The Montenegrins’ target was the empress. The sisters knew her and her weaknesses well. They had already introduced her to one holy man, Dr. Philippe, a Frenchman with striking similarities to Rasputin; he had started well—brilliantly—but had fallen from grace, and they were looking for a successor. The key to Alexandra was her grandmother, Queen Victoria. The English monarch was a dynastic breeding machine. Her nine children and thirty-five grandchildren included kings of England, the German kaiser, the queen of Spain, and Alexandra, empress of Russia. Victoria died three years before Rasputin first went to St. Petersburg, but she bequeathed him a legacy. She was a carrier of hemophilia.
The disease impairs blood clotting. Victims are unable to synthesize factor VIII, a protein that enables healthy blood to coagulate. The slightest wound can produce prolonged bleeding. Internal bleeding can begin for no apparent cause, with such violence and pain that joints become deformed. Hemophilia is almost invariably sex-linked, transmitted through the female line to male infants only. Victoria had passed the disease on to two of her five daughters, who in turn passed it to their sons. Care was taken to protect the victims from accidental knocks and falls—some were dressed in bizarre padded suits—but most were dead by age thirty.
Alexandra’s parents were Prince Ludwig of Hesse, ruler of a grand duchy of wine valleys and forested hills on the banks of the Rhine, and Victoria’s daughter Princess Alice. Mother and daughter had much in common, in events and in character. Both were married in mourning to foreigners. Both were ill at ease in their adopted countries and disliked at court; they remained deeply in love with their husbands, a rarity in arranged dynastic alliances; they suffered from the nervous debility and exhaustion then labeled neurasthenia. Each had a hemophiliac son.
Alice married her German prince when she was nineteen. The ceremony was overshadowed by the death of her father, Prince Albert, six months before. Queen Victoria wore black; “Alice’s wedding,” she wrote, “was more like a funeral.” When Princess Alice arrived in Darmstadt, the little capital of Hesse, a relative wrote that she was thought “a foreigner, come from distant England.” Her marriage was happy, though, and she had seven children. The sixth was born in June 1872, three years after Anna Egorovna had given birth to Grigory Rasputin in her Siberian cabin. The infant was christened Alix—“ ‘Alix’ we gave for Alice as they murder my name here,” her mother explained. She was not known as Alexandra until she left for Russia. Rasputin had no known godparents; Baby Alix had the future rulers of England and Russia, Edward VII and Alexander III, their wives, an English princess, and the duke of Cambridge.
Hemophilia was already known to be in the family. Alice’s younger brother Leopold had developed telltale bruises and bleeding shortly after his birth, and constant hemorrhages had lamed him. Alice proved to be a carrier. Her son Friedrich Wilhelm, “Frittie,” cut his ear when he was two and bled continuously. A year later he ran across his mother’s room while she was practicing Chopin’s Funeral March on the piano and tried to steady himself on the bow window. It was unlatched, and he fell two stories into the garden. He died of a brain hemorrhage that evening. On each anniversary of his death, Alix was taken to the crypt where he was buried.
Alix was happy as a small child—nicknamed Sunny, a “sweet, merry little person, always laughing and a dimple in one cheek”—until her mother died. The children developed diphtheria, which proved fatal for the youngest, four-year-old May. Alice embraced her surviving son, Ernie, when she broke the news to him; the British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, called it “the kiss of death,” for she caught the disease. Exhausted and depressed from childbearing, she succumbed to it. At six Alix was motherless; a brother and sister had also gone. The Darmstadt palace was dark; her mother’s room was left as it had been when she was alive, her bed draped with black crepe. Little Sunny became moody and listless. “Poor old Grandmamma will try to be a mother to you,” Victoria wrote to her. Alix spent much of the year in England with her, in castles still in mourning for her grandfather, whose bed was turned down each night and whose chamber pot was scrubbed each morning, as if he had used it.
While young Rasputin played pitch and toss with pig knuckles in the dirt and learned the essentials of peasant survival—how to hold a scythe and drive a cart—Victoria taught Alix the arts of ruling. She was drilled in deportment, learning to hold her head high and still for ten minutes at a time; she did the cercle, practicing social graces by touring a room and talking to pieces of furniture as if they were people. She was painfully shy outside the family—an excellent pianist, with a real flair for Wagner, she reddened with embarrassment when her grandmother made her play for visitors at Windsor—and she covered it with a contrived hauteur that, though undeniably regal, brought her little sympathy.
Her tutor, “Madgie” Jackson—a woman of “hard ways and crabbed, bad temper,” Victoria thought—encouraged Alix to reject the meek role expected of women and their exclusion from politics. The girl became self-willed and stubborn, alert to ideas and confident in her own. She knew that women could be powerful and historic figures; her grandmother ruled over a quarter of the world’s population. She was well grounded, in the arts, in languages, in mathematics, and in morbidity.
Alix made her first visit to Russia in 1884, at the time Rasputin was suffering his alleged torment at the hands of the lascivious general’s wife in Tyumen. She attended the marriage of her elder sister Ella to the Russian Grand Duke Serge, dining with her tsar-godfather Alexander III on June 8. Her second cousin, the heir apparent, Tsarevich Nicholas, noted his first meeting with her in his diary that evening: “I sat next to little twelve-year-old Alix, and I liked her awfully much,” he wrote. He was sixteen, a handsome young man, whose neat and regular features were relieved of a certain bland weakness by striking blue eyes. It was a happy year for Alix, but it held a distant warning. Her hemophiliac uncle Leopold was wintering in Cannes when he accidentally struck his head and died of a brain hemorrhage.
