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“Hey, show us what you can do, Olympian!” (that summer Dmitry had participated in the Olympic Games in Stockholm), Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich says to Dmitry. “Show us how to jump?”

Immediately Dmitry, playful, sails over the high fence. Later, in the forest, where the imperial train is waiting, Dmitry gallops right up the embankment to the train car. Alix is smiling out the window. So is Olga.

Then all of a sudden the engagement is off. Behind the scenes of the break is that same smiling Alix. The mistress of the family does not want Dmitry.

She is looking for another match for her daughter: the Romanian heir. But Olga is true to her feelings, as her father once was. She thinks up a patriotic justification: “I am Russian and wish to remain Russian.”

But the engagement must take place, so the family sails to Constanta on the Standart.

A ceremonial welcome on the wharf, in the evening an official dinner. Olga sits next to the prince and chats with him with her usual delicate graciousness. Meanwhile the remaining grand duchesses make a show of being deadly bored.

Yes, the roles have been passed out—and the sisters are playing them well. The next morning no one is talking about a wedding anymore.

Why did the empress not want the marriage to Dmitry? Did she dream of seeing her eldest daughter a queen? Or had a terrible premonition already settled in her nervous soul then, and had she decided to remove her eldest daughter from the country no matter what the cost?

Chapter 6

DIARY OF THE SUCCESSFUL MONARCH

“IT SEEMS STRANGE TO THINK I HAVE TURNED 45”

The idyllic prewar decade. The family and royal Europe were living their own special life. They visited one another, corresponded, and married. These people, who had the lengthiest of titles, were to each other Georgie and Nicky, Alix and Minnie—simply, sisters, aunts, brothers, uncles, fathers, and sons.

All these years he kept in his diary a chronicle of the royal families’ social life.

In 1908, the Swedish King Gustav paid a visit. (During the reception for the Swedish king, Nicholas pointedly did not introduce Count Witte to him—Alix’s idea.) A meeting with the French President Falière, another with the English King Edward VII.

The royal family came—the new king and queen of Denmark. (After the death of Nicholas’s grandfather, the Danish king, Nicholas’s uncle took the throne.) At the ceremonial dinner the empress-mother did not pass up the opportunity to demonstrate her power, or, rather, what was left of her power. At her request, Count Witte was seated next to the high table where both royal families sat.

Vanity Fair continued: in late July the Standart went to France, then England. This was his return visit to Edward VII.

And again, the Crimea, the Livadia Palace. And from the Crimea, he went to see the king of Italy.

(On the eve of this farewell, Alix was sitting with Anya in the blooming Livadia park when Anya heard a familiar whistle. As always at that sound, Alix jumped up from the bench, blushing like a young girl, and said: “That’s him calling me.” And she rushed off, ran. It was all just as it had been in 1894.)

But it was already 1909.

On the return trip Nicholas circumvented Austria (thus expressing his protest to the Austrian emperor over Austria’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This gesture was widely noted by the newspapers of the world and in it the prelude to the future world war was already sounded.)

Grand Duke Michael Nikolaevich, the father of Sergei, Sandro, and George, Nicholas’s closest childhood friends, died. The people of his youth were leaving him behind.

The priest Ioann of Kronstadt died. His prophecies and his miracle working were famous to all Russia. He had not taken the vows of schema, he was not a monk, and he had not given up conjugal life, but the people considered him a saint. The only man who could have stood up to Rasputin was dead.

Another year passed. The years were slipping by. The English King Edward VII, one of the principal founders of the Russo-Anglo-Franco alliance, passed away. Nine