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(Who turned out to be right? Yes, soon the people’s revolution would destroy tsarist rule. But ten years later, new revolutionary tsars would come, and for many decades Russia would cut itself off from Europe once again.)

On the day of the dynasty’s tricentennial, Life for the Tsar was performed as usual at the Mariinsky Theater. During the service in Kazan Cathedral, two doves circled under the cupola. Nicholas stood beside his son, gazing up at this beautiful omen. The Sarov saint had been right after all: the second half of his reign would see a flourishing.

Everything seemed so stable!

“21 February, 1913. Thursday. The day of the celebration of 300 years of rule was bright and very springlike. At 12.15 Alexei and I in a carriage, Mama and Alix in a Russian coach, and finally, all the daughters in a landau set out for Kazan Cathedral. Ahead was a company in convoy, with another company behind.”

During the ceremonies, Alix was persecuted by headaches and her ineffable, recurrent sadness.

“I’m a wreck,” she told Anya.

“There was a service at the cathedral and a manifesto was read. We returned to the Winter Palace the same way.… We were in a happy mood that reminded me of the coronation. We had lunch with Mama. At 3.45 everyone gathered in the Hall of Malachite. And in the concert chamber we received congratulations until 5.30. About 1500 people filed by. Alix was very tired and went to bed.… I read and sorted through the sea of telegrams.… I looked out the window at the lights and searchlights from the Admiralty tower. A strong southwest wind was blowing.”

But “We were in a happy mood” is not what sticks in the mind. What sticks in the mind is “Alix was very tired and went to bed” and the silent, lonely man gazing out the window at the holiday lights.

“It made me so sad to see your lonely figure,” she would write him in a letter.

Loneliness. Only the family. Alix, the children, and he. The friends of his youth were rarely invited now. Sergei Mikhailovich was still with the aging Mathilde (that “awful woman”—a taboo theme in the family). Nicholas Mikhailovich, the liberal historian, was chairman of the Russian Historical Society (of which Nicholas himself was honorary chairman). Author of a monumental biography of Alexander I, he was especially interested in the mysterious legends surrounding the strange death of that emperor and in the holy man Feodor Kuzmich who appeared in Siberia shortly after the tsar’s burial. He tried to find clues to the puzzle in the Romanov family archives. The possible secret departure from the throne of his grandfather’s brother and the tsar’s transformation into a holy man were very disturbing to Nicholas himself, too, but it was hard for them to talk. Nicholas Mikhailovich was a mystic, a Mason, and a freethinker. In Petersburg he lived all alone in his palace among his books and manuscripts. He livened up only “at home”—in Paris, where he painstakingly tried to explain to his friends the principles of Nicky’s rule.

In the family he was called “Monsieur Egalité.” As the eighteenth century once called the liberal Duke of Orléans.

To complete the resemblance: the liberal Duke of Orléans was guillotined by the French Revolution; the liberal Nicholas Mikhailovich would be shot in the Fortress of Peter and Paul by the October Revolution. Meanwhile, this mysterious man predicted his own death and even described it: “one dark, raw night, a few paces from the ponderous graves of my ancestors.”

The year 1913 was drawing to a close. It was fall at the Livadia Palace. But the paths of the beautiful park were deserted. Once a frequent visitor, Dmitry no longer showed his face here. Now the favorite cousin was no longer allowed access to Livadia, but in Petersburg’s salons the brilliant guardsman must have heard the wild gossip about his lost bride and the dirty Siberian muzhik. Nor was Nicholas’s brother Misha there on the Livadia park allées. He had persisted in his romance with the twice-divorced Mrs. Wulfert, a commoner, and had in fact defied Nicholas’s order that he not marry her.