She returned to Russia five years later, this time in winter, to sledge with Nicholas by torchlight on structures of wooden planks and scaffolding sprayed with water to form ice hills. They ate blinis and caviar, and a ball was held for her. Alix had become a beauty, tall and slender, with striking chestnut hair and blue-gray eyes, and, an observer wrote, “a singular wistful and sweet sadness that never goes quite away even when she smiles.” Nicholas, now a Guards officer, fell in love.
Alix was back in Russia the following summer, staying with her sister Ella on Grand Duke Serge’s Ilinskoye estate on the Moscow River. She went rowing, picnicked on cold boar and smoked sturgeon, and picked wild berries in the woods. She disliked cities and was nervous in society; the hay-scented, green-shadowed countryside she saw now remained for her the real Russia, as she thought the peasants, dusty figures in linden-bark sandals who bared their heads and knelt as her carriage passed, true Russians.
Although she did not meet Nicholas on this trip, the cousins remained constant. Alix refused to marry Eddy, the eldest son of the Prince of Wales; Nicholas said that he would rather enter a monastery than become engaged to the German kaiser’s ugly sister Margaret. He parted from his young mistress, a striking ballerina, Mathilde Kschessinskaya. They agreed to meet near a barn on the Volkhonsky Highway to say good-bye. She came out from St. Petersburg by carriage; he rode his horse from the nearby army camp where he was stationed. They wept. “When the tsarevich departed for camp,” she wrote, “I remained by the barn and watched him go until he was no longer in sight.” At the end of 1891 Nicholas wrote in his diary: “My dream is to someday marry Alix H[esse]. I have loved her for a long while.” He was to remain faithful to her for life; death did not part them.
Alix’s father died in 1892—he collapsed in front of her at lunch; she took to her bed with hysteria—and her brother Ernest became grand duke of Hesse. Nicholas attended his marriage in the spring of 1894 to represent Russia. Alix was at the station to meet him, and they dined by candlelight that evening to a string quartet playing Mendelssohn. Nicholas saw her alone the next morning and proposed. She looked “particularly pretty, but extremely sad.” The bride of the Russian heir was obliged to be Orthodox; she wished to remain a Lutheran, and sobbed to him: “No, I cannot.” Her cousin Willy, the German kaiser, reminded her that other German princesses—Catherine the Great, her own sister Ella—had converted on marrying Russians. He said it was her “bounden duty” to do so.
Willy seized Nicholas the next day, took some flowers from a vase, and, thrusting them into his hand, sent him off to propose again. Alix was waiting for him in a room overlooking the palace garden, the windows closed against a violent spring thunderstorm. She accepted; they both cried like children. “O God, what a mountain has rolled from my shoulders,” Nicholas wrote in his diary that evening. “The whole day I have been walking in a dream.”
The union, so fateful, was made. Rasputin’s reaction, if any, is unknown; Europe’s great matchmaker, Queen Victoria, viewed it with foreboding. Her doubts were not about Nicholas—“I like him very much”—but about Russia. “The more I think of sweet Alicky’s marriage the more unhappy I am,” she wrote, “on account of the Country, the Policy and the differences with us and the awful insecurity to which that sweet Child will be exposed.… All my fears about her future marriage now show themselves so strongly when I think of her so young and most likely to be placed on that very unsafe throne, her dear life and above all her Husband’s constantly threatened and unable to see her but rarely.… She has no parents and I am her only Grandparent.”
In fact, Alix found “the Policy” of her new country much to her liking. Autocracy had been dinned into Nicholas by his tutor Constantine Pobedonostsev, a cold-eyed lawyer in steel-rimmed glasses and bow tie, a reactionary who thought parliamentary democracy “one of the vainest of human delusions,” serving only the “personal ambition, vanity, and self-interest of its members.” Nicholas was not stupid—he was fluent in five languages, speaking English without a trace of an accent, and he was taught political economy, history, international law, military science, and chemistry by outstanding teachers—but he had no intellectual curiosity and accepted the role of tsar as he received it, by rote. Alix took to absolutism easily, by nature. Otherwise awkward in her new country, she never questioned its system of government, or her place in it, other than to bitterly condemn its spasmodic lurches to liberalism; this acceptance she maintained despite the general loathing of its absolutism, shared by her imperious grandmother, that spread across the English-speaking world and beyond.
Alix was as foreign to Russia in other respects as her unhappy mother had been to Darmstadt. She learned fluent, English-accented Russian—Alexander III sent his personal confessor to Windsor to instruct her in the language and the Orthodox catechism before the marriage—but she arrived as a German princess. Russians, with a historic distaste that stretched back to medieval battles against the Teutonic knights, called her “the German woman.” It was unfair, for she was more English than German. English was her mother tongue, and it was her language of love. Nicholas courted her in it, and their letters and notes were written in it. Religion and politics apart, her tastes were English. Like her mother, she bought her furniture by mail order from Maples department store in London and hung her walls with pastoral watercolors of the Scottish highlands. Her favorite writer was the romantic novelist Marie Corelli, the pseudonym of Mary Mackay, who was hugely popular in England—William Gladstone and Oscar Wilde read her—and almost unknown outside it.
