The Rasputin File (19 page)

‘Father himself used to say in Tsarskoe Selo that when he was gone, the court would be gone, too.’

And we find the same thing in a great many of the depositions. ‘It has been established,’ wrote the investigator Rudnev, ‘that he said to the sovereign, “My death will be your death, too.’“

The peasant knew: she was not afraid of those words; on the contrary, they soothed her. For he
was
alive, that strong peasant still loved by all. And he had promised to live a very long time. And, after all, why would the Lord who had sent him take him away?

And then in 1910, at the very pinnacle of his success, when he had become the only one, something mysterious started to happen.

The ‘Dark Forces’

The sleepy new year of 1910 was marked by very few events capable of holding the attention of Russia’s newspapers and inhabitants. However, it was also to introduce some of the key figures in our story.

Convened in Petersburg was the First All-Russian Congress for the Struggle against Drunkenness, that truly ‘Russian disease’. Amusing incidents from ancient history were recalled, such as a battle in which the drunken warriors lost their trousers. The government was accused of making money from that abiding Russian calamity. Whereupon the insulted representatives of the Ministry of Finance walked out of the congress. Village priests were charged with ‘excessive admiration’ for the famous words attributed to Saint Vladimir, the tenth-century Kievan prince who
converted Rus to Christianity, that ‘drinking is the Russian’s joy.’ Whereupon the theological delegation walked out, too.

The State Duma was occupied with the latest scandal. The well-known monarchist Nikolai Markov, known as Markov II, had demanded the passing of new decrees against the Jews. ‘The Russian people,’ Markov announced, ‘do not wish to become the slaves of the parasitic Judaic tribe.’ Prince Volkonsky, who was presiding, attempted to expunge his words. Markov II was voted out of the Duma for the next fifteen sessions. At another session, another famous monarchist, Purishkevich, reported that the leftist movement in student circles consisted of ‘Jews, and over them, the professors, among whom there are also numerous Jews, and that is why anarchy rules in the universities’.

This announcement produced an uproar, with shouting and abusive language from all quarters. The Speaker of the Duma ‘lost control and displayed his utter helplessness’. As a result, he was removed and a new Speaker was elected, Alexander Ivanovich Guchkov, one of the most brilliant and adventurous people in the Duma. The newspapers enjoyed publishing his biography. There had not been a single debacle at the beginning of the century that this son of a wealthy Moscow merchant had not participated in. He had gone to help defend the Armenians during their slaughter by the Turks, he had participated in the Boer War in Africa, naturally on the Boer side, and during the Russo-Japanese War, he had even been captured by the Japanese. He was well known in the Duma for fist fights during the sessions and for calling out Pavel Milyukov, the head of the Constitutional Democratic Party, the largest in the Duma.

On taking the post of Speaker, he gave a speech in which he spoke for the first time of certain mysterious ‘dark forces’ that had made themselves known in the highest summits of society.

In Moscow on Khodynka Field, sadly famous for loss of life during the coronation, aviators were conducting flights. The celebrated Sergei Utochkin, known in Russia as the ‘hero of the aerial expanse’, made several circuits in a biplane. Seated with some difficulty on the little bicycle-style passenger seat behind him was Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, vice-governor of Moscow (and yet another of our future characters). A female aviator also took part in the flights: the dark-haired beauty Princess Shakhovskaya, who would soon become a fanatical devotee of Rasputin’s.

On 7 November occurred what was perhaps the only historic event of the year. On that day all Russia was absorbed in mourning. Leo Tolstoy had died at Astapov Station while fleeing his home. Nicholas wrote in an address on Tolstoy’s death, ‘I sincerely regret the demise of the great writer …May the Lord God be merciful in his judgment of him.’

Of the peasant himself there was only vague talk. No one really knew anything, and for that reason he attracted universal attention.

The
Khlyst
Saviours

People were struck by the mystery of his biography — the transformation of a fallen man, by his rumoured gift of miraculous healing and prophecy, and by the closed world of the royal family in which he was at home. For those on both the left and the right, it was a happy confirmation of a cherished idea: the ‘precious talents of the simple Russian’.

Nor was that all. Another reason for his popularity was the rumour of his links to the
Khlysty
.

