Nicholas and Alexandra (42 page)

Their telegram was delivered to Nicholas at Spala. Coming immediately after the crisis with Alexis, it staggered the Tsar. "He broke his word, his word of honor," Nicholas said, agitatedly rubbing his brow as he showed the telegram to Anna Vyrubova. "How in the midst of the boy's illness and all our trouble, could they have done such a thing?" At first, Nicholas wanted to keep the marriage a secret. "A terrible blow ... it must be kept absolutely secret," he wrote to Marie. The impossibility of this soon became obvious. Nevertheless, Nicholas deprived his brother of the right of regency on Alexis's behalf, and put Michael in a state of tutelage as if he were a minor or a mental incompetent. Grand Duke Michael, second in line for the Russian throne, was then forbidden to return to Russia.

Later, the reason for Michael's seemingly impetuous decision to marry became clearer. From the medical bulletins and news reports that were filtering across Europe, Michael suddenly became aware of the fact that his nephew might die at any moment. If Alexis died, Michael knew that he would be compelled to return to Russia under circumstances which would make it impossible for him to marry a woman of Nathalie's standing. Before this could happen, he—or she— decided to act. "What revolts me more than anything else," said Nicholas, "is his [Michael's] reference to poor Alexis's illness which, he says, made him speed things up."

Despite his anger, Nicholas could not ignore his brother's
fait accompli.
Nathalie was now his brother's wife. Reluctantly, he granted her the title of Countess Brassova and consented that her infant son,

his nephew, should be styled Count Brassov. When the war began, Nicholas permitted the couple to return to Russia and Michael went to the front in command of a Cossack brigade. But neither Nicholas nor Alexandra ever received or uttered a word to the bold and beautiful Nathalie Cheremetevskaya.

To those who remember it, the winter season in St. Petersburg following the tercentenary seemed especially brilliant. The tall windows in the great palaces along the Neva blazed with light. The streets and shops were filled with bustling crowds. Fabergé, with its heavy granite pillars and air of Byzantine opulence, was thronged with customers. In elegant hair-dressing salons, ladies sat on blue-and-gold chairs, congratulating themselves on getting an appointment and exchanging the latest gossip. The most delicious story that year concerned Vaslav Nijinksy's expulsion from the Imperial Ballet. The banishment followed a performance of
Giselle
in which the magnificent dancer had worn an unusually brief and revealing costume. When he appeared on stage, there was a commotion in the Imperial box. The Dowager Empress was seen to rise, fix the stage with a devastating glare and then sweep out of the theatre. The dancer's expulsion followed immediately.

The mood of the capital was one of hope. Russia was prosperous, memories of the war with Japan had faded, the tercentenary had provided a surge of enthusiasm for the ancient monarchy. There were rumors that court balls would be held again, now that the Tsar's daughters were growing up. Grand Duchess Olga, golden-haired and blue-eyed, had already made her first appearances at St. Petersburg balls. Grand Duchess Tatiana, slender, with dark hair and amber eyes, was ready to be presented. The court balls did not take place that winter, but the social event of the season was a ball which the Dowager Empress gave for her granddaughters at the Anitchkov Palace. The Empress came, but left at midnight, and it was the Tsar who remained until 4:30 a.m. to escort his daughters home. On the train back to Tsarskoe Selo, he sipped a cup of tea and listened while the girls discussed the party and planned how late they would sleep the next morning.

Beyond the circle of sparkling light, the enthusiasm of the tercentenary quickly dissipated. Unrest among the workers and peasants continued to grow. In April 1912, an incident had taken place in the remote Lena goldfields of Siberia. The miners had gone on strike and were walking in protest toward the office of the Anglo-Russian Lena

Gold Mining Company when a drunken police officer ordered his men to open fire. Two hundred people were killed, and Russia seethed with anger. In the Duma and the press, the massacre was called "a second Bloody Sunday." The government ordered a Commission of Inquiry, and the Duma, unwilling to rely on the report of a government commission, decided to conduct its own investigation. The head of the Duma commission was Alexander Kerensky.

