Secret Lives of the Tsars (29 page)

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The much-lauded Komissarov later died in obscurity of delirium tremens.

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It should be recalled that a shot also had been fired at Alexander’s father, Nicholas I, during the Decembrist Revolt of 1825.

Alexander III (1881–1894): A Colossus of Unwavering Autocracy

The Guardian of Russia

—A
LEXANDER
III
ON HIS WIFE
, E
MPRESS
M
ARIE
F
EODOROVNA

His father called him “the bullock,” an apt description for the lumbering, hardheaded behemoth who succeeded Alexander II in 1881 and immediately set about dismantling the liberalizing policies he believed contributed directly to his father’s murder. “Constitution?” Alexander III snorted. “They want the emperor of all of Russia to swear to cattle?” A profoundly biased nationalist, religious fanatic, and ferocious anti-Semite, the uncouth autocrat hardly presented the picture of an enlightened modern monarch. “I have such a dislike to the fat Czar,” Britain’s Queen Victoria sniffed. “I think him a violent … Asiatic full of hate, passion & tyranny.” But Alexander III had one redemptive quality that softened him and brought out the best in his humanity: his wife, Empress Marie. Theirs was an unlikely love story—born out of tragedy and altered destinies—but it was genuine, enduring, and, most unusual in a Russian royal marriage, faithful until death
.

The Romanovs were gathered in grief in the spring of 1865 as twenty-one-year-old Grand Duke Nicholas—their beloved
“Nixa”—lay dying of tuberculosis before them. It was simply incomprehensible that Alexander II’s bright, handsome, and vibrant heir—“the crown of perfection,” as his uncle Constantine called him—would soon be gone. And with him, all the best hopes for the glorious future of the imperial dynasty.

Among the distraught family members surrounding the tsarevitch in those final hours was his petite, seventeen-year-old fiancée, Princess Dagmar of Denmark, known to the family as “Minnie.” Her dark eyes, Nixa had once rhapsodized, “speak for her: they are so kind, intelligent, animated.” Also present was Nixa’s adoring brother, Alexander, or “Sasha,” as he was called (like his father). To the distress of all, this hulking, somewhat dim-witted ox of a man—whose only demonstrable skill seemed to be bending metal to his will with his bare hands—was about to replace his far more promising sibling in the line of succession.

Nixa commended both his fiancée and his brother to his father. “She is so sweet, isn’t she?” he said of Minnie, after which he implored the grief-stricken emperor, “Papa, take care of Sasha; he is such an honest and good person.” Then, before taking his final breaths, the young man silently took the hands of Dagmar and Alexander and joined them together. As one witness noted, “It seemed like the Tsarevitch was handing his fiancée over to his beloved brother, to whom he was also leaving his place on earth.”

The sad circumstances that resulted in Minnie and Sasha’s eventual engagement did not bode well for a happy future together. Nor did the fact that each of their hearts lay elsewhere: Minnie’s with the memory of her dead fiancée; Sasha’s with his mistress, Princess Maria Mescherskaya, one of his mother’s maids of honor. Although the new heir recognized
that the velvety-eyed Maria could never be his consort, he was still most reluctant to abandon her in favor of Minnie.

“I want to refuse to marry Dagmar, whom I cannot love and don’t want,” Alexander lamented in his diary. “Perhaps it would be better if I relinquished my right to the throne. I feel incapable of ruling. I have too little respect for people and get fed up with everything that concerns my position.”

Disgusted by his son’s pining intransigence, Alexander II sent Maria away and sharply reminded the new heir of his duty. With that imperial command, Sasha had little choice but to travel to Copenhagen and ask for Minnie’s hand—an odious task that became surprisingly pleasant when Alexander arrived and found himself attracted to the young princess who should have been his sister-in-law. When at last he mustered the courage to propose, Sasha found Minnie more than receptive. She kissed him passionately and assured him that she could love no other. “We both burst into tears,” Alexander recalled, “then I told her that my dear Nixa helped us much in this situation and that now of course he prays about our happiness.”

On September I, 1866, Princess Dagmar left her relatively humble life in Denmark—where she and her sister Alexandra (the future queen of England) once shared a bedroom and sewed their own clothes—for the staggering opulence of the Russian court. The famed author Hans Christian Andersen, who had known Minnie since she was a little girl, was there to see her off. “Yesterday, at the quay, while passing me by, she stopped and took me by the hand,” he wrote. “My eyes were full of tears. What a poor child! Oh Lord, be kind and merciful to her! They say that there is a brilliant court in Saint Petersburg and the tsar’s family is nice; still, she heads for an
unfamiliar country, where people are different and religion is different and where she will have none of her former acquaintances by her side.”

Minnie arrived in St. Petersburg to a rapturous welcome and instantly enchanted her future subjects with her effortless grace and vivacity. “Dagmar’s popularity was growing,” observed Alexander’s friend S. D. Sheremetyev. “She was seen as a key to prosperity, all the hopes were laid on her and she would light the hearts with her eyes, her simplicity and charm promised happiness and peace.”

The only one who seemed less than enthralled with Dagmar’s arrival was Alexander, who, socially awkward as he was, thoroughly hated all the public ceremonies associated with the event. “In general, the tsarevitch was impossible in the role of fiancé,” wrote Sheremetyev. “He showed himself in public only because it was his duty, he felt revulsion for illuminations and fireworks. Everyone pitied the bride, deprived of the graceful and gifted bridegroom [Nixa] and forced to join another without love, a crude, unpolished man with bad French. That was the reigning assessment in court circles.”

