Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [3]
Since then I have often recalled those photographs—the dead deer and the naked tsar—when thinking about him lying dead and naked on the warm July ground by the mine shaft into which they later tossed his body.
Then I was given his diary.
In July 1918, the Czechs and Cossacks were advancing on Ekaterinburg. The Bolsheviks would have to surrender the town. Yakov Yurovsky left Ekaterinburg on the last train out. The “secret courier” (as he was officially referred to in the documents) was carrying the tsar’s leather cases—one of which contained the family archive of the very recently executed Romanovs.
So there he was riding the train, looking through the albums of photographs. The former photographer must have found this very interesting. But the main thing, naturally, was that he read the tsar’s diary. The diary of the man with whom his name would be linked from then on and always. Imagine what he felt as he leafed through it on his long journey, trying to picture this life lived in full view of the entire world.
That is how the diary of Nicholas II, kept in the Romanov archive, came to be in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution. The Romanov archive. I call it the Archive of Blood.
Nicholas kept a diary for thirty-six years without interruption. He began it at the age of fourteen, in 1882, in the palace at Gatchina, and ended it as a fifty-year-old prisoner in Ekaterinburg.
Fifty notebooks filled from beginning to end with his neat handwriting. But the final, fifty-first notebook is only half filled: his life was cut short, and yawning blank pages remain, conscientiously numbered by the author in advance.
This diary contains no reflections, and opinions are rare. He is terse—this taciturn, retiring man. The diary is a record of the principal events of the day, no more. But his voice lingers on its pages.
The mystical force of genuine speech.
The revolution punished him without trial, not allowing him a final say. The portrait of this puzzling man was created only after his death—by his opponents and his supporters. Now he himself can speak in the words he himself once wrote. I leaf through his diary. One experiences an eternal yet banal sensation in the archive: one feels other hands, the touch of hands across a century. He himself will lead us through his life. He is the Author.
Chapter 1
DIARY OF THE YOUNG MAN
THE DIARY BEGINS
The author of the diary was born on May 6, 1868.
An old postcard: an angelic infant in long curls. Here Nicholas is all of a year.
Another photograph: a youth with his hair fashionably parted.
In 1882 Nicholas received a gift from his mother: a gilt-edged “book of souvenirs” bound in precious inlaid wood. This luxurious book became the first notebook of his diary. Nicholas was moved to begin keeping a diary conscientiously by a fateful date in Russian history: March 1, 1881.
On the dank night of February 28, 1881, in a Petersburg apartment, the light stayed on for a long time. All that day, from early morning, certain young people had been going in and out of the apartment. Since eight o’clock in the evening six had remained, four young men and two young women. One of them was Vera Figner, distinguished leader of People’s Will, the revolutionary terrorist organization. Subsequently she would describe that day in her autobiography.
The other woman was Sofia Perovskaya, who in the morning was going to take a direct part in the cause. They had convinced her to get some sleep.
Vera Figner and the four men worked through the night. Only toward morning did they fill the kerosene cans with blasting jelly. They now had four homemade bombs.
The cause was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, one of the greatest reformers in the history of Russia. That spring he had been preparing to give Russia its longed-for constitution, which would have brought his feudal despotism into the ranks of civilized European states.
But the young