Rasputin Page 5

  In any case, by the time of the Revolution, there were so many rumours linking Anna Vyrubova to Rasputin that she finally decided to have herself officially examined by doctors. The result, which she promptly made public, was perhaps unsurprising: she was still a virgin.

  What was Rasputin’s appeal for the Imperial couple? Both loved the idea of the adoring peasant. The Tsar had a distaste for sophistication, making the same grimace when saying ‘intelligentsia’ as when he said ‘syphilis’. Reverence for the peasant was rife within the Russian aristocracy of the time. Many had taken up Count Tolstoy’s view that the peasants were ‘closer to God… They lead moral working lives and their simple wisdom is in many ways superior to all the artifices of our culture and philosophy.’

  The Tsarina liked to attend public churches with the ever-obliging Anna Vyrubova in order to be with ‘plain people’. ‘The peasants love us,’ she insisted.

  Amid the fripperies of life at Court, there was always a call for an uncorrupted straight-talker, a character like Queen Victoria’s John Brown. Indeed, one of the Imperial family’s closest companions, Lili Dehn, compared the Tsarina’s faith in Rasputin to Queen Victoria’s in Mr Brown. Inevitably the Tsarina’s worship of the peasants was encouraged by Rasputin who claimed: ‘Great is the peasant in the eyes of God.’

  Rasputin manifested all the right, ‘plain’ attributes; he also had good timing. By late 1905, the Imperial Couple were suffering the effects of several bouts of civil unrest and the tragedy of Bloody Sunday, in which the Tsar’s soldiers had shot dead hundreds of innocent demonstrators. They were increasingly taking refuge in the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, 15 miles from the capital.

  The Tsarina had always been unpopular with the Russian aristocracy. She deemed them decadent, while they dismissed her in turn as haughty and puritanical. She had no time for creature comforts, existing happily on chicken cutlets twice a day for months on end.

  The Tsar, meanwhile, was considered a colourless and indecisive character. He was ripe for moulding and cheerfully went along with his wife as she indulged her oddly conflicted appetites for the bourgeois and the spiritual. The Tsarina was as happy ordering chintzes from the latest Maples catalogue as she was cultivating mystics.

  Hated by the revolutionaries and mistrusted by the aristocracy, the Imperial couple became ever more isolated. A folie à deux extended to a folie à sept as the five children followed their mother’s lead in gravitating towards ‘plain’ Russians and outlandish prophets. Rasputin, the peasant Man of God, seemed like the answer to a family prayer. The increasingly friendless Imperial Family had found someone they could call, once again, ‘our Friend’.

  As opposition to Rasputin’s presence at Court grew within the Orthodox Church, the Government and even among the Russian people, the Imperial couple took the criticism personally. The more vicious the attacks, the more they would be seen, particularly by the Tsarina, as tests of faith, to be withstood at any price.

  The Palace guards labelled Rasputin a ‘peasant of modest allure’. But for the Tsarina there was nothing modest about it. If she was drawn, first, to his obvious plainness, she was soon enslaved by his apparent healing powers. In the course of the next few years, he seemed to prove himself the only one able to cure her beloved son.

  Arguments have raged as to whether Rasputin actually possessed healing powers at all; if they existed, what form did they take? The Tsar’s mother, his brother-in-law, the Grand Duke Alexander, and the children’s French tutor, Pierre Gilliard, deemed his cures nothing more than coincidence. Others, including Alexis’s English tutor, Sydney Gibbes, put them down to hypnosis: the writer Robert K. Massie, the author of Nicholas and Alexandra, who himself had a haemophiliac son, is one of those who believe that hypnosis can help stem bleeding.

  It was suggested that Rasputin’s ability to comfort the Tsarina may have had a calming effect on her son: if his blood pressure dropped, the bleeding could have eased. One of Rasputin’s secrets might have been his distaste for the wonder drug aspirin, available from 1899. With all his love of novelty, Rasputin distrusted aspirin. He was right to be suspicious: aspirin, then being dished out by the Court doctors for pain relief, was later discovered to be an anti-coagulant; the pills would have made the bleeding considerably worse. Rasputin once claimed that Alexis would be mysteriously cured by the time he was 13. But haemophilia is still incurable.

