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danced gracefully and was an excellent shot. He had been taught to keep a diary and, in the style of innumerable princes and gentlemen of that era, he faithfully recorded, day after day, the state of the weather, the number of birds he shot and the names of those with whom he walked and dined. Nicholas's diary was identical to that of his cousin King George V;both were kept primarily as a catalogue of engagements, written in a terse, monotonous prose, and regarded as one of the daily disciplines of an ordered life. Curiously, Nicholas's diary, which lacks the expressive language of his private letters, has proved a rich mine for his detractors, while George's diary is often praised for its revelation of the honest character of this good King.
    In May 1890, a few days before his twenty-second birthday, Nicholas wrote in his diary, "Today I finished definitely and forever my education." The young man then happily turned to the pleasant business of becoming a rake. His day usually began in mid-morning when he struggled out of bed exhausted from the previous night. "As always after a ball, I don't feel well. I have a weakness in the legs," he wrote in his diary. "I got up at 10:30. I am persuaded that I have some kind of sleeping sickness because there is no way to get me up."
    Once on his feet, he went to a council meeting, or received the Swedish minister, or perhaps a Russian explorer just back from two years in Ethiopia. Occasionally he was lucky. "Today, there was not a meeting of the Imperial Council. I was not overwhelmed with sadness by the fact."
    Most of the time, Nicholas was required to do absolutely nothing. The essential function of a tsarevich, once he had finished his schooling and reached manhood, was to wait as discreetly as possible until it came his turn to become tsar. In 1890 Alexander III still was only forty-five years old. Expecting that he would continue to occupy the throne for another twenty or thirty years, he dawdled about giving his son the experience to succeed him. Nicholas happily accepted the playboy role to which he had tacitly been assigned. He
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    appeared at meetings of the Imperial Council, but his eyes were fixed on the clock. At the first reasonable opportunity, he bolted.
    On winter afternoons, he collected his sister Xenia and went ice-skating. "Skating with Xenia and Aunt Ella. We amused ourselves and ran like fools. Put on skates and played ball with all my strength," he wrote. He fell on the ice, got sore knees, sore feet and had to hobble around in slippers, grumbling about the good luck of people still able to skate. At twilight, flushed by exercise and the freezing air, the skaters bundled themselves into a drawing room for glasses of steaming tea. Dinner might be anywhere: at home, as a guest, or in a restaurant with a party of friends, entertained by an orchestra of balalaikas.
    Every night during the winter season, Nicholas went out. In the month of January 1890, he attended twenty performances, sometimes two in a day, at the opera, theatre and ballet. It was during this month that Tchaikovsky's ballet Sleeping Beauty was first presented in St. Petersburg; Nicholas went to a dress rehearsal and two performances. He attended plays in German, French and English, including The Merchant of Venice. He was especially fond of Eugene Onegin and Boris Godunov and in February he even arranged to play a small part in a production of Eugene Onegin. He was a much-prized guest at exclusive late-evening soirees where the guests were entertained by the Imperial Navy Band, or a chorus of sixty singers, or a famous raconteur who told stories to amuse the guests. Two or three times a week, the Tsarevich attended a ball. "We danced to exhaustion . . . afterwards supper ... to bed at 3:30 a.m." The arrival of Lent abruptly ended this round of festivities. The day after the ball and midnight supper which ended the winter season in 1892, he wrote in his diary, "All day I found myself in a state of