Nicholas and Alexandra (20 page)

In parts of Russia, the Manifesto, by stripping the local police of many of their powers, led directly to violence. In the Baltic states, the peasants rose against their German landlords and proclaimed a rash of little village republics. In the Ukraine and White Russia, bands of Ultra-Rightists, calling themselves Black Hundreds, turned against

the familiar scapegoats, the Jews. In Kiev and Odessa, pogroms erupted, often with the open support of the Church. In the Trans-Caucasus, similar attacks, under the guise of patriotism and religion, were made on Armenians. In Poland and Finland, the Manifesto was taken as a sign of weakness; there was a sense that the empire was crumbling, and mass demonstrations clamored for autonomy and independence. At Kronstadt on the Baltic and Sevastopol on the Black Sea, there were naval mutinies. In December, the Moscow Soviet led two thousand workers and students to the barricades. For ten days they held off government forces, proclaiming a new "Provisional Government." The revolt was crushed only by bringing from St. Petersburg the Semenovsky Regiment of the Guard, which cleared the streets with artillery and bayonets. During these weeks, Lenin slipped back into Russia to lead the Bolsheviks; the police soon found his trail and he was forced to flit secretly from place to place, diminishing his effectiveness. Still, he was gleeful. "Go ahead and shoot," he cried. "Summon the Austrian and German regiments against the Russian peasants and workers. We are for a broadening of the struggle, we are for an international revolution."

Nicholas, meanwhile, waited impatiently for his experiment in constitutionalism to produce results. As Witte stumbled, the Tsar became bitter. His letters to his mother mark the progression of his dis-illusionments:

November 9: "It is strange that such a clever man [Witte] should be wrong in his forecast of an easy pacification."

November 23: "Everybody is afraid of taking courageous action. I keep trying to force them—even Witte himself—to behave more energetically. With us nobody is accustomed to shouldering responsibility, all expect to be given orders which, however, they disobey as often as not."

December 14: "He [Witte] is now prepared to arrest all the principal leaders of the outbreak. I have been trying for some time past to get him to do it, but he always hoped to be able to manage without drastic measures."

January 25, 1906: "As for Witte, since the happenings in Moscow he has radically changed his views; now he wants to hang and shoot everybody. I have never seen such a chameleon of a man. That, naturally, is the reason why no one believes in him any more."

Feeling his status slipping, Witte tried to recapture the Tsar's good will by cynically chopping away most of the strength from the Manifesto he had only recently written. Without waiting for the Duma

to be elected, Witte arbitrarily drafted a series of Fundamental Laws based on the declaration: "To the Emperor of all the Russias belongs the supreme autocratic power." To make the government financially independent of Duma appropriations, Witte used his own great personal reputation abroad to obtain from France a massive loan of over two billion francs.

Despite these efforts, Sergius Witte took no part in the affairs of the Russian parliament which he had helped to create. On the eve of its first meeting, Nicholas asked for his resignation. Witte pretended to be pleased by the move. "You see before you the happiest of mortals," he said to a colleague. "The Tsar could not have shown me greater mercy than by dismissing me from this prison where I have been languishing. I am going abroad at once to take a cure. I do not want to hear about anything and shall merely imagine what is happening over here. All Russia is one vast madhouse." This was nonsense, of course; for the rest of his life, Witte itched to return to office. His hopes were illusory. "As long as I live, I will never trust that man again with the smallest thing," said Nicholas. "I had quite enough of last year's experiment. It is still like a nightmare to me." Eventually, Witte returned to Russia, and Nicholas made him a grant of two hundred thousand roubles from the Treasury. But in the nine years which were to pass before Witte died, he would see the Tsar only twice again, each time for a brief interview of twenty minutes.

In all these months of war with Japan and the 1905 Revolution, Nicholas and Alexandra had had only one brief moment of unshadowed joy. On August 12, 1904, Nicholas wrote in his diary: "A great never-to-be-forgotten day when the mercy of God has visited us so clearly. Alix gave birth to a son at one o'clock. The child has been called Alexis."

