worried. A hemorrhage began this morning without the slightest cause from the navel of our small Alexis. It lasted with but a few interruptions until evening. We had to call … the surgeon Fedorov who at seven o’clock applied a bandage. The child was remarkably quiet and even merry but it was a dreadful thing to have to live through such anxiety.”
The next day: “This morning there again was some blood on the bandage but the bleeding stopped at noon. The child spent a quiet day and his healthy appearance somewhat quieted our anxiety.”
On the third day, the bleeding stopped. But the fear born those days in the Tsar and his wife continued to grow. The months passed and Alexis stood up in his crib and began to crawl and to try to walk. When he stumbled and fell, little bumps and bruises appeared on his arms and legs. Within a few hours, they grew to dark blue swellings. Beneath the skin, his blood was failing to clot. The terrifying suspicion of his parents was confirmed. Alexis had hemophilia.
This grim knowledge, unknown outside the family, lay in Nicholas’s heart even as he learned of Bloody Sunday and Tsushima, and when he signed the Manifesto. It would remain with him for the rest of his life. It was during this period that those who saw Nicholas regularly, without knowing about Alexis, began to notice a deepening fatalism in the Tsar. Nicholas had always been struck by the fact that he was born on the day in the Russian calendar set aside for Job. With the passage of time, this fatalism came to dominate his outlook. “I have a secret conviction,” he once told one of his ministers, “that I am destined for a terrible trial, that I shall not receive my reward on this earth.”
It is one of the supreme ironies of history that the blessed birth of an only son should have proved the mortal blow. Even as the saluting cannons boomed and the flags waved, Fate had prepared a terrible story. Along with the lost battles and sunken ships, the bombs, the revolutionaries and their plots, the strikes and revolts, Imperial Russia was toppled by a tiny defect in the body of a little boy. Hidden from public view, veiled in rumor, working from within, this unseen tragedy would change the history of Russia and the world.
* Anti-Semitism, an endemic disease in Russia, stemmed from the oldest traditions of the Orthodox Church. “To the devoutly … Orthodox Russians,” explains a Jewish historian, “… the Jew was an infidel, the poisoner of the true faith, the killer of Christ.” Every tsar supported this faith. Peter the Great, refusing to admit Jewish merchants to Russia, declared, “It is my endeavor to eradicate evil, not to multiply it.” Catherine the Great endorsed Peter’s decision, saying, “From the enemies of Christ, I desire neither gain nor profit.” It was Catherine who, upon absorbing heavily Jewish regions of eastern Poland into her empire, established the Jewish Pale of Settlement, an area in Poland and the Ukraine to which all Russian Jews supposedly were restricted. The restrictions were porous, but the life of a Jew in nineteenth-century Russia remained subject to harassment and persecution. That this antagonism was religious rather than racial was repeatedly illustrated by cases of Jews who gave up their faith, accepted Orthodoxy and moved freely into the general structure of Russian society.
* The era was one of bitter labor strife in all industrial nations. In the United States, for example, during the Pullman strike of 1894, Judge William Howard Taft, a future President, wrote to his wife, “It will be necessary for the military to kill some of the mob before the trouble can be stayed. They have killed only six as yet. This is hardly enough to make an impression.” In the end, 30 were killed, 60 wounded and 700 arrested. Six years later, Theodore Roosevelt, campaigning for Vice President, said privately, “The sentiment now animating a large proportion of our people can only be suppressed … by taking ten or a dozen of their leaders out, standing them against the wall and shooting them dead. I believe it will come to that. These leaders are planning a social revolution and the subversion of the American Republic.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER TEN
THE secret of Alexis’s disease was hidden and carefully guarded within the inner world of Tsarskoe Selo, “the Tsar’s village.” “Tsarskoe Selo was a world apart, an enchanted fairyland to which only a small number of people had the right of entry,” wrote Gleb Botkin, the son of Nicholas II’s court physician. “It became a legendary place. To the loyal monarchists, it was a sort of terrestrial paradise, the abode of the earthly gods. To the revolutionaries, it was a sinister place where blood-thirsty tyrants were hatching their terrible plots against the innocent population.”
