Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty

by Robert K. Massie

Kisses,

  Sunny

  The following day, when Rasputin still had not appeared, Alexandra telegraphed: “No trace yet.… The police are continuing the search. I fear that these two wretched boys have committed a frightful crime, but have not yet lost all hope. Start today, I need you terribly.”

  On the third day, January 1, 1917, Rasputin’s body was found. In their haste, the murderers had left one of his boots on the ice near the hole. Divers probing beneath the ice in that vicinity brought up the corpse. Incredibly, before he died, Rasputin had struggled with sufficient strength to free one of his hands from the ropes around him. The freed arm was raised above the shoulder; the effect was that Rasputin’s last gesture on earth had been a sign of benediction.

  In Petrograd, where everyone knew the details and juicy stories of the Rasputin scandal, confirmation that the Beast was slain set off an orgy of wild rejoicing. People kissed each other in the streets and hailed Yussoupov, Purishkevich and Grand Duke Dmitry as heroes. At the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, there was a crush to light a sea of candles around the icons of St. Dmitry. Far off in the provinces, however, where the peasants knew only that a moujik, a man like themselves, had become powerful at the court of the Tsar, the murder was regarded differently. “To the moujiks, Rasputin has become a martyr,” an old prince just returned from his estate on the Volga reported to Paléologue. “He was a man of the people; he let the Tsar hear the voice of the people; he defended the people against the court folk, the pridvorny. So the pridvorny killed him. That’s what’s being said.”

  History, with all its sweep and diversity, produces few characters as original and extravagant as Gregory Rasputin. The source and extent of his extraordinary powers will never be fully known; the shadow of this uncertainty perpetually will refresh the legend. The duality of his countenance—the one face peaceful, soothing, offering the blessings of God; the other cynical, crafty, reddened by lust—is the core of his mysterious appeal. In his single, remarkable life, he represents not only the two sides of Russia’s history, half compassionate and long-suffering, half savage and pagan, but the constant struggle in every soul between good and evil.

  As for the evil in Gregory Rasputin, it should be carefully weighed. He has been called a monster, yet, unlike most monsters in history, he took not a single life. He schemed against his enemies and toppled men from high places, yet, once they had fallen, he sought no vengeance. In his relations with women he was undoubtedly villainous, but most of these episodes occurred with the consent of the women involved. Unquestionably, he used his “holy” aura to seductive advantage and, failing all else, forced himself upon unwilling victims. But even here the screams of outrage were greatly amplified by rumor.

  Rasputin’s greatest crime was his delusion of the Empress Alexandra. Deliberately, he encouraged her to believe that there was only one side of him: Father Gregory, Our Friend, the Man of God who gave relief to her son and calmed her fears. The other Rasputin—drunken, leering, arrogant—did not exist for the Empress except in the malicious reports of their common enemies. An obvious rogue to everyone else, he carefully hid this side from her. Yet no one could believe that the Empress did not know; therefore, her acceptance of him was taken as acceptance of his worst behavior. On her part, this can be called foolishness, blindness, ignorance. But on his part, the deliberate exploitation of weakness and devotion was nothing less than monstrous evil.

  Predictably, the impact of Rasputin’s death fell less severely on Nicholas than on Alexandra. Told of Rasputin’s disappearance while he sat in a staff meeting at Headquarters, the Tsar left the room immediately and telegraphed “Am horrified, shaken.” Nevertheless, he did not leave for Petrograd until January 1, when Rasputin’s death was confirmed. Once again, in death as in life, Nicholas was less concerned about Rasputin than about the effect that the murder would have on his wife. In the months preceding the assassination, Rasputin’s advice had become less welcome. Often Nicholas was irritated by what he regarded as clumsy intrusions by Rasputin into political and military matters. The Tsar, wrote Gilliard, “had tolerated him [Rasputin] because he dared not weaken the Empress’s faith in him—a faith that kept her alive. He did not like to send him away, for if Alexis Nicolaievich died, in the eyes of the mother, he would have been the murderer of his own son.”

