It was the beginning of the end for the imperial family.
Alexandra believed only what she wanted to see. When Rasputin made sexual advances toward her eldest daughter, Olga, and the girls’ governess complained of his impropriety, it was she who got sacked. When Alix’s sister Ella ventured to declare that Rasputin was a fraud, her remark fractured the sisters’ relationship irreparably. Nicholas was of a similar mind, but he knew that dismissing Rasputin would ruin his wife’s emotional health. Nicholas would never have forgiven himself if the self-important Rasputin were sent away from Tsarkoe Selo and Alexis were to die soon after his departure.
In 1912, after Alexis suffered a dreadful bleeding episode at Spala and Rasputin was able to cure him long-distance from Siberia, Alexandra wrote to him gratefully, with the same effusiveness she employed in addressing all her intimate friends: My beloved, unforgettable teacher, redeemer and mentor! How tiresome it is without you! . . . I only wish one thing: to fall asleep, forever on your shoulders and in your embrace. What happiness to feel your presence near me. Where are you? Where have you gone? Oh, I am so sad and my heart is longing. . . . Will you soon be again close to me? Come quickly, I am waiting for you and I am tormenting myself for you. I am asking for your holy blessing and I am kissing your blessed hands. I love you forever.
She signed it Yours, M (for “Mama”).
This letter sparked rumors that the tsarina and the starets were lovers. Those rumors bred others that he had slept with all four grand duchesses as well.
Alexandra was passionately in love with her own husband, was wildly religious, and found the Russian court’s moral laxness unforgivable. So it’s highly unlikely that she was Rasputin’s mistress. Nevertheless, her connection with the starets, even if it wasn’t sexual, imported corruption into the highest circles of Russian society. And their relationship hastened the downfall of the Romanov dynasty: while Nicholas was leading the Russian army during World War I, Alexandra was in St. Petersburg acting as regent. Her chief adviser—the man who convinced her to suggest specific troop movements to her husband, and who also strongly influenced the selection of ministers responsible for the governance of the empire while Nicholas was at the front—was Rasputin.
Alexandra and Rasputin were believed to be secret German sympathizers or even enemy spies, and their actions in the tsar’s absence were viewed as an attempt to bring Russia to its knees so that the Kaiser’s troops could march right in.
Although Alix heeded Rasputin’s political advice with disastrous results, neither of them had anything but tremendous patriotic devotion to Mother Russia. During the Great War Alix worried constantly for Nicky’s welfare, writing often to assure him of her love and support, her unshakable loyalty, and her fear for his well-being. In one of her 1914 letters, Alexandra gushed: I bless and love you as no man was rarely been loved before. I long to lessen your weight, to help you carry it—to stroke your brow, press you to myself . . . I long to hold you tight in my arms and let you rest your weary head upon my old breast. We have lived through so much together in these twenty years and without words understand each other.
She perfumed her letters to Nicholas or slipped pressed lilies or violets between the pages. Nicky would scent his replies with jasmine petals, Alix’s favorite bloom.
“Good morning my darling,” her letters to the front would begin, and they would end with exhortations to “Sleep well, my treasure,” assuring him that “I yearn for your kisses, for your arms and shy Childy [Nicholas] gives them to me [only] in the dark and wify lives by them.” Alexandra could not conceal her anguished concern each time Nicholas had to depart for the front: Oh, my love, it was hard bidding you goodbye and seeing that lonely, pale face with big sad eyes at the . . . [train] window—my heart cried out, take me with you . . . I gave my good-night kiss to your cushion and longed to have you near me. . . .
These are not the words of a woman having an extramarital affair with a smelly peasant, no matter how indispensable his presence was to her son’s health. Alexandra’s passion for Nicholas remained that of a young lover: 32 years ago my child’s heart already went out to you in deep love. . . I know I ought not to say this, and for an old married woman it may seem ridiculous, but I cannot help it. With the years, love increases and the time without your sweet presence is hard to bear. Oh, could but our children be equally blessed in their married lives.
