Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  “My dear Mama, you can’t imagine what I went through before that moment,” Nicholas wrote to Marie. “There was no other way out than to cross oneself and give what everyone was asking for. My only consolation is that such is the will of God, and this grave decision will lead my dear Russia out of the intolerable chaos she has seen for nearly a year.”

  The rest of the imperial family reacted with horror to what the tsar had done. In a stroke, he had hobbled the very institution he had sworn to uphold at his coronation. “That was the end,” wrote Nicholas’s cousin and brother-in-law, Grand Duke Alexander (“Sandro”—married to the tsar’s sister Xenia). “The end of the dynasty and the end of the empire. A brave jump from the precipice would have spared us the agony of the remaining twelve years.”

  Nicholas himself was tormented by his decision. “I am too depressed,” he tearfully confided to Prince Vladimir Orlov. “I feel that in signing this act I have lost the crown. Now all is finished.”

  All the more distressing was the fact that the October Manifesto did little to quell the violent upheavals. “For the most part the peasant disturbances are still going on,” Nicholas reported to his mother. “They are difficult to put down because there are not enough troops or Cossacks to go round. But the worst thing is another mutiny of the naval establishments in Sebastopol and part of the garrison there. How it hurts, and how ashamed one is of it all.”

  That December, a massive revolt in Moscow resulted in the deaths of five thousand people, with fourteen thousand more wounded. “The driving force behind both the troops and the rebels is no longer that of enthusiasm or any human impulse,” a correspondent for The New York Times reported. “It is the force of superhuman hate, and hence the deeds reported are not acts of patriots, soldiers, or otherwise, but the enormities of madmen.”*5

  So 1905 came to a close. And out of the chaos and destruction of the “year of nightmares” emerged one of the darkest, most mysterious figures in Russian history—the “Holy Devil” who would lead the Romanov dynasty to its ultimate destruction twelve years later: Rasputin.

  * * *

  *1 Actually, it was World War I that would ensure the “great separation” of families Victoria feared. A number of the queen’s descendants—including her grandsons George V of Britain and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany—would face one another as mortal enemies.

  *2 The bombastic and ultramilitarist German emperor, loathed by most of his royal relations in Britain, was related to Alix through their mothers, both of whom were daughters of Queen Victoria.

  *3 After the assassination of her husband, Alexandra’s sister Ella founded a convent in Moscow and became a nun. Her life of charitable work came to a ghastly end under the Bolsheviks in 1918, when she was tossed, still alive, down a mine pit and left to die with several others.

  *4 The peace conference was held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. The real winner was Witte, however, who managed to obtain favorable concessions for Russia and was awarded the title of count by the tsar. “He went quite stiff with emotion,” recounted Nicholas, “and then tried three times to kiss my hand.” The warm feelings were not to last. (See footnote on this page.)

  *5 Nicholas bitterly turned on Count Witte as the experiment in constitutional government he had advocated seemed to fail. “As for Witte,” the tsar wrote to his mother, “since the happenings in Moscow he has radically changed his views; now he wants to hang and shoot everybody. I have never seen such a chameleon of a man. That, naturally, is the reason why no one believes him any more.”

  Nicholas II (1894–1917): Gliding Down a Precipice

  Hearken unto Our Friend [Rasputin]. Believe him. He has your interest and Russia’s at heart. It is not for nothing God sent him to us, only we must pay more attention to what He says.

  —EMPRESS ALEXANDRA TO NICHOLAS II

  The tragedies and mishaps of Nicholas II’s first decade of rule were punctuated in 1904 by the cruel discovery that the tsar’s long-awaited heir, Tsarevitch Alexis, was suffering from the debilitating and incurable disease of hemophilia. The apparently miraculous ability of a peasant mystic by the name of Grigori Rasputin to control the suffering child’s symptoms led Empress Alexandra to the disastrous belief that he had been sent by God. Together, Alexandra and her unkempt guru would control the fate of Russia—through war and revolution—and further propel the Romanovs to their ultimate doom.

  “We made the acquaintance of a man of God,” Nicholas II recorded in his diary at the end of 1905—“Gregori [Rasputin], from the Tobolsk region.”

