Nicholas and Alexandra

But no act of consideration could erase the terrible event. Masses of simple Russians took the disaster as an omen that the reign would be unhappy. Other Russians, more sophisticated or more vengeful, used the tragedy to underscore the heartlessness of the autocracy and the contemptible shallowness of the young Tsar and his “German woman.”

   After a coronation, the newly crowned monarch was expected to travel, making state visits and private courtesy calls on fellow sovereigns. In the summer of 1896, Nicholas and Alexandra went to Vienna to visit the aging Emperor of Austria-Hungary, Franz Joseph, called on the Kaiser at Breslau and spent ten quiet days in Copenhagen with Nicholas’s grandparents, King Christian IX and Queen Louise of Denmark. In September, taking with them ten-month-old Olga, they sailed to visit Queen Victoria.

The Queen was in Scotland at the great, turreted, granite castle of Balmoral deep in the Highlands of Aberdeen. In a driving rain, the Russian Imperial yacht Standart anchored in the roadstead at Leith, and Uncle Bertie, the Prince of Wales, came aboard to escort the Russian guests through the wild mountains. Thoroughly drenched from riding in open carriages, they arrived at the castle after dark. The Queen was waiting for them on the castle steps, surrounded by tall Highlanders holding flaming torches.

Overjoyed to see each other, grandmother and granddaughter spent hours playing with the baby. “She is marvelously kind and amiable to us, and so delighted to see our little daughter,” Nicholas wrote to Marie. Nicholas was left in the hands of Bertie. “They seem to consider it necessary to take me out shooting all day long with the gentlemen,” he complained. “The weather is awful, rain and wind every day and on top of it no luck at all—I haven’t killed a stag yet.… I’m glad Georgie comes out to shoot too—we can at least talk.”

From Scotland, the Russian party traveled to Portsmouth and then to France. Unlike the British visit, which had been a family holiday, the Tsar’s visit to Paris was an event of the highest importance to both countries. Despite the great difference in their political systems, the needs of diplomacy had made military allies of Europe’s greatest republic and its most absolute autocracy. Since 1870, when France lost the Franco-Prussian War and was stripped of its eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, French statesmen and generals had dreamed of the day they would take revenge on Germany, aided by the countless soldiers of the Tsar. For his part, Tsar Alexander III had wanted a counterbalance to the immense military power of the German Empire which had grown up on his western frontier. Besides, France was willing to loan to Russia the enormous sums Alexander III needed to rebuild his army and to build his railways. In 1888 and 1889, the first of these loans was floated on the Paris Bourse at a low rate of interest. In 1891, the French fleet visited Kronstadt, and the Autocrat of all the Russias stood bareheaded while the bands played the “Marseillaise.” Until that moment it had been a criminal offense to play this revolutionary song anywhere in the Tsar’s dominions. In 1893, the Russian fleet visited Toulon, and in 1894, the year of Alexander Ill’s death and his son’s accession, Russia and France signed a treaty of alliance. In his Memoirs, Raymond Poincare, President of France during World War I, recorded, “Those of us who reached manhood in 1890 cannot recall without emotion the prodigious effect produced by the friendliness of the Emperor Alexander III.”

Nicholas II was the first tsar to visit France since the entente had been formed, and the French government proposed to give him an overwhelming welcome. It being late September, Paris carpenters were ordered to wire artificial chestnut blooms to the famed chestnut trees to give the city its most pleasing appearance. Police were stationed every twenty yards along the line of parade to dampen the enthusiasm of revolutionaries or anarchists who might jump at the chance to assassinate an autocrat. The French fleet steamed to the middle of the English Channel with flags flying and bands playing to greet the Tsar as he crossed from England.

From the moment Nicholas’s carriage appeared on the wide boulevards of Paris, the people of France raised a thunderous, unceasing ovation. Huge crowds frantically waved their handkerchiefs and shouted as Nicholas and Alexandra went by. Seeing Olga and her nurse in another carriage, the crowds shouted “Vive le bebe,” “Vive la Grande Duchesse” and even “Vive la nounou.” Nicholas was overcome. “I can only compare it with my entry into Moscow [for the coronation].” Together, the Imperial guests visited Notre Dame, the Ste. Chapelle, the Pantheon and the Louvre. At the Invalides, they looked down on the tomb of Russia’s invader, Napoleon. With Alexandra in a blue satin gown standing at his side, Nicholas laid a foundation stone of the Pont Alexander III over the Seine. At Versailles for an evening, Alexandra was assigned the rooms of Marie Antoinette.