  For Nicholas himself, the quickest pang of Rasputin’s death lay in the fact that the murder had been committed by members of the Imperial family. “I am filled with shame that the hands of my kinsmen are stained with the blood of a simple peasant,” he exclaimed. “A murder is always a murder,” he replied stiffly in refusing an appeal from his relatives on behalf of Dmitry. Almost fifty years later, the Tsar’s sister Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna still showed the same shame and scorn for her family’s behavior: “There was nothing heroic about Rasputin’s murder,” she said. “It was … premeditated most vilely. Just think of the two names most closely associated with it even to this day—a Grand Duke, one of the grandsons of the Tsar-Liberator, and then a scion of one of our great houses whose wife was a Grand Duke’s daughter. That proved how low we had fallen.”

  Soon after Nicholas’s return to Petrograd, enough evidence had been amassed to incriminate the three leading conspirators. Grand Duke Dmitry was ordered to leave Petrograd immediately for duty with the Russian troops operating in Persia; the sentence undoubtedly saved his life, as it put him out of reach of the revolution which was soon to follow. Yussoupov was banished to one of his estates in the center of Russia; a year later, he left his homeland with Princess Irina, taking with him, from all his vast fortune, only a million dollars in jewels and two Rembrandts. Purishkevich was allowed to go free. His part in the murder had placed his prestige at a peak. To strike down a member of the Duma who had also become a hero was no longer possible even for the Autocrat of all the Russias.

  In secrecy, Rasputin’s body was taken to the chapel of a veterans’ home halfway between Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo, where an autopsy was performed and the body was washed and dressed and laid in a coffin. Two days later, on January 3, Rasputin was buried in a corner of the Imperial Park where Anna Vyrubova was building a church. Lili Dehn was present: “It was a glorious morning,” she wrote. “The sky was a deep blue, the sun was shining and the hard snow sparkled like masses of diamonds. My carriage stopped on the road … and I was directed to walk across a frozen field towards the unfinished church. Planks had been placed on the snow to serve as a footpath, and when I arrived at the church I noticed that a police motor van was drawn up near the open grave. After waiting several moments, I heard the sound of sleigh bells and Anna Vyrubova came slowly across the field. Almost immediately afterwards, a closed automobile stopped and the Imperial family joined us. They were dressed in mourning and the Empress carried some white flowers; she was very pale but quite composed although I saw her tears fall when the oak coffin was taken out of the police van … the burial service was read by the chaplain and after the Emperor and Empress had thrown earth on the coffin, the Empress distributed her flowers between the Grand Duchesses and ourselves and we scattered them on the coffin.”

  Inside the coffin, before the lid was sealed, the Empress had two objects placed on Rasputin’s breast. One was an icon, signed by herself, her husband, her son and her daughters. The other was a letter: “My dear martyr, give me thy blessing that it may follow me always on the sad and dreary path I have yet to follow here below. And remember us from on high in your holy prayers. Alexandra.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Last Winter at Tsarskoe Selo

  DURING the dreary weeks of winter that followed Rasputin’s murder, the Tsar of all the Russias suffered something close to a nervous collapse. Utterly weary, craving only tranquillity and rest, he remained secluded at Tsarskoe Selo. There, in the bosom of his family, surrounded by a narrow circle of familiar figures, he lived quietly, avoiding decisions that affected ministers, munitions, his millions of soldiers and tens of millions of subjects. Rod
zianko, who saw him twice during this period, recalled the audience in which Nicholas got up and went to the window. “How lovely it was in the woods today,” he said, looking out. “It is so quiet there. One forgets all these intrigues and paltry human restlessness. My soul felt so peaceful. One is nearer to Nature there, nearer to God.”

  Nicholas remained all day in his private quarters. He converted his billiard room into a map room, and there, behind a door guarded by his motionless Ethiopian, he stood for hours over huge maps of the battlefields spread out on the billiard tables. When he left the room, he carefully locked the door and carried the key in his own pocket. At night, he sat with his wife and Anna Vyrubova in the Empress’s mauve boudoir, reading aloud. His public utterances were vague. He issued a manifesto to the army which, although written for him by General Gurko, was molded of Nicholas’s own continuing patriotic dream: “The time for peace has not yet come.… Russia has not yet performed the tasks this war has set her.… The possession of Constantinople and the Straits … the restoration of a free Poland.… We remain unshaken in our confidence in victory. God will bless our arms. He will cover them with everlasting glory and give us a peace worthy of your glorious deeds. Oh, my glorious troops, a peace such that generations to come will bless your sacred memory!” Paléologue, reading the manifesto and wondering at Nicholas’s meaning, decided that it “can only be … a kind of political will, a final announcement of the glorious vision which he had imagined for Russia and which he now sees dissolving into thin air.”

