Two touring cars set out after breakfast. Alexis and his father were in the first, along with Gilliard and an officer from the Standart; the sailor Derevenko and a single Cossack guard followed in the second. Trailing long plumes of dust, the cars climbed the slopes of the mountains behind the Imperial palace, passing through cool forests of towering pines. Their destination was a great rust-colored cliff called Red Rock, which offered a majestic view of the valleys, the white palaces and the turquoise sea below. After lunch, descending the northern slope, the little cavalcade came on patches of still un-melted winter snow. Alexis begged that the cars be stopped, and Nicholas agreed. “He [Alexis] ran around us, skipping about, rolling in the snow, and picking himself up only to fall again a few seconds later,” wrote Gilliard. “The Tsar watched his son’s frolics with obvious pleasure.” Although he intervened from time to time to caution his son to be careful, Nicholas was convinced for the first time that the ordeal at Spala was finally over.
“The day drew to a close,” Gilliard continued, “and we were quite sorry to have to start back. The Tsar was in high spirits during the drive. We had an impression that this holiday devoted to his son had been a tremendous pleasure to him. For a few hours, he had escaped his imperial duties.”
Despite her shyness and the close family circle that surrounded her, talk of marriage began to focus that year on eighteen-year-old Grand Duchess Olga. A match with Edward, the Prince of Wales, was mentioned. Nothing came of it, and the Prince remained unmarried until 1936, when he gave up his throne to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson. More serious discussion centered on Crown Prince Carol of Rumania. Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, was an advocate of this match; he saw in it a possibility of detaching Rumania from her alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Nicholas and Alexandra were receptive to Carol’s suit, but Olga herself was implacably opposed.
On June 13, the Russian Imperial family paid a brief, formal visit to the Rumanian Black Sea port of Constanza. Carol and his family waited on the pier as the Standart brought the Russian visitors from Yalta. The single day was crowded with ceremonies: a cathedral service, a naval review and luncheon in the morning, followed by a military review, a formal tea, a state dinner, a torchlight parade and fireworks in the evening. All day long, the Rumanians stared at Olga, aware that in the Russian girl they might be observing their future queen.
In that sense, the visit was a waste of time. Even before the Standart arrived in Constanza, Olga found Gilliard on deck. “Tell me the truth, Monsieur,” she said, “do you know why we are going to Rumania?” Tactfully, the tutor replied that he understood it was a matter of diplomacy. Tossing her head, Olga declared that Gilliard obviously knew the real reason. “I don’t want it to happen,” she said fiercely. “Papa has promised not to make me, and I don’t want to leave Russia. I am a Russian and I mean to remain a Russian.”
Olga’s parents respected her feelings. Alexandra, sitting one day on the terrace at Livadia, explained their viewpoint to Sazonov. “I think with terror that the time draws near when I shall have to part with my daughters,” she said. “I could desire nothing better than that they should remain in Russia after their marriage. But I have four daughters and it is, of course, impossible. You know how difficult marriages are in reigning families. I know it by experience, although I was never in the position my daughters occupy, being [only] the daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse, and running little risk of being obliged to make a political match. Still, I was once threatened with the danger of marrying without love or even affection, and I vividly remember the torments I endured when … (the Empress named a member of one of the German reigning houses) arrived at Darmstadt and I was informed that he intended to marry me. I did not know him at all and I shall never forget what I suffered when I met him for the first time. My grandmother, Queen Victoria, took pity on me, and I was left in peace. God disposed otherwise of my fate, and granted me undreamed-of happiness. All the more then do I feel it my duty to leave my daughters free to marry according to their inclination. The Emperor will have to decide whether he considers this or that marriage suitable for his daughters, but parental authority must not extend beyond that.”
Carol did not give up hope of marrying a Romanov grand duchess. Two years later, he suggested to Nicholas that he marry Marie, then sixteen. Nicholas laughingly declared that Marie was only a schoolgirl. In 1947, having abdicated the throne of Rumania, Carol made the third of his three marriages. His wife was the woman who had been his mistress for twenty-two years, Magda Lupescu.
