Rasputin Read online

  It was during these early days in the capital that Rasputin met the man who would become one of his most unhinged followers, the monk Iliodor. A celebrated anti-semite, Iliodor led processions carrying giant dolls dressed in Jewish kaftans. At the end of rumbustious ceremonies, the dolls would be burnt. Iliodor was 11 years Rasputin’s junior, but, when they met, it was Rasputin who acted like an awe-struck child, putting the grimy fingers of one hand in his mouth and stamping his feet on the spot, as if about to gallop away.

  Despite this inauspicious start, the bearded pair became friends, spending days fishing on the Tura. Maria offers a slightly unconvincing picture of them casting their lines while enjoying ‘interminable religious arguments and philosophical discussions’.

  Meanwhile, bishops in St Petersburg gathered to listen to Rasputin’s largely predictable prophecies: one bishop would suffer a hernia, another would lose his mother. A third prediction, that one would father a child out of wedlock, was obviously more outlandish. It is not known how the bishops regarded the finer details of the predictions, but they were generally impressed. Father John of Kronstadt, the highly respected priest who had heard the last confession of Tsar Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, interrupted one of his services to proclaim: ‘We have a Man of God in our congregation. Step forward.’ Grigory Rasputin leapt forward. He would probably have enjoyed the khlyst-like flavour of Father John’s services, during which the congregation were encouraged to shout their sins.

  Rasputin’s reputation was gathering steam. Reports from the secret police, the Okhrana, echoed the enthusiastic clerics, claiming that Rasputin could blow on a handful of earth and turn it into a magnificent rose tree. Hundreds of women crowded outside the house where he was staying and a St Petersburg paper reported that he ‘restored sight to the blind and movements to the paralysed’. When the occasional question arose about his activities at the bath-house, his friend Iliodor would defend him, supporting newspaper reports that he ‘visits bathing establishments and brings holy word to those who bathe… They are morally cleansed.’

  The Tsar and Tsarina’s own confessor, Bishop Feofan, was one of Rasputin’s most assiduous early supporters. Feofan was a particularly valuable ally: along with his connections at Court, he was known to be associated with the St Petersburg Theological Academy. Feofan’s credentials could not be faulted, but his endorsement of Rasputin never represented any kind of approval from the Church. The handful of bishops now supporting Rasputin were out on a limb.

  Feofan testified at the 1917 Commission that Rasputin had originally arrived with a letter from a Bishop Chrysanthos. ‘Once he [another bishop, Sergius] invited us to his lodgings for tea, and introduced for the first time to me and several monks and seminarians a recently arrived Man of God, Brother Grigory as we called him then. He amazed us all with his psychological perspicacity.’ They quizzed him about the fate of a squadron due to engage in a battle with the Japanese. Rasputin was pessimistic: ‘I feel in my heart it will be sunk.’ He proved correct.

  The Tsarina’s unswerving devotion to her husband, ‘beloved Nicky dear’ is laid bare in a torrent of passionate love letters. Unfortunately her devotion was inflamed by a protective, motherly impulse; she believed herself smarter than he.

  Bishop Feofan related how Brother Grigory had gone to Sarov, in 1903, to attend a canonisation, and announced to the congregation that the long-awaited heir to the throne would be born within a year. The prophecy was borne out when, following the births of four grand duchesses, the Tsarevich Alexis was born on August 12 1904. Feofan believed that he had been the one who had told Grand Duchess Militza about Rasputin: ‘I let slip that a Man of God was among us named Grigory Rasputin.’ But Grand Duchess Militza had, of course, already shared tea with Rasputin following their less productive exchange over the wood-saw in Kiev.

  Such was the trust between Bishop Feofan and Brother Grigory that, at one point, they lived together. It was Grand Duchess Militza who orchestrated Rasputin’s move into Feofan’s house, but Rasputin soon found the set-up constraining. He disliked limits on his movements or, more importantly, limits on visits from ‘little ladies’ and soon transferred himself to the house of a less scrupulous journalist friend. He would eventually move into flats of his own on the English Prospect and then on Nikolaevsky Street.

  But Feofan remained happily ignorant of the foibles of his Man of God. Like Iliodor, he was ready with explanations of the trips to the Kazan bath-houses: ‘He too wanted to test himself, to see if he had extinguished passion in himself.’ Nobody would argue with the sainted Feofan when he insisted, even more implausibly, that Rasputin had mastery over the weather. This particular rumour had begun in Pokrovskoye after Rasputin had been assailed by angry fathers and husbands of ‘Rasputinki’. He had raised his arm to the sky at the beginning of a long, dry spell and said: ‘Let there be no rain for three months.’

