Nicholas and Alexandra

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Fateful Deception

THE Empress had thrown herself heart and soul into the war. Burning with patriotism, filled with energy and enthusiasm, she forgot her own illness to plunge into hospital work. Alexandra was happiest when immersed in other people’s problems, and the war gave endless scope to this side of her nature. “To some it may seem unnecessary my doing this,” she said, “but … help is much needed and every hand is useful.” Nursing became her passion. The huge Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo was converted into a military hospital, and before the end of 1914 eighty-five hospitals were operated under her patronage in the Petrograd area alone. This activity, although on a grand scale, was not unique; many Russian ladies at this time established themselves as patrons of hospitals and hospital trains. But only a few followed the Empress’s example by enrolling in nursing courses and coming daily in person to tend the wounded.

Life inside the Alexander Palace was transformed. The Empress, who had stayed in bed nursing her ills until noon, now was up for Mass at seven. Promptly at nine, dressed in the gray uniform of a nursing sister, she arrived at the hospital along with her two eldest daughters, Olga and Tatiana, and Anna Vyrubova for her nursing course. The hospital atmosphere was brutal and pathetic. Every day, Red Cross trains brought long lines of wounded and dying men back from the front. Most had had only first aid in the trenches and front-line dressing stations. They arrived dirty, bloodstained, feverish and groaning. Under the direction of trained nurses, the students washed and bandaged the ripped flesh and mangled bodies. “I have seen the Empress of Russia in the operating room,” wrote Anna Vyrubova, “… holding ether cones, handling sterilized instruments, assisting in the most difficult operations, taking from the hands of busy surgeons amputated legs and arms, removing bloody and even vermin-ridden field dressings, enduring all the sights and smells and agonies of the most dreadful of all places, a military hospital in the midst of war.” Nevertheless, wrote Anna, “I never saw her happier than on the day, at the end of her two months training, she marched at the head of the procession of nurses to receive the Red Cross … diploma of a certified war nurse.”

After a morning in the operating room, Alexandra ate a hurried lunch and spent the afternoon visiting other hospitals. Moving through the aisles between hospital beds, the tall figure of the Empress in her nurse’s uniform stirred the wounded men. They reached out bandaged hands to touch her; they wept as she knelt beside their beds to pray. Officers and peasant boys alike, facing amputations, cried from their beds, “Tsaritsa, stand near me. Hold my hand that I may have courage.

To Alexandra, this was Russia, bleeding and dying. She was the Russian Empress, the matushka of all the brave men and boys who had given themselves for Russia. “Very bad wounds,” she wrote to Nicholas on October 21, 1914 (O.S.). “For the first time, I shaved one of the soldiers’ legs near and around the wound.…” Later, the same day, in a second letter: “Three operations, 3 fingers were taken off as blood poisoning had set in and they were quite rotten.… My nose is full of hideous smells from those blood poisoning wounds.” And again: “I went in to see the wound of our standard bearer—awful, bones quite smashed, he suffered hideously during bandaging, but did not say a word, only got pale and perspiration ran down his face and body.…” On November 19 (O.S.): “An officer of the 2nd Rifles, poor boy, whose legs are getting quite dark and one fears an amputation may be necessary. I was with the boy yesterday during his dressing, awful to see, and he clung to me and kept quiet, poor child.” On November 20 (O.S.): “This morning we were present (I help as always giving the instruments and Olga threaded the needles) at our first big amputation. Whole arm was cut off.”

Alexandra spared herself nothing, not even terrible, shattering wounds in the groin: “I had wretched fellows with awful wounds—scarcely a man any more, so shot to pieces, perhaps it must be cut off as so black, but hope to save it—terrible to look at. I washed and cleaned and painted with iodine and smeared with vasoline and tied them up and bandaged all up.… I did three such—and one had a little tube in it. One’s heart bleeds for them—I won’t describe any more details as it’s so sad, but being a wife and mother I feel for them quite particularly—a young nurse (girl) I sent out of the room.”

To Nicholas, at Army Headquarters, death was remote, a question of arithmetic, as regiments, brigades and divisions shriveled away and then were restored by new recruits. To Alexandra, death was familiar and immediate. “During an operation a soldier died … hemorrhage,” she wrote on November 25, 1914 (O.S.). “All behaved well, none lost their heads [Olga and Tatiana] were brave—They and Ania [Vyrubova] had never seen a death. But he died in a minute.… How near death always is.”

In November, she formed a special attachment to a young boy, mentioning him repeatedly in her letters: “A young boy kept begging for me … the little boy begged me to come earlier today … I find the young boy gradually getting worse … in the evenings he is off his head and so weak … He will pass away gradually. I only hope not whilst we are away.”

