Alexandra (27 page)

In effect, Nicky was carrying forwards the reform begun by his grandfather Alexander when he freed the serfs and instituted the first significant body of reforms.

But like his grandfather, he instituted the changes – and then backed away from them. Within weeks of issuing his manifesto, he had authorized the military to punish revolutionaries,
workers, anyone who had been vocal in his or her opposition to the government. Arrests, executions, the widespread destruction of homes and villages went on throughout the winter, along with brutal
pogroms against Jews in many cities. In town after town, village after village, dragoons rode in and set fire to barns where food was stored, killed animals, burned houses. Mass executions were
held, there was random slaughter and mayhem.

Thousands died in the bloodbath of reprisals – yet the revolutionaries had won. The rights had been granted. In a single year the tsar had been forced to
surrender his absolute power and also to concede defeat to the Japanese, ceding to them half of Sakhalin, and to evacuate Manchuria.

The old order had collapsed. And instead of bringing calm and restoring peace, the advent of reform brought demands for further reform, and more violence.

Shut away under guard at Tsarskoe Selo, besieged by frightening rumours, never knowing from one day to the next whether conspirators armed with dynamite might find a way to steal into the
Alexander Palace and blow them all up, apprehensive about the tsarevich and without the comforting protective influence of Philippe, the imperials waited for news to arrive by courier from Moscow
and Petersburg as the days grew short and darkness closed in around them.

In their worry and isolation they heard, from Bishop Theophan, Alix’s confessor and President of the Petersburg Theological Seminary, and from Nicky’s confessor Father Alexander, of
a healer from Siberia, now living in Petersburg, called Father Gregory, said to possess extraordinary gifts of prayer and curative powers and the ability to read the future. Hundreds of miraculous
healings had been attributed to him. In particular he was said to be able to ‘bewitch the blood’, to control the flow of blood from one part of the body to another, even to stanch the
bleeding of wounds.

Militsa and Stana too knew of Father Gregory and his reputation for remarkable healings, and they told Alix and Nicky about him.

The Siberian was brought to court, and ushered past the battery of watchful guards into the presence of the imperials. He stood there, in their midst, a middle-aged peasant with long reddish
hair and an uncombed beard, reeking of dirt, speaking in short bursts of nearly incomprehensible Russian – the heavily accented Russian of the Tobolsk region. His face was deeply scarred and
weathered, his teeth blackened and neglected, and his gleaming eyes rolled like the eyes of a madman as he talked.

But there was a warmth in his presence, a radiance that was familiar to Alix and Nicky from countless other encounters with healers and psychics, most recently Philippe
Vachot. As Father Gregory talked on, jumping rapidly from topic to topic, quoting from the Bible, making pronouncements about the future, he wrapped his hearers in the mantle of his charisma. They
listened contentedly, then eagerly, for his presence was powerful, and his words seemed to carry the weight of the divine.

Had not Philippe promised that his spirit would enter into another man, and live on through him? Perhaps Father Gregory was that other man, the avatar of the powerful Frenchman who had protected
the family for so long. Perhaps Father Gregory was sent from God, to continue the work Philippe had begun. Alix, seeing him and hearing his words, began to feel certain of this. And the more
certain she became, the more hopeful she was for the future, for if only she and her family remained within the orbit of Father Gregory’s power, as they once had within that of Philippe, they
might never have to worry again.

W
hen Nicky’s sister Olga first saw Father Gregory she was struck by how primitive he was. His guttural, uncouth voice, his uncontrolled
gestures, his habit of tossing his head and rolling his eyes as he talked made him seem like something out of the Siberian forest, a man yet more than a man, more like a primal force, an eruption
of nature with the raw purity of a waterfall or an avalanche.

And along with this raw natural vitality went another very arresting quality: a deep and unfeigned spiritual feeling, expressed through gentleness and piety.

‘When I saw him,’ Olga wrote, ‘I felt that gentleness and warmth radiated from him. All the children seemed to like him. They were completely at their ease with him. I still
remember their laughter as little Alexei, deciding he was a rabbit, jumped up and down the room.’
¹

As Olga watched, Father Gregory took Alexei by the hand and took him into his bedroom, and the adults followed.

‘There was something like a hush as though we had found ourselves in church,’ Olga remembered. ‘In Alexei’s bedroom no lamps were lit; the only light came from the
candles burning in front of some beautiful icons.’ Father Gregory bowed his head in prayer, and little Alexei, standing beside him, grew very still.

‘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 utter
sincerity.’
²

At the time he met the imperial family Father Gregory was one of a number of startsy, or stranniki, in Petersburg, many of them rough-spoken,
uncultivated men who
dressed in peasant garments and were coarse in their habits and tastes. Many were flagrantly dissolute, holding orgies, drinking heavily, brawling and making public nuisances of themselves; most
were well known to the police. Their immorality and vulgar behaviour was part of their theology of ‘salvation through sin,’ which required them to sin lustily in order to attain the
maximum salvatory effect.

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.