Rasputin Read online

  It is hard to gauge what affect, if any, the Dowager’s words had upon the Imperial couple. It seems very unlikely that either was truly grateful for the Dowager’s ‘frankness’. The Tsar’s diary entry is particularly non-committal: ‘Mama came for tea; we had a conversation with her about Grigory.’

  But shortly afterwards, the Tsar asked the fearsome Mikhail Rodzyanko, President of the Duma, to launch an investigation into Rasputin’s life. In the course of several subsequent inquiries, Rodzyanko would hear of at least one woman petitioner instructed by Rasputin to return in a décolleté dress in order to secure her husband’s promotion. As Rasputin would put it: ‘All right, I’ll see to it. But come again tomorrow in an open dress with naked shoulders. Otherwise don’t bother.’

  Rodzyanko was under no illusion about the sensitive nature of his final report. Before seeing the Tsar, he steeled himself with a prayer in the Kazan Cathedral. The Tsar’s response to Rodzyanko’s brave denunciation is not recorded in any detail. But when Rodzyanko raised the thorny issue of women in the bath-house, the Tsar retorted that communal bathing was ‘accepted among the common people’. Rodzyanko seemed to make headway when he produced a picture of Rasputin dressed as a priest and the Tsar commented: ‘This time he’s gone too far.’ But the principal outcome of the report was to drive a wedge between Rodzyanko and the Tsar. The Tsar eventually refused to see him and cut him dead at a service commemorating the Battle of Borodino in Moscow in 1912. As Rodzyanko explained grimly: ‘His dissatisfation with me was my report on Rasputin.’

  It was during this same year that the 24-year-old Englishman, Gerald Hamilton, the model for Isherwood’s Mr Norris, paid Rasputin two visits. Hamilton saw nothing of any ‘dark forces’ and was, in fact, deeply impressed by Rasputin, particularly when he saw him performing a cure on a young epileptic boy. ‘The boy was brought forward by his mother and sat in a chair. Rasputin first looked at him; then he put his hands on him, muttering prayers. Later the boy twitched a lot, but Rasputin never took his hands off his chest. This huge man became paler and paler until finally the boy… got up and ran to his mother. It took about seven minutes in all.’

  After the cure, Hamilton recalled that Rasputin collapsed dramatically into a chair proclaiming: ‘All the good has gone out of me, and I must get new strength. I have been fighting the evil spirits in that poor boy.’ The story is slightly undermined by Hamilton’s recollection that the cure took place at Gorokhovaya Street when, in fact, Rasputin did not move there until 1914.

  Hamilton remained resolutely enamoured of Rasputin; he was not in the least put out when he heard that Rasputin did not care for the English: ‘I considered it a great privilege to have seen undeniable proof of his extraordinary gift of healing. It may seem profane to mention Jesus Christ in any connection with Rasputin but for all I know God may choose odd vessels to do his work.’

  As fresh attacks were launched in the Duma and at Court, it may have struck Rasputin’s beleaguered supporters that some vessels could be too odd.

  But in October 1912 an event occurred which raised Rasputin’s stock at the Palace and, for a while, rendered him unassailable. He was on one of his frequent visits to Pokrovskoye at the time: ‘going for a little home’, as the Tsarina put it blithely. The purpose of these endless returns was twofold: he appeased his detractors by keeping a low profile while gratifying his weakness for creature comforts and soft furnishings. He may even have welcomed a respite from the dizziness of his life in St Petersburg, with its unending array of colourful characters.

  As he was walking along the River Tura with his daughter Maria, he suddenly clutched his head and told her something had happened to the Tsarevich Alexis: ‘He’s been stricken.’ A couple of days later he received a telegram from Anna Vyrubova saying that Alexis was mortally ill in a hunting lodge at Spala, in Poland.

  The Rasputins were in the middle of a family lunch when the telegram had arrived. Rasputin made one of his fierce gestures at the maid, Dounia, to stop doing dishes, while he left the room to pray. He was grey and sweating when he reappeared, but immediately set about composing a reply. He loved sending telegrams, not least because he could leave any awkward spellings to the telegraphist. He sent two messages: ‘The Little One will not die…. Do not let the doctors bother him too much.’

