Alexandra (31 page)

In the countryside there was no equivalent disorder in morals, though the combination of social unrest and financial hardship created immense resentment and a growing longing for change. These
were the times memoirists, looking back across a decade, would call the ‘troubled years’, the ‘black years’, for the Russian peasants, who lived in dread of being identified
as radicals or rebels and being sent
into Siberian exile, or worse. Many thousands were hanged as subversives or conspirators, their animals slaughtered and their villages
burned by government agents who were even more feared than the robber bands that roamed unhindered from province to province, stealing from well-off peasants, relieving tax collectors of their
sacks of gold and even purloining entire shipments of grain and oil and coal.

But if the mood of recklessness did not take hold outside Petersburg, the gossip from the capital did penetrate to the provincial cities and villages, and nearly all the gossip was centred on
the man the newspapers called Rasputin, the Siberian charlatan who in the guise of a holy healer was said to have mesmerized and seduced the empress and gained control over the entire imperial
family.

The sensation-loving public, avid for scandal and sexual gossip, could not get its fill of stories about the man one newspaper called ‘that fornicator of human souls and bodies’,
Rasputin. Pressure was brought to bear on the newspaper editors by the imperial ministers, and fines were levied for every scurrilous story printed, but public demand was insatiable and the stories
continued to appear.
¹
Soon all Petersburg knew of Rasputin’s sordid past, his inexhaustible sexual appetite, his seductions of his female
followers, the boasts he made that the tsar knelt down and washed his feet, that he had slept with the empress, her daughters and other women of the court, and that he had a chest full of letters
from Alix and the girls, all testifying to their love for him and his complete domination of them.

Obscene graffiti began to appear on the brick walls of palaces, crude images of the empress and her unholy paramour making love, and in the streets children sang bawdy songs about the pair.
Delegates to the Duma – the third Duma, the second, convened in the spring of 1907, having been dissolved as too radical – heard speeches about how the court was being controlled by
intriguers and frauds, and no one doubted that the references were to Rasputin.

The private life of the imperial family, and especially the empress, had been dragged into the mire of titillating sexual scandal. Petersburgers whispered that Alix was not only the lover of
Rasputin but the lover
of Anna Vyrubov as well. She had no shame, they said. She had no morals, no loyalty. She was the Niemka, the German bitch, German to the core.

Alix was once again very unwell. The least exertion exhausted her, and she was often short of breath and in pain. Now and then she would attend the theatre, or sit for a time enduring some
public function, looking alternately worried and sour, but it was noticed that she was always ill at ease, and greatly relieved when the time came to leave.
²
Her private routines had altered. Her chronic shortness of breath prevented her from singing, and playing the piano overtired her. She took up painting still lifes and, as
ever, occupied herself quietly with reading and handwork and writing letters.

‘Dearest Madgie,’ she wrote to her old governess late in the spring of 1911, ‘very tenderest thanks for your dear letter. We came over here [to Peterhof] on Saturday and hope
to go to sea . . . We long for that rest.’ She had been sick for seven months, she told her correspondent, and Nicky had been overworking. They both needed relaxation. ‘I hope to get a
little better, so as not to be always lying [down].’ ‘The children are growing up fast. In November Olga will be sixteen, Tatiana is almost her size at fourteen – Marie will be
twelve, Anastasia ten, Alexei seven.’

She told the governess that the older girls were taking her place at luncheons and receptions, military reviews, and commemorative events, learning, as Alix herself had learned at their age, how
to make the rounds of a roomful of guests, pausing briefly to exchange a few words with each and then moving gracefully on to the next. All the young grand duchesses were fluent in four languages
– Russian, English, German and French – and were able to mingle comfortably with diplomats, government ministers, generals and admirals, and the aristocrats of the household.
‘They must get accustomed to replace me,’ Alix wrote, ‘as I rarely can appear anywhere and, when I do, am afterwards long laid up – over-tired muscles of the
heart.’
³

