Nicholas and Alexandra

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Rasputin

THERE was much about Gregory Rasputin that was repulsive. When he first appeared in 1905 in several of St. Petersburg’s most elegant drawing rooms, the heralded Siberian “miracle worker” was in his early thirties, broad-shouldered, muscular, of average height. He dressed roughly in loose peasant blouses and baggy trousers tucked into the top of heavy, crudely made leather boots. He was filthy. He rose and slept and rose again without ever bothering to wash himself or change his clothes. His hands were grimy, his nails black, his beard tangled and encrusted with debris. His hair was long and greasy. Parted loosely in the middle, it hung in thin strands to his shoulders. Not surprisingly, he gave off a powerful, acrid odor.

To his devotees, none of these details mattered. Women who found him disgusting discovered later that disgust was a new and thrilling sensation; that the rough and strong-smelling peasant was an alluring change from a surfeit of perfumed and pomaded cavalry officers and society gentlemen. Others, less sensual, reasoned that his coarse appearance was a sure sign of his spirituality. Were he not a Holy Man, they said to themselves, such a ragged moujik would not be here among us. Satisfied with this conclusion, they went out, adding their voices to the growing chorus which chanted that Rasputin was indeed a Man of God.

Rasputin’s eyes were his most remarkable feature. Friends and enemies alike described their strange power. Anna Vyrubova, who worshipped Rasputin, spoke of him as having a “pale face, long hair, un-cared for beard and the most extraordinary eyes, large, light, brilliant.” The monk Iliodor, who hated Rasputin, described his “steely grey eyes, deep set under their bushy eyebrows, which almost sank into pinpoints.” Paléologue, who had to consider Rasputin as a political phenomenon, found himself focusing on the eyes: “Rasputin was dark, with long stiff hair, a thick black beard, a high forehead, a broad prominent nose, and sensuous mouth. The full expression of his personality, however, seemed concentrated in his eyes. They were pale blue, of exceptional brilliance, depth and attraction. His gaze was at once piercing and caressing, naïve and cunning, far-off and intent. When he was in earnest conversation, his pupils seemed to radiate magnetism. He carried with him a strong animal smell, like the smell of a goat.”

It was difficult to resist the power of Rasputin’s steady gaze. Men and women who met him out of curiosity found themselves fascinated, lured and compelled by the glimmering eyes and the urgent, mysterious will behind them. Prince Yussoupov, who murdered Rasputin, went to him first, coolly announcing that he was sick, to learn more about Rasputin’s methods of “healing.”

“The ‘starets’ made me lie down on the sofa,” Yussoupov wrote later. “Then, staring intently at me, he gently ran his hand over my chest, neck and head, after which he knelt down, laid both hands on my forehead and murmured a prayer. His face was so close to mine that I could see only his eyes. He remained in this position for some time, then rising brusquely, he made mesmeric passes over my body.

“Rasputin had tremendous hypnotic power. I felt as if some active energy were pouring heat, like a warm current into my whole being. I fell into a torpor, and my body grew numb; I tried to speak but my tongue no longer obeyed me and I gradually slipped into a drowsy state, as though a powerful narcotic had been administered to me. All I could see was Rasputin’s glittering eyes; two phosphorescent beams of light melting into a great luminous ring which at times drew nearer and then moved farther away. I heard the voice of the starets but could not understand what he said.

“I remained in this state without being able to cry out or to move. My mind alone was free, and I fully realized that I was gradually falling into the power of this evil man. Then I felt stir in me the will to fight his hypnosis. Little by little the desire to resist grew stronger and stronger, forming a protective armour around me. I had the feeling that a merciless struggle was being fought out between Rasputin and me. I knew that I was preventing him from getting complete mastery over me, but still I could not move: I had to wait until he ordered me to get up.” Rasputin closed the interview with “Well, my dear, that’ll be enough for the first time.”

A story told by Fülöp-Miller, Rasputin’s biographer, indicates the strange duality of Rasputin’s nature:

“A young girl who had heard of the strange new saint came from her province to the capital and visited him in search of … spiritual instruction. His gentle monastic gaze and the plainly parted light brown hair … all at first inspired her with confidence. But when he came closer to her, she felt immediately that another quite different man, mysterious, crafty, and corrupting, looked out from behind the eyes that radiated goodness and gentleness.

