Ten years later, Tsaritsa Alexandra, her husband, and their five children were prisoners in another palace; eleven years later, on the night of 16–17 July 1918, they were murdered in a Siberian cellar.

When the downfall came, a torrent of calumny poured on Alexandra's head. During the war with Germany she was called “the German woman,” a German spy, a traitor to Russia. In fact, Alexandra despised Imperial Germany and its strutting monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Her own small grand-duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt had entered the new empire hostile to the dominance of Prussia and the Hohenzollern dynasty and, throughout her life, Alexandra thought of herself as Hessian, not German. She blamed the outbreak of the First World War on the “idiotic pride and insatiable ambition of the Hohenzollerns,” and bluntly declared, “Prussia has meant Germany's ruin.” In fact, Alexandra's childhood surroundings, education, appearance, personal habits, beliefs, and moral outlook were almost entirely drawn from the tradition and culture of England, not of Germany. When she married the Tsar of Russia, she became, in certain respects, extravagantly Russian. But Pierre Gilliard, a Swiss tutor who spent thirteen years at the Russian court, never heard the empress speak German.

Alexandra was also accused, before and after the Revolution, of having been the mistress of Grigory Rasputin, the flamboyant Siberian “holy man” whose sexual antics were the subject of leering discussion by every literate person in Russia—except the empress. This was as untrue as the accusation of treason. Alexandra believed in Rasputin because he presented himself as a messenger from God and a true representative of the Russian peasantry and because he seemed to be the only person able to preserve the life of her hemophiliac son, the tsarevich Alexis. His claims on the first two counts were fraudulent; her belief that he could save her son, however, was supported by the evidence of numerous occasions when he seemed to have done precisely that.

After Alexandra's death, 630 letters written to her husband were found in a black leather suitcase in Ekaterinburg; of these, 230 were written over the period from the couple's first meeting to the outbreak of war in 1914; the other 400 were written during the war years, 1914–1917. She wrote, pouring out a cataract of thoughts and emotions, never imagining that any eyes but his would read her words. Once published, these letters immediately became key historical documents, helping to explain events, personalities, and decisions at the summit of the autocracy on the eve of the Russian Revolution.

The demise of the Soviet state has made available other documents long secluded in Moscow archives. Among them are Alexandra's diaries for the years 1887–1892, 1894, and 1916–1918. The current volume, covering 1918, was presented to her on 1 January by her second daughter, Tatiana, and records the final six and a half months of her life. Its cryptic, unemotional style stands in sharp contrast to the tumultuous style of her letters. Here she is creating, for herself alone, a simple record of the highlights of each day: the weather and temperature; family illnesses and health; meals; periods and subjects of study; visitors (welcome and unwelcome); books read; games played. Her religious faith is evident. On the diary's first page, she displays her effort to master the numerical system of Old Church Slavonic (different from everyday Russian, which uses Arabic numerals). Through the diary, she records saint's days, feast days, and other religious holidays. Every religious service held by the family in Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg is set down. Usually, her feelings about an event break through only in a highly abbreviated form. Nevertheless, despite its style and brevity, the diary is filled with poignancy and drama. Alexandra does not know what is going to happen; the modern reader does. Fleshed out by our knowledge from other sources, this diary gives a clear picture of these grim weeks and tells us much about the character of this much-criticized, reclusive, and melancholy woman.

In 1878, when Alix was six, diphtheria carried away her mother and her younger sister. As a precaution against the disease, all of Alix's dolls and toys were burned. Desolate, the little girl began to seal herself off, building a shell of aloofness which only a few would penetrate. Queen Victoria attempted to keep watch over this small granddaughter as best she could; tutors and governesses in Darmstadt were required to send special reports to Windsor and received in return a steady flow of instruction from the queen. Alix was a good student. She acquired a grounding in European history and geography; she became bilingual in English and German, and she also spoke French. She played the piano with amateur brilliance but disliked playing in front of people. When Queen Victoria asked her to play for guests at Windsor, Alix obliged, but a flush across her face and shoulders betrayed her torment. As the years in Darmstadt and England went by, her upbringing was thoroughly English and entirely Victorian. The future empress of Russia was molded into a proper English gentlewoman.

The youngest of four living sisters, Alix watched her sisters marry. Victoria, the eldest, chose a titled but impoverished German-born British naval officer, Prince Louis of Battenberg, who became First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy at the outbreak of the First World War. Alix's sister Irene married a German, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the only brother of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Her sister Elizabeth, called Ella, married the Russian Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, a younger brother of Russian Emperor Alexander III. Eventually, Alix, the shy, youngest sister, outshone them all by marrying Alexander III's son, Nicholas II, and herself becoming empress of Russia.

Alix met Nicholas at Ella and Sergei's wedding in St. Petersburg in 1884, when Alix was twelve and Nicholas was sixteen. They met again five years later, and although there was an attraction on this occasion, they were not engaged until 1894. They were married suddenly that year when Tsar Alexander III unexpectedly died of nephritis, and his brothers, the uncles of the new tsar, decided that the untried twenty-six-year-old Nicholas needed the steadying influence of marriage. For his new twenty-two-year-old wife, the sequence was bewildering: overnight, it seemed, she converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy, her name was changed from Alix to Alexandra, and she was married.

The marriage was a life-long success. “How contented and happy I am with my beloved Nicky,” she wrote to one of her sisters during her first weeks in St. Petersburg. She had a husband who, she knew, loved and relied upon her absolutely. Over the years, this reliance was to give Alexandra enormous influence over Nicholas. She had come to him at a moment of overpowering crisis. “I am not prepared to be a tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling,” he had confessed to a cousin when he mounted the throne. Thereafter, Alexandra gave him the confidence that no one else—not his mother, his uncles, his brothers and sisters, his cousins, nor his ministers—was able to provide.

In contrast to the private success of her marriage, the public appearance of the new empress in St. Petersburg was an immediate failure. “I feel myself completely alone. I weep and worry all day long because I feel that my husband is so young and so inexperienced,” she wrote to a friend in Germany. The first ceremonial exposures of the reserved young woman from a small, provincial court on the Rhine were blighted by shyness and fright. As she stood beside her husband, people filing past in reception lines found themselves confronting a tall, cold-eyed figure, silent and unsmiling, her hand rigidly extended for a perfunctory kiss. Alexandra, in turn, quickly decided that the moral life of the capital, including that of many members of her own husband's family, was idle, listless, and decadent. Scandalized by the profusion of flaunted love affairs among the aristocracy, she began reviewing palace invitation lists and crossing off names. Society, in a cycle of mutual dislike and rebuff, disdainfully pronounced the young empress a prude and a bore. Alexandra withdrew further into her shell. Pleading headaches, backaches, and pregnancy (she gave birth five times during her first ten years of marriage), she relinquished all but the most essential contact with Russian society.

A place of shelter in this storm was Alexandra's fervent new attachment to the Orthodox church. She had not given up her devout Lutheranism easily; for months before her marriage, the requirement that a prospective Russian empress convert to Orthodoxy had been the chief impediment to her acceptance of Nicholas. Repeatedly, he had tried to persuade her; for days, she had wept and whispered, “No, I cannot.” Nicholas was determined and, eventually, she capitulated. “We were left alone and with her first words she consented…. I cried like a child and she did too,” he wrote to his mother.

Alexandra embraced her new religion with passionate intensity. In Russia, she assumed that she would find among both aristocrats and peasants a closely knit community of devout believers. Her discovery that many Russians had little use for this kind of religion shocked the young empress; her reaction, again, was to withdraw. Her place, she concluded, was with the church in its purest, most zealous, and, some said, most primitive form. She went to church every day. She read constantly from the Bible and the lives of the saints. She collected rare icons and, believing that healing power emanated from these works of art, arranged them carefully in rooms she occupied. Certain Russians of that day dabbled in mysticism, spiritualism, and the occult. Alexandra refused to rule out the possibility that these might be legitimate approaches to God. She made religious pilgrimages and looked forward to conversations with religious hermits, mystics, “soul doctors,” and peasant holy men.

Alexandra's other place of refuge was her family. From the beginning, she and Nicholas hoped for a son, as, since the reign of Emperor Paul at the beginning of the nineteenth century, only males could succeed to the Russian throne. Their first four children were daughters—Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia. Their fifth child, born 12 August 1904, was the long-desired boy, a blue-eyed, golden-haired infant christened Alexis. He was, according to the Swiss tutor Pierre Gilliard, “the center of this united family…. His sisters worshipped him. He was his parents' pride and joy. When he was well, the palace was transformed. Everyone and everything in it seemed bathed in sunshine.”

Pierre Gilliard, Thirteen Years at the Russian Court (New York: Doran, 1921),72.

But Alexis was a hemophiliac. This disease, which appears only in males and is transmitted by hereditary laws from mother to son, is characterized by the inability of blood to clot normally. In Alexis's case, it was handed down to him by the first royal hemophilic carrier, his great-grandmother Queen Victoria. The queen's fourth son, Prince Leopold, was a hemophiliac, and at least two of her daughters and three of her granddaughters were carriers. One of these granddaughters was Alexandra.

The blow further altered Alexandra's life. When the tsarevich was born, there was little that medicine or science could do to halt the flow of blood from a ruptured internal blood vessel. Minor external cuts and scratches were not dangerous—they could be treated by pressure and tight bandaging—but internal bleeding, particularly into the confined space of a knee, ankle, or elbow joint, meant excruciating pain and crippling. Blood seeping into surrounding tissue and muscle could create a hematoma as large as a grapefruit which pressed inward on the nerves. The pain brought screams and groans and, eventually, exhaustion when Alexis, white-faced, lying in bed with his head resting on his mother's arm, could only look up and whisper, “Mummy.” Alexandra could do nothing except hold his hand and kiss his forehead.

Throughout Alexis's life, his health was Alexandra's principal preoccupation. Talk of his condition dominates her letters to her husband and the pages of her diary. Year after year, specialists were consulted and shook their heads. Because the normal world was powerless, Alexandra drew up other battle plans. Her family was a place where sadness need not be hidden nor pretense offered. She sought answers from her new church, which teaches its believers that suffering is an experience that enriches the soul. Through the vigor and frequency of her prayers, she determined to wrest from God the miracle that science denied. “God is just,” she declared and begged for mercy for her son. When Alexis was well, she dared to hope. Even as the years passed and one hemorrhage followed another, she refused to believe that God had deserted her. Knowing that the disease had been transmitted through her own body, she fixed on her own unworthiness. If she was the instrument of her son's torture, she could not also be the instrument of his salvation. She must, therefore, find someone closer to God who would intercede on her behalf. When Rasputin, the Siberian peasant reported to possess miraculous powers of faith healing, arrived in St. Petersburg, Alexandra believed that her prayers had been answered.