  Visitors were shocked by the Tsar’s appearance; there were wild rumors that Alexandra was giving him drugs. On the Russian New Year, the diplomatic corps arrived at Tsarskoe Selo for its annual reception. Nicholas appeared, surrounded by his generals and aides, to exchange handshakes, smiles and congratulations. “As usual,” wrote Paléologue, “Nicholas II was kind and natural and he even affected a certain care-free air; but his pale, thin face betrayed the nature of his secret thoughts.” A private audience left the French Ambassador filled with gloom. “The Emperor’s words, his silences and reticences, his grave, drawn features and furtive, distant thoughts and the thoroughly vague and enigmatical quality of his personality, confirm in me … the notion that Nicholas II feels himself overwhelmed and dominated by events, that he has lost all faith in his mission … that he has … abdicated inwardly and is now resigned to disaster.”

  Nicholas made a similar impression on Vladimir Kokovtsov, the former Prime Minister. Kokovtsov had always had a high regard for Nicholas’s quick, intuitive grasp of most subjects and his exceptional memory. Entering the Tsar’s study on February 1, Kokovtsov was deeply alarmed by the change in his sovereign: “During the year that I had not seen him, he became almost unrecognizable. His face had become very thin and hollow and covered with small wrinkles. His eyes … had become quite faded and wandered aimlessly from object to object.… The whites were of a decidedly yellow tinge, and the dark retinas had become colorless, grey and lifeless.… The face of the Tsar bore an expression of helplessness. A forced, mirthless smile was fixed upon his lips and he answered, repeating several times: ‘I am perfectly well and sound, but I spend too much time without exercise and I am used to much activity. I repeat to you, Vladimir Nicolaievich, I am perfectly all right. You have not seen me for a long time, and possibly I did not have a good night. Presently I shall go for a walk and shall look better.”

  Throughout the interview, Kokovtsov continued, “the Tsar listened to me with the same sickly smile, glancing nervously about him.” Asked a “question which seemed to me perfectly simple … the Tsar became reduced to a perfectly incomprehensible state of helplessness. The strange, almost vacant smile remained fixed on his face; he looked at me as if to seek support and to ask me to remind him of a matter that had absolutely slipped his memory.… For a long time, he looked at me in silence as if trying to collect his thoughts or to recall what had escaped his memory.”

  Kokovtsov left the room in tears. Outside, he found Dr. Botkin and Count Paul Benckendorff, the Grand Marshal of the court. “Do you not see the state of the Tsar?” he asked. “He is on the verge of some mental disturbance if not already in its power.” Botkin and Benckendorff both said that Nicholas was not ill, merely tired. Nevertheless, Kokovtsov returned to Petrograd with the strong impression “that the Tsar was seriously ill and that his illness was of a nervous character.”

  Alexandra was bowed by Rasputin’s murder, but, drawing on the same reserves of inner fortitude which were to sustain her during the pitiless months ahead, she did not break. Rasputin had often told her, “If I die or you desert me, you will lose your son and your crown within six months.” The Empress had never doubted him. Rasputin’s death removed the savior of her son and her link with God. Without his prayers and counsel, any disaster was possible. The fact that the blow had come from within the Imperial family did not surprise her. She knew their feelings and understood that she had been the real target of the assassins.

  After the murder, she sat quietly for a number of days, with tear-stained face, staring in front of her. Then, she rallied, and the face she showed even to those in the palace was calm and resolute. If God had taken her Friend, she was still on earth. While life remained, she would persevere in her faith, in her devotion to husband and family, in her resolve, sealed now by Gregory’s martyrdom, to maintain the autocracy given to Russia by God. Touched by the same sense of earthly doom that afflicted the Tsar, she steeled herself for the shocks to come. 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 Stürmer 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 starets had done, he telephoned every morning at ten, to either the Empress or Anna Vyrubova. He reported that Rasputin’s spirit sometimes came to him at night; that he could feel the familiar presence and hear the familiar voice as it gave him advice. A story making the rounds in Petrograd depicted Protopopov in the middle of an audience with Alexandra suddenly falling on his knees and moaning, “Oh, Majesty, I see Christ behind you.”

  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.”