Critics detested Corelli as a “self-righteous, sentimental moralist, lacking self-criticism or a sense of the absurd.” Alix was pilloried on the same grounds. Petersburg society, malicious and demanding, found her stubborn and provincial. She dressed badly, with her mother’s passion for mauve. She was gauche, they said, she danced poorly, she had no small talk. Her French, the language of polite society, was hesitant and stumbling. She represented no great dynastic alliance; she was a poor catch for a Romanov heir. Her new home was not kindly disposed toward her, and her old one was glad to see her go. When the engagement was announced, according to the finance minister Sergei Witte, the Russian ambassador asked the marshal of the Hesse court how Alix had matured since he had first known her as a child. After making sure that nobody could overhear, the marshal whispered: “How lucky we are that you are taking her from us.”
Alexander III was dying, his body poisoned by kidney failure. Nicholas asked his fiancée to join him at the sickbed in the Livadia Palace in the Crimea. The grand marshal of the court forgot to order an imperial railroad train to wait for her at the Russian frontier as she crossed from Berlin. She caught a standard passenger train, which gave her a rare glimpse of lowborn Russians. The tsar struggled into dress uniform to receive her as a future Russian empress. He was too weak to stand. He sat on a chair in his bedroom, struggling for breath, his great frame shrunken and yellow.
The autocrat in her soul was at once on display. Alix was offended that the tsar’s doctors reported first to Empress Marie, ignoring her fiancé’s precedence as heir. It seemed not to occur to her that the family was in shock, that none had expected the giant monarch to be felled, that all naturally deferred to the empress in her grief. “Sweet child, pray to God. He will comfort you.… Your Sunny is praying for you and the beloved patient.… Darling boysy, me loves you oh so very tenderly and deep,” she wrote in Nicholas’s diary. “Be firm.… if the Dr. [Doctor] has any wishes or needs anything, make him come direct to you. Don’t let others be put first and you left out; you are Father’s dear son and must be told all and be asked about everything. Show your own mind and don’t let others forget who you are. Forgive me lovy.”
The words are haunting; Alix wrote them at age twenty-two, when she was an inexperienced princess from an obscure principality, to a man to whom she was not yet married but who would in a few hours inherit one seventh of the land area of the globe. In them she defined the future, for nothing was to change through war, scandal, and revolution. She loved Nicholas, fiercely, but she already found him weak, too ready to “let others be put first.” She would scold him, bully him to be firm; she regretted it, “forgive me lovy,” but she did it for his sake. She alone, with God, would defend his interests; she would make sure that others never “forget who you are.” The notes she wrote him—in a flowing English hand, full of underlinings and the hasty abbreviations of a mind that thought impulsively as it wrote, in this Victorian baby language, “darling boysy,” with the same allusions to God and prayer, and above all, with the same insistence on his power and primacy—filled volumes by the end. She was his love, his friend, his adviser; she was his absolutism. From this first note her letters show it all. They were a reprise for the Russian empire.
In the afternoon of October 19, 1894, Alexander was given the last rites, rallied enough to say a short prayer and kiss his wife, and expired. Empress Marie collapsed into Alix’s arms, an intimacy that was not to resume. Nicholas ran from the room and cried on the shoulder of his brother-in-law Sandro, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich. What would become of him, he sobbed, of Sandro, of Alix and his mother, of Russia itself? “I am not prepared to be tsar,” he said. “I know nothing of this business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers.” Nicholas was twenty-six. Death had sought him out before. His grandfather, Alexander II, liberator of the serfs, had been killed by a bomb in the streets of the capital thirteen years before. Leo Tolstoy had appealed to the new tsar to spare the terrorists, to “put forward another ideal, higher than theirs, greater and more generous.” Alexander III hanged them. His task was to restore the autocracy, and he did so, with such vigor that the terrorists shuffling in chains to Siberia admitted that theirs had become “a cottage industry.”
Nicholas loved his father, the great “Bear” who rose at seven, washed in ice-cold water, wore a peasant’s blouse and worn-down boots, who was strong enough to bend a silver ruble in his hand and tear decks of cards in half to amuse his children, who cursed violently and often. The son knew that his younger brother Michael was his father’s favorite—Michael could throw a pitcher of water over him and the Bear would laugh, whereas Nicholas would have “got what for”—and that he was in every way his father’s reverse. He was slim and slight, dressed beautifully, was exquisitely polite—even revolutionaries admired his manners—and never swore. Fine qualities, no doubt, for the constitutional monarch of a quiet country—his German cousin Willy thought him best suited to be “a country gentleman growing turnips”—but not for a Russian autocrat. Rasputin, who benefited greatly from his character, said that Nicholas had “no insides,” no guts.
Nicholas also lacked an instinct to rule. Under his grandfather liberalism had made some strides; jury trials, local government elections, a public state budget were introduced. The terrorist bomb had done that in; his father’s years of repression had mirrored Pobedonostsev’s dictum that Russia was “an icy desert and the abode of the ‘Bad Man,’ ” which must be governed by a strong tsar contemptuous of the “cheap and shallow ecstasies” of reform. But the essential question of government—autocracy or accountability?—remained. The autocrat needed application and drive to justify his semi-divine status. When Pobedonostsev tried to tutor Nicholas in the intricacies of government, he found his student “became actively absorbed in picking his nose.” Victoria made sure that Alix had a grounding in statecraft. Alexander, expecting to live well into the next century, was happy to let young Nicky enjoy the airhead life of a Guards officer; he could catch up on the business of ruling later. Alexander had no illusions about his son.
“What?” he growled when his finance minister, Sergei Witte, suggested that Nicholas be made president of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. “Have you ever had a serious conversation with him?”