  Whatever lay behind the cures, the courtiers had to acknowledge their effectiveness. Even the sceptical Director of the Imperial Court, Alexander Mossolov, wrote of Rasputin’s ‘incontestable success in healing’.

  Alexis was aged three when he was first healed by Rasputin. He had fallen in the grounds of the Palace; he had hurt his leg and his face was so badly swollen that his eyes had closed. He had been ill for three days before the Man of God was summoned and appeared in his bedroom. After several minutes of silent prayer, the boy smiled and his mother cried with joy. Rasputin silenced the ecstatic Tsarina with the same gesture with which he had rebuffed the dog-loving Grand Duke Nicholas four years earlier.

  On another occasion, it was said, Rasputin was talking to the Tsarina about providence when he suddenly interrupted himself, shouting: ‘He’s in the blue room.’ The pair ran to the blue billiard room, to find Alexis standing on the table. Rasputin scooped the boy up seconds before the table was hit by a huge, falling chandelier. Of such stuff are legends created.

  Rasputin’s visits to the Palace, dressed, according to one unlikely report, in ‘thick black glasses and a cossack uniform’ became increasingly frequent. Unfortunately, in these early days, it was deemed crucial to keep the boy’s illness secret, even from his tutors. This meant that nobody outside the immediate family would have been aware of the poignant reason behind the visits. The Tsar’s own sister, Grand Duchess Xenia, reported that she knew nothing of Alexis’s haemophilia until the spring of 1912, by which time the boy was nearly eight.

  The reasons behind Rasputin’s uncharacteristic discretion cannot be known. Did he fail to grasp the significance of the boy’s illness? Was he simply being considerate towards the Tsar and Tsarina? The most likely explanation is that he believed it in his own interests to be discreet, though this was not always enough to silence him.

  The Court doctors did, of course, understand the reasons behind Rasputin’s presence. But their understanding did not make the visits any less irksome to them. The blow to their professional pride was exacerbated by Brother Grigory’s lack of social graces. This despite at least one of the doctors barely cutting the mustard himself. As Gleb Botkin sniffed of Dr Derevenko: ‘He was… of peasant stock and showed it only too clearly in his manners and speech.’ The smarter Dr Botkin was frequently involved in slanging matches with Rasputin: Botkin baited him by insisting he had performed autopsies and never found a soul, while Rasputin retorted snappily: ‘How many emotions, memories, imagination have you found?’

  In a misjudged bid to improve relations, Rasputin once visited Dr Botkin at his house in Tsarskoye Selo. He pretended to have some interesting medical complaint but was shown the door, with Dr Botkin’s words ringing in his ears: ‘I can see you’re as fit and healthy as a bull.’ Whenever they subsequently passed each other in a corridor, Dr Botkin would turn his back.

  For all the fervent support he enjoyed within the immediate Imperial family, Rasputin’s position at Court was ever more precarious. The younger of the Tsar’s sisters, Grand Duchess Olga, who first saw him when he was visiting the Imperial children, had initially been chary of Rasputin, but was then impressed by how relaxed Alexis was with him, jumping about and pretending to be a rabbit. She was completely won over after seeing him praying with the children: ‘I was conscious of the man’s sincerity.’

  But her approval was short-lived. Within months he had offended her by snuggling up to her on a sofa, putting his arm around her shoulder, stroking her and asking if she was happy and loved her husband. The Grand Duchess, who was in fact not happy with her husband,
reacted badly, finding his curiosity ‘unbridled and embarrassing’.

  While Mossolov, the Director of the Imperial Court, acknowledged Rasputin’s healing powers, he never got over his initial dislike. He described Rasputin as having ‘an impudent familiarity combined with a servility which fitted like a glove on this upstart’. His low opinion was formed after their first meeting, at the Hotel d’Europe, when Rasputin disgraced himself, in some appalling but unspecified way: ‘As he left he ruined my overcoat.’

  The pair’s subsequent meetings did nothing to change Mossolov’s view. He was particularly horrified to discover that ‘our Friend’ ate exclusively with his fingers: ‘Rasputin set to, without knife or fork.’

  Grand Duchess Militza turned against her protégé when she found he had been visiting the Palace secretly: ‘You, Grigory, are an underhanded person,’ she raged. The Black Sisters would have been even more disconcerted by the silence of the Imperial couple. Through lengthy discussions about Rasputin, no mention had been made of any visits. As the Tsar wrote in his diary, December 9 1906: ‘Militza and Stana [Anastasia] dined with us – discussed Grigory all evening.’

