Alexandra (32 page)

When Kokovtsov advised the starets to leave Petersburg, the latter not only refused but protested at the top of his voice that he was innocent of any intrigue or wrongdoing. He never went to the
palace without being ordered there, he shouted. ‘They summon me!’ The minister was unimpressed, sent Rasputin away and told the tsar about their conversation. He told Minnie about it
too, and Minnie, who for years had kept her distance, for the most part, from all that went on in the imperial family, decided that the time had come to intervene.

Minnie went to tea at the Alexander Palace in February of 1912. She was nearly sixty-five years old, but retained her bustling air and much of her charm. She knew that her daughter-in-law was
often unwell, and that her chest pains and breathlessness had once again been severe the previous month. She had only limited sympathy for Alix, however, dismissing her constant ill health as the
result of living in draughty rooms and throwing open her windows to the frigid air. Minnie blamed Alix entirely for ‘ruining both the dynasty and herself’ by her ill-advised favouritism
for Rasputin.
¹⁶
Alix did not see the harm she was doing, but she must be made to see it, Minnie had confided to Kokovtsov. Someone had to bring
both the tsar and his wife to their senses.

It must have been a long, tense afternoon. Minnie laid out the case against Rasputin – his well-documented debaucheries, his damaging and indiscreet boasts and loose talk, the angry
speeches being made by deputies, the crude stories and jokes repeated at dinner tables and in ballrooms. The dignity and authority of the throne were being undermined. Unless Rasputin was sent
away, immediately, and never again allowed near the palace, the future of the dynasty was in peril.

Nicky said little, other than to observe that he didn’t see how he could send Father Gregory away.
¹⁷
The year before, under pressure
from his critics, the starets had gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Athens, then had spent the summer away from the capital. In all he had been gone for the better
part of the year. But his absence had not led to any lessening of the furore over his presumed intimacy with the tsarina, and Minnie was well aware of this.

It was Alix who spoke up in response to her mother-in-law’s accusations. Her voice no doubt taut with strain, red blotches appearing on her cheeks as she became impassioned in her defence
of Father Gregory, Alix began by excoriating ‘dirty-minded gossips’ for inventing all the slander. Sophie Tioutchev had started it all, the empress said; the governess had lied, turning
a beautiful, innocent and holy relationship into something ugly. And when the lies began to spread, the imperial ministers, ‘all cowards’, had failed to stand up and defend the
family’s honour. The truth was that Father Gregory was ‘an exceptional man’, whom Minnie should spend time with before she passed judgment on him. He sought neither influence nor
wealth, Alix insisted. She herself had never given him anything valuable, only a few hand-embroidered shirts and handkerchiefs, and inexpensive icons and amulets. He had sent her in return Eastern
cakes he had blessed, and prayers and cards he had written.
¹⁸

Minnie listened as Alix went on, noting with increasing resignation that she, and not Nicky, was speaking for the throne and the family. Most of what Alix said was beside the point, Minnie told
Xenia afterwards. She did not grasp the deep political issues involved, the true severity of the damage. Alix was blind, Nicky passive: such was the dowager empress’s assessment. There was
nothing more she or anyone else could do. ‘We are powerless to ward off the misfortune which is sure to come,’ she told Kokovtsov.
¹⁹

Send him away! The suggestion must have rankled with Alix after her mother-in-law had gone. How could they possibly send Father Gregory away? They needed him, each of them. He had become their
assurance, their succour, their lifeline, as Philippe had once been. Far from destroying the dynasty, Father Gregory was the one on whom the entire Romanov future rested, for without his prayers
the heir to the throne would surely be dead. Russia owed much to him.

Alix kept nearby the tokens Father Gregory had given her, icons, painted Easter eggs, telegrams. The previous winter, when she had been so ill, he had written in one of
her notebooks, ‘Here is my peace, source of glory on earth, a present for my warm-hearted Mama.’
²⁰
She treasured his message. She
needed his peace. Why couldn’t the world understand how much she needed it, how, without it, she feared that she could not go on?

