In 1892, the same year Alexandra was orphaned by the death of her father, Duke Louis of Hesse, Nicholas made the following entry in his diary: “My dream is to some day marry Alix H. I have loved her a long while and still deeper and stronger since 1889 when she spent six weeks in St. Petersburg. For a long time I resisted my feeling that my dearest dream will come true.”
If only Alexandra would lay aside her misgivings about converting to Russian Orthodoxy—a sacrifice required of every tsar’s consort—life would be perfect! Alicky was already the subject of much gossip within her family. By then she was nearly twenty-two, tall and slender with red-gold hair and gray-blue eyes, but was still unwed, holding out hope for Nicky, yet all the while maintaining that their different religions posed an insuperable barrier to their happiness.
In April 1894, several of the crowned heads of Europe gathered in Coburg for the wedding of Alicky’s homosexual brother Ernest to his cousin Victoria Melita, the daughter of Victoria and Albert’s son Alfred. Nicholas and Alexandra were able to spend a good deal of time together, but Alicky burst into tears whenever the subject of religious conversion was raised. So Ella was dispatched to have a nice long talk with her younger sister. Ella had converted when she wed Serge, and somehow she managed to convince Alicky that Russian Orthodoxy and Lutheranism were really quite similar!
As soon as Alicky made her peace with the issue, the young couple was in perfect harmony. And with no further impediment to their union, she joyfully agreed to give her hand to the equally exultant Nicholas, who wrote in his diary, “A marvelous, unforgettable day. Today is the day of my engagement to my darling, adorable Alix. . . . The whole family was simply enraptured.”
And 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 contentment. . . . The whole world is changed for me: nature, mankind, everything, and all seems to be good and lovable . . . she is quite changed. She is gay and amusing, talkative and tender.”
When she discovered that her fiancé kept a diary—in which his entries were written in English—Alexandra began to scribble romantic notes in it, which usually began with the words “Many loving kisses.” One such comment read, “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.”
An early love note from Nicky to Alicky reads, “I love you my own darling as few persons can only love! I love you too deeply and strongly for me to show it; it is such a sacred feeling, I don’t want to let it out in words, that seem too meek, and poor and vain.”
Alexandra promised her beloved that “I am yours, 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.”
For the time being life was sunshine and roses. They were reveling in being in love.
But on November 1, 1894, after a brief illness, Tsar Alexander III died. The twenty-six-year-old Nicholas, unschooled in statecraft and riddled with chronic indecision, was now the Tsar of all the Russias. The task ahead of him was enormous. A hundred million subjects inhabited imperial Russia; three-quarters of them were peasants who dwelled in the countryside. Among the population were native Russians, Germans, Orthodox Jews, Slavs, Uzbeks, Tartars, Georgians, and Armenians. The tsar ruled from St. Petersburg, but the empire’s center of commerce was Moscow, a lengthy rail journey thousands of miles to the southeast.
Suddenly, Alexandra, already out of her element and disdained by her formidable mother-in-law, was about to become bride and empress all at once.
The wedding date of November 26 had been chosen because it was also the birthday of the now dowager empress Marie, who was still deep in mourning for her husband. On the day of the ceremony, poor Alexandra, who had been nicknamed “the funeral bride,” was laced into a heavy, old-fashioned court dress of silver brocade with a sumptuous robe and train made of cloth of gold lined with ermine. The diamond nuptial crown was all ready to be placed atop her upswept hair. Meanwhile, inside the Uspensky Sobor Cathedral within the Kremlin, guests were shifting from foot to foot and muttering to themselves as the 11:30 commencement time for the ceremony time came and went. Nicholas, in his crimson uniform and boots of the Lifeguard regiment of the Hussars, may have feared that his bride had developed a case of cold feet.
The delay was due to the detention of the hairdresser by a skeptical security detail, and only after an hour of frantic explanation was the sweating and agitated man admitted to Alexandra’s presence.
Nonetheless, she made a radiant bride, and the royal couple was pronounced man and wife shortly before one p.m. Alix had converted to Russian Orthodoxy and henceforth would be known as Alexandra Feodorovna.
