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

by Robert K. Massie

  On a warm April night, Nicholas boarded a train in St. Petersburg accompanied by three of his four uncles, Grand Dukes Vladimir, Serge and Paul. When he arrived in Coburg a day and a half later, dressed in full uniform, Alix was waiting at the station. That night, they went to dinner and an operetta with the family. The following morning, unable to wait any longer, Nicholas went straight to Alix and proposed. In his diary and in a letter to his mother he described what happened.

  “What a day!” he wrote in his diary. “After coffee about ten, I went with Aunt Ella to Alix. She looked particularly pretty, but extremely sad. They left us alone and then began between us the talk which I had long ago strongly wanted and at the same time very much feared. We talked till twelve, but with no result; she still objects to changing her religion. Poor girl, she cried a lot. She was calmer when we parted.”

  In his letter to Gatchina, Nicholas wrote: “I tried to explain that there was no other way for her than to give her consent and that she simply could not withhold it. She cried the whole time and only whispered now and then, ‘No, I cannot.’ Still I went on repeating and insisting … though this went on for two hours, it came to nothing.”

  But Nicholas was not alone in his suit. As the relatives gathered from all over Europe, there were so many people present that family dinners had to be divided into two sittings, one at seven, the second at nine. A few hours after Nicholas’s first talk with Alix, Queen Victoria arrived, escorted by a squadron of British Dragoons. The Queen favored the Russian marriage and had a talk with the reluctant girl, taking the somewhat original tack that Orthodoxy was not really so very different from Lutheranism. The following day, the Kaiser appeared. Not at all unhappy at the prospect of marrying a German princess to the future Tsar of Russia, he too pressed Nicholas’s suit with Alix. Above all, it was Ella who calmed Alix’s fears and encouraged her ardor. Ella had not been required to change her religion to Orthodoxy when she married Serge, since her husband was not in line for the Russian throne. But she had accepted Orthodoxy voluntarily. She insisted to Alix that a change of faith was not really so enormous or unusual an experience.

  Long before it took place, Grand Duke Ernest’s wedding had been thoroughly overshadowed by the matter of Nicholas and Alix. During the wedding ceremony, Nicholas watched Alix closely. “At that moment,” he wrote, “how much I would have liked to have been able to look into the depths of Alix’s soul.”

  The very next day Alix capitulated. Nicholas wrote exultantly in his diary: “A marvelous, unforgettable day. Today is the day of my engagement to my darling, adorable Alix. After ten she came to Aunt Miechen* and after a talk with her, we came to an understanding. O God, what a mountain has rolled from my shoulders…. The whole day I have been walking in a dream, without fully realizing what was happening to me. William sat in the next room and waited with the uncles and aunts till our talk was over. I went straight with Alix to the Queen [Victoria]…. The whole family was simply enraptured. After lunch we went to Aunt Mary’s Church and had a thanksgiving service. I cannot even believe that I am engaged.”

  To his mother, Nicholas wrote: “We were left alone and with her first words she consented…. I cried like a child and she did too, but her expression had changed: her face was lit by a quiet content. … The whole world is changed for me: nature, mankind, everything, and all seem to be good and lovable…. She is quite changed. She is gay and amusing, talkative and tender.”

  Later, everyone present remembered the moment that this fateful match was made. “I remember I was sitting in my room,” recalled Princess Marie Louise of England. “I was quietly getting ready for a luncheon party when Alix stormed into my room, threw her arms around my neck and said, ‘I’m going to marry Nicky!’”

  Nicholas awoke the next morning to the clatter of horses’ hoofs on cobblestones and the hoarse shout of military commands. Under his window, Queen Victoria’s Dragoons were executing a drill in his honor. “At ten o’clock,” he wrote in his diary, “my superb Alix came to me and we went together to have coffee with the Queen.” While they remained in Coburg, every day began with “coffee with Granny.” Victoria was delighted with the young couple. An incurable romantic and an indefatigable royal matchmaker, she loved to surround herself with soft-eyed young people in love. Alix was her special pet, and now that the match was made, she wanted to revel in it.

