Nicholas and Alexandra

muttered words were “It is nothing.”

The assassin, Gabriel Princip, was a native Bosnian of Serb extraction. On trial, the boy declared that he had acted to “kill an enemy of the South Slavs” and to “avenge the Serbian people.” The Archduke, Princip explained to the court, was “an energetic man who as ruler would have carried through ideas and reforms which stood in our way.” Years later, after Princip had died of tuberculosis in an Austrian prison, the truth came out: the plot had been laid in Belgrade, capital of Serbia, by the Serbian terrorist society known as the Black Hand. Its leader was none other than the chief of Serbian Army Intelligence.

The Austrian government reacted violently to Princip’s act. The Heir to the Throne had been killed in a Slav province by a Serb. The time and the pretext had arrived to crush “the Serbian viper.” Field Marshal von Conrad- Hotzendorf immediately declared that the assassination was “Serbia’s declaration of war on Austria-Hungary.” Count Berchtold, the Chancellor, who hitherto had opposed preventive war against Serbia, changed his mind and demanded that “the Monarchy with unflinching hand … tear asunder the threads which its foes are endeavoring to weave into a net above its head.” The most candid appraisal of the situation came in a personal letter from the Emperor Franz Joseph to the Kaiser:

“The bloody deed was not the work of a single individual but a well organized plot whose threads extend to Belgrade. Although it may be impossible to establish the complicity of the Serbian government, no one can doubt that its policy of uniting all Southern Slavs under the Serbian flag encourages such crimes and that the continuation of this situation is a chronic peril for my house and my territories. Serbia,” the Emperor concluded, “must be eliminated as a political factor in the Balkans.”

Despite the excitement in Vienna, most Europeans refused to consider the Archduke’s assassination a final act of doom. War, revolution, conspiracy and assassinations were the normal ingredients of Balkan politics. “Nothing to cause anxiety,” said the Paris newspaper Figaro. “Terrible shock for the dear old Emperor,” Britain’s King George V wrote in his diary. The Kaiser received the news three hours later aboard his sailing yacht, Meteor, as he was setting out from Kiel to take part in a race. A motor launch sped toward the yacht and William leaned over the stern to hear the shouted news. “The cowardly detestable crime … has shaken me to the depths of my soul,” he wired his Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg. But William did not think that the assassination meant war. What appalled him was the occurrence of that most monstrous of crimes, a regicide.

   Three days before the events at Sarajevo, the Russian Imperial family sailed from Peterhof on their annual summer cruise along the Baltic coast. As they were boarding the Standart, Alexis, jumping for the ladder leading up to the deck of the yacht, caught his foot on a rung and twisted his ankle. Toward evening that day, he began to feel serious pain.

The following morning, the Standart was anchored in the heart of one of the Finnish fjords. Gilliard, making his way to Alexis’s cabin, found both Dr. Botkin and the Empress with his pupil, who was suffering intensely. The hemorrhage into the ankle was continuing, the joint swollen and rigid. Alexis was weeping; every few minutes, as the throbbing pain mounted, he screamed. Alexandra’s face was white. Gilliard went back to collect his books and then settled down to read to him as a distraction. Despite the illness, the cruise continued.

It was aboard the Standart that Nicholas and Alexandra learned what had happened at Sarajevo. Because neither he nor his ministers expected the assassination to lead to war, the Tsar did not return to his capital. On the day following the Archduke’s death, other news, even more sensational for every Russian, arrived on the Standart. It passed quickly through the ship in excited whispers: an attempt had been made on Rasputin’s life. None dared speak openly, but almost every person aboard hoped that the starets was finished. Alexandra, struggling with Alexis’s illness, became frantic with worry. She prayed continually and telegraphed daily to Pokrovskoe.

What had happened was this: Rasputin, returning to his village on June 27, had been followed there without his knowledge by Khina Gusseva, Iliodor’s agent. Gusseva caught the starets alone in a village street. She accosted him and, when he turned, drove Iliodor’s knife deep into his stomach. “I have killed the Antichrist,” she screamed hysterically and then attempted unsuccessfully to stab herself.