  The Bishop never tired of singing his Man of God’s praises to the Tsar and Tsarina: ‘It is the voice of the Russian soil which speaks through him.’ He added that Rasputin had ‘so deep a passion of repentance that I would all but guarantee his eternal salvation’.

  On November 1 1905, two weeks after signing the October Manifesto outlining Russia’s first parliament, the Tsar and Tsarina agreed to have tea with Rasputin. The tea was held on a sunny afternoon, at the Montenegrin Black Princesses’ villa, Sergevka, at Peterhof. Brother Grigory was immediately relaxed, addressing the Imperial couple as Batiushka and Matiushka (little father and little mother). He would soon refer to them even more simply as ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’. The Tsar made a characteristically unforthcoming entry in his diary: ‘We had tea with Militza and Stana [Anastasia]. We met the Man of God Grigory from the province of Tobol.’

  Rasputin was not the first mystic at Court. Holy Men had always been a feature of Court life. In the early 1800s the Holy Man to Nicholas I had accurately predicted the sequence of names of future monarchs, concluding, ominously, that Nicholas II would be followed by a ‘peasant with an axe in his hand’.

  The vacillating Tsar Nicholas II frequently summoned clairvoyants to conjure up the spirit of his domineering father, Alexander III, who twisted forks in knots and called him ‘girlie’. Alexander clearly retained some influence over his son, and Nicholas was a willing subject, refusing to be put off, even when his late father’s guidance was at its most vague. One medium, a bogus gynaecologist, passed on a typical message: ‘Take courage, my son, and do not abandon the struggle.’ This same medium insisted that a catastrophe in Russia could only be averted while he himself was alive. He was sadly vindicated, dying just five months before the Revolution.

  Another of the Tsar’s peasant clairvoyants correctly foretold the disastrous outcome of the Russo-Japanese War and disconcerted the Tsar by banging dolls and shouting ‘Sergei’. He later insisted she was referring to Grand Duke Sergei, who was blown up by terrorists in 1905. While he consulted clairvoyants, the Tsarina and her friend Anna Vyrubova were said to be obsessed by scrutinising Egyptian cards and reading coffee grounds.

  The couple’s Court priest, Father Vassiliev, was himself no stranger to mysticism. The Tsarina maintained that his religious fervour made him ‘shriek and hop like a dervish’. His favourite homily seemed unhelpful: ‘Don’t worry, the devil neither smokes nor drinks nor engages in revelry and yet he is the devil.’

  Grand Duchess Militza recognised fertile ground and took it upon herself to introduce a series of holy fools to the Imperial couple. First there was Matryona the Barefoot, dressed in rags, who brought icons to the Palace and shouted incomprehensible prophecies. She was followed by an epileptic called Mitya Kobalya from Kozelsk, who, like Rasputin, came with the endorsement of Bishop Feofan. Mitya had short arms and spoke as unintelligibly as Matryona. However, he had the advantage of an interpreter, a sexton called Egorov. Mitya looked the part: ‘He wears his hair long and unbound and goes about barefoot the year round, leaning on a staff’ was the way one onlooker described him. He pre
dicted Russia’s defeat at Port Arthur. He was on less certain ground, however, when asked, years before, whether the Tsarina would bear an heir. The Tsarina herself had put the question to him; Mitya’s response had been to scream so loudly that she had hysterics. The translator’s barely audible interpretation was that it was ‘too early to tell’.

  ‘Blessed Mitya’ must have been a controversial presence, as Anna Vyrubova later tried to claim that he had never been to the Palace. But on January 14 1906 the Tsar referred to an exhaustingly long meeting with Mitya in his diary: ‘The Man of God Dmitri came to see us from Kozelsk near the Optina Pustyn Monastery. He brought with him an image drawn according to a vision he had had. We talked for about an hour and a half.’

  If members of the Imperial entourage had misgivings about this particular Man of God, Mitya certainly enjoyed the blessing of another unconventional character at Court, a Tibetan healer called Peter Badmaev. The healer, subsequently accused of drugging the Tsar, insisted that Mitya ‘impressed me as an intelligent, religious peasant’. But Badmaev’s attempts, over two years, to treat Mitya’s catarrh were unsuccessful; the Man of God never shook off another of his sobriquets, Mitya the Nasal-voiced. Incidentally, Rasputin mistrusted Dr Badmaev: ‘That Chinaman would betray you for a kopeck.’