The long-awaited boy arrived suddenly. At noon on a hot summer day, the Tsar and his wife sat down to lunch at Peterhof. The Empress had just managed to finish her soup when she was forced to excuse herself and hurry to her room. Less than an hour later, the boy, weighing eight pounds, was born. As the saluting cannon at Peterhof began to boom, other guns sounded at Kronstadt. Twenty miles away, in the heart of St. Petersburg, the batteries of the Fortress of Peter and Paul began to thunder—this time the salute was three hundred guns. Across Russia, cannons roared, churchbells clanged

and flags waved. Alexis, named after Tsar Alexis, Nicholas's favorite, was the first male heir born to a reigning Russian tsar since the seventeenth century. It seemed an omen of hope.

His Imperial Highness Alexis Nicolaievich, Sovereign Heir Tsarevich, Grand Duke of Russia, was a fat, fair baby with yellow curls and clear blue eyes. As soon as they were permitted, Olga, nine, Tatiana, seven, Marie, five, and Anastasia, three, tiptoed into the nursery to peek into the crib and inspect their infant brother.

The christening of this august little Prince was performed in the Peterhof chapel. Alexis lay on a pillow of cloth of gold in the arms of Princess Marie Golitsyn, a lady-in-waiting who, traditionally, carried Imperial babies to the baptismal font. Because of her advanced age, the Princess came to the ceremony especially equipped. For greater support, the baby's pillow was attached to a broad gold band slung around her shoulders. To keep them from slipping, her shoes were fitted with rubber soles.

The Tsarevich was christened in the presence of most of his large family, including his great-grandfather King Christian IX of Denmark, then in his eighty-seventh year. Only the Tsar and the Empress were absent; custom forbade parents to attend the baptism of their child. The service was performed by Father Yanishev, the elderly priest who had served for years as confessor to the Imperial family. He pronounced the name Alexis, which had been carried by the second Romanov Tsar, Alexis the Peaceful, in the seventeenth century. Then he dipped the new Alexis bodily into the font, and the Tsarevich screeched his fury. As soon as the service was over, the Tsar hurried into the church. He had been waiting anxiously outside, hoping that the aged Princess and the elderly priest would not drop his son into the font. That afternoon, the Imperial couple received a stream of visitors. The Empress, lying on a couch, was seen to smile frequently at the Tsar, who stood nearby.

Six weeks later, in a very different mood, Nicholas wrote again in his diary: "Alix and I have been very much 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.

PART TWO

CHAPTER TEN

The Tsar's Village

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 IPs 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 Catherine the Great and her grandson, Alexander I. In 1776, Catherine ordered the famous architect Rastrelli to build a palace at Tsarskoe Selo which would outshine Versailles. Rastrelli erected the big blue-and-white Catherine Palace, an ornate structure with more than two hundred rooms. It pleased Catherine so much that she made Rastrelli a Russian count. Mingling taste with exquisite diplomacy, the French ambassador at Catherine's court told the Empress that her beautiful palace lacked only one thing—a cover of glass to protect so breathtaking a masterpiece. After Napoleon's defeat in 1812, Alexander I commissioned another Italian, Quarenghi, to build a second, smaller palace at Tsarskoe Selo. 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 1895, in the spring after their marriage. 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 of odors; the sweetness of lilies in tall Chinese vases, the delicate

fragrance of violets and lilies of the valley bunched in silver bowls, the perfume of hyacinths in rare lacquered pots.

To guard this paradise, to tend its lawns and pick its flowers, to groom its horses, polish its motorcars, clean its floors, make its beds, polish its crystal, serve its banquets and bathe and dress its Imperial children took thousands of human hands. Besides the Cossacks, a permanent garrison of five thousand infantrymen carefully chosen from all the regiments of the Imperial Guard provided guard detachments at the palace gates and foot patrols in the Imperial Park. Thirty sentries were always stationed inside the palace, in vestibules, corridors, staircases, kitchens and even in the cellars. The guardsmen were supplemented by plainclothes police who inspected the servants, tradesmen and workmen and kept notebook records of all who came and went. In bad weather, the Tsar could look from any window and see a tall soldier in a long greatcoat, cap and boots pacing his round. Not far away, there was usually a forlorn policeman with galoshes and umbrella.