Nicholas and Alexandra Read online

  When her house was ready, Nicholas celebrated the housewarming by giving her a vodka service of eight small gold glasses inlaid with jewels. Thereafter, she said, “we led a quiet, retiring life.” Nicholas usually rode up on horseback in time for supper. They gave little parties, attended by the three young Grand Dukes, another dancer or two and a tenor of whom Nicholas was fond. After supper, in “an intimate and delightful atmosphere” the company played baccarat.

  Nicholas, meanwhile, continued his functions at court. “I have been nominated a member of the Finance Committee,” he wrote at one point. “A great honor, but not much pleasure.… I received six members of this institution; I admit that I never suspected its existence.” He became president of a committee to aid those who were starving in a famine, and he worked hard at the job, raising money and donating substantial funds of his own. His relations with his father remained distant and deferential. “I would have liked to exercise with the Hussars today,” he wrote, “but I forgot to ask Papa.” Sergius Witte, the burly, efficient Finance Minister who built the Trans-Siberian Railway and later served Nicholas during the Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution, gave an account of a conversation he had with Alexander III. According to Witte, he began the conversation by suggesting to the Tsar that the Tsarevich be appointed president of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Witte says Alexander III was astonished by his proposal.

  “What? But you know the Tsarevich. Have you ever had a serious conversation with him?”

  “No, Sire, 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 would he be able to be president of a committee?”

  “Nevertheless, Sire, if you do not begin to initiate him to affairs of state, he will never understand them.”

  In 1893, Nicholas was sent to London to represent the family at the wedding of his first cousin George, Duke of York—later King George V—to Princess Mary of Teck. The Tsarevich was lodged in Marlborough House with most of the royal personages of Europe living just down the hall. The Prince of Wales, always concerned with sartorial matters, immediately decided that the young visitor needed sprucing. “Uncle Bertie, of course, sent me at once a tailor, a bootmaker and a hatter,” Nicholas reported to his mother. This was his first visit to London. “I never thought I would like it so much,” he said, describing his visits to Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s and the Tower. Appropriately, he avoided that citadel of representative government, the Houses of Parliament.

  Nicholas was immediately taken with Princess Mary. “May is delightful and much better looking than her photographs,” he wrote. As for his cousin George, Nicholas and the bridegroom looked so much alike that even people who knew them well confused one with the other. George was shorter and slimmer than Nicholas, his face was thinner and his eyes somewhat more protuberant, but both parted their hair in the middle and wore similar Van Dyke beards. Standing side by side, they looked like brothers and almost like twins. Several times during the ceremonies, the resemblance caused embarrassment. At a garden party, Nicholas was taken for George and warmly congratulated, while George was asked whether he had come to London only to attend the wedding or whether he had other business to transact. The day before the wedding, George, mistaken for Nicholas, was begged by one gentleman of the court not to be late for the ceremony.

  After the wedding, Nicholas visited Windsor Castle and had lunch with Queen Victoria. “She was very friendly, talked a lot, and gave me the Order of the Garter,” he reported. He went to a ball at Buckingham Palace and, knowing his mother would be pleased, told her, “I danced a lot … but didn’t see many beautiful ladies.”

  In St. Petersburg, meanwhile, little Kschessinska’s career as a dancer was gathering momentum. Already, at nineteen, she was dancing such roles as the Sugar Plum Fairy in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. Tchaikovsky himself came to her rehearsals and accompanied the dancers on the piano. Once after Mathilde had danced Princess Aurora, the composer came to her dressing room especially to congratulate her. In later years Mathilde Kschessinska would rank with Anna Pavlova and Tamara Karsavina among the great ballerinas of pre-revolutionary Russia.

  There were those, of course, who ascribed Mathilde’s early success primarily to her connection with the Tsarevich. Not that society regarded the liaison on either side with moral disdain. For the Russian aristocracy, ballet was a supreme art and the mingling of great titles and pretty ankles was a common thing. Many a deep-bosomed young dancer in the back row of the Imperial Ballet left the Maryinsky Theatre pulling her cloak about her shoulders, gathered her skirts and stepped into the plush velvet interior of a waiting coach to be whirled away to a private supper in one of the city’s elegant palaces.

