Nicholas and Alexandra (28 page)

obviously painful gasps. I often saw her lips turn blue. Constant worry over Alexis had completely undermined her health." Dr. Botkin, who came every day at nine in the morning and five in the afternoon to listen to her heart, mentioned years later to an officer in Siberia that the Empress has "inherited a family weakness of the blood vessels" which often led to "progressive hysteria." In modern medical terminology, the Empress Alexandra undoubtedly was suffering from psychosomatic anxiety symptoms brought on by worry over the health of her son.

Alexandra's own letters occasionally mentioned her poor health. In 1911, she wrote to her former tutor, Miss Jackson: "I have been ill nearly all the time. . . . The children are growing up quite fast. . . . I send them to reviews with their father and once they went to a big military luncheon ... as I could not go—they must get accustomed to replace me as I rarely can appear anywhere, and when I do, am afterwards long laid up—overtired muscles of the heart."

To her sister Princess Victoria of Battenberg she wrote: "Don't think my ill health depresses me personally. I don't care except to see my dear ones suffer on my account and that I cannot fulfill my duties. But once God sends such a cross it must be borne. ... I have had so much, that, willingly I give up any pleasure—they mean so little to me, and my family life is such an ideal one, that it is a recompense for anything I cannot take part in. Baby [Alexis] is growing a little companion to his father. They row together daily. All 5 lunch with me even when I am laid up."

Alexandra's inability to participate in public life worried her husband. "She keeps to her bed most of the day, does not receive anyone, does not come out to lunches and remains on the balcony day after day," he wrote to his mother. "Botkin has persuaded her to go to Nauheim [a German health spa] for a cure in the early autumn. It is very important for her to get better, for her own sake, and the children's and mine. I am completely run down mentally by worrying over her health."

Marie was sympathetic. "It is too sad and painful to see her [Alexandra] always ailing and incapable of taking part in anything. You have enough worries in life as it is without having the ordeal added of seeing the person you love most in the world suffer. . . . The best thing would be for you to travel . . . that would do her a lot of good."

Taking Botkin's and his mother's advice, Nicholas escorted his wife to the German spa of Nauheim so that the Empress could take the cure. Nicholas enjoyed himself on these trips. Dressed in a dark

suit and bowler hat, he strolled, unrecognized, through the streets of the little German town. Alexandra, meanwhile, bathed in the warm waters, drank bottled water and went shopping in Nauheim with an attendant pushing her wheelchair. At the end of several weeks, she went back to Russia, rested but not cured. For the mother of a hemophiliac, as for the son, no cure has ever been found.

Russians are a compassionate people, warm in their love of children and deeply perceptive in their understanding of suffering. Why did they not open their hearts to this anguished mother and her stricken child?

The answer, incredibly, is that Russia did not know. Most people in Moscow or Kiev or St. Petersburg did not know that the Tsarevich had hemophilia, and the few who had some inkling had only hazy ideas as to the nature of the disease. As late as 1916, George T. Marye, the American Ambassador, reported, "We hear all sorts of stories about what was the matter with him [Alexis] but the best authenticated seems to be that he has some trouble of the circulation, the blood circulates too close or too freely near the surface . . . [of] the skin." Even within the Imperial household, people such as Pierre Gilliard who saw the family regularly did not know for many years precisely what was wrong with Alexis. When he missed a public function, it was announced that he had a cold or had suffered a sprained ankle. No one believed these explanations and the boy became the subject of incredible rumors. Alexis, it was said, was mentally retarded, an epileptic, the victim of anarchists' bombs. Whatever it was, the mystery made it worse, for there was never a focus for sympathy and understanding. Just as at Khodynka Meadow after their coronation, Nicholas and Alexandra attempted to continue in the midst of disaster by pretending that nothing unusual had happened. The trouble was that everyone knew that behind the façade of normalcy something terrible was happening.