Once in my youth I was talking to a family friend of ours, the Acmeist poet Sergei Mitrofanovich Gorodetsky, who was then a very old man. In Rasputin’s time, Gorodetsky was one of the most popular poets of the day, the author of a celebrated book of verse called
Spring Wheat
. And grinning under his grey moustache, Gorodetsky said something that I have remembered for its paradox: ‘Rasputin was attractive and in fashion because he was a
Khlyst.’

It was only recently, while working on the brilliant period of Russian literature so rightly called the Silver Age, that I came to understand the meaning of that sentence.

It is amazing, but all the celebrated writers of the age had in one way or another become interested in the then mysterious
Khlyst
sect. The celebrated writer and philosopher Vasily Rozanov went to live in a
Khlyst
community and wrote about the
Khlysty
in his
The Apocalyptic Sect. Two
influential minds of the day, the husband and wife team of the novelist Dmitry Merezhkovsky and the poet Zinaida Gippius, lived in a
Khlyst
community in 1902. And they wrote to Alexander Blok, ‘Everything we saw there was…ineffably beautiful.’ And Blok, Russia’s foremost poet, and the famous writer Alexei Remizov (as Blok’s wife reports in a letter to her mother) ‘went to a
Khlyst
meeting together’. Yet another well-known writer, Mikhail Prishvin, wrote in his journal for 1908:’9 November… Together with Blok, Remizov, and Sologub [another influential figure!] I visited a
Khlyst
community.’ The famous poets Konstantin Balmont and Andrei Bely also wrote about the
Khlysty
. And the best-known peasant poet of the beginning of the century, Nikolai Klyuev, tells, while creating a fashionable biography for himself, of his wanderings with the
Khlysty
. ‘Many looked hard for a rapprochement with the
Khlysty,’
wrote Prishvin.

What made them do so was their shared sense of looming apocalypse.

The same sense, in fact, that had impelled the leaders of the intelligentsia to try to find a common language with the official church in the religious philosophical colloquia of 1903. And to try without success. Now it had been decided to try to act through the sects. The intelligentsia believed that it was in the sects, and above all in the most powerful of them, the
Khlysty
, that those who expressed the true religious aspirations of the people were coming together. The
Khlysty
, Prishvin wrote, ‘are a subterranean river … An immense kingdom of
Khlysty
, elusive and unidentifiable, has emerged … within the Orthodox Church itself.’ The intelligentsia believed that an alliance between its own spiritual wing and the spiritual wing of the common people — the sects — would be able to stand athwart the coming storm. The sects, as a bridge to the people. Merezhkovsky wrote, ‘We need to “reach out to the people” in our own new way… There is no doubt that something is happening and beginning to ripen everywhere and in everyone, and we shall go out to meet it. And … the crossing over to the people will be easier and more natural through the sectarians.’

The intelligentsia would later mock the royal couple for their faith in a benighted peasant. Yet at the same time and however paradoxically, they dreamed of the same thing. But all this touched only the intelligentsia’s leaders. For the ordinary philistine, the
Khlysty
remained religious criminals, the embodiment of secret debauchery.

While Father Grigory was living with the Lokhtins, the general’s wife had in essence become his secretary. There in her salon Rasputin won himself ever more new devotees. It was through the Lokhtins that he met Georgy Sazonov, the publisher of progressive economics magazines.

In 1917 Sazonov was, along with other followers of Rasputin, summoned before the Extraordinary Commission. And in the File I found his testimony.

Sazonov, Georgy Petrovich, sixty years old, testified that his family ‘were old friends of the Lokhtin family, of the engineer Vladimir Mikhailovich Lokhtin, his wife Olga Vladimirovna, and their daughter Lyudmila … Olga Vladimirovna telephoned with the information that Grigory Efimovich Rasputin had asked permission to visit us.’

Thus began their friendship. And Sazonov describes Rasputin as he was in those years: ‘He impressed me as a nervous person…He could not sit quietly in one place, but fidgeted and moved his hands…He spoke jerkily and for the most part incoherently.’ But when that fidgety person gazed at his interlocutors, ‘a special power shone in his eyes that had an effect on people who were… especially susceptible to external influence.’

