The Rasputin File (45 page)

The royal family set off for the Crimea at the end of April. Nicky had, as always, resisted for a while. But Alix had won. Rasputin was not staying in Pokrovskoe ‘for good’. The papers were already reporting that he had left for the Crimea, for Yalta.

The Livadia palace was deserted. Grand Duke Dmitry, the tsar’s former favourite, was no longer received. The tsar’s brother Mikhail was in exile abroad. And the tsarina’s devout sister and Rasputin’s sworn enemy, Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna, was not visiting Livadia any more, either. Only ‘ours’ were there: Vyrubova, Lili Dehn, and Rasputin. As usual, he was driven in secret from his Yalta hotel to the Livadia palace.

And as usual, Yalta thrived on the gossip about his secret visits. The last spring in the Livadia palace was drawing to an end. Neither the royal family nor Rasputin would ever see it again.

Rasputin proposes to return to Petersburg in May,’ the
Russian Word
wrote. And in fact he did go to Petersburg, but, as usual, he stopped along the way in Moscow. ‘Grigory Rasputin arrived in Moscow on 13 May 1914, and, as is his custom, stayed with Anisia Ivanovna Reshetnikova. Rasputin denied rumours that he intends to retire to a monastery, and that he had clashed with Dzhunkovsky,’ the paper wrote.

After Dzhunkovsky’s lack of success in establishing official surveillance of Rasputin, the head of the gendarmes was lying low, and there had been no further clashes. But Rasputin knew that he was still being followed, clandestinely. But there was no point in complaining now: the tsar was no longer with him. The tsar meant to go to war.

And Rasputin felt out of place in Petersburg. He wanted to leave. As if he had had a presentiment of something, he himself wanted to get out of that dangerous city. But with war in the offing, Alix was afraid to let him go for very long. He was her last hope. Those anticipating the war understood that. The semi-literate peasant was once more at the centre of world events.

But summer came, a deceptive political vacation. And Alix put her trust in the summer lull and let him go back to Pokrovskoe for the season. As the papers reported, ‘Rasputin is leaving for Pokrovskoe, where he will remain until August, when he will return to Petersburg again.’ And in the meantime, the papers rushed to conduct interviews with that human sensation.

In the light of the looming events, a journalist from the
New Times
asked Rasputin, ‘Are you aware of what Count Witte has been saying about your good efforts to intercede against those who have been calling for war?’

‘The national dignity must be protected, but sabre rattling is unbecoming. I have always said that,’ the peasant replied. The newspaper immediately published this with a very clear hint to its readers: during the Balkan events, questions of war and peace had been given up to the authority of the semi-literate peasant. And that had ended with Russia’s humiliation and the betrayal of the Slavic peoples. Can we really allow that to happen this time?

How many times had Alix forbidden him to speak to journalists! On 30 May the
Saint Petersburg Courier
reported that Rasputin had ‘appealed to the police with a request to guard his apartment against the visits of newspaper reporters, who were annoying him, at the same time changing his telephone number’. And then he finally broke away from the capital. He left the city and fled to Pokrovskoe, where it happened all over again.

Two Bloody Events Strangely Coincide

Rasputin left Petersburg together with his faithful admirers Golovina and Vyrubova. They arrived in Tyumen on 8 June. And then they proceeded along his favourite route from Tyumen to the Verkhoturye Monastery with its relics of Saint Simeon. And then, after saying goodbye to Vyrubova and Golovina (his admirers were returning to Petersburg), Rasputin drove his horses on to Pokrovskoe. With the journalists now following on his heels instead of agents. Although it is possible that some of them were performing the role of agent, too.

He did not succeed in living quietly in Pokrovskoe for long.

Two events occurred in the last days of June. Although externally incommensurate, each had an influence on the fate of whole peoples, on the future deaths of millions, and on the map of the entire globe. One is well-known: on 28 June 1914 (NS), in Sarajevo, the Serbian nationalist student Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. Which meant the inevitable explosion of the ‘Balkan boiler’. The war parties in Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary were exultant. ‘Well, now we shall settle accounts with Serbia!’ said Count Berchtold, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister. But it was clear that Russia would not allow Serbia to be stifled. On 22 July the tsar’s emissary, Count I. L. Tatischev, reported that Kaiser Wilhelm had decided to support Austria-Hungary. World war was becoming a reality.

