Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  She slowly became disconnected from reality, refusing to acknowledge the criticism directed at her and defending Rasputin against anyone who questioned him, including other members of the imperial family. Her greatest opponents within the imperial family were Nicholas II’s aunt and cousins—Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna and her children—who had long held ambitions for the throne. Even Alexandra’s mother-in-law, Minnie, was soon an unwelcome guest because of her criticism of her daughter-in-law and the staretz. Minnie and Alexandra had always been at loggerheads, but there was never so much animosity as after Rasputin came on the scene. The same was true for Nicholas II’s sister Olga Alexandrovna. A devoted friend to Alexandra and a loving aunt to the grand duchesses, Olga was stunned by the way Alexandra shut her out of her life when she began criticizing Rasputin.

  The last straw came when Alexandra’s own sister Ella, the most respected royal in Russia, arrived at Tsarskoe Selo to try and talk some sense into the tsarina. Ella had been living in near seclusion at a convent since her husband’s murder in 1905. When the rest of the Romanovs heard that the highly respected Ella was venturing to Tsarskoe Selo, everyone held their breaths. Upon coming face-to-face with her sister, she cut straight to the point.

  “Rasputin is exasperating society,” she said. “He is compromising the imperial family and leading the dynasty to ruin.”

  “Rasputin is a great man of prayer,” Alexandra replied, unmoved by her sister’s plea. “All these rumors are slanders.”867

  Sadly, the meeting went downhill from that point, and both sisters walked away angry and resentful. Ella later recounted the meeting to Prince Felix Youssopov, the tsar’s nephew. “She dismissed me like a dog,” Ella reported with tears in her eyes and trembling with emotion.868 Their meeting marked the last time Alexandra and Ella would ever see each other. The dowager empress soon joined the chorus of voices in the Romanov family speaking out against Alexandra. During an audience with the historian Paul Miliukov, she ominously predicted, “My unhappy daughter-in-law does not understand that she is ruining both the dynasty and herself. She sincerely believes in the holiness of some rogue [Rasputin] and we are all helpless to avert misfortune.”869

  By late 1916, no one could deny the dangerous revolutionary storm that was gathering over Petrograd. Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, one of Nicholas II’s many relatives, was disturbed by the fact that

  [People were] speaking of the Emperor and Empress with open animosity and contempt. The word “revolution” was uttered more openly and more often [than ever before]; soon it could be heard everywhere. The war seemed to recede into the background. All attention was riveted on interior events. Rasputin, Rasputin, Rasputin—it was like a refrain; his mistakes, his shocking personal conduct, his mysterious power. This power was tremendous; it was like dusk, enveloping all our world, eclipsing the sun. how could so pitiful a wretch throw so vast a shadow? It was inexplicable, maddening, baffling, almost incredible.870

  When Ella failed to convince her sister to abandon Rasputin, the imperial family decided to take matters into their own hands. The plan was masterminded by Prince Felix Youssopov, who had married the tsar’s niece in 1914. The Youssopovs, despite being nonroyals, were unimaginably wealthy. Their estate in the Caucasus—one of several dozen throughout Russia—was so vast that it covered 125 miles along the shore of the Caspian Sea. Felix’s wealth meant that he was very popular in Saint Petersburg. He developed a long-standing friendship with Nicholas II’s cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, whom he had fought with for Irina’s heart. When Felix decided to take action against Rasputin, he recruited Dmitri with ease. Joining the conspirators in their plot were Vladimir Purishkevich, a verbose, outspoken, monarchist member of the Duma, and a relatively low-ranking military doctor named Lazovert.

