S4 – 1: In Search of a Friend

a mystical power born of an invisible force. He studied the occult and mysticism, and soon was treating patients with psychic fluids and astral forces, and he had a potent effect on women. When writers caught wind of him, they called him the Cagliostro of our Age, after the Italian magician and psychic healer of a century before. Are clearly he was taking his place in history, and that was all before he met the Romanovs. To anyone in the court circles of Imperial Russia in those years, it would

have been no surprise that Melitsa made the introduction. She had married into the branching Romanov family tree and brought her dark fascinations with her. Now she was taken with this occult healer, and by all accounts she insisted that her cousin, Nicholas, the Czar of Russia, meet the man, And we know that in nineteen o one Nicholas did just that. In fact, in his diary for that day, Nicholas called him remarkable. The man's other worldly powers brought

him back to the powers of this world. After all, for a peasant with mystical talents, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. Soon Nicholas and Alexandra were meeting with him together. Sometimes Melissa joined them, or even widened the circle to other close relatives. In fact, it wouldn't be long before you would say that the Imperial couple of Russia were obsessed. They would gather around this occult teacher and hang on his every word. They would listen for hours.

One historian even writes that the Czar and Czarina of Russia reached the height of religious ecstasy in his presence. In fact, in their private conversations, Nicholas and his wife Alexandra started to refer to him secretly as our friend, and then they introduced him to their daughters. He started to pray with them in their bedroom. By now you can probably guess the man's identity. A royal favorite and a cult healer in the court of the last Romanovs.

That's right, I mean Philippe Nazir Vakad. And if that name is a surprise, it's because once we peel back the layers of legend and myths around the history we think, we know there's always something far more dark and far more fascinating to reveal underneath. And if there's one time in place to find hidden and destructive energies humming behind a veil of lies, it's the doomed court of the last Romanovs. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. They called

her Sunny. She was a bright spark in her family's life. She was raised with tenderness and whimsy, and all of that seemed to flow out from the little girl too. She was also determined and independent. Before she was six, little Alex was already driving horse drawn carriages. It was like she was born to take the reins. After all, she was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria she had her mother's name, Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Alice, married into German nobility.

In the heart Alice became Alex when the name was handed down to the newborn. Along with her dimpled cheeks and radiant curls, the sunshine of her personality was needed in the family. When Alex was still an infant, her older brother Fretty, had fallen out from a window. He might have survived the bumps and bruises, but he had hemophilia. Any small injury could take his life. After the fall, they lost him. It was the darkness in which Sonny

grew up. By all accounts, her parents weren't lavish people, despite their social rank. In fact, one thing that is often said about her mother is that she took a deep interest in nursing, and not just from the death of her son. In fact, when she was still a girl, she had been inspired by Florence Nightingale as Princess and Hessa. She found a hospital and even worked with Nightingale herself to train the nursing staff. Her daughters followed along on

the visits to patients. If young Alex had a strong will, she also had a natural curiosity. No doubt those early trips stuck with her. But if her earliest years were a bright dance of childish curiosity and simple pleasures, even greater tragedy would eclipse those years. A tragedy called diphtheria. It burned through the Hessa household, and before its murderous work was done, her mother and one of her sisters

were dead. Little Alex was just six years old. In the years that followed, Alex went from one house of grief to another. A royal life was a mobile one, and Alex traveled frequently, not least because now that her mother was gone, it was her grandmother who directed her upbringing. Even when she was at home in Darmstadt. Every aspect of her training and education was selected and overseen through a massive string of letters from England. Under Queen Victoria's

watchful eye. Alex was polished and pruned in the English style. So it was no small thing when Queen Victoria cut wind of a romance in her family which she did not approve of. Alex's older sister Ella had fallen for a cousin. That wasn't the problem, though. It's who the

cousin was. The Russian Grand Duke Sergey, Alexandrovitch. Nothing that Victoria could do would stop the marriage, though, But the match between Ella and Sergey wasn't the only one struck at their wedding, because that's where twelve year old alex first caught the eye of another Russian prince, Sergey's nephew Nicholas. That only sixteen he had been seated with Alex and her sister's over dinner, and if his diaries are anything

to go by, she made an impression. All it took was one meeting for her to become his little darling. It wasn't a secret though. Just a few days after their meeting they exchanged letters, the first of many that would follow. It would be a long five years before the pair would see each other again, but a lifelong

passion had begun. Not that they had an easy road, you see, if Queen Victoria objected to one granddaughter marrying into Russia, there was no way she could be pleased by her face of her returning in the same direction. Here's historian Helen Rappaport to tell us more. Queen Victoria was pretty adamant initially at the thought of her precious granddaughter Alexandra Alicki, as they called her, marrying into the

