The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (13 page)

But nothing could substitute for what Alexei wanted most of all—to be like other boys. “
Can’t I have a bicycle?” he once begged his mother.

“Alexei, you know you can’t,” she replied.

“Mayn’t I play tennis?” he persisted.

“Dear, you know you mustn’t,” Alexandra answered.

Alexei burst into tears. “Why can other boys have everything and I nothing?” he wailed pitifully.

Sometimes he seemed almost defiant in the face of his illness. Once, during a review of the palace guard, he hopped onto one of the gardeners’ bicycles. Nicholas was in mid-salute when he spied his son zigzagging precariously across the parade ground. Frightened the boy might fall, Nicholas halted the review and ordered the soldiers to surround and capture the bicyclist. Squealing with excitement, Alexei led them on a merry chase. Another time, when he was seven, he sprang onto the tabletop during one of the few children’s parties he was allowed to attend. Waving the other young guests up alongside him, he burst into a frenzied game of follow the leader. Wildly, the boy hopped from table to chair and back to the table. Horrified, his sailor nannies, Derevenko and Nagorny, tried to stop him before he hurt himself. But Alexei just hollered,
“All grown-ups have to go!” and shoved them out the door.

The boy could be rude and domineering. As a six-year-old, he once walked into his father’s office, where the foreign minister sat waiting for the tsar. Alexei expected the minister to leap to his feet. When he didn’t, the boy stomped up to him and with fists clenched, shouted, “
When the Heir to the Russian throne enters a room, people must get up.” Another time, he was playing in the nursery with his sisters when he learned a group of soldiers wanted to meet him. “Now, girls,” the six-year-old said dismissively,
“run away. I am busy. Someone has just called to see me on business.”

No wonder Nicholas once joked that he “
trembled for Russia” under the rule of “Alexei the Terrible.”

The children found plenty of interesting things to do—playing tennis, hiking, dancing, bicycling, anything busy. All five of them adored animals, and at Tsarskoe Selo they had dozens of pets. Among them was Vaska the cat, and Ortipo, a French bulldog who snored so loudly he kept the girls awake at night. There was Vanka, a trained donkey from the Cinizelli Circus, who would snuffle through the children’s pockets in search of treats and who loved to chew rubber balls. There was an elephant with his own elaborate stable; two llamas; a mouse who lived in the “Little Pair’s” bedroom wall; and a parrot named Popov who resided—of all places—in the tsar’s bathroom. And there was a King Charles spaniel who earned the family nickname
mersavetz
(“rascal”) because, said Marie, he did his “
governor-general” on the carpets. (Her parents gave the girls a little silver bucket and shovel with which to clean it up.)

One passion shared by the entire family was photography. Everyone, even little Alexei, had his or her own Kodak Brownie camera. The cameras were lightweight and easy to use, and the family took them everywhere, snapping away indiscriminately—dozens of photographs each day. Anastasia even attempted a self-portrait. “
I took [one] picture while looking in the mirror,” she told her father, “and it was hard, because my hands were shaking.”

Most evenings after dinner, the family took time to carefully paste their photographs into special albums made of green Moroccan leather and engraved with the imperial eagle. Over the years, they filled album after album with snapshots, forming a detailed
record of their everyday lives at Tsarskoe Selo … and wherever they went.

Like clockwork, the family traveled throughout the year on what was called the royal progress. Every March, the Alexander Palace was abandoned, and the Romanovs headed south to the Crimea and warm weather. By May, they were ready to move again, this time to their summer mansion at Peterhof, where they could catch the cool breezes coming off the Baltic Sea. Four weeks later, in June, they boarded their imperial yacht, the
Standart
, for a cruise around the Finnish islands. When August rolled around, they made their
way to Poland and their hunting lodges. Come September, they returned to the Crimea for a short time, before heading back to Tsarskoe Selo to sit out the long Russian winter. But they avoided St. Petersburg. Even though it was the country’s capital and the seat of national government, the family never spent more than a few days a year in the cavernous Winter Palace, which Alexandra hated. In addition, with the hundreds of doors and passageways leading into the place, it was impossible to guarantee the family’s safety.

Most of their traveling was done by imperial train—a chain of luxurious railroad cars “
more like a home than a [locomotive],” recalled family friend Anna Vyrubova. It included a lilac-and-gray sitting room for the empress, a study of mahogany and green leather for the tsar, and a children’s car filled with white painted furniture and chests of toys. There was also a kitchen with three stoves, a dining room that seated twenty, and a small room where the servants laid out
zakuski
(“appetizers”) before every meal. Here Nicholas and the children helped themselves to small but savory delicacies—caviar, smoked herring, pickled mushrooms, and, a family favorite, reindeer tongue.