Early in March, he died. She wrote: “My poor wounded friend has gone. God has taken him quietly and peacefully to himself. I was as usual with him in the morning and more than an hour in the afternoon. He talked a lot—in a whisper always—all about his service in the Caucasus—awfully interesting and so bright with his big shiny eyes.… Olga and I went to see him. He lay there so peacefully covered under my flowers I daily brought him, with his lovely peaceful smile—the forehead yet quite warm. I came home with my tears. The elder sister [nurse] cannot either realize it—he was quite calm, cheery, said felt a wee bit not comfy and when the sister 10 minutes after she had gone away, came in, found him with staring eyes, quite blue, breathed twice—and all was over—peaceful to the end. Never did he complain, never asked for anything, sweetness itself—all loved him and that shining smile. You, lovy mine, can understand what that is, when daily one has been there, thinking only of giving him pleasure—and suddenly—finished.… Forgive my writing so much about him, but going there and all that, had been a help with you away and I felt God let me bring him a little sunshine in his loneliness. Such is life! Another brave soul left this world to be added to the shining stars above. It must not make you sad what I wrote, only I could not bear it any longer.”

The Empress’s letters to the Tsar were never meant for any eyes but his. In all, 630 letters were found in a black leather suitcase in Ekaterinburg after her death; of these, 230 were written over the period from their first acquaintance to the outbreak of war in 1914. The other 400 were written during the war years 1914–1916. They were written with no inkling that anyone else would ever read them, far less that they would one day be published and become key historical documents used to explain events, personalities and decisions on the eve of the Russian Revolution. Today, they offer this and even more: an intimate window into a soul, a unique portrait of a woman which none of her contemporaries in Russia could possibly have seen.

Alexandra wrote voluminously. She would begin early in the morning, add paragraphs during the day, go on for pages late at night and perhaps add even more the next day. In a bold, rounded hand, she wrote to the Tsar in English in the same telegraphic style she used for her friends: breathless prose with irregular spelling, many abbreviations, frequent omissions of words that seemed obvious, and punctuation largely with dots and dashes. Both the length and the style of her letters are unfortunate. Often by skipping and jumping, she gives an impression of light-mindedness on subjects about which she actually cared deeply. Similarly, the intense fervor of other passages is strong evidence of the great passions of which Alexandra was capable, but not—as some have charged—sufficient proof that the Empress was mad. The sheer length of her letters has made their interpretation difficult for historians and biographers. It is arduous to read them all and impossible to quote more than a minuscule fraction. Yet, in her case to an extraordinary extent, excerpting has been misleading. A thought whose germination has been proceeding for sentences—perhaps paragraphs—suddenly arrives full strength in a stark and damning phrase. These phrases, plucked from the mass of verbiage, make a loquacious woman seem hopelessly hysterical.

A remarkable feature of these letters was the freshness of Alexandra’s love. After two decades of marriage, she still wrote like a young girl. The Empress, so shy and even icy about expressing emotion in public, released all her romantic passion in her letters. Beneath the Victorian surface of reserve, she revealed the extravagant, flowery emotions of the Victorian poets.

The letters, usually arriving with petals of lilies or violets pressed between their pages, begin “Good morning, my darling … My beloved one … My sweetest treasure … My Own Beloved Angel.” They end: “Sleep well, my treasure … I yearn to hold you in my arms and rest my head upon your shoulder … I yearn for your kisses, for your arms and shy Childy [Nicholas] gives them me [only] in the dark and wify lives by them.” She was in anguish whenever he left for the front: “Oh, my love! It was hard bidding you goodbye and seeing that lonely, pale face with big sad eyes at the … [train] window—my heart cried out, take me with you … I gave my goodnight kiss to your cushion and longed to have you near me—in thoughts I see you lying in your compartment, bend over you, bless you, and gently kiss your sweet face all over—oh my Darling, how intensely dear you are to me—could I but help you in carrying your heavy burdens, there are so many that weigh on you.” Their burdens were much on her mind: “I … try to forget everything, gazing into your lovely eyes.… So much sorrow and pain, worries and trials—one gets so tired and one must keep up and be strong and face everything.… We show nothing of what we feel when together. Each keeps up for the other’s sake and suffers in silence. We have lived through so much together in these 20 years—and without words have understood each other.” Although her language had the fresh, gushing quality of young love, Alexandra did not deceive herself about the passing of time: “32 years ago my child’s heart already went out to you in deep love.… I know I ought not to say this, and for an old married woman it may seem ridiculous, but I cannot help it. With the years, love increases and the time without your sweet presence is hard to bear. Oh, could but our children be equally blessed in their married lives.”

Nicholas read her letters in bed at night, the last thing before going to sleep. His replies, if more restrained, were no less intimate and tender. “My beloved Sunny,” he wrote, “when I read your letters my eyes are moist … it seems that you are lying on your sofa and that I am listening to you, sitting in my armchair by the lamp.… I don’t know how I could have endured it all if God had not decreed to give you to me as a wife and friend. I speak in earnest. At times it is difficult to speak of such things and it is easier for me to put it down on paper, owing to stupid shyness.… Goodbye, my beloved sweet Sunny.… I kiss you and the children tenderly. Ever your old hubby, Nicky.”

Sitting on her balcony, the Empress described the changing seasons at Tsarskoe Selo: “the sun behind the trees, a soft haze over all, the swans swimming on the pond, steam rising off the grass,” and later, “the leaves are turning very yellow and red,” and then, “the pink sky behind the kitchen and the trees thickly covered in snow look quite fairy like.” From Mogilev, in early spring, Nicholas wrote “the Dnieper broke up yesterday. The whole river was covered with blocks of ice, they moved swiftly but noiselessly and only occasionally could be heard the sharp sound of the clashing of two large ice blocks. It was a magnificent spectacle.” A few weeks later: “the birches are growing green, the chestnuts are shimmering and soon will burst into bud. Everything smells good. I noticed two small dogs chasing each other while I stood washing at my window.”

