Alexandra (14 page)

Nicky turned for advice to the man who had tutored and advised his father, and who had tutored him: the lawyer Constantine Pobedonostsev, head of the Church Synod. Pobedonostsev held strong
views on the need to preserve inviolate the old political order: the absolute autocracy of the tsar, the absolute subordination of his subjects, the rejection of harmful Western ideas about
constitutional reform. Pobedonostsev gave Nicky some notes to refer to when he made his speech; fortified with these notes, which he concealed in his lambskin hat, Nicky prepared to meet the
deputation.

In the Nicholas Hall, members of the nobility, representatives of the zemstvos and other city groups were waiting on January 17, 1895, to be addressed by Tsar Nicholas. Many in the audience were
enthusiastic, eager for encouragement from the new young tsar. Their expectations reflected their circumstances; the harvest of 1894 had been good, the first adequate harvest in four years. It had
helped to weaken their discontent and revive their hopes. Perhaps, after all, there was no curse on Russia, other than the curse of ill-advised ministers. And perhaps Tsar Nicholas, after reading
the petitions they had sent him, would realize that his ministers were wrong and that he needed the advice of his people.

They had urged him, in their petitions, to listen to their collective voice, the voice of the people, and having heard it, to protect them against the evils of poverty and overtaxation, punitive
tariffs and low grain prices, to broaden their rights, consult with them, entrust them with more of their own decisions. There must be no more vast famines, no more epidemics, no more needless
misery.

Nicky took Pobedonostsev’s notes out of his hat and prepared to speak to his subjects. Though he trembled inwardly, his voice was unwavering, even harsh as he delivered his short
message.

‘I shall maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly as it was preserved by my unforgettable dead father,’ he told them. Any other
course would be unthinkable. As for their hopes, their expectations that he might include them in any fashion in the work of government, these were nothing but ‘senseless dreams’.

It was his own phrase, and a memorable one. ‘Senseless dreams.’ What Pobedonostsev had written in his notes was ‘unrealizable dreams,’ but Nicky, either because of his
nervousness or because, on the spur of the moment, looking out over the sea of upturned faces, he saw fit to amend it, spoke the words ‘senseless dreams’ instead.
¹¹

The import of his words spread through the vast crowd, and almost in an instant their hopes were turned to dismay. The vision of a slow, orderly progression towards political reform that so many
of them had imagined – increasing civil liberties, governmental efficiency, the advance towards constitutionalism – began to dissolve. Instead there came a vision of darkness, of
monumental want, crushing misery, perpetuated indefinitely into the future. The tsar did not want to help them. He did not care that they were suffering. He was a man of iron, with a stone for a
heart. There was indeed a curse on Russia, God’s curse, and nothing anyone could do or say would ever take it away.

A
satirical drawing of the emperor and his mother was passed from hand to hand in the imperial court. Some laughed at it, but most were shocked
– and even more shocked when they learned that the emperor’s wife had drawn it.

The drawing showed Nicky as a naughty baby sitting in a high chair, refusing a plate of soup his mother was handing to him. Minnie, fierce and scolding, was reprimanding him. Both figures were
exaggerated, caricatures of themselves, Nicky made comically infantile and Minnie made into a farcical nagging mother.

The cartoon was clever, but had a malicious edge to it that was unmistakable to all who saw it. And as Alix’s chief waiting maid Martha Mouchanow pointed out, the empress was oblivious to
the harm it was bound to do.

For Alix, Mouchanow wrote, was ‘inclined to be satirical, and had a keen sense of humour, that was not destined to add to the pleasures of her existence’. She not only drew
caricatures, of everyone from members of the imperial family to ministers and leading society figures, she was ‘fond of showing them’. Naturally, the people she drew were offended
(except for Nicky, probably), and those who had not yet been the subject of her sketches feared that they soon would be. The public, meanwhile, was ‘scandalized to see the tsar made fun of by
his own wife’, Mouchanow thought, ‘who ought to have been the first person to show him respect and deference’.
¹

Disregarding, probably even welcoming, the unpleasant stir she was causing, Alix went on drawing her caricatures. She drew her in-laws: the matronly, authoritarian Aunt Miechen, who referred to
her as ‘that stiff Englishwoman’; she drew the loud, hectoring Uncle Vladimir, who disliked her and had opposed Nicky’s marriage to her, and who was, due
to the compulsions of protocol, her frequent escort on formal occasions, Nicky having to escort his mother.
²
She drew Countess Lamsdorff, one of
her maids of honour to whom she took a ‘violent dislike,’ and Minnie’s ageing, hypochondriacal, triple-chinned lady-in-waiting Countess Kutuzov, a descendant of the great
Napoleonic Field Marshal Kutuzov, who complained that she had suffered a heart attack after seeing a mouse.

There were so many characters at the imperial court who lent themselves to mimicry and exaggeration – eccentric old servants; Minnie’s muscular Circassian bodyguard Omar, a former
bandit, with dark flashing eyes and a dishonest smile; the elderly gentleman who wore an old-fashioned white wig and claimed the right to live in the imperial palace by virtue of his descent from
the poet Zhukovsky; the crippled Countess Marie Kleinmichel, among the leaders of Petersburg society, rich, haughty, and full of gossip.

The more Alix showed her drawings to those around her the more she laid herself open to rebuke. It was said that she was not only unkind and spiteful, but domineering. When one night she and
Nicky dined at the barracks of Nicky’s Hussar regiment, she found the company tedious, and was overheard to say to her husband, ‘Now come, my boy, it’s time to go to
bed!’

