Rasputin and his Russian Queen: The True Story of Grigory and Alexandra

By Mickey Mayhew

Rasputin’s relationship with Russia’s last Tsarina, Alexandra, notorious from the famous Boney M song, has never been adequately addressed; biographies are always for one or the other, or simply Alexandra and her husband Nicholas. In this new work, Mickey Mayhew reimagines Alexandra for the #MeToo generation: ‘neurotic’; ‘hysterical’; ‘credulous’ and ‘fanatical’ are shunted aside in favor of a sympathetic reimagining of a reserved and pious woman tossed into the heart of Russian aristocracy, with the sole purpose of providing their patriarchal monarchy with an heir. When the son she prayed for turns out to be a hemophiliac, she forms a friendship with the one man capable of curing the child’s agonizing attacks.

Some say that between them, Grigori and Alexandra brought down 300 years of Romanov rule and ushered in the Russian Revolution, but theirs was simply the story of a mother fighting for the health of her son against a backdrop of bigotry, sexism and increasing secularism. Bubbling with his trademark bon mots, Mickey Mayhew’s new book breathes fresh life into two of history’s most fascinating - and polarizing - figures.

She liked to pray and he liked to party, but when they found themselves steering Russia into the First World War, her gender and his class meant that society simply had to crush them.

This is the real story of Rasputin and his Russian queen, Alexandra.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: May 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781399083683

Mickey Mayhew

Lifelong Londoner Mickey Mayhew recently completed his PhD on the cult surrounding 'tragic queens' Anne Boleyn and Mary Queen of Scots. In that time, he was also co-author on three books relating to Jack the Ripper, published by The History Press. His first non-fiction work, The Little Book of Mary Queen of Scots, was also published by The History Press in January 2015; I Love the Tudors, by Pitkin Publishing, arrived in 2016. He has a column in the journal of The Whitechapel Society, having previously been a film and theatre reviewer for various London lifestyle magazines. Through 2018/2019, he was an assistant researcher on several projects for London South Bank University.

Book preview

Introduction

Ra ra Rasputin

Lover of the Russian queen

There was a cat that really was gone

Ra ra Rasputin

Russia’s greatest love machine

It was a shame how he carried on.*

Boney M refuelled a legend with those lyrics.

Their song, a smash hit when released in 1978, brought the name of Siberian holy man Grigory Rasputin – and also Russia’s last tsarina/‘queen’, Alexandra – seamlessly into a modern pop culture historical narrative. It went to the top spot in Germany – Alexandra’s homeland – and in Austria, but just missed out on a No.1 spot in the UK. An infectiously catchy tune, the lyrics are, however, wide of the mark where the actual relationship between Grigory and Alexandra are concerned. They were never lovers. And as to whether he was really ‘Russia’s greatest love machine’, well, he certainly gave it a good try, but there’s no need to slut-shame him on that score. However, a good pop song trumps historical fact any day, with the idea that Rasputin was Alexandra’s lover now almost as much a part of historical folklore as the fallacy about Anne Boleyn’s supposed sixth finger. Basically, mud sticks. However, with a good metaphorical cloth one may wipe away the slurs and the innuendoes – however catchy – and present something fresh, authentic and true.

__________________

*  ‘Rasputin’ Words and Music by Frank Farian/Fred Jay/George Reyam © 1978, Reproduced by permission of Far Musikverlag Gmbh & Co./Sony Music Publishing London W1T 3LP

Chapter 1

The Boy from Siberia

The Rasputin we know from history is a caricature, not a real man. Many volumes have been written analysing his actions and personality, but none has captured all his facets. He has been described variously as the Mad Monk, as Father Gregory, as one of the greatest villains in history, and as a saint. (Lovell 1992, p. 38)

When Grigory Rasputin was born in Siberia, in 1869, the place hadn’t changed for centuries.

