Sex-crazed monk who destroyed a dynasty
Tsar Nicholas was pathetically self-pitying and in thrall to his highly strung and haughty wife. But what REALLY doomed them was her obsession with Rasputin, the . . .
THE DISGRACEFUL scene was typical of the sort of sordid events that showed that the autocratic Romanov dynasty, who for three centuries had ruled Russia, had completely lost the plot.
Fuelled with booze and lust, Rasputin, the Mad Monk of Russia, was on the rampage, dancing wildly like a dervish round a fashionable Moscow restaurant, grabbing at the gypsy girls in the chorus line of the cabaret and loudly boasting in explicit terms about what he had been doing (and would do again) to no less a person than Her Imperial Highness Tsarina Alexandra, wife of Tsar Nicholas II and Mother of the Nation.
And, to press home the point, he stood on a table, undid his trousers and flashed for all to see that part of his anatomy which apparently had the Empress (and hundreds of other high-born women) in his thrall.
The police were called and threw the snarling, cursing so-called Man of God in jail. They would have pressed charges if an order had not come from the Tsar’s palace in Petrograd to release him.
The newspapers had a field day with the story, dwelling on every sordid detail. The message was clear. Grigori Rasputin, the Siberian peasant with the mesmeric eyes who had wormed his way into the confidence of Russia’s royal family and wielded huge power in the land as a result, had exposed his true self in every sense.
Yet the gullible Tsar — and even more so his wife Alexandra — continued not only to protect but to idolise this straggly-bearded drunken lecher.
For many in troubled Russia, riven by social unrest, strikes, mutinies and assassinations, this degrading incident in 1915 was the the historic turning point.
It could all have been so different. Just 50 years earlier, the Russian empire — so vast it encompassed 104 nationalities and 146 languages — had begun to embrace the modern world. Under the humane Tsar Alexander II, serfdom was abolished, giving freedom to 22 million peasants, and there were social and political reforms, including an elected assembly.
Hopes were high for the future, too, in the capable hands of the heir to the throne, Nikolai. He had the ability and the personal charisma that might have seen through the careful liberalisation — fusing a mighty past with a changing present — that Russia needed.
If he had lived, that is. But Nikolai died of meningitis aged 21, and the opportunity of more, much-needed modernisation was lost as the succession passed to his brother, Sasha, a loutish bear of a man who preferred hunting and drinking to intellectual pursuits.
As Alexander III, he reverted to autocratic rule, brooking no opposition or dissent, and instilled that old-fashioned belief in the divine right of kings to his son, the boyish, slight, rather effete Nicholas. The stage was set for disaster . . .
A bright, bold visionary monarch might have steered Russia in the right direction at this critical point in its history. But Nicholas, timid and placid to the point of paralysis, had none of those attributes.
Coming to the throne in 1894 aged 26, he wept like a child. ‘I never wanted to be Tsar,’ he whined to his brother-in-law. ‘What’s going to happen to me and to Russia?’ He was so useless at making decisions that he couldn’t even organise his father’s funeral. His cousin, Britain’s Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), had to step in and take charge.
Events also had a nasty habit of backfiring on Nicholas, even when he tried to do the right thing. At his coronation, some 400,000 packages of food and mugs of beer were laid on at Moscow’s equivalent of Hyde Park for his peasant subjects to tuck into.
Unfortunately, three- quarters- of- amillion of them turned up on a hot summer’s day, and in the panicky pushing, jostling and queue-jumping, 3,000 were trampled to death. Bloody bodies were heaped onto carts and driven away.
Then the new Tsar compounded this misfortune by failing to cancel his own celebrations — the respectful thing to do — and dancing the night away at a palace ball. When this error of judgment was pointed out to him, he reacted — typically — by feeling sorry for himself. Weakminded and ineffectual, Nicholas was an emperor with absolute powers but without a dictator’s temperament.