  Late on the night of December 29, 1916, Rasputin was lured to Youssopov’s Petrograd home, the Moika Palace. He was promised a meeting with Felix’s wife, Irina, who was in the Crimea at the time. At Moika, he and his would-be assassins dined on cake and a bottle of Madeira. What the staretz did not realize was that his food was heavily poisoned by Dr. Lazovert. Shockingly, he continued to eat and eat, showing no signs of succumbing. Desperate, Felix shot Rasputin. Assuming he was dead, the group left his body in the basement and went to drink off their crime. What happened later still defies explanation almost a century later. Late that night, Felix stumbled downstairs to examine the body. He “felt for a pulse; there was none. Then, in a burst of rage, he seized the corpse by the shoulders and shook it violently. He threw the body back against the floor, then again knelt down beside it. Suddenly, the left eye twitched and opened.”871 According to author Karl Shaw, on his deathbed, Dr. Lazovert confessed “that he had completely lost his nerve and hadn’t in fact poisoned anything at all.”872 This deathbed confession has never been confirmed independently, but the fact that Lazovert fainted at least once that night lends credence to its plausibility.

  Trapped in a horrific nightmare, Felix watched in disbelief as the crazed Rasputin, blood dripping from his lips, rose to his feet and attacked him.

  “Felix! Felix!” Rasputin cried. “I will tell the Tsarina everything!” Hearing the commotion, Dmitri and Vladimir came running down the stairs.

  “Purishkevich, shoot!” Felix frantically shouted at Vladimir. “Shoot! He’s alive! He’s escaping!”

  As Rasputin made his way across the palace courtyard, Vladimir shot him for the last time in the back of the head. His ostensibly lifeless corpse dropped to the ground. Certain that the staretz was finally dead, the group disposed of his body in the freezing Neva River, where he died from drowning. Without even realizing, Felix had fulfilled an eerie prophecy Rasputin had spoken about him earlier. Anna Viroubova recalled, “The Holy Man told me that Felix Youssoupoff has the strangest destiny, but he sees blood on his hands.”873

  Rasputin’s murder did not solve any problems in Russia. At first, the people were exuberant. “I clearly remember,” wrote Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, “the unprecedented excitement at the hospital” where she worked as a nurse when news of Rasputin’s death was made public. The news, she noted, “was met everywhere with a joy bordering on hysteria; people in the streets embraced each other as they did at Easter, and women cried.”874 The joy people felt at Rasputin’s death was quickly consumed by the drama that was created within the imperial family when Nicholas and Alexandra learned that their own relatives had been involved in the murder. Alexandra wanted the murderers punished. “I cannot get over it,” she exclaimed to Dr. Eugene Botkin, the family’s physician. “Dimitriy, whom I have loved as my own son, conspiring against my life! And Youssoupoff—a nobody who owes all he has solely to the mercy of the Emperor! It is terrible.”875

  Dmitri and Felix were arrested shortly thereafter. Bertie Stopford, a member of the British embassy in Saint Petersburg, noted that “all the Imperial family are off their heads at the Grand Duke Dmitri’s arrest.”876 Punishments were quickly meted out. Vladimir Purishkevich, who escaped arrest by rushing to the front lines, was absolved of guilt. Dmitri and Felix were not so fortunate. Prince Felix was banished to his palatial estate in central Russia. Dmitri was ordered to serve with the army at the Persian front. Nicholas II received a petition for clemency on Dmitri’s behalf from nearly two dozen Romanovs. The first person to sign was Olga, the queen dowager of Greece, a former grand duchess and Dmitri’s grandmother.

  Your Majesty,

  We all, whose names you will find at the end of this letter, implore you to reconsider your harsh decision concerning the fate of the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich.

  We know that he is ill and quite unnerved by all he has gone through. You, who were his Guardian and his Supreme Protector in infancy and boyhood, well know how deeply he loved You and Our Country.

  Most heartily do we implore Your Majesty, in consideration of his weak health and his youth, to allow the Grand Duke to go and live on his own estates, either at Oncova or Illinskoe.

  Your Majesty mus
t know the very hard conditions under which our troops live in Persia—without shelter and in constant peril to health and life.

  To have to live there would be for the Grand Duke almost certain death, and in the heart of Your Majesty surely a feeling of pity will be awakened towards this young man who from childhood had the joy of living in your house, and whom you loved and to whom you used to be like a father.

  May God inspire you and guide you to turn wrath into mercy!

