فصل 17

Chapter Seventeen

TERRIBLE THINGS ARE GOING ON IN ST PETERSBURG

‘Father Grigory went missing last night. They are looking for him everywhere – it’s absolutely dreadful.’ Such was the state of foreboding at the Alexander Palace on 17 December 1916 that even Anastasia noted Rasputin’s disappearance. The girls and their mother had sat up until midnight, ‘all the time waiting for a telephone call’; it never came. So anxious were they that in the end ‘the four of us slept together. God help us.’1 The following day there was still no news, but word was already out, as Maria wrote in her diary, that ‘they suspect Dmitri and Felix’.2 ‘We are sitting together – can imagine our feelings – thoughts’, Alexandra wrote to Nicholas in her characteristic staccato style, adding that they knew this much: Grigory had been invited to Felix Yusupov’s palace on the evening of the 16th. ‘There had been a ‘big scandal … big meeting, Dmitri, Purishkevitch* etc. all drunk. Police heard shots, Purishkevitch ran out screaming to the Police that our Friend was killed.’ The police were out searching for Grigory now but Alexandra was already utterly distraught: ‘I cannot and won’t believe that he has been killed. God have mercy.’3

If the story was true, then all the tsaritsa’s hopes for the family’s continuing protection from harm were shipwrecked. Only a month previously she had written to Nicholas reiterating her absolute faith in Grigory’s help and guidance during these difficult years:

Remember that for your reign, Baby, and us you need the strength prayers and advice of our Friend … Ah Lovy, I pray so hard to God to make you feel and realize, that He is our caring, were He not here, I don’t know what might not have happened. He saves us by His prayers and wise counsils [sic] and is our rock of faith and help.4

Final confirmation of Rasputin’s death, when it came, could not have been altogether unexpected, even for Alexandra, for gossip in the capital about his rise from messianic faith healer to meddler in affairs of state, and now a morose drunk, had long since reached boiling point. Demoralized by Nicholas’s decision to enter the war, which he had predicted would be disastrous for Russia, Rasputin had allowed his life to fall into disarray. He saw nothing but doom hanging over Russia as the war dragged on and sought refuge in an almost permanent state of alcoholic oblivion.5 Stories of his debauched late-night drinking sessions at Donon’s Restaurant and a string of fashionable hotels – the Astoria, the Rossiya and the Europe – or hanging out with the Massalsky’s Gypsy Chorus at the Samarkand, were legion.6 In his cups, Rasputin had loudly boasted of his influence over the tsaritsa: ‘I can make her do anything’, he was said to have bragged earlier that year. In response Nicholas had summoned Rasputin to Tsarskoe Selo and reprimanded him. Rasputin admitted that he had indeed been ‘sinful’, but it was clear that he was now out of control. The gossip of ‘magic cures and gay carousals’ that had first greeted his arrival in St Petersburg had now turned into a ‘conflagration of rumour’ in which he and the empress were seen as representing ‘Dark Forces’ that were threatening to engulf Russia.7 Alexandra was talked of as being ‘a go-between in traitorous intrigues with the Germans’ and Rasputin accused of being a German spy ‘who had wormed his way into the confidence of the Tsarina for the purpose of obtaining military secrets’.8 Such was the level of seething resentment levelled at the empress by the end of 1916 that members of the imperial family were openly suggesting she be sent to a remote convent for the sake of the country – and her own sanity. But first and foremost Rasputin had to be got rid of.

As they waited for news at the Alexander Palace, the girls and Alexandra’s two closest friends – Anna Vyrubova and Lili Dehn – gathered round the despairing empress. The following night Tatiana and Olga slept in their mother’s room. And then, on the 19th, they had ‘confirmation that Father Grigory has been murdered, most probably by Dmitri, and thrown from the Krestovsky bridge’, as Olga wrote in her diary. ‘They found him in the water. So awful and can’t bear to write about it. We sat drinking tea with Lili and Anna and the whole time felt Father Grigory among us.’9

One of the ADCs on duty at the time recalled the impact of the news on the grand duchesses:

There, upstairs, in one of their modest bedrooms, the four of them sat on the sofa, huddled up closely together. They were cold and visibly terribly upset, but for the whole of that long evening, the name of Rasputin was never uttered in front of me …They were in pain, because the man was no longer among the living, but also because they sensed that, with his murder, something terrible and undeserved had started for their mother, their father and themselves, and that it was moving relentlessly towards them.10

At 6 p.m. on the evening of the 19th Nicholas arrived in haste from Stavka with Alexey, prompted by an urgent telegram he had received from his wife telling him that ‘There is danger that these two boys are organizing something still worse’ – a coup d’état, with the connivance of others in the Romanov family and in tandem with right-wing monarchists in the Duma.11 Rumour had been abroad for some time that Dmitri Pavlovich and his clubbing crony Felix Yusupov were involved. English nurse Dorothy Seymour, at the Anglo-Russian Hospital, had met Dmitri several times socially and remembered him as ‘beautiful to behold, vastly conceited, but superb in glorious youth and dash’. On the evening of 13 December, Dmitri had talked to Dorothy over dinner ‘of many intrigues’ and she had gathered that ‘something was afoot’.*12

