An approximate breakdown of Russia’s social classes at the turn of the twentieth century.
HOLLY PRIBBLE
In this official portrait taken in 1888, twenty-year-old Nicholas stands behind his father, Tsar Alexander III. Surrounding them are the other members of his family. His mother, Maria, stands behind brother Michael. Sister Olga leans against her father; beside her sits brother George. Sister Xenia is to the right of Nicholas.
THE STATE ARCHIVE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION, MOSCOW
This photograph of Alix and her sisters posing with their grandmother was taken shortly after their mother’s death in 1878. From left to right: Princess Irene, seated; Princess Victoria, standing; Queen Victoria seated and holding six-year-old Alix’s hand; and Princess Elizabeth (who later married Nicholas’s uncle the Grand Duke Serge) standing behind Alix.
ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST/@HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II 2013
The Winter Palace in 2011, looking very much as it did when Nicholas and Alexandra lived there.
ERIC ROHMANN
A view of the Great Palace at Peterhof, a large seaside park that became the Romanovs’ summer residence.
ERIC ROHMANN
The Alexander Palace, where Nicholas and Alexandra made their home. The family’s private rooms were located in the left wing.
ERIC ROHMANN
Nicholas and Alexandra’s bedroom in the Alexander Palace. Note the numerous icons on the walls.
COURTESY OF BRANSON DECOU COLLECTION DIGITAL ARCHIVE, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ, CA
Bejeweled Nicholas and Alexandra pose in the seventeenth-century costumes they wore to their fancy dress ball in 1903.
CORBIS
The little grand duchesses posed for this portrait in 1900. From left to right are three-year-old Tatiana, one-year-old Marie, and five-year-old Olga.
THE STATE ARCHIVE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION, MOSCOW
Alexandra and baby Anastasia in 1901. The empress signed this portrait Alix.
THE STATE ARCHIVE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION, MOSCOW
Baby Alexei in 1904, looking bright-eyed and healthy despite his diagnosis of hemophilia.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In 1896, peasants from all across Russia converged on Moscow for Nicholas’s coronation to receive small gifts and food from the tsar, as was the custom. This photograph shows what was called the People’s Feast on the day after the tragic events. Note the long tables and the communal bowls.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Barefoot peasants living in a traditional village, outside their izba, C. 1910.
KEYSTONE-MAST COLLECTION, UCR/CALIFORNIA MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE
Peasant women washing laundry in the Volga River, C. 1900.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Plank beds in the workers’ dormitory of a factory in St. Petersburg, C. 1900. AS many as seventy-five workers slept in one room on long wooden platforms divided into individual spaces by foot-high partitions. Factories charged workers to live here, docking the cost from their pay.
ZENO, BERLIN
Some of Moscow’s poorest citizens pose outside a shared three-story house, C. 1900. AS many as a thousand people squeezed between the walls of these ramshackle buildings, paying five kopecks a night (the equivalent of twelve hours’ work) for a space no bigger than a closet.
IMAGNO/AUSTRIAN ARCHIVES, VIENNA
Two Moscow workers share a space and a drink, C. 1904.
ZENO, BERLIN
St. Petersburg factory workers—both men and boys—pose for this 1910 photograph.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
This painting depicts the injuries inflicted on protesting workers by tsarist soldiers shown stationed (at right) before the Winter Palace on Bloody Sunday, 1905.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The opening of the Duma in the Winter Palace, 1906. On the left stand the autocratic nobles of Russia, and on the right, the newly elected deputies. Before them, Nicholas reads his speech in front of an ermine-draped throne—a sign of royal supremacy. TO the far left, a ramrod-straight Alexandra, along with Nicholas’s mother and other members of the royal entourage, watches.
CORBIS
The Duma in session at the Tauride Palace, 1907. Note the portrait of Nicholas looming over the proceedings, a constant reminder to deputies that they were ever under the watchful eye of the tsar.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A photograph of Vladimir Lenin taken around 1918.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The tsar’s police round up villagers as part of Nicholas’s crackdown, 1906. The officer on the far right is checking identification papers.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A group of Jewish children gather for a photograph in 1905 in Warsaw, Poland (then part of the Russian empire).
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
An apprentice boy, C. 1900.
