Alexandra Feodorovna did not make any real friends during the first years that followed upon her marriage. Indeed it was only after the Japanese war that she started the intimacies for which she was so much reproached by her subjects. The most notorious was that for Rasputin, but there were two others just as nefarious—that with Madame Wyroubieva and with the Princess Dondoukoff.
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Grand Duchess Elizabeth
The latter was a lady of considerable intelligence and a physician of no mean skill whom the Empress had put at the head of the private hospital she had organised at Czarskoi Selo long before the war broke out. Later on when other lazarets and ambulances, the number of which increased every day as the terrific struggle went on, were organised in the Imperial residence, the Princess Dondoukoff was appointed general superintendent of all these establishments, and it was she who coached the Czarina as well as her daughters in the duties of a Red Cross nurse. She was of a pushing temperament, had the reputation of being loose in her morals, though personally I saw nothing that could have justified it, and was also gifted with a remarkable propensity for intrigue. No one liked her, but everybody feared her. She insinuated herself thoroughly into the confidence of the Empress, who referred to her in everything, and willingly listened to her. She was of course among the followers of Rasputin, and with him and Madame Wyroubieva formed a trio which it would have been difficult not only for the general public but also for the immediate attendants of the Russian Sovereign to fight against.
The Princess Dondoukoff used to give drugs to Alexandra Feodorovna which the latter used to take unknown to her medical attendants and which were declared by them, when they discovered the fact, to have had a good deal to do with her shattered nerves. This may or may not have been true,—I shall not venture an opinion upon the subject,—but certainly my mistress was far too fond of the Princess, and would have done better to have seen less of her, if only from the point of view that the weight which she laid on her opinions considerably incensed the doctors who were in regular attendance upon her, who objected to the manner in which their own prescriptions were neglected.
The Princess introduced at Court a quack medical man from Thibet called Bachmanoff, who, she pretended, had brought with him from his country all kinds of secret remedies which she advised the Czarina to try on the little Grand Duke Alexis. The fond mother believed her, and Bachmanoff became one of her favourites. It is impossible to say whether he would have cured the child, because the latter’s nurse, a sailor called Derewenko, of whom he was inordinately fond, and whom I have already had occasion to mention, threw out of the windows all the powders and potions which Alexandra Feodorovna asked him to give to her son, and took great care the boy should not get anything but what his own doctor had ordered him to take. Ultimately the Grand Duke got better and stronger, and last year he might have been pronounced cured, at least in so far as the chronic ailment from which he was suffering could be cured. But the Empress in her joy at this unexpected recovery was persuaded that it had taken place, thanks to the Thibetan, in whom she believed more than ever.
The friendship for Madame Wyroubieva was perhaps even worse than the attachment of the foolish Sovereign to the Princess Dondoukoff. Madame Wyroubieva was the daughter not of the Emperor’s private secretary, as she represented herself to be, but of a State Secretary (which is quite a different thing, being a purely honorific position) called Tanieieff. She had been married to a navy officer with whom she could not agree, and they were divorced, not because he had grown mad, as she declared (divorce for insanity is not allowed in Russia), but because he had found reason to object to her conduct. The Empress, for reasons no one ever understood, took her part and invited her once or twice to the Palace of Czarskoi Selo. Madame Wyroubieva made the most of her opportunities and soon became quite indispensable to Alexandra Feodorovna. She it was who, with the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, introduced Rasputin into the Imperial household, and with him she established such control of the Czarina’s actions that soon the latter became simply a tool in their hands.
Madame Wyroubieva was, above everything else, a grabbing woman. She fully meant to make a fortune out of the position of trust she was supposed to occupy. Both she and Rasputin were in their turn in the hands of a gang of adventurers who used them for their own ends, and they set up a shameful exploitation of the public exchequer for which unfortunately the Empress was made responsible. The latter only looked upon Rasputin as a saintly personage, a kind of orthodox yogi whose prayers were sure to be taken into account by the Almighty. Terrible things have been hinted at in regard to her relations with him, but all that I can say is that to my knowledge, at least, she was never alone with him for one single moment, and that except in regard to the health of the heir to the throne, my mistress never spoke with him of anything else but religious subjects. The public said that he was all powerful at Court, but I feel convinced that these rumours arose from certain unscrupulous persons who had an interest in spreading them because they managed (thanks to the intimacy of which they boasted with a personage who, as they related, could turn and twist the sovereigns at his will and pleasure) to obtain army contracts and other things they desired. Among them were Protopopoff and Sturmer, and the notorious Manassevitsch Maniuloff, whose blackmailing propensities caused him to be arrested and sentenced to several years’ hard labour from which he was released by order of the present Russian government. Rasputin in reality was treated in the Palace as a kind of jester who was allowed to do as he wished—a sort of fool, after the pattern of Chicot in Dumas’ novels, and neither Nicholas II., who liked him even better than did the Empress, nor the latter ever thought of him as of anything else than a holy pilgrim (for that was what he proclaimed himself to be) whose vocation was to go about preaching the gospel to the world. One must not forget that there have been many such in Russia, and that the natural tendency to mysticism, which is one of the characteristics of the Russian character, has always welcomed them with effusion. The Empress, who, though a German, was more superstitious than any Russian, fully believed that the presence of Rasputin at her side was a shield against all possible dangers. She therefore refused to be parted from him, and whenever anything happened of a nature to cause her worry she used to send for him, when he would prostrate himself on the ground and invoke the powers of Heaven to deliver him and his friends from evil. He was a thorough fanatic, or at least professed to affect the ways of a fanatic, and he used to force the Empress to prostrate herself before holy images beside him, and to remain with her face pressed to the floor for hours in earnest supplication to a God whom, he averred, he was the only one to honour as he ought to be honoured. It is difficult to realise that an Empress of Russia, and one of the haughty temperament of Alexandra Feodorovna, could lend herself to such ridiculous practices, but so it was, and I can only say what I have seen without attempting to explain it. But it was not surprising that when the Imperial family came to hear of all this, it should have been indignant and tried to oust from the Palace a man whose presence in it tended to discredit royalty at a time when, on the contrary, every possible means should have been resorted to in order to raise its prestige.