“He sat down opposite her, edged quite near and his light blue eyes changed color and became deep and dark. A keen glance reached her from the corner of his eyes, bored into her, and held her fascinated. A leaden heaviness overpowered her limbs as his great wrinkled face, distorted with desire, came closer to hers. She felt his hot breath on her cheeks, and saw how his eyes, burning from the depths of their sockets, furtively roved over her helpless body, until he dropped his lids with a sensuous expression. His voice had fallen to a passionate whisper and he murmured strange, voluptuous words in her ear.

“Just as she was on the point of abandoning herself to her seducer, a memory stirred in her dimly … she recalled that she had come to ask him about God … she gradually awoke … the heaviness disappeared … she began to struggle.… He was at once aware of the increasing inner resistance, his half-shut eyes opened again, he stood up, bent over her … and pressed a passionless, gentle, fatherly kiss on her forehead. His face distorted with desire became smooth again and was once more the kindly face of the wandering teacher. He spoke to his visitor in a benevolent, patronizing tone, his right hand raised to his forehead in blessing. He stood before her in the attitude in which Christ is depicted on old Russian icons; his glance was again gentle and friendly, almost humble, and only in the depth of those little eyes still lurked, almost invisible, the other man, the sensual beast.”

Rasputin focused his eyes not only on feverish women, but on ministers of the Imperial government. At the request of the Empress, he called on and was received by two successive Prime Ministers of Russia, Peter Stolypin and Vladimir Kokovtsov.

Stolypin, a man of great strength and will, later described the visit of Rasputin to his friend Michael Rodzianko, President of the Duma: “He [Rasputin] ran his pale eyes over me, mumbled mysterious and inarticulate words from the Scriptures, made strange movements with his hands, and I began to feel an indescribable loathing for this vermin sitting opposite me. Still, I did realize that the man possessed great hypnotic power, which was beginning to produce a fairly strong moral impression on me, though certainly one of repulsion. I pulled myself together.…”

To a remarkable degree, the same scene was repeated with Stolypin’s successor, Kokovtsov: “When Rasputin came into my study and sat down in an arm chair, I was struck by the repulsive expression of his eyes,” Kokovtsov wrote. “Deep seated and close set, they glued on me and for a long time, Rasputin would not turn them away as though trying to exercise some hypnotic influence. When tea was served, Rasputin seized a handful of biscuits, threw them into his tea and again fixed his lynx eyes on me. I was getting tired of his attempts at hypnotism and told him in as many words that it was useless to stare at me so hard because his eyes had not the slightest effect on me.”

Both Stolypin and Kokovtsov departed from their interviews convinced that they, at least, had triumphed over the Siberian moujik. In fact, both had simply made more certain their own political fates. The interviews had been arranged by Alexandra so that Rasputin could evaluate the two ministers. Leaving each of them, he reported to her that neither man seemed attentive to him or to the will of God. Upon these reports, unknown to them, the palace reputations of both of these Prime Ministers, the best men that Russia had, began to decline.

Rasputin’s eyes were the foundation of his power, but when they failed him, he was quick to use his wheedling tongue.

The rise of Gregory Rasputin would have been impossible in any country other than Russia. Even in Russia, pungent, shaggy, semi-literate peasants did not normally take tea with prime ministers. Yet neither Kokovtsov nor Rasputin considered the scene quite as bizarre as it seems today; it was not, as someone put it, “as if Og had entered the White House.”

Rasputin appeared in St. Petersburg as a starets—a Man of God who lived in poverty, asceticism and solitude, offering himself as a guide to other souls in moments of suffering and turmoil. Sometimes, as in his case, the starets might also be a strannik—a pilgrim who carried his poverty and his offerings of guidance in wanderings from place to place. These were types that all Russians could recognize. Through Russian history, armies of impoverished pilgrims had walked across the steppes from village to village and monastery to monastery, living on whatever the peasants or monks might choose to give them. Many ascetics walked barefoot in the winter or wrapped their legs with heavy chains. Some preached, others claimed powers of healing. If the Orthodox Church caught them preaching heresy, they went to prison, but their poverty and self-sacrifice often made them seem holier than the local priests.

