The Last Tsar

by Edvard Radzinsky

  Anya was quite musical. From the very beginning she managed to pick the right note.

  In 1907 she was invited to join the family on their yacht to their favorite place, the Finnish Skerries.

  In the sun-filled stateroom they played piano four-handed. Later Anya would tell Alix of how her hands had turned to stone, she was so agitated. Then they sang duets. Alix was a contralto, Anya a soprano, so their duet meshed instantly.

  When Anya disembarked, Alix said, “Thanks be to God; He has sent me a Friend.”

  Anya was often taken on walks in the Skerries. Bright, tranquil evenings on the tsar’s yacht. Peaceful lights burning onshore. The smell of the water and of the cigarettes in the sovereign’s hands. The white yacht Polar Star slipped through the fallen night.

  In 1918, the arrested Anya Taneyeva would find herself once again on the Polar Star, where the Central Baltic staff would convene and the yacht’s new masters—the revolutionary sailors—would take her. Everything would be spat upon, befouled. They would put her in the filthy hold, which teemed with parasites, and then lead her across the familiar deck to be interrogated. And she would remember those other nights.

  What was the main reason behind the young lady’s success?

  “The most ordinary Petersburg young lady, who had fallen in love with the empress and was always gazing at her with her ecstatic eyes and saying ‘Ach, ach, ach!’ Anya Taneyeva herself is not pretty and looks like a blob of fancy pastry,” Witte wrote in his Memoirs.

  After the fall of the tsarist regime in February 1917, the “Special Commission of Inquiry on the abuses of tsarist government ministers and other high officials of the overthrown regime” was created. Assigned to it was a typical liberal figure, a comrade procurator of the Ekaterinoslav district court, a certain V. M. Rudnev. Subsequently he recalled questioning the arrested Anya: “I was … frankly speaking, hostilely inclined toward her.… I was immediately struck by the unusual expression in her eyes, an expression full of unworldly meekness.” Guileless Anya had brought to the tsar’s family sincerity, devotion, and adoration, which were so lacking in the cold court. That was the investigator’s conclusion. He added: “Mrs. Vyrubova could not have exercised any political influence whatsoever. The empress’s intellect and will were far too strong a counterweight.”

  Simple-hearted, stupid, and ugly?

  Vera Leonidovna:

  “She was quite pretty.… A beauty but in a very Russian manner: ash blond hair, great big blue eyes, a luxuriant body.… I remember seeing her for the first time. I was walking down Nevsky after a rehearsal. Atlantis was still alive: smart carriages raced past, and coachmen in tight-fitting indigo coats drove cheap droshkies. I often hear that sound now—the sound of a vanished life.… Here was the magnificent plume of a horse guardsman dashing by. With his back to the coachman and a greatcoat draped over his shoulders, the mayor of Petersburg went flying past surrounded by bicyclists; evidently the sovereign himself was to drive through shortly. It was two o’clock, and I saw the most elegant turnouts.

  “That was when I saw the carriage: a young woman half-reclining, lazily, the feathers of her hat dangling over her beautiful, rather full face, her legs draped with a fur coverlet. ‘There she is,’ said my friend. There was a great deal of talk about her then. If rumor had Rasputin for the tsaritsa, they gave the tsar to Anya as a lover as well. By the way, she always told very sweet stories about herself and always funny things. Only intelligent people know how to make fun of themselves.… She was intelligent. She was also a great actress. This woman, who participated in all of Rasputin’s political games, appointed and ousted ministers, and carried out the most complex intrigues in the court, could look like an utterly artless Russian dolt. Was it a mask? Or had the mask become her face once and for all?”

  Yes, Anya immediately grasped “Sana’s” nature. Russia’s mistress was shy. Her ingenuousness clashed with the icy chill of the court. Seeing herself misunderstood, she turned inward. She mastered reserve and distance, which were perceived as arrogance. Anya found the key to Sana’s heart: ecstatic, constant, and unbounded adoration.

  Could she really have remained by Alix’s side for twelve whole years playing such a monotonous game, though? Oh no, she was constantly thinking up dangerous, intriguing new games for her imperial friend.

