The Curse of the Romanovs

by Staton Rabin

  Forty thousand Czech POWs also were fighting against the Red Army. For a while there were dozens of different types of governments in power in different parts of the Russian empire, and it was unclear who would ultimately win.

  Eventually, by the end of 1921, the civil war was over, and the Bolsheviks were firmly in power. They remained so—as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—until the Russian Revolution of 1991 that toppled the communists.

  One of the causes of the Russian Revolution of 1917-1918 was public outrage against Grigory Efimovich Rasputin—an illiterate self-proclaimed holy man or “starets” (religious advisor or pilgrim; he was not really a priest) born in Siberia in 1872 who gained the complete trust of Tsarina Alexandra. Grigory Efimovich came to be known as “Rasputin,” which may derive from the Slavic name “Rasputa” or the word “Raputko” meaning “ill-behaved child.” Most language experts say that “Rasputin” comes from the same root as “rasputnik” (libertine) or “rasputstvo” the Russian word for dissipation or debauchery. Others dispute that “Rasputin” had any negative meaning. But, during his lifetime, Rasputin’s enemies sometimes also referred to him, contemptuously, as “Grishka.”‡ He eventually tried (unsuccessfully) to change his last name to Novy (“newcomer”).

  Rasputin seemed to have the mysterious ability to temporarily stop the bleeding of the hemophiliac heir to the Russian throne, Tsarevich Alexei. Some people today think it’s possible that Rasputin hypnotized Alexei, which reduced the boy’s stress and helped him recover from his hemophilia attacks. Others say it might have been the power of prayer. But even today, how Rasputin was able to help the boy remains a mystery.

  Historian Alex De Jonge writes in his book The Life And Times of Grigorii Rasputin that the Mad Monk made “a powerful impression” on those who met him. His eyes “seemed to read their very souls” and “it was claimed by some that he was able to make his pupils expand and contract at will. The voice was strange too. He talked in a thick, almost incomprehensible Siberian accent…. His conversation was desperately hard to follow, for he often spoke in riddles …”

  After Rasputin’s telegram to the tsarina (mentioned in this book) seemed to miraculously save Alexei’s life during his severe bleeding crisis at the royal family’s Polish hunting lodge at Spala in September 1912, Rasputin’s hold over the tsarina became total. Alexei’s illness was the greatest secret‡ of the Russian royal family. The government was already unstable, and if news got out that the tsarevich was severely ill, the monarchy would have been in even greater danger of being toppled. The Russian people heard rumors the boy was ill, but did not know the precise nature of his illness, nor how severe it really was. They did not understand why weird Rasputin, who had a very bad reputation for drinking and womanizing, and who influenced Russian politics through his close relationship with the tsar and tsarina, was allowed so much control over Russia and the royal family, and why the family listened to his political advice.

  Nicky was frequently away at military headquarters in Mogilev during World War I, so Rasputin’s influence over the tsarina, and the Russian political decisions made in the tsar’s absence, grew even greater.

  Tsar Nicholas and the tsarina were warned about Rasputin many times, but Alix had total faith in the starets and would not listen to anything bad said about “Our Friend.” The tsar went along with her wishes, since he feared that if he banished Rasputin from the palace forever, and Alexei became ill, his son might die and Alix might blame him for the boy’s death. But the tsar did send Rasputin away from time to time. And Rasputin’s visits to the royal couple and Alexei were kept secret. He would pretend to be visiting one of the servants so that he would not have to sign the royal register that would show that he had actually visited the tsar and tsarina.

  There were rumors that Tsarina Alexandra was having a romance with Rasputin. Their relationship was a very close one; she believed that only he had the power to keep her son alive, and the empress’s letters to Rasputin—secretly leaked to the press at the time by some of Rasputin’s many enemies—are filled with expressions of love. One telegram from the tsarina to Rasputin said: “I sacrifice my husband and my heart to you. Pray and bless. Love and kisses—darling.” But it’s easy to read too much into this. These letters may just be innocent expressions of affection and deep gratitude, written in the “flowery” style common in the early 1900s. Respected Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky believes there’s strong evidence that the empress and Rasputin may have had an affair. But Alix loved her husband Nicky very much, and, judging by the excerpts I’ve read from their letters to each other and their diaries, I share the opinion of most Romanov scholars that she wasn’t unfaithful to him.