That she addressed her husband in the casual manner of a brisk English governess giving orders to a young child caused still more remarks to fly through the court, and Minnie, calling her
daughter-in-law into her presence, lectured her on the proper way to address the sovereign – as ‘Sir’ or ‘Your Majesty’. Alix bristled; court protocol was one thing,
but her relationship with Nicky was her own business, their own business.
³
No one could dictate to her what the nature of that tender, intimate,
jokey, deeply loving tie ought to be.

Alix was retrenching, drawing her battle lines. Through her caricatures she was launching an assault, albeit a misguided and ultimately futile one, against the family and court that was
rejecting her. The effort was emotionally costly. It meant that she had to
become two selves: the warm, vulnerable self she liberated when with Nicky, and the hardened,
flinty self she showed to others. It was noticed that the empress pinched her lips almost convulsively when under stress. Her voice when addressing servants or family members was low and
constrained, her movements nervous and unsure.
⁴
The flinty public self was fundamentally unconvincing, and frayed around the edges.

A page in the imperial household described his first encounter with the empress. She was ‘beautiful and majestic’, but when she offered her hand for him to kiss, it was with
‘an awkward and embarrassed gesture’, he wrote. ‘A sense of unease was thus the first thing you noticed on meeting the young empress, and this impression she never managed to
dispel. She was so obviously nervous of conversation, and at moments when she needed to show some social graces or a charming smile, her face would become suffused with little red spots and she
would look intensely serious.’

The page was particularly struck by Alix’s eyes, which ‘promised kindness, but instead of a bright spark, they contained only the cold embers of a dampened fire. There was certainly
purity and loftiness in the look, but loftiness is always dangerous; it is akin to pride and can quickly lead to alienation.’
⁵

Others noted the same unease, the same tell-tale physical signs of nervousness, the same chilliness in the empress. ‘One could not say that the superficial impression she produced was
favourable,’ wrote a court observer. ‘Despite her wonderful hair which lay like a heavy crown on her head and large dark-blue eyes beneath long lashes, there was something about her
exterior that was cold, even repellent.’ If only she had kept still, her marmoreal beauty would have remained fascinating. But she broke its spell as soon as she moved. ‘Her majestic
stance gave way to a maladroit bending of the legs resembling a curtsy at greeting or parting. When she was conversing or grew tired, her face became covered in red blotches; her hands were red and
fleshy.’
⁶

Many memoirists who met Alix in her first months in Russia recorded similar impressions, of a beautiful young woman, stiff and ill at ease, who mumbled in a barely audible voice and was
physically
awkward, even clumsy. She seemed to know nothing of the art of putting others at their ease. Instead she infected them with her own self-conscious uncertainty,
and made them recoil with her unsmiling aloofness. The odd blotches on her skin, and her beet-red hands, embarrassed others and added to their discomfort.

Unlike her vivacious mother-in-law, whose girlish face was full of smiles on social occasions, Alix appeared never to smile in public. Her expression often conveyed a discontented
impatience.

‘As she was easily embarrassed,’ Ernie wrote about his sister, ‘and honest to a fault, she would unsmilingly tilt her head to one side if something displeased her, with the
result that people often thought that she was unhappy, or bored, or simply capricious.’
⁷

Aware that there was a strong current of anti-German feeling in Russia, and that the aristocracy was steeped in French culture, Alix knew that if she were ever to be accepted, she would have to
present herself as a cultivated, French-speaking German. French was the language of the Russian court, but Alix rarely spoke it, since she and Nicky spoke English with one another. Alix’s
French was full of mistakes, and though Nicky tried to help her improve it by reading French novels aloud to her, she never mastered the idiom, and the courtiers laughed at her efforts, and
criticized her for pretending to be something she was not.
⁸

She dreaded social functions, knowing in advance that her linguistic errors would lead to laughter and censure, and that her nervousness would itself make her tongue-tied and worsen her command
of the language. When it came time to circulate among the guests, she froze; she could hardly speak. She began to blush and look uncomfortable and to ‘long to disappear into the
ground’.
⁹
She managed to get through the suppers at the Winter Palace by seeking out the Turkish ambassador Husny Pasha and sitting beside
him. He was a dull, prosaic old-fashioned diplomat, with no pretensions to wit or social prestige. He did not criticize her French, and she found his leaden conversation a relief.
¹⁰

That the new empress was in actuality a complex person with high ideals who held herself to an elevated standard of conduct (with
a few exceptions, as in the drawing of
unkind caricatures) was not at all apparent to her detractors. They would have been very surprised to learn how empathetic she could be, how, when any of her servants suffered a loss or an illness,
she responded immediately with kindness and solicitude.
¹¹
They would never have guessed, from her reserve, that her capacity for friendship was
very great and that, as her lady-in-waiting Sophie Buxhoeveden wrote, she was always ‘ready to do literally anything for her friends’. Their interests became hers; she assumed their
burdens. ‘She would take up things and people with violent enthusiasm,’ according to Buxhoeveden. ‘The first enthusiasm might wane with time, but her friendships were
lasting.’
¹²

The empress was in fact a baffling combination of warmheartedness and reserve – the latter seeming to mask the former. The paradox of her nature could not be understood unless one got to
know her well, or spent time with her alone.

‘I must have a person to myself, if I want to be my
real
self,’ Alix wrote to a member of her household, Marie Bariatinsky, who in time became her friend. ‘I am not
made to shine before an assembly – I have not got the easy nor the witty talk one needs for that. I like the
internal being
, and that attracts me with great force.’

Alix’s deep capacity for aesthetic enjoyment, and for religious feeling, qualities of little account in the public sphere, went unappreciated.

‘As you know,’ she told Marie Bariatinsky, ‘I am of the preacher type. I want to help others in life, to help them to fight their battles and bear their
crosses.’
¹³
Her natural arena was the battleground of conscience, where scruples warred with temptations, and the impulse to fulfil
one’s duties was at odds with the contrary impulse to seek pleasure and ease.