  ANYA’S GAMES

  Among the papers Yurovsky brought out after the family’s execution were many letters. All through World War I, breathless with love, Alix and Nicky inundated each other with letters, letters that contained puzzling lines. For instance, once Alix added this enigmatic postscript: “Lovy, you burn her letters so as that they should never fall into anybody’s hands?”

  Whose letters? Why mustn’t those letters fall into anybody’s hands? Who is this person anyway, this “she”?

  Elsewhere: “If we are not both firm, we will have lovers’ scenes & scandals.… You will see when we return she will tell you how terribly she suffered without you.… Be nice & firm.… She always needs cooling down.” So “she” would dare pursue lovers’ scenes and scandals and, evidently, letters to Nicholas?

  Not mincing words, Alix brands this unknown woman: “quite hardened already … nothing of the loving gentle woman.” “She is boring and very tiresome.” And so on.

  Here is quite a nasty caricature—testimony to Alix’s infinite jealousy: “She is full of how thin she has grown, tho I find her stomach & legs colossal (& most unappetising)—her face is rosy, but the cheeks less fat & shades under her eyes.” In her letters Alix refers to her as “the Cow.”

  But now we have nearly a cry: “No one dare call you ‘my own.’ You are mine, all mine, not hers.… Anya wants to come see us tomorrow & I was so happy that we are not going to have her in the house for a long time.”

  Yes, “she,” “the Cow”—this is all Anya. What about “naive” and “meek”? Does this mean the rumor was right? And there was no idyllic love between Alix and Nicky? Was Anya the tsar’s mistress? But here is Investigator Rudnev:

  “The facts of the medical certificate for Mrs. Vyrubova drawn up in May 1917 at the instruction of the Special Commission of Inquiry establish beyond a doubt that Mrs. Vyrubova was a virgin.” Does this mean, again, that there was nothing going on? But what was in fact going on? Where are these curses of the tsaritsa coming from?

  Meanwhile, almost simultaneously, Alix was writing her husband: “Perhaps you will put in your telegram to me that you thank her for the inclosed letter & send love or messages?” And in another letter: “Ania talks about her loneliness—that makes me angry. She visits us twice a day & spends 4 hours every evening with us,—you are her life.” Does this mean the home wrecker calmly visited every day and they allowed her to spend long hours at court?

  What was going on?

  “THE OTHER MAN”

  On September 2, 1915, Alix wrote Nicholas: “I went with Ania to Orlov’s grave.” On October 4 Alix wrote again: “Then we fetched Ania & drove … to the cemetery as I wanted to put flowers on poor Orlov’s grave.” She informed Nicholas of each visit to “poor Orlov’s” grave. This is amazing, for rumor proclaimed Orlov to be Alix’s lover. Moreover, society gossip named him Alexei’s father.

  Alexander Afinogenovich Orlov was a major-general of the imperial suite, a brigade commander, and namesake of the famous Alexei Orlov who put Catherine the Great on the Russian throne. Alexander Afinogenovich liked to play up his connection to that handsome rake of the gallant eighteenth century, but with a dash of the twentieth century—cocaine and other such pleasures. Everything changed completely with the arrival in Petersburg of the young Hessian princess. Orlov offered up to her his sincere, chivalrous respect. His crude hussar ways disappeared, leaving only the ecstatic admiration of a knight encountering his Beautiful Lady. When Alix was rejected by Nicholas’s parents, Orlov remained constant in his admiration. We underscore—admiration. When she became empress, Alix never forgot the faithful Orlov.

  Orlov was assigned to a reg
iment whose chief was the Beautiful Lady herself. Now he rightfully carried the empress’s colors. The medieval romance continued.

  Jack London wrote a story about two people who decide to trick God and make their passion eternal: they come up with the idea of not allowing a final embrace. Alix did not want her romantic passion with Nicky to extinguish in the prose of life. Her instinct as a loving woman told her that it would require “another man” to keep the fire going. And Orlov’s love—the respectful love of a poor knight for an unattainable princess—was the love of that other man.

  The court reacted as would be expected: an artless rumor about the tsaritsa’s amorous intrigues was born. The result was a conversation between the empress-mother and Nicholas. But Alix would not allow this exciting game canceled. She thought up something with her friend: Orlov could marry Anya, to forestall gossip. But the handsome general declined, and this, evidently, was his downfall. Orlov was sent abroad, and en route he died suddenly. Possibly the omnipotent secret police was concerned with the family’s reputation.

