The Family Romanov: Part Two

We are impoverished; we are oppressed, overburdened with excessive toil, contemptuously treated....

We are impoverished; we are oppressed, overburdened with excessive toil, contemptuously treated....

We beseech thy help.

Instead, he believed Russia was on the road to great progress that would, in the end, trickle down to everyone. Hadn’t the imperial government, using money collected from Nicholas’s subjects, built railroads that stretched across Russia? And hadn’t mills, factories, and foundries sprung up all over the country?

There was a reason to celebrate, too. “Baby Tsar has a new tooth!” Alexandra exuberantly reported.

By giving the Duma the final word on the creation of laws, Nicholas had essentially waived his autocratic rights.

Staunch supporters of the tsar, members of the Black Hundred vowed to stamp out anyone they believed threatened the autocracy.

This included “upstart” workers, students, and Jews—most especially Jews.

In the two weeks after the signing of the October Manifesto, there were 694 separate pogroms across the country. Pogroms (derived from the Russian word meaning “to wreak havoc”) were organized attacks against Jews.

Instead, they shared Nicholas’s view that “the Yids,” as he derisively called his Jewish subjects, “must be kept in their place.”

In the first days after the Manifesto the subversive elements raised their head...and because nine-tenths of the trouble-makers are Jews, the people’s anger turned against them.

But Chaia...suddenly ceased her efforts, and...implored the ruffian to let go of her father.

He yielded to her entreaties....

Meanwhile, the true revolutionaries—a handful of men and women who believed only a violent overthrow of the tsar could save Russia—still hoped to stage an armed insurrection.

Nicholas authorized what were known as Punitive Expeditions, detachments of tough, well-trained soldiers who restored order in the most brutal ways possible.

The lower classes no longer acted out, recalled one noble, but their “courtesy, friendliness, bows [were replaced by] animosity [and] rudeness.”

“I am not convinced this [manifesto] requires me to renounce the right of supreme power,” he said.

The court dignitaries...looked across in a haughty manner...at the ‘people off the street’ whom [events] had swept into the palace.

Instead, they watched, stone-faced, as the tsar mounted the dais.

Sarcastically called “the Duma of the Lords, Priests and Lackeys,” this third group of deputies, who took their seats in November 1907, was highly acceptable to Nicholas.

A courteous and observant man with a fastidiously trimmed mustache, Gilliard had arrived at the palace two years before Gibbes.

Nicholas was in mid-salute when he spied his son zigzagging precariously across the parade ground. Frightened the boy might fall, Nicholas halted the review and ordered the soldiers to surround and capture the bicyclist.

Here Nicholas and the children helped themselves to small but savory delicacies—caviar, smoked herring, pickled mushrooms, and, a family favorite, reindeer tongue.

Her daughters especially missed her. Feeling isolated, and longing for any kind of contact, they ended up writing wistful little notes that they sent to Alexandra’s sickroom.

“My sweety darling Mama,” thirteen-year-old Olga wrote a bit ungrammatically in January 1909 after receiving a long note from Alexandra exhorting her to be gentle, kind, polite, and patient.

Now, when he wasn’t expected at the Imperial Palace, the starets attended parties and soirées at some of the finest mansions in the city.

And he stepped far beyond the bounds of propriety by pulling the prettiest women into his lap to hug and kiss them.

Instead, he felt only “loathing” and “revulsion.”

Behind the tsar, riding in a separate carriage, came Stolypin. No guards on horseback protected him. No police held back the crowds. “You see, we are superfluous,” he commented to a minister sitting beside him.

Then General Spiridovitch and a phalanx of armed guards bustled the two very shaken teenagers and their father away.

Overhead, “the deep southern sky glitter[ed] with myriads of stars,” recalled one lady, “and an autumn moon cast its silver light across the shining waters.”

Sixteen-year-old Tatiana was willowy and tiny-waisted.

Everywhere in the flickering light of the candles, gold glinted, from the altar and icons to the priests’ vestments and the great dome overhead.

Infuriated, the Duma president (who believed all the rumors about the starets) shouted, “Clear out at once, you vile heretic.”

“Her face was cold and expressionless, almost austere,” said Meriel Buchanan, the British ambassador’s daughter.

Alexandra stood stone-faced and straight as a stick, the diamonds covering her gown’s bodice trembling with each nervous breath she took.

Despite the tight security in and around the cathedral, he kept “anxiously and furtively scanning the faces of the assembly as if afraid of meeting some secret danger,” recalled one observer.

But while the people acted curious or reverent, on only one occasion was the family greeted with spontaneous good feelings.

When I opened it he had actually cut some hair off and he was rather disconcerted when I told him he had a bald place....

More than five other child apprentices were also squeezed into this space. All were poorly fed, badly clothed, and regularly beaten. Desperate to call attention to his son’s plight, Nicholas’s father sent a letter to the newspaper New Russia.