The Rasputin File (5 page)

Reading those memoirs prepared for publication in Finland, I knew with certainty that Vyrubova had taken nothing new out of Russia with her.

Unlike her prudent friend, the tsarina had (fortunately for us) been unable to burn most of her letters in which she expressed her undying love for Nicky. Almost all these letters she exchanged with Nicholas have survived. And endlessly referred to in them is ‘Our Friend’. If one must judge Rasputin’s relations with the royal family before 1914 chiefly on the basis of the testimony of other witnesses, then from the first day of the war the tsar and tsarina begin to speak of those relations themselves. Although
one other source did help me to comment on their letters: Olga, the younger sister of Nicholas II.

The Last Of The Ruling Family

The rare journalists who visited her in those years found it hard to believe that the owner of the little house hidden away in Canada, the short woman dressed in an old-fashioned black skirt, a torn sweater, and sturdy brown shoes, had once owned palaces and been waited upon by dozens of servants. She survived until 1960 and thus also managed to pass the century’s midpoint. Her funeral at the Orthodox Cathedral in Toronto brought together the remnants of the first Russian emigration. Although her tiny rooms did contain some old furniture, the only thing that really recalled the past was the enormous portrait of Alexander III over the fireplace.

Olga, Nicholas’s sister, and the youngest daughter of Alexander III, was the last surviving member of his large family. Her memory had been remarkable right up to her death and had amazed the journalist who transcribed her memoirs. And in preparing for the show on Rasputin, I used those memoirs that she had dictated to the insistent journalist — yet another voice from the forever-vanished Winter Palace court.

Rasputin’s Resurrection In The New Russia

But at the time I still had not found the File. On the other hand, the 1990s saw the emergence from oblivion of documents concerning Rasputin in the Tobolsk and Tyumen archives. Located there are the birth registers of the Church of the Mother of God, on the basis of which it has at last become possible to establish the precise date of Rasputin’s birth. Contained in the Tyumen archive, as well, are the ‘File of the Tobolsk Ecclesiastical Consistory in Regard to Grigory Rasputin’s Affiliation with the
Khlysty’
, which had been thought lost, and the ‘File Regarding the Attempt on Grigory Rasputin’s Life’.

I am grateful to both archives, which considerately provided me with photocopies of the precious Rasputin documents in their possession.

Grigory Rasputin has of late begun to enjoy something of a resurrection in Russia, and he has even become an essential part of a revived national or,
more accurately, nationalistic ideology. Here in truth is another of history’s jests: the man whom Russian monarchists saw as the destroyer of autocracy has become the standard-bearer of the new autocratic ideas.

In fact, the man himself — or, more precisely, his writings — has played no small part in his resurrection. After
perestroika
, his writings again became available, producing a tremendous impression. In a country where ignorance of the Bible was universal, his forgotten Biblical sayings and muscular language of the people were bewitching.

The new interest in Rasputin derives from a justified sense that the image of him created over the last century is little more than a political legend. That the testimony published by Schyogolev in his
Proceedings of the Extraordinary Commission
was essentially the testimony of Rasputin’s enemies. And that there are many inconsistencies.

But all that the new research has yielded is a political legend turned on its head. The ‘holy devil’ Grigory has become the holy elder Grigory. Russian myths about devils and saints — how many there have been this century! Bloody Nicholas II and then Nicholas the saint, the father and teacher Stalin and then the bloody monster Stalin, the saintly Lenin and then the bloody Lenin. The culmination of all the recent research on Rasputin is the nationalists’ favourite tale about the evil ‘Yid-Masons’. ‘It was, in essence, the Masons who created the Rasputin myth, a myth having as its goal the blackening and discrediting of Russia and its spiritual principle’ (Oleg Platonov,
Russia’s Crown of Thorns)
.

History loves to jest. The fact is that before the revolution and immediately after it the nationalists of the time accused Rasputin himself of being, well, an agent of the Masons! And they also maintained that the ‘dark forces’ of Masonry had decided to exploit his influence over the tsar and tsarina for their own purposes. Rasputin was accused of being a ‘Jewish stooge surrounded by Jewish secretaries’. So much more amusing, then, are history’s new jests in present-day Russia. The historian N. Koslov has proclaimed Rasputin’s a ritual’ murder. It turns out that Rasputin was murdered by Jews manipulating Masons under their control!

