Authors: Carolly Erickson
Each day in Holy Week, Alix and Nicky watched the procession of priests and servants accompanying the icon of the Miraculous Virgin of Mount Athos, mounted in a carriage, wind through the
Kremlin, on its way to the homes of the sick and dying. Many gravely ill people claimed to have been revived by coming near this holy
icon. The sacred Icon of the Redeemer
rose above them when they passed through the Spassky Gate; this icon too was believed to have brought about miracles. They kissed the wonder-working icon in the tower of the Church of the
Annunciation, and knelt before the image of the Virgin of Vladimir, the Virgin of Tenderness, in the Church of the Assumption, that holiest of images, before which Tamerlane the Great, the Sword of
Islam, had cowered and retreated in fear.
They prayed to the icons for an heir for Russia.
It was partly at Ella’s urging that they prayed, for Ella, having converted voluntarily to Orthodoxy, was undergoing a deepening of her piety and was convinced that God would hear and
answer her sister’s and brother-in-law’s prayers.
Because Ella and Serge lived in Moscow, Alix did not see Ella often. However, Ella had been sending her sister gifts, letters, and emissaries – in particular, nuns with whom she talked and
prayed.
1
Partly due to Ella’s influence, partly because of the strong interest at court in mystical faith and occult experimentation, Alix and Nicky had begun inviting self-styled mystics and
religious teachers to the Alexander Palace. Some of them, such as the Austrian healer Schenk and the French psychic Papuce, were Europeans, but most were Russians, for holy men with extraordinary
spiritual gifts were a fixture of Russian religious tradition.
It was as if there existed in Russia two streams of religious inspiration: the church, with its hierarchy of priests and higher clergy, and another more amorphous body of teachers and masters,
bound by no community or discipline and answerable to no superior. To this body belonged the stranniki, the Holy Wanderers who roamed from village to village, casting spells and praying over barren
fields and dying cattle, claiming to be able to see the future and to cure ills in the present. Holy Fools also wandered from place to place, and it was thought that the voice of God spoke through
them. Startsy, or elders, were spiritual teachers or mentors gifted with clarity of vision; they offered guidance to the faithful who came to them and submitted themselves to the startsy’s
will and insight.
Russians held stranniki, Holy Fools and startsy in awe. Though they often had the appearance of dirty, deranged outcasts, their clothing threadbare, their hair filthy
and uncombed, their manner wild-eyed and intimidating, still they were believed to possess a rare holiness – to be, by their very nature, channels for the divine. Many cures were ascribed to
them, and they were believed capable of foreseeing the future. The credulous gathered around stranniki and Holy Fools with unreasoning fervour, but even the sceptical, among them educated,
sophisticated people who questioned the existence of God, conceded that these shabby, half-incoherent holy beggars possessed authentic and inexplicable powers.
So when Alix and Nicky welcomed the holy Matrena, a wandering fortune-teller, and Vasya Tkachenko, another strannik, and Antony the Wanderer to the palace they were following an established
Russian custom, which called for well-off people to provide charity to ‘God’s slaves’, as the wanderers were sometimes called. And when they took in the Holy Fool Mitya Kozelsky,
a mute simpleton with deformed legs who ‘talked’ by means of hand gestures, they were seeking a blessing, a glimpse of God, a message of comfort.
For there existed at court, as the new century opened, a tight circle of seekers into hidden teachings, explorers of occult mysteries, and the emperor and empress were among their most eager
members.
Organizers of this circle were Nicky’s cousins by marriage, Militsa and Anastasia of Montenegro, daughters of King Nicholas of Montenegro, Militsa married to Grand Duke Peter
Nicholaevitch, younger son of Emperor Alexander II’s brother Nicholas, and Anastasia married to Duke George of Leuchtenberg.
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Alix had a
family connection to the Montenegrin sisters also. Her cousin Prince Francis Joseph of Battenberg was married to Militsa and Stana’s sister Anna, and Francis Joseph and Anna lived in
Darmstadt.
The two vivacious sisters, of whom Militsa was the more colourful and unconventional, galvanized the thirst for supernatural explorations and the excitement that arose whenever a psychic or
spiritual healer was brought to court. Anastasia, or Stana, held spiritual
meetings in her mansion at Znamensky, and Militsa gathered the devotees in a secluded tower in
her garden at Sergeyevsky.
Alix, alternately tearful and depressed over her lack of a son and expansively hopeful and prayerful, saw more and more of Militsa and Stana, drawn to Militsa’s formidable intellectuality
as well as to the promise of secret learning.
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For the first time since she came to Russia, Alix felt welcomed and accepted. The group of fellow
seekers brought together by the Montenegrins provided Alix with the sense of community she had long looked for in vain. She took her place in the circle, not as a German outsider, nor as empress,
but merely as a pilgrim among pilgrims, a spiritual explorer, one in need of divine help. It must have come as an immense relief to her to be able to sit quietly in the group, relaxed and
expectant, forgetting herself in the collective hush and anticipation of revelations to come.
In the early months of 1901, Alix had several reasons for participating in the spiritual circle. First, she had lost two people who were dear to her: her closest friend Juju Rantzau and her
grandmother Queen Victoria, both of whom had died at the beginning of the year.
Along with her friendship, Juju had served as a sort of confessor to Alix, a moral guide. ‘She was a rare flower, too delicate for this world,’ Alix wrote of her friend, ‘but
rejoicing others with her fragrance and cheering them on the way. She understood the difficulties of this world and the different temptations, and always encouraged one in the right, and helped one
to fight one’s weaknesses.’
The weekly diary that Alix and Juju exchanged had been a valued psychological anchor to the empress. Now that it was discontinued, she felt adrift.
‘It came so naturally to speak about one’s faith to her, that now I feel her loss greatly. Only her dear writings have remained to me. I pray to God to make me as worthy, as she was,
of a new and more perfectly happy life in yonder world.’
4
The afterlife was much on Alix’s mind that winter, with Queen Victoria also in ‘yonder world’. The great queen, who had been a seemingly eternal fixture in Europe for three
generations, died on
January 22, 1901, and Alix’s first reaction was to make plans to go to England with Ernie for the funeral. She regretted not having gone to
visit Victoria in England the previous year; she had had the feeling then that she would never see her grandmother’s ‘dear old face’ again, and, now that she was dead, Alix wanted
one more glimpse of her.
‘How I envy you,’ Alix wrote to her sister Victoria after abandoning her initial impulse to make the journey to Windsor, ‘being able to see beloved Grandmama being taken to her
last rest. I cannot believe she is really gone, that we shall never see her any more. It seems impossible.’
5
Alix told her friend Marie
Bariatinsky that the queen had ‘been as a mother to me, ever since mama’s death’. Even though a distance had grown between Alix and her grandmother on her last visit to Balmoral,
Alix’s underlying affection remained very strong. According to Nicky’s sister Xenia, when Alix learned of Queen Victoria’s death she was ‘in despair’. ‘She did
so love her grandmother!’
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.