Details soon emerged that Dmitri, Yusupov and fellow conspirator Purishkevich had lured Rasputin to Felix’s palace on the Moika at around midnight on the evening of Friday 16 December. Yusupov had picked Rasputin up from his flat on Gorokhovaya ulitsa and driven him there. In a basement dining room, he had plied Rasputin with booze and cream cakes sprinkled with cyanide. Incredulous that the poison failed to do its work and increasingly frantic that their assassination plot would fail, Yusupov had then shot Rasputin in the back with Dmitri Pavlovich’s Browning revolver. But Rasputin still refused to die; it took two more bullets from Purishkevich (the first missed, the second hit Rasputin in the torso) before a fourth and fatal shot to the forehead finished him off.13 Rasputin’s body was then bundled into a piece of cloth, tied up with rope and taken in Dmitri Pavlovich’s car to Petrovsky Island, where it was consigned to the Malaya Nevka through a gap in the ice.14 At 6 that morning Dorothy Seymour recalled that Dmitri Pavlovich ‘in mad spirits’ had rushed into the Anglo-Russian Hospital with Yusupov to have a wound dressed in Yusupov’s neck.15

After the frozen, mangled body was hauled out of the river and an autopsy performed it was reclaimed by the Romanovs. It was taken for burial in secret in the Alexander Park, close by the partially constructed northern wall of the new Church of St Serafim, which Anna Vyrubova was funding with the compensation monies from her accident. When Nicholas, Alexandra and their daughters arrived for the funeral at 9 a.m. on the morning of 21 December, Rasputin’s zinc coffin had already been closed and lowered into the grave.†16 After joining the officiating priest in prayers, each of them dropped white flowers on the coffin and then silently departed.17 In Petrograd meanwhile people were rejoicing on the streets. ‘A dog’s death for a dog’, they shouted and – hailing Dmitri Pavlovich as a national hero – lit candles before the icons of St Dimitri in all the churches to give thanks for his gallant act of patriotism. Before Nicholas had even arrived back from Stavka, Alexandra had had Dmitri illegally placed under house arrest; her husband maintained this tough line, rejecting pleas of leniency from his royal relatives. ‘No one has the right to murder’, he responded fiercely to their plea for leniency. ‘I know that many will have this on their conscience, as Dmitri Pavlovich is not the only one involved. I am astonished at your appeal to me.’18 He immediately ordered Dmitri back to the army – at Qazvin on the Persian front.19 Felix Yusupov was exiled to his estate 800 miles (1,300 km) south in the province of Kursk.

Alexandra’s response to the savage murder of her wise counsellor was plain for all to see. ‘Her agonized features betrayed, in spite of all her efforts, how terribly she was suffering’, remembered Pierre Gilliard. ‘Her grief was inconsolable. Her idol had been shattered. He who alone could save her son had been slain. Now that he was gone, any misfortune, any catastrophe was possible.’20 Anna Vyrubova later described the empress’s state of mind at that time as ‘nearer the insanity they accused her of than she had ever been before’.21 ‘My heart is broken’, Alexandra told Lili Dehn. ‘Veronal* is keeping me up. I’m literally saturated with it.’22

Rasputin’s death cast its terrible pall over the whole family. Olga was profoundly disturbed by it, as she told Valentina Chebotareva not long afterwards: ‘Maybe it was necessary to kill him, but not in such a terrible way’, a remark that suggests she had by now realized the full extent of his baleful influence over their mother. Olga was appalled that two members of her own close family were involved: ‘one is ashamed to admit they are relatives’, she said. Dmitri’s role must have been particularly wounding for all of them.23 General Spiridovich later claimed that Olga had always ‘instinctively sensed there was something bad in Rasputin’.24 But what troubled her even more was this: ‘why has the feeling in the country changed against my father?’ No one could give her an adequate explanation and she continued to appear ‘filled with a growing anxiety’.25

Tatiana also took Rasputin’s death very hard but kept her feelings to herself, treasuring the notebook in which she had written down extracts from his letters and telegrams as well as his pronouncements on various religious topics.26 Her mother meanwhile clung to the bloodstained blue satin tunic that her beloved Grigory had been wearing on the night of his ‘martyrdom’, ‘preserving it piously as a relic, a palladium* on which the fate of her dynasty hangs’.27 It was left to Dr Botkin to voice what many privately were thinking: ‘Rasputin dead will be worse than Rasputin alive’, he told his children; adding prophetically that what Dmitri Pavlovich and Yusupov had done was ‘to fire the first shot of the revolution’.28 ‘Lord have mercy and save us this New Year 1917’, was all Olga could think of as that difficult year came to an end.29

