Sonia Orbeliani died in 1915 in the hospital at Tsarskoe Selo where the Empress Alexandra was tending wounded soldiers from the battlefront. Rather than change into black mourning clothes, Alexandra came directly to the memorial service in her nurse’s uniform. “I feel somehow nearer to her like this, more human, less Empress,” she said. Late that evening, before the coffin was closed, Alexandra sat beside the body of her friend, staring at the peaceful face, stroking the golden hair. “Leave me here,” she said to those who wanted to take her away to rest. “I would like to be a little more with Sonia.”
Sonia Orbeliani came close to being what Alexandra so fervently desired at the Russian court: a friend of the heart. But even Sonia never fully tapped the immense reservoir of emotion inside the Empress. Outside her own family, the only person to whom Alexandra ever fully opened her whole soul was a heavy, round-faced young woman named Anna Vyrubova.
Anna Vyrubova, born Anna Taneyeva, was twelve years younger than the Empress Alexandra. Her family was distinguished; her father, Alexander Taneyev, was both Director of the Imperial Chancellery and a noted composer. Through his house moved government ministers, artists, musicians and ladies of society. Anna herself attended an exclusive dancing class where an occasional partner was young Prince Felix Yussoupov, the son of the wealthiest family of the Russian nobility.
In 1901, at seventeen, Anna Taneyeva fell ill, and the Empress paid her a short visit in the hospital. It was one of many such calls that Alexandra made, but the romantic girl was overwhelmed by the gesture. Anna conceived a passionate admiration for the twenty-nine-year-old Empress. After her recovery, Anna was invited to the palace, where Alexandra discovered that she could sing and play the piano, and the two began to play and sing duets.
An unhappy romance further strengthened the bond. Although Anna Taneyeva was too heavy and soft to be considered beautiful, she had clear blue eyes, a pretty mouth and a trusting, innocent charm. “I remember Vyrubova when she came to visit my mother,” said Botkin’s daughter Tatiana. “She was pink-cheeked, full, and all dressed in fluffy fur. It seemed to me that she was too sweet talking to us and petting us and we didn’t like her very much.” In 1907, Anna was being courted by Lieutenant Boris Vyrubov, a survivor of the Battle of Tsushima. Anna was reluctant to marry Vyrubov, but Alexandra overrode her objections and urged her to go ahead. Anna agreed, and the marriage was performed with the Tsar and his wife as witnesses. Within a few months, the marriage collapsed. Vyrubov, whose ship had been sunk from under him, had shattered nerves and never managed to consummate his marriage.
The Empress blamed herself for Anna’s misfortune. For a while, she devoted most of her time to her romantic and lonely young friend. Anna was invited that summer to join the Imperial family for its annual two-week cruise aboard the Imperial yacht through the Finnish fjords. Sitting on deck during the day or under lamplight in the yacht’s salon at night, Anna poured her heart out. Alexandra responded by talking of her own childhood, her dreams before her marriage, her loneliness in Russia, her hopes and fears for her son. From those days on board the yacht there sprang one of those intimate, confiding relationships such as exist only between women. The tie between them grew so strong that they could sit for hours in silence, secure in unexpressed affection. On each side, anxieties were calmed, wounds healed and faith encouraged. When the cruise ended, Alexandra cried out, “I thank God for at last having sent me a true friend.” Nicholas, who liked Anna, told her good-naturedly, “Now you have subscribed to come with us regularly.”
From that summer, Anna Vyrubova centered her life on the Empress Alexandra. If for some reason Alexandra could not see her for a day or so, Anna pouted. At these times, the Empress teased her, calling her “our big baby” and “our little daughter.” To bring her closer, Anna was moved into a small house inside the Imperial Park, just two hundred yards from the Alexander Palace. It was a summer house with no foundations, and in the winter an icy chill rose up through the floors. Often after dinner Nicholas and Alexandra came to visit.