Since leaving the university in St. Petersburg in 1905, Kerensky had become a familiar figure as he defended political prisoners in courtrooms all across Russia. Although his arguments and his successes frequently were embarrassing to the government, "I was not subject to the slightest pressure," he said. "No one could oust us from the courts, no one could lift a finger against us." The same sense of legal fair play prevailed at the Lena goldfields investigation: "The government commission sat in one house and we sat in another. Both commissions were summoning and cross-examining witnesses . . . both were recording the testimony of the employees, both were writing official reports. . . . The gold fields administration greatly resented our intrusion but neither the . . . [government investigators] nor the local officials interfered in any way; on the contrary . . . the Governor actually helped." Kerensky's report bitterly damned the police, and not long afterward the Minister of Interior resigned.

From the goldfields, Kerensky went straight to the Volga region to run for election to the Fourth Duma. He ran as a critic of the government, was elected, and for the two years before the war he traveled across Russia making, speeches, holding meetings and doing "strenuous political organizing and revolutionary work . . . The whole of Russia," he wrote, "was now covered with a network of labor and liberal organizations—the co-operatives, trade unions, labor clubs." It was no longer even necessary for agitators to be secretive about their work. "In those days a man as openly and bitterly hostile to the government as myself toured from town to town quite freely making speeches at public meetings. At these meetings, I criticized the government sharply. . . . [Never] did it enter the heads of the Tsarist Cheka to infringe on my parliamentary inviolability."

Kerensky's work, and that of others like him, had an effect. In 1913, the year of the tercentenary, seven hundred thousand Russian workers were on strike. By January 1914, the number had grown to one million. In the Baku region, fighting broke out between the oil workers and the police, and, as it had always been in Russia, the Cossacks came at a gallop. By July 1914, the number of strikers had swollen to one and a half million. In St. Petersburg, mobs of strikers were smash-

ing windows and erecting barricades in the streets. That month, Count Pourtalès, the German Ambassador, repeatedly assured the Kaiser that in these chaotic circumstances Russia could not possibly fight.

The end of the Old World was very near. After three hundred years of Romanov rule, the final storm was about to break over Imperial Russia.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Long Summer of
1914

By the spring of 1914, the nine-year-old Tsarevich had made a good recovery from the attack at Spala eighteen months before. His leg had straightened and, to his parents' delight, he walked with only a trace of a limp. In celebration of Alexis's return to health, the Tsar decided one clear May morning to abandon his papers and take his son on an outing. The excursion from Livadia into the mountains was to be entirely male. Alexis was overjoyed.

Two touring cars set out after breakfast. Alexis and his father were in the first, along with Gilliard and an officer from the
Standart;
the sailor Derevenko and a single Cossack guard followed in the second. Trailing long plumes of dust, the cars climbed the slopes of the mountains behind the Imperial palace, passing through cool forests of towering pines. Their destination was a great rust-colored cliff called Red Rock, which offered a majestic view of the valleys, the white palaces and the turquoise sea below. After lunch, descending the northern slope, the little cavalcade came on patches of still un-melted winter snow. Alexis begged that the cars be stopped, and Nicholas agreed. "He [Alexis] ran around us, skipping about, rolling in the snow, and picking himself up only to fall again a few seconds later," wrote Gilliard. "The Tsar watched his son's frolics with obvious pleasure." Although he intervened from time to time to caution his son to be careful, Nicholas was convinced for the first time that the ordeal at Spala was finally over.

"The day drew to a close," Gilliard continued, "and we were quite sorry to have to start back. The Tsar was in high spirits during the drive. We had an impression that this holiday devoted to his son had been a tremendous pleasure to him. For a few hours, he had escaped his imperial duties."

Despite her shyness and the close family circle that surrounded her,

talk of marriage began to focus that year on eighteen-year-old Grand Duchess Olga. A match with Edward, the Prince of Wales, was mentioned. Nothing came of it, and the Prince remained unmarried until 1936, when he gave up his throne to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson. More serious discussion centered on Crown Prince Carol of Rumania. Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, was an advocate of this match; he saw in it a possibility of detaching Rumania from her alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Nicholas and Alexandra were receptive to Carol's suit, but Olga herself was implacably opposed.

