The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (4 page)

Because of Russia’s size, the tsar required a second tier of officials and administrators to carry out his will. Outside St. Petersburg, the country was divided into thirty-four provinces, each administered by a governor (also chosen by the tsar). Each had at his disposal an imperial army and police to help enforce the tsar’s laws. Additionally, each province was divided into districts overseen by the
zemstvo
, or local council. The
zemstvo
managed the collection of taxes in their localities and dealt with issues like food supply and road maintenance. Not surprisingly, most members of the
zemstvo
were landowning nobility or wealthy townsmen.

Russia also required a huge imperial bureaucracy to enforce laws, impose fines and fees, and keep records. Because the majority of bureaucrats were neither well educated nor well paid, they were easily corrupted. It was common for low-ranking bureaucrats (those working closest to the citizens) to demand bribes for everything from issuing business licenses to approving land titles. Because of this, the lower classes despised bureaucrats. They viewed them as greedy, petty cheaters. Unfortunately, since the low-ranking bureaucrat was the most visible of all government workers, he became the public face of Romanov rule.

The tsar’s government was propped up by both its military and
its police force. Public safety was not the first priority of either organization. Instead, their most important function was protecting the autocracy from political dissent. If Russians so much as grumbled about the government, they could be arrested and exiled to far-off, frozen Siberia without recourse. To keep the peace and protect order, the tsar censored the press, banned books, limited public speech, and refused people the right to assemble for political reasons. Houses could be searched. Mail could be opened and read. Businesses and universities could be closed for no other reason than that the tsar commanded it. Even members of the nobility were subject to his will. The tsar could seize their property, refuse them permission to marry, and banish anyone from the country—all with just a snap of his autocratic fingers.

Nicholas did not look forward to the day he would sit on the Russian throne. Shy and gentle, he enjoyed playing tennis, taking long walks, and reading in his bedroom. Every month the imperial librarian sent him twenty books from around the world. Nicholas, a fast reader, especially liked military history. He wasn’t anything like his bullheaded, tough-as-nails father, Tsar Alexander III, who boomed when he spoke, and who had strong opinions and an even stronger will. How could he possibly live up to the expectations of his big Russian bear of a father?

And his father
was
bearlike. Standing six foot three, Tsar Alexander was so strong he could bend iron fire pokers and tie silver forks into knots. Once, while he was riding on the imperial train with his family, the locomotive jumped the rails, causing the roof to cave in. Using his tremendous strength, Alexander hoisted the roof onto his wide shoulders and held it until everyone escaped unhurt.

Alexander possessed incredible political strength, too. He demanded complete obedience from his subjects. “
The tsar is swift and harsh. He shows no mercy,” one of Alexander’s courtiers noted. “He raises his iron fist, and the … people shudder, and obey.” Once, when an adviser threatened to resign, the tsar picked up the man by his lapels and flung him to the marble floor. “
Shut up! When I choose to kick you out, you will hear of it in no uncertain terms!”

That was how Alexander III held Russia together.

No wonder the thought of one day taking his father’s place terrified mild-mannered Nicholas. He prayed for his father to live a long—
very, very long
—life.

Nor was Alexander eager for his son to become tsar. The boy’s small size embarrassed him. (Nicholas would stand just five foot seven when fully grown, with narrow shoulders and short, stocky legs.) So did his high-pitched laugh and sloppy handwriting. “
Nicholas is a
devchonka
—a bit of a girlie,” Alexander once cruelly and publicly declared about his then thirteen-year-old son.

His opinion didn’t change as the boy grew older. When Nicholas was in his mid-twenties, it was suggested he chair a government committee. Alexander snorted at the suggestion. “
Tell me, have you ever spoken to His Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke Tsarevich? Then don’t tell me you never noticed that the Grand Duke is a dunce!”

Alexander did almost nothing to prepare his son for his future role as “autocrat of all Russia.” Nicholas never learned to deal with ministers or politicians. He never gave a speech, studied diplomacy, or grappled with national policy. In short, he never developed the qualities of a statesman. “
It was my father’s fault,” Nicholas’s sister Olga later wrote. “He would not even have Nicky sit in on Council of State.… I can’t tell you why.”

But living in his father’s bear-size, ridiculing shadow
did
teach Nicholas one thing: to conceal his real feelings beneath a falsely
patient smile. “
I never show my feelings,” he once admitted. During his lifetime, very few people would ever know how hurt, scared, or inadequate he truly felt.

Most people agreed that Empress Alexandra was beautiful. She had flawless pale skin, golden hair, and clear blue eyes. But it was a sour kind of beauty. Alexandra’s sharp nose gave her face a cold sternness, and her tight, thin lips rarely curved into a smile. “
When she did [smile],” recalled her cousin Queen Marie of Romania, “it was grudging, as though making a concession.”