  Your Majesty’s most loving and devoted,

  Olga, Queen of Greece:

  [et al] … 877

  Queen Olga handed the petition to the tsar herself, who then handed it back to her, refusing his family’s plea. “No one has the right to kill, and I am astonished that the family should address itself to me with such requests,” he scrawled angrily into the margins of a memo to his relatives.878 This crisis severed the ties once and for all between the tsar, tsarina, their children, and the rest of the imperial family. From this point on, the palace gates were closed to the rest of the Romanov clan, cutting Nicholas and Alexandra off from a vitally important support group. “I believe in no one but my wife,” Nicholas told Sandro, his sister Xenia’s husband and Prince Felix’s father-in-law.879

  Rasputin’s murder was a mortal wound to Alexandra’s soul. The only person she believed could save her son was now gone. Pierre Gilliard, the tutor to Alexandra’s daughters, remembered “how terribly she was suffering. Her idol had been shattered. He who alone could save her son has been slain. Now that he had gone, any misfortune, any catastrophe, was possible.”880 Queen Alexandra told George V, “the wretched Russian monk caused a tremendous sensation in the world! but [is] only regretted by poor dear Alix who might have ruined the whole future of Russia through his Influence.”881 Rasputin’s body was buried at Tsarskoe Selo in a quiet, tearful ceremony attended by the empress, her daughters, and a few close friends. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, Alexandra and the grand duchesses dropped in letters and holy icons that each of them had signed. Rasputin’s death heralded a new, dark page in Russia, one that he himself had foreseen. Before his death, he wrote a letter entitled “The Spirit of Gregory Efimovich Rasputin-Novykh of the village of Pokrovskoe.” It was an eerily accurate warning that was revealed after the funeral.

  I write and leave behind me this letter at St. Petersburg. I feel that I shall leave life before January 1. I wish to make known to the Russian people, to Papa [Nicholas], to the Russian Mother [Alexandra] and to the Children, to the land of Russia, what they must understand. If I am killed by common assassins, and especially by my brothers the Russian peasants, you, Tsar of Russia, have nothing to fear, remain on your throne and govern, and you, Russian Tsar, will have nothing to fear for your children, they will reign for hundreds of years in Russia. But if I am murdered by boyars, nobles, and if they shed my blood, their hands will remain soiled with my blood, for twenty-five years they will not wash their hands from my blood. They will leave Russia. Brothers will kill brothers, and they will kill each other and hate each other, and for twenty-five years there will be no nobles in the country. Tsar of the land of Russia, if you hear the sound of the bell which will tell you that Gregory has been killed, you must know this: if it was your relations who have wrought my death then no one of your family, that is to say, none of your children or relations will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people.… I shall be killed. I am no longer among the living. Pray, pray, be strong, think of your blessed family.

  Gregory882

  Mystics have long held the strange accuracy of this letter to be proof of Rasputin’s supernatural abilities. If anything, it betrays how truly politically savvy Rasputin was. The subtext of this letter reveals a man fully aware of Russia’s impending implosion, a man who knew that should there be any kind of action against the monarchy, he would be one of the first targets. To a careful eye, this last appeal from Gregory Rasputin, seemingly from beyond the grave, is little more than the emotional blackmail he continually exercised over the Romanovs.

  17

  “May God Bless Your Majesty”

  (December 1916)

  The optimism in Austria-Hungary that Bulgaria’s and Turkey’s entries into the war brought was ephemeral as imperial casualties mounted. According to one report submitted to Franz Joseph, “the Monarchy had lost 2,083,000 men killed or permanently disabled by the end of 1915.”883 News of Austria’s losses was quickly followed by a series of events that marked a turn of the tide against the Habsburg Empire. The first blow came in August 1916 when, after two years of floundering neutrality, Romania came into the war on the Entente side. This was a bitter blow to both Franz Joseph and Wilhelm II, since King Ferdinand of Romania was a member of the House of Hohenzollern.