Incredibly, as this desperate, personal battle was being waged, Russia did not know. Afraid to inform the nation that the heir to the throne lived under the constant shadow of death, the few who knew connived to erect a façade of normalcy. In film footage of public appearances of the imperial family, Alexis is often carried in the arms of a husky sailor. Today, no one notices; then, those who noticed did not ask why. The secret was kept. Even the Swiss tutor Pierre Gilliard, who came to the palace five times a week to tutor the children in French, did not know. Whenever his youngest pupil disappeared, his four young female students became melancholy and distracted. But when he asked the reason, the boy's sisters answered evasively, “Alexis Nicholaievich is not well.”

Gilliard, Thirteen Years, 26.

Because the condition of the tsarevich was never revealed, Russians were unable to accurately judge the character of the empress or the true nature of her relationship with Rasputin. Unaware of her ordeal, they ascribed her remoteness and the look of permanent sadness on her face to hostility toward Russia. As she devoted herself to lengthening hours of prayer, her own public appearances were further curtailed. When she did emerge, she was more silent, colder, and more withdrawn. During wartime, with Russian anger inflamed against Germany, the various complaints Russians had against the empress—her German birth, her aloofness, her devotion to Rasputin—merged into a sweeping torrent of suspicion and wrath.

Alexandra's English practicality was displayed in the orderly daily routines by which her Russian family lived. This regimented schedule stemmed not only from Alexandra's memories of Mrs. Orchard's Darmstadt routine, but from Mrs. Orchard herself, who had followed the empress to Russia and taken charge of the Russian imperial nursery. The empress's work habits always seemed more English than Russian, more Protestant than Orthodox. She preached that life is meant for work, not pleasure, and she insisted that her daughters plunge themselves into learning, correspondence, charitable work, or, failing all else when their hands were idle, needlework and embroidery.

Physically, Alexandra could not always follow her own prescriptions. “She keeps to her bed most of the day, does not receive anyone, does not come out to lunches and remains on the balcony day after day,” Nicholas wrote to his mother, the dowager empress Marie. Neither Alexandra nor her doctors could pinpoint the medical cause. As a girl, she had suffered from sciatica, a severe pain in the back and legs, and this scourge reappeared throughout her life. Her pregnancies—four in the first six years of marriage—were difficult. The battle against her son's hemophilia left her physically and emotionally drained. At times of crisis, she sat without relief beside Alexis's bed; once the danger had passed, she collapsed, sometimes for weeks, moving about only by wheelchair. In 1908, when the tsarevich was four, she developed a condition which she referred to as an “enlarged heart.” No one doubted that something was wrong. “Her breath came in quick, obviously painful gasps. I often saw her lips turn blue,” said the tsar's sister, Grand Duchess Olga.

Ian Vorres, The Last Grand Duchess: The Memoirs of Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna (London: Hutchinson, 1964), 130.

Dr. Yevgeny Botkin, the family physician, came to the palace every day at nine and again at five to listen to her heart. He noted, interestingly, that when the empress was among people she liked and trusted, her heart trouble did not assert itself. But if a situation developed contrary to her liking, or if something was said or done against her wishes, she immediately began to complain about her heart. Years later, in Siberia, Botkin mentioned that he believed his patient suffered from “progressive hysteria.”

Colonel Eugene Kobylinsky, deposition, quoted in Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (London: Thornton Buttonworth, 1920), 219.

In modern medical terminology, the empress undoubtedly was suffering from psychosomatic symptoms brought on by anxiety—including, most prominently, her worry over the health of her son.

Despite her infirmities, Alexandra's romantic passion for her husband never waned. After twenty years of marriage, the empress, who was shy and reserved about expressing emotion in public, still poured out her feelings in her letters. She began, “Good morning, my darling … My beloved one … My sweetest treasure … My own beloved angel.” She concluded: “Sleep well, my treasure … I yearn to hold you in my arms and rest my head upon your shoulder.” During the war, when Nicholas left for the front, Alexandra wrote, “Oh, my love! It was hard bidding you goodbye and seeing that lonely pale face with big sad eyes … my heart cried out, take me with you…. I longed to have you near me … [to] bend over you, bless you, and gently kiss your sweet face all over—oh my darling, how intensely dear you are to me!” Never imagining that anyone else would read her letters, she reminded him of the childish, sentimental names they had for each other's genitalia. Nicholas's replies were more restrained, but no less tender. “My beloved Sunny, when I read your letters my eyes are moist … I don't know how I could have endured it all if God had not decreed to give you to me as a wife and friend. I speak in earnest. At times it is difficult to speak of such things and it is easier for me to put it down on paper, owing to stupid shyness … Goodbye, my beloved sweet Sunny.”

As the threat of war spread across Europe in July 1914, Alexandra pleaded with her husband to hold Russia aloof. She brandished a telegram from Rasputin in Siberia, opposing the war and predicting that, if war came, it would mean the destruction of the Romanov dynasty and empire. Nicholas brushed the telegram aside; at that stage, his indulgence of Rasputin's connection with his family did not include intrusion into state affairs. When the tsar ordered general mobilization of the Russian army in response to the Austrian bombardment of Belgrade, Alexandra declared, “It's not true.” Hurrying to her husband's study, she argued frantically with him for half an hour. Then, returning to her room, she dropped on a couch and murmured, “War! And I knew nothing of it. This is the end of everything.”

Anna Vyrubova, Memories of the Russian Court (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 105.

Ironically, the coming of the war transformed the empress. Alexandra always seemed happiest when immersed in other people's problems, and war gave almost endless scope to this side of her nature. Burning with patriotic enthusiasm, she put aside her own illnesses and plunged into hospital work. “To some it may seem unnecessary my doing this,” she said, “but help is much needed and my hand is useful.” The huge, ornate Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, used for receptions and balls before the war, was converted into a military hospital, and before the end of 1914 eighty-five hospitals were operating under her patronage in the Petrograd area alone. In this work, Alexandra did not become simply an imperial patron. She enrolled herself and her two older daughters in a nurses' training course, and every morning at nine, dressed in the gray uniforms of nursing sisters, they left the palace for the hospital. The atmosphere in this place was shocking and brutal. Every day, Red Cross trains brought wounded and dying men—dirty, bloodstained, feverish, and groaning—from the front. The empress and her daughters cleaned and bandaged these mangled bodies. “I have seen the Empress of Russia in the operating room,” said her friend Anna Vyrubova, “holding ether cones, handling sterilized instruments, taking from the hands of busy surgeons amputated legs and arms, removing bloody and vermin-ridden field dressings.”

Vyrubova, Memories, 109–110.

It was horror, but it was also fulfillment. Alexandra was drawn to nursing not only by her Victorian work ethic, but also by her familiarity with suffering. Sensitized by her son's hemophilia and by her own ill health, she identified with people in pain. “I never saw her happier than on the day, at the end of her two months' training, she marched at the head of the procession of nurses to receive the Red Cross diploma of a certified war nurse,” Vyrubova continued. To Alexandra, these men were Russia itself, bleeding and dying. And she—kneeling beside them to pray, holding their hands when they died—was the Russian empress, Matushka, the mother of all the brave men and boys who were giving themselves for the motherland.

Alexandra's devotion to her hospitals did not fail, but eventually her energy and health gave way. This did not stop her pen. Lying on a chaise longue in her mauve boudoir under portraits of the Virgin Mary and Marie Antoinette, or sitting on her balcony looking out at the park with a writing tablet on her knees, she wrote voluminously. She began early in the morning, added paragraphs during the day, went on for pages late at night, and perhaps added more the following day. She wrote mostly in English, in torrential, breathless prose with irregular spelling, many abbreviations, frequent omissions of words that seemed obvious, and punctuation made up largely of dots and dashes.

During the war, writing to Nicholas, she applied this prose style to extended political exhortation. Worried about the future of Russia, her family, and the inheritance awaiting her son, Alexandra attempted to influence her husband's passive, almost mystical, resignation to fate. Throughout his life, Nicholas had tried to do what he thought was right; when the result was failure, he tended to accept what had happened as the will of God. Alexandra's concept of suffering was different: Suffering was a part of life. Sometimes it was ennobling, but unless it came unmistakably from God, it need not be passively accepted. In the political arena, she insisted, it was often one's duty to stand up and fight. In particular, she believed that the tsar had an imperative responsibility to do whatever was necessary to preserve the autocracy. “On the day of my coronation,” Nicholas had said, “I swore to preserve the autocracy and shoulder the whole burden of governing my people. I must keep that oath intact for my son.” In upholding this oath, Alexandra believed, irresolution and fatalism could lead to catastrophe. As she saw it, her own sacred duty was to prevent this from happening.

“Forgive me, my precious one,” she wrote in 1915, “but you know you are too kind and gentle—sometimes a good loud voice can do wonders and a severe look—do, my love, be more decided and sure of yourself…. Humility is God's greatest gift but a sovereign needs to show his will more often.” Repeatedly, her letters inveighed against the demand of the Duma, or representative body, for greater participation in government: “We are not a constitutional country and dare not be, our people are not educated for it…. Never forget that you are and must remain autocratic emperor…. For Baby's sake we must be firm as otherwise his inheritance will be awful, as with his character he won't bow down to others but be his own master, as one must in Russia whilst people are so uneducated.” A year later, shortly before Nicholas's abdication, a torrent of political advice poured from Alexandra's pen: “I am fully convinced that great and beautiful times are coming for your reign and Russia … we must give a strong country to Baby and dare not be weak for his sake, else he will have a harder reign, setting our faults right and drawing the reins in tightly which you let loose…. He has a strong will and mind of his own, don't let things slip through your fingers and make him build all over again. Be firm … one wants to feel your hand—how long, years, people have told me the same, ‘Russia loves to feel the whip’—it's their nature—tender love and then the iron hand to punish and guide. How I wish I could pour my will into your veins…. Be Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Emperor Paul—crush them all under you—now don't you laugh, naughty one.”

Nicholas replied, figuratively shaking his head: “My dear, tender thanks for the severe scolding. I read it with a smile because you speak to me as though I was a child … Your ‘poor little weak-willed’ hubby, Nicky.”

Alexandra learned about the abdication on the evening of the sixteenth. “The door opened and the empress appeared,” recalled Lili Dehn. “Her face was distorted with agony, her eyes were full of tears. She tottered rather than walked…. Taking my hands in hers, she said brokenly, ‘Abdiqué!’ … I waited for her next words…. ‘The poor dear … all alone down there … what he has gone through, oh my God, what he has gone through…. And I was not there to console him.'’”