Not only was the landscape a bitingly cold constant, but his life, like that of any other rural Russian peasant, was exactly the same as it had been for hundreds of years beforehand. Emancipation (in 1861) barely alleviated the crushing conditions many found themselves burdened with. Life was short, harsh and unrewarding; you worked hard and then you died, and that was about it. Primitive little villages – like his birthplace of Pokrovskoe – dotted the landscape, utterly cut off from the extravagance of St Petersburg or the magnificence of Moscow. In Pokrovskoe, pigs roamed freely among the unpaved streets, but noblemen were in short supply. This dichotomy between ‘the haves’ and ‘the have-nots’ was diligently observed in 19th century Russia. As Grigory matured, his life experience reflected, for example, those living in Victorian London, where the depressed East End peered enviously at the wealth and prosperity of the City of London, a mere stone’s throw away. Certainly, ‘The sophistication of St Petersburg salons was not matched in the grubby, ill-kempt villages.’ (Service 1997, p. 9). But Pokrovskoe’s populace were not envious. They adored the tsar, Russia’s absolute ruler, and believed that he adored them in return; they were the lifeblood of the country, after all, and not those indulgent fops crowding the thoroughfares of the major cities. And the village of Pokrovskoe was not ill-kempt. The people worked hard and kept their village quite ordered, making a living from the land, from lace weaving and leather workshops, selling their wares in the market and even sending their children for a rudimentary education in the local schoolhouse. Yes, they drank, and they partied hard during those brief respites in their backbreaking routines, but they were proud.

Pokrovskoe was founded around 1642, on the left bank of the Tura River, on the road connecting Tyumen in western Siberia with the capital of the province, Tobolsk. There was no railway, and so the village was served by road – the Siberian postal track – and also by steamers travelling to Tyumen in the south and Tobolsk in the north. The population numbered around 1,300, scattered around 200 or so timber households. There were several commercial shops, along with a grain store, a liquor store, several bakeries and a few taverns; however, there was no doctor or dentist to speak of. The nearest hospital was in Tyumen, 80km away. The Rasputin family had strong roots in the village and their surname occurs frequently in local records. That surname – often the subject of wild conjecture – has nothing to do with a slang Russian sexual slur or indeed with any other, more veiled innuendo. It likely originates with the Russian word for crossroads, or for those able to converse with spirits; Grigory’s reputation as a ‘Siberian sorcerer’ perhaps feeds partly from this latter explanation. He was possibly the only surviving child of Yefim and Anna, although several sources indicate that a girl, Feodosiya, may also have reached adulthood, although precious little of her is known. Although Pokrovskoe had a schoolhouse, it appears that any education Grigory received was basic at best; most of his time was spent helping his father, who had once worked as a sort of a courier/taxi service between Tyumen and Tobolsk. Now, father and son ploughed the land and looked after the livestock, selling grain to local mills and also making frequent journeys to trade the stuff in Tyumen. Grigory grew up all but illiterate, although this was the norm at that time, and in such a place. In fact, almost the entire Rasputin family appear to have been illiterate, at least until their status in Russian society rocketed into the stratosphere.

Many of the myths percolating around Grigory’s early years – precious few facts exist – are concerned with his stealing horses and then selling them on for vastly inflated prices. There is no concrete evidence of this whatsoever, but these accusations were among the first salvos of metaphorical mud flung at him; like so many others, they have rather defied the act of a good evidential cleansing. As he left boyhood behind, the fact that he was sometimes drunk, and behaved sexually in a manner typical of a teenager, is far likelier, although these nuggets also escape absolute verification. We assume him to have been a buck of some considerable stamina because his adult self tended to womanise, but even the most diligent historian cannot be certain. Given that the failure of a man to marry a woman if she conceived could in some Siberian villages result in castration would indicate that he was perhaps considerably more conservative in such matters than his detractors maintained. In fact, almost everything known of Grigory until he arrived in St Petersburg is, apart from the fact of his marriage and children, the result of gossip, backbiting and recrimination spewed forth in the wake of his rise to power. Precious little is known of Grigory’s mother, but whilst relations with his father are less elusive, they were often problematic. Although they enjoyed a relatively harmonious working relationship, they fought in later life, and this may well have happened when Grigory was younger too. This didn’t stop them sharing a household for the better part of their lives, however. The few extant photographs of Yefim Rasputin show a man shorter than his towering offspring, lurking nervously in the background, the face ruddy and the beard unkempt.