  Rasputin did not meet the Romanovs till around 1905—when Alexei was about a year old—so even if he and the tsarina were lovers, it’s not possible that Rasputin was Alexei’s father.

  Rasputin was murdered by Felix Yusupov and his coconspirators on the night of December 16-17, 1916. Alexei was not present for Rasputin’s murder, and there’s no evidence that Alexei suggested that his cousin murder Rasputin.‡ But the remarkable circumstances surrounding Grigory Efimovich’s death, as I’ve described them in this book, and the repeatedly unsuccessful attempts of Prince Felix and his coconspirators to kill the seemingly indestructible starets that night, are really true. Accounts of the murder vary somewhat depending on which eyewitness is telling the story.

  On the night of his death, Rasputin told Felix: “The aristocrats can’t get used to the idea that a humble peasant should be welcome at the Imperial Palace. They are consumed with envy and fury. But I’m not afraid of them. They can’t do anything to me. I’m protected against ill fortune. There have been several attempts on my life but the Lord has always frustrated these plots. Disaster will come to anyone who lifts a finger against me.”

  He was, it seems, mostly correct. But, weeks earlier, he had correctly predicted the time of his death—saying that he would die “before January 1.”

  After Rasputin’s murder, Tsar Nicholas banished Felix to one of Yusupov’s distant palaces, and Dmitri was also sent into exile. This was considered a mere “slap on the wrist,” and some historians believe that although Nicholas sympathized with his wife’s distress over Rasputin’s death, he was rather relieved that the troublesome Rasputin was finally out of the way.

  Not long after the murder, Rasputin’s bloated corpse floated up from the Neva River—the assassins had failed to weigh down his body. An autopsy showed water in his lungs. This meant that, remarkably, he was still breathing when his rope-bound body was thrown into the river, even after having been already poisoned, shot, and bludgeoned. The Mad Monk’s hands were raised in death, as if he had struggled to free himself from his bonds.

  Nicholas II, his immediate family, Dr. Botkin, and several servants, were murdered by the Bolsheviks‡ on the night of July 16-17, 1918, at Ipatiev House (“the House of Special Purpose”) in Ekaterinburg, Russia. The murders must have been truly horrific, not only for the victims but for the killers as well. Bullets bounced off of several of the victims’ bodies. The stunned firing squad didn’t know that Alexei’s sisters had—at the instructions of their mother—sewn diamonds into their corsets to protect the Romanov family’s jewels from being confiscated by the Bolsheviks, and to perhaps eventually use the gems to buy their freedom. When the royal family and their servants went into that basement at Ipatiev House, they had no idea that they were about to be shot. The bullets ricocheted off of the hidden diamonds, and it must have seemed to the assassins that the girls were being protected by some miraculous power. Many of the victims that night died a slow and agonizing death. Yurovsky’s men ordered that the girls who survived the fusillade of bullets should be bayoneted until they were dead. Most accounts of the murders say that the tsar and tsarina died instantly from gunshot wounds, but that Alexei had to be finished off with a bullet directly to the head. So much shooting was done in that small room that an hour later, heavy smoke stil
l hung in the air.

  It is as hard for me to write about this horrible and tragic event as it may be for some of you to read about it. Perhaps this is why in my own telling of this story, I prefer to imagine that Alexei might have miraculously survived the assassination of the Romanovs by the Bolsheviks that night. Although some have speculated that this might in fact be true, I confess that I believe it is probably just wishful thinking.

  For a long time people wondered whether Anastasia or Alexei might have survived the assassination. Given the confusion and secrecy surrounding the assassination of the Romanovs, and the tragedy of their deaths, it is not surprising that many impostors have stepped forward over the years, claiming to be one of the tsar’s children. The most famous of these was Anna Anderson, who surfaced back in the 1920s and claimed to be Alexei’s sister Anastasia, before DNA testing existed and could have established whether this was true or not. DNA testing long after her death proved beyond doubt that she was not Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicholaevna Romanov.

