Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  “All the children seemed to like him,” wrote their aunt Olga. “They were completely at ease with him. I still remember little Alexis, deciding he was a rabbit, jumped up and down the room. And then, quite suddenly, Rasputin caught the child’s hand and led him to the bedroom.… There was something like a hush as though we found ourselves in church. In Alexis’s bedroom, no lamps were lit; the only light came from the candles burning in front of some beautiful icons. The child stood very still by the side of the giant, whose head was bowed. I knew he was praying. It was all most impressive. I also knew that my little nephew had joined him in prayer. I really cannot describe it—but I was then conscious of the man’s sincerity.”

  Until Rasputin hit on her.

  So there it was: Behind the façade of piety the staretz presented to Nicholas and Alexandra lurked an unapologetic lecher; a Siberian satyr who blithely bedded all classes of women with the frequency and relish of a jackrabbit. “He has enough for all,” his oft-betrayed (and apparently resigned) wife once said.

  “He would be surrounded by his admirers, with whom he also slept,” Rasputin’s secretary reported. “He would do his thing with them quite openly and without shame. He would caress them … and when he or they felt like it he would simply take them to his study and do his business.… I often heard his views, a mixture of religion and debauchery. He would sit there and give his instructions to his female admirers.

  “ ‘Do you think that I degrade you? I don’t degrade you, I purify you.’

  “That was his basic idea. He also used the word ‘grace,’ meaning that by sleeping with him a woman came into the grace of God.”

  Rasputin’s remarkable success with women—“He had too many offers,” reported his secretary—may be attributed, at least in part, to the pseudoreligious concept he espoused in which it was held that in order to be truly forgiven, one had to gravely sin first. This gave his female followers just the excuse they needed to leap into bed with the magnetic mystic (whose frequent visits to public bathhouses, where his female disciples were granted the privilege of washing his genitals, belies his lingering reputation for being dirty and foul-smelling).

  “Women,” wrote Rasputin’s biographer René Fülöp-Miller, “found in Gregori Elfimovich [his patronymic] the fulfillment of two desires which had hitherto seemed irreconcilable, religious salvation and the satisfaction of carnal appetites.… As in the eyes of his disciples, Rasputin was a reincarnation of the Lord, intercourse with him, in particular, could not possibly be a sin; and those women found for the first time in their lives a pure happiness, untroubled by the gnawings of conscience.”

  While Rasputin was very careful to conceal his lecherous side from his imperial patrons, he certainly seemed to suffer no inner turmoil over the apparent dichotomy of his nature. “Contradictions,” he declared, “what of them, for you they are contradictions, but I am me, Gregori Rasputin, and that’s what matters; look at me, see what I have become!”

  It was true that the rough Siberian peasant, who had spent many years roaming Russia, living hand to mouth while preaching his un-Orthodox brand of religion, had now reached the very apex of society. And to these who had witnessed the “Holy Devil’s” unlikely rise, it was appalling. “In the salons of St. Petersburg, which I frequented fairly regularly, Rasputin was the sole topic of conversation,” reported the Russian minister to Bulgaria. With time, the talk became increasingly salacious.

  Much of the gossip revolved around the empress’s relationship with the staretz, and came as a direct consequence of Nicholas and Alexandra’s decision to keep their son’s incurable disease a palace secret. Lacking awareness of Alexis’s condition, and Rasputin’s apparently efficacious treatment of it, society became convinced something unsavory was happening between the already unpopular, semireclusive empress and the crude, hypersexual peasant whose gross promiscuity was now public knowledge.