Russian throne. Queen Victoria was absolutely against the idea of Alicki marrying Nikki young Nicholas at Saryevitch of Russia because she felt that Russia was very unstable, very unsafe, I mean, even then by the eighteen eighties and nineties there was his history of political assassination and um, you know, Nicholas's own grandfather had been murdered by revolutionaries, so they had

to overcome quite a lot of obstacles. Victoria was right, of course, but her foresight about royal life in Russia wasn't enough to change Alex's mind. After all, she was young, bald end soon enough in love. Victor Maria did everything she could, more and more often. She invited Alex to visit England to stay with her there to spend time with her British cousin Eddie. But Alex wouldn't be tempted

by Queen Victoria's throne or air. She followed her own instincts wherever they would lead, like one visit when she was traveling through Wales with Queen Victoria and they stopped to survey the coal mines. It was the place where England's empire turned the earth into raw fuel of the Industrial Revolution. It was, in a sense, the birthplace of

the empire's raw power. Alex's grandmother hoped the girl would fill her head with thoughts of inheriting the English crown, that all this power could be hers, But Alex was intrigued by something else instead, the minds themselves. She insisted on seeing more than the surface. On her demand, she was taken down to walk grimy tunnels, to feel the cool air underground, to experience the darkness, or herself never

forget who you are. Those can be inspiring words. They can lift us up in moments when we feel confused or at a loss. They can be a reminder to hold fast to what is good and true about our place in the world. For Nicholas, they were a warning. They came to him from his mother in the days when he was finally becoming a man. But what she meant was, do not forget that one day you will be emperor. You see, his father had just become Czar of Russia. Nicholas was now the tsar vich the crown prince,

the next in line. The problem was that Nicholas loved nothing more than being just one of the guys. In particular, he loved the closeness and camaraderie of the military. As a colonel in the horse Guards, he loved the drills, the meals together with his fellow officers, and not to mention the after hours the knights out on the town. There was a comfort and a sense of belonging there, belonging that he had never felt growing up in his

father's shadow, and that shadow was long. You see, Nicholas's father, Alexander the Third, was an enormous man. His feats of physical strength were his calling card. He was commanding and severe, and unlike the Romanovs that came before him, he was pious, strictly devoted to his marriage and family. In his huge hands and by his huge personality, he bent Russia to his will the way he bent iron pokers and toward

decks of cards for fun. Aggressive power was his style, and that's where young Nicholas did not feel at home. You see, he was an intelligent boy. With his tutors, he learned French, German and spoke English so well some historians have said that he could have fooled an Oxford professor. He was witty and fun and not at all the kind of person his colossus of a father could respect. Maybe that's why Nicholas found some solace among the horse guards,

at least through military serve us. Maybe he could impress his father, he could prove that he was more than just the kind of person unsuitable for rule, an intellectual. But when he was so drunk that the other officers had to carry him home after a night of carousing, that's where his mother's voice came in. Never forget who you are. He might sit, probably atop his horse, shoulder to shoulder with other cavalry officers, but one day he would need to be ready to take the reins of

the Russian Empire. But it wasn't just his parents who were hammering this message into Nicholas. He was getting that message loud and clear from the tutors who cultivated his mind. In fact, he was taught by the Church authorities who had also instructed his father. And while Nicholas was given to languages and writing and everything that came with it, he was always pursued by the warnings that had steered his father's court away from an intellectual culture. You see.

In the late eighteen hundreds, the Church authorities were teaching that reliance on human mind made Russia vulnerable to human delusion. What wasn't delusional aristocratic rule that was real. In fact, it was the command of God himself, and it was God himself who chose the tsar's to do. Anything that would limit the complete power of the Russian Empire's ruler would be simply put the spit in the face of God.

