The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia

by Candace Fleming

  FAMILY SECRET

  Their son’s illness devastated Nicholas and Alexandra. “Life lost all meaning for the imperial parents,” recalled Nicholas’s friend and cousin, Sandro. “My wife and I were afraid to smile in their presence. When visiting the palace, we acted as if we were in a house of mourning.”

  Typically, Nicholas believed Alexei’s illness was God’s will, and so he accepted it passively. “My own fate, and that of my family are in the hands of Almighty God,” he said.

  But Alexandra blamed herself for the boy’s condition. Hemophilia—a genetic disease affecting only males but transmitted by their mothers—was widespread in her family. Not only did several of her nephews suffer from the condition, but her own brother had died of it as a child. She knew she’d passed the disease to her son. But after she’d waited so long and prayed so hard, why had God allowed this terrible thing to happen?

  Alexandra believed there could be only one explanation: God had found her unworthy. But if her unworthiness had caused Alexei’s suffering, didn’t it stand to reason that she could save him by becoming holier? And so she began to pray longer and harder, spending hours on her knees in the palace chapel. She covered the walls of the nursery, and even baby Alexei’s crib, with hundreds of icons and religious images. She begged God to heal her son.

  Until God granted that miracle, however, she and Nicholas chose to keep their boy’s condition a secret. There would be no public announcement. Instead, doctors and servants were ordered to remain silent, and the word hemophilia was banned from palace use. Life at court became even narrower. The family, fearing the heir’s condition would be discovered and talked about, rarely went out in public. And only a few family members and close friends were invited in. Convinced Alexei’s illness was a threat to the tsar’s regime, they withdrew completely into the protective bubble of Tsarskoe Selo.

  Little did they know that the real danger to Nicholas’s throne was not Alexei’s hemophilia. It was the dark clouds of social unrest gathering across his empire.

  What a pity that Nicholas sleeps!

  —Carl Joubert, 1904

  Russia As It Really Is

  BLOODY SUNDAY

  By 1905, the working class had begun envisioning a better life. And these visions began with books. “When I came in from work, I did not lie down to sleep immediately,” recalled a weaver named Feodor Samilov. “Instead I picked up a book, lit a candle that I had bought with my own savings, and read until I could no longer keep my eyelids from closing.”

  He wasn’t alone. The speed with which factory workers learned to read “was little short of astonishing,” noted one historian. By 1905, six out of every ten laborers in Moscow were literate—an increase of twenty percent in less than ten years. And in St. Petersburg the number of working men and women who could read was three times greater than in the rest of Russia. Now the factory worker in St. Petersburg who could not read was the exception. The opposite was still true back in his peasant village.

  These readers had almost no access to political writings. Censorship laws made such literature illegal, and newspapers faced stiff fines and forced closings if they included material considered offensive by the government. The result was that they steered clear of such writing. As for books, only those deemed appropriate by the tsar’s censors were allowed on library shelves. “I read Jules Verne … and James [Fenimore] Cooper, and was captivated by their descriptions of journeys and discoveries,” said weaver Samilov. “Over a period of five to six years, I read through the most diverse assortment of books imaginable … but I never encountered one that could have awakened my class consciousness.” Even so, he added, “Books taught me how to think.”

  These literate workers were now able to picture a government more responsive to their needs; they had “caught sight of a new life,” recalled factory worker Semën Balashov, “one very different from our life of servitude.” In January 1905, he joined ten thousand other men, women, and children who had abandoned their jobs. Taking to the streets, they refused to return to work until their demands were met. What did they want? A living wage, an eight-hour workday, affordable housing, and public education.

  An energetic young priest named Father George Gapon led them. Gapon had devised a new and dramatic way of drawing attention to the workers’ demands. He would march them directly to the tsar and present him with a petition that began:

  We, the workers and inhabitants of St. Petersburg … our wives, our children, and our aged, helpless parents, come to THEE, O SIRE to seek justice and protection. We are impoverished; we are oppressed, overburdened with excessive toil, contemptuously treated.… We are suffocating in despotism and lawlessness. O SIRE we have no strength left, and our endurance is at an end. We have reached the frightful moment when death is better than the prolongation of our unbearable suffering.… We beseech thy help.