“When their Majesties came to tea with me in the evening,” Anna wrote, “the Empress generally brought fruit and sweetmeats with her and the Emperor sometimes brought a bottle of cherry brandy. We used to sit around the table with our legs drawn up so as to avoid contact with the cold floor. Their Majesties regarded my primitive way of life from the humorous side. Sitting before the blazing hearth, we drank our tea and ate little toasted cracknels, handed around by my servant…. I remember the Emperor once laughingly saying to me that, after such an evening, nothing but a hot bath could make him warm again.”
When not playing hostess in her cottage, Anna was at the palace. She came after dinner, joining in the family’s puzzles, games and reading aloud. In conversation, she rarely proposed a political subject or urged an original opinion, preferring instead to endorse whatever the Tsar and the Empress had just said. If husband and wife disagreed, her role was to come down ever so gently on the side of the Empress.
Unlike most famous royal favorites, Anna Vyrubova asked nothing for herself except attention and affection. She was without ambition. She never appeared at court ceremonies and never asked for favors, titles or money for herself or her own relatives. Occasionally, Alexandra made her accept a dress or a few hundred roubles; usually Anna gave the money away. During the war, she spent most of her small inheritance on equipment for one of the military hospitals at Tsarskoe Selo.
In a court where the sharp edges of petty intrigue and ambition showed all too plainly, Anna Vyrubova outraged many people. Some scorned her unattractiveness and her naïveté, others felt simply that an empress of Russia deserved a more glittering companion. Grand duchesses of the Imperial blood who were never invited to the Imperial palace were irked to think that the dumpy Vyrubova was sitting night after night in the intimate circle of the Imperial family. Maurice Paléologue, the French Ambassador during the war, was shocked by Anna’s inelegant appearance. “No royal favorite ever looked more unpretentious,” he wrote. “She was rather stout, of coarse and ample build, with thick, shining hair, a fat neck, a pretty, innocent face with rosy, shining cheeks, large strikingly clear bright eyes and full, fleshy lips. She was always very simply dressed and with her worthless adornments had a provincial appearance.”
For the same reasons that others scorned Anna Vyrubova, the Empress prized her. Where others thought only of themselves, Anna’s apparent selflessness set her apart and made her seem all the more rare and valuable. On no account would Alexandra listen to criticism of her young protégée. When Anna sensed dislike in a person and reported it to the Empress, Alexandra bristled toward the antagonist and increased her attentions to Anna. Almost belligerently, the Empress refused to make Anna an official lady-in-waiting and allow her to become enmeshed in the duties and intrigues which went with that rank. “I will never give Anna an official position,” she said. “She is my friend, I wish to retain her as such. Surely an Empress is allowed the right of a woman to choose her friends.”
Later, during the war, when the Empress assumed an important part in the government of Russia, Alexandra’s friendship for Anna took on political significance. Because she was known as the Empress’s most intimate confidante, every gesture Anna made, every word she uttered, was watched and commented on. Correctly or incorrectly, Anna’s opinions, activities, tastes and mistakes were associated in the public mind with Alexandra Fedorovna. This association was especially significant in connection with Anna’s unqualified devotion to the extraordinary Siberian miracle-worker Gregory Rasputin, whose influence on the Imperial couple and therefore on Russia was to grow to towering proportions. Anna met Rasputin when he first arrived in St. Petersburg; he prophesied the collapse of her marriage, and she became convinced that he was a man divinely blessed. Certain that Rasputin could help ease the burdens carried by her mistress, Anna became his most passionate advocate. When Alexandra and Rasputin communicated, Anna was often the physical link. She carried messages in person and tele
phoned Rasputin daily. She transmitted his opinions faithfully and urged them upon the Empress. But Anna herself was not a source of ideas or political action. Everyone who dealt with her personally—ministers, ambassadors, even Rasputin’s secretary—described her in the same terms: “a vehicle,” “an ideal gramophone disc,” “she understood nothing.”
