Olga pushed Mamma down the hall, wheels skimming against marble as they approached the guard-flanked door of Papa’s study. Slowing, she glanced through the open door of a vacant room opposite: within, a soldier was nodding off on a chaise lounge, his booted feet resting on a tasseled pillow, a lit cigarette clamped loosely between his lips.
“You’d better put that out,” Olga called. The soldier started, nearly swallowing the cigarette, and Olga smiled with grim satisfaction. “Wouldn’t want to start a fire, now, would you?”
Emerging from the study, Papa chuckled softly. “Steady now, darling,” he said. Much as she wanted to run into his arms, Olga knew the soldiers would prevent it: what if he slipped her some illicit message for Mamma? They’d been separated from Papa for three weeks now—a measure intended to keep Mamma and Papa from colluding as Kerensky and his team parsed through their correspondences, looking for evidence of pro-German treason.
Papa looked tired but serene enough. “Hello, darling,” he said, and Olga watched Mamma’s shoulders slacken with relief at the sight of him. For a couple as close as her parents, Olga knew it was torture for them both to live in separate wings of the palace, so close and yet so far away, meeting only at mealtimes in the presence of Kerenksy’s armed guards.
“Nicky,” she whispered, her voice so low that even Olga had to lean forward to hear. “I don’t want to do this, Nicky.”
Papa crouched, taking Mamma’s hands in his; she gripped them, her fingers white. “We both know that you must,” he replied. “He’s a reasonable man, my dearest; there’s no need for concern. Be strong. Tell him what he needs to know, and the rest will follow. I’ll be waiting out here when you’re done.”
“Right, Colonel,” said one of the soldiers, stepping forward. “That’s enough. Let the commission get on with their work.”
Papa straightened, and it irked Olga to see how passive he was in the face of the soldiers’ perpetual aggravations. Mamma looked up at him, her blue eyes welling with tears.
“Be strong, Alicky,” he repeated as Olga wheeled her through the door.
Olga had always found Papa’s study a comforting place. With its overstuffed bookcases and walnut walls, the room had a gleaming, golden air suffused with the scent of old books and furniture polish. Even in the harshest days of winter, when the wind howled down the palace’s white corridors, the study remained cozy, its heavy curtains blocking out the billowing snow. On more than one occasion Olga had fallen asleep on the divan while keeping Papa company as he worked, the crackling fire and scratch of pen on paper lulling her into gentle, beeswax-scented dreams.
Today, Olga entered hesitantly, half expecting to see the justice minister lounging, like his soldier, with his boots atop Papa’s desk, but he was standing by the bookcase, staring down at a folio of cream-colored notes. In years past, only Papa had a key to the study, satisfied that the room and its contents were under his sole purview: no servants misplacing his papers while they cleaned; no errant ministers casting a well-timed eye over classified documents. Upon his return to Alexander Palace, Papa had forfeited the key to Kerensky, who had taken to using the room as his base of operations. Day after day, his soldiers carted in boxes of Mamma’s correspondences—notebooks, letters that she and Anna Vyrubova hadn’t succeeded in burning—and Papa’s diaries; their Bibles and books inspected page by page for concealed messages. Lamp bases, unscrewed in the expectation of finding German cyphers hidden beneath the brass; portraits, removed from walls in their hunt for secret telegraph machines.
Kerensky closed the folio, looking up. “Good afternoon, madam,” he said. He circled to Papa’s desk: devoid of its usual clutter of photographs and icons, it now held a typewriter, a pad of paper and a single stack of letters written in Mamma’s languid hand.
Kerensky followed Olga’s gaze to the topmost of the letters, frowning. “Thank you, Grand Duchess. That will be all.”
Mamma’s voice was faint but steady. “What I have to say can be said in front of my daughter.”
