Nicholas and Alexandra

CHAPTER TWELVE

A Mother’s Agony

HEMOPHILIA is as old as man. It has come down through the centuries, misted in legend, shrouded with the dark dread of a hereditary curse. In the Egypt of the Pharaohs, a woman was forbidden to bear further children if her firstborn son bled to death from a minor wound. The ancient Talmud barred circumcision in a family if two successive male children had suffered fatal hemorrhages.

Because over the last one hundred years it has appeared in the ruling houses of Britain, Russia and Spain, it has been called “the royal disease.” It has also been called “the disease of the Hapsburgs”; this is inaccurate, for no prince of the Austrian dynasty has ever suffered from hemophilia. It remains one of the most mysterious and malicious of all the genetic, chronic diseases. Even today, both the cause and the cure are unknown.

In medical terms, hemophilia is an inherited blood-clotting deficiency, transmitted by women according to the sex-linked recessive Mendelian pattern. Thus, while women carry the defective genes, they almost never suffer from the disease. With rare exceptions, it strikes only males. Yet it does not necessarily strike all the males in a family. Genetically as well as clinically, hemophilia is capricious. Members of a family in which hemophilia has appeared never know, on the birth of a new son, whether or not the child will have hemophilia. If the child is a girl, the family cannot know with certainty whether she is a hemophilic carrier until she grows and has children of her own. The secret is locked inside the structure of the chromosomes.^*

If modern science has made little progress in finding the cause of or a cure for hemophilia, it has achieved an extensive charting of the scope of the disease. Hemophilia follows no geographical or racial pattern; it appears on all continents, in all races at a statistical ratio of one hemophiliac among every 5,000 males. In the United States, there are 200,000 hemophiliacs. Theoretically, the disease should appear only in families which have a previous history of hemophilia. But today, in the United States, forty percent of all cases appearing have no traceable family history. One explanation for this is that the defective gene can remain hidden for as many as seven or eight generations. A more probable explanation is that the genes are spontaneously changing or mutating. What causes these spontaneous mutations, no one knows. Some researchers believe they are the result of new and rapidly changing environmental factors such as drugs or radiation. In any case, their number apparently is increasing.

The most famous case of spontaneous mutation occurred in the family of Queen Victoria. The tiny indomitable woman who ruled England for sixty-four years and who was “Granny” to most of Europe’s royalty was, unknowingly at her marriage, a hemophilic carrier. The youngest of her four sons, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, had hemophilia. Two of her five daughters, Princess Alice and Princess Beatrice, were hemophilic carriers. When the daughters of Alice and Beatrice—Queen Victoria’s granddaughters—married into the royal houses of Russia and Spain, their sons, the heirs to those two thrones, were born with hemophilia.

The Queen, on learning that her own son had hemophilia, was astonished. Bewildered, she protested that “this disease is not in our family,” and indeed it had not appeared until that point. A spontaneous mutation had occurred, either in the genetic material of Victoria herself or on the X chromosome passed to her at conception by her father, the Duke of Kent. Nevertheless, soon after Leopold’s birth in 1853, the evidence of the disease in the form of bumps and bruises was unmistakable. At the age of ten, he was assigned to tend, during a family wedding, his equally stubborn, four-year-old nephew William, the future Kaiser. When William fidgeted and Leopold reprimanded, the small German boy bit his uncle on the leg. Leopold was unharmed, but Queen Victoria was angry. Leopold grew up a tall, intelligent, affectionate and stubborn prince. Throughout his boyhood and adolescence, his wilfulness often led to hemorrhaging, and he was left with a chronically lame knee. In 1868, the British Medical Journal reported one of his bleeding episodes: “His Royal Highness … who has previously been in full health and activity, has been suffering during the last week from severe accidental hemorrhage. The Prince was reduced to a state of extreme and dangerous exhaustion by the loss of blood.” In 1875, when Leopold was twenty-two, the same journal recorded: “The peculiar ability of the Prince to suffer severe hemorrhage, from which he has always been a sufferer … is essentially a case for vigilant medical attendance and most careful nursing.… He is in the hands of those who have watched him from the cradle and who are armed by the special experience of his constitution, as well as the most ample command of professional resources.”

The Queen reacted in a manner typical of hemophilic parents. She was unusually attached to this son, worried about him, overprotected him, and as a result of her constant admonitions to be careful, she often fought with him. When he was fifteen, she gave him the Order of the Garter at a younger age than his brothers “because he was far more advanced in mind and because I wish to give him this encouragement and pleasure as he has so many privations and disappointments.” When Leopold was twenty-six, his mother wrote to the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, that Leopold could not represent her at the opening of an Australian exposition as Disraeli had asked. Using the royal third person, the Queen wrote: “She cannot bring herself to consent to send her very delicate son who has been four or five times at death’s door [italics the Queen’s] and who is never hardly a few months without being laid up, to a great distance, to a climate to which he is a stranger and to expose him to dangers which he may not be able to avert. Even if he did not suffer, the terrible anxiety which the Queen would undergo would unfit her for her duties at home and might undermine her health.”

