Alexandra, Alexei, and Rasputin

The most sensationalized episode in the family’s history, treated both-sides (METHODOLOGY §4). Alexei’s hemophilia gave the Siberian peasant Grigori Rasputin his hold over the Empress Alexandra, whose desperation for her son drew her to a healer whose apparent power over the boy’s bleeding she took for holiness. Rasputin’s presence at court, and Alexandra’s reliance on him during the war, did grave and lasting damage to the monarchy’s reputation. This file separates the well-attested core from the lurid legend — above all the Yusupov-memoir account of Rasputin’s murder, flagged [Disputed:].

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / ROCOR

The Root: Alexei’s Hemophilia

The story cannot be understood apart from the Tsarevich’s illness. Alexei, born in 1904, inherited hemophilia (the disorder later identified in the remains as hemophilia B; see The Discovery and Identification), which made every injury a potential mortal crisis and subjected the boy and his parents to recurrent terror (Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, 1967, which frames the whole Rasputin story around the disease). For the intensely devout Alexandra, the child’s suffering was a spiritual as well as a medical agony, and it disposed her to seek help outside the failing resources of the court physicians — in prayer, in holy men, and, fatefully, in Rasputin (Smith, Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs, 2016).

Rasputin’s Hold

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (c. 1869–1916) was a Siberian peasant with a reputation as a starets-like wanderer and healer who reached the capital in the years after 1905 and was introduced into court circles (Smith, Rasputin, 2016, the standard modern biography, which sifts the man from the myth). His hold on the imperial couple rested on one thing above all: on several occasions his presence, prayers, or telegrams coincided with the calming of Alexei’s bleeding crises, most famously during the near-fatal Spała crisis of 1912. Whether by suggestion, by the calming of the anxious household, by the avoidance of harmful medical intervention (such as aspirin, which worsens bleeding), or by means the participants understood as miraculous, the child improved, and Alexandra became convinced that Rasputin was a man of God on whom her son’s life depended (Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, 1967; Smith, Rasputin, 2016, weighing the explanations).

This conviction had political consequences out of all proportion to Rasputin’s actual office, which was none. During the First World War, with Nicholas at the front from 1915 (see Nicholas II as Ruler), Alexandra’s letters urged appointments and policies on her husband, sometimes invoking Rasputin’s views, and the perception grew — in society, the Duma, and the wider public — that a debauched peasant charlatan was ruling Russia through a German-born empress (Pares, ed., The Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar, 1923, the primary evidence for Alexandra’s interventions; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996, on the political damage). The perception was exaggerated but immensely damaging; the Rasputin scandal did more than almost anything to discredit the crown in its last years.

[Disputed: the extent of Rasputin’s actual political influence and the truth of his lurid reputation. (a) The contemporary and long-popular image — of a near-omnipotent, sexually rapacious charlatan who effectively governed Russia — was propagated by the monarchy’s enemies and by sensational memoir literature, and is substantially exaggerated (Smith, Rasputin, 2016, which documents how the legend outran the man). (b) At the same time, Rasputin’s presence, Alexandra’s reliance on him, and the appearance of his influence over wartime appointments did real and measurable damage to the dynasty’s legitimacy, whatever his actual power (Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996). This collection reports the political damage as real and the “mad monk who ruled Russia” caricature as substantially a myth, following the modern scholarship.]

The Murder, December 1916

By late 1916 a conspiracy of highly placed figures — led by Prince Felix Yusupov, with the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and the right-wing Duma politician Vladimir Purishkevich — resolved to kill Rasputin, believing they were saving the monarchy from him. Rasputin was murdered in the early hours of 17/30 December 1916 at the Yusupov palace in Petrograd; his body was recovered from the Malaya Nevka river (Smith, Rasputin, 2016; Fuhrmann, Rasputin: The Untold Story, 2013).

[Disputed: the famous “poisoned, shot, and drowned” account of the murder. The dramatic narrative — that Rasputin was fed cyanide-laced cakes and wine that failed to kill him, was then shot, revived, and was finally drowned, displaying almost supernatural vitality — derives largely from Prince Felix Yusupov’s own memoirs (Lost Splendour and related accounts), which are self-dramatizing and were written to cast the assassin as the monarchy’s would-be savior. Modern scholarship regards the memoir as heavily embellished: the autopsy did not confirm poisoning, and the forensic evidence points to death by gunshot, most likely a shot to the head, without the prolonged, poison-defying ordeal of the legend (Smith, Rasputin, 2016; Fuhrmann, Rasputin, 2013). Sensational later theories — such as British intelligence involvement — are speculative and not established. This collection reports the murder as a fact and the Yusupov “indestructible Rasputin” narrative as an unreliable, embellished memoir account.]

Rasputin’s murder came too late to save the monarchy; the February Revolution followed within weeks (see Abdication 1917).

How This Bears on the Family’s Sanctity

The Rasputin affair is often wielded either to discredit the family entirely or, on the tsarebozhie side, to be explained away. Both moves distort. The sober position is that the affair reveals Alexandra’s tragic combination of maternal desperation and poor political judgment, and Nicholas’s fatal passivity in restraining a situation that was destroying the dynasty — real failures, of exactly the kind the canonization commission had in view when it called the reign “contradictory” (see Nicholas II as Ruler). The family were not glorified in spite of an airbrushed past but for the manner of their death; the Rasputin episode belongs to the honest historical record that the passion-bearer glorification does not require us to erase (see What the Church Canonized). To venerate the passion-bearers is not to pretend Alexandra never trusted Rasputin; it is to honor how she and her family died.

See Also

References

  • Smith, Douglas. Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. (The standard modern biography; sifts the man from the legend; the murder and the unreliability of the Yusupov account.)
  • Fuhrmann, Joseph T. Rasputin: The Untold Story. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. (The murder; the forensic critique of the poisoning narrative.)
  • Massie, Robert K. Nicholas and Alexandra. New York: Atheneum, 1967. (The hemophilia and the origin of Rasputin’s hold; the Spała crisis.)
  • Pares, Bernard, ed. The Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar, 1914–1916. London: Duckworth, 1923. (Alexandra’s wartime interventions and invocations of Rasputin — the primary evidence.)
  • Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924. London: Jonathan Cape, 1996. (The political damage to the monarchy.)