Alexandra (13 page)

It had been only thirty-three years since the peasants – formerly serfs legally bound to the land, subject to being bought and sold by their masters – had been granted their freedom
by Nicholas’s grandfather Alexander II. The ‘Tsar-Liberator’, as he was known, had dissolved the bonds of serfdom and decreed that all former serfs were free men, able to own land
themselves and carry on business enterprises, beholden only to the other members of their village communities.

The euphoria that followed emancipation had been short-lived, however, for the tsar himself, ambivalent about the wisdom of granting freedom to the uneducated, unruly, potentially disorderly
majority of his subjects, had as it were hobbled their liberty by hedging it in with restrictions and limitations. Unlike other free men, the former serfs had to carry passports and could not go
where they liked, when they liked; they were judged in special courts, subject to special taxes. And if one of them defaulted on a tax obligation, the
others in his
community were obligated to make up for the shortfall. These were onerous restrictions, made more onerous by the alarming fall in peasant prosperity that followed emancipation. Everywhere the
former serfs eagerly bought land – only to discover that, having taken on the burden of a heavy mortgage payable to the government, the amount of land they could own was much smaller than the
amount they had farmed as serfs. They had acquired personal liberty, and had become property owners, but at the price of an ever-deepening poverty.

It was a bewildering dilemma, this bitter outcome of emancipation. How, the peasants asked themselves, could their Little Father the Tsar allow his children to undergo such harsh privation?
Surely he wanted what was best for them. Surely he wished to aid them – yet when the famine came, it was their own organizations, the zemstvos, which had come to their aid, not the tsar.

Thus as the 1890s opened, the traditional reverence for the tsar – a reverence still overwhelmingly present, almost as automatic as a reflex – was being diluted, even reversed, by
the restless, angry mood born of catastrophe. Most of the time, among most of the people, as at the imperial wedding in Petersburg, the reverential, even worshipful attitude was uppermost.
(‘Their majesties are to people here what the sun is to our world,’ an American visitor to Russia wrote in 1895, addressing an American correspondent. ‘I do not expect you to
understand it, it must be seen and felt.’
²
) But increasingly often the worshipful reaction gave way to hostility, and once again, as in the
era of Nicky’s grandfather Alexander II, revolutionary groups began to expand in numbers and influence and political radicals, who advocated the overthrow of the tsar’s government,
found among factory workers a receptive audience for their views.

If, indeed, a curse lay upon Russia, if the twin scourges of famine and disease were flaying the countryside and causing unprecedented anguish and upheaval, one would not know it from reading
the new tsar’s diaries, which were full of references to long walks and bicycle rides around the palace garden, reading (he liked to read historical journals and memoirs; early in his reign
Nicky recorded enjoying ‘a
new French book about Napoleon’s time on the island of St Helena’ and Countess Golovin’s ‘interesting memoirs for
the time of Catherine the Great’
³
), and above all, spending time with his new wife.

‘It’s a shame work takes up such a lot of time that I would so much like to spend alone with her,’ Nicky wrote candidly. Nothing pleased him more than having a ‘day of
rest’, with no reports to read and no audiences to hold.
⁴
Then he could spend a quiet, idle afternoon with Alix, reading while she did her
embroidery, hanging pictures, pushing her in her wheeled chair when she was suffering sciatic pain and could not get out on her own.

If Nicky’s subjects were in anguish, that anguish was far away, contained in the dry words of a ministerial report on agricultural conditions or a few paragraphs in a newspaper article on
an outbreak of cholera. Apart from visitors to the palace or casual encounters with servants, Nicky rarely saw his people at all, other than on state occasions. Once, in the early weeks of his
reign, he left the Anitchkov Palace unescorted one afternoon, and went out along Nevsky Prospekt. He strolled past the shops, looking at the window displays, attracting no more attention than would
any other good-looking young man in military uniform. He had not gone far, however, when a passing carriage halted and an older man – the prefect of Petersburg, General Von Val – got
out and approached him.

‘This is not possible, Your Highness,’ the general said.

The tsar protested that he was perfectly safe, that no one had bothered him.