Constantly frustrated by his mother’s attempts to shelter him, Leopold looked for something to do. His older brother Bertie, the Prince of Wales, suggested giving him command of the Balmoral Volunteers, a military company stationed near the royal castle in Scotland. The Queen, fearing for Leopold’s knee, declined, and Leopold thereafter refused to go to Balmoral. When the Queen tried to keep her son sequestered on an upper floor of Buckingham Palace, Leopold slipped away for two weeks to Paris. At twenty-nine, to his mother’s surprise, he found a German princess, Helen of Waldeck, who was unafraid of the disease and willing to marry him. They lived happily for two years and she bore him a daughter. Helen was pregnant a second time when, in Cannes, Leopold fell, suffered a minor blow on the head and died, at thirty-one, of a brain hemorrhage. His mother sorrowed for herself and the family, but, she wrote in her journal, “for dear Leopold himself, we could not repine … there was such a restless longing for what he could not have … that seemed to increase rather than lessen.”

Prince Leopold, the first of the royal hemophiliacs, was the Empress Alexandra’s uncle. His affliction meant that all of his five sisters were potential carriers, but only Alice and Beatrice actually transmitted the mutant gene into their offspring. Of Alice’s eight children, two of the girls—Alix and Irene—were carriers. One son, Alix’s brother Frederick, called “Frittie,” was a hemophiliac. At two, he bled for three days from a cut on the ear. At three, Frittie and his older brother Ernest burst romping into their mother’s room one morning while she was still in bed. The windows which reached to the floor were open. Frittie tumbled out and fell twenty feet to the stone terrace below. No bones were broken and at first he seemed only shaken and bruised. But bleeding in the brain had begun, and by nightfall Frittie was dead.

The Empress Alexandra was a year-old baby when Frittie died, and she was twelve at the death of Leopold. Neither tragedy struck her personally. Her first meaningful contact with hemophilia occurred when it appeared in her two nephews, the sons of her older sister Irene and Prince Henry of Prussia. One of these boys, a younger Prince Henry, died, apparently of bleeding, at the age of four in 1904, just before the birth of Alexis. His short life was lived behind palace walls and his disease was concealed, probably to hide the fact that hemophilia had appeared in the German Imperial family. The older brother, Prince Waldemar, survived to the age of fifty-six and died in 1945.

Under normal circumstances, the appearance of hemophilia in her uncle, her brother and her nephews should have indicated to Alexandra the possibility that she was carrying the hemophilic gene. The genetic pattern had long been known: it was discovered in 1803 by Dr. John Conrad Otto of Philadelphia and confirmed in 1820 by Dr. Christian Nasse of Bonn. In 1865, the Austrian monk and botanist Gregor Johann Mendel formulated his law of genetics, based on twenty-five years of cross-breeding garden peas. In 1876, a French doctor named Grandidier declared that “all members of bleeder families should be advised against marriage.” And by 1905, a year after Alexis was born, Dr. M. Litten, a New Yorker, had had sufficient experience with the disease to write that hemophilic boys should be supervised while playing with other children and that they should not be subjected to corporal punishment. “Bleeders with means,” he added, “should take up some learned profession; if they are students, dueling is forbidden.”

Why, then, did it come as such an overwhelming shock to Alexandra that her son had hemophilia?

One reason suggested by the late British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane is that although the genetic pattern was known to doctors, this knowledge never penetrated the closed circles of royal courts: “It is predictable,” wrote Haldane, “that Nicholas knew that his fiancée had hemophiliac brothers although nothing is said in his diaries or letters, but by virtue of his education, he attached no importance to this knowledge. It is possible that they or their counselors consulted doctors. We do not know and doubtless will never know if … the court doctor counseled against marriage. If a distinguished doctor outside court circles had desired to warn Nicholas of the dangerous character of his approaching marriage, I do not believe he would have been able to do it, either directly or in the columns of the press. Kings are carefully protected against disagreeable realities.… The hemophilia of the Tsarevich was a symptom of the divorce between royalty and reality.”

There is, as Haldane says, no evidence that either Nicholas or Alexandra ever interpreted the laws of genetics to determine their own chance of having a hemophilic son. Almost certainly, both considered the mystery of the disease, of who would and would not be afflicted, to be a matter in the hands of God. This also seems to have been the attitude of Queen Victoria, who apparently did not understand the hereditary pattern of the disease she had spread so widely. When one of her grandchildren died in childhood, she wrote simply, “Our poor family seems persecuted by this awful disease, the worst I know.”

