The Last Tsar Read Free

agitation I could scarcely get the words out, that the tsar had been killed, and I wept: the terrible nightmare that had oppressed young Russia for so many decades had been broken off. All had been redeemed by this moment, this tsarist blood we had shed.” And they embraced for joy—the young people who had killed the tsar-reformer.
    “The revolutionary is a
doomed
man.” This is a quotation from Mikhail Bakunin’s famous
Revolutionary Catechism
, according to which the revolutionary must break with the civilized world’s laws and conventions and renounce any personal life and blood ties in the name of the revolution. He must despise society and be ruthless toward it (and must himself expect no mercy from society and be prepared to die), intensifying the people’s misfortunes by all possible means, spurring them on toward revolution. He must know that all means are justified by a single goal: revolution.
    They had resolved to smear the stalled Russian cart of history with blood. And roll on, roll on—to 1917, the Ekaterinburg cellar, and the Great Red Terror.
    Tsar Alexander II passed away in the palace in agony.
    This picture: the murdered grandfather bleeding profusely. It would not quit Nicholas his whole life long.
    In blood, he became heir to the throne.
    “A tsar’s blood shed” gave birth to his diary. Nicholas was the heir, and now his life belonged to history. Starting with the New Year he must record his life.
H IS FAMILY
    As a result of countless dynastic marriages, by the twentieth century scarcely any Russian blood flowed in the veins of the Russian Romanov tsars.
    But “Russian tsar” is a nationality in itself, and the German princess who ascended to the Russian throne and brought glory on herself in Russian history as Empress Catherine the Great felt truly
Russian
. So Russian that when her own brother prepared to visit Russia she was indignant: “Why? There are more than enough Germans in Russia without him.” Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, was in his appearance and habits a typical Russian landowner who loved everything Russian. The proud formula “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality” flowed in the non-Russian blood of Russia’s tsars.
    Nicholas’s mother was the Danish Princess Dagmar; his grandmother, the Danish queen. He called his grandmother “the mother-in-law of all Europe”: her numerous daughters, sons, and grandchildren had allied nearly all the royal houses, uniting the continent in this entertaining manner from England to Greece.
    Princess Dagmar was first engaged to the elder son of Alexander II—Nicholas. But Nicholas died from consumption in Nice, and Alexander became heir to the throne. Along with his title, the new heir took his deceased brother’s fiancée for his wife: on his deathbed Nicholas himself joined their hands. The Danish Princess Dagmar became Her Imperial Highness Marie Feodorovna.
    The marriage was a happy one. They had many children. Nicholas’s father proved to be a marvelous family man: his main precept was to preserve the foundations of the family and the state.
    Constancy was the motto of Nicholas’s father, the future Emperor Alexander III.
    Reform—that is, change and quest—had been the motto of Nicholas’s grandfather, Emperor Alexander II.
    His grandfather’s frequent enthusiasms for new ideas found a unique extension in his many romantic involvements. Alexander II’s love affairs followed one after the other, until
she
—the beauty—appeared: Princess Catherine Dolgorukaya. To everyone’s astonishment, Alexander II was faithful to his new mistress. Children were born. An official second imperial family appeared, and Alexander II spent nearly all his time with them. And when the revolutionaries began their tsar hunt, Nicholas’s grandfather took an extravagant step: for their safety he settled both his families in the Winter Palace.
    In 1880 Nicholas’s grandmother, Marie Feodorovna, Alexander II’s official wife, died,