(1872-1918)
Part 2
At last, Nicholas and Alexandra had a home for theit own. They went to live to Alexander palace in tsarkoe Selo, a village fifteen miles away from St. Petersburg. There, in the seclusion of Tsarkoe Selo, the Imperial couple became more isolated from the Russian society and from their subjects.
Children began to arrive in 1895. On November 15, Alexandra gave birth to a girl, Grand Duchess Olga. A year and a half later, on June 10, 1897, Grand Duchess Tatiana was born. Everyone was dissapointed as they had been hoping for a son. But Nicholas and Alexandra were young and they could bear more children, the hope of a son was still alive. But on June 26 1899, another girl was born to the Imperial couple, Grand Duchess Marie; another dissapointment for Russia, Alexandra had failed again, she couldn't gave them a heir.
Some days later, Nicholas' brother, Grand Duke George, died of tuberculosis. When Nicholas became Tsar, George, as his second brother, was named Tsarevitch and heir to the throne; at his death, the next in line was the youngest brother, Grand Duke Michael, but before he was named officialy as tsarevitch, on November, 1900, Nicholas became ill with typhoid fever and was about to die. Alexandra was again pregnant. Minister Serguei Witte and the Dowager Empress suggested that Michael should be regent in case Nicholas died, if Alexandra gave birth to a boy; if she had a girl, Michael would be Tsar. Alexandra believed they were plotting to remove Nicholas from the throne; she was certain that this time she would have a boy and in case of Nicholas' death, she was the one who should be regent. But eventuallym, Nicholas recovered and Alexandra gave birth to another girl on June 18, 1901, Grand Duchess Anastasia.
Some months before Anastasia's birth, on January 21, Alexandra's grandmother, Queen Victoria, had died. Alexandra was devasted , even more, because she couldn't attend the funeral becuase of her advanced pregnancy. On January 28, she wrote to her sisiter Victoria of Battenberg: "How I envy you, being able to see beloved Grandmama being taken to her last rest. I cannot believe she is really gone, that we shall never see her any more. It seems impossible since one can remember she was in our life, and a dearer kinder being never was. The whole world sorrows over her. England without the Queen seems impossible. How thankful that he was spared all physical suffering. Morally she had too much to bear this year" (Buxoheveden).
Kaiser Wlhelm II had always adviced Nicholas in favour of a Russian expansion towards Asia, because he wanted to keep Russia far away from Germany's interests in Europe, so Nicholas' interests were upon Manchuria and Corea which were occupied by Russian troops since 1900. Besides, Russia was using Port Arthur, a port free of ice in Southern Manchuria, as a naval base. But Japan was becoming powerful and wanted to throw Russia away from Asia, so on January 13 1904, the Russian government received a note from Japan asking if Russian had the intention to respect the integrity of the Chinese territories, referring to manhcuria and Corea. Russia, who tought Japan as an insignificant country, nevcer answer and on February 5 Japan broke diplomatic relations with the Russian government. On February 8 a japanese fleet atacked the Russian squadron in Porth Arthur, and on Fberuary 10 Japan formally declared war to Russia, blocking the Russian fleet in Porth Arthur. Kaiser Wilhelm urged Nicholas to sent tha Baltic fleet to help Port Arthur; after much indescition, Nicholas agreed and sent it. But the Baltic fleet was in very bad condition and it arrived at Port Arthur intil May 1905, having departured since October 1904. Port Arhur was a great defeat for Russia since the japanese crushed their fleet completely; on June 6, 1905, Russia surrendered.
During the Ruso-Japanese war, Alexandra had been very active; she organized the galleries of the Winter Palace as workshops fpr warwork, where there were made bandages out of sheets and other things nedded for the woundeds, and sent them to the Red Cross. She was pregnant again and on August 12. 1904 she gave birth to the long awaited heir, the Tsarevitch Alexis
The Tsarevitch was christened at Peterhof Church with the assitance of many European royalties, including the little Prince's great-grandfather, the old King Christian IX of Denmark. His grandparents were Kaiser Wilhelm II, King Edward VII, his uncle Ernest Ludwig of Hesse and his grandmother, the Dowager Empress. According to the Russian Orthodox custom , the parents had to absent from their son's christening. The service was performed by old Father Yanishev who had been the Imperial family's confessor for years. Princess Marie Golitsyn, a nonagenarian lady-in waiting who by tradition carried the Imperial children to the batptismal font, was also to carry Alexis, but because her advenced age, special precautions had to be taken. When the service ended Nicholas (Alexandra was still in bed, recovering from childbirth) rushed into the church; he had been waiting outside, fearing that the old priest and the aged princess could drop her son into the batptismal pile.