If Alexandra was surrounded by hemophilic relatives before she married, so were most of the princesses of Europe. So numerous were Queen Victoria’s royal progeny—nine children and thirty-four grandchildren—that the defective gene had been spread far and wide. In marrying and having children, hemophilia was considered one of the hazards royal parents faced, along with diphtheria, pneumonia, smallpox and scarlet fever. Royal princes, even those who were heirs to a throne, did not shy away from a prospective mate because there was hemophilia in her family. Prince Albert Victor of England, who, had he lived, would have been king in place of his younger brother, George V, sought Princess Alix’s hand before Nicholas won it. Had they married, hemophilia would have come down through the line of the British royal family. Kaiser William II was surrounded on all sides by hemophilia. He and his six sons escaped, but his uncle and two of his nephews were victims. William himself was in love with Ella, Empress Alexandra’s older sister. Had Ella married William instead of Grand Duke Serge (they were childless), the Kaiser also might have had a hemophilic heir.

In that era, every family, including royal families, had a long string of children and expected to lose one or two in the process of growing up. The death of a child was never a casual experience, but it rarely brought the life of a family to more than a temporary halt. Nevertheless, in Alexandra’s case the mere threat of death of her youngest child involved her totally, and through her, the fate of an ancient dynasty and the history of a great nation. Why was this so?

It is important to understand what the birth of Alexis meant to Alexandra. Her greatest desire after her marriage had been to give the Russian autocracy a male heir. Over the next ten years, she had four daughters, each healthy, charming and loved, but still not an Heir to the Throne. The Russian crown no longer passed down through the female as well as the male line, as it had to the daughters of Peter the Great and to Catherine the Great. Catherine’s son, Tsar Paul, hated his mother and changed the law of succession so that only males could inherit the throne. Thus, if Alexandra could not produce a son, the succession would pass first to Nicholas’s younger brother Michael and after that, into the family of his uncle Grand Duke Vladimir. Each time Alexandra became pregnant, she prayed fervently for a boy. Each time, it seemed, her prayers were ignored. When Anastasia, their fourth daughter, was born, Nicholas had to leave the palace and walk in the park to overcome his disappointment before facing his wife. The birth of the Tsarevich, therefore, meant far more to his mother than the arrival of just another child. This baby was the crowning of her marriage, the fruit of her hours of prayer, God’s blessing on her, on her husband and on the people of Russia.

All who saw the Empress with her infant son in those first months were struck with her happiness. At thirty-two, Alexandra was tall, still slender, with gray-blue eyes and long red-gold hair. The child in her arms appeared to be glowing with health. “I saw the Tsarevich in the Empress’s arms,” wrote Anna Vyrubova. “How beautiful he was, how healthy, how normal, with his golden hair, his blue eyes, and his expression of intelligence so rare for so young a child.” Pierre Gilliard first saw the Tsarevich when his future pupil was eighteen months old. “I could see she [Alexandra] was transfused by the delirious joy of a mother who had at last seen her dearest wish fulfilled. She was proud and happy in the beauty of her child. The Tsarevich certainly was one of the handsomest babies one could imagine, with lovely fair curls, great grey-blue eyes under the fringe of long curling lashes and the fresh pink color of a healthy child. When he smiled, there were two little dimples in his chubby cheeks.”

Because she had waited so long and prayed so hard for her son, the revelation that Alexis suffered from hemophilia struck Alexandra with savage force. From that moment, she lived in the particular sunless world reserved for the mothers of hemophiliacs. For any woman, there is no more exquisite torture than watching helplessly as a beloved child suffers in extreme pain. Alexis, like every other child, looked to his mother for protection. When he hemorrhaged into a joint and the pounding pain obliterated everything else from his consciousness, he still was able to cry, “Mama, help me, help me!” For Alexandra sitting beside him, unable to help, each cry seemed a sword thrust into the bottom of her heart.

Almost worse for the Empress than the actual episodes of bleeding was the terrible Damoclean uncertainty of hemophilia. Other chronic diseases may handicap a child and dismay the mother, but in time both learn to adjust their lives to the medical facts. In hemophilia, however, there is no status quo. One minute Alexis could be playing happily and normally. The next, he might stumble, fall and begin a bleeding episode that would take him to the brink of death. It could strike at any time in any part of the body: the head, nose, mouth, kidneys, joints, or muscles.

