The Rasputin File (65 page)

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Authors: Edvard Radzinsky

BOOK: The Rasputin File
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This is what has always amazed me about Rasputin’s strange manner. How is it that everything is possible and nothing shameful here? Or is it all different than it seems? To be sure, nowhere else will you see what took place there in that empty dining room. Where pampered aristocratic ladies waited for the caresses of a dirty middle-aged peasant, waited submissively for their turn without getting angry or jealous.

The Testimony Of Those Who Visited The Sofa

Yet all that time the police were describing his incessant search for
new
women. ‘3 November 1915. An unknown woman arrived to petition for her ensign husband … When she came out, she started telling the porter, “Rasputin barely listened to my request and started holding my face in his hands, and then my breasts, saying, ‘Kiss me…I’ve fallen in love with you.’ Then he wrote out some sort of note and started making advances again. He didn’t give me the note, but said, ‘Come back tomorrow.’ “ And she added, “To go to him, you have to make a down payment on what he wants, and I cannot do that.” ’

Now that the ‘holy period’ was over, what were all those endless women, so scrupulously recorded by the police agents, to him?

The ones who refused him are named in the agents’ testimony. But the unhappy petitioners who agreed to ‘make a down payment’ unfortunately are not. As a rule they are identified by initial only — ‘Madame K.’ — or are referred to as ‘a certain lady’. ‘A certain lady,’ Beletsky testified, ‘in order to return her husband from exile, first gave Rasputin all her money, but he demanded more … She pleaded with him not to touch her.’ But Rasputin ‘gave her an ultimatum: either she did what he wanted and he would ask the sovereign about her husband, or she would never show herself again’. And ‘taking advantage of her nervous state’, he possessed her. And after that went to see her at her hotel several times. And then he ‘broke off relations with her and gave orders not to admit her’.

Zhukovskaya tells similar stories about the obscure women from whom Rasputin extorted ‘down payments’. All the stories have the same ending: he would sleep with the women and then drop them in disgust. But those unhappy women were all so fleeting, and thus unwilling to talk about their misfortunes, that the Extraordinary Commission was unable, except for Vishnyakova, to call a single one of them.

In trying to make sense of our hero, we shall want to remember his fastidious near-loathing of the unknown women who slept with him, and remember, too, their words: ‘he took advantage of my nervous state,’ as a ‘certain lady’ said to Beletsky; and ‘after reducing me to hysterics, [he] deprived me of my virginity,’ as the nurse Vishnyakova testified.

Yet the unknown fallen petitioners constituted a part of the round dance that might have astonished Casanova — all those flashing women’s bodies passing through Rasputin’s bed, or rather across the half-ruined sofa in his narrow little study, only to vanish at once from his life.

The tiny room and broken-down sofa have been described by Alexandra Belling, who visited the apartment. And they have been described in even greater detail by Zhukovskaya:

The sofa’s leather was rubbed completely bare and its back was broken off and propped against it. ‘Well, sit down, sit down.’ Putting his arm around me and nudging and prodding me from behind, Rasputin leaned up against the sofa’s back, and it fell off. After extricating myself, I said with a glance at the broken sofa, ‘It isn’t any good. You ought to at least call a carpenter.’ He became flustered. ‘Yes, it broke off from that itself,’ he muttered, lifting up the heavy back with one hand and returning it to its place. ‘It’s all the sister from Simbirsk. As soon as she spends the night here, it will fall off for sure. It’s goblinry.’

The bulky frame of the peasant woman who sometimes kept Rasputin busy
at night had, in combination with the unfortunate sofa’s numerous other tests both day and night, worn it out.

But who were they — the ones who passed over that of t-suffering couch?

From the words of his agents and his own conversations with Rasputin, Beletsky would generalize that besides the petitioners who were tormented by the requirement of having to ‘make a down payment’, the main clients of Rasputin’s sofa were petitioners ‘who took a light view of moral principles, [and] many of them were even proud of Rasputin’s attentions to them and candid about their intimacy with him, however temporary it had been’.

Once again he does not provide their names. For the reason that as a rule they too disappeared with a strange swiftness from the apartment on Gorokhovaya after visiting the sofa. Only a few of them stayed on, in which case the external surveillance agents naturally established their names.

‘Get Out Of Here!

In 1917 the Extraordinary Commission required the ladies who had ‘stayed on’ to answer some disagreeable questions. Their testimony has survived in the File.