All Russians listened to these holy men. To illiterate peasants who had never walked beyond the nearest river, they talked of mighty cities, foreign lands, mysterious healings and miracles of God. Even educated Russians treated them with respect. Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamasov, “The starets is he who takes your soul and will and makes them his. When you select your starets, you surrender your will. You give it to him in utter submission, in full renunciation.” Before his death, Count Leo Tolstoy visited the revered starets of Optina Poustin for counsel. Traditionally, the rags, the chains, the clear renunciation of the world gave these men freedoms that others lacked. They could rebuke the mighty, sometimes even the tsars themselves.

Rasputin was a fraudulent starets. Most were saintly old men who had left all temptation and worldly goods behind. Rasputin was young, he was married and had three children, and his powerful friends later bought him the grandest house in his village. His mind was impure and his moral behavior was gross. But he had in lavish abundance some of the dramatic trappings of holiness. Along with his burning eyes, he had a fluent tongue. His head was filled with Scriptures, and his deep, powerful voice made him a compelling preacher. Besides, he had wandered the length and breadth of Russia and twice made pilgrimages to the Holy Land. He presented himself as a humble penitent, a man who had sinned greatly, been forgiven and commanded to do God’s work. It was a touching symbol of his humility, people said, that he kept the nickname “Rasputin” which he had earned as a young man in his native village. “Rasputin” in Russian means “dissolute.”

Rasputin was born Gregory Efimovich, the son of Efim, a farmer who once had been a coachman in the Imperial Mail. The year was 1872; thus he was thirty-three when he first met the Imperial family, and forty-four when he died. His birthplace was Pokrovskoe, a village on the Tura River in western Siberia, 250 miles east of the Ural Mountains. It was a hard, wind-swept land where the temperature in winter dropped to forty below zero and to survive took great strength and hard physical work. Climate and isolation had their effect on the mind, and more mystics, more holy men and more outlandish sects came out of Siberia than any other part of Russia.

There is a story that, as a boy, Gregory uttered his first startling bit of prophecy. He lay in bed with fever while a group of villagers gathered in his father’s house to discuss the theft of a horse. From his bed, the story goes, Gregory arose, flushed and excited, and pointed his finger at a peasant in the room, declaring that he was the thief. Outraged, the peasant denied it, and Gregory was beaten. That night, however, a pair of distrustful villagers followed the accused man and saw him take the horse from his shed into the forest. Gregory acquired a modest local reputation as a seer, a heady thing for a boy of twelve.

As a young man, the seer became a rake. He drank and fought and made free with the village girls. He became a wagoner, carrying goods and passengers to other villages, an occupation that extended the range of his conquests. A good talker, sure of himself, he tried every girl he met. His method was direct: he grabbed and started undoing buttons. Naturally, he was frequently kicked and scratched and bitten, but the sheer volume of his efforts brought him notable success. He learned that even in the shyest and primmest of girls, the emptiness and loneliness of life in a Siberian village had bred a flickering appetite for romance and adventure. Gregory’s talent was for stimulating those appetites and overcoming all hesitations by direct, good-natured aggression.

On one of his trips, Gregory—now dubbed Rasputin by his snickering neighbors—carried a traveler to the monastery of Verkhoturye, a place used both as a retreat for monks and as a seat of ecclesiastical imprisonment for heretical sectarians. Rasputin was fascinated by both groups of inhabitants and remained at the monastery for four months.

Most of those confined at Verkhoturye were members of the Khlysty, a sect which believed in reaching God through the raptures of sexual encounter. Their secret nocturnal orgies took place on Saturday nights in curtained houses or clearings deep in the forest. Both men and women arrived dressed in clean white linen gowns and began singing hymns by candlelight. As the candles burned lower, the singers began to dance, slowly and reverently at first, then more wildly. In a fever of excitement, they stripped their bodies and submitted to the whip brandished by the local leader of the sect. At the peak of their frenzy, men and women fell on each other, regardless of age or family relationship, and climaxed their devotions with indiscriminate intercourse.

In later years, Rasputin’s enemies often charged him with membership in the Khlysty. Had they been able to prove it, even the Empress might have been shocked, but solid evidence was never available. The most that could be proved—and Rasputin freely admitted this—was that, like the Khlysty, Rasputin believed that to sin was the first step toward holiness.

Soon after returning to Pokrovskoe, Rasputin, then barely twenty, married a blonde peasant girl four years older than he. Through all his life, even at the height of his notoriety, his wife, Praskovie, remained at home in Pokrovskoe. She knew about his womanizing and never complained. “He has enough for all,” she said with a curious pride. She bore him four children—two sons and two daughters. The eldest son died in infancy and the other was mentally deficient; the two girls, Maria and Varvara, later came to live with their father and be educated in St. Petersburg.

