas, betroths himself to the servant of God, Alexandra,’ the priest announced, and the attendants held crowns over the heads of the bride and groom while they walked three times around the lectern – Alexandra’s attendants having difficulty keeping her long train from upsetting the candelabra and starting a fire. At last it was over, and the newly married pair kissed the icons and turned to accept the blessings and congratulations of their guests.

  Outside the palace, the morning’s layer of soft white snow had turned to black slush beneath the feet of the huge crowd that continued to wait patiently yet in mounting excitement for the tsar and tsarina to reappear in their carriage. Pressing in on the palace gates, squeezed in among buildings, jammed tightly together along the roadway, the people kept arriving, all wanting a glimpse of the newly married imperial couple.

  More and more of them arrived, until Nevsky Prospekt was a solid mass of bodies in dark clothing. From the windows above the street, where the city’s more affluent citizens watched the spectacle, the street appeared clogged, and the small number of mounted police, who here and there attempted to invade the wall of packed onlookers, found the wall to be impenetrable.

  The overcast afternoon had given way to dim twilight by the time the palace gates were opened and the imperial carriage, accompanied by a military escort, attempted to pass through. Cheering and shouting, the waiting Petersburgers greeted Nicky and Alix enthusiastically, pressing in around their carriage in a swarm, making it all but impossible for the coachman to force the horses forward.

  Inch by inch, with the deafening shouts and exclamations of thousands of voices on all sides, the carriage made its way towards Kazan Cathedral, where after what seemed an eternity Nicky and Alix got out and, under guard, entered the church to kiss the revered icon of the Mother of God. But when with difficulty they got back into the vehicle, they could not proceed. The military escort had not been able to hold back the surging crowd. Mobbed on all sides, the coach was as if enmired in the morass of people, and the tsar and tsarina, clinging to one another, must have felt fearful.

  Where were the police? Why didn’t they intervene to force the crowds back? Why had there been no plan, no precautions taken to safeguard the imperial coach?

  ‘Little Father, Little Father,’ the people cried, nearly swamping the delicate carriage with its painted panels and intricately carved woodwork. Those closest to the windows peered in, and were rewarded with a glimpse of Nicky in his crimson uniform and Alix in her diamonds, her beautiful features firmly set, a look of terror in her eyes.

  At length, after much angry shouting, the coachman laying about him with his whip, a narrow gap appeared in the sea of wildly waving hands and clustered bodies. Gradually the coach began to move, foot by slow foot, along the broad avenue, until it turned into the courtyard of the Anitchkov Palace – Minnie’s palace. Servants were waiting with lit torches to welcome the bride and groom and lead them to their new home, a small suite of apartments on the ground floor.

  Minnie too was waiting, and presented her son and daughter-in-law with the traditional Russian gifts of bread and salt.

  The long, trying day was nearly over. Nicky and Alix, having divested themselves of their finery, sat before the fire in their little sitting room and began to answer the hundreds of telegrams that had arrived for them.

  Alix had a terrible headache, brought on by the frightening carriage ride, the tense ordeal of the robing ceremony, the strain of the wedding itself. ‘We dined at eight o’clock and collapsed into bed early,’ Nicky wrote in his diary.6 They belonged to each other now, they could never again be parted. Clasped in each other’s arms, they forgot all else, even the clamour of the crowd that went on, growing louder and more raucous, a harsh charivari, until the early hours of the morning.

  9

  In the early 1890s, the years just prior to the wedding of Nicholas II and Alexandra, Russia suffered a series of disastrous famines. In province after province, the crops withered and died before they could be harvested, cattle died, what scant reserves of food there were were soon used up and, in village after village, starvation resulted. The peasants were hardy and stoic; they took a long time to die. They grew thin, and watched their children grow thin and sad-eyed. Gradually what vitality they had ebbed; they no longer had the strength to complain, to seek aid, even to pray. They buried their children, then sat down and waited for the end.

  Some help arrived. Local charity, organized by the popularly elected assemblies, the zemstvos, allowed some villages to survive. Here and there a wealthy landowner bought food abroad and imported it to distribute among the emaciated villagers. But these efforts were insignificant in the face of the monumental want that swept region after region, causing many to say that God was angry with his people, that they were being chastised for their sins.

  The terrible ongoing famine was all the more overwhelming in that it was followed by devastating outbreaks of cholera and typhus, in which hundreds of thousands of survivors of the famine perished. A curse lay upon Russia, it was said – and whether it was the curse of divine displeasure, or climatic change, or, as many said, the curse of the tsar’s ministers interfering in people’s lives, it was ruinous, and it was causing a great wave of angry discontent.