  Another impostor, Vasily Filatov, claimed to be Alexei. Naturally, any person making such a claim would have to be a hemophiliac. It was never established whether Filatov had hemophilia, nor whether his DNA matched that of the Romanov family. A book, translated into English from Russian, was written about Filatov: The Escape of Alexei, Son of Tsar Nicholas II (by multiple authors, published by Harry N. Abrams). Filatov died in 1988.

  Most historians believe it’s not possible that anyone—least of all Alexei, a hemophiliac—could have survived the barrage of bullets at Ipatiev House that night in 1918.

  Decades went by after the murders, and nobody seemed to know for sure where the Romanovs and those murdered with them had been buried. Some of their bones were finally found by self-appointed investigators Alexander Avdonin and Geli Ryabov in 1979 in the Koptyaki Forest. However, the Bolsheviks (now known as the Communists or Soviets) were still in power in Russia at the time. So the two men kept their discovery a secret, reburied the bones, and waited for a change in government.

  After the Russian Revolution of 1991 and a change to a more democratic form of government, in the summer of that year

  Avdonin and Russian archeologists, forensic experts, government officials, and others returned to the grave site to dig up the bones. The bones were later positively identified‡ through DNA testing (comparing “fingerprints” of the DNA in those bones to the DNA patterns of living Romanov relatives and relatives of others killed that night), in the 1990S. For a very detailed account of how the Romanovs’ bones were found and identified, read The Fate of the Romanovs by Greg King and Penny Wilson (John Wiley & Sons, 2003).

  After many delays due to political and religious controversies, on July 17, 1998, the eightieth anniversary of the assassination of the Romanovs, the family’s remains received a formal Christian burial at the cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in St. Petersburg. (The family was also canonized as Christian martyrs, a form of sainthood, by a vote of Russian Orthodox bishops in August 2000.) The burial ceremony was attended by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Romanov relatives, and others. Saints Peter and Paul is the same cathedral where, traditionally, Russia’s Romanov tsars and tsarinas had always been buried. Although nine sets of bones identified as belonging to people assassinated at Ipatiev House on that terrible night in July 1918 have been found, two sets of bones are still missing: those of one of the grand duchesses—either Anastasia or Marie …

  … and the bones of Alexei Romanov.

  GENERAL NOTES

  Russian transliterations: The Russian Cyrillic alphabet is different from the alphabet used in English. In recent decades, Russian words or names have usually been transliterated into English by following the “Library of Congress System”—but there are other acceptable spelling variations, as well. For the Russian words in my book, I’ve chosen the most simple, easy-to-read English transliterations used by Romanov historians, rather than strictly adhering to the Library of Congress System.

  Alexei and each member of his immediate family kept diaries from the time they were children. Occasionally the tsarina would write comments in the tsar’s diary—as when she expressed her love for him, shortly after their marriage.

  Even decades after the Russian royal family was kidnapped from their home in Tsarskoye Selo, some of the rooms they’d lived in still smelled of rose oil from their icon lamps.

  Although Alexei refers to heaven or hell several times in The Curse of the Romanovs, and Russian Orthodox Christians do believe in this concept, they think hell and heaven are experiences rather than physical places.

  Vaslav Nijinsky (a Pole born in Kiev, Ukraine, circa 1890) studied ballet at Russia’s Imperial Theatrical School and upon his graduation in 1907 joined the Mariinsky Theatre’s Imperial Ballet. He is considered one of the greatest ballet dancer-choreographers of all time and has been called “the god of dance.” Nijinsky worked with and had a personal relationship with legendary ballet impressario Sergei Diaghilev, who collaborated with the choreographer Michel Fokine. One of the ballets that Nijinsky danced in was Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The music had such a daring, new, modern style that the audience rioted at the first performance in Paris in 1913. Diaghilev’s company, the Ballets Russes, starring Nijinsky, was based in Paris. The first ballet that Nijinsky choreographed himself was Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un Faune (“The Afternoon of a Faun”), which caused another scandal (due to his choreography, not the music).

