Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (13 page)

Alexandra Fedorovna seemed to have been born into sorrow, to look upon life as a battle of endurance, and yet that had not always been the way. For with her dimpled cheeks and her happy disposition she had been called ‘Sunny’ when she was a little girl. Her joylessness, for all the consuming marital love and devotion she received from Nicholas and their children, did not endear her to the Russian people. It was hard to fathom for those who did not know her, but the seeds of a melancholy temperament had been sown in early childhood. She had suffered the loss of her adored little brother Frittie, a haemophiliac, in 1873. Then, in a double tragedy in 1878 when she was only six, her five-year-old sister May and her 35-year-old mother Princess Alice of Hesse had both succumbed and died when the whole family went down with diphtheria. With their deaths the sunshine departed from Alix’s life for ever.

Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter Vicky, the widowed Empress Frederick of Germany, did not much care for her niece. To Vicky’s mind, the death of her mother had meant Alix had been spoiled and indulged as compensation, and had grown up with a streak of obstinacy and an excessively high opinion of herself. Alexandra was burdened by the enduring sin of pride, her austere manner accentuated by her tallness and her straight-backed deportment (the result of a spinal condition which limited the flexibility of her upper vertebral column; early newsreel footage reveals this awkwardness of manner in her strange stiff nodding, from the neck up, at crowds during public ceremonials). She became withdrawn and difficult, reticent about showing affection and suspicious of strangers, fearful of giving love to someone who might be taken from her. Further traumatised by the premature death of her father when she was 18, Alix retreated to the protective wing of her grandmother Queen Victoria in a state of nervous collapse. She spent long periods in England – at the royal homes at Windsor, Balmoral and Osborne – and English soon became her natural language. The manners and morals of the strong-minded British Queen left their indelible mark on her, everything from Victoria’s extraordinary tolerance of copious draughts of freezing cold air through open windows all the year round, to her morbid obsession with death and her perpetual state of mourning for her dead husband Albert. Such unhealthy preoccupations rubbed off on the impressionable young Alix, who was encouraged to pay regular visits to the crypt where her own dead mother and siblings lay.

From Victoria, Alix also inherited an indomitable will and stubbornness, as well as her idiosyncratic brand of Victorian prudery and reserve. Duty to family and to the state (in which her grandmother was a devout
believer) was ingrained in her – French ambassador Maurice Paléologue called it a ‘militant austerity’ of conscience – as well as her grandmother’s idiosyncratically unsophisticated bourgeois tastes. Alix grew up disliking modernity in all its forms, wedded instead to the limited, homely tastes of the conventional hausfrau. Everything she did was dictated by an attention to thrift and industriousness in that most English of ways – hence her later insistence that her own daughters never sat idle and always had something to sew. When she gave presents, they were not the usual ostentatious objects expected of an empress, but personal hand-sewn, painted or knitted items. Such un-Russian behaviour, down to Alexandra’s insistence on showing her maids how to black-lead the grates in the royal apartments, later made her the butt of jokes among the sophisticates at the St Petersburg court. Privately, however, she also had that most contradictory of her grandmother’s traits: an intense, impulsive sensuality and need for physical passion that ran absolutely counter to her prudish, censorious exterior. Tragically she did not, however, inherit the one abiding grace of her grandmother that might have saved the Romanov dynasty from collapse – a scrupulous observance of constitutional monarchy.

It took five years of waiting and superhuman persistence on the part of the Tsarevich Nicholas to wear down Alix’s resistance to conversion to Russian Orthodoxy from Lutheranism in order for their marriage to take place. He had first been captivated by her when she was 12 and he 16 at the wedding of her sister Ella to Grand Duke Sergey of Russia in 1884. Puppy love turned to consuming passion on his part when he saw Alix again, now a radiant beauty, in 1889. Nicholas set his heart on marrying her. His parents had their own ideas about a suitable bride, preferring Princess Hélène of Orleans, daughter of the Comte de Paris, the pretender to the French throne. But he resisted; it was the one time the Tsarevich stubbornly and uncharacteristically refused to accede to parental wishes. When Alexandra declined the marriage proposal of Edward, Duke of Clarence, in May 1890, Nicholas renewed his addresses, despite Alix’s tearful protestations about the impossibility of giving up her faith.

