Rasputin Read online

  Rasputin was jubilant; as he had already told one of his policemen: ‘Your Dzunkovsky’s finished.’ But the young Grand Duchesses would have been disappointed to see him go: they were great fans of his repertoire of bird calls.

  The Tsarina’s angry response was especially incoherent; it is hard to tell whether she was more exasperated with Dzunkovsky or her husband. ‘He acts as a traitor and not as a devoted subject who ought to stand up for the Friends of his Sovereign,’ she wrote to the Tsar. ‘You see how he turns your words & orders round – the slanderers were to be punished… ah, it’s so vile… If we let our Friend be persecuted we & our country shall suffer for it. Ah my love, when at last will you thump with her (sic) hand upon the table & scream at Dzunkovsky & others when they act wrongly – one does not fear you – they must be frightened of you.’

  When Rasputin eventually saw the Tsar, he successfully defended himself with his usual pleas: it was hard for those seeking the path of truth and righteousness; he was a ‘sinful man’ but he couldn’t help it. ‘Despite my terrible sins, I am a Christ in miniature.’

  Nikolai Sablin, the Commander of the Imperial yacht, the Standart, carried out a further investigation. He admitted later that he had been reluctant to mention the incident at the Yar to the Tsarina as it had had a ‘morbid effect on her’. Sablin himself found tales of Rasputin’s debauchery hard to believe, particularly when they involved women in elevated circles: ‘It seemed impossible that any society woman, unless possibly a psychopath, could give herself to such a slovenly peasant.’

  Rasputin’s supporters found various defences for his worsening behaviour. The Tsarina came to believe that an imposter was posing as Rasputin and misbehaving in clubs. Others insisted any deterioration was linked to mental and physical trauma resulting from his stabbing in Pokrovskoye. As for Rasputin himself, he always had a homily to hand: ‘It is wrong to pretend they [human desires] do not exist and to allow them through neglect to atrophy.’ Of saints he would add that they ‘turn to filth in order that, amid the filth, their aureole may shine with double brightness’.

  Rasputin was becoming ever more brazen in his attitude to women. He took the adage ‘faint heart never won fair maiden’ a stage further, making aggressive passes at any woman not classifiable as ‘elderly’. ‘Is there something on your conscience that you haven’t dared tell your confessor?’ he would say to women. He would allude to the sex lives of horses before making his moves: ‘Come, my lovely mare.’ His female visitors were expected to feel blessed as he distributed boiled eggs in his soiled hands or gave them lumps of black bread dripping with soup. After enjoying his favourite fish stew, he would generously proffer a finger: ‘Lick it clean.’

  Confusing his prey, he would somehow succeed in occupying the moral high ground: his lust for a woman would be a measure of her impurity. He must have judged one princess, upon whom he advanced without preliminaries, as exceedingly impure: ‘You are a tasty dish,’ he cajoled her, fondling her breasts and sticking his fingers inside her collar. ‘You know where the spirit is?’ he asked her, before lifting the hem of her dress. ‘It’s here.’ He owned a sofa so overused that its back had given way. Though he himself had been leaning on it when it broke, he always blamed one particular large woman: ‘It’s all the sister from Simbirsk…. It’s goblinery.’

  And yet Rasputin always took a protective stance when it came to the women close to him. On one occasion, he took the Tsarina’s confidante, Lili Dehn, to task after seeing her out walking with a strange man who was, in fact, her own father. And his daughters were well supervised: suitors were allowed only half an hour to discuss fashion before being unceremoniously thrown out. These lofty attitudes he combined with finely honed advances upon married women: ‘You have sad eyes. He torments you a lot.’

  He considered fellow travellers on the long train journey from Petrograd to Pokrovskoye fair game. He liked trains, saying: ‘Without railroads a peasant has to stay home because he can’t walk all through Siberia.’ This statement was, of course, untrue: he had once chosen to cover hundreds of miles on foot rather than stay home. One of the best advantages of train journeys, for Rasputin, was the endless opportunities they offered for ‘rejoicing’. There was a Madame S. whom he tried to seduce in his carriage, backing off only when she pulled his beard. Another female traveller was spotted in his compartment ‘lying with the elder in her undergarments’.