“No, Sire,” Witte said. “I have never had the pleasure of having such a conversation with the heir.”
“He is still absolutely a child, he has only infantile judgments, how will he be able to be president of a committee?”
The young man unfit to run a committee was now to inherit an empire. Sandro felt a sense of “imminent catastrophe” as he watched his future ruler break down. An altar was set up on the palace lawns, and the Romanovs formed a semicircle around it. The guns of the fleet at Yalta boomed as a priest administered the imperial oath of allegiance and Nicholas, weeping, was proclaimed emperor and autocrat of all the Russias, the Sovereign Tsar Nicholas II.
The next day, as an autumnal storm swept in from the Black Sea, Alix was confirmed into the Russian church. She wore black; the palace was hung with black. Only the family was present as she renounced the “heresies” of her childhood Protestantism in a firm voice and repeated the Orthodox creed. The names given her at birth—the names of her English mother and aunts, Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice—were swept away. Alix became Alexandra Fedorovna. She was anointed with oil on her forehead, eyelids, neck and throat, and wrists and palms; she then took holy communion with her fiancé and his widowed mother. Nicholas wanted to marry her at once, in private, in the Livadia Palace while his dead father lay in the chapel guarded by Cossacks. His uncles said that a tsar must wed in public.
The journey to Moscow with the corpse took a week as the funeral train stopped in cities on the route for services. Eight black horses with purple bands on their harnesses pulled the coffin through the Moscow streets to the Kremlin, halting outside ten churches while litanies were sung from the steps. “She has come to us behind a coffin,” onlookers said of the foreign princess half-masked by driving sleet. A crowd of dignitaries waited at the station as the train slowly drew through dripping fog into St. Petersburg. Sergei Witte watched Nicholas step down with two blondes. At first the politician mistook Alexandra for her aunt, the Princess of Wales. “The young lady who turned out to be our future empress seemed not only less good looking but also less sympathetic than her aunt,” he recalled. “Of course she too was pretty then, and still is, but her mouth always seems to be set in anger.” The cortege took four hours to cross the city to the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, muffled drums and church bells tolling. The coffin was displayed in the cathedral for seventeen days. Twice each day Alexandra attended services with her fiancé. She had to kiss the dead tsar’s lips; he had not been embalmed for three days after his death, his face was a “dreadful color,” and he gave off a terrible smell.
Nicholas insisted that the marriage, planned for the following spring, be brought forward to the week after the funeral. It was his mother’s birthday, and protocol allowed court mourning to be lifted for twenty-four hours. His haste was such that his bride had no trousseau. Praskovya Fedorovna Rasputin’s wedding five years earlier was witnessed by a few Siberian peasants; no record of it was made. Thousands lined the Nevsky Prospect as Alexandra Fedorovna was driven to the Winter Palace; armed guardsmen were posted every few feet along the route, while secret policemen mingled with the crowds looking for signs of assassins. The bride wore a tiara of diamonds set in platinum, with a wreath of orange blossoms from the imperial conservatory in Warsaw, and a diamond necklace of 475 carats.
It took more than twenty minutes for the wedding procession to pass the three thousand guests in the rooms and halls of the palace, officers drawing their swords to salute her; her mouth trembled slightly, which an onlooker found relieved the “habitual hard expression” that detracted from her classic beauty. “One’s feelings one can imagine,” Alexandra wrote. “One day in deepest mourning lamenting a beloved one, the next day in smartest clothes being married.” The court returned to mourning after the ceremony in the white and gold palace chapel; there was no reception or honeymoon. “At last united, bound for life,” Alexandra wrote in Nicholas’s diary on their wedding night, “and when this life is ended, we meet again in the other world and remain together for eternity. Yours, yours.”
The young couple were happy but lonely. Their relations with the other Romanovs started poorly. The dowager empress was Danish. Experienced and practical, she was well placed to help Alexandra cope with the strains of becoming a Russian empress. Instead, she felt that she was losing her son to an obstinate outsider. She insisted that her name be placed first in the daily prayers for the imperial family in the Orthodox Mass. Alexandra resented this, and the tension was obvious in the Anichkov Palace, the dowager empress’s residence, where the newly marrieds were at first obliged to live. They shared the dining room, but there was little table talk.
The new empress did not like society, nor did it like her. She was shy and her smile thin-lipped. She preferred the company of children and the old to those of her own age. Prince Sergei Volkonsky, who met her frequently as the director of the imperial theaters, found that “sociability was not in her nature.” Her face blotched red with effort when she held a conversation, and she seemed to have a “natural indisposition toward the race of man.” People ignored her, Volkonsky said, so that she was “only a name, a walking picture.” In return, she despised St. Petersburg; “it’s a rotten town,” she wrote, “not an atom Russian.” Her husband shared her contempt for his capital, his dislike extending as far as its founder, the restless, westernizing Peter the Great. “He is the ancestor who appeals to me least of all,” Nicholas told Eugene Botkin, his personal physician. “He had too much admiration for European culture. He stamped out Russian habits, the good customs, the usages which are the nation’s heritage.”
The couple preferred Moscow; with its narrow lanes, its wooden slums and bulbous, ornate churches, it was more Russian. They brought it calamity when they were crowned in the city in May 1896. During the five-hour ceremony in the Cathedral of the Assumption, the tsar’s chain of the Order of St. Andrew fell from his shoulders to the floor. The incident was kept secret for fear it would be seen as an ill omen. The following morning a massive open-air feast was held on the Khodynka Field, the training ground for the Moscow garrison. Free beer and coronation mugs attracted a crowd of half a million, so dense that a patroling Cossack found his horse lifted into the air when he rode into it. A rumor swept the field that the beer was about to run out. As the crowd surged forward people were knocked into deep trenches and gun pits. Those behind trampled forward over them and they disappeared. The crowd gave off a “terrible, long, drawn-out wail,” and men and women broke away from its edges “in utter terror.”