  Alexis had injured his leg while jumping onto a boat. He seemed to have recovered, but the Tsarina had then taken him for a drive and the violent shaking of the carriage had brought on a stomach haemorrhage. His subsequent cries of pain were so heart-rending that the more sensitive servants resorted to ear-plugs. None of them would have known, at this point, that Alexis had haemophilia. His anxious doctors met regularly in Mossolov’s room. As Mossolov recalled: ‘None of the remedies which they prescribed sufficed to arrest the bleeding.’

  The eight-year-old boy himself was prepared to die, instructing his despairing parents to bury him beneath a blue sky and build a monument. The Tsar reluctantly agreed to issue a news bulletin announcing that the Tsarevich was ill; bulletins were posted as far away as Siberia. A tent erected on the lodge lawn for worship was soon being visited by weeping Polish peasants. The fervent Father Vassiliev performed the last rites.

  Alexis began to recover the day Rasputin’s first telegram arrived from Pokrovskoye. The Tsarina was convinced that, without Rasputin’s prayer, her son would have died. As she said to Mossolov: ‘It’s not the first time the starets [Holy Man] has saved his life.’ The doctors were apparently confounded. One of them, Professor Federov, had at one point asked Mossolov’s advice, asking whether he should risk experimenting without telling the Tsar or Tsarina. As Mossolov wrote: ‘Professor Federov said: “Should I prescribe without saying anything?”’ After the spectacular recovery, Mossolov asked Federov if he had applied some secret remedy; but Federov replied, tantalisingly, that even if he had, he couldn’t have admitted it.

  Alexis after Spala

  The Imperial Family

  The Tsarevich’s journey back to Russia was meticulously planned. The roads were smoothed between the hunting lodge and the station; the train to St Petersburg travelled at 15mph and never once used its brakes. Mossolov reported that the doctors at Spala were not consulted about the fragile Tsarevich’s departure and were deeply upset to have found themselves so promptly sidelined. When the Tsar described the crisis to his mother, he made no mention of Rasputin’s telegrams.

  Relations between ‘our Friend’ and the Palace had never been closer. By the time the Imperial family reached St Petersburg, Rasputin and his two daughters had also returned. The Tsarina telephoned on arrival and Maria gushed: ‘Mama, I have missed you.’ The girl was ecstatic to receive a further call, from Anna Vyrubova, issuing a coy invitation for tea to meet ‘a certain family’.

  The Tsarina’s view of the Russian aristocracy as decadent had been formed during her first days in the capital. Coming originally from the quieter German Court of Darmstadt, she had been shocked by the loose society, all-night parties and flaunted love affairs: ‘The heads of the young ladies of St Petersburg are filled with nothing but thoughts of young officers,’ she had sniffed.

  Her misgivings resulted in the Imperial children’s social lives being woefully restricted. Dr Botkin’s son, Gleb, recalled that their only friends were the children of Alexis’s sailor carer, Andrei Derevenko, and Rasputin’s two daughters. The Grand Duchesses met the Misses Rasputin relatively late on, in 1912; but for Gleb, it was not late enough: he dismissed them as ‘veritable street urchins’.

  In fact, Maria, now 14, had already been in St Petersburg for two years and was quite accomplished: able to play tennis, accompany herself singing and hold forth about fashion. Born Matryona, she had adopted the smarter name of ‘Maria’: she might have been glad to distance herself from the ragged mystic, Matryona the Barefoot.

  The Rasputin girls would have had a smattering of high culture from their father. The Man of God had developed an unlikely taste for opera and ballet; he was said to have
enjoyed particularly a performance by Chaliapin in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. And both sisters were, of course, suitably religious, praying for hours under Rasputin’s beady eye: such was their father’s strictness that they regarded sitting on their heels while kneeling as a major transgression.

  Nonetheless, Maria found her first tea at Anna Vyrubova’s house a challenge. She successfully selected a dress with a sailor’s collar, but admitted to being thrown, when, braced for a curtsey, she found herself swept up by the Tsarina for a kiss. She struggled to find a conversational gambit, finally hitting upon: ‘You must have hundreds of servants.’ The Tsarina agreed, putting Maria at her ease, but then added, less truthfully, that she could easily manage without them. Conversation between Maria and the young Grand Duchesses ran more smoothly, though the Tsarina would have disapproved of the topic: the Grand Duchesses enthused fancifully about the ‘handsome officers’ with whom they danced or played tennis.