One of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Edith Lytton, wrote that what finally won Alix’s heart was probably Nicholas’s reappearance at a family wedding in Coburg in 1894, without his wispy adolescent moustache but with a full and manly beard. Alix finally melted in the face of the handsome Tsarevich’s persistent attentions, and after many hours spent in fervent prayer she made her peace with God and her conscience and finally agreed to convert to Orthodoxy. Queen Victoria declared herself to be ‘thunderstruck’ by such a turnaround in her devout and
pious granddaughter. At the end of October 1894, as her poor ‘gentle little simple Alicky’ set off for Russia, the Queen worried terribly about her fragile granddaughter marrying into such a dark and unstable monarchy and a society with ‘such a want of principle’. Her blood ran cold at the thought of Alix being sacrificed to ‘those dreadful Russians’. Certainly Alix’s arrival was not auspicious, for it came in time for a sombre reunion with her fiancé at his father’s deathbed. Within three weeks she found herself a ‘Funeral Bride’ and Empress of Russia, under the new name of Alexandra Fedorovna. It was a gloomy start to her marriage, as had been that of her mother, Princess Alice, who had also married in front of a muted congregation drowned in black, only six months after devotedly nursing her father Prince Albert during his fatal illness.

Nicholas the Silent Sufferer and Alix the Funeral Bride were thus united under clouds of gloom and much superstitious prediction about what fate had in store for them. And so they clung to each other, with an incredible tenacity and all-inclusive passion that demonstrated the deep inner needs each found fulfilled in the other. The intensity of Alix’s love as ‘Wifey’ to Nicholas’s ‘Huzy’ was smothering, oppressive, overheated; but Nicholas seemed to thrive on it, like a hothouse plant under glass. They knew each other ‘through and through’, Alexandra asserted, and only ever needed to be together, with their children, ‘utterly cut off in every way’. Fine aspirations for any modest, devoted suburban couple; only they were not ordinary, private individuals but Emperor and Empress of Russia, and they had a duty to their public.

Queen Victoria’s affection for Alexandra and Nicholas grew after the couple visited her at Balmoral in 1896 with their first child, Olga. They were, she thought, ‘quite unspoilt and unchanged and as dear and simple as ever’. And within the very close circle of family and the handful of friends that knew them, indeed they were. Alexandra was after all very beautiful, with delicate features, lovely reddish-gold hair and fine blue eyes. But much like her mother Princess Alice, she had a severe kind of beauty, accentuated by the sharp nose, that lent an austerity and coldness. The thin, taut lips rarely mellowed into a smile in public; indeed they had a perpetually mournful expression that suggested a lingering sense of life’s disappointments rather than its pleasures. Such seriousness of manner spilled over into a remorseless religiosity – another inheritance from Princess Alice. Alexandra had surprised everyone with the speed and messianic fervour with which she had embraced not just the Russian faith, but Russianness itself. With her sister Grand Duchess Ella, who had also converted on her marriage into the Romanov family, she shared the same levels of ‘charitable exaltation’ that intensified as the years went by.
She had no hesitation in pronouncing herself entirely ‘Russian’ in sentiments and displaying all the loyalty of a native-born patriot. Indeed, Orthodoxy became a consuming passion and a solace, the motor that drove Alexandra spiritually and emotionally. It also, indirectly, became her undoing.

Sadly for Alexandra, the perception of her at court and among the Russian people at large started off on a bad footing and never recovered lost ground. For she failed dismally to take on board that most important piece of advice given her by her grandmother: that it was her first duty in her adoptive country to win the love and respect of the people. Crippled by reserve, lonely and isolated, with her husband’s time taken up by affairs of state, Alexandra proved incapable of doing so. She lacked Nicholas’s great gifts: his charm, his engaging manner and his self-control. She seemed vain and self-willed, forever closed off and undemonstrative. From the day of her arrival she was viewed as a foreigner – as the
nemka
, ‘the German woman’. Her prudery and seriousness counted against her, as did her lack of taste in clothes, her poor dancing skills and her religious piety. Her response to the hostility she encountered was to retreat even further. She was reticent if not brusque with strangers, she spoke in a whisper, avoided coming down for meals, was picky and disdainful about food when she did, and frequently retired from them ‘indisposed’. She did everything she could to avoid being put on display in public ceremonials. Knowing she could not hold her own against what she saw as the decadent sophisticates of St Petersburg or the ‘spider’s net’ of the Moscow social set, in whose presence her whole face, neck and chest flushed crimson with nerves, Alexandra sought friends and companions among the upper middle classes and moneyed bourgeoisie. To friends such as these – her ladies-in-waiting Lili Dehn and Anna Vyrubova, who knew the extent of her many and distressing physical ailments kept secret from the public at large – the Tsaritsa was sweet, long-suffering, gracious and kind. They became her obedient, admiring poodles. Alexandra effortlessly dominated them, their lowlier social status ensuring an unquestioning devotion to her as a superior spiritual and moral being. But, being the clever woman she was, she often found the toadying attentions of the intellectually challenged, immature Anna Vyrubova irritating. She frequently reviled Vyrubova in letters to Nicholas and was jealous of her doting affection for him, yet she never failed to exploit her as a captive audience for her interminable religious homilies, making of Vyrubova her almost constant companion during the war years when Nicholas was away at the Front.