From the start, the imperial marriage was the picture of the Victorian ideal: outwardly placid, privately passionate. On their wedding night Alicky took the time to write in Nicky’s diary, “At last, united, bound for life, and when this life is ended, we meet again in the other world and remain together for eternity. Yours, yours.” The following morning she added, “Never did I believe there could be such utter happiness in this world, such a feeling of unity between two mortal beings. I love you, those three words have my life in them.”
Although their love life was a study in compatibility, Alexandra might have wished for one significant change on the domestic front. In Russia, a dowager empress took social precedence over the current one and Nicky’s mother, Minnie, was no exception. She refused to hand over the crown jewels to her successor until Alexandra eventually got up the courage to make an embarrassing fuss about it. Minnie took dinner beside her son every night, as Alicky uncomfortably watched her infantilize him. Minnie had even chosen the newlyweds’ suite of rooms at the Anitchkov Palace, which were small, cramped, and markedly inferior to her own apartments, although Nicholas and Alexandra were now the tsar and tsarina. Their quarters were the ones Nicky and his brother Georgy had shared as children, never intended for adults with vast formal wardrobes. Consequently, Alexandra had no space to hang and store her clothes. And she soon discovered that their servants, also handpicked by Minnie, were spying on her every word and deed and reporting the details to the dowager. Evidently Minnie didn’t think her daughter-in-law was showing Nicholas enough respect by addressing him with pet names like “Boysy” (Alix was “Girlsy”).
But Alexandra’s concern for her beloved Nicky trumped any worries about her own reputation at court. She recognized all too well the magnitude of his responsibilities. Nicholas remained in utter awe of his office, referring to it as “that awful job I have feared all my life.” He picked up nervous tics like chain-smoking and stroking his beard.
Early in their marriage Alexandra wrote, “I weep and I worry all day long because I feel that my husband is so young and i nexperienced . . . I am alone most of the time. My husband is occupied all day and he spends his evenings with his mother.”
Alix begged her husband to assert himself, but he was congenitally incapable of it, and petrified of conflict, particularly with Minnie. Alexandra’s attempts to fight back backfired in a big way. In an effort to remind everyone that she was now the empress, she dressed opulently and appeared dripping with jewels, but was mocked for overdoing it; and her fashion sensibilities and designer clothing from the best Paris couturiers were criticized for being both tacky and extravagant. Alexandra was never accepted as one of their own by the Russian aristocracy, who disliked and mistrusted her. And for all her language lessons, she never learned to speak Russian well.
Adept with pen and ink, however, Alix amused herself by sketching caricatures of her imperial in-laws. A particularly acerbic one depicted her husband as a baby sitting in a high chair being scolded by his mother. But when her drawings were discovered, the Romanovs failed to see the humor.
A few months later, however, tensions between Alexandra and her in-laws began t
o ease. Perhaps they realized that she was there to stay, made Nicky desperately happy, and there was nothing they could do about it. “Half a year now that we are married. How intensely happy you have made . . . [me],” wrote Alexandra in her husband’s diary.
On May 26, 1895, Nicholas and Alexandra were crowned in the Ouspensky Cathedral in Moscow. Seven thousand guests partook of the coronation banquet, but the festivities were marred by tragedy when an outdoor event at Khodynka Field offering free food and beer to the half million subjects gathered there turned fatal, earning the tsar the nickname “Bloody Nicholas.” A rumor that they were running out of beer fomented a stampede, and several dozen people, if not hundreds, were trampled to death or wounded. Their mangled bodies were quickly cleared from the field and promptly disposed of in mass graves, so as not to spoil the gaiety. Because it was widely (and falsely) reported that Alexandra, impervious to the tragedy, danced the night away at a ball hosted by the French, she became known as “the German bitch,” an epithet that would dog her all her life. In 1895 it was merely insulting; in 1918, it would be lethal.
The stress of all the coronation activities caused Alexandra to miscarry the male fetus that would have become the tsarevich, the heir to the imperial throne. Eventually, Alexandra and Nicholas would have five children. Between 1895 and 1901 four daughters—Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia—were born; and on August 12, 1904, Alexandra gave birth to the tsarevich, Alexis Nicolaevich.
