Nicholas and Alexandra

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Romanov Dynasty

IN 1913, the gilded world of the European aristocracy seemed at its zenith. In fact, fashionable society, like the rest of mankind, stood one step from the abyss. Within five years, three European empires would be defeated, three emperors would die or flee into exile and the ancient dynasties of Hapsburg, Hohenzollern and Romanov would crumble. Twenty million men, aristocrats and commoners alike, would perish.

Even by 1913, there were omens of danger. The aristocracy of Europe continued to move through a world of elegant spas, magnificent yachts, top hats, tailcoats, long skirts and parasols, but the old monarchs who had given character to this world were vanishing. In Vienna, the aged Emperor Franz Joseph was eighty-seven; already he had sat on the throne for sixty-four years. In England, not only Queen Victoria but also her son King Edward VII were in their graves. King Edward’s death left his nephew the Kaiser the dominant monarch in Europe. William reveled in his new preeminence and scorned the pair of gentle cousins who occupied the thrones of England and Russia. William, meanwhile, changed uniforms five times a day and let it be known that when he commanded troops at army maneuvers, the side he was leading was expected to win.

Beneath the polished sphere of kings and society, there was a wider world where millions of ordinary people lived and worked. Here, the portents were even more ominous. Nations ruled by kings and emperors had grown into industrial behemoths. The new machines had given the monarchs vastly greater power to make war; by 1913, it was scientifically assured that a dynastic quarrel would lead to the death not of thousands, but of millions of men. In the upheaval of such murderous wars lay promise of revolution. “A war with Austria would be a splendid little thing for the revolution,” Lenin wrote to Maxim Gorky in 1913. “But the chances are small that Franz Joseph and Nikolasha will give us such a treat.” Even without war, the stresses produced by industrialization promised future storms of frustration and unrest. Governments shuddered under the impact of strikes and assassinations. The red banners of Syndicalism and Socialism floated beside the golden standards of militant nationalism. These were the days when, in Churchill’s words, “the vials of wrath were full.”

Nowhere was there greater contrast between the effortless lives of the aristocracy and the dark existence of the masses than in Russia. Between the nobility and the peasants lay a vast gulf of ignorance. Between the nobility and the intellectuals there was massive contempt and flourishing hatred. Each considered that if Russia was to survive, the other must be eliminated.

It was in this atmosphere of gloom and suspicion that Russia began a national celebration of the ancient institution of autocracy. The occasion was the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty, which had come to power in 1613. The hope of the Tsar and his advisors was that by raising again the giant figures of Russia’s past they might submerge class hostility and unite the nation around the throne.

To an astonishing degree, the tercentenary succeeded. Huge crowds—workers and students among them—flooded the city boulevards to cheer Imperial processions. In the villages, peasants flocked to catch a glimpse of the Tsar as he passed by. No one then dreamed that this was the sunset of autocracy, that after three hundred years of Romanov rule no tsar would ever pass that way again.

In February 1913, Nicholas and Alexandra prepared for the tercentenary celebrations by moving with their children from Tsarskoe Selo to the Winter Palace. None of them was fond of the palace. It was too large, too gloomy, too drafty, and the tiny enclosed garden was much too small for the children to play. Besides, Alexandra had a special reason for disliking the Winter Palace: it reminded her of the weeks she had spent in St Petersburg as a bride, going to the theatre, speeding along in a troika, having cozy suppers before a blazing fire. “I was so happy then, so well and strong,” she told Anna Vyrubova. “Now I am a wreck.”

The official tercentenary celebration began with a great choral Te Deum in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan. On the morning of the service, the Nevsky Prospect, down which the Imperial carriages would pass, was jammed with excited crowds. Despite lines of soldiers holding the people back, the crowd, cheering wildly, burst the cordons and mobbed the carriage containing the Tsar and the Empress.

Under its great golden dome, the cathedral was packed to capacity. Although most of those present were standing, seats in front had been saved for members of the Imperial family, foreign ambassadors, government ministers and members of the Duma. Shortly before the Tsar arrived, a dramatic squabble had occurred over the Duma seats. Michael Rodzianko, the President of the Duma, had with great difficulty secured these seats for his members. As he entered the church, a guard whispered to him that a peasant had sat down in one of them and refused to move.

