The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (2 page)

On the night of February 12, 1903, a long line of carriages made its way through the Imperial Gates of St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace. The great mansion, which stretched for three miles along the now-frozen Neva River, blazed with light, its massive crystal and gold chandeliers reflected a hundred times in the mirrored walls of its cathedral-size reception rooms. The light cast a welcoming glow that contrasted sharply with the snow and ice outside. Bundled in sable, ermine, or mink wraps, the passengers alighted. Bracing themselves against the icy wind howling off the Gulf of Finland, they hurried through the arched doorway.

Inside, the strains of the court orchestra greeted them. Masses of fresh roses, lilacs, and mimosas imported just for the night from the South of France perfumed the air. Handing their furs to the waiting footmen, guests paused in front of the pier glass to straighten silk skirts and pat pomaded hair into place before ascending the wide marble staircase to the second floor.

A series of halls, each more grand than the last, met the guests. Gilded ceilings and doorways. Columns of malachite and jasper. White marble statues. Through these rooms the guests wandered, plucking flutes of champagne from silver trays, clapping each other on the back, laughing, joking, gossiping. They felt completely at ease in their opulent surroundings. That’s because they were members of the nobility—the 870 families known in Russia as the
bélaya kost
—literally meaning “white bone,” or what we would call blue blood.

Holding titles like prince and princess, duke, baron, count and
countess, the
bélaya kost
represented only 1.5 percent of the population, but owned 90 percent of all Russia’s wealth. Educated and sophisticated, many of them could trace their family roots all the way back to the ancient princes who had ruled the country centuries before. And most lived lives of incredible luxury that were, recalled one princess, “
a natural part of existence.” They built summer and winter palaces filled with fine antiques and priceless objets d’art, ordered designer gowns from Paris, vacationed in Italy or on the French Riviera, and spoke English or French (but seldom Russian because it showed a lack of breeding). Privileged from birth, the
bélaya kost
socialized only with each other. They belonged to the same clubs, attended the same parties, frequented the same shops, restaurants, and salons. Above all, they possessed an unshakable belief in their own superiority. As one member of the upper crust explained, nobles had “
a certain quality of being among the chosen, of being privileged, of not being the same as all other people.”

Tonight, they felt especially “chosen.” Weeks earlier, the court runner had hand-delivered a stiff vellum card embossed with the imperial insignia—the gold double-headed eagle—to their palaces. It was an invitation from Tsar Nicholas II—an invitation to a ball!

St. Petersburg’s upper crust buzzed. Even though the imperial couple was traditionally the center of society, Nicholas and Alexandra detested the social whirl. They rarely threw receptions or balls, preferring to remain in seclusion. This, however, was such a grand occasion—the two-hundredth anniversary of St. Petersburg’s founding as the Russian capital—that even the party-shunning royal couple could not ignore it. And so Nicholas was throwing a costume ball. Guests were told to come dressed in seventeenth-century garb.

Giddy with excitement, the nobility flocked to dressmakers and tailors, where they spent fortunes on gold silk tunics, caftans edged in sable, and headdresses studded with rubies and diamonds.
Grand Duke Michael, Nicholas’s younger brother, even borrowed an egg-size diamond from the crown jewels to adorn the cap of his costume. (During the festivities, the priceless bauble fell off his costume and was never found.)

At precisely eight o’clock came a fanfare from the state trumpeters. Then the great fourteen-foot-tall mahogany doors that led to the imperial family’s private rooms swung open. The grand marshal of the court appeared. Banging his ebony staff three times, he announced, “Their Imperial Majesties!”

The room instantly fell silent. Men bowed. Women curtsied. And Tsar Nicholas II stepped into the hall.