  Gapon felt sure this would work. After all, most Russians still believed in the long-held Russian tradition of the Batiushka Tsar, the Father of the Russian People. While they cursed landowners, bureaucrats, police, and factory managers for their problems, they rarely blamed the tsar. It wasn’t his fault, they said. He lived so close to heaven, he didn’t know about his people’s suffering on earth. But once they told him and handed over a petition, like a good and loving father the tsar would protect them from the greedy factory managers. He would help them win decent working and living conditions. Gapon saw himself at the head of a mass march to St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace, where the tsar, stepping out onto the balcony, would receive their request with loving benevolence.

  On Saturday, January 21, Gapon informed government officials about the march taking place the next day. He begged for the tsar to receive their petition at two o’clock in the afternoon. He didn’t know that Nicholas was fifteen miles away at Tsarskoe Selo, or that the only people waiting for the marchers would be the soldiers Nicholas had ordered there after learning about the event. Now some twelve thousand bayonets and rifles stood ready.

  The next morning, as snow swirled across the frozen rivers, workers organized themselves into processions. It was Gapon’s plan for them to march along different streets, meeting at the Winter Palace Square. Wearing their best clothes for their meeting with the tsar, 120,000 men, women, and children walked peacefully along. Some carried crosses or icons. Others waved Russian flags or hoisted portraits of Nicholas and Alexandra high above their heads. As they went, they sang hymns, laughed, and talked excitedly. More than once, they burst into the national anthem, “God Save the Tsar.”

  But the marchers soon found their way blocked by soldiers. Unsure of what this meant, and not wanting to be late for their meeting, the workers pressed forward.

  The soldiers fired.

  Bullets shredded the flags, and icons, and portraits of Nicholas. Bodies fell to the snow-covered ground.

  “The tsar will not help us!” cried one of the stunned workers.

  “And so we have no tsar,” added another darkly.

  When the shooting stopped, between 150 and 200 men, women, and children lay dead. Between 450 and 800 were wounded. And the traditional ideal of the tsar as the people’s loving “father” was destroyed. No longer would Nicholas be held blameless for their troubles. Now he was a “blood-stained creature” and a “common murderer.” The day itself became known as Bloody Sunday.

  “Remember, son,” said one father after the shooting had stopped. “Remember and swear to repay the tsar. You saw how much blood he spilled, did you see? Then swear, son, swear.”

  While his soldiers fired on St. Petersburg’s citizens, Nicholas breakfasted with close friends and family in the semicircular hall of the Alexander Palace (as he did every Sunday morning), then attended services in the chapel. Afterward, he pulled the children around the park in their toboggan, before settling down beside the fireplace in Alexandra’s drawing room with a glass of tea. It wasn’t until early evening that his pleasant routine was interrupted by reports of the massacre. He was shocke
d. “Lord, how painful and sad this is!” he wrote later that night. But he did not blame himself. Nicholas insisted that his troops had been forced to shoot. What else could they do in the face of mob action? The workers, Nicholas asserted, should beg his forgiveness.

  Alexandra, too, maintained it was all the workers’ fault. “Yes, the troops, alas, were obliged to fire.… Had a small deputation brought, calmly, a real petition for the workman’s good, all would have been otherwise.”

  A handful of Nicholas’s advisers disagreed. They begged him to consider measures that would improve workers’ lives. “I do not want to die without having told you … what great evil you will bring to yourself and to millions if you continue on your present course,” Count Leo Tolstoy warned in a letter. Tolstoy, a great writer who had enjoyed wealth, success, and fame, wondered how Nicholas, “a free man not lacking for anything, and a reasonable and good man,” could allow such misery to continue. He concluded that it was all the fault of their form of government. “Autocracy … no longer answers the needs of the Russian people,” he asserted. “Give the masses the opportunity to express their desires and demands … improve men’s lives,” and prevent a revolution.

