The Rasputin File (40 page)

From Zhukovskaya’s memoirs:

A loud noise was heard in the vestibule. I turned toward the partly open door where something unbelievably bright, wide, and developing … was already fluttering on the threshold…In an absurdly high, resounding voice it sang out hysterically, ‘Chri-i-i-st is Ri-i-sen!!!’ Then the something rushed past me … and flopped down between Rasputin’s chair and mine … After rushing in, Lokhtina embraced his head from behind and started kissing him wildly, yelling in a broken voice choking with emotion, ‘Dear little one, blessed vessel, little bearded one …’ Desperately fighting her off, Rasputin yelled, half-suffocated, ‘Unhand me, Satan!’ When he had at last released his neck from her grasp, he threw her with all his might into a corner … Breathing heavily, Lokhtina made her way over to the couch … [and] roundly cried out, ‘But you are still mi-i-ne! And I kno-o-w you loo-ve me-e!’

‘I loath you, you scum!’ Rasputin quickly and decisively retorted. ‘But I will kiss you again.’

Immediately running over to Rasputin, Lokhtina grabbed him by the head…Rasputin struck her so hard that she was hurled against the wall, but… again she started yelling ecstatically, ‘Go ahead, beat me, beat me, beat me!’ And bending her head, she tried to kiss the place on her breast
where Rasputin had hit her … She recalled a kind of strange priestess, relentless in her rage and adoration.

Filippov, of course, has already described a similar scene of battery.

But after the battery Zhukovskaya saw an altogether mysterious rite Suddenly Vyrubova went over to Lokhtina, kneeled down in front of her, kissed her hand, and then returned to her place. ‘You have guessed, at last!’ Lokhtina said very calmly. And then she said, ‘Is there a reason I am not seeing my novice? Promptly, now! Kneel, and my hand, my hand!’

And Munya, keeling before Lokhtina, kissed her hand.

And it was no invention. For Munya Golovina even had occasion to explain her strange reverence for Lokhtina to an investigator in the File.

From Golovina’s testimony: In 1913, as a form of protest against the attacks on Lokhtina, I started calling myself her novice and served her whenever she came to Petersburg … I wanted thereby to take the place of her beloved daughter, and I proposed to Lokhtina that it would be easier for her if she transferred her love, even if it was to some outsider.’ That was all that she was able to explain to the investigator.

But the question still remains: why did Vyrubova, a rather cold, calculating person, also bow down before Lokhtina? And why in the File do the witnesses speak of the insolent telegrams sent by the general’s wife to Tsarskoe Selo that were nonetheless tolerated by the tsarina herself? And why did the tsar’s daughters correspond with her?

‘She left letters and papers at the Napoikins’ apartment [where she lived] … I made copies of the letters to her from the grand duchesses Olga, Tatyana, and Maria,’ Prugavin testified in the File. And by no means did Rasputin always beat her. Sometimes he even conversed with her for a long time. And she behaved severely with his devotees, like someone older. That in fact is how another witness, the singer Belling, has described the mysterious general’s wife:

A woman came in…dressed in a white homespun dress of old-fashioned cut with the white headgear of an Orthodox nun on her head…Hanging from her neck were numerous little books with crosses — twelve copies of the Gospels … She … whispered something to Rasputin, and whenever someone spoke loudly, she looked angrily in that person’s direction, and then could no longer restrain herself and said, ‘Here at the father’s, as in a temple, you should behave with grandeur.’

‘Leave them alone, let them enjoy themselves,’ Rasputin said.

‘One should have joy in one’s heart but humility on the outside,’ she sternly reproved him.

And Prugavin, the student of sects, was probably right when in the File he slightly parted the curtain concealing the strange general’s wife: ‘I would not be prepared to say that she was mentally ill merely because she maintained that Grigory was the “Lord of hosts” and Iliodor, “Christ,” since I would in that case also have to acknowledge the mental illness of the
Khlysty
, in whose mysticism one finds the assertion of such incarnations regarding one or another teacher.’

So the question remains: just who was the strange general’s wife?

Yet Another Mysterious Lady

There is yet another of Rasputin’s admirers who was not in the photograph. Even though her name is often glimpsed in the reports of the security agents: ‘On 27 August at 10:55 Vera Illarionovna, the Baroness Kusova, arrived to see him…The baroness spent the night at his place.’

