The Family Romanov: Part Three

Here and there along their meandering route, the ship dropped anchor.

In their white dresses, the teenaged grand duchesses bantered and flirted with the young officers as they whirled to the strains of the Standart's brass band.

But just four days out, terrible news shattered their idyllic days.

“That hunk of carrion stuck me with a knife,” he wrote her, “but with God’s help, I’ll live.”

The next day, Nicholas—who had cut short his vacation and returned to his summer mansion at Peterhof ordered his army to mobilize along the border his country shared with Austria.

She, too, prayed “fervently...as if she could banish an evil dream.”

“I say a terrible storm cloud hangs over Russia,” he’d written ominously.

This day the streets teemed with people.

The German and Austrian armies held their positions, too. Stalemate ensued.

The German and Austrian armies held their positions, too. Stalemate ensued.

I can hear wailing, and a tumult of voices, but I’ve suddenly grown numb.

Under her patronage, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo was converted into a hospital, as were eighty-five other mansions and palaces in the St. Petersburg area.

In May 1915, after a long winter of being mired in the trenches, a combined Austrian-Germany force attacked the Russian troops still hunkered down in the Carpathian Mountains.

Thousands more deserted, returning to their farms, only to discover that in many cases the government had requisitioned all their crops and livestock.

Gone were the cheering crowds, the merrily waving banners, the Russian people’s bravado.

Nicholas now realized something extraordinary needed to be done to quell the nation’s anger.

“Yes, do come,” the commander had insultingly replied. “I’ll hang you.”
Rasputin seethed.

Knowing Rasputin’s influence with the empress, they came seeking favors: one to have her husband transferred from the front, another to obtain a job promotion, still another to be given a lucrative government contract.

Not only was the citizenry convinced that Rasputin was a fake, but they saw the empress as a narrow-minded, reactionary, hysterical woman because she remained under the fraud’s spell.

“I fully trust in Our Friend’s wisdom endowed by God to counsel what is right for you and our country,” she wrote Nicholas soon after he departed for Stavka.

And so it went—a crazy game of “ministerial leapfrog”—as ministers were appointed and fired by Nicholas at the behest of the empress and her starets.

There was no way, he concluded, that Rasputin was alive when his killers dumped him in the river. This was corroborated by the fact that no water was found in the lungs.

A worker could buy little else because of shortages and exorbitant prices.

The city, recalled Ambassador Paléologue, now struck him as a “lunatic asylum,” filled with a “poisonous atmosphere” and “profound despondency and fear.”

As he chugged eastward, he blithely wrote to his wife: “I will miss my half-hourly game of cards every evening, but vow to take up dominoes again in my spare time.”

The hungry, unemployed throng is starting down the path of elemental and uncontrollable anarchy....

The hungry, unemployed throng is starting down the path of elemental and uncontrollable anarchy....

It was, wrote one historian, “a motley, exuberant mob. There were soldiers tall and hot in their rough, wool uniforms; students shouting exultantly; and a few gray-bearded old men just released from prison, their knees trembling, their eyes shining.”

Still loyal to the tsar, Rodzianko vacillated, unsure of what to do.

Before the day was done, twelve deputies of the former Duma created what they called the Provisional Committee of Duma Members for the Restoration of Order and for the Relations with Individuals and Institutions (Provisional Government for short).

And it would rule only until a national “constituent assembly” could meet, where representatives from all across the country would decide on the type of government Russians would live under.

Power, it believed, had not been wrested from the tsar so that the nobility and middle class could simply rule the workers through another form of government.

No, the revolution had been fought for “the people”—the poor and the marginalized.

During this time, people would learn to relinquish what Marx had called “their petty notions of small property.”

“They are stopping the cars. They commandeered mine, and I’ve had to walk every step of the way!”

Poised tensely, the troops waited as night fell.

They believed his abdication in favor of a different ruler would be enough to appease the people.

Why did he give it all up so easily? Some historians have speculated that his abdication was an extraordinary act of patriotism, that he cared more about winning the war than keeping his throne.

Suddenly, at this odd hour, there sounded a short, booming peal of the cathedral bell. Then another, and a third. The pealing grew faster, its noise spread over the town, and soon the bells of all the outlying churches started to ring.

Strangers, weeping openly, embraced each other. The solemn, exultant whistling of locomotives could be heard from the direction of the station.