Nicholas and Alexandra

I bought my copy of Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie (1967) for a dollar at the short-lived BookRack used book store at 70th and Van Dorn in Lincoln, probably while I was in high school. Seeing as I love books about royal families and have always been a little bit fascinated by the totally odd Rasputin, I'm not sure why I hadn't read it before this.

Massie's interest in the Last Tsar of Russia and his family started with the disease of hemophilia -- a disease shared by the Tsar's son, Alexis, and Massie's own son. The central thesis of Massie's book is that, while the causes of the Russian Revolution were naturally very complicated, the fact that the Heir to the throne had a life-threatening disease spurred the fall of the empire. If the Tsarevich wasn't a hemophiliac, his mother never would have relied on Rasputin to the extent that she did, and his influence on the royal family would have been small, if not non-existent. However, since the Empress saw Rasputin as the only person who could ease her son's pain and stop his fits of bleeding, the empire was in his weird, religious, hypnotic, sex-obsessed hands.

It's actually not a bad argument, and although Massie gives a sometimes overly-sympathetic portrait of the Tsar and his family (while ignoring much of the social and political context of Russia in the early-20th century), he ends up providing us with a thoughtful and sensitive portrait of Nicholas, Alexandra and their five children not as politicians, rulers, or pawns in an ideological struggle, but as a tight-knit family who really didn't deserve the ending they got. And regardless of how inevitable the Russian Revolution might have been, the ultimate execution of the entire royal family could have been prevented in a million ways. The last section of the book is rather rough reading as each and every avenue of escape is closed off due to disorganization, miscommunication, cowardice, or lack of responsibility.

Oddly enough, just as I was starting this book, Dr. M and I watched Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark, which is filmed entirely in the Hermitage in St. Petersberg, which was formerly the Winter Palace and a home of the Tsar and his family. [The movie is famous for being done entirely in one shot, and it really is amazing to watch -- you should totally rent it.]

If you (like me) love looking at old pictures and artifacts, you will drool over the massive online Romanov-related exhibits on (and linked from) this site. The awesome thing about reading a history book about famous people who lived after the dawn of photography is that you aren't shackled to the few pictures in the center of the book since Google Image Search can show you a picture of any minor historical character in which you might be interested. How about Mathilde Kschessinska, the famous ballerina that had a long affair with the young Tsar, or Natalie Cheremetevskaya, the twice-divorced commoner that married the Tsar's younger brother, almost lost him his royal appointment and very nearly became empress after the abdication of Nicholas. No problem. I love that...

Now for a few facts that I can't help but share:

• The reign of Nicholas and Alexandra got off to a bad start when a celebration in Khodynka Meadow the day after the coronation turned into a blood bath after rumors that there wouldn't be enough free beer for everyone gathered turned into a mad rush for the beer carts. Hundreds were killed and thousands injured.
• The Tsar had a private librarian whose job was to select twenty of the best books from around the world each month (since the Tsar spoke and read many languages), which the Tsar would then carefully arrange in order of preference.
• Although he spoke Russian to everyone else, Nicholas always spoke and wrote to his wife in English. Alexandra was a German Princess, but she was also the grand-daughter of Queen Victoria and spent much of her youth in England. Thus her English was always stronger than her Russian.
• When Alexandra finally gave birth to a son (and Heir) after having four girls, the country was ecstatic. At his baptism, he was carried to the alter by an elderly woman who had carried young royals to their baptism for years. Since everyone was worried that the old woman might drop the Tsarevich, a special golden support harness was fastened to her shoulders and around the basinette.
• The house in which the royal family was executed housed the archives of the local Communist party in the 1950s. Massie notes that the basement room in which the killing took place was "now occupied by dusty bins filled with old documents."
  

So, while this was a fun-to-read and interesting history of the last Tsar and the fall of Russia, I feel like I'll need to read a few more books in order to get a more balanced look at the whole thing. Still (as you can see from this really long post), I liked the book a lot and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in this intriguing royal family.