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INTRODUCTION Russia’s People of Empire STEPHEN M. NORRIS AND WILLARD SUNDERLAND “You are mistaken, my dear grandmamma,” Alix wrote in 1900. “Russia is not England. Here we do not need to earn the love of the people. The Russian people revere their Tsars as divine beings, from whom all charity and fortune derive.”1 The grandmother in question was no ordinary one: she was Queen Victoria. And by the time she wrote the letter, Princess Alix had adopted a new name and a new country: she was Empress Alexandra of Russia. The selected passage reveals several aspects of Alexandra’s personality. Born in the German state of Hesse-Darmstadt, Princess Alix grew up an ardent Anglophile. Influenced by her English mother, Alice, and grandmother, Queen Victoria, Alix adored English culture and regularly visited the country. This German attachment to Englishness remained with her for the rest of her life. After meeting and falling in love with the future Nicholas II, tsar of Russia, Alix changed her name to the Russian “Alexandra” and converted to Russian Orthodoxy, but she retained her love for all things British. She and Nicholas spoke and wrote to each other in English; they read English literature together; they decorated their house and garden in the English style. While Alexandra remained “English” in her temperament and worldview, her marriage and religious conversion added a “Russian” element to her persona. She became a zealous convert to Orthodoxy and a firm supporter of the Russian autocratic system, as her letter to Victoria indicates. Alexandra frequently admonished her husband to be strong, making comparisons to such iron-willed rulers of the past as Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible. She wanted her “Nicky” to embrace a mystical idea of autocratic power that she thought defined the Russian way. Famously, the last ball the royal couple hosted at the Winter Palace in 1903 required everyone to dress in the costumes of the seventeenth century. Nicholas and Alexandra judged the event an unqualified success and even considered requiring seventeenth-century attire at court thereafter. When not organizing costume balls, Alexandra was acting as Nicholas’s righthand woman and his strongest advocate of the Russian imperial system. During World War I, she urged him to be “the Samoderzh. [autocrat] without wh. Russia Cannot exist” and to “show to all, that you are the Master & your will shall be obeyed—the •• • 2 Stephen M. Norris and Willard Sunderland time of great indulgence & gentleness is over—now comes yr. reign of will & power, & they shall be made to bow down before you and listen to yr. orders.”2 These appeals had a powerful effect on Nicholas, redoubling his commitment to rigidly defending his prerogatives as tsar even to the point, eventually, of undermining the monarchy. Indeed, Alexandra’s personality, her forceful entreaties, her gossipy letters about politics , and her meetings with Rasputin helped to bring down the very system she defended so vociferously. Mark Steinberg and Vladimir Khrustalev have concluded that “Alexandra’s contribution to this tragic history . . . lay less in the pull toward domestic life that she exerted over Nicholas, or even in her damaging interference in government administration, than in her encouragement of Nicholas’s anachronistic political convictions.”3 Alexandra’s story is admittedly unique. Not all royal spouses have exerted such influence on their partners. Even the coincidence of Alexandra’s German provenance had a crucial impact on history because, as the war against the German powers wore on, rumors began to swirl that she sympathized with the enemy and was secretly sabotaging the Russian war effort. This made it all the easier for a suspicious populace to view her sway over the tsar as proof of the total corruption of the monarchy. Yet Alexandra’s basic profile as a non-Russian—in this case, as a foreign princess— who was at the same time a European cosmopolitan and a devoted Russian patriot was otherwise not in the least bit unusual. This sort of cultural mixing was common in Russia, for princesses and much humbler souls alike. A famous quip describing Alexandra as a practical Englishwoman on the surface and a mystical Russian underneath , in fact, perfectly captures the multicultural layering that shaped her personality .4 The empress, in short, was a creation of empire. The same can be said of one of Alexandra’s contemporaries who in every other way would have seemed her polar opposite. Ioseb Jughashvili, better known as Stalin, was, like Alexandra, a non-Russian who became Russian through...

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