Baby in the Palace - PART I

snatch something from the table, upsetting a dish of jellied oysters onto the rich Persian carpet of the floor. Servants would gather instantly to clean up the mess, shaking their heads remorsefully: “Your Imperial Highness, such behavior simply won’t do!” And the Tsar would chuckle lightly to himself, commenting that after his death, Russia was going to tremble under the rule of Aleksei the Nasty.

Another time, Aleksei, seated beside his father during a formal dinner, suddenly dived under the table and returned with a lady’s shoe. Proudly, he presented his trophy to his father. The Tsar sternly told him to put the shoe back where it belonged, and Aleksei disappeared under the table once more. A few moments, one of the ladies at the table uttered a shriek -- the Tsarevich had put a large strawberry into the toe of her shoe and replaced it none too gently onto her foot! For several weeks after that stunt, the little boy was banished from the grown-ups’ dinner table.

From a very young age, Aleksei, fascinated by all sorts of warfare, uniforms and soldiers, was allowed to be present with his father at regimental reviews. Here, too, his naughtiness became legendary -- once, aged seven, he rode a bicycle right across the parade ground. Astonished, Tsar Nicholas II abruptly brought the review to a standstill and ordered that everyone go after Aleksei to get him off the bike.

Besides regimental reviews and practical jokes, Aleksei was very fond of sailors, two of whom were assigned to look after him and hence became his “sailor nannies”; Nagorny, the more dedicated of the two, would follow the family to Ekaterinburg and suffer execution from the Bolsheviks, reportedly for trying to keep a guard from stealing Aleksei’s golden cross. By Major-General Hansbury-Williams, the commander-in-chief of the British mission in Russia during World War 1, Nagorny was described as “a great big cheerful and adoring servant of his little master.” Aleksei’s own wardrobe consisted largely of naval uniforms, which he adored as they allowed him to romp in both comfort and style. Many of his playmates -- all of them appointed, or at least screened carefully, by his mother -- were the sons of sailors, and together they played mock wars, complete with sophisticated strategy and tiny cannons that fired smoke. In the First World War, Aleksei would write to his father: “Yesterday we played at

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