The quote regarding the relationship between Nicholas and Kschessinska being platonic comes in an 1892 entry in the Tsesarevich's diary: "Since the camp of 1890 until now I have been madly (platonically) in love with little K.”(Nicholas II’s Diary, 1 April, 1892, in GARF, F. 601, Op. 1, D. 52)
Throughout 1891-92, it seems the burgeoning romance went no further, as Nicholas indicated in his diary by the careful inclusion of the word “platonically.” Nicholas was encumbered where Kschessinska was concerned by one annoying fact: she still lived with her mother and father. In the fall of 1892, Mathilde asked Nicholas to purchase the house at No. 18 English Embankment as her new residence. Although its previous tenants had included the composer Rimsky-Korsakov, it was infamous in the Imperial capital as the house where Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaievich had lived with his own mistress, the ballerina Kuznetsova; after this, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaievich Senior had lived within its walls with his ballerina Chislova, and their four illegitimate children.
Writing her memoirs in the 1950s, with her husband Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich still living and helping translate the text, Kschessinska could scarcely reveal the intimate details of what took place in her relationship with the Tsesarevich. Yet if her memoirs are interesting for what they left unsaid, they are also unreliable in many instances. According to Kschessinska, Nicholas often complained that he had “only a vague feeling for Princess Alix,” and that he looked on what he hoped would be his eventual engagement to her as “an unavoidable necessity.”(Kschessinska, 39) This is so patently untrue that it calls Kschessinska’s veracity into question. Kschessinska freely admits in her book, she closely studied numerous works on Imperial Russia, including Nicholas’s published diary and the letters of the Emperor and Empress, before beginning her own memoirs. And while she selectively quoted from several of them, she ignored the wealth of evidence that indicated that to Nicholas she was nothing more than a diversion on his determined road to win Princess Alix of Hesse.
Kschessinska remained silent on the affair, and we can only weave together the few assorted pieces in an attempt to form a representative picture of what took place. By the beginning of 1893, however, it seems the pair had crossed from flirtatious romance to sexual adventure. Okhrana agents, charged with shadowing the Tsesarevich as he moved round Petersburg, noted that he often remained at Kschessinska's house “until sunrise.” “In the evening,” Nicholas wrote in his diary in January, “I dashed off to see my K. and spent the best night with her yet. I am still under her spell-my pen is trembling in my hand!”(Nicholas II’s Diary, 25 January 1893, in GARF, F. 601, Op. 1, D. 54)
The implications are obvious. That Mathilde did not record any prurient details in her memoirs should not be surprising; but nor is it surprising that Nicholas should have been just as reticent in his own diary in describing details of the relationship. First, the reference by Nicholas to his “platonic” love for Kschessinska in April, 1892, is the only such mention to be found in his diary; by the end of the year, the ballerina had been installed in her own house, allowing the Tsesarevich to visit her in a privacy which had previously been denied. As his diary indicates, once Kschessinska was installed in her own residence, Nicholas regularly visited her and even spent the night, the effects of which, as noted above, left him “trembling.” What, one must ask, were the pair doing all night long to evoke such a reaction? While the answer is obvious, there is no further evidence to be found in Nicholas’s diary. This is not unusual, not only given Nicholas’s character and methodical habit of laconic entries, but more importantly the times in which he lived. Being first and foremost a gentleman, it is unthinkable that Nicholas would have recorded either passionate feelings nor sexual details in a diary which he knew would, by virtue of his position, one day be read by others; even the night of his wedding is left in the abyss, the following morning’s entry commencing with a simple statement of fact regarding his status as a married man. Then, too, there is Nicholas’s “confession” to Alix of Hesse on their engagement. We do not know what was said, though Nicholas clearly felt it to be some indiscretion he was forced to admit. Alix’s reply, written in his diary, leaves little doubt but that she herself regarded it as a “sin,” even if morality forbade her from naming it. She forgave him, quoting from the Bible by writing, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.”(Alexandra, writing in Nicholas II’s Diary, 14 April 1894, in GARF, F. 601, Op. 1, D. 56) A “platonic” friendship between Nicholas and Kschessinska would scarcely warrant such magnanimous forgiveness, nor the deliberate use of the Biblical idea of sin, even for the morally prim Alix of Hesse. One is therefore forced to conclude that, in the end, Kschessinska got exactly what she wanted from Nicholas, and took him to her bed in triumph in early 1893.
Greg King