Alexandra’s letters were her husband’s salvation during the tensest months of his life. Nicholas would read them just before he nodded off to sleep. His emotions were no less touched than hers by the deep and loving bond they shared and his words paint a tender picture of domestic tranquility in a world of chaos: My beloved Sunny, when I read your letters my eyes are moist . . . it seems that you are lying on your sofa and that I am listening to you, sitting in my armchair by the lamp . . . I don’t know how I could have endured it at all if God had not decreed to give you to me as a wife and friend. I speak in earnest. At times it is difficult to speak of such things and it is easier for me to put it down on paper owing to stupid shyness. . . . Goodbye, my beloved sweet Sunny. . . . I kiss you and the children tenderly. Ever your old hubby, Nicky.
In another letter he confessed that “I drink them and savor every word you write, and often bury my nose and press my lips to the paper you have touched.”
Love notes aside, knowing her husband’s distaste for confrontation Alexandra urged Nicholas to be more of an autocrat. Giving away too many rights to the people would only jeopardize Alexis’s legacy. She wrote to remind Nicky that “We’re not a constitutional country and dare not be, our people are not educated for it . . .” and, “For Baby’s sake we must be firm, as otherwise his inheritance will be awful, as with his character he won’t bow down to others but be his own master, as one must in Russia whilst people are still so uneducated.”
Nicholas humored her, replying, “Tender thanks for the severe scolding. I read it with a smile because you speak to me as though I was a child. . . . Your poor little weak-willed hubby, Nicky.”
But there was tension behind the mask. Nicholas wore Alexandra’s portrait about his neck day and night as an emblem of her indispensable presence. Without her, he admitted to being an emotional and physical wreck. He was ailing and exhausted, but the cocaine he took to revive him and ease his heart pain was rapidly aging him. Only forty-nine years old, his eyes were sunken and “stony,” his pupils faded, and his nose had grown fat while the rest of his face had become wrinkled, thin, and hollow. His beard and mustache were described as “tobacco yellow” by one observer, and his melancholy expression was one of utter helplessness and resignation. In the summer of 1915, he remarked, “perhaps a sacrificial victim is needed to save Russia. I will be that victim.”
And back in the capital city of St. Petersburg, renamed “Petrograd” when the war with the Germans began in 1914, Alix was chain-smoking and dosing herself with Veronal to help her sleep.
After the revolution of 1905, it had been clear to the rest of Europe that the tsarist monarchy was on shaky ground. By the end of 1916, change at the top of the food chain was inevitable. The only question was whether it could be achieved without violence.
Alexandra was at the nadir of her popularity. Because she was a first cousin of the Kaiser—although she despised him and his militaristic posturing—she was presumed to be part of a pro-German cabal at the very pinnacle of Russian government and society. Behind her back her detractors called her Nemka, the “German woman,” just as Marie Antoinette had been derided as L’Autrichienne , “the Austrian bitch.” Nicholas was warned by one of his own relations that Alexandra could not be trusted: “. . . What she tells you is not the truth; she is only repeating what has been cleverly suggested to her. If you are not able to remove this influence from her, at least protect yourself.”
It was Rasputin’s malignant presence that had to be eliminated for the health of the empire. He disappeared from Tsarkoe Selo in the last days of December 1916, lured away by
the wealthy Prince Felix Youssoupov, the husband of Nicholas’s niece Irina. With Nicholas’s tacit, top-secret approval, the plot’s mastermind, Youssoupov, along with a handful of coconspirators, invited Rasputin to his palace with the promise that the beautiful Irina would be there; in fact, she was miles away, in the Crimea at the time. Always a sucker for sex, Rasputin fell for it, resulting in one of the most famous murders in Russian history. He managed to survive being poisoned, shot, bludgeoned, and kicked, until finally he was bound and drowned in the Neva River. Even so, he managed to slip some of his ropes after he was tossed into the dark and icy water. On January 3, 1917, his body was buried in a corner of the Imperial Park. The devastated empress placed Romanov family mementoes and a personal letter to the deceased inside his casket.
