Nicholas and Alexandra (5 page)

his train left Moscow in a different direction. Six other attempts were made, and on March 1i, 1881—ironically, only a few hours after the Tsar had approved the establishment of a national representative body to advise on legislation—the assassins succeeded. As his carriage rolled through the streets of St. Petersburg, a bomb, thrown from the sidewalk, sailed under it. The explosion shattered the vehicle and wounded his horses, his equerries and one of his Cossack escorts, but the Tsar himself was unhurt. Stepping from the splintered carriage, Alexander II spoke to the wounded men and even asked gently about the bomb thrower, who had been arrested. Just then a second assassin ran up, shouting, "It is too early to thank God," and threw a second bomb directly between the Tsar's feet. In the sheet of flame and metal Alexander II's legs were torn away, his stomach ripped open, his face mutilated. Still alive and conscious, he whispered, "To the palace, to die there." What remained of him was picked up and carried into the Winter Palace, leaving a trail of thick drops of black blood up the marble stairs. Unconscious, he was laid on a couch, his right leg torn off, his left leg shattered, one eye closed, the other open but vacant. One after another, the horrified members of the Imperial family crowded into the room. Nicholas, aged thirteen, wearing a blue sailor suit, came in deathly pale and watched from the end of the bed. His mother, who had been ice-skating, arrived still clutching her skates. At the window looking out stood his father, the Heir Apparent, his broad shoulders hunched and shaking, his fists clenching and unclenching. "The Emperor is dead," announced the surgeon, letting go of the blood-covered wrist. The new Tsar, Alexander III, nodded grimly and motioned to his wife. Together they walked out of the palace, now surrounded by guardsmen of the Preobrajensky Regiment with bayonets fixed. He stood for a moment, saluting, then jumped into his carriage and drove away "accompanied by a whole regiment of Don Cossacks, in attack formation, their red lances shining brightly in the last rays of a crimson March sunset." In his accession manifesto, Alexander III proclaimed that he would rule "with faith in the power and right of autocracy." For the thirteen years of his father's reign, Nicholas saw Russia ruled according to the theories of Pobedonostsev.

Nicholas, at twenty-one, was a slender youth of five feet seven inches, with his father's square, open face and his mother's expressive eyes and magnetic personal charm. His own best qualities were gentleness, kindliness and friendliness. "Nicky smiled his usual tender, shy,

slightly sad smile," wrote his young cousin and intimate companion Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich. Himself prepared to like everybody, Nicholas hoped that people liked him. As best he could tell through the thickets of flattery and etiquette surrounding his rank, they did.

In many respects, his education was excellent. He had an unusual memory and had done well in history. He spoke French and German, and his English was so good that he could have fooled an Oxford professor into mistaking him for an Englishman. He rode beautifully, danced gracefully and was an excellent shot. He had been taught to keep a diary and, in the style of innumerable princes and gentlemen of that era, he faithfully recorded, day after day, the state of the weather, the number of birds he shot and the names of those with whom he walked and dined. Nicholas's diary was identical to that of his cousin King George V;
both were kept primarily as a catalogue of engagements, written in a terse, monotonous prose, and regarded as one of the daily disciplines of an ordered life. Curiously, Nicholas's diary, which lacks the expressive language of his private letters, has proved a rich mine for his detractors, while George's diary is often praised for its revelation of the honest character of this good King.

In May 1890, a few days before his twenty-second birthday, Nicholas wrote in his diary, "Today I finished definitely and forever my education." The young man then happily turned to the pleasant business of becoming a rake. His day usually began in mid-morning when he struggled out of bed exhausted from the previous night. "As always after a ball, I don't feel well. I have a weakness in the legs," he wrote in his diary. "I got up at 10:30. I am persuaded that I have some kind of sleeping sickness because there is no way to get me up."

Once on his feet, he went to a council meeting, or received the Swedish minister, or perhaps a Russian explorer just back from two years in Ethiopia. Occasionally he was lucky. "Today, there was not a meeting of the Imperial Council. I was not overwhelmed with sadness by the fact."

Most of the time, Nicholas was required to do absolutely nothing. The essential function of a tsarevich, once he had finished his schooling and reached manhood, was to wait as discreetly as possible until it came his turn to become tsar. In 1890 Alexander III still was only forty-five years old. Expecting that he would continue to occupy the throne for another twenty or thirty years, he dawdled about giving his son the experience to succeed him. Nicholas happily accepted the playboy role to which he had tacitly been assigned. He

appeared at meetings of the Imperial Council, but his eyes were fixed on the clock. At the first reasonable opportunity, he bolted.

