The Rasputin File (48 page)

So he had been warned: do not presume to stick your nose into political affairs. But it was impossible to step aside; the tsarina needed prophecies and required them of him.

As a result, he was now constantly drunk. Endless drinking bouts and mad revelry, if only to suppress his fear. And more and more, after he had got drunk, he would break into a wild dance reminiscent of
Khlyst
‘spiritual beer’. His health had returned, and along with it an intimidating animal strength and stamina.

And now he was a wild habitué of private restaurant rooms.

The most detailed description in the File of Rasputin’s drunkenness is to be found in Filippov’s testimony. Filippov himself was not unacquainted with that ‘Russian disease’. And in describing the awfulness of Rasputin’s drinking at the time, that observer and participant could not hide his admiration for those ‘aesthetic orgies’.

In 1914, after he had fallen into a period of wildness and orgies, Rasputin once sat at my place from 12:00 noon till 12:00 midnight, during which he drank a great deal, sang, danced, and talked to the audience that had gathered there. Then, after driving several people to Gorokhovaya Street, he continued drinking sweet wine with them until 4:00 a.m. When the church bells started ringing (this was just before Lent), he expressed a wish to go to prime, and… took himself to church and stood through the entire service until 8:00 a.m., and then on returning home, received some eighty people as if nothing had happened. At the same time, he drank in a remarkable way, without any of the brutishness so typical of the drunken Russian peasant … I often wondered how he kept his head clean, since it
always had some kind of oil on it, and how it was that after every kind of drinking bout and other excess he did not sweat … By the way, he never suffered from the vomiting that usually follows a drinking bout. Nor do I recall any external indecency in his clothing, unbuttoned trousers, for example, even though in 1915 he called on me daily, sometimes even twice a day, and his drinking bouts reached…such dimensions that my apartment was turned into a virtual bar room.

Drunkenness To The Rescue?

But then the business took a serious turn. On one of his binges, he was beaten up. During another, he boasted and talked about his meetings with the ‘tsars’. It seemed to his friend Filippov that Rasputin was perishing right before his eyes. He was especially frightened by Rasputin’s drunken conversations about the royal family. And Filippov decided to have a talk with Vyrubova.

‘At the end of 1914 and the beginning of 1915 Rasputin … drank especially hard and was involved in sprees at the Bear and other restaurants where he even dared to parade his influence with the Lofty Personages. I wrote a letter to Vyrubova in which I described the concrete escapades of Rasputin’s at the Bear that had ended in his being beaten, and I insisted that decisive measures be taken to influence Rasputin.’ But, as Filippov testified, rather than taking measures, Vyrubova immediately told Grigory about the dangerous complaints of his friend. After which Rasputin himself appeared and ‘engaged in stormy remonstrations’. He said that ‘no Vyrubova, and in fact no one at all, could influence his behaviour, and that even if he should take off his boot and make Vyrubova kiss his foot, she would do so.’ The enraged Filippov went to Vyrubova for an explanation, and she replied with a sigh, ‘You are speaking of the fact that I told him the contents of your letter about him, but that is the only time and he is the only person; before him I am powerless.’

The intelligent Vyrubova did not try to explain a paradox that Filippov would not have understood. Father Grigory’s enemies would come to understand it only afterwards, when it was too late. Prince Yusupov would formulate it: every scandal around Rasputin served only to strengthen his position.

It was the tsarina’s trap. She was at the time informed ever more often about Father Grigory’s drunkenness. But every report of his indecencies provoked the tsarina’s stormy anger with those who reported them. She
could not explain to those normal people living in the ordinary world what she herself knew — the mystical secret of his madness, his
yurodstvo
. Could idle people really grasp the actions of those vanished saints of ancient Rus? That humble need to endure abuse? And now she acknowledged her cross: to defend him from those people. To protect the man of God and keep him by the throne. Each episode of mad drunkenness accompanied by its chorus of denunciations forced her to attack his enemies. And to make short work of them cruelly and without explanation. And in order to avoid explaining to those people who understood nothing, she devised her own version of what she was told. Now, whenever she was shown the agents’ reports about Rasputin’s drunken feats, she indignantly ordered the police to track down the contemptible person who had dared to impersonate Father Grigory. The peasant appreciated the advantages of the situation. Each drunken scandal helped him lure his enemies out into the open where they could be annihilated. So he could tipple without a thought.

