laughing—it was really absurd. At the sound of my laughter the soldier awoke … he scowled at us and we withdrew.”
Off duty, the soldiers wandered freely through the palace. Baroness Buxhoeveden awoke one night to find a soldier in her bedroom, busily pocketing a number of small gold and silver trinkets from her table. Alexis attracted the most attention. Groups of soldiers kept tramping into the nursery, asking, “Where is Alexis?” Gilliard once came on ten of them standing uncertainly in a passage outside the boy’s room.
“We want to see the Heir,” they said.
“He is in bed and can’t be seen,” replied the tutor.
“And the others?”
“They are also unwell.”
“And where is the Tsar?”
“I don’t know; but come, don’t hang about here,” said the determined Swiss, at last losing patience. “There must be no noise because of the invalids.” Nodding, the men tiptoed away, whispering to each other.
Gilliard became even closer to the Tsarevich at this time because Alexis had just been abruptly and cruelly deserted by another of the key figures in his small, intimate world. Derevenko, the sailor-attendant who for ten years had lived at the boy’s side, catching him before he fell, devotedly massaging his injured legs when he could not walk, now saw his chance to escape this life which apparently he had hated. He did not leave without an act of petty but heartless vengeance. The scene was witnessed by Anna Vyrubova: “I passed the open door of Alexis’s room and … I saw lying sprawled in a chair … the sailor Derevenko.… Insolently, he bawled at the boy whom he had formerly loved and cherished, to bring him this or that, to perform any menial service.… Dazed and apparently only half conscious of what he was being forced to do, the child moved about trying to obey.” Derevenko immediately left the palace. Nagorny, the Tsarevich’s other sailor-attendant, was outraged by the betrayal and remained.
In the long imprisonment that followed, Alexis found happy distraction in a movie projector and a number of films given him before the revolution by the Pathe film company. Using the equipment, he gave a number of “performances,” inviting everyone to come to his room, where with grave delight he played the role of host. Count Benckendorff, a guest at these soirees, found himself thinking, “He is very intelligent, has a great deal of character and an excellent heart. If his disease could be mastered, and should God grant him life, he should one day play a part in the restoration of our poor country. He is the representative of the legitimate principle; his character has been formed by the misfortunes of his parents and of his childhood. May God protect him and save him and all his family from the claws of the fanatics in which they are at present.”
Once all the children were well enough, the parents decided to resume their lessons, dividing their subjects among the people available. Nicholas himself became an instructor in history and geography, Baroness Buxhoeveden gave lessons in English and piano, Mlle. Schneider taught arithmetic, Countess Hendrikov taught art, and the Empress, religion. Gilliard, besides teaching French, became informal headmaster. After Nicholas had given his first lesson, the Tsar greeted Gilliard, “Good morning, dear colleague.”
The tranquillity of Nicholas’s behavior during his imprisonment, beginning with the five months he and his family were held at Tsarskoe Selo, has attracted both contemptuous scorn and glowing praise. In general, the scorn has come from those who, distant in place or time, have wondered how a man could fall from the pinnacle of earthly power without lapsing into bitter, impotent fury. Yet those who were closest to Nicholas during these months and saw him as a man; who had been with him during the years of supreme power and knew what a burden, however conscientiously carried, that power had been—these witnesses regarded his calm as evidence of courage and nobility of spirit. It was not a secret inside the palace that the Tsar’s immense shield of reserve and self-control had broken when he returned to the palace; everyone knew that Nicholas had wept, and for a moment, for everyone, the anchor was gone. Then, he recovered and his bearing became once again the anchor which held everything and everyone else. “The Tsar accepted all these restraints with extraordinary serenity and moral grandeur,” said Pierre Gilliard. “No word of reproach ever passed his lips. The fact was that his whole being was dominated by one passion, which was more powerful even than the bonds between himself and his family—his love of country. We felt that he was ready to forgive everything to those who were inflicting such humiliations upon him so long as they were capable of saving Russia.”
