Nicholas and Alexandra

WILLIAM II, KAISER OF GERMANY, 1888—1918 (Willy)

First cousin of Empress Alexandra. Distant cousin of Nicholas II

COUNT VLADIMIR FREDERICKS

Minister of the Imperial Court

COUNT PAUL BENCKENDORFF

Grand Marshal of the Imperial Court, Fredericks’ subordinate

DR. EUGENE BOTKIN

Court physician. Botkin attended primarily the Empress Alexandra

DR. FEDOROV

A doctor who cared for the Tsarevich Alexis

DR. VLADIMIR DEREVENKO

A doctor permanently assigned to the Tsarevich Alexis

PIERRE GILLIARD

Swiss tutor of the Tsarevich Alexis

ANNA VYRUBOVA

The Empress Alexandra’s closest friend and confidante

DEREVENKO

A sailor assigned to watch the Tsarevich Alexis night and day. No relation to Dr. Derevenko

MATHILDE KSCHESSINSKA

Ballerina. Mistress of Nicholas II before his marriage

GREGORY RASPUTIN

A Siberian peasant

ALEXANDER KERENSKY

Prime Minister of the Provisional Government, 1917

VLADIMIR ULYANOV (Lenin)

First leader of the Soviet State

PART ONE

NOTE

The titles EMPEROR and TSAR, and EMPRESS and TSARITSA, are all correct and are used interchangeably in this book. EMPEROR was a higher rank, first taken by Peter the Great, but Nicholas II, a Slavophile, preferred the older, more Russian title, TSAR.

Dates in Russian history can be confusing. Until 1918, Russia adhered to the old Julian calendar. In the nineteenth century, this calendar was twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar used almost everywhere else. In the twentieth century, the Russian calendar fell thirteen days behind. In this book, all dates are given according to the newer, Gregorian calendar, except those specifically indicated as Old Style (O.S.).

Every Russian has three names: his first or Christian name; the name of his father with VICH added (meaning SON OF); and his family name. Thus, Nicholas was Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov. For women, the second name is their father’s with EVNA or OVNA (DAUGHTER OF) added. The Tsar’s youngest daughter was Anastasia Nicolaevna.

CHAPTER ONE

1894: Imperial Russia

FROM the Baltic city of St. Petersburg, built on a river marsh in a far northern corner of the empire, the Tsar ruled Russia. So immense were the Tsar’s dominions that, as night began to fall along their western borders, day already was breaking on their Pacific coast. Between these distant frontiers lay a continent, one sixth of the land surface of the globe. Through the depth of Russia’s winters, millions of tall pine trees stood silent under heavy snows. In the summer, clusters of white-trunked birch trees rustled their silvery leaves in the slanting rays of the afternoon sun. Rivers, wide and flat, flowed peacefully through the grassy plains of European Russia toward a limitless southern horizon. Eastward, in Siberia, even mightier rivers rolled north to the Arctic, sweeping through forests where no human had ever been, and across desolate marshes of frozen tundra.

Here and there, thinly scattered across the broad land, lived the one hundred and thirty million subjects of the Tsar: not only Slavs but Baits, Jews, Germans, Georgians, Armenians, Uzbeks and Tartars. Some were clustered in provincial cities and towns, dominated by onion-shaped church domes rising above the white-walled houses. Many more lived in straggling villages of unpainted log huts. Next to doorways, a few sunflowers might grow. Geese and pigs wandered freely through the muddy street. Both men and women worked all summer, planting and scything the high silken grain before the coming of the first September frost. For six interminable months of winter, the open country became a wasteland of freezing whiteness. Inside their huts, in an atmosphere thick with the aroma of steaming clothes and boiling tea, the peasants sat around their huge clay stoves and argued and pondered the dark mysteries of nature and God.

In the country, the Russian people lived their lives under a blanket of silence. Most died in the villages where they were born. Three fourths of them were peasants, freed from the land a generation before by the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs. But freedom did not produce food. When famine came and the black earth cracked for lack of rain, and the grain withered and crumbled to dust still on the stalks, then the peasants tore the thatch from their roofs to feed their livestock and sent their sons trudging into town to look for work. In famine, the hungry moujiks wrapped themselves in ragged cloaks and stood all day in silence along the snowy roads. Noble ladies, warm in furs, drove their troikas through the stricken countryside, delivering with handsome gestures of their slender arms a spray of silver coins. Soon, along came the tax collector to gather up the coins and ask for others.

When the moujiks grumbled, a squadron of Cossacks rode into town, with lances in their black-gloved hands and whips and sabers swinging from their saddles. Troublemakers were flogged, and bitterness flowed with blood. Landowner, police, local governor and functionaries were roundly cursed by Russia’s peasants. But never the Tsar. The Tsar, far away in a place nearer heaven than earth, did no wrong. He was the Batiushka-Tsar, the Father of the Russian people, and he did not know what suffering they had to endure. “It is very high up to God! It is very far to the Tsar!” said the Russian proverb. If only we could get to the Tsar and tell him, our troubles would be at an end—so runs the plot of a hundred Russian fairy tales.

As the end of the century approached, the life of many of these scattered towns and villages was stirring. The railroad was coming. During these years, Russia built railroads faster than any other country in Europe. As in the American West, railroads bridged the vast spaces, linked farms to cities, industries to markets. Travelers could step aboard a train in Moscow and, after a day in a cozy compartment, sipping tea and watching the snowbound countryside float past, descend onto a station platform in St. Petersburg. In 1891 the Imperial government had begun the construction of Russia’s greatest railway, the Trans-Siberian. Beginning in the eastern suburbs of Moscow, the ribbon of track would stretch more than four thousand miles to the Pacific Ocean.

Then, as now, Moscow was the hub of Russia, the center of railroads, waterways, trade and commerce.