The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (16 page)
Read The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia Online
Authors: Candace Fleming
Shocked whispers rippled through the congregation.
The empress’s expression as she entered the cathedral minutes later only added to the gossip. “
Her face was cold and expressionless, almost austere,” said Meriel Buchanan, the British ambassador’s daughter.
The sight of eight-year-old Alexei didn’t help, either. Still unable to walk, he was carried to his seat by a Cossack guard. Behind him, people put their heads together and whispered yet again. What was wrong with the future tsar?
At last, the four grand duchesses entered. In their white silk gowns with trains of red velvet, they looked like fairy princesses. All eyes watched as they took their places behind their parents and brother. “Is that Olga Nikolaevna?” some people might have whispered. “Who is the little one?” Hardly anyone could tell the grand duchesses apart. Almost always photographed in matching white dresses, they tended to be considered as a whole, rather than as individuals. The grand duchesses obviously accepted this. Recently, they’d begun signing the letters and gifts they gave jointly as OTMA—a combination of the first letter of each of their names.
As the music began, the congregation turned back toward the altar and the imperial couple. Alexandra stood stone-faced and straight as a stick, the diamonds covering her gown’s bodice trembling with each nervous breath she took.
Nicholas, too, appeared uneasy. Despite the tight security in and around the cathedral, he kept “
anxiously and furtively scanning the
faces of the assembly as if afraid of meeting some secret danger,” recalled one observer. It was obvious the tsar no longer felt safe even among his most loyal subjects.
That’s when some people noticed the imperial couple looking up into the shadowy heights of the cathedral dome. Two doves circled over their heads. Believing in religious omens as they did, they took this as a good sign.
“A symbol,” Nicholas later said, “that the blessings of God, after three centuries, continue to rest on the … Romanov[s].”
Two months later, as part of the anniversary celebration, the family took a weeklong trip to Moscow. Along the route, people flocked to see them. In Kostroma on the Volga River, people ventured waist-deep into the water for a closer look at the family. And in villages, old peasant men and women fell to their knees as the royals’ cars whizzed past. From their open-topped Renaults, the family hardly noticed the little tables that stood before many of the huts. On them, peasants had laid flowers, salt, and bread—the traditional Russian offering to guests. But while the people acted curious or reverent, on only one occasion was the family greeted with spontaneous good feelings.
It happened during a visit to an ancient monastery. An old peasant woman stepped from the gathered crowd and approached Alexandra. Falling on her knees, she begged the empress for a blessing. Alexandra made the sign of the cross above the woman’s bent head. Then impulsively, she unwound the silk shawl she was wearing and gave it to the peasant.
The crowd burst into cheers. “
God save the Tsar!” they cried. “Let your Sovereign Family live forever.”
This single experience convinced both Nicholas and Alexandra that the jubilee’s mission had succeeded. Said the empress to a friend shortly after the celebrations, “
You can see it for yourself—we need
merely to show ourselves and at once their hearts are ours.” Added Nicholas, “
My people love me.”
“
Nobody … could have imagined that in less than four years Nicky’s very name would be splattered with mud and hatred,” his sister Olga later said.
EACHING
A
LEXEI
Not long after the tercentenary celebrations, Pierre Gilliard, who had discovered the truth about Alexei’s illness at Spala, and Sydney Gibbes, who still knew nothing about it, began tutoring the tsarevich. It was long past time for the almost nine-year-old to enter the classroom, but his frequent illnesses had delayed his education. Now, with the boy on the mend, the teachers began their lessons. Sadly, recalled Gilliard, Alexei had not been taught the “
habits of discipline.” The boy hated to be corrected, and tended to be lazy. He also blamed his teachers for his being in the classroom. “
I had a definite impression of his mute hostility,” Gilliard wrote, “and at times it reached a stage of open defiance.” What sort of defiance? The always-reserved Gilliard did not elaborate.
But Sydney Gibbes did. One day, he taught Alexei to make a “telephone” by holding one end of a wire to his ear and the other between his teeth. But the project quickly turned into a scuffle, Gibbes fending off his student as Alexei struggled with all his might to wrap the wire around the teacher’s teeth.
Another time, the two skirmished over scissors.
“I had rather a bad [time],” Gibbes wrote in dismay. “[Alexei] wanted to cut my hair, and then his own, and when I tried to prevent him, he went behind the curtain and held it round him. When I opened it he had actually cut some hair off and he was rather disconcerted when
I told him he had a bald place.… He would insist on cutting or pretending to cut everything. The more I tried to prevent him, the more he shrieked with delight.” Concluded Gibbes, “Lessons with the tsarevich were more exciting than pleasant.”
Still, Alexei was “
sensitive to the suffering in others because he suffered so much himself,” claimed Gilliard.