  The tsar’s reference to this first meeting with the strange Siberian peasant with apparently mystical powers was merely a passing one, a seemingly insignificant addition to his daily log. For though Rasputin would eventually come to dominate Nicholas’s reign—and fatally undermine it in the process—he was, at the time, just one more in a parade of dubious holy men, false prophets, and charlatans who managed to infiltrate the inner sanctum of the Alexander Palace.

  The reclusive empress had been desperate enough to be drawn in by these frauds because of her continued inability to bear a son to inherit the throne. After ten years of marriage, she had only given birth to a succession of girls—four in all: Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and the child destined to become perhaps the most famous Romanov of all, Anastasia. Each of these grand duchesses was healthy and vibrant, but because of a law enacted by the mad emperor Paul that (out of hatred for his mother Catherine the Great) debarred women from ruling Russia, the imperial crown was in danger of passing out of Nicholas’s immediate family.

  In her frantic efforts to conceive a son, Alexandra subjected herself to all manner of hokum. She bathed in waters believed to be beneficial for sex selection, for example, and admitted into her presence an assortment of malformed and deranged mystics, one of whose epileptic seizures were taken to be signs of divine intercession. A French quack named Philippe, with his self-proclaimed power to control gender, was imported to Russia and, at the tsar’s command, given a medical degree to enhance his respectability. In another instance, Alexandra was advised that a long-dead holy man by the name of Seraphim would intercede on her behalf, but only if he was canonized. Accordingly, Tsar Nicholas had Seraphim declared a saint—notwithstanding the fact that one of the most important indications of saintliness in the Orthodox Church, an uncorrupted corpse, was found to be lacking when Seraphim’s rotting body was exhumed.

  Then, in August 1904, a miracle happened: Alexandra delivered a beautiful baby boy. He was named Alexis, after the second Romanov tsar. “Oh, it cannot be true!” the empress cried. “It cannot be true! Is it really a boy?” To his overjoyed mother, Alexis instantly became “my sunbeam.”

  “I could see she was transformed by the delicious joy of a mother who had at last seen her dearest wish fulfilled,” recalled Pierre Gilliard, who tutored Nicholas and Alexandra’s daughters, and eventually Alexis as well. “She was proud and happy in the beauty of her child.”

  Nicholas, too, was ecstatic over the arrival of his long-awaited heir. Alexander Mossolov, head of the Court Chancellery, recalled being taken by the happy emperor to see Alexis in his nursery. “I don’t think that you have yet met my dear little Tsarevitch,” Nicholas said. “Come along and I will show him to you.”

  “We went in,” Mossolov continued. “The baby was being given his daily bath. He was lustily kicking out in the water.… The Tsar took the child out of his bath towels and put his little feet in the hollow of his hand, supporting him with the other arm. There he was, naked, chubby, rosy—a wonderful boy.”

  “Don’t you think he’s a beauty?” asked the beaming father.

  The boy was indeed angelic, “with long fair curls, great grey-blue eyes under the fringe of long, curling lashes and the fresh pink color of a healthy child,” as Gilliard described him. But Nicholas and Alexandra soon made a devastating discovery about the health of their precious son, for ben
eath that rosy skin ran blood that wouldn’t clot. It was the hallmark of a hideous, incurable disease called hemophilia, the first sign of which appeared when the tsarevitch was just six weeks old. “Alix and I are very disturbed at the constant bleeding in little Alexis,” Nicholas recorded in his diary. “It continued from his navel until evening.”

  Before long, indications of the dread malady became unmistakable. Every bump or minor trauma, harmless for most children, became a life-or-death ordeal for Alexis. It was as if seemingly ordinary childhood accidents set off subdural explosions in the boy. Blood flowed unceasingly from broken vessels, pooling in great swelling masses that corroded the surrounding tissue and cartilage before finally being reabsorbed into the body. In the process, the normally happy and carefree child would be left immobilized for weeks, tortured with excruciating pain, and never far from death.

