Alexandra

by Carolly Erickson

  But perhaps, within the circle of believers, it was not after all impossible. For among the gifts of the teachers and advisers sought out by Militsa and Stana were some who claimed to be able to communicate with the dead, or to place those of sincere faith in a state in which they themselves could receive messages from the other world.

  Alix’s other pressing motivation for taking part in the Montenegrins’ circle was that she was once again pregnant, and was vacillating between hope and anxiety over the sex of her unborn child.

  Much to her surprise and delight, this pregnancy felt different from the three previous ones. She was not constantly ill, she looked and felt bursting with health and, although stout, appeared ‘very beautiful’, according to KR.7 The most obvious explanation for the difference was that this time she was carrying a boy. And why not? She knew that she was capable of conceiving a son; had she not miscarried one? And she knew that some women had boys after a long series of girls. And if her baby was not a boy, perhaps it could become one. There were spiritualists who claimed to be able to influence the sex of a child in utero.

  Alix visited Stana and Militsa nearly every day throughout the winter of 1901, and with the coming of spring she continued to be intermittently hopeful. She spent hours talking with her new intimates, and also with Militsa’s diffident, cultivated husband Peter. Besides joining the spiritual circle, Alix and Nicky spent social time with the Montenegrins, reading together and discussing what they read, the talk often turning to theology and philosophy. Militsa, a strong personality who liked to hold forth before small audiences, lectured the others on her particular specialty, Persian literature, along with Hindu and Confucian teachings. Though Militsa’s actual knowledge was probably quite shallow, her observations were stimulating to Alix, who had a quick intelligence and who liked conversing about ideas. She had been reading on her own since coming to Russia, studying the writings of Augustine and Jerome, investigating what her biographer Sophie Buxhoeveden called ‘French and English philosophical books’. She had virtually no one to talk to about these books and the abstract concepts they elucidated. Now she had found a satisfying discussion group, an outlet for her vigorous if largely untrained intellect.

  Alix’s fourth baby was born in mid-June, another girl whom she named Anastasia. The birth was as easy as the pregnancy had been, with a relatively short labour. ‘We both had a feeling of calm and solitude,’ Nicky wrote in his diary, adding that ‘Alix felt quite cheerful.’8 The contrast to her dismay at the births of her three other daughters was striking. It seems likely that Alix owed her calm and cheer to the effects of her deepening spiritual questing, and in particular, to a new influence in her life: the hypnotist Philippe Vachot.

  The small, black-haired Vachot, a man of fifty, ‘very unsightly in appearance’, according to the sceptical KR, had become the leader of the Montenegrins’ circle. Despite his unprepossessing appearance, Vachot had a powerful effect on the devotees, who knelt and kissed his hand when he came to them and listened attentively, their faces aglow with inspiration, when he spoke to them in his soft voice with its southern French accent.

  ‘Are you all listening to me?’ Vachot would ask once they had settled down in the dimly lit room.

  ‘We all hear you, O Master,’ they would respond in unison.

  ‘I am nothing in myself,’ he reminded them, meaning that he was nothing more than a channel through which the divine force entered the world.

  Groans of denial met this remark as Vachot made the rounds of the room, bending down to listen as each member of his audience confided his or her difficulties and desires to him.

  ‘Believe and you will be cured,’ he told each of them, pausing at times to pass his hands over their heads and bodies, tracing complex patterns in the air.9

  ‘Our friend Philippe,’ as Alix and Nicky came to call him, claimed to be able to cure nervous diseases by means of manipulating invisible magnetic forces with his hands. Reportedly he made many other claims as well: that he could conjure the spirits of the dead (it was said he had summoned the ghost of Alexander III, who gave Nicky advice), that he could make himself invisible at will, along with anyone who was with him, and that he could control the sex of an unborn child.