Yet despite the vast differences in temperament between the extroverted Minnie and the sullen Sasha, this odd couple managed to endear themselves to each other. They were married on November 9, 1866, in a lavish ceremony at the Winter Palace chapel, followed by a honeymoon neither would ever forget. While Minnie giggled uncontrollably when Sasha appeared before her in the traditional wedding night attire—a heavy silver gown, with matching slippers curled at the toes, and a silver turban topped by cupid figures—her new husband recorded his own impressions of the evening:

“I locked the door behind me. All the lights were turned off in her room.… I walked into the dressing room, locked
the door and reached for the handle on the bedroom door. It felt as if my heart was trying to escape from my body. Afterwards I closed both doors to the dressing room and walked over to Minny [
sic
]. She was already lying on the bed. It is impossible to describe the feelings that overwhelmed me as I pulled her towards me and embraced her. We embraced and kissed each other for a very long time. I then said my prayers, locked the door to the study, blew out the candles and lay down on the bed. I took off my slippers and my silver dressing gown and felt my darling’s body against my own.…

“How I felt thereafter I don’t wish to describe here.…

“Afterwards we talked a lot. Both of us had many questions and many answers. Thus we spent our first night together—and we never slept!”

Alexander’s contentment with his new bride, who was given the name Marie Feodorovna upon her conversion to Orthodoxy, extended well beyond the honeymoon suite. Minnie became his constant companion and encouraged him as he began training to become Russia’s next tsar. It was a daunting task, given Sasha’s total lack of preparation prior to Nixa’s death and his grievous deficiency in inherent ability. (His tutor lamented that Alexander “had been so badly misused by Nature, who sent him into the world with the shabbiest of intellectual gifts.”) Yet with his cheerful bride by his side, Sasha persisted. Minnie somehow managed to make everything better.

“All the reports … of [Alexander’s] being so unhappy with Minny—and she having married him to please her mother—are not true,” the Crown Princess of Prussia reported to her mother, Queen Victoria. “I think they are very domestic and attracted to each other and he makes a very good husband.”

Alexander himself affirmed his feelings in a diary entry
several weeks after his wedding: “God grant … that I may love my darling wife more and more, she who loves me with all her heart, a love for which I am so grateful, and for the sacrifice that she made by leaving her parents and her fatherland for my sake. I often feel that I am not worthy of her, but even if this were true, I will do my best to be.”

Though their private intimacy was apparent, what the public saw of the couple left the impression that there was very little to recommend them to each other. Minnie was sparkling and vivacious, with a joie de vivre that enchanted all who met her. “No wonder the emperor [Alexander II] likes her, and no wonder the Russians like her,” wrote an American observer, Thomas W. Knox. “I like her, and I am neither emperor nor any other Russian, and never exchanged a thousand words with her in my life.”

The young empress-to-be loved nothing more than a party, where she invariably dazzled. At one ball not long after her marriage, an observer noted that she was “indefatigable” and “in high spirits … with her cheeks flushed by dancing, she had a freshness of look very rare in Russia.” The tsarevitch, on the other hand, much preferred solitary pursuits like hunting and fishing. “He looked like a big Russian
muzhik
[peasant],” Alexander’s future finance minister, Sergei Witte, wrote; “in manner he was more or less bear-like.” When he was dragged to obligatory social events, much against his will, Sasha was indeed as awkward and ungainly as a dancing Russian bear. Once, after a partner thanked him for a dance, Alexander replied bluntly: “Why can’t you be honest? It was just a duty neither of us could have relished. I have ruined your slippers and you have made me nearly sick with the scent you use.”

Yet beneath this boorish exterior, Sasha had a “wonderful
heart, good humor, and fairness,” as Witte observed. “I like him very much,” the Crown Princess of Prussia (“Vicky”) wrote in the report to her mother, Queen Victoria. “He is awkward, shy and uncouth, from being so very big, but he is simple and unpretending not proud and capricious as most Russians are, and has something straightforward and good-natured about him which I like and I think you would also.” Furthermore, Vicky noted of Minnie, “She seems quite happy and contented with her fat, good-natured husband who seems far more attentive and kind to her than one would have thought.”
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So it was that the ursine tsarevitch and his petite bride settled into harmonious domesticity at the Anichkov Palace and began to raise a family. Their firstborn was the doomed future emperor Nicholas II, whose arrival in 1868 thrilled his father: “God has sent us a son.… What a joy it was—it is impossible to imagine. I rushed to embrace my darling wife; who at once grew merry and was awfully happy.” Young Nicholas was followed by five siblings: Alexander (who died of meningitis before his first birthday), George, Xenia, Michael, and Olga. At their father’s insistence, the royal children were reared under relatively Spartan conditions amid the opulence of the palace. They slept on cots and were served only the simplest of meals. But they had parents who adored them.

A contented Sasha wrote to his wife after nearly twelve
years of marriage: “My dear love Minny … I would to embrace you in my thoughts and with my whole heart wish us both our old, sweet, dear happiness; we do not need a new one, and preserve, O Lord, that happiness which we, thanks to his grace, have enjoyed for more than 11 years.”