  The weather was cold and gray that day, Nicholas wrote, “but everything in my heart was bright.” Uncle Bertie suggested that since so large a part of the family was present, there ought to be a photograph. The thirty members of the family trooped down to the garden, and the result was a remarkable panorama of royalty. The old Queen, tiny and indomitable, sat in the middle of the front row, holding her cane. The Kaiser was there, the only man seated, dressed in a uniform and his fierce mustache. Nicholas, small and mild in a bowler hat, stood next to Alix, who appeared pretty but unsmiling.

  From everywhere came congratulatory telegrams. “We answered all day,” Nicholas complained, “but the pile grew rather than diminished. It seems that everybody in Russia has sent flowers to my fiancée.”

  Whatever their opposition to the match, Tsar Alexander III and his wife responded gallantly, once it was made. Alix wrote the Empress calling her “Aunty-Mama,” and Marie wrote back to Nicholas: “Your dear Alix already is quite like a daughter to me…. Do tell Alix that her … [letter] has touched me so deeply—only—I don’t want her to call me ‘Aunty-Mama’; ‘Mother dear’ that’s what I am to her now…. Ask Alix which stones she likes most, sapphires or emeralds? I would like to know for the future.” As a start, Marie sent Alix an emerald bracelet and a superb Easter egg encrusted with jewels.

  Spring came suddenly to Darmstadt, and the park was filled with flowers, the air perfumed and warm. Nicholas couldn’t believe what had happened. “She has changed so much these last days in her relationship with me, that I am brimming with pleasure. This morning she wrote two sentences in Russian without error.” When the family went for drives in carriages, Nicholas and Alix followed behind in a pony cart, taking turns at the reins. They walked, gathered flowers and rested beside the fishponds. They dined together at every meal. “It isn’t easy to talk with strangers present, one has to give up talking about so many things,” Nicholas complained. In the evenings they went to concerts in the local theatre. At Nicholas’s request, the choir of the Preobrajensky Regiment of the Imperial Guard arrived by train from Russia to sing for his fiancée and the other assembled guests.

  Nicholas began spending the end of each day with Alix in her room. “We were together a long time, she was remarkably tender with me…. It is so strange to be able to come and go like this without the least restraint … What a sorrow to part from her even for one night.”

  Finally, after ten days of bliss, the time came for Nicholas to say goodbye. He spent the last evening in Alix’s room while warm spring rain fell on the trees outside her window. “What sadness to be obliged to part from her for a long time,” he wrote. “How good we were together—a paradise.”

  The following day, as he traveled eastward to Russia, Nicholas’s heart was suffused with love and sadness, and he wore a new ring on his finger. “For the first time in my life, I put a ring on my finger. It makes me feel funny,” he said. At Gatchina, he found his family gathered to meet him, Tsar Alexander III still wearing the knickers in which he had just returned from shooting ducks. There were telegrams waiting from Alix and Queen Victoria to be answered. Then Nicholas took a long walk in the park with his mother and told her everything that had happened.

  The month of May seemed interminable to the Tsarevich. He spent his days pacing among the lilacs in the park, then rushing off to write another letter to Alix. At last, in June, he boarded the Imperial yacht Polar Star, which carried him down the Baltic and across the North Sea to Alix in England. At the end of the four-day trip, nearing the English coast, he wrote, “Tomorrow I shall see my beloved again…. I’ll go mad with joy.” He landed at G
ravesend and hurried by train to London’s Waterloo Station “into the arms of my betrothed who looked lovely and more beautiful than ever.”

  Together, the pair went to a cottage at Walton-on-Thames belonging to Alix’s eldest sister, Princess Victoria of Battenberg. For three memorable days, they relaxed on the banks of the gently flowing river. They walked on the bright green lawns and gathered fruit and flowers from nearby fields. Under an old chestnut tree in the cottage garden, they sat in the grass and Alix embroidered while Nicholas read to her. “We were out all day long in beautiful weather, boating up and down the river, picnicking on the shore. A veritable idyll,” Nicholas wrote his mother. Years later, both Nicholas and Alix remembered every detail of those three shining days in the English countryside, and the mere mention of the name Walton was enough to bring tears of happiness to Alix’s eyes.