“Sure enough,” wrote Rodzianko, “it was Rasputin. He was dressed in a magnificent Russian tunic of crimson silk, patent leather top boots, black cloth trousers and a peasant’s overcoat. Over his dress he wore a pectoral cross on a finely wrought chain.” Rodzianko firmly ordered the starets out of the seat. Then, according to Rodzianko, Rasputin tried to mesmerize him on the spot. “He stared me in the eyes.… I felt myself confronted by an unknown power of tremendous force. I suddenly became possessed of an almost animal fury, the blood rushed to my heart and I realized I was working myself into a state of absolute frenzy. I, too, stared straight into Rasputin’s eyes, and, speaking literally, felt my own staring out of my head.… ‘You are a notorious swindler,’ I said.” Rasputin fell on his knees, and Rodzianko, who was bigger and stronger, began to kick him in the ribs. Finally the Duma President lifted Rasputin by the scruff of his neck and threw him bodily out of the seat. Murmuring, “Lord, forgive him his sin,” Rasputin slunk away.

The days after the service were crowded with ceremonies. From all parts of the empire, delegations in national dress arrived to be presented to the Tsar. In honor of the sovereign, his wife and all the Romanov grand dukes and grand duchesses, the nobility of St. Petersburg jointly gave a ball attended by thousands of guests. Together, the Imperial couple attended a state performance of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar at the opera. “The orchestra was a mass of officers in uniform and the boxes were filled with ladies in jewels,” wrote Anna Vyrubova. “When Their Majesties appeared, the whole house rose and gave them tumultuous applause.”

The strain of these activities, coming only four months after Spala, was intense. At receptions in the Winter Palace, the Empress stood for hours in the middle of the enormous crowds jamming the state rooms. She looked magnificent in dark blue velvet with a diamond tiara and diamond necklace; for one ball she wore white with pearls and emeralds. Several times, as a reminder of Russia’s past, she wore a long Oriental gown of silk brocade and the tall cone-shaped kokoshnik worn by Russian empresses before the court was Westernized by Peter the Great. Her daughters appeared in shimmering white gowns wearing the Order of St. Catherine, a scarlet ribbon blazing with diamonds. But Alexandra’s strength was fragile. At one ball, wrote Baroness Buxhoeveden, “she felt so ill that she could scarcely keep her feet … she was able to attract the attention of the Emperor who was talking at the other end of the room. When he came up it was only just in time to lead her away and prevent her from fainting in public.”

One night at the Maryinsky Theatre, she appeared pale and silent in a white velvet dress with the pale blue ribbon of the Order of St. Andrew across her breast. From an adjacent box, Meriel Buchanan watched her closely: “Her lovely, tragic face was expressionless … her eyes enigmatic in their dark gravity, seeming fixed on some secret inner thought that was certainly far removed from the crowded theatre.… Presently it seemed that this emotion or distress mastered her completely, and with a few whispered words to the Emperor she rose and withdrew.… A little wave of resentment rippled over the theatre.”

For Easter that year, Nicholas gave Alexandra a Fabergé egg which bore miniature portraits of all the reigning Romanov tsars and empresses framed in Russian double eagles. Inside, the surprise was a globe of blued steel with two maps of the Russian Empire inset in gold, one of the year 1613, the other of 1913. In May, the Imperial family set off on a dynastic pilgrimage to trace the route taken by Michael Romanov, the first of the Romanov tsars, from his birthplace to the throne. On the Upper Volga, where the great river curves north and west of Moscow, they boarded a steamer to sail to the ancient Romanov seat of Kostroma, where in March 1613 sixteen-year-old Michael was notified of his election to the throne. Along the way, peasants lined the banks to watch the little flotilla pass; some even plunged into the water to get a closer look. On this trip, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna remembered, “Wherever we went we met with manifestations of loyalty bordering on wildness. When our steamer went down the Volga we saw crowds of peasants wading waist-high in the water to catch a glimpse of Nicky. In some of the towns I would see artisans and workmen falling down to kiss his shadow as we passed. Cheers were deafening.”

