Peter the Great moved the Russian capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712, but the emperors had continued to be crowned in Moscow, in the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin. The last Russian tsar Nicholas II wasn`t an exception. His father, Alexander III, died in 1894 but Nicholas was crowned two years later, on 26 May 1896. His reign started with a tragedy that happened in three days at the Khodynskoe field (a large area where the Leningradskiy prospect begins nowadays). At that time it was a training base of the Moscow garrison and a traditional place of mass events. Moreover, the coronations of Alexander II and Alexander III were celebrated by the Moscow public there too, and no disaster happened. But the coronation of Nicholas II was preceded by a sequence of tragic mistakes.
The coronation of Nicholas II in the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin.
Laurits Tuxen/Hermitage Museum
The first one was made while the organizers were planning the number of guests at the generous celebration. The preparations were headed by Nicholas II’s uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, General-Governor of Moscow. Everything was prepared generously, but it had turned out to be not enough: 10 000 buckets of mead, 30 000 buckets of beer, a lot of temporary theatres and show-booths. But the main thing for each guest was a special present. It contained a spice-bread with Nicholas’ monogram, a piece of sausage, some sweets and walnuts, a bread roll from the famous Moscow baker Filippov and a commemorative painted enamel mug which also had the new tsar’s monogram on it. All these goods were wrapped into a headscarf. Of course, everyone who came to Khodynka desired to get that present. The organizers didn’t take into account that people were going to come not only from Moscow, but from the surrounding villages too. The contemporaries estimated that the celebration had gathered up to 400 000 guests - practically one in two residents of that day’s Moscow had decided to visit this public party. Vladimir Dzhunkovskiy, an aide-de-camp of Sergei Alexandrovich remembered: “The whole field was thickly covered with people”. All of them had crowded at 1 km2 of the Khodynskoe field. This caused a disaster.