January opened on a sombre note for the Romanov family and their entourage. They attended a prayer service together at midnight and exchanged New Year greetings but Pierre Gilliard had no doubt that they had all entered a period of ‘dreadful waiting for the disaster which there was no escaping’.30 A last gasp of imperial ceremonial came during an official visit by Prince Carol of Romania and his parents, their country having finally entered the war on the side of Russia and its allies.31 Alexandra decided to take advantage of a rare state dinner – held in Carol’s honour on the 9th – to present Maria officially to the court. She and Nicholas still viewed their third daughter, albeit affectionately, as chubby and gawky; the previous evening the girls had all been trying on dresses and according to Tatiana, ‘Maria had got so fat that she couldn’t get into any of them’.32 She had long taken her family’s teasing with good heart and this occasion was no exception. ‘She looked extremely pretty in her pale blue dress, wearing the diamonds that her parents gave to each of their daughters on her sixteenth birthday’, recalled Iza Buxhoeveden, but unfortunately, ‘Poor Maria slipped in her new high heels and fell when entering the dining hall on the arm of a tall Grand Duke’. ‘On hearing the noise, the Emperor remarked jokingly, “Of course, fat Marie.”’ After her sister had ‘fallen over with a thud with all her might’, as Tatiana recalled, she had sat there on the floor laughing ‘to the point of embarrassment’. Indeed the whole occasion turned out to be quite amusing: ‘After dinner papa slipped on the parquet floor, [and] one of the Romanians knocked over a cup of coffee.’33 But it had all washed over Olga, who, still thinking of Mitya, had noted her former patient’s twenty-fourth birthday in her diary. Valentina Chebotareva thought she had seemed particularly sad of late. ‘Is that the fault of your guests?’ Chebotareva had asked her. ‘Oh, there’s no threat of that now, while there’s a war’, Olga had added, alluding to the unspoken suggestion of a marriage.34 Elizaveta Naryshkina had rather hoped that an engagement between Olga and Carol still might take place, for she found him ‘charming’. But Anna Vyrubova had noticed that Prince Carol’s ‘young man’s fancy [had] rested on Marie’ at that dinner, despite her clumsy behaviour. Before he left for Moscow on 26th January, Carol made a formal proposal for her hand. Nicholas had ‘good-naturedly laughed the Prince’s proposal aside’, saying that his seventeen-year-old daughter ‘was nothing more than a schoolgirl’.35 At Carol’s final lunch with the family Elizaveta Naryshkina noticed how markedly the four sisters kept their distance from him and only Nicholas made any effort at conversation.36 Behind the scenes, however, Carol’s mother, Marie – now Queen of Romania – had had her hopes renewed the day of their departure from Russia, when she and her husband King Ferdinand had received ‘ciphered telegrams from Russia’. ‘It seems they still think about a marriage for Carol with one of Nicky’s daughters,’ she confided to her diary. She was surprised and gratified; ‘one would have thought about it now when our poor little Country hardly exists, now when we have not even a house of our own left.* But on the whole it is flattering and might be taken as a good sign!’ The only problem was Carol himself: ‘I do not at all know if he wants to marry.’37

Two of the last private visitors to the Alexander Palace were the head of the Anglo-Russian Hospital, Lady Sybil Grey, and Dorothy Seymour. Having been in Petrograd since September 1916, Dorothy had been excited to be sent an official invitation to meet the tsaritsa, telling her mother that ‘It will be too annoying if they start a revolution before I have time to get down to see her’.38 When she and Lady Sybil took the train out to Tsarskoe Selo, Dorothy found the whole experience, despite the difficult times, an ‘amazing fairytale’.39 They were met at the station ‘by gorgeous officials, footmen, horses all white and prancing – Great State – At the palace door two glorious footmen with huge orange and red ostrich plumes on their heads.’40 After being entertained to lunch by Iza Buxhoeveden and Nastenka Hendrikova the two women were taken ‘through miles of palace and a huge banqueting room’ to a door that was opened ‘by a huge negro’ and ushered in to meet Alexandra and Olga. The empress, wearing purple velvet and ‘huge amethysts’, seemed to Dorothy ‘quite lovely’ and ‘wonderfully graceful’. But there was something haunted about her ‘desperately sad eyes’. Olga, in her nurse’s uniform, seemed very plain in comparison. ‘Pretty eyes. Nice little thing, very pleasant and informal’, recalled Dorothy. They sat and talked for almost two hours, at the end of which she came away impressed by Olga’s spirituality and sensitivity. She was ‘evidently a pacifist, and the war and its horrors [were] on her nerves’. Dorothy left with a sense of sadness and the overwhelming feeling that the room they had sat in – and the palace itself – were already ‘heavy with tragedy’.41

The spectre of illness continued to dog the imperial family that winter; Alexandra was still suffering with her heart and legs and Alexey had recurring pain in his arm, and then swollen glands. Shortly after Dorothy Seymour’s visit the still sickly Olga had gone down with a painful ear infection. The two invalids had been sharing the same room when, on 11 February, a couple of young cadets whom Alexey had befriended at Stavka had been brought in to play with him. Olga had remained in the room with them, and Alexandra had noticed that one of the boys was coughing; the following day he went down with measles.42 By 21 February, Olga and Alexey both seemed unwell, but the doctors assured Nicholas that it was not measles, and he began packing for a return to Stavka. He had not wanted to leave Tsarskoe at this time, mindful of the gathering danger since Rasputin’s murder of a possible coup against him. The warnings had been coming thick and fast from his own relatives, including his brother-in-law Sandro, who visited and begged Nicholas to concede to a proper, democratically elected Duma free of imperial interference; ‘with a few words and a stroke of the pen, you could calm everything and give the country what it yearns for’, he urged. To Sandro it was clear that Alexandra’s constant meddling in affairs of state was ‘dragging her husband into an abyss’. Even now she bridled at any talk of capitulation: ‘Nicky is an autocrat. How could he share his divine right with a parliament?’43 And now Nicholas’s brother Grand Duke Mikhail was warning of imminent mutiny in the army if the tsar did not immediately return to Stavka. Nicholas listened to Sandro passively, as he always did, lighting one cigarette after another. He had no stomach for a fight, either with his relatives, his wife, or his government. His life was in the hands of God and he had long since abandoned all responsibility for it. Reluctant to leave the family, he nevertheless prepared to go. A highly strained atmosphere prevailed over lunch the day he left. Everyone seemed anxious and ‘wanted to think more than talk’.44

