Taking pleasure in insulting his wealthy guests, Rasputin sometimes dipped his finger into a plate of jam and, turning to one of them, said, “Humble yourself, lick it clean.” He ridiculed the expensive gifts the women showered on him. “What’s this, little mother … you could feed five villages of starving people with [this].” And he stepped far beyond the bounds of propriety by pulling the prettiest women into his lap to hug and kiss them. His rudeness, he believed, made him even more attractive to the bored nobility.
And it worked … for a while. But soon, rumors began swirling through society about the goings-on in Rasputin’s apartment. And the upper crust was horrified. How dare the starets offend well-born ladies in that way? Rasputin, many nobles decided, wasn’t a holy man. He was just a lecherous impostor. By 1911, doors began slamming in his face.
But not the palace doors. “They accuse Rasputin of kissing women,” Alexandra grumbled to Nicholas. “Read the apostles; they kissed everybody as a form of greeting.”
Because the starets was always on his best behavior in front of them, it was easy for the couple to ignore the truth: that Rasputin was a charlatan. Instead, they grew angry with anyone who criticized him. His enemies “are ours,” Alexandra declared.
STOLYPIN VS. THE STARETS
All the rumors worried Prime Minister Peter Stolypin. He didn’t trust the starets’ hypnotic ways. What kind of advice was the crude charlatan giving the tsar? Deeply loyal to the throne, Stolypin decided to launch an in-depth investigation into Rasputin’s activities. He hoped solid evidence would force Nicholas to see the truth. For weeks, the police tailed Rasputin, questioning anyone he spoke with, and opening his mail. In February 1911, they turned over their findings to Stolypin. Although their report has been lost to history, rumors of its contents swirled. Some claimed it provided evidence that Rasputin had molested numerous women—maids, noblewomen, even nuns. And according to one member of Rasputin’s family, the report contained obscene photographs. Whatever the truth, the report was obviously dark—so dark that Stolypin hurried to the tsar.
Nicholas read the report. But he refused to believe it. Why, he asked, was everyone so preoccupied with Rasputin? His relationship with the starets was his personal business, having nothing to do with political affairs. Naïvely, he did not see how Rasputin’s bad behavior tarnished the reputation of the throne. Instead, he suggested that the prime minister meet with Rasputin. He was sure the two men would come to like each other.
Since a royal suggestion was the same as a command, Stolypin had no choice but to invite Rasputin to his office.
The starets arrived wearing an expensive fur coat (a gift from the empress) and a confident smile. He assured the prime minister that he was a peaceful man without a political agenda. “There is no need for the police to worry about me,” he said.
“If this is true,” Stolypin retorted, “then you do not need to fear the police.”
When he heard these words, Rasputin’s features changed. His eyes grew intense and piercing. Leaning forward, he locked gazes with the prime minister. “He mumbled mysterious and inarticulate words from the Scriptures,” recalled Stolypin, “and made strange movements with his hands.”
But Stolypin did not fall under this spell. Instead, he felt only “loathing” and “revulsion.” “I could have you … prosecuted,” he shouted, obviously referring to the mysterious findings of the police report. He gave the starets two choices: face the charges or leave St. Petersburg immediately. Which would it be?
Rasputin didn’t answer. Snatching up his coat, he stormed from the office. He would complain to the empress about this rude treatment!
Knowing he needed to get to the tsar before Alexandra did, Stolypin hurried to Tsarskoe Selo. Pacing angrily, he told Nicholas about the meeting. The man was dangerous, he insisted.
Nicholas lit a cigarette. “Everything you say may be true,” he conceded, “but I must ask that you never speak to me again of Rasputin. In any event, I can do nothing about it.”
Stolypin thought Nicholas was talking about his inability to stand up to his wife. But he may have been referring to their need for Rasputin because of Alexei’s hemophilia, which was still a secret.
Either way, Nicholas refused to take action.
So Stolypin took matters into his own hands. Without the tsar’s permission, he wrote an order banishing Rasputin from St. Petersburg.
