Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family

by Robert K. Massie

  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: in a restaurant with a party of friends, or as a guest in a home where the host would provide 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 pageantry 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 Kschessinska. 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 possi
ble how much she liked 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 Obolensky 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.

  In India, Bariatinsky and Oblensky each killed a tiger, but Nicholas, to his immense chagrin, shot nothing. The heat was intense and the Tsarevich grew irritable. From Delhi he complained to his mother, “How stifling it is to be surrounded again by the English and to see red uniforms everywhere.” Hurriedly, Marie wrote back:

  “I’d like to think you are very courteous to all the English who are taking such pains to give you the best possible reception, shoots, etc. I quite see that the balls and other official doings are not very amusing, especially in that heat, but you must understand that your position brings this with it. You have to set your personal comfort aside, be doubly polite and amiable, and above all, never show you are bored. You will do this, won’t you, my dear Nicky? At balls you must consider it your duty to dance more and smoke less in the garden with officers just because it is more amusing. One simply cannot do this, my dear, but I know you understand all this so well and you know my only wish is that nothing can be said against you and for you to leave a good impression with everybody everywhere.”

  George suffered in the Indian heat. His cough persisted and he developed a constant fever. To his great disappointment, his father and mother ordered him to break off the tour. When the Pamiat Azova sailed from Bombay, George left on a destroyer in the opposite direction to return to his quiet life in the Caucasus.

  Nicholas continued eastward, stopping in Colombo, Singapore, Batavia and in Bangkok, where he called on the King of Siam. He went on to Saigon and Hong Kong, and arrived in Japan just as the cherry trees were blooming in Tokyo parks. He visited Nagasaki and Kyoto and he was passing through the town of Otsu when his tour—and his life—nearly came to an abrupt end. Suddenly on a street a Japanese jumped at him swinging a sword. The blade, aimed at his head, glanced off his forehead, bringing a gush of blood but failing to bite deep. The assassin swung a second time, but Prince George of Greece forcefully parried the blow with his cane.

  The assailant’s motives have never been clear. Nicholas, although he bore a scar for the rest of his life and sometimes suffered headaches in that part of his skull, gave no explanation. Two stories, both largely rumor, have been offered. One attributes the assault to a fanatic outraged by the supposedly disrespectful behavior of Nicholas and his companions in a Japanese temple. The other describes it as the jealous lunge of a Samurai whose wife had received the Tsarevich’s attention. The episode terminated the visit, and Alexander III telegraphed his son to return home immediately. Thereafter, Nicholas never liked Japan and customarily referred to most Japanese as “monkeys.” A subsequent entry in his diary reads, “I received the Swedish minister and the Japanese monkey, the chargé d’affaires, who brought me a letter, a portrait and an ancient armor from Her Majesty [the Empress of Japan].”

  On his way home, Nicholas stopped in Vladivostock long enough to lay the first stone of the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. He found Vladivostock a desolate frontier town of muddy, unpaved streets, open sewers, unpainted wooden houses and clusters of mud-plastered straw huts inhabited by Chinese and Koreans. On May 31, 1892, he attended an outdoor religious service swept by cold Siberian winds. He wielded a shovel to fill a wheelbarrow with dirt, trundled it along for several yards and emptied it down an embankment of the future railroad. Soon after, he grasped a trowel and cemented into place the first stone of the Vladivostock passenger station.

  Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Nicholas again began to see Kschessinska. At first, they rendezvoused secretly in carriages on the bank of the Neva. Later, the Tsarevich began to call on Mathilde at her father’s home. Usually, he brought with him three youthful cousins, Grand Dukes Serge, George and Alexander Mikhailovich. Kschessinska served the young men her father’s champagne and listened while they sang songs from Russian Georgia. On Sundays, Mathilde went to the race track and sat just opposite the Imperial box, never failing to receive a bouquet of flowers, delivered for the Tsarevich by two fellow officers of the Guards.