  Philippe was certainly an accomplished charlatan, and the more suspicious members of the court and government, alarmed by the central place he was coming to occupy in the emperor’s and empress’s lives, and by the lengths to which they went to keep their association with him a secret, set about exposing his deceit. What they discovered was that in his native France he had been a butcher and had experience as a medical assistant, and that he had begun practising his magnetic healing there only to be arrested several times for fraud. The Russian secret police, operating in France, were well aware of Philippe and his illegal activities; they had a dossier on him and knew when he left the country to go to Russia, though they made no effort to detain or control him.

  What Philippe’s opponents could not assess, however, was his genuine power to influence the thinking and strengthen the belief of those who sought him out. Herein lay his value to these seekers; he was a catalyst for their own increasing trust and positive thought – and positive thinking can bring about somatic change, as Alix was soon to demonstrate.

  Through the summer of 1901 Nicky’s diary is full of references to ‘our friend’ and to the many evenings he and Alix spent in the company of the hypnotist. Sometimes they visited him after the theatre, staying until two-thirty in the morning; sometimes they went to Znamenka immediately after dinner and listened to Philippe lecture all evening. ‘We all prayed together,’ Nicky wrote.10 They prayed, they entered a collective trance, they tasted what one member of the circle called the ‘sacred joy’ of Philippe’s presence.

  For what Philippe told his followers was that he had been sent to earth on a divine mission, and that that mission was in its last days. Soon he would lay his earthly body aside, but the mission itself would not end, for his spirit would inhabit the body of another man, and this man would continue his work.

  Though he spoke of endings, and of death, his hearers were rapt, caught up in the idea of his divine mission, feeling themselves to be somehow part of it, filled with certainty that, having received the benison of his soothing words, their own lives too would become infused with holy purpose. According to KR, who was well informed, Nicky and Alix ‘had fallen into a mystical frame of mind’. They returned from Znamenka, and their long evenings with Philippe, ‘in an exalted state, as if in ecstasy, with radiant faces and shining eyes’.11

  Alix was quite taken out of herself. She had not only found a community, an emotional home, she had found – or so she was convinced – an escape from the endless series of failures by which she had been plagued since she first came to Russia. She had found the divine key to success at last.

  Guided by Philippe, she could accomplish what had so far eluded her. She could give the Romanov dynasty, and her husband, a son and heir. She could gain respect and authority among her in-laws, among the courtiers, among the people at large. She could overcome her social discomfort. In short, she could become the triumphant woman God surely meant her to be, having called her to her important role as empress.

  ‘How rich life is since we know him,’ Alix wrote to Nicky when he was apart from her, ‘and everything seems easier to bear.’ Philippe’s ‘thoughts and earnest prayers’ followed them both constantly, Alix assured Nicky; even though he was away from them in body – he had returned to Lyon late in the summer of 1901 – his presence hovered near them, watching over them.12

  Buoyed by this new-found belief, and surrendering to the divine force she knew resided in Philippe, Alix asked him to return from France to treat her – specifically, to use his powers to help her conceive a son.

  Just what form this treatment took no one recorded. Probably it involved much prayer, Philippe’s trademark magnetic manipulations, and hypnotic suggestions. By January of 1902 Alix was convinced that she was pre
gnant, and that her child would at last be the long hoped-for son.

  Throughout the winter of 1902 her conviction strengthened. Her periods had ceased, her waist was thickening, her face growing more full and exhibiting the ‘glow’ of a mother-to-be. Philippe assured her that all was going well, that the child in her womb was the Romanov heir. He advised her to pray to Serafim of Sarov, an eighteenth-century holy man, who would add his wonder-working powers to the process unfolding within her. Nicky immediately ordered the church to canonize Serafim and, though there was opposition to this canonization by imperial fiat, it proceeded.

  Alix was expecting her baby to be born in August, 1902, but no official announcement of the pregnancy was made.13 In April she confided to Xenia, who was also pregnant at the time, that she was in fact expecting, and that her swelling abdomen was beginning to be ‘difficult to hide’. She felt well, she told her sister-in-law. She was hopeful. Only a few more months, and everyone would be gratified.14

  She did not consult the court accoucheur Dr Ott or the imperial surgeon Dr Girsh. Philippe advised against it and, besides, Alix had had four children; she was an old hand at pregnancy. She ordered her dressmakers to let out her gowns, she rested, she prayed in front of the wall of icons in her bedroom.