The climax of the tercentenary came in Moscow. On a brilliant blue day in June, Nicholas rode into the city alone, sixty feet in advance of his Cossack escort. In Red Square, he dismounted and walked, behind a line of chanting priests, across the square and through a gate into the Kremlin. Alexandra and Alexis, following in an open car, also were supposed to walk the last few hundred yards. But Alexis was ill. “The Tsarevich was carried along in the arms of a Cossack of the bodyguard,” wrote Kokovtsov. “As the procession paused … I clearly heard exclamations of sorrow at the sight of this poor helpless child, the heir to the throne of the Romanovs.”

Looking back on the tercentenary once it was over, the principals drew different conclusions. In Alexandra, it confirmed once more her belief in the bond between the Tsar and his people. “Now you can see for yourself what cowards those State Ministers are,” she told a lady-in-waiting. “They are constantly frightening the Emperor with threats of revolution and here—you see it yourself—we need merely to show ourselves and at once their hearts are ours.” In Nicholas, it aroused a desire to travel further within Russia’s borders; he talked of sailing again along the Volga, of visiting the Caucasus, of going perhaps even to Siberia. Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, writing in retrospect, knowing what was to come, declared, “Nobody seeing those enthusiastic crowds, could have imagined that in less than four years, Nicky’s very name would be splattered with mud and hatred.”

Even Kokovtsov, who felt that the ministers and Duma had been ignored, admitted that the celebrations appeared successful. “The Tsar’s journey was to be in the nature of a family celebration,” he wrote. “The concepts of state and government were to be pushed into the background and the personality of the Tsar was to dominate the scene. The current attitude seemed to suggest that the government was a barrier between the people and their Tsar, whom they regarded with blind devotion as anointed by God.… The Tsar’s closest friends at the court became persuaded that the Sovereign could do anything by relying on the unbounded love and utter loyalty of the people. The ministers of the government, on the other hand, [and] … the Duma … both were of the opinion that the Sovereign should recognize that conditions had changed since the day the Romanovs became Tsars of Russia and lords of the Russian domains.”

The Romanov dynasty was the fruit of a marriage in 1547. The bride was Anastasia, daughter of the Romanovs, a popular family of the Moscow nobility. The groom was the seventeen-year-old Muscovite prince Ivan IV, who had just proclaimed himself Tsar of Russia. Ivan’s technique of choosing a wife was in the grand manner: he ordered two thousand girls lined up for his inspection; from this assembly he chose Anastasia. Nevertheless, Ivan was deeply in love with his young wife. When she died ten years later, Ivan suspected that she had been poisoned. His grief turned to rage and perhaps to madness. His reign thereafter was such a crescendo of cruelties that he became known as Ivan the Terrible. He carried an iron staff with which he impaled courtiers who irritated him. When the city of Novgorod rebelled, Ivan surrounded the city and for five weeks sat on a throne in the open air while before his eyes sixty thousand people were tortured to death.

Torn between good and evil, Ivan talked incessantly of leaving the throne. He did leave Moscow midway in his reign for a monastery, where he alternated between spectacular debauchery, bloody executions and abject remorse. Returning to the throne, he soon fell into a rage and stabbed his eldest and favorite son. When the young man died, Ivan tried to atone by reading the Bible and interminable prayers. He sobbed that his life had been ruined by the death of his beloved Anastasia Romanovna. Writing to his enemy Prince Kurbsky, he said, “And why did you separate me from my wife? If only you had not taken from me my young wife … none of this would have happened.” Toward the end, he was haunted by his victims. His hair fell out and he howled every night. When he died, supposedly in the middle of a game of chess with his courtier Boris Godunov, his last act was to call for a cowl and become a monk.

Ivan was succeeded by his feeble second son, Fedor, who was succeeded in turn by the regent, Boris Godunov. Boris ruled as Tsar for five years. His death opened the door to a horde of claimants and pretenders—in Russian history, this period is known as the Time of Troubles. At one point, the throne was claimed by a son of the King of Poland. A Polish army occupied Moscow, entrenched itself in the Kremlin and burned the rest of the city. Besieged by the Russians, the Poles held out in the Kremlin for eighteen months, fending off starvation by eating their own dead. In November 1612, the Kremlin surrendered. Russia, which had had no tsar for three years, convened a national assembly, the Zemsky Sobor, to elect a new tsar.

