Alexandra (30 page)

‘My dear pearl M!’ he wrote to Marie in 1908, ‘tell me how you talked with the sea, with nature! I miss your simple soul. We will see each other soon! A big kiss.’ His
words were those of a rapturous innocent, a holy fool. ‘My dear M! My little friend! May the Lord help you to carry your cross with wisdom and joy in Christ. This world is like the day, look
it’s already evening. So it is with the cares of the world.’
¹⁸

This blithe, elemental lyricism was Father Gregory’s trademark, an ability to dwell mentally in a realm beyond the ordinary, on a higher plane of existence where the cares of the world
were
overshadowed by an ecstatic joy in the knowledge of God’s omnipresent, benign power. Trusting in the goodness of creation, fearful of nothing, seeing the future
and knowing that it too was good gave the Siberian a radiant optimism that drew the beleaguered imperials to him.

‘When I can see our dear friend, I shall be very happy,’ Alix told her daughter Olga.
¹⁹
In his presence her doubts receded, her
faith increased. And her headaches (and Nicky’s too) were cured – at least for a time. Father Gregory had only to shout, ‘Be off!’ and the terrible blinding pain ceased.

Beneficial as he was to the tsar and his immediate family, Father Gregory struck others as not only odd but threatening. Xenia thought him ‘sinister’.
²⁰
Ella, remembering how Alix had been led into delusion by Philippe Vachot, sent warnings to her sister cautioning her against drawing Father Gregory too deeply into
her family life and relying too much on his ministrations.
²¹
Few among the household staff held the Siberian starets in awe, rather the
reverse.
²²
He continued to attract a large number of followers to his Petersburg apartment, and word of his cures was spread through the
capital. But he also aroused distrust. His true nature eluded comprehension. He made people uneasy. His surreal, fey quality was taken by some to be something else entirely: the evasive cunning of
the trickster. Indeed even those who admired him admitted that he was ‘like a chameleon, whose words and actions changed their colour according to the varied needs of the people he met, the
environment and, finally, his own moods’. And while this chameleon-like adaptability made Father Gregory a sympathetic guide and teacher, it also allowed him to slip with disarming ease into
intimacy with people, intimacy that could, or so it seemed to those who were suspicious of him, prove to be dangerous.
²³

By 1909 the imperial doctors were amazed that Alexei was still alive. Chronic bleeding in his stomach threatened to turn into a fatal abscess. Pain from internal bleeding in his back made him
scream, sometimes for days, his hoarse cries so piteous that the servants, hearing them as they passed along the corridor outside his room,
had to cover their ears. His
legs grew stiff with engorged blood, the left leg so distorted that for a long time he could not use it at all and had to be carried everywhere by his constant companion, the burly sailor
Derevenko.

He could become ill very suddenly: in the midst of a family meal, while out for a drive, while reciting his lessons. Bleeding would begin, the colour would suddenly drain from his face and he
would begin to cry. The sight of him in such a condition, his limbs distorted, his face ‘drawn and seamed with suffering’, was terrible – it made Nicky weep and take refuge in his
study – and his moans and screams wrenched the hearts of his doctors, his sisters, above all his parents.

Alix had seen Alexei through many crises by the time he was five years old, but every fresh attack made her panic. White-faced and agitated, she took charge, calling in the doctors, sending to
Petersburg for Father Gregory or, if he was away from the capital, sending him a telegram, praying to the saints whose icons hung around her son’s bed.

‘God has not abandoned us,’ she repeated when Alexei’s suffering was at its worst. Though at times she looked despairing, her will to believe was strong. She trusted in Father
Gregory to pray for Alexei, and his prayers, she once told an officer of the
Standart
, ‘have a particular force’ because of his ascetic life.
²⁴
Each time, even if it looked as though the boy would surely die, he recovered – if not immediately, then within hours or days.