  The chatter became louder and more ferocious when a series of purloined letters from members of the imperial family to Rasputin were published in 1911. One of the most damning was from the empress, whose normally florid style of writing—exercised in this case by a devoted disciple addressing her spiritual master—could be easily misinterpreted as a steamy love letter:

  My Beloved, unforgettable teacher, redeemer and mentor:

  How tiresome it is without you. My soul is quiet and I relax only when you, my teacher, are sitting beside me. I kiss your hands and lean on your blessed shoulders. Oh, how light do I feel then! I only wish one thing: to fall asleep, forever on your shoulders and in your arms. What happiness to feel your presence near me. Where are you? Where have you gone? Oh, I am so sad and my heart is longing.… Will you soon again be close to me? Come quickly, I am waiting for you and I am tormenting myself for you. I am asking for your Holy Blessing, and I am kissing your blessed hands. I love you forever.

  Yours,

  Mama

  Rasputin did little to dispel the rumors—quite the contrary, in fact. The staretz basked in the prestige his access afforded him. “He began to feel he had a politico-historical mission,” wrote his biographer Alex de Jonge, “professing to have become convinced that somehow his destiny was linked to the destiny of the nation and the ruling house.”

  Rasputin bragged about his influence with the emperor and empress with all the subtlety with which he used to seduce gullible sex partners. “The tsar thinks I’m Christ incarnate,” he crowed. “The tsar and the tsarina bow down to me, kneel to me, kiss my hands. The tsarina has sworn that if all turn their backs on Grisha [his nickname] she will not waver and still always consider him her friend.”

  There was more than an element of truth to Rasputin’s grandiose pronouncement, for though Russia’s sovereign may not have exactly groveled at the peasant’s feet, Alexandra was indeed his fierce and uncompromising defender. “Saints are always culminated,” the empress said to Dr. Botkin in reaction to the public outrage over Rasputin. “He is hated because we love him,” she told her friend Anna Vyrubova. “They accuse Rasputin of kissing women, etc. Read the Apostles, they kissed everybody as a form of greeting.”

  Anyone who dared impugn her “mentor,” the man she considered the salvation of her son, and of Russia, earned the empress’s unswerving enmity. Prime Minister Peter Stolypin—widely regarded as Russia’s ablest politician, and the best hope to lead the nation into its semiconstitutional future—despised Rasputin*6 and was thus, in turn, hated by Alexandra. Even Stolypin’s assassination in 1911 did little to temper her wrath. “Those who have offended God in the person of our Friend may no longer count on divine protection,” the vengeful empress proclaimed. Similarly, Stolypin’s successor, Vladimir Kokovtsov, also faced Alexandra’s antipathy over Rasputin and eventually found himself out of a job.

  Dowager Empress Marie was mortified to read the lurid accounts of Rasputin’s debauchery, and more aghast still that Alexandra continued to receive him anyway. “My poor daughter-in-law does not perceive that she is ruining both the dynasty and herself,” Marie confided to Prime Minister Kokovtsov in February 1912. “She sincerely believes in the holiness of an adventurer, and we are powerless to ward off the misfortune which is sure to come.”

  In an effort to persuade Nicholas and Alexandra of the looming danger Rasputin represented, the dowager empress had what was described to the Bulgarian minister as a “heart-to-heart talk” with them. Addressing the empress, according to this account, Marie stated bluntly, “It is no question of you, or your affections, your convictions or rather your religious manias. It is a question of the Emperor, of the Dynasty, of Russia! If you go on this way, you will be the undoing of us all!”

  Alas, if Marie expected any support from her son in her attempt to break Rasputin’s spell, she was gravely disappointed. Nicholas proved every bit as unyielding as his wife on the subject—domestic harmony absolutely depended upon it. “Better one Rasputin than ten fits of hysterics a day,” the tsar once remarked in an unguarded moment.

  Bes
ides, to Nicholas II, Rasputin “was just a good, religious, simple-minded Russian,” as he told his security chief. “When in trouble or assailed with doubts, I like to have a talk with him, and invariably feel at peace with myself afterwards.”

  The emperor, who described himself as “suffocating in this atmosphere of gossip, lies, and malice,” was, like Alexandra, particularly sensitive to challenges against the staretz in the Duma and in the press. As far as he was concerned, it was no one’s business whom they invited to their home—a stance Rasputin, protecting his own position, actively encouraged. “What are these questions about Gregori?” he said to the emperor. “It is the devil’s doing. No questions should be asked.”

