Sorry Elisabeth, but I have to disagree completely here. The responsibility for the family's safety lay with the Provisional Governement (and later, the Bolsheviks), not Alexandra. She may have "worn the trousers all unseen" in Nicholas's place, but so what? She still had no authority, or say, in what ultimately happened to her or her family. Or are you saying that decisions she made after the abdication led to the deaths of her, Nicholas, the children and servants?
Actually, that's exactly what you are saying, isn't it? If not, what is there to forgive?
You might be right that I'm being unduly harsh with Alexandra. Of course the
ultimate responsibility for the murder of the imperial family lay with the Bolsheviks. But I'm sorry, the more I read about Nicholas and Alexandra the more exasperated I become with their consistent record of very bad decision-making. Okay, we all make mistakes. We have all made stupid decisions that we regret with hindsight. But the last emperor and empress of Russia made one terrible decision after another, and never even seem to have acknowledged that they had made mistakes, much less learned from them. Gibbes in his memoirs recalls that, after the October Revolution, Nicholas regretted abdicating. But there's no evidence whatsoever that he felt any regret for all the actions that had made his abdication all but inevitable in the first place.
It would be one thing if Nicholas and Alexandra, like Grand Duchess Elisabeth, had been all on their own, without children. Consciously or unconsciously they could have taken their path to martyrdom without any reproaches from the likes of myself. But the fact of the matter is that they did have children, and after the abdication, they should have moved heaven and earth to get them out of Russia. As one of their retainers said during the March Revolution, when Alexandra refused to get the children out of the country because they were ill with measles, the first people to be taken out of a burning house are the invalids... And later, in Tobolsk, Kobylinsky recalled that he never understood why the family hadn't taken the great opportunity afforded them during this period to escape - indeed, throughout the fall and well into the winter, before the Bolsheviks could send their own reinforcements, the soldiers guarding the Romanovs clearly sympathized with the entire family.
I thought Soloviev did try to rescue them but was duped? Would you still call him a charlatan, or just foolish?
No, Soloviev was a real charlatan. He made off with, if not all the money raised to save the family, then most of it. This particular conspiracy seems to have existed mainly in Alexandra's head.
What strikes me about Nicholas and Alexandra, always, is their terrible passivity. Probably this had something to do with Nicholas's fatalism. But why did they always rely so much on other people to "save" them? Why not seize the initiative and try to escape on their own? They had all the jewels they needed to bribe any unwilling guards and to pay for a safe passage to China. Kobylinsky, as we have seen, was willing to aid them in an escape. The central government was thousands of miles away and largely ineffective at such a distance... Marie Antoinette, in similar circumstances, I can almost guarantee you, would have gotten her entire family out safely. (As it was, in much, much worse circumstances, she almost succeeded in getting her family out of revolutionary France.) But then I think Marie Antoinette was a woman of real strength and substance, whereas Alexandra, like her husband, was mainly delusional when it came to the hard political realities.
And in my previous post, you would see that I said criticism is one thing, bashing is another. So, I'm not sure where the comment about Hillary is coming from. I never said that criticism was off limits.
Well, I don't think I'm "bashing" Alexandra. I think I'm criticizing her, perhaps too severely, but then again, maybe not, because as I said, the more I think about all this, and the more I read about it, the more critical I become of both her and her husband - both before and after the abdication.