In Europe, the early summer of 1914 was marked by glorious weather. Millions of men and women went off on holidays, forgetting their fears of war in the warmth of the sun. Kings and emperors continued to visit each other, dine at state dinners, review armies and fleets and bounce each other’s children on their knees. Beneath the surface, however, differences were detectable. The important visits took place between allies: King George V visited Paris; the Kaiser visited the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand; Raymond Poincaré, President of France, visited the Tsar in St. Petersburg. In their entourages, the chiefs of state brought generals and diplomats who sat down quietly with their opposite numbers to compare plans and confirm understandings. Military reviews took on special significance. Troops on parade were carefully watched for signs of élan, vigor and readiness for war.
An event of special symbolic importance took place at the end of June when the dashing British Admiral Sir David Beatty led the First Battle Cruiser Squadron of the Royal Navy up the Baltic on a visit to Russia. England, alarmed by the rapid building of the Kaiser’s powerful High Seas Fleet, was reluctantly abandoning a century of “splendid isolation.” A closer tie with Tsarist Russia, hitherto despised in press and parliament as the land of the Cossack and the knout, was part of Britain’s new diplomacy. On June 20, a blazing, cloudless day, Beatty’s four huge gray ships, Lion, Queen Mary, Princess Royal and New Zealand, steamed slowly past the Standart and anchored at Kronstadt. The Imperial family went aboard Beatty’s flagship, Lion, for lunch. “Never have I seen happier faces than those of the young grand duchesses escorted over Lion by a little band of middies especially told off for their amusement,” reported the British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. “When I think of them as I saw them that day,” he added, “the tragic story of their deaths seems like some hideous nightmare.”
The following day, while thousands of Russians stared at the English ships swinging silently on the Baltic tide, Beatty and his officers visited Tsarskoe Selo. Beatty himself, the youngest British admiral since Nelson, made a tremendous impression. His youthful, clean-shaven face caused many Russians, accustomed to seeing admirals with beards to their waists, to mistake Beatty for his own flag lieutenant. But Beatty’s manner was unmistakably one of command. His square jaw and the jaunty angle at which he wore his cap suggested the sea dog. He spoke in a voice which would have carried over the howl of a gale. It was as if the solid reality of Britain’s enormous seapower, a thing few Russians understood, had suddenly been revealed in Beatty’s person.
After Beatty’s departure, the Imperial family boarded the Standart for their annual two-week cruise along the coast of Finland. They were at sea four days later, June 28, when the terrible day arrived which is known in European history simply as “Sarajevo.”
A hot Balkan sun shone down that morning on the white, flat-roofed houses of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. The streets were crowded with people who had come from miles away to see the middle-aged Hapsburg prince who one day would be their emperor. Tall and fleshy, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not ragingly popular anywhere within the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had been ruled for sixty-six years by his aged uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph. Yet Franz Ferdinand was sufficiently enlightened politically to see—as his uncle and the government in Vienna did not—that unless something was done about the Slav nationalism burning inside the empire, the empire itself would disintegrate.
Austria-Hungary in 1914 was a h
odge-podge of races, provinces and nationalities scattered across central Europe and the upper Balkans. Three fifths of these forty million people were Slavs—Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Bosnians and Montenegrins—yet the empire was ruled by its two non-Slavic races, the Austrians and the Magyars of Hungary. Not surprisingly, most of the Slavic peoples within the empire restlessly longed for the day they would be free.
On these turbulent Slav provinces within the empire, the small independent Slav kingdom of Serbia acted as a magnet. Inside Serbia, passionate Slav nationalists plotted to break up the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire and weld the dissident Slav provinces into a single Greater South Slav Kingdom. Serbia lacked the military strength to wrest the provinces away by force, but Belgrade, the Serb capital, became a fountainhead of inflammatory Slav nationalist propaganda. Belgrade also became the headquarters of a secret terrorist organization called the Black Hand, designed to strike at Austria-Hungary by sabotage and murder.
