The Rasputin File (33 page)

How much does this image fail to resemble that of the awful lust-driven peasant who at the very same time was stalking the streets of Petersburg in pursuit of women! Just who was that peasant? A cunning changeling? A sexual psychopath? Or is it that despite my having written so many pages, I still do not know him any better than I did before? And am still only on the way to his secret?

A Dandy With ‘Mistakes In Grammar’

In the summer of 1912 exciting news spread through society.

‘7 June 1912. Olga Nikolaevna was betrothed last night to Dmitry Pavlovich,’ the general’s wife Bogdanovich wrote in her diary.

Dmitry was the tsar’s favourite. His letters to Nicholas have survived, the scoffing letters of a rake. A duellist and hard drinker, tall and well built like most of the Romanovs, a favourite of the Guards — he had everything that Nicky lacked. Despite the return of his father from exile in 1905, Dmitry had continued to live with the royal family. But Alix did not like him. For the youth did not hide his disdain for the peasant.

And she looked forward to the marriage of her daughter and Dmitry with dread. It was then that another rake arrived in Petersburg from England, one who, fortunately for Alix, changed everything — Felix Yusupov.

As Felix later recalled, he and Dmitry saw a lot of each other in the course of 1912–13. ‘He was then living with the royal family at the Alexander Palace, but we spent … all our free time together.’ Felix, who was several years older than the handsome Dmitry, completely captivated the grand duke. In place of the reclusive, monotonous life of the Alexander Palace with its grand duchesses and the empress eternally fussing over the unfortunate boy, Felix revealed another world to him. He did what his own older brother had done for him: he introduced Dmitry to the feverish life of nocturnal Petersburg. Now at night a car waited for the two playboys. Almost every night we drove to Petersburg and carried on a merry life in
restaurants, night cafes, and among Gypsies. We invited performers to dine with us in private rooms. And often Pavlova would join us.’ But it was not only the famous ballet star Anna Pavlova who joined them. Felix’s unconventional tastes, which he writes about himself in his memoirs, also attracted to the private rooms male ballet dancers who shared those tastes.

The royal family was horrified. ‘Their Majesties, knowing of my scandalous adventures, looked askance at our friendship,’ Felix recalled. Or, to put it more accurately, knowing of Felix’s homosexual propensities, which at the time were punishable by imperial law, the tsars regarded Dmitry’s passionate attachment to Felix with fear.

Olga’s future husband was forbidden to see Felix. ‘The secret police were keeping an eye on that now,’ Felix recalled.

The centenary of the Battle of Borodino, the site near Moscow which saw the onset of the destruction of Napoleon’s
grande armee
, was celebrated in August 1912. Reaching all the way up Tver Street from Moscow’s Brest Station were ceremonial lines of soldiers and behind them crowds of people. The bells of the city’s innumerable churches kept ringing. To cries of ‘Hurrah’, the tsar, Alix, the heir, and Olga took their places in the first barouche. Dmitry sat in the last calash. All eyes sought the fiancé of the tsar’s eldest daughter.

But Felix proved to be stronger. Stronger than both the royal prohibitions and the happiness of becoming the husband of the tsar’s daughter. The encounters with Felix continued. Rumour had a simple explanation: Dmitry was bisexual. And Dmitry, the future lover of the celebrated Coco Chanel, was then madly infatuated with Felix. In the idiom of the salons of the day, it was called ‘making mistakes in grammar’. Dmitry preferred to move out of the Alexander Palace. Now he was lodged in his own house in Petersburg, and Felix helped him to furnish it in the luxury for which his own home, the Yusupov palace on the Moika Canal, was celebrated. With precious furniture and paintings.

And so, Dmitry had made his choice. Now with a clear conscience Alix could, or, more accurately, was compelled to, break off Olga’s engagement. Dmitry had compromised himself by his scandalous friendship. But this time, too, Nicholas remained loyal to his affections. He continued to have a soft spot for Dmitry. He chose to regard the rumours with caution. And the peasant understood what was required of him. And he did not let his benefactress down. Rasputin predicted that Dmitry would from his debauched life soon contract a skin disease. So at his request Alix ordered the girls ‘to wash their hands with a special solution after any meetings and handshaking with the grand duke’.

Had The Prince Been Slapped?