  Militza became involved in a pamphlet accusing Rasputin of the ‘Spreading of False Khlystlike Doctrine and of Forming a Society of Followers of His False Doctrine’. In the pamphlet, released on September 6 1907, Rasputin was accused of ‘self-importance and Satanic pride’. If it could now be established that he was a khlyst, he could be excommunicated. Rasputin’s old enemy, Bishop Anthony of Tobolsk, sprang into action, demanding monthly bulletins from three local priests in Pokrovskoye.

  Rasputin made a habit of returning regularly to Pokrovskoye: ‘I came home joyful,’ he would proclaim. Ongoing home improvements may well have contributed to his joy. Through her early years of devotion, Grand Duchess Militza had showered the Rasputins with money, allowing them to move from the old izba to a lavish two-storey wooden house, with flower boxes in the windows and a tin roof. Further funds had been found for upper guest rooms, duly kitted out with a large floor clock and an Offenbach piano. Rasputin was particularly keen on a new gramophone; he could now squat and stamp to an endless supply of rousing dance music.

  If Rasputin felt any unease about falling out with his benefactor, he did not let it cramp his style. He carried on returning to his lavish house accompanied by a bevy of ‘little ladies’. Praskovia still fell to her knees, removed his boots and marvelled at his growing wardrobe of silk shirts and smart sashes.

  At the bidding of Bishop Anthony, the priests quizzed villagers about Rasputin’s habits. But his neighbours were reluctant to testify against him, conceding only that he wore a gold pectoral cross and that strange music could be heard coming from his cellar. They admitted seeing him emerging, wet, from the bath-house, with women. But they seemed unfazed by this. He himself said cheerily: ‘The sovereign knows… I don’t go with one person but… with company.’ Why shouldn’t he ‘hug and kiss little ladies’? The village children approved of him: ‘Granddaddy Grishka’ always had his pockets full of gumdrops and honey cakes.

  In the end, the vague conclusion to the Bishop’s elaborate inquiry in Pokrovskoye was that Rasputin had created some sort of religious society which held meetings for prayers. The villagers’ refusal to condemn Rasputin may well have been connected with his largesse. As his influence and status rose at Court, so did his ability to bestow riches upon his home village. By this time he was providing horses, cows and even houses for poorer families. At one point he was given 5,000 roubles by the Tsar for the church. This, in fact, gave rise to an argument as the villagers declared that they preferred to spend the money on a school. Rasputin was frequently incensed by what he regarded as their lack of grace, flouncing off to Tyumen: ‘Nobody understands a thing in this village.’

  When troubling stories of Rasputin’s habits began spreading in St Petersburg, the Tsarina decided to send Bishop Feofan to Pokrovskoye with her protégé, believing that the Bishop would return with glorious stories of Rasputin in his ‘plain’ element. She had been delighted by Anna Vyrubova’s report of her trip to Pokrovskoye, during which villagers visited in the evening to sing, pray and share simple fare: ‘raisins, bread, nuts and perhaps a bit of pastry.’

  Feofan’s more discerning party included the ascetic Father Makari, who might have been relieved to take a break from his mud hut and chickens. What Makari made of Rasputin’s comfortable way of life can only be imagined, but Feofan was disgusted. His impression was that the house reflected a: ‘semi-indigent peasant notion of how rich people lived in the cities’. Feofan disapproved of the wide beds with soft springy mattresses and was especially struck by the ‘large soft carpet covering the entire floor’. He said finally that during a fast ‘Brother Grigory ordered something to eat and cracked nuts.’

  Rasputin was particularly shameless on his home turf: ‘It cost 600 roubles,’ he announced, of an elaborate chandelier. Picking up a gold cross, he enthused: ‘See this cross, it’s got “N” stamped on it. The Tsar gave it – did it to honour me’. He would flourish jewelled eggs and icons and finally his prized silk shirts: ‘Her Majesty sewed this for me.’ One shirt had a missing collar: ‘I gave it to “Papa” [the Tsar] to wear at night because he had a sore throat,’ he boasted. When his unhinged friend, the monk Iliodor, visited Pokrovskoye, Rasputin bragged that the Tsar had proclaimed him ‘a true Christ… Me!’

