The Kitchen Boy
turns out, this was the second thing I learned that night about the Tsaritsa, her obsession with violent death, which took the form of her fascination with Marie Antoinette. It seems that the Empress, so mystical, so fatalistic, had suspected for years what awaited her own family, though never in all of history has an imperial brood, the symbol of a nation, been so crudely butchered, children and servants and pets, all liquidated, all except a young kitchen boy. To hell with the
kommunisty
!
    How strange is history. The Aleksander Palace was preserved as such, just the way the Emperor and Empress left it when they walked out the door. It was kept that way until World War Two, when the Nazis used it for their headquarters and the nearby Great Palace for a stable and garage. This was during the nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad, as Peter – Sankt-Peterburg – had been renamed by the
Bolsheviki
, and those were the days of utter hell on earth. It was during this time that the Gestapo assumed the basement beneath the Tsar’s wing as a place of torture, and to this day the gardens of that stately palace are filled with an untold number of bodies. At the end of the war the palace and its rooms were damaged, but not horribly so – the German booby traps were found and defused just five hours before they were to blow – and Nikolai and Aleksandra’s apartments could have been easily restored. Instead, some Soviet general decided to wipe away any memory of Nikolai the Bloody and Aleksandra the
nemka
, the German. And so today, only two of Nikolai’s rooms remain, his gorgeous,
stijl moderne
office and his cozy, warm reception room, which the hypocritical Red general kept for his own personal use.
    One other odd thing, and this concerns Rasputin. Late in the fall of 1916, before my time with the Romanovs, that mysterious monk with the long, greasy hair and sharp nose finally began to understand the hatred against him, that many powerful princes and grand dukes believed he was leading the dynasty and country to ruin. In fact, he correctly supposed that he would soon be dead, or more precisely murdered. With this in mind, Rasputin wrote a note to his Tsar and Tsaritsa, which was only delivered to them after he was killed by young Prince Felix Yusopov, who was married to the Tsar’s own niece, a pretty young thing who died just a short while ago, actually, in ’67.
    In his prophetic letter, Rasputin wrote:
     
    Tsar of the land of Russia… If it was your relations who have wrought my death, then no one of your family, that is to say, none of your children or relations will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people.
     
    Strange, is it not? Rasputin was murdered in December of 1916 – poisoned, stabbed, shot, and finally drowned. It took all of that to kill that powerful peasant, and he was right. Nikolai and Aleksandra, their children, and many other Romanovs – in total almost twenty – would be dead within the predicted time. How in the name of God did Rasputin, the holy mad monk, know this? It’s almost enough to make one a Believer.
    So Aleksandra knew well what had happened to Marie Antoinette, just as Rasputin’s words reverberated in her chest with each beat of her weak heart. But let me make one thing very clear, the Romanovs never gave up hope. To the very end itself – even as they descended those twenty-three steps in the depth of that night – they never stopped praying, hoping, believing that they would be rescued by a storm of three hundred officers. Yes, there were many depressing hours in each one of those days, but Nikolai and Aleksandra kept praying to their God, kept hoping for dear friends to save them… friends, who in the end never appeared, which is perhaps not that surprising. After all, while 90 percent of the Russian people did not want them dead, the same 90 percent did not want them back on the throne either. Such was the horrible paradox – saving them

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