Spała, 1912: Rasputin’s reported healing, the messages and the conflicting memoirs

In October 1912, the Russian heir Alexei suffered a severe illness while the imperial family was staying at Spała in Poland. His eventual improvement became one of the central episodes in Rasputin’s reputation as a healer. The familiar outline is dramatic: doctors feared the worst, a message requested Rasputin’s prayers, reassurance arrived and the child survived. The surviving accounts are more complicated. They disagree over the original accident, the messages and how soon improvement followed.

The Polish locality and its surviving setting

Spała is in present-day Łódź Voivodeship. The Polish State Forests’ account of the residence records the imperial family’s last visit in 1912 and the palace’s destruction by fire in January 1945. It was not rebuilt. A modern view of Spała should therefore not be presented as a photograph of the room where Alexei lay. The accompanying image shows the park and water tower in July 2026, providing locality context.

The pin is an approximate village-area reference, rounded from the documented Spała coordinates. It does not identify a surviving sickroom, a precise carriage route or a private residence. Although this episode concerns Russia’s imperial family, the illness under discussion occurred in the Polish locality. The geographical reference follows that event, rather than Rasputin’s home or a later Russian palace.

Gilliard: a sick child behind the court’s public routine

The tutor Pierre Gilliard’s Thirteen Years at the Russian Court, chapter II, published in 1921, places him at Spała as Alexei’s lessons began and then stopped. He recalls the child’s pallor, being carried, and the contrast between court entertainment and distress outside the sickroom. During a performance by the younger grand duchesses, he saw Alexandra hurry towards her son and later return to the guests with her composure restored.

He distinguishes that observation from medical information learned afterwards. He says Dr Vladimir Derevenko later explained that an earlier blow against a boat had caused internal bleeding, followed by renewed trouble at Spała. Gilliard describes a slow recovery and continuing attention to the contracted leg. This chapter supplies no account of Rasputin’s telegram. Its silence does not prove that a message was absent, but it cannot be cited as an eyewitness verification of that message.

Vyrubova: the request for prayers

Anna Vyrubova, Alexandra’s close friend, gives the crucial message narrative in Memories of the Russian Court, chapter VII, pages 92–95 of the 1923 edition. She describes severe pain, the family’s exhaustion and an evening when the child’s condition seemed desperate. According to her, Alexandra asked her to telegraph Rasputin for his prayers. The reply predicted survival and advised against allowing the doctors to trouble the child excessively.

Her timing deserves attention. Vyrubova says the reply came quickly but places the turning point a few days afterwards. She then describes a difficult convalescence, rather than an immediate return to normal health. The distinction between rapid communication, later improvement and complete recovery is easily lost in a shortened miracle story. Her recollection supports the history of an appeal and the confidence attached to it; by itself it cannot establish that a distant prayer caused the physiological change.

Spiridovitch: two messages and a different accident

Alexander Spiridovitch’s later memoir offers another version. UKPX has read Rob Moshein’s 2004 translation of the passage from Les Dernières Années de la Cour de Tsarskoe Selo, identified there as the 1929 publication, rather than the original French volume. It describes an injury against a bathtub at the earlier residence, followed by worsening after a carriage outing at Spała. The boat and bathtub versions should not be silently combined.

Spiridovitch presents two messages: one reassuring the family and discouraging tiring medical attention, the other reporting that prayer had been heard. He also attributes pessimistic opinions to the doctors and describes precautions during the journey home. These remain a memoirist’s reported conversations, not signed clinical notes. Even the child’s poignant request for a memorial is explicitly traced through another person who had heard it from Alexandra. Being close to the household did not make every detail direct observation.

A later court account changes the interval

Sophie Buxhoeveden’s The Life and Tragedy of Alexandra Feodorovna, chapter XV, published in 1928, places improvement on the morning after reassurance arrived. That differs from Vyrubova’s interval of several days. Buxhoeveden also says Professor Rauchfuss told her that a bulletin had been worded to prepare for the possibility of announcing Alexei’s death. Her account connects the recovery with Alexandra’s strengthened faith in Rasputin, while presenting that faith as the mother’s interpretation.

Elsewhere in the chapter, Buxhoeveden rejects stories of drugs and hypnosis and suggests that apparent cures could coincide with a tendency towards improvement. Those are her historical judgments, not results of a controlled investigation. She states that her residence in the Alexander Palace covered 1913–1917; the entire earlier Spała narrative should consequently not be labelled her personal bedside testimony. Her position in the household made her a useful later source, with identifiable limits.

Why the timing and wording matter

The sources do not offer one interchangeable transcript. One narrator gives a request and a reply, another distinguishes two messages, and their recovery intervals differ. A careful reconstruction must retain those differences before asking what the episode explains. Selecting the shortest interval because it makes the most striking story would turn a disputed detail into an apparently established fact.

The pages also contain dates expressed through different historical conventions and transcriptions. This account identifies the episode as October 1912 without assigning an exact day to an original telegram that UKPX has not inspected. Nor have the original medical bulletins been checked for this article. Statements about what doctors believed are therefore attributed to the memoirs that report them. Their agreement on the family’s alarm is stronger evidence for the household’s experience than for a particular theory of healing.

What later genetics can establish

The medical background has its own evidential history. In Genotype analysis identifies the cause of the “royal disease”, published in Science in 2009, Evgeny Rogaev and colleagues reported genomic work on historical Romanov specimens. The original abstract identifies a likely disease-causing mutation in F9, the gene encoding clotting factor IX, and concludes that the inherited disorder was haemophilia B. UKPX has checked that original abstract and bibliographic record, rather than the full methods and supplementary data.

This later evidence matters when reading earlier speculation. John M. L. Kendrick’s 2004 paper had questioned the conventional diagnosis and proposed a different kind of blood disorder from historical symptoms. Its abstract predates the genetic investigation. It should not be presented as though molecular evidence remained unavailable. Conversely, identifying an inherited disorder does not establish why one particular crisis improved on a particular day. The genetic result tests a different question from the sequence surrounding a prayer request.

Spała remains significant because a real, frightening illness became inseparable from a powerful reputation. The memoirs preserve distress, appeals, reassurance and recovery, alongside concrete disagreements. They permit a history of what people reported and believed. They do not supply an experiment capable of isolating Rasputin’s contribution from the course of the illness and the care Alexei received.

Related reading: Stanisława Tomczyk’s Wisła experiments, and Spiritual & Psychic cases.