On June 13, the Russian Imperial family paid a brief, formal visit to the Rumanian Black Sea port of Constanza. Carol and his family waited on the pier as the
Standart
brought the Russian visitors from Yalta. The single day was crowded with ceremonies: a cathedral service, a naval review and luncheon in the morning, followed by a military review, a formal tea, a state dinner, a torchlight parade and fireworks in the evening. All day long, the Rumanians stared at Olga, aware that in the Russian girl they might be observing their future queen.

In that sense, the visit was a waste of time. Even before the
Standart
arrived in Constanza, Olga found Gilliard on deck. "Tell me the truth, Monsieur," she said, "do you know why we are going to Rumania?" Tactfully, the tutor replied that he understood it was a matter of diplomacy. Tossing her head, Olga declared that Gilliard obviously knew the real reason. "I don't want it to happen," she said fiercely. "Papa has promised not to make me, and I don't want to leave Russia. I am a Russian and I mean to remain a Russian."

Olga's parents respected her feelings. Alexandra, sitting one day on the terrace at Livadia, explained their viewpoint to Sazonov. "I think with terror that the time draws near when I shall have to part with my daughters," she said. "I could desire nothing better than that they should remain in Russia after their marriage. But I have four daughters and it is, of course, impossible. You know how difficult marriages are in reigning families. I know it by experience, although I was never in the position my daughters occupy, being [only] the daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse, and running little risk of being obliged to make a political match. Still, I was once threatened with the danger of marrying without love or even affection, and I vividly remember the torments I endured when . . . (the Empress named a member of one of the German reigning houses) arrived at Darmstadt and I was informed that he intended to marry me. I did not know him at all and I shall never forget what I suffered when I met him for the first time. My grandmother, Queen Victoria, took pity on me, and I was left in peace.

God disposed otherwise of my fate, and granted me undreamed-of happiness. All the more then do I feel it my duty to leave my daughters free to marry according to their inclination. The Emperor will have to decide whether he considers this or that marriage suitable for his daughters, but parental authority must not extend beyond that."

Rebuffed by Olga, Carol did not give up hope of marrying a Romanov grand duchess. Two years later, he arrived in Russia and suggested to Nicholas that he marry Marie, then sixteen. Nicholas laughingly declared that Marie was only a schoolgirl. In 1947, Carol, as King of Rumania, made a third marriage with the woman who had been his mistress for twenty-two years, Magda Lupescu.

In Europe, the early summer of 1014 was marked by glorious weather. Millions of men and women went off on holidays, forgetting their fears of war in the warmth of the sun. Kings and emperors continued to visit each other, dine at state dinners, review armies and fleets and bounce each other's children on their knees. Beneath the surface, however, differences were detectable. The important visits took place between allies: King George V visited Paris; the Kaiser visited the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand; Raymond Poincaré, President of France, visited the Tsar in St. Petersburg. In their entourages, the chiefs of state brought generals and diplomats who sat down quietly with their opposite numbers to compare plans and confirm understandings. Military reviews took on special significance. Troops on parade were carefully watched for signs of
élan,
vigor and readiness for war.

An event of special symbolic importance took place at the end of June when the dashing British Admiral Sir David Beatty led the First Battle Cruiser Squadron of the Royal Navy up the Baltic on a visit to Russia. England, alarmed by the rapid building of the Kaiser's powerful High Seas Fleet, was reluctantly abandoning a century of "splendid isolation." A closer tie with Tsarist Russia, hitherto despised in press and parliament as the land of the Cossack and the knout, was part of Britain's new diplomacy. On June 20, a blazing, cloudless day, Beatty's four huge gray ships,
Lion, Queen Mary, Princess Royal
and
New Zealand,
steamed slowly past the
Standart
and anchored at Kronstadt. The Imperial family went aboard Beatty's flagship,
Lion,
for lunch. "Never have I seen happier faces than those of the young grand duchesses escorted over
Lion
by a little band of middies especially told off for their amusement," reported the British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. "When I think of them as I saw them that day," he added,