  As Nicholas’s affection for Kschessinska grew stronger, he gave her a gold bracelet studded with diamonds and a large sapphire. The following summer, when Kschessinska returned to the military theatre at Krasnoe Selo, Nicholas came often to rehearsals, sitting in her dressing room, talking until the rehearsal began. After the performance, Nicholas came for Kschessinska, driving his own troika. Alone together they set off on starlit rides, galloping through the shadows on the great plain of Krasnoe Selo. Sometimes, after these blood-stirring rides, the Tsarevich stayed after supper until dawn.

  At the end of that summer of 1892, Kschessinska decided that she needed a place of her own. “Though he did not openly mention it,” she said, “I guessed that the Tsarevich shared this wish.” Her father, shattered by her announcement, asked whether she understood that Nicholas could never marry her. Mathilde replied that she cared nothing about the future and wished only to seize whatever brief happiness Fate was offering her. Soon after, she rented a small two-story house in St. Petersburg, owned by the composer Rimsky-Korsakov.

  When her house was ready, Nicholas celebrated the housewarming by giving her a vodka service of eight small gold glasses inlaid with jewels. Thereafter, she said, “we led a quiet, retiring life.” Nicholas usually rode up on horseback in time for supper. They gave little parties, attended by the three young Grand Dukes, another dancer or two and a tenor of whom Nicholas was fond. After supper, in “an intimate and delightful atmosphere” the company played baccarat.

  Nicholas, meanwhile, continued his functions at court. “I have been nominated a member of the Finance Committee,” he wrote at one point. “A great honor, but not much pleasure…. I received six members of this institution; I admit that I never suspected its existence.” He became president of a committee to aid those who were starving in a famine, and he worked hard at the job, raising money and donating substantial funds of his own. His relations with his father remained distant and deferential. “I would have liked to exercise with the Hussars today,” he wrote, “but I forgot to ask Papa.” Sergius Witte, the burly, efficient Finance Minister who built the Trans-Siberian Railway and later served Nicholas during the Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution,
gave an account of a conversation he had with Alexander III. According to Witte, he began the conversation by suggesting to the Tsar that the Tsarevich be appointed president of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Witte says Alexander III was astonished by his proposal.

  “What? But you know the Tsarevich. Have you ever had a serious conversation with him?”

  “No, Sire, I have never had the pleasure of having such a conversation with the Heir.”

  “He is still absolutely a child, he has only infantile judgments, how would he be able to be president of a committee?”

  “Nevertheless, Sire, if you do not begin to initiate him to affairs of state, he will never understand them.”

  In 1893, Nicholas was sent to London to represent the family at the wedding of his first cousin George, Duke of York—later King George V—to Princess Mary of Teck. The Tsarevich was lodged in Marlborough House with most of the royal personages of Europe living just down the hall. The Prince of Wales, always concerned with sartorial matters, immediately decided that the young visitor needed sprucing. “Uncle Bertie, of course, sent me at once a tailor, a bootmaker and a hatter,” Nicholas reported to his mother. This was his first visit to London. “I never thought I would like it so much,” he said, describing his visits to Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s and the Tower. Appropriately, he avoided that citadel of representative government, the Houses of Parliament.

  Nicholas was immediately taken with Princess Mary. “May is delightful and much better looking than her photographs,” he wrote. As for his cousin George, Nicholas and the bridegroom looked so much alike that even people who knew them well confused one with the other. George was shorter and slimmer than Nicholas, his face was thinner and his eyes somewhat more protuberant, but both parted their hair in the middle and wore similar Van Dyke beards. Standing side by side, they looked like brothers and almost like twins. Several times during the ceremonies, the resemblance caused embarrassment. At a garden party, Nicholas was taken for George and warmly congratulated, while George was asked whether he had come to London only to attend the wedding or whether he had other business to transact. The day before the wedding, George, mistaken for Nicholas, was begged by one gentleman of the court not to be late for the ceremony.