The junior Rasputin was fashioned more robustly, even as a youth, with a tall, solid, powerful frame, the face well-proportioned, although the nose tended to fleshiness. The eyes – those eyes – were the very fount of his charisma; deep-set, a sparkling, icy blue, they still fascinate over a hundred years later. When synced with his voice – deep, melodic and steady – they could lull even the most guarded into lending an ear to his will. The cynic imagines that Grigory learned easily what magic he might weave with such assets, but such thoughts come from a modern age where the preoccupation with appearance borders on obsession; he may have been quite utterly unaware of the effect he had on people. Testimony to the fact that he wielded those eyes like weapons comes from his enemies, or from those who sensed a threat to their own positions; he is never referred to as a mesmerist by any of his enthusiasts. In fact, one might pen an entire biography of Grigory based upon the whole ‘Rasputin did this’ or ‘Rasputin said that’ brand of tabloid journalism. For instance, ‘There seems little doubt that she (Alexandra) was under the mesmeric influence of Grigory Rasputin, the peasant holy man, who, she believed, had the mystical power to cure the haemophilia of her son Alexei.’ (Smith 2018, p. 90) This is literal shorthand for countless books regarding their relationship. But that was not his life, nor hers; they were both much more, much better, than the lyrics of a Boney M record suggest. Other stereotypes abound; yes, his beard was unruly and his hair lank – idly combed and then parted down the middle – but he was not a ‘dirty peasant’, although his table manners may have lacked a certain … finesse. The average Russian peasant was actually a great frequenter of bathhouses, a habit Grigory carried to St Petersburg, although he may have used these establishments as much for meeting women as he did for washing. In Pokrovskoe, the pools scattered along the shores of the Tura also provided ample opportunity for bathing, certainly during summer, also serving as something of a social milieu, as the populace basked – often naked – whilst their clothes sat neatly stacked and drying nearby. There was scant self-consciousness or embarrassment about such communal activities; they were simply part of the fabric of life in Siberia, although strict rules of etiquette accompanied them. For instance, it was considered in such circumstances bad form for a man to ogle a woman, although a natural curiosity from both sexes doubtless simmered beneath these otherwise idyllic scenes.

As he matured, Grigory cultivated rather a solitary persona, prone to spending time wandering the nearby forests, weaving amidst the giant birches and the larches; either that, or simply reclining in a field and gazing wistfully up at the sky. Modern sentiment thus longs to hurl various diagnostic labels – ‘autism’ or ‘ADHD’ – but such sentiments are entirely unprovable; ‘eccentric’ may be a far safer term to employ. Certainly, he was a late developer verbally (well over two years old), although a veritable prodigy in regard to walking. As he grew up, countless examples of his affinity for the holy – or the supernatural – are said to have percolated about him, although quite whether they would have been deemed worthy of note had he remained a modest peasant seems questionable. No one was interested in Grigory until he rose to prominence, at which time a veritable plethora of faces from his past would happily furnish visitors to Pokrovskoe with weird and often lurid tales of his youth. However, there may be a kernel of truth to several such stories, like the cows wont to producing milk in abundance whenever he approached, or that he could revive dying animals simply by cupping his hands about their skulls. Such talents – or tales – were nothing new in Siberia at that particular time. The Russian peasantry lived in a world of almost medieval superstition, governed by a religion that venerated the miraculous. Rather than purloining horses himself, Grigory is actually said once to have outed a sly horse-thief by discerning the man’s thoughts via a vague telepathy, before informing the owner and then allowing mob justice to proceed. Several sources also attest to the grander fact that he experienced some sort of divine revelation whilst still a young man, whereupon the Holy Mother/Virgin appeared to him, floating in the sky above a field he was ploughing, manifesting herself in the form of the Virgin of Kazan. The Virgin of Kazan (also Our Lady of Kazan) was an icon of the Russian Orthodox Church, representing the Virgin Mary. At the time, this vision left him quite bewildered, but it resonated somewhat with that introverted, mindful persona; he was fashioned for greater things. To the modern eye, such tales smack of the sort of unproven folklore surrounding countless charismatic historical characters, but with Grigory there is an unnerving tendency to take these tales at face value. For, as time would tell, he would certainly exhibit definite powers of healing where the future tsarevich of Russia was concerned, restorative episodes witnessed by countless bystanders, and for which modern scholars still struggle to provide a definitive explanation.

Chapter 2

Queen Victoria’s Favourite

Grigory’s pedigree was obscure; hers, by contrast, was impeccable.

Alexandra Feodorovna – born Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine – was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, one of the most powerful women in the world. As she grew up, Alix would become a firm favourite of that formidable matriarch, but it would take a devastating familial tragedy to truly bond them. As it was, the life of this little girl with the reddish-golden hair began without fanfare on 6 June 1872. She was the sixth child of Princess Alice, Queen Victoria’s second daughter, and Ludwig IV, Grand Duke of Hesse. A seventh child, and a fifth daughter, Marie or ‘May’, arrived several years later. Alix was baptised in the Protestant Lutheran faith; among her many godparents were the future Tsar Alexander III of Russia and his wife, Maria Feodorovna. The Hesse sisters – sans May – would all one day make a series of impressive dynastic marriages (as they matured, several of them bore a remarkable resemblance to the recently deceased Queen Elizabeth II of England). However, despite their excellent dynastic pedigree, their home in Hesse, in Germany, was not a particularly prominent royal residence. In fact, it was something more akin to a regally remote outpost. Darmstadt, seat of the grand dukes of Hesse, was of modest size, with the family living mainly at the New Palace – where Alix was born – in the centre of the town. There, her mother would live a relatively modest life as the wife of a relatively modest German prince. Today, little remains of Alix for the casual sightseer to the city, although her mother is commemorated in a relief portrait or two, as well as the Alice Hospital. The Russian Orthodox Church of St Mary Magdalene – built in 1897 – now serves as a shrine for icons of the murdered Russian royal family.

