Robert Alexander: The Romanov Bride

“Oh, Sergei!” I exclaimed. “Salvos were fired upon the marchers-I’m told many were killed!”

“Yes,” he muttered slowly. “Count Shuvalov himself has just brought me the news. I’m told nearly a thousand have died.”

“Oh, Lord!” I gasped, crossing myself. “Were they just workers, or-”

“Women and children, too.”

“No…!” I said, bursting into tears.

Sergei turned around then, his face paler than I had ever seen, his eyes red, for we both sensed what this meant for the country and what darkness it would bring.

He said, “Come, child, we must pray for the dead.”

We did just that. Leaving the Count, we headed directly to the attached church, where we were on our knees the rest of the afternoon and well into the night, offering blessings for the newly departed.

Sadly, only later was it proven that the vague rumors were actually true, that the workers had meant the Emperor no harm, that they had merely intended to gather at the Palace and present him with a petition requesting his help. Just think if it had been so… if the Tsar had met directly with his lowest, neediest subjects! Just think what wonderful things we could have done for our beloved country!

Instead, all went from bad to worse, and the strikes spread like a terrible fire, leaping from factory to factory.

That was how my path started, right then and there on that Bloody Sunday as I reached for my beautiful Shura and found her lifeless. That was the day my sweet wife and unborn child died and that was the day the Tsar died, too. From then on I dedicated my life to revenge… and swore my life and soul to the Revolution. Day and night my cry was: Workers of the World, Unite! Down with the Autocracy! All Power to the People! So many innocents were killed that day, which proved to be the dress rehearsal for the Great October Revolution twelve years later. Yes, for decades if not a century Russia had been a boiling cauldron just waiting to explode, and explode it did with vicious power.

It was true, in a matter of moments all that I lived for was cruelly taken away, and there was no bottom to the depth of my pain. I do remember collapsing in the red snow and sobbing as I never had, I do remember a Cossack coming by and beating me with the flat of his sword, but… but suffice to say that, I don’t know, three or four days later I found myself hiding in an attic with a group of revolutionaries, for my transition to hatred was just that quick.

Of course, Father Gapon survived as well. But his bodyguards did not. Those men who had volunteered to protect the priest did just that, acting as a human shield and taking the bullets and falling for the Revolution. If only I’d thought to do likewise, to stand before my wife and protect her. But I didn’t, and to this day I still don’t understand how those bullets could have missed me, how I was not even grazed, and how my Shura, standing right next to me, could have been killed so quickly and cleanly. But that was what happened and that was how I lost my faith, for if there had been a God he would have spared her and our unborn baby and taken me instead. Or, perhaps best, taken all three of us together.

As for Gapon… within moments after the shooting had stopped a group of his ardent supporters rushed over and whisked him away. I vaguely remember seeing this, somehow remember watching as they hustled him down a lane, shaved his familiar beard, pulled his priestly garments from his body, then dressed him as an ordinary worker and sent him scurrying into hiding. I didn’t see him again or cross his path for almost two years until that one day when he was murdered in a dacha outside the capital. Hung from a hook, he was. No, it wasn’t the Tsar’s secret agents who did that. It was our people, revolutionaries who were so displeased with him for his betrayals, for it turned out that all along he’d had secret contacts with the police. I actually helped kill him, and I was glad to do so: four of us hung him from a hook on the wall, and when the hook proved not high enough from the floor, me and another comrade pulled on Gapon’s shoulders until he was strangled. The police didn’t find his body for a whole month.

With the murder of my own wife, I turned freely to hatred and seized the opportunity to murder any Romanov I could. We were determined to get rid of our oppressors and their capitalist dogs, we were determined to turn a page in history and make sure there was no going back. And that was how and why of course we decided to go after the Grand Duke Sergei, that bastard who had ruled Moscow with an iron fist for, what, some fourteen years. There was no question, he was the worst Governor-General that Moscow had ever seen. After all, it was he who ran the Zhidki out of town, and he who made those few Zhid boys who stayed in the city to register as stable boys and the few Zhidka girls as prostitutes.

That was how, too, I ended up in Moscow a few weeks later. I traveled there to participate in the incredibly glorious plans to murder the Grand Duke Sergei. Within days of Bloody Sunday it was decided in the highest echelons of the revolutionary committee that, first off, the most reactionary and hated of the Romanovs should be executed. A kind of trial was held, and it was determined by all that the Grand Duke Sergei should meet his death. I think, actually, that after the events of Bloody Sunday not just me but the masses as a whole were crying out for revenge. On top of Russia sat the disgustingly rich Tsar, beneath him came those 1000 or so conniving titled families, then the merchants and little bourgeoisie people. Finally at the bottom came us, hungry peasants and weary workers who made up the biggest part of Russia, some said as many as 80%. We meant to change all that, we did, by whatever means necessary. We meant to turn society completely upside down and completely reverse the table of ranks so that we were on top and Nikolai the Bloody and his greedy family and all the others were smashed down there at the bottom beneath us. I volunteered to join these terrorists, and so some three weeks after the murder of my wife and unborn child, I traveled to Moscow and joined this secret group, which was determined to kill the Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich.

And if in the process of killing that despicable oppressor we also killed his beautiful bride, well, so be it. What did I care? Nothing, that was what.

My heart had turned to cinder.

As I stood in front of my tall, triple mirror in my dressing room, I was not especially pleased with what I saw. Was the yellow silk dress, which I myself had designed, just the right one for tonight? Were the sleeves tailored snugly enough? Was the collar, which was decorated with seed pearls and petite diamonds, too extravagant in detail? Or was it the color, was it somehow all wrong?

Turning to my dressing maids, I asked, “What do you think, girls?”

“Lovely, Your Highness,” replied Luba, a trim gray-haired woman who had served me since my marriage some twenty years past.

The other, Varya, a plain short girl in my service for only a few months, practically whispered, “Beautiful, Your Highness.”

As the two maids began to tighten my whalebone corset and fasten the long row of buttons up the back of my dress, I continued to examine myself with great criticism. So many had told me how pleasing I was to the eye-the kind proportions of my face, my fairish hair, and soft gray-blue eyes-but I could never find that beauty in myself. Yes, I made quite a ceremony of dressing for the evening, but the truth was that I spent all those hours looking for problems, for I was all too aware how much my husband hated imperfections, from the curl of my hair to the cut of my dress. If there was so much as a crease or an uncomely fold in my gown, the wrong necklace or uncalled-for earrings, my husband would demand that I change.