  It was this kind of behaviour that made Iliodor and his other fervent supporter Bishop Feofan begin to have second thoughts. But Rasputin seemed oblivious to their changes of heart. His behaviour rarely bore out his supporters’ claim that he had learnt to ‘read people’ on his pilgrimages or that he could smell out enemies. Maria made efforts to explain her father’s lack of acuity: ‘He had an immediate, infallible instinct about people – then forgot it.’

  With the increasingly wary Iliodor, Rasputin made the serious error of brandishing a stash of adoring letters from the Tsarina and the Grand Duchesses. In a cavalier mood, he left the letters lying around, and the sly Iliodor couldn’t resist pocketing them.

  The smart house in Pokrovskoye which Rasputin occupied intermittently from the early 1900s until his death. The house and its lavish furnishings were largely gifts from the Grand Duchess Militza.

  Rasputin with followers in Pokrovskoye

  With Maria, Varya and Dmitri

  After his stay, Iliodor claimed that two of Rasputin’s servants had tried to get into bed with him. Rasputin, in turn, accused Iliodor of ogling his devoted maid, Dounia, while she undressed for a wash. Despite their arguments, at the end of 1909 Rasputin accompanied Iliodor to his home town of Tsaritzyn. Here he blotted his copy book by failing to cure a holy fool called Nastya, who threw the contents of a chamber pot at him. But he had more success with other inhabitants and, when he left, was presented with a 160-rouble tea set.

  If Rasputin could shrug off the misgivings of Feofan and Iliodor, he soon found himself facing an altogether fiercer enemy: the bullet-headed Peter Stolypin, Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior. Stolypin had not been impressed by the Tsar’s fulsome letter to him about Rasputin in 1906. He set no store by the Man of God’s attempt to help his daughter and was outraged when Rasputin tried to hypnotise him.

  Ignorant of the most important reason for Rasputin’s visits to the Palace, Stolypin thought he could simply use his powers of persuasion to keep the Man of God at bay. He succeeded in making the malleable Tsar promise, in 1908, to stop seeing Rasputin, but within weeks the Tsar had broken his word.

  In desperation, Stolypin decided to ban Rasputin from St Petersburg for five years. But when attempts were made to pin the banning notice on him, Rasputin could not be found. He had, in fact, taken temporary refuge at his enemy Grand Duchess Militza’s house, where he would have had an uncomfortable time of it.

  Visits from her sister, Anastasia, may have been some consolation: Rasputin was in good odour with Anastasia after giving his blessing to her unpopular second marriage to
the towering Grand Duke Nicholas. Now both Black Sisters were married to Romanov brothers, Peter and Nicholas. ‘The marriage of the brother [Nicholas] will be the salvation of Russia,’ gushed Rasputin.

  But he would later change his mind about the marriage, making enemies of both Black Sisters. They in turn would go to the palace in Tsarskoye Selo to complain about Rasputin to the Tsarina, who received them coolly, discounting their tales out of hand.

  Years later, in 1911, Stolypin would put together a damning report on Rasputin, but the Tsar simply threw it into the fire. He refused to discuss the subject: ‘I can do nothing about it.’ He gave a clue to the nature of his hesitation with one overheard remark: ‘Better one Rasputin than ten fits of hysterics a day.’ Rasputin was not comforted when he heard of the Tsar’s stand against Stolypin. Instead, he growled to Anna Vyrubova that the Prime Minister still had too much power. But it turned out that, during these early days of Rasputin’s rise, Stolypin actually had very little power. The Man of God’s visits to Tsarskoye Selo carried on continuously through 1908 and 1909.

  Though ‘the Tsars’ never granted Rasputin the ultimate honour of kissing his hand, they would readily peck a hairy cheek. The Tsarina frequently received Brother Grigory at Anna Vyrubova’s house, the ‘portico to power’, as Protopopov called it. She would enter followed by a footman with cakes and sandwiches. Yussoupov later wrote that Anna Vyrubova, as hostess, was ‘intoxicated with playing the role of an influential person’. By the end of 1908 the Tsar was writing appreciatively in his diary that Rasputin had helped decorate Anna’s Christmas tree.