فصل 07

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فصل 07

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Chapter Seven

OUR FRIEND

By the autumn of 1907 Alexey was out of his baby skirts and into long trousers; his girlish curls were turning smooth and brown, but he still was an engagingly beautiful child, similar in looks to his sister Tatiana. His outward robustness, however, belied the fact that he was already a ‘Child of many Prayers’, as Lili Dehn described him.1 With little to go on about the heir to the Russian throne, the foreign press was full of fanciful stories about plots to kidnap or murder him, or to poison his bread and butter or his porridge. It was also, already, discussing rumours about his ‘ill health’, which for now was ‘ascribed to the misfortune that so many residences of the Czars leave much to be desired from the point of view of sanitary science’.2

The first stories about the tsarevich to emerge tended to focus on his rather spoilt behaviour. Little Alexey had a mind of his own and a strength of personality to equal Anastasia’s. He loved attending army inspections and manoeuvres with his father, strutting around in his miniature uniform, complete with toy wooden rifle, and playing the despot – even at the tender age of three. He was already a stickler for the due respect that should be accorded him as heir and at times showed a marked air of impertinence – a trait he also shared with his nearest sibling.3 He rather liked the outmoded ritual of being kissed on the hand by the officers on board ship and ‘didn’t miss his chance to boast about it and give himself airs in front of his sisters’, as Spiridovich recalled. On the recent Shtandart cruise off Finland Alexey had taken it into his head to have the ship’s band got out of their beds to play for him in the middle of the night. ‘That’s the way to bring up an Autocrat!’ Nicholas had remarked, with paternal pride.4 There were times, however, when Nicholas took his son’s peremptory behaviour in hand, such as when he discovered that Alexey took particular delight in suddenly creeping up on the guards posted at the front of the Alexander Palace, ‘watching them out of the corner of his eye as they sprang to attention and stood like statues while he strolled nonchalantly past’. Nicholas forbade the guards to salute unless another member of the family accompanied Alexey; the boy’s humiliation ‘when the salute failed him’ had, it was said, ‘marked his first taste of discipline’.5

For a while everyone had had to contend with the reign of ‘Alexey the Terrible’, as Nicholas called his son, but mercifully he soon began to grow out of the worst of his bad behaviour.6 Some of it no doubt was a response to the limitations placed upon him by his condition. For here was a little boy who had everything:

the most costly and expensive playthings, great railways, with dolls in the carriages as passengers, with barriers, stations, buildings, and signal boxes, flashing engines and marvelous signalling apparatus, whole battalions of tin soldiers, models of towns with church towers and domes, floating models of ships, perfectly equipped factories with doll-workers, and mines in exact imitation of the real thing, with miners ascending and descending,7

– all of which were mechanical and could be made to work at the press of a button. But Alexey did not have his health. As time went on and the restrictions on what he could and could not do increased he rebelled at constantly hearing the word ‘no’. ‘Why can other boys have everything and I nothing?’ he kept on asking angrily.8 Alexey proved difficult at times for his dyadka Derevenko to control, for he was naturally adventurous and constantly challenged all his carers. He liked nothing better than hurtling down his indoor slide at the Alexander Palace or riding round in his pedal car, but every knock and bang was potentially dangerous.

In the early 1900s there was nothing any doctor could do to control the bleeding into the joints that followed the tsarevich’s numerous accidents other than to apply ice and confine the little boy to bed. At the time, acetylsalicylic acid – an early form of aspirin available from the 1890s – was considered a useful painkiller (Alexandra had taken salicylic acid for her sciatica). But in Alexey’s case it was counterproductive – thinning the blood and thus intensifying the bleeding. Nicholas and Alexandra were fiercely resistant to the use of morphine because of its powerful addictive effect and so the best and only way to protect Alexey was to have him constantly watched, but this did not prevent him having his worst accident yet, in the autumn of 1907, when, out playing in the Alexander Park, he fell and hurt his leg. There was hardly any visible bruising but the internal haemorrhage triggered by the fall caused him excruciating pain. As Olga Alexandrovna – who had rushed over on hearing the news – recalled: ‘The poor child lay in such pain, dark patches under his eyes and his little body all distorted, and the leg terribly swollen.’9 The doctors could do nothing, nor could Professor Albert Hoffa, an eminent orthopaedic surgeon who was called in haste from Berlin. ‘They looked more frightened than any of us and they kept whispering among themselves’, Olga Alexandrovna recalled. ‘There seemed just nothing they could do, and hours went by until they had given up all hope.’10