Knowing how much he missed his children, Alexandra filled her letters with homey details of their activities: “Baby has his lessons and goes out in the donkey sled twice a day. We take tea in his room and he likes it.… Baby madly enjoys your bath and made us all come and look on his pranks in the water. All the daughters beg too for the same treat some evening. May they?” When the Tsar’s permission arrived: “The girls are wild that they may bathe in your bath.” And later: “Baby ate lots of blinis.… Baby improves playing on the balalaika. Tatiana too. I want them to learn to play together.… Marie stands at the door and, alas! picks her nose.… On the train, the girls are sprawling on the floor with the sun shining full upon them to get brown. From whom have they got that craze?…”

Despite the distraction of hospital work, the Empress continued to suffer from shortness of breath and used a wheelchair when not in public. Her feet were swollen and her teeth ached. During the spring of 1916, the dentist came daily; sometimes she saw him three separate times in a day. Alexis was bothered with recurring bleeding into his elbows and knees. When he was unable to walk, the Empress spent hours lying on a sofa in his room and took her dinner beside his bed. As evening approached and his pain became stronger—“he dreads the night,” she wrote—his sisters Olga and Tatiana came to distract him.

“Baby was awfully gay and cheery all day … in the night he woke up from pain in his left arm and from 2 on scarcely got a moment’s sleep,” she wrote on April 6, 1916. “The girls sat with him a good while. It seems he worked with a dirk and must have done too much—he is so strong that it’s difficult for him always to remember and think that he must not do strong movements. But as the pain came with such force in the night and the arm won’t bend I think it will pass quicker—generally three nights pain.… I cried like a baby in church. Cannot bear when the sweet child suffers.”

That night, she wrote again: “This afternoon I spent in Baby’s room whilst Mr. G. [Gilliard] read to him.… He suffered almost the whole time, then would doze for a few minutes, and then again strong pains.… Reading is the best thing, as for a time it distracts the thoughts.… Seeing him suffer makes me utterly wretched. Mr. G. is so gentle and kind with him, knows exactly how to be with him.”

For those who knew her, there never was any question of the Empress’s Russian patriotism. War between Germany and Russia was personally excruciating—her brother Grand Duke Ernest of Hesse was in the German army—but her allegiance was fervently Russian. “Twenty years have I spent in Russia,” she explained to a lady-in-waiting. “It is the country of my husband and my son. I have lived the life of a happy wife and mother in Russia. All my heart is bound to this country.” Nevertheless, she grieved at the change that had come over Germany. “What has happened to the Germany of my childhood?” she asked Pierre Gilliard. “I have such happy, poetic memories of my early years at Darmstadt. But on my later visits, Germany seemed to me a changed country, a country I did not know and had never known.… I had no community of thought or feeling with anyone.” She blamed the change on Prussia and the Kaiser. “Prussia has meant Germany’s ruin,” she declared. “I have no news of my brother. I shiver to think that the Emperor William may avenge himself against me by sending him to the Russian front. He is quite capable of such monstrous behavior.”

Because of her awkward personal position, Alexandra was especially sensitive to the national reputation of the soldiers on both sides. When the German army savagely burned the Belgian library town of Louvain, she cried, “I blush to have been a German.” On September 25, 1914 (O.S.), she wrote to the Tsar, “I long that our troops should behave exemplarily in every sense and not rob and pillage—leave that horror to the Prussian troops.… I want our Russian troops to be remembered hereafter with awe and respect—and admiration.… Now I am bothering you with things that do not concern me, but only out of love for your soldiers and their reputation.”

Her deep sorrow was war itself and the suffering it brought. Like so many others, she yearned that the suffering would have meaning: “I do wonder what will be after this great war is over. Will there be a reawakening and new birth in all—shall once more ideals exist, will people become more pure and poetic, or will they continue to be dry materialists? So many things one longs to know. But such terrible misery as the whole world has suffered must clean hearts and minds and purify the stagnant brains and sleeping souls. Oh, only to guide all wisely into the right and fruitful channel.”

Sharing the Tsar’s patriotism, convinced that she and her husband were the center of a great national movement which was sweeping Russia, the Empress worked in the hospitals and awaited victory which would surely come. It was not until the spring of 1915, when the prospect of early victory had faded, that Alexandra’s letters first showed a serious interest in her husband’s work.

Her concern began, curiously enough, with the matter of the Tsar’s personal bearing. Wholly imbued with the principle of autocracy, convinced that it was the only form of government for Russia, Alexandra worried that her gentle husband, whom she loved for his kindness and charm, was not sufficiently regal. “Forgive me, precious one,” she began to write in April 1915, “but you know you are too kind and gentle—sometimes a good loud voice can do wonders and a severe look—do, my love, be more decided and sure of yourself. You know perfectly well what is right. They [the ministers] must remember who you are. You think me a meddlesome bore, but a woman feels and sees things sometimes clearer than my too humble sweetheart. Humility is God’s greatest gift but a sovereign needs to show his will more often.”