Dehn, The Real Tsaritsa, 165.

Six days later, the former tsar, now titled “Citizen Romanov,” returned home. For the next four months, he and his family were held prisoners in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. In the light of their later experience, the regime was not strict: the family remained in its own surroundings, waited on by its own servants, dining off its own plates. But they were no longer free to go where they wanted or see whom they wished. Bands of soldiers roamed the corridors, bawling, “Where is The Heir?” “Show us The Heir!” Excursions were confined to limited areas of the imperial park where they were permitted to walk, row on the lake, and plant a vegetable garden. They endured rudeness and occasional humiliation: a toy rifle was wrenched from Alexis's hands by a soldier; another guard amused himself by poking a bayonet between the spokes of Nicholas's bicycle, sending the former monarch sprawling.

The Romanovs' principal jailer was Alexander Kerensky, Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government formed by members of the Duma after Nicholas's abdication. On 3 April, Kerensky arrived to inspect his prisoners. The minister later admitted that his manner had been abrupt and nervous:

To be frank I was anything but calm before this first meeting with Nicholas II…. All the way along the endless chain of official apartments, I was struggling for control of my emotions…. The imperial family were standing near the window…. From this cluster … there stepped out somewhat hesitantly a man of medium height in a military kit who walked forward to meet me with a slight peculiar smile. It was the emperor…. He stopped in confusion. He did not know what to do … I hurriedly walked over… shook hands and sharply said, “Kerensky” as I always do. Nicholas II gave my hand a firm grasp, immediately recovering from his confusion, and smiling… led me to his family. His daughters and the Heir Apparent were obviously burning with curiosity and their eyes were simply glued to me. But Alexandra Feodorovna stood tense and erect—proud, domineering, irreconcilable; she held out her hand to me, slowly and unwillingly.

Alexander Kerensky and Paul Bulygin, The Murder of the Romanovs (London: Hutchinson, 1935), 122–123.

Not long after, Kerensky returned to the palace to conduct an investigation of the empress's “treasonable, pro-German” activities. This interview was casual, lasting only an hour. The minister began by politely and mildly asking about the role she had played in politics. She replied that she and the tsar were “the most united of couples, whose whole joy and pleasure was in their family life, and that they had no secrets from each other; that they discussed everything, and that it was not surprising that in the last years which had been so troubled, they had often discussed politics…. It was true that they had discussed the different appointments of ministers, but this could not be otherwise in a marriage such as theirs.” Kerensky was “struck by the clarity, the energy, and the frankness of her words,” and reported to his governmental colleagues that Alexandra had been loyal to Russia. He requested that the Petrograd newspapers, which had been virulently attacking the Romanovs, “put an end to their campaign against the tsar and more particularly the empress.”

Kerensky's impressions of the imperial couple, particularly of Nicholas, continued to improve. Kerensky himself reported that he was affected by Nicholas's “unassuming manner and complete absence of pose. Perhaps it was this natural, quite artless simplicity that gave the Emperor that peculiar fascination, that charm which was further increased by his wonderful eyes, deep and sorrowful…. It cannot be said that my talks with the tsar were due to a special desire on his part; he was obliged to see me … yet the former emperor never once lost his equilibrium; never failed to act as a courteous man of the world.”

From its beginnings, the authority of the Provisional Government was challenged by the Petrograd Soviet. A particularly sensitive point was the future of the Romanovs. Before meeting the imperial family, Kerensky already had said, “I will not be the Marat of the Russian Revolution. I will take the tsar to Murmansk myself,” referring to the Arctic port where he would put Nicholas and his family on board a British warship. In this expectation, the empress began sorting and packing and asked Dr. Botkin whether he would accompany them into exile in England. When King George V refused asylum to his Russian cousins, Kerensky looked elsewhere. It was to put them out of reach of the threatening Petrograd Soviet, not for poetic justice, that he sent the Romanovs to Siberia. He chose Tobolsk because it was a backwater without a railway, had a population which was prosperous, content, and old-fashioned, and possessed nothing remotely resembling an industrial proletariat. In addition, Tobolsk had a large provincial governor's residence suitable for housing the prisoners.

The family departed Tsarskoe Selo at dawn on 14 August 1917 in circumstances that were comfortable if not elegant. Their train consisted of wagon-lits of the International Sleeping Car Company, a restaurant car stocked with wines from the imperial cellar, and baggage compartments filled with favorite rugs, pictures, and knickknacks from the palace. In their portable jewel chests, the empress and her daughters carried diamonds, pearls, and other gems. In addition to the ladies and gentlemen of their retinue or suite, the Romanovs were accompanied to Siberia by two valets, six chamberlains, ten footmen, three cooks, a butler, a wine steward, two doctors, a nurse, two foreign tutors, a clerk, a barber, and a sailor from the imperial navy who for five years had carried and cared for the tsarevich. Three hundred and fifty veteran soldiers, picked from the Imperial Rifle Regiments and commanded by Colonel Eugene Kobylinsky, went along as an armed escort. Kerensky had given Kobylinsky a double mission: he was to guard the prisoners and prevent escape, but he was also to protect them from harm. On the night of their departure, Kerensky, who had come to Tsarskoe Selo to see them off, was asked by Count Paul Benckendorff, a minister of the court, how long they would stay in Siberia. He promised that, once the Constituent Assembly had met in November, Nicholas and his family would be free to go where they liked. By November, Kerensky himself had become a fugitive from Bolshevism.

The journey on the train, rattling eastward across the Urals, took four days. The mission and passengers were kept secret; the train, flying a Japanese flag and bearing placards proclaiming “Japanese Red Cross Mission,” passed through towns and villages with blinds drawn and troops surrounding the station. At the end of each day, the train stopped in open country so that Nicholas and the children could descend for a walk; Alexandra remained in her compartment, fanning herself in the heat. In Tiumen, the passengers boarded a boat and began a two-day voyage up the Tura and Tobol rivers to Tobolsk.

Tobolsk, where the tsar and his family were to spend the next eight months, lay at the junction of the Tobol and Irtysh rivers. Once it had been a link with the Arctic and an important trading center for fish and furs. But the builders of the Trans-Siberian Railway had bypassed Tobolsk, going two hundred miles to the south, through Tiumen. In August 1917, when the imperial family arrived, the town was, as Kerensky had described it, “a backwater.” Its twenty thousand people still made a living mostly from trade with the north. In summer, all transport was by river steamer; in winter, when the rivers were frozen, people traveled in sledges over the ice, or on paths cut through the snow along the riverbanks. The town itself was a sprawl of whitewashed churches, wooden buildings, and log houses scattered along streets that were thick with dust in the summer. In spring and fall, the dust turned to mud and the wooden planks laid down as sidewalks sometimes sank out of sight.

The Governor's House, a large, white, two-story building, fringed on every side with balconies, was the largest residence in town. Still, it was not large enough for the imperial party. The family moved into the mansion's main (or second) floor, with the four grand duchesses sharing a corner room and Nagorny, the tsarevich's sailor, sleeping in a room next to Alexis. The tsar and the tsaritsa shared a bedroom; in addition, she had a sitting room and he had a study. The tutor Pierre Gilliard lived on the ground floor downstairs in what had been the governor's study, and a number of servants were crammed into the attic. The remainder of the household lived across the street in a house owned by a merchant named Kornilov.

At first, Kobylinsky allowed the family considerable freedom of movement. On their first morning in the house, they all walked across the street to see how the rest of their party was settling into the Kornilov house. Some of the soldiers objected to this degree of freedom, and Kobylinsky reluctantly authorized the building of a high board fence which enclosed the house and a section of a small side street beside the house. The family subsequently took all its exercise within this muddy, treeless compound. Those who accompanied the Romanovs, on the other hand, were permitted to come and go freely, and several of the empress's maids took apartments in town. Dr. Botkin established a small medical practice in Tobolsk.

As Kerensky suspected, the people of Tobolsk remained strongly attached to the symbol and the person of the tsar. Walking past the Governor's House, they removed their hats and crossed themselves. When the empress appeared sitting in her window, they bowed to her. The soldiers repeatedly had to intervene and break up clusters of people who gathered in the muddy streets whenever the grand duchesses came out on a balcony. Merchants openly sent gifts of food, nuns from the local convent brought sugar and cakes, and peasant farmers arrived with butter and eggs. When the family was allowed to leave the house for the first time, to attend mass at the nearby Church of the Annunciation, a watching crowd stood behind a double cordon of soldiers. When the family passed—the tsar and his children on foot, the empress pushed in her wheelchair—many in the crowd made the sign of the cross and some fell on their knees.

By January 1918, Tobolsk was deep in a Siberian winter. At noon, the sun shone brightly, but by midafternoon the light had faded. The thermometer outside dropped to 68 degrees below zero Farenheit, freezing drafts blew through cracks in the doors and windows, and a glacial chill penetrated the walls. The girls' corner room became, in Gilliard's words, “a real ice house.”

Gilliard, Thirteen Years, 253.

A fire burned all day in the drawing room, but the temperature inside the house never rose above 44 degrees. Sitting near the fire, the empress shivered, her fingers so stiff she could scarcely move her knitting needles. Outside, she saw “bright sunshine and everything glitters with hoar frost…. There are such moonlit nights it must be ideal in the hills. But my poor unfortunates can only pace up and down the narrow yard.” Despite their circumstances, she said, the tsar was “simply marvelous. Such meekness while all the time suffering intensely for the country…. The others all good & brave & uncomplaining and Alexei is an angel … Anastasia, to her despair, is now very fat as Marie was, round and fat to the waist, with short legs. I do hope she will grow. Olga and Tatiana are both thin.”

Vyrubova, Memories, 314–316.

Inside the Governor's House the imperial family settled into a routine which, although restricted, was almost cozy. The family ate a breakfast of tea and bread in the dining room downstairs at eight-thirty; Alexandra remained in bed and drank coffee. At nine, when Nicholas went to his study to read, the children's lessons began. Alexis was instructed in history and geography by Sidney Gibbs, an English tutor, and by the tsar. Alexandra gave German lessons three times a week to Tatiana and once a week to Marie. The empress also took on the teaching of religion to her children. Her program was extensive. Tatiana was assigned the books of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, and Joel. Marie read Joshua and Solomon, Anastasia read Isaiah, and Alexis, besides reading stories of David and Solomon, marched steadily through the gospels of Mark and Luke. (Olga, at twenty-two, was considered above schooling.) In addition to the Bible, Alexandra's students read a number of explanatory religious texts, including, in Alexis's case, Gogol's Meditations on the Divine Liturgy.