No sooner had a drawn and hollow-cheeked Nicholas said farewell than it became clear not only that Olga and Alexey were coming down with measles, but that Anna Vyrubova too had been infected – and seriously so. On 24 February Tatiana joined them in the darkened sickroom, where their devoted mother wearing her Red Cross uniform nursed her three children.45 All had terrible coughs and were suffering from headaches and earache as their temperatures rocketed.46 Despite the seriousness of their condition Nicholas was already discussing the children’s recuperation with Dr Feoderov at Stavka. He wrote and told Alexandra that the doctor considered it ‘absolutely necessary for the children and Aleksei especially [to have] a change of climate after their complete recovery’. Perhaps, soon after Easter, he told Alexandra, they could take them to the Crimea? ‘We will think it over quietly when I come back.… I won’t be long away – only to put all things as much as possible to rights here and then my duty will be done.’47

In the grip of deep snow and remorseless sub-zero temperatures, Petrograd that winter of 1916–17 was a desperate place. The transport system was in disarray due to fuel shortages; a lack of labour, horses and implements was further affecting the production and transportation of food. There was no flour, and long queues could be seen everywhere for what little bread was baked; virtually no meat was to be had and sugar and butter could only be got on the black market. There was no wood for fuel and the streets were piled high with garbage. Talk of revolution was on everyone’s lips. Petrograd was doomed, a Chertograd – ‘Devil’s town’, as poet Zinaida Gippius wrote in her diary:

The most frightening and crude rumours are disturbing the masses. It is a charged, neurotic atmosphere. You can almost hear the laments of the refugees in the air. Each day is drenched in catastrophes. What is going to happen? It is intolerable. ‘Things cannot go on like this’ an old cab-driver says.48

The ‘first claps of thunder’ were heard with riots and protests in the workers’ districts of the Vyborg Side and Vasilievsky Island.49 Soon hungry crowds were marching along the Nevsky prospekt as bakeries and food shops came under attack. By 25 February, and with a lift in the temperature, street disturbances were becoming widespread and violent, with acts of arson, looting and the lynching of policemen. The capital was seething with strikers. At the Alexandra Palace the tsaritsa remained convinced that none of this posed a serious threat. Bread rationing was all that was needed to bring the situation under control. ‘It’s a hooligan movement,’ she wrote to Nicholas, ‘young boys and girls running about and screaming that they have no bread; only to excite … if it were very cold they would probably stay indoors. But this will all pass and quieten down, if the Duma would only behave itself.’50 Meanwhile she was proud to tell him that his two youngest daughters ‘call themselves the sick-nurses – sidelki – chatter without end and telephone right and left. They are most useful.’ The lift at the palace had stopped working and Alexandra was increasingly relying on Maria to do the running around that she could not manage, affectionately calling her ‘my legs’.51 But she was expecting both her younger daughters inevitably to succumb to the measles. Alexey was now covered in one great ugly rash, ‘like a leopard – Olga has flat spots, Ania too all over, all their eyes and [their] throats ache’.52

By the 27th, a day of ‘street brawls, bombs, shootings and numerous wounded and dead’, shouts of ‘Bread, victory!’ and ‘Down with the War!’ could be heard everywhere on the streets of Petrograd.53 Nicholas could not leave Stavka and meanwhile his children’s temperatures had reached 39 degrees C (over 102 degrees F) or more.54 With measles spreading at the Alexander Palace and unrest raging in the city, Alexandra struggled to maintain her equilibrium, still convinced that the disturbances, like the sickness, would pass; but the strain of it was ageing her and her hair was turning grey. ‘Terrible things are going on in St Petersburg’, she confided in her diary, shocked to hear that regiments she had always thought loyal to the throne – the Preobrazhensk and the Pavlovsk Guards – were even now mutinying.55 She was therefore greatly cheered by the arrival of Lili Dehn, who had bravely come out to Tsarskoe Selo to offer moral support, leaving her son behind in the city with her maid. But by 10 p.m. that evening a message came from Duma chairman Mikhail Rodzianko advising that Alexandra and the children be evacuated from the Alexander Palace immediately. ‘When the house is burning,’ he had told Count Benkendorf, Minister of the Court, ‘you take the children to safety, even if they are ill.’56 Benkendorf immediately telephoned Mogilev and informed Nich-olas. But the tsar was adamant: his family should stay put and wait until he could get back, which he hoped would be on the morning of 1 March.57

Many years later, Meriel Buchanan recalled the ‘deathlike stillness of Petrograd’ on the eve of revolution. ‘There were the same wide streets we knew so well, the same palaces, the same golden spires and domes rising out of the pearl-coloured mists, and yet they all seemed unreal and strange as if I had never seen them before. And everywhere emptiness: no long lines of carts, no crowded trams, no isvostchiks,* no private carriages, no policemen.’58 The following morning, 28 February, as rioting continued across the city, out at an Alexander Park deep in snow and in temperatures of -37.2 C (-35 F) the sound of intermittent firing and shouting could be heard, coming from the Tsarskoe Selo barracks. What had started as a group of renegade drunken soldiers firing in the air soon developed into a mutiny by most of the garrison and reserve battalions. Soon rifle fire was joined by the sound of military bands playing the Marseillaise to cheers of ‘Hurrah!’ The imperial family meanwhile had little protection beyond a few remaining loyal troops camped outside in the park in the bitter cold.