When Alexandra heard what the prime minister had done, she burst into hysterical tears and begged Nicholas to help “Our Friend” (the Romanovs’ name for Rasputin).
For once, Nicholas stood firm. No matter how much his wife cried about the heartlessness of the separation, he refused to overrule his prime minister. (Some historians suspect this was the tsar’s way of taking indirect action on the matter of the report.) He did, however, soften the blow. Summoning Rasputin to the palace, Nicholas said, “You have mentioned your desire to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I think this would be a good time for it.”
But how, wondered Rasputin aloud, could a poor man like him pay for such a trip?
“I will … give you the journey as a token of our esteem,” replied Nicholas. “The Lord knows you have earned it through your many services to the crown.”
A pilgrimage to the Holy Land! It was the greatest gift possible for an Orthodox Russian. Pleased, Rasputin hurried home to pack.
He would be away from St. Petersburg until June. In that time, Nicholas hoped the controversy would blow over.
A PREMONITION OF DEATH
In September 1911, the entire imperial family, as well as a handful of ministers including Stolypin, traveled to Kiev. Because the city was celebrating the unveiling of a statue dedicated to his grandfather, Nicholas had agreed to make a public appearance. As his procession wound through the city, thousands of people lined the streets. But to their disappointment, most could not see the tsar through the circle of armed guards and policemen surrounding him. Since the events of 1905, Nicholas almost never ventured out. When he did, he went with heavy security.
Behind the tsar, riding in a separate carriage, came Stolypin. No guards on horseback protected him. No police held back the crowds. “You see, we are superfluous,” he commented to a minister sitting beside him.
Neither man noticed the tall, bearded peasant who pushed his way to the front of the crowd. It was Rasputin, who had traveled to Kiev—on his own, and uninvited—to be near the imperial family. Now, as Stolypin’s carriage passed, Rasputin reportedly began to shake. “Death is after him!” he shouted, raising a bony finger and pointing at the prime minister. “Death is driving behind him! Behind Peter [Stolypin]!” But only those in the crowd heard him.
The next evening, Nicholas attended a special performance being held in his honor at the Kiev opera house. Because Alexandra refused to appear in public, it was decided that fifteen-year-old Olga and fourteen-year-old Tatiana would go instead. The delighted girls followed Nicholas up the red-carpeted stairs and took their seats in the imperial theater box overlooking the stage. From there, they could see the dozens of soldiers posted throughout the theater.
Earlier, the tsar’s security agents had searched the place for bombs and hidden assassins. Still, General Spiridovitch, chief of security, worried. “I was,” he admitted, “obsessed by indescribable anxiety.” From his aisle seat below the Romanovs’ box, he had a clear view of the tsar, while beside him in the front row sat Stolypin, along with the other ministers.
The curtain rose. The music swelled. And Spiridovitch’s anxiety grew. “Each instant I thought I heard steps in the aisle,” he admitted, “and despite myself I would turn around.”
The opera wore on. Then, during the second intermission, Nicholas and Olga stepped out in the hallway for a glass of tea, leaving Tatiana alone in the theater box. At that moment, a young man dressed in evening clothes rushed down the aisle. Pulling out a revolver, he aimed and fired twice.
Tatiana acted on instinct. Leaping from her chair, she slammed the door
to the box shut, then flung her weight across it in an attempt to keep her father out. “Papa, don’t come in,” she shouted. “They are shooting!”
Her strength was no match for her father’s. Shouldering open the door, he charged past her. Olga followed. As the three leaned over the railing, they saw Stolypin standing in the front row. “He slowly turned his face toward [us],” said Nicholas, “and with his left hand made the sign of the Cross in the air. Only then did I notice that he was very pale and that his … uniform [was] bloodstained. He slowly sank into his chair.”
Around him, the theater erupted into chaos. As General Spiridovitch raced toward the tsar’s box, and policemen tackled the shooter, audience members shrieked and pushed for the exits. Then calmer heads shouted for the national anthem to be played. The orchestra burst into music.
It was Nicholas’s cue to appear—safe and sound—to the crowd below. From the box, he waved and saluted as the audience cheered.
