He caught pneumonia. Doctors could hear liquid in his lungs, a sign that finally persuaded his personal physician, Dr Mandt, that there was no hope of a recovery. Badly shaken by the defeat at Evpatoria, on the advice of Mandt, Nicholas handed over government to his son, the Tsarevich Alexander. He asked his son to dismiss Khrulev and replace Menshikov (who was then sick himself) with Gorchakov as the commander-in-chief. But everybody knew that Nicholas had himself to blame for having ordered the attack, and he was filled with shame. According to Mandt, who was with him when he died, the Tsar’s ‘spiritual suffering broke him more than his physical illness’, and news of the reverses at Evpatoria ‘struck the final blow’ to his already failing health.47
Nicholas died on 2 March. The public had known nothing of the Tsar’s illness (he had forbidden any bulletins on his health to be published) and the announcement of his sudden death immediately gave rise to rumours that he had committed suicide. It was said that the Tsar had been distraught about Evpatoria and had asked Mandt to give him poison. A crowd assembled outside the Winter Palace, where the black flag was raised, and angry voices called for the death of the doctor with the German name. Fearing for his life, Mandt was whisked away in a carriage from the palace, and left Russia shortly afterwards.48
Various other rumours began to circulate: that Mandt had killed the Tsar (a version advanced by certain figures at the court to counteract the idea that Nicholas had killed himself); that Mandt was rewarded for his loyalty with a portrait of the Tsar in a diamond-studded frame; and that a doctor by the name of Gruber had been imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for showing too much interest in the Tsar’s death. Rumours of the Tsar’s suicide were readily believed by those who were opposed to his authoritarian rule: that he should have taken his own life seemed to them a tacit recognition of his sins. The rumours were given credence by distinguished scholars in the final decades before 1917, including Nikolai Shil’der, the author of a four-volume biography of Nicholas, whose father, Karl Shil’der, had been at his court; and they were widely cited by historians in the Soviet period. They are still believed by some historians today.49
In her intimate diary of life at court, Anna Tiutcheva presents enough details of the Tsar’s final hours to rule out the serious possibility of suicide. But she also makes it clear that Nicholas was broken morally, that he was so filled with remorse for his mistakes, for the disastrous war that he had brought to Russia through his impulsive foreign policies, that he welcomed death. Perhaps he thought that he no longer had God on his side. Before he died, the Tsar called his son to him and asked him to tell the army and in particular the defenders of Sevastopol that ‘I have always tried to do my best for them, and, where I failed, it was not for lack of good will, but from lack of knowledge and intelligence. I ask them to forgive me.’50
Dressed in military uniform, Nicholas was buried in the cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the burial place of all Russia’s rulers since Peter the Great. Just before the lid of his coffin was closed, the Empress laid upon the heart of Nicholas a silver cross with a depiction of the Church of St Sophia in Constantinople, ‘so that in Heaven he would not forget to pray for his brothers in the East’.51
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Cannon Fodder
News of the Tsar’s death arrived in Paris and London later on 2 March. Queen Victoria was among the first to hear. She reflected on his death in her journal:
Poor Emperor,