  Despite Mathilde’s success on the stage, the flame between her and Nicholas began to flicker. Nicholas had never hidden from Kschessinska his interest in Princess Alix. Early in 1894, he told Mathilde that he hoped to make Alix his fiancée. Later that year, Nicholas and Mathilde parted, saying goodbye at a highway rendezvous, she seated in her carriage, he astride a horse. When he rode away, she wept. For months, she went through “the terrible boundless suffering … of losing my Niki.” The great ballet master Marius Petipa consoled her by persuading her that suffering in love is necessary to art, especially to the great stage roles to which she aspired. “I was not alone in my grief and trouble.… The [younger] Grand Duke Serge … remained with me to console and protect me.” Serge bought her a dacha with a garden by the sea. Later, at the height of her success, she met Grand Duke Andrei, another cousin of the Tsar. Although Andrei was seven years her junior, they traveled together on holidays to Biarritz and Venice. In 1902, Mathilde and Andrei had a son, and in 1921, in Cannes, they married.

  * Tolstoy had left the Church, and the excommunication was only a formal acknowledgment of this fact. Still, Pobedonostsev may have taken a personal satisfaction in expelling the great novelist. Since 1877, when Tolstoy completed Anna Karenina, it had been rumored that the character of Alexis Karenin, the coldly pompous bureaucrat whom Anna cuckolds and then divorces, was modeled on an episode in the family life of Constantine Pobedonostsev.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Princess Alix

  MY DREAM is some day to marry Alix H. I have loved her a long while and still deeper and stronger since 1889 when she spent six weeks in St. Petersburg. For a long time, I resisted my feeling that my dearest dream will come true.”

  When Nicholas made this entry in his diary in 1892, he had not yet established his temporary little household with Kschessinska. He was discouraged about the prospects of his interest in Princess Alix. Russian society did not share Nicholas’s rapture for this German girl with red-gold hair. Alix had made a bad impression during her visits to her sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth in the Russian capital. Badly dressed, clumsy, an awkward dancer, atrocious French accent, a schoolgirl blush, too shy, too nervous, too arrogant—these were some of the unkind things St. Petersburg said about Alix of Hesse.

  Society sniped openly at Princess Alix, safe in the knowledge that Tsar Alexander III and Empress Marie, both vigorously anti-German, had no intention of permitting a match with the Tsarevich. Although Princess Alix was his godchild, it was generally known that Alexander III was angling for a bigger catch for his son, someone like Princess Hélène, the tall, dark-haired daughter of the Pretender to the throne of France, the Comte de Paris. Although a republic, France was Russia’s ally, and Alexander III suspected that a link between the Romanov dynasty and the deposed House of Bourbon would strengthen the alliance in the hearts of the French people.

  But the approach to Hélène did not please Nicholas. “Mama made a few allusions to Hélène, daughter of the Comte de Paris,” he wrote in his diary. “I myself want to go in one direction and it is evident that Mama wants me to choose the other one.”

  Hélène also resisted. She was not at all willing to give up her Roman Ca
tholicism for the Orthodox faith required of a future Russian empress. Frustrated, the Tsar next sent emissaries to Princess Margaret of Prussia. Nicholas flatly declared that he would rather become a monk than marry the plain and bony Margaret. Margaret spared him, however, by announcing that she, too, was unwilling to abandon Protestantism for Orthodoxy.

  Through it all, Nicholas nurtured his hope that someday he would marry Alix. Before leaving for the Far East, he wrote in his diary, “Oh, Lord, how I want to go to Ilinskoe [Ella’s country house, where Alix was visiting] … otherwise if I do not see her now, I shall have to wait a whole year and that will be hard.” His parents continued to discourage his ardor. Alix, they said, would never change her religion in order to marry him. Nicholas asked permission only to see her and propose. If Alix were denied him, he stated, he would never marry.