Alix decided to bring back the peasant to the capital, although she realized that Nicky would be obstinate. But as she was trying to persuade Nicky, the telegraph brought news to Petersburg that put an end to her efforts: in distant Pokrovskoe an unknown woman had walked up to Rasputin and stuck a knife in his stomach. The one person who apparently could have stopped Russia’s intervention, and consequently world war, fell to a knife.

Could Rasputin really have stopped the war? Much would later be said about that. His future acquaintance the singer Belling recounted in her memoirs how once during dinner he said, ‘If not for the damned evil-doer woman that cut up my intestines, there would be no war … While my intestines were healing, the Germans started fighting!’

As Rasputin’s friend Sazonov testifies in the File, ‘Rasputin himself confirmed to me: if he had been in Petrograd, there would have been no war.’
The peasant had the right to say that, since he knew that it was not he who was the main actor in the matter but
she
. All he had to do was play his part — come to Petersburg and prophesy against the war. So that on the basis of his prophecies the tsarina would have the right to break the tsar’s will.

But the court and society believed that
he
was the one. As Guchkov testified, ‘Rasputin’s attitude towards the war was negative. An Italian correspondent asked him before it began whether or not there would be a war. He answered, “Yes, they are starting one. But God willing, there will be no war, and I will see about it.”’

The Murderer’s Account

It had happened as Rasputin was coming back from church. He was almost home. Someone was waiting for him by his gate. It was a young woman. She asked for alms, and as Rasputin was giving her money, she pulled out a knife and stabbed him. The woman, a certain Khionia Guseva from Tsaritsyn, was seized. All the Russian papers gave front-page coverage to the event.

Preserved in the Tambov archive are the three volumes of the investigation into ‘the attempt on the life of the peasant… Grigory Efimovich Rasputin’. Khionia Guseva herself provided testimony: ‘On 29 June (NS) after the midday meal I saw … Grigory Rasputin coming … I had a dagger in a sheath under my skirt…and I pulled it out through a slit in my blouse. I stabbed him once in the stomach with the dagger. After which Rasputin ran away from me while I rushed after him … in order to inflict a fatal blow.’

They ran past houses and petrified crowds. A small woman brandishing a dagger, and Rasputin pressing his shirt against his wound. But she failed to stab him a second time. ‘He picked up a shaft on the ground and hit me on the head with it, at once knocking me down…It was afternoon and people came running from all directions and said, “Let’s kill her,” and picked up the shaft. I quickly got to my feet and said to the crowd, “Hand me over to a constable. Don’t kill me.” They tied my hands and took me to the regional office, and on the way they… kicked me, but they didn’t beat me.’

The young woman had a terrifying face with a nose ravaged as if by syphilis. But Khionia explained, ‘I am only a girl and never had children nor suffered from syphilis…I was spoiled by medicines, which ruined my nose when I was thirteen.’

When he learned that Khionia was from Tsaritsyn, Rasputin came to
and declared that the attack had been a fatal greeting from the Tsaritsyn monk Iliodor. But Guseva denied that Iliodor had had anything to do with it. She explained her action as her own decision after reading about Rasputin in the newspapers: ‘I consider Grigory Efimovich Rasputin a false prophet and even an Antichrist… I decided to kill Rasputin in imitation of the holy prophet who stabbed four hundred false prophets with a knife.’

Rasputin lay between life and death for several days. All his admirers and the royal family sent him telegrams with best wishes for his recovery. Guseva’s interrogation was already under way. ‘During her interrogation,’ the
New Times
reported, ‘Guseva expressed regret at not having killed the elder. Khionia Guseva is a hatter by profession … She made Rasputin’s acquaintance in 1910 when he visited the Balashev monastery hostel in Tsaritsyn, where Khionia’s friend, the nun Xenia, lived.’ The newspapers were fascinated by the romantic possibilities. One version had it that Rasputin had seduced Guseva when she was young and beautiful. Another speculated that Rasputin had corrupted the young beauty Xenia as a minor during a rite of ‘rejoicing’, and that Guseva was taking revenge on her behalf. And although it soon became clear that the alluded-to Xenia had only seen Rasputin from a distance and was by no means young, no one bothered to refute anything. Readers wanted the ‘Rasputin story’.