Through the Russian newspapers and French and English magazines he was allowed to have, Nicholas followed military and political events with keen interest. At his request, the priest in church prayed for the success of the Russian and Allied armies, and when the priest offered a prayer for the Provisional Government, Nicholas fervently crossed himself. Above all, he was anxious that the army be kept disciplined and strong and that the country remain faithful to its allies. Having seen with his own eyes the collapse of discipline at the palace, he worried about the decay taking place at the front. Hearing that General Ruzsky had resigned, Nicholas said indignantly, “He [Ruzsky] asked that an offensive be undertaken. The Soldiers’ Committee refused. What humilation! We are going to let our allies be crushed and then it will be our turn.” The following day, he mellowed and consoled himself. “What gives me a little hope,” he said, “is our love of exaggeration. I can’t believe that our army at the front is as bad as they say.”
Purely in a physical sense, the abdication and imprisonment at Tsarskoe Selo were a blessing for the fearfully weary man whom Nicholas had become. For the first time in twenty-three years, there were no reports to read, no ministers to see, no supreme decisions to make. Nicholas was free to spend his days reading and smoking cigarettes, playing with his children, shoveling snow and walking in the garden. He read the Bible from the beginning. At night, sitting with his wife and daughters, he read aloud to them from the Russian classics. Gently, by example, he tried to make easier for Alexandra the painful transition from empress to prisoner. After the long midnight service on Easter Eve, Nicholas quietly asked the two officers of the guard on duty to join his family for the traditional Easter meal in the library. There, he embraced them, not as prisoner and jailor, but as Russian and Russian, Christian and Christian.
Alexandra, unlike Nicholas, faced the overthrow of the monarchy and the beginning of captivity with deep bitterness. Proud and silent, thinner than ever before, her hair now predominantly gray, she remained most of the day on the sofa in the girls’ room. In the evening, she traveled by wheelchair to visit Anna, with Nicholas himself usually pushing the chair. Everything spoke to her of humiliation. Used to filling her rooms with violets, lilies of the valley and hyacinths from the park greenhouses or brought fresh from the Crimea, she was now forbidden these as “luxuries unnecessary for prisoners.” Occasionally when a maid or footman brought her a single branch of lilac, the Empress wept in gratitude.
For weeks, Alexandra remained convinced that, despite what had happened in Petrograd, the real Russia— the millions of peasants and the army—remained faithful. Only gradually, with a kind of bitter humor, did she begin to accept reality. Nicholas showed her the way. “He would sometimes laugh at the idea of being what he called ‘an Ex,’ ” said Lili Dehn. Alexandra picked up the expression. “Don’t call me an Empress any more—I’m only an Ex,” she would say. One day at lunch when an especially unpalatable ham appeared on the table, Nicholas made everyone laugh by shrugging and saying, “Well, this may have once been a ham, but now it’s nothing but an ex-ham.”
In Petrograd during the weeks after the abdication, feelings mounted against all Romanovs. On March 24, Grand Duke Nicholas, reappointed by the Provisional Government to his old post of Commander-in-Chief of the Armies, arrived to take up his duties at Mogilev only to find a letter from Prince Lvov awaiting him. In the letter, the new Premier asked the Grand Duke to resign, explaining apologetically that “the national feeling is decidedly and insistently against the employment of any members of the House of Romanov in any official position.” Rigidly loyal, the Grand Duke immediately acquiesced, handing the command to Alexeiev with the grandiloquent declaration, “I am happy once more to be able to prove my love for my country which so far Russia has not doubted.” Then the old soldier retired from the army and retreated to his estate in the Crimea.
Still, the focus of popular hatred was always the Tsar and his family at Tsarskoe Selo. From the moment of abdication, rumors spread through Petrograd that “Citizen Romanov” and his wife, “Alexandra the German,” were working secretly to betray the country to the Germans and with their help restore the autocracy. The press, freed of censorship and restraint, rushed into print with lurid tales of Rasputin and the Empress which hitherto had been passed only by word of mouth. The “private lives” of the Tsar’s four daughters were written by their “lovers.” A Rabelaisian palace dinner menu, described as “typical,” was published so that the hungry people of Petrograd could read how “Nikolasha” and his family were gorging themselves: “Caviar, lobster soup, mushroom patties, macaroni, pudding, roast goose, chicken pie, veal cutlets, orange jelly, pork chops, rice pudding, herrings with cucumber,
