Alexandra (37 page)

He basked in her ardour, her nurture. She was gratified by being a much-needed unlimited font of reassurance and advice. Such was their exchange. There was never a cold or critical word, never a
note of domineering wife and subservient husband. Only love, flowing back and forth between them as it always had, and unquestioned understanding.

Embodied in Alix’s long letters were certain fixed principles: that Nicky needed to be much stronger in exerting his authority, and to protect himself from bad counsel; that there were
‘always liars, enemies’ around him – and her – and that these liars and enemies needed to be identified; that interfering relatives and a group she referred to as
Ella’s ‘bad Moscow set’ were to be shunned; and that Grand Duke Nicholas – ‘Nikolasha’ – was not sufficiently loyal and was doing an unsatisfactory job in
commanding the military.

Alix tried to keep herself informed about all that was going on, in the war, within the ministries, and in the country at large, but her sources of information were severely limited. She read
the newspapers, and Nicky’s letters, but she talked to only a small circle of people, chiefly Anna Vyrubov (who was carrying on an unpleasant petty feud against her in the first year of the
war, though their friendship continued), and the members of her household staff.
³
Rumours from Petrograd reached her via chance conversations
with wounded
soldiers, doctors and nurses. Through Anna, an invalid after early 1915 but still able to get about a good deal, Alix learned what was being said at
Anna’s father’s house, among his social circle which included officials, artists and aristocrats, and also at the salon of Princess Paley, Grand Duke Paul’s wife, who kept open
house at her mansion in the capital. Most of what Alix heard or was told by others was partial or biased or tainted either by flattery or criticism. And none of it changed her opinions, or softened
her rigid judgments.

Instead of information, she relied on her instincts; she prayed in her own chapel in the cavelike crypt of the cathedral at Tsarskoe Selo for divine guidance, she listened for the tinkling of
the little bell attached to the icon Monsieur Philippe had given her years earlier, to warn her when evil threatened, and she turned, as ever, to Father Gregory.

She had always needed help from the occult, the divine, the Beyond. Now she needed it more than ever. Who better to give it to her than Father Gregory? But he had changed, and she saw that he
had. He had grown fat, his previously gaunt face puffy, his nose the inflamed red of the alcoholic. The years of dissolute living were evident in his face, and he had long since exchanged the
coarse cloth garb of a peasant for silken shirts and velvet breeches. He drank steadily, deeply, often uncontrollably. He staggered along the streets of Petrograd at midnight, calling out loudly to
prostitutes, stopping to urinate against the side wall of a church or unbuttoning his trousers in public places and waving his penis at shocked onlookers, always drinking, ultimately passing
out.
⁴

He had always been indifferent to wealth, but in 1915 he was surrounded by money, gambling with it until the police closed the gambling house down, involved with lending it (or involved with
those who were involved), flinging twenty-five-and fifty-rouble notes into the air and passing them out with abandon to casual acquaintances he met in night clubs. If not exactly venal, Father
Gregory had become at least entrepreneurial; he obtained lucrative army supply contracts for friends, he arranged deferments from army service, he used his influence to obtain desirable billets for
those who bribed him.
⁵

Though supplicants and sycophants continued to crowd his apartment, and though he still performed remarkable healings, most notably saving Anna Vyrubov’s life
after her near-fatal accident early in 1915, Father Gregory gave less attention to spiritual pursuits. Having given in to temptation and cynicism, he became self-destructive, and having survived
two assassination attempts, the one in Pokrovsky in the summer of 1914 and the other in January of 1915, when assassins from Tsaritsyn tried to run him over with a troika, he became daring, even
foolhardy. Perhaps he thought himself immortal. Perhaps he foresaw inevitable catastrophe, both for Russia and for himself, and no longer took care to avoid it.

Whatever Father Gregory had become, the empress continued to defend him when confronted with proof of his profligacy, and continued to be soothed and comforted by his blessings and reassurances.
Because Alexei had no major attacks of bleeding, there was no need for her to send for Father Gregory as often as in the past, but the operators at the palace switchboard were ordered to put his
calls through at once whenever he made them, and Alix knew that whenever she summoned him, if he was in Petrograd, he would come.