Kerensky exhaled heavily but he didn’t respond, and Olga could feel her mother donning the chilly, imperious persona she wore in public—the one which armored her all-too-fragile soul, which allowed her to fulfill her duties as empress while her son lay, dying, in bed. It allowed her to withstand the snickers of Russia’s elite without breaking down; it gave her the strength to stand up to the ministers who dismissed her as a lesser-born German princess. With a tilt of her chin and a straightening of her shoulders, Mamma’s shyness turned into austerity, her reticence into steeled resolve: she transformed from Alix, wife and mother, into Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, beautiful and bejeweled. In too many ways, it was a persona better suited to the high colors and passions of an oil painting rather than to flesh and blood; but it was also the persona which, Mamma believed, bestowed upon her the all-important advantage of infallibility.
Finally, Kerensky conceded. “It’s no concern of mine whether she’s here or not, so long as she remains quiet.” He looked up at Olga, a hint of amusement playing on the edge of his downturned lip. “If you’re capable of silence, Grand Duchess.”
Olga reddened—still, she’d accomplish more by being within the room rather than without. Vowing to pass on everything she heard to Tatiana, Olga sank onto the divan. “Of course, Minister.”
He nodded, rummaging in the pocket of his collarless jacket before holding out his cigarette case. Neither Mamma nor Olga took one, and he crooked them in once more, setting the open case on the desk as he reached for his lighter.
“Thank you, Empress, for taking the time to meet with me today,” he began, and Mamma huffed. He looked up in surprise.
“Not that I had much choice in the matter, Minister. But by all means,” she smiled witheringly as she settled against the wicker back of her wheelchair, “how kind of you to have me.”
Kerensky raised an eyebrow, and Olga couldn’t tell whether he was irritated or impressed by Mamma’s sharp retort. Like Mamma, Kerensky seemed to have retreated behind a façade; but whereas hers was crafted of hauteur, his was politesse. “I understand how difficult this all must be for you.”
“Do you?” said Mamma. “Accused of betraying my own people? My own countrymen?” She shook her head, arranging the hem of her sleeve with brisk indignation. “Paying for hospitals out of my own pocket; nursing our soldiers with my own hands...and I’m the traitor! Truly, Minister. It beggars belief.”
Kerensky drummed his lighter on the folio. “With all due respect, Empress, your recent conduct has thrown that admirable sentiment into question. Given that your early years were spent amongst the very Germans we have been fighting since 1914—given that your brother, Empress, is marshalling German troops as we speak—it is not outside the realm of possibility for your allegiances to lie in two places at once.”
“It has been incredibly painful to watch Germany and Russia at war, but I know where my allegiance lies,” Mamma retorted. “It lies with my husband and my son. With Russia. My loyalty to Germany ended the day I married the emperor.”
“If that is the case, then you have nothing to fear from our conversation.” Kerensky leaned forward, his forearms resting on Papa’s desk. “I do hope you can appreciate my position, Empress. Your conduct as regent was unorthodox at best, and treasonous at worst. Appointing and dismissing ministers at will, disclosing confidential military information to unauthorized individuals, relying on the advice of a dissolute priest... These actions, Empress, have without question harmed the country you say you love.”
Mamma colored as Kerensky lit his cigarette. Smoke plumed in the room, and the scent was sharper, more acrid, than Papa’s eagle-headed Benson & Hedges. “This is an important conversation,” he continued. “We must establish the logic of your actions. If it is all as innocent as you claim, this testimony will be of benefit to you and your husband. But make no mistake: there are those within the Provisional Government who would see you hanged for the chaos you created. I have no wish for our government to follow the French example, so I will do what is in my power to establish due procedure.” He balanced the cigarette on the edge of a Fabergé ashtray, the blue enamel gleaming in the afternoon light. “So, let’s not waste any more time. When your husband, Nicholas Alexandrovich, formerly tsar of Russia, appointed himself commander in chief of Russia’s army in August of 1915, he named you regent in his stead. In this capacity, you—”
“No,” said Mamma quietly.
Kerensky looked up, his fountain pen poised over a fresh sheet of paper. “I beg your pardon?”
“That’s incorrect.” Mamma shifted in her chair. “There was no formal designation, no true regency. I was tasked with overseeing the appointments of government ministers and with ensuring that the domestic affairs of our country were handled in the tsar’s absence. I was to speak with my husband’s authority and maintain order amongst our ministers in the state Duma.”
“And this didn’t strike you as odd? A wife, standing in for her husband? An empress, taking on the God-given duties of a tsar?”
