Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg by Helen Rappaport Page A

Conforming to Job’s biblical archetype of unquestioning self-sacrifice, Nicholas had seemed, without any resistance to fate, to grow into the same qualities as obedient son, pious tsar and dutiful husband. Such profound mysticism was, from the beginning, the hallmark of his sense of himself as tsar, of his relationship with his people, and of his duty – to them, to his country, and to God. He grew up in the sincere belief that he could redeem the sins of Russia through his own humiliation and suffering, on his personal road to Golgotha. A greater power was controlling his destiny and resistance was futile. It was this knowledge that had enabled him so easily to give up the throne and to endure the monotony of his life in captivity. Soon there would be an end to it all, as he so often told himself,
kak Gospodu ugodno budet
– according to God’s will.
    The physical and spiritual weariness that overwhelmed him now at the age of 50 had finally divested the Tsar of his one great quality. For virtually everyone who ever met Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov said that he had the finest, kindest, most velvety blue eyes they had ever seen. It was an inheritance from his mother’s Danish side of the family. But behind those gently smiling, sensitive eyes, which every now and then drooped as he spoke, as though to block out the intimate gaze of others, lay a whole hidden world – a lifetime’s thoughts and anxieties forever deeply repressed. For all his obvious, superficial charm and modesty,there was no guessing at the true nature of the Tsar’s reticent personality. It was perhaps only his wife who ever saw what lay beyond – an inner, profoundly melancholic loneliness. But even she found it hard at times to overcome her husband’s pathological reticence. And beautiful though they were, Nicholas’s eyes also had a strange, blank impassiveness about them. They reflected nothing back of the inner man, and now they were greatly changed. Even at Tsarskoe Selo the previous year, as a famous photograph of Nicholas in captivity had testified, the bags underneath them were very pronounced, the shadows darker too. Those who saw the Tsar before he was taken away to Tobolsk said that his eyes seemed sunken. The soft, clear light remarked on by so many so often had now departed, leaving the whites tinged with yellow.
    Nicholas’s spiritual and mental decline had begun with Russia’s ill-judged and catastrophic war against Japan in 1904, a year that would be his
annus horribilis
, for it also marked the terrible discovery that his new-born and much longed-for son and heir had the incurable condition of haemophilia. The strain of knowing that Alexey could at any time have a fatal attack, coupled with the 1905 revolution and the war years after 1914, had worn him out. When the moment came, he had been glad to abdicate. Shortly before, he had suffered a painful coronary occlusion whilst standing during a service in church, the first sign of the stress that was wearing his body down. But then, ironically, during the nine months at Tobolsk, when he had worked hard outdoors chopping wood and clearing snow with an indefatigable energy that everyone marvelled at, Nicholas had briefly become healthier and fitter than in a long time.
    But that was all gone now and with it any hopes of a quiet life in exile. His face bore the indelible signs of fatigue and listlessness, broken only by his enduringly sad, wistful smile. Nicholas now had a large bald patch; his hair was receding and going grey at the temples. His distinctive reddish-brown beard was going grey too. His teeth were rotten and long neglected and must have caused him pain, their decay, combined with his heavy smoking, bringing severe halitosis too. Nicholas looked prematurely aged, with hollow cheeks, his face weathered and wrinkled, coarsened to a dark reddish brown from so much exposure to the sun. His clothes too were worn and patched. He might no longer be tsar or head of the army