Nicholas had longed to model himself after his favorite tsar, Alexei I, Alexei the Peaceful. But by the time he returned to Petersburg, the people were already calling him Nicholas the Bloody.
Have you seen the coronation Easter egg Fabergé made that year for the wife of Nicholas the Bloody? Its golden shell, wrapped in gold netting, opens up, and a miniature of a gold and red imperial coach slides gently from its nest of gold velvet. Fabergé made fifty-six Easter eggs for the tsars before he fled Russia in 1918. Alexander III ordered one each year for his empress beginning in 1884, and after his death, Niki ordered two a year, one for his mother and one for Alix, each egg reflective of a momentous occasion of the reign—a coronation, the canonizing of a saint, the completion of the Trans-Siberian railroad, the Romanov tercentenary—and if there was no great event to commemorate, then an egg full of whimsy and delight. The Easter egg of 1916 during the war looked like death—the gray steel shell, a grenade more than an egg, was elevated by four bullet casings, the sheen of the egg embellished with the double headed eagle in gold, the tsar’s miter-shaped crown fixed at the top where the grenade’s pin sat. Inside, a miniature portrait on a miniature easel depicted the tsar and the tsarevich at the front consulting with the commanders of the army, a bleak leafless tree in the background, the sky gray and cloudy. The Easter eggs Fabergé made for the year 1917 were undeliverable: by then Niki had abdicated and was imprisoned with his family at Tsarskoye Selo. But Fabergé still sent him the bill.
I know I dream of a Russia that has disappeared, a Russia that exists not / On the map, nor yet in space, as wrote Marina Tsvetaeva in exile here, a prominent poet in Moscow, but who, like me, lost both her country and her audience after the revolution. I saw her last at the funeral for Prince Volkonsky in 1938 at the Orthodox Church on the rue François Gérard, standing off to the side, speaking to no one, no one speaking to her. She had rallied behind the Provisional Government that deposed the tsar and no monarchist in Paris would ever forget it. After that, she returned with her family to Moscow. There were those of us who did this—who found our loss of purpose and place here so great that it overpowered our fear and distrust of a Russia under Lenin or Stalin. Yes, she returned, as did others—the composer Prokofiev, the writer Gorky—Stalin loved those artists, gave them apartments and dachas and prizes: the Stalin Prize! But Tsvetaeva found herself a pariah there, her poetry too sympathetic to the old regime and to the Provisional Government that had briefly replaced it. It was as if she had been tainted, as well, by her time in the West. Without Stalin’s protective embrace, people were afraid to be seen with her, to speak to her there. Her husband, who had fought for the Whites, was arrested and shot shortly after their return on suspicion of spying for the West. Her daughter, Alya, was sent to serve seven years in a labor camp for the same reason. Eventually, Tsvetaeva hanged herself. She had found the answer to her own question, the one she asked in “Poems to a Son”: Can one return to a / House which has been razed?
No, one cannot return, except in dream or memory.
So let’s return, by memory.
The Scepter and the Orb
By 1897 Niki and Alix had two children, Olga and Tatiana. You would think, after witnessing such a spectacle of consummation, I would have given up loving Niki, but though the country had twice celebrated the birth of daughters, with hundred-and-one-gun salutes, the country was only as happy as the birth of a daughter could make it, and therein lay my hope. What if Alix could give Niki only daughters? The country had reacted with disappointment, as Niki must have, especially the second time, when the guns stopped firing just past one hundred instead of going on to a glorious three hundred that announced a son and heir had been born. Niki needed an heir, but in lieu of one, the family used its daughters’ beauty as bait to secure the love of the people, distributing photographs, postcards, and calendars with images of Niki’s daughters dressed in their petticoats, in bonnets trimmed with fur, and jackets buttoned up to fur collars, and as they grew older, photographs of them dressed in pearls and lace, their long hair partly tied up with ribbons, partly hanging down their backs and shoulders. The beautiful faces of these children who had been born in the purple inspired worship: the Cossacks who guarded them saved as holy icons each flower or stone the girls offered them as little gifts. But pretty as those children were, they were not boys. And though Elizabeth Petrovna had been empress, as had two Catherines, and though Victoria sat on England’s throne, none of Niki’s daughters could be heir. For the past one hundred years in Russia only men had inherited the scepter and the orb. Paul I had decreed this, his laws born out of hatred for his mother, Catherine the Great, the German princess who married Tsar Peter III and then had him murdered, seized the throne for herself, and sidelined her son by sending him to a provincial palace from which he was not liberated until her death in 1796 on the way to the toilet. Then she left him a letter that told him the tsar had not even been his father, that he was the son of her lover, an officer—a letter of dubious veracity, for Catherine had shared her husband’s bed for a while before denying it to him, this letter designed as a final stratagem to undermine her son even after her death. And it did rattle him: Was he not even a Romanov? For in a country with a king, birth is everything. Paul resealed his mother’s letter and kept it with instructions that it was to be read only by each new emperor over the next hundred years. So Niki knew he needed a son. Alix’s sisters had all had boys. Niki’s sister Xenia would have six of them. And yet Alix could bear the tsar only daughters.
When I walked in the Summer Garden and saw the wet nurses strolling there in their gold-embroidered sarafans—blue silk or cotton beneath the gold thread if they were nursing a boy—their breasts hung with necklaces of amber beads that kept sickness away, I thought: If only I had given Nicholas a son. And when I saw a little boy play with a hoop and ball or ride the swings in the summer and in the winter take a sled down the great ice hill built at Admiralty Place, I thought: I should not have worn the beeswax cup my sister taught me how to wear to keep my father and mother from dying of shame lest I have a baby. And during the week before Lent, I would have stuffed this son with blini soaked in butter. And just before Easter, I would have baked him little cakes shaped like the larks who bring with them warm weather, planting in the dough raisins for eyes. I would have bought him red-painted eggs and chocolate eggs and wooden toys, a miniature wooden palace with a matching coach of wood, tin, and glass waiting out front. At Christmas he would have had gingerbread cookies and a bear marionette who danced when his string was pulled and a live bird in a cage. Sergei Mikhailovich was a good courier of Niki’s secrets and of mine, but a son would have been better than a courier—a snare. If I had had a son, Niki would feel compelled to see him, and therefore, me. The first Christmas after Niki became engaged to Alix I went between Christmas and New Year’s to have my fortune told, as was the custom: young girls always want to know who their husbands will be. I wanted to know something else. Not, What is his name? But, When will I see him again? And yet all the tricks of the fortune-tellers told me nothing. The candle melted into a bowl of water but formed no discernible shape. The piece of burning paper held up to the wall made not the shadow of a figure, but a blur. The mirrors reflected into one another only empty walls. The passerby in the street was a mute and could not tell me if he was a Sergei, an Alexander, or a Nicholas.