From eleven to noon, the tsar and children, usually accompanied by Gilliard, went out into the small courtyard for exercise. Nicholas, deprived of long walks, complained to Kobylinsky, who had tree trunks brought into the side yard. Thereafter, Nicholas and Gilliard, working with a two-man saw, cut wood for fireplaces and for heating water for baths. At one o'clock, the family assembled downstairs for lunch, although Alexandra usually ate in her room. After lunch, the tsarevich lay on a sofa while Gilliard read to him. At two, when the weather permitted, father and children went out again. While the tsar walked back and forth with his fast military step, his daughters hurried to keep up. At four-thirty, tea was served, after which the children's lessons resumed until six-thirty. Dinner at seven-thirty was followed by a gathering in the large hall for coffee or tea.

It soon became routine for the suite and the tutors to spend the evening with the family. Alexandra described the group in her diary as “we 7 [the imperial family], Nastinka [Countess Hendrikova], Trina [Schneider], Tatishchev, Valia [Dolgoruky], Mr. Gilliard, Mr. Gibbs, Dr. Botkin, [and] Dr. Derevenko.” When the large hall became too cold, everyone took refuge in the imperial couple's drawing room, the warmest room in the house. Nicholas usually read aloud while Alexandra lay on a couch and did embroidery. Card games followed, often bezique, a version of pinochle. At nine, Alexis was sent to bed. At ten, his sisters followed, while the rest of the party remained together, sometimes until midnight.

It was Alexandra, sitting upstairs most of the day, who felt most acutely the passage of time and the change in their circumstances. She was aging rapidly (she was only forty-five), and her hair was gray. “I have grown quite thin. My gowns are like sacks,” she wrote to Anna Vyrubova. “I read much and live in the past which is so full of memories. I sow [sew], embroider and knit with glasses because my eyes have become too weak to do without them.” With her daughters, she made presents for Christmas: knitting woolen waistcoats for the suite and servants, painting ribbons for bookmarks, and making stockings for Alexis. “His are full of holes,” she wrote. “I make everything now. Father's trousers are torn and darned; the girls' under linen in rags.”

Alone in the house while the others were outside, Alexandra played the piano or sat on her balcony in the sunshine. “I can see all around me churches and hills, the lovely world. [There are] many churches around so we can always hear bells ringing.” Sometimes, closing her eyes, she dreamed of English gardens. Mail still arrived with letters and packages from people far away: from Anna Vyrubova and others in Petrograd; from Nicholas's mother, dowager empress Marie, and his sisters Grand Duchesses Xenia and Olga in the Crimea. In January, as her children, one by one, succumbed to German measles, Alexandra again displayed her talent for nursing. And the prison regime still permitted her to receive medical help for herself: in the autumn of 1917, Dr. Kostrinsky, the former family dentist, arrived from the Crimea and devoted ten days to the empress's teeth. During the winter a local oculist came and supplied her with new eyeglasses.

Confinement bore most heavily on Alexandra in the form of denial of daily visits to church. Although a priest, a deacon, and nuns often came for evening prayer services in a corner of the downstairs drawing room arranged with icons and lamps, the absence of a consecrated altar made it impossible to hold mass. “We are not allowed to go to church on account of some kind of disturbance,” Alexandra wrote Anna Vyrubova. “Nevertheless, church draws me irresistibly.”

In spite of everything, Alexandra still considered herself Russia's empress. “When I sit in the window, the people bow to me if there are no guards present,” she said. In these signs of respect, she found a continuing summons to duty. “I feel old, oh, so old, but I am still the mother of this country and I suffer its pains as my own child's pains and I love it in spite of all its sins and horrors … although Russia's black ingratitude to the emperor breaks my heart.” And later, “The strange thing about the Russian character is that it can so suddenly change to evil, cruelty and unreason and can as suddenly change back again…. Russians are in reality big, ignorant children.” The real reward, Alexandra believed, would come in another world. “One by one, all earthly things slip away, houses and possessions ruined, friends vanished. One lives from day to day. But God is in all, and nature never changes…. The more we suffer here, the fairer it will be on that other shore where so many dear ones await us.”

Vyrubova, Memories, 313.

Not everyone in the Governor's House shared Alexandra's exalted fatalism. Her daughters—active, healthy young women between sixteen and twenty-two—were bored. “We often sit in the windows looking at the people passing,” Anastasia wrote to Anna Vyrubova, “and this gives us distraction.”

Vyrubova, Memories, 309.

To enliven the long Siberian evenings, Gilliard and Gibbs proposed staging amateur Sunday evening theatricals made up of one-act plays in French, English, and Russian. A seven-week series began on 27 January with Les Deux Timides, a thirty-minute French play directed by Gilliard with a cast including the tsar, Prince Dolgoruky, Tatiana, and Anastasia. The audience consisted of the remainder of the family and suite, Dr. Botkin, Dr. Derevenko, Dr. Derevenko's son Kolia, and four maids. The following Sunday, Gilliard appeared, supported by Tatiana and Alexis, in a skit entitled A La Porte. Then came La Bête Noire with Tatishchev, Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Countess Hendrikova. On 17 February, Gibbs took his turn, directing an English play entitled Packing Up, acted by Anastasia, Marie, and Alexis. Alexandra immensely enjoyed it. “Awfully amusing & really well and funnily given,” she wrote in her diary; in fact, Gilliard reported, the empress had laughed so hard that she almost fell out of her chair. The weekly performances continued through 10 March with more plays in English and French and one in Russian, The Bear by Chekhov, in which Nicholas again appeared on stage. Thereafter, Lent brought these evenings of distraction to a close.

Meanwhile far away, the momentum of the revolution was accelerating. In November 1917, the Kerensky government had been overthrown by a Bolshevik coup d'état. At first, Nicholas, attempting to follow events in his newspapers, could not believe that Lenin and Trotsky posed any serious danger. They seemed to him to be a pair of blackguards, unsavory clowns, and—probably—traitors in the pay of Germany. When they suddenly vaulted to power, Nicholas was appalled. “For the first time, I heard the tsar regret his abdication,” wrote Gilliard. “It now gave him pain to see that his renunciation had been in vain and that by his departure in the interests of his country he had in reality done her an ill turn. This idea was to haunt him more and more.”

Gilliard, Thirteen Years, 243.

Until January 1918, the changes in Petrograd and Moscow had little impact on distant Tobolsk. Commissar Vasily Pankratov, whom the tsarist regime had held in solitary confinement for fifteen years, was content to keep the prisoners restricted to the Governor's House; how they spent their days did not concern him. Colonel Kobylinsky, who commanded the soldiers, continued to balance keeping the prisoners from escaping and guarding them from harm. In mid-January, however, some of the soldiers became increasingly hostile and began to encroach on Kobylinsky's authority. An elected Soldier's Committee decided, by a narrow majority, that Nicholas could no longer be permitted to wear an officer's epaulettes. “At first it seemed as though the Czar would refuse” to comply, wrote Gilliard, “but, after exchanging a look and a few words with the Czarina, he recovered his self-control and yielded for the sake of his family.”

Gilliard, Thirteen Years, 252.

Ten days later, on orders from Moscow, Commissar Pankratov was dismissed, and in mid-February most of the original veteran soldiers of the guard were demobilized and ordered to return home. The replacement soldiers dispatched to Tobolsk tended to be younger men who were more affected by revolutionary sentiments.

On 27 February, Kobylinsky received a telegram declaring that, as of 1 March, “Nicholas Romanov and his family must be put on soldiers' rations and that each member of the family will receive 600 rubles per month drawn from the interest of their personal estate.” Nicholas asked Gilliard, Tatishchev, and Dolgoruky to do accounts and draw up a budget. The little committee looked for economies and recommended that ten servants be let go and that butter and coffee be excluded from the table. Alexandra also took an interest in the matter and, along with Tatiana and Marie, went over the accounts with Gilliard.

Through February, the newspapers were filled with reports of peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk between Bolshevik Russia and Imperial Germany. Nicholas regarded this prospect with grief and shame; he called it “a disgrace” and “suicide for Russia.” A year before, on leaving Army Headquarters after his abdication, he had said to the British military attaché, Maj. Gen. Sir John Hanbury-Williams, “Remember, nothing matters but beating Germany.” Hearing a rumor that the treaty included a clause demanding that the tsar and the imperial family be handed over to Germany without harm, Nicholas called it “either a maneuver to discredit me or an insult.” Defiantly, Alexandra added, “They [the Germans] must never dare to attempt any conversations with Father [Nicholas] or Mother [herself]…. After what they have done to the tsar, I would rather die in Russia than be saved by the Germans.”

Gilliard, Thirteen Years, 257.

On 3 March, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed. Bolshevik Russia withdrew from the war, and the German army occupied all of Poland and one-third of European Russia.

That same month, sitting on her balcony in the early spring sunshine, sometimes wearing only a thin blouse and a silk jacket, Alexandra quietly began to hope. With the approach of Easter, she began to believe that some miraculous resurrection would come to Russia. “God will not leave it like this,” she wrote to Anna Vyrubova. “He will send wisdom and save Russia, I am sure…. The nation is strong and young and soft as wax. Just now it is in bad hands and darkness and anarchy reign. But the King of Glory will come and will save, strengthen and give wisdom to the people who are now deceived.”

This deliverance was not at hand. Instead, an old personal enemy rose up to smite Alexandra. Alexis had been relatively well during the autumn and winter; there were swellings in his knees and arms, but not much pain or incapacitation. For the tsarevich, the winter weather and family coziness had been exhilarating. “Today there are 29 degrees of frost, a strong wind and sunshine,” he wrote to Anna Vyrubova. “We walked and I went on skis in the yard.” Subsequently, he strained a ligament behind his left knee, but the tsaritsa reported no complications. At the end of January, he hurt his foot and this time suffered serious pain. As always, Alexandra remained with him day and night, having lunch and dinner by his bed. Alexis had a single playmate in Tobolsk, Kolia Derevenko, the son of his doctor, who had come to Siberia with his father, mother, and grandmother. In January, Kolia's visits became more frequent; often he arrived for tea and stayed for dinner. Within a week, Alexis was better. At the end of February, he hurt his toe, but that episode also passed quickly.

The worst blow occurred near the middle of April. On 12 April Alexandra wrote in her diary: “Baby stays in bed as fr. coughing so hard has a slight hemorrhage in the abdom.” The hemorrhage worsened. The following day, the tsarevich suffered severely, vomiting repeatedly and sleeping only twenty minutes at a time. On 14 April, she recorded that he had “every half-hour very strong cramp-like pains.” Alexandra remained with him throughout the day; Gilliard and others stayed with him at night. He began to improve; then, a week after the first attack, “far stronger pains today, only slept 20 m. in the day, no appetite, such suffering. Spent all day with him.”