‘The Baroness Kusova left his place at 07:30 on 28 August.’

‘The striking brunette Baroness K.,’ as Dzhanumova describes her.

‘Kusova regularly frequented Rasputin’s salon; she was regularly in attendance there. She had various kinds of business there, various deals,’ a witness testified before the Extraordinary Commission. Which means she was one of the practical ladies with the mercantile ideas who traded her ‘body’?

Vera Kusova herself says something similar, in any case. The File, from the testimony of Baroness Vera Illarionovna Kusova, twenty-seven years old:

I made Grigory Rasputin’s acquaintance in 1913 …My husband was serving in the Crimean regiment, whose patron was the empress…The royal family was then living in the Crimea. I wanted to make better arrangements for my husband. With that purpose but also out of curiosity I once approached Rasputin at the shore … After introducing myself to him, I stated my request. Rasputin promised to help me. In July I went to Petersburg for about two weeks and visited Rasputin with the purpose of asking him again about an arrangement for someone who was very close to me, and also with the purpose of asking him for spiritual support in relation to a misfortune that had befallen me…It turned out, however, that he was unable to give me any spiritual solace, since I saw that he spoke commonplaces to those who came to him for advice. Nevertheless, I continued to visit Rasputin in order to meet with people there who were interesting or necessary to me … I did not view Rasputin as a holy person.

And then the investigator presented Kusova with a certain telegram for her to explain. ‘There was much that was revealed to him,’ she suddenly said, ‘and that is why I wrote to Laptinskaya in 1916, “Oh, if only Father Grigory, who would somehow help from there, too [that is, from beyond the grave], would teach me.”’

So when Rasputin was already dead and she could no longer meet people at his home ‘who were necessary’ to her, she not only continued to communicate with Akilina but even asked for Grigory’s help from beyond the grave. For, it turned out, ‘Much was revealed to him.’ Even though she had just declared that ‘he was unable to give any spiritual solace.’

Perhaps, like Vyrubova, she was by no means telling the Commission everything.

All the more so, since in Lokhtina’s testimony in the File we learn something quite different about Kusova: ‘At our first meeting…she related … that her life was in fact not good… Later I happened to hear that her husband drank heavily, and that she suffered because of it. She related that once while drunk he had ridden a horse into her bedroom.’ Yes, the baroness was, above all, an unhappy woman in need of comfort. And more. In the same testimony given by Lokhtina there is a most interesting fact. It turns out that the baroness, like Lokhtina herself, greeted those around her with ‘Christ is risen,’ even though it was not Easter.

A Sermon And A Dance

And all during tea Rasputin spoke without stopping. And while he talked he would from time to time nervously break off a piece of bread and throw it down on the tablecloth, or crumble the rolls with his stubby fingers. But they did not see that. They were listening to him and attending to his sermon.

From Guschina’s testimony: ‘Rasputin impressed me as a holy man. He spoke of God and the soul.’

Prince Zhevakhov (the same one who is in the photograph) recalled the first time he heard Rasputin preach. His colleague Pistolkors had taken him to a Petersburg apartment on Vasiliev Island filled with the curious. And he never forget Rasputin’s inspired speech.

‘How is brutalized man with his beast’s habits to begin living a life that is pleasing to God?’ Rasputin said. ‘How is he to climb up out of the pit of sin? How is he to find the path that leads from our cesspool into fresh air and the light of God? There is such a path. And I shall show it to you.
Salvation is in God … And you shall see God only, and only when you see nothing else around you. Because everything around you, all that you do, and even the room in which you sit, conceals God from you. What then must you do to see God?’ he asked with a sort of nervous intensity in the hush that had fallen. ‘After a church service in which you spend time in prayer, go outside the city on a Sunday or a holiday to some clean field. And walk, walk, until behind you see not the black cloud from factory chimneys that hangs over Petersburg but the blue of the horizon. Stand then and think about yourself. How small and insignificant you will seem to yourself then, and the whole capital — what an anthill it will have turned into in your mental gaze … And then what will become of your pride, your self-esteem, your consciousness of power? And you will lift up your eyes to heaven … and you will feel with all your heart, with all your soul, that you are one with the Lord, our Father, and that He is the only one who needs your soul. That He alone will stand up for you … and help you. And will find for you such compassion … That will be your first step along the path to God. This time, you may not go any further along that path. Return to the world, resume your former activity, but hold on to what you have brought back like the apple of your eye. It is God you have brought back with you. And preserve Him and let everything you do in the world now pass through Him … Only then will any earthly affair be transformed into the work of God. For it is as the Saviour has said, “the Kingdom of God is within us.” Find God, and live in him and with him.’

