Rasputin Read online

  Throughout 1909, the Tsar makes references to Rasputin’s visits in his diary: ‘4 February… At 6.00 o’clock the Archimandrate Feofan and Grigory came to see us. He also saw the children.’ ‘29 February… At 2.30 Grigory came to see us, and we received him with all the children. It was so good to hear him with the whole family.’ ‘29 March (the Day of Christ’s Joyful Resurrection)… After tea upstairs in the nursery I sat for a while with Grigory, who had come unexpectedly.’ ‘26 April… From 6.00 to 7.00 we saw… Grigory… I also sat with Grigory a little while in the nursery this evening.’ On August 15 1909, he wrote: ‘I talked with Grigory a long time this evening.’

  But for all the Tsar’s buoyant diary entries, the Imperial couple recognised the growing opprobrium attached to the visits. The tutor, Pierre Gilliard, noted that the children had been instructed by the Tsarina never to mention Rasputin’s name. He himself saw Rasputin only once, in an anteroom of the Palace, as he was preparing to leave. He recalled: ‘I had the distinct impression I was in the presence of a sinister and evil being.’ Mossolov seconded Gilliard’s view, making reference to ‘Rasputin the Sinister’.

  The servants who spotted Rasputin at the Palace were equally disparaging. As early as the winter of 1908, a maid, Sophia Tyutcheva, was disconcerted to see a ‘peasant in tight-fitting coat’ in the darkened corridors. In the spring of 1910, Tyutcheva reported, with dismay, that Rasputin was visiting the Grand Duchesses at bedtime, when the girls were in their nightclothes.

  The stolid Mossolov thought well of Tyutcheva, regarding her as a good influence on the sometimes unruly Imperial children: ‘Their manners at once showed great improvement.’ He set store by her sense of propriety and now reported her views with approval: ‘Tyutcheva’s opinion was that the unsavoury muzhik [peasant] should not be allowed at night among the children.’ But when Tyutcheva complained to the Tsar, she found him unreceptive, replying dramatically: ‘I am alive only thanks to his prayers.’ Tyutcheva was duly fired.

  Another maid from the Court, Maria Vishnyakova, had an altogether more serious complaint. She claimed she had been assaulted and raped during a visit to Pokrovskoye. She said that Rasputin had ‘started kissing me. I was in hysterics, he took my virginity’. When she complained, the Tsarina dismissed her testimony, insisting that everything about Rasputin was holy. The impasse was broken only when Vishnyakova lost her credibility after being found in bed with a cossack. She, too, was sacked.

  Rasputin at the Alexandra Palace with the Tsarina, the maid Maria Vishnyakova and all five Imperial children

  With relations at Court growing thornier, Rasputin also found himself losing supporters in the Church. First among these was his former houseguest and fishing companion, the monk Iliodor, who was becoming increasingly deranged, locking himself in a monastery at Tsaritzyn with thousands of his followers. At the end of his services he would decapitate a makeshift dragon he called Revolution. He built tunnels under the monastery and, in a final act of hubris, planned to build a massive tower.

  Unleashing attacks upon his old friend, Iliodor complained that Rasputin ‘emitted a disagreeable odour’ and was bad with old ladies. He quoted Rasputin dismissing one elderly petitioner: ‘Your love pleases me, mother, but God ain’t with it.’ He insisted the Synod take steps against Rasputin, or he would renounce his faith. The Synod responded, instead, by ordering him to leave Tsaritzyn and join another, distant monastery.

  Unaware of the extent of Iliodor’s betrayal, Rasputin was initially protective of him. He spoke up on his behalf when the Tsar also tried to order him to leave Tsaritzyn. He told the Tsar that, if he did not stop persecuting Iliodor, God would take revenge on the sickly Tsarevich. But later, on learning the truth, he switched sides without hesitation, barking: ‘File his teeth.’

  The Tsar decided to send a loyal aide de camp, Alexander Mandryka, to Tsaritzyn to deal with Iliodor. But Mandryka ended up being distracted by shocking tales of Rasputin’s debauchery. The nuns at Tsaritzyn were claiming that, during his visit, Rasputin had been conducting orgies and bathing with novices. When Mandryka returned and met the Tsar, on February 10 1911, his reports on Iliodor were eclipsed by these shocking stories: ‘It is even said he [Rasputin] enjoyed the favour of Her Majesty,’ Mandryka concluded, before bursting into tears. The Tsar felt obliged to send for a glass of water.