In a letter, Alexandra gave a more complete account to Vyrubova: “Sunbeam [Alexis] has been ill for the past week. I don't know whether coughing brought on the attack or whether he pushed up something heavy but he had an awful internal hemorrhage and suffered fearfully. He is better now but sleeps badly. The pains … have not entirely ceased. He is frightfully thin and yellow…. Yesterday he began to eat a little. The child has to lie on his back and he gets so tired. I sit all day beside him holding his aching legs and I have grown almost as thin as he…. Yesterday for the first time he talked with us and even played cards. He is frightfully thin with enormous eyes…. He likes to be read to, eats little. I am with him the whole day. Tatiana and M. Gilliard relieving me at intervals. M. Gilliard reads to him tirelessly.”

On Monday 22 April, having first recorded that Alexis still was “terribly pale & thin,” Alexandra noted in her diary that “more soldiers on foot & on horseback” were arriving almost daily in Tobolsk. It was impossible for her to know the importance of these arrivals, and that, as a result, she soon would be leaving her son behind for nearly a month. The reason was that Yakov Sverdlov, one of Lenin's senior lieutenants, had ordered Vasily Vasilevich Yakovlev to bring the tsar to Moscow. On 22 April, Yakovlev arrived in Tobolsk with 150 horsemen, as well as a private telegraph operator through whom he communicated directly with the Kremlin.

From the beginning an air of mystery attended this new commissar. On his first evening in Tobolsk, he had tea with the tsar and the tsaritsa but said nothing about his mission. He was around thirty-two years old, tall and muscular, with jet black hair. Alexandra wrote that he gave the “impression of an intelligent highly nervous workman [or] engineer.” She and Nicholas further noted that, although Yakovlev was dressed as an ordinary sailor, he seemed to display a more cultivated background: his language was correct; he addressed Nicholas as “Your Majesty” and greeted Gilliard by saying “Bonjour, Monsieur.” His hands were clean and his fingers long and slim.

Next morning, Yakovlev revealed his mission. He showed Kobylinsky his authorization and declared that any opposition by Kobylinsky or his soldiers meant instant death. Kobylinsky took Yakovlev to see Nicholas and Alexis. The tsarevich was lying in bed, his leg still badly drawn up from his recent hemorrhage. Later in the day, Yakovlev returned with an army doctor who assured Yakovlev that the boy was seriously ill and could not be moved.

On the morning of 25 March, Yakovlev discussed his dilemma with Kobylinsky. Originally, he had been assigned by the Central Executive Committee to bring the entire imperial family to Moscow. His discovery that the tsarevich was seriously ill had forced a reconsideration. He had communicated with Moscow. “Now, I have received an order to leave the family in Tobolsk and only to take the emperor away.” He asked to see the tsar as soon as possible.

Kobylinsky quoted in Wilton, Last Days, 205.

“After lunch at two o'clock,” said Kobylinsky, “Yakovlev and I entered the hall. The emperor and empress stood in the middle of the hall and Yakovlev stopped a little distance from them and bowed. Then he said, ‘I must tell you that I am the Special Representative of the Moscow Central Executive Committee and my mission is to take all your family away from Tobolsk, but as your son is ill, I have received a second order which says that you alone must leave. The emperor replied, ‘I refuse to go.’’ Hearing this, Yakovlev said, ‘I beg you not to refuse. I am compelled to execute the order. In case of your refusal, I must take you by force or I must resign my position. In the latter case, the Committee would probably send a far less scrupulous man to replace me. Be calm. I am responsible with my life for your safety. If you do not want to go alone, you can take with you any people you wish. Be ready, we are leaving tomorrow [morning] at four o'clock.’”

Kobylinsky quoted in Wilton, Last Days, 205.

Yakovlev bowed again, first to the tsar, then to the empress, and left. As soon as he was gone, Nicholas summoned Kobylinsky and asked where he thought Yakovlev intended to take him. Kobylinsky did not know but said that Yakovlev had mentioned that the journey would take four or five days; therefore, he assumed the destination was Moscow. Nicholas nodded and, turning to Alexandra, said bitterly, “They want to force me to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. But I would rather cut off my right hand than sign such a treaty.” The empress agreed and, grimly remembering the circumstances of the abdication, declared emotionally, “I shall also go. If I am not there, they will force him to do something in exactly the same way they did before.”

Kobylinsky quoted in Wilton, Last Days, 206.

The news spread quickly through the house. Tatiana, in tears, knocked at Gilliard's door and asked him to come to her mother. The empress, greatly upset, told the tutor that the tsar was being taken the next morning and explained her own painful dilemma: “The commissar says that no harm will come to the tsar and that if anyone wishes to accompany him, there will be no objection. I cannot let the tsar go alone. They want to separate him from his family as they did before. They're going to try to force his hand by making him anxious about his family. The tsar is necessary to them; they feel that he alone represents Russia. Together, we shall be in a better position to resist them and I ought to be at his side in the time of trial. But the boy is still so ill. Suppose some complication sets in. Oh, God, what ghastly torture! For the first time in my life, I don't know what to do. I've always felt inspired whenever I had to make a decision and now I can't think. God won't allow the tsar's departure; it can't, it must not be.”

Gilliard, Thirteen Years, 260.

Tatiana, watching her mother, urged her to make a decision. “But, Mother,” she said, “if Father has to go whatever we say, something must be decided.”

Gilliard, Thirteen Years, 261.

Gilliard suggested that if she went with the tsar, he and the others would take excellent care of Alexis. He pointed out that the tsarevich was over the worst of the crisis.

“Her Majesty,” he wrote, “was obviously tortured by indecision; she paced up and down the room and went on talking to herself rather than to us. At last she came up to me and said, ‘Yes, that will be best. I'll go with the tsar. I shall trust Alexis to you.’ A moment later the tsar came in. The Empress walked toward him saying, ‘It's all settled. I'll go with you and Marie will come too.’”

Gilliard, Thirteen Years, 261.

In addition, Prince Dolgoruky, Dr. Botkin, the maid Anna Demidova, and the manservant Ivan Sednyov were to go with the imperial couple.

Meanwhile, Alexis was lying upstairs awaiting the visit his mother had promised to make after lunch. When she did not appear, he began to call, “Mama! Mama!” His shouts rang through the house even as Nicholas and Alexandra were talking to Yakovlev. When Alexandra still did not come, Alexis became frightened. Between four and five, she quietly came into his bedroom and explained to him that she and his father were leaving that night.

The entire family spent the rest of the afternoon and evening beside Alexis's bed. The empress prayed. At ten-thirty p.m. the suite came to join them for evening tea. They found Alexandra sitting on a sofa surrounded by her daughters, their faces swollen from crying. Nicholas and Alexandra were calm. At eleven-thirty they came downstairs to say good-bye to the servants. Nicholas embraced every man; Alexandra, every woman.

From the Kornilov house across the street, watchers saw the Governor's House ablaze with lights throughout the night. Near dawn, the clatter of horses and the creak of carriages signaled Yakovlev's arrival. The vehicles, which had to carry the party across two hundred miles of melting snow and mud to Tiumen, were crude baskets on wheels, more cart than carriage, lacking both springs and seats. Only one had a roof; in this, a mattress was placed for the empress to lie on.

When the family came downstairs, Alexandra, seeing Gilliard, begged him to go back up and stay with Alexis. The tutor went up to the boy's room and found him lying in bed, his face to the wall, weeping. After the cavalcade had left, Gilliard, sitting beside Alexis on the tsarevich's bed, heard Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia climb slowly up the stairs and pass, sobbing, to their room.

Near the center of Ekaterinburg, a successful merchant named N. N. Ipatiev had, around 1900, constructed a handsome, two-story house of white brick and heavy stone. The exterior of the house was designed in the style of old Muscovy with a carved façade and elaborate cornices. Behind these classical features, however, Ipatiev had greatly improved on the austere comforts of the old boyars (Muscovite noblemen) by equipping his house with modern plumbing and electric lights. Although Alexandra, on first arriving, described Ipatiev's house as “small,” she saw it from the perspective of one accustomed to imperial palaces; in fact, the house possessed twenty-one rooms. The main rooms where Ipatiev and his family lived and received were on the second floor. Below, built into a hill, the lower story was made up of some rooms at street level and other rooms, almost cellars, half-buried in the earth.

Near the end of April 1918, the Ural Soviet abruptly ordered Ipatiev to leave his house. As he was departing, workmen began erecting a board fence fourteen feet high, enclosing the house and the small garden behind. Nicholas, Alexandra, and Marie entered Ipatiev's house on 30 April. Alexandra's diary describes the six-hour wait in the railway yard while Yakovlev negotiated the delivery of his prisoners to the Ural Soviet, Prince Dolgoruky's separation from the family (he was imprisoned and, later that summer, shot), the trip in an open motorcar followed by a truckload of heavily armed soldiers through back streets of the city, a late lunch of soldier's rations in the form of a bowl of borscht brought from a local hotel, and, eventually, after Nicholas had read aloud from the Bible, the end of their first day in the house.

They arrived at the Ipatiev house on Tuesday of Passion Week, and, despite their circumstances, the prisoners immediately began preparing for Easter, the holiest day in the Orthodox calendar. Nicholas read aloud from the book of Job, his patron saint. On Holy Thursday, he and Dr. Botkin took turns reading aloud the story of Christ's Passion from the four gospels. On Saturday night, a priest and deacon were permitted to come to perform the traditional Orthodox midnight service, ending in the proclamation by the priest, “Christ is risen!” and the response of the worshippers, “He is risen, indeed!”

Biblical stories of suffering and Calvary had a growing significance inside the Ipatiev house. Upon arriving, Alexandra noticed that the guards were new. In fact, the Ipatiev house now had two distinct sets of guards. On the street outside the fence, the guard consisted of ordinary Red soldiers. Inside the house, the guards were special Bolshevik zealots picked from revolutionary Ekaterinburg factory workers. The leader of this inner guard, Alexander Avdeev, was a tall, thin-faced man who habitually referred to the former tsar as “Nicholas the Blood Drinker.” A few months before, Avdeev had personally arrested the owner of the factory in which he worked. He hated the tsar and told his men that Nicholas had forced Russia into war solely in order to spill the blood of a greater number of workers. Avdeev drank heavily, went beltless and unbuttoned, and encouraged his followers to do likewise. On the excuse of examining the family's baggage, Avdeev and his men thoroughly pilfered the family's baggage stored in a downstairs room.