The choice fell on another boy, 16-year-old Michael Romanov. By blood, Michael’s claim was weak; he was no more than the grand-nephew of Ivan the Terrible. But he remained the only candidate on whom all the quarreling factions could agree. On a cold, windy day, March 13, 1613, a delegation of nobles, clergy, gentry, traders, artisans and peasants, representing “all the classes and all the towns of Russia,” arrived at Kostroma on the Upper Volga to inform Michael Romanov that he had been elected Tsar. Michael’s mother, who was present, demurred, pointing out that all previous tsars had found their subjects disloyal. The delegates admitted that this was true, but, they added, “now we have been punished and we have come to an agreement in all the towns.” Michael tearfully accepted and on July 11, 1613, in the Kremlin, the first Romanov tsar was crowned.

The greatest of the Romanovs was Michael’s grandson, Peter the Great. Peter became tsar in 1689 and reigned for thirty-six years. From boyhood, Peter was interested in Europe. As an adolescent in Moscow, he shunned the Kremlin and played outside the city with three older companions, a Scot, a German and a Swiss. In 1697, Peter became the first tsar to leave Russia, when, traveling under an alias, he toured Western Europe for a year and a half. His incognito was difficult to maintain: Peter was almost seven feet tall, he traveled with a retinue of 250 people including dwarfs and jesters, his language was Russian, his manners barbarous. Fascinated by the art of surgery being practiced at the Anatomical Theatre in Leyden, Peter noticed squeamish looks on the faces of his courtiers; instantly, he ordered them to descend into the arena and sever the muscles of the cadavers with their teeth.

When he returned to Russia, Peter wrenched his empire violently from East to West. He personally shaved the waist-long beards and sheared the caftans of his boyars (nobles). To modernize their sleeping habits, he declared, “Ladies and gentlemen of the court caught sleeping with their boots on will be instantly decapitated.” Wielding a new pair of dental pliers which he had acquired in Europe, he collected teeth from the jaws of unwary and terrified subjects. When he considered that St. Petersburg, his European capital, was sufficiently finished to be inhabitable, he gave his boyars twenty-four hours to pack their belongings in Moscow and leave for the north.

There was no side of Russian life that Peter did not touch. Along with the new capital, he built the Russian army and navy and the Academy of Science. He simplified the Russian alphabet and edited the first Russian newspaper. He flooded Russia with new books, new ideas, new words and new titles, mostly German. He wreaked such havoc on the old Russian culture and religion that the Orthodox Church considered him the Antichrist. For all his modern ideas, Peter retained the impulses of an ancient, absolute autocrat. Suspecting that his son and heir, the Tsarevich Alexis, was intriguing against him, Peter had the youth tortured and beaten to death.

The other towering figure of the Romanov dynasty was not a Romanov or even a Russian. Catherine the Great was born an obscure German princess, Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst. At fourteen, she married Peter the Great’s grandson, Peter III. For eighteen years they lived together, first more as brother and sister, then as antagonists when Peter insulted her in public and lived openly with his mistress. In 1762, a conspiracy was organized on her behalf and Peter was forced to abdicate. Soon afterward, at a dinner party, he died in a scuffle. Prince Alexis Orlov, one of the conspirators entrusted with his custody, declared, “We cannot ourselves remember what we did.” Because it has never been established that Peter III fathered Catherine’s son Paul, there is a strong chance that the original Romanov line ended in this scuffle.

Catherine’s reign brought classical style to the Russian autocracy. Diderot, Locke, Blackstone, Voltaire and Montesquieu were her favorite authors. She wrote frequently to Voltaire and Frederick the Great; she built the Hermitage to serve as a guest house if Voltaire should ever come to Russia, but he never did. Catherine herself wrote a history of Russia, painted and sculpted. She never remarried. She lived alone, rising at five to light her own fire and begin fifteen hours of work. Over the years, she took dozens of lovers. A few, such as Prince Gregory Orlov and Prince Gregory Potemkin, helped her rule Russia. Of Potemkin, she wrote that their letters might almost be man to man, except that “one of the two friends was a very attractive woman.”

Catherine died in 1796, the year that Napoleon Bonaparte was winning his first military triumphs in Italy. Eighteen years later, Napoleon invaded Russia and entered Moscow only to see his army destroyed by winds and snows. Two years after that, in 1814, Catherine’s grandson, Tsar Alexander I, rode into Paris at the head of a Russian army. After Alexander I came his brother, Nicholas I. Nicholas II, descendant and heir to Michael Romanov, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, was the great-grandson of Nicholas I.