A
few weeks after the uncomfortable conversation with Minnie, in March of 1912, Alix came to an important decision. It was time to reveal, at least
to the most trusted family members, the true nature of Alexei’s disease. Once they knew that he had the bleeding disease, and that Father Gregory was able to keep him alive despite even the
most severe attacks, they would be sympathetic and supportive.

She sat down with Nicky’s sister Olga and told her the truth about Alexei. He was fatally ill, yet he had not died because Father Gregory had only to pray for him whenever he bled
uncontrollably and he recovered. It was miraculous, the empress told her sister-in-law. Alexei had only to be in Father Gregory’s vicinity, and immediately he felt better.
¹
She could not praise the starets highly enough. ‘He always senses when I need him,’ she said, her usually dour expression brightening at the
thought. ‘How can I not believe in him?’ Alix went on to confide to Olga, who then confided it to Xenia, that her own illness was caused by her worry about her son. She was quite ill,
and did not expect to recover.

The year 1912 was an important commemorative year, with celebrations in Moscow marking the hundredth anniversary of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and monuments erected at historically
significant sites. The tsar and his family were present for the dedication in Moscow of a statue of Alexander III. There were luncheons and teas and receptions, military parades and gatherings of
diplomats. Alix could not attend them all, but did her best to go to as many of these events as possible, sending Olga and Tatiana when too fatigued
or in pain to go
herself. It was all ‘terribly tiring’, as she told one of her correspondents. After the celebrations were over, she was ‘for a very long time quite done up’.
²
Her fatigue was evident to all in the summer, when even a refreshing cruise aboard the
Standart
could not revive her. The French foreign minister
Raymond Poincaré, who visited the tsar and tsarina at Peterhof that hot summer, was struck by her evident pain and discomfort.

‘The empress remained motionless like a statue,’ Poincaré recalled. ‘But after a few minutes she took part [in the conversation] by moving her head to accentuate the
remarks of the emperor and she put in a few discreet remarks of her own.’ Nicky, the minister thought, looked well, his skin bronzed by the sun. But Alix, suffering in the heat and encased in
a dark dress, a bothersome black hat trimmed with ostrich feathers and lace weighing down her head, was decidedly ill at ease. ‘From time to time a red flush spread suddenly over her face and
it looked as if she felt a pain stab at her heart, or had difficulty to breathe.’
³

She was worried about Alexei. The doctors were unanimous in advising that he have a hernia operation, but were gravely concerned that any surgery could cause a haemorrhage. Father Gregory had
been sent to Siberia and, though Alix believed that he would know, through his psychic abilities, if he was needed, she worried nonetheless. Could Father Gregory’s prayers overcome the
consequences of surgery? Alexei had never before had an operation, so no test of Father Gregory’s prayers under those extreme circumstances had ever been made. No postponement of the surgery
was possible. It had to be done in the summer, to allow time for the patient to recuperate sufficiently to undertake all the travelling the family was obliged to do in the autumn – trips to
the Borodino battlefield and to Moscow for more commemorative ceremonies, a visit to Poland for the shooting season, then back to Petersburg for the winter. But what if the worst happened, and
neither the doctors nor Father Gregory were able to save the child? His death could hardly come at a worse time, with the monarchy in disgrace and talk of European war and the tsar himself the
subject of renewed gossip. (It was said that he drank too much, and was becoming lax and negligent.)

A decision had to be made. The surgery was performed, no haemorrhage resulted. Enormously relieved, in September the family set out for Moscow.

