Aristocratic ladies invited holy men to their salons, just as Militsa and Stana invited psychics and healers to theirs. The patronage of the high-born women, combined with the startsy’s healings, assured them a large following and a secure livelihood. Many of them fell foul of the clergy, however, and were eventually denounced and driven out of the capital. Father Gregory was an exception in that he had the support of several prominent members of the church hierarchy and, at the time he was first invited to Tsarskoe Selo, he had been living in Petersburg for several years enjoying increasing repute for his healings.
His origins and earlier life were obscure. A few sketchy details were known: that his name was Gregory Yefimovich Novy, and that he came from the village of Pokrovsky in Tobolsk Province in Siberia, that he had a wife, two daughters and a mentally deficient son (the wife and daughters sometimes came to the capital to stay with him), and that he had acquired, early in life, the nickname ‘Rasputin,’ which means ‘the Debauched One’ or ‘the Vagabond’.
A vagabond he claimed to have been. Leaving Pokrovsky, he had wandered widely, repenting of his wayward past and, dragging the iron chains of a penitent pilgrim, travelling from one monastery to another seeking alms. He said that he had gone as far afield as Jerusalem.3 Everywhere he went he healed the sick, even sick animals, bewitched the blood, and foretold the future. His name became known. Ultimately he found his way to Petersburg, where he lodged with a priest.
After his initial visit to court it did not take long for Father Gregory’s fame to spread even more widely. His apartment swarmed with people, all waiting patiently for his blessing. A visitor described the scene: ‘To a stranger Rasputin’s flat seemed a madhouse,’ he wrote. After passing through a ‘dark musty-smelling hall,’ the newcomer entered a waiting room ‘full of people from early morning until late at night. The whole of Russia seemed to be represented there: peasants in leather jerkins and high boots, smelling of earth and dung . . . an officer of the Guards in a splendid uniform . . . portly village priests sat monumentally immobile with beards spread over their fat chests, on which great crosses hung on massively linked chains.’4 There were students, journalists, artists and bankers. But most of Father Gregory’s devotees were women, peasant girls, noblewomen, ‘elderly women full of a holy enthusiasm.’
It was a mixed group of women who surrounded the starets, titled ladies in silk and diamonds, crippled grandmothers from the provinces, middle-class matrons, all waiting for Father Gregory to extend his dirty hand for them to kiss, to offer them tea or Madeira wine. Their devotion was absolute. They came, bringing flowers and other gifts, and stayed for hours, sitting at his table with its none too clean cloth, joining in when he burst into song, eating the black rye biscuits he handed out – or wrapping them in handkerchiefs to be kept as relics. The lucky ones received Father Gregory’s cast-offs – faded, reeking shirts – to be put on reverently and worn to bring good luck.
The physicians of the capital, stunned by Father Gregory’s cures, tried to expose him as a greedy charlatan, but failed. Too many reliable witnesses had seen, and reported, that the healings were genuine; whether they were achieved through hypnosis, or whether, as the starets consistently claimed, the power of God came through him, made no difference to the outcome.5 And his own belief in his abilities compelled trust and belief in others. As to the accusation of greed, this too collapsed in the face of Father Gregory’s simple manner of living and his habit of giving away the money grateful clients brought him. He was not poor, and was shrewd enough to manage his financial affairs adroitly, but he had few possessions – even the furniture in his apartment was not his.6
To assess Father Gregory with anything like objectivity is very difficult for anyone far removed in time and culture from the Russia of 1905. The extraordinary veneration accorded to religious figures, the pervasiveness of faith, the credulous religious climate all separate the modern reader from the world in which the Debauched One flourished. Father Gregory’s contemporary John of Kronstadt, a saintly healer who performed miraculous cures and gave away all that he had, devoting himself to ministering to the poor, was worshipped by a cult of women who believed him to be Jesus reincarnate. In a frenzy of adoration the women assaulted their adored Father John and tore at his flesh with their teeth until he bled.7 At a time when such extreme religious practices as self-flagellation, self-castration and even mass suicide were part of provincial religious life – though far from its mainstream – miraculous healings seemed a relatively moderate and entirely credible phenomenon.
