When I was twelve years old I began to write a book. It wasn’t the first one I’d started – I started writing at eight, scrawling down tales of boarding schools and the childhood of the young Brontës - but it was the first I actually finished. In blandly fictionalised style, it told the life story of the last Empress of Russia, Alexandra, whose family had recently captured my attention thanks to a book of my grandmother’s entitled, “Mountbatten: eighty years in pictures.” Leafing through the pictures in that book, I was intrigued by Alexandra and her family for their close connection to the very English, recently murdered Mountbatten. Until then, Russia had seemed a strange foreign place, the home of grim, grey-coated Communists and over-disciplined young gymnasts. Now, suddenly, it felt close and familiar: this woman, Russia’s last Empress, was not only the aunt of war-hero Mountbatten, who I had read about, but also the great-great-aunt of England’s Prince Edward, a blond, toothy sixteen-year-old boy I had a thing about just then.

 

I began to write my book almost in an attempt to make sense of the story of the last Tsar by recounting it to myself. My favorite member of the family was the son, Alexei, and the book I wrote at twelve was his story more than anyone’s, telling the tale of his mother’s love and worry for him, and how this brought her to trust in Rasputin and all but hand over the government of Russia to him. I had acquired a new Bible: Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra. Shortly after completing my novel I began to rewrite it. I was a year older; the emphasis had changed: suddenly the focus of the book was not their son but the love story of Nicky and Alix and how this determined the course of their lives, and my mission was to tell others about this. Hand-written, with my personal illustrations and a cast that included most of their closest relatives around Europe, the book came to several hundred pages and was more satisfying to me as a portrait of their era than the simplistic first version. Two of my school friends read it; one even asked me to consider sending it to a publisher, but I refused, realistic enough to know that it was still very recognisably a piece of juvenilia.

The family of the future Empress in 1875. 

The children are, left to right: Ella, Ernie, May (in their father's arms), Alix, Irene and Victoria. 

My favourite image of Alexandra as a child is a smiling portrait by Friedrich von Angeli, evidently drawn from photographs taken at this same sitting, for she wears the white lace dress and cross around her neck on a velvet ribbon. It hangs above a staircase at Broadlands, the home of her nephew Lord Mountbatten, but unfortunately I have never seen it reproduced in a book. 

One pretty - if sombre! - and widely available image of the Empress as a child is this one: 

 

Over the next few years I read more widely, and began to question some of my own beliefs. In particular, I read on inter-library loan the Empress’s own correspondence with her husband, a volume published in 1923, which showed me a different Empress to the strait-laced, sad-eyed victim of circumstance, unhinged through worry over her child, who emerged from Massie’s book. This Empress was a tougher character, irreverent and with a sense of humour, bickering with her friends, playing with or scolding her children, and writing to their father with clear-eyed realism about their faults. More to the point, she had very strong and sure views on politics: she was far from being Rasputin’s innocent dupe. Flushed with the success of my first foray into evaluating primary sources, I wrote an extended essay at school in which I attacked all previous portrayals of Alexandra as both sentimental and patronising. I no longer have it, but the introduction to my essay was remarkably similar to the first paragraph of chapter one of Greg King’s biography, The Last Empress, a book published ten years after I wrote my essay, by an author just three years my senior who also started writing about Alexandra when he was twelve.

 

Unlike Greg, I gave up when I went off to university and discovered new interests and pass-times. I did, however, visit Russia in 1993, as a sort of fulfilment of my childhood dream, and when I spotted The Last Empress in Waterstone’s not long afterwards I bought a copy and read it with an uncomfortable sense that it was the book I should have written. I loved his thoughtful examination of her childhood, and his discussion of her interest in education: here was Alexandra as an individual, more than simply a woman who married Nicholas and had a child with haemophilia. But while I was delighted to see Greg write that Rasputin was Alexandra’s instrument rather than vice versa, I felt that the section which dealt with her war-time role in government could have been more fully realised, her role and opinions more carefully explored. And then I forgot about it all again.

 

Around the year 2000, we had a computer at home for the first time, and I decided to do something useful with it and write something. I returned to the subject I knew best: Alexandra. I decided that in deference to the work I’d done and plans I’d had as child I would re-write my oeuvre in a style suitable for adults and try at last to have it published. So I expanded my reading, absorbing all the volumes of memoirs I’d been unable to afford as a child, and reading through volumes of newly-declassified letters and photographs from former Soviet archives. Most significantly, I read Dominic Lieven’s biography of Nicholas II, and Joseph Fuhrmann’s new edition of the Empress and Emperor’s wartime letters. Lieven is more overtly sympathetic to the imperial couple, and in his book he presents the political decisions Nicholas made as entirely coherent from his own point of view. He has less to say about Alexandra’s role, which he tends to downplay, but for me this didn’t matter: reading her letters I could see clearly how the decisions she made fit in with the arguments of monarchist politicians and their defensive stance against anarchy as they perceived it, as presented in Lieven’s book. Joe Fuhrmann is less persuaded of the coherence of the imperial vision, but his commentary supplied invaluable information on individual politicians which reinforced my theory that Alexandra was doing far more than simply putting in place men who would protect Rasputin and hence her son. Joe’s excellent biography of Rasputin: Rasputin: a Life, also proved immensely enlightening in portraying the infamous Holy Man as a human being whose faults were known to the imperial couple.

