Alexandra (12 page)

Mouchanow watched her new mistress during the tense hour that ensued. Alix continued to sit unmoving before her mirror, ‘saying hardly a word, but with tears in her eyes which, however,
she bravely tried to conceal’. Mortified, increasingly irritated, on edge, she waited in the greatest uneasiness for the impasse to resolve itself. The others, trying and failing to attract
her attention, interpreted her marmoreal calm as hauteur, and felt themselves silently chastised. The gulf between mistress and servants widened, and began to be corroded by resentment.

Minnie, well-meaning but ineffectual, fluttered anxiously about with the others, unable to offer Alix any reassurance. There was no bond between the two women, though Alix found her future
mother-in-law to be ‘sweet and patient’. ‘She touches one with her gentleness,’ Alix wrote in a letter to one of her sisters.
³
But Minnie was still struggling with her great grief at the loss of her husband, and was despondent at losing two of her children, first Xenia and now Nicky,
to marriage within a few months of one another. After years of opposition, Minnie had reconciled herself to having Alix as a daughter-in-law. But her long opposition would never be
forgotten by either woman, and the most that could be hoped for between them was civility and a wary affection. Minnie was no help to Alix now.

At last, to Alix’s enormous relief, the door of the room opened and the hairdresser, overheated and excited, rushed in. He had been refused entrance to the palace by the police, as it
turned out, and it had taken him an hour to straighten out the confusion. Swiftly he pinned Alix’s diadem in place, and her long lace wedding veil. Now the wedding procession could begin.

At twelve-thirty, the doors of the Concert Hall were thrown open and the first of a long line of servants in scarlet livery made their slow way through the first of the grand salons, traversing
a narrow pathway marked out by guards of honour with sabres drawn. At the same moment the great guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress across the river began firing, each renewed burst so loud that it
seemed as if the windows of the hall would shatter. One hundred and fifty gentlemen of the chamber marched past the assembled notables, then came Prince Trubetskoy, marshal of the court, with his
gold staff seven feet high.

Behind the marshal walked Minnie, her pale face nearly as white as her dress, on the arm of her father the king of Denmark. Behind them came Nicky, in the crimson tunic and fur-lined cloak of a
colonel in the Life Guard Hussar regiment. On his arm walked Alix, moving, an observer thought, ‘quite simply and with great dignity’, a magnificent vision in her silver gown and
glittering diamonds, her shimmering mantle, held by four chamberlains, flowing out behind her like a river of gold.

‘She looked the perfection of what one would imagine an Empress of Russia . . . would be,’ the English visitor Lord Carrington thought.
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As the imperials passed all the men bowed low, the women dipped in a curtsy, silks and satins rustling, ceremonial swords rattling. All the thousands of eyes were on the bride
– and Alix felt the force of their gaze – but after appraising her, all eyes seemed to turn to Minnie.

For it was the Dowager Empress, not the bride, who was the true centre of attention that day. Everyone at court knew that it was her birthday – a very sad birthday
because of her bereavement. All their sympathies were directed towards Minnie, for she had made herself beloved and the affections of the courtiers, built up over many years, were intensified by
recent events. She was given the first position in the procession, ahead of her son and his wife-to-be, she was deferred to, admired – for she was still, at forty-seven, in her prime, and was
very pretty – and accorded a great degree of sympathy. It was clear to all that she was suffering that day; Nicky’s relative Constantine, his father’s cousin, known in the family
as ‘K.R.’, wrote in his diary that Minnie looked frailer than usual, ‘like a victim being led to the slaughter’.
⁵

It was not in Alix’s nature to be envious of Minnie’s pre-eminence, and besides, her own happiness at the prospect of marrying Nicky overshadowed any prickings of envy she might have
been tempted to feel. Her good sense told her, however, that there was a potential danger to her caused by the courtiers’ strong allegiance to her mother-in-law; it would be easy for them to
perceive her, Alix, as an interloper, an outsider bent on supplanting the Dowager Empress, vying with her for power and influence. Should that perception become widespread, it would lead to
factionalism, and to a poisonous prejudice against her, reinforcing the natural prejudice felt by Russians against all foreigners. So it must have been with some trepidation that Alix took note of
the primary attention accorded to Minnie, and the primary place she was given in the wedding procession.

