Rasputin by Frances Welch Page A

Imperial family’s closest companions, Lili Dehn, compared the Tsarina’s faith in Rasputin to Queen Victoria’s in Mr Brown. Inevitably the Tsarina’s worship of the peasants was encouraged by Rasputin who claimed: ‘Great is the peasant in the eyes of God.’
    Rasputin manifested all the right, ‘plain’ attributes; he also had good timing. By late 1905, the Imperial Couple were suffering the effects of several bouts of civil unrest and the tragedy of Bloody Sunday, in which the Tsar’s soldiers had shot dead hundreds of innocent demonstrators. They were increasingly taking refuge in the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, 15 miles from the capital.
    The Tsarina had always been unpopular with the Russian aristocracy. She deemed them decadent, while they dismissed her in turn as haughty and puritanical. She had no time for creature comforts, existing happily on chicken cutlets twice a day for months on end.
    The Tsar, meanwhile, was considered a colourless and indecisive character. He was ripe for moulding and cheerfully went along with his wife as she indulged her oddly conflicted appetites for the bourgeois and the spiritual. The Tsarina was as happy ordering chintzes from the latest Maples catalogue as she was cultivating mystics.
    Hated by the revolutionaries and mistrusted by the aristocracy, the Imperial couple became ever more isolated. A
folie à deux
extended to a
folie à sept
as thefive children followed their mother’s lead in gravitating towards ‘plain’ Russians and outlandish prophets. Rasputin, the peasant Man of God, seemed like the answer to a family prayer. The increasingly friendless Imperial Family had found someone they could call, once again, ‘our Friend’.
    As opposition to Rasputin’s presence at Court grew within the Orthodox Church, the Government and even among the Russian people, the Imperial couple took the criticism personally. The more vicious the attacks, the more they would be seen, particularly by the Tsarina, as tests of faith, to be withstood at any price.
    The Palace guards labelled Rasputin a ‘peasant of modest allure’. But for the Tsarina there was nothing modest about it. If she was drawn, first, to his obvious plainness, she was soon enslaved by his apparent healing powers. In the course of the next few years, he seemed to prove himself the only one able to cure her beloved son.
    Arguments have raged as to whether Rasputin actually possessed healing powers at all; if they existed, what form did they take? The Tsar’s mother, his brother-in-law, the Grand Duke Alexander, and the children’s French tutor, Pierre Gilliard, deemed his cures nothing more than coincidence. Others, including Alexis’s English tutor, Sydney Gibbes, put them down to hypnosis: the writer Robert K. Massie, the author of
Nicholas and Alexandra,
who himself had a haemophiliac son, is one of those who believe that hypnosis can help stem bleeding.
    It was suggested that Rasputin’s ability to comfort the Tsarina may have had a calming effect on her son:if his blood pressure dropped, the bleeding could have eased. One of Rasputin’s secrets might have been his distaste for the wonder drug aspirin, available from 1899. With all his love of novelty, Rasputin distrusted aspirin. He was right to be suspicious: aspirin, then being dished out by the Court doctors for pain relief, was later discovered to be an anti-coagulant; the pills would have made the bleeding considerably worse. Rasputin once claimed that Alexis would be mysteriously cured by the time he was 13. But haemophilia is still incurable.
    Whatever lay behind the cures, the courtiers had to acknowledge their effectiveness. Even the sceptical Director of the Imperial Court, Alexander Mossolov, wrote of Rasputin’s ‘incontestable success in healing’.
    Alexis was aged three when he was first healed by Rasputin. He had fallen in the grounds of the Palace;