You see, the Russian authorities believed that humans were so weak, selfish, and vicious that they couldn't be trusted to rule themselves. In fact, they couldn't even be trusted to think. The right thing to do. Couldn't be discovered by thinking through your problems, like say, the problems that might arise if you were governing a massive empire. No, Instead, the way forward would be revealed by God. The only hope for

humanity was to obey the czar. Must obey God, of course, and in political terms this meant that the people must obey the czar. As he would later put it to his Prime Minister, Nicholas believed that the heart of the czar is in the hand of God. For the young Nicholas growing up under this instruction. This meant that he learned to mistrust the ideas and arguments of the people

around him. Instead, he taught himself to rely on mystical knowledge, hunches and impulses, ideas that came to him through instinct, ideas that he took to be the voice of God in his life. It was one reason that over his lifetime Nicholas would ignore the advice of his counselors over and over again. But of course, his heart wasn't just in the hands of God. It was also in the hands of the German princess raised by the British Empress. It was set on Alex. It was death that opened

the door. It was the fall of Nicholas returned home to Russia. After a long visit with Alex, he found that the colossus was brought low, his father was dying. They tried all sorts of things. First, they went to the imperial hunting town of Spala in Poland, but when the doctors insisted they moved him to the warmer climate of Crimea. Nicholas sent for Alex immediately, and she was on the next train. She met Nicholas's father in time for the all important moment, he gave her his blessing.

The engagement between Nicholas and alex was official. It wasn't just the Czar whose preferences had delayed the engagement, it was alex herself because there was a major change that she would have to make before she could join the Russian Imperial family. Alex you see, was Lutheran. Here's Dr Helen Rappaport again. There is no way she could have retained her Lutheran German Lutheran faith and be a future

Sari Saris of Russia. So this was a hugely challenging period for her because she loved Nikki Art, she did not want to abandon her Lutheran faith. Alexandra had all been always been pretty religious and pious and very observant. So it was a really, really difficult period because eventually it was her sister Ella who helped the suade her because Ella, too, like alex Alexandra, married a Russian. She married granddukes so gay but without all the agonizing about

adopting the russtional thoughts faith. Ella embraced it pretty much immediately and then persuaded Alexandra to also do likewise, without her older sister Alex would never have taken the plunge. It was at another family wedding that spring, with the many branches of Queen Victoria's family tree drawn together, that Nicholas had finally proposed to Alex, and with the gathering family around her urging her aunt, she accepted. Whatever Alex may have felt, we can imagine in Nicholas's relief. One

historian remarked that the Tsarovitch cried like a child. He wrote to his mother that nature, mankind, everything all seemed good and lovable. His tears were tears of joy. Of course, the same camp be said on a deathbed. In that case, the only thing to come is the grave. On November one, the czar's illness took him. It was time for the Tsarovitch to take up his mantle. It was time for him to not just remember who he was, but to become the next ruler of the Russian Empire, and Nicholas

was terrified. We even have his desperate questions. He asked to his brother in law in the first desolate moments after his father died, and they definitely don't ring with the determination of a new leader. What am I going to do, He asked, what is going to happen to me, to you, to alex to mother, to all Russia. I am not prepared to be czarre. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling.

Helen Rappaport agrees now that the problem from for Nicholas right from day one was that he should probably had another twenty years to prepare for becoming zare. So he hadn't learned the tools of the trade. He hadn't learned state's craft, state craft. He was timid and frightened and terrified of the enormous responsibility of becoming Zar in his trenches, when, of course he would have expected becomes are maybe in

his forties. But in the end Nicholas's on rushing destiny was unavoidable, and he marched into it like a soldier marching to war. He took it very, very seriously, and in a very kind of dogmatic and rather narrow way, in that he simply decided or declared rather from them and when she became czar, but he would preserved the autok Chrissy handed to him by his father, Alexander the

Third exactly has passed down to him. The future before him wasn't all terrible destiny, though, because it also had alex It was on the first of November that the Tsar died. The very next day, alex took her first communion in the Russian Orthodox Church. She was now consecrated to her new faith, and it was at the end of the same month that Nicholas and alex were married. But if it was a transformation for Nicholas from Tsarevich to tsar, the transformations for alex were all the greater.