  Basil Shulgin, a monarchist member of the Duma, wrote about the two sides of Rasputin, whom he called “a Janus,” and the ocean of misunderstanding between the emperor and his subjects that resulted:

  “To the imperial family he [Rasputin] had turned his face as a humble staretz and, looking at it, the Empress cannot but be convinced that the spirit of God rests upon this man. And to the country he has turned the beastly, drunken, unclean face of a bald satyr from Tobolsk.… And because of the man’s fateful duality … neither side can understand the other. So the Tsar and his people, however apart, are leading each other to the edge of the abyss.”

  A leap further toward that chasm came in the fall of 1912, when Rasputin solidified his power after he at least appeared to have rescued Tsarevitch Alexis from what was by far the most frightening trauma the boy had yet suffered.

  The imperial family had retreated to their vast hunting estate in Poland when, in the midst of their relaxed vacation, eight-year-old Alexis took a terrible tumble jumping into a boat. At first it appeared the fall had caused minimal internal damage—just some swelling and bruising below the groin. But then, after the family moved on to their smaller estate at Spala, the empress took her son on a fateful carriage ride through the surrounding forest paths. Before long, Alexis began to wince in pain and cry out every time the carriage jolted. Duly alarmed, Alexandra ordered the driver to return to the lodge as quickly as possible.

  “The return drive stands out in my mind as an experience in horror,” recalled Anna Vyrubova, who had accompanied mother and son on the ride. “Every movement of the carriage, every rough place in the road, caused the child the most exquisite torture and by the time we reached home, the boy was almost unconscious with pain.”

  The doctors were, as usual, helpless as the blood from broken vessels flowed unceasingly, filling a large area around the original injury and creating a massive hematoma. Pain-relieving drugs were never administered to Alexis for fear of their addictive qualities, so the boy lay in agony as his life slowly ebbed away.

  “The days between the 6th and the 10th [of October] were the worst,” the emperor reported to his mother. “The poor darling suffered intensely, the pains came in spasms and recurred every quarter of an hour. His high temperature made him delirious night and day, and he would sit up in bed and every movement brought the pain on again. He hardly slept at all, had not even the strength to cry, and kept repeating, ‘Oh Lord, have mercy upon me.’ ”

  So intense and unrelenting was the pain that the normally exuberant young boy began to see death as a welcome relief. “When I am dead, it will not hurt anymore, will it?” he whispered at one point. And at another, the child solemnly instructed his parents to “build me a little monument of stones in the woods.” Nicholas and Alexandra both believed that time was rapidly drawing near.

  As her dying child struggled desperately, the empress remained where she always did—by his side, providing whatever poor comfort she could. “During the entire time,” recounted Anna Vyrubova, “the Empress never undressed, never went to bed, rarely even laid down for an hour’s rest. Hour after hour she sat beside the bed where the half-conscious child lay huddled on one side, his left leg drawn up.… His face was absolutely bloodless, drawn and seamed with suffering, while his almost expressionless eyes rolled back in his head. Once, when the Emperor came into the room, seeing the boy in this agony, and hearing the faint screams of pain, the poor father’s courage completely gave way and he rushed, weeping bitterly, to his study.”

  So there she was, the empress left all alone, her husband too consumed by his own grief, while the doctors shook their heads in despair. Not even Rasputin was present, but far, far away, on a visit to his homeland. Yet despite the vast distance, Alexandra cabled him anyway, begging for the holy man’s intercession. Hours later—as the public announcement of the tsarevitch’s death was being drafted and his funeral planned—a response arrived from Siberia: “The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much.” Alexis began to improve almost immediately, and with that Rasputin became invincible.