  As long as he was well, Alexander III ignored his son’s demands. In the winter of 1894, however, the Tsar caught influenza and began having trouble with his kidneys. As his vitality began to ebb alarmingly, Alexander began to consider how Russia would manage without him. Nothing could be done immediately about the Tsarevich’s lack of experience, but Alexander III decided that he could at least provide his heir with the stabilizing effect of marriage. As Princess Alix was the only girl whom Nicholas would even remotely consider, Alexander III and Marie reluctantly agreed that he should be allowed to propose.

  For Nicholas, it was a great personal victory. For the first time in his life he had overcome every obstacle, pushed aside all objections, defeated his overpowering father and had his way.

  Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice, Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, was born on June 6, 1872, in the medieval city of Darmstadt a few miles from the river Rhine. She was named Alix after her mother, Princess Alice of England, the third of Queen Victoria’s nine children. “Alix” was the nearest euphonic rendering of “Alice” in German. “They murder my name here, Aliicé they pronounce it,” her mother said.

  Princess Alix was born “a sweet, merry little person, always laughing and a dimple in one cheek,” her mother wrote to Queen Victoria. When she was christened, with the future Tsar Alexander III and the future King Edward VII as godfathers, her mother already called her “Sunny.” “Sunny in pink was immensely admired,” Princess Alice reported to Windsor Castle.

  If the emotional ties between England and the small grand duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt were strong, those between Hesse and Prussia, ruled by the House of Hohenzollern, were weak and embittered. Only two years before Alix’s birth, Hesse had been forcibly incorporated into the newly created German Empire. As recently as 1866, Hesse had sided with Austria in an unsuccessful war against Prussia. Alix’s father, Grand Duke Louis of Hesse, hated Prussia and the Hohenzollerns, and throughout her life Alix shared his bitterness.

  Darmstadt itself was an old German city with narrow cobblestone streets and steeply roofed houses covered with ornamental fifteenth-century carvings. The palace of the Grand Duke stood in the middle of town, surrounded by a park filled with linden and chestnut trees. Inside, Victoria’s daughter had filled its rooms with mementoes of England. The drawing rooms were hung with portraits of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and all the living English cousins. Sketches of English scenes and English palaces lined the walls of the bedchambers. An English governess, Mrs. Orchard, ruled the nursery. Mrs. Orchard was not one for frills. The children’s bedrooms were large and airy, but plainly furnished. Meals were simple; Alix grew up eating baked apples and rice puddings. Mrs. Orchard believed in strict daily schedules with fixed hours for every activity. Years later, when Alix had carried this training to Russia, the Russian Imperial family ate on the stroke of the hour and divided its mornings and afternoons into rigid little blocks of time while Mrs. Orchard watched and nodded approvingly. She, along with her well-drilled habits, had been brought to Russia.

  Before she was six, Alix drove her own pony cart through the park, accompanied by a liveried footman who walked at the pony’s head. In the summertime, her father, Grand Duke Louis, took his family to a hunting lodge called Wolfsgarten. There, Alix spent her mornings in a sun-filled courtyard, running up and down a flight of high stone steps and sitting by the courtyard fountain, dipping her hand in the water, trying to catch a goldfish. She liked to dress in her mother’s cast-off dresses and prance down the hall engulfed in crinoline, imagining herself as a great lady or a character from a fairy story.

  Christmas was celebrated with German lavishness and English trimmings. A giant tree stood in the palace ballroom, its green branches covered with apples and gilded nuts, while the room glowed with the light of small wax candles fixed to the boughs. Christmas dinner began with a traditional Christmas goose and ended with plum pudding and mince pies especially shipped from England.

  Every year, the family visited Queen Victoria. The Hessian children loved these visits to Windsor Castle near London, to the granite castle of Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands and to Osborne, the tiled Renaissance palace by the sea. Many years afterward, in Russia, the Empress Alexandra was to dream of herself as a little girl again, fishing for crabs, bathing and building sand castles on an English beach.