On winter afternoons, he collected his sister Xenia and went ice-skating. "Skating with Xenia and Aunt Ella. We amused ourselves and ran like fools. Put on skates and played ball with all my strength," he wrote. He fell on the ice, got sore knees, sore feet and had to hobble around in slippers, grumbling about the good luck of people still able to skate. At twilight, flushed by exercise and the freezing air, the skaters bundled themselves into a drawing room for glasses of steaming tea. Dinner might be anywhere: at home, as a guest, or in a restaurant with a party of friends, entertained by an orchestra of balalaikas.

Every night during the winter season, Nicholas went out. In the month of January 1890, he attended twenty performances, sometimes two in a day, at the opera, theatre and ballet. It was during this month that Tchaikovsky's ballet
Sleeping Beauty
was first presented in St. Petersburg; Nicholas went to a dress rehearsal and two performances. He attended plays in German, French and English, including
The Merchant of Venice.
He was especially fond of
Eugene Onegin
and
Boris Godunov
and in February he even arranged to play a small part in a production of
Eugene Onegin.
He was a much-prized guest at exclusive late-evening soirees where the guests were entertained by the Imperial Navy Band, or a chorus of sixty singers, or a famous raconteur who told stories to amuse the guests. Two or three times a week, the Tsarevich attended a ball. "We danced to exhaustion . . . afterwards supper ... to bed at 3:30 a.m." The arrival of Lent abruptly ended this round of festivities. The day after the ball and midnight supper which ended the winter season in 1892, he wrote in his diary, "All day I found myself in a state of gaiety which has little in common with the period of Lent."

During this quieter period, Nicholas stayed home, dined with his mother and played cards with his friends. A telephone was installed in his room at the palace so that he could listen to Tschaikovsky's opera
Queen of Spades
over an open line direct from the stage. He regularly accompanied his father on hunting parties, leaving the palace at dawn to spend a day in the forests and marshes outside the capital, shooting pheasants and hares.

Nicholas was never happier than when he was sitting on a white horse outside the Winter Palace, his arm frozen in salute as squadrons of Cossacks trotted past, their huge fur caps sitting down on their eyebrows, pennants fluttering from their lances. The army, its pag-

eantry and history fascinated him all his life, and no title meant more to him than the rank of colonel awarded him by his father.

At nineteen, Nicholas was given command of a squadron of Horse Guards and went with them to Krasnoe Selo, the great military camp outside St. Petersburg used by regiments of the Imperial Guard for summer maneuvers. Installed in a private bungalow with a bedroom, study, dining room and a balcony overlooking a small garden, he lived the pleasant, mindless existence of any wealthy aristocratic young Russian officer. He participated fully in the life and chatter of the messrooms and his modesty made him popular among his fellow officers.

"I am happier than I can say to have joined the army and every day I become more and more used to camp life," he wrote to his mother, Empress Marie. "Each day we drill twice—there is either target practice in the morning and battalion drill in the evening or the other way round—battalion drill in the morning and target practice in the evening. . . . We have lunch at 12 o'clock and dine at 8, with siesta and tea in between. The dinners are very merry; they feed us well. After meals, the officers . . . play billiards, skittles, cards or dominoes."

The Empress worried that the eager subaltern would forget that he was also the Tsarevich. "Never forget that everyone's eyes are turned on you now, waiting to see what your first independent steps in life will be," she wrote. "Always be polite and courteous with everybody so that you get along with all your comrades without discrimination, although without too much familiarity or intimacy, and
never
listen to flatterers."

Nicholas wrote back dutifully, "I will always try to follow your advice, my dearest darling Mama. One has to be cautious with everybody at the start." But to his diary he confided more fully: "We got stewed," "tasted six sorts of Port and got a bit soused," "we wallowed in the grass and drank," "felt owlish," "the officers carried me out."

It was as a young officer in the spring of 1890 that Nicholas first met a seventeen-year-old dancer in the Imperial Ballet, Mathilde Ksches-sinska. A small, vivacious girl with a supple body, a full bosom, an arched neck, dark curls and merry eyes, Kschessinska had been rigorously schooled in ballet for ten years and in 1890 was the best dancer in her graduating class. By chance, that year the entire Imperial family attended the. graduation performance and supper.

