almost all day long.” “Alix looked after me better than any nurse,” Nicholas wrote to Marie once he was feeling better. “All through my illness I could not stand up. Now I can easily walk from the bed to the dresser.”
Scarcely had Nicholas recovered when Queen Victoria died. Only the summer before, when the eighty-one- year-old Queen had invited the Empress to England, Alexandra had written to a friend: “How intensely I long to see her dear old face … never have we been separated so long, four whole years, and I have the feeling as tho’ I should never see her any more. Were it not so far away, I should have gone off all alone for a few days to see her and left the children and my husband, as she has been as a mother to me, ever since Mama’s death 22 years ago.”
When the news of Victoria’s death arrived in January 1901, Alexandra wanted to start immediately for Windsor, but, being pregnant with Anastasia, she was persuaded not to go. At the memorial service in the English church in St. Petersburg, the Empress wept in public. To her sister she wrote, “How I envy you being able to see beloved Grandmama being taken to her last rest. I cannot really believe she has gone, that we shall never see her any more.… Since one can remember, she was in our life, and a dearer, kinder being never was.… England without the Queen seems impossible.”
The death of her grandmother did more than carry away the woman Alexandra loved best. It also removed an influence of stability and a source of encouragement. Ever since her marriage, the Empress and the Queen had written regularly, although Alexandra destroyed their letters in March 1917. The Queen had always worried about Alexandra’s excessive shyness, fearing that the dramatic ascent in a single month from being a German princess to becoming Empress of Russia had left no time for developing ease in society.
This had, in fact, been a problem since Alexandra’s first public appearance as Empress in the winter season of 1896. As she stood beside her husband at a ball, Alexandra’s eyes were cold with fright and her tongue was stilled by nervousness. That night, Alexandra later admitted, she was terrified and would have liked to sink beneath the polished floors. But she stayed until midnight and then gratefully swept away.
The new Empress’s first receptions for the ladies of St. Petersburg were blighted by the same shyness. As the reception line filed past, the invited ladies found themselves confronting a tall figure standing silent and cold before them. Alexandra rarely smiled and never spoke more than an automatic word of welcome. In an awkward way, her hand hung in the air, waiting to be kissed. Everything about her, the tight mouth, her occasional glance down the line to see how many more were coming, plainly indicated that the young Empress’s only real desire was to get away as soon as possible.
It did not take many of these balls and receptions before nervousness and uncertainty turned on both sides to active dislike. Alexandra’s childhood in the little court at Darmstadt, her training under the strict Victorian standards of Windsor, had not prepared her for the gay, loose society of St. Petersburg. She was shocked by the all-night parties, the flaunted love affairs, the malicious gossip. “The heads of the young ladies of St. Petersburg are filled with nothing but thoughts of young officers,” she declared, accurately enough. Scandalized by the flourishing love affairs among the aristocracy, Alexandra took the palace invitation lists and began crossing off names. As one prominent name after another disappeared, the list was decimated.
Many people in St. Petersburg society quickly dismissed the young Empress as a prude and a bore. There is a story that at one of her first court balls she saw a young woman dancing whose decolletage she considered too low. One of her ladies-in-waiting was sent to tell the offender: “Madame, Her Majesty wants me to tell you that in Hesse-Darmstadt we don’t wear our dresses that way.”
“Really?” the young woman is said to have replied, at the same time pulling the front of her dress still lower. “Pray tell Her Majesty that in Russia we
Alexandra’s new zeal over Orthodoxy embarrassed society. Themselves Orthodox from birth, they thought of the Empress with her aggressive collecting of rare icons, her wide reading of church history, her pilgrimages, her talks about abbots and holy hermits, as crankish. When she tried to organize a handiwork society in St. Petersburg whose members would knit three garments a year for the poor, most St. Petersburg ladies declared that they had no time for such rubbish.
Members of the Imperial family resented the way the Empress seemed to seal them off from the palace and the Tsar. Large and scattered though it was, the Russian Imperial family, like most Russian families, had always been closely knit. Uncles and aunts and cousins were accustomed to frequent visits and invitations to dine. Anxious to be alone with her young husband, Alexandra was slow to issue these invitations. The family became indignant. Imperial grand duchesses, themselves the sisters or daughters of a tsar, huffed that a mere German princess should attempt to come between them and their prerogatives.
Society enjoyed the friction between the two Empresses, Alexandra and Marie, siding openly with Marie and talking longingly of gayer days. But Marie lived mostly abroad, either in Copenhagen or visiting her sister, now Queen Alexandra of England, or staying in her villa on the French Riviera.
Perhaps, because of the shyness she carried from childhood, the Empress Alexandra could never successfully have acted the public role demanded of her. Yet, in addition to her own personality, every happenstance conspired against her. Marie had lived in Russia for seventeen years before she came to the throne; Alexandra barely one month. The new Empress spoke almost no Russian. Unable to grasp the intricate ranking of the court, she made errors and gave offense. Once she was Empress, there was no way for her to make friends; ladies could not simply drop in on her or casually invite her for tea. Her sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth, who might have acted as a bridge between the throne and society, had moved to Moscow. Alexandra’s private plans to start giving lunches were interrupted by her recurring pregnancies and long confinements. Childbearing was not easy for her and, long before each birth was due, she canceled all appointments and went to bed. After the birth, she insisted on nursing each child and disliked being far from the nursery.
Between the Empress and the aristocracy it became an unhappy cycle of dislike and rebuff. In her own mind, Alexandra found the explanation for this by telling herself that they were not real Russians at all. Neither the jaded nobility, nor the workers who went on strike, nor the revolutionary students, nor the difficult ministers had anything to do with the real people of Russia. The real people were the peasants she had seen during her summer at Ilinskoe. These humble people, multiplied into millions, who walked through the birch groves on their way to the fields, who fell on their knees to pray for the Tsar, were the heart and soul of Holy Russia. To them, she was certain, she was more than just an Empress; she was
* The strange phenomenon of powerful chiefs of state withholding vital government information from their immediate heirs has not been restricted to Russia or autocracies. Only when he suddenly became President on the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt did Harry Truman learn that the United States was in the final stage of an immense effort to build an atomic bomb.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ALEXANDRA’S view of life in the provinces, although oversimplified, was generally accurate. Even at the turn of the century, the Russian countryside was studded with manor houses belonging to loyal country squires, and with villages inhabited by peasants whose fathers had been serfs and who themselves still clung to traditional patterns of life. Each sleepy provincial town was much like the next: at the top a crust of local nobility and gentry, then the bureaucrats and professional classes—judges, lawyers, doctors and teachers—and below them, priests and clerks, shopkeepers, artisans, workmen and servants. At times a current of unrest, a tricklet of liberalism, might run through one of these towns, but overwhelmingly the prevailing mood was conservative. Ironically, exactly such a town was Simbirsk on the Middle Volga, the childhood home of two men who in succession would play major roles in the overthrow of the Russia of Nicholas and Alexandra. One was Alexander Fedorovich Kerensky. The other, eleven years Kerensky’s senior, was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, called Lenin.
Simbirsk in the 1880’s and 1890’s was an isolated town perched on a hill above the Volga River. There was no railroad, and although paddlewheel steamers stopped at its quay during the summer, in winter the only highway was the ice of the frozen river. On the crest of the hill, looking out over the river and the meadowland stretching away to the eastern horizon, stood the town’s cathedral, the governor’s mansion, the high school, the library. “From the summit right down to the waterside,” recalled Kerensky, “stretched luxuriant apple and cherry orchards. In the spring the whole mountain-side was white with blossom, fragrant, and at night breathless with the songs of the
