Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [28]
It was a risk-free ultimatum. They knew they would not have to back down. Alix stood behind them.
Delicate Nicky was nodding tirelessly in opposite directions, trying to reconcile everyone: Pahlen’s report disappeared into the bowels of the archives. But the Moscow police chief, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich’s man, was dismissed. And to his mother’s horror, Nicholas set off for the estate of the Duke of Khodynka—Ilinskoe.
He had not wanted to be tsar, he had not wanted to distress his mother, he had not wanted anyone to be killed, he had not wanted Alix to be sad. Yet all those things had come to pass. That was what it meant to be tsar.
FEAST FOR THE SLAIN
Even now, outside Moscow, that broad allée with centuries-old trees leading up to the famous estate Ilinskoe is there. The plane trees, a hundred years old then, still stand in the park, as does the ancient church.
“3 June, 1896. The wedding anniversary of Uncle Sergei and Ella.”
This day was celebrated noisily at Ilinskoe. Children ran around the estate: the new generation of the Romanov family.
The nineteenth century was drawing to a close, the sets for the terrible new century were being invisibly raised—and the cast was coming out onstage, the Romanovs who would live in the twentieth century.
Here was a five-year-old boy in velvet pants. This was Dmitry, son of the youngest brother of Nicholas’s father, Grand Duke Paul. Dmitry was born here at Ilinskoe and he killed his own mother.
It happened in Ilinskoe before Nicholas’s marriage to Alix.
Today, too, this path descends from the top of the hill to the Moscow River. At the river’s edge you can find half-ruined wooden piers. It was here, in the hot summer of 1891, enjoying the sun and the morning, that the young woman, the Greek Princess Alexandra, the wife of Grand Duke Paul, ran down to the pier.
As she was getting into a boat she went into premature labor. Soon after, the dead Alexandra’s body was laid out at the estate. But the boy came into the world and survived. He was called Dmitry.
Dmitry’s father, Grand Duke Paul, would be exiled from Russia. After his wife’s death he had a scandalous affair with the wife of Grand Duke Vladimir’s adjutant. Paul decided to marry her, but the dowager empress was implacable, and Paul’s brothers, Sergei and Vladimir, were forced to take her side. This was the first scandal in the Romanov family that poor Nicky had to referee. Nicholas was forced to send “dear Uncle Paul” out of Russia. But Dmitry remained in Russia and with his sister was raised in the family of Sergei Alexandrovich and Ella.
Unable to have their own children, Ella and Sergei Alexandrovich showered all their kindness on Dmitry and his sister.
During the revolution of 1905, the Socialist Revolutionary Kalyaev appeared with a bomb by the Bolshoi Theater. It had all been carefully calculated: as soon as the bright lanterns of the grand duke’s carriage turned on in the storm, Kalyaev threw himself in front of the carriage—and saw Ella and the children in the carriage along with Sergei Alexandrovich. Kalyaev did not dare throw his bomb. An idealistic terrorist of the idealistic nineteenth century! The next time Sergei Alexandrovich went alone, however, Kalyaev did not miss.
After the murder of her husband, Ella devoted herself to the creation of a cloister, and Dmitry lived with his Uncle Nicky. “Papa and Mama”—that was what he called Nicholas and Alix.
Ella had been one of the most captivating women of that time long past. The French ambassador to Russia, Maurice Paléologue, recalled fondly:
“I remember dining with her in Paris … in about 1891. I can still see her as she was then: tall, stern, with shining blue, naive eyes, her tender mouth, the soft features of her face and her straight slender nose … the charming