  In 1878, when Alix was six, diphtheria swept the palace in Hesse-Darmstadt. All but one of the Grand Duke’s children were stricken. Victoria sent her own physician from England to help the German doctors, but, despite their efforts, Alix’s four-year-old sister, May, died. Then, worn out from nursing her children, Alix’s mother, Princess Alice, also fell ill. In less than a week she was dead.

  The death of her mother at thirty-five, had a shattering effect on six-year-old Alix. She sat quiet and withdrawn in her playroom while her nurse stood in the corner, weeping. Even the toys she handled were new; the old, familiar toys had been burned as a precaution against the disease. Alix had been a merry, generous, warm little girl, obstinate but sensitive, with a hot temper. After this tragedy she began to seal herself off from other people. A hard shell of aloofness formed over her emotions, and her radiant smile appeared infrequently. Craving intimacy and affection, she held herself back. She grew to dislike unfamiliar places and to avoid unfamiliar people. Only in cozy family gatherings where she could count on warmth and understanding did Alix unwind. There, the shy, serious, cool Princess Alix became once again the merry, dimpled, loving “Sunny” of her early childhood.

  After her daughter’s death, Queen Victoria treated Grand Duke Louis as her own son and invited him often to England with his motherless children. Alix, now the youngest, was the aging Queen’s special favorite and Victoria kept a close watch on her little grandchild. Tutors and governesses in Darmstadt were required to send special reports to Windsor and receive, in return, a steady flow of advice and instruction from the Queen. Under this tutelage, Alix’s standards of taste and morality became thoroughly English and thoroughly Victorian. The future Empress of Russia developed steadily into that most recognizable and respectable of creatures, a proper young English gentlewoman.

  Alix was an excellent student. By the time she was fifteen, she was thoroughly grounded in history, geography and English and German literature. She played the piano with a skill approaching brilliance, but she disliked playing in front of people. When Queen Victoria asked her to play for guests at Windsor, Alix obliged, but her reddened face betrayed her torment. Unlike Nicholas, who learned by rote, Alix loved to discuss abstract ideas. One of her tutors, an Englishwoman named Margaret Jackson—“Madgie” to Princess Alix—was interested in politics. Miss Jackson passed her fascination along to Alix, who grew up believing that politics was a subject not necessarily restricted to men. Alix’s grandmother, after all, was a woman and still managed to be the dominant monarch in Europe.

  Alix first traveled to St. Petersburg at the age of twelve for the marriage of her sister Ella to Grand Duke Serge, younger brother of Tsar Alexander III. She watched with interest as her sister was met at the station in St. Petersburg by a gilded coach drawn by white horses. During the wedding ceremony
in the chapel of the Winter Palace, Alix stood to one side, wearing a white muslin dress, with roses in her hair. Between listening to the long, incomprehensible chant of the litany and smelling the sweet incense which filled the air, she stole side glances at the sixteen-year-old Tsarevich Nicholas. Nicholas responded and one day presented her with a small brooch. Overwhelmed, she accepted, but then shyly pressed it back into his hand during the excitement of a children’s party. Nicholas was offended and gave the brooch to his sister Xenia, who, not knowing its history, accepted it cheerfully.

  Nicholas and Alix met again five years later in 1889, when she visited Ella in St. Petersburg. This time, she was seventeen, he was twenty-one—ages when girls and young men fall in love. They saw each other at receptions, suppers and balls. He came for her in the afternoon and took her skating on frozen ponds and tobogganing down hills of ice. Before Alix departed, Nicholas persuaded his parents to give her a special tea dance, followed by a supper of blinis and fresh caviar, in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo.

  The following summer Alix returned to Russia, but not to St. Petersburg. She went instead to Ilinskoe, the Grand Duke Serge’s country estate near Moscow. There Serge and Ella lived a simple country life with friends invited for prolonged visits. Summer was at its golden height, there were lazy rambles in the fields and searches through the woods for berries and mushrooms. It was Alix’s first sight of the wide expanse of Russian meadowland, of the white birch groves and the peasants in their loose blouses and baggy knickers. She was impressed by the deep, respectful bows they gave to her, a visitor. When she visited a country fair with Ella, she happily bought wooden dolls and gingerbread to take back home to Darmstadt.