Not only did she leave her childhood faith to embrace the church of her new empire, but she left her name behind as well. The German name alex was gone, the Russian Alexandra Fyodorovna took its place. She was a Romanov. Now. During the wedding itself, something dire and morose hung over the day. Alexander would later called that the sacred rituals joining her to Nicholas seemed to be just one more

day in church after a month of funeral ceremonies. There was just one difference, she said, now her dress was white instead of black. Still, all her wedding day felt like just one more mass for the dead. It took time for things to change. The coronation of the news Are would not come until the spring of eighteen six, but the responsibilities of rule didn't wait for that day.

It fell to the couple swiftly and severely, And when the day of coronation did arrive, it brought burdens of its own, burdens like the heavy chain of the Order of Saint Andrew that Nicholas wore into the cathedral, and that was meant to be passed from him to Alexandra during the ceremony. But as Nicholas climbed toward the altar, the clasp holding this symbol of sacred power gave way. The chain fell from Nicholas when it thundered to his feet.

The fall reverberated across the gathered crowd and down through time. In the silence that followed, the whispers began where the news Ours shoulders broad enough to bear the burden of an empire. But that wasn't the only burden carried out of the capital. The other was far more gruesome, because the thing that Nicholas meant to be his crowning act of generosity turned into a maccab dance of death. You see.

He had advertised that every peasant in St. Petersburg would get a gift from the news are a kerchief of gingerbread and a mug, and for that mug there would be free beer. The posters went up everywhere, and the crowds came in. And when I say crowds, I mean half a million people. And when they were called forward, they all pressed forward at once. It became a stampede. Thousands who came for a gift from the Czar were caught in the crush, and hundreds were trampled and killed.

This was no small matter. In fact, Nicholas was sick that such a horrible tragedy was caused by his desire to make a good impression. For a moment, he thought about calling off the cell librations. But the rest of his family, oh, they wouldn't hear of it. While they danced at the coronation ball, the police picked through the field of bloated bodies wearing their festival clothes, smashed together

under the weight of desperate neighbors. And when the Romanovs traveled home after the festivities, they were passed by a procession of wagons, wagons that were filled with mangled corpses. Ella was deeply disturbed. Her sister Alexandra had married Nicholas under the shadow of the old Czar's death, and more tragedies had followed close on their heels. But it wasn't the depths of a few thousand peasants that upset Ella. No,

all of that was in the past. Stranger things had crept into the court at St. Petersburg, things that terrified Ella far more than the deaths of the St. Petersburg poor, although maybe she should have thought quite a bit more about what drove people to climb over their neighbor's dead bodies for a gift basket of in your bread. But Ella was like the rest of the Romanovs. She had been in Russia long enough to care about only a very small circle of aristocratic issues. And this is where

we come back to the spiritualist mystic Monsignor Philippe. He was the twenty nine of August of nineteen o two. Ella was writing to Nicholas's mother. She knew all about this mystical healer, she said, the man who was glued to her younger sister's side. In fact, this occult counselor Horror of horrors. Wasn't even Russian, he was French, and in Ella's eyes, he was influencing Nicholas and Alexandra to

a terrifying extent. Ella knew why too. She credited his place at court to the women she called the cockroaches, Nicholas and Alexandra's closest friends, the sisters Stana and Melitza. Those weren't the only nicknames they had, though. Whispers of spiders, crows and worse followed them through the St. Petersburg salons. But it wasn't enough to separate them from the Empress.

You See, like Ella and Alexandra, Stana and Melitza had married into Russian nobility, and sure they had made some enemies, but they had also gotten cozy with some important people at court. For instance, the Tsar's cousin and confidante, Nikolasha. Six ft five and brimming with violence, Nikolasha shared the Tsar's desperate devotion to the army. But where Nicolas was meek, Nikolasha was all ferocity. He loved lording his position and

his physical might over the soldiers under his command. The old Tsar had torn packs of cards to show his strength Nikolasha went further. When he wanted to show off the sharpness of a sword, he cut one of his dogs in half. If there was a Roman off in the mold of the old Tsar, it was Nikolasha. Maybe that's why Nicholas held him so close. Soon enough, Stana

held Nikolasha close as well. So when Alexandra was first coming to grips with what it meant to rule her new empire and embrace her new faith, it was Nikolasha, Stana, and Melizza who were speaking into her ear. Now, maybe it was natural for Alexandra to follow the lead of friends who knew what it was like to sail into the Russian nobility as an outsider. But here's the thing. Melissa's Russian Christianity was far more orthodox, and her sister