  The best known of Rasputin’s predecessors at the Court, however, was a French butcher – some said hairdresser – called M. Philippe Nizier-Vachod. He had been expelled from a college where he was studying medicine, and had then taken it upon himself to treat patients with what he referred to as ‘psychic fluids and astral forces’. He claimed to live on the borderline between two worlds. The French authorities set no store by his remedies: he was arrested five times for practising medicine without a licence.

  The Black Peril, Militza and Anastasia, had met M. Philippe in Cannes. In a great state of excitement, Militza reported back to the Tsarina that this new mystic could cure all diseases, including syphilis. She introduced the Tsar and Tsarina to M. Philippe when he followed the sisters back to Russia. According to some sources, the Tsar met M. Philippe during a visit to France. One of the Tsar’s grand duke cousins was horrified, insisting that M. Philippe had a ‘terrible southern French accent’. He added, in further disapproval, that the Tsar and Tsarina would return from sessions with M. Philippe, having ‘fallen into a mystical frame of mind’.

  M. Philippe was also able to summon the tireless spirit of Tsar Alexander III and apparently shared Rasputin’s mastery of the weather, once tempering a storm to protect the Imperial yacht, the Standart. He even boasted that he could make himself and others invisible. On one occasion, Prince Yussoupov’s father waved at Grand Duchess Militza as he spotted her riding in a carriage with M. Philippe but she failed to wave back. When he later challenged her, she replied that he couldn’t possibly have seen her: M.Philippe had been wearing a hat that made his companion invisible.

  Of prime importance to the Imperial couple was M. Philippe’s claim to be able to determine the sex of an unborn baby through the ‘transcendental practice of hermetic medicine, astronomy and psychurgy’. Sadly, his fallibility in this direction was exposed when the Tsarina gave birth to her fourth daughter, Anastasia, in June 1901, rather than the predicted son. Upon the baby’s arrival, M. Philippe ungraciously accused the Tsarina of having insufficient faith. As the matter of an heir became more urgent, it was said that he installed himself in the Tsar and Tsarina’s bedroom. His capacity to make himself invisible would have proven invaluable.

  Aware of M. Philippe’s growing band of critics, the Tsar and Tsarina began calling him, cryptically, ‘our Friend’, as they would later do with Rasputin. The Tsar made several vain attempts to protect him: at one point requesting a medical diploma from the French Government. He finally gave M. Philippe a cursory title: ‘Inspector of port sanitary services’.

  But the disapproving Grand Duke was not to be appeased, noting: ‘The bad thing is that they cover their visits to Znamenka [Militza’s palace] in secrecy.’ The Tsar’s mother, the down-to-earth Dowager, became so anxious about M. Philippe that she sent secret agents to France to investigate his background. She need not have worried. M. Philippe’s days at the Russian Court were, by then, already numbered. The turning point had come when the Tsarina, carried away by M. Philippe’s pronouncements, fell victim to a phantom pregnancy. It was believed that M. Philippe had hypnotised her; there were wilder rumours that she had given birth to a monster. Before M.Philippe was dispatched back to Lyon, he correctly predicted that the Tsar and Tsarina would one day have another ‘Friend’. He left the Tsarina an icon with a bell which he said would ring at the approach of enemies. He had one final success, prophesying the date on which he would die, in 1905. When the excitable younger Montenegrin Princess, Anastasia, heard of his death, she proclaimed that his spirit had entered her body.

  For all the Black Sisters’ attachment to their previous men of God, they were particularly possessive of Rasputin. They had, after all, hosted the momentous tea at which Rasputin had first been presented to ‘the Tsars’. After that meeting, Militza had made Rasputin swear not to contact the Palace without consulting her. If he did, she warned obscurely, it would be the end of him. She may have been worried about future fallings-out: relations between her and the Tsarina had already cooled since the days when the Black Princesses had been in charge of emptying the Imperial chamber pot.

  But Bishop Feofan was later to testify that his irrepressible protégé cared nothing for Militza’s warnings. Within a few months, Rasputin had contacted the Tsar independently and made several visits to the Palace with Feofan: three years after his encounter with Grand Duchess Militza in the woodshed, the mercurial Rasputin was developing a taste for high society.

