Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [1]
The last tsaritsa from the house of Romanov read these words from the prophet Obadiah (1:4) to her daughter in the Ipatiev house. On the family’s last day of life.
The progenitor of the Romanov clan was Andrei Ivanovich Kobyla, a distinguished émigré from the land of Prussia, where, in the fourteenth century, a long and fruitful line that included many of Russia’s most distinguished families began with Kobyla and his brother Feodor. Kobyla’s great-great-granddaughter Anastasia became wife and tsaritsa to Tsar Ivan the Terrible. Thus Andrei Kobyla’s descendants allied themselves with the ancient dynasty of Muscovite tsars.
The tsaritsa’s brother, Nikita Romanovich, was particularly close to the cruel tsar. But Ivan the Terrible died, and in his will and testament he appointed Nikita Romanovich guardian and councilor to his son, the new tsar, Feodor.
The struggle for power commenced.
Slandered by the all-powerful Boris Godunov, Tsar Feodor’s brother-in-law, the eldest of Nikita Romanovich’s sons was forced to take monastic vows under the name Filaret.
With the death of Tsar Feodor in 1598 Rurik’s ancient dynasty came to an end, whereupon ensued a period of unprecedented turbulence for old Russia—the Time of Troubles. Selected to be tsar was Boris Godunov, whom the people suspected of having murdered the infant Dmitry, heir to the throne. In the midst of unimaginable famine and death, Godunov died and the Poles invaded Russia, putting a tsar-pretender, the False Dmitry, on the Russian throne. Russia suffered widespread impoverishment, cannibalism, brigandage.
It was then, during the Time of Troubles, that Filaret Romanov was returned from exile and made metropolitan of Rostov.
The Poles were driven from Moscow, and the false tsar perished. And at last, in 1613, the Assembly of the Land put an end to the terrible interregnum.
The son of Metropolitan Filaret, Michael Romanov, who was at that moment at Kostroma’s Ipatiev monastery, was unanimously elected tsar by the Assembly of the Land on February 21, 1613. Thus began the three-hundred-year history of the house of Romanov.
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The mysticism of history: the monastery whence the first Romanov was called upon to rule was the Ipatiev; the house where the last ruling Romanov, Nicholas II, parted with his life was the Ipatiev house, named after the building’s owner, the engineer N. N. Ipatiev.
A Michael was the first tsar from the house of Romanov; a Michael was also the last, in whose favor Nicholas II tried unsuccessfully to abdicate the throne.
PRELUDE:
FROM THE ARCHIVE OF BLOOD
In the seventh decade of our century, in Moscow, lived a strange old woman: her wrinkled face was plastered with a grotesque layer of theatrical makeup; her bent figure tottered on high heels. She moved almost by feel, but nothing could induce her to don glasses. Oh, no, she had no intention of looking like an old woman!
According to the Theatrical Encyclopedia she was then in her tenth decade.
This was Vera Leonidovna Yureneva—a star of the stage from the turn of the century. Once, her student admirers harnessed themselves to her carriage in place of horses to take her home from her performances. Now, yesterday’s femme fatale was living out her life in a communal apartment on a miserable pension. And she had rented one of her two rooms to me, a sorry student at the Historical Archival Institute.
Evenings, when I returned home, I often had long talks with her in the communal kitchen. The suites of Petersburg restaurants, the glamorous Yacht Club with its grand dukes, the palaces on translucent White Nights—this drowned world where she had once lived Vera Leonidovna ironically referred to as Atlantis. She scattered names: “Anya”—just Anya—turned out to be Anna Vyrubova, the empress’s fateful friend; and “Sana”—to the rest of Russia the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. Thus began our nightly conversations in a Moscow kitchen, our journey to a drowned Atlantis. I recorded her stories greedily. And now that I have read so many reminiscences by participants in those stormy events,