  Certainly those in the population educated enough and aware enough to comprehend the force and range of recent government policies believed those policies to be punitive and misguided, marked by indifference to the plight of peasants and large landowners alike. The tsar’s Finance Minister, Sergei Witte, and his predecessor Ivan Vyshnegradsky, had forced the peasants to sell their grain at such low prices that they took large losses, and were driven deeper into poverty; at the same time the ministers made it much more difficult, through the imposition of high tariffs, for landowners small and large to buy machinery and fertilizer from Europe, without which they could not improve their yields and raise their incomes. Most critics of the finance ministers could not comprehend the mounting pressures the ministers themselves were under: the fluctuations of the global economy, the panic in the West over dwindling gold reserves and the oversupply of wheat and rye and barley worldwide that led prices to fall drastically and threatened the stability of the entire monetary system. They only knew that the immediate effect of the harsh policies was to cause widespread misery.

  And there was something else askew in the economy, another cause of misery that ought to have been, educated observers felt, a cause of prosperity and improvement in the lot of the poor. Russia was rapidly becoming industrialized. Vast fortunes were being made as steel poured from new plants, coal was drawn in unprecedented amounts from newly worked mines, oil flowed from new wells. The country contained great wealth in oil and mineral deposits, enough wealth, perhaps, to abolish poverty altogether, provided the revenues were shared. But of course they were not being shared; rather, foreign investors and a small group of Russian speculators were ta
king all the profits – and exploiting the labourers from whose toil the profits arose.

  Over the course of a single generation, from the period after the end of the Crimean War to the accession of Nicholas II, hundreds of new factories had been built in Moscow and Petersburg. The number of factory workers had more than doubled. And with the growth of the factories had come an increase in suffering, for the workers, whose days averaged from fourteen to seventeen hours, were paid very little and housed in overcrowded, unheated slums full of the stench of rotting rubbish and open sewers.

  The contrast between the luxury of the imperial court and the ragged populace of the capital was glaring. Visitors inevitably commented on it. Alix’s aunt Victoria, Dowager Empress of Germany, saw Russia as ‘another world’, with ‘something so squalid and sad, suggesting poverty and loneliness, about the landscape and population’ and extremes of wealth and poverty far more exaggerated than in any western European country.1 The Romanovs in their palaces possessed untold millions of roubles, and spent them lavishly, while the factory workers in the districts across the river struggled to survive on ten roubles a month. On the streets of Petersburg, and in the provincial towns, the sharply defined economic gradations of society were evident, as was the very high proportion of peasants; for every uniformed military officer or dark-suited civil servant one saw, there were dozens of peasants, looking like shaggy beasts in their long locks and woolly sheepskin coats, strips of dirty cloth wrapped around their feet and bark sandals worn in place of shoes. The peasants, and the city workers who had migrated from the countryside in search of jobs, constituted the great majority of the population, and were bearing the brunt of Russia’s distress.

  It had been only thirty-three years since the peasants – formerly serfs legally bound to the land, subject to being bought and sold by their masters – had been granted their freedom by Nicholas’s grandfather Alexander II. The ‘Tsar-Liberator’, as he was known, had dissolved the bonds of serfdom and decreed that all former serfs were free men, able to own land themselves and carry on business enterprises, beholden only to the other members of their village communities.

  The euphoria that followed emancipation had been short-lived, however, for the tsar himself, ambivalent about the wisdom of granting freedom to the uneducated, unruly, potentially disorderly majority of his subjects, had as it were hobbled their liberty by hedging it in with restrictions and limitations. Unlike other free men, the former serfs had to carry passports and could not go where they liked, when they liked; they were judged in special courts, subject to special taxes. And if one of them defaulted on a tax obligation, the others in his community were obligated to make up for the shortfall. These were onerous restrictions, made more onerous by the alarming fall in peasant prosperity that followed emancipation. Everywhere the former serfs eagerly bought land – only to discover that, having taken on the burden of a heavy mortgage payable to the government, the amount of land they could own was much smaller than the amount they had farmed as serfs. They had acquired personal liberty, and had become property owners, but at the price of an ever-deepening poverty.

  It was a bewildering dilemma, this bitter outcome of emancipation. How, the peasants asked themselves, could their Little Father the Tsar allow his children to undergo such harsh privation? Surely he wanted what was best for them. Surely he wished to aid them – yet when the famine came, it was their own organizations, the zemstvos, which had come to their aid, not the tsar.

  Thus as the 1890s opened, the traditional reverence for the tsar – a reverence still overwhelmingly present, almost as automatic as a reflex – was being diluted, even reversed, by the restless, angry mood born of catastrophe. Most of the time, among most of the people, as at the imperial wedding in Petersburg, the reverential, even worshipful attitude was uppermost. (‘Their majesties are to people here what the sun is to our world,’ an American visitor to Russia wrote in 1895, addressing an American correspondent. ‘I do not expect you to understand it, it must be seen and felt.’2) But increasingly often the worshipful reaction gave way to hostility, and once again, as in the era of Nicky’s grandfather Alexander II, revolutionary groups began to expand in numbers and influence and political radicals, who advocated the overthrow of the tsar’s government, found among factory workers a receptive audience for their views.