What made his situation even more perilous was that he was in thrall to a domineering wife he adored, who railed at him constantly that it was his God-given duty to rule his people with a rod of iron. Live up to the legacy of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, she urged. Autocracy was Russia’s way. Whip them until they bleed and they will love you for it.
That the 20th century was dawning and times had changed eluded her — but so did many other ingredients of a successful modern monarchy, such as compassion, understanding and good public relations.
German-born Alexandra, known in the family as Alix, was striking and elegant with blue eyes, golden hair and high cheekbones — but her beauty disguised anxiety that bordered on hysteria, hypochondria (she complained of sciatica and constant headaches) and a complete distrust of other people that verged on paranoia.
She was haughty. She rarely smiled. She had no close friends but was exclusively committed to her husband and children, living in a bubble that floated above all the troubles that Russia was plunging into.
As a member of what has been called the richest family in history — worth around £34 billion at 1917 rates — it was certainly a gilded bubble, with palaces, priceless artworks and precious jewels.
Their homes had fountains covered in gold and they wore clothes embossed with valuable gems. They even had a motor car converted to run over snow with tracks attached to the back wheels and skis on the front, a vehicle greatly enjoyed by the Bolsheviks who eventually captured it.
However, money could not assuage their worries, especially about the future of the Russian monarchy.
The birth of a son — after four daughters, the beautiful Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia — was a joyous affair and might have ended the royal family’s anxieties about the future.
There was a male heir at last to continue the dynasty (albeit somewhat unnecessary given at least two of the Romanov line in the past had been powerful empresses, notably Catherine the Great).
But bad luck intervened here, too. After the umbilical cord was cut, the baby bled from his navel for 48 hours and nearly died there and then.
Alexei, the Tsarevich, had the terrible, inherited disease of haemophilia. He would have to live his life (probably a short one anyway) wrapped in cotton wool, constantly watched, kept out of harm’s way.
His health and survival became the Tsarina’s obsession — more important than the swelling ranks of anarchists, socialists and Communists calling for revolution, mass strikes in factories, cavalry charges on street demonstrators, leaving thousands dead, mutiny in army barracks and on the battleship Potemkin.
Against Alexandra’s advice to tough it out, Nicholas gave in to the mob in 1905, though reluctantly and while damning ‘their insolence’.
He agreed to civil rights for all, an elected Duma (parliament), almost universal suffrage and a prime minister to run the government on his behalf. They were major concessions and two decades earlier might have done the trick. But now it was too late.
The unrest continued — inside the new Duma where the liberals and leftists challenged the Tsar’s authority, but also outside it in councils of workers and peasants called soviets. Radical leaders such as Trotsky and Lenin ruled the streets.
The Tsar hit back the only way he knew — with violent repression and executions by the thousands. ‘Terror must be met with terror,’ he ordered.
It was in that same year of 1905 that Rasputin arrived in Petrograd from Siberia, entered the life of the royal family and quickly became, in the phrase that the instantly besotted Alexandra would use of him, ‘Our Friend’.
