Alexandra made it her mission to give the Romanov dynasty a healthy son and heir. But she gave birth to four daughters in succession. In desperation she turned to Dr Philippe, a practitioner of ‘astral medicine’, who had been introduced to the imperial family in 1901 during their visit to France. He convinced her she was pregnant with a son, and she duly expanded until a medical examination revealed that it was no more than a sympathetic pregnancy. Philippe was a charlatan (he had been fined three times in France for posing as a regular practitioner) and left Russia in disgrace. But the episode had revealed the Empress’s susceptibility to bogus forms of mysticism. One could have predicted this from the emotional nature of her conversion to Orthodoxy. After the cold and spartan spiritual world of north German Protestantism, she was ravished by the solemn rituals, the chanted prayers and the soulful singing of the Russian Church. With all the fervour of the newly converted, she came to believe in the power of prayer and of divine miracles. And when, in 1904, she finally gave birth to a son, she was convinced it had been due to the intercession of St Seraphim, a pious old man of the Russian countryside, who in 1903 had been somewhat irregularly canonized on the Tsar’s insistence.
The Tsarevich Alexis grew up into a playful little boy. But it was soon discovered that he suffered from haemophilia, at that time incurable and in most cases fatal. The disease was hereditary in the House of Hesse (one of Alexandra’s uncles, one of her brothers and three of her nephews died from it) and there was no doubt that the Empress had transmitted it. Had the Romanovs been more prudent they might have stopped Nicholas from marrying her; but then haemophilia was so common in the royal houses of Europe that it had become something of an occupational hazard. Alexandra looked upon the illness as a punishment from God and, to atone for her sin, devoted herself to religion and the duties of motherhood. Had the nature of her son’s illness not been kept a secret, she might have won as a mother that measure of sympathy from the public which she so utterly failed to attract from it as an Empress. Alexandra constantly watched over the boy lest he should fall and bring on the deadly internal bleeding from which the victims of haemophilia can suffer. There was no way he could lead the life of a normal child, since the slightest accident could start the bleeding. A sailor by the name of Derevenko was appointed to go with him wherever he went and to carry him when, as was often the case, he could not walk. Alexandra consulted numerous doctors, but a cure was beyond their science. She became convinced that only a miracle could save her son, and strove to make herself worthy of God’s favour by donating money to churches, performing good works and spending endless hours in prayer. ‘Every time the Tsarina saw him with red cheeks, or heard his merry laugh, or watched his frolics,’ recalled Pierre Gilliard, the Tsarevich’s tutor, ‘her heart would fill with an immense hope, and she would say: “God has heard me. He has pitied my sorrow at last.” Then the disease would suddenly swoop down on the boy, stretch him once more on his bed of pain and take him to the gates of death.’28
It was her desperate need to find a miracle cure that brought Rasputin into her life and into the life of Russia. Grigorii Rasputin was born into a relatively wealthy peasant family in the village of Pokrovskoe in western Siberia. Until recently it was thought that he had been born in the early 1860s; but it is now known that he was younger than people assumed — he was in fact born in 1869. Little more is known about Rasputin’s early years. A commission set up by the Provisional Government in 1917 interviewed a number of his fellow villagers, who remembered him as a dirty and unruly boy. Later he became known as a drunkard, a lecher and a horse thief, which was almost certainly how he acquired his surname, from the word rasputnyi, meaning ‘dissolute’.fn5 At some point he repented and joined a group of pilgrims on their way to the nearby monastery of Verkhoturye, where he stayed for three months before returning to Pokrovskoe, a much changed man. He had renounced alcohol and meat, learned to read and write a little, and become religious and reclusive. The main cause of his conversion seems to have been the ‘holy man’ or starets Makarii, a monk at the Verkhoturye Monastery, whose spiritual powers, like those of the starets Zosima in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, had attracted disciples from all over the region. Makarii had been received by the Tsar and the Tsarina, who were always on the lookout for Men of God among the simple folk, and it was Makarii’s example that Rasputin later claimed had inspired him. There is no question of Rasputin ever having been Makarii’s disciple: he had never received the formal education needed to become a monk, and indeed seemed quite incapable of it. When the post of the Tsar’s confessor fell vacant in 1910, Alexandra insisted on Rasputin being trained for ordination so that he could take up the job. But it soon became clear that he was unable to read anything but the most basic parts of the Scriptures. The capacity for learning by heart, which was essential for the priesthood, proved quite beyond him (Rasputin’s memory was in fact so poor that often he even forgot the names of his friends; so he gave them nicknames, such as ‘Beauty’ or ‘Governor’, which were easier to recall). In any case, it was not exactly the Orthodox faith that Rasputin brought with him from the wilds of Siberia to St Petersburg. His strange hybrid of mysticism and eroticism had more similarities with the practices of the Khlysty, an outlawed sect he would certainly have encountered at Verkhoturye, even if the frequent accusations that he was himself a member of the sect were never proved conclusively. The Khlysty believed that sin was the first step towards redemption. At their nocturnal meetings they danced naked to achieve a state of frenzy and engaged in flagellation and group sex. Indeed there was a lot in common between the views of the Khlysty and the semi-pagan beliefs of the Russian peasantry, which Rasputin’s mysticism reflected. The Russian peasant believed that the sinner could be as intimate with God as the pious man; and perhaps even more intimate.29
At the age of twenty-eight, or so Rasputin later claimed, he saw an apparition of the Holy Mother and went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There is no record of this pilgrimage, and it is more likely that he merely joined the trail of peasant wanderers, wise men and prophets, who for centuries had walked the length and breadth of Russia living off the alms of the villagers. He developed an aura of spiritual authority and a gift for preaching which soon attracted the attention of some of Russia’s leading clergymen. In 1903 he appeared for the first time in St Petersburg sponsored by the Archimandrite Theophan, Alexandra’s confessor, Bishop Hermogen of Saratov, and the celebrated Father John of Kronstadt, who was also a close friend of the royal family. The Orthodox Church was looking for holy men, like Rasputin, who came from the common people, to revive its waning influence among the urban masses and increase its prestige at Nicholas’s court.
It was also a time when the court and social circles of St Petersburg were steeped in alternative forms of religion. In the salons of the aristocracy and the drawing-rooms of the middle classes there was a ferment of curiosity about all forms of spiritualism and theosophy, the occult and the supernatural. Séances and ouija boards were all the rage. In part, this reflected a hedonistic quest for new forms of belief and experience. But it was also part of a more general and profound sense of moral disequilibrium, which was echoed in the works of writers such as Blok and Belyi and was symptomatic of European culture during the decade before 1914. Various holy men and spiritualists had established themselves in the palaces of Russia’s great and good long before Rasputin came on to the scene. Their success cleared the way for him. He was presented at parties and soirées as a man of God, a sinner and repentant, who had been graced with extraordinary powers of clairvoyance and healing. His disgusting physical appearance merely added piquancy to his moral charms. Dressed in a peasant blouse and baggy trousers, his greasy black hair hung down to his shoulders, his beard was encrusted with old bits of food, and his hands and body were never washed. He carried a strong body odour, which many people compared to that of a goat. But it was his eyes that caught his audience’s attention. Their penetrating brilliance and hypnotic power made a lasting impression. Some people even claimed that Rasputin was able to make his pupils expand and contract at will.30