By then, the tsarina, who had initially been so loath to convert to Russian Orthodoxy, had embraced the religion with the fervor of a zealot. She read church history, collected icons, and dabbled in the occult practices that were popular among the Russian aristocracy. However, to many people, particularly her in-laws, she remained an outsider, grim and thin-lipped when she was expected to greet and mingle with guests, her hands red and spotted from some sort of nervous reaction. No one cut her any slack. She’d barely been in Russia a month and could hardly speak the language before she had suddenly become their empress. Her lofty status and title made it impossible for her to make friends because everyone was beneath her. And during her first years of marriage she was so often in the throes of a difficult pregnancy, confined to months of bed rest, that she had attended few social or state engagements.
The early years of Nicholas’s reign saw a flowering of culture known as the Russian Renaissance or the Silver Age. Theater and literature sparkled with Stanislavsky, Chekhov, Gorky, and Sholom Aleichem. Pavlov conducted his canine experiments. The canvases of Kandinsky, Chagall, and Bakst brought painting into the modern age, while the artistry of Petipa, Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Fokine, and Pavlova turned the stage of the imperial ballet into one unrivaled among its peers. Prokofiev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Vladimir Horowitz, and Jascha Heifetz made glorious music. It was an embarrassment of riches, especially in a world where many of the tsar’s subjects were starving and unemployed.
By 1905, when the empire had lost the Russo-Japanese war, the seeds of revolution had been sown from within. In early January, waves of protests began to sweep across the country; workers struck en masse. On January 22, an activist workers’ movement secretly led by the police marched peaceably on the Winter Palace in the capital city of St. Petersburg. Nicholas’s infantry fired into the mob, massacring men, women, and children. The day became known as “Bloody Sunday,” shattering the illusion that the tsar was one with his people.
Although Alexandra was exceptionally distraught over the carnage of Bloody Sunday, she defended her husband. “My poor Nicky’s cross is a heavy one to bear, all the more as he has nobody on whom he can thoroughly rely and who can be a real help to him . . . he tries so hard, working with such perseverance, but the lack of what I call ‘real’ men is great. . . .”
And to her sister Victoria, Alix wrote of the 1905 uprising and the increased demands for a parliamentary form of government: “All over the country it is spreading. The Petition had only two questions concerning workmen and the rest was atrocious: separation of the Church from the Government, etc. . . . How I wish I were clever and could be of real use. I love my new country. It’s so young, powerful and has so much good in it, only utterly unbalanced and childlike. . . .”
In mid-October 1905, Russia was paralyzed by a general strike. Overnight a new workers’ organization sprang up, led by a fiery Marxist orator named Leon Trotsky.
Nicholas had two choices: become a dictator or write a constitution. He chose the latter for expediency’s sake, although he didn’t believe in either a constitution or a parliamentary body. The Imperial Manifesto of October 30, 1905, transformed Russia from an absolute autocracy into a semi-constitutional monarchy.
On paper.
Nicholas was neck-deep in political upheaval but he still found time for his family, and especially for the infant tsarevich, a chubby golden-haired cherub, named for Nicky’s favorite tsar, the seventeenth-century Alexis the Peaceful. It had taken ten years for Alexandra to give him a son; a male heir was of paramount importance ever since Tsar Paul I, the son of Catherine the Great, had changed the rules of succession. Paul so detested his mother for her role in the murder of his father, he decreed that no woman could ever again inherit the imperial throne.
But the joys of finally begetting an heir were short-lived. Within weeks of his birth, little Alexis began to bleed from his navel. The flow was stanched but after a day or two it began again. Alexandra’s worst fears were confirmed. Alexis had the Bleeding Disease, better known to us as hemophilia. Her uncle and baby brother had died from it and several of her male relatives also suffered from it. Alix was certain that her son had inherited the fatal trait through her and cursed herself for passing it to him. The empress’s guilt overwhelmed her, and in time, her desperate search for a cure would play a significant role in the collapse of the Russian empire and the execution of the Romanovs.
