Alexandra (53 page)
Authors: Carolly Erickson
Ella’s motives are a mystery. She claimed to be vastly content in Russia but, according to Kurth,
Lost World
, p. 66, her marriage to Serge was unconsummated because of
Serge’s ‘curious tastes’. So Ella may have been lonely, and wanted Alix for company. Or, having rebelled against her grandmother’s marital plans for her, she may simply
have wanted Alix to find the courage to follow her heart and defy their grandmother as well.
16
. Nicholas’s diary entries for January to March, 1890 (O.S.), give a detailed description of his and others’
activities during the social season. Iroshnikov, pp. 119ff.
17. In 1894, Nicholas wrote that he had loved Alix ‘for a long time’ but that he had loved her ‘more strongly and tenderly since 1889, when she
stayed six weeks at Petersburg.’ Vladimir Poliakov,
The Tragic Bride: The Story of the Empress Alexandra
(New York, 1927), p. 13. In April 1892 Nicholas wrote in his diary ‘I
have loved Alix H[esse] for three years already.’
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family
, p. 270.
18. Buxhoeveden, p. 23.
Chapter 4
1
. James Pope-Hennessy,
Queen Mary
(New York, 1960), p. 183.
2
.
Ibid.,
p. 183.
3
. Madame von Kolemine pestered Louis incessantly and may have threatened to blackmail him. The fact that she had his love
letters in her possession made Queen Victoria anxious; she worried that there might be further legal complications or scandal. The queen recommended that Louis get as far away from Europe as
possible – India was her suggestion.
Advice to a Granddaughter
, pp. 68–9.
4
. Poliakov, p. 11.
5
. Iroshnikov, p. 125.
6
.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family
, pp. 270–1.
7
. Nicholas confessed in his diary to ‘very nearly falling asleep from tiredness’. Iroshnikov, p. 118. One
afternoon in March of 1890 he wrote that he ‘looked at Nevsky Prospekt through the railings for something to do’.
8
. In winter 1891, Nicholas wrote that he was ‘madly in love with Olga
Dolgorukaya’.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family
, p. 270.
9
.
Once a Grand Duke
, p. 140.
10
.
Once a Grand Duke
, p. 140;
Education of a Princess
, pp. 17–8. Nicky’s cousin Sandro wrote
of Serge, ‘Try as I might, I simply cannot find one redeeming feature in his character . . . Stubborn, rude, and unpleasant, he defied his own shortcomings, throwing complaints from anyone
back in their faces, and thereby providing rich fodder for slander and calumny.’
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family
, p. 245.
11
. Nicholas’s diary, in
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family
, pp. 264–8, and Iroshnikov, p.
120.
12
. Kurth, p. 40.
13
.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family
, p. 268.
14
. Serge Sazonov,
Fateful Years
(New York, 1928), p. 110.
15
. Buxhoeveden, p. 33. Alix referred to the years between 1889 and 1894 as ‘five sad years’ in a 1894 letter to
her governess Madgie.
16
. Iroshnikov, p. 125.
Chapter 5
1
. Alix confided to her lady-in-waiting Sophie Buxhoeveden that her earliest recollections were of romping with her father.
Buxhoeveden, p. 6.
2
. Andrei Maylunas and Sergei Mironenko, eds.,
A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra: Their Own Story
(New York,
1997), p. 15.
3
.
Ibid.
, p. 26.
4
. Alix prided herself on her sexual sophistication. As she wrote to Nicky in 1894, she sometimes felt ‘very old knowing
things others don’t know until they are married’. ‘As a child I knew things others don’t till they are grown up and married,’ she wrote. ‘I don’t know how
it came!’
Lifelong Passion
, p. 86.
5
. Buxhoeveden, p. 31.
6
.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family
, p. 271. This diary entry was written several weeks after Nicholas
had been given permission to propose to Alix. A younger contemporary of Matilda recalled seeing the ballerina enter a drawing room in St Petersburg, ‘an elegant woman in deep rose velvet and
a picture hat with pale ostrich feathers’. She looked, the younger woman thought, like an ‘exotic bird’. Edith von Almedingen,
I Remember St Petersburg
(London, 1969), p.
