Alexandra (40 page)

F
ather Gregory was losing his powers. He had managed to stop the tsarevich’s bleeding, but he felt a distinct waning of his abilities. When
asked to help the sick he demurred, apologizing. ‘I cannot do it,’ he said bluntly. ‘The Lord has taken my power from me.’

Certainly his drinking increased, as did his frequent visits to the notorious Villa Rode, a nightclub in a Petrograd suburb, where the owner had added on a special room that he kept ready for
the starets’s use. There amid his entourage of admirers and hangers-on, lost in an alcoholic haze, the Siberian danced clumsily to gypsy music, twirling and kicking with frenzied abandon.
Most nights he did not cause scandal – the members of his secret police escort kept him restrained and, when they could not restrain him, bribed any witnesses to his excesses to remain silent
– but from time to time incidents occurred that became notorious.

One night early in 1916, as Father Gregory was cavorting in the night club, he was confronted by several young men in uniform, one of whom had taken out his revolver. They faced each other, the
drunken peasant and the steely-eyed young officers, and before long the men flinched, turning aside.

‘You want to kill me!’ Rasputin shouted. ‘There is no power left which can direct you against me. Go home. I want to stay with my party here and relax.’

The young men left – but everyone in the room had felt their menace, and experienced a shiver of fear. Rasputin had won the confrontation, for the moment, but the menace remained. For
weeks
the episode was talked about, analyzed. Was it proof that the Siberian was indeed powerfully protected? Or was it a harbinger of disaster to come?

The starets was receiving obscene phone calls; people insulted him to his face. Hundreds of admirers and petitioners still came to his apartment each day, asking for help and favours, for money,
for healing. Women sent him flowers (‘Silly creatures, these women,’ Rasputin told Felix Yusupov, ‘silly creatures who spoil me’); Simanovich brought him large sums of money
from grateful petitioners on whose behalf he had contacted ministers or other officials.
¹
He was at the height of his worldly power – he
who had never sought power, but by 1916 had become edgily, uncomfortably accustomed to wielding it.

Yet the very root of that power lay in his ability to heal, and he felt he had lost it.

But if he could no longer heal anyone, he could still help them. Drawing on the large subsidy of five thousand roubles a month he was receiving from the interior ministry, and the bribes brought
in by Simanovich, Father Gregory handed out money to nearly everyone who came to him. Widows, schoolgirls, impoverished veterans, peasants who had lost their lands, refugees, invalids, the wretched
of the streets who found their way to him: he gave freely to them all, while taking with equal freedom from dishonest officials, businessmen, lawyers, politicians. He rewarded himself generously,
with cases of wine, expensive sturgeon and imported delicacies, nightly banquets and debauches, expensive prostitutes. He sent money to his wife in Siberia and enrolled his daughters in costly
private schools.

Demoralized, bombarded with sensation, trapped by his protectors who both shielded him and gathered damning information about him, Rasputin floundered, yet he managed to be available when called
to the palace. And he continued to advance his influence, keeping up his close ties to the journalist and informer Manuilov, socializing with his secret police handlers, recommending candidates for
high office and afterwards cultivating them. He was the spider at the centre of a vast web of contacts, adept at putting people in touch
with others who could help them or
conspire with them. He seemed to know everyone, to be able to find out about everyone. No one in Petrograd was more feared, more sought out, or more reviled.

In the spring of 1916 the imperial train moved slowly southwards from Petrograd, carrying the tsar, the tsarina and their children towards the Rumanian frontier. Nicky was on his way to review
troops, Alix to visit hospitals and workshops, so the journey had a serious purpose. But it had the air of a family holiday and, as they went farther south, and the land grew greener and the
temperature milder, the holiday feeling increased.

Alix had declared that they could not go to Livadia, that would be ‘too great a treat to indulge in during the war’. But after stopping at Vinnitza and Bendery they went to
Sebastopol, and to Eupatia, where she had set up several sanatoria, and to Odessa, where she inspected the iodine factory, and in each place there was a little time for relaxing and lying in the
hot sun. Everywhere flowers bloomed in the sunshine, growing against whitewashed walls, along stone paths, in stone urns on broad terraces and in enclosed gardens where fountains splashed and birds
sang. There were orchards scented with pink blossom, and fields where white oxen pulled ploughs turning the earth for spring planting.

