They had not been married long when Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, died in 1894. To celebrate the coronation of Nicholas and Alexandra, an outdoor festival was arranged for the poor, but hundreds of thousands turned up in search of a free meal and over a thousand of them were trampled to death in the crush. Grand Duke Sergei was Governor-General of Moscow at the time, and his mismanagement was blamed. Nicholas and Alexandra had arranged to attend a ball being held in their honour by the French that evening, and did not cancel. As they danced, crushed bodies were still being removed from the scene of the disaster by the cartload. Insensitivity of that kind was not easily forgotten.
St Petersburg society despised Alexandra anyway. Had some gaiety relieved the severity of her character she would have been forgiven almost anything, but she was haughty and distant and did not make friends easily. She was appalled by anything remotely improper, while St Petersburg society was quite relaxed and unshockable.32 Georgina Buchanan, Sir George Buchanan’s wife, who knew her when she was young, accused her of a ‘naïve simplicity’ allied with ‘uncompromising and domineering self-assurance’. She ‘strove from the very first to influence her husband to what she considered was the right way of thinking’.33 Alexandra seized upon the notion that the essence of Russianness was expressed by ‘the people’, and they all, from Archangel to Vladivostok, were fervently loyal. It followed that criticism was alien. In her mystic belief about ‘the people’ she echoed Militsa, but also her grandmother, Queen Victoria. The old Queen’s principles had influenced her when she was a girl, andVictoria was fond of the illusion that she was closer to the spirit of the English than the aristocracy were. Like Alexandra, the old lady could be self-righteous and was deeply wounded by bitchiness. They both wallowed in dramatic self-pity when the opportunity presented itself. But Victoria was sharp and livelyminded and Alexandra was entirely unburdened by reason.
By the turn of the century the court was led by the Grand Duchess Vladimir in St Petersburg, while the Tsar and Tsarina and their three daughters were rarely seen outside Tsarskoye Selo. The magnificent Romanov palaces were rarely, some never, visited and even the treasures of the comparatively modest Alexander Palace were put into storage. Instead, Alexandra had the walls painted mauve and ordered ugly suites of furniture from Maples in the Tottenham Court Road. Queen Victoria herself, with her tartan and watercolour aesthetic, her fiddly little tables and hulking great ornaments, was never as tasteless as this.
To explain her neglect of society, her ignorance of science and her increasing dependence on mystics and clairvoyants and healers, Alexandra flaunted her preoccupation with motherhood. The empire must descend through the male line. Alexandra’s existence would have no meaning for her unless she could produce a son. She must be able to pass the Tsardom to her own flesh and blood. Magic would work; she knew it. Around the turn of the century, Monsieur Philippe, a magician from Lyons, was presented to the Tsarina by Militsa.
Philippe was an obvious charlatan. Only an under-occupied woman half-crazed by a single obsession, as by that time Alexandra was, could have taken him seriously. Her mother-in-law, the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, interceded with Nicholas, but to no avail. Proofs of the Frenchman’s rascality emerged and were put before the Tsarina. But Alexandra had a fatal flaw: the gift of faith. She was like the White Queen who had trained herself always to believe ten impossible things before breakfast. Once she had made up her mind that something was true, it became so. Nothing would shake her belief.
So when, in 1901, she gave birth to her fourth child, which Philippe had told her would be a boy – the new Tsarevich – and it was a girl, she was bewildered. Monsieur Philippe regretted that his prediction had been confounded, but had she had more faith, it would certainly have come true. She saw the point of this, and made herself believe even more.
A condemnatory Secret Service report on Philippe arrived from Paris. The agent responsible, Pyotr Rachkovski, who had run the Okhrana in Western Europe for a decade, was forced out of his job, while Monsieur Philippe stayed. The rest of the Romanovs fumed in the background. The Tsarina (and her husband too, because Nicholas preferred to concur with his wife rather than face the hysterics that would result if he contradicted her) paid Philippe more rapt attention than ever. In 1902 she seemed to be expecting a child. The magician from Lyons diagnosed her condition and announced that this time it would be a boy. After doctors expressed doubts that the pregnancy was genuine, Alexandra would allow no one else to examine her. Somehow Philippe was provided with papers certifying that he was a Russian doctor of medicine. In August, however, the Tsarina was losing weight, and got a second opinion. Hers had been a phantom, that is, imaginary, pregnancy.
With the Black Sisters as their only friends, the imperial couple were pretty well isolated by their faith in Philippe. Grand Duke Nikolai, notwithstanding his love for Anastasia, was embarrassed by his own indirect association with the whole affair. Alexandra’s elder sister, Elizaveta Fyodorovna, who was almost as religious as she was and married to Grand Duke Sergei, tried to persuade her that the mystic must go. The Russo-Japanese War was in the offing and Nikolai needed all the help he could get. Regretfully, the imperial couple sent Philippe home to France with an opulent motor car and a generous pay-off.
In the summer of 1904, Alexandra gave birth to a boy. She was delighted that her faith had at last been sincere enough. However, the baby was susceptible to mysterious bouts of illness. Little was known about haemophilia at the time, and it would be a year before the doctors diagnosed his condition. The Tsarina, who was not amenable to science or reason, was deeply ashamed. The elder girls and everyone else in the tiny royal circle were sworn to secrecy. The baby suffered intermittent agonies and the doctors were helpless. Alexandra had nowhere to turn, for by the time haemophilia was suspected, Monsieur Philippe was dead; he died in France in 1905. He had told her, however, that he would ‘return in the form of another’.
Bishop Feofan was introduced to the Tsar and Tsarina and became the Tsarina’s confessor. He was a straightforward, ascetic, Orthodox priest. This was not exactly what they wanted, and Father Ioann of Kronstadt joined the circle. He too came from the regular Orthodox hierarchy, with many followers and a reputation as a healer. But neither he nor Feofan could wholly engage this nervous, superstitious, desperate pair.
Beyond the gates of all the palaces, the clamour for change was growing to a roar. Grand Duke Sergei was blown up by a bomb. Sailors mutinied and peaceful protestors were mown down by Cossacks.
In October 1905, just three days after Nicholas had countermanded his wife’s advice and signed the papers that promised his subjects a constitution, Rasputin came to tea.
The impression he made on that first visit was good, but not earth-shattering. By this time he was in his mid-thirties, could pass for older, and was no longer the wild man from Siberia. He had become used to bathing, for one thing, and wearing clean clothes, still in the peasant style – for he was not a priest. He had visited many houses where there was indoor sanitation and carpets and a piano; even electric light, in one or two. He still ate with his fingers, but he restrained his appetite, and his hollow-cheeked visage with its intense, pale-eyed stare had lost none of its magnetism. He spoke of the sin of pride. To say that he was fluent is an understatement; his words tumbled over each other in a torrent, and to one like Alexandra, who always heard what she wanted to hear, they were magical. He urged the Tsar and Tsarina to ‘spit on all their fears, and rule’.34