At the same time, she was advising, “Be more autocratic, my very own sweetheart … Be the master and lord, you are the autocrat,” Alexandra also began to warn against those she thought were encroaching on the Imperial prerogatives. Grand Duke Nicholas was one target of her criticism; she continued her chiding until he fell. Simultaneously, the Empress bitterly inveighed against the Duma. “Deary, I heard that that horrid Rodzianko and others … beg the Duma to be called at once together,” she wrote in July 1915. “Oh, please don’t it’s not their business, they want to discuss things not concerning them and bring more discontent—they must be kept away.” Over and over in her letters, she sounds the theme: “We’re not a constitutional country and dare not be, our people are not educated for it.… Never forget that you are and must remain autocratic Emperor. We are not ready for constitutional government.” It was not only her husband’s prerogative she was protecting, but also the rights of her son, the future tsar: “For Baby’s sake we must be firm as otherwise his inheritance will be awful, as with his character he won’t bow down to others but be his own master, as one must in Russia whilst people are still so uneducated.”

Seen from Alexandra’s viewpoint, the next step was entirely logical. In waging this great fight to save Russia and the autocracy, she needed a powerful ally. Rasputin, she was convinced, was a Man of God; his credentials had been proved in the hours when his prayers had seemed miraculously to check the Tsarevich’s hemorrhages. Now, in a time of war, he also appeared the living embodiment of the soul of the Russian people: coarse, simple, uneducated, but close to God and devoted to the Tsar. From these premises, it was no great step for her to conclude that God intended Rasputin to guide Russia through the ordeal of war. If she could trust him with the dearest thing she possessed—the life of her son—why should she not also trust him with choosing ministers, commanding the army or directing the life of the entire nation?

For a while in the first autumn of war, Rasputin’s influence at Tsarskoe Selo had dwindled. Nicholas could not forgive him his opposition to what the Tsar considered a patriotic war; the Empress was busy from morning until night with hospitals, fulfilling herself in nursing. Once when Rasputin telephoned Anna Vyrubova and asked to see the Empress, Anna replied that the Empress was busy and that he had better wait a few days. Rasputin put down the phone with loud annoyance.

Early in the winter of 1915, however, Rasputin’s influence over the Empress was sweepingly restored by another of those remarkable episodes which studded his life. Late on the afternoon of January 15, 1915, a train carrying Anna Vyrubova from Tsarskoe Selo into Petrograd was wrecked. When Anna was found and extricated from the wreckage, she was in critical condition. Her legs had been crushed by the coils of a steam radiator; a steel girder had fallen across her face and pinned her head; her skull and her spine were badly injured. At the hospital where she was taken, a surgeon declared, “Do not disturb her. She is dying.” Nicholas and Alexandra came to her bedside and waited helplessly for the end. Rasputin, quite out of touch, did not hear about the accident until the following day. When he did, he jumped up from his table and drove straight to the hospital in a car lent to him by Countess Witte. When he entered the room, Anna was in a delirium, murmuring, “Father Gregory, pray for me,” while the Tsar and the Empress stood by. Rasputin strode to Anna’s side, took her hand and called out “Annushka! Annushka! Annushka!”

The third time he called, Anna slowly opened her eyes.

Rasputin ordered her, “Now wake up and rise.”

She made an effort to get up.

“Speak to me,” he commanded.

She spoke in a feeble voice.

“She will recover, but she will remain a cripple,” said Rasputin, turning to the others. Then he staggered from the room and collapsed in a wave of dizziness and perspiration.

Exactly as Rasputin had predicted, Anna recovered but thereafter moved only on crutches or in a wheelchair. Her devotion to Rasputin became unquestioning. Convinced that he was sent by Heaven to save the Imperial family, she dedicated herself to assisting Rasputin in his mission. Acting as intermediary, she did everything in her power to smooth over differences between her mistress and the starets.

In Alexandra, the episode overwhelmingly revived her conviction that Rasputin was a true saint capable of accomplishing miracles. Utterly convinced herself, she did her utmost to transfer her conviction to Nicholas. “No, harken unto Our Friend,” she wrote in June 1915. “Believe him. He has your interest and Russia’s at heart. It is not for nothing God sent him to us, only we must pay more attention to what He says. His words are not lightly spoken and the importance of having not only his prayers but his advice is great.… I am haunted by Our Friend’s wish and know it will be fatal for us and for the country if not fulfilled. He means what he says when he speaks so seriously.” In September 1916: “I fully trust in our Friend’s wisdom, endowed by God to counsel what is right for you and our country. He sees far ahead and therefore his judgement can be relied upon.”

One block from the Fontanka Canal, at 64 Gorokhovaya Street in Petrograd, stood the building where Rasputin lived during these crucial years, 1914–1916. A five-story brick apartment house, entered through a small paved courtyard, with a concierge’s room at the foot of the wide stairs, it was architecturally similar to thousands of buildings erected in that era in Paris, London, Berlin or New York. Socially, there was nothing distinguished about the house of the Imperial favorite. Rasputin’s neighbors were working people: a clerk, a seamstress, a masseuse. The staircase was thick with pungent smells: leather, sheepskin coats, thick clouds of cabbage soup and the rancid odor of hot sheep’s cheese.