  Empress Alexandra “hardly knew a day of happiness after she knew her boy’s fate,” remembered her friend Anna Vyrubova. “Her health and spirits declined, and she developed chronic heart trouble.… Although the boy’s affliction was in no conceivable way her fault, she dwelt morbidly on the fact that the disease is transmitted through the mother and that it was common in her family.”*1

  Indeed the empress’s entire world collapsed. Her answered prayers for a son were now accompanied by a never-ending nightmare. Anxiety plagued her, since she knew that with the smallest accident she could lose her sunbeam in an instant. Exhaustion depleted her as she kept vigil by Alexis’s bedside for days at a time, barely sleeping, while trying to nurse him back to health. And perhaps worst of all, despair overcame her as her beloved child pitifully wailed for the comfort and relief she was helpless to provide. “No tragedy affected Alexandra as deeply as her son’s hemophilia,” wrote her biographer Greg King. “It was not, for her, merely an illness; it became an active force working within her son.”

  Nicholas was as shattered as his wife by the cruel fate to which his son had been consigned. “The emperor aged ten years overnight,” noted one of Nicholas’s cousins. “He could not bear to think that the doctors had sentenced his son to death or life as an invalid.… For [Alexis’s] imperial parents, life lost all sense.” Yet no matter how deeply Nicholas grieved, he still had an empire to manage. And with Alexandra fully immersed in the welfare of the tsarevitch, which drained her entirely, the emperor was left without the comfort of his consort.

  “She keeps to her bed most of the day, does not receive anyone, does not come out to lunches and remains on the balcony day after day,” Nicholas confided to his mother. “[Eugene] Botkin [the court physician] has persuaded her to go to Nauheim [a German spa] for a cure in the early autumn. It is very important for her to get better, for her own sake, and the children’s and me. I am completely run down mentally by worrying over her health.”

  Other than the fact that he was heir to an empire, upon whom all hopes for the dynastic future rested, the little boy at the center of the Romanov family tragedy was in many ways just a typical youngest child—a charmer, doted on by his parents, adored by his four older sisters, and, as Gilliard noted, “endowed with a naturally happy disposition.… When he was well the palace was, as it were, transformed. Every one and every thing seemed bathed in sunshine.”

  But keeping the tsarevitch well was a constant struggle. To prevent injury, which might prove lethal, the child’s activities were severely curbed. There was to be no climbing trees or riding bikes. Running free was absolutely forbidden. Two sailors, Andrei Derevenko and Klementy Nagorny, were assigned to become the boy’s constant companions—male nannies of sorts—and to protect him at all costs from hurting himself.*2 “Luckily his sisters liked playing with him,” Gilliard wrote. “They brought into his life an element of youthful merriment that otherwise would have been sorely missed.”

  Yet despite enthusiastic siblings, a mountain of elaborate toys, and a menagerie of pets, Alexis nevertheless lacked something essential: the opportunity just to be a rough-and-tumble boy. “Why can other boys have everything and I nothing,” he once blurted in frustration.

  It was Pierre Gilliard who recognized the damaging effect Alexis’s insulated, overprotected existence would have on the formation of his character. And the tutor was determined to do something about it. Shockingly, the emperor and empress allowed him to cut away the strict constraints on Alexis’s every movement. All went well, until the boy fell off a chair upon which he was standing and endured a hideously painful brush with death.

  “I was thunderstruck,” Gilliard wrote. “Yet neither the Tsar nor the Tsaritsa blamed me in the slightest. So far from it, they seemed intent on preventing me from despairing.… The Tsaritsa was at her son’s bedside from the first onset of the attack. She watched over him, surrounding him with her tender love and care and trying a thousand attentions to alleviate his sufferings.… Think of the torture of that mother, an impotent witness to her son’s martyrdom in those hours of anguish—a mother who knew that she herself was the cause of those sufferings, that she had transmitted the terrible disease against which human science was powerless. Now I understand the secret tragedy of her life. How easy it was to reconstruct the stages of that long Calvary.”

  It is uncertain when exactly Rasputin reappeared at Tsarskoe Selo after first being introduced to the emperor and empress late in 1905. But the self-proclaimed holy man (often referred to as “the staretz”)*3 came highly recommended by some of the church’s top clergy, as well as several members of the tsar’s extended family—and the immediate effect he had on Alexis seemed nothing short of miraculous.