  Rasputin with Hermogen and Iliodor

  With his followers at Gorokhovaya Street

  So Iliodor’s rabble-rousing continued, for the moment, unchecked. But his coup de grâce, in terms of mischief-making, came in late 1911 when he copied and disseminated the letters he had pocketed at Pokrovskoye. None of his sermons could have unleashed the mayhem created by these innocent outpourings from the four young Grand Duchesses and their mother, the Tsarina, to their Man of God.

  The letters from the girls were almost theatrically fond. Grand Duchess Olga wrote: ‘It is hard without you, there is no one to tell my troubles to.’ Her younger sister, Tatiana, asked: ‘How’s Matriosha [Maria]. Whenever we get together at Anya’s [Anna Vyrubova’s] we always talk about all of you, we miss you, we miss you… Mother is ill without you.’ It was Tatiana who recorded conversations with Rasputin and kept all his letters to the family.

  Grand Duchess Maria, the third daughter, who slept with a Bible given to her by Rasputin, wrote: ‘I am kissing you. Kissing your pure hands… Let me see you alone about God.’ The youngest, Grand Duchess Anastasia, then aged ten echoed: ‘I kiss you and bless me.’

  The Tsarina’s letter, unfortunately, seemed to go beyond fondness: ‘I wish to fall asleep on your shoulder. I love you. I believe in you. I kiss you warmly’. The words were misleading; she was not in love but in the throes of a sort of religious hysteria. There was no impropriety intended; these declarations came from a woman of such modesty that she assiduously covered the lavatory and bath when they were not in use.

  One of the braver ministers took the Tsarina’s letter to the Tsar, who glanced at it and shoved it in a drawer, commenting drily: ‘Yes the letter is genuine.’ He fired the Minister, A. A. Makarov, a few days later.

  It was a rough period for Rasputin. And there was to be no let-up. The Tsar had barely recovered from Mandryka’s outburst and Iliodor’s public exposure of the Tsarina’s passionate letter before Rasputin arrived at the Palace bearing compromising photographs of himself cavorting with a Finnish ballerina. He had fallen victim to what would become a common Soviet tactic: discrediting by way of ‘kompromat’. He had been told that unless he left St Petersburg the photographs would be shown to the Tsar, and so he had opted for a pre-emptive strike.

  His tactic paid off, with the Tsar declaring simply that Rasputin had been weak and allowed himself to be exploited by revolutionaries. The Tsarina was probably never told about the photographs.

  Rasputin managed to brush off these slings and arrows, not least Iliodor’s rages against him. He would have a harder time dealing with the rancour of the more senior members of the Church. By the beginning of 1910, the most fervent of his early supporters, Bishop Feofan, was having insurmountable doubts about his Man of God. His earlier worries about the lavish furnishings at Pokrovskoye had been overshadowed by complaints of Rasputin abusing and even raping women. He wrote an anguished letter to another highly regarded priest, Hermogen, who had also once supported Rasputin, convinced that ‘the devout fire flowed in his soul’.

  Hermogen, a former lawyer, was very conservative and had no truck with the Duma, the recently established Russian parliament, which he denounced as an ‘enemy of Orthodox Russian people’. He had a highpitched voice and it was rumoured that he had castrated himself in a religious fervour. Feofan informed Hermogen that Rasputin was in a state of ‘spiritual temptation’ and that he ‘didn’t occupy the highest level of spiritual life’.

  It turned out Hermogen had also changed his mind about the Man of God after catching him trying to seduce the wife of another priest. More crucially, having read Iliodor’s letters, he believed
that Rasputin was sleeping with the Tsarina. Hermogen demanded immediate action, suggesting kidnapping Rasputin and searching his flat.

  Feofan favoured the less dramatic option of complaining to the Tsarina, but she was dismissive, insisting that stories of Rasputin’s misdemeanours were all ‘falsehood and slander’. She even suggested that Feofan was jealous of Brother Grigory. Feofan then wrote to the Tsar that he had heard a confession from a woman who had been seduced by Rasputin. He received no reply. The Bishop finally confronted Rasputin himself, ordering him to leave St Petersburg: ‘Go away, you fraud.’ Rasputin appeared repentant, weeping and begging forgiveness. But he had no intention of leaving and instead scurried straight to the Palace to complain to the Tsarina. The troublesome Bishop Feofan developed facial palsy, lung disease and malaria and was dispatched to the Crimea.