In March, 1915, she was ‘horribly weak’ once again, forced to curtail her personal visits to hospitals. She had only just recovered from the severe symptoms she had experienced the
previous winter, and this new assault was dispiriting. She obeyed her doctors and went to bed, ‘heart a good deal enlarged’, suffering from a racking chest cough, unable to put on her
clothes or put up her hair. But even in bed she kept herself occupied. Easter was coming, and she hoped for an Easter truce. Alix packed special parcels to be sent to the troops, boxes stuffed with
decorated eggs and Easter bread, writing paper, tobacco, candles, clean linen, and a small icon to be hung around the neck.

She could not do her nursing, or say her formal goodbyes to those who were leaving the hospitals for the front, but she could still write long letters, and look through the papers her secretary
sent to her, and meet with her household staff and her ladies-in-waiting who attended to her personal affairs.

Not until late April did she begin to return to her usual routine, and even then she was still taking ‘lots of iron and arsenic and heart drops [Veronal]’
to build up her strength, and suffering from sharp pains in her lower back, which she attributed to kidney trouble.
⁶

She had received a ‘long, dear letter’ from Ernie in Germany – an important letter, in that it seemed to hold the promise of a possible end to the war. Ernie wrote that he felt
certain Nicky understood him and that he had Alix’s empathy, that despite the enmity between their two nations, their personal feelings for each other were unchanged. ‘He longs for a
way out of this dilemma,’ Alix told Nicky, ‘that someone ought to begin to make a bridge for discussion.’
⁷
There were no formal
peace talks under way, but Ernie proposed sending a secret envoy to Stockholm who could begin private talks between the belligerents. If only Nicky would send an envoy of his own, the secret
communication could begin.

Whether or not Alix was naive enough to believe that Ernie was writing entirely on his own is unknown, but she thought enough of his letter to pass on the suggestion to her husband. She sent
Ernie a reply – indirectly, through family channels – to say that Nicky was away from the court and would not be able to send anyone to Stockholm soon.

She did not consult the war minister, or the interior minister, or, as far as is known, anyone else in the government about her brother’s letter. She mistrusted them; they were among the
liars and enemies to be avoided. And besides, they were preoccupied with the new German offensive which coincided with Ernie’s letter, a sustained push eastwards that resulted in a series of
major defeats for the Russian armies.

There was no resisting the German advance that spring. The heavy German guns shelled the Russian trenches with more than a thousand high-explosive shells a minute, ‘churning into
gruel’, as one contemporary wrote, the waiting Russians, most of them unarmed, unprotected by helmets. Corps after corps were decimated, entire regiments swept away, or nearly so, by the
relentless guns.
⁸
In the air, the Russian pilots had no machine-guns, and were reduced to trying
to ram the enemy at
the cost of their own lives and planes. Reinforcements were sent to the ever-receding front, most of them unarmed raw recruits, destined for slaughter. Transport and supply lines reached new levels
of inefficiency, and even the telephones failed to work when the exchange stations, located deep in the Polish forests, were demolished by wild boars.

Throughout the wet spring of 1915, as the Neva ice broke up and constant rain fell on Petrograd, a steady stream of refugees from the fighting sought shelter in the capital. They arrived at the
Warsaw Station, hundreds of tattered families in dire need of food and rest, lining up at hastily organized feeding stations for rations of black bread and hot soup. There were not enough barracks
to house them all, and so they lived under bridges, in abandoned warehouses, in sheds, any dry place they could find. Petrograd’s European community rallied to help the refugees, and Alix,
once she began to resume some activity in late April, went to see for herself what was being done, inspecting the food distribution centre, the maternity home set up by the wife of the British
ambassador, the stores of clothing and blankets and small coffins for the many infants and children too weak to survive their ordeal.
⁹

It was said that for every homeless family in Petrograd, there were ten on the way, clogging the roads, crowding the soldiers going back and forth from the front. ‘One ought really to do
something more for the refugees,’ Alix wrote to Nicky, ‘more food stations and flying hospitals – masses of children are homeless on the high road and others die – all
returning from the war – one says it is bitterly painful to see.’
¹⁰

The endless procession of refugees was disturbing to the citizens of Petrograd, not only because of their evident suffering but because they were an indicator of worse to come, harbingers of an
ultimate German onslaught that might well reach the Russian capital itself. Only Warsaw stood between the Germans and Petrograd, and it was greatly feared that Warsaw would soon be in enemy hands.
Was it time, people asked one another, to hide their valuables? To send precious things out of the country, or at least into the hinterlands of
Russia, perhaps to Siberia,
where they could be kept safe until the war ended?

