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“We worked in the garden. Cleared three trees that had fallen on top of one another. Then made a huge bonfire. Mama came to look at our bonfire it was so inviting.”

Burning, burning, a huge bonfire in the dark of night. Many years later this gray-eyed adolescent would kindle another bonfire in which an empire would perish.

THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF HIS LIFE

All this went on at Gatchina, where Alexander III shut himself in with his family after his father’s assassination. The tsar appeared in Petersburg from the New Year until Lent, during which time he gave royal balls whose Asiatic splendor stunned the foreign emissaries. But this was window dressing. The family’s real life was at Gatchina, where they lived in a magnificent palace whose formal rooms were empty. Alexander and his family occupied the mezzanine, once the servant’s quarters. His numerous family lived in small rooms so narrow one could scarcely bring in a piano. The shade of his murdered father haunted Alexander III. There was a chain of sentries along the fence, guards around the palace, and guards inside the park. The life of the young Nicholas began with a prison accent.

Meanwhile, the young soldier Alexander Volkov was beginning to make a career for himself: he was brought into the inner Palace Guard. After midnight he watched the emperor fish on the lake.

A moonlit night over the Gatchina park. Volkov stood all alone on the bank, demonstrating the guard’s small numbers. The real guard, comprising thirty men, was hiding in the bushes around the lake. Beyond the tsar’s boat was another guard with a convoy.

In the tsar’s boat the huntsman held up a lantern, the fish swam toward the light, and the huge, heavy tsar speared the surfacing fish.

Fishing and hunting at times even pushed back affairs of state. “Europe can wait while the Russian tsar fishes.” This aphorism of the powerful monarch, the master of one-sixth of the earth’s surface, circulated through the newspapers of the world.

Nicholas was taken hunting and fishing, but more often his father took Michael, the younger brother. The hardy rascal Michael was his father’s and mother’s favorite.

The tsar is drinking tea with guests on the balcony, and below Misha, as Michael is called, is playing. The father gets an idea for a bullyish prank: he takes a watering can and douses the boy from above with water. Misha is pleased. Misha laughs, the tsar laughs, the guests laugh.

But suddenly, an unexpected cry: “And now, Papa, your turn.” The tsar obediently presents his bald spot—and Misha douses him with the watering can from head to foot.

But the father’s iron will broke Michael’s childish independence. Both brothers would grow up good, gentle, and timid, as often happens with children of strong fathers.

This was when Nicholas grasped what is for an adolescent the bitterest truth: They don’t love me, they love my brother! His adolescent insight did not make him mean, sullen, or less obedient. He simply became reticent.

Alexander appointed the distinguished K. P. Pobedonostsev, chief procurator of the Holy Synod, Nicholas’s tutor.

Alexander III ascended to the throne with an understandable logic: there were reforms under my father, and what was the result? His murder. So Pobedonostsev was called to power. The desiccated old man with protruding ears had the dry wheeze of a grand inquisitor wasted away from fasting.

Pobedonostsev would explain that Russia was a special country where reforms and a free press would inevitably result in decadence and disorder. “Like frost he inhibits any further decay, but nothing will grow under him,” a Russian commentator pinpointed Pobedonostsev. But the frost-man was then already feeling the heat of the fiery luminescence advancing on the empire: revolution. Who was going to stand up to it? This kind boy whose nature was anything but that of a tsar? Pobedonostsev respected Nicholas as the future monarch, but he could not love him. Nicholas found no love in his tutor.

Instead of love