He could also be introspective. One bright summer day in 1913—six months after Alexei’s ordeal at Spala—Olga found Alexei lying on his back in the grass, gazing wistfully up into the sky.
What was he doing? she asked.
“
I like to think and wonder,” he replied.
“About what?”
“Oh, so many things,” he said. “I enjoy the sun and the beauty of summer as long as I can. Who knows if one of these days I shall be prevented from doing it.”
B
EYOND THE
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ALACE
G
ATES
:
A D
IFFERENT
K
IND OF
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DUCATION FOR A
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IFFERENT
K
IND OF
B
OY
Around 1913, poverty forced the peasant father of eight-year-old Nicholas Griaznov into an apprenticeship agreement with St. Petersburg shop owner A. Kasatkin. The father agreed that little Nicholas would work in the shop for four years, receiving a mere three rubles a month (not even enough to buy a cup of milk) plus room and board for his labor. In return, the shop owner promised to teach Nicholas a useful trade. But like most shop owners, Kasatkin looked upon his apprentices as nothing more than cheap labor. Expected to rise earlier than anyone else (around four thirty), the boy was on the go all day, delivering purchases, unpacking merchandise, or standing on the sidewalk in every kind of weather, coaxing customers into the store. Not until
midnight did he finally drop onto his straw mattress in the kitchen. More than five other child apprentices were also squeezed into this space. All were poorly fed, badly clothed, and regularly beaten. Desperate to call attention to his son’s plight, Nicholas’s father sent a letter to the newspaper
New Russia.
Because censorship allowed for public discussion of social problems as long as they weren’t blamed on the tsar or his government, the newspaper ran the letter. It read:
I tried to take my son away and put him in another shop, but his boss wouldn’t let him go. He said there was some kind of law which let him keep my son until the apprenticeship was over, that is, for three and a half more years, and until then he wouldn’t give him up. Kasatkin told me, “The law gives me the right to teach the boy to be a human being and to hit him and even beat him with a rod if he is disrespectful to my family. If you want your son back … then you will have to pay me … 300 rubles for my expense in training the boy. Then I’ll give him to you.” Now where is a poor peasant like me supposed to get that kind of money? I don’t even have a crust of bread, not to speak of [300] rubles to give Mr. Kasatkin for my child.
Days later, the newspaper printed Kasatkin’s response:
I would like to direct your attention to the following fact. I paid a middleman a good bit of money for [Nicholas], just like all the other merchants who buy apprentices for their stores. These middlemen travel around to impoverished villages … during the winter months when food is scarce. They collect eight- to ten-year-old boys and
send them to stores as apprentices without obtaining the consent of either the parents or the children. An honest press should not attack particular individuals but should attack this system of buying and selling children, which exists in [St.] Petersburg and in other cities. I alone do not have the power to fight against such established custom. Competition forces me to use as much cheap and unpaid labor as I can.
An approximate breakdown of Russia’s social classes at the turn of the twentieth century.
H
OLLY
P
RIBBLE
In this official portrait taken in 1888, twenty-year-old Nicholas stands behind his father, Tsar Alexander III. Surrounding them are the other members of his family. His mother, Maria, stands behind brother Michael. Sister Olga leans against her father; beside her sits brother George. Sister Xenia is to the right of Nicholas.
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HE
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RCHIVE OF THE
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USSIAN
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EDERATION
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OSCOW
This photograph of Alix and her sisters posing with their grandmother was taken shortly after their mother’s death in 1878. From left to right: Princess Irene, seated; Princess Victoria, standing; Queen Victoria seated and holding six-year-old Alix’s hand; and Princess Elizabeth (who later married Nicholas’s uncle the Grand Duke Serge) standing behind Alix.
R
OYAL
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OLLECTION
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RUST
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AJESTY
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UEEN
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LIZABETH
II 2013
The Winter Palace in 2011, looking very much as it did when Nicholas and Alexandra lived there.
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RIC
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OHMANN
A view of the Great Palace at Peterhof, a large seaside park that became the Romanovs’ summer residence.
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RIC
R
OHMANN
The Alexander Palace, where Nicholas and Alexandra made their home. The family’s private rooms were located in the left wing.
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RIC
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OHMANN
Nicholas and Alexandra’s bedroom in the Alexander Palace. Note the numerous icons on the walls.
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OURTESY OF
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RANSON
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E
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OU
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OLLECTION
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IGITAL
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RCHIVE
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ANTA
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RUZ
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Bejeweled Nicholas and Alexandra pose in the seventeenth-century costumes they wore to their fancy dress ball in 1903.
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ORBIS
The little grand duchesses posed for this portrait in 1900. From left to right are three-year-old Tatiana, one-year-old Marie, and five-year-old Olga.
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Alexandra and baby Anastasia in 1901. The empress signed this portrait
Alix
.
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