Short, with a neatly trimmed beard and large, soft blue eyes, Nicholas hardly looked like the imposing ruler of Russia. And yet this unassuming man reigned over 130 million subjects and one-sixth of the planet’s land surface—an area so vast that as night fell along the western edge of his territory, day was already breaking on the eastern border. His realm stretched from Poland to Japan and from the Arctic Ocean to the borders of the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey) and China. He was the richest monarch in the world: his family wealth was once estimated at $45 billion (in today’s U.S. currency). Every year he drew an income of 24 million gold rubles ($240 million today) from the state treasury, which derived most of
its
income from taxes and fees levied on the tsar’s subjects. And if he needed more, he simply appropriated it. He owned thirty palaces; estates in Finland, Poland, and the Crimea (all part of Russia at the time); millions of acres of farmland; gold and silver mines, as well as oil and timber reserves; an endless collection of priceless paintings and sculptures; and five yachts, two private trains, and countless horses, carriages, and cars. His vaults overflowed with a fortune in jewels.

His wealth was on full display that evening. Dressed as Alexei the Mild (the gentle seventeenth-century tsar whom Nicholas
nostalgically admired for having ruled, he believed, during a time of piety and morality), he wore a raspberry velvet caftan embroidered with gold thread, its collars and cuffs flashing with diamonds. He even carried the real Alexei’s iron staff and wore his sable-trimmed cap and pearl bracelets. Too bad, sniffed one grand duke, Nicholas was “
not sufficiently tall to do justice to his magnificent garb.”

But it was the appearance of Empress Alexandra that caused many in the hall to gasp. Alexandra was wearing a gold brocade gown shimmering with the thousands of diamonds and pearls that had been sewn onto it—a costume that cost one million rubles ($10 million today). Her elaborate headdress glittered with diamonds and emeralds, and her pearl earrings were so heavy it was hard for her to hold up her head. Around her neck hung an enormous 400-carat blue sapphire. “
[She] was just stunning,” one guest admitted. But others disagreed. “
She was dressed in the heavy brocade of which she was so fond,” one catty countess recalled, “with diamonds scattered all over her in defiance of good taste and common sense.”

With the imperial couple’s arrival, the court orchestra broke into a polonaise, which was the traditional first dance, and Nicholas and Alexandra led the dancing with “
appropriate pomp,” recalled one grand duke, “though [they were] hardly full of enthusiasm.” Even though he was “Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias,” as he was formally called, Nicholas often felt shy in society, while Alexandra acted nervous and awkward.

Now their guests followed suit, swirling and dipping. “
The whirl of the waltz [puffed out] the skirts,” recalled the French writer Théophile Gautier, who’d attended a ball at the palace two years earlier, “and the little gloved hands resting on the epaulettes of the waltzers looked like white camellias in vases of massive gold.”

When the orchestra began playing a quadrille, a relieved Nicholas and Alexandra left the dance floor. He moved among the crowd, greeting guests, while she uncomfortably talked with a group of
ladies. The empress’s distaste for the event was obvious, leading some of the women to whisper behind their hands. “
She danced badly,” remarked one princess, “and she certainly was not a brilliant conversationalist. She … gave the impression that she was about to burst into tears.”

At midnight, guests sat down to an exquisite French supper. There was soup with truffles, and delicate puffed cheese pastries served with fruit, followed by petite chicken soufflés in a rich sauce and roast duckling. As guests ate, servants bustled about serving wine and cognac from crystal decanters and coffee from engraved silver pots. The champagne bubbled and flowed. “It was,” gushed one guest, “
like a living dream!”

But beyond the golden glow of the Winter Palace, across its graceful courtyard and through its gilded gates, past mansion-lined avenues and the spires and domes of the city, lay the railroad tracks. Farther and farther across the frozen darkness they stretched, over silent steppes and across mountains to thousands of scattered villages where primitive log huts clustered around rutted dirt roads. Here lived the peasants.