At first, the weather exhilarated Alexandra. In May, Siberia was turning to spring and the empress was joyful that the long winter seemed over. “Glorious, so warm & sunny,” she wrote on 30 April, the day they entered the Ipatiev house. Thereafter: “Beautiful, warm, sunny, but windy … glorious bright sunshine … sunshine and clouds change about … beautiful warm morning … sat in the garden … warm wind…. ” Spring was fickle, however, and on 25 May she reported that it was “snowing hard” and the next day that “everything [was] covered by snow.”

After the beginning of their third week, it became difficult for the prisoners to see the snow on the ground from inside the house. On 15 May, Alexandra reported, an old man had painted over their windows from the outside with white paint so that they could only see the sky; the effect from inside was that they were in a thick fog. The following day, another man painted over the outside thermometer so that they were unable to read the temperature. Four days later, the commander of the guard scratched off the paint so that they could again see how warm or cold it was.

For the first eight days in Ekaterinburg, Alexandra had no word from her children in Tobolsk. She wrote to them daily, sometimes twice a day; in fact, thirty-four times in twenty-three days. On 8 May, a telegram from Tobolsk told her that all was well. One of the empress's letters advised “disposal of the medicines as had been agreed.” By prearranged code, “medicines” meant jewels. The fortune in gems brought from Tsarskoe Selo had been left behind in Tobolsk because Nicholas and Alexandra, given only a few hours' notice by Yakovlev, had not had time to hide them on their own persons. Receiving this message, the three daughters in Tobolsk began sewing diamonds, emeralds, amethysts, and pearls into the lining of their underclothing and hats. Removing the buttons from their woolen dresses, they made new buttons by taking jewels, wrapping them in black silk, and sewing them onto the clothes.

On 19 May, Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, and Alexis departed Tobolsk. The river ice had melted and the Rus, the same steamer which had carried the Romanovs up the river the summer before, brought the children and the remainder of the suite and servants back downstream to Tiumen, where they were put aboard a train for Ekaterinburg. Once again, when the train arrived at the station in Ekaterinburg, there was a selection process: the four children, Nagorny, the cook Kharitonov, a manservant Trupp, and a kitchen boy Leonid Sednyov (a nephew of the servant who had arrived earlier with the tsar) were sent to the Ipatiev house; General Tatishchev, Countess Hendrikova, Trina Schneider, all Russians, were arrested (and later shot); the two foreign tutors, Gilliard and Gibbs, were allowed to go wherever they wished. In the Ipatiev house, the children's arrival brought a burst of happiness and a shuffle of rearrangements. There were not enough beds, and that night Marie slept with her sisters on cloaks and cushions on the floor so that Alexis could have her bed. Kharitonov slept on a sofa, and little Leonid Sednyov slept across two chairs.

Thereafter, the tsar, his family, and members of their household were confined to five upstairs rooms. Nicholas and Alexandra had the corner bedroom, furnished with pale yellow wallpaper, two beds, a couch, two tables, a lamp, a bookcase, and a single armoire which held their clothing. Their four daughters and thirteen-year-old son shared another room (eventually, Alexis's bed was moved into his parents' room). The maid, Anna Demidova, slept in the dining room, Dr. Botkin slept in the salon, and Trupp and Kharitonov were in a large hallway. Two or three armed guards were always present on the main floor with the family, and in order to go to the washroom and toilet, the captives had to walk past these men.

The prisoners settled into a monotonous routine. Every morning the family rose at eight and assembled for morning prayers. Breakfast was black bread and tea. The main meal arrived around two P.M. when soup and cutlets, sent from a local soviet kitchen, were rewarmed and served by Kharitonov. Tea was served at five, supper at eight. Usually, Nicholas read aloud to the family after tea and in the evening; as the electricity was often turned off at night, the family read and played cards by candlelight. Those who wished were permitted to walk in the garden, forty steps in either direction, twice a day: thirty minutes in the morning, thirty minutes in the afternoon.

The family's joy at being reunited was quickly overshadowed by the illness of the tsarevich. The day the children arrived from Tobolsk, Alexandra wrote in her diary: “Baby woke up every hour from pain in his knee, slipped & hurt it when getting into bed. Cannot walk yet, one carries him. [He has] lost 14 pounds since his illness…. Tore sinews in the knee most probably.”

From that day to the end, Alexis's illness dominated his mother's thoughts. Mother and son had most of their meals in her bedroom. The tsarevich's physician, Dr. Derevenko, who again had been permitted to go about freely, was allowed to make occasional visits to his patient. During the seventy-eight days they spent in the Ipatiev house, Derevenko was the only outside person close to the family who was authorized to enter. To make certain that no messages passed by this channel between the prisoners and the outside, the doctor was allowed to come and examine his patient only in the presence of Avdeev. When Avdeev was unable to be present, Derevenko was not permitted to come, no matter how ill the boy was.

At first, the tsarevich slept in a room with the sailor Nagorny, who sat up with him when the boy was in pain. Dr. Botkin then appealed to Avdeev to ask the Ural Soviet that Gilliard be allowed to come to the Ipatiev house to help care for the tsarevich. In response, Avdeev brought four men to look at Alexis. When they left, the appeal was rejected. That night, Botkin sat up part of the night with the boy so that the exhausted Nagorny could sleep.

On 27 May, four days after his arrival in the Ipatiev house, Nagorny was taken away, along with the elder Sednyov. As the tsarevich's caretaker stepped out of the house surrounded by Red Guards, Gilliard, Gibbs, and Dr. Derevenko happened to be walking past in the street. “Nagorny was going to the carriage,” wrote Gilliard. “He was just setting foot on the step … when raising his head, he saw us all there standing motionless a few yards from him. For a few seconds he looked fixedly at us, then without a single gesture that might have betrayed us he took his seat. The carriages were driven off … in the direction of the prison.”

Gilliard, Thirteen Years, 272.

The next day, Alexandra asked Avdeev when they could have Nagorny back. Avdeev replied that he did not know. Alexandra confided to her diary that she feared they would never see either Nagorny or Sednyov again. Her foreboding was well placed: four days later, Nagorny and Sednyov were shot. The family was never told.

Eventually, as the bleeding in Alexis's knee stopped and the fluids were reabsorbed, his pain subsided and his leg began to straighten. When the weather was good, Botkin, Trupp, Kharitonov, or Marie carried him outdoors to sit in the sun. “Wheeled Baby into the garden & we all sat there for an hour,” Alexandra wrote on 18 June. “Very hot, nice lilac bushes & small honeysuckle, quite pretty foliage, but as untidy as ever.”

Most of the time, Alexandra, like Alexis, remained indoors, immobilized. Her head ached, her eyes ached, she felt dizzy. On 31 May, she “remained [the] whole day with shut eyes, head got worse towards the evening.” Unable to walk, she lay in bed or sat in her wheelchair in the pale yellow bedroom and stared at the white-painted windows. When she could, she embroidered, drew, read her Bible, her prayer books, and religious texts. Her daughters took turns caring for her: Marie read to her and washed her hair; Tatiana and Anastasia read to her; Olga stayed indoors with her when the others went out to walk. Alexandra herself found new things to do. On 28 May, she recorded, “I cut Nicholas's hair for the first time”; and on 20 June she cut it again. She worried about Prince Dolgoruky, of whom they had had no news. Surprisingly, some mail and a few newspapers continued to arrive. To Alexandra's delight, her sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth (Ella) sent coffee and chocolate, and the following morning, the empress reported she had had a “great treat, a cup of coffee.” Simultaneously, she learned that Ella had been sent from Moscow to Perm in the Urals. (The night after the annihilation of the imperial family, this other Hessian princess was murdered along with four other Romanovs.)

Unable to go out when he wished, Nicholas paced his room. One warm evening in June, he wrote in his diary, “It was unbearable to sit that way, locked up, and not be in a position to go out into the garden when you wanted and spend a fine evening outside.” Suffering from hemorrhoids, he went to bed for three days in June “since it is more convenient to apply compresses.” After two days and nights, he sat up and the next morning, got up and went outside. “The green is very fine and lush,” he wrote in his diary.

Birthdays were noted, but scarcely celebrated: on 19 May, Nicholas was fifty; on 6 June, Alexandra was forty-six; on 18 June, Anastasia turned seventeen; on 27 June, Marie, nineteen. (On 4 June, Alexandra reported that the new ruler of Russia had exercised his power even over the clock and, to save electricity, put the nation on daylight saving time.) With the passage of time, isolation and physical proximity created a new social entity, and the captives, from tsar and empress to doctor and cook, merged into an extended family. Botkin, now an old friend, sat with Nicholas and his wife after supper to talk and play cards. During the day, when Alexandra and Alexis could not leave the house, Botkin remained inside with them for card games. After Nagorny was removed, Botkin sometimes slept in the room with the tsarevich, and he shared with Nicholas, Trupp, Kharitonov, and even Marie the task of carrying the boy down the stairs and into the garden. On 23 June, Botkin himself became violently ill with colic, requiring an injection of morphine. He remained sick for five days; when he was able to sit up in an armchair, Alexandra sat with him.

June brought summer heat. Sudden thunderstorms with lightning and sheets of rain were followed quickly by bright sunshine and greater heat. On 6 June, Alexandra noted, “Very hot, awfully stuffy in rooms.” The kitchen made things worse: “Very hot, stuffy as no windows open and smells strong of kitchen everywhere,” she reported on 17 June. Four days later, she wrote: “Out in the garden, fearfully hot, sat under the bushes. They have given us…half an hour more for being out. Heat, airlessness in the rooms intense.”

Closed windows made the heat stifling. In order to keep the prisoners from escaping or signaling to the outside, all of the white-painted double windows in the family rooms were kept shut by order of the Ural Soviet. The tsar set himself to overturn this decree. “Today at tea, six men walked in, probably from the Regional Soviet, to see which windows to open,” he wrote in his diary on 22 June. “The resolution of this issue has gone on for nearly two weeks! Often various men have come and silently in our presence examined the windows.” On this issue, Nicholas II triumphed. “Two of the soldiers came and took out one window in our room,” Alexandra wrote on 23 June. “Such joy, delicious air at last and one window no longer whitewashed.” The prisoners crowded to the open window to inhale fresh air. “The air in the room became clean, and by evening, cool.” “The fragrance from all the town's gardens is amazing,” her husband said.

Nicholas's diary, quoted in Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 317.

