The Family Romanov: Russia, 1903–Beyond the Palace Gates

Bundled in sable, ermine, or mink wraps, the passengers alighted.

Bundled in sable, ermine, or mink wraps, the passengers alighted.

Handing their furs to the waiting footmen, guests paused in front of the pier glass to straighten silk skirts and pat pomaded hair into place before ascending the wide marble staircase to the second floor.

A series of halls, each more grand than the last, met the guests. Gilded ceilings and doorways.

They felt completely at ease in their opulent surroundings.

Weeks earlier, the court runner had hand-delivered a stiff vellum card embossed with the imperial insignia—the gold double-headed eagle—to their palaces.

Weeks earlier, the court runner had hand-delivered a stiff vellum card embossed with the imperial insignia—the gold double-headed eagle—to their palaces.

Weeks earlier, the court runner had hand-delivered a stiff vellum card embossed with the imperial insignia—the gold double-headed eagle—to their palaces.

Giddy with excitement, the nobility flocked to dressmakers and tailors, where they spent fortunes on gold silk tunics, caftans edged in sable, and headdresses studded with rubies and diamonds.

Grand Duke Michael, Nicholas’s younger brother, even borrowed an egg-size diamond from the crown jewels to adorn the cap of his costume. (During the festivities, the priceless bauble fell off his costume and was never found.)

At precisely eight o’clock came a fanfare from the state trumpeters.

Short, with a neatly trimmed beard and large, soft blue eyes, Nicholas hardly looked like the imposing ruler of Russia.

And yet this unassuming man reigned over 130 million subjects and one-sixth of the planet’s land surface—an area so vast that as night fell along the western edge of his territory, day was already breaking on the eastern border.

Every year he drew an income of 24 million gold rubles ($240 million today) from the state treasury, which derived most of its income from taxes and fees levied on the tsar’s subjects.

Dressed as Alexei the Mild (the gentle seventeenth-century tsar whom Nicholas nostalgically admired for having ruled, he believed, during a time of piety and morality), he wore a raspberry velvet caftan embroidered with gold thread, its collars and cuffs flashing with diamonds.

Alexandra was wearing a gold brocade gown shimmering with the thousands of diamonds and pearls that had been sewn onto it—a costume that cost one million rubles ($10 million today).

With the imperial couple’s arrival, the court orchestra broke into a polonaise, which was the traditional first dance, and Nicholas and Alexandra led the dancing with “appropriate pomp,” recalled one grand duke, “though [they were] hardly full of enthusiasm.”

Even though he was “Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias,” as he was formally called, Nicholas often felt shy in society, while Alexandra acted nervous and awkward.

“The whirl of the waltz [puffed out] the skirts,” recalled the French writer Théophile Gautier, who’d attended a ball at the palace two years earlier, “and the little gloved hands resting on the epaulettes of the waltzers looked like white camellias in vases of massive gold.”

As guests ate, servants bustled about serving wine and cognac from crystal decanters and coffee from engraved silver pots.

But beyond the golden glow of the Winter Palace, across its graceful courtyard and through its gilded gates, past mansion-lined avenues and the spires and domes of the city, lay the railroad tracks.

Farther and farther across the frozen darkness they stretched, over silent steppes and across mountains to thousands of scattered villages where primitive log huts clustered around rutted dirt roads.

They didn’t visit the peasants’ villages or deal with the hired laborers who worked their estates. Instead, they remained comfortably ensconced in luxurious St. Petersburg.

Often, there was little to eat but dark bread. It was a staple of their diet, and peasant housewives tried to stretch the loaves by mixing clay, ground straw, or birch bark into the flour.

Remarked one nobleman, “Every single peasant believed from the very bottom of his soul that one day, sooner or later, the squire’s land would belong to him.”

Beggars stood on every corner; drunkards lolled in every doorway.

Gangs of pickpockets, usually children, flitted through the crowds while prostitutes (many of them village girls who’d been unable to find work) plied their trade.

For these efforts, a worker earned around eighty kopecks a day (forty cents), hardly enough to support himself when just a loaf of bread cost twenty-four kopecks and a two-room tenement without water, kitchen, or toilet cost more than an entire month’s wages to rent.

At the same time, children coughing through the haze of noxious fumes in Moscow’s match factories earned a mere seventy cents a month!

If workers thought their jobs were too dangerous, or their hours too long, they had no recourse.

Thus, explained one worker, “The factory owner is the absolute sovereign...constrained by no laws, and who often simply arranges things to suit himself. The workers owe him unquestioning obedience as the rules [of the factory] proclaim.”

Thus, explained one worker, “The factory owner is the absolute sovereign...constrained by no laws, and who often simply arranges things to suit himself. The workers owe him unquestioning obedience as the rules [of the factory] proclaim.”

Since their meager pay did not keep up with the rise in the price of goods, workers lived on a diet of cabbage soup, dried peas, and sour black bread.

At the neighborhood taverns, they tried to drown their misery by squandering precious kopecks on cheap vodka and watered-down beer.

Compared with village hovels, what struck me about the houses of Moscow was their grandiose appearance, the luxury.

Compared with village hovels, what struck me about the houses of Moscow was their grandiose appearance, the luxury.

The courtyard had an acrid stench...[and] throughout...were dirty puddles of water and discarded vegetables.

My delight was beginning to turn into depression, into some kind of inexplicable terror....

Awkward, sluggish, with long hair that had been cut under a round bowl, wearing heavy boots with horseshoes, I was a typical village youth. The skilled workers looked down on me, called me a “green country bumpkin” and other insulting names.

Then began the furious hunt with spoons for the floating morsels of meat. The most dexterous would come up with the most....