Certainly Father Gregory’s powers gained credibility in 1907, when the tsarevich, after falling in the gardens at Tsarskoe Selo, suffered terrible pain when internal bleeding made his leg swell and his fever rise. The court doctors, who assumed that his life would be short and were surprised that he had survived into his third year, were prepared for this crisis to end in death, and were helpless and frightened. Observers saw them ‘whispering among themselves’ and looking resigned.8
With his parents by his bedside, Alexei’s condition grew worse by the hour. His face was a white mask, his eyes dark-rimmed and dim. His grotesquely distorted leg stuck out at an odd angle. He cried but could not move, so great was his pain.
In the early hours of the morning Father Gregory arrived from Petersburg. He stood at the foot of the tsarevich’s bed and bowed his head, and everyone in the room prayed with him.
No one recorded what took place over the next several hours, but when Alexei awoke later that morning, the change in him was little short of miraculous. He sat up in bed, his cheeks pink, his eyes bright, his leg back to its usual size and shape. When the astounded doctors came to take his temperature they found it to be normal. The attack had passed.
Sceptics told one another that it was only a coincidence that the boy’s remarkable recovery should have followed the starets’s visit and prayers, that the remission of bleeding in his leg and the reduction in the swelling must have occurred naturally. But the doctors insisted that there was no way the body could return to normal so rapidly. Had the internal bleeding stopped on its own, it would still have taken days for the accumulated blood to gradually work its way out of the leg and for the swelling and fever to go down.9
To Alix the remarkable healing was yet another sign that God was guiding her destiny and that of her family. Father Gregory was God’s gift. There was a mysterious divine symmetry at work in the lives of the imperials; the tsaverich was born with a potentially fatal illness, but at nearly the same time God had provided, in the Siberian healer, the means to counteract the disease. So the balance was righted, her prayers were answered. As long as she continued to believe and to trust in God, all would be well.
She struggled, with all her considerable willpower, to cling to that belief as her thirty-fifth birthday approached. The face she showed to the world – a world now restricted, for the most part, to the grounds of Tsarskoe Selo – was dour and closed, the eyes hooded, the mouth set and downward-turned. She looked like a woman under emotional siege, embattled against life. She spoke of herself now not only as a ‘bird of ill omen’ but as ‘a great worrier,’ and she had much to worry about.10
It was not just that her only son was fatally ill, spared only through the mercy of God, or that continuing social unrest and harsh repression threatened the future of Russia, or even that foiled plots against the tsar’s life and her own were still coming to light despite extreme police and military precautions: it was that her kind, forbearing husband was proving to be more and more ineffectual as a ruler, making it necessary for her to provide the strength and force of will that he lacked.
She saw no alternative. The new form of government brought into being in response to the ongoing social crisis was unstable, and, in her view, manned by mediocrities. The first Duma, convened in April of 1906 and dominated politically by the inexperienced liberal delegates representing the Cadet party, was floundering and the imperial ministers were weak and vacillating. The Romanov famil
y, now split into factions with the overbearing Aunt Miechen speaking out forcefully against Alix and lobbying to have the tsar step down in favour of his brother Michael, offered no practical advice or support, only criticism and complaints. Of Alix’s own relatives, her brother Ernie does not seem to have given her any meaningful counsel – and in any case his standing in Russian eyes was low because his divorce from Ducky made it possible for Nicky’s cousin Cyril to marry her, resulting in Cyril’s banishment and disgrace. Alix’s sisters wrote often and came to Russia from time to time, but neither the sympathetic Irene nor the more forceful and much older Victoria seems to have had any serious influence over her, and Ella, her life shattered by Serge’s assassination, was in a process of personal transformation that ultimately led her further and further away from her youngest sister.11
Ella embraced the ascetic life, remaking her bedroom at Illinsky into a stark room like a nun’s cell, stripped of furniture, the walls hung with icons. She kept the bloody clothes worn by her husband on the day he died and preserved them inside a large wooden cross hung on one wall. Ella and Alix were both finding new strength in their religious faith, but where Alix sought help through a personal connection with a starets, Ella turned to the Orthodox monastic tradition. She gave away her jewels and finery, greatly simplified her life, and began modelling herself on the sisters who had no connection to the world and devoted themselves to works of charity undertaken in the name of Jesus.
