by God. As such, she allowed him to choose state ministers from his friends. He duly filled the government with incompetents and sycophants, ensuring the Romanovs’ downfall. For the Russian people, Rasputin’s access to power was a mystery. They called him a magician, a hypnotist, a demon. He may have been all three, but the true reason for his power had little to do with magic or hypnotism. What the gossips of Moscow and Petersburg didn’t know about Father Grigory was that he was the only man who could keep the heir, Alexei, from dying of hemophilia.”
“The Romanovs found Rasputin to be an effective doctor?” Bruno asked.
“He wasn’t a doctor by training,” Nadia said. “There has been much speculation about what, exactly, he did specialize in. His power over Alexei certainly had much to do with a kind of medical treatment. Hemophilia was a deadly disorder at the beginning of the twentieth century. The disorder affected the blood vessels, which, when ruptured, could not heal, and thus the smallest bruise could lead to a hemophiliac’s death. Alexandra was a genetic carrier of the ‘bleeding disease,’ as it was called, inheriting it from her grandmother Queen Victoria. Women were carriers, but it only became manifest in men. Victoria’s sons and grandsons withered and died like cut flowers because of their inheritance. The tsarina felt horrible guilt over transmitting the disease to her son. She knew it to be a deadly disorder, requiring real medical care, and yet she trusted Rasputin, who was never trained as a doctor, to heal her son.”
“Why?” Bruno asked.
“That is at the heart of this album,” Nadia said. “He had methods that went beyond the perimeters of medicine. Of course, much of his power also stemmed from the force of his personality,” Nadia conceded. “He was a mystic, a holy man, a cunning and manipulative social climber, but there was—at the center of it all—an incredible mastery of human nature. Nothing he did was by chance. Later, once he had made the friendship of the tsarina, and had learned that his power over her would be absolute if he could heal her son, things changed. He needed an effective medicine for hemophilia, and he desperately tried to find one. I believe he saved Alexei with his formulas.”
Bruno glanced at the album. Nadia had opened it to a page filled with numbers.
“I have access to all of the records of the imperial treasures,” Vera said. “And I’ve never seen anything about this album.”
“It isn’t exactly common knowledge,” Naida said. “After the 1917 revolution, a committee was formed to make an official inquiry into Rasputin’s life, his influence on the tsar, and his murder. They interviewed people who knew him and collected firsthand accounts from his followers, patrons, friends, and enemies. A file was created about Rasputin. This file went missing during the Communist era—most people believed that it was burned with so many other tsarist-era documents.”
“I have colleagues who believe the burning of the imperial papers a crime against humanity, as egregious as Stalin’s purges,” Vera said.
Bruno shot Vera a look, wondering if she too believed the historical record more important than living, breathing human beings. It was this kind of thing that made Bruno feel allergic to academics.
“Perhaps your colleagues would be assuaged to learn, then, that the Rasputin file was spared,” Nadia said, her voice terse. She was clearly unhappy at the idea of papers being more valuable than human lives. “I was working in the Soviet archives in the eighties when I discovered it, buried in a room full of moldering surveillance records. It was not long after Angela Valko’s death. Vladimir had relocated to New York and I here to St. Petersburg—Leningrad at the time—where the tight restrictions on my existence felt like a salve to the wounds I had sustained during my work in Paris. So I took the file and, after copying everything, gave it to a friend, who smuggled it to France. It was put up for auction at Sotheby’s in Paris in 1996 and was purchased by a Russian historian. The original file is now in the hands of this man, who has made its contents public, even going so far as to create an investigative television series on Rasputin’s life.”
“You didn’t imagine that it could be important to our work?” Bruno asked, wondering how loyal Nadia was to the society.
“At that point I was finished with angelology,” Nadia replied. “I wanted nothing to do with this dead Russian mystic.