Like Queen Victoria’s, Alexandra’s natural reaction was to overprotect her child. The royal family of Spain put its hemophilic sons in padded suits and padded the trees in the park when they went out to play. Alexandra’s solution was to assign the two sailors to hover so closely over Alexis that they could reach out and catch him before he fell. Yet, as Gilliard pointed out to the Empress, this kind of protection can stifle the spirit, producing a dependent, warped and crippled mind. Alexandra responded gallantly, withdrawing the two guardians to permit her son to make his own mistakes, take his own steps and—if necessary—fall and bruise. But it was she who accepted the risk and who bore the additional burden of guilt when an accident followed.

To maintain the balance which provides adequate protection as well as attempting a degree of normalcy is a cruel strain for a mother. Except when the child is asleep, there are no hours of relaxation. The toll on the Empress was like battle fatigue; after too long a period of sustained alertness, her emotions were drained. This often happens to soldiers in war, and when it does, they are withdrawn from the front to rest. But for the mother of a hemophiliac there is no withdrawal. The battle goes on forever and the battlefield is everywhere.

Hemophilia means great loneliness for a woman. At first, when a hemophilic boy is born, the characteristic maternal reaction is a vigorous resolve to fight: somehow, somewhere, there must be a specialist who can declare that a mistake has been made, or that a cure is just around the corner. One by one, all the specialists are consulted. One by one, they sadly shake their heads. The particular emotional security that doctors normally provide when confronting illness is gone. The mother realizes that she is alone.

Having discovered this and accepted it, she begins to prefer it that way. The normal world, going about its everyday life, seems coldly unfeeling. Since the normal world cannot help and does not understand, she prefers to cut herself off from it. Her family becomes her refuge. Here, where sadness need not be hidden, there are no questions and no pretensions. This inner world becomes the mother’s reality. So it was for the Empress Alexandra in the little world of Tsarskoe Selo. Alexandra, trying to control the waves of anxiety and frustration that kept rolling over her, sought answers by throwing herself into the Church. The Russian Orthodox Church is an emotional church with a strong belief in the healing power of faith and prayer. As soon as the Empress realized that no doctor could aid her son, she determined to wrest from God the miracle which science denied. “God is just,” she declared, and plunged into renewed attempts to win His mercy by the fervent passion of her prayers.

Hour after hour, she prayed, either in the small room off her bedroom or in the palace chapel, a darkened chamber lined with silken tapestries. For greater privacy, she established a small chapel in the crypt of the Fedorovski Sobor, a church in the Imperial Park used by the household and soldiers of the Guard. Here, alone on the stone floors, by the light of oil lamps, she begged for the health of her son.

In periods when Alexis was well, she dared to hope. “God has heard me,” she cried. Even as the years passed and one hemorrhage followed another, Alexandra refused to believe that God had deserted her. Instead, she decided that she herself must be unworthy of receiving a miracle. Knowing that the disease had been transmitted through her body, she began to dwell on her own guilt. Obviously, she told herself, if she had been the instrument of her son’s torture, she could not also become the instrument of his salvation. God had rejected her prayers; therefore she must find someone who was closer to God to intercede on her behalf. When Gregory Rasputin, the Siberian peasant who was reported to have miraculous powers of faith healing, arrived in St. Petersburg, Alexandra believed that God had at last given her an answer.

For most young mothers of hemophilic sons, encircled by corrosive fear and ignorance, hope is thin and help is uncertain. The greatest support which any woman can have in this lonely torment is the love and understanding of her husband. In this respect, Nicholas’s contribution was remarkable. No man ever was gentler or more compassionate to his wife, or spent more time with his afflicted son. However this last Russian tsar may be judged as a monarch, his behavior as a husband and father was something which shone nobly apart.

The other support which the mother of a hemophiliac can hope for is the understanding of her friends. Here, Alexandra was at a special disadvantage. She had never made friends easily. The friends of her childhood had been left behind in Germany; when she came to Russia at twenty-two, it was to move onto the lofty isolation of the throne. Even before Alexis was born, Alexandra disliked the gay balls and empty life of society and the court. After his birth, she was wholly involved in her private struggle, and the normal life of a woman of her station seemed even emptier and more superficial. What she longed to find was, not the stylized attentions and conversations of most ladies of the court, but the simple, profound friendship of the heart which leaps all barriers and reaches from one soul into another, sharing the most intimate fears, dreams and hopes.

Once in a letter to Princess Marie Bariatinsky, one of the few close friends of her first years in Russia, the Empress described what she sought in her friends: “I must have a person to myself; if I want to be my real self. I am not made to shine before an assembly—I have not got the easy nor the witty talk one needs for that. I like the internal being, and that attracts me with great force. As you know, I am of the preacher type. I want to help others in life, to help them to fight their battles and bear their crosses.”