  In 1911 Nijinsky quit the Mariinsky Theatre after an argument over a revealing costume. So, in reality, Nijinsky would not have been in St. Petersburg at the time that Alexei sees him in my book. Nijinsky danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris and South America till 1914. Diaghilev, jealous of Nijinsky’s marriage to Hungarian ballerina Romola de Pulszky, fired them both from the Ballets Russes when they returned to Europe that year.

  After World War I broke out, the great dancer was held as a prisoner of war in Budapest, Hungary. Nijinsky was released in 1916, when he went on an American tour, reunited with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Nijinsky soon began to show signs of insanity: His fellow dancers noticed that he was afraid of them, and that he was worried that he would fall through a trap door on the stage. His illness was diagnosed as schizophrenia, and his career ended with a nervous breakdown in 1919. Nijinsky was in a mental institution in Switzerland from 1932 to 1933, and after 1919 spent most of his life in and out of asylums, during which time he wrote a diary (later published) in two volumes. Nijinsky died in London in 1950.

  The husband of the great French writer Colette saw Nijinsky dance at the height of his powers and wrote of him: “Yesterday when Nijinsky took off so slowly and elegantly, describing a trajectory of 4½ meters and landing noiselessly in the wings, an incredulous ‘Ah!’ burst from the ladies…. Since the Romantic period it had been the women, the Muse, the diva, the ballerina who had been worshipped: to admire a man for his grace and beauty was unheard-of.”

  For more information about Nijinsky, go to: http://www.nypl.org/research/lpa/nijinsky/home.html or http://members.tripod.com/Barry_Stone/nijinsky.htm The Mariinsky Theatre is still open in St. Petersburg, Russia.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  (WHAT’S TRUE, WHAT’S NOT)

  The Curse of the Romanovs reflects young Alexei Romanov’s limited perspective on his parents as rulers, and shows his love and loyalty toward them. This book is by no means intended to be an objective interpretation of Nicholas II’s and Empress Alexandra’s roles in Russian history. It is clear that Alexei had a loving and well-intentioned family, but it is equally true that his parents’ actions (and, in some cases, failure to take action) as rulers resulted in much death and misery in Russia. The Curse of the Romanovs is a novel, imagined from Alexei’s point of view; for a different and more objective perspective on the Romanovs and the Russian Revolution, you must read history books.

  Varda Rosenberg and her family are purely my invention. All the other major characters in The Curse
of the Romanovs are based on real people.

  One of Alexei Romanov’s diadkas (sailor-nannies), Derevenko—unrelated to his doctor, Derevenko—did in fact turn against the Romanov family after the February Revolution. He angrily ordered Alexei around after the provisional government took power, when the Romanov family was under house arrest. Derevenko was clearly resentful at having once been their servant. However, after he fled the palace, it’s not known what happened to him. There’s no evidence that Derevenko joined the Red Army.

  Nagorny, Alexei’s other diadka, remained loyally devoted to him and his family till the end. He was with the Romanovs even when they were held captive at Ipatiev House, but was eventually taken away by the Bolsheviks, was jailed in Ekaterinburg, and—unbeknownst to Alexei and his family—was shot and killed just a few days later.

  Alexei’s nosebleed that started at Mogilev happened in December 1915, not December 1916. I moved it a year ahead to expedite the story and put it closer to the time of Rasputin’s murder.

  Alexei did indeed speak Russian, English, and French. Alexei’s German-born mother spoke to the children in English, to the servants in Russian, and to her court in French. Tsar Nicholas II spoke Russian to their children, but the letters Alexei’s parents exchanged were in English.

  The Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, in which Alexei had lived most of his life, was turned into a museum soon after the Bolsheviks took over Russia. As early as June 23, 1918, the front halls of the former palace were opened to the public for viewing, quickly followed by his parents’ personal rooms. Orphans were moved into the royal children’s former quarters.