The official death toll was 1,389; the actual figure was probably higher. Nicholas, deeply shocked, was advised by his uncles that he should attend a gala evening at Moscow’s smart Hunt Club as planned. Her eyes red with tears, Alexandra opened the ball by dancing a quadrille with Nicholas. The couple visited the injured in the hospital and gave the family of each victim a thousand rubles, but the folk memory of Khodynka remained, and with it the superstition that Nicholas and his bride would lead Russia to tragedy.
Alexandra’s devotion to autocracy was soon noted. True, she had willing material to work with. Nicholas was an inbred reactionary, a lover of old icons, old customs, old ways of spelling. Grammarians argued over whether to scrap the traditional but purely decorative hard sign written at the end of Russian words. “Personally,” Nicholas told Dr. Botkin in all earnest, “I shall never trust nor give a responsible position to a man who omits the hard sign.” But it was Alexandra who took the blame for it.
Declarations of loyalty were made to the tsar by members of local councils. One, for Tver, expressed the hope that the “rights of individuals will be protected permanently and energetically.” Nicholas, taking this as a challenge to absolutism, rebuked the Tver delegates for their “senseless dreams of participation” in government. He added that he would uphold the autocracy “as firmly and unflinchingly as … my unforgettable dead father.” These remarks, which aroused irritation more than fear, opened him to ridicule at the start of his reign. “A little officer came out; in his cap he had a bit of paper,” a delegate wrote sarcastically. “He began mumbling something, now and then looking at that bit of paper, and then he suddenly shouted out: ‘senseless dreams’; here we understood we were being scolded for something.”
The incident was damaging to Alexandra, whose hand was seen behind it. “What earthly reason was there suddenly to hurl a threat at the head of the entire nation?” Constantine Pobedonostsev, Nicholas’s old tutor in absolutism, exploded. He was asked who could have advised the tsar to do such a thing. “Have you not guessed?” he snapped. “Of course, it is the young empress.” How could she, when she knew nothing of Russia? She thought she knew everything, Pobedonostsev replied, and she was obsessed with the idea that her husband did not assert himself enough. “She is more autocratic that Peter the Great,” he added, “and perhaps as cruel as Ivan the Terrible. Hers is a small mind that believes it harbors great intelligence.”
Alexandra was smitten by her new religion. “She completely succumbed to what I call Orthodox Paganism, that is to worship of the form without understanding the spirit,” Sergei Witte wrote, ascribing this to the beauty of court services and to her “dull, egotistical character” and narrow view of the world. At every service across Russia prayers were chanted for Alexandra and her husband; Orthodoxy was a symbol of their mastery. “ ‘If you do not bow down before me, you are my enemy, against whom I will use my autocratic powers because what I wish represents the truth,’ ” Witte explained her attitude. “Given her psychology, given the fact that she was surrounded by lackeys and intriguers, it is easy to see why she should fall into such illusions.”
Alexandra’s failure to produce a male heir made her vulnerable to faith healers and mystics. By 1901 she had four children, bonny, healthy, lively, but all girls—Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia. The question of the succession became urgent when Nicholas fell ill with typhoid fever. A century past, shortly before he was strangled in a palace plot, the unstable and half-mad Tsar Paul had expressed his hatred of women in general—and his mother, Catherine the Great, in particular—by replacing primogeniture with Salic law. Under this no woman could succeed to the Russian throne unless all legitimate male descendants were dead. To Alexandra’s utter despair, constitutional experts advised her that her eldest daughter, Olga, had no claim to the throne. If Nicholas died he would be succeeded by his brother Michael. The imperial couple instructed Pobedonostsev to prepare the draft of a decree to allow for succession in the female line; the tutor found a legal minefield and made little progress.
Dr. Philippe, the Montenegrin sisters’ French import, claimed to be able to divine the sex of an unborn child. He made other claims, too: that he was a medical man, that he could cure the sick, that he was close to God. Like Rasputin he was a peasant’s son and proud of it, and a dabbler in right-wing politics. His real name was Nazier-Vachot, and he had started work at age thirteen in a Lyons butcher’s shop. He set himself up as a faith healer when he was in his early twenties. His consulting rooms in the city were soon filled with disturbed patients, whom he treated with a mixture of conventional drugs, prayer, and the laying on of hands. He made enough money to anger qualified medical men, and he was twice prosecuted in France for practicing without a license.
His followers included the Russian military attaché in Paris, Count V. V. Murayev-Amurskii, who thought that the “doctor” had come down from heaven and would reascend there. In 1900 the count introduced him to the Montenegrins, who were wintering in Cannes. He was a “mild little man with a gentle manner and persuasive eyes,” which could change from chestnut to a “splendid blue.” He appeared clairvoyant; like Rasputin he drew close to people and would “tell you in a few words what was troubling you, and what you did not dare confess to him.” He soon cast his mystic spell over the sisters. They invited him to visit them in St. Petersburg.