  His female visitors were expected to feel blessed as he distributed boiled eggs in his soiled hands or gave them lumps of black bread dripping with soup. After enjoying his favourite fish stew, he would generously proffer a finger: ‘Lick it clean.’

  He could not excuse his behaviour with pleas of deprivation. Although he hadn’t had sexual relations with his wife since her hysterectomy, his Siberian maid Dounia, smitten since the age of 14, had been more than happy to move to Petrograd and step into Praskovia’s shoes. According to Maria, their relationship had begun after he made a sudden lunge at her as she undressed him, provocatively, in her nightgown.

  Prominent among his ‘little ladies’ at Gorokhovaya Street was the voluptuous Akilina Laptinskaya, described by a banker friend of Rasputin as a ‘woman of inordinate corpulence’. Laptinskaya was something of a renaissance woman. A former nun and trained nurse, she worked for Rasputin as a secretary and financial assistant. She also took on the humbler tasks of supplying him with glasses of water and pieces of fruit. Finally, it fell to her to be ever ready, like ‘Sister Maria’, to relieve his tension. Police guards, supplied by the Palace, would peer, agog, through the uncurtained kitchen windows as Rasputin advanced upon her.

  Laptkinskaya explained his process: ‘He would be surrounded by his admirers, with whom he also slept… He would caress them… and when he or they felt like it he would simply take them into this study and do his business… I often heard his views, a mixture of religion and debauchery. He would sit there and give instructions to his female admirers. “Do you think that I degrade you? I don’t degrade you. I purify you.” That was his basic idea. He also used the word “grace” meaning that by sleeping with him a woman came into the grace of God.’

  Reading her lucid testimony, it is tempting to cling to Laptinskaya as some kind of voice of sanity. But she had been distinctly unstable when Rasputin first met her. As a nun, she had suffered a run-in with the mad monk Iliodor, in the course of which she claimed he raped her and he claimed she seduced him. The result was that, by the time Rasputin came across her, she was confined to her cell, clutching at the walls and talking with a deep voice. Rasputin apparently restored her to her senses with the words: ‘I order you to be silent.’

  Another ‘little lady’ was Olga Lokhtina, a former St Petersburg society hostess, whom Rasputin had once cured of neurasthenia. Maria claimed her father had undergone months of celibacy before meeting Lokhtina; she had greeted him at her front door in a peignoir and he had been unable to resist her. Days after meeting him, she had forsaken her husband and daughter and followed him to Pokrovskoye. According to one account she travelled the 1,600 miles on foot.

  Such was Lokhtina’s devotion that she teamed a white be-ribboned dress with an unattractive wolfskin bonnet given to her by Rasputin. She passed her time chanting psalms and canticles, weighed down by twelve copies of the Gospels which she hung around her neck. She would bring Rasputin cake, then lie on his battered sofa, while he kneaded her breasts. Their relationship at some point developed a sadomasochistic edge and he started beating her, calling her ‘mad bitch’ as she shouted, ‘Christ is risen.’ ‘She won’t let me alone. She demands sin,’ he would protest, as she responded: ‘You are God,’ while yanking his penis.

  When the ‘little ladies’ returned to Pokrovskoye ‘for a little home’, Lokhtina would bathe with Rasputin, his wife Praskovia and two daughters, proclaiming: ‘Bad and dirty thoughts occur only to bad people.’ The stolid Praskovia took everything in her stride. It was said, by Simanovich, that she and Grigory ‘had a sincere friendship
and never quarrelled’ and her constant response to his enthusiastic ‘rejoicing’ was an enigmatic: ‘He has enough for all.’ Praskovia did once throw Lokhtina out of the house by her hair; but only because Lokhtina had called her stingy. She and Grigory both took a dim view of parsimony. The Tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Olga, complained that the Tsarina gave Rasputin sashes, crosses and patent-leather boots. His complaint was that she gave him only icons and bric-a-brac: ‘It’s terrible how stingy she is.’ However, he did treasure one of the Tsarina’s crosses, refusing to check it in at the bathhouse and preferring to stow it in the toe of his shoe with a sock.

  Bishop Feofan once commented mildly that Rasputin was ‘unrestrained in his treatment of the female sex… He stroked them with his hand during conversation’. Others were less reticent; the American Ambassador George T. Marye made an unfavourable comparison between Rasputin and Tiberius: ‘The storied infamies of the Emperor Tiberius on the Isle of Capri are made to seem moderate and tame.’ A journalist wrote grimly: ‘In place of the Imperial Standard, floated Rasputin’s undergarment.’