Alexis's secret was deliberately withheld at the wish of the Tsar and the Empress. There was a basis for this in court etiquette: traditionally, the health of members of the Imperial family was never mentioned. In Alexis's case, this secrecy was vastly extended. Doctors and intimate servants were begged not to reveal the staggering misfortune.* Alexis, his parents reasoned, was the Heir to the Throne of

* Dr. Botkin kept the secret well and never discussed the illness with his own family. In 1921, his daughter Tatiana wrote a book about the Imperial family without mentioning the nature of the Tsarevich's illness or the word "hemophilia." This suggests either that she still did not know or that, true to her father's code, she still felt bound by secrecy.

the world's largest and most absolute autocracy. What would be the fate of the boy, the dynasty and the nation if the Russian people knew that their future Tsar was an invalid living under the constant shadow of death? Not knowing the answer and fearing to discover it, Nicholas and Alexandra surrounded the subject with silence.

A revelation of Alexis's condition would inevitably have put new pressures on the Tsar and the monarchy. But the erection of a wall of secrecy was worse. It left the family vulnerable to every vicious rumor. It undermined the nation's respect for the Empress and, through her, for the Tsar and the throne. Because the condition of the Tsare-vich was never revealed, Russians never understood the power which Rasputin held over the Empress. Nor were they able to form a true picture of Alexandra herself. Unaware of her ordeal, they wrongly ascribed her remoteness to distaste for Russia and its people. The years of worry left a look of sadness settled permanently on her face; when she spoke to people, she often appeared preoccupied and deep in gloom. As she devoted herself to hours of prayer, the life of the court became stricter and her own public appearances were reduced. When she did emerge, she was silent, seemingly cold, haughty and indifferent. Never a popular consort, Alexandra Fedorovna became steadily less popular. During the war, with national passions aroused, all the complaints Russians had about the Empress—her German birth, her coldness, her devotion to Rasputin—blended into a single, sweeping torrent of hatred.

The fall of Imperial Russia was a titanic drama in which the individual destinies of thousands of men all played their part. Yet in making allowance for the impersonal flow of historic forces, in counting the contributions made by ministers, peasants and revolutionaries, it still remains essential to understand the character and motivation of the central figures. To the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna this understanding has never been given. From the time her son was born, the central concern of her life was her fight against hemophilia.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Royal Progress

Each year as spring crept north across Russia, the Imperial family fled the frosts and snows of Tsarskoe Selo for the flowering gardens of the Crimea. As the moment of departure approached, the Tsar's spirits always lifted. "I am only sorry for you who have to remain in this bog," he said cheerfully to the cluster of grand dukes and government ministers who came to see him off in March 1912.

There was a regular cyclical pattern to these annual migrations. March brought the spring exodus to the Crimea; in May, the family moved to the villa on the Baltic coast at Peterhof; in June, they cruised the Finnish fjords on the Imperial yacht; August found them at a hunting lodge deep in the Polish forest; in September, they came back to the Crimea; in November, they returned to Tsarskoe Selo for the winter.

The Imperial train which bore the Tsar and his family on these trips across Russia was a traveling miniature palace. It consisted of a string of luxurious royal-blue salon cars with the double-eagled crest emblazoned in gold on their sides, pulled by a gleaming black locomotive. The private car of Nicholas and Alexandra contained a bedroom the size of three normal compartments, a sitting room for the Empress upholstered in mauve and gray, and a private study for the Tsar furnished with a desk and green leather chairs. The white-tiled bathroom off the Imperial bedroom boasted a tub with such ingeniously designed overhangs that water could not slosh out even when the train was rounding a curve.

Elsewhere in the train, there was an entire car of rooms for the four Grand Duchesses and the Tsarevich, with all the furniture painted white. A mahogany-paneled lounge car with deep rugs and damask-covered chairs and sofas served as a gathering place for the ladies-in-waiting, aides-de-camp and other members of the Imperial suite, each

of whom had a private compartment. One car was devoted entirely to dining. It included a kitchen equipped with three stoves, an icebox and a wine cabinet; a dining room with a table for twenty; and a small anteroom, where before every meal
zakouski
were served. Even while traveling, the Imperial suite observed the Russian custom of standing and helping themselves from a table spread with caviar, cold salmon, sardines, reindeer tongue, sausages, pickled mushrooms, radishes, smoked herring, sliced cucumber and other dishes. At dinner, Nicholas always sat at the middle of a long table with his daughters beside him, while Count Fredericks and other court functionaries sat opposite. With rare exceptions, the Empress ate alone on the train or had her meals with Alexis.