  There was no “other man” now. Would Alix and Nicky’s love actually die of familiarity? Anya took on the role of the other woman. Orlov had adored the tsaritsa platonically. Now Anya would adore the tsar platonically. Now she was the other, creating the necessary tension in the eternal love game between Alix and Nicky. At the same time, she adored the tsaritsa as before … and now the tsar as well! Like a schoolgirl who falls in love with her girlfriend, she idolized the object of Alix’s affections. No, of course she did not allow herself to vie with her sovereign mistress, she merely let herself languish from unrequited love for her chosen one—she even staged scenes, but ridiculous, naive ones. At the center of the new love tension was Nicky the supernumerary, and circling him the two leading actresses in this subtle love play.

  Anya was already starting to worry. Voices were beginning to be heard in the large Romanov family: get rid of this friend. But Anya managed to hang on with the help of an amusing new game.

  One day she announced to Alix that she had decided to go away. Sacrifice her love for them to calm the court. Soon afterward, to general astonishment, omnipotent Anya married the modest naval officer Boris Vyrubov. Witte commented nastily: “The poor empress wails like the wife of a Moscow merchant marrying off her daughter.” But Anya knew the finale to this marriage in advance—she possessed precise information about her groom—and soon she fled her marital bed, for her husband turned out to be a sexual deviant and drug addict. Anya could tell the mystically inclined tsaritsa that this was her punishment for betraying her predestination. Her lot, having given up on the possibility of a family of her own, was to serve Russia’s first family.

  So who was she? Simple-hearted, good, serene, candid? Yes. And also—sly, secretive, cunning, intelligent. A dangerous woman who devoted herself to a single passion. Witte wrote: “The entire inner circle pays court to Anya Vyrubova, as do their wives and daughters. Anya arranges various indulgences for them and influences which political figures get close to the sovereign.”

  This was her passion: power. The power that immediately suited the young lady and to which she subsumed her entire life. The secret blood of Emperor Paul. Anya was the invisible mistress of the most brilliant court in Europe.

  Then suddenly, in 1914, this unexpected hurricane of insane jealousy from the empress. Everything was in jeopardy!

  What had happened? Had Anya overplayed her hand? Were the southern nights to blame—those maddening nights in the white Livadia Palace?

  None of them are alive now. They have long since departed this world. We are still trying to re-create the scenes, but the shaky figures dissolve in the darkness. The curtain falls. They are behind the curtain, and we are not going to disturb them.

  Actually, it is all quite clear: in 1914 (at the start of the war between her new and former homelands), Alix was on the verge of hysteria, and this combined in her with the strange, carnal quality that had been introduced into the palace with the “Holy Devil,” Grigory Rasputin. Although the palace made the devil over into a saint, the half-mad tsaritsa could not help but sense the invisible field of his lust, the electrical charge of his unbridled power. Hence her passionate, carnal dreams in her letters to Nicholas. No, this was no longer comfortable marital love but a frenzied challenge that found an outlet in the insane jealousy that engulfed her then. Now, as in years past, Anya was energetically playing her part of the safe other woman. But one day Alix saw herself in the mirror: tormented, aging … gray hairs had appeared. And next to Nicky this young, blooming woman with ecstatic eyes riveted to him as if she were begging to be petted. Delusion was born.

  Anya behaved wisely. Trying to justify herself would have meant fanning suspicion, so she responded with the offended coolness and contempt of the unjustly insulted. And with rudeness. This last was new for Russia’s mistress, but it proved the best medicine. Soon Alexandra was complaining to Nicky: “her humour towards me has not been amiable this morning—what one would call rude.” To rudeness Anya added yet another kind of medicine. “She flirts hard with the young Ukrainian,” the empress wrote querulously, but “misses & longs for you.” The storm was already abating, however. And soon: “I only dread Ania’s humour”—and, humbly—“I will take all much cooler now and don’t worry over her rudeness … we are friends & am very fond of her & always shall be, but something has gone.”

  Everything fell back into place.