In Vienna, the Imperial capital, the disruptive influence of Serbia was greatly feared. Field Marshal von Conrad-Hötzendorf, Chief of the Austrian General Staff, described Serbia as “a dangerous little viper.” For years, Conrad-Hötzendorf had impatiently awaited orders to crush the Serb menace. But in 1914 the Emperor Franz Joseph was eighty-four. He had come to the throne in 1848; the years of his reign had been marked by tragedy. His brother Maximilian had become Emperor of Mexico and had been shot by a firing squad on a Mexican hillside. His only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, had died with his mistress in a love-pact suicide at Mayerling. His wife, Empress Elizabeth, had been struck down by an assassin’s knife. His nephew and heir, Franz Ferdinand, had defied his will and married a commoner, Countess Sophie Chotek. Before settling the succession on Franz Ferdinand, the old Emperor forced the Archduke to renounce the throne for any children he should have by Sophie. On public occasions, Sophie, wife of the heir, was forced to walk behind the least important ladies of the royal blood and to sit at a distant end of the Imperial table. She found the humiliations unbearable; the Archduke made violent scenes with his family, but the Emperor refused to give way. His last hope was to die in peace with his Imperial dignity and his empire intact.
Busy soothing his wife, absent from the court, Franz Ferdinand knew nevertheless that the Emperor would not live forever. Politically, he understood that the policy of drift could not continue. His proposal was to appease the Slavs within the empire by bringing them into active participation within the government: he foresaw an eventual broadening of Austro-Hungarian “dualism” into a “trialism” which would include in the government Austrians, Magyars and Slavs. His solution was opposed by all concerned: by Austrian and Magyar ministers who did not wish to share their power, and by Slav nationalists who feared that the plan’s success would destroy their own dreams of a South Slav kingdom. Yet Franz Ferdinand persisted. As a preliminary step, he decided that while he was watching Austrian army maneuvers in the Bosnian mountains, he would also pay a ceremonial visit to the provincial capital of Sarajevo. To expand this gesture of friendship, the Archduke brought his wife, the mother of his three disinherited children. In addition, he asked that the troops which normally lined the streets during an Imperial visit be dispensed with. Except for 150 local policemen, the crowds were to have free access to the Heir to the Throne.
Franz Ferdinand was dressed that day in the green uniform of an Austrian field marshal, with feathers waving from his military cap. As his six-car motorcade entered the town, he was in the open back seat of the second car with Sophie beside him. On the streets, he saw smiling faces and waving arms. Flags and bright-colored rugs hung as decorations, and from the windows of shops and houses his own portrait stared back at him. Franz Ferdinand was enormously pleased.
As the procession neared the city hall, the Archduke’s chauffeur glimpsed an object hurled from the crowd. He pressed the accelerator, the car jumped forward and a bomb which would have landed in Sophie’s lap bounced off the rear of the car and exploded under the wheels of the car behind. Two officers were wounded. The young Serb who had thrown the bomb ran across a bridge, but was apprehended by the police.
Franz Ferdinand, meanwhile, arrived at Sarajevo’s city hall. He was pale, shaken and furious. “One comes here for a visit,” he shouted, “and is welcomed by bombs!” There was a quick, urgent conference. One of the Archduke’s suite asked if a military guard could be arranged. The provincial governor replied acidly, “Do you think Sarajevo is filled with assassins?” It was decided to go back through the city by a different route. On the way, however, the driver of the first car, forgetting the alteration, turned into one of the prearranged streets. The Archduke’s chauffeur, following behind, was momentarily misled. He too started to turn. An official shouted, “Not that way, you fool!” The chauffeur braked, pausing to shift gears not five feet from the watching crowd. At that moment, a slim nineteen-year-old boy stepped forward, aimed a pistol into the car and fired twice. Sophie sank forward onto her husband’s breast. Franz Ferdinand remained sitting upright, and for a minute no one noticed that he had been hit. Then the governor, sitting in front, heard him murmur, “Sophie! Sophie! Don’t die! Stay alive for our children!” His body sagged and blood from a wound in his neck spurted across his green uniform. Sophie, the wife who could never become an empress, died first from a bullet in the abdomen. Fifteen minutes later, in a room next to the ballroom where waiters were preparing chilled champagne for his reception, the Archduke died. His last 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-Hötzendorf 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 crime
s, 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.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty Page 33
