The Rasputin File (4 page)

These particular documents were transcriptions: the semi-literate Rasputin spoke, and someone wrote down what he said. And wrote it down with affection.

After the revolution, Rasputin’s published writings were all removed from the public libraries and transferred to closed repositories. It is hard to appreciate the charm of his books in translation. It is a special world, naive and beautiful, resembling the paintings of the Primitivists. His powerful and tender old-Russian speech unfortunately disappears in translation. It needs a poet to translate it well.

I can imagine the fascination experienced by those who listened to that speech, and who saw those piercing lupine eyes and the electric hands with which he would lightly touch his interlocutor while conversing.

Rasputin’s Unpublished Diary

And then I found Rasputin’s ‘diary’ in the archive. With the subheading, ‘Written at his dictation. Kramer, L P.’

Rasputin’s unpublished diary: it was as if all the characters of Schyogolev’s
Proceedings of the Extraordinary Commission
had stepped down from its pages. And many of the stories in the diary, as well as the heroes of those stories, tallied with what I had read in the
Proceedings! And
yet… And yet the more I read of the diary, the more my enthusiasm waned. All that Bolshevik historical scholarship was trying to prove at the time — the elder’s debauchery, the venality of Petersburg high society, the pathetic stupidity of the tsar — was contained in the diary.

Here is Rasputin instructing the tsar, ‘pounding his fist’, and explaining to the silly autocrat the enigma of the Russian people: ‘How are you thinking of teaching the peasant? Through his ass? You want to tear his ass out, but such anger will grow in his head.’ ‘With tsars’, Rasputin explains, ‘you have to use the spirit, not reason … He doesn’t understand reason, but he’s afraid of the spirit.’ And here he is mastering the submissive tsarina: he has resolved to make peace with Germany, and the tsarina is reverently kneeling before him, promising to carry out his wishes. And then, of course, there is his incessant debauchery with the ‘rotten aristocracy’: ‘Mama [the tsarina] drove me to Kusikha’s [to the Baroness Kusova’s] in Pavlovsk … The general’s wife V. was there, too. The two of them stick to me like flies. She herself sticks to me and is always afraid someone will find out.’

It was obviously all a crude ideological forgery. It was not for nothing that in the subheading ‘written at his dictation’, someone had pencilled in the phrase, ‘as if’: ‘as if written at his dictation.’

It is not, I think, very hard to identify the forgery’s author. For the author (or authors) was already well known for another forgery that at the time had been spectacularly successful with its readers.

The ‘Red Count’ And The Spurious Diaries

In 1927, on the tenth anniversary of the fall of the tsar, the magazine
The Past
began the publication of ‘Vyrubova’s diary’. All Russia was besotted
by the diary, which revealed secret and highly intimate details of the disintegration both of the royal family and of the regime that had recently governed the country.

True, rumours very soon began circulating that Vyrubova had had nothing whatever to do with its publication. Named as the authors of the diverting forgery were two well-known people: the publisher of the
Proceedings of the Extraordinary Commission
, P. Schyogolev, and the celebrated writer Count Alexei Tolstoy (the ‘Red Count’, as he was known in Moscow), an active Bolshevik collaborator.

Schyogolev and Tolstoy had already co-authored a play with very similar ideas:
The Empress’s Conspiracy
, about Rasputin’s attempt to carry out a palace revolution and install the tsarina as the country’s leader. The play was wildly successful. It ran simultaneously in six of the largest theatres in Moscow and Leningrad.

And in 1927, on this tenth anniversary, it had evidently been impossible to carry out a powerful ideological campaign discrediting tsarism without the help of Schyogolev and the ‘Red Count’. Nor could the campaign itself have been dispensed with; it was, in a phrase of the day, a ‘social imperative’. Schyogolev, as the publisher of the
Proceedings
, obtained the material, whilst the count did the writing. Thus did the spurious Vyrubova ‘diary’ make its appearance. Its enormous success demanded that the work be continued. Rasputin’s ‘diary’ was intended as a kind of sequel to Vyrubova’s. And as in the creation of Vyrubova’s ‘diary’ and
The Empress’s Conspiracy
, Schyogolev provided the ‘Red Count’ with historical details from the published and, mainly, unpublished
Proceedings
. But thanks to the highly gregarious and frequently drunk ‘Red Count’, the story behind the Vyrubova forgery soon got out. There was no point in even thinking about publishing a second one, and the idea was abandoned. Schyogolev, who apparently had a taste for literary hoaxes, then turned Rasputin’s ‘diary’ over to the archive. But by the 1930s the tsarist theme no longer interested the country. And so the diary was left to gather dust in the Commission archive.