The Tsarina, a lost and suffering soul in search of a Redeemer, saw him as the answer to her prayers. With just a word, he seemed (to her, though not to others) to be able to cure the bleeding of her haemophiliac son. That sealed her spiritual pact with Rasputin. He called her ‘ Mama’, she
With just a word, he seemed able to cure the Tsarina’s sickly son
sewed a shirt for him in the compulsive relationship that grew between them. The Tsar looked on benignly, happily accepting almost as much guidance from Rasputin as his wife did. He refused to heed the warnings or see the danger in her closeness to this charismatic holy man with his piercing eyes, greasy beard and wandering hands. Though Alix wrote to Rasputin that ‘I love you and believe in you’, their intimacy was almost certainly not sexual. But his lechery — he never learned to keep his large hands and long fingers to himself, casually caressing bare shoulders, and groping breasts and thighs — led to gossips concluding they must be lovers. In Petrograd and Moscow, rumour was rife, fuelled by pornographic pamphlets that recounted his erotic adventures. His manhood was said to be a massive 14in and that he could keep it erect for as long as he liked. Satirists called it ‘the rudder that rules Russia’ because it was supposedly servicing not only the Tsarina but her four daughters and mother-in-law, along with their entire court circle of women. Whether any of this was true no longer mattered. The monarchy in Russia, already under threat from many sides and in desperate need of dignity and respect, sank ever deeper into disrepute among its subjects, high and low. A pro-monarchy MP wrote despairingly of ‘ this terrifying knot’. Adding: ‘The Emperor insults the people by allowing into the palace an exposed libertine, while the country insults the Emperor with its awful suspicions.’ Rasputin’s malign influence grew with every year. He had unhindered access to the royal family’s private chambers, simply barging in whenever he wished. Alix turned to him for advice on all matters and Nicholas, too, increasingly depended on his counsel and prayers. The Press, banned from mentioning his name, denounced what it called ‘Dark Forces’ in the Tsar’s palace, to no effect.
When the Great War broke out in 1914, with Russia pitted against Germany, Austria and Turkey, patriotic fervour at first put the Tsar back on a pedestal as leader of his nation under arms. But then bungled battles and massive losses — 1.8 million dead and captured in the first five months alone — quickly took the shine off his reputation once more.
Deciding to take personal charge of his armies, Nicholas left Petrograd for the front, taking with him, at his wife’s insistence, Rasputin’s comb to run through his hair each day because, she told him, it will ‘help you’.
But he made the disastrous error of leaving the Tsarina at home to run Russia. She inevitably leaned heavily on Rasputin, who picked her ministers for her, constantly advised on policy and politics and even, absurdly, gave his opinion on military matters.
Prime ministers were hired and fired — four in an alarming short space of time — and a despairing member of the Duma likened Russia to a speeding car with a mad chauffeur at the wheel.
But Alix was ecstatic about the situation, writing to Nicholas: ‘All my trust lies in Our Friend, who only thinks of you, Baby [Alexei, the Tsarevich] and Russia. And guided by Him we shall get through this rocky time.
‘It will be hard fighting but a Man of God is near to guide your boat safely through the reefs.’
But his very presence was the problem. A Russian princess, who returned home in 1916 after three years away, was astounded by how the latest story about Rasputin ‘ occupied every mind, in trains, in trams, on the streets’.
A newly arrived diplomat from France noted how every conversation ‘always ends up leading to Rasputin’.
Finally, palace insiders decided he had to go. A group of nobles, led by Prince Felix Yusupov, the husband of the Tsar’s niece, and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Nicholas’s first cousin, plotted his murder.
In December 1916 Rasputin was lured to Yusupov’s palace by the prospect of women and, in a cellar, fed cakes laced with cyanide. The poison failed to do the job and he was shot down with a revolver. The body lay inert on the flagstones. No pulse. Dead.
But then an eye opened and Rasputin leapt to his feet, foaming at the mouth, and managed to crawl outside into the snow, where the assassins pursued him and finished him off with a bullet in the brain.
They then shoved the body into a car, drove to a bridge and heaved it, wrapped in a fur coat, into the icy river below. It rose eerily to the surface next day.
But if his aristocratic killers had hoped his death would save the monarchy they were mistaken. It was too late. The rot that Rasputin represented had gone too far, sealed by Germany’s ignominious defeat of Russia in the war. The people turned on their masters.
As Russia descended into anarchy and rival factions fought to take charge of the government, Tsar Nicholas abdicated — just as Rasputin had predicted. He once warned Nicholas and Alexandra: ‘If I die or you desert me, you’ll lose your crown in six months.’
They lost their lives, too, shot down like dogs in a cellar, just like Rasputin had been. They had revered ‘Our Friend’ as their personal saviour and the saviour of tsarist Russia, too.
He turned out to be the death of both.
Every year, his malign influence grew stronger