The following year Militsa arranged for Dr. Philippe to be presented to Nicholas and Alexandra in the château of Compiègne when they were on a state visit to France. He captivated the couple—mystic powers, womb sexing, hints of the divine—and returned to Russia with them. Militsa lived in the Znamenka Palace, very close to the imperial summer palace at Peterhof. Nicholas and Alexandra visited the Znamenka almost every other evening. Here, according to General Spiridovich, the head of the tsar’s personal police, they practiced spiritualism with the pseudo-doctor. The Montenegrins promoted him shamelessly, persuading the empress to read the lives of the saints while they chattered on about the similarities to Dr. Philippe. They told the empress that all his acts were blessed by the saintly Ioann of Kronstadt. It was untrue—Ioann complained that he had never said a word to Philippe when they met briefly at Militsa’s palace, for the good reason that he had no French and the Frenchman had no Russian—but the empress believed it. The séances continued.
Talk of them raced through the salons of Petersburg. The French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, was told that Philippe raised the ghost of the dead Alexander III to advise his son on how to govern Russia. Others said that the Frenchman controlled the weather, ensuring smooth seas while the imperial yacht was cruising. Witte was sure that Philippe held “nocturnal séances with Their Majesties”; he remarked that the behavior of the “neurasthenic empress” deeply disturbed her mother-in-law.
It was indeed bizarre. The empress was anxious to reward Dr. Philippe for his services. He wanted official recognition of his “medical” status. Militsa asked the Okhrana’s man in Paris, General Rachovsky, to persuade the French government to grant him a medical diploma. Rachovsky protested that this was impossible and prepared a report on Philippe’s activities in France. It described him as a clever confidence trickster who exercised power over people with weak personalities. Rachovsky was promptly sacked by the interior minister, Vyacheslav Plehve, who added the vindictive rider that the victim would receive no pension unless he lived continuously out of harm’s way in Brussels. Witte castigated Plehve for getting rid of the linchpin of Russia’s counterterrorist effort in western Europe. The interior minister shrugged and said that the tsar had personally ordered it.
In France, Baron Alphonse Rothschild complained to Witte that he feared for his huge Russian investments. A country whose court had been penetrated by a charlatan was no place to put one’s money, the financier said. Nearer home Prince Elston Yusupov, the richest man in Russia, was walking by the sea in the Crimea when Militsa drove past with a stranger in her carriage. Yusupov bowed, but the Montenegrin made no response. He asked her later why she had cut him. “You couldn’t have seen me,” she explained, “for I was with Dr. Philippe, and when he wears a hat he is invisible and so are those with him.”
Buoyed by faith in his powers, and aware of Alexandra’s despairing need for an heir, Dr. Philippe overreached himself in 1902. He convinced her she was bearing a son. She stopped wearing a corset. She grew fatter. An official announcement was made that she was pregnant and would attend no receptions until after the birth. In her ninth month, the capital waited to count the cannon shots that would announce the birth from the Fortress of Peter and Paul. Three hundred rounds would mean a boy, a hundred, a fifth daughter. None came. Alexandra took to her bed. A medical team led by her personal obstetrician, Professor Ott, waited for the first labor pains. When Ott was at last allowed to examine her, he found the pregnancy was a phantom.
Society sniggered; Witte was not so sure it was a laughing matter. If a charlatan could convince the empress that she was pregnant—and she was no girl but the mother of four—then Witte thought that she would believe anything. Once she believed something, her “spineless but good” husband was soon convinced of it, too—and he was a man with unlimited power over the well-being of 140 million subjects. Philippe was indeed an omen. If the empress could fall for one holy man, then by temperament and character it was likely that she would do so again. Rasputin was an accident waiting to happen.
Philippe had to go, but he took a handsome payoff. The tsar gave him a Serpollet automobile, the title inspector of port sanitary services, and a diploma from the St. Petersburg academy of military medicine. Spiritualist sessions continued, with Countess Nina Sarnekau as medium. The fixer Simanovich claimed he was carousing in the countess’s apartment with influential friends—gentlemen-in-waiting, a provincial governor, the head of the Red Cross, a famous Rumanian violinist—when a palace automobile arrived to take her to the tsar. The countess was drunk but could not decline the invitation to conduct an imperial séance; she left to peals of laughter from her guests, who asked what she would do if the ghosts she raised had also been drinking.
The search for the boy child went on. Archimandrite Feofan, Rasputin’s admirer, urged the couple to canonize a pious hermit-monk, Serafim. His bones had been buried sixty years before next to a well in Saratov whose waters were believed to cure the sick, the blind, the deaf, and infertile women. Senior churchmen and the synod were opposed to the beatification. Serafim’s body was found to have decomposed, failing the test of miraculous preservation necessary for sainthood. The tsar was warned that Serafim had made an unfortunate prophecy. The monk had foretold that he would be canonized, in the presence of the tsar and his family, but that blood would overwhelm the country shortly after and that millions of Russians would be scattered to the four corners of the earth. Nicholas insisted that the canonization go ahead. When the bishop of Tambov protested, he was dismissed from his see and relocated in Siberia.
An expedition thick with court hangers-on and placemen was mounted to Saratov, a Volga River port, in June 1903. Peasants cured by immersion in the well were paraded for Alexandra to meet. The sighted told her that they were once blind; the nimble that they had been lame. A single ominous note was sounded. A “holy fool” and clairvoyant named Pasha began hitting one of the dolls she always carried with her, shrieking “Serge.” Grand Duke Serge had become the hated governor of Moscow after his marriage to Alexandra’s sister Ella. Terrorists had not yet kept their vow to kill him, however, and the incident passed almost unnoticed. A gala banquet was held on the eve of the ceremony. Guests noticed that Alexandra was in an excitable state, her breath labored, eyes fixed, red spots on her cheeks. At midnight she left the table and was taken to Serafim’s grave by three priests. She prayed at the graveside and then bathed herself in the waters of the holy well.