Rasputin’s apartment on the third floor of this building was surprisingly small and sedate. It consisted of five rooms. “The bedroom … was small and very simply furnished,” wrote Prince Felix Yussoupov, who often visited Rasputin. “In a corner close to the wall was a narrow bed with a red fox bedspread, a present from Anna Vyrubova. Near the bed was a big chest of painted wood; in the opposite corner were lamps which burned before a small icon. Portraits of the Tsar and Tsarina hung on the walls along with crude engravings representing biblical scenes.” [In the dining room] “water was boiling in the samovar; on the tables were a number of plates filled with biscuits, cakes and nuts; glass bowls contained jam and fruit and other delicacies; in the center stood a great basket of flowers. The furniture was of massive oak, the chairs had very high backs, a bulky dresser full of crockery took up most of one wall. There were a few badly-painted pictures. A bronze chandelier with glass shades lighted the table. The flat had an air of middle-class solidity.”

Here, on days when he had not been drinking late, Rasputin rose early and went to Mass. By the time he returned for a breakfast of bread and tea, the first of his petitioners already was climbing the stairs. Rasputin’s influence at court brought him people from all walks of life: bankers, bishops, officers, society women, actresses, adventurers and speculators, peasant girls, old women who had traveled miles simply to get his blessing. The callers came in such numbers that many had to wait in line on the staircase. Outside, the curb was lined with the automobiles of important people visiting Rasputin.

If Rasputin liked a visitor and decided to help, he took his pen and scrawled a few clumsy lines: “My dear and valued friend. Do this for me. Gregory.” These scraps of paper, carrying the aura of great connections, were often all that was needed to obtain a position, win a promotion, delay a transfer or confirm a contract. Some of these notes, attached to petitions, went straight to the Empress, who forwarded them to the Tsar. Because Mosolov was head of the Court Secretariat, Rasputin’s notes often arrived on his desk. “All were drawn up the same way,” he wrote, “a little cross at the top of the page, then one or two lines giving a recommendation from the starets. They opened all doors in Petrograd.” In one case, Mosolov was unable to help. “A lady in a low cut dress, suitable for a ball … handed me an envelope: inside was Rasputin’s calligraphy with his erratic spelling: ‘My dear chap, Fix it up for her. She is all right. Gregory.’ The lady explained that she wanted to become a prima donna in the Imperial Opera. I did my utmost to explain to her clearly and patiently that the post did not depend in any way on me.”

Usually, because he wrote poorly and slowly, Rasputin did not bother to name the service to be performed, leaving it to the petitioner to supply these details. Often, he did not even name the addressee, assuming that the petitioner would place it in the most appropriate hands. Eventually, to save time, Rasputin made up a supply of these notes in advance. As his petitioners arrived, he simply handed them out.

In return for his services, Rasputin accepted whatever his visitors might offer. Financiers and wealthy women put bundles of money on the table and Rasputin stuffed them into his drawers without bothering to count. If his next petitioner was a person in need, he might pull out the whole bundle and give it away. He had little need of money himself; his flat was simple, most of his wines and foods were brought as gifts. His only real interest in acquiring money was to accumulate a dowry for his daughter Maria, who was in school in Petrograd and lived in a room in his apartment.

For pretty women, there were other methods of payment. Many an attractive visitor, thinking she could win his help with words and smiles, rushed suddenly out of his apartment, weeping or trembling with rage. Helped down the stairs, she went off to the police station to complain that Rasputin had tried to rape her. There, her name and the circumstances of her plight were duly noted, but Father Gregory was never punished.

Along with his droves of petitioners, another cluster of people attended faithfully on Rasputin. Day after day, in front of the house, in the concierge’s lodge and on the stairs leading to Rasputin’s door, lounged a squad of detectives. They had a double function: to guard the starets’s life and to take careful notes of everyone he saw and everything that happened to him. Bored, shifting their feet on the stairs to let the petitioners pass, they scribbled down minute details: “Anastasia Shapovalenkova, the wife of a doctor, has given Rasputin a carpet.… An unknown clergyman brought fish for Rasputin.… Councilor von Kok brought Rasputin a case of wine.” When a visitor left Rasputin’s apartment, the plainclothesmen swarmed around, hoping to learn what had happened inside. If the visitor was garrulous, little dramas were scrawled deadpan into the notebooks:

November 2: “An unknown woman visited Rasputin in order to try to prevent her husband, a lieutenant at present in hospital, from being transferred from St. Petersburg.… [She said] ‘A servant opened the door to me and showed me to a room where Rasputin, whom I had never seen before, appeared immediately. He told me at once to take off my clothes. I complied with his wish, and went with him into an adjoining room. He hardly listened to my request; but kept on touching my face and breasts and asking me to kiss him. Then he wrote a note but did not give it to me, saying that he was displeased with me and bidding me to come back next day.”