ZENO, BERLIN
A rare snapshot of a relaxed and smiling Alexandra picnicking on the coast of Finland, C. 1908.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Afternoon tea at the family palace in the Crimea in 1909. Alexei sits front and center, while from left to right are Nicholas, Anastasia, Olga, Marie, Tatiana, and Alexandra.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Even though he was supposed to be careful, Alexei took all sorts of physical risks, as this photograph taken around 1909 shows. AS Anastasia looks on worriedly, Alexei swings exuberantly from a pole.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Olga (front) and Tatiana (left) play in the surf in the Crimea, C. 1909. On the right, holding a Kodak Brownie box camera, is Alexandra’s good friend Anna Vyrubova.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
The imperial couple in the Crimean scenery, C. 1910.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
A retouched lantern slide showing Rasputin with the Romanovs, C. 1910. In the front row from left to right are the children’s nurse, Tatiana, and Marie. In the second row from left to right are Alexandra, Rasputin, Alexei, and Anastasia. Standing behind the starets is Olga.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, one of Rasputin’s greatest foes.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Anastasia and Alexei cuddle in a chair on the terrace of the family palace in the Crimea, 1910.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Olga (center) and Tatiana study with Pierre Gilliard at the palace in the Crimea, C. 1911.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Anastasia looks over Olga’s shoulder as the older girl reads, C. 1912.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Alexandra reveals both her weariness and sadness in this candid photograph taken in the doorway of Alexei’s sickroom at Spala in 1912.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Alexandra sits at her recovering son’s bedside just days after the hemophilic episode that almost killed him.
RUSSIAN PICTORIAL COLLECTION, ENV. A2, HOOVER INSTITUTION ARCHIVES, STANFORD UNIVERSITY, STANFORD, CA
Nicholas and Alexei on the balcony of the Alexander Palace, C. 1913.
By tradition, the family maintained close ties with the armed forces, and both father and son liked to wear uniforms. The boy’s leg is still bent at the knee, owing to the events at Spala.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
This portrait of the Romanov family is one of a series taken to mark the tercentenary in 1913. Eight-year-old Alexei sits before his parents, while eleven-year-old Anas
tasia sits next to Nicholas. In the back from left to right are thirteen-year-old Marie, fifteen-year-old Tatiana, and seventeen-year-old Olga.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Arise, lift yourselves up, Russian people,
Arise for battle, hungry brother,
Let the cry of the people’s vengeance ring out—
Onward, onward, onward!
We’ve suffered insult long enough,
And submitted too long to the nobles!
Let us straighten our powerful backs
And show the enemy our strength!
So arise, brothers, arise and be bold,
And then shall the land be ours once more,
And from bitter aspens shall we hang
Every last lackey of that Vampire-Tsar.
—“The Peasant Song,” 1917
SUMMER ON THE STANDART
Many Russians would remember June 1914 as being glorious, with clear skies, a golden sun, and soft, cooling breezes. Feeling almost carefree, the Romanovs set off on holiday aboard the Standart. They cruised the coast of Finland. Here and there along their meandering route, the ship dropped anchor. Then Nicholas and the children rowed ashore to forage through pine forests for berries and mushrooms. Because of her back problems, Alexandra rarely left the ship. Instead, she reclined on deck, sewing and reading until her family returned for dinner. Afterward, there was dancing beneath the ship’s canvas awnings. In their white dresses, the teenaged grand duchesses bantered and flirted with the young officers as they whirled to the strains of the Standard’s brass band. Bored by all the mush, Alexei scrambled across the deck, climbing up ladders and swinging from ropes as his sailor nannies chased after him. At day’s end, the family gathered for evening prayers sung by the sailors’ choir. Alexandra especially loved this time of day, when the rays of the setting sun danced on the water, and the deep voices of the sailors, singing the Lord’s Prayer, echoed across the vast, watery silence. Retiring to their staterooms, they fell blissfully asleep to the waves’ gentle rocking.
But just four days out, terrible news shattered their idyllic days. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, prince and heir to Austria-Hungary, had been murdered.
WAR CLOUDS LOOM
Austria-Hungary was an empire made up of a group of provinces located in Central Europe. While its two largest ethnic groups were German and Hungarian, in 1914 there were also forty million Slavs—Poles, Croats, Bosnians, Serbians, Czechs, and Slovaks—living within the empire because their territories had been occupied by the Austrians. Most of these Slavic people hated being ruled by the Austrians. Burning for the day they would be free, some plotted to break up the empire and return the Slavic provinces to their rightful people.
The small Slav kingdom of Serbia supported these desires. Its government looked the other way as extremist groups, bent on using violence and destruction against Austria, organized within its borders. It was one of these terrorists, a nineteen-year-old named Gavrilo Princip, who calmly stepped out in front of Archduke Ferdinand’s car during the prince’s ceremonial visit to the city of Sarajevo (in modern-day Bosnia). Aiming carefully, Princip fired twice. The archduke’s wife, Sophie, instantly crumpled, and blood gushed from the archduke’s neck. Fifteen minutes later, both the future ruler of Austria-Hungary and his wife were dead.
Over the next two weeks, political tensions in Europe grew. Blaming the Serbian government for the assassination, Austria-Hungary moved to punish the tiny country. It began threatening war.
Fearing attack, Serbia turned to Russia for help. Years earlier, the two Slavic countries had signed a mutual defense agreement. This meant they were treaty-bound to defend each other.
Meanwhile, Germany—which had a defense treaty with Austria-Hungry—quickly let it be known that it sided against Russia and Serbia.
