Secret Lives of the Tsars (40 page)

Now it was left to Purishkevich to finish the assassination that had descended into something of a farce. The
staretz
had staggered outside. “What I saw would have been a dream if it hadn’t been a terrible reality,” Purishkevich wrote. “Rasputin, who half an hour before lay dying in the cellar, was running quickly across the snow-covered courtyard towards the iron gate which led to the street.… I couldn’t believe my eyes. But a harsh cry, which broke the silence of the night persuaded me. ‘Felix! Felix! I will tell everything to the Empress!’ It was him, all right, Rasputin. In a few seconds, he would reach the iron gate.… I fired. The night echoed with the shot. I missed. I fired again. Again I missed. I raged at myself. Rasputin neared the gate. I bit with all my force the end of my left hand to force myself to concentrate and I fired a third time. The bullet hit him in the shoulders. He stopped. I fired a fourth time and hit him probably in the head. I ran up and kicked him as hard as I could with my boot in the temple. He fell into the snow, tried to rise, but could only grind his teeth.”

By this time Yussoupov had reappeared and began viciously clubbing the fallen
staretz
as blood splattered the snow. The killers then rolled up the body in a curtain, tied it securely, proceeded to the frozen Neva River, and shoved the corpse
through a hole in the ice. Now the Holy Devil really was dead. Or was he? According to some accounts, the autopsy performed on Rasputin after his body was eventually recovered from the river indicated there was water in his lungs. If true, it meant that after being poisoned, shot, and beaten, the
staretz
ultimately died by drowning.

News of his demise was greeted with jubilation in the capital, as if a dragon had at last been slain. The assassins were hailed as heroes, the national anthem was played and sung in churches, and people crowded into the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan to give thanks. “The very cabmen in the street are rejoicing over the removal of Rasputin,” reported one British officer in the capital at the time, “and they and many others think that by this the German influence has received a check.”
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Even the empress’s saintly sister Ella—the grand duchess turned nun—was exultant. “Prayed for you all darlings,” she telegraphed Grand Duke Dmitri, who was soon banished to the Persian front for his role in the murder. And to Yussoupov’s mother, Ella wired: “All my deepest and most tender prayers surround you all because of the patriotic act of your dear son. May God protect you all.”

Of course not all the royals were quite so ecstatic. “There is nothing heroic about Rasputin’s murder,” wrote the tsar’s sister Olga, still bristling fifty years after the fact. “It was … premeditated most vilely. Just think of the two names most
closely associated with it even to this day—a Grand Duke [Dmitri], one of the grandsons of the Tsar-Liberator [Alexander II], and then a scion of one of our great houses [Yussoupov] whose wife was a Grand Duke’s [Sandro’s] daughter. That proved how low we had fallen.”

And though he was conveniently rid of a pesky interloper whom he indulged mostly for his wife (and son’s) sake, Nicholas II was nevertheless “filled with shame that the hands of my kinsmen are stained with the blood of a simple peasant.” The emperor was merciless toward his cousin Dmitri, declaring, “Murder is murder,” and even a joint letter from a number of members of his extended family pleading for leniency left him unmoved. In fact, he was furious. “I allow no one to give me advice,” he wrote on the margin. “In any case, I know that the consciences of several who signed that letter are not clean.”

Through the swirl of family drama that resulted from the tsar’s harsh response, one essential truth remained: Nicholas was not wrong about some of his relatives’ clouded consciences. Indeed, quite a few of them had long been plotting against him and, especially, his wife. This was particularly true of the tsar’s domineering uncle Vladimir, once described by a visiting American as having a “fat and rather meaningless face,” which was accompanied by dangerous ambition. The grand duke was entirely contemptuous of his softhearted nephew and never quite accepted that it was Nicholas, not he, who sat on Russia’s throne. There were even genuine fears upon Alexander III’s death that Vladimir would try to seize the throne—just as there were six years later when Nicholas II nearly succumbed to typhoid fever in the fall of 1900.

