During these eleven days, her golden hair became tinged with gray.
Even so, she stood it better than the Tsar. “I was hardly able to stay in the room, but of course had to take turns with Alix for she was exhausted by spending whole nights by his bed,” he wrote to his mother. “She bore the ordeal better than I did.” Anna Vyrubova says that once when Nicholas came into the room and saw his son in agony, his courage gave away and he rushed out of the house, weeping.
Both parents were certain that the boy was dying. Alexis himself thought so and hoped so. “When I am dead, it will not hurt any more, will it, Mama?” he asked. In another moment of relative calm, he said quietly, “When I am dead, build me a little monument of stones in the woods.”
Nevertheless—incredibly, it seemed to Gilliard—outside the sickroom, the surface household routines went on unchanged. Polish noblemen continued to arrive to hunt with the Tsar, and Nicholas rode off with them into the forest. In the evenings, the Empress would briefly leave the bedside and appear, pale but composed, to act as hostess for her husband. Desperately, they played this charade, trying to conceal from the world not only the extent of the Tsarevich’s illness, but their own anguish.
Gilliard, watching from his newly intimate vantage point, could scarcely believe what he saw. One night after dinner, his pupils Marie and Anastasia were to present two scenes from Moliere’s
“I could see the Tsaritsa in the front row, smiling and talking gaily to her neighbors,” the tutor wrote. “When the play was over, I went out by the service door and found myself in the corridor opposite Alexis Nicolaievich’s room from which a moaning sound came distinctly to my ears. Suddenly I noticed the Tsaritsa running up holding her long, awkward train in her two hands. I shrank back against the wall and she passed me without observing my presence. There was a distracted and terror-stricken look on her face. I returned to the dining room. There all were happy. Footmen in livery were handing around refreshments and everyone was laughing and exchanging jokes.…
“A few minutes later the Tsaritsa came back. She had resumed the mask. She smiled pleasantly at the guests who crowded around her. But I noticed that the Tsar, even while engaged in conversation, had taken up a position from which he could watch the door, and I caught the despairing glance which the Tsaritsa threw him as she came in. The scene … suddenly brought home to me the tragedy of a double life.”
Despite all precautions, the shroud of secrecy surrounding the illness began to tear. St. Petersburg buzzed with talk, none of it accurate. There were blind guesses as to what had happened; a lengthy article in the
Official announcements of the grave illness of the Heir to the Throne plunged Russia into national prayer. Special services were held in great cathedrals and in small churches in lonely villages. Before the blessed icon in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan in St. Petersburg, Russians stood and prayed night and day. There was no church at Spala, but a large green tent was erected for that purpose in the garden. “All the servants, the Cossacks, the soldiers and all the rest were wonderfully sympathetic,” Nicholas wrote to his mother. “At the beginning of Alexei’s illness, they begged the priest, Vassiliev, to hold a
More than once, it seemed the end had come. At lunch one day, the Tsar was handed a note scribbled by the Empress from her place beside Alexis’s bed. Alexis was suffering so terribly, she said, that she knew he was about to die. Pale but collected, Nicholas made a sign to Fedorov, who hastily left the table and went to the sickroom. But Alexis continued to breathe and the agony continued. The following night, when the suite was sitting helplessly in the Empress’s boudoir, Princess Irene of Prussia, Alexandra’s sister, came to the doorway. With a white face, she begged the suite to retire, saying the boy’s condition was desperate. The last sacrament was administered, and the bulletin sent to St. Petersburg that night was worded so that the one to follow could announce that His Imperial Highness the Tsarevich was dead.
It was on this night, at the end of hope, that Alexandra called on Rasputin. She asked Anna Vyrubova to telegraph him in Pokrovskoe, his home in Siberia, begging him to pray for the life of her son. Rasputin immediately cabled back: “God has seen your tears and heard your prayers. Do not grieve. The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much.”