The war had moved onto Russian soil, a large part of Russian territory was now occupied by the central powers. One high-ranking official openly made it known that, in his view, only
Russia’s enormous spaces and the difficulty of moving troops along roads turned to thick, clinging mud by spring rains could save the country from foreign occupation within a very short
time.

In her ill, insomniac, fearful state, her brain ‘cretinized’, as she often said, Alix saw herself to be at the centre of the crisis. She was the hub around which all revolved, she
needed to be the still centre at the heart of the chaos. It was up to her to act, to make the important decisions, and to urge her husband to follow them. Relying on divine inspiration, and
perceiving that inspiration to come through Father Gregory – as in the past it had come through Monsieur Philippe and others – she listened to what Father Gregory told her, though his
words were often cryptic and his advice came in spurts. She sought his advice, she listened, and she clung to her principles.

She fought to retain her emotional equilibrium, but felt it slip away, under assault from the irritations of daily living – the ‘odious humour’ of Anna Vyrubov, the close
surveillance of the Alexander palace by her critics who harangued the servants and reported every minute detail of the imperial family’s life to the newspapers – her worries over
daughter Olga, who was becoming overtired and thin from her war work, and over daughter Tatiana, who was so ‘awfully sad’ and feeling neglected, worries over Nicky’s heart, which
‘did not feel right’, and over the armies, now in full retreat.

‘I had been praying and crying and feeling wretched,’ she told Nicky in June of 1915. ‘You don’t know how hard it is being without you and how terribly I always miss
you.’
¹¹
She felt ‘very low’, hearing of ‘nothing but deaths’, soldiers dying, children and elderly people dying,
death everywhere. Late at night, for consolation, she took out Nicky’s old letters, some written before they were engaged, and sought to ‘warm up her aching heart’ by rereading
them.

Again and again, one solution to the military crisis, the threat of further invasion, all the heartache of loss and confusion presented itself: the tsar must rule
alone, governing not only the country but the military. After all, he alone was master and sovereign of Russia, he had been set at the pinnacle of power by God himself. He alone was the font of
wisdom, steadfastness, courage and strength. Now all that force needed to be exerted to reinvigorate the routed armies.

‘Nobody knows who is the emperor now,’ Alix wrote to Nicky, and it was all because of Nikolasha’s command – and his meddling, his ‘false position’. He
hectored the ministers with his loud voice, he blundered into bad decisions, being ‘far from clever, obstinate and led by others’.
¹²
He was nothing but a stumbling block, and a stumbling block that had to be removed.

Nikolasha had to go.

When she met with the British ambassador George Buchanan, Alix confided to him that in her view, her husband should have taken command of the armies from the start of the war – as in fact
he had wanted to do. She knew that the ministers had been opposed to this, but she had no patience with ministers who tried to ‘prevent him doing his duty’. ‘The Emperor
unfortunately is weak,’ she told Buchanan, ‘but I am not, and I intend to be firm.’

The ambassador saw from the set of her features that the empress would not listen to any contrary arguments.
¹³
That she had not fully
weighed the consequences of the proposed shift in command, consequences endlessly discussed by the governments of Britain and France as well as by the tsar’s own ministers. She had not
considered, or adequately considered, the effect it would have if the tsar, as military commander, lost a major battle, or several major battles. His political authority would plummet as his
military reputation declined. She had not given enough consideration to the sheer workload of keeping up with both political and military responsibilities – a workload no single man could
reasonably carry, in Buchanan’s view, and do it well. She had forgotten to consider that, only ten years earlier, there had been a revolution in Russia, and revolutionary extremists still
awaited their opportunity to take over the government.