  Among them was one given her by Philippe, from which hung a tiny bell. It was an icon of protection, for Alix herself and for her child. Philippe had warned her that, if the bell rang, it meant there were ‘evil people all around’. But the holy image, like the Virgin of Vladimir and the Redeemer over the Spassky Gate, would ward off all harm. No evil could penetrate the sacred barrier. She was held, safely forever, behind the strong and certain shield of the divine.

  15

  Magnificent sunsets fanned out in fiery reds and pinks over the Gulf of Finland in the summer of 1902, their dramatic colours more intense than at any time in recent memory. Sunrises too were exceptionally vivid, and throughout the long daylight hours the air seemed to hold a pinkish cast that lent gardens, buildings, even people a healthy, faintly unreal glow.

  Alix, sitting on her balcony at Peterhof, watching the gradual deepening of the intense colours in the sky over the blue waters of the gulf, waited calmly for the onset of her labour, the culmination of her hopes. The unusual beauty of the sky and the rosy light must have seemed to her a fitting backdrop for the birth of her son. She was tranquil, sanguine, serene. Nothing troubled her when she was at her most reflective, not the recent assassination of the Interior Minister Sipyagin, not the distress of the War Minister Kuropatkin over growing tensions between Russia and Japan, not the huge increase in the numbers of dissidents and demonstrators being sent into exile – not even the puzzling shape of her own body which, though swollen, had not taken on the ripe roundness of a full-term pregnancy. Despite appearances, all was well, she believed, for Philippe was always near, and he assured her that everything was working out for the best.

  In August the skies darkened and a chill wind blew across the gulf. Rain splashed down in torrents day after day, making the palace fountains overflow and keeping the fretful, irritated members of the imperial family, who had gathered to await the confirmation of the empress’s pregnancy by the doctors, indoors.

  They conferred with one another about the assassination of Sipyagin and its aftermath of increased police activity, about the explosion of the volcano on Martinique that had sent tons of volcanic ash into the air, causing the lurid sunrises and sunsets; about the dowager empress’s fury at Militsa and Stana for leading Nicky and Alix into religious extremism and a dangerous dependency on the foreign Dr Philippe.

  The best informed among them spoke in serious terms about the deteriorating state of Nicky’s ineffectual leadership, of feared weakness in the army and navy, of the evident lack of clear direction in the government. Others aired personal grievances. Uncle Vladimir complained that Nicky had had the audacity to tell him whom he could and could not bring into the royal box at the theatre – of course he ignored his nephew’s directives. Sandro complained about the government post he had been given and insisted on a change. The usual factions that gathered around Aunt Miechen and Minnie spread gossip about each other.

  But there was unusual unanimity about this very odd and unsettling matter of the empress’s state of health, and its connection to the sinister Dr Philippe. Was she or wasn’t she pregnant? No one knew for sure. She avoided going out, except to her clandestine meetings with the French medium, so the truth could not be discerned by the shape of her body. She had told Xenia that she was expecting, but was very secretive with Ella, who distrusted Dr Philippe and everything about him; to Ella she simply said that she had taken a remedy of some sort that had helped her conceive.1

  Philippe had been thoroughly discredited, his police record in Paris brought to light, yet Alix continued to put her trust in him and Nicky, against all reason, punished the Russian agent who had revealed his fraud. What motive could Nicky have had for doing this? Speculation burgeoned. Philippe claimed to be able to cure syphilis; was the emperor a syphilitic? Did Philippe know some other dark secret that gave him a hold over the imperial family? What was going on?2

  Or was there some even more sinister plot at work? It was whispered that Philippe had been brought to court in order to entice Alix into an unhealthy reliance on him, so that she could be revealed as mentally unstable, a melancholic, and shut away in an institution.3

  Amid the darker rumours there was also a good deal of laughter about Dr Philippe and the imperials. Nicky and Alix were seen as fools in the grip of a quack – fit subjects for caricature of the kind Alix had once drawn so unkindly. It was absurd that Nicky and Alix should imagine they could conceal their dealings with the quack, for the secret police knew everything, had spies everywhere; for all anyone knew, Philippe himself might be a spy!