In this way a new myth has emerged about the tsar and the peasant Rasputin as the preservers of the immemorial Russian ideas of Orthodoxy and autocracy, as men who had become the objects of persecution by Masons dreaming of turning Russia towards the West. It has all become so tedious, simplistic, and vulgar.

After all, they can make whatever claims they want. They can dismiss the reports on Rasputin by the tsarist secret police agents as lies. They can declare that Rasputin never got drunk, that he never engaged in lechery. That he was a pure and good Christian who had been slandered by his
enemies. For there was no testimony by his friends. The File was still missing. I needed to find it.

The File

While getting ready for my television show on Rasputin’s murder, I decided to take a look at the Yusupov family archive.

The archive has been clumsily divided into two parts. The main Yusupov archive is at the Russian State Archive for Ancient Documents (RGADA). The RGADA archive contains the history of the ancient family’s incalculable riches. Descendants of Tartar rulers who had entered the service of the Muscovite tsars, the Yusupovs became over the course of three centuries the wealthiest of landholders; Rasputin’s future murderer owned thousands of hectares of land. In the nineteenth century the Yusupovs became the greatest of industrialists. In 1914, their income was 1.5 million gold roubles a year. The richest family in Russia.

The lesser part of the Yusupov archive is held at the History Museum. I found in the two repositories both the largely unpublished correspondence of Felix Yusupov (Rasputin’s murderer) and his wife, Irina, and letters written to Felix by his mother, the beauty Zinaida, one of Rasputin’s chief enemies. The letters reveal how the plot to murder the elder took shape, and they provide a new picture both of the murder itself and of the secret of the relationship between Felix and Maria Golovina, one of Rasputin’s admirers.

The Yusupov Palace itself is full of secrets. Strange rooms that are not shown on any plan of the building are being discovered to this day. Secrets and corpses are in fact quite in the Yusupov family tradition. The great-grandmother of Felix Yusupov was one of the most beautiful women in Europe. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks discovered a secret door in her apartment. And behind the door they found a coffin with the decayed body of a man. Her great-grandson Felix told a story about a dangerous revolutionary lover of hers who had been imprisoned in the fortress at Sveaborg and whose escape she had engineered. She had apparently hidden him in her palace until his death.

In 1925, it was noticed that the plaster under the front staircase in the old seventeenth-century Yusupov Palace in Moscow was a different colour from the adjacent walls. Making a hole, investigators revealed a chamber in which they found seven chests. These had apparently been hastily and haphazardly secreted there by the owners as they were fleeing the country. Discovered in this way were Yusupov family silver, diamonds, pearls, and
emeralds, as well as other family documents that were subsequently added to the Yusupov archive.

The day I came to see the Yusupov palace for myself was oddly disturbing.

That morning I had been invited to lunch by Prince Michael, Duke of Kent, who was visiting Petersburg at the time. Descended from King George V, that double of Nicholas II, Prince Michael also closely resembles the last Russian tsar. Both in his features and, more importantly, in his eyes: light-coloured eyes with the same tenderly sad expression described in so many memoirs of Nicholas. Following that meeting with the relative with the face of the last tsar, I went to videotape the palace where the man who had undone the tsar had himself been murdered.

Everything had been preserved: I walked down the same staircase from which Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich and the other plotters had nervously listened to what was going on in the basement.

I went into the yard by the same door through which the bloodied Rasputin had fled, while trying to save himself. And then I returned to the basement which had been transformed by Felix into an elegant room. Here they had sat just before the murder. Standing there now are two silly wax figures depicting Felix and Rasputin. The door to the basement was shut and I remained alone. I had a strange feeling that I had seen that basement before: the small space, the windows raised just slightly above the ground through which only the legs of passers-by could be seen, the massive walls that blocked out all sound. It was a double of the Ipatiev House basement, where the royal family had been executed.