  But Rasputin hadn’t quite finished with him. The Provisional Government’s Commission was told that, in October 1913, a stranger approached the wife of a paralysed priest, offering her 1,000 roubles if she would say that Feofan had told her the Tsarina was sleeping with Rasputin. The woman later received a letter in a fine hand, presumably not Rasputin’s, telling her to think again and tell the truth.

  The Tsarina fought back against Feofan and Hermogen, commissioning a study, ‘Russian Saints Who Were Holy Fools in Christ’, in which she underlined passages describing the Saints’ ‘sexual dissoluteness’. She ignored the fact that these particular holy fools in Christ were debauched only before their conversions, when they were young: Rasputin was by then a seasoned 40 years old. The author of the study was amply rewarded and later pronounced: ‘I don’t care about Rasputin. Thanks to him, I’m now a prelate making 18,000 roubles a year, with all the fringe benefits.’

  Rasputin’s aphorisms included, on marriage: ‘A good graft revives an old tree’; he would admonish the rich: ‘You could feed five villages with what’s hanging on your walls.’

  What the churchmen made of Rasputin’s next move is not known; but, at the Tsar’s suggestion, he journeyed to the Holy Land. Upon his return, the Tsarina and Anna Vyrubova collaborated with him on a thin volume: ‘My Thoughts and Meditations: A Short Description of Visits to the Holy Places’. Rasputin proudly presented his book to friends, inscribed with a large, shaky ‘G’. In the opening passages he makes much of his joy at leaving St Petersburg, a centre of ‘vain and worldly things’, where ‘we slumber and fall into evil ways’. Alongside his book about Jerusalem, Rasputin’s works include ‘Pious Meditations’ and ‘Life of an Experienced Wanderer’.

  The Tsarina never tired of his ministrations. When she had a headache, she insisted: ‘I write down the saying of our Friend and the time passes more quickly.’ Rasputin’s aphorisms included, on marriage: ‘A good graft revives an old tree’, and on a prospective trip: ‘Before crossing the river, see that the ferry is in its place’. He would admonish the rich: ‘You could feed five villages with what’s hanging on your walls’, and instruct city dwellers: ‘Go out of the town into the fields’ while insisting they do not pick flowers: ‘It is cruel to take life by force.’

  On national traits he proclaimed: ‘The worst Russian has a better soul than foreigners.’ Finally he made a strong pronouncement on women following a rebuff from a Muscovite: ‘Peter women better than Moscow women.’ This last proclamation was delivered to the accompaniment of smashing plates. The Tsarina was impressed by Rasputin’s resourcefulness. She liked the way he always had a remedy up his sleeve, sometimes literally: he would create poultices by boiling water and mashing it up with crumbling pieces of oak bark picked from his grubby pockets.

  But the Imperial couple’s various strategies to cleanse Rasputin’s reputation were never going to appease the clerics. Hermogen decided to summon Rasputin to his quarters at the Yaroslavl Monastery in December 1911. It is a mark of Rasputin’s self-confidence that he suspected nothing of what was in store. In fact, he thought he was enjoying a rare break from hostilities. Within the previous few months, the turncoat Feofan had been seen off by the Tsarina. Meanwhile, his old enemy, Stolypin, had been shot in a theatre in Kiev, dying five days later. The Tsar had rushed to his hospital bedside, fallen to his knees and whispered ominously: ‘Forgive me.’

  It turned out that Rasputin had earlier spotted Stolypin in the street, and said: ‘Death is stalking him.’ But this was seen less as a prophecy than a reaction to Stolypin’s sickly appearance. After her initial shock at the assassination, the Tsarina observed coldly: ‘Those who have offended our Friend may no longer count on divine protection.’ Striking the final blow, Rasputin produced a book describing the celebrations of 1911, during which Stolypin had been murdered. He called it ‘Great Festivities in Kiev!’

  So after Hermogen contacted him, Rasputin may even have been looking forward to a get-together with the clerics. He readily agreed to be collected by Iliodor, on December 16; coincidentally the same date as his fateful midnight assignation with Yussoupov five years later. He was clearly unaware, at that point, that Iliodor already loathed him.