However, Rasputin’s death changed nothing in the way the Russian government functioned. Revolution remained imminent. Nicholas was warned by Mikhail Rodzianko, the chairman of the fourth Duma, Russia’s legislative body, to do something about his wife’s interference in politics. “Alexandra Feodorovna is fiercely and universally hated, and all circles are clamoring for her removal.” He added that “all Russia is unanimous in claiming a change of government and the appointment of a responsible premier invested with the confidence of the nation. . . . Sire, there is not a single honest or reliable man in our entourage; all the best have either been eliminated or have resigned. It is an open secret that the Empress issues orders without your knowledge, that Ministers report to her on matters of state. . . . Indignation against and hatred of the Empress are growing throughout the country. She is looked upon as Germany’s champion. Even the common people are speaking of it.”
“Give me facts,” Nicholas demanded.
Rodzianko could present him with none. But he pointedly warned the tsar, “To save your family, Your Majesty ought to find some way of preventing the Empress from exercising any influence on politics. . . . Your Majesty, do not compel the people to choose between you and the good of your country.”
But the politician’s personal attacks on his wife, coupled with the demand that he send her away, only served to rile Nicholas’s anger and stoke his chivalry. “The Empress is a foreigner. She has no one to protect her but myself. I shall never abandon her under any circumstances.”
On March 7, 1917, Nicholas departed once more for army headquarters, ignoring his eleventh-hour opportunity to create a responsible ministry that would save his government. On March 8, he remained unaware of the violent riots taking place in the capital because the news was slow to reach him; and in any event his ministers did him a fatal disservice by sugarcoating the truth and downplaying the seriousness of the upheaval.
Petrograd was ground zero for the Russian Revolution of 1917. The first bread riots began on March 8, while Nicholas was en route to army headquarters. Factories had closed and there was a tremendous shortage of fuel and bread because so much of it was consumed by the troops. On March 12, the imperial government in Petrograd collapsed, and legislative power passed into the hands of the Duma. The mob marched in the streets. Bakeries were sacked and looted; arsenals were opened; prisons were stormed and the inmates released. But the imperial guard refused to fire on the crowd, summarily deserting their posts and joining the revolutionaries, swelling their ranks to 66,000 by nightfall.
Three days later, in his private rail car en route to Petrograd, Nicholas abdicated in favor of his twelve-year-old son, Alexis, but rescinded his decision a few hours later, only to re-abdicate in favor of his younger brother, Michael. But Michael didn’t want the job and handed back the crown. After three centuries, the Romanov dynasty had ended with a whimper.
Alexandra was hysterical when she learned of her husband’s abdication, sobbing and muttering, “The poor dear . . . all alone down there . . . what he has gone through. . . . And I was not there to console him.” On March 17, Nicky, detained by the revolutionaries, was finally allowed to telephone Alix. She rushed to the phone like a young lover. Nicholas said simply, “You know?” Alexandra replied, “Yes,” and they continued the conversation with a discussion about their children, aware that people were in the room at both ends of the line. In the days preceding her husband’s return Alexandra burned her diaries and many of her letters, including years of correspondence with her grandmother, Queen Victoria. The letters she chose to save were those that contained proof of the imperial couple’s Russian patriotism.
Alexandra, dressed in her nurse’s uniform, was placed under house arrest at Tsarkoe Selo on March 21. That day, Nicholas was apprehended at Mogilev while he was visiting his mother and brought to Tsarkoe Selo, where he was reunited with his family. Alone in the children’s room, they fell into each other’s arms. Alexandra was quick to assure Nicholas that he was infinitely more important to her as a husband and a father than as the tsar whose throne she had shared. Nicholas laid his head against Alix’s breast and sobbed like a baby.
As the Bolshevik Revolution raged, the imperial family remained under house arrest for five months at the mercy of the insurgents, hoping for rescue or for the opportunity to escape to a friendly nation. But on August 13, 1917, the day after Alexis’s thirteenth birthday, the family was transported to Tobolsk in Siberia, where they resided for eight months under guard, living on credit and forced to economize. On April 26, 1918, a detachment commanded by Commissar Vasily Vaslevich Yakovlev arrived in Tobolsk to convey the entire family to Ekaterinberg. There, the imperial family was lodged in the two-story home of a merchant who had been given twenty-four hours’ notice to vacate the premises. The residence, which had been ominously renamed “the House of Special Purpose,” had been turned into a prison. The windows in the five rooms on the top floor had been sealed and painted white so that no one could see outside.