That was when France, because of its mutual defense treaty with the tsar, weighed in on the side of the Slavs.
And England? It, too, allied itself with Russia because of a treaty it had signed with France.
“My God! My God! What madness!” exclaimed French Ambassador Paléologue. All of Europe tottered precariously on the brink of catastrophe. An Austrian attack on Serbia could mean the start of a war the likes of which the world had never seen.
“I HAVE KILLED THE ANTI-CHRIST!”
On June 30, Alexandra cabled Rasputin from aboard the Standart. “It is a serious moment,” she wrote. She begged him to pray for peace.
Her telegram arrived in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoe just hours later, and a messenger delivered it to Rasputin’s house (the starets was visiting his family for the summer). Rasputin ripped open the envelope and read the telegram while standing in the doorway. Realizing it required an immediate response, he went after the messenger. But as he stepped through his gate and into the street, an unknown woman appeared. “Her mouth and face were veiled so I could only see her eyes,” he later recalled. “At that moment a dagger flashed in her hand and she stuck it once into my stomach.… I could feel the blood pouring out of me.”
“I have killed the anti-Christ! I have killed the anti-Christ!” the woman screamed hysterically.
Clutching his wound with both hands, Rasputin stumbled toward the church. Dagger raised, the woman came after him. But a crowd, attracted by the commotion, stopped her. Pushing her to the ground, they held her until the police arrived.
Meanwhile, Rasputin was carried to his house, where he lay moaning and bleeding until a doctor from the town of Tyumen, forty-seven miles away, arrived eight hours later. Recognizing the seriousness of Rasputin’s condition, the doctor chose not to move the patient. Instead, he performed surgery by candlelight in the starets’ bedroom. Rasputin, who refused anesthesia, instantly fainted.
When he came to hours later, he did two things: he called a priest to pray for him, and he cabled Alexandra. “That hunk of carrion stuck me with a knife,” he wrote her, “but with God’s help, I’ll live.”
He was barely conscious when her reply arrived. “We are deeply shaken—praying with all our hearts.”
But Alexandra did more than pray. She sent a specialist to Siberia. He immediately transferred Rasputin to the hospital in Tyumen, where another, more delicate surgery was performed to repair the starets’ internal organs.
For the next forty-six days, Rasputin recuperated in the hospital. Feverish and weak from loss of blood, he read the newspapers and worried. What if war broke out? Germany, he believed, would defeat Russia. The kaiser would take Nicholas’s place on the throne, and when that happened, the pleasant life he’d built for himself would be swept away. His privileges. His influence. All would be gone. Rasputin couldn’t let that happen. In hopes of averting war, he began sending almost daily cables to Nicholas.
Surely, the diplomats “should be able to keep the peace,” he wrote in one. In another, he said, “We don’t have a war yet, and we don’t need one.” He even went so far as to advise Nicholas not to “give [our enemies] a reason to start yelling again.”
On July 28, Austrian-Hungarian troops began bombing the Serbian capital of Belgrade. The next day, Nicholas—who had cut short his vacation and returned to his summer mansion at Peterhof—ordered his army to mobilize along the border his country shared with Austria.
According to some reports, when Rasputin heard this news, he thrashed about in bed so wildly that he ripped out his bandages. “[Do] not plan for war,” he urgently telegrammed the tsar, “for war will mean the end of Russia and yourselves, and you will lose to the last man.”
When Nicholas received this telegram, he ripped it up in frustration. He felt so conflicted. His instincts told him that war could be “a good thing, especially from the standpoint of morale.” An event like that would unite the Russian people, heal class divides. But Alexandra, who believed all Rasputin’s warnings, pleaded with Nicholas to maintain the peace and listen to Our Friend. He spoke, she insisted, for God. At the same time, Nicholas’s generals pressured him to prepare for a war they claimed was just
one shot away.
Nicholas wavered, unable to decide on a course of action. But events soon made the decision for him.
WAR COMES TO THE ROMANOVS
On August 1, 1914, everyone except Alexei (who was bedridden because of a twisted ankle) attended vespers in the little Alexandria church at Peterhof. Standing before the altar in the candlelight, Nicholas wore, observed Pierre Gilliard, “an air of weary exhaustion, [and] the pouches that always appeared under his eyes when he was tired [were] markedly larger.” Hands clasped, he prayed with all his might for God’s help.
Beside him, Alexandra’s face bore the same “care-worn … look of suffering so often seen at [Alexei’s] bedside.” She, too, prayed “fervently … as if she could banish an evil dream.”
The girls added their prayers to their parents’. Bowing their heads, the family chanted the familiar and comforting words:
O Lord, save the people,
And bless thine inheritance.
And give peace in our time, O Lord;
For it is thou, Lord, only that makes us dwell in safety.
When the family returned from church, Nicholas—promising he’d be only a moment—stepped into his study to read the latest reports. The others went into the dining room to wait for him.
The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia Page 12
