Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [27]
“We moved on to Petrovsky [Palace], where we received several deputations at the gates.… I had to give a speech.… Dined with Mama. Went to the ball at Montebello’s.”
Meanwhile, the empress-mother had a very clear understanding of what had caused the Khodynka catastrophe. She had mastered her husband’s principles of rule. A command system (autocracy) functions only when the pyramid is crowned by Fear. With the death of the strong emperor, Fear had begun to wane. And just as an organism declares its illness with a high temperature, so with this terrible catastrophe the system had declared what was for her most ruinous: Fear had waned. Nicholas was a weak tsar.
His mother decided that Fear must return. The punishment must be harsh. Was Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, her husband’s own brother, guilty? All the better. It was he who must be punished as an example. Then Fear would return.
She demanded the immediate creation of a commission of inquiry and punishment for the guilty parties. Nicholas agreed. One other thing she demanded: the cancellation of all entertainments, including the evening ball being given by the French Ambassador Montebello.
This is the conversation concealed in his note “Dined with Mama.”
“We left Mama’s.”
For the first time, Alix took a stand against his mother. She would not allow the husband of her beloved sister to be fed to the wolves. She would not allow the entertainments canceled. Sergei Alexandrovich was right: everything should go on as if nothing had happened. A coronation occurs once in a lifetime, the ball must take place. (In the depths of her soul she tried to drive out this new, bloody presentiment: first a wedding in the wake of a funeral, now these corpses on Khodynka Meadow. She hoped that the ball and the music and these triumphs would wipe them from her memory.) And again Nicholas consented.
“Went to the ball at Montebello’s.”
Yes, to the horror of the new emperor’s friends, Nicholas and Alix danced at this ball.
As before, constantly at Nicholas’s side was Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich: Moscow had already dubbed him the Duke of Khodynka.
Then, on the following days:
“19 May. At 2 went with Alix to Old St. Catherine’s Hospital and toured all the barracks and wards where the unlucky victims from yesterday lay….
“20 May.… At 3 went with Alix to St. Mary’s Hospital, where we saw the second largest group of injured.”
He contributed generously for the victims. But the country noticed only one thing: “Went to the ball at Montebello’s.” His mother had been right.
There is a concept: a tsarlike nature is the sum of qualities that produces the impression of a powerful will. Nicholas did not possess those qualities. “Irresolute compassion,” “paralysis of will”—this is what some said about him. Others objected: he was crafty. In actual fact, he was stubborn. His tragedy was that, although he was stubborn, he was also unable to say a clear no to a petitioner’s face. He was too delicate and well bred to be crudely determinate. He preferred silence to rejection, and as a rule the petitioner took his silence for consent. Nicholas was merely waiting for someone to turn up with his point of view.
When he did, then Nicholas immediately made his decision. As a consequence, the first petitioner, who had taken silence for agreement, cursed the sovereign’s perfidy and spinelessness. That is precisely what happened with Kschessinska. When his mother and the minister crossed the ballerina’s name off the coronation program, he held his tongue—he could not insult his mother. But he waited. When his Uncle Vladimir came to intercede for Mathilde, Nicholas agreed on the spot.
It was the same with Khodynka. He was the one, understanding Alix’s state, who decided to go on with the celebration, but he did not have the nerve to oppose his mother. Then, as if yielding to the demands of Sergei Alexandrovich.… But the legend about his spinelessness had been created, and it would run through his entire life. From the very beginning, his image was merged with an “un-tsarlike nature.”
He appointed