Rasputin was gravely hurt; the slash in his stomach had exposed his entrails. He was taken to a hospital in Tyumen, where a specialist sent by his friends in St. Petersburg performed an operation. For two weeks, his life was uncertain. Then, with the enormous physical strength which marked his life, he began to recover. He remained in bed for the rest of the summer and, accordingly, exercised no influence on the momentous events which were to come. Gusseva was placed on trial, declared insane and put into an asylum.

It was sheer coincidence that placed the two assassination attempts, the one at Sarajevo and the one at Pokrovskoe, so close together in time. Yet the coincidence alone is enough to provoke a tantalizing bit of speculation: Suppose the outcome of these two violent episodes had been reversed. Suppose the Hapsburg Prince, a well-meaning man, the heir and the hope of a crumbling dynasty, had lived, while the surging life and mischievous influence of the Siberian peasant had ended forever. How different the course of that long summer—and perhaps of our twentieth century—might have been.

   On July 19, the Standart returned its passengers to Peterhof. Alexis, still suffering from a swollen ankle, was carried ashore. Nicholas and Alexandra plunged immediately into preparations for the state visit of the President of France, Raymond Poincare, who was due in St. Petersburg the following day.

Raymond Poincare was ten years old in 1870 when Prussian armies seized his native province of Lorraine, exiling him for most of his life from the place of his birth. Poincare became a lawyer and then, successively, Foreign Minister, Premier and President of France. A short, dark-haired, robust man, he impressed all who met him. Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, reported to the Tsar: “In him [Poincare], Russia possesses a reliable and true friend endowed with a statesmanlike understanding that is exceptional and with an indomitable will.” The German ambassador in Paris had much the same impression. “M. Poincare differs from many of his countrymen by a deliberate avoidance of that smooth and fulsome tone characteristic of the Frenchman,” he wrote. “His manner is measured, his words unadorned and carefully weighed. He makes the impression of a man with a lawyer’s mind who expresses his conditions with stubborn emphasis and pursues his aims with a powerful will.” Nicholas, who had met Poincare once before, said simply, “I like him very much. He is a calm and clever man of small build.”

Only a few weeks before Poincare’s arrival in Russia, he had been preceded to St. Petersburg by the new French Ambassador, Maurice Paleologue. A veteran career diplomat, Paleologue was also a brilliant writer whose talents later brought him membership in the French Academy. From the moment of his arrival in Russia, Paleologue began keeping a diary of people, events, conversations and impressions, providing an extraordinarily vivid account of Imperial Russia in the Great War.

Paleologue’s diary began on July 20, 1914, the day that Poincare arrived in Russia. The President was steaming up the Baltic aboard the battleship France; that morning the Tsar invited Paleologue to lunch with him aboard his yacht before the arrival of the France. “Nicholas II [was] in the uniform of an admiral,” wrote Paleologue. “Luncheon was served immediately. We had at least an hour and three quarters before us until the arrival of the France. But the Tsar likes to linger over his meals. There are always long intervals between the courses in which he chats and smokes cigarettes.…” Paleologue mentioned the possibility of war. “The Tsar reflected a moment. ‘I can’t believe the Emperor [William II] wants war.… If you knew him as I do! If you knew how much theatricality there is in his posing!’ Coffee had just arrived when the French squadron was signalled. The Tsar made me go up on the bridge with him. It was a magnificent spectacle. In a quivering silvery light, the France slowly surged forward over the turquoise and emerald waves, leaving a long white furrow behind her. Then she stopped majestically. The mighty warship which had brought the head of the French state is well worthy of her name. She was indeed France coming to Russia. I felt my heart beating. For a few minutes there was a prodigious din in the harbor; the guns and the shore batteries firing, the crews cheering, the Marseillaise answering the Russian national anthem, the cheers of thousands of spectators who had come from St. Petersburg on pleasure boats.”

That night, at Peterhof, the Tsar welcomed his guest at a formal banquet. “I shall long remember the dazzling display of jewels on the women’s shoulders,” wrote Paleologue. “It was simply a fantastic shower of