‘What a reverent hush there was in the room!’ Zhevakhov recalled. Even though Rasputin had said nothing new. But a sort of nervous power emanating from him had hypnotized his listeners. So that one may easily imagine what silence, what reverence there was whenever he spoke at the table to those who were devoted to him. And often he would suddenly break off what he was saying, and the resonant voice that Dzhanumova found so astonishing would command, ‘Write!’

He had become used to it. He would give someone a pencil, and she would transcribe his words. He often repeated his teachings. He knew how important it was to repeat things to his ‘fools’ (as he called his devotees in one of his telegrams — ‘fools’ because they were educated and did not understand simple things). And he dictated ways to keep Love in one’s soul through all calamities and revilement. But above all he spoke about Love for the Creator to those unhappy women, those widows and women who had been divorced or cast off by their husbands, or who no longer enjoyed their love. Abandoned and offended women constituted the absolute majority in his salon.

‘Creator! Teach me to love. Then shall all my wounds received in love be as nothing and my sufferings become pleasing to me.’ And the words sounded like the Song of Songs: ‘God, I am Thine, and Thou art mine. Do not deprive me of Thy love!’ This transcription was made by the tsarina.

When they were spellbound by his teaching, when the faces of his ‘fools’ shone, he instructed them to sing hymns. And all together the Petersburg ladies sang the old hymns. Along with the peasant.

Guschina, Vyrubova, and Golovina have talked about those hymns. ‘Akilina in a high beautiful soprano voice started to sing and the others joined in … Rasputin’s pleasant deep voice resonated like an accompaniment, setting off and playing up the women’s voices. I had never heard such spiritual singing before. It was beautiful and sad. Then they started to chant Psalms,’ Dzhanumova recalled.

And he schooled the royal family in the same thing. As witnesses would testify, they often sang hymns together in their house arrest after the revolution. And at the moment of greatest enthusiasm, of almost general exaltation, Rasputin would suddenly leap to his feet and demand music. And then his famous, somehow desperate dancing would begin. Filippov recalled:

There was in his dancing something
Khlyst-like
. … He danced assiduously and at length, with special nervous, frenzied movements, leaping and from time to time shouting ‘Oh!’ the way someone would cry out upon being lowered into icy water…He danced fifteen minutes to an hour without ceasing … inspired to the point of a kind of ecstasy or frenzy … He said that all religious people must be good dancers, and in that connection mentioned King David, who had danced down an entire road in front of a temple.

But sometimes at the height of the festivities the telephone would ring, reducing his entire salon to holy awe. And Akilina’s solemn voice would inform Rasputin that there was a call ‘from Tsarskoe Selo!’

And then the guests would begin to leave. And parting with Rasputin was a ritual, too.

‘They started to disperse,’ Dzhanumova recalled, ‘and kissed the father’s hand, and he embraced each one and kissed her on the lips … ‘Some rusks, father,’ the ladies asked. He handed out burned rusks to them all, which they wrapped up in their scented handkerchiefs … and put away in their handbags … and then they whispered to the maid, asking for the father’s dirty linen … And with his sweat, if possible.’ And under the intelligent Akilina’s stern gaze, the ladies would collect the peasant’s dirty linen. And Munya would help those who were leaving to put on their boots.

From the testimony of Molchanov: ‘They would try to say goodbye to him in private, for which they would step into the hallway. I shall note this strange behaviour on the part of Vyrubova: once after saying goodbye to Rasputin in the hallway, she came back into the room for some reason, but on doing so refused to shake my hand goodbye, announcing that she had already said goodbye to the father and would not be saying any more goodbyes.’ It was so nice to take away with oneself the warmth of the holy hand that brought happiness.