A people's tragedy

You are mistaken, my dear grandmama; Russia is not England. Here we do not need to earn the love of the people. The Russian people revere their Tsars as divine beings, from whom all charity and fortune derive. As far as St Petersburg society is concerned, that is something which one may wholly disregard. The opinions of those who make up this society and their mocking have no significance whatsoever.

The contents of this correspondence soon became known in St Petersburg circles, resulting in the complete breakdown of relations between the leaders of high society and the Empress. She steadily reduced her public appearances and limited her circle of friends to those from whom she could expect a slavish devotion. Here lay the roots of her paranoic insistence on dividing court and society into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, which was to bring the monarchy to the brink of catastrophe.26

The unpopularity of the Empress would not have mattered so much had she not taken it upon herself to play an active political role. From her letter to Queen Victoria it was clear that the mystical attractions of Byzantine despotism had taken early possession of her. Even more than her mild-mannered husband, Alexandra believed that Russia could still be ruled — and indeed had to be — as it had been ruled by the medieval tsars. She saw the country as the private fiefdom of the crown: Russia existed for the benefit of the dynasty rather than the other way round. Government ministers were the private servants of the Tsar, not public servants of the state. In her bossy way she set out to organize the state as if it was part of her personal household. She constantly urged her husband to be more forceful and to assert his autocratic will. ‘Be more autocratic than Peter the Great’, she would tell her husband, ‘and sterner than Ivan the Terrible.’ She wanted him to rule, like the medieval tsars, on the basis of his own religious convictions and without regard for the constraints of the law. ‘You and Russia are one and the same,’ she would tell him as she pushed him this way and that according to her own ambitions, vanities, fears and jealousies. It was the Tsarina and Rasputin who — at least so the public thought — became the real rulers of tsarist Russia during the final catastrophic years. Alexandra liked to compare herself with Catherine the Great. But in fact her role was much more reminiscent of Marie Antoinette, the last queen of ancien-régime France, whose portrait hung over her writing desk in the Alexander Palace.27

Alexandra made it her mission to give the Romanov dynasty a healthy son and heir. But she gave birth to four daughters in succession. In desperation she turned to Dr Philippe, a practitioner of ‘astral medicine’, who had been introduced to the imperial family in 1901 during their visit to France. He convinced her she was pregnant with a son, and she duly expanded until a medical examination revealed that it was no more than a sympathetic pregnancy. Philippe was a charlatan (he had been fined three times in France for posing as a regular practitioner) and left Russia in disgrace. But the episode had revealed the Empress’s susceptibility to bogus forms of mysticism. One could have predicted this from the emotional nature of her conversion to Orthodoxy. After the cold and spartan spiritual world of north German Protestantism, she was ravished by the solemn rituals, the chanted prayers and the soulful singing of the Russian Church. With all the fervour of the newly converted, she came to believe in the power of prayer and of divine miracles. And when, in 1904, she finally gave birth to a son, she was convinced it had been due to the intercession of St Seraphim, a pious old man of the Russian countryside, who in 1903 had been somewhat irregularly canonized on the Tsar’s insistence.