‘Sheila Gershovna Lunts, twenty-five, a barrister’s wife, of the Jewish faith, no criminal record.’ This handsome woman had met Rasputin at a party given by Professor I. Kh. Ozerov, the friend of Rasputin’s publisher, Filippov, whom Rasputin had once described to Filippov as ‘a state nobody’. She testified:

I had heard many nasty things about Rasputin before, especially about his attitude towards women, which is why when I came in, and this peasant in high boots and a Russian coat looked at me, I had an unpleasant feeling … Rasputin…made jokes, laughed, and read fortunes from the palms of those present, and his predictions took the form of barely comprehensible apothegms. To me, for example, he said, ‘You are a sufferer, but the Lord Jesus will help you and your truth will win out!’ He joked with the ladies, and tried to embrace first one and then another, but they wouldn’t let him. He drank wine, although not very much.

Rasputin naturally took a liking to the curly-haired Sheila. And the familiar pursuit began.

‘Once he called me in the evening from a certain Knirsha, whom I didn’t
know. He said to me over the phone, “Come on over. We’re having a lot of fun here!”’

Knirsha’s apartment was one of the main places Rasputin went for amusement from the end of 1915 to January 1916, his last year. It constantly flickers through the security agents’ entries.

‘21 January. Rasputin…went to Knirsha’s.’

‘30 January. Rasputin went to Knirsha’s…He came home completely drunk at 4:30 a.m.’

Andrei Knirsha was an insurance company official, ‘an Alphonse supported by women,’ as a security agent said of him. And although Sheila’s friends warned her that Knirsha ‘was involved in shady deals’, as she put it, she agreed to go to the suspicious apartment. At fault was the unlucky Jewish Pale of Settlement: ‘I very much wanted my parents, who did not have the right of residence in the capital, to move to Petrograd,’ she would testify. But knowing of Rasputin’s ‘nasty attitude towards women’, she should not have had any doubt about the purpose of his call.

‘I arrived at the apartment,’ Lunts reported, ‘with its chic furnishings, although it was the luxury of a parvenu, and found Knirsha himself there, young but very stout with broad cheekbones. His mistress was the wife of some old general.’ She was amazed to find there too ‘the well-known Duma member Protopopov, who at the time was still only the Deputy Speaker of the State Duma but with whom I was already acquainted at the time, having met him at Professor Ozerov’s… Finding Protopopov in Rasputin’s company gave me an awful start, and later in conversation I observed to him, “It does not befit you to be in such a place,” to which Protopopov replied, “Yes, I agree!” and praised me for my frankness.’

She did not realize that she was present at an historic meeting. Protopopov, one of the leaders of the opposition, was in that haunt to establish good relations with Rasputin and the ‘tsars’.

Hovering round the peasant

at the soirée were several ladies, and Rasputin was provoking the jealousy of a tall blonde lady whose name was, I think, Yasinskaya, and with whom he was evidently on intimate terms. That lady didn’t like me either, maybe because Rasputin had told everyone that he liked me very much, that my eyes knocked him out. A supper was served at Knirsha’s with lots of wine. Rasputin drank his usual Madeira and then called for a Gypsy chorus … Rasputin danced … the party started to take on the character of an orgy … and I left.

Apparently without ever understanding why he had summoned her.

But whether it was the opportunity to help her parents or interest of
another kind that was very likely present in that sensual woman, Protopopov’s future lover, she herself ‘called Rasputin and told him [she] had a matter to discuss with him’.

And so Sheila Lunts found herself in the room with the sofa.

‘I heard voices coming from the dining room, but whom the voices belonged to I had no idea. I related my request to him, and told him that whenever my sister visited me and stayed on without official permission I felt enormous anxiety, and I asked him to help me.’

But there were too many people in his dining room, and she was obliged to leave.

And again she herself called Rasputin and told him:

‘Remember the business I was asking about?’ But it turned out he had forgotten all about it, and he answered, ‘I don’t remember anything, come on over!’ I went over to his place. He wanted to hug and kiss, but I pushed him away. When I repeated my request, he answered, ‘Well, I’ll come to see you, meet your sister, and take care of everything!’
I called him, and he came to see me when there was nobody at home except me and the maid. In the study he started pressing himself on me terribly. I remarked to him, ‘Leave off with that, don’t, let’s just be friends, I have never deceived my husband.’
He asked, ‘Is it true that you’ve never deceived him?’
‘On my word of honour,’ I replied.
‘Well, I believe it then!’ Rasputin said. ‘But if you ever want to deceive him, let me be the first!’ Then Rasputin asked if I had any wine. I told him I didn’t have, but that there was some 180-proof spirits. Rasputin drank a little glass of the spirits and took a bit of apple. Then indicating the chair by the desk, Rasputin said, ‘Sit!’ I sat down. Then Rasputin … started dictating some rubbish to me in Church Slavonic. I filled up a whole page…
After he left, I was supposed to go to him again with my petition: it was a tedious, endless fuss…I stopped going to see him.