December 3: “Madame Likart visited Rasputin … to ask him to intervene on her husband’s behalf. Rasputin proposed that she should kiss him; she refused, however, and departed. Then the mistress of Senator Mamontov arrived. Rasputin asked her to return at 1 a.m.”

January 29: “The wife of Colonel Tatarinov visited Rasputin and … the starets embraced and kissed a young girl in her presence; she found the incident so painful that she had decided never to visit Rasputin again.”

The staircase watch was maintained at night as well as by day, and the police kept track of Rasputin’s evening companions: “Maria Gill, the wife of a Captain in the 145th Regiment, slept at Rasputin’s.… About 1 a.m. Rasputin brought an unknown woman back to the house; she spent the night with him.… Rasputin brought a prostitute back to the flat and locked her in his room. The servants, however, afterwards let her out.… Vararova, the actress, slept at Rasputin’s.”

Sometimes when Rasputin had been aroused but left unsatisfied by his female visitors, he wandered up and down the stairs, pounding on doors:

May 9: “Rasputin sent the concierge’s wife for the masseuse but she refused to come. He then went himself to Katia, the seamstress who lives in the house, and asked her to ‘keep him company.’ The seamstress refused.… Rasputin said ‘Come next week and I will give you fifty roubles.’ ”

June 2: “Rasputin sent the porter’s wife to fetch the masseuse, Utilia, but she was not at home.… He went to the seamstress Katia in Flat 31. He was apparently refused admittance, for he came down the stairs again, and asked the porter’s wife to kiss him. She, however, disengaged herself from his embrace, and rang his flat bell, whereupon the servant appeared and put Rasputin to bed.”

In time, Rasputin became friendly with the detectives. As his door opened and his powerful figure and weather-beaten face appeared, the detectives would bow, lift their hats and wish him good morning. Often, they were able to be of service to him. One night, two gentlemen with drawn revolvers dashed up the stairs, declaring that their wives were spending the night with Rasputin and that they had come to avenge the dishonor. While one group of agents staved off the angry husbands, others raced up the stairs to give warning. In haste, Rasputin managed to bundle the ladies down the back stairs before their husbands burst in the front door.

Late at night, Rasputin thundered down the stairs, jumped into his car and drove off to carouse until dawn. The police, stuffing their pencils and notebooks into their pockets, scurried to follow:

December 14: “On the night of 13th to 14th December, Rasputin, accompanied by the 28 year old wife of … Yazininski, left … about 2 a.m. in a car for the restaurant Villa Rode.… He was refused admittance on account of the lateness of the hour; but he began to hammer on the doors and wrenched the bell off. He gave five roubles to the police officer on guard, not to annoy him. Then he went off with his companion to the Mazalksi gypsy choir at Number 49 and remained there until 10 a.m. The pair, in a very tipsy state, then proceeded to Madame Yazininskaia’s flat, from which Rasputin did not return home until midday. In the evening, he drove to Tsarskoe Selo.”

April 15: “Rasputin … called on the honorary burgess Pestrikov.… As Pestrikov was not at home, he took part in a drinking party which Pestrikov’s son was giving to some students. A musician struck up and there was singing and Rasputin danced with a maidservant.”

His revels ended, Rasputin staggered home, still accompanied by the exhausted but dogged detectives:

October 14: “Rasputin came home dead drunk at 1 a.m. and insulted the concierge’s wife.”

November 6: “Rasputin … came back drunk … as he went up to his flat he inquired if there were any visitors for him. On hearing that there were two ladies, he asked ‘Are they pretty. Very pretty? That’s good. I need pretty ones.’ ”

January 14: “Rasputin came home at 7 a.m. He was dead drunk.… He smashed a pane of glass in the house door; apparently he had had one fall already, for his nose was swollen.”

Day after day, these reports piled up in huge bundles on the desks of the police. From there, they were passed to some whose duty it was to read them, and to many who, although unauthorized, paid handsomely to savor their lusty flavor. Ministers, court officials, grand dukes, countesses, foreign ambassadors, great industrialists, merchants and stockbrokers all pored over them. The talk of Petrograd, they titillated or outraged every important citizen. Marye, the American Ambassador, wrote breathlessly in his diary: “Rasputin’s apartments are the scene of the wildest orgies. They beggar all description and from the current accounts of them which pass freely from mouth to mouth, the storied infamies of the Emperor Tiberius on the Isle of Capri are made to seem moderate and tame.” The notes convinced all who read them that the man they described was coarse, unscrupulous, a satyr. Only one person, offered the chance, refused to read them. The Empress was convinced that the senior officials of the police hated Rasputin and would do what they could to blacken his name. For her, the famous “staircase notes” were only fiction.

The sheer, blind obstinacy of Alexandra’s refusal to see the truth was never more dramatically displayed than in the notorious incident of the Yar in April 1915. Rasputin had arrived in Moscow, supposedly to pray at the tombs of the patriarchs in the Ouspensky Sobor inside the Kremlin. At night, however, he decided to visit the popular Yar restaurant, where he soon became roaring drunk. Bruce Lockhart happened to be present. “I was at Yar, the most luxurious night haunt of Moscow, with some English visitors,” he wrote. “As we watched the music hall performance in the main hall, there was a violent fracas in one of the private rooms. Wild shrieks of women, a man’s curses, broken glass, and the banging of doors. Headwaiters rushed upstairs. The manager sent for policemen.… But the row and the roaring continued.… The cause of the disturbance was Rasputin—drunk and lecherous, and neither police nor management dared evict him.” Eventually, a telephone call reached the Assistant Minister of Interior, who gave permission to arrest him, and Rasputin was led away “snarling and vowing vengeance.” According to witnesses, Rasputin had exposed himself, shouting boastfully that he often behaved this way in the company of the Tsar and that he could do what he liked with “the Old Girl.”