  But Nicholas buried his head in the sand. “There are no labor problems in the city,” he insisted. “No unrest in the countryside.” Instead, he believed Russia was on the road to great progress that would, in the end, trickle down to everyone. Hadn’t the imperial government, using money collected from Nicholas’s subjects, built railroads that stretched across Russia? And hadn’t mills, factories, and foundries sprung up all over the country? With such great changes, there were bound to be a few disruptions. But Nicholas firmly believed all would be well.

  “FOOL’S PARADISE”

  Over the next few months, violence spread across Russia as people reacted to Bloody Sunday. “It makes me sick to read the news,” said Nicholas; “strikes in schools and factories, murdered policemen, riots.” It was the beginning of what his mother called “the year of nightmares.”

  And yet he took almost no action to end the unrest. Instead, he remained isolated with his family at Tsarskoe Selo. In August, he took them for a two-week cruise on the Baltic Sea. Anchoring off the coasts of various Finnish islands, Nicholas and his daughters (Alexei was still too little to hike with them) explored the beaches and woods. Returning to the ship hours later, the children emptied their pockets of the treasures they’d brought back for their mother—shiny rocks, bits of shell, wildflowers. There was a reason to celebrate, too. “Baby Tsar has a new tooth!” Alexandra exuberantly reported.

  Meanwhile, the country had suffered through sixteen hundred strikes since Bloody Sunday. Involving almost a million people, these labor walkouts surged and ebbed as workers joined them, then returned to their jobs, then struck again.

  But then, on October 3, there was a walkout by Moscow’s printers for better pay and working conditions. By mid-October, the printers in St. Petersburg and other cities went on strike, too. Then the railway workers joined the strike, bringing the country’s entire train system to a grinding halt. Millions of other workers followed suit. Factory workers, schoolteachers, postal workers, telegraph operators—all walked off their jobs, as did doctors, lawyers, bankers, even the ballerinas of St. Petersburg’s Imperial Mariinsky Theatre. Cities ground to a standstill. There were no newspapers or tramcars, and there was no electricity at night. Factories closed. Trains sat unmoving on the tracks. And fuel and food began to grow scarce. Day and night, mobs marched through the streets, waving red flags (a traditional revolutionary symbol) and threatening to destroy any business that did not shut its doors. No longer were people striking just for better wages and living conditions. The events of Bloody Sunday had shown them that they needed a voice in how their country was run. Only then could they hope to better themselves in society. And so they also demanded a legislature—a Duma—whose members they would elect.

  This last demand was largely due to an organization called the St. Petersburg Soviet (soviet means “council” in Russian). Begun in early 1905 by a handful of workers from several of the city’s factories, the soviet’s purpose was to organize and coordinate all the strike actions happening across the city. Members urged workers to act with discipline and with common goals in mind (like the Duma the people wanted to establish). Because it took the form of a workers’ government, it appealed to the city’s voiceless classes. By October, the organization had over five hundred members from more than a hundred St. Petersburg factories and workshops. Perhaps more important, it inspired laborers in fifty other Russian cities to set up soviets, too.

  But these soviets would be short-lived. Perceiving them as a political threat, Nicholas declared the workers’ councils illegal. He had their leaders arrested, and their meetings suppressed. As quickly as the soviets had sprung up, they disappeared.

  Despite the chaos in the city, Nicholas continued on as if nothing had happened. “The tragic aspect of the situation,” one courtier wrote in his diary on October 14, “is that the tsar is living in an utter fool’s paradise, thinking that He is as strong and all-powerful as before.”

  CHOICES

  Ten days later, Prime Minister Count Sergei Witte took matters into his own hands. Having demanded an audience with the tsar, he bluntly told Nicholas that the country was on the verge of a revolution so potentially devastating that it would “sweep away a thousand years of history.” The tsar had two choices: “Crush the rebellion by sheer force … and that would mean rivers of blood,” Nicholas later explained to his mother, or “give to the people their civil rights, freedom of speech and press, also to have … a Duma.”

  Nicholas recoiled at the idea of these democratic reforms. “The heart of the tsar is in the hand of God,” he told his ministers. Any change would weaken the sacred, moral power bestowed upon him by the Almighty. “I am not holding on to the autocracy for my own pleasure,” Nicholas went on. “I act in this spirit only because I am certain that this is necessary for Russia.”