It was then that another meeting may have taken place between Rasputin and Felix, although the latter does not mention it. The meeting is overgrown with legend. The actress Vera Leonidovna Yureneva told me about it: Felix, infuriated by Rasputin’s meddling in Dmitry’s betrothal, repeated what he had successfully carried off many times before. He dressed up as a young woman and appeared before Rasputin. When the latter made his usual advances, the bad boy’ started laughing at him and insulting him. For which he was slapped.

For me, however, there is one thing in the legend that rings false. Why didn’t Felix shoot him on the spot? Shooting the debauched peasant after he had dared to raise his hand against the prince would have been welcomed by everyone! True, the situation itself was perhaps not the best one. And for that reason it may have been necessary to do nothing.

The rumours of a slap had in fact seemed quite fantastic to me, until I found in the File the remarkable testimony of the tsarina’s friend Yulia Dehn.

‘In regard to Prince Felix Felixovich Yusupov … that effeminate and elegantly dressed young man visited Rasputin both before my acquaintance with him and during the year of that acquaintance [1911–12]…I know that during some argument between the prince and Rasputin, who did not care for the prince’s behaviour, Rasputin had struck him, after which the prince stopped visiting him.’

She speaks about it as a known fact. Even though Yusupov was in Petersburg at the time and might easily have refuted her words if they had been an invention.

Rasputin’s Exoneration

The tsar had not received Rodzyanko, and the charges that Rasputin was a
Khlyst
continued unabated. But then what unexpected joy for the tsarina! God had intervened for the elder. The truth had won out: Alexis, the new bishop of Tobolsk, had conducted a new investigation. And the Tobolsk Theological Consistory had reached a new Decision.

The Right Reverend Alexis, Bishop of Tobolsk … has thoroughly examined the evidence in the file on Grigory Novy. Travelling through the Tobolsk district…he stopped in the village of Pokrovskoe and there engaged in a lengthy discussion with the peasant Grigory Novy about the
objects of his faith and aspirations, and talked about him with people who knew him well … From all of the above-indicated, the Right Reverend Alexis has derived the impression that the case against the peasant Grigory Rasputin-Novy of belonging to the
Khlyst
sect was instituted without sufficient basis, and for his own part he considers the peasant Grigory Novy to be an Orthodox Christian and a person of great intelligence and spiritual aptitude who is seeking the truth of Christ and who can, when the opportunity arises, provide good counsel to anyone who may need it.

On the basis of Bishop Alexis’s report ‘in regard to new information’, the Consistory decreed in an act dated 29 November 1912, that ‘The case of the peasant Grigory Rasputin-Novy of the village of Pokrovskoe is hereby suspended and considered closed.’

After reading the Decision, the tsar asked that copies be immediately distributed to the Synod, the ministers, and the Duma. So that the fat man Rodzyanko might be appeased.

The reasons for the appearance of the Decision, which is contained in the Tobolsk archive, had been a mystery to me. And then in the File I found the testimony of the son of Bishop Alexis of Tobolsk, testimony that made the whole story clear.

Parting The Curtain Of Exoneration

In 1917 Leonid Alexeevich Molchanov, the son of the late Bishop Alexis, was called before the Extraordinary Commission.

He had met Rasputin in 1912. At the time he was secretary to the chief magistrate of the Pskov District Court and was twenty-three years old. His father had been transferred that year from Pskov to Tobolsk, and he had gone to visit him during his vacation: ‘On 7 July I set out by steamboat from Tyumen to Tobolsk… When it became clear that Rasputin would be taking the same boat, the news produced something of a sensation in the crowd.’ And although ‘after the newspaper articles … my attitude towards him was one of opposition’, Molchanov still wanted to meet him.

‘I spent the entire day with him until the Pokrovskoe landing, where he had to get off… Rasputin said that much falsehood was being written about him, that Hermogen and Iliodor, instead of performing their pastoral duties, had taken up politics, and that the sovereign did not care for those “synodians” who, instead of performing their pastoral duties, only cared about splendid clothing and ribbons and medals, and who turned up in
Tsarskoe Selo in the capacity of dignitaries rather than pastors.’ After hearing Rasputin’s stories about his persecution, Molchanov immediately responded with the story of his father’s own persecution by the members of the Synod. It turned out that his father had once been the bishop of Taurida. And, as his son explained, Bishop Alexis had been slandered. With the purpose of removing him from the Crimea, ‘so that the pulpit could be cleared for Feofan, who was being forced out of Petrograd’. And to do that, the ‘synodians’ had sent Alexis deep into Siberia to distant Tobolsk. ‘Rasputin began to feel sorry for my father … [and] announced that as soon the opportunity presented itself, he would tell “Papa” and “Mama” about it.’