Alexei seemed to be recovering well. He stood proudly beside his father at the Borodino battlefield, in uniform, his bearing erect and a look of authority in his dark blue eyes, while the
soldiers passed in review. He was charming, good-looking, said to be intelligent though relatively untutored. He had more promise than his father had possessed at the age of eight. It was now known
within the Romanov family, thanks to Alix’s revelations during the previous winter, that the heir to the throne had the bleeding disease, but it was also noticed that in the past year he
seemed to be in better health than in the past. His crises came less frequently, his episodes of bleeding were fewer. There was some hope that Alexei might belong to that very small minority of
haemophiliacs who, like his cousin Waldemar and his great-uncle Leopold, lived into adulthood.
⁴

This hope began to wane, however, when Alexei bruised his thigh while the family was in residence at the hunting lodge of Bielovezh and his groin and left leg began to swell with engorged blood.
After weeks of rest the swelling went down, and the tsarevich, immobile for three weeks, began to try to stand up on his own. The family had moved on to the hunting lodge of Spala, deep in the
forest, at a site so remote that there was not even a village for many miles around. Here, on the night of October 15, another haemorrhage began, much more serious than the first.

Alexei’s screams woke his mother, who came at once to sit by his bedside. By morning the boy was in terrible pain, his lower back and hip bulging, the skin stretched taut, his eyes bright
with fever. He could not bear to be touched.

The paediatrician in attendance, Dr Ostrogorsky, recommended that specialists be brought in and so messages were sent to Dr Fedorov, who had been treating Alexei for a long time, and to the
Royal Paediatrician Dr Raukhfus, telling them to come to Spala at once. Meanwhile the tsarevich’s fever continued to rise and his leg and back to swell, and he cried and moaned piteously.

Spala in hunting season was a gathering point for Polish nobles, who came to join the tsar in organized hunts for elk and stag, bison and wild boar. Nicky was
inordinately proud of his skill with a gun, and boasted of the large numbers of beasts he brought down every autumn.
⁵
Each evening, the dead
animals taken that day were laid out on the ground for the guests to admire by torchlight – a macabre spectacle and a depressing one, given Alexei’s worsening condition.

Death was everywhere at Spala, in the rows of animal corpses, in the daily business of slaughter, in the discussions of guns and trophies that went on during and after dinner. Visitors to the
hunting lodge were not informed of the crisis in the family, and so they continued to enjoy the tsar and tsarina’s hospitality, their pleasure unshadowed by concern over the little
tsarevich’s condition. Each day they woke very early and assembled at the sound of the hunting horn for the ride through the forest; each evening they feasted and drank in the dining room,
becoming boisterous at times, their high spirits a jarring contrast to the apprehension in the nursery.

Alix spent less and less time with her guests as her son’s fever rose and his hoarse screams became more shrill. She sat beside him all night, sleeping hardly at all herself, watching as
he became delirious. Dr Fedorov arrived on October 17 and the following day the patient seemed to improve slightly. But on the nineteenth he was much worse, his face white and thin, his body
contorted. He could neither sleep nor eat. Even to cry brought him added pain. He repeated, ‘Lord have mercy,’ again and again, wailing and crying out, ‘Mama, help me!’ He
allowed no one near him besides his mother and father and Derevenko, his sailor attendant, who carried the wailing boy in his arms for hours.

Dr Fedorov drew Nicky and Alix aside and told them that Alexei’s stomach had begun to haemorrhage, and that he was at risk of blood poisoning and peritonitis. He told them to prepare
themselves for the possibility that their son would die, and soon.

In the dim corridors of the lodge, so dim that electric lights had to be kept burning both day and night, the servants and staff went about their tasks with sombre expressions. No official word
had been given
out about Alexei’s condition, but everyone knew he was in grave danger of death. He had never before suffered so acutely, or for so long. Those who
had occasion to enter his room were shocked at the pallor of his face, the fragility of his thin small body. It was as if he had already passed from life into another realm at the threshold of
death, his body already corpselike in its whiteness, his breath already beginning to cease as, lacking the energy to scream or cry, he murmured his prayer for divine mercy and whispered his
mother’s name.