To the public beyond the palace gates, therefore, Alexandra remained an enigma. They saw so little of her that her almost permanent absence
from view proved a fertile breeding ground for rumour, malevolent gossip and ultimately hatred. Alexandra failed to learn the one big lesson of her grandmother’s reign after Victoria had retreated from public view in 1861 with the death of Albert. Twenty years of reclusive life, refusing all public appearances, had brought upon the once popular and unassailable British monarchy the full brunt of public criticism and had aroused a great deal of republican dissent. A monarch could not afford to be invisible. In Alexandra’s frequent absences Nicholas worked the Romanov publicity machine hard with his five lovely children, but in the end it was not enough. Although the Imperial Family were frequently photographed and
cartes de visite
of them were widely available, in dozens and dozens of family photographs Alexandra is either absent or, if seen at all, sits solemnly in profile or looking away from the camera. Others show her reclining in her favourite environment – her mauve boudoir. This was her world: surrounded by varying shades of the colour of mourning, the walls smothered with hundreds of icons from floor to ceiling, and with the suffocating smell of lilac, lilies of the valley and violets sent daily from the French Riviera. Rarely upright and active, let alone vigorous, the Tsaritsa, for her husband and her children, became the woman in a wheelchair. She seemed to be always sickly, indisposed, struggling with her many demons, real and imagined; when she ventured outside, she hid herself under a parasol, always absorbed in her own thoughts, conscious of the watchfulness of others. True, she did her best to suffer her ailments stoically, and always revived in spirits when relaxing on board the royal yacht the
Shtandart
or at the family’s summer palace in Livadia, but the shades of Alexandra’s sick room followed the young family wherever it went and blighted all their lives.

In Alexandra, Nicholas undoubtedly found a surrogate for his own lack of will and forcefulness, as well as a consuming maternal protectiveness he had never had from his own mother. Behind the scenes, his impressionability and his malleable personality were rapidly moulded by Alexandra’s powerful and assertive character. In public she might have appeared awkward and self-conscious, but in private she was vocal, emotional and highly strung. With her domineering, masculine mind she articulated her personal opinions in long and hectoring letters to her husband in which she exhorted him to be everything he inherently was not – firm, decisive, intractable and at all times asserting the dignity of his position. Convinced of her own infallibility, Alexandra would brook no criticism from even the most well-meaning and concerned of friends and relatives. Blindly obstinate in her determination to hang on to power, she relentlessly belaboured the hapless Nicholas with her paranoid suspicions about ‘rotten’ ministers and her reactionary opinions
on domestic policy. That she truly believed she was right there is no doubt; so much so that she worked herself up into a frenzy in her attempts to inject her own willpower into her husband’s flaccid spirit: ‘I am fighting for your reign and Baby’s future’, she would repeatedly remind him. In order to defend that inheritance she reeled off endless admonitions: ‘a Sovereign needs to show his will more often’ . . . ‘let others feel you know what you wish’ . . . ‘If you could only be severe my love’ . . . ‘They must learn to tremble before you’ . . . ‘be more autocratic’ . . . ‘show everybody that you are master’ . . . ‘let them feel your fist at times’. Alexandra would not let go; when Nicholas’s command of the army finally took him away from her in late August 1915, in scribbled page after page, several letters a day, she bombarded him with her increasingly hysterical ramblings.