The compulsion to fight other people’s battles and help bear their crosses stemmed in part from Alexandra’s own frustration. Nothing is more discouraging and debilitating than to be permanently confronted with a situation which never changes and which cannot be changed, no matter how hard one tries. Frequently, mothers of hemophiliacs experience an overwhelming urge to throw themselves into helping others who can be helped. Many of the problems of this world, unlike hemophilia, hold out some promise of hope. By helping others, Alexandra was actually trying to keep a grip on her own faith and sanity.

One of those whom the Empress helped in this way was Princess Sonia Orbeliani. A Georgian girl who arrived at court in 1898 at the age of twenty-three, Sonia Orbeliani was small, blonde and high-spirited, an excellent sportswoman and a fine musician. The Empress was always fond of Sonia’s cleverness and cheerfulness, but it was not until the girl fell ill while accompanying the Imperial party on a visit to Darmstadt that Alexandra’s feelings were fully aroused. As soon as Sonia became sick, Alexandra dropped everything to care for her, despite the criticism of her German relations and of members of the Imperial suite. The illness was a wasting spinal disease which all knew was hopeless. But for nine years, until Sonia died, Alexandra made her life worth living.

“The Empress had great moral influence over her,” wrote Baroness Buxhoeveden, a lady-in-waiting who witnessed the long ordeal. “It was she who led the doomed woman who knew what was awaiting her, to the attainment of that wonderful Christian submission with which she not only patiently bore her malady but managed to keep a cheerful spirit and keen interest in life. For nine long years, whatever her own health was, the Empress never paid her daily visit to her children without going to Sonia’s rooms, which adjoined those of the Grand Duchesses. When Sonia had an acute attack of illness … the Empress went to her not only several times a day but often at night when she was very ill: indeed no mother could have been more loving. Special carriages and special appliances were made for Sonia so that she could share the general life as if she were well.… She followed the Empress everywhere.”

Sonia Orbeliani died in 1915 in the hospital at Tsarskoe Selo where the Empress Alexandra was tending wounded soldiers from the battlefront. Rather than change into black mourning clothes, Alexandra came directly to the memorial service in her nurse’s uniform. “I feel somehow nearer to her like this, more human, less Empress,” she said. Late that evening, before the coffin was closed, Alexandra sat beside the body of her friend, staring at the peaceful face, stroking the golden hair. “Leave me here,” she said to those who wanted to take her away to rest. “I would like to be a little more with Sonia.”

Sonia Orbeliani came close to being what Alexandra so fervently desired at the Russian court: a friend of the heart. But even Sonia never fully tapped the immense reservoir of emotion inside the Empress. Outside her own family, the only person to whom Alexandra ever fully opened her whole soul was a heavy, round-faced young woman named Anna Vyrubova.

Anna Vyrubova, born Anna Taneyeva, was twelve years younger than the Empress Alexandra. Her family was distinguished; her father, Alexander Taneyev, was both Director of the Imperial Chancellery and a noted composer. Through his house moved government ministers, artists, musicians and ladies of society. Anna herself attended an exclusive dancing class where an occasional partner was young Prince Felix Yussoupov, the son of the wealthiest family of the Russian nobility.

In 1901, at seventeen, Anna Taneyeva fell ill, and the Empress paid her a short visit in the hospital. It was one of many such calls that Alexandra made, but the romantic girl was overwhelmed by the gesture. Anna conceived a passionate admiration for the twenty-nine-year-old Empress. After her recovery, Anna was invited to the palace, where Alexandra discovered that she could sing and play the piano, and the two began to play and sing duets.

An unhappy romance further strengthened the bond. Although Anna Taneyeva was too heavy and soft to be considered beautiful, she had clear blue eyes, a pretty mouth and a trusting, innocent charm. “I remember Vyrubova when she came to visit my mother,” said Botkin’s daughter Tatiana. “She was pink-cheeked, full, and all dressed in fluffy fur. It seemed to me that she was too sweet talking to us and petting us and we didn’t like her very much.” In 1907, Anna was being courted by Lieutenant Boris Vyrubov, a survivor of the Battle of Tsushima. Anna was reluctant to marry Vyrubov, but Alexandra overrode her objections and urged her to go ahead. Anna agreed, and the marriage was performed with the Tsar and his wife as witnesses. Within a few months, the marriage collapsed. Vyrubov, whose ship had been sunk from under him, had shattered nerves and never managed to consummate his marriage.

