Nicholas and Alexandra, by Robert K. Massie (Random House, New York 1967).
This biography of czar Nicholas II and his wife the empress Alexandra tells the story of their lives in the decades leading up to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the royal family's brutal murder in a basement in Ekaterinburgh in 1918. Massie pays close attention to the characters of the royal couple, and of their hemophiliac son Alexei (the heir to the throne). The family's intimate life is documented and detailed with excerpts from the czar's and the empress's diaries, as well as observations of the family by friends, relatives, loyal retainers like the French tutor Gilliard, and important political figures such as Kerensky. Massie is an excellent writer with a great sense of drama. Once you start the book, it's hard to put down.
In this book, Nicholas is a gentle, earnest, pious man who never was comfortable with the demands of being czar. He wavered on significant issues, acceded too often to strong personalities (including Alexandra herself), and could not comprehend the vast social changes in Russia nor the growing crisis of the autocratic system itself. He seemed a likable man who was happiest with his wife and children around him at afternoon tea -- not something to hate him for, but not the best characteristics for the czar of Russia.
We see Russian history and the buildup to the Bolshevik Revolution through the lives of the royal family. Massie makes the history understandable and dramatic. I felt an increasing sense of dread, knowing the fate of the family. I sympathized with them and their world. How could you not sympathize with a family nursing and shielding the angel-faced young czarevich Alexei, who suffered the terrible effects of hemophilia?
Massie shows that it was Nicholas and Alexandra's isolation that both supported them and helped lead them to their doom. They relied on each other for mutual support in family and political matters. Their obsessive struggle with Alexei's hemophilia led them to rely on the crazy monk Rasputin. Rasputin did seem to have some weird beneficial effect on Alexei, and the empress thought of him as a kind of saint. She believed Alexei was doomed without him. She consistently relayed his deranged political advice to Nicholas and pressed him to follow Rasputin's direction (advocating the sacking of effective ministers, generals, and administrators, advice meant mostly to bolster Rasputin's position). Nicholas acceded with catastrophic consequences. They were unaware and ignorant of the growing hostility to themselves right up to the collapse of the czar's government in World War I.
I think it's a minor weakness of the book that the level of hostility directed at the royal family by the Bolsheviks is not really explained. Once they were arrested, following the czar's abdication, the family was treated crudely by their communist guards. They were repeatedly humiliated. Their escape routes were closed off by mobs of citizens and soldiers. Who were these Russians? What led to this? A short two years before, thousands were kneeling piously before Nicholas as he paraded in Petrograd. The discontent and hatred of the royal family comes as something of a surprise, at least to me.
One of the strong personalities who attempted to sway and control Nicholas was Kaiser Wilhelm (the czar's cousin), who successfully set up a private channel with Nicholas. Through their private correspondence, the Kaiser tried to weaken the anti-German alliance between Russia and France, and to maintain autocracy in Russia and Germany. In the time while I was reading Nicholas and Alexandra, I read a report that Donald Trump had attempted to set up a private channel in the White House with Russia's Vladimir Putin, and this channel would have supposedly been off limits to American intelligence agencies. If this report was true (which would be astounding), it's interesting to consider the parallel to that earlier private correspondence. We know that Putin's strategy has been to weaken NATO and the Western alliance, just as the Kaiser's had been to weaken the Russia-France alliance.
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