“Of course not,” Mamma replied, and Olga was surprised by her sanguinity. Weeks earlier, such a challenge would have provoked fury in her, but perhaps Mamma was better at diplomacy than Olga had suspected. “The tsar and I are one flesh; we share the burden of leading our country, just as we share the task of raising our children. We have no secrets from each other. Is it not right that I, knowing my husband’s mind best, would be tasked with carrying out his wishes while he defended our borders?”
“But you didn’t just carry out his wishes, did you? You made decisions in your own right. You appointed and dismissed ministers based on little more than impulse.” Kerensky looked up, his expression impassive. “Forgive me for being blunt, but you have no practical experience in governance. Why should the tsar have trusted you over his own ministers?”
Mamma stiffened, her voice icing over. “I was guided in my decision-making by a man of God, Minister.”
“Father Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin—a man with even less experience in governance than you. A peasant with nothing to recommend him to the highest post in the land beyond your assurances of his competency. You might be able to appreciate, Empress, why such an advisor raised questions amongst the Duma.”
Mamma’s gaze didn’t waver as she pulled out a cross from the folds of her skirt—one Father Grigori had given her, carved from the branches of a larch tree in his home village. An instrument of God doesn’t need gilt and finery, he’d said when he handed it to Mamma, his low voice rumbling through the Mauve Room: God’s spirit lives in the humble, as well as the grand.
“You know, Father Grigori didn’t care what people thought of him,” Mamma said, the corners of her mouth downturned as she ran her thumb along the soft wood. “A prophet is never acknowledged in his own time—look at what the Pharisees did to Christ. The tsar is God’s emissary on Earth; it stands to reason that He would send a man of God to provide His guidance in times of strife.”
Kerensky scratched his pen across the page. “Men of God still have earthly preoccupations, Empress. What’s to say Grigori Rasputin wasn’t using your faith as a means of wielding influence over the tsar?”
“How would that benefit Father Grigori? He never asked for payment. He spoke for the people of Russia—the peasants, the villagers.” Mamma looked past Kerensky’s shoulder, her expression soft: she’d spent hours in here, days, with Papa, with Father Grigori; she’d sat in Kerensky’s seat, balanced her own cigarettes on the dainty ashtray as she worked out matters of policy. “My husband was an autocrat, once. Before the October Manifesto, the tsar simply needed to wave his hand and his will would be done. Now, we must take ministers into account...all of them squabbling, all looking for ways to curry advantage, to push their own agendas.” Her expression hardened, and Olga pictured a flock of rooks descending on the desk, cawing, flapping their wings in a bid to be heard. “Such a system was difficult enough in times of peace, but with the war... I gave the tsar the courage he needed to make decisions worthy of his station. Worthy of the limitless power that had been bestowed upon him by God.”
“All decisions that strengthened Father Grigori’s standing in court. All decisions that enfeebled any voices in the government that contradicted your own.” Kerensky tilted his head to one side, his cordiality poorly concealing the steel edge of his questions. “You tell me Rasputin was a forgiving man, but dismissing his enemies strikes me as retribution, rather than compassion.”
Mamma’s smile sharpened; she leaned forward, the wheels of her chair creaking as they shifted with her weight. “Father Grigori was a forgiving man, Minister, but I do not share his tolerance. To find myself second-guessed at all turns; to be publicly undermined by ministers more interested in feathering their nests than doing what was right. Powerful men make powerful enemies; powerful women even more so. Why distract Nicholas when what was needed was a strong hand?” She sat back, a hard glow of conviction suffusing her cheeks, and Olga could see, in her eyes, the fears that had unmoored her in the final days of Papa’s reign. Mamma had seen enemies on all sides, then. Had they been real, or had she willed them into existence through her own actions?
“My husband is a sensitive soul. I’m afraid he can be quite suggestible. With the added responsibility of the war, he was vulnerable to those who sought to wrest away his influence. But I knew what was more important: passing my husband’s crown, intact, along to my son. With Father Grigori’s guidance, I did what I could to strengthen my husband’s hold on Russia.”