Stana followed in her wake. So in the days when they put their heads together, one of the things Stana and Melissa managed to pass on to Alexandra was a deep interest in the crossroads of Orthodoxy and the occult, especially the teachings of mystics and holy men. Here's historian Douglas Smith to tell us more. These two sisters, who were the King of Montenegro, who had married into the extended Romana family, and they were utterly obsessed with the

occult and Rosicrucianism and mysticism. And they learned about this Messieur Philippe through travels to France, and they helped introduce him to Nicholas and Alexandra Um and he made his way to the court in St. Peter's and they were utterly taken with him. They were convinced he was a prophet um, that he could divine the future, and that he had insights into the nature of rule and power and how Nicholas should govern Russia. Of course, Alexandra wasn't

the only one looking for guidance. Nicholas was also searching for a beacon to lead him, and if he held to the teachings of his childhood, he was looking less for the statesman and theorists of the day to lay out a plan of action, and more for the voice of God, not least because one of the problems that preoccupied both Nicholas and Alexandra was one over which no counsel of scholars or schemers could hold sway. They needed to produce an air. Not that their marriage didn't bring

them children. It did first Olga, then Tatiana, then Maria and finally, in nineteen o one, Anastasia. But if they took joy in their daughters, they also grew increasingly fearful, and of course the burden fell heaviest on Alexandra. Here's Helen Rappaport again. Her role, essentially once she was Itza was to produce a male heir, because in Russia the throne was passed down by male children only. So the pressure on Alexandra from day one, first of all, was

to produce children, but particularly to produce a boy. And I think it's almost impossible to imagine the enormous emotional and psychological pressure on her over a period of ten years to produce a boy and to keep having girls. Uh, and not only that difficult pregnancies, big babies. I mean, she must have suffered physical agonies producing those four girls

in in fairly quick succession. So when Stana went to mon Senior Philippe for headaches, and then Melitza got his help on treating her six son, of course they would see the possibility of helping their friend the Empress as well. The introductions went swimmingly he was exactly what Nicholas and Alexandra had been looking for, not least because as a spiritualist he could channel the voices of the dead for Nicholas. That meant Philip's seances were a way to make up

for lost time. When he needed advice on holding the reins of Russia, he could ask the person who knew the job the best, his dead father. And to Alexandra he offered something even more valuable. Philip claimed that there was a certain magnetic electric energy that emanated from his fingertips, and by passing them over uh the Empress's belly once she was pregnant, he could make sure that the next

child she had would be a son. And obviously this is something that was high on their list of priorities, and that gave Philipp this great um hold over Nicholas and Alexander for quite some time. But if that was a joy to Stana and Melitza, it was a horror to Ella and to the Dowager Empress, Nicholas's mother, But they did more than send letters back and forth pouring

scorn on the Montenegrin sisters. Soon enough, Nicholas's mother had the palace commandant on the case, investigating the French mystic who had lived for two months in a small house near the palace, and he went further to working with the head of the Czarist secret police in Paris to

collect information on Philippe. What did they hear back That the man was a Charlatan, He was a dabbler in black magic, and plenty worse too, including anti Semitic smears and conspiracy theories that made him out to be a Satanist. If this report was meant to turn Nicholas and Alexandra away from their new friend, their royal favorite backfired. Any valid criticisms of Philippe were mingled with racist slander, plenty of reasons for Nicholas and Alexandra to throw it aside.