A report including every detail of Rasputin’s behavior was drawn up and personally submitted to the Tsar by General Dzhunkovsky, an aide-de-camp who was commander of all the police in the empire. It was assumed by those who knew its contents that this time Rasputin was finally finished. Nicholas summoned Rasputin and angrily asked for an explanation. Rasputin’s excuse was ingenious and contained at least a kernel of truth. He explained that he was a simple peasant who had been lured to an evil spot and tempted to drink more than he should. He denied the grosser parts of the report and swore that he had never made any statement about the Imperial family. Nevertheless, without showing the report to Alexandra, the Tsar ordered Rasputin to leave Petrograd for a while and return to Pokrovskoe.

Later, the Empress read the report and exploded with wrath. “My enemy Dzhunkovsky has shown that vile, filthy paper to Dmitry [Grand Duke Dmitry, later one of Rasputin’s assassins]. If we let our Friend be persecuted, we and our country will suffer for it.” Dzhunkovsky’s days were numbered. From that moment, the Empress’s letters were filled with a stream of pleadings to “get rid of Dzhunkovsky,” and in September 1915 he was dismissed.^*

Whatever else he might be doing, Rasputin always took exquisite care to preserve the image of piety he had created at Tsarskoe Selo. It was the keystone of everything, his career and his life, and he protected it with cunning and zeal. Sometimes, an unexpected telephone call from Tsarskoe Selo would break in and upset his evening plans. He growled, but even when thoroughly drunk, managed to sober himself immediately and rush off to consult with “Mama,” as he called the Empress, on matters of state.

Alexandra’s disbelief in the evil half of Rasputin’s nature was considerably more complicated than a simple, prudishly Victorian blindness to that side of life. She was certainly moralistic, but she was not ignorant or squeamish about sex and vice. She had heard most of the stories about Rasputin’s villainous behavior and she had consciously rejected them as false and slanderous. For this fateful misjudgment on her part, Rasputin himself was shamefully—and yet, as an actor, brilliantly—responsible.

Gregory Rasputin was one of the most extraordinary and enigmatic men to appear on earth. He was an overwhelming personality and a superbly convincing actor. He had prodigious physical strength and caroused night and day at a pace that would kill a normal man. His physical presence projected enormous magnetism: prime ministers, princes, bishops and grand dukes as well as society women and peasant girls had felt his powerful attraction and, when the relationship soured, had been as powerfully repelled.

Now, all of the terrible power of this remarkable personality was concentrated on a single objective: convincing the Empress that he was as she saw him, the pure, devoted Man of God, sprung from the soil of peasant Russia. Because of his painstaking care, Alexandra never saw him as anything else. His superb performance was strongly enhanced by the miracles she had seen take place at the bedsides of Alexis and Anna. Whenever he felt himself threatened, Rasputin skillfully played on the Empress’s fears and her religious nature. “Remember that I need neither the Emperor or yourself,” he would say. “If you abandon me to my enemies, it will not worry me. I am quite able to cope with them. But neither the Emperor nor you can do without me. If I am not there to protect you, you will lose your son and your crown within six months.” Even had she begun to doubt the starets’s purity, Alexandra—having been through Spala and the nosebleed on the train—was not willing to take risks. Rasputin must be what he said he was and he must stay with her or her world would collapse.

Shrewdly, Rasputin secured his position and enhanced his hold by meeting the Empress’s more prosaic need for constant reassurance and encouragement. His conversation and telegrams were an artful blend of religion and prophecy, often sounding like the gloriously meaningless forecasts which fall from penny machines at county fairs: “Be crowned with earthly happiness, the heavenly wreaths will follow.… Do not fear our present embarrassments, the protection of the Holy Mother is over you—go to the hospitals though the enemies are menacing—have faith.… Don’t fear, it will not be worse than it was, faith and the banner will favor us.” Blurred though these messages were, the Empress, weary and harassed, found them comforting.

Politically, Rasputin’s advice was usually confined to carefully endorsing policies which the Empress already believed in, making certain that the idea was rephrased in his own language so that it would seem freshly inspired. Where his ideas were in fact original and specific, they accurately and realistically represented peasant Russia. Throughout the war, he warned of the bloodletting. “It is getting empty in the villages,” he told the Tsar. Yet, when challenged by Paléologue that he had been urging the Tsar to end the war, Rasputin retorted, “Those who told you that are just idiots. I am always telling the Tsar that he must fight until complete victory is won. But I am also telling him that the war has brought unbearable suffering to the Russian people. I know of villages where there is no one left but the blind and the wounded, the widows and the orphans.”