She hadn’t always been that way. As a child, the future empress—little Princess Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice of Hesse-Darmstadt (now part of Germany)—was full of laughter, her broad smile deepening the dimples in her rosy cheeks. For this reason, her family nicknamed her Sunny. But when she was six years old, her mother died. Overnight, “Sunny” turned aloof, serious, and withdrawn. “
Her attitude to the world [became] perpetually mistrustful,” said Queen Marie, “strangely empty of tenderness and, in a way, hostile.… She held [people] at a distance, as though they intended to steal something which was hers.”

She also became obsessed with God and the afterlife. “
Life here [on earth] is nothing,” she later wrote in her diary. “Eternity is everything, and what we are doing is preparing our souls for the Kingdom of Heaven.”

With her mother’s death, Alix’s maternal grandmother—Queen Victoria of England—stepped in to raise the child. The most powerful monarch in all Europe, Queen Victoria was a no-nonsense woman used to getting her own way. Brushing aside any objections from Alix’s father, Grand Duke Ludwig IV, the aging queen set
out to mold her youngest and most favorite grandchild in her own image. Handpicked by Her Majesty, a string of English tutors and governesses traveled to Hesse with instructions to send detailed reports back to Windsor Castle. In return, they received a stream of orders from the queen: the princess must learn to speak proper English; high standards of taste and morality should be set; training in the avoidance of idle talk and gossip was imperative. And so, the German princess grew into a proper young Englishwoman. Duty to family and to country. Thrift and industriousness. Modesty and simplicity. And like Queen Victoria herself, Alix grew to be stubborn, iron-willed, and controlling.

Nicholas and Alexandra first met in 1884, when he was sixteen and she just twelve. Alix had traveled to Russia for the wedding of her oldest sister, Princess Elizabeth of Hesse, to Nicholas’s uncle, Grand Duke Serge. Despite his small size, the future tsar of Russia was both handsome and charming. Smiling at the girl on the day she arrived at the Romanovs’ Peterhof estate, he introduced himself. “
I’m Nicky,” he said.

“I’m Sunny,” she replied stiffly.

“Yes, I know,” he said. The two were second cousins, related through a royal tangle of relations. Plopping down beside the young princess, he spent the next few hours trying to break through her wall of reserve. He must have succeeded, because later that day he wrote in his diary, “
I sat next to little … Alix whom I really liked a lot.”

For the next four days, they enjoyed each other’s company, walking in the Peterhof gardens. They picked flowers for each other, shared secrets, and even scratched “Alix, Nicky” with a diamond on a window of one of the houses.

The day before Alix and her family returned to Hesse, Nicholas
gave her a small, jeweled brooch as a token of his affection. She accepted it, overwhelmed. But the next afternoon, worried about what her grandmother would think, she returned it. Offended, Nicholas gave the brooch to his little sister. Alix went home.

Five years passed before they saw each other again. In 1889, Alix arrived in St. Petersburg for a six-week stay with her sister. This time, she was seventeen and Nicholas twenty-one—the perfect age for romance. They saw each other constantly. He took her sledding and ice-skating, accompanied her to late-night suppers, ballets, and operas. He even hosted a dance in her honor. In the ballroom, which was perfumed with fresh roses and orchids, the couple danced in each other’s arms until the orchestra’s final note faded into the starry night. By the time Alix returned home, she was in love with Nicholas. And he was head-over-heels with her. Pasting her photograph in his diary, he later wrote, “
My dream—one day to marry Alix H!”

Five more years passed. With no official responsibilities, Nicholas did little but attend the opera and ballet. He went to parties and dances and stayed out until the early-morning hours. “
As always, I don’t feel well after a ball,” he confessed in his diary. “I have a weakness in the legs.… I am persuaded that I have some kind of sleeping sickness because there is no way to get me up.”

He discovered a deep love for the army—its order and routine—after his father made him a junior officer, as Romanov tradition demanded. “
[The army] appealed to his passive nature,” recalled his best friend and cousin, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, known as Sandro. All Nicholas had to do was follow orders, while his superiors dealt with any problems. Freed from decision making,
Nicholas focused on what he enjoyed most—laughing and partying with his fellow officers. “
We got stewed,” he confided in his diary. “
The officers carried me out.” “
Wallowed in the grass and drank.”

He also embarked on a grand world tour that took him, among other places, to Egypt’s pyramids and India’s jungles. “
Palaces and generals are the same the world over,” Nicholas wrote. “I could just as well have stayed at home.”

He and Alix did not see each other once during this time. Still, they wrote to each other—little notes filled with hopes and dreams and words of love. At last, on a balmy April morning in 1894, the two met again at a royal wedding in Coburg, Germany. Nicholas seized the chance to propose. But as much as Alix longed to say yes, she hesitated. Russian law demanded that the wife of the future tsar be a follower of the official state religion, Russian Orthodoxy, a branch of Christianity.