Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (34 page)

His wife’s insularity did not strike Nicholas II as unusual. Growing up, his parents had insisted that family life and governance were to be kept mutually exclusive. This extended to sheltering Nicholas and his siblings, even into their twenties. Alexander III “would not even have Nicky sit in the Council of State until 1893,” wrote his sister Olga. “My father disliked the mere idea of state matters encroaching on our family life.”
⁴⁸¹
Nicholas and Alexandra were united in their desire to isolate themselves from the outside world. “I feel very sorry for the Emperor and Empress,” wrote the British ambassador to Russia. “They live at Tsarskoe Selo in a world apart, and are almost like prisoners since it is not considered safe to come even to Saint Petersburg.”
⁴⁸²
By all appearances, Tsarskoe Selo was a fortress against the difficulties of life. By 1905, the fences were ten feet high and capped off by barbed wire and razor-sharp spikes.

Alexandra and Nicholas’s growing isolation from other members of the Romanov family—and the imperial court as a whole—earned them a reputation for being haughty and difficult, especially the tsarina. Her natural timidity was mistaken for aloofness, prompting many to think she was cold, distant, and uncaring. Whispers, from within the court and without, grew louder and louder claiming that Nicholas and Alexandra should never have been permitted to ascend the throne. But where Nicholas II was easily influenced by members of the imperial family, especially his larger-than-life uncles, Alexandra stood resolute against their influence. She closed in around Nicholas, making a concerted effort to shield him from their advice. Sadly, when she did this, she also prevented him from receiving the help he so desperately needed to rule Russia. Even Alexandra’s own brother, Ernie, commented on this issue during a visit to Livadia. When a woman asked him about his sister, he replied, “My sister? She is splendid. Only you people here don’t know how to treat her. The Tsar is an angel, but he doesn’t know how to deal with her. What she needs is a superior will which can dominate her, and which can, so to speak, bridle her.”
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To outsiders, Alexandra seemed mad. She rejected the opinions of those who were truly wise in favor of others whom she believed possessed some small merit. On both sides of what became the Alexandra issue, misunderstanding reigned supreme. It was not long before most of the Romanovs wanted nothing to do with the empress.

Alexandra did not care what people thought of her, especially Russia’s hypocritical courtiers of whom, in the early days of her marriage, she had drawn embarrassing caricatures of in an act of defiance against their criticisms. They became just as scathing of her. “What else could we expect from Victoria’s grand-daughter,” her critics opined. “Hemming red-flannel petticoats on weekdays and reading the Bible on Sundays—there’s an Englishwoman for you!”
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One of the tsarina’s friends later remarked on the chasm that separated Alexandra from those around her: “The Russian aristocracy could not understand why on all the earth their Empress knitted scarves and shawls as presents for her friends. Their conception of an Imperial gift was entirely different, and they were oblivious of the love which had been crocheted into the despised scarf or the useful shawl.”
⁴⁸⁵

Alexandra’s only concerns were helping Nicholas rule the Russian Empire and raising their children. Their four daughters were charming young girls who brought great joy to their parents’ lives. Alexandra was a devoted mother who loved her children beyond words. Unlike Princess May, Alexandra took a hands-on approach to parenting, rather than give the care of her children entirely over to governesses. Whatever grief she may have experienced at the Russian court, Alexandra received ample rewards for it in the blessedness of her family life.

