The Rasputin File (17 page)

her purely Christian forgiveness in regard to those she had been compelled to endure inside the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress. This was the taunting of the guards, which expressed itself in spitting in her face and removing her clothing and undergarments, along with blows to her face and other parts of her body …I should note that I heard about the taunting not from her but from her mother. Vyrubova confirmed it all with a remarkable lack of rancour, explaining that they weren’t responsible, for ‘they know not what they do.’

It is true, she asked him not to punish those responsible, so as not to make her situation worse. So, without even checking on whether there had in fact been any taunting, Rudnev believed her and transferred her out of the fortress.

But she saved her trump card for the end. The provincial investigator knew about the legend of which all Russia was talking: that Vyrubova had been ‘the concubine of the tsar and of Rasputin’. And as if taking care that the good man should know the whole truth about her, she insisted on an evidentiary medical examination. And Rudnev was amazed: Vyrubova was a virgin. Now he believed her unreservedly. And was prepared to shut his eyes to the ‘white lies’ Vyrubova had spoken to his face. In his summary he wrote: ‘She enjoyed no influence whatever at court, nor could she, since there was too great an advantage in quality of intellect and will in the empress in comparison with the limited, weak-willed, but selflessly devoted and ardently affectionate Vyrubova.’ Thus wrote Rudnev of the most influential woman in Russia. The poor provincial could not even begin to suspect the exquisite psychological and erotic intrigues engaged in by the woman under his investigation. And he therefore added his voice to the many-voiced chorus of witnesses who spoke unanimously in their interrogations of the ‘naive and dim-witted’ Vyrubova. True, the majority of those witnesses would perish in the revolution, while the ‘naive and dim-witted’ Vyrubova would survive intact. The tsarina’s friend would know how to make good use of the revolutionary writer Gorky and the revolutionary leader Trotsky to break out of her cell. Upon regaining her freedom, she would, while hiding out in Petrograd, initiate a correspondence with the tsarina and even attempt to free her! And she would succeed as well in organizing her own flight from Bolshevik Russia! That woman, who dismissed and installed ministers and who from time to time even ruled the iron will of the last tsarina, knew how to look like a simple-hearted Russian scatterbrain. That mask of convenience had long since become her face.

Anya’s Game

By the time Anya met Rasputin, she was already close to the throne. Her father, Alexander Sergeevich Taneev, a stout little old man who spoke nothing but pleasantries to everyone, performed the duties of director-in-chief of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancery. It was something of a family post: her grandfather and great-grandfather had occupied it over the reigns of three emperors. On her mother’s side, she had even inherited royal genes;
among her ancestors was an illegitimate child of the mad emperor Paul. In 1904 she was presented to the empress and received the royal monogram and rank of municipal maid of honour. Alix immediately realized that she had found a Friend. A year later, in 1905, Anya was already accompanying the empress on the royal yacht,
Polar Star
. ‘During the trip, the empress complained that she had no friends outside the family, and that she felt like a stranger,’ she explained under interrogation.

Anya understood the tsarina at once. The observant Vyrubova would in her memoirs precisely describe the consistently peremptory personality of the lonely Alix. But she would be observant only in her book. In life and at the palace she had chosen a different role, the only possible one, given the tsarina’s personality: ‘kind and simple-hearted’. The devoted girl, hanging on the empress’s every word and astonished by her ideas. That is how Anya made her appearance in the life of the royal family not long before Rasputin’s own arrival in their midst. And very soon, Anya started turning up in the tsar’s diary.

‘9 January 1906. Sergei and A. A. Taneeva had breakfast with us’; ‘4 February. A. A. Taneeva joined us for breakfast.’ The young maid of honour had in the briefest span of time become a character in the tsar’s diary and in all their lives. And had immediately thrust the Montenegrin princesses out of the tsarina’s heart. At the same time, the sage Anya was visiting Militsa’s palace. To study mysticism, for which the tsarina had such a passion.

In 1907 Anya got married. Or, more accurately, was compelled to marry. Rumours of far too dangerous a kind had started to circulate about the close friendship between Anya and the tsarina. The court viewed the appearance of the new favourite with jealousy.

