Madame Blavatsky on the Doomed Destiny of the Romanovs

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 18 pages

Eighteen pages of letters printed in The Pioneer of Allahabad in April 1881, unsigned but pasted into Blavatsky's own scrapbook and attributed to her by Boris de Zirkoff. The occasion was the assassination of Alexander II, and the claim in the title is stated as the first letter's heading: that since Peter the Great not one of the Romanovs has died of natural causes.

The reporting is the reason to read it. The great bell of the Kremlin, Ivan Velikiy, silent for twenty-six years, was heard on the morning of 22 March; the crowds had heard of the attempt but not of the death, and were thrown into panic by the first of its three long peals. Before the third had died away — echoed by the four hundred gold-domed churches of the white-walled mother city — a compact mass of bareheaded people had blocked the adjacent streets and squares. It is in such gatherings, she argues, that the national pulse of Russia can best be felt: there is no premeditation, no organised loyalty, no assembling by the police, and a crowd of fifty thousand can never act a part. The descriptions are drawn not from official papers but from private letters by moderate correspondents.

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