The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (22 page)

the sound of breathing.11

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Finally, Rasputin stood up and told Alexey to open his eyes.

Bewildered, the boy looked around him and finally focused on

Rasputin’s face. ‘Your pain is going away; you will soon be well. You must thank God for healing you. And now, go to sleep’, he told

him gently. As he left, Rasputin assured Nicholas and Alexandra:

‘The tsarevich will live.’ Soon after he had left, the swelling in

Alexey’s leg began to subside. When his aunt Olga saw him the next

morning he ‘was not just alive – but well. He was sitting up in bed,

the fever gone, the eyes clear and bright, not a sign of any swelling on his leg.’12

Alexey had cheated death, but no one could explain his miracu-

lous recovery. Rasputin clearly had great powers of intuition and

auto-suggestion that had had some kind of calming effect, causing

his haemorrhaging blood vessels to contract, (much as adrenalin has

the reverse effect and dilates them).13 Many of his followers saw

Rasputin’s gift of healing as being in the Vedic tradition of the

Siberian shamans who believed in the connectivity between the

natural and spiritual worlds. Like all the imperial doctors, Alexey’s paediatrician Dr Sergey Fedorov – who had been called in on several

occasions when there had been a crisis – had an instinctive dislike

of the man, but he could not explain why what Rasputin did worked,

while conventional medicine failed him.14 In treating the tsarevich,

Rasputin insisted that the use of aspirin and all drugs should be

abandoned in favour of a reliance solely on prayer and spiritual

healing – and this, ironically, may also have been of some benefit.

But the ability to stop the flow of blood was not exclusive to him;

it was a gift he shared with other folk healers. As Iza Buxhoeveden

observed, it was not uncommon for Russian peasants to control

bleeding in their injured livestock by ‘exercising pressure on the

smaller blood-vessels and thus stopping bleeding’, but it was a secret gift that they ‘jealously guarded’.15 Princess Barbara Dolgorouky

also recalled:

Among the peasants in Russia there were most remarkable

healers. Some healed burns, some stopped blood and some cured

toothaches – I know of some exceptional cases of toothaches

which were stopped not only for these particular minutes of pain,

but for ever. And from a distance . . . I knew and later was a

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great friend of a Russian lady, Madame de Daehn, who cured

burns by touching the burned places and murmuring something.16

One thing is certain: the unquestioning trust Nicholas and

Alexandra invested in Grigory, as they called him, was based on a

profound and genuine belief that he was – pure and simple – not

just a healer but a man of God, sent to help them when no one else

could. If Alexey were to survive with Grigory’s help, then it was

God’s will.17

During those first occasional visits Rasputin made to Tsarskoe

Selo (and sources vary on how often he came), Olga and Tatiana

were sometimes allowed to sit in on his discussions about religion

with their parents, but the younger girls, especially Anastasia, were for a while excluded. Mariya Geringer remembered hurrying over

to see the empress on an urgent matter one evening, when Anastasia

‘rushed to meet her in a corridor, threw out her arms and blocked

her way, saying “You and I can’t go there, the New One (the name

given to Rasputin) is there.”’ Anastasia ‘was not allowed to enter’

when Rasputin was visiting, as she ‘always laughed when he spoke

or read about religious matters’, unable to take religious discussions seriously.18

It was not long, however, before even she had begun to relate

to him. On one occasion Aunt Olga arrived on a visit and was taken

upstairs by Nicholas and Alexandra, where she found Rasputin with

the children ‘all in white pyjamas . . . being put to bed by their

nurses’:

When I saw him I felt that gentleness and warmth radiated from

him. All the children seemed to like him. They were completely

at their ease with him. I still remember their laughter as little

Alexis, deciding he was a rabbit, jumped up and down the room.

And then, quite suddenly, Rasputin caught the child’s hand and

led him to his bedroom, and we three followed. There was

something like a hush as though we had found ourselves in

church. In Alexis’s bedroom no lamps were lit; the only light

came from the candles burning in front of some beautiful icons.

The child stood very still by the side of that giant, whose head

was bowed. I knew he was praying. It was all most impressive.

I also knew that my little nephew had joined him in prayer.19

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Olga Alexandrovna always freely admitted that she had never

liked Rasputin – he was ‘primitive’ and ‘uncouth’ and paid no lip-

service to court etiquette, addressing the imperial family by the

informal
ty
rather than the formal
vy
and often calling Nicholas and Alexandra ‘papa and mama’. She was discomfited by Rasputin’s

unbridled familiarity, which she saw as intrusive and impertinent

– as well as, probably, sexually intimidating. It was a common

response, for wherever he went Grigory Rasputin sparked contro-

versy. He remains one of the most written-about personalities in

late imperial Russian history, and one who has attracted some of

the most sensationalist and contradictory claims. As the English

novelist and travel writer Carl Eric Bechhofer, who met him, recalled:

‘Before I went to Russia and all the time I was there, I never could

make any two accounts of Rasputin tally’; in Bechhofer’s view, the

levels of his perceived wickedness were always ‘in large proportion

to the political liberalism of the reporter’.20 Part of this stems no doubt from Rasputin’s inherently contradictory personality.

Depending on whether one was with him or against him Rasputin

was either pious, mild and benevolent or the polar opposite – promis-

cuous, bestial and repellent. But who was he in reality – ‘sensual

hypocrite’ or ‘wonder-working mystic’?21 History has struggled for

the last 100 years to make up its mind.