There was one place where Alix always felt better, where she could be out of doors, resting on a chaise longue or driving in her pony carriage, where her energy seemed to return and her natural
urge to
make improvements could find an outlet. Livadia, the Crimean villa perched high on its cliff above the blue ocean, had become her favourite place. Their movements
less restricted now than in previous years, and the threat of terrorist attacks presumed to have decreased, the family visited Livadia each spring and autumn. Daily life there was much less formal
than at Tsarskoe Selo, the pace more leisurely and the atmosphere unceremonious. Servants, guests, even the officers of the
Standart
, which rode at anchor in the bay, all joined the family
at one table for the midday meal, and when ministers from Petersburg arrived, places were laid for them as well. There were no state carriages with outriders and liveried coachmen, no resplendent
uniforms for the staff, no rigid schedule to be kept. Guests sat on the terrace or amid the rose bushes and blooming vines in the colonnaded garden, lingering over cups of tea and talking. In the
evenings, the balalaika orchestra from the yacht gave concerts, or the Cossacks who guarded the family sang in chorus. There were entertainers from the local Tartar villages as well, and, on
occasion, Olga and Tatiana gave readings of French plays.

According to Martha Mouchanow, the empress was ‘never so happy as in the Crimea’, and she contentedly joined in the social life that developed within the small colony of aristocratic
villa owners. There were dances for the young people, dinners for visitors, jaunts aboard the
Standart
to the palace of Novy Sviet for banquets of roasted lamb and baked fowl, saffron rice
and baklava, accompanied by wine made from grapes grown in the estate’s extensive vineyards. Among Alix’s favourite visitors was the Emir of Bokhara, a very grand dignitary who never
travelled without an interpreter and at least two of his ministers, tall, exotic figures in robes of silver and gold whose long beards were dyed scarlet.
⁴
It amused Alix to converse with the emir who, though he spoke fluent Russian, thought it more in keeping with his dignity to speak in his own language; the solemnity with
which he spoke, and the whole cumbersome procedure of translating their remarks back and forth, made it hard for Alix to keep her composure and gave her funny stories to tell later, after her guest
had left.

However carefree the mood at Livadia, it was a place of sorrow – and this was part of the attraction of the area for the empress – for patients with
tuberculosis came by the hundreds to Yalta and the surrounding coastal area to seek healing in hospitals. Some recovered, but many did not and funeral processions were a frequent sight. Emaciated,
blanket-wrapped consumptives basking in the sun were on every terrace, or so it seemed. Alix joined the Anti-Tuberculosis League, sold her own and her children’s handcrafts in the
organization’s annual bazaar, and sent her daughters out to sell flowers on Flower Day to benefit the patients. She organized the construction of two new sanatoria, built on property owned by
the imperial family at Massandra, and visited many of the worst cases there herself, sending Olga and Tatiana when she was too tired and ill to go. It was good for the girls to see for themselves
just how severe the illness could be, and how much suffering it caused, she said when questions were raised about the wisdom of exposing her daughters to the contagious disease. ‘They should
realize the sadness underneath all this beauty.’
⁵

At Livadia, Alix was able to accomplish a good deal despite her intermittent invalid state. Far from Petersburg, away from the stresses of the court, the criticism of her in-laws and the libels
of the press, she was restored – at least some of the time. The old villa from Alexander III’s day having been torn down, she took pleasure in furnishing the new, larger structure that
was built in its place, ordering white furniture and chintz curtains for the airy rooms, placing antique statues in the garden, overseeing the tending of the groves of olive and cypress trees that
surrounded the house.

Nicky welcomed his wife’s bursts of energy, but was confused by them. Just when he had accustomed himself to living with an invalid, the invalid rose from her couch and went off to the
sanatorium to visit patients or drove out in the pony carriage. He confessed to KR that the situation was ‘tiresome and depressing’.
⁶

Compounding the confusion was Alix’s odd manner and behaviour. She was capable of gaiety, she laughed easily, with her children she was warm and affectionate. But she gravitated towards
illness and death, towards any circumstance in which tragedy loomed and in which she could assume the role of rescuer – a role that allowed her to step out of her
everyday, troubled self and assume a simpler, less emotionally demanding identity, that of self-sacrificing caretaker.