  The eldest, Olga, plied Maria with questions about her life, both in Pokrovskoye and St Petersburg. The Grand Duchesses thought the Rasputins exotic because they went to school. The Tsarina had tried to get Maria and her sister Varya into the glamorous Smolny Institute for young ladies but both girls had been rejected. They were now happily installed at a regular Gymnasium. The Grand Duchesses were lost in admiration when they heard that the racy sisters enjoyed a weekly visit to the cinema.

  Maria maintained that the Tsarina was sufficiently taken with her to issue a separate invitation for dinner. Over prawns, herring and caviar, the Tsarina informed Maria that she must put her cutlery on a rack while she was eating. If she left knives or forks on her plate, it would be assumed that she had finished. The dinner was apparently rounded off with a rich dessert incorporating ten egg yolks and a quart of cream, called ice cream Romanov. After dinner, the Tsarina insisted that she loved Maria and wanted her to live at the Palace. The girl sat at the Tsarina’s knee on a silken pillow.

  On November 29, Rasputin received another clean bill of health from the Church. The endorsement had a slightly dodgy provenance, coming as it did from Bishop Alexis of Tobolsk, a known protector of the khlysty. Howeve, this would not have bothered Rasputin. Bishop Alexis had been happy to issue the endorsement and happier still to accept, as a reward, his promotion to Exarch of Georgia.

  The year 1913 marked the 300th year of Romanov rule. It also saw Rasputin over-reaching himself, becoming embroiled in ever more scrapes as he hogged prime spots during the grand celebrations.

  At the Kazan Cathedral, in February, he stationed himself in a seat reserved for members of the Duma. The Duma President Rodzyanko grew livid when, amid the finery, he spotted Rasputin in a sort of fancy dress: ‘He was luxuriously clad in a dark-raspberry silk peasant shirt, high patent leather boots, wide black trousers and a black peasant’s shirt.’ Rodzyanko ordered him to move, but the Man of God sat tight and glared at him. Rodzyanko then grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and, as Rasputin fell theatrically to his knees, kicked him in the ribs. Rasputin was removed by guards, tut-tutting: ‘Lord forgive him such sin.’ Rasputin’s temerity here is to be admired: Rodzyanko once described himself to the Tsarevich as the ‘largest, fattest man in Russia’. It was said that, on a clear day, his voice could be heard a full kilometre away.

  At another celebration, at Kostroma, in May, Rasputin again took a prominent seat next to the altar and refused to move. This time he managed to stay put, even though he technically had no right to be there at all: Vladimir Dzunkovsky, the former Governor of Moscow, had made a point of refusing his request for a ticket. The Tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Xenia, was horrified at witnessing the resulting ‘displeasure and protest among the clergymen’. At the Kremlin, Rasputin created a stir again, grabbing yet another coveted seat. Xenia noted in her diary that ‘Rasputin was all over the place… How will it all end?’

  She was smartly rebuffed when she expressed her worries to the Tsarina: ‘Of Grigory she said how could she not believe in him, when she saw how “The Little One” got better whenever he [Rasputin] was near him or praying for him.’ Felix Yussoupov’s mother went to the Palace to complain about Rasputin, at the behest of the Tsarina’s own sister Ella, but was given short shrift: ‘I hope we never meet again,’ snapped the Tsarina.

  From this point on there would be a split within the Romanovs. The Tsar’s immediate family supported Rasputin, while every other member opposed him. The Tsar’s mother, the Dowager, was bitterly disappointed that nothing had come of her ‘frank’ tea with her son and daughter-in-law: the ‘holy fool Grishka’ was still at Court: ‘She [her daughter-in-law] is bringing about her own downfall and that of the dynasty… She deeply believes in that dubious individual.’ She lamented to Rodzyanko: ‘My son is too pure of heart to believe in evil.’ In the end the Dowager gave her son a clear choice: if he would not send Rasputin away from St Petersburg, she herself would leave. She was the one who left, to live in Kiev.

  But the Imperial couple’s faith in ‘our Friend’ was not to be shaken. On July 16, the Tsar wrote in his diary that Alexis’s ‘right elbow began to hurt from waving his arms about too much while playing. He could not sleep for a long time and was in great pain, poor thing!’ Rasputin came the next day: ‘Soon after his departure the pain in Alexis’s arm started to disappear, he became calmer and began to fall asleep.’