  He swept buoyantly out of his flat in a 2,000-rouble fur coat. But when he arrived at the monastery, he was immediately brought down to size by the dwarf ‘Blessed Mitya’ in ascetic’s rags. Mitya pronounced – presumably through his interpreter – that Rasputin should be killed or castrated, adding: ‘You have offended many nurses. You are sleeping with the Tsarina. You are an anti-Christ.’ He then set about punching Rasputin, before grabbing his penis and trying to pull it off.

  Rasputin tried to push Mitya away: he finally succeeded, sending the ‘little prophet’ flying across the room. But before he could straighten up, the stately Hermogen had begun beating him on the back with a heavy cross, accusing him of suffering from a sickness he called satyriasis.

  Hermogen dragged Rasputin to the chapel and made him swear never to see the Tsar and Tsarina again, adding: ‘Don’t return to Russia for three years.’ The fiery Iliodor, wielding an axe, now weighed in, agreeing with Mitya that Rasputin should be castrated. Iliodor wanted Rasputin sent to the prison island Sakhalin; the lavish house in Pokrovskoye must be burnt to the ground. Rasputin eventually managed to wrest himself free and shot out of the room, before locking the angry clerics in by propping a chair up under the doorknob.

  As soon as he had recovered himself, Rasputin fired off complaints to both the Tsarina and the Synod. Retribution was swift: Hermogen was ordered into exile to the Jirovitsky Monastery in Vladimir Oblast, denied his rights to a hearing. When he wrote requesting an audience in order to divulge certain secrets, the Tsar replied that he didn’t want to know them. Instead, he was bundled unceremoniously into a car and driven to the station. Iliodor was eventually chased to ground, arrested and sent to the Florishchev Monastery, where he set about plotting to kill Rasputin; such was his zeal that, at one point, he accrued 120 bombs.

  Iliodor now denounced the Imperial couple, dismissing the Tsar, at five feet four inches, as ‘a little man’. He himself was proud to resemble a Volga brigand, with hands the size of large stones. He added that the Tsar, a keen tippler and smoker, was a ‘drunk weed puffer’. In fact, there were claims that Rasputin had cured the Tsar of his drinking habit, with an elaborate procedure involving complex switches of wines and glasses. He had also cured his friend Simanovich, who swore to the cure’s efficacy: ‘I never drank again for as long as I lived.’ But Iliodor knew nothing of any cures. He carried on raging against the Imperial Family, finally insisting that the Tsarina was ‘debauched’ and that Alexis was fathered by Rasputin.

  When the Synod failed to take action against Rasputin, Iliodor dismissed it as a ‘House of Pigs’ and signed a renunciation of faith in his own blood. Asked subsequently to give his religion at hotel reception desks, he declared himself Iliodorian.

  Through the early months of 1912, opposition to Rasputin continued to grow. The Speaker of the Duma, Alexander Guchkov, was known for resorting to fist fights during sessions, but he was uncharacteristically restrained in his fir
st speech against Rasputin, referring to him discreetly as ‘dark forces’. The Man of God was not fooled, writing a plaintive note: ‘Dear Papa and Mama! Now the accursed demon gains strength. And the Duma serves him, there are a lot of revolutionaries and Yids in it… And Guchkov, their lord… slanders and makes a discord…’

  On March 9, Guchkov made further discord with a more direct speech attacking Rasputin as ‘an enigmatic tragicomic figure, a kind of ghost or relic of age-old ignorance.’ He continued to rage: ‘By what avenues has this man achieved his central position? By having seized such influence that even the supreme bearers of State and Church power bow down before it!… Just think who is lording it at the summit!’ The Tsarina was furious, snapping back: ‘Guchkov needs to be on a high tree.’

  The Tsar’s mother, once so anxious about the Court mystic M. Philippe, was consumed with worry about the increasingly public controversy surrounding Rasputin. She arranged to meet her son and daughter-in-law for an urgent discussion and emerged believing she had carried the day. The Tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Xenia, wrote in her diary: ‘Mama is so pleased that she said everything… Alex [the Tsarina] defended Rasputin, saying he was a remarkable man and Mama should meet him… Mama merely advised them to let him go now… Alex declared that it was wrong to yield… But they were still very grateful to Mama for having spoken so frankly. And she even kissed Mama’s hand.’