To support his family, Rasputin took up farming. One day while plowing, he thought he saw a vision and declared that he had been directed to make a pilgrimage. His father scoffed—“Gregory has turned pilgrim out of laziness,” said Efim—but Gregory set out and walked two thousand miles to the monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. At the end of two years, when Gregory returned, he carried an aura of mystery and holiness. He began to pray at length, to bless other peasants, to kneel at their beds in supplication when they were sick. He gave up his drinking and curbed his public lunges at women. It began to be said that Gregory Rasputin, the profligate, was a man who was close to God. The village priest, alarmed at this sudden blossoming of a vigorous young Holy Man within his sphere, suggested heresy and threatened an investigation. Unwilling to argue and bored by life in Pokrovskoe, Rasputin left the village and began once again to wander.

Rasputin’s first appearance in St. Petersburg occurred in 1903 and lasted for five months. Even in the capital, remote and sophisticated, his reputation had preceded him. He was said to be a strange Siberian moujik who, having sinned and repented, had been blessed with extraordinary powers. As such, he was received by the city’s most famous churchman, Father John of Kronstadt. John was a saintly figure noted for the power of his prayers, and his church at Kronstadt was an object of pilgrimages from across Russia. He had been the private confessor to Tsar Alexander III and had sat with the family by Alexander’s bed at Livadia while the Tsar was dying. To be received and blessed by this most revered priest in Russia was an impressive step in Rasputin’s progress.

In 1905, Rasputin was back in St. Petersburg. This time, he was taken to meet the aged Archimandrite Theophan, Inspector of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy and former confessor to the Empress Alexandra. Like Father John, Theophan was struck by the apparent fervor of Rasputin’s faith and arranged for him to meet another ranking churchman, Bishop Hermogen of Saratov. With all of these priests and bishops, Rasputin’s approach was the same. He refused to bow and treated them with jolly, spontaneous good humor, as if they were friends and equals. Put off balance by his egalitarianism and simple sincerity, they were also impressed by his obvious gifts as a preacher. He was a phenomenon, it seemed to them, which had been given to the Church and which the Church, then trying to strengthen its roots among the peasants, could put to valuable use. They welcomed him as a genuine starets.

In addition to the blessing of the Holy Fathers of the Church, Rasputin began his life in the capital with the endorsement of two ladies of the highest society, the Montenegrin sister princesses, Grand Duchess Militsa and Grand Duchess Anastasia. The daughters of King Nicholas I of Montenegro, each had married a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, and both were prominent practitioners of the pseudo-Oriental brand of mysticism then in vogue in many of the capital’s most elegant drawing rooms. This upper layer of society, bored with the old church routines of traditional Orthodoxy, looked for meaning and sensation in the occult. Amid an atmosphere of decadence, of cards and gold lying on green baize tables, of couples flushed with champagne dancing all night, of galloping troikas, of fortunes staked at the race track, the mediums and clairvoyants flourished. Grand dukes and princes gathered around tables, the curtains drawn behind their backs, to hold seances and try feverishly to communicate with the other world. There were table-rappings in darkened rooms where strange voices were said to speak and the tables themselves were declared to have risen and floated in the air. Numerous great mansions had their domestic ghosts. Footsteps sounded, doors creaked and a certain tune was always played on the piano by invisible hands whenever a member of the family was dying. Rasputin, who had so impressed the saintly men of the Church, was received with equal excitement by this coterie of the occult.

It was Grand Duchess Militsa who first brought Rasputin to Tsarskoe Selo. The fateful date, November 1, 1905 (O.S.), is fixed by an entry in Nicholas’s diary: “We have got to know a man of God, Gregory, from Tobolsk Province.” A year later, Nicholas wrote: “Gregory arrived at 6:45. He saw the children and talked to us until 7:45.” Still later: “Militsa and Stana [Grand Duchess Anastasia] dined with us. They talked about Gregory the whole evening.”