Maurice Paléologue once did some idle arithmetic and calculated that, by blood, Tsar Nicholas II was only 1/128th Russian, while his son, the Tsarevich Alexis, was only 1/256th Russian. The habit Russian tsars had of marrying German and Danish wives was responsible for these startling fractions; they suggest better than anything else the extent to which the original Romanov blood had been diluted by the beginning of the twentieth century.

As head of the family, Nicholas II presided over an immense clan of Romanov cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews. Although keenly jealous of name and rank, they were often casual about duties and obligations. By education, language and taste, they were part of the cosmopolitan aristocracy of Europe. They spoke French better than they spoke Russian, they traveled in private railway coaches from hotels at Biarritz to villas on the Riviera, they were more often seen as guests in English country houses or palaces in Rome than on their family estates beside the Volga or the Dnieper or the Don. Wealthy, sophisticated, charming and bored, most of the Romanovs considered “Nicky,” with his naïve fatalism, and “Alicky,” with her passionate religious fervor, to be pathetically quaint and obsolete.

Unfortunately, in the public mind, all the Romanovs were lumped together. If Nicholas’s inadequacies as tsar weakened the logic of autocracy, the family’s indifference to its reputation helped to corrode the prestige of the dynasty. Nicholas’s sister Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna recognized the family’s failure. Shortly before her death in 1960 she observed sorrowfully:

“It is certainly the last generation that helped to bring about the disintegration of the Empire.… All those critical years, the Romanovs, who should have been the staunchest supporters of the throne, did not live up to their standards or to the traditions of the family.… Too many of us Romanovs had … gone to live in a world of self-interest where little mattered except the unending gratification of personal desire and ambition. Nothing proved it better than the appalling marital mess in which the last generation of my family involved themselves. That chain of domestic scandals could not but shock the nation … but did any of them care for the impression they created? Never.”

The problem was divorce. By law, members of the Imperial family were forbidden to marry without the sovereign’s consent. They were also forbidden to marry commoners or persons who had been divorced. The Orthodox Church permits divorce in cases where adultery has been committed; indeed, in the eyes of the Church, the act of adultery itself dissolves a Christian marriage. But what is permitted is certainly not encouraged. In the Imperial family, whose private life was supposed to set an example, divorce was considered a stain and a disgrace.

Yet, scarcely was Nicholas II on the throne before the strict code began to crumble. First, his cousin Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich casually married a commoner and went to live in England. Next, the Montenegrin princess Grand Duchess Anastasia divorced her husband, the Duke of Leuchtenberg, to marry Grand Duke Nicholas, the tall soldier who commanded the Russian armies in World War I. Soon afterward, the Tsar’s youngest uncle, Grand Duke Paul, having been left a widower, married a commoner and a divorcée.

“I had a rather stern talk with Uncle Paul which ended by my warning him of all the consequences his proposed marriage would have for him,” Nicholas wrote to Marie on this occasion. “It had no effect.… How painful and distressing it all is and how ashamed one feels for the family before the world. What guarantee is there now that Cyril won’t start at the same sort of thing tomorrow, and Boris and Serge the day after? And in the end, I fear, a whole colony of members of the Russian Imperial family will be established in Paris with their semi-legitimate and illegitimate wives. God alone knows what times we are living in when undisguised selfishness stifles all feelings of conscience, duty, or even ordinary decency.”

Three years later, Grand Duke Cyril, Nicholas’s first cousin, fulfilled the Tsar’s gloomy prophecy by marrying a divorcée. To make matters more delicate, Cyril’s new wife was Princess Victoria Melita, whose former husband was Empress Alexandra’s brother Grand Duke Ernest of Hesse. It had been at the wedding of “Vicky” and “Ernie” that Nicholas had proposed to Alexandra. Nicholas reacted to Cyril’s move by dismissing him from the Imperial Navy and banishing him from Russia. This action, in turn, infuriated Cyril’s father, Grand Duke Vladimir, who threatened to resign all his official posts. In the end, Nicholas retreated. “I wonder whether it was wise to punish a man publicly to such an extent, especially when the family was against it,” he wrote to Marie. “After much thought which in the end gave me a headache, I decided to take advantage of the name day of your grandson and I telegraphed to Uncle Vladimir that I would return to Cyril the title which he had lost.”