  Tensions rose, the rain poured down, and on the night of August 31, 1902, Alix began to feel contractions.

  No one recorded exactly what took place, whether the pains went on all night or only for a short time, whether Philippe was summoned to her bedside, whether Nicky, who must have been present, was caught up in his wife’s hopes or whether by this time, if not earlier, he had come to realize that there was no child in her womb.

  For Alix, the terrible moment of truth must have been among the great shocks of her life. Instead of delivering a child she suddenly began to bleed, as she had not bled for nine months, and, as Xenia wrote, ‘a tiny ovule came out’. Her abdomen deflated, her pains ceased. Dr Ott was at last allowed to examine her, and ‘confirmed that there was no pregnancy, but that luckily everything internally was all right.’4 He diagnosed amenorrhoea, the result of anaemia.

  ‘At last a natural way out of this unfortunate situation has been found,’ Xenia wrote. ‘She is in bed – as a precaution, as there can sometimes be bleeding [haemorrhaging] in such cases. Thank God so far she is in good health.’

  Xenia was sympathetic, but others were far less so. Inevitably, there was laughter – and anger, for had not the foolish empress embarrassed the entire family and the country? She was a troublemaker, a blight on Russia. Not only was she barren of sons, but she was apparently delusional as well. And why hadn’t the emperor handled the entire awkward matter more capably, so as to prevent all the confusion and embarrassment? Why hadn’t he been able to control his wretchedly inconvenient wife?

  Lying in her bed, emptied of all her hopes, Alix cried. Shock had given way to sorrow and bewilderment. She struggled to understand. She had been so certain that in all things she was acting under divine guidance. Was this awful emptiness too God’s will? Or had she failed?

  Alix ‘cried terribly’ when Minnie and Xenia came to her bedside and she told them what had happened. She had accepted the truth, but was sad and low.5 The shock, the loss, the violent wrenching of all her expectations brought out the vulnerable girl in Alix, a side she almost never showed to anyone but her husband, her late friend Juju Rantzau and Martha Mouchanow. She reached out to Xenia and
Minnie as she might have reached out to her own mother, had she lived. For a brief time, the brittle control she normally maintained in the presence of her in-laws cracked open, leaving her shattered emotions exposed.

  But the moment passed quickly, for Minnie took advantage of the embarrassment over Alix’s false pregnancy to lecture her and Nicky about how misled they were in trusting the tricks and false promises of Philippe and, as soon as she did that, Alix’s wall of self-protective reserve went up once again.

  Minnie confronted her son and daughter-in-law with the contents of the police report on Philippe, but Nicky’s response was that ‘all the rumours were very much exaggerated’, and he refused to be pinned down as to how intertwined his and Alix’s lives had become with their spiritual mentor.

  Dr Ott issued an official announcement about Alix’s indisposition. ‘Thanks to a departure from the normal course,’ it read, ‘the interrupted pregnancy has resulted in a miscarriage.’6 It was the least embarrassing explanation. There was no mention of anaemia.

  Inwardly still in a vulnerable state, Alix was in need of reassurance, and she soon found it, once again, in Philippe and her emotional anchor, the spiritual circle. Within months, by the end of 1902, her hopes and expectations had been raised yet again, all her confusion dispelled. Philippe had convinced her that, with the aid of the holy Serafim of Sarov, she could yet triumph over all limitations, physical or spiritual, and conceive a son.

  The year 1903 was the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of St Petersburg and, all over the city, preparations were under way for a variety of commemorations. The city’s builder, Peter the Great, whose modest log cabin was still preserved and visited by travellers, was to be honoured with exhibits in the Yekaterinov Palace, the Technological Institute, and at the Admiralty. There were to be special observances at Palace Embankment and the Petrovsky Embankment, in the Peter and Paul Fortress, on St Isaac’s Square and in the Summer Gardens. Book stalls were selling Jubilee Almanacs, and special historical publications were issued.