Rasputin was not, in fact, the first “Holy Man” brought to the palace by the Grand Duchess Militsa. In 1900, when Alexandra was desperately anxious to give her husband a male heir, Militsa advised her of the existence of a French mystic and “soul doctor” named Philippe Vachot. Vachot had begun as a butcher’s assistant in Lyon, but he had found life easier as a faith healer; many believed he could also determine the sex of unborn children. This did not impress the French authorities, who three times had prosecuted him for practicing medicine without a license. In 1901, Nicholas and Alexandra paid an official visit to France, and Militsa arranged for them to meet Vachot. He proved to be a childlike little man with a high forehead and penetrating eyes. When the Imperial couple returned to Russia, Vachot went along as part of their baggage.

Unfortunately for Vachot, the Empress’s next child, like the preceding three, proved to be a girl, Anastasia. In 1903, Vachot declared that the Empress was pregnant and would have a son. She was not even pregnant and Vachot’s stock plummeted. Despairing, Alexandra was persuaded to give up Vachot and he was sent home, lavishly remunerated, to die in obscurity. But before he left, he told the Empress, “You will someday have another friend like me who will speak to you of God.”

At first, Rasputin’s reception at the palace caused little comment. His credentials on all sides were impeccable. He had the blessing of the most saintly men of the church; Father John and the Archimandrite Theophan had both advised the Empress to have a talk with the devout peasant, and he was introduced from the highest social circle of the capital.

None of these people, however, expected the degree of intimacy with which Rasputin came to be accepted at the palace. Usually, he came in the hour before dinner when Alexis was playing on the floor in his blue bathrobe before going to bed. When Rasputin arrived, he sat down with the boy beside him and told stories of travels and adventures and old Russian tales. There was the story of the humpbacked horse, of the legless rider and the eyeless rider, of Alyonushka and Ivanushka, of the unfaithful Tsaritsa who was turned into a white duck, of the evil witch Baba Yaga, of the Tsarevich Vasily and the beautiful Princess Elena. Often, the girls, the Empress and the Tsar himself found themselves listening.

It was on such an evening in the autumn of 1907 that Grand Duchess Olga, the Tsar’s youngest sister, first met Rasputin. Nicholas said to her, “Will you come and meet a Russian peasant?” and Olga followed him to the nurseries. There, the four girls and their small brother, all wearing white nightgowns, were waiting to go to bed. In the middle of the room stood Rasputin.

“All the children seemed to like him,” said Olga. “They were completely at ease with him. I still remember little Alexis [then three], deciding he was a rabbit, jumped up and down the room. And then, quite suddenly, Rasputin caught the child’s hand and led him to his bedroom, and we three followed. There was something like a hush as though we had found ourselves in Church. In Alexis’s bedroom no lamps were lit; the only light came from the candles burning in front of some beautiful icons. The child stood very still by the side of the giant, whose head was bowed. I knew he was praying. 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 sincerity.… I realized that both Nicky and Alicky were hoping that I would come to like Rasputin.…”

Rasputin’s manner with Nicholas and Alexandra exactly suited his role. He was respectful but never fawning; he felt free to laugh loudly and to criticize freely, although he larded his language heavily with biblical quotes and old Russian proverbs. He referred to the sovereigns not as “Your Majesty” or “Your Imperial Majesty,” but as Batiushka and Matushka, the “Father” and “Mother” of the Russian peasants. In these ways he deepened the contrasts between himself, the Man of God and representative of the Russian people, and the polished figures of court and society whom Alexandra despised.

Both Nicholas and Alexandra spoke freely to Rasputin. To the Tsar, Rasputin was exactly what he had described to his sister, “a Russian peasant.” Once, speaking to one of the officers of his guard, Nicholas elaborated: “He [Rasputin] is just a good, religious, simple-minded Russian. When in trouble or assailed by doubts, I like to have a talk with him, and invariably feel at peace with myself afterward.” To Alexandra, Rasputin became much more important. Gradually, Alexandra became convinced that the starets was a personal emissary from God to her, to her husband and to Russia. He had all the trappings: he was a peasant, devoted to the Tsar and the Orthodox faith; he represented the historic triumvirate: Tsar-Church-People; in addition, as an irrefutable proof of his divine mission, Rasputin was able to help her son.