Then General Spiridovitch and a phalanx of armed guards bustled the two very shaken teenagers and their father away. That night, said Nicholas, both girls “slept badly,” and Tatiana “cried a lot.”
Five days later, Stolypin died.
His assassin, a man by the name of Dmitri Bogrov, was hastily executed before an investigation could be made into his murderous act. Why had he killed the prime minister? The question went unanswered.
But Alexandra believed she knew. “Those who offend Our Friend may no longer count on divine protection,” she said.
SWEET SIXTEEN
Weeks later, Olga glided across the state dining room of her family’s palace in the Crimea, her pink tulle evening gown rustling, her white-gloved hand resting daintily on her father’s arm. For the very first time, her long blond hair had been swept up into a fashionable coil. And around her neck glittered a birthday present from her parents: a necklace made of sixteen luminous pearls and sixteen flawless diamonds, one for every year of her life. They were Olga’s first jewels, and they were being worn to her very first ball—her own!
Cheeks flushed, she greeted her guests—family, friends, courtiers, and young officers—before moving onto the dance floor with her father for the first waltz. The pair whirled across the marble floor to the strains of the regimental band. Because the night was so warm, the French doors had been thrown open, and the fragrance of the gardens’ roses and orchids filled the room.
As the guests watched, did they whisper about the murder Olga had witnessed just weeks earlier? Did they look for signs of strain on her face? If they did, they would have noticed nothing. “She floated,” recalled one guest, “like a butterfly” as she moved from her father’s arms to those of the young officers who stepped forward to ask for a dance.
Unable to face even this social evening, Alexandra, along with Alexei and her other three daughters, watched it all from a balcony above the courtyard. But after the lavish midnight supper was served, the empress reluctantly made an appearance. “She looked,” said one guest, “like a Greek icon, in a gown of cloth of gold.… The Tsarevich was next to her, his lovely little face flushed with the excitement of the evening.”
Later, guests wandered along the winding paths of the luxuriant, rose-drenched gardens. Overhead, “the deep southern sky glitter[ed] with myriads of stars,” recalled one lady, “and an autumn moon cast its silver light across the shining waters.”
It was a moment of brightness in a world growing increasingly dark.
LETTERS TO RASPUTIN
Nicholas had hoped the rumors about Rasputin would run their course while the starets was away. Instead, things only grew worse. In late 1911, copies of letters began circulating around the city, letters from the imperial family to Rasputin. They revealed to all who read them just how much the Romanovs depended on the starets. In one letter, Olga spoke of her mother’s invalidism. “God grant that dear Mama will not be sick any more this winter,” she wrote, “[and that she will] not be so terribly melancholy and difficult.”
Tatiana’s letters begged Rasputin to “forgive all the sins I have committed against you,” as if he were some sort of savior.
Marie’s letters exposed the fact that she slept with a Bible Rasputin had given her. She wished her mother would “let me see you alone about God. It would be wonderful if I prayed to God with you.”
And Anastasia wrote that she saw him in her dreams. No letters from Alexei appeared in print.
But it was Alexandra’s letters that readers found most shocking: “I wish only one thing: to fall asleep on your shoulder.… I love you and believe in you.… I kiss you warmly.” They took these words as proof that Alexandra and Rasputin were having an affair. They didn’t know the empress wrote the same sort of gushing letters to everyone she knew—her sisters, friends, daughters.
Furious, Nicholas ordered the police to track down the originals. They did (although where they found them remains a mystery). When the minister of the interior turned the letters over to Nicholas, the tsar turned pale. He’d been hoping they were fakes. “These are not counterfeit,” he said after sliding them from their envelopes. Then he tossed the pile into his desk drawer and lit a cigarette. His hands, recalled an eyewitness, trembled with barely restrained anger.
Alexandra was angry, too. She shot off a sternly worded telegram to Rasputin, scolding him for being so irresponsible with her letters.
Rasputin cabled right back. He tried to excuse himself by claiming the letters had been stolen. In truth, he had given them to an acquaintance while boasting—once again—about his close ties to the imperial family.