Once the ceremony began, however, the focus shifted back to the bridal pair, and to the wedding liturgy itself. Bride and groom held lighted tapers in their hands, the priest swung the gilded
censer, filling the chapel with pungent incense. The rings were exchanged, the vows were repeated. ‘The servant of God, Nicholas, betroths himself to the servant of God, Alexandra,’ the
priest announced, and the attendants held crowns over the heads of the bride and groom while they walked three times around the lectern – Alexandra’s attendants having difficulty
keeping her long train from upsetting the candelabra and starting a fire. At last it was over, and the newly married pair
kissed the icons and turned to accept the
blessings and congratulations of their guests.

Outside the palace, the morning’s layer of soft white snow had turned to black slush beneath the feet of the huge crowd that continued to wait patiently yet in mounting excitement for the
tsar and tsarina to reappear in their carriage. Pressing in on the palace gates, squeezed in among buildings, jammed tightly together along the roadway, the people kept arriving, all wanting a
glimpse of the newly married imperial couple.

More and more of them arrived, until Nevsky Prospekt was a solid mass of bodies in dark clothing. From the windows above the street, where the city’s more affluent citizens watched the
spectacle, the street appeared clogged, and the small number of mounted police, who here and there attempted to invade the wall of packed onlookers, found the wall to be impenetrable.

The overcast afternoon had given way to dim twilight by the time the palace gates were opened and the imperial carriage, accompanied by a military escort, attempted to pass through. Cheering and
shouting, the waiting Petersburgers greeted Nicky and Alix enthusiastically, pressing in around their carriage in a swarm, making it all but impossible for the coachman to force the horses
forward.

Inch by inch, with the deafening shouts and exclamations of thousands of voices on all sides, the carriage made its way towards Kazan Cathedral, where after what seemed an eternity Nicky and
Alix got out and, under guard, entered the church to kiss the revered icon of the Mother of God. But when with difficulty they got back into the vehicle, they could not proceed. The military escort
had not been able to hold back the surging crowd. Mobbed on all sides, the coach was as if enmired in the morass of people, and the tsar and tsarina, clinging to one another, must have felt
fearful.

Where were the police? Why didn’t they intervene to force the crowds back? Why had there been no plan, no precautions taken to safeguard the imperial coach?

‘Little Father, Little Father,’ the people cried, nearly swamping the delicate carriage with its painted panels and intricately carved
woodwork. Those
closest to the windows peered in, and were rewarded with a glimpse of Nicky in his crimson uniform and Alix in her diamonds, her beautiful features firmly set, a look of terror in her eyes.

At length, after much angry shouting, the coachman laying about him with his whip, a narrow gap appeared in the sea of wildly waving hands and clustered bodies. Gradually the coach began to
move, foot by slow foot, along the broad avenue, until it turned into the courtyard of the Anitchkov Palace – Minnie’s palace. Servants were waiting with lit torches to welcome the
bride and groom and lead them to their new home, a small suite of apartments on the ground floor.

Minnie too was waiting, and presented her son and daughter-in-law with the traditional Russian gifts of bread and salt.

The long, trying day was nearly over. Nicky and Alix, having divested themselves of their finery, sat before the fire in their little sitting room and began to answer the hundreds of telegrams
that had arrived for them.

Alix had a terrible headache, brought on by the frightening carriage ride, the tense ordeal of the robing ceremony, the strain of the wedding itself. ‘We dined at eight o’clock and
collapsed into bed early,’ Nicky wrote in his diary.
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They belonged to each other now, they could never again be parted. Clasped in each
other’s arms, they forgot all else, even the clamour of the crowd that went on, growing louder and more raucous, a harsh charivari, until the early hours of the morning.