It is certainly clear that despite being a man of religion, Rasputin

was also a shrewd opportunist, nor did he ever make any attempt

to hide his physical appetites. On arriving in the capital, he did the rounds of the salons of a
fin-de-siècle
St Petersburg noted for its decadence, pandering to rich society ladies who dabbled in the

then-fashionable cults of faith healing, table turning and eastern

mysticism, and built a following among them. He was, for his detrac-

tors, an easy personality to caricature in his loose peasant blouse

and long boots, with his heavy frame, his long oily black hair and

beard, and his coarse bulging lips. But there is no denying the

astonishing force of his personality: his sonorous voice was hypnotic and those legendary blue eyes, which he apparently could dilate at

will, gave him the look of an Old Testament prophet. Rasputin

consciously and cleverly exploited the innate theatricality of these

two gifts, the unfamiliar, archaic church Russian that he spoke adding
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to his strange other-worldliness. The salacious gossip circulating

about him seemed to have no adverse effect on his devoted followers,

who remained drawn to Rasputin’s inexplicable powers of healing,

for there was absolutely no doubt about the deep and affecting

influence he had over the sick. By 1907 the impressionable Anna

Vyrubova had become an ardent follower and was regularly inviting

him to visit her at her little house close by the Alexander Palace.

Having witnessed her son’s recovery at first hand the tsaritsa

wanted desperately to believe in this holy man’s unexplained gifts,

for here at last was a lifeline when all conventional medicine had

failed. Rasputin made no inflated claims to her about his healing

powers and why they were effective; nor was he paid for his services

(he once complained to Lili Dehn that he ‘was never even given his

cab-fares’; though often lavish gifts from Nicholas and Alexandra,

including tunics hand-embroidered by her, were from time to time

sent to him).22 For Rasputin, healing was a simple matter of unques-

tioning faith and the power of prayer. And those two great weapons

in the Christian armoury – faith and prayer – were fundamental to

Alexandra’s credo. She called him Grigory – ‘Our Friend’ – seeing

in him not just the saviour of her son, but something bigger – a

holy man and seer. She responded warmly to his Christian wisdom

and the simplicity of his message: ‘Man must live to praise God . . .

asking for nothing, giving all.’23 Here was an ordinary man of the

people, a true
muzhik
,
a valuable conduit between herself and Nicholas – as
batyushka
and
matyushka
(little father and little mother)

– and the Russian people.24 At a time when they saw danger all

around, Nicholas and Alexandra at last felt they had met someone

they could truly trust.

They had no illusions, however, about Rasputin’s libidinous

personality. Unbridled gossip about him was raging in the city and

investing their hopes in him might provoke scandal. With this in

mind Alexandra enlisted Nikolay Sablin, one of her and Nicholas’s

most trusted friends, and one who was particularly close to the

children, to visit Rasputin in St Petersburg to find out more. Sablin knew nothing of Rasputin but went to see him, having been told

by the empress that he was ‘very pious and wise, a true Russian

peasant’.25 Sablin was repelled by Rasputin’s appearance and found

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his manner unnerving. But he spoke very animatedly to Sablin about

the imperial family, religion and God and like everyone else Sablin

admitted there was something compelling about Rasputin’s pale,

deep-set eyes. He sensed that Rasputin was eager to ingratiate himself with the imperial family – for he had certainly already been bragging about his illustrious connections. Sablin suggested that he

should never request audiences with the tsar, in response to which

Rasputin had grumbled: ‘When they need me to pray for the

tsarevich they call me, and when they don’t – they don’t!’26

After several meetings with him Sablin had no option but to

admit to the tsaritsa that he had come away with a negative impres-

sion. Alexandra refused to accept his view: ‘You cannot understand

him because you are so far removed from such people,’ she had

replied stubbornly, ‘but even if your opinion was correct, then it is God’s will that it is such.’27 As far as she was concerned, God had

willed that they should meet Grigory, just as God had willed it that

everyone else should despise and revile him. This was the cross that

Grigory had to bear; just as Alexey’s affliction was her own for having transmitted haemophilia to him. In befriending Grigory the outcast

she truly believed that in his godliness he would rise above the

slander; and, more importantly, he would keep her precious boy

alive.

Sydney Gibbes later recorded his impressions of Rasputin. Not

long after taking up his post with the imperial family, he had been

invited to go and meet Rasputin in St Petersburg. The children

heard of this and the next day came bursting into the schoolroom.

‘What did you think of our friend?’ they asked. Isn’t he wonderful?’

Gibbes noticed Rasputin was always on his best behaviour with the

tsar and tsaritsa and that ‘his table-manners, which were much

complained of by his critics, were those of a decent peasant’. He

was never aware of Rasputin exerting any influence at court, though

conceded that he had an instinctive ‘naïve cunning’. But there was

no doubting Rasputin’s ‘extraordinary powers over the little boy’s

bleeding attacks’; Rasputin could always cure them, he recalled, and

once did so ‘by speaking to the boy over the telephone’.28

In March 1908 Alexey had another fall, this time hitting his

forehead. The swelling was so bad that he could hardly open his

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eyes. But on this occasion Rasputin was not called in, for he was

back at his home in Pokrovskoe in western Siberia (where he had

a wife, Praskovya, and three children), under investigation by the

Church. His enemies had accused him of spreading false doctrine

as the leader of a dissident and disreputable sect known as the
Khlysty
, notorious for the use of self-flagellation in religious rites.29

It was three weeks before Nicholas was relieved to write and tell

his mother that Alexey was recovering and that ‘the swelling and

bruising have disappeared without trace. He is well and happy, just