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Episode 10.49: The Tsarevich

Well, hello friends. You may have noticed this week’s episode is a bit shorter than usual. That is going to be true for the next few weeks, because guess what, my kidney stone drama has returned. Everything I went through last autumn is now being gone through again, except this time it’s my left side rather than my right side. I am okay at the moment. I’m just biding my time on painkillers, but the amount of legwork I’ve had to do to move towards aranging the surgical resolution to all of this has cut into my work time quite a bit. But I am moving forward, uh, I have a procedure scheduled for this Friday, april 2nd, that’s just a couple of days from now, and then a second one two weeks after that on April the 16th, because it’s a two-step procedure

. So, that’s one thing that’s going on. The absolutely hilarious wrinkle is that with Hero of Two Worlds now finished –and it is finished — our time in France is finished. It has been great, but now it’s time to move back home. Now this has been coming for a while, I just haven’t said anything about it yet, but everything is arranged and the plane tickets are bought and locked in and they are bought and locked in for April 18th. So if you do the math, that means that the schedule for the surgeries is going to mean that I’m practically going directly from a hospital bed to an airplane, which, you know, gee whiz, that will be tons of fun. So basically what’s happening with me is that we have just a few weeks left in France, I have a huge list of things to do, and my body has decided to throw onto that to-do list, have multiple surgical procedures, including all requisite consultations, lab tests, and scans that go along with it. Now, going through all of this at the end of last year was quite a miserable ordeal, but was thus a character building experience, because as you all know, according to Calvin’s dad, being miserable builds character. But my friends, I have to tell you, I find the prospect of doing it all again gratuitous and unnecessary. Like, I’ve had this character building experience, I do not need to do it again, especially not right now three weeks before I’m leaving France forever. But the gods do not seem interested in my opinion, and so I will do it all again.

Now, what will the impact on the show be? What are the implications of this for all of you? Well, I was already going to take two weeks off at the end of April and the beginning of May to account for moving back to the United States and getting resettled. But I still have three more new episodes scheduled for April 4th, April 11th, and April 18 that do need to be published to meet some advertising obligations that I frankly cannot afford not to meet. So I’m going to navigate all this by breaking the material up into much smaller bits just to make it more manageable for me, so what would normally be covered in one episode or two episodes will be covered in multiple episodes. So, this week we were supposed to introduce, he-whose-name-you-already-know, but that part was meant to come after I did the requisite explanation for why he-whose-name-you-already-know even shows up in the first place.

So, this is how we break up the material. Today, I’m going to talk about the plight of Alexei Romanov, tsarevich of Russia, and next week we will do he-whose-name-you-already-know, and it’s Rasputin. I mean, it’s Rasputin. But, uh, let’s get on with this, because as soon as I’m done recording, I’m getting on a train to go meet with an anesthesiologist.

After Nicholas and Alexandra got married in 1894, they started producing a fine healthy batch of children on a two-year clockwork cycle. Their first daughter Olga was born in 1895, and Tatyana in 1897, Maria in 1899, and Anastasia in 1901. The four daughters grew up loving and loved by their parents. They also grew up loving and loved by each other. They were very close in age, and due to the particularly bubble-like world they inhabited, which was even more bubble like than other European royal families, they were around each other far more than they were allowed to be around anyone else their own age. Their bond was tight enough that correspondence emanating from their little world was often signed OTMA, for Olga Tatyana, Maria, and Anastasia, as they were practically just one collective entity. They also shared an odd upbringing defined by spartan luxury. On the one hand, they were raised in palaces and surrounded by enormous wealth and privilege, but Nicholas insisted on the same kind of Russian upbringing that had been imposed on him by his father: the girls slept on camp beds with no pillows, there was little decoration or ornamentation in their rooms, and they started each day with a freezing cold bath.

Though the growing Romanov family loved each other, as the years passed, there was a little problem. The tsar did not yet have a male heir. This was despite all of the praying that the devout Nicholas and the especially devout Alexandra could muster. So it did finally seem like a god given blessing when Alexandra finally gave birth to a son in the summer of 1904. As this blessed event occurred just as all the news coming out of the war in the far east was bad, and the swirling domestic forces that were about to coalesce into the Revolution of 1905 were swirling, Nicholas said, “there are no words to thank god for sending us this comfort in a time of sore trials.” Alexandra herself breathe a massive sigh of relief as the nearly decade long burden of not having given birth to a boy was finally lifted, so she could finally relax.

The little baby boy was named Alexei, and the newborn tsarevich could count among his godparents his great grandfather, King Christian the Ninth of Denmark, his great uncle, King Edward the Seventh of the United Kingdom, who everybody called Uncle Bertie, and older once removed cousins the Prince of Wales, aka the future King George the Fifth and Kaiser Wilheim, aka Cousin Willy. And before we move on, I just gotta give it to the old conservative royalists out there because they were totally right that one of the advantages of having all of these royal and imperial families related to each other is that disputes between their countries could obviously just be worked out at the family dinner table, totally precluding the possibility of their respective kingdoms and empires falling into a massive war of suicidal self-destruction. The vast intermarriage of these royal houses in the 19th century paved the way for the 20th century, which as we all know is a period of prolonged peace, harmony, and good will between them.