Nevertheless, in the tumultuous days culminating in the fall of the dynasty, the unpretentious Anna was accused of holding major political influence over the Tsar and his wife. Rumor inflated her into a monster of depravity who was said to reign over sinister orgies at the palace. She was accused of conniving with Rasputin to hypnotize or drug the Tsar; she was described as sharing the beds of both Nicholas and Rasputin, with a preference for the latter and a lewd dominion over both. Ironically, both the aristocracy and the revolutionaries told the same stories with the same relish and the same small grunts of rage. After the fall of the monarchy, with the rumors swirling viciously around her head, Anna Vyrubova was dragged off to prison by the Provisional Minister of Justice, Alexander Kerensky. Later, put on trial for her “political activities,” Anna pathetically defended herself in the only way she knew: she asked for a medical examination to prove her sexual innocence. The examination was performed in May 1917 and, to the astonishment of all Russia, Anna Vyrubova, the notorious confidante of the Empress Alexandra, was medically certified to be a virgin.
As one precarious year followed another, emotional stress took a terrible toll on Alexandra’s physical health. As a girl, she suffered from sciatica, a severe pain in the back and legs. Her pregnancies, four in the first six years of marriage, were difficult. The battle against her son’s hemophilia left her physically and emotionally drained. At times of crisis, she spared herself nothing, sitting up day and night beside Alexis’s bed. But once the danger had passed, she collapsed, lying for weeks in bed or on a couch, moving about only in a wheelchair. In 1908, when the Tsarevich was four, she began to develop a whole series of symptoms which she referred to as the result of “an enlarged heart.” She had shortness of breath, and exertion became an effort. She was “indeed a sick woman,” wrote Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, the Tsar’s sister. “Her breath often came in quick, obviously painful gasps. I often saw her lips turn blue. Constant worry over Alexis had completely undermined her health.” Dr. Botkin, who came every day at nine in the morning and five in the afternoon to listen to her heart, mentioned years later to an officer in Siberia that the Empress has “inherited a family weakness of the blood vessels” which often led to “progressive hysteria.” In modern medical terminology, the Empress Alexandra undoubtedly was suffering from psychosomatic anxiety symptoms brought on by worry over the health of her son.
Alexandra’s own letters occasionally mentioned her poor health. In 1911, she wrote to her former tutor, Miss Jackson: “I have been ill nearly all the time…. The children are growing up quite fast…. I send them to reviews with their father and once they went to a big military luncheon … as I could not go—they must get accustomed to replace me as I rarely can appear anywhere, and when I do, am afterwards long laid up—overtired muscles of the heart.”
To her sister Princess Victoria of Battenberg she wrote: “Don’t think my ill health depresses me personally. I don’t care except to see my dear ones suffer on my account and that I cannot fulfill my duties. But once God sends such a cross it must be borne…. I have had so much, that, willingly I give up any pleasure—they mean so little to me, and my family life is such an ideal one, that it is a recompense for anything I cannot take part in. Baby [Alexis] is growing a little companion to his father. They row together daily. All 5 lunch with me even when I am laid up.”
Alexandra’s inability to participate in public life worried her husband. “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,” he wrote to his mother. “Botkin has persuaded her to go to Nauheim [a German health 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 mine. I am completely run down mentally by worrying over her health.”
Marie was sympathetic. “It is too sad and painful to see her [Alexandra] always ailing and incapable of taking part in anything. You have enough worries in life as it is without having the ordeal added of seeing the person you love most in the world suffer…. The best thing would be for you to travel … that would do her a lot of good.”
Taking Botkin’s and his mother’s advice, Nicholas escorted his wife to the German spa of Nauheim so that the Empress could take the cure. Nicholas enjoyed himself on these trips. Dressed in a dark suit and bowler hat, he strolled, unrecognized, through the streets of the little German town. Alexandra, meanwhile, bathed in the warm waters, drank bottled water and went shopping in Nauheim with an attendant pushing her wheelchair. At the end of several weeks, she went back to Russia, rested but not cured. For the mother of a hemophiliac, as for the son, no cure has ever been found.
Russians are a compassionate people, warm in their love of children and deeply perceptive in their understanding of suffering. Why did they not open their hearts to this anguished mother and her stricken child?