 

Photographs of Alexandra enjoying herself are not as rare as some people believe. These were all taken in the summers of 1907 or 8 and are from the Romanov Collection, Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University. 

Picnicking in Finland. 

Playing with her daughter Tatiana

On board yacht with with someone else's children:

 

The online world has opened up sources and opportunities which did not exist when I was a child first writing my book. The adult version has been vastly enriched by the information on Bob Atchison’s website, The Alexander Palace Time Machine, which ranges from full-text books to wonderful photographs to exclusive unpublished information about the running of Nicholas and Alexandra’s homes. Writing the book, I also corresponded fairly regularly with Bob, who I told nothing about my project but who unknowingly bolstered my confidence hugely by pretty much agreeing with my views, and also suggested further reading. The online world also brought me, perhaps inevitably, to the email address of and eventually close friendship with Greg King, who at that point – 2001 – was running a Russian history magazine named Atlantis, and writing Fate of the Romanovs (both in partnership with Penny Wilson, although I have never got to know Penny so well). Greg and I spent many hours discussing the ins and outs of Alexandra’s character and her relationship with her children, with the consequence that I was asked to critique potentially controversial sections of Fate of the Romanovs, and to write for the magazine. The other consequence of reading the drafts of Fate of the Romanovs – much of which hit home far harder than the final, published version in showing exactly how and why Nicholas II came to be so hated - was that I abandoned my novel, suddenly deeply ashamed of the pro-Nicholas stance of so many of the pages. For several years it lay untouched on a hard drive.

 

The Empress with her own children and cameras, 1908 or 9. From left to right the children are: Anastasia, Tatiana, Marie, Alexei and Olga [Romanov Collection, Yale University]

But times change, feelings change: I am more neutral about Nicholas and Alexandra now, and the novel I started and all-but completed in 2001 is finally ready, with some minimal re-writes, to see the light of day. It is still ostensibly the love story of Nicholas and Alexandra in the Edwardian world context, as it was when I was thirteen, but the underlying intention of the adult book is to tell the Empress’s political story from her own point of view, to explain how the intelligent, reasonably well-educated and liberal Princess Alix of Hesse could become the autocratic woman who apparently handed over an empire to a semi-literate Holy Man. Rather than simply accept the lazy explanation that she had lost her mind and did not know what she was doing, I have tried to understand Alexandra's thinking with as much recourse to her own letters as is possible, and to see what happened to Russia in her and Nicholas's hands as a reasoned and coherant set of events so far as is possible. The book is also an attempt to present Alexandra as I have seen her since I first read her own letters: not the mother of an ideal family in private and unknowing victim of manipulation in her official life, but a practical, sometimes sharp-tongued woman who enjoyed gossip but suffered fools not at all; whose ideal family life was in a sense a part of the political system she represented. In short, a woman who for better or worse was responsible for her own fate. It is the closest I will get to a writing a true biography of Alexandra, and it is best that way. There are events in Alexandra's life about which we still know too little for an explanation to be possible in a strictly factual book: I have had to speculate, for instance, about the causes and circumstances of the "false pregnancy" she experienced in 1902: we do not know, in medical terms, what really happened; we do not know that she did not truly have an imaginary pregnancy, as historians usually accept, though I have preferred to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume a missed miscarriage.  Similarly, there is no specific evidence spelling out Alexandra's political programme (other than maintaining the monarchy!), but circumstantial evidence in her letters and background allows me to express her priorities in terms of those of some of the era's politicians or thinkers, from conservative monarchists to the semi-Slavophile populists.

  

The Hessian family as married adults, showing from left to right: Ernie, Alix (with Nicholas), Irene (with Henry), Ella (with Serge) and Victoria (with Ludwig)

Alexandra saw herself as the voice of common sense, and viewed others around her just as they viewed her: she thought politicians panicky, hysterical. As a historian, looking back with the perspective of ninety years, I find her rigidity and her obsession with her husband's and son's inheritance at the expense of practically all else extremely distasteful, and I have no wish to be thought of as an apologist for Alexandra or for the myopic Tsarist regime. But I can also see the humanity that never left her; and as a novelist I can look at events from Alexandra's perspective, can see the religious tradition and psychological background that underpinned her views, and can understand that each decision she took made sense to her in the battle - as she saw it - to prevent Russia from collapsing into chaos. That her decisions did nothing more than accelerate this collapse is an irony of history, but she was far from being the only person complicit in this tragic process: the "good guys" of the Duma were no less blinkered than she, and the very people who should have worked together to save imperial Russia were the ones who ultimately dragged her over the cliff. 

I think I have put my ideas about Alexandra together into the best novel yet written about her life; but more than anything I hope it is a pleasure to read. One of the greatest surprises to me when first I read the correspondence of this supposedly stiff and proper woman was how much I enjoyed her company. I hope you now enjoy it too.

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