He could become ill very suddenly: in the midst of a family meal, while out for a drive, while reciting his lessons. Bleeding would begin, the colour would suddenly drain from his face and he would begin to cry. The sight of him in such a condition, his limbs distorted, his face ‘drawn and seamed with suffering’, was terrible – it made Nicky weep and take refuge in his study – and his moans and screams wrenched the hearts of his doctors, his sisters, above all his parents.
Alix had seen Alexei through many crises by the time he was five years old, but every fresh attack made her panic. White-faced and agitated, she took charge, calling in the doctors, sending to Petersburg for Father Gregory or, if he was away from the capital, sending him a telegram, praying to the saints whose icons hung around her son’s bed.
‘God has not abandoned us,’ she repeated when Alexei’s suffering was at its worst. Though at times she looked despairing, her will to believe was strong. She trusted in Father Gregory to pray for Alexei, and his prayers, she once told an officer of the Standart, ‘have a particular force’ because of his ascetic life.24 Each time, even if it looked as though the boy would surely die, he recovered – if not immediately, then within hours or days.
For some reason Alix did not expect Father Gregory to cure her, beyond easing her migraines. Her sciatic pain had never been as acute as during the years when the Siberian was coming to the palace increasingly often. Her weak heart seemed to be growing weaker. Beyond the facile explanation that for her to be cured was outside the will of God, there was no way to account for this apparent paradox. Of course, Alexei’s recurrent attacks of bleeding were potentially fatal, while Alix’s chronic pain and fatigue were not. Still, she must have longed for relief and, so far as is known, the starets did not provide it.
Sometime in 1910 one of the nursery staff, a nanny named Vishniakov, asked to see Alix. The nanny was very upset, and Alix, who was accustomed to listening sympathetically to the problems of her servants and household members and to helping them whenever she could, was no doubt prepared to be understanding. But the story Nanny Vishniakov told – between sobs – brought forth another response entirely.
Vishniakov had gone with Father Gregory and others to his village of Pokrovsky in Siberia for three weeks of rest. While there, she said, he had entered her room stealthily, at night, crept into her bed and seduced her. Nor was she the only one, the nanny said; she had seen with her own eyes the starets’s flagrant and indiscreet seduction of at least one other member of the household.25
It was not the first time the empress had heard, and rejected as slanderous, first-hand accounts of Father Gregory’s seductions and debaucheries. A trusted woman of the court, sent to Pokrovsky to learn the truth about the starets, confided to Alix that Father Gregory had tried to seduce her maid. The empress’s own confessor, the Archimandrite Theophan, and other important clerics had come to the palace to inform the tsar and tsarina that the man they turned to for spiritual guidance was bringing discredit on the imperial family by his immorality and the notoriety it was creating. Militsa and Stana had begun to have doubts about Father Gregory after becoming convinced that he behaved himself scandalously at times. The ladies-in-waiting, Nicky’s sister Xenia, the governess Sophie Tioutchev were uncomfortable around the Siberian, gossiped about him, and made Alix aware that they disapproved of his being allowed near the four grand duchesses, especially when the girls were in their nightclothes. It was improper, unwise and reckless to put a wolf among the innocent, trusting lambs, they thought; it was inviting disaster.
Alix’s immediate response to the accusations of Nanny Vishniakov was that ‘she did not believe such slanders, and saw in them the work of dark forces, wishing to ruin’ Father Gregory.26 ‘Saints are always calumniated,’ she told Dr Botkin, who came to the palace twice each day to listen to her heart.27 Theophan was sent away, Sophie Tioutchev and others in the household told to be silent – though they continued to shake their heads and whisper about the starets, their stories reaching the capital and being told and retold there with elaborations.
Alix knew that her guide and mentor was flawed and full of vices, but she trusted him not to harm her children and she told herself that the allegations against him were invented by her husband’s enemies. To attack the starets was just one more way to attack the tsar himself, for Father Gregory had all but become a member of the imperial family. Besides, the starets himself denied everything, and she wanted to believe his denials.