Hemophilia is an inherited blood-clotting deficiency where blood fails to coagulate properly after a cut, puncture, or wound. Even the slightest bruise can cause blood to fill the joints, resulting in severe swelling and extreme pain. The trait is passed through the female line on a recessive gene. Women are carriers but are rarely sufferers of the disease. Queen Victoria was a carrier, as were three of her daughters, including Alexandra’s mother, Alice.
At the deliberate wish of his parents, Alexis’s disorder was the best-kept secret in the empire. Even the boy’s tutors were unaware of the diagnosis. After all, what would be the heir’s fate—or that of the empire—if the people were to learn that their future tsar was an invalid who might not survive to adulthood?
The nuclear imperial family was a tight-knit one. In the private wing of the thousand-room Alexander Palace in Tsarkoe Selo (the Tsar’s Village)—a Disneyesque version of all that was opulent and exotic about Russia—the family would dress up for afternoon tea and enjoy postprandial parlor games and genteel activities, such as pasting photos into scrapbooks and albums and quietly reading in each other’s company. The imperial children were raised like dutiful Victorian bourgeoisie with respect for their elders, charity toward the poor, and a strong sense of duty and usefulness.
Unlike many royal couples, Alexandra and Nicholas shared a bed. The tsar liked to read before putting out the light, but on the occasions when he tried to fall asleep right away, he was sometimes kept awake by Alix, still engrossed in her book, noisily crunching English biscuits. They always spoke and wrote to each other in English. To the tsarina her husband was always “Nicky.” He called his wife “Sunny” or “Sunshine.” And they shared a secret signal for nookie time: Nicholas would whistle, imitating the warbling of a bird. Early in their marriage, Alix would blush crimson when she heard his signal, drop whatever she was doing, such as needlework or correspondence, grasp her heavy skirts and hasten to heed her husband’s sexual summons.
But as the years wore on Alexandra began to suffer from migraines, shortness of breath, and sciatica, and was often confined to a wheelchair. Alexis’s disease had turned her furthe
r inward. She prayed for hours a day asking God to send someone who could heal her son. When none of the doctors were successful, she never doubted His mercy; she merely resigned herself to accepting her own unworthiness of it.
Finally, in 1905 a savior arrived in the form of a big, burly, lanky-haired peasant. Born Grigory Efimovich in Pokrovskoe, a village in Western Siberia, Rasputin was a smelly, shaggy man with a long black beard and mesmerizing pale blue eyes. He called himself a starets—one of the Russian men of God who lived in poverty with the asceticism of a hermit. All Russians, regardless of rank or birth, listened to such holy men and gave them credence. And among the startsky of Russia, Rasputin was a rock star. According to his patients, through his hypnotically charismatic gaze Rasputin had the power to bewitch the blood, controlling its flow from one part of the body to another and stanching wounds mesmerically. They overlooked his utter inattention to personal hygiene, his filthy, coarse garments, and his unkempt appearance. No one cared that the holy man was a hedonist—half saint, half satyr, with a sexual appetite the size of Russia itself. In fact, the name “Rasputin”—bestowed on him by his Siberian neighbors for his outsized habits of drinking, fighting, and fornicating—means “dissolute.” But titled women dripping in jewels fell over themselves to bed him, and men who should have known better considered it a privilege to sacrifice their wives’ bodies to Rasputin’s libidinous advances.
Alexandra never succumbed to Rasputin’s questionable physical charms. But that didn’t stop tongues from wagging, especially after he became her personal starets. Alix was so dependent on him to cure Alexis that the British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane believed “Rasputin took the empire by stopping the bleeding of the tsarevich.” Late-twentieth-century medical historians have hypothesized that Rasputin’s meditative, mesmeric techniques and reassuring presence were calming influences that lowered Alexis’s blood pressure, thereby enabling clotting to begin. But at the time, many skeptics considered him to be nothing but a mountebank. Nevertheless, the tsarina would credit none of the starets’s detractors and welcomed Rasputin into the Alexander Palace with open arms.
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