The happiness Nicholas II and Alexandra enjoyed was soon overshadowed by talk of war. During the empress’s fifth and final pregnancy, Russia found itself embroiled in war in the Far East. The problem began internally. Conflict in the tsarist empire had been brewing for years. Work stoppages, strikes, and riots were becoming commonplace in Moscow and Saint Petersburg as a result of the poor living conditions, rampant poverty, and illiteracy among the masses. These problems only added to the maelstrom when Russia went to war with Japan in 1904, which proved to be Nicholas II’s
annus horribilis
. The conflict had been brewing ever since Russian imperial ambitions branched out into Asia by targeting Manchuria. But when the first volley was fired, it caught the Russian Empire totally unprepared. After breaking off peace talks with Russia in February 1904, Japan sent a group of torpedo boats to attack Port Arthur, Russia’s Asian military command center in China and its only seaport on open, warm water. After making it into port, the torpedo boats sank two of the most advanced warships in the Russian fleet. “Yes, it is a trying time,” Alexandra wrote to her sister Victoria, “but one must put all one’s trust in God, who gives strength and courage. Unluckily I cannot get about at all and spend my days on the sofa … walking and standing causes me great pain.”
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Despite Russia’s lack of preparedness, the war was met with enthusiasm by the population at first. It diverted the nation’s attention off its own problems and onto the war effort. The French military attaché in Russia reported on the people’s reaction to the war: “All the Russians, apart from a handful of fanatics, are prepared to make any sacrifice to bring it to a victorious conclusion and avenge the insult to the Russian flag. We are witnessing a great outburst of national vigour and the grim determination which animates even the lowest classes—particularly the lowest classes—is most impressive.”
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There was an inflated sense that the tsarist empire would quickly vanquish the forces of Japan; many in Russia considered the Japanese an inferior race. Alexandra wrote about the war to her brother, Ernie, how “we did everything to avoid it, but it seems it had to be, & it has done our country good.”
⁴⁸⁸
Wilhelm II supported Russia in the conflict by allowing Russian ships to be refueled with coal at German stations en route to the Far East.

The early weeks of the war also brought about a resurgence in the imperial family’s popularity, which had taken a serious hit in the first years of the twentieth century. Undoubtedly, the imperial couple was relishing their popularity when, in the summer of 1904, the day Tsarina Alexandra had hoped and prayed for finally arrived. On the stiflingly hot afternoon of August 12, Nicholas and Alexandra were at the Peterhof Palace, on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg in the Gulf of Finland. Just as the couple sat down to lunch, the empress went into labor. After a surprisingly short delivery of only one hour, the empress delivered an eleven-pound son at 1:15 p.m. Holding the child in his arms, Dr. Ott turned to Nicholas and announced, “I congratulate Your Majesty on the birth of a tsarevich!”
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When Alexandra awoke from the effects of the chloroform, she looked around the room and saw her husband’s beaming face. “Oh, it cannot be true; it cannot be true,” she cried out in joy. “Is it really a boy?”
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A thunderous 301-gun salute announced to the people of Saint Petersburg that an heir had finally been born—this may seem like overkill, but in 1537 when Jane Seymour presented Henry VIII with his much coveted son, the future Edward VI, the Tower of London guards fired off two thousand rounds of artillery as a tribute. It was the first time in nearly three hundred years that an heir had been born to a reigning tsar. In his diary, Nicholas described it as a “great and unforgettable day … during which we were clearly visited by the grace of God.”
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The reaction across Russia was rapturous. Church bells rang out in parishes from Kiev to Siberia as people celebrated into the small hours of the morning. Nicholas, his mother, and his daughters attended a
Te Deum
to thank God for the birth of a son.

Eleven days later, Alexandra’s son made his first public appearance for his christening. The tiny infant was paraded through the streets of Saint Petersburg resting on a cloth-of-silver cushion in a gilded carriage drawn by six cream-colored horses. The four-hour ceremony was held at the ornate Peterhof Palace, famous for its gold-plated, eight-tiered fountain system that reminded visitors of Versailles. In a fitting move during a time of war, the entire armed forces were named godparents to the tsarevitch, along with the Prince of Wales and Emperor Wilhelm II. The christening brought together the entire Russian imperial court. Hundreds of men and women, dressed in dazzling medals and jewels made of gold and diamonds, watched as the metropolitan of Saint Petersburg baptized the little boy, who was given the title tsarevitch and publicly proclaimed heir to the throne. During the ceremony, Nicholas II and Alexandra named their only son Alexei, after the seventeenth-century tsar of the same name. Some people looked upon the choice as a bad omen: “others shook their heads and saw the name as foreboding; it was an unlucky name. According to a seventeenth-century prophecy, the Romanov dynasty would end with an Alexey as heir.”
⁴⁹²

