Read Online And the Rest Is History by Marlene Wagman-Geller - Free Book Online Page B

Alix. For a long time, I resisted my feeling that my dearest dream will come true.” Alexander did not share his enthusiasm, declaring that a minor German princess was not a sufficient matrimonial prize to the heir to the Russian empire. Everything changed when the tsar became gravely ill at age forty-nine. The result was that the new tsarevitch received permission to marry the woman he loved. It also meant he had impossibly giant boots to fill.
    In 1894, the royal heads of Europe traveled to Germany for the wedding of Alix’s brother Ernest. When Nicholas arrived at the station, Alix was waiting for him and that night they went to dinner and an operetta. The following morning he proposed; however, although she loved him (it was why she had turned down a proposal from the Prince of Wales), she refused as she was committed to her Lutheran religion. Finally, realizing she had adored him for a decade, she capitulated and they both broke down in tears. After ten days he was obliged to leave and wrote, “What sadness to be obliged to part from her for a long time. How good we were together—a paradise.”
    Their separation did not last long. As his father lay dying, Nicholas, with a tremendous duty hovering, was desperate for the support of his beloved, and Alix hastened to Russia where she converted to Russian Orthodoxy, thus becoming Alexandra Fedorovna. To each other, however, they were Nicky and Alicky.
    Although they were to be married in the spring, Nicholas changed the date to the week following the funeral, which took place on November 26, 1894, in the Grand Church of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Mourning obscured their sumptuous Orthodox wedding. The superstitious peasants took this as a bad omen and repeatedly crossed themselves while murmuring, “She comes to us behind a coffin.” On their wedding night, the bride wrote in her husband’s diary, “Never did I believe there could be such utter happiness in this world, such a feeling of unity between two mortal beings. I love you, those three words have my life in them.”
    The royal couple’s main residence was Tsarskoye Selo, an enchanted fairyland comprising two hundred rooms on eight hundred acres, replete with artificial lake. There the tsar and tsarina lived in a cocoon of preposterous protocol unchanged since the reign of Catherine the Great. Their rarefied world was protected from the real one by a high iron fence and five thousand guardsmen. One of its most famous rooms was the empress’s mauve boudoir, so named because everything in it was of that hue.
    Soon the area above the Mauve Room became the nursery for four daughters: the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia. Dwelling in their domestic idyll, the girls proclaimed their unity by referring to themselves as the OTMA, derived from the first letter of each of their names. Much as Nicholas and Alexandra adored their daughters, they desperately desired a son, as only males could inherit the throne. Therefore, they were ecstatic with the arrival of Alexei. Little could they have imagined that his arrival would result in the fall of the three-hundred-year reign of the House of Romanov.
    Soon after his birth, the new tsarevitch had a bleeding episode from hemophilia. When the doctors proved powerless, the desperate mother turned to a peasant holy man, Grigory Rasputin. She became convinced he was her son’s sole hope of survival, and, consequently, he began to wield great influence in the royal inner circle. This infuriated the Russian nobles, who were aghast that a low-born man, one given to drinking and womanizing, wielded more power than they did. He also further antagonized the peasants; they might have accepted their monarch’s wealth, but the sinner masquerading as a saint was too much. Nicholas wanted to dismiss the mad monk but, realizing that his presence gave his wife hope, refused to do so.
    Nicholas and Alexandra also made a