Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [24]
“6 November. In the morning admired our enchanting little girl. She doesn’t seem like a newborn at all because she’s such a large child and her little head is covered with hair.”
The Russian nanny (the assistant to the English nanny) said that “a head covered with hair” was a definite token of the little girl’s future happiness.
In 1918 she would be lucky. She would be standing next to her mother in that half-cellar room. “The tsaritsa and Olga tried to shield themselves with the sign of the cross, but could not do so. Shots rang out” (from the testimony of one of the sharpshooters in the guard, A. Strekotin).
The little girl grew up. A photograph he took: Alix and, next to her mother, on spindly little legs, tiny Olga.
Childishly (to his death he would be sweetly infantile), he kept comparing her with his sister’s daughter.
“21 March, 1896. After mass we brought our daughters to Holy Communion. Ours was perfectly calm, but Irina cried a little….
“1 April. Xenia brought Irina to our little one’s bath. They weigh the same, 20 pounds, but our little girl is chubbier.”
The birth coincided with the end of the mourning period. A brilliant ball is held at the Winter Palace: thousands of guests, the orchestra plays a polonaise, the master of ceremonies strikes his staff three times, Arabs in white turbans throw the doors open wide, the brilliant hall bows—and Nicholas and Alexandra make their entrance.
Alix still spoke Russian poorly, and being among people was quite a task for her. In any case, she was completely taken up with her infant; Alix ruled the nest at Tsarskoe Selo.
Nicholas’s mother and her people ruled the country. There was a story about the flower that righted itself: crushed by her husband’s iron will, the power-loving mother finally righted herself, and so on. In fact, it was all much more tragic and simple. The dowager empress (Aunt Minnie, as she was called in the Romanov family) knew her own son all too well. She feared that someone must inevitably come to influence the good Nicky (at that time she was not thinking of Alix)—perhaps Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, an out-and-out retrograde, or the dead tsar’s other brother Vladimir, as charming as he was stupid. Or Alexander’s dear but foolish third brother, Paul. Any of them could be fatal for the empire. This pragmatic woman believed in herself; she had learned a great deal from Alexander III. Witte’s diaries contain a colorful description of this period: “Ask my mother”—that was Nicholas’s response to Witte on the subject of naming another minister. And elsewhere, again in a difficult moment: “I shall ask my mother.”
Marie Feodorovna demonstrated perspicacity by setting Nicky up with Sergei Yulievich Witte, her husband’s minister of finance. Witte constituted an entire era in himself: a supporter of reforms, a liberal—or, rather, a conservative liberal, as he would have to be after the frost that raged under Alexander. Witte knew that in Russia one cannot change the temperature too quickly.
At first the empress-mother tried to appear everywhere at her son’s side.
Vera Leonidovna:
“At that time the dowager empress suddenly seemed astonishingly young. All Petersburg was intrigued by this puzzle. People said that this stunning woman had decided to undergo an operation in Paris. She had heard about this operation from the future English Queen Alexandra—that is to say, she saw its fruits. Despite her age, Alexandra literally stunned everyone with her youthfulness.… It is a hideous operation: first the epidermis is removed from the face with a sharp spoon and the face is transformed into one great wound. The wound is moisturized and treated and a clear lacquer is applied to the face. This new, tender, pure face has to be treated very carefully