‘It is not possible, Your Highness,’ the general repeated, truly concerned. ‘I pray you to return to the palace.’

By now a small crowd had begun to gather, and someone recognized the tsar. Immediately there were shouts of ‘Hurrah!’ and gestures of reverence. Soon, Nicky could tell, there would
be pandemonium. Reluctantly he allowed himself to be taken back to the palace in the general’s carriage.

Once there, Minnie scolded him for risking his life in such a dangerous fashion. Didn’t he realize that the entire future of Russia
was on his shoulders? Why, he
didn’t even have a son yet – if he were to be killed, the throne would pass to his brother Georgy, and Georgy was ill. What had he been thinking of? Or, rather, why had he not been
thinking at all?

Minnie’s reprimand had its effect, and the tsar did not go out alone again. In this, as in many other areas of his life, Nicky looked to his mother to guide him. It was noted that he
sometimes interrupted the reports of his ministers and asked them to wait while he consulted with his mother. His dependence on her, along with his passivity and his shyness, were universally
perceived. He never stood up for himself or asserted his own views.

‘He did not like to argue,’ one observer wrote, ‘partly through a lack of self-confidence, and partly through a fear that he might be proved wrong or that others would perceive
the error of his opinions. He realized that he was incapable of defending his own point of view, and found the idea of this quite demeaning.’
⁵

Paralyzed with indecision, withdrawn and insecure, Nicky deferred to his strong-willed mother, and in fact her overweening influence was apparent in every aspect of Nicky’s life –
and Alix’s too – in the early weeks and months of the new reign. The dowager empress had decided where the newlyweds would live, how their tiny suite of rooms would be furnished, and
what servants would wait on them there. They dined with her at every meal, obtained her permission before going anywhere or seeing anyone. Because they had so few rooms of their own, Alix had to
borrow her mother-in-law’s sitting-room to receive her own guests, which led to increased strain, for Minnie and Alix were uncomfortable in each other’s presence. Alix, diffident and
deferential at first, chafed under the restrictions placed on her, while Minnie, still grieving and deeply disturbed over the transfer of power from her husband to her ineffectual son, tried to
control her son and daughter-in-law’s lives to an inordinate degree.

That the six cramped, shabbily decorated rooms assigned to them in the Anitchkov Palace – rooms Nicky had once shared, as a boy, with his brother Georgy – were inadequate was
abundantly clear,
yet Nicky did not demand larger ones. It did not seem to him important enough to argue about that there was no space for Alix’s clothes, that the
rooms were badly ventilated and cold, or that as tsar, he deserved the finest suite of apartments in the palace, not the meanest.

Coping as best she could with the overall situation, Alix went along with her husband’s attitude at first. But before long she discovered that an insidious intrigue was going on around
her, and this eventually forced her to change her stance.

The servants, she soon discovered, were reporting everything that she did and said to Minnie – everything from her preferences in food and dress to her casual remarks to the misbehaviour
of her little terrier dog to her bathroom and boudoir habits. She had no privacy, and an attempt was clearly being made to rob her of her dignity.

She reacted. She began to dress up, to garb herself ‘with great magnificence’, as her principal waiting maid Martha Mouchanow remembered, from early morning until late at night.
Disregarding the designs her court dressmakers proposed, she sketched gowns of her own design, ornate, elaborate ones, in sharp contrast to the simpler tailored gowns her mother-in-law favoured. If
she dressed like an empress, Alix seems to have reasoned, she would be treated with respect.

But the tactic achieved the opposite result. The ill-judged opulence in dress led to much smothered laughter, and unflattering comparisons between Alix and the undeniably more elegant, more
simply dressed Dowager Empress. The dressmakers fumed, the servants sneered and complained to Minnie that Alix overworked them by asking them to bring out three or four different gowns, complete
with hat, gloves, shoes, stockings and other accessories, each time she changed her clothes during the day so that she could choose from among them.
⁶

The complaints about Alix’s fussiness reached Minnie, and she chastised Alix, adding, with a hint of snobbery, that ‘when she [Alix] was at Darmstadt she would not have dared to
display such a capricious temper’.
⁷
The reference to her lower status and relatively
modest upbringing wounded and
offended Alix, who soon found herself barraged with criticisms.