In 1903—the same year as Nicholas’s costume ball—four out of every five Russians were peasants. And yet the upper classes knew next to nothing about them. They didn’t visit the peasants’ villages or deal with the hired laborers who worked their estates. Instead, they remained comfortably ensconced in luxurious St. Petersburg. From there it was easy to romanticize the peasants’ life. Most nobility (Nicholas and Alexandra included) envisioned peasants living in simple yet cozy huts, their “
cheeks glowing with good health” and their teeth “whiter than the purest ivory,” gushed one
Russian writer. It was common knowledge among the nobility that the country’s fresh foods and clean air made the peasants healthier than the “
vain city women who sickened themselves with rich food and tortured their bodies with laces, corsets, and shoes made only for fashion,” declared one nobleman. And it was especially pleasing to picture the peasants enjoying life’s simple pleasures “
decked out in their holiday best, singing and dancing in fresh-cut meadows.”

Nothing was further from the truth. Most peasants had never slept in a proper bed, owned a pair of leather shoes, eaten off a china plate, or been examined by a doctor. Most had never been beyond the borders of their villages.

These villages were dismal places. Along narrow, unpaved streets that were muddy in the spring and dusty in the summer stood a line of crudely built one- or two-room log huts called
izby
. Inside each, a wood-burning clay oven used for cooking and heating filled the room, taking up as much as a fourth of the space. Its large, flat top was a favorite sleeping place for the sick or elderly. Because most
izby
did not have chimneys (they cost too much), the smoke from the oven filled the room, leaving everything covered in a layer of black soot.

Most had no furniture, either. Instead, long wooden benches ran along the walls. Used for seating during the day, they were converted into beds at night. Without mattresses or pillows, peasants simply took off their coats and used them as blankets. Wrote one charity worker who visited a peasant hut in the 1890s:

Often, there was little to eat but dark bread. It was a staple of their diet, and peasant housewives tried to stretch the loaves by mixing clay, ground straw, or birch bark into the flour. They also served a watery cabbage soup called
shchi
for supper, usually without meat. Recalled one elderly peasant, “
It has been a year and a half since we’ve eaten any [meat].” Many peasants were so poor, even the cockroaches abandoned their huts. “
A cockroach is a natural aristocrat,” explained one observer, “and requires a greater degree of comfort than can be found in the dwellings of the rural poor.”

Their poverty stemmed from a shortage of land. Most peasants did not own the land. Instead, each village had a group of elders called the commune that held title to
all
available acreage. It was the commune’s job to decide the number of acres each family received to plant, based on the number of members per household. Unfortunately, the commune’s holdings did not grow along with the population. Year after year, resentful families watched the size of their parcels shrink as communes tried to provide land to everyone. By 1903, the average peasant allotment had shrunk from eleven acres to six, and one out of every five families farmed less than three.

To make this shortage even worse, a family’s parcels were usually not adjacent to one another. The acreage was scattered across a commune’s entire territory. “
Strips [of land] six feet wide are by no means rare,” wrote one shocked journalist from the London
Times
. “Of these narrow strips, a family may possess as many as thirty in a single field!” Peasants wasted precious hours each day dragging plow and scythe from one scrap of land to another. Hitching their
sons and daughters to crude wooden plows (just one in three peasants owned a horse), they struggled to furrow the muddy soil before planting their grain by hand.

But no matter how hard a peasant family worked, most could not grow enough food to get through the year. A few managed to scrape together the necessary coins to buy flour. Most, however, simply tightened their belts even further. “
There are many … households that do not have the means to buy [even] cabbage,” noted one visiting physician in 1907.

Most peasants were convinced that the best way to improve their lot in life was to cultivate more acreage. And so they looked with land-hungry eyes toward the nobility’s estates. Remarked one nobleman, “
Every single peasant believed from the very bottom of his soul that one day, sooner or later, the squire’s land would belong to him.”

To the peasants’ minds, the nobility—who possessed not only half the land in Russia but also the most fertile acreage—did not legitimately own their estates. Peasants believed the land should belong to those who plowed it. Since the nobility did not work their estates themselves, the peasants felt justified in taking whatever they could. They picked fruit from the squire’s orchards, fished in his ponds, and gathered mushrooms and firewood in his forests. They knew these activities were illegal, but most ignored the law. After all, what was wrong with a hungry family stealing a few apples from a man who had more than he could ever use himself? “
God grew the forests for everyone,” they would say, quoting a Russian proverb.