30.
7
.
Lifelong Passion
, pp. 32–3.
8
.
Ibid.
, p. 33.
9
.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family
, p. 272.
10
.
Lifelong Passion
, p. 33.
11
.
Ibid
., pp. 30–1.
12
.
Ibid
., p. 34.
13
. These internal preoccupations are recorded in Alix’s letters.
Lifelong Passion
, p. 67. It is worth noting
that in all her reminiscences Alix did not mention her late mother.
Chapter 6
1
.
Lifelong Passion
, p. 45.
2
.
Ibid
., p. 48.
3
.
Ibid
., pp. 48–9. Exactly what the compromise was that permitted Alix to retain, in her conscience at least,
her fealty to Lutheranism is only hinted at in the surviving printed sources. After Nicholas left Coburg, he wrote to Alix from Gatchina, ‘Of course I told them [his parents] all of what you
wanted me to say and they gave in at once and said you would not have to renounce the old belief, but that it would be like with Ella.’
Ibid
., p. 60.
4
.
Ibid
., pp. 48–9.
5
. Victoria wrote to her namesake, Alix’s sister Victoria, on May 25, 1894, ‘Still the feeling that I had laboured
so hard to prevent it [an engagement] and that I felt at last there was no longer any danger and all in one night – everything was changed.’
Advice to a Granddaughter
, p. 124.
A few weeks after leaving Coburg, Victoria quizzed Alix unmercifully about her change of heart about marrying Nicky. Alix told Nicky how ‘she [Queen Victoria] began by asking me so many
questions, when, how, and where, and what made me change my decision and so on, till I no longer knew what to say.’
Lifelong Passion
, p. 60.
6
.
Ibid
., p. 49.
7
. Poliakov, pp. 26–7.
8
.
Lifelong Passion
, pp. 52, 55.
9
. Buxhoeveden, p. 34.
10
. Poliakov, p. 27;
Lifelong Passion
, p. 61.
11
. Buxhoeveden, pp. 35–6.
12
.
Lifelong Passion
, p. 67.
13
.
Ibid.,
p. 67.
14
.
Ibid.
, p. 83.
15
. Poliakov, pp. 42, 46, 48, 49.
16
.
Ibid.
, pp. 50ff.
17
.
Ibid.
, p. 47.
18
.
Lifelong Passion
, p. 72.
19
.
Ibid.
, p. 80.
Chapter 7
1
. Nicky referred to his becoming tsar as ‘the worst . . . that which I feared all my life!’
Lifelong
Passion
, p. 118.
2
.
Last Grand Duchess
, pp. 9–10, 38;
Once a Grand Duke
, p. 69.
3
.
Lifelong Passion
, p. 86.
4
. Nicky’s sister Olga, in
Last Grand Duchess
, p. 55, erroneously states that Alix arrived in Livadia two days
after Alexander III’s death, having made the journey in the company of Bertie. Other sources make it clear that Alix did not travel with Bertie, but with her sister Victoria and others, that
Ella met them en route, and that Nicky was waiting for them all at Simferopol. Bertie arrived two days after the death.
5
. Iroshnikov, p. 19.
6
. Poliakov, p. 60.
7
.
Once a Grand Duke
, p. 168.
8
.
Lifelong Passion
, p. 99.
9
.
Ibid
., p. 100.
10
.
Ibid.
, p. 87.
11
.
Last Grand Duchess
, p. 55.
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
1
.
The Empress Frederick Writes to Sophie: Letters 1889–1901
, ed. Arthur Gould Lee (London, 1955), p. 281.
2
. Cited in Suzanne Massie,
Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia
(New York, 1980),
p. 277.
3
. Iroshnikov, p. 132.
4
.
Ibid.,
p. 132.
5
. Alexander Mossolov,
At the Court of the Last Tsar
(London, 1935), p. 72.