By the time she knew she was pregnant again, the following February, Russia had drifted into war with Japan. The Chinese empire was a rotting carcass on whose northern province of Manchuria both countries were feeding. The Russians seized the big warm-water harbor and fortress at Port Arthur. Their expansion was given further drive by the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 1901. It had taken troops eighteen months to toil their way by rough road and river from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific. That was now cut to thirteen days. A group of adventurers at court promoted a scheme for a timber concession on the Yalu River, with their eyes on Korea. The Japanese felt they were being forced into war.
Russia drifted. The foreign ministry, a visitor said, was “indescribable”; everyone in it was asleep. The German ambassador said that he had never seen such laziness. “All officials arrive at eleven or twelve o’clock and disappear at four never to be seen again,” he reported. “During office hours they do nothing but smoke and promenade in the corridors.” Witte felt that war would be a great disaster; Nicholas dismissed him. “Now I shall rule,” the tsar noted—pathetically—in his diary that evening, as though, by sacking him, he had acquired Witte’s brilliant mantle. Plehve thought that a “little victorious war” would buy off the threat of revolution at home.
Nicholas, though cautious, had a weakness for war and glory. He had enjoyed his time as a Guards officer. “I am happier than I can say to have joined the army,” he wrote to his mother when he was nineteen. He liked mess nights, drinking, and parades. His brother-in-law, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, thought the life appealed to his “passive nature”—“one executed orders and did not have to worry over the vast problems handled by one’s superiors.” In 1904 the tsar held the honorary rank of colonel. “His father was a proud tsar and an equable and unaffected nobleman,” Witte said icily. “Nicholas II is not a proud tsar, but a very proud and affected Guards colonel.”
Nicholas had visited Japan on a world tour when he was a youth. He was so incurious that he found the trip “senseless. Palaces and generals are the same the world over, and that’s all I am allowed to see. I could just as well have stayed home.” A single incident stood out in his mind. He was being driven through the town of Otsu when an onlooker slashed at his face with a sword. A second blow was parried by his cousin, Prince George of Greece, with his walking cane, but Nicholas carried the scar and a grudge against the Japanese for life. He called them “macaques,” monkeys, in official reports. He believed them “an unpleasant, contemptible, and powerless people” whom the Russian colossus would destroy at a stroke.
On a snowy, wet night in January 1904, he and Alexandra sat in the imperial box at the Mariinsky Theater to watch a performance of the opera Rusalka. The Japanese ambassador had broken off negotiations and had left St. Petersburg with his staff two days before. Japanese spies in Port Arthur reported that the Russians were not expecting an attack—“they do not maneuver, they do not carry out any gunnery exercises”—and that piles of torpedoes had been left in the open to rust. “War is war, and peace is peace,” the tsar told a general plaintively, “but this business of not knowing either way is agonizing.” The Japanese decided the issue for him as he watched the opera. Vice Adm. Togo Heihachiro was steaming for Port Arthur with a force of eleven destroyers. Nicholas had been assured by his admirals that the “monkeys” were incapable of handling modern warships; they were “like children playing with toy ships in a bath.”
Togo was on a turkey shoot. The seven battleships moored in Port Arthur had their lights burning. None of their great guns was manned or loaded. The shore batteries were so heavily greased against winter cold that they could not fire. The Russian commander, Gen. Yevgenny Alekseev, owed his promotion to having passed himself off as a member of the imperial family wanted by French police for starting a brawl in Marseilles. He had intelligence reports that the Japanese were on the move; he ignored them. No torpedo nets were in place to protect the fleet. Togo’s destroyers fired their torpedoes at will into the Russian hulls and turned back to sea. Alekseev was reading a book in his study when he heard the explosions. He told an orderly that he did not wish to be disturbed. News of the attack first reached St. Petersburg from a commercial agent in the port.
The war started well enough politically. Generals and tramps marched side by side down the Nevsky singing “God save the tsar,” and when Nicholas drove past Witte’s house, he gave him a triumphant and self-satisfied look. The ex-minister thought that war would turn to revolution soon enough, and revolution to anarchy. “How sad for Russia!” he wrote. “How sad for the emperor, that poor, unfortunate man.… He is a good man, and is by no means stupid, but he has no will.”
It was a military disaster. A Russian minesweeper, sunk by one of her own mines, was lost together with the only log of the minefields she had laid. In March, on a rare foray, the flagship Petropavlovsk was blown up by a Russian mine. The remnants of the fleet stayed in Port Arthur. Nicholas was exposed to humiliation. He was besotted by his own autocratic power, a leading senator thought, which “he exercises sporadically, without prior deliberation, and without general reference to the general course of affairs.” All was done piecemeal or by chance, on momentary impulse, “through the intrigues of one person or another.… There is no policy based on principles, well reasoned and firmly directed, in any field.”