  If, indeed, a curse lay upon Russia, if the twin scourges of famine and disease were flaying the countryside and causing unprecedented anguish and upheaval, one would not know it from reading the new tsar’s diaries, which were full of references to long walks and bicycle rides around the palace garden, reading (he liked to read historical journals and memoirs; early in his reign Nicky recorded enjoying ‘a new French book about Napoleon’s time on the island of St Helena’ and Countess Golovin’s ‘interesting memoirs for the time of Catherine the Great’3), and above all, spending time with his new wife.

  ‘It’s a shame work takes up such a lot of time that I would so much like to spend alone with her,’ Nicky wrote candidly. Nothing pleased him more than having a ‘day of rest’, with no reports to read and no audiences to hold.4 Then he could spend a quiet, idle afternoon with Alix, reading while she did her embroidery, hanging pictures, pushing her in her wheeled chair when she was suffering sciatic pain and could not get out on her own.

  If Nicky’s subjects were in anguish, that anguish was far away, contained in the dry words of a ministerial report on agricultural conditions or a few paragraphs in a newspaper article on an outbreak of cholera. Apart from visitors to the palace or casual encounters with servants, Nicky rarely saw his people at all, other than on state occasions. Once, in the early weeks of his reign, he left the Anitchkov Palace unescorted one afternoon, and went out along Nevsky Prospekt. He strolled past the shops, looking at the window displays, attracting no more attention than would any other good-looking young man in military uniform. He had not gone far, however, when a passing carriage halted and an older man – the prefect of Petersburg, General Von Val – got out and approached him.

  ‘This is not possible, Your Highness,’ the general said.

  The tsar protested that he was perfectly safe, that no one had bothered him.

  ‘It is not possible, Your Highness,’ the general repeated, truly concerned. ‘I pray you to return to the palace.’

  By now a small crowd had begun to gather, and someone recognized the tsar. Immediately there were shouts of ‘Hurrah!’ and gestures of reverence. Soon, Nicky could tell, there would be pandemonium. Reluctantly he allowed himself to be taken back to the palace in the general’s carriage.

  Once there, Minnie scolded him for risking his life in such a dangerous fashion. Didn’t he realize that the entire future of Russia was on his shoulders? Why, he didn’t even have a son yet – if he were to be killed, the throne would pass to his brother Georgy, and Georgy was ill. What had he been thinking of? Or, rather, why had he not been thinking at all?

  Minnie’s reprimand had its effect, and the tsar did not go out alone again. In this, as in many other areas of his life, Nicky looked to his mother to guide him. It was noted that he sometimes interrupted the reports of his ministers and asked them to wait while he consulted with his mother. His dependence on her, along with his passivity and his shyness, were universally perceived. He never stood up for himself or asserted his own views.

  ‘He did not like to argue,’ one observer wrote, ‘partly through a lack of self-confidence, and partly through a fear that he might be proved wrong or that others would perceive the error of his opinions. He realized that he was incapable of defending his own point of view, and found the idea of this quite demeaning.’5

  Paralyzed with indecision, withdrawn and insecure, Nicky deferred to his strong-willed mother, and in fact her overweening influence was apparent in every aspect of Nicky’s life – and Alix’s too – in the early weeks and months of the new reign. The dowager empress had decided where the newlyweds would live, how their tiny suite of rooms would be furnished, and
what servants would wait on them there. They dined with her at every meal, obtained her permission before going anywhere or seeing anyone. Because they had so few rooms of their own, Alix had to borrow her mother-in-law’s sitting-room to receive her own guests, which led to increased strain, for Minnie and Alix were uncomfortable in each other’s presence. Alix, diffident and deferential at first, chafed under the restrictions placed on her, while Minnie, still grieving and deeply disturbed over the transfer of power from her husband to her ineffectual son, tried to control her son and daughter-in-law’s lives to an inordinate degree.

  That the six cramped, shabbily decorated rooms assigned to them in the Anitchkov Palace – rooms Nicky had once shared, as a boy, with his brother Georgy – were inadequate was abundantly clear, yet Nicky did not demand larger ones. It did not seem to him important enough to argue about that there was no space for Alix’s clothes, that the rooms were badly ventilated and cold, or that as tsar, he deserved the finest suite of apartments in the palace, not the meanest.

  Coping as best she could with the overall situation, Alix went along with her husband’s attitude at first. But before long she discovered that an insidious intrigue was going on around her, and this eventually forced her to change her stance.

  The servants, she soon discovered, were reporting everything that she did and said to Minnie – everything from her preferences in food and dress to her casual remarks to the misbehaviour of her little terrier dog to her bathroom and boudoir habits. She had no privacy, and an attempt was clearly being made to rob her of her dignity.