  But the Tsarina was not to be distracted by what she regarded as idle chitchat. With Russia at war, she must consolidate the power of the Man of God. ‘He sees far ahead, therefore his judgement can be relied upon,’ she told her husband. ‘Hearken unto our Friend, believe him… All my trust lies in our Friend.’ She closed one letter with the confident prediction: ‘a country where a Man of God helps the Sovereign will never be lost.’

  She and Rasputin were increasingly thrown together while the Tsar spent more time at the battlefront. Their alliance was probably strengthened by their alienation from what might be called conventional society. The Siberian peasant and the German-born Empress were both outsiders and both, broadly speaking, unpopular. Their developing bond was already regarded with alarm by most of the Tsar’s relations and a significant swathe of the Russian people. It would, in time, be regarded with deep suspicion the world over.

  But there seems to have been nothing improper about the relationship. 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. In a letter she drew the Tsar as a babe in arms and wrote: ‘Be more autocratic, my very own sweetheart… Sweety mine… don’t laugh, you naughty one. It is war.’

  Rasputin, as usual, echoed and re-enforced her sentiments. What he actually thought about the Tsar’s capabilities remains a mystery, but he didn’t mind dabbling in a bit of diablerie and disrespect: ‘Papa understands nothing and cannot cope,’ he wrote once, adding: ‘He’s afraid of everyone. He looks round to see if anyone is eavesdropping.’ No wonder the Tsar began resorting to drugs: ‘Hope the cocain [sic] worked well,’ wrote the Tsarina.

  Neither would have seen anything treacherous, however, in Rasputin’s insults. The Tsarina was convinced she was operating in Russia’s best interests: her love for her husband was matched by a fierce loyalty to her adoptive country. Rasputin was, as he saw it, simply strengthening the position of the brighter of ‘the Tsars’.

  Among the pair’s early, humbler projects was stopping Rasputin’s son, Dmitri, then aged 20, from going to the front. The Tsarina intervened on his behalf: ‘Our Friend is in despair his boy has to go to war.’ So while Romanov princes were being slaughtered in battle, Dmitri Rasputin was safely installed in Petrograd as a medical orderly.

  Their next venture was infinitely more ambitious: the ousting of Grand Duke Nicholas, at that point Commander of the million-strong Russian Army. The Tsarina wrote elaborately to her husband: ‘Sweetheart needs pushing always & to be reminded that he is the Emperor & can do whatsoever pleases him – you never profit of this – you must show you have a way & will of yr. own & and not led by N [Grand Duke Nicholas] & his staff, who direct yr movements.’ Rasputin, she added: ‘Does not like N going with you, finds everywhere better alone… N was our Friend’s enemy and brings bad luck.’ For herself she added: ‘I have absolutely no faith in N – know him to be far from clever and, having gone against a Man of God, his word can’t be blessed.’

  When the Tsar eventually capitulated, his wife moved promptly to the next nag: ‘May the replacement of Nikolasha take place rapidly. No beating about the bush.’ Upon hearing of the campaign against him, Grand Duke Nicholas went to Rasputin’s flat and berated him, calling him an ‘ungrateful pig’. After the Grand Duke stormed out, Rasputin fell to his knees before an icon, praying for those who ‘spitefully use God’.

  The Grand Duke’s replacement, it emerged, was to be the Tsar himself. The decision proved deeply unpopular: the stout-hearted Dowager, the Tsar’s mother, had already voiced her worries. She wrote in her diary on August 12 1915: ‘He started to talk about assuming supreme command instead of Nikolai. I was so horrified I almost had a stroke… I added that if he did it, everyone would think it was at Rasputin’s bidding, I think this made an impression as he blushed deeply!’ But the Tsarina heartily approved of her husband’s promotion. On September 10 1915, she wrote: ‘Our Friend read their cards in time, and came to save you by entreating you to clear out Nikolasha and take over the Command yourself.’

  Before departing for the front, Tsar Nicholas met his Cabinet, who pleaded with him to change his mind. Ten ministers had signed a petition registering their objection. He was sweating and clutching an icon as he rose to his feet: ‘I have heard what you say, but I adhere to my position.’