By this time a circle of crazed female admirers had formed around Rasputin. ‘The women who surrounded him treated him with mystical
devotion, called him “Father”, and kissed his hand.’ But the thing that most pleased the deeply religious Sazonov, just as it had his friend Lokhtin, was Rasputin’s ‘sincere religiousness’, something quite rare in those years. ‘That religiousness was not feigned, nor was Rasputin posing. Our maid said that whenever [he] happened to spend the night at our house, he prayed instead of sleeping … When we stayed at our dacha, the children saw him in the forest deep in prayer … Our neighbour, a general’s wife who could not hear his name without revulsion, made an effort to follow the children into the forest, and, even though an hour had passed, also saw him deep in prayer.’

In that period (before 1913), Rasputin did not, as Sazonov describes him, partake of alcoholic beverages or eat meat, and he observed all the fasts. ‘I might call that period of Rasputin’s life,’ Sazonov puts it in the File, ‘the period when he achieved a certain spiritual loftiness from which he later lapsed.’

And the delighted Sazonov would later invite Rasputin to move into his large, upper-class apartment. As would be entered in the report of the secret surveillance of Rasputin established at that time, ‘On his arrival in 1912, he stayed … in the apartment of the publisher of the magazine
Russian Economist
, Georgy Petrovich Sazonov, and his wife … Rasputin is evidently involved in a love affair with the latter.’

But knowing of Rasputin’s sincere religiousness, Sazonov would never have believed it. Just as Olga Lokhtina’s husband could not believe it either. For neither Sazonov nor Lokhtin completely understood that mysterious man.

Rasputin continued to keep his relations with the tsar wrapped in enigma. He was cautious. Even his friend Sazonov had little to say except that Rasputin called the empress and emperor ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’, since they were indeed ‘mother and father whom the Lord had placed here to watch over and care for the Russian land’. Rasputin had not at that time begun to drink. Sazonov remembered only one ‘sensational’ story in the File:

‘The tsarina evidently regarded him with adoration … He related the following fact: he was walking through a Petersburg park and met the tsarina driving in the opposite direction…On seeing him, she ordered the horses stopped, rushed over to him, and kissed his hand in the sight of everyone in the park.’

The story made the rounds of the Petersburg salons. And the kissing of Rasputin’s hands by the ‘tsars’ would occupy a large place in the interrogations of the Extraordinary Commission. And in the File two of those who knew Rasputin and the royal family well, Vyrubova and another of the
tsarina’s friends, Yulia Dehn, would heatedly deny that it had occurred. Most likely they were lying, for they could not explain to the uninitiated that the humbling of pride preached by the peasant was very close to the hearts of both Nicky and Alix. Christ washing the feet of his disciples and the ‘tsars’ kissing the hand of a peasant — the hand, in Rasputin’s words, that ‘feeds you all’ — was something the religious royal family could easily understand.

The Fashionable Elder

By 1910, however, even more interesting devotees had announced themselves. A certain Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich had made himself a devoted follower of Rasputin. ‘Bonch’, as he was often called by his friends, was an expert on Russian sectarianism. He had written numerous works on the Old-Believer and other heresies. But it was not that work that would make him famous in Russian history. This modest investigator of heresies was a member of the underground party of Bolsheviks and one of Lenin’s closest associates (he would become a leader of Soviet Russia, the man in charge of the affairs of the Council of People’s Commissars and a founder of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police). The reasons for Bonch-Bruevich’s delight in and enormous curiosity about Rasputin are clear. Lenin’s address on the sects at the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party had been written by Bonch-Bruevich and contained a whole panegyric by the Bolshevik Bonch on the
Khlyst
sect: ‘From a political point of view, the
Khlysty
therefore deserve our full attention as passionate haters of everything that issues from the “authorities,” that is, from the government … I am convinced that through a tactical rapprochement of revolutionaries and the
Khlysty
we can acquire numerous friends.’ So when Rasputin began to be persecuted for his
Khlyst
sympathies, Bonch-Bruevich would immediately write with the authority of an expert, ‘Rasputin does not belong the
Khlyst
sect!’ He was obliged to defend his potential allies.