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“Your Highness, it has most burdensomely fallen upon me to inform you of your arrest.”

After Kornilov’s departure Alix called in Lieutenant Zborovsky of the Convoy. Her words were worthy of the moment.

“Beginning with me, we are all going to have to submit to fate. I knew General Kornilov before. He is a knight, and I am at peace now for my children.”

(Exactly one year later, in March 1918, Kornilov would perish on the field of battle in the Civil War. His corpse would be dug out of its grave and burned by the Red victors on the outskirts of Ekaterinoslav.)

The surrender of posts at Tsarskoe Selo was set for 4:00 P.M. His Imperial Highness’s Convoy had to quit the palace. The tragic play continued: they acted out the parting scene wonderfully, the empress and the Convoy. She gave them small icons and gifts from the family. Accepting an icon, each officer dropped to one knee. Then she led Lieutenant Zborovsky into a darkened room—to say goodbye to the sick grand duchesses (Marie too had fallen ill by that time). Zborovsky bowed low to the tsar’s daughters, but he thought they seemed bewildered. No, they still did not know everything.

The empress gathered her “people” and suite in a hall. “Anyone who does not leave the palace by four o’clock this afternoon will be considered under arrest,” she told them. “The sovereign is arriving tomorrow morning.”

The hardest of all now remained: to tell them. She told her daughters herself. It was a dreadful conversation. “Mama was grieving, and I was crying, too.… But later we all tried to smile at tea,” Marie told Anya.

Gilliard took on the task of informing his pupil.

“You know, Alexei Nikolaevich, your father does not want to be emperor any longer.”

The boy looked at him with astonishment, trying to read what was happening on his face.

“He is awfully tired and he has had many difficulties of late.”

“Oh, yes! Mama told me that they stopped his train when he wanted to come here, but father will be emperor again, won’t he, later on?”

Gilliard explained that the sovereign had abdicated in favor of Michael, but Uncle Michael had refused the throne.

“In that case, who will be emperor?”

“Now—no one.”

Alexei flushed furiously and said nothing for a long time, but did not ask about himself. Then he said: “In that case, if there is not going to be a tsar anymore, who is going to rule Russia?”

This question seemed naive and childish to the good Swiss, but millions of others, too, were asking: Who will be tsar? The new tsar in a country that had always had tsars.

The revolution could not wipe out autocracy because it was in the people’s blood. And he would come again—a new tsar. A revolutionary tsar. But a tsar.

“If there is not going to be a tsar anymore, who is going to rule Russia?”

At four o’clock the revolutionary soldiers replaced the Tsar’s Convoy. But they were not protecting the family; they were guarding it. Lieutenant Zborovsky looked on with horror at this new sentry with their red ribbons. The world had fallen apart. “We had it … we had it … and now it is gone. This is something savage … incomprehensible.” So he wrote in his diary.

Alix’s first night under arrest, the last night before the arrival of the overthrown emperor.

A cruel frost, and the snow in the Tsarskoe Selo park sparkling under the moon. In the nighttime silence, Lili Dehn went downstairs with a blanket and linens to the boudoir next to the empress’s bedroom. The grand duchesses had asked her not to leave Alix alone.

Alix, with enthusiasm, made Lili’s bed on the couch: “Oh, Lili, Russian ladies don’t know how to make their own beds. When I was a girl, my grandmother showed me how it is done.”

The bed “in the style of Queen Victoria” was ready; she had played the role of concerned mistress. Alix left her bedroom door open so Lili “would not be lonely.” Both were left alone with their thoughts in the moonlit rooms. Neither slept. Lili listened to the empress’s coughing and a new sound: the