Russian secret police were fired, and rumors flew that it was because the Tsar was furious, maybe even that Philippe had identified his enemies and was tightening his grip on Nicholas. At the Zar's prompting, Nikolasha even went out and got Monsignor Philippe a medical degree from the Russian Military Medical Academy, complete with uniform and no wonder The Czar and Czarista refused to hear either just critiques or malicious gossip about

their spiritual adviser. After all, they had been harboring a secret, a triumph they credited to the powers of Philippe. Alexandra was pregnant. Months passed. If Alexandra felt vindicated in the face of her royal mother in law's criticism, Over time, that thrill turned to caution and then to worry. The pregnancy didn't seem to be progressing the way she expected. Philip had promised that the baby was a boy, their son and heir. He also told Alexandra not to let

doctors examine her. Ella tried over and over to get her sister to change her mind to let go of Philippe. After the investigation into the occultist word was spreading and important secrets, they only drove more interest and curiosity about the hidden life of the Czarina would turn idle questions into malicious stories. Ella wanted her sister to see that it was a prophetic moment from Ella, but Alexander was listening more to Stana and Melitza than her own sister.

It would take the tables turning before Alexandra would relent, But the tables did turn. In August of nineteen o two, after months of protting, Alexandra agreed to a check up with Russia's leading gynecologist. The whole family was stunned by what he found. She was not carrying a son. Instead, she was suffering a molar pregnancy. Philippe had been dead wrong, and if she had not been following his advice to keep things secrets, the doctors could have helped her long before.

But if you think this revelation could change Nicholas and alex Andrew's mind, then you don't know the Romanovs. Yes, they told the family the truth through the shame and embarrassment, and their next stop was Philippe himself. Not to express their anger with him, though they went back to him for comfort. The rest of the family was furious and Ella was proved right. Stories started finding their way to

the press. The tempest poured out of the teacup and into the atmosphere, false stories mixed with the truth that these are was being influenced by a French occultist and taking advice on matters of state. In the darkness of seance to Nicholas and Alexandra, Philippe was a personal friend and spiritual advisor to the public, though he was now the Satanic power behind the throne. As the year passed, the rest of the royal court urged them to realize that the rumors could be false, but the damage of

the scandal could be all too real. In the end, Nicholas came around. If he was going to be the caretaker of Czarism that he wanted to be, he needed to make a change. It was painful, but to ease the break, Monsignor Philippe gave Alexandra gifts. First, he gave her a small bunch of dried flowers. They had been touched by the hand of Christ himself, he told her. Second, he gave her a bell. He said that by an unseen force, it would ring whenever someone who was not

a friend came near. No doubt, Alexandra felt grateful to have it in such an unfriendly place, and we know she treasured both of them. Philip also left the pair with one more thing, a prophecy that was also a set of instructions. Follow them, and Alexandra would finally conceive a son and heir. At the end of nineteen o two and into nineteen o three. The pair did just that, they had to fight the Church and have a long

dead holy man canonized as a saint. They had to make a pilgrimage to the monastery at Sarov, where they needed Alexandra to bathe in the spring. There. The imperial couple had thrown off advice from many quarters, but they followed these instructions to the tea. They won their battle with the Church, and on the nineteenth of July, Nicholas himself took part in a holy procession to carry the

relics of their new saints into Sarov Cathedral. That night, these are and Zarina, along with others, lowered themselves into the river Sarova. The water was frigid, but Philip's promises warmed their courage. So did the pilgrims who joined them on their trek to Sarov. Some accounts say that it was one hundred and fifty thousand people, others say it was twice that. Regardless of the actual number, there was

one thing that Alexandra and Nicholas took to heart. The Russian people were with them, so it seemed was the guiding hand of God, because within a month Alexandra was pregnant again, and this time it was real. Here's Helen Rappaport once again, finally in this longed for boy. Now, of course the church fells rang and gun salutes with fars all over Russia, and everyone was celebrating the Saryevitch,

and then this horrendous tragedy befallsome. Now, this longed for beautiful child, and he was a very beautiful baby, turns out to be him Ophelia. Once again. For Alexandra, joy was quickly overshadowed by terror, because when the baby was just a week old, Alexandra noticed blood seeping from his belly button and unaccountable bruises blooming over his body. The realization dawned that her son, the new Tsarovich Alexei, had the same condition that had killed her brother Fretty all

those years before. From there on out, protecting Alexey would become a central preoccupation of Alexandra's life, hardly less for Nicholas too, And they went back to their first familiar line of defense. They wrapped the boy's illness in secrecy. It was the difference between Czar and Zarina, all of this pressure for Alexandra to bear his son, and so little respect for who she was as a ruler, a thinker, a person. Nicholas at least could put on his military