  Romania’s entrance into the war coincided with the birth of Zita’s next child, a son, on May 31, 1916. She named the infant Felix after her dear brother. A book commemorating his birth was soon published, highlighting that he had arrived “in the sight of victory” after a series of successes in the Tyrol.884 Within months of Felix’s birth, there was little doubt that Franz Joseph was dying. He had been battling suffocating bronchitis for months. His final breaking point came when he heard the outcome of the Brusilov Offensive. A Russian victory on the eastern front had shattered Austria’s armies, resulting in the deaths of 1.5 million soldiers, with only 350,000 Russian soldiers killed or captured. The historian Richard Charques observed about the campaign, “Relatively well nourished, the onslaught achieved swift and dramatic gains on both flanks. Brusilov’s feat, assisted in part by the half-heartedness of the Slav elements in the enemy ranks, was indeed remarkable and demonstrated in striking fashion the Russian power of recovery.”885 The defeat crushed the emperor, the most die-hard believer in the cause of the war. Archduke Charles was commanding the Twentieth Army Corps near Schässburg when he was recalled to Schönbrunn.

  On November 17, Franz Joseph’s condition became critical. An official announcement was made declaring that Charles would now govern alongside the emperor. Over the next several days, Franz Joseph was uncompromising in his self-discipline. He continued to work all day at his papers and only made the most minor concessions to his health. Too weak to kneel when he said his daily prayers, he acquiesced to his doctors’ orders and prayed seated in his desk chair instead. The morning of November 21 marked the last day in the life of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. In the morning, he summoned Charles and Zita into his room where he was working on army recruitment papers. By the evening, “it was clear that he was slipping away.”886 Too weak to continue working, he took to his bed, where he died a few hours later, surrounded by Charles, Zita, his daughters Valerie and Gisela, and his ministers. Reportedly, he died singing “God Save the Emperor.”887 Afterward, the stunned group filed into an anteroom to compose themselves. “No one knew what to say or what to do,” Zita remembered.888 A few moments later, the court chamberlain Prince Lobkowitz walked up to Charles and, with tears in his eyes, made the sign of the cross on his forehead, saying, “May God bless Your Majesty.” Zita later recalled, “It was the first time we heard the imperial title used to us.”889 At the age of twenty-nine, Zita’s husband was now Emperor Charles I of Austria.

  Twenty-four-year-old Zita was now the youngest-reigning consort in Europe. Her husband was the head of an empire that stretched from the Vorarlberg on Lake Constance in Switzerland to the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania. Austria-Hungary’s northern border reached more than sixty miles past Prague to the banks of the Elbe River, while its southernmost point touched the tip of Albania on the Adriatic Coast. Zita, along with being empress of Austria, was also now queen consort of Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Slavonia890, Dalmatia, Lodomeria, Galicia, Illyria, and Jerusalem. These core territories gave Austria its essence as an empire, and its imperial status was inextricably linked with the union of these thrones with the Habsburg monarchy.

  The day after his accession, Emperor Charles I com
posed an emotional letter to the Austrian people.

  I am compelled to occupy the throne of my ancestors in troubled times.… I am one with my peoples in the firm determination to seek peace and the survival of our country.…

  In invoking the blessing of Heaven for my House and my Peoples I swear before God that I will be a loyal steward of the heritage of my ancestors. I shall do all in my power to end the horrors and sacrifices of war at the earliest possible moment, and to restore the blessings of peace as soon as honor, the interest of our Allies and the co-operation of our Enemies will permit.891

  At two o’clock in the afternoon on the cold, gray day of November 30, 1916, tens of thousands of mourners lined the streets of Vienna, stood on balconies, or perched themselves on windows to bid farewell to Emperor Franz Joseph. After Louis XIV of France, he is the longest-reigning monarch in European history, lasting sixty-eight years and 355 days. “For us, personally, the old Emperor’s death meant the loss of a good, fatherly friend,” recalled Dona’s daughter, Sissy. “Aside from our grief we feared for the future of the two allies in a war in which both Germany and Austro-Hungary faced hitherto inconceivable consequences.”892