The night afterwards I returned to Moscow. The next day was the premiere of
Khovanschina
at the Bolshoi Theatre. I had been invited by my friend Slava Rostropovich who was conducting the opera. I looked at the stage and the costumes from the times of the kingdom of Muscovy, the same costumes in which Nicholas and Alexandra had been so fond of dressing up for their ‘historical’ balls. It all seemed like a continuation of the day before.

As indeed it was.

After the opera I went to congratulate Rostropovich. And then in the dressing room crammed with people he said to me, ‘What a present I’ve prepared for you! You’ll go crazy! You’ll simply die! You must come to see me in Paris immediately! I’m holding it there!’ He paused, but I already knew what was next. And he said, ‘I bought some documents for you at a Sotheby’s auction. It’s a complete file, an enormous one. And do you know what it’s about?’ I knew. And he then finished, ‘It’s about Rasputin. It’s
the interrogations of the numerous people he knew by the Provisional Government Commission.’

The longest day of my life had ended.

At Rostropovich’s apartment in Paris, in his living room draped with Winter Palace curtains emblazoned with the tsarist coat of arms, and containing an easel with a portrait of Nicholas with those same inexpressibly sad lapis eyes by the great portrait painter Valentin Serov, he pulled out an enormous volume. The testimony of Rasputin’s publisher Filippov, of Sazonov, and of Maria Golovina. And so on. It was the File, the source of the testimony Simpson had quoted.

The File, the one I had been looking for so long!

A Very Brief Description Of The File

The standard cover bore the inscription, ‘The Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Illegal Acts by Ministers and Other Responsible Persons’. Contained within were nearly five hundred pages of documents on the special forms of the Commission with the Commission’s stamp. All the interrogation transcripts were signed by the people who had been interrogated. Here were the signatures of Vyrubova, the gendarme (political police) chief Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, Colonel Komissarov, the doctor of Tibetan medicine Badmaev, the minister of internal affairs Khvostov, the head of the Moscow secret police Martynov, and so on. As though the detention cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress of March 1917 had come back to life. And the signatures of the famous interrogators of the Thirteenth Section who had conducted the interrogations: T. and V. Rudnev and G. Girchich.

What reading it was. The File contained the sensational testimony of Bishop Feofan, the famous church hierarch and ascetic through whom, as had often been claimed before the File, Rasputin had gained access to the royal family. The File also contained the testimony of monks from faraway Siberian monasteries and from the Verkhoturye Monastery where the mysterious transformation of Rasputin began. And, finally, it had the testimony so important to me and so desired by me — the testimony of those who had especially valued and liked Rasputin.

A Photograph Brought To Life

There is a famous photograph of Rasputin that has been compulsory in all the biographies of him. In it Rasputin is depicted surrounded by eighteen or so women and a few men. The photograph is mutely entitled, ‘Rasputin surrounded by his devotees’.

The testimony from the File now makes it possible for the first time to identify everyone in the photograph. And not merely to identify them. Included in the File is direct testimony about Rasputin by several of the people in the famous photograph. So that in the pages of this book the famous picture will, as it were, come to life, and the people who were able to observe Rasputin almost every day will begin to speak.

The File also turned out to contain the testimony of people without whom it would be hard to write an impartial biography of Rasputin. The first of these is Alexei Frolovich Filippov, ‘Rasputin’s publisher and sincere admirer’, as he is fairly characterized by those adhering to the new ‘holy Rasputin’ legends. Filippov was not merely an ‘admirer’ but a fierce defender of Rasputin. In his testimony, the publisher (and, I shall add, rich man and banker) by force of literary habit described everything to the investigator in detail — from Rasputin’s psychology and sexual life to his body and even his reproductive organs, which so preoccupied Petersburg society of the day. The File also includes the testimony of Georgy Petrovich Sazonov, another ‘ardent admirer of Rasputin’, as he is characterized by the elder’s new devotees. And it includes the testimony of Rasputin’s friend and one of the most mysterious figures in Petersburg, the Asian healer Badmaev, who treated the most important tsarist dignitaries with Tibetan herbs. And, finally, the File includes the testimony of a whole group of ladies suspected of the most intimate of relations with Rasputin: the young Baroness Kusova, the singer Varvarova, the young widow Voskoboinikova, and the cocottes Tregubova and Sheila Lunts.