  On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated along with his wife in Sarajevo, precipitating the international crisis that ultimately led to World War I. That very same day, while visiting his home village in Siberia, Rasputin was stabbed in the stomach by a fanatic disciple of the monk Iliodor, his sworn enemy. “I have killed the Anti-Christ,” the crazed assassin screamed. As it turned out, she had only wounded him, albeit grievously. The attack was severe enough to have nearly gutted the staretz and left him powerless to prevent the looming disaster of war. Had he been able to see the tsar in person, Rasputin later said, peace would surely have been maintained.

  While no one expected war in the immediate aftermath of Franz Ferdinand’s murder, it became increasingly likely as ultimatums were issued and alliances called upon. Russia began to mobilize to defend Serbia against possible attack by Austria-Hungary and Germany, which prompted Rasputin to send Nicholas II a stern warning from his sickbed. “Let papa not plan war,” he insisted; “it will be the end of Russia and all of us, we shall lose to the last man.” The emperor angrily tore up the telegram.

  Despite Rasputin’s dire prediction, there was no stopping Nicholas, and on August 2, 1914, he issued a declaration of war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. The emperor’s bellicose stance had a profound effect on his people. All strife seemed to vanish as the country came together in a surge of nationalism not seen in more than a century (and certainly greater than that which briefly accompanied the onset of Russia’s war with Japan a decade earlier). “Here was a Russia which I had never known,” wrote the British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart—“a Russia inspired by a patriotism which seemed to have its roots deep down in the soil.”

  A massive, exuberant crowd gathered in front of the Winter Palace—the very place where so many had been slaughtered during Bloody Sunday years before. When the emperor and empress appeared on the balcony above, the people immediately prostrated themselves. “To those thousands on their knees,” wrote Paléologue, “at that moment the Tsar was really the Autocrat, the military, political and religious director of his people, the absolute master of their bodies and souls.”

  It was a demonstration of loyalty of which the emperor had long been deprived. “Never in all Nicky’s twenty years of luckless reign had he heard so many spontaneous hurrahs,” wrote one of his cousins. Indeed, as one contemporary noted, he had never been “so beloved, so respected, so popular in the eyes of his subjects at that moment.… Portraits of the monarch were in all the principal shop windows, and the veneration was so deep that men lifted their hats and women—even well-dressed, elegant ladies—made the sign of the cross [as they passed].”

  Even the much-derided empress enjoyed a brief respite from her subjects’ contempt. Princess Julia Cantacuzene, a granddaughter of President Ulysses S. Grant who married the emperor’s chief of staff, recounted a touching scene inside the Winter Palace when, as Nicholas and Alexandra made their way through a crowd after a prayer service, many of those gathered surged forward for closer contact with their sovereign:

  “Our beautiful Empress, looking like a Madonna of Sorrows, with tears on her cheeks, stretched her hand in passing
to this or that person, now and then bending gracefully to embrace some woman who was kissing her hand. Her Majesty that day seemed to symbolize all the tragedy and suffering that had come upon us; and, feeling it deeply, to give thanks to this group for the devotion their attitude implied. Her expression was of extraordinary sweetness and distress, and possessed beauty of a quality I had never seen before in the proud, classic face. Everyone was moved by Her Majesty’s manner in a moment when she must be tortured by thoughts of her old home.”

  And so it was in the summer of 1914: a nation united behind its sovereign; revolutionaries dispersed, disheartened, and in hiding; and, as the empress called it, “a ‘healthy war’ in the moral sense,” to be waged against a malevolent enemy. “God is with us!” the emperor confidently declared (as did Kaiser Wilhelm).

  “One breathes very easily in this pure atmosphere,” one member of the Duma wrote, “which has become almost unknown among us.” But that was before the monstrous realities of war—all the misery, bloodshed, and despair—revealed themselves and soon drove Mother Russia to her knees. From the outset, Russian losses were staggering. In fact, just five months after the conflict started, one million soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured. Within a year, the war effort was on the verge of collapse. It certainly wasn’t due to a lack of fighting men; more than fifteen million eventually marched off as part of what the British press called “the Russian steamroller.” Nor was there any absence of valor. As early as October, the emperor was pleading with his troops to preserve themselves.