After the grand duke’s death in 1909, his widow, Miechen, pursued her late husband’s grandiose schemes and barely hidden
grudges with equal vigor. She had long despised the Empress Alexandra, who occupied a position Miechen deemed rightly hers (see
Chapter 13
), but by the time of Rasputin’s murder, simmering resentment had turned to rage as the grand duchess and other Romanovs felt the world upon which they rested so comfortably begin to crumble beneath them. They blamed this all on the empress and the disastrous policies she dictated to her husband. “She must be annihilated!” Miechen declared.

Amid all the jubilation and recriminations that surrounded Rasputin’s murder, Empress Alexandra quietly grieved for the holy man she once addressed as her “beloved, unforgettable teacher, redeemer and mentor.” Pierre Gilliard, the loyal tutor who would remain with the Romanovs almost to the very end, later wrote “how terribly she was suffering. Her idol had been shattered. He who alone could save her son had been slain. Now that he had gone, any misfortune, any catastrophe was possible.”

Before he was buried on the grounds of the palace at Tsarskoe Selo, Alexandra placed in Rasputin’s coffin an icon signed by her whole family, as well as a written plea for his protection from above. As it turned out, the Holy Devil would not rest in peace for long. And given what was in store for the Romanovs, the efficacy of his heavenly intercessions on their behalf would have to be deemed negligible.

Emerging from the grave site, the empress dusted the dirt off her hands, raised her head high, and with defiance flashing through her gray-blue eyes, went forward with the work that still had to be done. God had given the Russian crown to her husband, and with faith in Gregori’s holy intercession
from above, she would do everything she could to preserve it for her son. “From that point,” wrote biographer Robert K. Massie, “through the months left to her to live, Alexandra never wavered.”

Such fortitude in the face of personal tragedy might have been admirable, had it not been accompanied by the empress’s fatal determination to proceed along the same perilous path as before, the one that would eventually lead her and the rest of her family down the shaft of an abandoned mine pit. It was she who still ruled Russia while her husband passively stood by—a dynamic perfectly illustrated when Alexandra carved out a secret nook adjacent to Nicholas’s office, from where she could conveniently monitor all his conversations. She eventually installed a couch in the hidden space to lounge more comfortably as she eavesdropped.

The ministerial shuffle continued. Prime Minister Alexander Trepov was out, replaced by the aged and extremely reluctant Prince Nicholas Golitsyn, who ineffectively begged the tsar to reconsider the appointment. “If someone else had used the language I used to describe myself,” Golitsyn wrote, “I should have been obliged to challenge him to a duel.” The only minister to consistently maintain his position was the half-mad Protopopov, who now believed he could channel the spirit of Rasputin. Yet still he was unable to get food supplies to the starving populace. Russia was hurtling toward revolution.

“It seems as certain as anything can be that the Emperor and Empress are riding for a fall,” reported General Sir Henry Wilson, an old acquaintance of Alexandra, visiting Russia with an Allied mission. “Everyone—officers, merchants, ladies—talks openly of the absolute necessity of doing away with them.”

The Dowager Empress Marie also noted the increasingly sinister mood and openly worried about her son and daughter-in-law’s apparent blindness to it. “All the bad passions seem to have taken possession of the capital,” she wrote to her daughter Xenia. “The hatred augments daily for her [Alexandra] that is disastrous, but doesn’t open eyes yet. One continues quietly to play with fire.… What my poor Nicky must suffer makes me mad to think! Just everything might have been so excellent after the
man’s
[Rasputin’s] disappearance and now it is all spoiled by her rage and fury, hatred and feeling of revenge!… so sad!” Then Marie’s letter took on a more ominous tone, one that seemed to echo her sister-in-law Miechen’s call for the empress’s annihilation: “Alexandra Feodorovna must be banished. I don’t know how but it must be done. Otherwise she might go completely mad. Let her enter a convent or just disappear.”

Michael Rodzianko, president of the Duma, had long shared the imperial family’s concerns about the empress. “Alexandra Feodorovna is fiercely and universally hated, and all circles are clamoring for her removal,” he told the tsar’s younger brother Michael. “While she remains in power, we shall continue on the road to ruin.”