But there was a downside to all of this interrelation, and the specific downside we need to talk about today is hemophilia. At the dawn of the 20th century, the royal houses of Europe were rife with hemophilia. Thanks to their shared link to Queen Victoria, who was known as the grandmother of Europe. Victoria apparently had a spontaneous gene mutation that made her a carrier for hemophilia, which is a hereditary trait subsequently carried by women, but expressed in men. The disorder was already well-known in the medical community, and understood for decades to be a result of genetic inheritance. So, when Victoria gave birth to nine children who subsequently produced 42 grandchildren, who all went out there and married into the various royal houses of Europe, they took hemophilia with them. One of Victoria’s sons Leopold turned out to be a hemophiliac, and two of her daughters, Alice and Beatrice, turned out to be carriers. Alice then passed the gene along to one of her sons, who subsequently died in childhood of a hemorrhage, and two of her daughters. Irene and Alexandra, now empress of Russia. By the time Alexandra gave birth to Alexei in 1904, hemophilia was spread all throughout the royal houses of Europe, and now it came to Russia.

The first sign of hemophilia in the tsarevich came right away when they snipped the umbilical cord and it just kept bleeding. Then six weeks later, the little babies navel presented even more bleeding. And as hemophilia was known, it caused immediate concern in the family, and Alexei was closely monitored as he grew up. And their early concern transitioned to full blown acceptance, as everybody watched the simple falls of the toddler produced scary blotches and bruises. The main concern here was not simple scrapes and cuts, but those bruises, which indicated internal bleeding. Internal bleeding that caused discomfort, pain and might lead directly to his death. When little Alexei was three, he smacked his face and his eyes swelled shut. Sometimes there would hardly even seem to be any cause at all; he would just wake up complaining that his arm or his leg didn’t work properly as blood had seeped painfully into his joints. After the hemophilia diagnosis became unavoidable, the imperial family elected to hide the condition as much as possible and keep it a strict family secret.

It eventually came to be understood in public and in the global presses that something was amiss with the heir to the Russian throne, that he had some kind of recurring medical issue, but nobody knew exactly what. Even the family’s French tutor, who taught the imperial daughters and who was around the household frequently by 1906, was kept in the dark for many years, and not told why Alexei would take to his bed for weeks at a time, and why his sisters would be so downcast as a result.

The cloud of love, worry, fear and dread led Alexei to have a very uneven and isolated childhood. On the one hand, he had to be monitored round the clock by nurses, and then, when he was five, the family assigned him two trusted sailors who worked on the imperial yacht, who could keep a secret and who were good with children, to act as constant minders, guardians, and nurses. He was also kept away from other boys his own age, as other boys, his own age would naturally want to play way too rough. His mother also forbid him from normal things like playing sports and riding horses because the slightest fall might kill him.

But this protective worrying was balanced on the other hand by excessive leniency in any nonphysically threatening part of his life, because Nicholas and Alexandra seemed to feel so bad forbidding so many things for his own good that they hardly disciplined him at all if he was just being annoying, rather than risking his own life.

By the age of five, so roundabout 1909, the young tsarevich had some kind of understanding of the bizarre position he found himself in: both that he was cursed with some kind of unique affliction, but also blessed to be one of the most important people in the world. At least, that’s certainly how everybody treated him. He was well aware that he was treated differently from other people, and so his life became a mix of maximum prohibition on the one hand, and maximum leniency on the other, depending on whether or not the activity in question was dangerous and this impacted his personality, and it frankly turned him into something of a mischievous little brat. He played pranks, he ignored commands from adults if those commands displeased him, he demanded government minister stand when he showed up, and he yelled and threw tantrums if they did not. He ordered around staff and officials and military officers, and ultimately only seemed to listen to his father, the tsar. He once grabbed a woman’s parasol and threw it in some water and only felt bad and apologized because his father told him he was disappointed, not because he actually felt bad about it. Another time at dinner, he crawled under the table and stole the woman’s shoe, then when the tsar ordered him to put it back, he did, but only after sticking a strawberry in the toe for the poor woman to jam her foot into.

In between these episodes of mischievous brattiness though, he occasionally rebelled against the physical constraints his parents tried to keep him under, but found out for himself that the little bumps and scrapes you acquire just from living life, not even necessarily doing anything too dangerous, sent him to bed for weeks of painful recuperation. All of this took a toll on him, especially as he came to understand that his disorder was potentially fatal.

Now no young kid is supposed to lay around pondering his own mortality and wondering if this time would be the time that he died. But he did. And so too did his parents, especially the emperess, who labored under constant worry. When the doctors can only do so much Alexandra let her spirituality and devout Christianity take her in any direction possible that would ease her worried mind. I mean, look, all parents endure never-ending concern about their children’s safety. Humans are fragile. The world is hard and sharp and moving a thousand miles an hour. One mistake, one accident, and that’s it. We all know it. But the Romanovs lived with this to the extreme, and easing this mental burden led the empress to seek out spiritual advisers and spiritual healers and anybody who might ease herself pain and her own constant worry.

So, this is the mentality of the imperial family when they heard about an obscure faith healer from Siberia who had come to St. Petersburg in 1906 bearing letters of recommendation, and who had patrons in high society. And that, unfortunately, is where we’re going to have to leave it for now, because this is where Rasputin comes from. This is why Rasputin is important. But because the family hid the hemophilia of their son from the world, from Russian society, from the Russian people, from, from everybody, nobody at the time could quite understand how or why Rasputin was able to get such a hole of the tsar and his wife. But it’s pretty simple: they believed he was blessed by god with the power to heal their son.