8

To precede the Coronation on May 14, Nicky and Alix had been caught up, after the opening procession on May 9, with ceremonial receptions that required them to offer a good welcome to many a high official from home and abroad. This ability to remain affable while not shifting one’s feet, nor indicating strain, was seen as one more measure of royal competence. As he complained afterward to Alix and to his mother (with a smile), his cheeks were sore from being kissed by plenipotentiaries with stiff mustaches.

On May 13, sacred ornaments were transported to the throne hall of the Kremlin Palace and a host of anxieties rose into his mood. The ceremonies were, by now, familiar, but he felt as if hell itself were waiting. He wanted nothing to go wrong. For he saw the fourteenth of May as deliverance. By its end, he would no longer be acting Tsar, but consecrated as the Tsar. Done with that at last—if nothing went wrong.

I suspect he knew that something was in the offing. But he had no instinct for when it might happen. Each day from the tenth to the thirteenth seemed as dangerous to him as the next.

For that matter, he was not alone in such anticipations. Given the firm Russian expectation that nothing good can prevail for long, many were certain that all good weather would disappear by the morning of the Coronation. Instead, on the fourteenth of May, Moscow was alive with early morning sunshine. Morose predictions had to be postponed. Any number of women who had been quick to predict floods of downpour were still convinced something would yet go bad. Since Alix had converted to Russian Orthodoxy immediately after the demise of Alexander III, these women now said, “She comes to us behind a coffin.” Given, however, the beauty of this exceptional day, a countersentiment soon arose. Many were now saying, “We are close to the end of the century. Maybe the new one, this twentieth century, will be different. Let miracles of beauty and comfort come to us.”