During these times, the empress “
was frequently absent from … view,” said Pierre Gilliard. This was because Alexandra, weakened by her five pregnancies and exhausted from the strain and worry over Alexei’s illness, had grown sickly. Closing herself up in her sitting room with a backache, migraine, or some other ailment, she often spent days locked away from her children.

Her daughters especially missed her. Feeling isolated, and longing for any kind of contact, they ended up writing wistful little notes that they sent to Alexandra’s sickroom. Some expressed love. Others apologized for being naughty. But all begged for Mama’s attention.

“
My sweety darling Mama,” thirteen-year-old Olga wrote a bit ungrammatically in January 1909 after receiving a long note from
Alexandra exhorting her to be gentle, kind, polite, and patient. “It helps me very much when you write to me what to do, and then I try to do it better as I can.”

Just days later, eleven-year-old Tatiana wrote, “
My darling Mama! I hope you won’t be very tired and you can get up to dinner. I am always so awfully sorry when you … can’t get up. I will pray for you my darling Mama in church.… Please sleep well and don’t get tired.… Perhaps I have lots of faults, but please forgive me.… Many, many kisses to my beloved Mama.”

In May 1910, Marie, then eleven, longed for some motherly advice. “
Mama, at what age did you have your own room … at what age did you start wearing long dresses?”

And Anastasia just wanted to share her day’s events. “
Madam dearest, I am afraid to go [to my bedroom] in the dark so I sat down on the W.C. picking my toe in the dark,” her quirky, undated letter reads. “I hope you’re well soon. Go to bed and be quiet. Good night. Sleep well.”

Alexandra’s response to her daughters’ notes was always the same. Her suffering was a heavy cross they each must bear, she told them. “
I know it’s dull having an invalid mother,” she wrote Marie in December 1910, “but it teaches you all to be loving and gentle. Only try to be obedient, then you make it easier for me.”

The girls tried, always hoping that “darling Mama” would feel better tomorrow and rise from her sofa to join them.

Rasputin had become all the rage in St. Petersburg society. With Cousin Militsa’s help, he’d gotten to know many members of the nobility. Now, when he wasn’t expected at the Imperial Palace, the
starets
attended parties and soirées at some of the finest mansions in the city. Introduced as a man of God, he strode into opulent drawing rooms, wearing his peasant blouse and boots, his black hair hanging to his shoulders. Taking his hostess’s soft hands in his rough ones, he gazed deep into her eyes. Was it hypnosis that swept so many noblewomen off their feet? It certainly wasn’t his fine manners. Rasputin spoke with
“coarse barnyard expressions,” wrote one historian. If that wasn’t enough, he bragged constantly about his relationship with the imperial couple. “
See the gold cross?” he would say. “It’s got ‘N’ stamped on it. The tsar gave it—did it to honor me.” Or “
Her Majesty sewed this shirt for me. I got other shirts she sewed.”

Despite his crudeness, the ladies swooned over him. Dissatisfied with their pampered lives, many were searching for something new and exciting to fill their time. Rasputin fit the bill. Soon they formed a sort of fan club. Every day, dozens of noblewomen climbed the narrow, creaking stairs to his upper-floor apartment in St. Petersburg. Ignoring the stink of rancid butter and cabbage soup that filled the dark rooms, they gathered around him. Some even sat at his feet. Those unable to attend telephoned with tearful excuses, while one—an opera singer—called every afternoon just to
sing him an aria. Telephone in his hands, the receiver pressed to his ear, he danced around the room.

Taking pleasure in insulting his wealthy guests, Rasputin sometimes dipped his finger into a plate of jam and, turning to one of them, said, “
Humble yourself, lick it clean.” He ridiculed the expensive gifts the women showered on him. “
What’s this, little mother … you could feed five villages of starving people with [this].” And he stepped far beyond the bounds of propriety by pulling the prettiest women into his lap to hug and kiss them. His rudeness, he believed, made him even more attractive to the bored nobility.

And it worked … for a while. But soon, rumors began swirling through society about the goings-on in Rasputin’s apartment. And the upper crust was horrified. How dare the
starets
offend well-born ladies in that way? Rasputin, many nobles decided, wasn’t a holy man. He was just a lecherous impostor. By 1911, doors began slamming in his face.

But not the palace doors. “
They accuse Rasputin of kissing women,” Alexandra grumbled to Nicholas. “Read the apostles; they kissed everybody as a form of greeting.”

Because the
starets
was always on his best behavior in front of them, it was easy for the couple to ignore the truth: that Rasputin was a charlatan. Instead, they grew angry with anyone who criticized him. His enemies “
are ours,” Alexandra declared.