  “He was taken to the bedside of the tsarevitch,” reported one palace insider. “The child looked at him and began to bubble with laughter. Rasputin laughed too. He laid his hand on the boy’s leg and the bleeding stopped at once. ‘There’s a good boy,’ said Rasputin. ‘You’ll be alright. But only God can tell what will happen tomorrow.’ ”

  In an instant, the grubby, unschooled peasant had accomplished what the tsarevitch’s doctors had long since deemed impossible. And for the empress, he quickly came to represent a deliverance from darkness—the divine instrument of her son’s salvation. “Rasputin was the intermediary between her and God,” Gilliard wrote. “Her own prayers went unanswered but his seemed to be.” Soon, others began to believe in the healing powers of the staretz as well.

  “There is no doubt about that,” wrote Nicholas’s sister Olga. “I saw those miraculous effects with my own eyes and that more than once.”*4 Indeed, even the imperial surgeon, Professor S. P. Federov, was impressed by what he witnessed: “And look, Rasputin would come in, walk up to the patient, look at him and spit. The bleeding would stop in no time.… How could the empress not trust Rasputin after that?”

  Historians have long been baffled by the peasant’s mysterious healing effect on Alexis and his apparent ability to control the vicious disease that plagued the boy. Some dubious theories have been proposed to explain it. One such supposition was that the so-called staretz had been in league with someone inside the palace who kept him updated on the tsarevitch’s condition. This allowed the “healer” to appear just as the boy’s symptoms were starting to subside naturally.

  Others have been more circumspect in their analysis, noting, for example, that some of the personal qualities possessed by Rasputin lent themselves well to calming the suffering child—a process modern medicine now regards as critical to a hemophiliac’s recovery after an injury. Certainly many of Rasputin’s contemporaries remarked upon his uncanny ability to soothe and comfort—“the gift of bringing calm and serenity to the soul,” as one described it. There was also the self-possession and supreme authority in his voice, as well as his penetrating eyes, which though they both attracted and repelled those upon whom he fixated them, were almost universally described as hypnotic.

  “Our eyes met and I was instantly struck by his uncanny appearance,” recalled Lili Dehn, one of the empress’s ladies-in-waiting and a constant companion. “At first he appear
ed to be a typical peasant from the frozen north, but his eyes held mine, those shining steel-like eyes which seemed to read one’s inmost thoughts.” Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador, recorded a similar impression: “The whole expression on the face was concentrated in the eyes—light-blue eyes [others describe them as green] with a curious sparkle, depth and fascination. His gaze was at once penetrating and caressing, naïve and cunning, direct and yet remote. When he was excited, it seemed as if his pupils became magnetic.”*5

  Whatever the source of Rasputin’s apparent mastery over the tsarevitch’s disease—and it may very well simply have been a gift for healing—Empress Alexandra sincerely believed this plainspoken peasant was, quite literally, Heaven sent. And with these divinely ordained credentials, Rasputin became one of the few true intimates of the royal family. To their new “Friend,” the emperor and empress were not Their Majesties, but “Papa” and “Mama”—his welcoming hosts.

  “They would kiss three times in the Russian fashion, and then start to talk,” reported General A. I. Spiridovich, chief of the tsar’s personal security service. “He would speak to them of Siberia, of the needs of peasants, of his pilgrimages. Their Majesties would always discuss the health of the tsarevitch or their current worries about him. When he withdrew after an hour’s conversation with the Imperial Family he always left Their Majesties cheerful, their souls filled with joyous hope. They believed in the power of his prayers to the very end.… No one could shake their faith in him.”

  It was a strange tableau: the loftiest personages in Russia intimately conversing in their imperial sanctum with one of the many millions of peasants over whom they ruled but rarely ever saw or noticed. Rasputin delighted in this unique access, but refused to modify his essential earthiness to blend in better with his opulent surroundings (even if the material of his traditional attire did become richer over time). He ate with his hands and wiped his mouth with his beard. His language was blunt, even at times to the point of rudeness, but the royals didn’t mind: This is what made him a man of the people.