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Freedom Street opened out from the balcony. And from Freedom Street there was a good view of the family seated on the balcony: an average-size man in a military tunic, girls in white dresses, and a majestic lady, also in white, holding a lace parasol.

The appearance of the family on the balcony was a favorite spectacle and the principal theater in quiet Tobolsk.

From a letter I received from Andrei Anuchin in Magnitogorsk after my article about the execution of the tsar’s family was printed in Ogonyok:

“They would come out on the balcony. Especially, I remember, we were all amazed at the girls. Their hair was shorn like little boys. We thought that was the fashion in Petrograd. True, later people said they had been sick, but I don’t know for sure. Still, they were very pretty, very clean.… The empress was an imposing lady, but not young—my father kept wondering, What, he said, did Grigory see in that old woman? My father had worked with Rasputin in the rooms in the Tobolsk hotel. And Rasputin had been our guest.”

So went this monotonous life, where everything was an event.

“24 August. Vladimir Nikolaevich Derevenko arrived with his family. This made the event of the day.”

Dr. Derevenko was Alexei’s physician, but at this time the boy was healthy—a rare period in his life when he had been in good health for quite a while. The doctor brought his son Kolya along—he was allowed to come on Sundays to play with Alexei.

A quiet, quiet life, but….

“25 August. Walks in the garden are becoming incredibly tedious, here the sense of sitting locked up is much stronger than at Tsarskoe Selo.”

What about her?

Upstairs and down the hall, the first and largest room was Alix’s.

She spent the greater part of the day there, or on the balcony. Rarely did she go downstairs, even before dinner. She had her favorite books. She read her Bible—in its brown binding and with its many bookmarks—and her “good books,” the multitude of spiritual books she had brought along.

They would later be found in the cesspool of the Ekaterinburg house.

The usual scene: a fire in the fireplace, although it was still warm outside, the little dog resting on its knees. The sounds of the piano: Tatiana playing in the drawing room.

Alix was writing another letter to Anya.

“Often I scarcely sleep.… My body pains me, my heart is better since I live so tranquilly. I am terribly thin.… My hair is graying quickly too.”

(She paid a high price for this “I live so tranquilly.” That year her hair turned gray and she wasted away.)

“We have settled far from everyone, we live quietly & read about all the horrors—but let us not talk about that. You are living in all that horror, that is enough.”

The “horrors.” Anya wrote to her about them in detail. The tension was mounting around the unhappy Romanov family. Misha had been arrested. Savinkov, the former terrorist and one of the organizers of Sergei Alexandrovich’s murder, was now running the War Ministry. It was on his demand that both Misha and his wife—“that woman,” the smug Countess Brasova (now Alix had forgiven her, now Alix only pitied her)—were arrested. And poor Paul Alexandrovich (she had forgiven him as well for all the nasty things he had written in the papers immediately following this horrible revolution).

History had come full circle: yesterday they were locking these bomb throwers up; today the bomb throwers were locking them up. It was a new world. Although Kerensky did free Misha and Paul soon after, they were both eventually killed by the Bolsheviks, Misha in 1918 and Paul in 1919.

In this time of “horrors,” the tsaritsa began to dream of moving to the Ivanov monastery. Their dynasty had begun in a monastery, and it ought to end in one as well.

Late in 1904, while Russia was being defeated in its war with Japan, Nicholas had had an amazing idea. The question had arisen in the Holy Synod about restoring the ancient Orthodox patriarchy in Russia. After long reflection and conversations with the empress, Nicholas decided to abdicate the throne,