For some reason Alix did not expect Father Gregory to cure her, beyond easing her migraines. Her sciatic pain had never been as acute as during the years when the Siberian was coming to the
palace increasingly often. Her weak heart seemed to be growing weaker. Beyond the facile explanation that for her to be cured was outside the will of God, there was no way to account for this
apparent paradox. Of course, Alexei’s recurrent attacks of bleeding were potentially fatal, while Alix’s chronic pain and fatigue were not. Still, she must have longed for relief and,
so far as is known, the starets did not provide it.

Sometime in 1910 one of the nursery staff, a nanny named Vishniakov, asked to see Alix. The nanny was very upset, and Alix,
who was accustomed to listening
sympathetically to the problems of her servants and household members and to helping them whenever she could, was no doubt prepared to be understanding. But the story Nanny Vishniakov told –
between sobs – brought forth another response entirely.

Vishniakov had gone with Father Gregory and others to his village of Pokrovsky in Siberia for three weeks of rest. While there, she said, he had entered her room stealthily, at night, crept into
her bed and seduced her. Nor was she the only one, the nanny said; she had seen with her own eyes the starets’s flagrant and indiscreet seduction of at least one other member of the
household.
²⁵

It was not the first time the empress had heard, and rejected as slanderous, first-hand accounts of Father Gregory’s seductions and debaucheries. A trusted woman of the court, sent to
Pokrovsky to learn the truth about the starets, confided to Alix that Father Gregory had tried to seduce her maid. The empress’s own confessor, the Archimandrite Theophan, and other important
clerics had come to the palace to inform the tsar and tsarina that the man they turned to for spiritual guidance was bringing discredit on the imperial family by his immorality and the notoriety it
was creating. Militsa and Stana had begun to have doubts about Father Gregory after becoming convinced that he behaved himself scandalously at times. The ladies-in-waiting, Nicky’s sister
Xenia, the governess Sophie Tioutchev were uncomfortable around the Siberian, gossiped about him, and made Alix aware that they disapproved of his being allowed near the four grand duchesses,
especially when the girls were in their nightclothes. It was improper, unwise and reckless to put a wolf among the innocent, trusting lambs, they thought; it was inviting disaster.

Alix’s immediate response to the accusations of Nanny Vishniakov was that ‘she did not believe such slanders, and saw in them the work of dark forces, wishing to ruin’ Father
Gregory.
²⁶
‘Saints are always calumniated,’ she told Dr Botkin, who came to the palace twice each day to listen to her
heart.
²⁷
Theophan was sent away, Sophie Tioutchev and others in the household told to be silent – though they continued to shake their
heads and whisper about the
starets, their stories reaching the capital and being told and retold there with elaborations.

Alix knew that her guide and mentor was flawed and full of vices, but she trusted him not to harm her children and she told herself that the allegations against him were invented by her
husband’s enemies. To attack the starets was just one more way to attack the tsar himself, for Father Gregory had all but become a member of the imperial family. Besides, the starets himself
denied everything, and she wanted to believe his denials.

The campaign to expose Father Gregory as a sordid libertine had the effect of driving the empress more deeply into isolation. Her own poor health, and the need to keep Alexei’s illness a
secret, meant that there were few people she could confide in. Now that small circle of intimates shrank still further.

Anna Vyrubov, Alix’s young, stout, rather cloying devotee, came to the palace every day. Somewhat dim-witted but stubborn and above all loyal – not only to Alix but to Father
Gregory, whose disciple she had long been – Anna was welcomed eagerly by the empress as long as she was not ‘too gushing or too exacting’.
²⁸
It was an incongruous friendship, between the tall, earnest, sad-eyed invalid empress and the short, shallow, vivacious maid of honour, but they were bound by their common
faith in Father Gregory, by Anna’s hero-worship of Alix, and by a mutual fondness that had begun when Anna, as a girl of sixteen, had nearly died of typhoid and Alix had come to sit by her
bedside often, supporting her in her recovery.
²⁹
Despite what others saw as her aloofness, Alix had a gift for friendship. Julia Rantzau, Marie
Bariatinsky, Martha Mouchanow, her wardrobe mistress Princess Galitzine, all had, to a greater or lesser extent, been good friends of Alix’s, as Lily Dehn and Sophie Buxhoeveden would become
her close friends later on.