  In battling Alix’s jealousy, Anya could be perfectly calm. Next to her stood someone who would never allow her to be insulted, her strongest partner in these games with Alix: Rasputin.

  Anya had heard of Rasputin from the Montenegrin princesses. When she saw him, she appreciated him immediately.

  “A FANTASTIC MAN”

  Rasputin had been long awaited in the palace. At the very beginning of Nicholas’s reign, as the family searched in vain for popular truth seekers and the Montenegrins seduced the Anglo-German princess with the mysterious world of sorcerers and holy fools, he was approaching.

  When they went to the canonization ceremonies at Sarov and the mysterious wilderness—here, indeed, the devil took on the guise of the saint: the image of the wise, meek Serafim would be adopted by the Holy Devil—Grigory Rasputin.

  “In the village of Pokrovskoe there is a pious Grigory. Like Saint Serafim, and the prophet Elijah, he is given to shutting the sky—so that drought befalls the land until he commands the heavens to open and pour down life-giving rain.” Thus recounted Father Feofan, rector of the Petersburg Theological Academy, to his admirers the Grand Dukes Peter and Nicholas Nikolaevich. And here were the Montenegrins, the grand dukes’ wives, bringing news to the palace: just like the Venerable Serafim, Grigory walked about his village surrounded by innocent girls, and just like him he preached humility, love, and kindness and healed the sick.

  Late in 1903, Rasputin appeared in the halls of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy wearing a greasy jacket, oiled boots, and baggy trousers that hung down in back like a torn hammock, his beard tangled and his hair parted like a tavern waiter’s. He had hypnotic gray-blue eyes, first gentle and kind, then fierce and angry—but usually guarded. His speech was strange, too, almost incoherent, lulling, somehow primordial.

  While the Montenegrins were passing on to Alix their ecstatic tales of the Holy Man, Anya decided to bring him to the palace. Like a brilliant director she staged her scene: the appearance of the Holy Man before the empress.

  It is late at night, she and the tsaritsa are playing Beethoven four-handed. At about midnight, on Anya’s instruction, Rasputin is led silently into the half-lighted room. The empress is seated with her back to him. She continues to play with Anya. The clock strikes midnight.

  “Don’t you feel something happening, Sana?”

  “Yes, yes,” answers the empress, a little frightened.

  Then Anya slowly turns her head, and the poor tsaritsa, obediently, does as well. When the nervous Alix sees the vague figure of a muz
hik in the doorway, like a vision, she is struck by hysterics. Rasputin comes to her, hugs the tormented woman to his chest, and strokes her quietly, gently murmuring, “Be not afraid, my dear. Christ is with you.”

  Rasputin is one of the most popular myths of the twentieth century. The madness of Russian debauch, the sexual power that vanquished Petersburg society, the diamonds and luxurious furs thrown at the oiled boots of the devil-muzhik, and this muzhik, who defiled the marital bed of Russia’s first family in full view of the country—all this has sold millions of books.

  Rudnev, the investigator of the Special Commission of Inquiry, later compiled a very interesting memorandum: “One of the most valuable materials for illuminating the personality of Rasputin was the observations journal kept by the surveillance established for Rasputin by agents of the secret police. The surveillance was both external and internal, and his apartment was under constant watch.… Since the periodic press paid inordinate attention to Rasputin’s unruliness, which became synonymous with his name, the investigation has given this issue proper attention. The richest material for illuminating this aspect of his personality came from that permanent secret surveillance of his apartment, which made it clear that Rasputin’s amorous exploits did not go beyond nighttime orgies with young women of frivolous conduct and chanteuses, as well as with several of his suppliants.… As for his proximity to ladies of high society, in this respect the surveillance and investigation obtained no positive materials whatsoever.”

  So, there were no “ladies of high society”! But what was there?

  Grigory Rasputin was born in the village of Pokrovskoe, in Siberia, the son of the peasant Efim Novykh. His father was a terrible drunkard who suddenly saw the light, stopped drinking, and saved up a sufficiency. Then his wife died and his muzhik despair kicked in again: he began drinking and lost all his money. His son Grigory was well known at this time for his own dissolute life. As Rasputin he went to Tobolsk, worked as a waiter in a hotel, there married the servant Praskovye, and she bore him three children: a son and two daughters.