Kerensky’s hand flew across his note pad; Olga leaned forward but the minister’s scrawl was illegible from where she sat. Was he a man of God, this bloodless revolutionary? In his own way, Olga was sure that he cared for the common people—but he had been appointed from within the ranks of a political party, composed of men who grappled for the power that Papa’s abdication had left unchecked. These ministers felt they could throw chains upon that power and wrestle it to earth; that, with enough grasping hands, no one figure would rise to the exalted position Papa had once held. The Provisional Government claimed that it would better circumstances for all Russians—that, like the Duma before them, they could write out their lofty ideals in a manifesto, a blank page made black with promises. But promises could be broken. How could Kerensky be sure that his colleagues, with their dark suits and calculated smiles, would adhere to the ideals that had brought them together, rather than wield power for their own purposes?
But then, perhaps Kerensky’s growing influence over Russia was God-given, too.
“Let me ask you, Empress: What defined Grigori Rasputin as a man of God?” Kerensky drummed the barrel of his fountain pen, sending flecks of black ink across his notes. “His faith? His charity? Doubtless you know that Grigori Rasputin was a talented dissembler, a saint within the palace walls, but a satyr without. A khlyst, some say. You’ve seen the police reports, I trust. Women in and out of his apartments at all hours; drunken fights with cuckolded husbands. Hypnotism, hypocrisy.”
Olga listened, uneasy. She knew the price Father Grigori had asked in return for his service; she knew that Mamma would have paid it, a thousand times over, for what she received in return.
“Without sin, there can be no redemption; without redemption, there can be no salvation. Believe me, Minister, Father Grigori was aware of his own shortcomings. The devil tempts each of us in his own way. Who among us can claim that they’ve never succumbed?” She smiled, though it was a cold, merciless thing. “Minister, I expected more from you than cheap rumors. Father Grigori was a good man.”
“What good man takes advantage of young women?” Kerensky snapped. “What good man engages in midnight orgies?”
“Lies, Minister!” Mamma’s cheeks glowed with outrage, and she clutched her shawl close around her shoulders. “I’ll remind you that my daughter is present, I’d thank you not to use such language—”
Kerensky ran a hand through his oiled hair, and Olga could feel his patience thinning. “What hold did Grigori Rasputin have over you? Why was he a frequent visitor to the palace? Please, Empress—anything you can tell me; anything at all. I implore you. Can’t you see what you’ve lost because of him?”
“It was my understanding, Minister, that I’m the one under investigation, not Father Grigori.” She paused. “Are you a man of faith, Minister?”
“Not particularly,” he replied. “I believe in action, Empress: action and outcome. I believe in building a better world for the Russian people; in winning this war so that we can turn our attention to providing at home what so many people already have in Europe. Religious freedom. Workers’ rights. Full larders and hope for a better future. I believe in working for change, rather than praying for it.”
Mamma leaned back in her seat once more. “Then we are in agreement on one thing, Minister Kerensky. In our own ways, we’ve worked toward what we believe to be a better future.” She smiled, and it felt more genuine, now, than before. “What you need to know is this: with my husband’s blessing, I appointed ministers who I believed would be of service to the tsar. I acted in accordance with my faith. I put my faith in God, in my husband, in Russia—and in Father Grigori.”
Kerensky was silent a long moment. Then he tapped his cigarette end in the ashtray. “For what it’s worth, Empress, I believe you,” he said. “But our country needed more than your faith in Father Grigori. Russia needed competent ministers, munitions, food, stable supply lines—things that you, in dismissing competent ministers, denied it. It needs those things now, if we are to prevail against our foes.”
For a split second Mamma’s armor broke as she flinched. Kerensky’s words, it seemed, had finally hit home—but then she steeled once more.
Olga knew what she would say next. Mamma had always been one for religious recitation, reciting psalms to underpin her conviction in her faith—in love and duty. But in recent months, a more militant psalm had replaced the rest, eclipsing her once-frequent entreaties toward tolerance.
“More numerous than the hairs on my head are those who hate me without reason,” Mamma intoned. “Many are those who would destroy me, my treacherous enemies. Minister, faith is the bedrock on which actions are taken. If you don’t have faith, then I’m not the one who’s lost.”