The Rasputin File (49 page)

‘To The Best Of Jews’

Thus did Rasputin write on the photograph of himself he gave to Simanovich. A security agent has provided a description:

Aron Simanovich, a merchant of the First Guild, forty-one years old (born in 1873), four children … He is a ‘merchant’ in name only; he is not involved in business of any kind, although he does gamble at various clubs. He goes to Rasputin’s almost every day …An extremely harmful person and a great intriguer capable of any kind of chicanery or speculation. There have been instances of bringing to Rasputin persons of the female sex of easy virtue by the look of it, and of furnishing wine.

(After the introduction of the dry law in 1914, wine had to be ‘furnished’.) Rasputin and Simanovich had met several years before in Kiev, where the latter owned a jewellery shop. Even then he had a record with the criminal investigation division as a club gambler and loan shark. He lent money at high rates of interest to the golden youth who visited the clubs. After his move to Petersburg and the fall of Dobrovolsky, Simanovich became the peasant’s chief financial adviser and the supplier of the most profitable petitioners.

In the beginning Simanovich freed Jews from military service through
Rasputin. For a consideration, naturally. But in 1915 the business got more serious. When the defeats in the war started to mount, the favourite Russian explanation for all failures at once came into being. It was not the third-rate generals nor the profiteers who were bilking millions in the supply of weapons and outfitting, who were at fault, but spies. Spies — the ‘internal Germans’ who would not permit defeat of the external variety. In keeping with the traditional anti-Semitism, the Jews had been declared spies from the start. At the order of the commander-in-chief, several Jews were hanged in Dvinsk for espionage. (It would later emerge that innocent men had been hanged.) The ruthless eviction of Jews who kept the Jewish faith, including rich entrepreneurs, had begun in Petrograd. Simanovich kept them in Petrograd through Rasputin.

Rasputin liked Simanovich. He liked his dignity in the presence of the powerful Anya. He liked it that he truly loved his disenfranchised people and stubbornly tried through Rasputin to change the royal family’s attitude towards Jews. And he liked it that that rascal, though taking in enormous sums from rich Jews, disinterestedly helped the poorer members of his tribe. He liked Simanovich’s delight in the scale of his binges and Simanovich’s almost awed admiration for his mysterious power. For Simanovich, who loved his children, never forgot the miracle that he believed Rasputin had worked with his son, who had been ill with the then incurable disease called Saint Vitus’s dance.

A Ten-Minute Miracle

‘I brought in my ailing son, sat him down on a chair in the bedroom, and left the apartment. My son came home an hour later. He was healed and happy, and the disease did not recur again.’ It is one of the few stories about Rasputin in Simanovich’s memoirs that is not the fruit of his lush imagination.

In 1917 the Extraordinary Commission decided to verify the talk about the miracle. Simanovich’s son was called before the Commission. And retained in the File is the remarkable testimony of Ioann Simanovich, a twenty-year-old student of Jewish faith.

From 1909 to 1910 I began to show symptoms of the nervous disease called Saint Vitus’s dance. I had at the onset of the disease gone to doctors, particularly since on one occasion I was forced to lie in bed because my whole left side was paralysed … Among the doctors who treated me I can name Professor Rosenbach and Dr Rubinko, who lived in Petrograd… In 1915 Rasputin heard about my disease from my father and suggested
bringing me to his apartment. After remaining alone in the room with me, Rasputin sat me on a chair and, taking his place opposite me, peered intently into my eyes and started stroking my head with his hand. At the time I experienced a special kind of state. The session lasted ten minutes, I think. After which Rasputin said to me as we were parting, ‘It’s all right, it will pass!’ And, really, I can now attest that after that meeting with Rasputin, the attacks were no longer repeated with me. Although more than two years have passed since that session … I ascribe the healing exclusively to Rasputin, since the medical remedies merely alleviated the form of the attacks but did not eliminate their manifestation. Whereas after the visit to Rasputin the attacks ceased.