Seeing how desperate the situation was becoming, Lili offered to stay with Alexandra, having asked Nikolay Sablin and his wife, who lived in the same block of flats in the city, to take care of her son.59 The sick children ‘looked almost like corpses’, she recalled. From their beds they could clearly hear the firing in town and asked her what the shooting was about. Lili pretended not to know; such noises always sound louder in the frost, she told them. ‘But are you sure that’s what it is?’ Olga asked. ‘You can see how even Mama is nervous, we are so worried about her sick heart. She is overtaxing herself too much. You absolutely must tell her to rest.’60 It was hard maintaining an air of calm but Alexandra was adamant that she did not want the children to know anything until it was ‘impossible to keep the truth from them’. That day she telephoned Bibi at the annexe, warning her of the dangerous situation now prevailing: ‘It’s all finished, everyone has gone over to their [the revolutionaries’] side. Pray for us, we need nothing more. As a last resort we are prepared to take the children away, even the sick ones … All three are in the same room in complete darkness, they are suffering greatly, only the little ones know everything.’ Hearing this from Bibi, Valentina Chebotareva discussed the situation with her wounded patients. They all believed that Nicholas would ‘uphold Rodzianko’s government’ when he returned. ‘Salvation is possible,’ Valentina wrote in her diary that night, ‘but I am full of doubt.’61

At 10 p.m. on the evening of the 28th, anxious to thank the loyal troops still guarding them in the bitter cold outside, Alexandra emerged from the Alexander Palace holding Maria’s hand and walked out to speak to them, the only light coming from the glow of fire on the horizon. Lili Dehn watched Alexandra from a window, ‘wrapped in furs, walking from one man to another, utterly fearless of her safety’.62 All was strangely silent in the park except for gunfire in the distance and the sound of boots crunching on snow as she and Maria ‘passed like dark shadows from line to line’, acknowledging the soldiers with a smile.63 Many called out greetings and Alexandra stopped to talk to them, particularly the officers of the Tsar’s Escort, who formed a protective circle round her as she returned to the palace. ‘For God’s sake,’ she said before leaving them, insisting that they go inside and warm themselves, ‘I ask all of you not to let any blood be shed on our account!’64

That night, Alexandra decided that Maria should sleep in her bed. In fact, one of the girls had slept in her room with her ever since Nicholas had left for Stavka, as they were all fearful of leaving their mother alone.65 A bed was made up for Lili on the sofa in the girls’ drawing room which connected directly into their bedrooms, where she also could be on hand if needed. Anastasia got the room ready, thoughtfully putting a nightgown for Lili on the bed, setting an icon on the bedside table and even a photo of Lili’s son Titi from their own collection.66 ‘Don’t take off your corset’, Alexandra said, instructing both Lili and Iza Buxhoeveden to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. ‘You don’t know what might happen. The emperor will arrive tomorrow between 5 and 7 and we must be ready to meet him.’67 That night, Lili and Anastasia found it hard to sleep; they got up to look out of the window and saw that a large gun had been positioned in the courtyard. ‘How astonished Papa will be!’ Anastasia had remarked, open-mouthed.68

Many of the palace servants fled that night, but in Petrograd, Duma chairman Mikhail Rodzianko was still managing to maintain order and the situation in the city seemed to have eased. ‘They say that they’ve gone to Tsarskoe Selo to inform the empress of a change of government’, wrote Elizaveta Naryshkina, who was currently trapped in the city. ‘Full revolution has taken place peacefully.’69 But this was not entirely so: revolutionary groups even now were heading for the Alexander Palace, intent on seizing Alexandra. Count Benkendorf surveyed the remaining troops he could count on: one battalion of the Guards Equipage, two battalions of the Combined Regiment of Imperial Guards; two squadrons of the Tsar’s Escort, one company of the Railway Regiment and one battery of field artillery brought over from Pavlovsk.70

Early in the morning of 1 March everyone was awake and anxiously expecting the tsar’s arrival at any moment. But he didn’t come. At Malaya-Vishera, a hundred miles (160 km) south in Novgorod province, insurgents on the line had turned his train back; the route to Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo beyond was closed. The imperial train was instead diverted to Pskov. Here, unexpectedly, Nicholas was met by a deputation from the Duma who had come out by special train with one thought in mind: to force him to abdicate.

At Tsarskoe Selo a frantic Alexandra was firing off letters and telegrams to no avail; no reply came. And now Anastasia had gone down with measles too. Alexandra was intensely grateful for the support of Lili Dehn – ‘an angel’, who was ‘inseparable’ from her. Lili did her best to comfort Anastasia, who ‘could not reconcile herself to the idea of being ill and kept crying and saying “Please don’t keep me in bed”’.71 ‘God for sure sent it, for the good somehow,’ Alix wrote to Nicky of their children’s suffering. Later that same day she scrawled another letter: ‘Your little family is worthy of you, so brave and quiet.’72

For seventy-two hours the household at Tsarskoe Selo waited. ‘No news of the Emperor; we don’t know where he is’, wrote Elizaveta Naryshkina.73 Meanwhile, over in a railway siding at Pskov, 183 miles (294.5 km) to the south-west, Nicholas had on 2 March abdicated the throne, not just for himself but his son also. His decision, it later emerged, was based on a candid conversation he had had with Alexey’s paediatrician Dr Feodorov, about the nature of his son’s condition. Feodorov had told him that although Alexey might live for some time, his condition was incurable. Nicholas knew that if his son became tsar under the required regency of his brother Grand Duke Mikhail, he and Alexandra, as former monarchs, would not be allowed to remain in Russia and would be sent into exile. Neither of them could contemplate separation from their son and so he abdicated for both of them.* But he also did so in the genuine hope that his abdication was the best thing both for Russia and the honour of the army – and that it might defuse the volatile political situation.74 At Mogilev Nicholas had been joined by his mother Maria Feodorovna, who had travelled up from Kiev where she was now living. With the millstone of duty lifted from him, Nicholas sat quietly and dined with his mama, went for a walk, packed his things and after dinner played a game of bezique with her. He signed the declaration of abdication at 3 o’clock that afternoon and finally left Pskov at 1 a.m. ‘with the heavy sense of what I had lived through’, heading back to Mogilev to bid farewell to his military staff. All around him he saw nothing but ‘betrayal, cowardice and deception’; there was only one place he wanted to be and that was with his family.75 ‘Now that I am about to be freed of my responsibilities to the nation,’ Nicholas had remarked to the commander of the Tsar’s Escort, Count Grabbe, ‘perhaps I can fulfill my life’s desire – to have a farm, somewhere in England.’76