The Unsleeping Eye Of The Police

But probably the most entertaining documents pertaining to Rasputin that I read at that time in the Commission archive were the volumes of reports by the police agents assigned to cover him. Those ‘external surveillance’ agents were supposed to write a daily account of all Rasputin’s movements about the city. They tried to describe the innumerable visitors who came
to his apartment. Noted, too, were any of Rasputin’s absences from his lodgings, the times he returned, where he went, and whom he met along the way. No public figure received a more detailed description of his life over the course of several years than the semi-literate peasant Grigory Rasputin. But the volumes left in the archive were a mere vestige. Part of the surveillance documentation had perished during the February Revolution when the tsarist secret police department headquarters were burned down, and part was destroyed by the police officials themselves, since they, too, had been among Rasputin’s visitors and he among their guests. As the former minister of internal affairs Khvostov testified before the Extraordinary Commission: ‘When I retired from the service, Stürmer [the prime minister] took the documents to his office, especially the ones concerning Rasputin … [as] the main interest was in him. Everything was burned at once.’ But the reports that have survived reveal the wild mosaic of Rasputin’s days — the visits to restaurants and Gypsy singers, the meetings with ministers, the risque scenes in his kitchen to which the agents were privy thanks to a lack of curtains, as well as the jumble of visitors to his apartment: prostitutes, duchesses, bankers, schemers, pious lady admirers, and high-priced cocottes. The police recorded everything: their names, their arrival times, and their departure times the next morning after a night with the peasant.

Another Rasputin ‘Diary’

But the missing File of those who knew Rasputin well never left my mind.

After the start of
perestroika
I renewed my inquiries. At the beginning of the 1990s I made a careful search for it in Petersburg. But the only document concerning Rasputin preserved in the State Historical Archive, located in the once luxurious buildings of the former Senate and Synod (where, as we shall see, at one time congregated many who had been appointed to those bodies by the simple peasant himself), was a small school copybook with a portrait of Pushkin and the semi-literate inscription, ‘Diry’.

The discovery in the 1990s of that copybook provoked a wave of articles in the world’s leading newspapers. Rasputin’s ‘diary’ had been discovered! But in point of fact Rasputin, who like all unlettered peasants adored writing, managed only to jot down a few reflections in his wretched scrawl. He evidently used the term ‘diary’ because it sounded important, knowing that the tsar and tsarina kept diaries, too.

Finally, in the former Museum of the Revolution in the villa of the ballerina
Mathilde Kschessinska, a lover of the young Nicholas, I saw another recent sensation: the file photographs, discovered in the 1990s, from the inquest conducted after Rasputin’s murder. There was a view of the yard of the Yusupov palace across which Rasputin had run one December night in 1916 while trying to save himself from his murderers. And photographs of his corpse after it had been dragged from the river — of his mutilated face and his naked body with the bullet holes. I succeeded in establishing that the report on Rasputin’s autopsy had in the 1930s been in the possession of the Academy of Military Medicine. And then suddenly it had vanished. In fact, it was not only the documents that vanished. Soon afterwards a number of research assistants who had seen the autopsy report also disappeared. It was the time of the Stalinist terror. True, I did turn up an official document regarding the exhumation and burning of the elder’s body after the revolution. But still, I found no trace whatever of the missing documents produced by the Thirteenth Section, no trace of the File.

The Search For Documentation

At the beginning of the 1990s my book on Nicholas II was published in Russia. Not having found the File, I had been quite circumspect about Rasputin. I am also the host of the popular Russian television programme,
The Enigmas of History
. After the book on Nicholas II, I was inundated with letters requesting that I do a show on Rasputin. And I decided to do two on his death.

I tried to find for the show whatever new information I could in the way of recollections of him. I remembered a manuscript that I had seen in the Archive of Literature and Art when I was still a student. The ‘Memoirs of Zhukovskaya’ have to this day still not been published in their entirety in the West.

Vera Alexandrovna Zhukovskaya (a relative of the famous scientist N. E. Zhukovsky) was a young writer. But the unrelenting eroticism of her memoirs made me suspect that they were merely a clever invention, that she had never visited Rasputin.