Returning to that ‘relatively modest life’ of a daughter of Europe’s great matriarchal matchmaker, well, this still involved several grand family homes and servants galore, but is also bequeathed an heirloom of a far deadlier nature: haemophilia.

Of Alix’s two brothers, Ernest – ‘Ernie’ – and Friedrich – ‘Frittie’ – it was Frittie who inherited this disease from his matriarchal grandmother; Queen Victoria had also passed it to her youngest son, Leopold. The bleeding disorder which soon surfaced so frequently in various European royal houses appears to have originated via a mutation in Queen Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent and was thus passed to her, then on to her children, manifesting only in males. Therefore, although Queen Victoria’s daughter Alice was not a haemophiliac, Alice still passed the disease to Frittie, although Ernest was thankfully spared the ravages of a condition then virtually untreatable. In haemophilia, a lack of clotting factor proteins means that bleeding from a cut may continue far longer than normal, although a far deadlier consequence was that any blow might rupture blood vessels and cause internal bleeding, the blood seeping into the spaces between limbs and joints; when these spaces became engorged, the areas began to swell, tightening the skin with the pressure and causing excruciating pain until a clot formed and reabsorption occurred. In order to avoid calamities, haemophiliacs were encouraged to avoid potentially risky situations and activities; in other words, they were schooled to sidestep all of the physical vicissitudes of life itself, and to live in a world cossetted by concern and without hope of an effective remedy for their condition. ‘Each bleeding episode added to the damage. Once inside a joint, blood had a corrosive effect, destroying bone, cartilage, and tissue. As bone formation changed, limbs locked in bent positions.’ (Massie 2016, p. 173).

Frittie first experienced the horror of haemophilia aged just two, when he cut his ear; the incident left his hair and face streaming with blood, and it took several days for doctors to stay the bleeding, with the dreaded diagnosis administered soon afterward. Several months later, in May 1873, a fall through an unfastened window led to a brain haemorrhage and then death. Alice was left devastated by his passing. Although her younger brother, Leopold, had been diagnosed with haemophilia as a child, Alice herself would have been only marginally aware of how the disease was transmitted; understanding and accurate treatment was still decades away. Then, prevention was the only effective balm, and a rambunctious toddler would have been a hard task to manage even for the most diligent of parents. In mourning, Alice was to encourage yearly visits to the crypt containing little Frittie’s body. She never became the professional griever her mother was, but the experience of her father’s and then Frittie’s death – coupled perhaps with a genetic predisposition - meant that she came close on occasion. Certainly, her mother ‘had always had an almost obsessive predilection for the observance of mourning, far more so than was even commonly accepted as appropriate at the time.’ (Hibbert 2000, p. 286).

Although Alix’s cheery disposition had initially earned her the nickname ‘Sunny’ (she was ‘Alicky’ to her English relatives, thus avoiding confusion with her aunt Alexandra, Princess of Wales, who was ‘Alix’), this event set above her the first pale but distinct pall of a lifelong fatalism. Perhaps it also passed to her from Alice in much the same way that Alice seemed smeared with her own mother’s anguished persona. Eventually, haemophilia would curse one of Alix’s children, but when it did, God – in whom Alix believed so fervently her entire life – would send her Grigory Rasputin, and he would save her child. She would not lose her son the way her poor mother had lost Frittie.

Alice and Ludwig were not your typical royal parents. Rather than farming out the care of their surviving children, they were almost ‘hands-on’ in their approach, raising Ernest and his sisters – Victoria, Elizabeth (‘Ella’), Irene, Alix and May – to be modest and aware of their lofty station in life, and therefore cognisant of the lesser fortunes of others. Frequently, Alice took them to the hospitals she sponsored, to visit the sick and the dying. But hers was no lip service social conscience: ‘She was in full correspondence with Octavia Hill, the social reformer, about the condition of the London poor; she (Alice) was a genuinely interesting 19th century woman – acutely alive to all the change in society going on around her, not least in the position of women.’ (Wilson 2015, p. 270). Alice was also a personal friend of Florence Nightingale, and carried some of her advice regarding sanitation to the hospitals in Darmstadt. She was also frequently on hand to treat soldiers in both the Austro-Prussian war and the Franco-Prussian war, which ended in 1871. The children accompanied her on these visits too, but Alix was then merely a glimmer in her mother’s eye, spared the sight of such awful sufferings.