6
. Mouchanow, pp. 21, 23, 131.
7
.
Ibid
., p. 24.
8
.
Ibid.
, pp. 25, 28.
9
.
Ibid.
, p. 22.
10
.
Ibid.,
p. 22.
11
. Harrison Salisbury,
Black Night, White Snow: Russia’s Revolutions 1905–1917
(New York, 1978), p. 62;
Iroshnikov, p. 131.
Chapter 10
1
. Mouchanow, pp. 50–1.
2
.
Last Grand Duchess
, p. 61.
3
. Mouchanow, pp. 87–8.
4
. Iroshnikov, p. 138.
5
.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family
, p. 18.
6
. Iroshnikov, p. 123.
7
.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family
, p. 250.
8
. Mouchanow, p. 34.
9
. Buxhoeveden, p. 58.
10
.
Ibid
., p. 58.
11
. Mouchanow, pp. 43–4.
12
. Buxhoeveden, pp. 166–7.
13
.
Ibid
., 166. In this preoccupation Alix was joined by her dear friend Juju Rantzau in Germany who, Alix wrote,
‘understood the difficulties of this world, and the different temptations, and always encouraged one in the right, and helped one to fight one’s weaknesses’. Alix and Juju
exchanged weekly letters which either have been lost or, if still in existence, have not been published. Buxhoeveden, p. 167. What a treasure these letters would be to a biographer!
14
. Mouchanow, pp. 39, 141. Alix embroidered beautifully; Mouchanow thought that cloths she decorated for use in church
‘would easily have won a prize at any exhibition’. Mouchanow, p. 143.
15
.
Lifelong Passion
, p. 131.
16
.
Ibid.
, p. 130.
Chapter 11
1
. Mouchanow, p. 68.
2
. Mouchanow, p. 68, refers to ‘some hopes of maternity she [Alix] was nursing’ at the time of the coronation.
Later on, after she miscarried the child, ‘her doctor said that the expected child would, in all probability, have been a boy’.
3
.
Lifelong Passion
, p. 133.
4
. Iroshnikov, p. 306.
5
. Bernard Pares,
The Fall of the Russian Monarchy
(New York, 1961), p. 131.
6
. ‘The unpopularity of the young sovereign [Alix] was already an established fact when the coronation took
place,’ Mouchanow wrote. ‘It appeared quite plainly on the day when she made her public entry into the ancient city, when the crowds greeted her with absolute silence, whilst they
vociferously cheered the Dowager Empress . . . When she was alone in her rooms she wept profusely over this manifestation of the displeasure of the nation in regard to her person.’ Mouchanow,
pp. 51–2.
7
. This account of the events at Khodynka Meadow is taken from the eyewitness narrative of the reporter Vladimir Giliarovsky,
cited in Iroshnikov, pp. 30–1, the diary of Nicholas II in
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family
, p. 286, Poliakov, pp. 107–11, and
Last Grand Duchess
, pp.
66ff. The value of the pink enamel mugs to the Muscovites of 1896 was far greater than can be imagined by the modern reader. To them, an unbreakable cup that would last forever was an unheard-of
marvel.
8
. The official death toll, given in a statement released on the evening of the catastrophe, was 1389, with 2690 wounded.
Actual numbers were far higher.
9
.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family
, p. 286.
10
. Buxhoeveden, p. 69, and Mouchanow, pp. 54–5, record the efforts the empress was making to disguise, in public,
her tearful private feelings.
11
.
Last Grand Duchess
, p. 68.
12
. Mouchanow, p. 68, wrote that ‘owing to over-fatigue’, the empress ‘had an accident which destroyed
some hopes of maternity she was nursing’. The doctor who treated her was in no doubt that she had been pregnant, and probably with a son. Though no announcement was made, it was rumoured that
the empress had had a miscarriage, ‘and, with the usual wickedness of humanity, it was rumoured that the sovereign had had
reasons to hide the condition she found
herself in, and that the accident in itself had been brought on more voluntarily than accidentally.’