For she was very troubled indeed. Her inner tensions had brought on not only illness but a disturbing sense that she had lost self-command, which made her fearful and worsened her symptoms of
anxiety – shortness of breath, a pounding heart, sweaty palms, a sense of doom. She suffered, so Dr Botkin thought, from ‘progressive hysteria’, a psychological condition that had
more and more severe physical manifestations.

And by 1911, in the words of the court minister Baron Fredericks, Alix ‘often conducted herself strangely’.
⁷
Her behaviour was
erratic, she did unexpected things and reacted in unexpected ways. She muttered in a very low voice, so that others had to strain to hear her. Yet they had to speak very loudly to her, for she had
begun to lose her hearing.
⁸
Consciously or unconsciously, she used her heart condition to manipulate people and to try to control situations.
Among family and uncritical staff and servants, her symptoms were quiescent. But when contradicted or frustrated, or among people she knew to be hostile to her or to hold contrary opinions to hers,
she complained of chest pain and began gasping for breath. The symptoms were not feigned, but they were, in Dr Botkin’s view, psychosomatic.
⁹

The empress’s ‘strange’ behaviour and the gossip about it, the emperor’s passivity, the turmoil in the Duma and among the ministers following the assassination of
Stolypin in September, 1911, led to renewed suspicion of Rasputin and a fresh wave of articles and rumours in Petersburg.

‘Everybody already knows and talks about him, it’s terrible the things they say about him, and about Alix, and everything that goes on at Tsarskoe,’ Xenia wrote in her diary
early in 1912. ‘How will it all end? It’s terrible.’
¹⁰

As to the government’s attitude towards the Siberian, conflicting views were aired. Some said the police were protecting Rasputin, and that a book exposing his crimes and sordid habits had
been
confiscated and burned by police officials.
¹¹
Others whispered that the police were watching Rasputin and
keeping a record of all that he did. Cynics argued that both could be true, for it was well known that the police could not be trusted and that they represented conflicting interests.

Police agents were in fact following Rasputin when he was in the capital, gathering detailed evidence of where he went and with whom, what women he slept with, what others he accosted. It was
quite a full dossier, giving times and places and names, recording drunken brawls, visits to prostitutes, assignations at bath houses and violent incidents in the course of which offended women
threatened Rasputin or spat on him.
¹²
Nor was this the only record of the starets’s lewd behaviour. Iliodor and Mitya Kozelsky, a
strannik who had at one time been in favour at the palace, prepared a written record of what Rasputin had said and done that reflected badly on the imperial family – his boasts of his sexual
prowess and long list of lovers, his seduction of at least one nun, his claims of intimacy with the empress and her daughters.

In the Duma, Alexander Guchkov, leader of the influential Octobrist party, had copies made of several letters the empress was said to have written to Rasputin and distributed them
widely.
¹³

‘My Beloved, unforgettable teacher, redeemer and mentor,’ one letter began, ‘how tiresome it is without you. My soul is quiet and I relax only when you, my teacher, are sitting
beside me.’ ‘I kiss your hands and lean my head on your blessed shoulders. Oh, how light do I feel then! I only wish one thing: to fall asleep, forever on your shoulders and in your
arms.’
¹⁴

The furore in the Duma grew more heated, the gossip in the capital more salacious. Vladimir Kokovtsov, who had replaced Stolypin as principal minister, was visited by Rasputin and was repelled
by him. They had met before; in the previous year Rasputin had come to Kokovtsov and, ‘on orders from Tsarskoe Selo’, offered him the post of Minister of the Interior. Now, however,
with all the damaging reports and stories that had come to light, Kokovtsov saw the Siberian not as a messenger from the palace but as a maleficent, half-mad character, a grotesque from a
melodrama.

‘I was shocked by the repulsive expression of his eyes,’ Kokovtsov wrote years later in his memoirs, ‘deep-set and close to each other, small, grey in
colour.’ Rasputin stared at the minister for a long time with his ‘cold, piercing little eyes’, as if intending to hypnotize him. ‘Next he threw his head sharply back and
studied the ceiling; then he lowered his head and stared at the floor; all this in silence.’
¹⁵