And so, Sheila’s testimony was that there had been nothing between her and Rasputin. The easiest thing would be to suggest that she was lying. But remembering Rasputin’s peculiar visits to the prostitutes, I think that up to a point she was telling the truth. And that is the reason why one senses hidden astonishment in her testimony: he made advances to her, and after receiving nothing more than the obligatory light rebuff, let her go with something close to relief. And she continued to visit him. Although it must have been quite clear to Rasputin that she was coming to ‘make a down payment’. And still he did not take it and continued his innocuous importuning,
his ‘fuss’. And then suddenly she herself, as she asserts, broke off those visits that were obviously a matter of concern to her. But why?

Just as suddenly broken off were Rasputin’s meetings with another frivolous lady, Maria Gayer. Her own testimony is not in the File. But it does contain a characterization of her by her coachman, Yakov Kondratenko. ‘She… had no occupation. She engaged in loose living. She was, one could say, simply a “woman of the streets”. No sooner would she wink at some strange man, than you would have to drive them to a hotel … I know that she often went to see Rasputin, and that he would come to see her and drink until he was soused.’

The agents recorded constant encounters between Rasputin and Maria Gayer on the 15th, 17th, 19th, 23rd, 24th, 25th, and 28th. And then all of a sudden it came to an end. And she vanished from his life.

Disappearing from Rasputin’s home no less suddenly was yet another extremely complaisant lady, the cocotte Tregubova, whom the agents had earlier described as ‘exchanging deep kisses with Rasputin’. And in the File she tells a story very much like that told by Lunts. Tregubova herself went to see Rasputin frequently, during which the usual Rasputinian pestering went on. But she had only to resist slightly for Rasputin to give up.

‘I went to see Rasputin about ten times, in view of the fact that he had promised to get me a place on the imperial stage, although with the condition that I consent to intimate relations with him. Which of course I did not.’ It doesn’t make any sense — the chasteness of this lady whom both the other witnesses in the File and the police agents are unanimous in calling a ‘prostitute’. And why, given that chasteness, did she go to see Rasputin ‘ten times’ in spite of his ‘pestering’?

According to Tregubova, their relationship ended in an ugly scene. After one of his periodic advances, ‘He spat in my face and said, “To hell with you, then, you Yid.” And he left.’ Following which the vindictive Rasputin decided to drive her, as a Jew, out of Petrograd. On 17 January 1916, she received an order from Beletsky to ‘leave Petrograd … by 10:00 p.m.’ She then rushed to Rasputin, ‘pleading to be allowed to stay in Petrograd’. Apparently, this time her visit satisfied the peasant, since he gave her a letter to Beletsky: ‘Let her be, don’t touch her, let her stay.’ But as she would soon find out, Rasputin then called Beletsky and said, ‘Don’t let her stay, send her away.’ According to the records of the Petrograd Address Bureau, ‘the above-mentioned Tregubova departed from Petrograd for residence in Tiflis.’

What A Strange Story!

And there was another woman — Vera Varvarova. She was twenty-eight at the time. In the File she testified, ‘I’m an artiste, I sing Gypsy romances … I sang in the presence of the tsar.’

On tour in Kiev she had insulted an official and been threatened with a jail term. She went to Rasputin. Soon afterwards she ‘received a document from the Senate cancelling the punishment’. After which Rasputin ‘called me and said, “Come sing for me as my guest.” I went with Staff-Captain Ezersky, with whom I was living at the time. There were a great many guests at Rasputin’s — ladies — and I sang and played the guitar, and his guests sang along and Rasputin danced … After that I often went to see him that year for soirées of that kind … He was completely correct with me, especially as I was constantly in the company of Ezersky,’ she explained, insisting that she had never been in ‘the room with the sofa’. And she described what she had seen happen before her eyes to the ladies who went with Rasputin to the little sofa.

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