But from time to time at the height of his drunkenness, a call would come from Tsarskoe Selo, and he would be advised that Alexei was in a bad way. And mysteriously sobering up, so that even the smell of alcohol on him dissipated, he would set off in the car that had been sent for him to save the boy. At the palace he was the same as before: clean, affectionate but not servile, independent, and sometimes even menacing, as befitted a prophet.

The Noose Is Tightened

It was then after a long interval that Zhukovskaya appeared at his new apartment on Gorokhovaya Street. As she recounted in her memoirs:

After crossing beneath a dark archway into a courtyard poured with asphalt, I approached a reddish-brown three-storey building whose front door opened towards me by itself. A very courteous doorman explained to me in anticipation of my inquiry that Rasputin lived on the second floor, and that the door to his apartment was covered with crimson cloth. While the doorman was removing my boots, I gazed suspiciously at a certain personage … sitting in the corner next to a little iron stove: he would look at everyone entering with excessive attention and then assume a profoundly indifferent expression. Personages of the same sort were now on the floors leading to his apartment, as well as next to the building.

In his new residence on Gorokhovaya Street Rasputin was under tireless surveillance — or rather, guard — for his own protection, naturally. And so
that the tsarina would not put an end to the surveillance, she was from time to time shown ‘intercepted letters with threats to kill Rasputin’.

A Department of Police summary has survived:

External surveillance was established of the Dark One, residing at 64 Gorokhovaya Street. At first it yielded no results, since he was too cautious and moreover surrounded by devotees who would try to take him away. Such remained the case until a letter (anonymous) with a threat to kill Rasputin was received. In response to it, the security Branch offered to assign two agents, Terekhov and Svistunov, to guard Rasputin. He accepted the offer. The agents guarding Rasputin also executed the Department of Police requirement of identifying the parties who were visiting him. Having complete confidence in the agents, Rasputin often took them with him, which made the work easier. On his trips to Pokrovskoe or Moscow, he was accompanied by the same agents who reported to the Department of Police… twice a week by letter.

A Palace Coup?

Rasputin had known since the jubilee celebrations how Dzhunkovsky regarded him. And he had known since Stolypin’s time that the agents were not so much protecting him as spying on him. But he could not now refuse the guard. Take it away, and there would be no obstacle to his being shot down on the street like a dog. There was a war going on and Petrograd was packed with armed people. So an assassination attempt could be pinned on just about anyone. And the last episode, the automobile collision, had demonstrated that his enemies were active. But he had already begun to grasp that he would not have long to live as the captive of his enemies’ surveillance. Waiting for his own guard to do him in. But there was a way to be saved! Remove his enemies! Chase them away, toss them out on their backs. Dzhunkovsky, all of them! A palace coup and the coming to power of ‘ours’. And he knew that it would come about, that it would happen. Because he already understood: it was exactly what ‘Mama’ was dreaming about. So enough of drowning his fear in drunkenness. The time to take action had come. All the more so since at the end of 1914 and the beginning of 1915 a team of bold, dangerous people had clustered around him.

The Team Of Rascals

They were the ones Filippov would honour as ‘rascals and speculators’, but whom Rasputin called his ‘secretaries’. And their appearance on the scene
was no coincidence. Money had drawn them together. The enormous amounts of it that were now whirling around the modest apartment on Gorokhovaya Street.

At the time a mighty weapon had fallen into Rasputin’s hands — the petitions of citizens. Entrepreneurs, military officers, civilian officials, poor Russian people, and wealthy Jews who although they had made themselves rich were still without rights — all dreamed of circumventing the monstrous machine of Russian bureaucracy. And Our Friend was able to provide a means. Bypassing the interminable bureaucratic obstacles, their petitions went directly from the peasant’s hands to the summits of power, to the ministers, and even the ‘tsars’. He gave the petitioners his semi-literate notes of recommendation to the ministers, notes he termed ‘petranudge’ (‘patronage’). And behind each other’s backs the ministers endeavoured to fulfil the favourite’s request! And now his ante-room was crammed with petitioners.

Zhukovskaya has described it: ‘The “waiting room”, an empty room with a couple of chairs,’ was ‘full of the most diverse visitors, beginning with a general in all his decorations and ending with some unprepossessing person in a provincial dark-blue knee-length coat who was strongly reminiscent of some village innkeeper.’

The File, Molchanov’s testimony: ‘A great number of petitioners turned up at Rasputin’s … Rasputin would usually run into the other room, take a pile of papers, and then in his scrawl write a note to the ministers or other people with power…Rasputin’s requests were passed on to the tsars through Vyrubova.’