Back at the Alexander Palace the tsaritsa was still fervently praying for news of her husband. Meanwhile the first rumours began to reach the capital that Nicholas had abdicated. Shortly afterwards, the Guards Equipage, on the orders of their commander Grand Duke Kirill, were ordered to leave the palace, for Kirill had thrown in his lot with the new provisional government. The tsaritsa watched as the naval colours – so familiar from the family’s many trips on the Shtandart – were marched away. But as the Guards left, others such as Rita Khitrovo, one of Olga and Tatiana’s fellow nurses from the annexe, were arriving to offer help. Even some servants who had been stranded in the city had managed to make their way back to Tsarskoe Selo on foot. Outside their windows the children were greatly comforted to see their ‘dear Cossacks … with their horses, standing around their officers and singing their songs in low voices’, as Maria told her father.77 But it was a terrible time for her and her mother as they watched over the sickroom: Olga and Tatiana were very much worse, with abscesses in their ears. Tatiana had gone temporarily deaf, and her head was swathed in bandages. Olga had been coughing so much that she had completely lost her voice.78

Prime Minister Rodzianko continued to urge that the children be got away to safety but Alexandra was adamant: ‘We’re not going anywhere. Let them do what they will, but I won’t leave and will not destroy the children [by doing so].’79 Instead, she asked Father Belyaev of the Feodorovsky Sobor to bring the icon of Our Lady of the Sign from the Znamenie Church and hold prayers upstairs for the children: ‘We put the Icon on the table that had been pre-pared for it. The room was so dark that I could hardly see those present in it. The empress, dressed as a nurse was standing beside the bed of the heir … a few thin candles were lit before the icon’, the priest recalled.80 In the afternoon, Ioannchik’s wife, Princess Helena, bravely made her way over to see Alexandra. She was shocked at how the last two weeks had dramatically aged her. There was no doubting her courage and she found her ‘extremely dignified’:

Even though she had gloomy forebodings about the fate of her imperial spouse and fear for her children, the empress impressed us with her sangfroid. This composure may have been a characteristic of the English blood that flowed in her veins. During these tragic hours she did not once show any sign of weakness, and like any wife and mother she lived through those minutes as a mother and woman would.81

‘Oh my, our 4 invalids go on suffering,’ Alexandra wrote to Nicholas that day, not knowing if her letter would reach him, ‘only Marie is up and about – calm and my helper growing thin as [she] shows nothing of how she feels.’ There is no doubt, however, that recent events had finally cowed Alexandra’s combativeness. A new note of meekness was to be discerned, as she assured Nicholas that ‘Sunny blesses, prays, bears up by faith and her martyr’s [Grigory’s] sake … she assists into nothing … She is now only a mother with ill children.’82

On the afternoon of 3 March it was Grand Duke Pavel (still resident at his home at Tsarskoe Selo) who arrived finally bringing news of Nicholas. ‘I heard that N[icky] has abdicated, and also for Baby’, Alexandra noted curtly in her diary.83 She was shocked but remained outwardly calm; in private she wept bitterly. Sitting with the grand duke over supper, she talked of a new and different future. ‘I may no longer be Empress, but I still remain a Sister of Mercy’, she told him. ‘I shall look after the children, the hospital, and we will go to the Crimea.’84 In the midst of this crushing news Maria remained the only one of the five children still not affected by sickness, but even she was convinced, as she told Iza Buxhoeveden, that she was ‘in for it’.85 It was hard for her to keep her mother going on her own and protect her from harm, as all four sisters had done so conscientiously all their adult lives.

That afternoon Alexandra received Viktor Zborovsky, one of the most trusted officers of the Escort guarding the palace. She thanked him for his continuing loyalty and reiterated that no blood should be shed in protecting the family. As Zborovsky was leaving Maria stopped him and they ended up chatting for an hour. He was deeply moved by the great change in her during recent days. ‘Nothing remained of the former young girl’, he told his colleagues later; in front of him stood ‘a serious sensible woman, who was responding in a deep and thoughtful way to what was going on.’86 But the strain of it all was telling on her. That evening Lili heard the sound of weeping and went to look: ‘In one corner of the room crouched the Grand Duchess Marie. She was as pale as her mother. She knew all!… She was so young, so helpless, so hurt.’87 ‘Mama cried terribly’, Maria told Anna Vyrubova, when she visited her sickbed to talk about her father’s abdication. ‘I cried too, but not more than I could help, for poor Mama’s sake’; but Maria was terrified that they would come and take her mother away.88 Such ‘proud fortitude’ was but one instance of what Anna later recalled was ‘shown all through those days of wreck and disaster by the Empress and her children’.89

