Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

I could imagine how she felt, though, in that moment, being made such a fuss over. After all, such theater was my milieu and I had been the object of such fuss and the purveyor of such stagecraft myself. It is easy to forget when you stand there glittering that you are not the wizard who conjured up these spells, though you are made to look that way to your audience, which gasps, thunderstruck by you. Yes, like Alix, I, too, had enjoyed such moments. Just two months after the coronation I stood at Peterhof in a little grotto on Olga Island, named so for Nicholas I’s favorite daughter. A stage had been built out on the lake and the guests were rowed in small boats to their seats in stands constructed on the island. When the ballet began, I stepped from my little grotto onto a mirror, which floated on the lake, supported by pontoons, and the stagehands worked the pulleys that drew me to the stage proper. It was like the reika , a small platform on a long track constructed first for The Nutcracker , on which the Sugar Plum Fairy stands in arabesque, her hand in her prince’s, while the stagehands winch the wire to draw the reika across the stage, the fairy gliding upon it as if by magic. To the assembled, it looked as if I walked on the water and their oohs and aahs skipped toward me. I walked on water. Alix lit a city with her fingers. But her action impressed far many more than did mine.

The coronation weeks, though filled with miracles, were not without their casualties. Eighteen people died in the mayhem that ensued when heralds in their gold tunics and black-and-red-feathered hats distributed souvenir parchments announcing the date of the coronation—the carriage in which they rode was robbed by a sea of bodies and stripped of its imperial emblems, which became also, I suppose, souvenirs. That, though, was nothing compared to the two thousand peasants crushed to death on Khodynka Field outside of Moscow, where four days after the coronation, according to tradition, the peasantry were to be fed and barrels of beer were to be sprung, filling red, blue, and white enameled cups stamped with the tsar’s initials, the Cyrillic H II, with the image of the crown above it and the date 1896 below. Unbelievably, the tents and tables had been pitched on a field pocked with ditches and trenches where the Moscow garrison trained. How imbecilic was that? Tents and tables rocking on pitted ground. Even at Alexander III’s coronation a handful of peasants were trampled to death there, but this year five hundred thousand peasants were on that meadow, and when something—a rumor, a cry, a woman fainting—ignited a panic, the crowd began to push. Some were suffocated standing up, others fell into the ditches where they were trampled, mud pressed onto their cheeks and into their open eyes and mouths. The crushed bodies, arms like the arms of paper dolls flapping across their flattened trunks, lay like a tarp over the field, as if protecting the ditches and potholes that had killed them all. The chaos was filmed by the horrified Lumière brothers, there to record the banquet, but the police confiscated their film. They had time to think of that while they and the Cossacks laid the corpses on sheets and, when they had no more sheets, on the bare ground. And then they gave even that up and waited for the peasants’ carts filled with straw to arrive so they could clear the field before the ball given by the French ambassador that night at the Sheremetiev Palace in the city. The carriages of the partygoers would have to pass this field on their way to Moscow.

The dowager empress told Niki to cancel the evening’s ball, but Niki’s uncles insisted he and Alix attend while the corpses lay in piles in makeshift morgues—or lay where they had been stuffed, the ones that could not be carted away in time, beneath the field’s imperial viewing stand. Niki’s mother had a keen political nose—we had that in common, I would have gotten along with her well—but the uncles said their French hosts had trucked in tapestries and chandeliers and fountains and gold plates for the event and France was Russia’s most important ally and sentimentality was useless. At this point in his reign, with only seventeen months as tsar, Niki was still the obedient nephew who heeded the uncles who had been serving the empire for longer than he had been alive. His father might have considered them incompetent fools, but Niki felt there was no one less competent or more foolish than he. He was terrified of making a mistake. Every bureaucratic or ministerial appointment suggested to him by his father’s—and therefore his own—minister of the interior, Sergei Witte, was met with the same response— I shall ask my mother —which had M. Witte laughing up his sleeve at Niki. Still, to make up his own mind and make it up badly was the greater humiliation. He was so young, so young, we have to forgive him. Even at the ball itself, when Sergei Mikhailovich and his brothers took Niki aside and urged him to walk out with them, telling him it was not too late to cancel all the balls and performances and reviews and to hold instead a religious service, Niki, spying the steely faces of his uncles Vladimir, Paul, Alexei, and Sergei Alexandrovich, could not bring himself to do what his own conscience dictated. The hot-tempered Potato Club walked out, minus one, creating a stir Niki was afraid to be part of, the uncles hissing after the young men, Traitors . Sergei abandoned him to those uncles, whose conservative policies Niki would follow, to his detriment, for the next two decades. Better Sergei should have linked arms with Niki and reasoned with him in the soft way Sergei reasoned with me when I was wrongheaded. But, no, Sergei left him, and Niki stayed to dance for three hours that night in the foyer of the Sheremetiev Palace sweetened by one hundred thousand fresh roses from the South of France. Niki held a luncheon the next day at the Petrovsky Palace. He attended a state dinner that night at the Hall of the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky. He danced again at the governor-general’s ball. And then he led the military review of sixty thousand men from the cavalry, artillery, and infantry. The review was held on Khodynka Field.

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.