  When the three days were over, the young couple emerged from their private cocoon of happiness. “Granny” waited to greet them at Windsor Castle. Tsar Alexander III had sent his personal confessor, Father Yanishev, and the priest was anxious to begin Alix’s religious instruction. At Windsor, Nicholas presented his formal engagement gifts: a pink pearl ring, a necklace of large pink pearls, a chain bracelet bearing a massive emerald, and a sapphire-and-diamond brooch. Grandest of all was a sautoir of pearls, a gift to his new daughter-in-law from the Tsar. Created by Fabergé, the famed Russian court jeweler, it was worth 250,000 gold roubles and was the largest single transaction Fabergé ever had with the Imperial family. Staring at this dazzling display of gems, Queen Victoria smilingly shook her head and said, “Now, Alix, do not get too proud.”

  The heat was stifling in England that summer. Nicholas began riding out from Windsor Castle in the morning while it still was cool. He liked to trot down Queen Anne’s Way, a popular horse path bordered by magnificent trees, then come back home through open fields, “galloping like a fool.” He was always back by ten to join Alix and the Queen for coffee. Lunch was at two, and afterward everybody rested and tried to ward off the heat. Before tea, Nicholas and Alix drove under the great oaks of Windsor Park and admired the blooming rhododendron. Nicholas admitted to his mother, “I can’t complain. Granny has been very friendly and even allowed us to go for drives without a chaperone.” In the evening, when the air had cooled, they dined with guests on a balcony or terrace and listened to music being played in the castle courtyard. Once when a violinist came up from London, Alix accompanied him on the piano.

  Despite her lessons with Father Yanishev, Alix frequently popped into Nicholas’s rooms. He apologized to his mother for not writing home more often. “Every moment,” he pleaded, “I simply had to get up and embrace her.” During one of these visits, apparently, Alix discovered that Nicholas was keeping a diary. She began to write in it herself. These entries, most of them in English, began with short notes—“Many loving kisses,” “God bless you, my angel,” “forever, forever”—and progressed to lines of verse and prayers:

  “I dreamed that I was loved, I woke and found it true and thanked God on my knees for it. True love is the gift which God has given, daily, stronger, deeper, fuller, purer.”

  As the object of such overwhelming devotion, Nicholas felt that he had to speak about certain episodes in his past. He told her at this point about Kschessinska. Although she was only twenty-two, Alix rose to the occasion like a true granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She forgave him handsomely, even gushingly, but she also delivered a brief little lecture which cast Nicholas in the role of the male redeemed by the purity of love:

  “What is past is past and will never return. We all are tempted in this world and when we are young we cannot always fight and hold our own against the temptation, but as long as we repent, God will forgive us…. Forgive my writing so much, but I want you to be quite sure of my love for you and that I love you even more since you told me that little story, your confidence in me touched me oh so deeply…. [May] I always show myself worthy of it…. God bless you, beloved Nicky….”

  Knowing Nicholas’s love of military pageantry, the Queen arranged a succession of displays. At Windsor he watched a thousand cadets from the naval academy at Greenwich perform gymnastics to music. He reviewed six companies of the Coldstream Guards, and the officers invited him to dinner. Normally, Nicholas would have jumped at this invitation, “But … Granny loves me so and doesn’t like me missing dinner, nor does Alix,” he wrote, explaining to his mother why he refused. At Aldershot, the huge British military camp, they watched a torchlight retreat ceremony and listened to a massed choir of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish voices. Next day, Nicholas, dressed in his uniform of the Imperial Hussars, took the salute of columns of British infantry, cavalry and horse artillery. He liked especially the pleated kilts and the skirling pipes of the Highland regiments.

  While Nicholas was in England, a baby was born into the British royal family. “Yesterday, at 10 o’clock a son was born to Georgie and May to the general joy,” he wrote. The baby, named Prince Edward, would become King Edward VIII, and later the Duke of Windsor. Nicholas and Alix were chosen as godparents of the little Prince. “Instead of plunging the infant into the water,” noted the Tsarevich, “the archbishop sprinkled water on his head…. What a nice, healthy child.” Afterward the baby’s father dropped in on the engaged couple at Windsor. Even in his diary Nicholas showed a quaint touch of prudery as he described the visit: “Georgie came for lunch. Alix and he stayed in my room with me. I add these words ‘with me’ because otherwise it would sound a bit odd.”

