Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [66]
The pages of the diary were turning quickly. Life went on.
“6 May, 1913. It seems strange to think I have turned 45.… The weather was marvelous, unfortunately Alix felt poorly [this was often the case now]. Mass, congratulations, just like in the old days, only with the difference that they were all daughters.”
This was his forty-fifth birthday, the saint’s day of Job the Long-Suffering. From her letter: “You were also born on the day of Job, my long-suffering darling.” He was calling himself Job more and more often.
From the memoirs of the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue:
“One day Stolypin proposed to the sovereign an important domestic policy measure. Nicholas II listened to him thoughtfully and made a gesture, skeptical, offhand, as if to say: that or something else, does it really matter. Finally he declared in a sad voice: ‘Nothing I undertake ever works out. I am unlucky … and moreover the human will is so weak.… Do you know when my birthday is?’
“ ‘How could I not know?’
“ ‘May 6th. And what saint is celebrated on that day?’
“ ‘Forgive me, sovereign, I do not recall.’
“ ‘Job the Long-suffering.’
“ ‘Glory be to God, Your Highness’s reign shall culminate in glory, just like Job, who endured the most terrible trials and was rewarded by God’s blessing and prosperity.’
“ ‘No, believe me, Peter Arkadievich, I have more than a premonition. I am profoundly certain of this. I am doomed to terrible trials, but I will not receive my reward here, on earth.… How many times have I applied to myself Job’s words: “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me”’ [Job 3:25].”
Forty-five years old—an old man already. Job.… And a feeling common to people in their forties: life was becoming more and more like a dream. Such moods were especially strong in him during these years of relative peace. There was still calm in Europe, there was still peace, friendly visits were still being exchanged with Uncle Willy (it was en route to Berlin that Nicholas started this notebook of his diary).
Strange photographs were already pasted into his diary: his son in a military uniform saluting. The tsaritsa and a grand duchess, both of them in the uniforms of the regiments they served as colonel-in-chief.
A strange martial accent appeared in this notebook.
It also appeared in their life.
A nervous Alix felt a foreboding and melancholy. She was plagued by horrific headaches—that is why she was weeping at the tricentennial ceremonies.
The year 1913, the year of greatest well-being for his empire, came to a close.
On December 31 he wrote in his diary: “Oh Lord, bless Russia and us all with peace and quiet and piety.”
On January 6, 1914, as if concluding an era, the last Epiphany parade was held in the Winter Palace. Platoons of the Guards and the military institutes formed up. The empress-mother wore a silver Russian sarafan with the blue ribbon of St. Andrew. Alix was dressed in a deep blue, gold-embroidered sarafan with an enormous sable-trimmed train. Her headdress was crowned by a diamond diadem with a pearl. The legendary Romanov jewels!
In the cramped stuffiness of Ekaterinburg imprisonment, they would recall the endless cold marble hall, the Guards in formation with their backs to the Neva, giant Nicholas Nikolaevich surrounded by his giant Grenadiers … and how they emerged from the palace onto the Palace Embankment … and how the metropolitan descended to the ice-bound Neva to sanctify the water in an ice hole.
HIS SECOND WAR (“A MAGNIFICENT IMPULSE HAS GRIPPED ALL RUSSIA”)
The year was 1914. That hot July day they left with the children as usual for the Finnish Skerries on the yacht. In the afternoon a launch carrying