Sent To A Madhouse

No sooner did he improve than the correspondents broke into his ward in the hospital at Tyumen. His misfortune temporarily reconciled at least a part of the press to him. And as a result the tone of some of the newspapers became almost sympathetic for a while. The
Stock Exchange News
wrote, ‘He sat worn out by ill-health in a hospital smock and recounted his experiences…The wider public is unacquainted with his thoughts, which he records in a notebook almost every day.’ And the correspondent offered a quotation: ‘It is a great thing to be present in the final hour of the sick. You receive two rewards: you are visiting a sick person, and at the same time everything earthly seems like an illusion to you and a trap of the demon.’

Guseva was sent to a Tomsk hospital for the insane. It was the only possible way of avoiding a scandalous trial that might have brought about yet another wave of hatred against Rasputin.

N. Veryovkin, deputy minister of justice at the time, testified during his
interrogation before the Extraordinary Commission, ‘Guseva had been recognized insane … but the woman shouted, “I am in my right mind and I remember clearly: I meant to stab him with a knife.”‘ She was placed in a psychiatric hospital. Her relatives later applied for her release on the grounds that she had recovered. But the minister of justice issued instructions that her ‘release must not take place before any danger that the patient may present to those around her is completely eliminated’. So Guseva was destined to rot in the hospital until she was liberated by the revolution.

The attempt on Rasputin’s life was a shock for the unhappy general’s wife. At the time she had been visiting Iliodor at his farm. The
Saint Petersburg Courier
reported that ‘Lokhtina, upon learning of the attempted murder of Rasputin, ran to Iliodor’s house and shouted, “The day of judgment has come. Repent before it is too late.”‘ She spent half a day banging on the door and shouting before Iliodor’s votaries finally conveyed ‘Christ’s’ command that she clear out. She was afraid to go to Pokrovskoe; she was a pariah for Rasputin’s admirers, too. ‘The year that Guseva made her attempt on Rasputin’s life, all his admirers had turned away from Lokhtina because of her closeness to Iliodor … Lokhtina continued to believe that Iliodor was not involved. Rasputin, however, had no doubt of it,’ Maria Golovina testified.

The Attempt Explained

Rasputin would not stop talking about his Tsaritsyn enemy. The correspondent for the newspaper
Kama-Volga Speech
conducted an interview with him: ‘The Tsaritsyn woman, she … admired Iliodor. The woman, she would go for anything, as long as it was somebody else’s idea. Iliodor egged her on, she wasn’t acting on her own. She was just the hammer striking, but the anvil belonged to somebody else.’

And in his book
A Holy Devil
, Iliodor actually did confirm that he knew Guseva. ‘I know Khionia Guseva well. She is my spiritual daughter … Until the age of eighteen, she had a very beautiful face, and then she became deformed: her nose fell away. Her own explanation is that she prayed to God to take away her beauty. And he took it. It was simply that during a pilgrimage to the holy places she had slept in flophouses in the big cities and had been infected by the foul disease syphilis and turned into a freak.’ But Iliodor categorically denied any part in the attempted murder: ‘I have been unjustly accused by Rasputin of sending a murderer to him.’

Rasputin, however, handed over to the inquest a letter that had been
sent to him in Pokrovskoe three days after the dagger attack: ‘I, and not you, Grigory, have emerged the victor in this struggle! Your hypnosis has been dispersed, like smoke in the sun. I say that in spite of everything, you shall die! I am your avenger! The prisoner.’

‘I think the letter was written by Iliodor himself,’ Rasputin testified. The investigators attached the letter to the File. But unlike the investigators of 1914, we do not have to do our digging among scraps of evidence or rely on conjecture.

In the New York Public Library I read a most rare book given to the library by the daughter of the Russian general Denikin (who commanded the White Army during the civil war). The book was called
Martha of Stalingrad
, and its author was Iliodor. He wrote it after his emigration to America and published it in Russian. And in the book Iliodor says that it was he who decided to take Rasputin’s life. At his ‘New Galilee’, he gathered his flock by the banks of the river. Around four hundred people came. ‘The congregation chose the three most beautiful young women … Those three beauties,’ Iliodor writes, ‘were supposed to lure Rasputin and kill him.’ But Khionia Guseva, who was present, said, ‘Why ruin beautiful women whose lives are ahead of them? I am a wretched woman and of no use to any one…I alone shall bring about his execution. Father, give me your blessing to stab him as the ancient prophet stabbed the false prophets.’