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“I am not going anywhere! Let them do what they wish,” the empress answered Benckendorff.

By now the station at Tsarskoe Selo had been taken by the rebels. The trains were not running. So she sent two Cossacks from the convoy to Petrograd by rail. Their fur coats hid the uniform they had recently worn so proudly.

The Cossacks returned with news: the city was firmly in the hands of the rebellion. The mobs had opened the prisons and were storming the police stations and picking up policemen. The center was overflowing with people, and there were flags everywhere. The city was awash in blood-red calico.

In the palace all day February 28 they heard disorderly firing. It was the mutinous soldiers of the Tsarskoe Selo garrison shooting ecstatically (so far still in the air). Bands were thundering the “Marseillaise.” All day—that music. Half a kilometer from the palace, the first victim: a Cossack was killed. But the 40,000 insurrectionists were not yet threatening the palace.

Along the iron fence of the palace, astride their magnificent horses, were the mounted Cossack patrols of His Imperial Highnesses Convoy.

She called in Generals Resin and von Groten, in whose hands she now placed the palace’s defense.

The many faces of Alix: the obedient granddaughter of Queen Victoria, the eternal Sweetheart, the sequestered Muscovite tsarevna, the insane fanatic of autocracy. And finally Alix, in March 1917. The heroine of an antique tragedy: overthrown but ever the warrior. The blood of Mary Stuart.

At nine o’clock the palace trumpeters sounded the alarm, and the inspection of her troops began.

They formed up before the main entry of the palace: the Life Guards Second Kuban and Third Tersk companies. Two companies of the Convoy’s Cossacks lined up.

Next to the Cossacks, having come from the barracks, was a battalion of the Marine of the Guard under the command of Grand Duke Kirill. (The Marine had thinned out, some daring sailors having already begun to disappear mysteriously in the night.)

Finally, a battalion of a mixed infantry regiment and an antiaircraft battery—two guns on motorized platforms.

Here was all her army surrounded by a sea of gray greatcoats—the garrison of Tsarskoe Selo.

Lanterns burned by the palace entrance. Several hundred defenders stood silently in the freezing night. Commands were heard: “From the Convoy—constant mounted patrols along the railway between the station and the barracks. Anti-aircraft batteries and the Marine’s machine-guns—take a position suitable for opening fire, down the streets leading to the palace.” Midnight, when she would emerge from the palace, was drawing nigh.

Across the crunching snow, in the fierce frost, a fur coat draped over her shoulders, she walked down the rank. Her proud bearing. The leading tragic actress in the drama of the revolution. Beside her was Grand Duchess Marie, her only healthy daughter. Together they passed down the rank. Alix gathered the officers in the palace’s guard room: “Gentlemen, please, there is no need to shoot. No matter what happens. I do not want blood shed because of us.”

She had realized: one shot and everything would go up in a puff of smoke. Gray coats fanned out around the palace.

The next day, when she awoke, a new blow awaited her. The palace’s pride and glory, the Marine of the Guard, under the command of Grand Duke Kirill, had left the barracks. A red ribbon on his high-collared jacket and the tsar’s monogram on his epaulets, the tsar’s cousin had taken his unit to the Tauride Palace—to swear allegiance to the Duma. Kirill had not forgotten the humiliations of 1905. Nor had he forgiven Nicholas and Alexandra the filthy muzhik who had soiled the dynasty.

That same morning, a company of the railway battalion left for Petrograd in the Marine’s wake. Two companies of Cossacks, two guns, and an infantry battalion—such was her army then.

She realized that the palace could be stormed at any moment—the mutinous garrison no longer had anyone to fear.