Despite the excitement of leaving St. Petersburg, a trip on the Imperial train was not an unmitigated pleasure. There was always the nagging thought that, at any moment, the train might be blown up by revolutionaries. To make this less likely, two identical Imperial trains made every trip, traveling a few miles apart; potential assassins could never know on which the Tsar and his family were riding. Worse for the travelers were the normal discomforts and boredom of long train trips. Although it could go faster, the train customarily rattled along at fifteen to twenty miles an hour. Accordingly, the trip from St. Petersburg to the Crimea meant two nights and a day of bumping and jostling across the interminable vastness of the Russian landscape. In the summer, the sun beat down on the metal roofs, turning the salon cars into carpeted ovens. It was a regular practice to halt the train for half an hour wherever a grove of trees or a river offered an opportunity for the passengers to get out, stretch their legs and cool themselves in the shade or by the water.

Once when the train was stopped in open country at the top of a high embankment, the children took large silver trays from the pantry and used them to toboggan down the sandy slope. After dinner, in the presence of the Tsar and Empress, General Strukov, an aide-decamp, shouted to the children that he would beat them on foot to the bottom. Wearing his dinner uniform with the ribbon of Alexander Nevsky over his shoulder and his diamond-studded sword of honor in hand, the General threw himself down the bank. He slid for twenty feet, became mired up to his knees and gallantly waved as the children glided past, giggling with pleasure, on their silver saucers.

If the Imperial train was a means of travel, the Imperial yachts were a mode of relaxation. For two weeks every June, the Tsar gave

himself completely to a slow, seaborne meandering along the rocky coast of Finland. By day, the yacht steamed among the islands, finding an anchorage at night in a cove deserted except for the lonely hut of an isolated fisherman. The following morning, when the passengers awoke, they found themselves surrounded by sparkling blue water, beaches of yellow sand, red granite islands and dark forests of green pines.

Nicholas's favorite yacht was a 4,500-ton, black-hulled beauty named the
Standart,
especially built for him in a Danish shipyard. Moored in a Baltic cove or tied up beneath the Crimean cliffs in Yalta harbor, the
Standart
was a marvel of nautical elegance. As big as a small cruiser, fueled by coal and propelled by steam, the
Standart
nevertheless was designed with the graceful majesty of a great sailing ship. An immense bowsprit encrusted with gold leaf jutted forward from her clipper bow. Three tall varnished masts towered above her twin white funnels. The gleaming decks were covered with white canvas awnings and lined with wicker tables and chairs. Below were drawing rooms, lounges and dining rooms paneled in mahogany, with polished floors, crystal chandeliers and velvet drapes; only the private staterooms of the family were done in chintz. Along with a chapel and spacious rooms for the Imperial suite, there were quarters for the ship's officers, engineers, stokers, deckhands, stewards, valets, maids and a whole platoon of Marine Guards. In addition, somewhere in the yacht's lower decks, space had been found to house the members of the
Standart's
brass band and balalaika orchestra.

Life aboard the
Standart
was easy and informal. The family mingled freely with the crew and knew many of the sailors by their first names. Often a group of ship's officers was invited to dine at the Imperial table. During the day, the girls wandered the decks unescorted, wearing white blouses and polka-dotted skirts. Conversations and bantering shipboard flirtations sprang up between young officers and the blossoming Grand Duchesses. Even in the winter, when the yacht was laid up for refurbishing, the special bonds of shipboard life held firm. "During the performances of the opera, especially
Aida,
. . . sailors from the Imperial yacht
Standart
would often be called upon to play parts of warriors," wrote the Tsar's sister Grand Duchess Olga. "It was a riot to see those tall husky men standing awkwardly on the stage, wearing helmets and sandals and showing their bare, hairy legs. Despite the frantic signals of the producer, they would stare up at us [in the Imperial box] with broad grins."