The Last Tsar Read Free Page A

whereupon Nicholas’s grandfather married his mistress. Although the intelligent and punctilious Princess Catherine was quick to renounce all rights to the throne for her eldest son, who knew? Today, perhaps tomorrow, the impossible.… Alexander II was sixty-two years old, but he was at the dawn of his powers and health. Nicholas’s father took a marked step into the background. But now, just a few months after Alexander II’s shameful marriage, a bomb exploding on the Ekaterininsky Canal carriedNicholas’s grandfather to his grave. Naturally, Nicholas heard what people around him were saying: divine retribution for the sinful tsar!
    In the fall of 1882 Nicholas sang a song which so impressed him that when he got home he wrote it out on the inside cover of his very first diary (“The song we sang while one of us hid”). This folk song about the old hag death combing out the curls of the slain lad opens his diary. Yet another mysterious portent.
    “Began writing my diary on the 1st of January 1882. In the morning drank hot chocolate, dressed in my Life Guard reserves uniform.… Took a walk in the garden with Papa. We chopped and sawed wood and made a great bonfire. Went to bed at about half past 9.… Papa, Mama, and I received two deputations. Presented me with a magnificent wooden platter inscribed ‘The peasants of Voronezh to their Tsarevich.’ With bread and salt and a Russian towel.”
    Games at Gatchina, visits with his cousins the grand dukes, who were his age. The large Romanov family.
    “This morning the canaries were moved into a small wooden cage.… Sandro [Alexander] and Sergei … skated and played ball, and when Papa left we started a snowball fight.”
    Boys at play. A carefree life. Sergei and Sandro were the sons of Grand Duke Michael, his grandfather’s brother.
    Nicholas (or Nicky, as everyone called him) was especially friendly with Michael’s sons. Sergei, Sandro, and George Mikhailovich were his diary’s favorite characters, the comrades of his childhood games, his youth. The eldest was also a Nicholas, later the distinguished liberal historian Nicholas Romanov, who looked bemusedly on their play. He would always regard Emperor Nicky with gentle irony.
    Later, outside at the Fortress of Peter and Paul, Nicholas Mikhailovich and George Mikhailovich would be executed, and Sergei Mikhailovich would lie at the bottom of a mine shaft with a bullet in his head.
    “We worked in the garden. Cleared three trees that had fallen on top of one another. Then made a huge bonfire. Mama came to look at our bonfire it was so inviting.”
    Burning, burning, a huge bonfire in the dark of night. Many years later this gray-eyed adolescent would kindle another bonfire in which an empire would perish.
T HE CIRCUMSTANCES OF HIS LIFE
    All this went on at Gatchina, where Alexander III shut himself in with his family after his father’s assassination. The tsar appeared in Petersburg from the New Year until Lent, during which time he gave royal balls whose Asiatic splendor stunned the foreign emissaries. But this was window dressing. The family’s real life was at Gatchina, where they lived in a magnificent palace whose formal rooms were empty. Alexander and his family occupied the mezzanine, once the servant’s quarters. His numerous family lived in small rooms so narrow one could scarcely bring in a piano. The shade of his murdered father haunted Alexander III. There was a chain of sentries along the fence, guards around the palace, and guards inside the park. The life of the young Nicholas began with a prison accent.
    Meanwhile, the young soldier Alexander Volkov was beginning to make a career for himself: he was brought into the inner Palace Guard. After midnight he watched the emperor fish on the lake.
    A moonlit night over the Gatchina park. Volkov stood all alone on the bank, demonstrating the guard’s small numbers. The real guard, comprising thirty men, was hiding in the bushes around the lake. Beyond