Nicholas and Alexandra thought nothing could dampen their happiness, but they were dreadfully mistaken. In September, Alexandra was horrified when she noticed her baby son was bleeding from his navel. “Alix and I are very disturbed at the constant bleeding in little Alexei,” Nicholas confided to his diary. “It continued at intervals from his navel until evening.”
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For the next three days, Nicholas and Alexandra watched in terror as their son bled intermittently from his navel. It was then that they reached a horrifying conclusion: little Alexei was a hemophiliac. That dreaded blood disease that had killed Alexandra’s brother Frittie and her uncle Leopold had shown up in her son. The slightest bump or bruise could lead to a fatal bleeding episode. The long-term prognosis was equally grim, since the disease’s bleeding effect destroys tissue, bone, and cartilage. The empress then had a sickening revelation: it was she who had passed the disease on to Alexei. As a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she was a carrier of what the imperial court dubbed the “English bleeding disease.” Now, she passed the disease to her only son. “Oh, what anguish it was,” she wrote after Alexei’s first attack, “and not to let others see the knife digging in one.”
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Although the tsarina was somewhat familiar with the disease—her sister Irene’s two sons were both hemophiliacs—she did not realize how widespread it was in her family. Emperor Wilhelm II lost one of his brothers to hemophilia and would later watch a nephew die from it as well.

Once the truth of Alexei’s condition was revealed, the tsar and tsarina made the fateful decision to keep it a state secret. The truth of the tsarevitch’s illness was never to be revealed, not to the public, not even to other members of the imperial family. Everyone from the dowager empress to the tsar’s sisters to the palace servants were kept in the dark. The decision to hide the truth of Alexei’s condition was twofold. First, it was a long-standing tradition in Russia to never discuss the health of the imperial family. Second, Nicholas and Alexandra were afraid that if the truth were known, it would cast doubt on Alexei’s position as heir and thereby threaten the future of the monarchy. From the moment the decision was made, Tsarina Alexandra would not know a moment’s peace. Every moment of every day for the rest of her life would be tinged with anxiety and worry over her son’s delicate health.

9
A Mother’s Heart
 

(1905–06)

T
he new year brought with it an unending string of challenges for Russia. The country’s infrastructure continued to be undermined by strikes, work stoppages, and protests. The winter of 1904/05 was particularly unbearable for the people of Saint Petersburg. No longer able to endure rising food prices, falling wages, and the inevitable starvation that followed, the people took matters into their own hands. An assassination attempt on the tsar’s life was made that winter during a ceremony to bless the waters of the Neva River in Saint Petersburg, leading to a tangible increase in security at all imperial facilities. Nicholas II’s uncles, who were particularly hated for their brutality and graft, were often the targets of assassins. Ella’s husband, Serge, was so terrified of being murdered that he slept in a different palace in Moscow every night, surrounded by a constantly changing contingent of guards lest an assassin infiltrate their ranks. Dona’s son Willy was in Russia at the time. In his memoirs, the crown prince recalled the tense atmosphere: “The fear of assassins was very great at the court. Among the many precautionary and preventive measures which I saw taken everywhere, one that I met with on paying the Tsar a late evening visit made a deep impression upon me. In the vestibule of his private apartments, the Emperor’s entire body-guard of about one hundred men were posted like the pieces on a chess-board. It was impossible for anyone to pass; and my entrance created the greatest alarm and excitement.”
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On January 9, 1905, a group of exasperated workers gathered in the streets of Saint Petersburg. They were desperate for Nicholas II to reform his tottering empire. Their list of demands included a constituent assembly for the people and better working conditions, such as an eight-hour workday. As the crowd moved through the city streets toward the Winter Palace, it grew in size. Mostly made up of peasants—workers, women, and children—the mob’s size soared to more than two hundred thousand. Their leader, Father Gregory Gapon, was a priest loyal to the tsar—until recently, Gapon had been secretly working for the interior ministry. The crowd he now led was undeniably devoted to Nicholas II. “We workers and residents of the city of Saint Petersburg,” so went their petition to the tsar, “of various ranks and stations, our wives, children and helpless old parents, have come to Thee, Sire, to seek justice and protection.”
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As they hovered outside the gates of the palace, they held up portraits of the tsar and tsarina while singing the national anthem. What happened next has since gone down as one of imperial Russia’s grisliest political rallies.