On January 20, 1917, at Michael’s urging, Rodzianko brought these worries to the emperor in a private meeting at Tsarskoe Selo. “Your Majesty,” he said, “I consider the state of the country to have become more critical and menacing than ever. The spirit of all the people is such that the greatest upheavals may be expected.… All Russia is unanimous in claiming a change of government and the appointment of a responsible premier invested with the confidence of the nation.… Sire, there is not a single honest or reliable man left in your entourage; all the best have either been eliminated or
have resigned.… It is an open secret that the Empress issues orders without your knowledge, that Ministers report to her on matters of state.… Indignation against and hatred of the Empress are growing throughout the country. She is looked upon as Germany’s champion. Even the common people are speaking of it.”

At this point the tsar interrupted. “Give me facts,” he insisted. “There are no facts to confirm your statements.”

“There are no facts,” Rodzianko acknowledged, “but the whole trend of policy directed by Her Majesty gives ground for such ideas. To save your family, Your Majesty ought to find some way of preventing the Empress from exercising any influence on politics.… Your Majesty, do not compel the people to choose between you and the good of the country.”

In a sign of burgeoning despair and resignation, Nicholas pressed his head between his hands. “Is it possible,” he said, “that for twenty-two years I tried to act for the best and that for twenty-two years it was all a mistake?”

With little more to say than the absolute truth, Rodzianko responded: “Yes, Your Majesty, for twenty-two years you have followed the wrong course.”

The March Revolution of 1917 was sparked not by Lenin, Trotsky, or any other radical party—they had simply not made plans for one. It started in the streets, with a basic lack of bread. Day after day, people formed long lines in subzero temperatures to buy essentials at wildly inflated prices, only to be turned away when the meager supplies ran out. Confronted with this daily privation, they began to take on what the French ambassador described as a “sinister expression” on their faces, until hunger and frustration finally exploded into
rage. “They [the radical left] were not ready [for revolution],” wrote Basil Shulgin, a monarchist deputy in the Duma, “but the rest were.”

On March 8, people began smashing into bakeries, chanting, “Give us bread!” Their numbers grew the following day, as Cossack patrols began to share with the mob gestures of solidarity. “Don’t worry,” they declared, “we won’t shoot.” By Saturday, March 10, the protesters were joined by hordes of workers who went on strike that day, effectively shutting down the capital. Together they marched through the streets, waving red flags for the first time and shouting, “Down with the German woman! Down with Protopopov! Down with the war!”

With the capital seething with rising turbulence, the tsar’s ministers desperately sought a solution to the food shortages. Failing that, they offered to resign as a group—all except Protopopov, the minister most responsible for the desperate supply situation, who still believed the spirit of Rasputin would guide him to a resolution of the problem. The emperor refused their offer, as well as their suggestion that a ministry acceptable to the Duma be appointed to replace them.

Several days before the crisis started, Nicholas had left Petrograd (as St. Petersburg had been renamed)
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to return to military headquarters—and he was clearly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador, reported a most disconcerting meeting he had with the tsar in the weeks before his departure: “The Emperor’s words,
his silences and reticences, his grave, drawn features and furtive, distant thoughts and the thoroughly vague and enigmatic quality of his personality, confirm in me … the notion that Nicholas II feels himself overwhelmed and dominated by events, that he has lost faith in his mission … that he has … abdicated inwardly and is now resigned to disaster.”

Former prime minister Vladimir Kokovtsov had a similar impression after meeting the emperor on February 1. “During the year that I had not seen him, he became almost unrecognizable,” Kokovtsov recalled. “His face had become very thin and hollow and covered with small wrinkles. His eyes … had become quite faded and wandered aimlessly from object to object.… The whites were of a decidedly yellow tinge, and the dark retinas had become colorless, grey, lifeless.… The face of the Tsar bore an expression of helplessness. A forced, mirthless smile was fixed upon his lips.”

As the budding revolution continued to intensify that Saturday in the capital, the emperor issued the following command to General Sergei Khabalov, the military governor of Petrograd, from headquarters five hundred miles away:
I ORDER THAT THE DISORDERS IN THE CAPITAL, INTOLERABLE DURING THESE DIFFICULT TIMES OF WAR WITH GERMANY AND AUSTRIA, BE ENDED TOMORROW. NICHOLAS
. He may as well have ordered cats to bark, for as Khabalov later testified, “this telegram was like being struck with the head of an axe. How was I to bring the disorders to a halt tomorrow?”