This was the key. “It was the boy’s illness that brought Rasputin to the palace,” writes Sir Bernard Pares. “What was the nature of Rasputin’s influence in the family circle?” Pares goes on to ask. “The foundation of it all was that he could undoubtedly bring relief to the boy, and of this there was no question whatsoever.” The eyewitnesses agree. “Call it what you will,” declared Alexandra Tegleva, Alexis’s last nurse, “he [Rasputin] could promise her [the Empress] her boy’s life while he lived.” Mosolov, the court official, writes of Rasputin’s “incontestable success in healing.” Gilliard states that “Rasputin’s presence in the palace was intimately connected with the prince’s illness. She [Alexandra] believed that she had no choice. Rasputin was the intermediary between her and God. Her own prayers went unanswered but his seemed to be.” Kerensky, intruding on the family circle after Rasputin was dead, nevertheless declares that “it was a fact that more than once before the eyes of the Tsar and the Tsaritsa, Rasputin’s appearance by the bedside of the apparently dying Alexis caused a critical change.”

What was it, exactly, that Rasputin did? The common belief, never verified, is that Rasputin used his extraordinary eyes to hypnotize the Tsarevich and then, with the boy in a hypnotic state, suggested that the bleeding would stop. Medically, it could not have been that simple. No doctor established in this field accepts the possibility that hypnosis alone could suddenly stop a severe hemorrhage. Nevertheless, there is a strong body of responsible opinion which believes that hypnosis, properly used, can play a part in controlling hemophilic bleeding.

“Rasputin took the empire by stopping the bleeding of the Tsarevich,” wrote J. B. S. Haldane, the British geneticist. “It was perhaps an imposture, but it is also possible that by hypnotism or a similar method, he was able to produce a contraction of the small arteries. These last were placed under the regulation of the [autonomic] nervous system and although they are not normally controlled by the will, their contraction can be provoked in the body of a hypnotized subject.”^*

If it is medically possible that Rasputin could have controlled Alexis’s bleeding by using hypnosis, it is far from historically certain that he did. Stephen Beletsky, Director of the Police Department, which monitored all Rasputin’s activities, declared that in 1913 Rasputin was taking lessons in hypnotism from a teacher in St. Petersburg; Beletsky put an end to the lessons by expelling the teacher from the capital. Rasputin’s successes with Alexis, however, began well before 1913. If he had been using hypnosis all the while, why did he need lessons?

The probable answer to this mystery derives from recent explorations into the shadowy links between the working of mind and body and between emotions and health. In hematology, for example, it has been proved that bleeding in hemophiliacs can be aggravated or even spontaneously induced by emotional stress. Anger, anxiety, resentment and embarrassment cause an increase in blood flow through the smallest blood vessels, the capillaries. In addition, there is evidence that overwrought emotions can adversely affect the strength and integrity of the capillary walls. As these tend to become more fragile and break down under stress while at the same time they are attempting to handle an increased flow of blood, the likelihood of abnormal bleeding becomes greater.

There is an opposite side to this proposition: It is strongly suspected that a decrease in emotional stress has a beneficial effect on bleeding. As calm and a sense of well-being return to a patient, his capillary blood flow will decline and the strength of his vascular walls increase. In this context, the question of whether Rasputin hypnotized the Tsarevich becomes a matter of degree. If, technically, it was not hypnosis that he practiced, it was nevertheless a powerful suggestion—Prince Yussoupov’s account gives an indication of its strength. When Rasputin used this power on Alexis, weaving his tales, filling a darkened room with his commanding voice, he did in effect cast a spell over a boy overwhelmed by pain. Then, as Rasputin assured him in tones which left no room for doubt, Alexis believed that the torment was receding, that soon he would be walking again, that perhaps they would go together to see the wonders of Siberia. The calm and sense of well-being produced by this powerful flow of reassuring language produced a dramatic emotional change in the Tsarevich. And, as if by a miracle, the emotional change affected Alexis’s body. The bleeding slowed, the exhausted child dropped off to sleep and eventually the bleeding stopped altogether. No one else could have done it, neither the anguished parents nor the terrified doctors. Only a man supreme in his own self-confidence could transmit this self-confidence to a child.

Like every other explanation, this one is only a guess. It is supported, however, by current medical knowledge. It is also suggested by a wisp of testimony from Maria Rasputin, the starets’s daughter: “The power, the nervous force that emanated from my father’s eyes, from his exceptionally long and beautiful hands, from his whole being impregnated with willpower, from his mind concentrated on one desire … [were] transmitted to the child—a particularly nervous and impressionable subject—and … in some way … galvanized him. At first through the stream of emotion and later through the power of confidence, the child’s nervous system reacted, the envelope of the blood vessels contracted, the hemorrhage ceased.”