A distance was growing between Ella and Alix, and for Alix it only emphasized the fact that she was alone, or felt alone, in her responsibilities – alone, that is, save for Father Gregory. And while her faith was strong, it was not unwavering. There were moments when her certainty was shaken, especially when she felt ill; there were moments when her anxiety rose and a panicky feeling threatened.
The times were agitated, with accepted authorities toppling and established boundaries crumbling as political institutions were shifting and no steadying hand appeared to be guiding the transition to a new era. Predictions of imminent apocalypse haunted literature, the theatre, drawing room conversation; some said that the approach of Halley’s comet, due to appear in 1910, was a sign of the end, others that the recent discovery of a mammoth buried in the ice in Eastern Siberia, perfectly preserved for millennia, had a deeper meaning than mere scientific interest.12 Petersburgers, confronting the enormous shaggy beast unearthed from his resting place and installed in the newly built rotunda of the Zoological Museum, awed by his size, his huge fearsome tusks, seemed to see in him an emblem of their own transitoriness, a reminder that all human institutions, however immemorial, occupied but a fleeting moment in the long span of creation, and might well be swept away in a single awful instant of catastrophe.
In the aesthetic realm, to which Alix had always been sensitively attuned, old principles of order and meaning were being abandoned. In music and art, primal forces, even savage forces were being unleashed; cacophony and chaos reigned, outraging audiences and museum-goers (and thrilling a small but appreciative group of music lovers and art collectors). To the empress, whose taste ran to Wagnerian assertions of harmonic concord and mystical transcendence, the new directions in the arts seemed brutal and horrifying. ‘Twentieth-century culture’ was to her a culture of inhumanity, and she used the phrase as a term of opprobrium.13
In social relations the traditional proprieties were being abandoned, and nowhere more than in the imperial family itself, where the tsar’s weakening authority did nothing to counteract the centrifugal effect of a prevailing current of permissiveness (the tsar called it selfishness) among the well-born. Alix observed with extreme disapproval the dissolving of marital and family ties, the increasing number of divorces among the Romanovs, the disregard for loyalty and for the integrity of the succession.
With Alexei’s illness being kept a closely held secret, the expectation was that he would in time succeed his father. However, he was the only son, and an accident or an assassination (always, in these years, a genuine threat) could remove him suddenly. Those coming next in the line of succession (daughters being excluded by law from succeeding), though quick to disparage their patriarch and ignore his authority, were casual about jeopardizing their own legal standing vis-à-vis the throne. The tsar’s brother Michael was in love with one of the court ladies-in-waiting, Dina Kossikovsky, and begged Nicky to let him marry Dina morganatically. Nicky’s ageing, peremptory Uncle Vladimir, next in line after Michael, had brought shame on the family by debauchery abroad, while of Vladimir’s sons, Cyril was in involuntary exile due to his marriage to Ducky, Boris was an irresponsible playboy and Andrew was living with Nicky’s former love, the ballet dancer Matilda Kchessinsky; if he married her he too would be banished.14
A number of others further down the line of succession were surrounded by scandal. Vladimir’s brother Alexis had had a series of disreputable relationships and was living with an actress in Paris, and his brother Paul had been banished after marrying a commoner. Sandro’s older brother Michael had also married a commoner and had gone to live in England some years earlier. Stana had divorced her husband and married Nicky’s cousin Grand Duke Nicholas, while Sandro and Xenia, until recently a model couple in every way, had abandoned their fidelity to one another and were both romantically entangled with others. (They eventually found their way to a comfortable reconciliation and went on with their marriage.)