As the hymn-singing, icon-waving, noisy but entirely respectful mass of humanity closed in on the [palace] and showed no sign of withdrawing, the commander of the guard finally panicked and ordered his men to fire their first volley not over the heads of the crowd, as was the customary dispersal procedure, but slap [
sic
] into their bodies. Volley after volley followed and the killing continued late into the afternoon as Cossacks and other mounted troops of the Petersburg garrison hunted down groups who had fled the corpse-strewn palace square. ‘Bloody Sunday’ had entered its mark on the Russian calendar, and the stain was never to be removed.
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The irony was that neither Nicholas nor Alexandra was at the Winter Palace that day. They were instead at Tsarskoe Selo at the urging of their ministers, who felt it was an easier location to protect against the strife in the capital. Charles Hardinge, the British diplomat and statesman, could not hide his disgust at the massacre. He believed that the tsar had “missed the chance of his lifetime … if he had received at the Winter Palace a small deputation and promised to give them what has been sincerely promised to them in his name, he would have obtained the undying loyalty and admiration of the lower classes.”
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Alexandra was horrified at the bloodshed that day, which amounted to more than two hundred people killed. Her comments on the massacre are a chilling reminder of the repressive nature of autocracy in Russia: “The poor workmen who had been utterly misled, had to suffer, and the organizers have hidden as usual behind. I love my new country. It’s so young, powerful, and has much good in it, only utterly unbalanced and childlike.”
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In a letter to one of her sisters, she was more candid: “It is a time full of trials indeed. Things are in a bad state and it’s abominable [
sic
] unpatriotic at the time when we are plunged into war to break forth with revolutionary ideas.” Unfortunately, the empress refused to believe things were as bad as they really were. “Don’t believe all the horrors the foreign papers say,” she continued. “They make one’s hair stand on end—foul exaggeration.”
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This myopic quality would stay with Alexandra until the bitter end.

The situation in Russia remained dire. Any previous loyalty Gregor Gapon may have had toward the monarchy was now washed away in blood. “We have no tsar anymore,” he declared ominously. “Rivers of blood separate the Emperor from his people.”
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The day after the Bloody Sunday massacre, the Russian Social Democratic Party issued a bold statement against the monarchy: “Yesterday you saw the savagery of the monarchy. You saw the blood running in the streets … Who directed the soldiers’ rifles and shot against the breasts of the workers? It was the Tsar! the Grand Dukes, the ministers, the generals, the scum of the Court! … may they meet death. To arms, comrades! Seize the arsenals, depots and magazines of arms … destroy the police and gendarme stations and all the Governmental buildings. Down with the monarchic government!” Bloody Sunday proved to be “the first in a series of events to shake the tsarist empire.” The Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky declared, “The Revolution has come.”
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A few weeks later, revolutionaries succeeded in assassinating one of Nicholas II’s hated uncles. Grand Duke Serge, Saint Petersburg’s notoriously brutal governor, was murdered when his carriage was destroyed by a bomb thrown by Ivan Kalyaev, a member of the Social Revolutionary Party. In her grief, Serge’s wife, Ella, demonstrated true Christian integrity by going to visit Kalyaev in prison and even forgiving him. She went to the tsar begging him to pardon Kalyaev. “I admire this act,” recounted one of the grand dukes, “but I cannot grasp this incredible piety.” Ella’s plea to Nicholas II was to no effect. Kalyaev was executed shortly thereafter. Ella’s niece Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna recalled that she “gave proof of an almost incomprehensible heroism; no one could understand whence came the strength so to bear her misfortune.”
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Kalyaev’s execution did not deter the rapidly increasing revolutionary fever in Russia. A few weeks later, the secret police uncovered a plot in which assassins planned to masquerade as members of the imperial court choir. They intended to hide grenades under their robes during the upcoming Easter service and then later throw them into the midst of Nicholas, Alexandra, and their family. Even more jarring was the fact that the plot was discovered only a few short hours before the would-be assassins planned to carry out their mission.