Cornet S. V. Markov was another loyal officer allowed in to see Alexandra that day. He entered via the basement, which he remembered was full of soldiers of the Combined Regiments taking a break from the cold, and was taken upstairs through many rooms still full of the lingering fragrance of flowers. In the children’s apartments he came to a door on which was fixed a piece of paper on which was written ‘No entry without the permission of Olga and Tatiana’.90 A big table in the middle of the room was covered with French and English magazines, scissors and water-colours, where Alexey had been cutting out and pasting pictures before his illness. Alexandra came in and surprised him by saying, ‘Hello dear little Markov.’ She was dressed in her nurse’s white, ‘her sunken eyes very tired from sleepless nights and fear, expressive of unbearable suffering’. During their conversation she asked Markov to remove his imperial insignia – rather than have some drunken soldier on the street tear them from his jacket – and to tell his fellow officers to do likewise. She thanked them all for their loyalty and made the sign of the cross over him as he left.91

Alexandra was right to be fearful for the loyal troops still guarding her since they did so at increasing risk to themselves. They all took the news of the emperor’s abdication very hard. None more so than Viktor Zborovsky: ‘Something incomprehensible, savage, unreal had happened that was impossible to take in’, he wrote in his diary on 4 March. ‘The ground fell away from under one’s feet … It had happened … and there was nothing! Empty, dark … It was as though the soul had taken flight from a still living body.’92 For the last couple of days, in an attempt to demoralize those out at Tsarskoe Selo, a false rumour had been put about in Petrograd that the men of the Escort had defected. But this was far from the truth. When Alexandra at last made contact with Nicholas on the 4th one of the first to hear the news from her was Viktor Zborovsky. She wanted to reassure him that despite the pernicious rumours, she was in no doubt of the Escort’s loyalty and that she and Nicholas ‘were right to look upon the Cossacks as our true friends’. She also asked him, as she had Markov, to tell the officers of the Escort to remove their imperial insignia. ‘Do this for me,’ she urged, ‘or I will once more be blamed for everything, and the children might suffer as a result.’93 The men of the Escort took this instruction hard when Zborovsky brought it: for them it was a deeply dishonourable act and some of them wept and refused to comply: ‘What kind of Russia is it without the tsar?’ they asked.94 Honour, for the Escort, died hard and they were prepared to defend theirs to the death.

On 5 March Princess Helena tried to telephone Alexandra at the palace, only to find that the lines had been cut. With no telephones, no trains to Tsarskoe Selo, palace supplies of food and wood dwindling, no electricity or running water, domestic staff defecting and a crowd of curious and increasingly belligerent onlookers gathering outside the palace gates, the situation was becoming very dangerous for Alexandra and the children: ‘A curtain of bayonets separated the Imperial Family from the living world.’95 Lili Dehn noticed that Alexandra was now sometimes smoking cigarettes to ease her stress. It wasn’t until 5 March that Valentina Chebotareva at the annexe finally saw news of the abdication in the papers. ‘At the hospital it is as silent as the grave’, she noted. ‘Everyone is shaken, downcast. Vera Ignatievna [Gedroits] was sobbing like a helpless child. We really were waiting for a constitutional monarchy and suddenly the throne has been handed to the people. In the future – a republic.’96

Alexandra was now urging all of her entourage that they had the right to leave if they so wished. But even Lili Dehn refused to desert her, insisting she would stay ‘no matter what’.97 She feared she would never see Titi again, nor her husband, who was away on a military mission to England, but she was determined not to desert her empress. Iza Buxhoeveden, Nastenka Hendrikova and Trina Schneider – as well as the ever-present Dr Botkin and Count and Countess Benkendorf – all rallied round as well. Anna Vyrubova was still lying ill in the other wing of the palace, but her moral support at this time was crucial, as too was that of Elizaveta Naryshkina, who had at last managed to get back to Tsarskoe Selo from Petrograd. ‘Oh such emotional turmoil!’ she wrote of their reunion:

I was with the empress: calm, very sweet, much largesse of spirit. It strikes me that she has not quite grasped that what has happened cannot be put right. She told me: ‘God is stronger than people.’ They have all endured extreme danger and now it is as though order has been reestablished. She does not understand that there are consequences to all mistakes, and especially her own … the condition of the sick children is still serious.98

It was around 7 March that Alexandra regretfully decided, on the urging of Lili Dehn, to begin the systematic destruction of all her letters and diaries.99 Lili was worried that if they fell into the wrong hands they might easily be misinterpreted, or worse be deemed treasonous and used against her and Nicholas. And so, over the course of the following week, the two women sat together day after day in the girls’ sitting room, taking great piles of letters from a huge oak chest in which Alexandra had stored them and burning them in the fireplace. All of Alexandra’s most treasured letters from her grandmother Queen Victoria, her brother Ernie and many other relatives were ruthlessly consigned to the flames, but the hardest of all to part with were undoubtedly the hundreds of letters she had received from Nicky since the day of their engagement in 1894. Occasionally she stopped to read parts of them and weep before tossing them into the flames. And then too there were her many diaries, satin-covered ones dating from her childhood and the later leather-bound ones, which even now she was still keeping.* Everything remorselessly was turned to ash – with one exception: Nicky’s letters to her from Stavka during the war years, which Alexandra was determined to preserve as proof, should it be needed, of their undying loyalty to Russia.100 But on Thursday the 9th one of Alexandra’s maids came in and ‘begged us to discontinue’ as Lili recalled. The half-charred papers were being carried up the chimney and settling on the ground outside where some of the men were picking them up and reading them.101

In the sickroom, signs of recovery among the children were slow to come. Although Alexey was improving and his temperature dropping, Olga now was suffering from one of the complications of measles, encephalitis – inflammation of the brain – and Anastasia’s temperature was worryingly high. And then on the evening of the 7th the inevitable happened: Maria began to feel unwell and soon was running a temperature of 39 degrees C (over 102 degrees F). ‘“Oh I did so want to be up when Papa comes,” she kept on repeating, until high fever set in and she lost consciousness.’102

