Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

slept on a couple of mattresses on the floor and ate in the kitchen. They would have to buy
more furniture in the months to come.
She hired a woman to help her in the house and do the daily shopping, who took her,
one warm and humid morning, to the market in the neighboring Rozhdestvenskaya district. In
the few blocks they had to walk, across Litovskaya Boulevard the world changed. In the rundown
tenement blocks lived factory workers.
At one street corner a woman sold kvas from a big barrel on a cart, a turbid brown brew
made from fermented rye bread. A mob of people holding bottles and enameled milk cans
crowded around the cart jostling and pushing and shouting insults at each other. She found the
same graceless scene repeated at the open market. One woman in a high voice addressed her
as "fine lady" followed by a vulgar Russian epithet. Alexandra bristled, and then she realized,
that these people were angry and restless. Their rage was not specifically directed at her, the
social outsider, but equally at each other. Alexandra heard Ilia’s voice saying, "Look at these
disadvantaged, suppressed proletarian masses." She had never understood his Socialist
jargon, but now she saw the conditions with her own eyes.
An equal distance from their street in the other direction she discovered the ostentatious
glitter of the expensive shops along Nevsky Prospekt, the famous boulevard of St. Petersburg.
Here the arrogant upper class raced their liveried carriages, or idled away in the specialty
restaurants and French cafés. Police and military were everywhere.
Nowhere had she seen such a chasm between the poor and the feudal rich. Despite its
wild mixture of races and languages, Tiflis seemed more homogeneous. For the first time in
her life Alexandra felt a certain embarrassment to belong to the privileged class.
She decided to conquer the city. For days she wandered through its streets in search of
beauty and her own destiny. She grew convinced that she had to do something to reduce
human misery. In this environment her long-standing wish to paint or design rugs suddenly
appeared frivolous.
One day on her way home walking through the pleasant, shady park surrounding the
hospitals, she had the sudden inspiration that she should find work there.
At first she thought of seeking a part-time occupation as nurse, something that many
socially concerned women did. Then she remembered Dr. von Haffner and saw herself as a
physician. She had the intelligence to master medical school, and if she would apply herself,
she could finish it in less time than the average student. She knew what she wanted and why.
She almost ran home. Out of breath she sat and examined her spontaneous idea, trying
to think through all the many implications that such a decision would have for her and their life.
Times were not as stable as everyone wanted to believe. She sensed the unrest not
only among the workers in the Rozhdestvenskaya but also among the students she had met.
She was not Russian, and therefore able to clearly see the pomposity and sleepwalking
aloofness of the emperor and his government.
Tsar Nicholas II, a good but weak man, lived in a God-given state of ignorant bliss.
Preoccupied with the fatal hemophilia of his son, he was oblivious to the social fermentation
that surrounded him, and whenever he was forced to notice the unrest, used draconian
measures to suppress it.
Still the imperial house was the only guarantee for the stability of the empire. There
101