court balls would be held again, now that the Tsar’s daughters were growing up. Grand Duchess Olga, golden- haired and blue-eyed, had already made her first appearances at St. Petersburg balls. Grand Duchess Tatiana, slender, with dark hair and amber eyes, was ready to be presented. The court balls did not take place that winter, but the social event of the season was a ball which the Dowager Empress gave for her granddaughters at the Anitchkov Palace. The Empress came, but left at midnight, and it was the Tsar who remained until 4:30 a.m. to escort his daughters home. On the train back to Tsarskoe Selo, he sipped a cup of tea and listened while the girls discussed the party and planned how late they would sleep the next morning.
Beyond the circle of sparkling light, the enthusiasm of the tercentenary quickly dissipated. Unrest among the workers and peasants continued to grow. In April 1912, an incident had taken place in the remote Lena goldfields of Siberia. The miners had gone on strike and were walking in protest toward the office of the Anglo-Russian Lena Gold Mining Company when a drunken police officer ordered his men to open fire. Two hundred people were killed, and Russia seethed with anger. In the Duma and the press, the massacre was called “a second Bloody Sunday.” The government ordered a Commission of Inquiry, and the Duma, unwilling to rely on the report of a government commission, decided to conduct its own investigation. The head of the Duma commission was Alexander Kerensky.
Since leaving the university in St. Petersburg in 1905, Kerensky had become a familiar figure as he defended political prisoners in courtrooms all across Russia. Although his arguments and his successes frequently were embarrassing to the government, “I was not subject to the slightest pressure,” he said. “No one could oust us from the courts, no one could lift a finger against us.” The same sense of legal fair play prevailed at the Lena goldfields investigation: “The government commission sat in one house and we sat in another. Both commissions were summoning and cross-examining witnesses … both were recording the testimony of the employees, both were writing official reports.… The gold fields administration greatly resented our intrusion but neither the … [government investigators] nor the local officials interfered in any way; on the contrary … the Governor actually helped.” Kerensky’s report bitterly damned the police, and not long afterward the Minister of Interior resigned.
From the goldfields, Kerensky went straight to the Volga region to run for election to the Fourth Duma. He ran as a critic of the government, was elected, and for the two years before the war he traveled across Russia making speeches, holding meetings and doing “strenuous political organizing and revolutionary work … The whole of Russia,” he wrote, “was now covered with a network of labor and liberal organizations—the co-operatives, trade unions, labor clubs.” It was no longer even necessary for agitators to be secretive about their work. “In those days a man as openly and bitterly hostile to the government as myself toured from town to town quite freely making speeches at public meetings. At these meetings, I criticized the government sharply.… [Never] did it enter the heads of the Tsarist Cheka to infringe on my parliamentary inviolability.”
Kerensky’s work, and that of others like him, had an effect. In 1913, the year of the tercentenary, seven hundred thousand Russian workers were on strike. By January 1914, the number had grown to one million. In the Baku region, fighting broke out between the oil workers and the police, and, as it had always been in Russia, the Cossacks came at a gallop. By July 1914, the number of strikers had swollen to one and a half million. In St. Petersburg, mobs of strikers were smashing windows and erecting barricades in the streets. That month, Count Pourtales, the German Ambassador, repeatedly assured the Kaiser that in these chaotic circumstances Russia could not possibly fight.
The end of the Old World was very near. After three hundred years of Romanov rule, the final storm was about to break over Imperial Russia.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
BY the spring of 1914, the nine-year-old Tsarevich had made a good recovery from the attack at Spala eighteen months before. His leg had straightened and, to his parents’ delight, he walked with only a trace of a limp. In celebration of Alexis’s return to health, the Tsar decided one clear May morning to abandon his papers and take his son on an outing. The excursion from Livadia into the mountains was to be entirely male. Alexis was overjoyed.
Two touring cars set out after breakfast. Alexis and his father were in the first, along with Gilliard and an officer from the
“The day drew to a close,” Gilliard continued, “and we were quite sorry to have to start back. The Tsar was in high spirits during the drive. We had an impression that this holiday devoted to his son had been a tremendous pleasure to him. For a few hours, he had escaped his imperial duties.”
Despite her shyness and the close family circle that surrounded her, talk of marriage began to focus that year on eighteen-year-old Grand Duchess Olga. A match with Edward, the Prince of Wales, was mentioned. Nothing came of it, and the Prince remained unmarried until 1936, when he gave up his throne to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson. More serious discussion centered on Crown Prince Carol of Rumania. Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, was an advocate of this match; he saw in it a possibility of detaching Rumania from her alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Nicholas and Alexandra were receptive to Carol’s suit, but Olga herself was implacably opposed.
On June 13, the Russian Imperial family paid a brief, formal visit to the Rumanian Black Sea port of Constanza. Carol and his family waited on the pier as the
In that sense, the visit was a waste of time. Even before the
Olga’s parents respected her feelings. Alexandra, sitting one day on the terrace at Livadia, explained their viewpoint to Sazonov. “I think with terror that the time draws near when I shall have to part with my daughters,” she said. “I could desire nothing better than that they should remain in Russia after their marriage. But I have four daughters and it is, of course, impossible. You know how difficult marriages are in reigning families. I know it by experience, although I was never in the position my daughters occupy, being [only] the daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse, and running little risk of being obliged to make a political match. Still, I was once threatened with the danger of marrying without love or even affection, and I vividly remember the torments I endured when … (the Empress named a member of one of the German reigning houses) arrived at Darmstadt and I was informed that he intended to marry me. I did not know him at all and I shall never forget what I suffered when I met him for the first time. My grandmother, Queen Victoria, took pity on me, and I was left in peace. God disposed otherwise of my fate, and granted me undreamed-of happiness. All the more then do I feel it my duty to leave my daughters free to marry according to their inclination. The Emperor will have to decide whether he considers this or that marriage suitable for his daughters, but parental authority must not extend beyond that.”
Carol did not give up hope of marrying a Romanov grand duchess. Two years later, he suggested to Nicholas that he marry Marie, then sixteen. Nicholas laughingly declared that Marie was only a schoolgirl. In 1947, having