But the empress would not listen to his feeble excuses. Rasputin, she felt, had violated her trust.
Realizing he was in serious trouble, Rasputin rushed to Tsarskoe Selo. He begged Alexandra to see him.
She refused.
So Rasputin turned to the empress’s good friend, Anna Vyrubova. He begged her to speak to the tsar on his behalf. Anna—a staunch believer in the starets’ powers—agreed. She pleaded with Nicholas to include Rasputin in the imperial family’s Easter trip to the Crimea. After all, wasn’t the holiday a time for forgiveness?
Nicholas also refused.
Desperate now, Rasputin pleaded with Anna to help him stow away on the imperial train. Hiding out in the baggage car, the starets hoped the couple’s anger would soften once they saw him disembark in the Crimea.
But somehow, Nicholas learned of Rasputin’s secret travels. He ordered the guards to dump the starets and his luggage the next time the train stopped.
Frantic to get back into the family’s good graces, Rasputin traveled on to the Crimea by himself. But his appearance merely caused gossip. “Now I can rest easy,” said one courtier sarcastically. “Rasputin’s here—everything will go well.”
The imperial couple completely ignored him.
And so Rasputin returned to his Siberian village. And bided his time.
THE FAMILY NIGHTMARE
The spring and summer of 1912 passed pleasantly for the Romanovs. Sailing. Snapping photographs. Playing in the waves in front of their beachfront mansion at Peterhof. They even “walked barefoot,” enthused Anastasia. “It was great!” Eight-year-old Alexei was so healthy and suntanned that Alexandra started to believe her fevered prayers had indeed worked a miracle.
In August 1912, as they always did, the imperial family traveled to two of their three Polish hunting lodges. They went first to Bialowieza in eastern Poland. “The weather is warm and my daughters and I go for [horseback] rides on these perfect woodland paths,” Nicholas wrote his mother.
Alexei cried to go with them. His pleading broke his mother’s heart. She knew he felt smothered and overprotected. And so she let him go rowing on a nearby lake.
But instead of stepping carefully into the rowboat, the high-spirited boy leaped … stumbled … smashed his upper thigh into an oarlock. The accident caused a small bruise and enough swelling to land Alexei in bed for a few days. But it soon disappeared, and he felt fine. “All i
n all,” Nicholas wrote, “it did not seem like [much] to bother about.”
Two weeks later, the family moved to their forest lodge in Spala. Days passed. Nicholas hunted. The grand duchesses played tennis. And Alexandra and Alexei rested in the sunshine.
One afternoon, Alexandra took the boy for a carriage ride. At first, all seemed fine. Mother and son, as well as Anna Vyrubova (who often traveled with the family), happily bounced along the rutted road. Suddenly, Alexei cried out in pain. His stomach hurt. So did his back. Alarmed, Alexandra ordered the driver to return home. But there were miles to go, and every carriage bump caused the boy to cry out. It was “an experience in horror,” recalled Anna. By the time they got back to the lodge, Alexei was “almost unconscious with pain.”
Dr. Botkin quickly diagnosed the problem. The torn blood vessels from the rowboat accident had been seeping blood—first into Alexei’s leg, then into his groin, then into his lower abdomen. To make more room for the blood filling his tissues, Alexei’s leg had involuntarily drawn itself up, until it pressed awkwardly against his chest. Still the blood kept flowing. Soon, there would be no place else for it to go. Dr. Botkin and several specialists who had been called in could do nothing.
Curled on his side and semiconscious, Alexei shrieked with pain. His face, recalled Anna, “was absolutely bloodless, drawn and seamed with suffering while his almost expressionless eyes rolled back in his head.”
“Mama, help me,” Alexei wailed over and over again. “Won’t you help me? Won’t you?”
Like the doctors, Alexandra could do nothing. For the next eleven days, she held her son’s hand, sponged his feverish forehead, and prayed. She felt sure her son was dying.
Alexei believed he was, too. “When I am dead it will not hurt anymore, will it, Mama?” he asked one day. His words brought her to tears.
The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia Page 10