Another woman admitted to the shrinking circle of the empress’s intimates was Princess Dondukov, a follower of Father Gregory whom Martha Mouchanow described as ‘a physician of no
mean skill’ and high intellect. Aggressive and scheming, the princess was generally more feared than liked, according to Mouchanow, who
may have been jealous, but
Alix had confidence in her and sought her opinion on many subjects and confided in her, and may even have taken medicines she prescribed in preference to those prescribed by the court
physicians.
³⁰

The number of those who could be trusted was growing smaller and smaller. Only Nicky and Alexei and the girls, a few stalwarts such as Anna, Princess Dondukov and the faraway Marie Bariatinsky
with whom she corresponded, sister Irene and brother Ernie (not Ella, she was too opposed to Father Gregory), and Father Gregory himself could be relied upon completely. The others she could not be
sure of. They might belong to the dark forces that threatened Father Gregory, and through him, the imperial family, indeed Russia itself.

And the dark forces were growing strong, or so it seemed to Alix as the second decade of what she saw as the barbaric, inhumane twentieth century advanced. They were gathering, like a towering
thundercloud, over the capital.

A
reckless hedonism reigned in Petersburg in the mild winter and warm spring of 1911. There was a mania for skating, and the indoor rinks were full
of eager skaters racing, leaping and turning with perilous abandon. The gaudy red, orange and green trams that sped along the main avenues of the city ran on oblivious of obstacles in their path,
knocking over carts, injuring horses and maiming pedestrians who tried to jump on and off without waiting for the conductors to bring them jerkily to a halt. For three years running cholera
epidemics had carried off thousands of Petersburgers, leaving the survivors with an avid thirst for life; they sought pleasure, sensation, the thrill of risk, and they seemed to care nothing for
the danger.

In the drawing rooms and ballrooms of the great palaces were to be found the ultimate risk takers, the speculators who made and lost immense fortunes on the stock exchange and in financial
ventures in steel and coal, copper and oil. Deal making was the preoccupation of the hour, how to raise money and which schemes to invest it in to make it go up the fastest. And once the wealth was
acquired, there was the excitement of the gambling house, where it could all be wagered and, if lost, where a bullet to the head could put an end to the whole mad spiral of chance.

The reigning hostesses of the capital, Countess Betsy Shuvalov, Grand Duchess Victoria Melita (Ducky, recently returned to Petersburg from exile with her husband Grand Duke Cyril, and the leader
of the young ‘smart set’), and, above all, the widowed Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna (Aunt Miechen), took the risk of throwing
open their salons to a wide
variety of guests, from the great aristocratic families – the Orlovs, Tolstoys, Dolgorukovs and Gorchakovs – to the nouveaux riches, wealthy foreign investors, painters and composers,
and a variety of hangers-on whose manners were said by more staid guests to be ‘fast’ and whose morals did not bear scrutiny. Some said the social tone had been lowered, but there was
no turning back; old and new elites together were swept up in the craze for loud music, strong cocktails and the newest fad, dancing the tango until the early hours of the morning.

Nowhere was the hedonistic mood more in evidence than in the explosive realm of the erotic. Censorship laws were repealed in the wake of the government upheaval of 1905-06, and the result was a
wave of novels, poems and paintings that celebrated sexual expression in all its forms. Subjects once held to be unmentionable were now a frequent topic of conversation. People held forth on
homosexuality, voyeurism, and pederasty and were not reticent on the theme of their own personal pleasures and gratifications. Women took ‘oriental pills’ to enlarge their breasts and
men sought potions to enhance their virility. Nightlife became marked by decadence. Husbands and wives visited brothels together in the evenings, then went on to dance the tango at the fashionable
Suicide Club. Young men from noble families amused themselves at parties dressing in women’s gowns and long ropes of pearls, bright blue eyeshadow on their lids and chalk-white make-up on
their faces. The comet of 1910 had come and gone without destroying the world, but the sense of approaching doom, of the end-time, was still strong. People boasted of living for the moment, and
seemed to vie with one another in causing scandal – though it was harder now than in the past to find someone to shock, at least among the worldly elite of the capital.