A pettiness ran with the tsar’s charm. The director of his private office, Prince Nicholas Obolensky, had a regular morning appointment with him and often stayed on for lunch. When he fell from favor, Nicholas changed the meetings to 2:00 P.M. to save himself the embarrassment of not inviting the prince to dine. It annoyed him that his German cousin Willy was a head taller than he. Postcards showing the difference in their height were confiscated. He was fit; he liked sports, shooting, sailing, and tennis; he could still take sets off the Russian tennis champion when he was well into his forties. But he was frightened of his huge Romanov uncles. Grand Duke Alexis filled his admiral’s uniform with 250 pounds of flesh. Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich, “Nicky the Long,” stood six feet four inches in his cavalry boots. Serge, governor of Moscow, and Vladimir were less intimidating physically but equally demanding and authoritarian. His young cousin Sandro said that Nicholas spent the first ten years of his reign “sitting in his study behind a huge desk, listening with a feeling that went close to terror to the advice and directions of his uncles. He was afraid to be alone with them.”
Most of all he was frightened of his wife, now confirmed to be pregnant. Their letters to each other were similar in their endearments—“darling boysy,” “sweetest wifey”—but his were placatory and submissive, and hers demanding. When Nicholas ignored his recommendations, Witte several times asked who advised him. “The person whom I trust without reservation,” Nicholas replied. When Witte asked him who that might be, he wrote, the tsar “told me that it was his wife.” He was tetchy and sometimes drank heavily. His irritations ran to words. When an aide spoke of the intelligentsia, he snapped that the academy of sciences should erase it from the language: “How I dislike that word!” A reference to public opinion in a report had him asking angrily: “How does public opinion concern me?” It was in his nature, Witte thought, to “dislike persons who were firm in their opinions, their words, and their actions.” His inferiority complex—the unloved son, the dwarf nephew, the poor speaker—left him uncomfortable with “men who are mentally and morally superior to him.” He was at ease only with those he felt more poorly endowed than himself—or, like Rasputin, “people who, knowing this weakness, act as if they were more poorly endowed.”
By July, Japanese troops had placed Port Arthur under siege. Nevertheless, on July 10, 1904, the guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg boomed three hundred times in celebration. “For us a great, unforgettable day on which God’s goodness was so clearly visited upon us,” Nicholas wrote in his diary. “At 1:15 this afternoon, Alix gave birth to a son.” The tsar was certain that the recent beatification lay behind the happy event. “I have indisputable evidence of the holiness and miraculous power of Saint Serafim,” he told the synod procurator. “No one can ever shake my faith in that power.” A portrait of the saint hung in the tsar’s study, and tens of thousands of icons with his features were sent to troops at the Japanese front. “They send us Serafim in place of ammunition,” the soldiers complained.
Five days after the birth, Plehve was riding in his carriage guarded by police agents on bicycles. There was trouble everywhere. Troops en route to Manchuria refused to obey orders and ravaged railroad stations while their officers hid from them. A lawyer in Saratov, the new saint’s hometown, said that anger at the regime “bursts forth roaring and whistling through every crack and gap.” From exile the young revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote of peasants ravaged “by syphilis and all sorts of epidemics.… In thoughtful silence, our village is dying from disease.” Plehve opened the traditional safety valve—pogroms against the Jews, who were raped, blinded with stakes, murdered, and robbed—but neither that nor his bicycle escort was enough. Witte reckoned that “thousands of people were willing to give up their lives for the privilege of killing a major official.” One of them tossed a bomb into Plehve’s carriage. He used nitroglycerin, and only a few bloody traces of the interior minister were found.
The infant was christened Alexis. His father said he had chosen the name to break the chain of Alexanders and Nicholases. The superstitious thought the name an ill omen. Peter the Great had murdered his son and heir Alexis. A story was minted on the birth. The tsar, it ran, held himself responsible for the run of daughters. To ensure a son he urged his wife to give herself to another man. Her choice fell on Gen. Alexander Orlov, commander of her regiment of Uhlan lancers. A widower living high on his late wife’s fortune, he was a “jaunty, gallant line officer,” handsome, a prince with a taste for strong drink and spiritualism. She had once danced a waltz with him, in breach of imperial etiquette; he was a descendant of Catherine the Great’s lover Grigory Orlov. It was enough for tongues to start wagging with malice.
The imperial couple, “quite mad with joy,” ignored the talk. The baby had dimpled, chubby cheeks, with fair curls and gray-blue eyes set off by “the fresh pink color of a healthy child.” Nicholas insisted that Alexander Mosolov, head of the court chancellery, come to see the tsarevich in the nursery. The baby was kicking lustily in the bath, and Nicholas plucked him out and rested him in his arms. “Don’t you think he’s a beauty?” the tsar asked, smiling. Alexandra was relaxed and fulfilled, “proud and happy in the beauty of her child.”
When the baby was six weeks old, he began to hemorrhage from the navel. It took two days for the bleeding to stop. After three months he started to crawl. He tumbled, and telltale bruises developed on his arms and legs. He cried as the blood formed swellings under the skin. He had hemophilia.
Only close relatives and the empress’s few intimate friends were told. No outsider knew. Alexandra was ill and suffering; she was thirty-two, and the definitive moment in her life had turned, bleeding, against her. “She spends most of her time in bed,” Nicholas wrote to his mother, “lives in seclusion, doesn’t care to come to meals, and looks out of her window for hours together.” Pregnancies and sciatica had worn her out. She suffered vertigo and anxiety states and canceled public appointments. To the court she appeared her old “cold, haughty, and indifferent self. From this false impression she never fully recovered.” When Dr. Philippe had left the court, he presented Alexandra with a bell. He told her to ring it to ward off advisers who did not share her views. He also told her: “Someday Your Majesty will have another friend like me who will speak to you of God.” The Montenegrins had one such ready in the wings.