  Before he left England, the Tsarevich and his fiancée went with the Queen to Osborne, the seaside royal residence on the Isle of Wight. From the palace lawns they could watch flotillas of sailboats scudding before the wind. Like a small boy, Nicholas took off his shoes and walked through the waves rolling up on the sand.

  As the end of July approached, the six-week idyll came to an end. Alix had filled the diary with messages: “Love is caught, I have bound his wings. No longer will he roam or fly away. Within our two hearts forever, love sings.” As the Polar Star slipped past Dover, north-bound for the Baltic, Nicholas read her prayer, “Sleep gently, and let the gentle waves rock you to sleep. Your Guardian Angel is keeping watch over you. A tender kiss.”

  Next day, Nicholas stood at the rail watching a fiery sunset off the coast of Jutland and gazing across the water as twenty ships of the Imperial German Navy dipped their flags in salute. Entering the Baltic through the Skaggerak, the Polar Star steamed slowly down the Danish coastline within sight of the ancient castle of Elsinore. But Nicholas’s thoughts were far away.

  “I am yours,” Alix had written, “you are mine, of that be sure. You are locked in my heart, the little key is lost and now you must stay there forever.”

  There was another entry, too—a strangely prophetic line from Marie Corelli: “For the past is past and will never return, the future we know not, and only the present can be called our own.”

  * Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, the wife of Nicholas’s eldest uncle, Grand Duke Vladimir.

  4

  Marriage

  At Gatchina, Nicholas found his family in a state of alarm over his father’s health. Troubled by headaches, insomnia and weakness in the legs, the Tsar had consulted doctors, who recommended that he rest, preferably in the warm climate of the Crimea. But Alexander III was not a man to disrupt his schedule simply because he was not feeling well. The family entrained in September, not for the Crimea, but for the Imperial hunting lodge at Spala in Poland.

  There, the Tsar continued to feel ill, and a specialist, Professor Leyden, was summoned from Vienna. Leyden carefully looked over the bearlike frame and diagnosed nephritis. He insisted that his patient be moved to the Crimea immediately and forced to rest. This time, Alexander III agreed. Nicholas, meanwhile, found himself caught in a struggle between “my duty to remain here with my dear parents and follow them to the Crimea and the keen desire to hurry to Wolfsgarten to be near my dear Alix.” Eventuall
y, he suppressed his ardor and went with the family to the summer palace at Livadia in the Crimea.

  There, amid warm breezes scented with grapes, the Tsar began to improve. He ate well, took sunbaths in the garden and even went down to walk on the beach. But this improvement was only temporary. After a few days, he again began to have trouble sleeping, his legs gave way and he took to his bed. His diet was rigidly restricted and, to his distress, he was forbidden ice cream. Sitting alone by his bedside, his sixteen-year-old daughter, Olga, suddenly heard her father whisper, “Baby, dear, I know there is some ice cream in the next room. Bring it here—but make sure nobody sees you.” She smuggled him a plate and he enjoyed it immensely. A St. Petersburg priest, Father John of Kronstadt, whose followers believed him capable of miracles, was summoned. While the doctors worked, Father John prayed, but the Tsar grew steadily worse.

  Sensing what was coining, Nicholas asked Alix to come to Livadia. She came immediately, traveling by train as an ordinary passenger. Normally the fiancée of a tsarevich would have been honored with a special train, but the Minister of the Imperial Court, whose job it was to make such arrangements, was so involved with the illness of the Tsar that he simply forgot. Approaching the Crimea, Alix wired ahead that she wanted the ceremony of her conversion to Orthodoxy to take place as soon as possible. Nicholas could not suppress his happiness. “My God, what a joy to meet her in my country and to have her near,” he wrote. “Half my fears and sadness have disappeared.”

  He met her train in Simferopol and brought her to Livadia in an open carriage. During the four-hour drive, they were stopped repeatedly by Tartar villagers with welcoming bread and salt and armloads of grapes and flowers. When their carriage rolled up in front of the palace guard of honor, it was brimming with fruit and flowers. In his bedroom, seated in an armchair, Alexander III awaited the young couple. He was dressed in full-dress uniform. He had insisted, despite all objection, that this was the only way for the Tsar of Russia to greet a future Russian empress. Kneeling before the pale, enfeebled giant, Alix received his blessing, and she and Nicholas were formally betrothed.