The campaign to expose Father Gregory as a sordid libertine had the effect of driving the empress more deeply into isolation. Her own poor health, and the need to keep Alexei’s illness a secret, meant that there were few people she could confide in. Now that small circle of intimates shrank still further.
Anna Vyrubov, Alix’s young, stout, rather cloying devotee, came to the palace every day. Somewhat dim-witted but stubborn and above all loyal – not only to Alix but to Father Gregory, whose disciple she had long been – Anna was welcomed eagerly by the empress as long as she was not ‘too gushing or too exacting’.28 It was an incongruous friendship, between the tall, earnest, sad-eyed invalid empress and the short, shallow, vivacious maid of honour, but they were bound by their common faith in Father Gregory, by Anna’s hero-worship of Alix, and by a mutual fondness that had begun when Anna, as a girl of sixteen, had nearly died of typhoid and Alix had come to sit by her bedside often, supporting her in her recovery.29 Despite what others saw as her aloofness, Alix had a gift for friendship. Julia Rantzau, Marie Bariatinsky, Martha Mouchanow, her wardrobe mistress Princess Galitzine, all had, to a greater or lesser extent, been good friends of Alix’s, as Lily Dehn and Sophie Buxhoeveden would become her close friends later on.
Another woman admitted to the shrinking circle of the empress’s intimates was Princess Dondukov, a follower of Father Gregory whom Martha Mouchanow described as ‘a physician of no mean skill’ and high intellect. Aggressive and scheming, the princess was generally more feared than liked, according to Mouchanow, who may have been jealous, but Alix had confidence in her and sought her opinion on many subjects and confided in her, and may even have taken medicines she prescribed in preference to those prescribed by the court physicians.30
The number of those who could be trusted was growing smaller and smaller. Only Nicky and Alexei and the girls, a few stalwarts such as Anna, Princess Dondukov and the faraway Marie Bariatinsky with whom she corresponded, sister Irene and brother Ernie (not Ella, she was too opposed to Father Gregory), and Father Gregory himself could be relied upon completely. The others she could not be sure of. They might belong to the dark forces that threatened Father Gregory, and through him, the imperial family, indeed Russia itself.
And the dark forces were growing strong, or so it seemed to Alix as the second decade of what she saw as the barbaric, inhumane twentieth century advanced. They were gathering, like a towering thundercloud, over the capital.
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A reckless hedonism reigned in Petersburg in the mild winter and warm spring of 1911. There was a mania for skating, and the indoor rinks were full of eager skaters racing, leaping and turning with perilous abandon. The gaudy red, orange and green trams that sped along the main avenues of the city ran on oblivious of obstacles in their path, knocking over carts, injuring horses and maiming pedestrians who tried to jump on and off without waiting for the conductors to bring them jerkily to a halt. For three years running cholera epidemics had carried off thousands of Petersburgers, leaving the survivors with an avid thirst for life; they sought pleasure, sensation, the thrill of risk, and they seemed to care nothing for the danger.
In the drawing rooms and ballrooms of the great palaces were to be found the ultimate risk takers, the speculators who made and lost immense fortunes on the stock exchange and in financial ventures in steel and coal, copper and oil. Deal making was the preoccupation of the hour, how to raise money and which schemes to invest it in to make it go up the fastest. And once the wealth was acquired, there was the excitement of the gamb
ling house, where it could all be wagered and, if lost, where a bullet to the head could put an end to the whole mad spiral of chance.
The reigning hostesses of the capital, Countess Betsy Shuvalov, Grand Duchess Victoria Melita (Ducky, recently returned to Petersburg from exile with her husband Grand Duke Cyril, and the leader of the young ‘smart set’), and, above all, the widowed Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna (Aunt Miechen), took the risk of throwing open their salons to a wide variety of guests, from the great aristocratic families – the Orlovs, Tolstoys, Dolgorukovs and Gorchakovs – to the nouveaux riches, wealthy foreign investors, painters and composers, and a variety of hangers-on whose manners were said by more staid guests to be ‘fast’ and whose morals did not bear scrutiny. Some said the social tone had been lowered, but there was no turning back; old and new elites together were swept up in the craze for loud music, strong cocktails and the newest fad, dancing the tango until the early hours of the morning.
