Rasputin (13 page)

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.

B
ut 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.

His first reaction was to hit his assailant on the shoulder, but he then found himself defending her as she was set upon by a lynch mob of his supporters. Maria remembered the crowd shouting: ‘Kill her, we’ll drown her in the Tura.’ His proud boast at the time was ‘Grishka stood up for her.’ But he soon reverted to hostility, referring to her as ‘the slut who stuck a knife up my arse’.

His attacker, Khiona Guseva, was aged 33 and had no nose. Rasputin and his son, Dmitri, had noticed her at mass the preceding Sunday and Rasputin had reprimanded his son for pointing out how odd she looked. It was rumoured that, at 13, she had suffered a bad reaction to medicine and that her nose had become severely infected. There was another story that her nose had been lost, in adulthood, to syphilis.

Whatever happened, she could not, like Gogol’s hero of ‘The Nose’, simply have woken up without one. Gogol’s hero addressed the shame of being noseless after tracking down a giant-size version of his nose, praying in the Kazan Cathedral: ‘You will agree that it’s not done for someone in my position to walk around minus a nose. It’s all right for some old woman selling peeled oranges on the Voskresensky Bridge…’

But Rasputin was not interested in any poignant details: ‘If I had been stabbed by a beauty… But that noseless
stinker!’ he would rant. The Pokrovskoye police description of Guseva was stark: ‘nose absent, irregular hole in place’.

He would have been horrified to hear subsequent rumours that Guseva was his former lover. But then it was said that she had once been a milliner and nicknamed ‘little princess’ because of her elegant bearing and intellectual finesse. The truth was that she now lived in Tsaritzyn, home town of Rasputin’s staunchest current enemy, Iliodor. She was a devoted follower of Iliodor, who was convinced that she had lost her nose after nobly asking God to take away her beauty.

At the beginning of that summer, Iliodor is said to have strung a knife around Guseva’s neck and ordered her to kill Rasputin. She had dutifully stalked her victim from Yalta to St Petersburg and finally to Pokrovskoye. There she had rented a room and kept watch over the lavish Rasputin house from a window. During the day, she had stationed herself strategically on a particular wooden bench. At her subsequent trial Guseva was invited to plead insanity or ‘religious ecstasy’. She refused, insisting she was sane, but still ended up, a mad hatter, in the Tomsk Regional Clinic for the Insane.

After the stabbing, Rasputin was carried into his house. His devoted wife Praskovia sent plates crashing to the floor as she cleared the dining table. He was laid out and operated on by a doctor using just the light from a candle. Maria wrote proudly that her father refused any anaesthetic. A priest was called to hear his last confession and, according to Maria, the Rasputins’ lachrymose icon of the Virgin of Kazan wept again: a
servant who was dusting the Virgin’s face spotted drops of water. Rasputin sent a lurid telegram to the Tsarina: ‘That hunk of carrion struck me with a knife.’ Her reply was equally passionate: ‘Our grief is beyond description, we hope for God’s goodness.’

He had to be taken in a carriage to Tyumen for another operation. According to Maria, well-wishers gathered outside the house: ‘Peasants weeping and lamenting escorted the stretcher.’ Along the way, Maria and Dounia cushioned Rasputin’s body against Trakt 4’s infamous bumps.

When they reached the hospital, Rasputin was robust enough to insist that he wanted no journalists within cannon shot. But one canny reporter, from the
Stock Exchange News
, managed to inveigle his way into Rasputin’s ward, reporting: ‘He sat worn out by ill health in a hospital smock.’ The doctor who operated on Rasputin received a gold watch from his grateful patient and orders were issued to female carers ‘not to wear corsets’. There was clearly life in the old dog. Among visitors during his 46-day stay, bringing gifts from the faithful, was his most voluptuous ‘little lady’, Akilina Laptinskaya.

I
n August 1914, while Rasputin was still at State Hospital 649, war was declared. Rasputin was much upset, tearing his bandages and shouting: ‘Let Papa and Mama not plan war.’ He insisted he’d had a dream
in which he saw the ‘Neva [river] full of the blood of Grand Dukes’. He apparently wrote with curious lucidity to the Tsar: ‘You are the Tsar, the father of your people. Don’t let the lunatics triumph and destroy you and the people. And if we conquer Germany, what, in truth, will happen to Russia? We all drown in blood: the disaster is great; the misery infinite.’ He dispatched a more characteristic telegram to the Palace, which was unfortunately leaked to the Duma: ‘Don’t declare war. Fire Nikolasha [Grand Duke Nicholas].’

Rasputin had turned against Grand Duke Nicholas. He was no longer grateful for his generosity regarding Praskovia’s hysterectomy and made no secret of his new-found disapproval of the Grand Duke’s marriage to the Black Princess Anastasia. The Grand Duke had, in his turn, lost faith in the dog-healing Man of God. He had been shocked by Rasputin’s attacks on saints and churchmen, dismayed by his opposition to the war and mortified to hear of attacks upon himself. But at this early stage, the Tsar was in agreement with Grand Duke Nicholas, making one of his few, short-lived stands against Rasputin: ‘Our domestic affairs are not subject to the influence of others.’