  At the beginning of 1914, there was jubilation among Rasputin’s supporters when one of our Friend’s friends was appointed Prime Minister. The 75-year-old Ivan Goremykin had moustaches to his shoulders, fell asleep during meetings and jauntily referred to himself as ‘a man of the old school’ and an ‘old coat’. Yussoupov’s mother called him, more elaborately, ‘a fur coat in moth balls’. But Rasputin insisted that the elderly Goremykin understood one of life’s most important messages, that ‘one need not be shaken by the changing waves.’

  Goremykin replaced Vladimir Kokovstov, who had fallen from favour after an unfortunate tea with Rasputin. Kokovstov’s initial dismay over Rasputin’s table manners had given way to rage as he became convinced he was being hypnotised: ‘When tea was served, Rasputin seized a handful of biscuits, threw them into his tea and again fixed his lynx-like eyes on me.’ Kokovstov had appealed to the Tsar’s mother: ‘She wept bitterly and promised to speak to Nicholas. But she had little hope of success.’ Kokovstov had been, in any case, a marked man since labelling ‘our Friend’ a ‘Siberian tramp’.

  Rasputin and the new Prime Minister were as thick as thieves. The unlikely friendship forged between the two men marked Rasputin’s first real dabble in mainstream politics and gave rise to increasing consternation among his critics. Rasputin sent Goremykin streams of respectfully worded petitions: ‘Dear Elder of God, listen to them, assist them, if you can, with apologies, Grigory’; ‘Dear friend, be so kind do it for me.’ He would prepare piles of scribbled notes in advance and at some pains; as he was fond of saying: ‘I don’t even know the alphabet.’ On Goremykin’s birthday, Rasputin sent boxes of cigars and pheasants. He gave Goremykin’s wife cures over the telephone and she returned the compliment by delivering hot meals to his flat: she knew ten different ways to cook potatoes.

  During the early months of 1914, Rasputin enjoyed a period of relative calm. However many Romanovs were ranged against him, he enjoyed the support of the Tsar, the Tsarina and the Prime Minister of all the Russias.

  He moved to Gorokhovaya Street with his daughters Maria and Varya in May. The street was known for being down at heel. The impoverished anti-hero of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is often named as its most famous previous resident; in fact Raskolnikov’s squalid rooms were probably two streets away. But Gorokhovaya Street was situated yards from the station for trains to Tsarskoye Selo, where the Imperial family were spending most of their time. Within minutes of a phone summons, ‘our Friend’ could be well on his way to the Alexander Palace.

  A curious article published that summer boosted Rasputin’s reputation for extrasensory perception. The
writer wanted to test his actually rather shaky ‘gift for knowing people’. He showed him a portrait of Karl Marx and recorded his reaction. Rasputin became over-excited, switching on an electric light and examining Marx’s features closely: ‘He’s a Samson, my friend, a real Samson, yes, sir! Introduce me to him! We’ll go to see him right now! That’s somebody the people should follow in regiments!’ Though the test results were presented in a positive light, Rasputin’s comments were quite vague and he seemed to miss the crucial detail: that Marx had been dead more than 30 years.

  Such was Rasputin’s mood, at this point, that he was not in the least put out when the Tsar suggested that, despite the ostensible calm, he should return again to Pokrovskoye for a ‘bit of home’. He would have been consoled by 75,000 roubles from the Tsarina, smartly followed by a fond telegram dated April 9: ‘Pokrovskoye from Tsarskoye Selo for Novy. I am with you with all my heart, all my thoughts. Pray for me and Nicholas on the bright day [the anniversary of their engagement]. Love and kisses – Darling.’

  According to some reports the Tsar had, in fact, been intending to banish Rasputin to Pokrovskyoe for good; for all her reputation for stinginess, the Tsarina was proffering him a generous farewell gift. As it turned out, the irrepressible Man of God would return to St Petersburg within months.

  But it was while Rasputin was back in Pokrovskoye at the end of June that he suffered the first serious attempt on his life. He had been standing at the gate of his house, puzzling over a telegram from the Tsarina telling him that Alexis had twisted his ankle, when an ill-favoured woman asked him for money. As he groped about in his pockets for a modest five-kopeck piece, the woman stabbed him in the chest. ‘And I could feel blood pouring from me,’ he recalled.