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There was a convoy at Alexei’s birth—and there would be another at his death.

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The Swiss Pierre Gilliard, Alexei’s future tutor, was giving lessons to Alexei’s sisters. The tsaritsa brought the boy into the room where Gilliard was working with the girls. The heir was a month and a half old, a fairy-tale prince with platinum locks and big gray-blue eyes. Alexandra bathed the boy herself and had been inseparable from him since his birth.

But after that the Swiss rarely saw the magical boy. Dark rumors about some sort of illness were roaming the palace.

Once the boy ran into the classroom, and right behind appeared the sailor who watched after him. The boy was scooped up and carried away, and his indignant shouts were heard in the halls. Again he disappeared for months.

The mystery was revealed to Gilliard when the tsar was hunting at Spala in Poland. The family was staying at the lodge. Hunting, endless entertainments. At one such celebration Gilliard walked out of the ballroom into an inner passageway.

He found himself standing in front of a door where he heard desperate moans. A moment later the Swiss saw Alix approaching at a run, clutching her long dress, which was getting in her way. She was so upset she did not notice him.

This was the secret the family was keeping: soon after their son’s birth the doctors established what Alix had feared most in the world—her child had inherited a disease that was in her maternal line and that was transmitted only through females almost exclusively to their male offspring (to the heirs to thrones—fate’s joke on kings). Terrible and incurable—hemophilia. When Gilliard was later entrusted with Alexei’s education, the heir’s physician, Dr. Derevenko, explained the symptoms in detail: the walls of hemophiliacs’ arteries are so fragile that any blow or intense pressure can cause the blood vessels to burst and can mean the end. A fall or a cut can be the beginning of that end.

She had given birth to a son. She had dreamed of him for so long, yet she was the cause of his advancing, irrevocable death. Herein lay the reason behind her quickly progressing hysteria. Now they could only wait for a miracle, which Alix believed in with every fiber of her being: the disease would be cured. No one need know of this temporary illness. Because it was temporary. Saint Serafim would not abandon them. The Guardian would certainly send their family someone to save the heir to the great throne.

The image of Serafim of Sarov hung in the sovereign’s office.

——

The family left Petersburg and shut themselves up in the tsar’s residences on the outskirts of the capital, guarding the boy’s illness, which became a state secret. All their hopes were pinned on a Deliverer.

At that time magical rumors began to reach her: somewhere in the backwoods of Siberia, on the broad river Tobol (Nicholas recalled his youthful journey), in the small village of Pokrovskoe, he lived—the Holy Man.

Thus, on the threshold of the First Revolution, in the fire of a lost war, Grigory Rasputin appeared.

Chapter 3

DRESS REHEARSAL FOR THE COLLAPSE OF HIS EMPIRE

The revolution began with a mysterious event known as Bloody Sunday.

In 1881 the socialist Colonel Zubatov, shaken by the assassination of Alexander II, had rejected his socialist ideas and joined the police. During Nicholas’s coronation, Zubatov was already head of the Moscow secret police. The former socialist had devised a fantastic experiment: fight the socialists for influence over the workers with the aid of the police! So the police began to create workers’ unions.

Now during strikes the police tried to support the workers, and Zubatov forced the capitalists to make concessions, which they did. In 1902 thousands of workers filled the old squares of the Kremlin chorusing “God Save the Tsar.” They prayed for the health of their sovereign emperor—on their knees, in silence, heads bared. The governor-general of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, thanked the workers for their loyalty to the throne. The newspapers of Europe wrote in astonishment