In desperation, and remembering how Grigory Rasputin had helped Stolypin’s daughter, Alexandra telephoned Stana, whom she knew was in regular contact with him. Stana sent her servants out to find Rasputin, who hastened to Tsarskoe Selo. Arriving late, he entered by a side entrance and up the back stairs where he could not be seen. Nicholas, Alexandra and the four girls were anxiously awaiting him in the tsarevich’s bedroom, along with Anna Vyrubova, the imperial physician Dr Evgeny Botkin and Archimandrite Feofan (the tsar’s and tsaritsa’s personal confessor). Rasputin’s daughter Maria later described the scene as her father had told it to her:

Papa raised his hand, and making the sign of the cross, blessed the room and its occupants … Then he turned to the sickly boy, and observing the pallid features wracked with pain, he knelt beside the bed and began to pray. As he did this … each knelt as if overcome by a spiritual presence, and joined in the silent prayer. For a space of ten minutes, nothing was to be heard but the sound of breathing.11

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 miraculous 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 Feodorov – 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 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 by Alexey) 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 such 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

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 controversy. 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 – promiscuous, 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 detractors, 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 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 unquestioning 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 He was repelled by Rasputin’s appearance and found 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 him-self 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 impression. 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 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 like his sisters.’30 Whether this was in any way the result of intervention, by telegram or over the telephone, by Rasputin is unknown. Two months later Alexey was still unwell when members of the wider imperial family gathered at Tsarskoe Selo for the wedding of the girls’ childhood playmate, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, to Prince Wilhelm of Sweden. After the day’s ceremonials, which she steeled herself to sit through despite her anxieties for her son, and looking beautiful but extremely strained, Alexandra went up to Alexey’s bedroom. The nurse told her his temperature had finally fallen at 8 p.m. There was a telegram waiting for her – from Grigory in Pokrovskoe – which, when she opened it, assured her that all would be well and that ‘he would say a special prayer at eight that very evening’.31 Coincidence or not, such manifestations of the power of Grigory’s prayers for her boy were for the tsaritsa incontrovertible proof that he alone could save him from death – even at a distance. How could she not but invest all her desperate hopes in him? Wouldn’t any other mother have done the same?

Many of Nicholas and Alexandra’s European relatives who came to Russia for the wedding, and knew nothing of Alexey’s haemophilia, commented on how isolated the family had become by 1908 – ‘shut away from the rest of the world’, as Crown Princess Marie of Romania observed. The ‘happy family life’ that Nicholas and Alexandra clearly fostered was all very laudable in her view, but ‘their exclusiveness was little conducive towards that fine, loyal unity which had always been traditional in the Russian Imperial Family during the two former reigns and which had constituted its great power’.32 Marie felt the two of them were ‘too self-centered, too exclusively interested in their own children’; in so doing they neglected their European relatives, and this had led to their alienation from them. Brief state visits with the children in the Shtandart in the summers of 1907 and 1908 to Reval* in the Baltic – for a meeting between Nicholas, Edward VII and Kaiser Wilhelm – and to the King and Queen of Sweden at Stockholm had done nothing to change the general consensus. In the meantime, rumours continued to circulate about the tsarevich’s ill health, with whisperings that he suffered from ‘convulsions’, and from a ‘certain form of infantile tuberculosis which gives rise to acute alarm’; another source suggested ‘one of the layers of his skin was missing’, which predisposed him to constant haemorrhage.33 But nobody as yet had publicly uttered the dreaded word – haemophilia.