The truth about Rasputin’s effect on the Tsarevich will never be precisely known. Few medical records of these episodes were kept and none survived the Revolution. Not even persons intimate with most of the family secrets were privy to these dramatic episodes. Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, the Tsarevich’s aunt, declares, “There is no doubt about that [Rasputin’s healing powers]. I saw those miraculous effects with my own eyes and that more than once. I also know that the most prominent doctors of the day had to admit it. Professor Fedorov, who stood at the very peak of his profession and whose patient Alexis was, told me so on more than one occasion, but all the doctors disliked Rasputin intensely.”

It turns out, however, that if Olga saw the “miraculous effects,” she never saw the cause. She did not ever see with her own eyes what happened at Alexis’s bedside. The sole experience she cites is this:

“The poor child lay in pain, dark patches under his eyes and his little body all distorted, and the leg terribly swollen. The doctors were just useless … more frightened than any of us … whispering among themselves.… It was getting late and I was persuaded to go to my rooms. Alicky then sent a message to Rasputin in St. Petersburg. He reached the palace about midnight or even later. By that time, I had reached my apartments and early in the morning Alicky called me to go to Alexis’s room. I just could not believe my eyes. The little boy was not just alive—but well. He was sitting up in bed, the fever gone, the eyes clear and bright, not a sign of any swelling in the leg—Later I learned from Alicky that Rasputin had not even touched the child but merely stood at the foot of the bed and prayed.”

Olga may have been misled, both about the severity of the hemorrhage and about the speed of recovery. But not necessarily. It is one of the mysteries of the disease that the recuperative powers of its victims, especially when they are children, are extraordinary. A child who has been totally disabled and in great pain can be quickly restored. Even a night’s sleep can bring color into the cheeks and life into the eyes. Swellings recede more slowly and afflicted joints may be weeks or months returning to normal. But to observers like Olga Alexandrovna, the difference between a night and the following morning could well have seemed miraculous.

There were those who, in regard to Rasputin, expressed skepticism that his presence had any effect at all. Pierre Gilliard mentions the theory that Rasputin was a clever cheat who had an accomplice in the palace; the one most suspected, of course, was Anna Vyrubova. When Alexis fell sick, this theory runs, Rasputin waited until the crisis reached its peak. Then, signaled by his ally, he appeared at the precise moment the crisis was passing and took credit for the recovery. This theory, as Gilliard himself admits, is shaky. For one thing, it presupposes a medical knowledge on Anna Vyrubova’s part which her subsequent book does not reveal. It would have been risky; had Rasputin been summoned too soon or too late, his game would have been exposed. Most damaging of all to this theory is the fact that it assumes that Anna Vyrubova owed a greater allegiance to Rasputin than she did to the Empress. Overwhelmingly, the evidence denies this last assumption.

Whatever it was that Rasputin did or did not do, there was only one judge of his effectiveness who mattered. This was the Empress Alexandra. She believed that Rasputin was able to stop Alexis’s hemorrhages and she believed that he did it through the power of prayer. Whenever Alexis began to recover from an illness, she attributed it exclusively to the prayers of the Man of God.

^* Recently, over a three-year period, 1961–1964, at Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, Dr. Oscar Lucas used hypnosis to extract 150 teeth from hemophilic patients without transfusing a single pint of blood or plasma. Normally, for hemophiliacs, tooth extraction means a major operation requiring the transfusion of dozens of units of plasma before, during and for days after an operation. Lucas uses hypnosis in his work primarily to dissipate the fears that hemophiliacs naturally suffer when faced with the prospect of surgery and the accompanying major bleeding. “An emotionally tranquil patient has less bleeding difficulty than one emotionally distressed,” Lucas has explained. “Bleeding engenders fear and fear of bleeding is considerably greater in the hemophiliac than in non-bleeders. The anxiety which results may be averted through hypnosis.” Generally, Lucas suppressed anxiety by asking patients to recall pleasurable experiences. One patient enjoyed himself hugely during surgery by returning himself to a baseball park for the climactic inning of a crucial game. Whether Rasputin actually hypnotized the Tsarevich or not, the distraction a contemporary American receives from watching an exciting baseball game cannot be far different from that a small Russian boy would find in hearing the dramatic stories and legends told by a mysterious wanderer. Interestingly, Oscar Lucas was inspired to begin his own work in hypnosis after reading about Rasputin.