Filippov, Rasputin’s banker and publisher and someone located at the centre of Petersburg life, testified in the File that ‘Vyrubova’s friendship with the empress was explained by some in court spheres as an intimacy grounded in sexual psychopathology.’ And the monarchist A. Bogdanovich, the wife of the general who served as the warden of Saint Isaac’s, the largest cathedral in Russia, would more than once record in her diary the words of courtiers about the ‘unnatural friendship’ of Vyrubova and the tsarina.

In order to put a stop to the rumours, the devoted Anya decided to sacrifice herself and get married. And she married a modest naval officer, Lieutenant Alexander Vyrubov, though it is true that he owned a rather large estate.

From Nicholas’s diary for 4 February 1907: ‘Anna Taneeva presented her future husband Vyrubov.’ Once a married woman, she could no longer be
a maid of honour, and the court would be pacified. ‘The poor empress sobbed like a Moscow merchant’s wife giving up her daughter to be married,’ Witte mockingly wrote in his memoirs.

And, of course, the tsarina had asked Vyrubova to talk to the seer Rasputin about her marriage. And Anya, who at once grasped what Militsa had failed to grasp — the peasant’s role in the palace, set off to Militsa’s to make Our Friend’s acquaintance. In order to be able to bring back to the palace what Alix wanted to hear: the most rapturous impressions.

In point of fact, Anya’s marriage changed neither her life nor her situation.

The File, from the testimony of Vyrubova: ‘In 1907 I married Lieutenant Alexander Vasilievich Vyrubov, and when we came back from our honeymoon we rented a dacha, first in Petersburg and then in Tsarskoe Selo’ (since that is where the royal family lived). ‘My husband was reassigned to the Field Chancery, and in that same year of 1907 we accompanied the royal family to the sea.’ Vyrubov had been assigned to the chancery so that the friends would not be parted.

The singer Alexandra Belling saw Vyrubova at the time. ‘I met her at a musical evening,’ Belling recalled:

She had just been married and was happy … Her husband, a round-faced dark-haired sailor, never left her side, and constantly gazed into her eyes. She laughed continuously and, it appeared, was enjoying life … ‘That’s terribly funny!’ she said to me. ‘You got married on the ninth, and Ion the eleventh.’ And she burst into infectious laughter …But in spite of her gaiety, affectionate voice, sweet smile, and kind eyes, one did not sense sincerity in her, or anything that might have disposed one to credulity … One evening, as I … was singing … and Vyrubova was sitting with her hands over her face and listening … someone came in and announced that Anna Alexandrovna was ‘requested’. She became agitated and hurried out. After a few moments she reappeared in the doorway of the living room with a magnificent white boa round her neck, which made her look quite stunning, and with a splendid bouquet of bright red roses, which she handed to me, warmly thanking me and hugging me, and, as if in pain, pressing her forehead to mine.

And so she had it all: a honeymoon and happiness and a husband who gazed into her eyes. But ‘after living with her husband for a year and a half, Vyrubova testified before the Extraordinary Commission, ‘I was divorced from him, since it turned out he was suffering from mental illness …He went to Switzerland for treatment — I forget which city — and then we divorced, so I have not seen him since.

The investigator Rudnev sympathetically recalled, ‘According to Taneeva’s mother, the daughter’s husband had proved to be completely impotent, with an extremely perverse sexual psychology that manifested itself in various sadistic episodes in which he inflicted moral suffering on her and evoked a feeling of utter disgust.’

Had Vyrubova’s husband really been a complete psychopath who had then disappeared from view into a Swiss clinic? Not at all. Vyrubova’s former spouse remarried, and from 1913 to 1917 lived quietly on his estate. He was held in high esteem in his district, and had even been elected district marshal of the nobility in the city of Polotsk. So it is obvious why the courtiers regarded the reasons given for her divorce with great suspicion and returned even more insistently to their earlier theme.

And the general’s wife Bogdanovich, the hostess of a monarchist salon, wrote in her diary for 2 February 1908 that Zilloti, an aide to the chief of the naval high command related how struck everyone has been by the young tsarina’s strange friendship with her former maid of honour Taneeva, who married Vyrubov… When during a trip to the skerries the boat got stuck on a rock, the royal family spent the night on the yacht. The tsar slept alone in a cabin, while the tsarina took Vyrubova to her stateroom and spent the night alone with her in the same bed.’