On Wednesday 8 March Alexandra finally received news of Nicholas from Count Benkendorf – that he was safe and back at Mogilev, and would be returning to the Alexander Palace the following morning. At midday, General Lavr Kornilov, Commander-in-Chief of the Petrograd military district, arrived in the company of Colonel Evgeny Kobylinsky, newly appointed head of the military garrison at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘Kornilov announced that we are shut up … From now [we] are considered pris[oners] … may see nobody fr[om] outside’, Alexandra noted dispassionately.103 As Benkendorf understood it at the time, the imperial couple would only be under arrest until the children had recovered, after which ‘the Emperor’s family would be sent to Murmansk [an ice-free port on Russia’s extreme north-west border] where a British cruiser would await them and take them to England’.104 This was the hoped-for swift resolution to the problem of what to do with the former tsar, announced by the new Minister of Justice, Alexander Kerensky, in Moscow the previous day, and in response to an initial offer of help from King George V. ‘I will never be the Marat of the Russian Revolution’, Kerensky had grandly declared, but the hopes of a speedy and safe evacuation of the imperial family would soon prove to be a pipe dream.105

That morning Elizaveta Naryshkina had gone to church, during which the congregation had hissed when prayers were said for the tsar. When she got back to the palace Benkendorf told her:

We are arrested. We do not have the right either to go out of the palace, or telephone; we are only allowed to write via the Central Committee. We are waiting for the Emperor. The Empress asked to have prayers said for the Emperor’s return trip. Refused!106

Those in the entourage who wanted to leave, Kornilov told Alexandra that morning, had only forty-eight hours to do so; after that they too would be under house arrest. Many left hurriedly soon after in a ‘veritable orgy of cowardice and stupidity, and a sickening display of shabby, contemptible disloyalty’, recalled Dr Botkin’s son Gleb.107 Dr Ostrogorsky, the children’s paediatrician, sent word that he ‘found the roads too dirty’ to get out to Tsarskoe Selo any more.108 Much to his dismay Sydney Gibbes, who had been in Petrograd for the day on the 10th – his day off – was not allowed back into the palace. Even worse, however, was the news that the men of the Escort and Combined Regiments were to be sent away and replaced by 300 troops of the 1st Rifles, sent by the provisional government.

Although Maria already knew the truth, it was no longer possible for Alexandra to keep the news of their father’s abdication from the other children. They took it calmly, although Anastasia resented the fact that her mother and Lili had not told them, but ‘as Papa is coming, nothing else matters’.109 Tatiana was still so deaf from the otitis brought on by her measles that Iza Buxhoeveden noticed that ‘she could not follow her mother’s rapid words, her voice rendered husky with emotion. Her sisters had to write down the details before she could understand.’110 It was a bewildered and downcast Alexey, now on the mend, who was full of questions. ‘Shall I never go to G.H.Q. again with Papa?’ he asked his mother. ‘Shan’t I see my regiments and my soldiers?… And the yacht, and all my friends on board – shall we never go yachting any more?’ ‘No,’ she replied. ‘We shall never see the “Shtandart” … It doesn’t belong to us now.’111 The boy was concerned too about the future of the autocracy. ‘But who’s going to be tsar, then?’ he quizzed Pierre Gilliard. When his tutor responded that probably no one would be, it was only logical that he should then ask: ‘But if there isn’t a Tsar, who’s going to govern Russia?’112

Wednesday 8 March was an intensely melancholy day for Alexandra, for the men of the Escort were to leave that afternoon. They had all spent a sleepless night pondering their enforced departure and were intensely gloomy, unable to ‘understand or believe that the situation was hopeless’.113 Shortly before they left, the Escort asked Viktor Zborovsky to pass on their loyal sentiments to the empress. It was with profound regret, Viktor told her, that they had no option but to obey the order to leave. Alexandra asked him to thank all the men on behalf of herself and the children for their loyal service. ‘I ask you all to refrain from any kind of independent action that might only delay the emperor’s arrival and affect the fate of the children’, she said, adding, ‘Starting with myself, we must all submit to fate.’114

Zborovsky had found it hard to speak when Alexandra handed him some small icons – her farewell gift to the Escort. She then took him through to Olga and Tatiana’s room where both were still ill in bed. It took all Zborovsky’s powers of self-control not to break down in front of the children. Silently, he bowed low to them, and then to Alexandra and kissed her hand. ‘I can’t remember how I left’, he wrote in his diary later, ‘I went without turning round. In my hand I clutched the little icons, my chest felt tight, something heavy was gathering in my throat that was about to break out into a groan.’115

After the Escort rode away, all the entrances to the palace were locked and sealed except for a single exit via the kitchen and the main entrance for official visitors. ‘We were prisoners’, Pierre Gilliard recorded starkly in his diary.116 Lili Dehn remembered a very bright moon that night: ‘the snow lay like a pall on the frost-bound Park. The cold was intense. The silence of the great Palace was occasionally broken by snatches of drunken songs and the coarse laughter of the soldiers’ (of the new palace guard). In the distance, they could all hear the intermittent firing of guns.117

A hundred or more miles (160 km) away to the south, as the frost of another perishing winter night descended and the wind gathered, the imperial train carrying Nicholas II, last tsar of Russia and now plain Colonel Romanov, was heading back towards Tsarskoe Selo.