The Empress blamed herself for Anna’s misfortune. For a while, she devoted most of her time to her romantic and lonely young friend. Anna was invited that summer to join the Imperial family for its annual two-week cruise aboard the Imperial yacht through the Finnish fjords. Sitting on deck during the day or under lamplight in the yacht’s salon at night, Anna poured her heart out. Alexandra responded by talking of her own childhood, her dreams before her marriage, her loneliness in Russia, her hopes and fears for her son. From those days on board the yacht there sprang one of those intimate, confiding relationships such as exist only between women. The tie between them grew so strong that they could sit for hours in silence, secure in unexpressed affection. On each side, anxieties were calmed, wounds healed and faith encouraged. When the cruise ended, Alexandra cried out, ^“I thank God for at last having sent me a true friend.” Nicholas, who liked Anna, told her good-naturedly, “Now you have subscribed to come with us regularly.”

From that summer, Anna Vyrubova centered her life on the Empress Alexandra. If for some reason Alexandra could not see her for a day or so, Anna pouted. At these times, the Empress teased her, calling her “our big baby” and “our little daughter.” To bring her closer, Anna was moved into a small house inside the Imperial Park, just two hundred yards from the Alexander Palace. It was a summer house with no foundations, and in the winter an icy chill rose up through the floors. Often after dinner Nicholas and Alexandra came to visit.

“When their Majesties came to tea with me in the evening,” Anna wrote, “the Empress generally brought fruit and sweetmeats with her and the Emperor sometimes brought a bottle of cherry brandy. We used to sit around the table with our legs drawn up so as to avoid contact with the cold floor. Their Majesties regarded my primitive way of life from the humorous side. Sitting before the blazing hearth, we drank our tea and ate little toasted cracknels, handed around by my servant.… I remember the Emperor once laughingly saying to me that, after such an evening, nothing but a hot bath could make him warm again.”

When not playing hostess in her cottage, Anna was at the palace. She came after dinner, joining in the family’s puzzles, games and reading aloud. In conversation, she rarely proposed a political subject or urged an original opinion, preferring instead to endorse whatever the Tsar and the Empress had just said. If husband and wife disagreed, her role was to come down ever so gently on the side of the Empress.

Unlike most famous royal favorites, Anna Vyrubova asked nothing for herself except attention and affection. She was without ambition. She never appeared at court ceremonies and never asked for favors, titles or money for herself or her own relatives. Occasionally, Alexandra made her accept a dress or a few hundred roubles; usually Anna gave the money away. During the war, she spent most of her small inheritance on equipment for one of the military hospitals at Tsarskoe Selo.

In a court where the sharp edges of petty intrigue and ambition showed all too plainly, Anna Vyrubova outraged many people. Some scorned her unattractiveness and her naïveté, others felt simply that an empress of Russia deserved a more glittering companion. Grand duchesses of the Imperial blood who were never invited to the Imperial palace were irked to think that the dumpy Vyrubova was sitting night after night in the intimate circle of the Imperial family. Maurice Paléologue, the French Ambassador during the war, was shocked by Anna’s inelegant appearance. “No royal favorite ever looked more unpretentious,” he wrote. “She was rather stout, of coarse and ample build, with thick, shining hair, a fat neck, a pretty, innocent face with rosy, shining cheeks, large strikingly clear bright eyes and full, fleshy lips. She was always very simply dressed and with her worthless adornments had a provincial appearance.”

For the same reasons that others scorned Anna Vyrubova, the Empress prized her. Where others thought only of themselves, Anna’s apparent selflessness set her apart and made her seem all the more rare and valuable. On no account would Alexandra listen to criticism of her young protégée. When Anna sensed dislike in a person and reported it to the Empress, Alexandra bristled toward the antagonist and increased her attentions to Anna. Almost belligerently, the Empress refused to make Anna an official lady-in-waiting and allow her to become enmeshed in the duties and intrigues which went with that rank. “I will never give Anna an official position,” she said. “She is my friend, I wish to retain her as such. Surely an Empress is allowed the right of a woman to choose her friends.”

Later, during the war, when the Empress assumed an important part in the government of Russia, Alexandra’s friendship for Anna took on political significance. Because she was known as the Empress’s most intimate confidante, every gesture Anna made, every word she uttered, was watched and commented on. Correctly or incorrectly, Anna’s opinions, activities, tastes and mistakes were associated in the public mind with Alexandra Fedorovna. This association was especially significant in connection with Anna’s unqualified devotion to the extraordinary Siberian miracle-worker Gregory Rasputin, whose influence on the Imperial couple and therefore on Russia was to grow to towering proportions. Anna met Rasputin when he first arrived in St. Petersburg; he prophesied the collapse of her marriage, and she became convinced that he was a man divinely blessed. Certain that Rasputin could help ease the burdens carried by her mistress, Anna became his most passionate advocate. When Alexandra and Rasputin communicated, Anna was often the physical link. She carried messages in person and telephoned Rasputin daily. She transmitted his opinions faithfully and urged them upon the Empress. But Anna herself was not a source of ideas or political action. Everyone who dealt with her personally—ministers, ambassadors, even Rasputin’s secretary—described her in the same terms: “a vehicle,” “an ideal gramophone disc,” “she understood nothing.”