Beyond the Ipatiev house—beyond Ekaterinburg—Russia was convulsed by civil war. In numerous regions, the Bolsheviks, who had moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow, confronted various military groups of anti-Bolsheviks, none of whom were specifically monarchist. In Siberia, in the early summer of 1918, the anti-Bolshevik Whites were in the ascendant and had seized several cities and towns not far from Ekaterinburg. In Ekaterinburg, the Ural Soviet, aware of its own deteriorating position, worried about what to do with the Romanovs. On 13 June, Avdeev suddenly told the family that, because of a threat by “anarchists,” they must pack their belongings and be ready to leave. They spent the afternoon and evening packing, only to be told at midnight that the anarchists had been captured and they would not be leaving. Avdeev, who was drunk, also promised that Nagorny and Sednyov, both dead, would be returned to them within three days.

In the sunlight, Alexis sat quietly while Nicholas and his daughters walked under the eyes of the guards. In time, the guards' impressions of the family began to change. “I have still an impression of them that will always remain in my soul,” said Anatoly Yakimov, a member of the guard later captured by the Whites.

On 4 July, a “lovely morning, nice air, not too hot,” the president of the Ural Soviet, Aleksandr Beloborodov, appeared and abruptly dismissed Avdeev and his factory-worker guards. A new commandant, whom Nicholas called “the dark gentleman,” took control of the Ipatiev house. This man, who had black eyes, black hair, and a black beard and who wore a black leather jacket, was the Chekist Yakov Yurovsky. At first, Yurovsky's arrival heralded minor improvements in the prisoners' situation. The new Cheka guards were better disciplined, and petty harassment of the grand duchesses on their way to the toilet ceased. Yurovsky collected and made lists of the jewelry and gold ornaments worn by the family, returned some of the objects pilfered by Avdeev's men, sealed everything in packets, and left them for the family to keep. Within a few days, however, when Yurovsky's men began to cover the only open window with a heavy iron railing, Alexandra described him as “harsh,” and Nicholas said of him, “We like this man less and less.”

Ironically, on the day Yurovsky arrived, Alexandra recorded that Alexis was getting better: “Baby eats well & is getting heavy for the others to carry cruel they wont give us Nagorny back again. He moves his leg easier.” On 13 July, Alexandra noted that, “At 6:30, Baby had his first bath since Tobolsk. He managed to get in & out alone, climbs also in & out of bed, but can only stand on one foot as yet.” This was a glimmer of hope, but the pervading atmosphere was one of growing despair. The change was noted by an Ekaterinburg priest who had been permitted once before to enter the Ipatiev house to perform a service. Father Storozhev had come on 23 June, and Yurovsky had agreed that he could come again. On his first visit, he had noted that although Alexandra seemed tired and ill, Nicholas and his daughters were in good spirits. Alexis, unable to walk, had been carried to the service on a cot. He seemed happy when Father Storozhev approached with the crucifix, the boy looked up at him with bright, curious eyes. On Sunday, 14 July, when the priest returned, the change was marked. The priest found the family waiting together, all of them anxious and depressed. Alexis was sitting in his mother's wheelchair. Alexandra, wearing a lilac dress, sat beside him. Nicholas, in khaki field shirt, trousers, and boots, was standing with his daughters, who were dressed in white blouses and dark skirts. When the deacon sang the prayer “At Rest With the Saints,” the family kneeled and one of the girls began to weep. This time when the crucifix was brought to Alexis, the priest found him pale and thin, lying in a white nightshirt with a blanket covering him up to the waist. His eyes, looking up, were clear, but sad and distracted.

By the middle of July, a White Russian army, bolstered by thousands of anti-Bolshevik Czechs, was approaching Ekaterinburg. The prisoners knew that something was impending; on the twelfth Alexandra reported hearing infantry, cavalry, and artillery passing in front of the house; on the thirteenth she heard three revolver shots; on the fifteenth, artillery and more revolver shots.

Tuesday, July 16, the family's last day, began as a gray morning which brightened into sunshine. The family gathered, prayed together, and had tea. Yurovsky arrived to make his inspection and, as special treat, brought fresh eggs and milk for Alexis, who had a cold. When Yurovsky took the kitchen boy, Leonid Sednyov, away from the house, Alexandra wondered whether they would ever see him again. In mid-morning, Nicholas, Olga, Marie, and Anastasia went out for half an hour while Tatiana stayed behind to read to her mother from the prophets Amos and Obadiah. At four in the afternoon, Nicholas and his four daughters walked again in the garden. At eight, the family had supper, prayed, and then separated; Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia went to their room; Alexis went to bed in his parents' room. Alexandra stayed up to play bezique with Nicholas. At ten-thirty, she recorded the day's events in her diary. Her last entry was the temperature. It was cool, she wrote: “15 degrees” (58 degrees F.). Then, for the last time, she closed her diary, lay down, and went to sleep.

As it was for many young women of noble or even middle-class birth in the late nineteenth century, keeping her diary became early on for Alexandra a daily habit of pinpointing herself in time and space along a number line that extended from yesterday to today to tomorrow, thus producing a true log of her individual reality and existence. The uninscribed pages of her 1918 diary which follow the family's execution on the night of 16–17 July 1918, with the dates she had clearly written in at the top, offer their own mute pathos and ironic witness to Alexandra's fate, that of her family, and that of the imperial world she represented.

Her earliest entries are written in English with an admixture of German, which appears less and less frequently after her marriage. She is always scrupulous in noting her place of residence, the time of day at which she writes her entry, and the correlation of numerical date with day of the week. In the first entry for 1891, 1 January is a Thursday. She is in Darmstadt. She writes her diary entry at 8:07 p.m. She goes with Papa at 8:00 a.m. to the Stadtkirche. She notes the family members with whom she celebrates the new year. The only personal perception she offers is that the actors in the performance of Shakespeare's Tempest that she attended “acted well.” Then came supper and “To bed.”

Her days followed one another methodically with a regularity integral to the calm procession of imperial time. It was not the time of shopkeepers, laborers, or those busied by the hurly-burly of this world. Her world had the almost clock-like precision of a courtly dance. What to us may seem its boring, merely empty repetitiveness was the sign of its tranquil, unhurried continuity: the ritual of her daily life. Page after page of the 1918 diary shows her lunching at twelve or one, having tea at four-thirty, resting at six, usually dining with the children at eight, and at nine playing bezique with Nicholas, who often read to the family. “Dined with Baby,” “Nicholas read to us,” and “Rested & wrote” are phrases that recur in these pages like a litany, the basso continuo of a life whose tragic drama is being played out in higher registers.

At the time of her engagement to Nicholas in 1894, Alexandra expressed an idiosyncratic interest in numbers and coded language which continued throughout her life and may help to explain certain important features of her 1918 diary. On 16 April 1894 she writes: “At 5 went to the station, to receive ($$) Ella, Serge, Nicholas, Heidi…. ” Her entry for the following day begins: “After breakfast went to Ella. Sat with Nicky. $$ …. ” Entries of the same sort appear throughout the year.

Attempting an explanation of this code is beyond the scope of this brief essay. It is sufficient to observe that the future empress constructs a private language of numbers, Greek letters, and quasi-algebraic equations. Indirectly this violates the notion that her diary recorded nothing more important than the weather or the minor events of the day. Alexandra's recourse to this private language makes of these thoughts and feelings something “top secret,” the sanctum sanctorum of an emotional experience she could not put into words for herself. Although her letters to trusted friends demonstrate that she was capable of freely and fully articulating her perceptions, her diary suggests a complicated relationship to herself.

Twenty-four years later, in 1918, the same sensibility makes itself felt, though in a modified form. The dates, temperatures, and hours, set down like a numbered code with Germanic exactitude, do not now tell the story of a powerful romantic encounter but rather recount a life-and-death struggle with the transforming power of the Revolution. Whatever Alexandra's reasons for adopting this style of composition, by virtue of it her 1918 diary becomes a secret text. Through the irony of history, this text—whose secrets Alexandra hoped to keep from her Bolshevik captors—was held by them also to be a top-secret text (Sovershenno sekretno) in the Soviet archives for some seventy-five years after her death. Secrets perpetuate secrets.

It had been Alexandra's habit to bring both the moment she awoke and the moment she lay down to sleep into relation with the outside temperature and the temperatures of her sick children. Thus the 1918 diary begins with her notation that it was – 4 degrees (Celsius) on Monday, 1 January, the Feast of the Circumcision. She arises at seven-fifteen. At eight she goes to church. Olga's temperature is 37.3 degrees. Does Alexandra wake up early or late? Is Olga feeling better or not? Is – 4 degrees unseasonably warm or cold? These questions do not concern her here.

Rather, Alexandra's numbers express and organize her world. The empress had long made a practice of assigning a number to each item of correspondence she composed to friends and loved ones. Thus on 2 January she writes in her diary, “Mme. Syroboiarskaia No. 17. Lili [Den]: No. 4.” On 4 (17) May, after a prolonged separation from her children, she writes: “Maria Wrote 22 time to the children.” She likewise often observes not simply the names but the number of her company, as for instance in her 1 January entry, “We 7.” In the same spirit, she notes that 2 January marks the “3rd anniversary of Ania's accident.”

As a frontispiece to the diary, Alexandra wrote out the Cyrillic Old Church Slavonic alphabet. Under each letter she placed its numerical value. She closes the majority of her first one hundred entries with a letter from this sacred alphabet along with its corresponding number, as if to encode her own passage through the mundane cycle of days and hours with a larger mythic and religious journey. She finally abandons this device after the one-hundredth day, 10 (23) April. This was two days before the family is separated and she is forced to accompany Nicholas to Yekaterinburg—the point at which she might well have begun to perceive that some vital connection to the past was irrevocably severed.

Although the Old Church Slavonic alphabet evokes a reverenced tradition, the empress's sense of the present is signaled by an additional number owing to the transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. The new calendar was inaugurated officially by the Bolshevik government on 1 February 1918, yet it had been unofficially in use for some time. The third of January marks Alexandra's first use of the Gregorian calendar in her diaries. But this new dating system is conjoined to the old, which she does not relinquish—a fact of no little symbolic and psychological importance. Each day henceforth bears a double date in the form of a fraction: 3 January, old style, becomes the numerator, and 16 January, new style, becomes the denominator. Alexandra's representation of this double date, as well as her representation of positive and negative indoor and outdoor temperatures by writing numbers above and below a line, graphically suggests her deeper engagement with the question of lines of division, lines of demarcation, thresholds of experience.