The strong desire to verify their authenticity reminded me once more of the File. As Zhukovskaya herself wrote, it was a certain Alexander Prugavin who had helped her to gain access to the elder. His was a famous name in Rasputin’s day; he was one of the most prominent experts on Russian sectarianism. Moreover, Zhukovskaya claimed that she herself had taken Prugavin to see Rasputin! And that Prugavin had written a tale based on her stories about her meetings with Rasputin. So I could easily verify the
whole story. Prugavin’s testimony about Rasputin had, after all, been cited in Simpson’s ‘Resolution’. That meant that it, too, was in the File. I had to find the File.

‘A Large Pile Of Ashes’

At the time that I was working on the show, I thought of Vyrubova’s papers, too. Transcripts of several of her interrogations had been included in the
Proceedings
published by Schyogolev. But there should have been more. For, as the investigator Rudnev had written, the Thirteenth Investigative Section ‘gave special scrutiny’ to the activity of the tsarina’s closest friend and the elder’s chief admirer.

After Rasputin’s death, Vyrubova resided with the royal family at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Towards the end of February 1917, when rebellious crowds were already filling the city’s streets, the heir apparent and the four grand duchesses came down with the measles. And Vyrubova, having caught the disease from them, lay unconscious. She had been taken ill as the friend of the most powerful woman in Russia and had awoken in a palace not merely besieged but drowning irretrievably in a sea of revolution. The palace was plunged in darkness, the elevator no longer worked, and the tsarina was rushing among her patients. Yet hardly had Vyrubova regained consciousness than she and the tsarina started burning documents. At the end of March Vyrubova was arrested and brought before the Extraordinary Commission.

In her testimony published in the
Proceedings
, Vyrubova had said in reply to the investigator’s question as to ‘why she had burned a whole series of documents’, ‘I burned almost nothing. I burned only a few of the empress’s last letters, since I didn’t want them to fall into the wrong hands.’ And I believed her. Perhaps she had in fact hidden the most important documents. After all, had she not kept the tsarina’s letters written during the royal family’s later incarceration in Tobolsk, despite all of Alix’s calls to burn them? And if she had in fact hidden those letters, then was it not also possible that she had taken them with her on the night she fled Red Russia to Finland across the treacherous ice of the Gulf?

One of the few people close to the royal family to escape unharmed, Vyrubova died peacefully in Finland in 1964. In the Helsinki National Archives I was shown Vyrubova’s police dossier which included the interrogation conducted by the Finnish authorities after she had turned up in a refugee internment camp in the city of Terioki. The Finns fully understood the significance of her testimony. As was stated in the file, ‘this internment-camp
deposition is to be conveyed to the prime minister and president.’

But Vyrubova had had nothing new to say. Her answers were a scrupulous reiteration of her testimony before the Provisional Government’s Extraordinary Commission. In 1923, Vyrubova wrote and published her memoirs. She wanted to use her maiden name of Taneeva to conceal her identity, but her publishers preferred Vyrubova. I found no drafts of the memoirs in her archive.

In Finland she became a nun, although in secret; that is, she was able to live at home rather than in the convent (she was lame in one leg and they took her invalid status into account). I got in touch with the convent where she had secretly taken the veil, but there was nothing there. Vyrubova had lived by herself, seeing almost no one. It even occurred to me that she might have taken a vow of silence of some kind. But it turned out otherwise. Badly in need of money in 1937, she signed a contract with a Finnish publisher for a new edition of the memoirs. But as she was writing, the Second World War began. The First World War had destroyed her empire and her life, and now the Second World War dashed her hopes of obtaining a little money. Memoirs about the Russian tsar and tsarina fighting Germany were not what was called for in a Finland that had become a German ally. Then after the war, when the Soviet NKVD started to make inroads in Finland and émigrés were almost openly deported to the USSR, the tsarina’s friend was very probably afraid to remind people of her existence. Only in 1953, the year Stalin died, did she turn the completed book over to the Finnish publisher. But they failed to publish it; apparently they took the view that the manuscript did not add anything to the earlier editions. Then at the beginning of the 1980s, while going through the Finnish publisher’s papers after his death, his daughter came upon an envelope containing photographs. On it was written: ‘Photos of Anya Vyrubova with her autographs on the reverse’. And she also found the manuscript of Vyrubova’s memoirs. The book was published in 1984. The edition passed unnoticed, since there had been nothing new in it.