In her memoirs, Kschessinska recalled the arrival of Tsar Alexander III, towering over everyone else and calling in a loud voice, "Where is Kschessinska?" When the tiny girl was presented to him, he took

her hand and said to her warmly, "Be the glory and adornment of our ballet." At supper, the Tsar first sat next to Mathilde; then he moved and his place was taken by the Tsarevich. When Kschessinska looked at Nicholas, she wrote, "in both our hearts an attraction had been born impelling us irresistibly towards each other." Nicholas's entry in his diary that night was more laconic: "We went to see the performance at the Theatre School. Saw a short play and a ballet. Delightful. Supper with the pupils."

From that moment, Kschessinska struggled to put herself in Nicholas's line of vision. Knowing that Nicholas and his sister Xenia often stood on a high stone balustrade of the Anitchkov Palace watching passers-by on the Nevsky Prospect, Kschessinska strolled past the building every day. In May, on Nicholas's birthday, she decorated her room with little white, blue and red Russian flags. That summer she was selected to join the troupe which danced in the wooden theatre for officers at Krasnoe Selo, where the Tsarevich was on duty with the Guards. He came every day to watch Kschessinska's performance. Once when Tsar Alexander III saw them talking, he said to her with a smile, "Ah, you must have been flirting."

As the Tsarevich and the dancer were never alone, the romance that summer did not go beyond flirting. "I thought that, without being in love with me, he did feel a certain affection for me, and I gave myself up to my dreams," she wrote. "I like Kschessinska very much," Nicholas admitted to his diary. A few days later he wrote, "Gossiped at her window with little Kschessinska." And just before leaving the camp, he added, "After lunch, went for the last time to the dear little theatre at Krasnoe Selo. Said goodbye to Kschessinska."

Nicholas did not see Mathilde again for almost a year. In Ocotober 1890, he set out with his brother George on a nine-month cruise which took them from the Mediterranean Sea through the Suez Canal to India and Japan. In George's case, his parents prayed that the weeks at sea in warm sunshine and salt air would clear his congested lungs. For Nicholas, they intended a royal grand tour, an education in diplomatic niceties and an interval which would help the Tsarevich forget the young women who had begun to complicate his life.

Kschessinska was not the only one. Nicholas found the dancer appealing; she was close at hand; she was pretty; and she was letting him know in every way possible how much she Uked him. But his feelings for a tall, golden-haired German princess, Alix of Hesse, were more serious. Princess Alix was a younger sister of Grand Duchess Elizabeth, the twenty-five-year-old wife of Nicholas's uncle Grand Duke Serge. Elizabeth, called Ella, was a gay young woman

whose skating parties and family theatricals had brought a youthful bounce into the Imperial family. Nicholas was a frequent visitor in the home of this young aunt; when Ella's sister Alix came to St. Petersburg, Nicholas's visits became even more frequent. Serious and shy, Alix burned with inner fires. When she set her blue-gray eyes on Nicholas, he was overwhelmed. Unfortunately, she lived far away in Hesse-Darmstadt and his parents saw little to recommend their matching a Russian tsarevich with a minor German princess.

Leaving St. Petersburg in a gloomy mood, Nicholas and George went to Athens, where they were joined by their cousin Prince George of Greece. There the three cousins, accompanied by several young Russian noblemen, including Prince Bariatinsky, Prince Obo-lensky and Prince Oukhtomsky, boarded a Russian battleship, the
Pamiat Azova.
By the time the battleship reached Egypt, the cruise had turned into a traveling house party and Nicholas's spirits had soared. On the Nile, they transferred to the Khedive's yacht and began a trip up the river. In the broiling heat, Nicholas stared at the riverbank, "always the same, from place to place, villages and clusters of palm trees." Stopping in towns along the river, the youthful Russians became increasingly interested in the local belly dancers. "Nothing worth talking about," Nicholas wrote after watching his first performance. But the following night: "This time it was much better. They undressed themselves." The travelers climbed two pyramids, dined like Arabs, using their fingers, and rode on camels. They got as far as the first cataracts of the Nile at Aswan, where Nicholas watched Egyptian boys swimming in the foaming water.