The whispering campaign on the part of the servants had only been the start of a much wider assault of censure that spread within the imperial family and among the courtiers. The empress was
said to be capricious, extravagant, always avid for new gowns and especially new furs. Her bills from the Paris couturiers Worth and Paquin were said to be enormous – though in fact they were
far smaller than Minnie’s – and Aunt Miechen dismissed Alix’s taste as that of a parvenue, unused to having costly things and shamelessly eager to acquire and flaunt
them.
⁸
And to an extent, Aunt Miechen was right.

But the imputation of extravagance was only one of many reproaches. If the servants reported that the empress had a headache, and appeared pale, the family said it was because she was upset over
something Minnie had said or done. If she smiled, she was assumed to be mocking others in the family. If she frowned, she was being disagreeable. If she was merely thoughtful, she was said to be
angry. If she ordered English-style bacon for breakfast, she was said to be expressing scorn for Russian food. If her terrier snapped at the heels of a member of the family, Alix, and not the dog,
was blamed.

All but smothered under the avalanche of gratuitous opprobrium, Alix took a stand against it. She persuaded Nicky to take her away to Tsarskoe Selo for a week. While there, temporarily out of
Minnie’s control and removed, at least a little, from the relentless condemnation of the immediate family, she stiffened her backbone and armoured herself, inwardly, to face the assaults.
When she and Nicky returned from those few days away, Mouchanow noticed the change immediately. There was, she wrote, an alteration in the empress’s ‘manners and bearing, much of her
former diffidence and shyness having disappeared’.
⁹
She began giving orders, making decisions on her own, acting without consulting Minnie
first.

She summoned Mouchanow into her presence and instructed her that from now on, there would be new rules for the waiting maids to follow – rules which would protect her privacy and prohibit
talebearing.
When Mouchanow began to protest, Alix silenced her, telling her ‘most peremptorily’ to obey her instructions and not to offer any contradiction or
advice.
¹⁰
Stunned, Mouchanow set about implementing the new rules, knowing that they would create hostility among the servants where before there
had merely been disrespect and ridicule.

No doubt Alix too could predict the harshly disagreeable outcome of her new rules and firm attitude, but the former situation was untenable, and could not be endured. She had to assert herself
– there was no other way, since Nicky would never stand up for her or defend her interests and peace of mind. He looked to her for constant support and reassurance, but she knew she could not
look to him for protection in the maelstrom of court intrigue. To survive in its midst, she had to provide her own defence.

Meanwhile Nicky, doing his best to meet his responsibilities as tsar, was suffering from what he called ‘terrible emotions’, knowing that he had soon to appear before a deputation of
his subjects and make a brief speech. His natural diffidence made such an appearance a torment to him. He would have to enter a crowded hall, mount a dais, receive the worshipful greeting of those
present, and then make his remarks – nothing lengthy, only a few sentences. Still the dread of it ate away at him, making him withdrawn and nervous.

‘The tsar does nothing. He is a sphinx,’ one of the courtiers wrote, observing the new ruler. ‘He has no kind of personality.’ He was not often seen and, though affable
enough on social occasions, he did not seek company outside of his family. Beneath his sphinx-like exterior Nicky was full of nervous dread; he smoked, he had a habit of stroking his beard in a
preoccupied way, he sought release in physical activity. But the dread persisted.

Grieving for his father, he laboured under the burdensome certainty that he would never live up to his example. He would try, of course. He would honour Alexander III’s memory by
continuing his policies, by being diligent in controlling irresponsible tendencies towards self-government on the part of his people. He would keep ever sharp in his memory the terrible afternoon
when
he had watched his grandfather die, slain by revolutionary advocates of ‘the people,’ who were in truth enemies of the state. He would not listen to the
views of any minister who discussed, even in the abstract, the idea that Russia might one day adopt a constitution, or that he himself might become a constitutional monarch, subject to legal
restrictions.