Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [77]
“I never knew about any of this.… I could never even have imagined”—was all the distraught tsar could say. Then Nikolasha proposed bringing Alexandra Feodorovna to Headquarters to show her the report and put an end to the Friend. “Resolve the matter within the family”—here at Headquarters!
Nicholas agreed. Right now he wanted only one thing: to escape from this train and go home, to Tsarskoe Selo. He was already beginning to fear that they might simply not let him go. En route, calmer, he understood that all this was emotion and conjecture, that there was no real proof of treason. All that remained were stories about their Friend’s dissipation.
When she found out the whole story of what had happened at Headquarters, she fell into a febrile delirium and kept begging to let her keep Baby and not shut her up in a monastery. What did Alix’s cry not to shut her up in a monastery mean? “Is the Sovereign indeed powerless to shut up in a monastery the woman who is ruining him and Russia, the evil genius of the Russian people and the Romanov dynasty?” That is what the monarchist Purishkevich would write in his diary a year later (so this was not merely the fruit of Alix’s sick imagination).
Evidently, Nicholas had received an important report at Tsarskoe Selo. More than likely Rasputin collected the information; he had direct links to the secret police. As Alix would later write: “If [the tsar] had not taken N. N.’s place, he would have been dashed from the throne.” The report told Nicholas that there was in fact a plot.
Was this all Rasputin’s idea? Alexandra Feodorovna’s idée fixe?
Or, indeed, had the camarilla, sensing as in 1905 impending catastrophe, decided to replace Nicholas with Nikolasha again?
The diary of Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, looking back on events of the previous years, includes this note for December 29, 1916: “Then Dehn [the tsaritsa’s friend Lili Dehn] conveyed the portion of her conversation with Alix that had to do with Nikolasha. Alix had assured Dehn that she had documents in her hands proving that Nikolasha wanted to sit on the throne. That was why he had to be removed.”
It was clear to the tsar that this time at Headquarters things would come to no good. The commander-in-chief would demand that Rasputin be removed, which would kill Alix. Perhaps even the harshest measures for Alix herself, knowing that Nicholas would never consent to that. He would fall into a trap, though: they would not let him leave Headquarters, and he would be left with no choice but to abdicate. This secretive man did not want to insult Nikolasha with his suspicions. He simply announced to the ministers: “At this critical moment, the country’s supreme leader must stand at the army’s head.” This decision seemed insane to everyone. He had no other solution, though. Soon after, rumors circulated in Petrograd that the tsar had deposed Nikolasha and made himself commander-in-chief. This was a shock. Nicholas Nikolaevich had authority; the weak tsar was not any more popular in the army than in society at large, but even in the army there were rumors about the German tsaritsa, about her dealings with the enemy, about the dirty holy man.
His mother realized that Nicholas’s actions were a catastrophe.
Little K.’s gentle friend Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich wrote in his diary on August 24, 1915:
“This afternoon I was at Aunt Minnie’s [Empress-Mother Marie Feodorovna] and found her terribly despondent.… She believes that the removal of N[icholas] N[ikolaevich] will lead to N[icholas II]’s inevitable ruin.… She kept asking, Where are we going? ‘Where are we going? It isn’t Nicky, he is … he is sweet, and honest, and good—it’s all her doing.… She alone is responsible for all that is going on. It was not my dear boy who did this!’
“When Mama went to see her, she added as well that she was reminded of the times of Emperor Paul I, who in his last year began removing everyone loyal, and our great-great-grandfather