The French visit concluded with a huge military review on the river Marne. Nicholas, dressed in a Cossack uniform, sat on a sorrel horse and watched seventy thousand Chasseurs Alpins, African Zouaves, Spahi horsemen in flowing robes, and regiments of regular infantry in red pantaloons. Then, as a climax to the review, the Spahis whirled and charged en masse, engulfing the reviewing party in clouds of dust. Leaving the field to board his train, Nicholas rode down a road lined on both sides with battalions of French infantry. Spontaneously the French soldiers began to cheer “Vive l’Empereur!”

Exhilarated by their reception in France, Nicholas and Alexandra hated to begin the journey back to Russia by train across Germany. “We arrived at the frontier at eleven in the evening,” Nicholas wrote to Marie. “There for the last time, we heard the strains of our national anthem. After this began German helmets and it was unpleasant to look out of the window. At every station in France one heard ‘Hurrah’ and saw kind and jolly faces, but here everything was black and dark and boring. Happily, it was time to go to bed; by daylight it would have been even more depressing.”

Nicholas never forgot the outpouring of emotion displayed by the people and soldiers of France on his first visit as Tsar. In the future, this favorable impression in the mind and heart of the young Tsar was to serve France well.

^* Nicholas’s complete title was: Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, of Poland, of Siberia, of Tauric Chersonese, of Georgia, Lord of Pskov, Grand Duke of Smolensk, of Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia and Finland, Prince of Estonia, Livonia, Courland and Semigalia, Samogotia, Bialostock, Karelia, Tver, Yougouria, Perm, Viatka, Bulgaria, and other countries; Lord and Grand Duke of Lower Novgorod, of Tchernigov, Riazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Yaroslav, Belozero, Oudoria, Obdoria, Condia, Vitebsk, Mstislav and all the region of the North, Lord and Sovereign of the countries of Iveria, Cartalinia, Kabardinia and the provinces of Armenia, Sovereign of the Circassian Princes and the Mountain Princes, Lord of Turkestan, Heir of Norway, Duke of Schleswig Holstein, of Storman, of the Ditmars, and of Oldenbourg, etc.

CHAPTER SIX

The New Tsar

AT HOME, Nicholas plunged into “the awful job I have feared all my life.” He attacked the mountains of paper brought him every day and dutifully initialed them, wrote comments in their margins, signed orders, promotions and lists of honors. At first, feeling his way, he relied on Marie for guidance. “The various affairs you left me, petitions, etc. have all been attended to,” he reported faithfully. Two weeks later she wrote back, “I am sorry to have still to forward you so many papers, but it is always like that in early summer just before the ministers go on leave.”

But Nicholas did not always follow his mother’s recommendations. When she asked as a favor the loan of one million roubles from the State Bank to a needy princess, Nicholas lectured her sternly: “I must talk to you, darling Mama, about some rather unpleasant things.… As regards … a loan of a million roubles from the Bank, I must tell you honestly that this is impossible. I should have liked to see how she would have dared even to hint at such a thing to Papa; and I can certainly hear the answer he would have given her.… It would be a fine state of affairs indeed at the Treasury if, in Witte’s absence (he is at present on a holiday) I were to give a million to one, two millions to another, etc.… What forms one of the most brilliant pages in the history of dear Papa’s reign is the sound condition of our finances—[this] would be destroyed in the course of a few years.”

Far more difficult for Nicholas were the uncles, the four surviving brothers of Alexander III. Vladimir, the oldest, a hunter, gourmet and patron of the arts, was Commander of the Imperial Guard and President of the Academy of Fine Arts, Alexis, a man of infinite charm and enormous girth, was simultaneously Grand Admiral of the Russian Navy and an international bon vivant—“his was a case of fast women and slow