Reminders of the war were everywhere. Recuperating soldiers sat amid the blossoms in the gardens, ambulances and military trucks rumbled along the narrow streets and funeral processions
congested the roads. At night, on the train, it was necessary to draw heavy black curtains across the windows because of the danger of bombardment by German planes, launched from cruisers in the
Black Sea.

Still, with the coming of spring, hopes temporarily rose. The Germans had not, after all, marched towards Petrograd. Russian armies were receiving materials and supplies from abroad, and an
offensive was about to be launched. Apart from chronic pallor and abdominal swelling and some internal bleeding in both his arms, Alexei had been holding his own since December. He was nearly
twelve years old, tall and thin and good-looking. Father Gregory
had said that, if he lived to be seventeen, he would be completely cured.
²
In her most buoyant moments, Alix looked forward with optimism to his seventeenth birthday, just as she looked forward to the beneficial results of the most recent changes in
the government – changes she felt sure would be for Russia’s good.

At the end of January 1916, the prime minister, the antique Goremykin, had been replaced by a man Alix believed to be ‘excellent and honest’, a crony of Rasputin’s, Boris
Stürmer. On Alix’s advice and against the objections of every responsible, thoughtful voice he heard, Nicky appointed Stürmer, possibly to placate his wife, possibly because he
simply did not know what else to do.

The appointment was disastrous, and was soon followed by further ill-advised changes. The able war minister Polivanov was dismissed, and Stürmer took his place. In June, 1916, the foreign
minister Sazonov was dismissed – again to be replaced by Stürmer, who also took over the interior ministry for a time.

The pre-eminence of Stürmer was a telling symptom of the tsar’s incapacity. He vacillated, alternately acting with fitful resoluteness and withdrawing into glassy-eyed inactivity. He
mistrusted strong, capable leaders; he could not bring himself to delegate authority to able men, lest they rob him of his own powers. He trusted only his wife, as he told Sandro, and she had
little more than her devotion to recommend her. What trust he had placed in Father Gregory was being eroded for, by the spring of 1916, after years of denial and inaction, he was at last becoming
convinced that the starets was unredeemably corrupt.

The extent of Father Gregory’s unholy activities – his influence peddling at the highest reaches of government, his brokering of army contracts, his indiscreet revelations of
military secrets to his wide circle of contacts, plus his long history of priapism and his outrageous vulgarity, his general hatefulness in the eyes of educated Russians – was made clear by,
among others, G. I. Shavelsky, arch-priest of the Russian army and fleet. Shavelsky’s aim was to persuade the tsar that what confidence the soldiers and sailors still retained in the monarch
and his government was rapidly being destroyed by the
stories circulating about Father Gregory – stories that were, in many instances, true. The most notorious tale,
that the Siberian was the empress’s lover and controlled everything she did and said, was not true, but it was believed anyway. And even if they were not lovers, Shavelsky said, the empress
relied on her spiritual adviser to far too great an extent. She was naive, she trusted Father Gregory too much and was unable to see that his advice was merely self-serving, not oracular or
divinely inspired. It was up to the tsar to intervene immediately, lest the situation worsen.

Shavelsky’s message underscored what Nicky had been told the previous year by the interior minister, Shcherbatov, by his relatives, and by many others. All the advice, all the
investigations and reports, pointed in the same direction: the rot beneath the fabric of Russian governmental life went very deep, and Father Gregory was an integral part of that rapidly spreading
rot. Because of Alix’s reliance on him, his subversive influence was increasing.

But what could Nicky do? Just as Alix relied on her starets, so he, Nicky, relied on her. He leaned on her, needed her. He had begun to wear her portrait on his person day and
night.
³
He called her his ‘heart, brain and soul’. He missed her terribly, especially when he felt ill, as he often did. The cocaine
that he took to revive him and ease his heart trouble was ageing him, clouding his mind and sapping his strength.