The answer, incredibly, is that Russia did not know. Most people in Moscow or Kiev or St. Petersburg did not know that the Tsarevich had hemophilia, and the few who had some inkling had only hazy ideas as to the nature of the disease. As late as 1916, George T. Marye, the American Ambassador, reported, “We hear all sorts of stories about what was the matter with him [Alexis] but the best authenticated seems to be that he has some trouble of the circulation, the blood circulates too close or too freely near the surface … [of] the skin.” Even within the Imperial household, people such as Pierre Gilliard who saw the family regularly did not know for many years precisely what was wrong with Alexis. When he missed a public function, it was announced that he had a cold or had suffered a sprained ankle. No one believed these explanations and the boy became the subject of incredible rumors. Alexis, it was said, was mentally retarded, an epileptic, the victim of anarchists’ bombs. Whatever it was, the mystery made it worse, for there was never a focus for sympathy and understanding. Just as at Khodynka Meadow after their coronation, Nicholas and Alexandra attempted to continue in the midst of disaster by pretending that nothing unusual had happened. The trouble was that everyone knew that behind the façade of normalcy something terrible was happening.
Alexis’s secret was deliberately withheld at the wish of the Tsar and the Empress. There was a basis for this in court etiquette: traditionally, the health of members of the Imperial family was never mentioned. In Alexis’s case, this secrecy was vastly extended. Doctors and intimate servants were begged not to reveal the staggering misfortune.* Alexis, his parents reasoned, was the Heir to the Throne of the world’s largest and most absolute autocracy. What would be the fate of the boy, the dynasty and the nation if the Russian people knew that their future Tsar was an invalid living under the constant shadow of death? Not knowing the answer and fearing to discover it, Nicholas and Alexandra surrounded the subject with silence.
A revelation of Alexis’s condition would inevitably have put new pressures on the Tsar and the monarchy. But the erection of a wall of secrecy was worse. It left the family vulnerable to every vicious rumor. It undermined the nation’s respect for the Empress and, through her, for the Tsar and the throne. Because the condition of the Tsarevich was never revealed, Russians never understood the power which Rasputin held over the Empress. Nor were they able to form a true picture of Alexandra herself. Unaware of her ordeal, they wrongly ascribed her remoteness to distaste for Russia and its people. The years of worry left a look of sadness settled permanently on her face; when she spoke to people, she often appeared preoccupied and deep in gloom. As she devoted herself to hours of prayer, the life of the court became stricter and her own public appearances were reduced. When she did emerge, she was silent, seemingly cold, haughty and indifferent. Ne
ver a popular consort, Alexandra Fedorovna became steadily less popular. During the war, with national passions aroused, all the complaints Russians had about the Empress—her German birth, her coldness, her devotion to Rasputin—blended into a single, sweeping torrent of hatred.
The fall of Imperial Russia was a titanic drama in which the individual destinies of thousands of men all played their part. Yet in making allowance for the impersonal flow of historic forces, in counting the contributions made by ministers, peasants and revolutionaries, it still remains essential to understand the character and motivation of the central figures. To the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna this understanding has never been given. From the time her son was born, the central concern of her life was her fight against hemophilia.
* At the heart of the problem of hemophilia are the genes which issue the biochemical instructions that tell the body how to grow and nourish itself. Gathered in curiously shaped agglomerations of matter called chromosomes, they are probably the most intricate bundles of information known. They determine the nature of every one of the trillions of highly specialized cells that make up a human being. Scientists know that the defective gene which causes hemophilia appears on one of the female sex chromosomes, known as X chromosomes, but they have never precisely pinpointed the location of the faulty gene or determined the nature of the flaw. Chemically, most doctors believe that hemophilia is caused by the absence of some ingredient, probably a protein factor, which causes normal blood to coagulate. But one eminent hematologist, the late Dr. Leandro Tocantins of Philadelphia, believed that hemophilia is caused by the presence of an extra ingredient, an inhibitor, which blocks the normal clotting process. Nobody really knows.
There is a remote prospect that current research into the structure of chromosomes will help hemophiliacs. If it should become possible to locate the genes responsible—and then to correct or substitute for the faulty gene—hemophilia could be cured. But medical researchers hold out little hope for the immediate future. So far, science has been unable to change genetic characteristics in any form of life except bacteria.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family Page 21