  Clinging to his conviction that his rule was divinely ordained, the Tsar was now as isolated as he was obdurate. He believed he must not allow himself to be swayed by his ministers: ‘He… convinced himself (or perhaps was convinced by his wife) that on the day of his coronation in 1896 he had sworn to uphold autocracy,’ writes the historian Richard Pipes.

  A much-quoted article written by Vasily Maklakov, a conservative member of the Duma, seemed to capture the public imagination. Maklakov likened the Tsar to an incompetent driver on a dangerous road: ‘The driver’s slightest mistake will send the vehicle plunging down a precipice, killing all passengers. Among the passengers are capable drivers, but the chauffeur refuses to yield the wheel to them, confident that they will not seize it by force, for fear of a fatal accident.’

  After reading the article, Yussoupov attempted to include the outspoken Maklakov in a plot to get rid of Rasputin. Though Maklakov did not want to be directly involved, he did supply Yussoupov with a useful cudgel. He was not against the idea of murder, even coming up with his own scheme. Rasputin, he suggested, should be knocked on the head and run over; a victim, it would appear, of yet another incompetent driver.

  The Tsar had his moments of rebellion. Against the Tsarina and Rasputin’s advice, he insisted upon taking the fragile Alexis to the stavka, his military headquarters at the front, at Mogilev. But this gesture backfired horribly on one occasion when Alexis developed a nosebleed and the pair were obliged to turn back. The attack was so bad that Alexis’s tutor Pierre Gilliard thought that the boy might die. The Imperial train reversed at a snail’s pace, coming to a complete halt every time the boy’s bandages had to be changed.

  Upon their return, Rasputin refused, for the first and only time, to come to Alexis’s aid. He may have been smarting after his advice had been flouted. In any case, he gave instructions on the phone and did not appear at the Palace until the following day. Upon reaching Alexis’s room, he made the sign of the cross and dropped to his knees to pray: ‘Don’t be alarmed, nothing will happen.’ The boy’s bleeding stopped, but it was later claimed that he recovered simply because one of the Court doctors had cauterised the wound. Six days later, the Tsar returned to the front alone.

  At the stavka, the Tsar accrued a growing battery of Rasputin-abilia, forced upon him by his wife, with accompanying instructions. First there was the vial of wine, used to celebrate Rasputin’s name day, January 25: ‘Pour it into a glass and drink it all up for His [sic
] health.’ Then there was the comb: ‘Comb your hair before the sitting of the ministers. The little comb will bring its help.’ Finally, there was a mysterious stick topped with a fish holding a bird: ‘I send you a stick wh. was sent to Him fr. New Athos to give to you – he used it first & now sends it to you as a blessing – if you can sometimes use it, wld. be nice & have it in yr. compartment near the one Mr Ph[ilippe] touched, is nice too.’

  Back in the capital, the Tsarina was increasingly left to her own devices. But she had every confidence in herself: ‘Silly old wifey has trousers on unseen and was ready to lead.’ And she was more than willing: ‘God wishes your poor wifey to be your help, Gr always says so & Mr Ph too – & I might warn you in time if I knew things.’ Rasputin was, as ever, close at hand: ‘I’ll ask our Friend’s advice. So often he has sound ideas… Our Friend is always praying and thinking of the war.’ Rasputin’s thoughts could be quite specific: ‘Our Friend praying and crossing himself about Romania and Greece & our troops passing through… Says no more fogg wil disturb… Khvostov (Minister of the Interior) brought your secret marche route to me and I won’t say a word about it except to our Friend to guard you everywhere.’

  At one point Rasputin had a useful dream: ‘He saw in the night one should advance near Riga,’ reported the Tsarina. Otherwise he was full of general tips such as ‘firmness is a rock and wavering is death to all.’ The wavering Tsar tried, to an extent, to be receptive to ‘our Friend”s ideas. He was certainly witnessed by Alexis’s English tutor throwing a letter from one of Rasputin’s detractors in the bin: ‘This is another of those denunciations of Grigory. I get them almost every day and throw them away unread.’ Nonetheless, he once added a pleading postscript to one of his letters to the Tsarina: ‘Please lovy mine don’t mention these details to anybody. I only wrote them down for you.’