  Besides, it wasn’t wretched living conditions that had caused the country’s problems, claimed Nicholas. It was the fact that people had turned against the autocracy and their holy tsar. “We have sinned … and God is punishing us,” he said. Therefore, strikes and protests were not a sign that the country needed democratic reform. Rather, they were God’s way of telling the country it needed an even stricter autocracy.

  His ministers tried convincing him otherwise. Better to make a few concessions than turn St. Petersburg into a battleground, they said. Count Witte even drew up a document for the tsar to sign. But Nicholas refused to give in.

  Six days later, on October 30, Nicholas’s cousin and commander of the St. Petersburg Military District, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, stormed into the tsar’s study. Waving a revolver, he shouted, “If the Emperor does not accept the Witte [document] … I shall kill myself in his presence.… It is necessary for the good of Russia.”

  Cornered, Nicholas backed down. That same day, he reluctantly signed Witte’s document. Known as the October Manifesto, it granted “freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association” to the Russian people. But most important, it promised a Duma that would allow even the lower classes of Russians to have a say in how the country was run. Among the powers given to this newly created legislature, the manifesto pledged that “no law may go into force without the consent of the Duma.”

  It was a stunning concession. By giving the Duma the final word on the creation of laws, Nicholas had essentially waived his autocratic rights. No longer would one man, the tsar, make all the laws affecting citizens’ lives. Now a group of men, elected by the people, would decide what was best for them. “People have laid down their lives ‘For the Faith, Tsar and Country’—and this is how Russia was created,” fumed one nobleman. “But who is going to lay down his life ‘For the State Duma’?”

  Most of Nicholas’s subjects, however, greeted the manifesto joyfully. Calling off the strike, they cheered and
sang. Speakers appeared on street corners, testing their new freedom of speech. People imagined a new Russia, a free Russia, a Russia that included them. Said one citizen, the country “buzzed like a huge garden full of bees on a hot summer’s day.”

  REPRESSION AND POGROMS

  On the very day the October Manifesto was proclaimed, a crowd of jubilant Moscow workers marched to the city jail. There, on this sunny autumn day filled with so much promise, they eagerly exercised their newly granted freedom of speech by peacefully demonstrating for the immediate release of all political prisoners. They sang hymns. They made speeches. And to their astonishment, the jail doors opened. One hundred and forty political prisoners—imprisoned for having spoken and written against the tsar—now stepped out onto the cobbled street. Roaring its approval, the crowd hoisted several of the released men high onto its shoulders. Triumphantly, they headed back toward the city’s center. But they had not gone far before they met a large mob waving patriotic banners and carrying portraits of the tsar. As the still-celebrating workers grew closer, the mob pulled out knives and brass knuckles. Within minutes, the workers’ triumph turned to terror as they were slashed and beaten. Some were forced to kneel before Nicholas’s portrait, while others were made to kiss the national flag. When the attack was over, one of the prisoners lay dead, and dozens more were wounded.

  Who had committed this crime? The Union of Russian People, later to be known as the Black Hundred. Staunch supporters of the tsar, members of the Black Hundred vowed to stamp out anyone they believed threatened the autocracy. This included “upstart” workers, students, and Jews—most especially Jews. Formed in early October, the Black Hundred’s membership swelled with “uprooted peasants forced into towns as casual laborers; small shopkeepers … squeezed by … big business; [and] low ranking [government] officials” who felt their jobs were threatened by the new reforms. By 1906, the group claimed three hundred thousand members and one thousand branches across the country. Nicholas himself proudly wore the group’s emblem and accepted one for his infant son, Alexei. Wishing the group “total success” in uniting “loyal Russians,” Nicholas helped by financing the group’s rabidly anti-Jewish, antiworker newspaper. He even secretly provided guns to its members. Meanwhile, policemen—acting under orders from Nicholas’s minister of the interior—encouraged the Black Hundred to take to the streets, turning a blind eye as the mob attacked anyone who looked anti-tsar.