Nicholas and Alexandra

Historian Robert K. Massie’s historical non-fiction, Nicholas & Alexandra: The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1967), narrates the lives of Tsar Nicholas II, Russia’s last monarch, and his beloved wife Alexandra. Massie’s portrait of the Russian royal family is notably more sympathetic than previous historians’, focusing on Nicholas and Alexandra’s struggle with their son Alexis’s hemophilia. Starting his working life as a journalist at Newsweek, Massie’s interest in the Romanov family began when his own son, Robert, was diagnosed with hemophilia.

Massie begins his narrative with the ascension to the throne of Nicholas II after his father’s sudden death. On the day of Nicholas’s coronation, many people are killed in riots. Nicholas decides to ignore this tragedy, continuing with the planned celebrations. Massey notes that the Tsar’s inclination to ignore uncomfortable truths—especially about the people he rules—will ultimately prove his undoing.

Massie traces this trait back to the Tsar’s childhood. His father, Alexander III, was harsh and intimidating. Nicholas excelled in his studies, which were intended to prepare him for power, but he showed no real interest in the business of ruling, instead, leading a dissolute life as a young man. By the time he comes to the throne, he is unprepared and inexperienced.

The young Tsar is married to a German princess, Alexandra of Hesse. As he learns to cope with the responsibilities of running a vast empire, the Tsar falls genuinely in love with his beautiful young wife.

Nicholas is eager for a male heir, and Alexandra desperate to provide one. However, their first four children are girls. The couple has begun to despair of ever having a son, so they are overjoyed when Alexei is born. However, the joy is soon soured: Alexei has hemophilia, an hereditary disease (inherited, in this case, from Alexandra) which at the turn of the twentieth century was untreatable. Sufferers can bleed to death from cuts or bruises that would be harmless to a normal person: the new prince is unbearably fragile.

Alexandra quickly reaches her wits’ end under the pressure of caring for her precious son. Nicholas, too, is distracted by his son’s condition and struggles to perform his duties as Tsar. Massie draws on his own experience of caring for a child with hemophilia to suggest that the Tsar’s anxiety and grief for his son have been underemphasized in previous accounts of Nicholas’s life. Although he acknowledges that the Tsar had never been a particularly enthusiastic ruler, Massie believes that it was concern for his family’s welfare, rather than laziness or incompetence, which finally caused him to abandon his responsibilities as ruler. Quoting an anonymous source, Massie argues that Nicholas’s principal flaw was that he was “interested in being a good man, rather than a good leader.”

After a fall, Alexei is left bedridden with severe internal bleeding. His attendant doctors predict that he will not survive. Desperate, Alexandra turns to a mystic preacher and healer, Grigori Rasputin. Under Rasputin’s care, Alexei begins quickly to recover, and Alexandra becomes convinced of the mystic’s holiness and power. Rasputin actively works to increase his influence within the court, exploiting his position for financial gain. His influence is divisive: many courtiers regard him as a charlatan.

By this time, the First World War has broken out. On Rasputin’s advice, Nicholas travels to the front line, to lead his soldiers in person. The Tsar leaves Alexandra in charge of the administration of his empire. Onlookers are quick to notice that Rasputin’s influence over the Tsarina is so great that he is effectively running the country. Because Alexandra is German by birth, many Russians come to believe that she is secretly working for their enemies.

The war turns against the Russian Army. At the same time, Alexandra does a poor job of running the country. Rasputin is assassinated by a group of aristocrats who believe that, under his influence, the aristocracy is losing control of the country.

The aristocracy loses control nevertheless. A year after Rasputin’s death, the Russian Revolution breaks out, and the entire Romanov family is murdered.

Massie stresses the fatal role of Alexei’s hemophilia in the Romanovs’ story, going so far as to suggest that the prince’s illness proved pivotal in Russian—and world—history. Referring to Russian revolutionary Alexander Kerensky’s claim, “If there had been no Rasputin, there would have been no Lenin,” Massie adds, “If there had been no hemophilia, there would have been no Rasputin.”

Nicholas & Alexandra: The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty formed the basis of a 1971 Academy Award-winning film of the same name. Massie went on to write several more books about Russian royal history, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for his biography of Peter the Great. In 1995, he returned to the subject of Nicholas and Alexandra in The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, which draws on new evidence from the Soviet archives.