However, even such a self-deprecating, socially conscious Hessian household was nothing without a nanny of some sort, and so it was that Mrs Mary Anne Orchard – ‘Orchie’ – was duly despatched from England to oversee the upbringing of this particular royal brood. Orchie prized prudence and punctuality, arranging their days into manageable slices of time, with nary a moment to breathe between one activity and the next; idle hands were the devil’s workshop, after all. For Alix, she became almost a surrogate mother, waking, bathing and dressing her, before reading aloud some considered segment of the Bible, with various bedtime stories wheeled in to finish off the day. Alix was to carry Orchie’s sense of timekeeping and busyness to her children, running her household in Russia to the same exacting standards. Orchie ruled the nursery in the New Palace, but she was a friend to the children too; likewise, Alix would one day be a hands-on mother and also a confidante to her own considerable brood. She also sought to emulate the very ‘Englishness’ that Orchie had introduced into her own childhood, building on the standard set by Alice, a cosy conservativeness, replete with cold baths and hand-me-down toys and clothes. However, given her exalted position, Alix and her siblings likewise enjoyed a great many things that other children did not, including a veritable menagerie of pets; Shetland ponies, rabbits and even a pet fox. Summers were often spent at the Hesse hunting lodge at Wolfsgarten.

Among her siblings, Alix was closest to her younger sister May, the two of them almost devoted, whilst their mother drifted further away into melancholy. A family tour across Europe culminating in a visit to England merely hardened Alice’s despondency; in early September 1878, the paddle steamer Princess Alice – named for Alice herself – sank after striking another boat on the Thames. Nearly 700 souls were lost, all from the royally christened craft. Alice, being predisposed to such omens, took the disaster as a portent of doom, her mind more than ever focused on the moment when she would be reunited in Heaven with her beloved Frittie.

The family returned to Darmstadt in the autumn of 1878, and it was then that diphtheria struck, leaving devastation in its wake – perhaps the portent was correct. Diphtheria is a bacterial infection, the initial symptoms of which are often a fever and a sore throat; examination of the airway often yields the discovery of a white patch or membrane, which leads to obstruction and can cause a severe cough. The white patch or membrane may further clog up the airway, leading to increased breathing difficulties. Some cases of diphtheria could be quite mild, whilst a small but marked percentage might prove fatal. Alix’s eldest sister, Victoria, fell ill first, and then Alix herself grew sick. Alice and Orchie nursed the children themselves, with May, Irene, Ernest and then their father taking to their sickbeds in short order. At one point, Alix became so ill that her mother ordered the use of a steam inhaler, to prevent the girl from choking to death. However, it was Alix’s adored little sister May who eventually succumbed, passing away on 16 November 1878, aged four. For several weeks, Alice kept the news of May’s death from her other children, despite their repeated enquiries in regard to her welfare, as they themselves began slowly to recover. It wasn’t until December that the siblings were told, with Ernest initially refusing to believe his mother, before eventually breaking down in tears. In her attempt to console him, exhausted as she was from nursing them all, Alice contracted diphtheria herself, falling ill soon after. She put up a brave struggle, drifting in and out of consciousness, her mother’s own personal physician on hand and treating her as best he could. Delirious, she saw her father, Albert, and Frittie and May waiting to welcome her into Heaven. Then, on 14 December, seventeen years to the day since Prince Albert had died, his daughter Alice passed away. She was just thirty-five.

In less than a month Alix had lost her beloved baby sister and now also her mother. Queen Victoria, too, was shaken to the core, not simply for the loss of a beloved child and grandchild, but also because of the conjunction in dates with regard to the passing of her beloved Albert. She was to call the coincidence ‘most mysterious.’ Alice was the first of Queen Victoria’s children to perish, but while she lived she had been the perfect nurse during her father’s final illness, which, for the queen, added further pathos to the loss, alongside reiterating a date in the calendar she already abhorred. Alice was buried in the Grand Ducal mausoleum just outside Darmstadt, a union flag arranged across her coffin. None of