Nowhere was the hedonistic mood more in evidence than in the explosive realm of the erotic. Censorship laws were repealed in the wake of the government upheaval of 1905-06, and the result was a wave of novels, poems and paintings that celebrated sexual expression in all its forms. Subjects once held to be unmentionable were now a frequent topic of conversation. People held forth on homosexuality, voyeurism, and pederasty and were not reticent on the theme of their own personal pleasures and gratifications. Women took ‘oriental pills’ to enlarge their breasts and men sought potions to enhance their virility. Nightlife became marked by decadence. Husbands and wives visited brothels together in the evenings, then went on to dance the tango at the fashionable Suicide Club. Young men from noble families amused themselves at parties dressing in women’s gowns and long ropes of pearls, bright blue eyeshadow on their lids and chalk-white make-up on their faces. The comet of 1910 had come and gone without destroying the world, but the sense of approaching doom, of the end-time, was still strong. People boasted of living for the moment, and seemed to vie with one another in causing scandal – though it was harder now than in the past to find someone to shock, at least among the worldly elite of the capital.
In the countryside there was no equivalent disorder in morals, though the combination of social unrest and financial hardship created immense resentment and a growing longing for change. These were the times memoirists, looking back across a decade, would call the ‘troubled years’, the ‘black years’, for the Russian peasants, who lived in dread of being identified as radicals or rebels and being sent into Siberian exile, or worse. Many thousands were hanged as subversives or conspirators, their animals slaughtered and their villages burned by government agents who were even more feared than the robber bands that roamed unhindered from province to province, stealing from well-off peasants, relieving tax collectors of their sacks of gold and even purloining entire shipments of grain and oil and coal.
But if the mood of recklessness did not take hold outside Petersburg, the gossip from the capital did penetrate to the provincial cities and villages, and nearly all the gossip was centred on the man the newspapers called Rasputin, the Siberian charlatan who in the guise of a holy healer was said to have mesmerized and seduced the empress and gained control over the entire imperial family.
The sensation-loving public, avid for scandal and sexual gossip, could not get its fill of stories about the man one newspaper called ‘that fornicator of human souls and bodies’, Rasputin. Pressure was brought to bear on the newspaper editors by the imperial ministers, and fines were levied for every scurrilous story printed, but public demand was insatiable and the stories continued to appear.1 Soon all Petersburg knew of Rasputin’s sordid past, his inexhaustible sexual appetite, his seductions of his female followers, the boasts he made that the tsar knelt down and washed his feet, that he had slept with the empress, her daughters and other women of the court, and that he had a chest full of letters from Alix and the girls, all testifying to their love for him and his complete domination of them.
Obscene graffiti began to appear on the brick walls of palaces, crude images of the empress and her unholy paramour making love, and in the streets children sang bawdy songs about the pair. Delegates to the Duma – the third Duma, the second, convened in the spring of 1907, having been dissolved as too radical – heard speeches about how the court was being controlled by intriguers and frauds, and no one doubted that the references were to Rasputin.
The private life of the imperial family, and especially the empress, had been dragged into the mire of titillating sexual scandal. Petersburgers whispered that Alix was not only the lover of Rasputin but the lover of Anna Vyrubov as well. She had no shame, they said. She had no morals, no loyalty. She was the Niemka, the German bitch, German to the core.
Alix was once again very unwell. The least exertion exhausted her, and she was often short of breath and in pain. Now and then she would attend the theatre, or sit for a time enduring some public function, looking alternately worried and sour, but it was noticed that she was always ill at ease, and greatly relieved when the time came to leave.2 Her private routines had altered. Her chronic shortness of breath prevented her from singing, and playing the piano overtired her. She took up painting still lifes and, as ever, occupied herself quietly with reading and handwork and writing letters.