Six weeks after Alexis' birth, he bagan to bleed from the navel; it lasted two days and altough the doctor applied all kinds of bendages and cures, the bleeding didn't stop. When the Tsarevitch began to walk nd he tumbled, big swellings were formed under his skin and he cried out in terrible pain. Alexandra was shocked; it was evident that Alexis had haemophilia, the terrible blood disease trasmitted by her family. She had known befoee about the danger; her uncle Leopold was haemophiliac, and her own brother Friedrich had died in childhood because od the disease. Her nephew Henry, son of her sister Irene, had died on February of that same year, victim of the same illness. She had transmitted her beloved son the defective gene and she felt guilty for the boy's sufferring. The secret of Alexis' illness was kept a secret inside the intimate world of Tsarkoe Selo; not even the rest of the family was aware of it.
The Russo-Japanese war had left discontent, poverish and hunger among the Russian people. Before Alexis' birth, the Minister of the Interior, Phleve, had been assesinated by a terrorist. Father George Gapon, a thirty-two-year-old priest, who was also a paid police informer, created and organized a worker union, the Assembly of Russian Factory and Plant workers, which purpose was to ask for better living and working conditions for the people. He was inmensely popular among the poors. Gapon wanted to contrarest the revolutionary ideas among the workers by strenghtening in them the monarchist feeling. He said that the guilty of their sufferings was not the Tsar but the factory owners; if Nicholas knew how his subjects live, he would help them.
On January 1905, Gapon conceived the idea that he would personally head a workers manifestation to the Winter Palace to present the Tsar a petition in ame of the Russian people. He didn't tell any member of the government about his intentions until Saturday January 21, when he informed them that the march would take place the following day and he asked that the Tsar be present to recieved his petitons. The Minister of the Inerior, Sviatopolk Mirsky, was alarmed. He and the rest of the ministers gathered and decided that it was impossible that Nicholas, who was in Tsakoe Selo and who ignored everything about Gapon's march, could meet the priest. It was decided too that aditional troops would guard the Winter Palace to prevent any disorder.
That night Mirsky informed Nicholas about Gapon's plans for the next day. The Tsar wrote: "Since yesterday all the factories and works have been on strike. Troops have been called up from surrounding areas to reinforce the garrison. Up until now the workers have remain calm. Their number, 120,000 people. There is some priest at the head of the workers' union (the socialist Gapon). Mirsky came in the evening to report on the measures taken" (Maylunas).
On the morning of Sunday January 22, Father Gapon began his march a the head of thousand of workers. While they marched, they sang religious hymns and the Imperial hymn "God save the Tsar". At two o'clock in the afternoon they arrived infront of the Winter Palace. A line of Preobrajensky guards were blocking the acces to the Palace; they were told that the workers wanted to murder the Tsar. When the guards saw the crowd advancing towards the Palace, they opened fire. The bullets penetrated in the bodies of men, women and children; blood was everywhere. There were 92 deads and hundred of woundeds. Many of the march's leaders were arrested and Gapon dissapeared. That day was known as "Bloody Sunday".
From his hiding place, Gapon issued a public denounce, sying that "Nicholas Romanov, once Tsar, is now the murder of the soul of the Russian Empire". He became a complete revolutionary, but the Socialist Party considered that he kept links with the police and they condemend him to death. He was found dead, hanguing from a rope at an abnadone cottage in Finland, in April 1906.
As Nicholas, Alexandra was stunned with the event of the Bloody Sunday. She beleived she had the duty to support her husband during those difficult days and to guide him in the executions of his duties. She prayed to god to give her the wisdom to help Nicholas to make accurated political judgments and to cbhoose the right ministers. Three weeks after the "Bloody Sunday", Alexandra's brother-in-law, Grand Duke Serge, husband of her sister Ella and Nicholas' uncle, was murdered in Moscow.
By mid-October the whole Russia was paralyzed by a general strike. The trains stopped, the factories, schools and hospitals closed, the shios were anchored at the harbours. A new worker organization sprang out; it was called soviet and soon a leader appeared, Leon Trotski. As the Soviets threatened to destroy all the factories that were still working, suqdrons of cosacks were assigned to patrol every corner of the
According to Prime Minister Serguei Witte, there were only two ways to stop a possible rebelion: a militar dictatorship or the creation of a Duma (Parliament) wich would defend the civil rigths of people and their fredom of speech and press. This would be equivalent to a constitution and the end of autocracy. Witte redacted a Manifesto proposing the Duma and after discussing it with the Minister for two days, Nicholas signed it. The Tsar wrote: "My only consolation is that such is the will of God and this grave decition will lead my dear Russian out of the intolerable chaos she has been for nearly a year (Massie). By the Imperial Manifesto of October 30 1905, Russia stopped being an autocracy and became a semi-constitutoakl monarchy. But things didn't went out as Witte had tought The situation in Russia, far from improving, worsened. The Prime Minister became so unpopular and things were so bad that Niocholas asked him to resigned.