As the German-born granddaughter of Queen Victoria, at home in both English and German languages, and then an ardent convert to Russian Orthodoxy, the empress was no stranger to crossing the arbitrary lines of a divided world. But now she depicts daily experience not only in German and English (or English and Russian) but simultaneously and insistently as something defined by two different dates, often two different months, two different hours, both inside and outside temperatures. Her world is one in which she is constantly approaching a threshold—the line or limit graphically represented in her notation of time, temperature, day, and year. This threshold is one she encountered in all her daily tasks, from taking tea to celebrating church holidays. Depicted day after day in the 1918 dairy, this recurrent imposition of the line, the sense of arbitrary division in all her activities, produces the overwhelming impression of a woman living in two worlds—the old and the new, the ancient and the modern, the domestic and the imperial, the sacred and the profane, the quotidian and the apocalyptic—whose most mundane distinctions she scrupulously manages. By contrast, Nicholas is much more inconsistent in his use of the double dating system in his diaries. He adopts it on 1 (14) February but abandons it on 18 (31) March when he reverts again to the old style. Alexandra, it seems, was grounded in both worlds, whereas Nicholas was much more bound to only one.

The day the empress inscribes the new order in her diary, 3 (16) January, is followed exactly six months later on 3 (16) July by her execution, when she crossed another line of demarcation. This was mere chance, of course, but it becomes suggestive when seen in the context of Alexandra's passion for numerological progressions and anniversaries—as if precisely six months were necessary for the moment of her intellectual acceptance of the new calendar to be actualized in her corporeal death.

It was not the mere fact of enforced idleness in Tobolsk and Yekaterinburg that gave such regularity and order to Alexandra's diary. She did not live an eventless or routine life during these last seven months, yet the character of her diaries remains substantially the same from before the Revolution to the time of her confinement in Yekaterinburg. The diary, therefore, cannot be read as simply a “record” of events. Nor is it the product of mere lifelong habit. Rather, through her customary effort of observation and memory Alexandra continually constructed and reconstructed the past form of her life in the face of her present circumstances. It is not personal identity she affirms so much as a transpersonal, symbolic order of well-being and permanence. Did Alexandra simply not wish to recognize the collapse of her world? Or did she encode that perception in this final diary in the same way that she had encoded her 1894 meetings with Nicholas?

The form of her diary is stubbornly maintained throughout this tumultuous period, but it is not merely mechanical. Elements of the diary change over time, but its character does not. She introduces and then discontinues certain habits or routines. Others she revives. After her first entry on 1 January, she does not note the hour she awakens until 14 (27) April, when she journeys to Yekaterinburg, and not again until 23 May (5 June), when she observes that she “got up at 6:30, now 8:30” because of the recent Bolshevik decree instituting daylight saving time. Although virtually every entry contains the time she takes tea, has lunch, goes to sleep, or attends a church service, her concern for Aleksei's suffering or her own physical exhaustion leads to inconsistency. She uses Old Church Slavonic letters and numbers, which she had not previously employed and after a certain point does not return to. We see her introduce the Gregorian calendar even while continuing scrupulously to observe each church holiday.

Alexandra's diary brings the inexorable, predetermined succession of days, anniversaries, hours, and minutes—numbers following one another seemingly without end—into relation with the daily, unpredictable contingencies of the weather, her children's temperatures, and the chaotic events of the Revolution. We see the empress presiding over a world within a world, which is given simple form in her daily observations. In this transparent, almost invisible structure we see her thinking; we come to know the shifts of her mind and the conscious concessions by which she attempts to preserve the spirit of the ancient order in the profane and atheistic new world that declared obsolete the very orthography of that order. As the tsar and his family watched their retainers grow ever fewer, as they burned their letters and saw iron bars secured over their windows, as the daughters sewed their jewels into their corsets, and as the family prepared themselves for a denouement they could neither foresee nor forestall, the 1918 diary remains Alexandra's link to her past, even as it projects a future she could not inhabit. It was a past, however we may wish to judge it, whose character was determined by precisely that sense of order, decorum, and ritual which is the essence of her daily observations.

Therefore, although Alexandra's incessant jottings of time, place, weather, holidays, and anniversaries may seem, at first glance, of little or no importance, they are, upon reflection, what give this little book unique significance as a text. The diary records not only the empress's own day-by-day descent into the maelstrom of revolution and the modern world, but principally her symbolic accommodation of the new and her resistance to the destruction of a traditional order of thought, action, and belief. Her death was a representative death which proved synonymous with the death of the old calendar itself.

Imperial time is swallowed up in revolutionary time, just as the old calendar is displaced by the new. It is possible to trace this in the empress's diary at moments when the exigencies of the imperial world collide painfully with those of the Revolution which has engulfed it. At these points, the staid regularity of the diary gives way to a far less orderly recounting of the course of events. Perceptions, fears, and anxieties press in upon Alexandra on 12 (25) April, when she commits to her diary Commissar Yakovlev's ultimatum that Nicholas must transfer from Tobolsk to some unknown destination: “(if not willing then obliged to use force),” she writes. “I had to decide to stay with ill Baby or accompany him. Settled to accompany him as can be of more need & too risky not knowing where & for what. (we imagine Moscow) Horrible suffering. Marie comes with us, Olga will look after Baby, Tatiana the household & Anastasia will cheer all up.”

Gone here is the precision of her earlier notations about the weather, her time for taking breakfast or lunch, and when she retires for the night. Though these remain preoccupations, the form of the diary now muddles them together with impressions of the world that are breaking fast in upon her. The next day of travel, Friday 13 (26) April—not an insignificant combination for someone numerologically inclined—is recounted in an extended entry in which the ultimate fate of Alexandra and her family seems to make itself indirectly felt. “One does not tell us where we are going,” she complains.

The travel and separation of the family, however temporary, summon up, in Alexandra's hurried account, a sense of the larger transition through which Russia itself is now passing: “Road perfectly atrocious, frozen ground wind, snow, water up to the horses' stomachs, fearfully shaken, pain all over.” At this point, the daybook form of the diary collapses, just as the carriages in which the empress rides lose their wheels, the family loses its cohesion, and Russia itself disintegrates into civil war verging on chaos: “By turn each carriage lost a wheel or something else smashed. Luggage always late.—heart aches, enlarged, wrote to the children through our first coachman.”

Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, and Aleksei do not rejoin their parents until 10 (23) May, after a painful month long separation—Alexandra notes that it was exactly “4 weeks” since they had left Tobolsk. During this first month that she, Nicholas, and Maria spent in Yekaterinburg, the diary resumes its previous regularity. But in the days following the other children's appearance, the diary again loses its shape. The form of Alexandra's entry for 10 (23) May, as much as its content, tells of the confusing intensity of their reunion caused by the illness of the tsarevich and the Bolsheviks' ominous new encroachments on the family's imperial prerogatives. Aleksei “cannot walk yet, one carries him. Lost 14 pounds since his illness.” But then the empress observes: “Saw fr. far in the night great fire burning.” On 13 (26) May, she notes: “Lunch was brought again late.” The house was searched by the Bolshevik guards. The tsarevich's “swelling is a little less. No news of our people.” On 22 May (4 June), Alexandra writes with irritation: “Lenin gave the order that the clocks have to [be] put 2 hours ahead (economy of electricity) so at 10 they told us it was 12.” For Alexandra, time is now completely out of joint.

Hereafter, Alexandra struggles to reimpose the old form of the diary, something that became increasingly difficult as the Romanovs lose more and more control over events. While the imperial family's own personal possessions were being relentlessly inventoried by their Bolshevik captors, down to the bracelets Alexandra could not remove, Alexandra's own efforts to take the measure of all things in her world—the time, the weather, her children's temperatures, the number of gunshots heard in the night—reinvent a powerful symbolic connection to the imperium in which she and Nicholas were believed to be the last intercessors of God on earth. To those sharing the empress's faith, their deaths signified the loss of not merely two absolute monarchs but the world's concrete link to the Divine.

Fate and numbers are often associated. Friday the 13th is unlucky; 7 is lucky. But there is also the Old Testament book of Numbers, whose first chapters are devoted to the counting of the Israelites, and the apocalyptic number 666 of the Antichrist, of which Alexandra would have been keenly aware. We can only speculate on what fascination or compulsion lay behind the numbers so abundant in her private diary. What we do know is that she counted her days and numbered them, even as her days were numbered by forces she could not control or comprehend. The Bolsheviks conceived the Revolution as the consummation of history; Alexandra entered a different apocalyptic time—the “great fire” burning in the night—while observing the days, hours, and minutes as they passed. She recorded the temperature of her children and of the weather. The last notation of her hand was “15 degrees.” Neither Kafka nor Beckett could have memorialized with greater irony the death of the old imperial order or the birth of the new time and space wrought by the Revolution.

The idiosyncrasies of Alexandra's spelling, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization; her use of Arabic numerals for numbers and Old Church Slavonic Cyrillic to number her diary pages; and her heart, cross, and swastika symbols have all been retained. Abbreviations of common words have been retained where they are unlikely to cause misunderstanding (fr. for from, m. for minutes, p.c. for post card, etc.). However, abbreviated proper names have been completed without the use of brackets (N. is Nicholas, Al. is Aleksei, Turg. is Turgenev, etc.). Alexandra “encoded” the names of the correspondents to whom she wrote on a given day at the bottom of that day's diary entry. She often used only a single letter followed by the sequential number of the letter she sent (A. 5 signifies her fifth letter to Anna Vyrubova, for example). Where the editors could identify the correspondents with sufficient certainty, complete names have been substituted for the initials in the entry. Where some doubt remains or a name has eluded identification, it is reproduced as in the original.

Alexandra double-dated the headings of her diary entries in both old and new styles as of 3 January I9I8. Her device for noting the old date (Julian calendar) in the numerator and the new date (Gregorian calendar—adding thirteen days) in the denominator has been reproduced in this volume. Where dates in the notes, glossary, and chronology are double-dated, old style appears first, followed by new style in parentheses. Otherwise, the dates are generally those in use at the time: old style for dates before February 1918, new style for dates following 1 (14) February 1918 (the official adoption of the Gregorian calendar).

Alexandra's use of fractions to indicate partial hours (e.g., 4 3/4) has been standardized (4:45).

All temperatures noted by Alexandra are in degrees Celsius. Her use of an overbar or underbar to indicate air temperatures below or above zero, respectively, has been rendered by the familiar symbols (e.g., –25°).

With the exception of the Introduction, Russian names of people, places, and institutions have been transliterated according to a modified Library of Congress system—without soft signs and with a simplified handling of vowels. For some people with well-known names in English (for example, Nicholas and Alexandra), the common English name is used. Because the regular Library of Congress system is familiar to researchers, it is used for source citations and for Russian terms and phrases.

In the notes, all sources and documents cited have been translated from the Russian, with the exception of Pierre Gilliard's diary, which is quoted (with certain corrections) from F. Appleby Holt's translation from the French (New York, 1921). In rendering Russian Orthodox liturgical terms in English, the editors have consulted the Liturgical Calendar and Rubrics for the Year 1997 (St. Tikhon's Seminary Press).