Nevertheless, in the tumultuous days culminating in the fall of the dynasty, the unpretentious Anna was accused of holding major political influence over the Tsar and his wife. Rumor inflated her into a monster of depravity who was said to reign over sinister orgies at the palace. She was accused of conniving with Rasputin to hypnotize or drug the Tsar; she was described as sharing the beds of both Nicholas and Rasputin, with a preference for the latter and a lewd dominion over both. Ironically, both the aristocracy and the revolutionaries told the same stories with the same relish and the same small grunts of rage. After the fall of the monarchy, with the rumors swirling viciously around her head, Anna Vyrubova was dragged off to prison by the Provisional Minister of Justice, Alexander Kerensky. Later, put on trial for her “political activities,” Anna pathetically defended herself in the only way she knew: she asked for a medical examination to prove her sexual innocence. The examination was performed in May 1917 and, to the astonishment of all Russia, Anna Vyrubova, the notorious confidante of the Empress Alexandra, was medically certified to be a virgin.

As one precarious year followed another, emotional stress took a terrible toll on Alexandra’s physical health. As a girl, she suffered from sciatica, a severe pain in the back and legs. Her pregnancies, four in the first six years of marriage, were difficult. The battle against her son’s hemophilia left her physically and emotionally drained. At times of crisis, she spared herself nothing, sitting up day and night beside Alexis’s bed. But once the danger had passed, she collapsed, lying for weeks in bed or on a couch, moving about only in a wheelchair. In 1908, when the Tsarevich was four, she began to develop a whole series of symptoms which she referred to as the result of “an enlarged heart.” She had shortness of breath, and exertion became an effort. She was “indeed a sick woman,” wrote Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, the Tsar’s sister. “Her breath often came in quick, obviously painful gasps. I often saw her lips turn blue. Constant worry over Alexis had completely undermined her health.” Dr. Botkin, who came every day at nine in the morning and five in the afternoon to listen to her heart, mentioned years later to an officer in Siberia that the Empress has “inherited a family weakness of the blood vessels” which often led to “progressive hysteria.” In modern medical terminology, the Empress Alexandra undoubtedly was suffering from psychosomatic anxiety symptoms brought on by worry over the health of her son.

Alexandra’s own letters occasionally mentioned her poor health. In 1911, she wrote to her former tutor, Miss Jackson: “I have been ill nearly all the time.… The children are growing up quite fast.… I send them to reviews with their father and once they went to a big military luncheon … as I could not go—they must get accustomed to replace me as I rarely can appear anywhere, and when I do, am afterwards long laid up—overtired muscles of the heart.”

To her sister Princess Victoria of Battenberg she wrote: “Don’t think my ill health depresses me personally. I don’t care except to see my dear ones suffer on my account and that I cannot fulfill my duties. But once God sends such a cross it must be borne.… I have had so much, that, willingly I give up any pleasure—they mean so little to me, and my family life is such an ideal one, that it is a recompense for anything I cannot take part in. Baby [Alexis] is growing a little companion to his father. They row together daily. All 5 lunch with me even when I am laid up.”

Alexandra’s inability to participate in public life worried her husband. “She keeps to her bed most of the day, does not receive anyone, does not come out to lunches and remains on the balcony day after day,” he wrote to his mother. “Botkin has persuaded her to go to Nauheim [a German health spa] for a cure in the early autumn. It is very important for her to get better, for her own sake, and the children’s and mine. I am completely run down mentally by worrying over her health.”

Marie was sympathetic. “It is too sad and painful to see her [Alexandra] always ailing and incapable of taking part in anything. You have enough worries in life as it is without having the ordeal added of seeing the person you love most in the world suffer.… The best thing would be for you to travel … that would do her a lot of good.”

Taking Botkin’s and his mother’s advice, Nicholas escorted his wife to the German spa of Nauheim so that the Empress could take the cure. Nicholas enjoyed himself on these trips. Dressed in a dark suit and bowler hat, he strolled, unrecognized, through the streets of the little German town. Alexandra, meanwhile, bathed in the warm waters, drank bottled water and went shopping in Nauheim with an attendant pushing her wheelchair. At the end of several weeks, she went back to Russia, rested but not cured. For the mother of a hemophiliac, as for the son, no cure has ever been found.