The Tsarevitch Alexis was "the center of this united family; the focus of all his hopes and affections", as the boy's French tutor, Pierre Gilliard, wrote. He was adored by his parents and sisters. Like any boy of his age, he was cheerful and restless but his haemophilia was a dark cloud in his life. The most simple scratch or the most minimum blow could cause the rupture of a tiny blood vessel beneath the skin and bleeding behgan into the muscular tissue and joints, provoking the boy severe pains that unable him to walk. Two sailors, Dverevenko and Nagorny, were assigned to look permenently after the Tsarevitch. It was a great torment for Alexandra to attend the suffering of his beloved son. She overprotected and prayed constantly, hour after hour, for her sons's health. Among this constant and terrible agony, sprang out the malignant figure of Rasputin.
Grigory Efimovich Rasputin was born on January 10, 1869. in the village of Pokrovkoie in Siberia. His father, Efimy Rasputin, was farmer whose wife Anna had given him a previous child, Dimitri. When he was 8, Grigory Efimovich was playing with his brother when Dimitri fell in a pond and was drawned. At 12 Rasputin won fame as a vident when he identified a horsethief. As a teen-ager, he paid a visit to the Verkhouturye Monastery where he got to know some heretical sects as the Khlysty and the Skoptsy. This sect tought him the idea that one could only reach God's grace through sin and subsequent repentant, a doctrine which later he would preach among his follower in St. Petersburg. When he return to his village, he got married. His wife, Praskovie, bore him four children, two boys and two girls. The elder son died in childhood and the second one, Dimitri, was menthal retarded. The two girls, Maria and Vavara reached adulthood and eventually went to live with his father to St. Petersburg.
One day, while working in the fields, Rasputin said he had a vision of the Virgin Mary, who according to Grigory, ordered him to become a pilgrim, so he left his family in Pokroskoiev and went on a journey, walking some two thousand miles. He arrived to the Orthodox monastery of Mount Athos in Greece. When he returned he was a different man and won fame as a man of God, altough his preaches were not precisely Orthodox, but a mixture of Orthodox and heretec principles. Nevertheless he ebcame a convincing preacher among the poors of Pokrovoie and he had the great ability to manipulate the people around him.
The other side of Rasputin's contradictory personality was his fond for sex. he enjoyed to sleep with one or more naked women; his sexual apetite was insaciable.
Rasputin first appeared in St. petersburg in 1903, a year before Alexis' birth. He was received by several important Orthodox priests like Father John of Kronstand, the old archmandrite Teophan, who was Alexandra's conffesor, and Bishop Hermoguen of Saratov; all them were amezed by Rasputin religious fervour and his ability of preacher. They blessed them and considred him a starets. Rasputin began his life in St. Petersburg under the protection of the "Montenegrin princesses". This two sisters were Grand Duchess Militsa and Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughters of King Nicholas I of Montenegro, who were respectivly married to two brothers, Grand Duke Peter Nicolaievitch and Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievitch, who were Alexanders III's cousins. These two ladies were who took rasputin Tsarkoe Selo on November 1st. 1905. Nicholas II wrote on his dairy: "We had tea with Militsa and Stana (Anastasia). We made acquaintance of a man of God -Grigory, from the Tobolsk region" (Maylunas).
It is unknown when Rasputin cure Alexis for the first time but it is belelieved that it was around 1907. His increasingly influence among the Tsar and the Tsarina was not inmediate but gradual. Little by little he began to be accepted at Tsarkoe Selo in the intimacy of the Imperial family. He usually arrived an hour befor e dinner; he used to sit among the family and told them Russian tales and legends. All the children liked him as well as Nicholas and Alexandra. He referred to them as Batiushka and Matushka (Father and Mother of the Russian peasants).Little by little, Alexandra got convinced that Rasputin was a messanger of God; he represented the union of Tsar, Church and People, and above all he was capable to help her son. She sincerely beleived that his ability to cure Alexis came from prayer, so she turned to Rasputin as the only wasy of saving her son.