medals and parade with the troops. The scrutiny of the Czarina was so much more personal, so much more invasive, and there was hardly the expectation that she brought anything more to the table. It hadn't always been this way in Russia, though, after all, Catherine the Great had governed the empire for over three decades. But Catherine's son had hated her. He had poisoned that well when he changed the laws and tried to make sure that no woman

would rule Russia again. That legacy shut the door on Alexandra. But she had shown them, Yes, she had her son, even on their terms, she had won. Through it all, it was clear that Alexandra had few friends in the Imperial court. She would have to look beyond the halls of power to find the kind of support, personal and

spiritual that she was desperate for. She would win on her terms, too, And that's where the story really begins, because this season on Unobscured, we're exploring the story of one of the twenty centuries most notorious schemers, The man who had come to stand beside the Empress Alexandra as the days darkened and the fires of war came on. He was a peasant standing at the crossroads of history, a man who became a legend in his own lifetime. As one age was swept away by war and revolution

and something new emerged. The stories of his life were repeated and remade into the inhuman sorcerer we know today as Grigory Resputant. He was a preacher, a monster, a healer, and a friend to the most powerful family in the world, until, that is, their whole world came crashing down around them.

The reports that held the details of his life and death were locked away, and in the shadows of a fallen order, Legend after legend sprang in to fill the void and placed the weight of the empire's destruction on his shoulders. In those early days of her reign, though before the romanovs ever met the peasant preacher from Siberia, Alexandra's strength of will was clear for everyone to see, as was her loneliness in the vast Russian Empire. Even

in her own family, the men whispered after her. She was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and shouldn't her hold over the British Empire have put an end to the Snyder arguments about whether women were capable of commanding empires. Maybe it could have, but some men in Alexandra's family seemed to have missed that lesson men like her brother Ernie.

Maybe he was thinking of her early years when she was guiding teams of horses as a tiny child, that he twisted the experience back on her in disgusting terms. The Czar is an angel, Ernie said, But he doesn't know how to deal with alex What she needs is a superior will which can dominates and bridle her. Obviously, these would be heinous words coming from anyone, but from her own brother they use menace and condescension. It's a reminder of just how difficult it was for any women

of the era to command respect. When he looked at Nicholas's reputation for weakness and Alexandra's strength of character, he only saw flaws. No wonder Alexandra would be willing to shut out the toxic voices of those around her. But of course it seems Alexandra it was never truly numb to the venomous treatment she received, no wonder she would

treasure the witness of Monseigneur Philippe's ringing bell. She knew that even at the Reins, she was valued more for her womb than her mind, her strength, or her faith, and anyone could be an enemy. But that didn't break her will. It only made her more determined, more dead set on showing them, showing everyone who she was Empress of Russia. And there was one final promise left by Monsignor Philippe that she held onto. It gave her courage in the moments when she felt alone, when he was

comforting her through the painful separation. As he left Russia for the last time, he dried her tears, saying, be calm, your majesty, Another friend will come. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week. It was a life of work and wandering, and a life of little rest. Later, he would write, everything was interesting to me, good and bad, and he had so

much to learn. He wasn't seeking knowledge from books and from stages. No, that was the worst way to answer the questions that he was trying to answer the learned, Grigory wrote, do not go to God. They study everything by books, and that knowledge confuses them. It was just one of the many reasons that he didn't want to become a priest. After all, he said, he met many

who failed to live up to their responsibilities. He had thought of becoming a monk, but the rigid orders, days of studying theology, and cycles of trying and failing to hold to monastic discipline were the opposite of what he wanted. On the road, Gregory was hunting more than the abstractions of theologians and the rationalizations of corrupt clergy. Like other religious teachers, seekers, and believers of his day, he rejected

those things. Now he was hunting for spiritual revelation. He was looking for something earthier, the crossroads where the work of God met people in their ordinary life. And in that quest he had lots of examples to ponder. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership with Heart Radio, with research by Sam Alberty, writing by Carl Nellis, and

original music by Chad Lawson. Learn more about our contributing historians, source materials and links to our other shows over at grim and mild dot com, slash Unobscured, and as always, thanks for listening. Four