What must the tsarina and his own devotees have felt upon learning that Our Friend, like Christ, had exorcised the demon from someone by his mere touch. So Simanovich, to the extent he was capable of it, was devoted to him. Beletsky later testified how Simanovich had led Rasputin ‘away from suspicious acquaintances’, and with the help of money, had ‘restricted his dangerous revelry to private rooms’.

The ‘Brain Trust’

But the essential point was that Simanovich connected Rasputin with the Jewish bankers. And connected him with the richest of them, the famous ‘Mitya’ — Dmitry Lvovich Rubinstein. This Jew and businessman, in a country of official anti-Semitism and mongrel capitalism, had achieved a stunning success. A merchant of the first guild, he had become a banker and chairman of the board of the Franco-Russian Bank. With a doctorate in law, he knew how to exploit the numerous gaps in the semifeudal legal code. He understood the importance of the press. And when the pro-government and very respectable newspaper
New Times
was traded as a joint-stock company, he tried to acquire a controlling share, which his competitors declared an ‘attempt by international Jewry to take possession of the Russian press’. And the son of the deceased owner of the paper, the famous Alexei Suvorin, mounted a distinctive protest. To attract the attention of the government, he shot several times through a window during a stockholders’ meeting. Mitya was not allowed to buy the
New Times
. Rubinstein fully understood the shakiness of his situation in those years of patriotic fervour. And it was then that the idea occurred to him of achieving the impossible — of receiving through Rasputin the civil rank of actual state councillor (corresponding to the military rank of general), while still remaining an Orthodox Jew. For that, the peasant summoned Loman, the
builder of the Feodor Cathedral, to the apartment on Gorokhovaya Street.

‘Rubinstein had decided to make a donation for the construction of houses next to the Feodor Cathedral in exchange for the rank of actual state councillor. I declined the offer, for, as a Jew, he could not receive that rank,’ Loman testified in the File. But Rubinstein continued to entreat Rasputin. He needed to show everyone that he enjoyed the royal family’s special favour in order to demonstrate the soundness of his financial empire. And he pressured the peasant, believing in his omnipotence with the tsarina. Rubinstein, like everyone else, did not realize that Rasputin could only do what the tsarina herself wanted. But the peasant did try. ‘Rasputin told me that Rubinstein had asked him to obtain the rank of actual state councillor for him, and I believe he did ask the sovereign and empress about it, although I … know that he was turned down on it,’ Vyrubova testified. But in a great many other difficult matters that the Jewish banker was daily faced with, Rasputin was able to help. ‘I saw that fat little Jew a couple of times at parties at Rasputin’s … He didn’t drink or enjoy himself and kept leading Rasputin off into the study and talking to him about something. Coming out of the study he would usually say, “Now don’t forget to tell Anushka,” and Rasputin would answer, “All right, I’ll do it.”‘ (The File, from the testimony of the singer Varvarova.)

Rasputin’s secure position seemed to the banker to be a guarantee of the soundness of his own situation. And the banker Rubinstein, who had an excellent grasp of the political state of affairs, became one of Our Friend’s faithful advisers, a participant in the ‘Brain Trust on Gorokhovaya Street’.

But after the appearance of Jews in his circle, Rasputin had to justify himself before Lokhtina and the other old admirers who had been with him since the days of the Black-Hundred Iliodor, and before his friends in the Union of the Russian People.

The File, from the testimony of Lokhtina: ‘Regarding Rasputin’s attitude towards the Jews … I can only pass on the words of Father Grigory: “I distract them so they won’t make a lot of trouble for Russia.”’

Another devoted client of Rasputin’s and member of the ‘Brain Trust’ was Rubinstein’s business competitor, Ignaty Porfirievich Manus, a banker and stockbroker, and the chairman of the board of a transportation and insurance company. He was Orthodox, and Rasputin, naturally for a large sum of money, obtained the rank of actual state councillor for him. At the same time, the peasant found enjoyment in goading the two bankers, who were competitors and hated each other, into a contest to cater to him. The dry law in force during the war required Rubinstein to spend exorbitant amounts to obtain the wine that Rasputin and his guests consumed in
incredible amounts. The two bankers were also obliged to vie with each other in regard to the amount of money they passed on to the peasant. And the latter, like a pump, sucked up huge sums without a trace, sometimes without any accounting, distributing those sums at once to his acquaintances and drinking companions.

