Priya’s Reviews > Nicholas and Alexandra > Status Update

Three hundred and four years after a shy sixteen-year-old boy had reluctantly accepted the throne at the plea of the Russian nation, his descendant, also named Michael, had given it back. The Romanov dynasty was swept away.

“He was never sincere; not a moment,” Nicholas told Paléologue, speaking of the Kaiser. “In the end he was hopelessly entangled in the net of his own perfidy and lies….

In 1913, the gilded world of the European aristocracy seemed at its zenith. In fact, fashionable society, like the rest of mankind, stood one step from the abyss. Within five years, three European empires would be defeated, three emperors would die or flee into exile and the ancient dynasties of Hapsburg, Hohenzollern and Romanov would crumble. Twenty million men, aristocrats and commoners alike, would perish.

Stolypin, meanwhile, was beginning to weary in office. Attempting to overturn the traditions of centuries in five years was more than even so robust a figure as Stolypin could manage. His health waned in repeated attacks of grippe and he became constantly irritable. For a man who preferred clear, decisive action, working with a sovereign who believed in fatalism and mysticism was frustrating.

The fall of Imperial Russia was a titanic drama in which the individual destinies of thousands of men all played their part. Yet in making allowance for the impersonal flow of historic forces, in counting the contributions made by ministers, peasants and revolutionaries, it still remains essential to understand the character and motivation of the central figures.

Alexandra suppressed her own small, pathetic happiness. “Such was my entry into Russia,” she added later. “Our marriage seemed to me a mere continuation of the masses for the dead with this difference, that now I wore a white dress instead of a black.”

Once at dinner the Austrian ambassador hinted at trouble in the Balkans and mentioned ominously that Austria might mobilize two or three army corps. Alexander III quietly picked up a silver fork, twisted it into a knot and tossed it onto the plate of the Austrian ambassador. “That,” he said calmly, “is what I am going to do to your two or three army corps.

Winter was a great leveler. Tsar, minister, priest and factory worker all layered themselves in clothing and, upon coming in from the street, headed straight to the bubbling samovar for a glass of hot tea.