Because of the intense secrecy surrounding Alexey’s condition little record survives of the various attacks he suffered over the next four years or how often Rasputin visited Tsarskoe Selo or treated him from a distance, but just before Christmas 1908, in Rasputin’s continuing absence at Pokrovskoe, Dr Feodorov was summoned urgently from Moscow to attend the child.34 Anxiety within the family was further compounded that winter when Alexandra’s own health took a turn for the worst and she was laid up for eight weeks. ‘It is too sad and painful to see [Alix] always ailing and incapable of taking part in anything’, Maria Feodorovna wrote to Nicholas. ‘You have enough worries in life as it is – without having the ordeal added to it of seeing the person you love most in the world suffer.’35

Alexandra’s daughters too were increasingly feeling the separation from their mother through her constant illness and had taken to sending her plaintive little notes. ‘So sorry that never see you alone Mama dear’, wrote Olga on 4 December,

can not talk so should trie to write to you what could course better say, but what is to be done if there is no time, and neighter can I hear the dear words which sweet Mama could tell me. Good-bye. God bless you. Kisses from your very own devoted daughter.†36

Tatiana took it particularly hard: ‘I hope you wont be today very tied’, she wrote on 17 January 1909,

and that you can get up to dinner. I am always so awfuy sorry when you are tied and when you cant get up.… Perhaps I have lots of folts but please forgive me … I try to listen what Mary [Mariya Vishnyakova] says now as much as I kan.… Sleep well and I hope that you wont be tied. Your loving daughter Tatiana. I will pray for you in church.37

Alexandra responded from her sickroom with motherly exhortations: ‘Try to be as good as you can and not cause me worries, then I will be content,’ she told Tatiana, ‘I really can’t come upstairs and check how things are with lessons, how you are behaving and speaking.’38

In most cases, though, the onus was on Olga to set an example. ‘Remember above all to always be a good example to the little ones,’ Alexandra told her in the new year, ‘then our Friend will be contented with you.’39 Alexandra’s advice that Olga be kind and considerate extended to the servants as well, especially Mariya Vishnyakova, who of late had been getting cross with her: ‘Listen to her, be obedient and always kind … you must always be good with her and also S. I. [Sofya Ivanovna Tyutcheva]. You are big enough to understand what I mean.’40 It was advice that Olga responded to gratefully: ‘Mama dear it helps me very much when you write to me what to do, and then I try to do it is better as I can.’ The motherly exhortations followed thick and fast: ‘Try to have a serious word with Tatiana and Maria about how they should conduct themselves towards God.’ ‘Did you read my letter of the 1st? It will help when you speak to them. You must have a positive influence over them.’41 It is clear that Olga felt frustrated that she and her mother never had ‘time to talk things over properly’. ‘We will soon,’ Alexandra reassured her, ‘but right now I’m just too tired.’42 She was, however, concerned that Olga found it hard to contain her patience with her younger siblings: ‘I know that this is especially difficult for you because you feel things very deeply and you have a hot temper,’ Alexandra told her, ‘but you must learn to control your tongue.’43

By now, the children had come to enjoy visits from their ‘friend’ Grigory as a welcome diversion from their mother’s sickbed. He played with them and let them ride round the room on his back; he told them Russian folk tales and talked to them about God in a way that seemed entirely natural. He was clearly playing a key role as the girls’ moral guardian and kept in regular touch with them, sending telegrams such as one received in February in which he thanked them for remembering him, ‘for your sweet words, for your pure heart and your love for the people of God. Love the whole of God’s nature, the whole of His creation in particular this earth.’44 On 29 March 1909 he arrived unexpectedly on a visit, which delighted all the children. ‘I’m glad you had him so long to yourselves’, Alexandra told Olga from her sickbed.45 In June, at Peterhof, young Olga sent a note to her father, who was away on a visit to the King of Sweden: ‘My dear kind Papa. Today the weather is lovely, it’s very warm. The little ones [Anastasia and Alexey] are running around barefoot. Grigoriy is coming to see us this evening. We are all so very happy that we will see him again.’46

