Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [31]
Thus began Nicholas’s perilous truth seeking. After Klopov’s truth he could tell himself yet again: the impracticability of dreams….
So it was in everything. His fearsome father had aptly been called the “Peacemaker” because he was adept at avoiding war. Nicholas ascended to the throne with the same intention. At the turn of the century he read the essays of I. Bloch, an industrialist and philosopher who wrote about the impossibility of waging a limited war in the new Europe. War in the twentieth century, if it happened, must necessarily become global. “The victor will be unable to avert the most dreadful havoc; therefore every government that is now preparing for war must prepare too for social catastrophe.” Bloch predicted that war could be a graveyard for the great European monarchies. Nicholas received Bloch, and their conversation made an impression on him.
It was then that Nicholas’s “Appeal to the Rulers” was conceived. Nicholas proposed to Europe a universal peace.
Witte wrote about the basic idea for the “Appeal” in his Memoirs: “All of Europe will be united and peaceful, Europe will not be spending great sums on the rivalry between the various countries; it will not represent an armed camp, as it does now. Europe is deteriorating under the weight of mutual enmity and international wars … soon the other nations of America and Japan may be treating Europe with respect, but the kind of respect … due an aging beauty.”
The idea of universal peace would soon end, however, in war with Japan.
In 1899 a third daughter, Marie, was born. They still did not have their long-awaited son. The tsar’s family entered the twentieth century with three daughters. In 1899 Nicholas’s brother George died of tuberculosis, and now his youngest brother, Michael, became heir to the throne.
SORCERERS AND SAINTS
In the fall of 1900 Nicholas fell seriously ill in the Crimea. It was typhus.
He was dying. The question had already been raised as to who would inherit the throne, a strange question for Alix: their oldest daughter, Olga, naturally. As in England, where her grandmother, Queen Victoria, ruled. If you thought about it, the Russians themselves had had quite a few empresses. But Witte explained that Michael must rule. Such was Paul I’s law on succession, which embodied all of Paul’s hatred for his mother, Empress Catherine the Great: a woman must not occupy the Russian throne. A delicate point arose, however: Alix was pregnant, and this time she was certain a son would be born. The law, though, did not care. Whoever was heir to the throne at the moment of the monarch’s death would rule.
Witte was now a daily guest at the Livadia Palace. The ministers took up residence in a Yalta hotel. They shuttled between Yalta and Livadia, like crows anticipating their spoils, it seemed to Alix.
But Nicholas recovered—cheating death a third time. After his illness the dream of a son consumed Alix’s entire being. It was at this moment that the Montenegrin princesses appeared.
The daughters of the prince of Montenegro had been educated in Russia at the famous Smolny Institute for Well-Bred Young Ladies.
Militsa and Stana, those were the Montenegrins’ names (although at court they were sarcastically referred to as Montenegrin No. 1—Stana—and Montenegrin No. 2—Militsa). Both married grand dukes: Militsa the weak-chested Peter Nikolaevich and Stana his brother. Nicholas Nikolaevich, or Nikolasha, as he was called in the large Romanov family. Nicholas the Long, as he was called in the army and at court, ironically by some, admiringly by others. Big, shrill, the army’s favorite: Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich.
With the Montenegrins Alix felt like a tsaritsa. They showed her deference and admiration instead of the icy civility of the court. The Montenegrins surrounded her with deft servility. When she was stricken with a stomach ailment, they tended her like the lowliest