Basing her account on the word of Dolly Kochubei, née the Duchess of Leichtenberg (and thus a relative of the Romanovs), Bogdanovich sets forth the reason for the divorce as follows: ‘10 June 1908 …An unnatural friendship exists between the tsarina and Taneeva, and…Taneeva’s husband, Vyrubov, apparently…found among her things some letters from the tsarina that led to mournful thoughts.’ The general’s wife would frequently return to the topic: ‘6 February 1909. The young tsarina has had a severe attack of neurasthenia… which has been attributed to her abnormal friendship with Vyrubova. Something isn’t right in Tsarskoe Selo.’

‘Something Isn’t Right In Tsarskoe Selo

But how could she have lived with someone who was impotent and a sadist and yet still play at being the happy couple that Belling so vividly describes? Perhaps she really was happy in those years, happy precisely because her husband was impotent and did not touch her. And only when he tried to master himself and, as they put it in the eighteenth century, direct ‘an arrow into her quiver’, did he seem so terribly ‘sadistic and disgusting’ to her.
Perhaps that was why the unhappy Lieutenant Vyrubov had turned into a ‘psychopath in that year and a half. And if this is true, and she did reveal an aversion to men, then it is clear why even later that beautiful young woman had no man in her life. For in 1917, a full ten years after her divorce from Vyrubov, she was still a virgin!

Although there would be numerous flirtations in her life; flirtations for the sake of appearance were part of her game.

I have thought a great deal about her relations with the tsarina, and in the last book about Nicholas II, I attempted to explain them. Now it seems to me that I understand them better. At the basis of her relationship with the tsarina lay a hidden feeling, profoundly secret and repressed. And it both drew the unhappy Alix to her and frightened her. And knowing of the tsarina’s religiousness and purity, Anya, to hide that feeling, invented a delightful game that in the beginning attached the tsarina to her even more.

The Innermost Secrets Of The Heart

I found astonishing testimony in the File. In 1917 the Extraordinary Commission interrogated one Feodosia Voino, who had worked as Vyrubova’s maid. Voino reported that ‘Vyrubova was in love with the tsar, but I don’t know if it was mutual. She received letters from the tsar, and one such letter was intercepted by the tsarina. And then Vyrubova and the tsarina had a quarrel, which quickly came to an end, however. Vyrubova herself warned me and the housemaid that she had letters from the tsar in her safe, and that if she should suddenly die, the letters were to be returned to the tsar.

This might seem like an invention, had not the tsarina’s own letters survived. During the war, Alix and Nicky, sighing with love, wrote letters to each other that will remain a tale of the most beautiful romance. But there are some mysterious lines in those letters. For example, in one of them Alix adds the following postscript: ‘Lovy, you burn her letters so that they should never fall into anybody’s hands?’ (6 January 1916). And in another: ‘if now not firm, we shall be having stories & love-scenes & rows like in the Crimea’ (26 January 1915). And in yet another, ‘You will see when we return how she will tell you how terribly she suffered without you… Be nice & firm … she always needs cooling down’ (27 October 1914). So, it turns out that ‘she’ had dared to make scenes and rows and to harass Nicholas with letters! And Alix, not mincing words, brands the woman as ‘rude (27 October), and says there is ‘nothing of the loving gentle woman’ about her (20 November 1914). And in another letter, she refers to her as ‘the Cow’ (6 October 1915)!

But almost at the same time Alix writes to her husband, ‘Perhaps you will mention in your telegram, that you thank [her] for papers and letter and send messages’ (21 November 1914). And in another letter, ‘When A[nya] speaks of her loneliness, it makes me angry, she… twice a day comes to us — every evening with us four hours’ (2 January 1916).

Anya understood how dangerous for the religious tsarina’s soul were all the rumours about the ulterior abnormality of her love for Alix. And the intelligent Anya devised this game. A game that reassured the tsarina. The game of her repressed, pure, and unrequited love for Nicky. Thus at the time did pupils of the Institute for Noble Young Ladies, while idolizing an older girlfriend, fall passionately in love with the older girl’s chosen young man. But Anya did not permit herself to contend with the empress, she merely allowed herself to make scenes, ridiculous, naive, harmless scenes. The tsar was compelled to soothe the infatuated Anya with letters, while the tsarina did so with compassion. Her role was the harmless ‘third party’ who added tension to their relationship. And that stoked the fire, the passion, in Nicky and Alix’s great love.