Toward the end of June the family received two letters that told them to be prepared to be rescued. They sat up all night with their suitcases packed, but no one came. Hope turned to fear on July 4 when their usual guard unit was replaced with another led by the icy and sinister Jacob Yurovsky. At least five of the men were foreigners; some historians describe them as Latvians, others as Magyar former prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian army—the kind of men assigned to duties a Russian would balk at performing.
On July 16, the entire family and their small entourage, which included their physician, valet, and cook—as well as the Grand Duchess Tatiana’s dog—were ushered into the residence’s semi-basement on the pretext that the advancing German army had made it necessary to move them. In the sixteen-by-eighteen-foot room with an iron grille covering the window, they waited for the imaginary automobiles to arrive. One of the guards posed them in a tableau, explaining that he needed a photograph to prove they hadn’t been kidnapped by the Whites, the Bolsheviks’ rival revolutionary faction. But it was a ruse to get the family into a cluster. Moments later, they were told that the tsar’s family had failed to save them and they would all be shot.
Nicholas, his arm protectively placed about his son’s shoulder, had just enough time to say “What—?” before he was killed by a single revolver bullet. Alexandra made the sign of the cross as she, too, was felled by a single shot. Olga, Tatiana, and Marie, standing behind their mother, also died quickly. But Anastasia, who had only been wounded, regained consciousness and screamed as she saw her brother kicked in the head and two bullets fired into his ear. Seconds later, she was brutally bayoneted to death. Tatiana’s dog was killed by a rifle butt to the head. The family’s retainers were assassinated as well.
On July 17, the corpses were disposed of fourteen miles from Ekaterinberg in a mine shaft near Koptyaki, close to a quartet of pine trees nicknamed “Four Brothers.” They had been dismembered and chopped into little pieces, doused with gasoline and sulfuric acid to hasten decomposition. But the following morning, as rumors spread regarding their location, Yurovsky, desperate to avoid a backlash against his actions that might result in the unintentional martyrdom of the imperial family, moved as much of the remains
as he could to a sealed and concealed pit on Koptyaki Road.
The bodies of most of the Romanovs and their attendants were found in 1991, easily identified because the executioners hadn’t bothered to hack up Tatiana’s very recognizable pet. Alexis’s and Anastasia’s remains, which for some reason had been dumped near the pit, rather than within it, were finally found and identified in 2007. On March 11, 2009, the results of the DNA testing on the fragments conclusively proved that they were indeed those of the missing Romanov siblings. As of this writing the remains of Anastasia and Alexis have not yet been interred.
In 1991, the murdered imperial family were recognized as martyred saints by the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, although it took until the year 2000 for the synod of the Russian Orthodox Church to arrive at a similar conclusion; but because the last of the Romanovs had not died for their faith, as traditional martyrs have done, they were canonized as “Passion Bearers,” or “people who met their deaths with Christian humility.”
On July 17, 1998, a ceremony of Christian burial was held and the remains of the family (with the exception of Alexis and Anastasia) were laid to rest with state honors in the St. Catherine Chapel within the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul in St. Petersburg, reposing among the bodies of all other Russian emperors since Peter the Great.
Nicholas II, the last of the tsars, was not a good ruler; there’s no way around it. During his reign his subjects grew increasingly disillusioned. They were tired of being hungry, and were angered by the rampant corruption in his government, particularly after Rasputin began to meddle in politics and guide Alexandra’s hand. And it can certainly be argued that by giving way to Alexandra and not dismissing Rasputin from court, thereby permitting the starets’s influence to permeate and infect his government, and by turning a deaf ear on all pleas for responsible leadership, Nicholas made revolution—and Lenin’s eventual triumph—possible.
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