The entire Romanov edifice was tottering and Alix, seeing clearly that her husband would not be capable of preventing its collapse, increasingly took on herself the uneasy task of helping to shore it up. It was not a new task; it was, in fact, an extension of the role she had undertaken when she married Nicky, to be his encouragement and support, to help him when he faltered. Only now he was faltering much more conspicuously, and her ability to act as his brace and prop, indeed to do what he could not, might make the difference between life and death.
The clear, cold waters of the Gulf of Finland were calm on the afternoon of September 11, 1907, as the yacht Standart cruised slowly among the rocky islands off the Finnish coast. Though it was late in the season, the air still held a faint touch of warmth, and Alix, lying on a couch on deck as she usually did, with Alexei and her companion Anna Vyrubov nearby, was alternately occupied with embroidery and sketching.15
It was noticed that the empress was more at ease on the yacht than almost anywhere else, perhaps because she could be certain that within its confines her family was safe from would-be attackers, more likely because the atmosphere was informal, the family having been on comfortably familiar terms with the crew members for many years.16
Alexei and the girls were as much at home on the immense yacht, with its comfortable state rooms, chapel, and extensive staff quarters, as they were in the Alexander Palace, running up and down the teak decks in their navy-blue sailor suits, heavy pea coats buttoned to the neck, the girls with their long hair flying out behind them. Olga, now nearly twelve, looked eagerly out over the rail, across the transparent waters towards the empty horizon. With her considerable intelligence and outgoing nature she sought fun and stimulation, unlike ten-year-old Tatiana, whose affectionate, emotional nature drew her close to her mother and made her more reserved. Marie, at eight the most active of the quartet of daughters and the one most avid for parental attention, ran and jumped with noisy abandon while six-year-old Anastasia teased the crew members and played hide and seek with her sisters. The empress watched Anastasia closely, for she had become more cherished following an accident the previous summer; she had nearly drowned when a freak high wave swept her under and pounded the air from her lungs.
The quiet of the lonely landscape was what drew Nicky and Alix to it every fall, the expanse of dark firs on the deserted islands, the silence broken only by the lapping of small waves on the pebbled shoreline and the cries of birds flying overhead. Now and then a fisherman could be glimpsed, or a small hut in among the trees, but for the most part no other humans were visible, only the wide expans
e of sky and blue water, dense woodland and grey beach.
A sudden lurching of the ship startled the passengers, followed immediately by a violent shudder, a wrenching of the hull, and the terrifying sound of rock scraping against metal. The ship listed sharply leewards, throwing passengers and crew off their feet and sending them reeling, arms outstretched, to catch hold of some support.
Within seconds sirens began blaring, though there was no one for miles around to hear them. Crew members ran back and forth along the sloping deck, making their way from one handhold to another. The ship had struck a rock, the passengers were told. A large hole had been torn in its side beneath the water line. It was filling with water, and would sink.
A radio message was sent to Kronstadt, but it was only a formality; even if ships from the imperial navy were dispatched to rescue the Standart’s passengers, they could not possibly navigate the narrow, shallow waters between the islands, nor could they arrive in time to help, for the ship was sinking rapidly.
Nicky occupied himself, stopwatch in hand, in watching the rising water line, as crew members rushed to ready the lifeboats and supply them with water and food. He called out his observations. The Standart would sink, he thought, in twenty minutes or less.
Alix, by contrast, began giving orders to the crew. Grabbing Alexei, and calling her daughters, she herded them to the nearest lifeboat and gave orders that the children and the female staff members be lowered away first, keeping only Anna Vyrubov behind with her. Having watched the lowering of the first boats, she and Anna made their way into the cabins, their progress slow because of the increasingly sloping deck, the ceaseless screaming of the sirens adding to the general confusion. Alix flung the counterpanes off the beds and began emptying jewellery boxes, medicine chests and drawers onto the sheets. Icons stripped from the walls were added, along with warm coats and blankets. Tying the corners of the sheets together to form bundles, she and Anna managed to drag the bundles out on the deck and heave them into the remaining lifeboats.
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