Added to this ferment were the setbacks Russia was enduring in its war with Japan. The Russian economy had been weak for years and began to erode. The war already cost the empire nearly two billion dollars, and even that was not enough to provide meals for the soldiers or ammunition for their guns. The country’s overwhelming size compared to their tiny island adversary made Russia notoriously difficult to resupply, while the military leaders struggled to keep up with their Japanese counterparts. This fact came to the fore at the Battle of Mukden. Lasting from February into March 1905, 330,000 Russian soldiers fought, and almost 90,000 were killed: “Mukden was, in terms of the numbers involved, the biggest battle until then recorded.… Over six hundred thousand men, more than were ever engaged in any nineteenth-century battle, fought desperately for over two weeks instead of for a day.”
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The Russians were forced to retreat forty miles north and lost ninety thousand additional soldiers in the process.

Nicholas was anxious about the war’s outcome but was resolute in his determination to win it. “You may be sure that Russia shall fight this war to the end, until the last Jap is driven out of Manchuria,” he wrote to Wilhelm II.
⁵⁰⁵
The war was indeed about to end, but in a disastrous defeat for Russia. Desperate to secure a massive victory after the fall of Port Arthur, the tsar’s Baltic Fleet took a nine-month, eighteen-thousand mile journey through the Arctic to Japan to wipe out their naval forces. But when they arrived at what became known as the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, the Baltic Fleet was utterly annihilated in such a spectacular way that it sent shockwaves around the world. The “decisive battle” lasted “an incredibly brief forty-five minutes … The barrage of Japanese firepower resulted in the mind-boggling loss for Russia of six destroyers, twelve cruisers, eight battleships, and thousands of men.”
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According to one historian, the “battle of Tsushima was the greatest and most decisive naval action since Trafalgar a century before. Its effects, as far as the loser was concerned, were even more drastic. Not only did it end the war almost at once … it also marked the beginning of the slow end inside imperial Russia itself.”
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The news of the Russian defeat at Tsushima came as a crushing blow to Nicholas II, who was at a picnic with his family that afternoon. His sister Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna was with him and Alexandra when they received word of Japan’s devastating victory. She recalled that when Nicky was told, he “turned ashen pale … and clutched at a chair for support.” Alexandra, meanwhile, “broke down and sobbed.”
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With no alternative, Russia sued for peace with Japan, culminating in the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905, which was negotiated by President Theodore Roosevelt. The Russo-Japanese War brought nothing but humiliation to Nicholas II and his reign, striking a blow from which the imperial dynasty would never recover.

The death of the Empress Frederick meant that Dona was no longer living in her predecessor’s shadow. She now felt that she could spread her wings and expand her influence into different areas without fear of criticism or comparison to Vicky. Her Christian faith provided an easy outlet. She became actively involved in building and restoring dozens of churches in and around Berlin. She also attended numerous rallies put on by the Reichstag’s right-wing Christian Democratic Party. Her flurry of activity was motivated by a strong desire to “not to be a nonentity, as people had prophesied would be the case.” She took up managing the Red Cross, as well as other charitable organizations that had been patronized by the first German empress, Wilhelm’s grandmother Augusta. She also became passionate about the education of women. She was credited for doing “more than anyone else in Germany to make public careers open to women as well as men, encouraging them to work for their own living.”
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By the time she was forty-seven years old, Dona’s famed regal bearing remained undimmed; she still looked “every inch a queen.” One of her contemporaries observed, “Her face has become quite lovely, with its wealth of snow-white hair, which she wears piled up high on the top of her brow, and which she likes to ornate with a diamond tiara or crown.”
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Her head and neck were often adorned with some of imperial Germany’s finest jewels; one of her ladies-in-waiting once remarked that her “only claim to beauty” was that she had “a neck and shoulders modelled [
sic
] by an artist’s hand to support the burden of crown jewels.”
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This was one way in which Dona created something of a unique style in Prussia, even though she was not generally a trendsetter. Her predecessors, the empresses Augusta and Vicky, were modest women when it came to fashion and rarely made use of the stunning crown jewels. Wilhelm was lavish in the gifts he showered upon his wife, who loved wearing the finest diamonds and gemstones. In particular, her pearls were “worth millions, for they are so large, so perfect in color and shape, so lavish in their profusion that few Regalias [
sic
] contain such treasures.”
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