At eleven o’clock, when the Czar appeared at the top of the Red Staircase, the huge crowd in the square gave him a magnificent reception. He came down slowly, with the Czarina on his arm, and at the head of a long procession slowly crossed the bridge connecting the palace with the Cathedral of the Assumption and entered the church amid a frantic outburst of cheering from the crowd. The Metropolitan Bishops of Kiev, St. Petersburg, and Moscow and the high dignitaries of the Orthodox clergy were present. When Mass was over, the members of the Imperial family in turn approached the holy relics and kissed them. Then they knelt at the tombs of the patriarchs. Afterwards they went to the Monastery of Miracles to pray at the tomb of St. Alexis.
Long after Their Majesties had returned to the palace the crowd continued to collect in the square in the hope of seeing them again. Even when we came out several hours later there were still hundreds of peasants outside the palace.
Thursday, August 20th.—Popular enthusiasm is waxing from day to day. It seems as if the people of Moscow are so proud of having their Czar with them, and so anxious to keep him as long as possible, that they mean to hold him here by manifest proofs of their affection. The manifestations are increasingly spontaneous, enthusiastic, and expressive.
Alexis and I drive out in a car every morning. As a rule we go to the Monks’ Hill, from which there is a magnificent view of the valley of the Moskova and the city of the Czars. It was from this spot that Napoleon gazed on Moscow before entering it on September 14th, 1812. It is certainly a marvellous view. In the foreground, at the foot of the hill, is the Monastery of Novo-Dievitchy, with its fortified enceinte and sixteen castellated towers. A little further back is the Holy City, with its four hundred and fifty churches, its palaces and parks, its monasteries with their crenellated walls, its gilded cupolas and innumerable domes of brilliant colours and strange shapes.
As we were coming back from our usual drive this morning, so dense was the crowd that the chauffeur was obliged to stop in one of the rather narrow streets in the Yakimanskaïa quarter. The crowd consisted of humble folk and peasants from the district who had come into the city to shop or in the hope of seeing the Czar. All at once there was a loud shout: “The Heir!... The Heir!...” The crowd surged towards us, surrounded us, and came up so close that our way was blocked, and we, so to speak, found ourselves prisoners of these moujiks, workmen and shopkeepers who struggled and fought, shouted, gesticulated, and behaved like lunatics in order to get a better view of the Czarevitch. By degrees some of the women and children grew bolder, mounted the steps of the car, thrust their arms over the doors, and when they succeeded in touching the boy they yelled out triumphantly: “I’ve touched him!... I’ve touched the Heir!...”
Alexis Nicolaïevitch, frightened at these exuberant demonstrations, was sitting far back in the car. He was very pale, startled by this sudden popular manifestation, which was taking extravagant forms which were quite novel to him. He recovered himself, however, when he saw the kindly smiles of the crowd, but he remained embarrassed at the attention bestowed upon him, not knowing what to say or do.
Personally, I was speculating, not without considerable anxiety, how all this would end, for I knew that no police regulations are issued for the Czarevitch’s drives as neither the time nor the route can be fixed beforehand. I began to fear that we might meet with some accident in the middle of this unruly crowd swarming round us.
To my relief two huge gorodovy (policemen) came up, puffing and blowing, shouting and storming. The crowd displayed the unquestioning and resigned obedience of the moujik. It began to waver, then slowly drifted away. I then told Derevenko, who was following in another car, to go ahead, and by degrees we succeeded in getting clear.
Friday, August 21st.—Their Majesties, before returning to Tsarskoïe-Selo, decided to visit the Troïtsa Monastery, the most celebrated sanctuary in Russia after the world-famed Laure of Kiev. The train took us as far as the little station of Serghievo, from which we reached the monastery by car. Perched on a hill, it would be taken for a fortified city from a distance if the bright-coloured towers and gilded domes of its thirteen churches did not betray its true purpose. In the course of its history this rampart of Orthodoxy has had to resist some formidable assaults, the most famous being the sixteen months’ siege by an army of thirty thousand Poles at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
This monastery, like Moscow and the towns of the Upper Volga, is a spot where the past seems ever present. It calls up visions of the Russia of the boyarin, the Grand-Dukes of Moscow, and the first Czars, and vividly explains the historical evolution of the Russian people.