Russians are a compassionate people, warm in their love of children and deeply perceptive in their understanding of suffering. Why did they not open their hearts to this anguished mother and her stricken child?

The answer, incredibly, is that Russia did not know. Most people in Moscow or Kiev or St. Petersburg did not know that the Tsarevich had hemophilia, and the few who had some inkling had only hazy ideas as to the nature of the disease. As late as 1916, George T. Marye, the American Ambassador, reported, “We hear all sorts of stories about what was the matter with him [Alexis] but the best authenticated seems to be that he has some trouble of the circulation, the blood circulates too close or too freely near the surface … [of] the skin.” Even within the Imperial household, people such as Pierre Gilliard who saw the family regularly did not know for many years precisely what was wrong with Alexis. When he missed a public function, it was announced that he had a cold or had suffered a sprained ankle. No one believed these explanations and the boy became the subject of incredible rumors. Alexis, it was said, was mentally retarded, an epileptic, the victim of anarchists’ bombs. Whatever it was, the mystery made it worse, for there was never a focus for sympathy and understanding. Just as at Khodynka Meadow after their coronation, Nicholas and Alexandra attempted to continue in the midst of disaster by pretending that nothing unusual had happened. The trouble was that everyone knew that behind the façade of normalcy something terrible was happening.

Alexis’s secret was deliberately withheld at the wish of the Tsar and the Empress. There was a basis for this in court etiquette: traditionally, the health of members of the Imperial family was never mentioned. In Alexis’s case, this secrecy was vastly extended. Doctors and intimate servants were begged not to reveal the staggering misfortune.^* Alexis, his parents reasoned, was the Heir to the Throne of the world’s largest and most absolute autocracy. What would be the fate of the boy, the dynasty and the nation if the Russian people knew that their future Tsar was an invalid living under the constant shadow of death? Not knowing the answer and fearing to discover it, Nicholas and Alexandra surrounded the subject with silence.

A revelation of Alexis’s condition would inevitably have put new pressures on the Tsar and the monarchy. But the erection of a wall of secrecy was worse. It left the family vulnerable to every vicious rumor. It undermined the nation’s respect for the Empress and, through her, for the Tsar and the throne. Because the condition of the Tsarevich was never revealed, Russians never understood the power which Rasputin held over the Empress. Nor were they able to form a true picture of Alexandra herself. Unaware of. her ordeal, they wrongly ascribed her remoteness to distaste for Russia and its people. The years of worry left a look of sadness settled permanently on her face; when she spoke to people, she often appeared preoccupied and deep in gloom. As she devoted herself to hours of prayer, the life of the court became stricter and her own public appearances were reduced. When she did emerge, she was silent, seemingly cold, haughty and indifferent. Never a popular consort, Alexandra Fedorovna became steadily less popular. During the war, with national passions aroused, all the complaints Russians had about the Empress—her German birth, her coldness, her devotion to Rasputin—blended into a single, sweeping torrent of hatred.

The fall of Imperial Russia was a titanic drama in which the individual destinies of thousands of men all played their part. Yet in making allowance for the impersonal flow of historic forces, in counting the contributions made by ministers, peasants and revolutionaries, it still remains essential to understand the character and motivation of the central figures. To the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna this understanding has never been given. From the time her son was born, the central concern of her life was her fight against hemophilia.

^* At the heart of the problem of hemophilia are the genes which issue the biochemical instructions that tell the body how to grow and nourish itself. Gathered in curiously shaped agglomerations of matter called chromosomes, they are probably the most intricate bundles of information known. They determine the nature of every one of the trillions of highly specialized cells that make up a human being. Scientists know that the defective gene which causes hemophilia appears on one of the female sex chromosomes, known as X chromosomes, but they have never precisely pinpointed the location of the faulty gene or determined the nature of the flaw. Chemically, most doctors believe that hemophilia is caused by the absence of some ingredient, probably a protein factor, which causes normal blood to coagulate. But one eminent hematologist, the late Dr. Leandro Tocantins of Philadelphia, believed that hemophilia is caused by the presence of an extra ingredient, an inhibitor, which blocks the normal clotting process. Nobody really knows.

There is a remote prospect that current research into the structure of chromosomes will help hemophiliacs. If it should become possible to locate the genes responsible—and then to correct or substitute for the faulty gene—hemophilia could be cured. But medical researchers hold out little hope for the immediate future. So far, science has been unable to change genetic characteristics in any form of life except bacteria.

^* Dr. Botkin kept the secret well and never discussed the illness with his own family. In 1921, his daughter Tatiana wrote a book about the Imperial family without mentioning the nature of the Tsarevich’s illness or the word “hemophilia.” This suggests either that she still did not know or that, true to her father’s code, she still felt bound by secrecy.