Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [120]
He did not read this book aloud, but Alix could not have helped but see it—and remembered: Versailles, the Revolution, the execution of the royal couple.
“11 November. No papers or even telegrams from Petrograd for a long time. In such a trying time this is awful.”
On November 17 (again 17!) he learned of the Bolshevik seizure of power.
“17 November.… It makes me sick to read in the papers what happened two weeks ago in Petrograd and Moscow! Much worse and more shameful than events in the Time of Troubles.”
During that time Commissar Pankratov recorded:
“He was quite depressed, but depressed most of all by the looting of the wine cellars in the Winter Palace! ‘Couldn’t Mr. Kerensky have put a stop to that license?’
“ ‘Obviously not. A mob, Nicholas Alexandrovich, is always a mob.’
“ ‘How can that be?’ the tsar asked with sudden bile. ‘Alexander Feodorovich was put in by the people. A real favorite of the soldiers.… Regardless of what happened—why tear apart a palace, why allow the plunder and destruction of riches?’”
The old revolutionary and the former tsar did not understand one another. The tsar was not talking about cellars, he was talking about “plunder,” about the “senseless and merciless Russian insurrection.”
Gilliard recalled how during the first days of captivity the tsar had been strangely pleased. But as soon as he learned of Kornilov’s rout, and then the fall of the Provisional Government, Nicholas regretted his abdication more and more. It was a Time of Troubles.
Their last New Year’s had come. The cold was so fierce the boy went to bed wrapped up in all his blankets, the grand duchesses’ room turned into an icebox, and they all sat in Alix’s room—where a small fire burned—until late into the night. “It is boring! Today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today. God help us! God have mercy on us!” Alexei wrote in his diary.
“Today was grey and not too cold.… Today our boredom is green!” his father wrote on January 2.
They put the New Year’s tree right on the table. A Siberian spruce—but no toys. Their severe tree of 1918. Their last tree. For Christmas they made each other small gifts. Tatiana gave her mother a homemade notebook for a diary: a pathetic quadrille note pad inside a cloth cover she had sewn herself—in her mother’s favorite color, lilac (from a scrap of the empress’s scarf).
On the cover she embroidered a swastika, her mother’s favorite symbol.
I am opening the lilac cover. On the back of the cover Tatiana wrote in English: “To my sweet darling Mama dear with my best wishes for a happy new year. May God’s blessings be upon you and guard you for ever. Yr own loving girl Tatiana.”
Now Alix began a diary that she too would be fated not to finish.
On New Year’s Eve she wrote in this diary: “Thank God we are saved & together & He has protected us & all who are dear to us this year.”
If the legends are to be believed, this was supposed to be a fateful year for them.
In the Tobolsk house the tsar was reading a book by Sergei Nilus. (He wrote about this in his diary on March 27, 1918.) The wife of Nilus was known to the empress. When the Niluses were wed, Alix had given them an icon and a samovar with her own initials in blessing.
All this is to the point because the Niluses had entrée to the imperial court and knew a great deal. In the book Nicholas was reading, On the Banks of God’s River, Nilus recorded a legend told to him by the empress’s lady-in-waiting Mrs. Geringer.
A small chest was kept at Gatchina Palace, locked and sealed. Inside was something put there by the widow of the murdered Emperor Paul I, Maria Feodorovna, who had instructed that the chest be opened by the emperor who ruled Russia one hundred years after her husband’s murder. That day came in 1901. The tsar and tsaritsa—at the time still very young people—prepared for their journey to retrieve the chest as if it were an amusing outing. But they returned, according to the lady-in-waiting, “extremely thoughtful and sad.… After that, I heard that