Of all the blows delivered against the dynasty by the Romanov family itself, none was more damaging or more personally painful to the Tsar than the one which came from his brother Michael. Like many another youngest son and younger brother of a reigning monarch, Michael was ignored in public and indulged in private. Even as a child, he had been the only one able to tease his redoubtable father, Alexander III. A family story told of the morning that father and son were strolling in a garden when the Tsar, suddenly angry at Michael’s behavior, snatched a watering hose and drenched his son. Michael accepted the dousing, changed his dripping clothes and joined his father at breakfast. Later in the morning, Alexander got up from his desk and, as was his habit, leaned meditatively out of the window of his study. A torrent of water descended on his head and shoulders. Michael, waiting at a window above with a bucket, had had his revenge.

Grand Duke Michael, ten years younger than Nicholas, grew up a handsome, affectionate nonentity. Although from the death of his brother George in 1898 until the birth of his nephew Alexis in 1904 Michael was Heir to the Throne, no one seriously considered the possibility of “darling Misha” becoming tsar. It was unthinkable. Even in public, surrounded by government ministers, his sister Olga Alexandrovna blithely addressed Michael by her own pet name for him, “Floppy.”

Michael himself enjoyed automobiles and pretty girls. He had a garage filled with shiny motorcars which he loved to drive. Unfortunately, the Grand Duke had the troublesome habit of falling asleep at the wheel. Once, with Olga beside him, speeding to Gatchina to dine with their mother, “Floppy” nodded off and the car rolled over. Both brother and sister were thrown clear, unhurt.

Among his relatives, Michael was closest to Olga, the other baby of the family. Consequently, he was often around Olga’s attractive young female friends and maids-of-honor. In 1901, at the age of twenty-three, Michael decided that he was in love with the prettiest of these girls, Alexandra Kossikovsky, whom Olga called “Dina.” Romantically, he followed his sister and her suite to Italy, and in Sorrento he and Dina began planning an elopement. Before the scheme had advanced beyond the planning stage, Empress Marie heard about it. Summoning Michael, she overwhelmed him with anger and scorn. Dina was summarily dismissed.

Five years later, in 1906, Michael, now twenty-eight, again fell in love. This time, he wrote to his brother asking permission to marry a woman who was not only a commoner but who had twice been divorced. In dismay, Nicholas wrote to Marie: “Three days ago, Misha wrote asking my permission to marry.… I will never give my consent.… It is infinitely easier to give one’s consent than to refuse it. God forbid that this sad affair should cause misunderstanding in our family.”

This time, Michael did not give up. The lady involved was born Nathalie Cheremetevskaya, the daughter of a Moscow lawyer. At sixteen, she had married a merchant named Mamontov, then divorced him three years later to marry a Captain Wulfert of the Blue Cuirassier Guards. The colonel of her new husband’s regiment was none other than His Imperial Highness Grand Duke Michael. Within a few months Nathalie managed to become Michael’s mistress. From that moment on, she dominated his life.

Nathalie Cheremetevskaya was a beautiful woman of great allure. Paléologue encountered her once in a St. Petersburg shop during the war and hurried home to describe her to his diary with Gallic exuberance: “I saw a slender young woman of about 30. She was a delight to watch. Her whole style revealed great personal charm and refined taste. Her chinchilla coat, opened at the neck, gave a glimpse of a dress of silver grey taffeta with trimmings of lace. A light fur cap blended with her glistening fair hair. Her pure and aristocratic face is charmingly modeled and she has light velvety eyes. Around her neck a string of superb pearls sparkled in the light. There was a dignified, sinuous soft gracefulness about her every movement.”

At first, Michael respected the Tsar’s denial of permission to marry. Nevertheless, he and Nathalie left Russia to live together abroad. In 1910, Nathalie bore the Grand Duke a son whose name became George. In July 1912, the lovers took up residence in the Bavarian resort village of Berchtesgaden. One morning in October of that year, they secretly crossed the border into Austria and in a small Orthodox church in Vienna they were married. Only after their return to Berchtesgaden as man and wife did they notify the Tsar.

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 Caucasian division. 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 Nijinsky’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 smashing 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.