From that point, through the months left to her to live, Alexandra never wavered.
It was the Empress who took matters in hand. Since the day of the assassination, Anna Vyrubova’s mail had been filled with anonymous threatening letters. By the Empress’s command, Anna was moved for greater safety from her small house to an apartment in the Alexander Palace. Although the Tsar was in the palace, the Empress continued to exert a predominant influence on political affairs. The main telephone in the palace was not on his desk but in her boudoir on a table beneath the portrait of Marie Antoinette. Protopopov’s reports at the palace were given to either Nicholas or Alexandra, whoever was available, sometimes to both of them together. In addition, with her husband’s knowledge, the Empress took to eavesdropping on the Tsar’s official conversations. Kokovtsov sensed something of this kind in his interview. “I thought that the door leading from the [Tsar’s] study to his dressing room was half open, which had never occurred before, and that someone was standing just inside,” he wrote. “It may have been just an illusion but this impression stayed with me throughout my brief audience.” It was not an illusion, but it was a temporary device. Soon afterward, for greater convenience, the Empress had a wooden staircase cut through the walls to a small balcony overlooking the Tsar’s formal audience chamber. There, concealed by curtains, the Empress could lie on a couch and listen in comfort.
In the conduct of Russia’s government, Rasputin’s death changed nothing. Ministers came and went. Trepov, who had replaced Sturmer as Prime Minister in November, was allowed to resign in January to be replaced by Prince Nicholas Golitsyn, an elderly man whom the Empress had known as deputy chairman of one of her charitable committees. Golitsyn was horrified by his appointment and unsuccessfully begged the Tsar to choose another. “If someone else had used the language I used to describe myself, I should have been obliged to challenge him to a duel,” he said.
It made little difference. Protopopov was the only minister in whom the Empress had genuine confidence. The rest of the Cabinet scarcely mattered, and Protopopov rarely bothered even to attend its meetings. Rodzianko refused even to speak to him. At a New Year’s Day reception, the Duma President tried to avoid his former deputy. “I noticed he was following me.… I moved to another part of the hall and stood with my back [to him]. Notwithstanding … Protopopov held out his hand. I replied, ‘Nowhere and never.’ Protopopov … took me in a friendly manner by the elbow, saying, ‘My dear fellow, surely we can come to an understanding.’ I felt disgusted by him. ‘Leave me alone. You are repellent to me,’ I said.”
Dependent, like Rasputin, solely on the favor of the Empress, the Interior Minister hastened to clothe himself in Rasputin’s spiritual trappings. As the
Although the Empress was resolute, she had no joy in her work. Every Thursday evening, a concert of chamber music was given in a palace drawing room by a Rumanian orchestra. The Empress’s chair always was placed near the fire burning in the grate, and she sat absorbed by the music, staring into the glowing flames. On one of these nights, only two weeks before the Revolution, her friend Lili Dehn slid into a chair behind her. “The Empress seemed unusually sad,” she wrote. “I whispered anxiously, ‘Oh, Madame, why are you so sad tonight?’ The Empress turned and looked at me.… ‘Why am I sad, Lili?… I can’t say, really, but … I think my heart is broken.’ ”
A British visitor calling on the Empress during these same weeks was struck by her air of sadness and resignation. General Sir Henry Wilson, visiting Russia with an Allied mission, had known Alexandra as a girl in Darmstadt. Now, “taken down a long passage to the Empress’s own boudoir—a room full of pictures and bric-a- brac …,” he reminded her of “our tennis parties in the old days, 36 years ago, at Darmstadt.… She was so delighted with the reminiscences, and remembered some of the names I had forgotten. After this it was easy. She said her lot was harder than most people’s because she had relations and friends in England, Russia and Germany. She told me of her experiences and her eyes filled with tears. She has a beautiful face, but very, very sad. She is tall and graceful, divides her hair simply on one side, and it is done up at the back. The hair is powdered with grey. When I said I was going to leave her, as she must be tired of seeing strangers and making conversation, she nearly laughed and kept me on for a little while.”
Wilson was moved by this talk. “What a tragedy there is in that life,” he wrote. Nevertheless, when he left Russia a week later, he added, “It seems as certain as anything can be that the Emperor and Empress are riding for a fall. Everyone—officers, merchants, ladies—talks openly of the absolute necessity of doing away with them.”
The killing of Rasputin was a monarchist act. It was intended by the Grand Duke, the Prince and the Right-wing deputy to cleanse the throne and restore the prestige of the dynasty. It was also intended, by removing what they conceived to be the power behind the Empress, to eliminate the Empress herself as a force in the government of Russia. The Tsar, they thought, would then be free to choose ministers and follow policies which would save the monarchy and Russia. This was the hope of many members of the Imperial family, most of whom disliked the murder, but were glad the murdered man was dead.
The Tsar’s punishment of Grand Duke Dmitry and Prince Felix Yussoupov, mild though it was, disappointed these hopes. The family addressed a collective letter to Nicholas which combined a plea for pardon for Dmitry with a request for a responsible ministry. Nicholas, still outraged that members of his family had been involved in the assassination, was further offended by the letter. “I allow no one to give me advice,” he replied indignantly. “A murder is always a murder. In any case, I know that the consciences of several who signed that letter are not clear.” A few days later, hearing that one of the signers, the liberal Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, was going around his Petrograd clubs openly berating the government, the Tsar ordered him to leave the capital and remain in residence on one of his country estates.
The murder, far from closing the breach within the Romanov family, had widened it further. The Dowager Empress was greatly alarmed. “One should … forgive,” Marie wrote from Kiev. “I am sure you are aware yourself how deeply you have offended all the family by your brusque reply, throwing at their heads a dreadful and entirely unjustified accusation. I hope that you will alleviate the fate of poor Dmitry by not leaving him in Persia.… Poor Uncle Paul [Dmitry’s father] wrote me in despair that he had not even been given a chance to say goodbye.… It is not like you to behave this way.… It upsets me very much.”
From his home in Kiev, the Tsar’s cousin and brother-in-law Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich hurried to Tsarskoe Selo to plead that the Empress withdraw from politics and the Tsar grant a government acceptable to the Duma. This was the “Sandro” of Nicholas’s youth, the gay companion of his suppers with Kschessinska, the husband of his sister Xenia and the father-in-law of Prince Felix Yussoupov. He found the Empress lying in bed, dressed in a white negligee embroidered with lace. Although the Tsar was present, sitting and quietly smoking on the other side of their large double bed, the Grand Duke spoke plainly: “Your interference with affairs of state is causing harm … to Nicky’s prestige. I have been your faithful friend, Alix, for twenty-four years … as a friend, I point out to you that all the classes of the population are opposed to your policies. You have a beautiful family of children, why can you not … please, Alix, leave the cares of state to your husband?”
When the Empress replied that it was impossible for an autocrat to share his powers with a parliament, the Grand Duke said, “You are very much mistaken, Alix. Your husband ceased to be an autocrat on October 17, 1905.”
The interview ended badly, with Grand Duke Alexander shouting in a wild rage: “Remember, Alix, I remained silent for thirty months. For thirty months I never said … a word to you about the disgraceful goings on in our government, better to say in
One branch of the Imperial family, the “Vladimirs,” were not content to write letters, but talked openly of a palace revolution which would replace their cousin by force. Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna and Grand Dukes Cyril, Boris and Andrei—the widow and sons of the Tsar’s eldest uncle, Grand Duke Vladimir—carried resentments which stretched deep into the past. Vladimir himself, a forceful, ambitious man, always jealous of his older brother, Tsar