‘Dearest Madgie,’ she wrote to her old governess late in the spring of 1911, ‘very tenderest thanks for your dear letter. We came over here [to Peterhof] on Saturday and hope to go to sea . . . We long for that rest.’ She had been sick for seven months, she told her correspondent, and Nicky had been overworking. They both needed relaxation. ‘I hope to get a little better, so as not to be always lying [down].’ ‘The children are growing up fast. In November Olga will be sixteen, Tatiana is almost her size at fourteen – Marie will be twelve, Anastasia ten, Alexei seven.’
She told the governess that the older girls were taking her place at luncheons and receptions, military reviews, and commemorative events, learning, as Alix herself had learned at their age, how to make the rounds of a roomful of guests, pausing briefly to exchange a few words with each and then moving gracefully on to the next. All the young grand duchesses were fluent in four languages – Russian, English, German and French – and were able to mingle comfortably with diplomats, government ministers, generals and admirals, and the aristocrats of the household. ‘They must get accustomed to replace me,’ Alix wrote, ‘as I rarely can appear anywhere and, when I do, am afterwards long laid up – over-tired muscles of the heart.’3
There was one place where Alix always felt better, where she could be out of doors, resting on a chaise longue or driving in her pony carriage, where her energy seemed to return and her natural urge to make improvements could find an outlet. Livadia, the Crimean villa perched high on its cliff above the blue ocean, had become her favourite place. Their movements less restricted now than in previous years, and the threat of terrorist attacks presumed to have decreased, the family visited Livadia each spring and autumn. Daily life there was much less formal than at Tsarskoe Selo, the pace more leisurely and the atmosphere unceremonious. Servants, guests, even the officers of the Standart, which rode at anchor in the bay, all joined the family at one table for the midday meal, and when ministers from Petersburg arrived, places were laid for them as well. There were no state carriages with outriders and liveried coachmen, no resplendent uniforms for the staff, no rigid schedule to be kept. Guests sat on the terrace or amid the rose bushes and blooming vines in the colonnaded garden, lingering over cups of tea and talking. In the evenings, the balalaika orchestra from the yacht gave concerts, or the Cossacks who guarded the family sang in chorus. There were entertainers from the local Tartar villages as well, and, on occasion, Olga and Tatiana gave readings of French plays.
According to Martha Mouchanow, the empress was ‘never so happy as in the Crimea’, and she contentedly joined in the social life that developed within the small colony of aristocratic villa owners. There were dances for the young
people, dinners for visitors, jaunts aboard the Standart to the palace of Novy Sviet for banquets of roasted lamb and baked fowl, saffron rice and baklava, accompanied by wine made from grapes grown in the estate’s extensive vineyards. Among Alix’s favourite visitors was the Emir of Bokhara, a very grand dignitary who never travelled without an interpreter and at least two of his ministers, tall, exotic figures in robes of silver and gold whose long beards were dyed scarlet.4 It amused Alix to converse with the emir who, though he spoke fluent Russian, thought it more in keeping with his dignity to speak in his own language; the solemnity with which he spoke, and the whole cumbersome procedure of translating their remarks back and forth, made it hard for Alix to keep her composure and gave her funny stories to tell later, after her guest had left.
However carefree the mood at Livadia, it was a place of sorrow – and this was part of the attraction of the area for the empress – for patients with tuberculosis came by the hundreds to Yalta and the surrounding coastal area to seek healing in hospitals. Some recovered, but many did not and funeral processions were a frequent sight. Emaciated, blanket-wrapped consumptives basking in the sun were on every terrace, or so it seemed. Alix joined the Anti-Tuberculosis League, sold her own and her children’s handcrafts in the organization’s annual bazaar, and sent her daughters out to sell flowers on Flower Day to benefit the patients. She organized the construction of two new sanatoria, built on property owned by the imperial family at Massandra, and visited many of the worst cases there herself, sending Olga and Tatiana when she was too tired and ill to go. It was good for the girls to see for themselves just how severe the illness could be, and how much suffering it caused, she said when questions were raised about the wisdom of exposing her daughters to the contagious disease. ‘They should realize the sadness underneath all this beauty.’5
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