Carolly Erickson’s biography of the last Empress of
Russia has been sitting on my Russian bookshelves for a long time without being
read—now I’ve come back to it after several years of trying to sort out all the
multiple intrigues and complexities of the Russian Revolution/Civil War/WWI
involvement, all of which were going on simultaneously in 1917-18. If you put our American Revolution, Civil
War, and World War I together and stir them all up in a mixing bowl, you might
have some idea of what was going on in Russia during the early 20th century. Like the Czarina, Tolstoy’s widow, Sophia,
faced all these problems, virtually alone in her case, (Tolstoy had died in
1910), but at least she was relatively safe at the Tolstoy Estate near Tula,
South of Moscow, while the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were fighting it out in
the Urals at Ekaterinburg, with the Romanov family held as pawns in a life and
death chess game that ended oh, so tragically, in the summer of 1918.
Alexandra’s story begins in Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany—she
was yet another of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, in this case the child of
Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, Victoria and Albert’s second oldest
daughter, who like so many of the British Royals, had married into German Royal
families. In those days Germany lay in a
period of unification of mostly small provinces, with the state of Prussia as
the Prime Mover. Kaiser Wilhelm
(“Willy”) was himself Queen Victoria’s grandchild and Empress Alexandra’s first
cousin, so the First World War split family asunder. Queen Victoria’s Death in 1901 preceded all
this, but family ramifications and ties still had a devastating effect on her
relations in the first twenty years of the 20th century. Now, in the time of Elizabeth II, it’s still
very much about family, and it was something of a surprise to learn from this
book that even before the age of the Tabloids, newspaper reporters hounded the
Royals incessantly and produced salacious stories! Alexandra and her religious attachment to the
infamous holy man Rasputin were perfect fodder for such in those days.
Even more perhaps was her desire to keep the “family
secret” from almost everyone, that secret being her hemophiliac son, Alexi, her
youngest child, only son, and heir to the throne of Russia. Only a mother can fully appreciate the
terrible tribulations of raising such a child from infancy in the ever glaring
spotlight of the Russian Court and a Dowager Empress Mother-in-Law (“Minnie,”
the widow of Czar Alexander III), who disapproved of almost everything she did. Alexandra was no Catherine the Great, of
course, because it was her husband, Nicholas II, who had the real power,
nonetheless she was perceived, and often rightly so, as the power behind the
throne.
Erickson has a novelist’s grasp of her material and the
striking ability to put you there, in time and place. This is a woman’s story, but a family’s
tragedy, one that still rings true and firm after over a century. We are indeed just over one hundred years removed
from it, but all the ingredients—Love, hate, wealth, power, lust, good and
evil—are still very much with us today.