The story would naturally have interested Rasputin. But when he learned what it was that Molchanov’s father had been ‘slandered’ with, the story obviously interested him even more.

Victor Yatskevich, the director of the chancery of the chief procurator of the Most Holy Synod, speaks about it in the File. It turns out that Alexis lost his southern pulpit not at all because of Feofan but because of the young teacher Elizaveta Kosheva. With whom the hierarch had had a liaison. At first he had been transferred to Pskov. But located in the Pskov eparchy, as Yatskevich testified, ‘was the notoriously heretical Vorontsov Monastery, which had become a nest of the Ioannite sect’. These were the devotees of Ioann of Kronstadt. They worshipped Ioann as an earthly incarnation of Christ. And they had their own ‘Mother of God’, too: Porfiria Kiselyova. ‘Thus,’ Yatskevich explains, ‘they were an ordinary sect of the
Khlyst
type.’ And not only did Alexis not move against them; he even began to give their ‘ark’ his protection. For which he was transferred even farther away, to Tobolsk.

Cold Tobolsk, however, was very hard on the bishop. As his son related to Rasputin, Alexis suffered from nephritis, and cold regions had a severe effect on him. But that provincial bishop had no friends in the Synod to help him with a move to the south. So Rasputin understood that sitting in Tobolsk, which governed his own native village, was the bishop he needed. Aggrieved, without connections, badly in need of support, and, above all, a protector of the
Khlysty
.

And by 10 July, Molchanov’s father ‘received a telegram from the village of Pokrovskoe in which Rasputin asked for his blessing and permission to visit him in Tobolsk. Rasputin remained as his guest for three days.’ And soon afterwards followed Alexis’s first incentive. The provincial bishop was summoned to Tsarskoe Selo to Anya’s little house. Which at court was
mockingly called the ‘parvis of power’. Just as mendicants in a church parvis ask for money, so there people solicited high offices.

The File, from the testimony of Molchanov: ‘My father made Vyrubova’s acquaintance and … conducted a night service and mass at the Feodor Cathedral … after which he took breakfast at Vyrubova’s…At breakfast a telegram was sent to the yacht [that is, to the royal family] … and a gracious reply was received.’

So in the autumn the bishop prepared a grateful response. The investigation of the Tobolsk Theological Consistory regarding Rasputin’s affiliation with the
Khlyst
sect was closed.

A Miracle, A Miracle!

In the autumn of 1912 Rasputin performed one of his true miracles: he saved the life of the heir. And even his enemies would be forced to acknowledge it.

The tragedy began in early October at Spala, the tsar’s hunting castle in the Belovezh forest reserve. Something taking place in one of the inner rooms of the castle was kept secret from everyone. Even Alexei’s tutor, Pierre Gilliard, had no idea where his pupil had disappeared to. And then, the scene famously described by Gilliard in his memoirs took place. During a ball, Gilliard had left the hall by an interior corridor and found himself before a door beyond which desperate moaning could be heard. And then at the other end of the corridor he saw Alix running towards him, holding up her gown to keep from tripping over it. She had evidently been summoned at the height of the ball: the boy was suffering a new attack of intolerable pain. In her agitation she did not even notice Gilliard.

From Nicholas’s diary for 5 October: ‘We celebrated a joyless name-day today. Poor Alexei has been suffering from secondary haemorrhages for several days now.’

The swelling was followed by blood poisoning. The doctors were already preparing Alix for the inevitable end. It was time to make an announcement of the heir’s illness.

From the diary of KR: ‘9 October. A bulletin has appeared about the illness of the Tsarevich. He is the sovereign’s only son! May God preserve him!’

The year before, Alexei’s kidneys had haemorrhaged. But, as Xenia recorded in her diary, ‘They sent for Grigory. Everything ended with his arrival.’

This time Rasputin was far away. But Alix believed: his prayers were stronger than any distance.