The File, from the testimony of Varvarova: ‘Rasputin would say to me, “I received 10,000 from Rubinstein today, so we shall have a fine binge.’“

1914 Was Coming To An End

Christmas worship was under way in the Moscow cathedrals. Surviving in the diary of the celebrated writer Ivan Bunin is a description of a service on Ordynka Street at the Martha and Mary Cloister, whose abbess was Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna.

They would not allow Bunin into the church, mysteriously explaining to him that the grand duchess was with the visiting Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich. And the writer, standing outside, listened through the temple’s open doors to the mournful and emotionally charged singing of its virginal choir. And then out of the church floated icons and banners carried by virginal hands with the tall, thin-faced grand duchess in front dressed in white with a cross sewn in gold on the brow of her headgear and a large candle in her hand, and behind her a file of singing sisters with candle flames held close to their faces.

At the time, the circle of those who hated the elder was drawing ever closer around Elizaveta Fyodorovna. And her protégé, Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, who so hated Rasputin, was now a frequent guest in Moscow, alongside the Yusupovs and the commander-in-chief. Holiness, political power, and money had joined together.

Total Surveillance

The offensive against the peasant continued. Dzhunkovsky took another step which frightened the tsarina again. As stated in the police summary:

We have received additional intelligence about an assassination attempt, the order has been given to take more thorough measures. For which we have started assigning him a guard of 5–6 people and an automobile and driver. They have been working in two shifts — eleven people in all. The allocation of posts: one in the apartment or by the door to the stairs, one in the lobby in a doorman’s uniform, one for communication between the internal and
external surveillance, and a driver by the gate with the motor. In the event of a trip, one of the agents will go with him.

Those who were behind Dzhunkovsky wanted to know Our Friend’s every move. Now at any hour of the day or night he would be followed by an agent — an all-seeing eye — who would in his reports compile an uninterrupted twenty-four-hour chronicle of Rasputin’s life. Of his drunken life.

And evidently both the peasant himself and the people who surrounded him understood the need to hurry. ‘Ours’ must come to power.

A Very Dangerous Prince

It was then that another very popular figure of the day, a personality known to ‘all Petrograd’, Prince Mikhail Andronikov, became a frequent guest at Rasputin’s apartment.

Having established a relationship with Rasputin, the prince immediately found his way into the police reports. Here is one characterization of him:

Andronikov, Mikhail Mikhailovich, thirty-nine years old, attended the Corps des Pages. From a family of old Georgian aristocracy, an official in the Department of Internal Affairs, released from service for non-attendance at same. In 1914 appointed an official for special commissions attached to the chief procurator of the Most Holy Synod.

The prince was a typical figure both for Russia and for that insane time. Although he did not occupy any particular office, he was a very important personage. He had quit the tedious office work of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but, malicious tongues asserted, he still maintained close contact with the most important structure of the ministry, the office of special services. And he was a personal friend of Stepan Beletsky, the former chief of the Department of Police. At the time in question, the prince was registered as working for the Synod, although he was rarely seen there. But that modest Synod official was nonetheless received by all the ministers. And although regarded with scorn, he was received at the best Petersburg salons. All were afraid of the prince’s tongue. For that busy but dangerous bee worked tirelessly all day long spreading rumours and gossip throughout Petersburg’s working places and salons.

The already cited member of the Council of State Polovtsev recalled:

I have known the prince for a long time … He spent almost all his time visiting ministers and highly placed personages…He found out things from them and himself passed on rumours and facts from court and administrative
circles … People received him in order to stay abreast of court and bureaucratic intrigues, and in order to set needed rumours in motion through him … And on the other hand they feared him — they knew he was well received everywhere and could with his loose tongue do harm to anyone who was unpleasant to him … It would be ridiculous to call him a conservative or a liberal. His opinions about people in power depended on his relationship to them: if they received him, he praised them; if they avoided him, he belittled and hated them.