During his recuperation, Rasputin visited another of his controversial cleric friends, Bishop Varnava, in Tobolsk. Rasputin had been behind Varnava’s unpopular promotion to Bishop. The Bishop, in turn, had proved his own loyalty to Rasputin by joining the voluptuous ‘little lady’ Laptinskaya at his hospital bedside. Varnava’s eccentric tastes included a predilection for having photographs taken of himself in coffins. The Tsarina,
however, found him decidedly unphotogenic, comparing him to a ‘rodent with bushy tail and fat body’.

On his journey back to Pokrovskoye, Rasputin decided to protect himself from further attacks by dressing up in a white dress and bonnet. Coincidentally, at almost the same moment, the murderous Iliodor was fleeing across the Russian border, also dressed as a woman.

When Rasputin returned to St Petersburg, he found it much changed. The city had been renamed the more Russian ‘Petrograd’. As the troops were mobilised, a wave of patriotism had swept throughout Russia, with daily demonstrations held to support the Tsar. ‘For Faith, Tsar and Country’ and ‘For the Defence of Holy Russia’ were the rallying calls from factories and villages.

Upon his arrival at the flat, Rasputin phoned Anna Vyrubova and asked to see the Tsarina. Told he must wait a couple of days, he banged down the phone in annoyance. The ‘Tsars’ were reluctant to meet him because they knew of his opposition to the war. When they were all finally reunited, at Anna Vyrubova’s house, Rasputin wept, while predicting more tears and blood: ‘Dear friend, I will say again, a menacing cloud is over Russia… Lots of sorrow and grief, it is dark and there is no lightening to be seen.’ The Tsarina made no reply, while the Tsar continued sipping his tea.

In the end Rasputin accepted that his opposition to the war would cost him vital support at Court. He performed one of his adroit about-turns and was soon confiding in the French Ambassador: ‘I am always telling the Tsar that he must fight until complete victory is
won,’ adding hastily: ‘I’m also telling him that war has brought unbearable suffering to the Russian people.’

However, he was not going to drop his stand against Grand Duke Nicholas. As the Tsarina wrote to her husband: ‘Grigory loves you jealously and can’t bear N taking a part.’ Grand Duke Nicholas, in turn, roundly vetoed Rasputin’s suggestion that he visit the battlefront: ‘Come and I’ll hang you.’

The Tsarina soon found Rasputin indispensable as a war-time helpmeet, particularly valuing his endorsement of her gruelling hospital visits. She wrote giddily to her husband: ‘27 Oct. 1914, We are going to another hospital now directly… We shall go as sisters (our Friend likes us to) & tomorrow also.’ ‘21 November: this is the wire I just received from our Friend: “When you comfort the wounded God makes His name famous through your gentleness and glorious work”. So touching & must give me strength to get over my shyness.’ ‘28 November… At times I feel I can’t any more & fill myself with heart-drops & it goes again – & our Friend wishes me beside to go.’

Rasputin himself would not have been so welcome. Many at the Imperial Court were put out by his burgeoning interest in the war wounded. Dr Botkin’s son, Gleb, imagined the shocked reaction of soldiers on the steps of a military hospital, upon hearing the words of the Palace Commandant: ‘The carriage for Mr Rasputin.’

T
hat autumn the Man of God was himself fighting battles on various fronts. Aside from dealing with a growing band of enemies, he was plagued by worries that his powers were failing. In the previous year he had, according to the secret police, been reduced to brushing up his techniques as a hypnotist. The Okhrana had found a letter from Rasputin asking for lessons in hypnosis. A surveillance agent reported that the teacher of hypnotism had a moustache and was ‘swarthy of face’.

Neither of ‘the Tsars’, needless to say, had any inkling of Rasputin’s self-doubt. Shortly after their emotional tea, the Tsarina summoned him back to the Palace to help Alexis and pray by the boy’s bedside. The Tsarina wrote to the Tsar: ‘19 September… You, I know, notwithstanding all you will have to do, will still miss yr little family & precious agoo wee one [Alexis]. He will quickly get better now that our Friend has seen him & that will be a great relief to you.’

The Tsarina met Rasputin regularly at Anna Vyrubova’s house during this period. But, for all her confidence in ‘our Friend’, she was still worried about being seen with him: ‘23 Sept… Ania [as she called Anna] was offended I did not go to her, but she had lots of guests, & our Friend for three hours.’ The following day they did meet. She wrote to the Tsar: ‘24 Sept… flew for half an hour… to Ania’s house, as our Friend spent the afternoon with her & wanted to see me. He asked after you… may God give you courage, strength & patience – faith you have more than ever and it is this wh. keeps you up… And our Friend helps you carry yr. heavy cross and great responsibilities.’

Such was her faith in Rasputin as strategist that she was soon suggesting that she herself make contact with Nicholas Maklakov, the Minister of the Interior: ‘25 October… Our Friend came for an hour in the evening; he will await yr return and then go off for a little home… our Friend wishes me quickly to speak to Maklakov as he says one must not waste time until your return.’

When the Tsar returned to the Palace, he too gleaned support from Rasputin, writing at the end of October: ‘Felt utter fury against the Germans and Turks for their foul attack in the Black Sea! Only in the evening, under the influence of Grigory’s soothing words, did my soul regain its equilibrium.’