Despite her misgivings about the man himself, Olga Alexandrovna always refuted any suggestion of impropriety by Rasputin towards her nieces: ‘I know what their upbringing was down to the tiniest detail. The least sign of what is known as “freshness” on Rasputin’s part would have dumbfounded them! None of it ever happened. The girls were always glad to see him because they knew how greatly he helped their little brother.’47 Nevertheless, Alexandra continued to worry about the derogatory gossip in circulation about Rasputin. Although the charge of heresy had been abandoned as unproven, other accusations had followed and Stolypin (unmoved by Rasputin’s bedside manner in 1906) now had him under police investigation.48 St Petersburg was rife with talk of Rasputin’s disreputable drunken behaviour, his sexual exploits and the dubious company he kept. Even the faith of his erstwhile supporters Militza and Stana had waned, particularly now that Anna Vyrubova – whom they despised – had gained privileged access to him, supplanting them as the link between Rasputin and the throne. The Montenegrin sisters began actively trying to dissuade Nicholas and Alexandra from having any further dealings with Rasputin, whom they now looked upon as a ‘devil’. As a result, the close relationship they had until now enjoyed with the imperial family disintegrated. The imperial couple refused to be influenced by the gossip and doggedly clung to their own perception of Grigory as a true friend, despite his obvious faults – to which they were far from oblivious. The true reason for their friendship and their increasing dependency – Alexey’s haemophilia – ‘was kept a strict secret and it bound the participants still closer to one another, separating them still further from the rest of the world’.49

By the end of 1909 Alexandra was seeking regular spiritual advice from Grigory and meeting him at Anna Vyrubova’s house. Such was her trust in him that she was making unguarded and potentially compromising remarks in letters to him such as ‘I wish only one thing: to fall asleep, fall asleep for ages on your shoulders, in your embrace’, a comment which would later be seized on by her enemies and used against her.50 The girls too were writing regular notes, thanking Grigory for his help, eager to see him again and asking his advice. Now at a highly impressionable age, Olga, in her isolation from other more suitable mentors, looked upon her friend almost as a father confessor. She wrote in November 1909 saying how much she had missed seeing him, for she had been confiding in him about a teenage crush and was finding it hard to control her feelings as Grigory had advised her. She wrote again in December once more asking what she should do:

My precious friend! We often remember you, how you visited us and talked to us about God. It’s hard without you: I have no one to turn to about my worries, and there are so very many of them. Here is my torment. Nikolay is driving me crazy. I only have to go to the Sophia Cathedral* and I see him and could climb the wall, my whole body shakes … I love him … I want to fling myself at him. You advised me to be cautious. But how can I be when I cannot control myself … We often go to Anna’s. Every time I wonder whether I might meet you there, my precious friend; oh if only I could see you there again soon and ask your advice about Nikolay. Pray for me and bless me. I kiss your hands. Your loving Olga.51

Olga’s three sisters were all writing to Grigory in an equally trusting manner. Tatiana had sent a letter in March that year, asking him how long it would be before he returned from Pokrovskoe and wishing that they could all visit him there. ‘When will that time come?’ she asked impatiently. ‘Without you it is boring, so boring.’ Tatiana’s words were echoed by Maria, who told him she was pining in his absence and finding life so dull without his visits and his kind words: ‘As soon as I wake up in the morning I take the Gospel you gave me from under my pillow and kiss it … then I feel as though I am kissing you.’ Even the normally subversive Anastasia was demanding when she would see Grigory again:

I love it when you talk to us about God … I often dream about you. Do you dream about me? When are you coming?… Come soon, and then I will try to be good, like you have told me. If you were always around us then I would be good all the time.52

Such was the solitary existence of the four Romanov sisters that, by 1909, apart from each other’s company and occasional contact with other royal cousins, they were largely reliant on the friendship of adults: their Aunt Olga, a few close officers, servants and ladies-in-waiting – and a forty-year-old reprobate and religious maverick whose continuing influence over their family life was already sowing the seeds of their ultimate destruction.

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