Though he was only in his forty-ninth year, Nicky had begun to look, many observers thought, like an old man. The change was startling. His face had become thin and hollow and was covered with
innumerable small wrinkles. His eyes were sunken and darkly shadowed, the pupils faded, like the lifeless eyes of an ageing invalid. His face wore a helpless expression; his lips were fixed in an
odd little smile, humourless and unsettling.
⁴
As Father Gregory had noted, he had developed an obsessive wariness, and was forever looking around
him.

He looked, and felt, helpless. He had taken on the persona of Job. The strain of psychological martyrdom the tsar had always displayed now came to the fore in him. He had always felt doomed; now
his
country too seemed to him doomed, the recent slight upturn in her fortunes to the contrary.

‘Perhaps a sacrificial victim is needed to save Russia,’ he had declared in the summer of 1915. ‘I will be that victim.’
⁵

By the autumn of 1916 it had become evident that no amount of self-sacrifice could save the Russian monarchy from being swept under by a tidal wave of popular unrest. The immense losses in the
war (the Russian campaign launched earlier in the year had led to nothing but more dead and wounded), the rumours about the empress and Rasputin, and about her maintaining secret communications
with the German enemy, the cynicism about the tsar and his government, the increasing hardships of daily life caused indirectly by the war were pushing even the staunchest patriots to the breaking
point and beyond.

Newspaper headlines warned of German influence at court, of ‘dark powers behind the throne,’ and newspaper editors, no longer controlled by the government, printed fabricated stories
about the empress. People spoke of both the emperor and empress with ‘open animosity and contempt,’ and sang derisive songs about Alix and Rasputin. The word ‘revolution’
was heard often, and not only whispered but spoken aloud, as if in defiance of the secret police.

Dim lights shone on the unswept streets of Petrograd in October and November, 1916. Uncollected garbage piled up, clogging the roadways, and snowdrifts accumulated for want of workers to clean
the streets. Deaths in the large homeless refugee population began to accelerate, with typhus carrying off many.

Unusually harsh frosts warned of the onset of a severe winter, and the secret police, who watched and listened in every street in an effort to gauge the mood of the city, notified the tsar that
the labouring poor were ‘on the verge of despair’.

Among those who could afford to escape the rigours of the capital, there was an exodus that autumn; people crowded the ticket windows to buy tickets to Finland via Haparanda, or to travel south
to the Crimea or the Caucasus where food was sure to be available in the local markets and where the winter would not be so cold. Rationing
had begun, and among unrationed
goods prices had risen so high that meat now cost more than treble what it had in 1914, and butter and flour had more than doubled. Rents in the city too had risen a great deal, fuel was scarce and
exorbitant. People stood in lines stretching down many streets to buy oil for their lamps and vegetables for their supper. In front of the Society for Fighting High Prices, crowds formed very early
in the morning, waiting for foodstuffs that, most of the time, did not arrive at all.

For the trains carrying food and other necessities no longer pulled into the Petrograd stations in large enough numbers to supply the city adequately. There were not enough locomotives, there
were not enough workers, even when prisoners of war and workers imported from Persia and China were brought in, to operate the trains. Soldiers deserting from the army had begun drifting into the
capital, but they were not put to work; some had shot off their feet and were incapacitated, some were in hiding, and all were hostile to authority and unwilling to collude in the perpetuation of
the regime by which they felt betrayed.

As the autumn wore on, and the lines for food and fuel grew longer and those who waited in them colder, more and more soldiers poured into Petrograd. There were thirteen million men on the army
rolls, and most of them, it seemed, were coming to Petrograd. Their disruptiveness, their hostility, the stories they carried with them from the front – stories about Rasputin and the empress
carrying on nightly conversations with the Kaiser in Berlin, about Grand Duke Nicholas, their beloved former commander, who was said to be plotting to overthrow the tsar, about the tsar himself and
his ministers, said to be so fearful of the peasants that the Germans had been paid to exterminate them all – added to the already overstrained atmosphere and led to fresh secret police
alarms.