I
n the early 1890s, the years just prior to the wedding of Nicholas II and Alexandra, Russia suffered a series of disastrous famines. In province
after province, the crops withered and died before they could be harvested, cattle died, what scant reserves of food there were were soon used up and, in village after village, starvation resulted.
The peasants were hardy and stoic; they took a long time to die. They grew thin, and watched their children grow thin and sad-eyed. Gradually what vitality they had ebbed; they no longer had the
strength to complain, to seek aid, even to pray. They buried their children, then sat down and waited for the end.

Some help arrived. Local charity, organized by the popularly elected assemblies, the zemstvos, allowed some villages to survive. Here and there a wealthy landowner bought food abroad and
imported it to distribute among the emaciated villagers. But these efforts were insignificant in the face of the monumental want that swept region after region, causing many to say that God was
angry with his people, that they were being chastised for their sins.

The terrible ongoing famine was all the more overwhelming in that it was followed by devastating outbreaks of cholera and typhus, in which hundreds of thousands of survivors of the famine
perished. A curse lay upon Russia, it was said – and whether it was the curse of divine displeasure, or climatic change, or, as many said, the curse of the tsar’s ministers interfering
in people’s lives, it was ruinous, and it was causing a great wave of angry discontent.

Certainly those in the population educated enough and aware enough to comprehend the force and range of recent government
policies believed those policies to be punitive
and misguided, marked by indifference to the plight of peasants and large landowners alike. The tsar’s Finance Minister, Sergei Witte, and his predecessor Ivan Vyshnegradsky, had forced the
peasants to sell their grain at such low prices that they took large losses, and were driven deeper into poverty; at the same time the ministers made it much more difficult, through the imposition
of high tariffs, for landowners small and large to buy machinery and fertilizer from Europe, without which they could not improve their yields and raise their incomes. Most critics of the finance
ministers could not comprehend the mounting pressures the ministers themselves were under: the fluctuations of the global economy, the panic in the West over dwindling gold reserves and the
oversupply of wheat and rye and barley worldwide that led prices to fall drastically and threatened the stability of the entire monetary system. They only knew that the immediate effect of the
harsh policies was to cause widespread misery.

And there was something else askew in the economy, another cause of misery that ought to have been, educated observers felt, a cause of prosperity and improvement in the lot of the poor. Russia
was rapidly becoming industrialized. Vast fortunes were being made as steel poured from new plants, coal was drawn in unprecedented amounts from newly worked mines, oil flowed from new wells. The
country contained great wealth in oil and mineral deposits, enough wealth, perhaps, to abolish poverty altogether, provided the revenues were shared. But of course they were not being shared;
rather, foreign investors and a small group of Russian speculators were taking all the profits – and exploiting the labourers from whose toil the profits arose.

Over the course of a single generation, from the period after the end of the Crimean War to the accession of Nicholas II, hundreds of new factories had been built in Moscow and Petersburg. The
number of factory workers had more than doubled. And with the growth of the factories had come an increase in suffering, for the workers, whose days averaged from fourteen to seventeen hours, were
paid very little and housed in overcrowded, unheated slums full of the stench of rotting rubbish and open sewers.

The contrast between the luxury of the imperial court and the ragged populace of the capital was glaring. Visitors inevitably commented on it. Alix’s aunt
Victoria, Dowager Empress of Germany, saw Russia as ‘another world’, with ‘something so squalid and sad, suggesting poverty and loneliness, about the landscape and
population’ and extremes of wealth and poverty far more exaggerated than in any western European country.
¹
The Romanovs in their palaces
possessed untold millions of roubles, and spent them lavishly, while the factory workers in the districts across the river struggled to survive on ten roubles a month. On the streets of Petersburg,
and in the provincial towns, the sharply defined economic gradations of society were evident, as was the very high proportion of peasants; for every uniformed military officer or dark-suited civil
servant one saw, there were dozens of peasants, looking like shaggy beasts in their long locks and woolly sheepskin coats, strips of dirty cloth wrapped around their feet and bark sandals worn in
place of shoes. The peasants, and the city workers who had migrated from the countryside in search of jobs, constituted the great majority of the population, and were bearing the brunt of
Russia’s distress.