As the war continued, Rasputin, like Lenin, saw that along with peace the other predominant concern of the Russian people was bread. He recognized that the shortage of food was mainly a problem of distribution, and never ceased to warn the Empress that the most critical of Russia’s problems was the railways. At one point in October 1915, he urged Alexandra to insist that the Tsar cancel all passenger trains for three days so that supplies of food and fuel might flow into the cities.

When it came to the choice of ministers to rule the country, the area in which he exercised his most destructive influence, Rasputin had no design at all. He nominated men for the highest positions in the Russian government simply because they liked him, or said they liked him, or at the very least did not oppose him. Rasputin had no burning ambition to rule Russia. He simply wished to be left untroubled in his free-wheeling, dissolute life. When powerful ministers, despising his influence over the Empress, opposed him, he wanted them out of the way. By placing his own men in every office of major importance, he could ensure, not that he would rule, but that he would be left alone.

In time, every appointment in the highest echelon of the government ministries and in the leadership of the church passed through his hands. Some of Rasputin’s choices would have been comical except that the joke was too grim. Rasputin once found a court chamberlain named A. N. Khvostov dining at the nightclub Villa Rode. When the gypsy chorus began to sing, Rasputin was not satisfied; he thought the basses much too weak. Spotting Khvostov, who was large and stout, he clapped him on the back and said, “Brother, go and help them sing. You are fat and can make a lot of noise.” Khvostov, tipsy and cheerful, leaped onto the stage and boomed out a thundering bass. Delighted, Rasputin clapped and shouted his approval. Not long afterward, Khvostov unexpectedly became Minister of Interior. His appointment provoked Vladimir Purishkevich, a member of the Duma, to declare in disgust that new ministers now were asked to pass examinations, not in government, but in gypsy music.

Similarly, Rasputin’s ardent endorsement of the Empress’s belief in autocracy was at least in part self-defensive. Only under a system in which his patron and patroness were all-powerful would he survive. He resisted the demands of those in the Duma and elsewhere who urged responsible government, because the first act of such a government would have been to eliminate him. Furthermore, Rasputin honestly did not believe in responsible government. He did not believe that the Duma members or Rodzianko, their President, represented the real Russia. Certainly they did not represent the peasant Russia from which he had sprung. He believed in the monarchy not simply as an opportunist, but because it was the only form of government known in the villages. Traditionally, the peasants looked to the Tsar. Aristocrats, courtiers, landowners—precisely the men who sat in the Duma—were the classes which, historically, had barred the peasants’ access to the Tsar. Seen in this light, it became the Duma members, not Rasputin, who were the unscrupulous opportunists trying to steal the Tsar’s powers. To give the Duma more power than it had, to further dilute the role of autocracy, would bring to an end the old, traditional Russia of Tsar, Church and People. Rasputin understood this and resisted it. “Responsible government,” wrote the Empress to the Tsar, “as our Friend says, would be the ruin of everything.”

How did Nicholas regard these ardent, persistent letters exhorting him to choose this or that minister and, above all, to believe more in “our Friend”? There were times when he reacted by quietly ignoring her advice, wrapping himself in a mantle of silence, avoiding direct answers and calmly going his own way. The very vociferousness of Alexandra’s letters is evidence that she was often dissatisfied with his response; had she truly been ruling the empire and Nicholas merely a pawn executing her commands, these insistent, repetitive exhortations would not have been necessary.

But if Nicholas did not always gratify his wife’s entreaties, he rarely confronted her with an overt refusal. This was especially true in any matter involving Rasputin. Toward the starets, the Tsar’s own attitude was one of tolerant respect tinged with an amiable skepticism. At times, he confessed himself soothed by Rasputin’s semi-religious chatter. Leaving for the front in March 1915, he wrote to Alexandra, “I am going with such a calm in my soul that I am myself surprised. Whether it is because I had a talk with our Friend or because of the newspaper telling of the death of Witte [who had died of a stroke at sixty-seven] I don’t know.” On other occasions, Nicholas was annoyed at Rasputin’s intrusion into political matters and begged his wife “do not drag our Friend into this.”

Nevertheless, when the Empress threw herself at him verbally, pleading that he follow the advice of “the Man of God,” Nicholas often bowed. He knew very well how much she counted on the presence and prayers of Rasputin; he had seen with his own eyes what had happened at the bedsides of Alexis and Anna. To comfort her, encourage her and appease her fears, he endorsed her suggestions and recommendations. This relationship was greatly accentuated once Nicholas had left for Headquarters. Then, having left the management of internal affairs in the Empress’s hands, Nicholas regularly deferred to her suggestions in the appointment of ministers. And it was her choice of ministers, proposed by Rasputin, beseechingly pressed on and unwisely endorsed by the absentee Tsar, which lost the Tsar his throne.

^* A novel explanation of Rasputin’s two violently contrasting images—the holy man and the debauchee—is offered by Maria Rasputin in her book, Rasputin, My Father. According to this faithful daughter, her saintly father’s good name was blackened by the monstrous device, concocted by the Tsar’s enemies, of hiring an actor who resembled the starets and instructing him to debauch himself in the most obscene manner in the most public places. It is a dutiful effort, but it breaks under the weight of contrary evidence.