‘Vyrubova and I often called on Rasputin in Petrograd. The evening always ended with Vyrubova’s getting a stack of various petitions from Rasputin and taking them back home with her and then to the palace,’ Vyrubova’s maid Feodosia Voino testified in the File. And Rasputin himself gave petitions to the tsarina at Anya’s little house. ‘In the last years Rasputin … started to bring pocketfuls of petitions. The former tsar did not like it atall…I warned Rasputin about that attitude towards his petitioning, but Rasputin paid no attention,’ Vyrubova testified. The tsar had to tolerate it. Because Alix valued those petitions. They went with the image of Rasputin created by her, that of the disinterested peasant. And a few years before, it had been the truth.

But everything had changed. His new life of fantastic drinking bouts and binges with Gypsies demanded immense expenditure. And he not only spent the money, he was generous about giving it away.

He would now take the money himself, but more often his ‘secretaries’ would find rich petitioners for him. His retinue of ‘secretaries’ was a
distinctive way of collecting tribute from his petitioners. The huge amounts of money that the peasant was spending staggered the imagination of his acquaintance Molchanov. Alhough he ‘did not put the question of where Rasputin was getting that kind of money, thinking it had been given to him in Tsarskoe Selo’, Molchanov testified in the File.

The ‘Secretaries’

He liked his situation very much, that semi-literate peasant, who now had secretaries just as the important officials did.

The intelligent Akilina Laptinskaya, who remained devoted to him to her grave (literally, as we shall see), remained his chief attendant and principal secretary. And she kept an eye on the other secretaries, lest their hands get too sticky. But the sharp secretaries did not succeed in obtaining tribute from every petitioner. Poor people could as before reach Rasputin for nothing merely by coming up to him on the street and asking for a meeting. That was ‘God’s business’. The tsarina was touched by Anya’s stories about his help of the poor. And it was easy for attractive young ladies to get to Rasputin, too — all they had to do was find out his phone number. And use it as Zhukovskaya had done to call him up. An appropriate answer to his question ‘How old are you and are you beautiful?’ would open the door of his home on Gorokhovaya Street.

But men of means, to say nothing of the rich, gained access to Rasputin through his secretaries.

From Filippov’s testimony: ‘His secretaries, male and female, asked for and received enormous sums, of which only a third actually reached Rasputin’s hands. The other tens of thousands remained in those of Simanovich, Volynsky, Dobrovolsky, and, towards the end, Reshetnikov.’

The ‘secretaries’ of the first phase were two scoundrels he had rescued from prison, Volynsky and Dobrovolsky.

But soon afterwards a third secretary appeared, the Jew Simanovich.

From Vyrubova’s testimony: ‘At Rasputin’s I encountered the disagreeable Yid Simanovich and Dobrovolsky, also an exceptionally disagreeable and low type. For me, it was clear those gentlemen were intermediaries between Rasputin and his petitioners and were organizing some sort of business. Dobrovolsky’s wife, a heavily made-up and dubious personage, was on friendly terms with Rasputin’s daughters.’

The ‘secretary’ Simanovich subsequently related that ‘Rasputin accumulated a large amount of capital’ by extorting his petitioners. But that was a lie. He accumulated nothing and left nothing behind. The money, as it
were, burned in his hands: he either squandered it or gave it away. Only a little, for essentials, he sent to Pokrovskoe to his poor household. He no longer needed money for living expenses in Petrograd. Those around him paid for everything. His apartment was paid for out of the resources of the ‘tsars’, and his immense restaurant bills and the endless drinking bouts at his apartment were defrayed by his devotees and petitioners. But even so, whenever he learned that his secretaries had been cheating him, he would be overcome by a peasant rage. ‘The Dobrovolsky couple had great influence — he was a former inspector of public schools in the Tsarskoe Selo district. But when it was proved that they had not been giving all the money to Rasputin, after stormy explanations, they lost their influence,’ Beletsky, the director of the Department of Police, subsequently testified. The Dobrovolskys’ intrigues were exposed by the third secretary, Simanovich. At the time Rasputin, a former friend of the savage antiSemite Iliodor and of members of the anti-Semitic Union of the Russian People, was in the process of making the Jew Simanovich chief among the people he trusted. Simanovich would become a member of the distinctive ‘Brain Trust’ that was then taking shape on Gorokhovaya Street.