  On July 18 1906, Rasputin enjoyed his second tea with the Tsar and Tsarina. He had written a sparse telegram: ‘Tsar father, I want to bring you an icon of Righteous St Simon of Verkhoturye.’ He brought each of the four young Grand Duchesses and the two-year-old Tsarevich an icon and a piece of consecrated bread. It was said that he challenged the Tsarina to lift a box of matches, having persuaded her that it weighed three tons. The impressionable Tsarina, unsurprisingly, failed to lift it.

  He returned to the Alexander Palace, on Friday October 12, and spoke to the Tsar and Tsarina at some length. The Tsar wrote enthusiastically to his most powerful minister, Peter Stolypin, saying that Rasputin ‘made a strong impression on Her Majesty and me – our conversation lasted well over an hour.’ The Tsar suggested Rasputin visit Stolypin’s daughter, who had lost a leg in a bomb attack. Stolypin agreed to allow Rasputin to give his daughter a blessing. But he remained grimly unconvinced by Anna Vyrubova’s claim that his daughter benefited from any kind of healing.

  One of the Tsar’s earliest favours to Brother Grigory was to allow him to change his name to Rasputin Novy – Rasputin had always wanted to distance himself from the association his name had with the word for debauchee, ‘rasputnik’. The request was granted in a record-breaking seven days, on December 22 1906. Later Rasputin would claim it was the little Tsarevich Alexis who had christened him ‘new’, having clapped his hands and greeted him with the shout ‘novy, novy’.

  In fact, throughout his life, Rasputin was usually referred to as Brother or Father Grigory by his supporters; ‘the Tsars’ called him, simply, Grigory. Feofan would certainly have introduced him into society as Brother Grigory. His early encounters with the aristocracy included evenings at the home of a Countess Ignatiev. Fortunately for Rasputin, the Countess’s salon was known for its outlandish guests as much as for its celebration of the autocratic principle. Next to the barefoot, screaming ‘Blessed Mitya’, Rasputin would have seemed eminently presentable.

  But his most important new connection was the Tsarina’s friend, Anna Vyrubova. She first encountered the Man of God on a train, when, true to form, he had asked her about her ‘unhappy’ life. The train carriage did not lend itself to any exchange of confidences; Anna was prevented from fillin
g in the sorry details until the pair had been formally introduced at Militza’s palace. But then she poured out her worries about her impending marriage, due to take place in 15 days’ time. She had misgivings about her groom, who would, indeed, turn out to be a deranged alcoholic sadist. At this late stage, Anna was still wondering whether to go ahead with the wedding. Rasputin’s predictions were unhelpful: ‘He [Rasputin] told me I should marry but the union will be unhappy.’

  It was later rumoured that Anna’s husband was maddened after finding her in bed with the Tsarina: the two women were believed to enjoy an ‘unnatural friendship’. Anna was certainly devoted, convinced that the Tsarina had once cured her with the touch of a hand. But the Tsarina, for her part, does not seem to have been so enamoured, once describing her friend as encumbered with ‘stomach and legs colossal’. She added that Anna had an unappealing habit of speaking ‘as if she had a mouthful of porridge’. In fact, contrary to any rumours, Anna remained bemused about sex, flatly refusing conjugal relations with her new husband and lamenting to the young Maria Rasputin: ‘I hear of those who enjoy it so much. I wish I could.’

  Over the next ten years, Anna’s passion would be directed towards Rasputin. Gleb Botkin, the son of the Tsar’s doctor, believed her the victim of ‘sexual hysteria and religious mania…’ and that she was ‘head over heels in love with Rasputin’. She was thrilled by his divergent personalities – the ‘peasant with an unkempt beard’; the ‘Saint who uttered Heaven-inspired words’. When he held her hand she is said to have moaned and trembled.

  It is not known what Rasputin thought of her in these early days. She was young, in her early twenties, but the Tsarina was not the only one to note her less attractive features. Yussoupov said she had a ‘puffy shiny face and no charm whatsoever’. The French Ambassador, Maurice Paleologue, dismissed her as: ‘rather stout… with an ample build… a fat neck and full fleshy lips’. Either way, Rasputin made full use of the fox fur which she gave him to put on his bed in St Petersburg. At one point, he suggested provocatively that she watch while he was soaped by his wife in the bath-house at Pokrovskoye.