The next morning, Alexandra came down to the drawing room, thin and pale, but she was smiling. “The doctors notice no improvement yet,” she said, “but I am not a bit anxious myself now. During the night, I received a telegram from Father Gregory and he has reassured me completely.” A day later, the hemorrhage stopped. The boy was spent, utterly wasted, but alive.
The part played by Rasputin’s telegram in Alexis’s recovery at Spala remains one of the most mysterious episodes of the whole Rasputin legend. None of the doctors present ever discussed it in writing. Anna Vyrubova, the link between Rasputin and the Empress, writes of the telegram and the boy’s recovery without comment or evaluation. Pierre Gilliard, at that time a minor member of the household to whom many doors still remained closed, does not even mention Rasputin’s telegram. Strangely, even Nicholas, in writing to his mother, fails to mention the dramatic telegram from Siberia. His account, written after the ordeal had ended, was this:
“On Oct. 10 [O.S.] we decided to give him Holy Communion and his condition began to improve at once. The temperature fell and the pain almost disappeared and he fell quickly into a sound sleep for the first time. The family suite received Holy Communion and the priest took the Holy Sacrament to Alexis. It snowed all day yesterday, but it thawed last night. It was cold standing in Church but all that is nothing when the heart and soul rejoice.”
The Tsar’s silence in this letter on the matter of Rasputin’s telegram does not mean that he was unaware of it, or of the significance attached to it by his wife. Rather, it indicated his own uncertainty as to what had happened and his unwillingness to commit himself to belief in Rasputin, especially in a letter to his mother. Marie considered Rasputin a fraud, and a letter from Nicholas announcing that Rasputin had saved Alexis by sending a telegram from Siberia would have dismayed the Dowager Empress. Knowing this, Nicholas tactfully left Rasputin out of his account.
The remaining evidence is skimpy. Mosolov was at Spala. He suggests that Fedorov, the surgeon, may have had something to do with the recovery. Mosolov’s story is that at the height of the crisis Fedorov came to him and said, “I do not agree with my colleagues. It is most urgently necessary to apply far more drastic measures, but they involve a risk. Ought I to say so to the Empress? Or would it be better to prescribe without letting her know?” Later, after the bleeding had stopped, Mosolov asked Fedorov, “Did you apply the remedy you spoke of?” Fedorov threw up his hands and said, “If I had done so, I should not have admitted it. You can see for yourself what is going on here.” The implication that Fedorov did nothing is strengthened by the fact that later that year Fedorov met Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna and told her that “the recovery was wholly inexplicable from a medical point of view.”
Despite what Fedorov said, there is a possible medical explanation of this episode. After a greatly prolonged period of time, hemophilic bleeding may stop of its own accord. As long ago as 1905, Dr. M. Litten wrote: “It is impossible to predict in any individual case when the hemorrhage will be arrested; the great loss of blood itself seems to exercise a beneficent effect in the direction of constricting the hemorrhage. Anemia of the brain produces fainting accompanied by a reduction in blood pressure, and the hemorrhage eases soon after. Occasionally, on the other hand, it persists for so long a time that the patient bleeds to death.”
Today, long before a hemophiliac is allowed to reach this state, hemorrhage is arrested with transfusions of plasma. If plasma were not available, however, hemotologists agree that hemophiliacs often would find themselves in the state described.
Because the crisis at Spala is so obscure and yet so enormously important to what happened later, every possible explanation should be examined. In this context, it is reasonable to speculate that the arrival of Rasputin’s telegram did, of itself, have a beneficial effect on the desperate medical situation.
To begin with, one passage in Rasputin’s telegram—“Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much”—was excellent medical advice. With four doctors hovering anxiously around the bed, taking his temperature, probing his leg and groin, Alexis probably was denied the total absence of trauma he desperately needed. A clot, gradually formed, still fragile, could easily have been dislodged in the course of one of the doctors’ frequent examinations.