Tsarskoe Selo was a magnificent symbol, a supreme gesture, of the Russian autocracy. At the edge of the great St. Petersburg plain, fifteen miles south of the capital, a succession of Russian tsars and empresses had created an isolated, miniature world, as artificial and fantastic as a precisely ordered mechanical toy. Around the high iron fence of the Imperial Park, bearded Cossack horsemen in scarlet tunics, black fur caps, boots and shining sabers rode night and day, on ceaseless patrol. Inside the park, monuments, obelisks and triumphal arches studded eight hundred acres of velvet green lawn. An artificial lake, big enough for small sailboats, could be emptied and filled like a bathtub. At one end of the lake stood a pink Turkish bath; not far off, a dazzling red-and-gold Chinese pagoda crowned an artificial hillock. Winding paths led through groves of ancient trees, their massive branches latticed for safety with cables and iron bars. A pony track curved through gardens planted with exotic flowers. Scattered in clumps throughout the park were lilacs planted by a dozen empresses. Over the years, the shrubs had grown into lush and fragrant jungles. When the spring rain fell, the sweet smell of wet lilacs drenched the air.
Tsarskoe Selo sprang up when Catherine I, the lusty wife of Peter the Great, wanted a country retreat from the granite city her husband was building on the Neva marshes. Peter’s daughter, Elizabeth, displayed her parents’ instinct for grand construction. At a cost of ten million roubles, she built the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and then turned her attention to Tsarskoe Selo. Disliking the joggling carriages which bore her in and out of the city, she began constructing a canal so that she could make the journey entirely by water. Elizabeth died before the canal was finished, but the completed sections provided excellent bathing for the inhabitants of Tsarskoe Selo.
The two palaces standing five hundred yards apart in the Imperial Park during the reign of Nicholas II had been built by Empress Elizabeth and by Catherine the Great. In 1752, Elizabeth ordered the famous architect Rastrelli to build a palace at Tsarskoe Selo which would outshine Versailles. Rastrelli erected the big blue-and-white palace now called the Catherine Palace, an ornate structure with more than two hundred rooms. It pleased Elizabeth so much that she made Rastrelli a Russian count. Mingling taste with exquisite diplomacy, the French ambassador at Elizabeth’s court told the Empress that her beautiful palace lacked only one thing—a cover of glass to protect so breathtaking a masterpiece. In 1729, Catherine the Great commissioned another Italian, Quarenghi, to build a second, smaller palace at Tsarskoe Selo for her beloved grandson, the boy who was to become Alexander I. Quarenghi’s building, the Alexander Palace, was as simple as the Catherine Palace was ornate. It was here, to the Alexander Palace, that Nicholas II brought his bride to live in the spring of 1895. It remained their home for twenty- two years.
In describing palaces, simplicity becomes a relative term. The Alexander Palace had over one hundred rooms. From the tall windows of the Catherine Palace, the Tsar and his wife gazed down on terraces, pavilions, statues, gardens and ornate carriages drawn by magnificent horses. Inside the palace were long, polished halls and tall, shaded rooms furnished in marble, mahogany, gold, crystal, velvet and silk. Beneath huge chandeliers, rich Oriental rugs were spread on gleaming parquet floors. In winter, sapphire-and-silver brocade curtains helped to shut out the murky chills of Russian twilight. Large multicolored porcelain stoves warmed the cold rooms, mingling the smell of burning wood with the fragrant scent provided by smoking pots of incense carried by footmen from room to room. In every season, Empress Alexandra filled the palace with flowers. When autumn frosts ended the growing in the gardens and greenhouses at Tsarskoe Selo, flowers were brought by train from the Crimea. Every room had its swirl
