The Rasputin File (73 page)

The very next day one of the pictures was lying on Minister Protopopov’s desk.

During his interrogation by the Extraordinary Commission, Protopopov testified that ‘Purishkevich distributed 9000 copies of the photograph of Rasputin — Rasputin surrounded by several people …A table, wine on the table, balalaika players, a priest.’

‘How do you know that he distributed 9000 copies?’

‘On the back of the photo sent to me from Tsarskoe Selo, probably at the orders of the empress through Vyrubova or Voskoboinikova, was written “9000 copies”.’

The Last Picture Of The Living Rasputin

The story of that photograph — which, alas, I was not able to find — explains a great deal about the approaching denouement.

The news of the photograph was most likely brought to Protopopov by his pretty flame Voskoboinikova. And not only because she was at the time his lover, but also because she had a most direct relation to the picture. She herself was included in it as one of the gay sisters of mercy.

And she was required to give testimony for the File on the scandalous photograph.

‘In the picture shown to me — Rasputin with Bishop Isidor — I am included in profile behind Isidor. The picture was suggested by Colonel Loman’ (the builder and warden of the tsarina’s favourite Feodor Cathedral).

It had happened after the ‘official part was over’ and Vyrubova and the other important guests had left the infirmary. Voskoboinikova testified:

After the guests had gone, Isidor and Rasputin stayed at the infirmary for a while. Loman had invited us to remain behind to have some coffee; although the ‘upper crust’ had left, he said, why shouldn’t we labourers stay? Loman treated us to champagne and coffee and even to the singing of his choirboys … who artistically sang Russian songs … And then Loman suggested we have our picture taken. We were photographed by an employee of the Feodorov Cathedral. And Loman was among those to be photographed — he was standing behind Isidor. Later we asked for copies of the picture, but he said that they weren’t ready yet … Why Loman wasn’t included in the picture … I don’t know. It’s possible he sat down before the picture was taken. Besides the choirboys, included are Molchanova, a sister of mercy [the wife of Leonid Molchanov], my sister Bendina, and the sister of mercy Voino; seated are the sister Koscheeva, Rasputin, Bishop Isidor, and Maltsev
[the builder of the Serafim Sanctuary]. The sister Koscheeva is laughing in the picture and looks slightly tipsy.

Testimony about the scandalous photograph was also taken from Loman.

The File, from Loman’s testimony: ‘Shown in the picture is a luncheon … on the occasion of the laying of the foundation of the Serafim Sanctuary, which was built at the orders of Vyrubova not by me but by Maltsev. I did not intend to have my picture taken with the others, nor did I pose with them. I was standing somewhere …far away from the table and therefore did not show up in the photograph.’

No, it was no accident that Loman had not been included in the picture. And it was no accident either that the intelligent Vyrubova, as Voskoboinikova testified, ‘had warned us of the need to be more careful with Loman’. And it was no accident that Rasputin, according to Voskoboinikova, had said that ‘Loman should not be trusted,’ that he was an ‘ambiguous’ person.

The ‘ambiguous Loman’ was already serving two masters. And the experienced courtier had at someone else’s order devised the provocation. He had decided to take a picture of Rasputin and the scandalous Bishop Isidor in the merry company of inebriated sisters of mercy. He had decided to take a picture of a ‘Rasputin orgy’. And that is why they had ‘made sister Koscheeva laugh’ as the picture was being taken, and why Loman had sat down just before. The cunning Loman had already calculated the future and was serving the conspiracy.

It was a signal. The denouement was approaching. The rats were already fleeing the sinking ship. And Loman was making an effort and organizing that photo of an ‘orgy’, which he then passed on to the Duma.

On The Eve

‘Towards the end of 1916 the atmosphere in the building on Gorokhovaya Street was becoming ever more intense,’ Zhukovskaya remembered.

On the outside it was the same bazaar … the constant phone calls …the women buzzing like hornets and crowding into the reception room, the dining room, and the bedroom, women both old and young, pale and in make-up, who came and went, bringing heaps of candy, flowers, and boxes of other things, all of which was strewn about … Rasputin himself, worn out and with a roving gaze, at times seemed like a hunted wolf, and for that reason, I think, one felt in his whole mode of life a certain haste and lack of confidence, and everything seemed accidental and precarious — the closeness of some blow, something looming over that dark, unwelcoming building.

And like many others in those times, Zhukovskaya remembered and recorded his whisper: ‘“The ones over there are the enemies. They’re all searching, and trying, and laying a trap. I see it all. You think I don’t know it will soon all come to an end? Faith has been lost,” he suddenly said … “ there’s no more faith in the people, that’s what. Well, so long, my little bee! Kiss me goodbye.”‘ She never saw him again.

‘It Will Be A Revolution Of Rage And Revenge’

It had come to pass by the end of 1916. It was not the bullets of revolutionary terrorists, nor the shells of Germans at the front, but the existence of a single person that was threatening to destroy one of the greatest empires in the world. The opposition, society, the court had all struggled in vain against the illiterate peasant with the awful name from an unknown village.

In the days prior to Rasputin’s murder, Vasily Maklakov, a Duma deputy of the most powerful opposition party, the Constitutional Democrats, came to Moscow to speak before the chief influential factory owners and merchants. A police agent among those present wrote down Maklakov’s speech, and it has survived in the papers of the Department of Police. In the apartment of the millionaire Konovalov, his fellow party member, Maklakov spoke of the unavoidable revolution that Rasputin was bringing about.

‘The dynasty is risking its very existence, and not by means of destructive forces from without. It is by means of terrible destructive work from within that it is shortening its potential existence by a good century.’ And Maklakov then uttered some prophetic words: ‘The horror of the coming revolution … It will not be a political revolution, which might follow a predictable course, but a revolution of rage and revenge of the ignorant lower classes, a revolution that cannot be anything but elemental, convulsive, and chaotic.’

And the sense of inevitable apocalypse that had once more appeared in society now became universal. It was then that the young Prince Zhevakhov told the tsarina of a vision that a certain Colonel O. had had. The colonel had been lifted onto a high mountain from which all of Russia was visible to him, a Russia flowing with blood from border to border.

Alone

They still didn’t know that autumn in the Crimean grand-ducal palaces that their last year was ending. But they did sense that a terrible, inevitable time was ahead. And in that looming catastrophe the tsar was alone. As his
cousin the historian Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich afterwards recorded in his diary, ‘Around Alexander III there had been a closed circle of a few trusted people … After the twenty-third year of Nicholas’s reign he did not have a single friend left, neither among his relatives nor in high society.’ More accurately, the lonely tsar had only one friend — Our Friend, the universally detested peasant who threatened the empire and the dynasty! Even his mother was opposed to her son, who was destroying the empire.

The File, from Vyrubova’s testimony: ‘The dowager empress was against the sovereign and the empress. They saw Marie Fyodorovna so rarely that in the twelve years I was with Alexandra Fyodorovna, I saw Marie Fyodorovna perhaps three times.’

Hatred of the tsarina was in universal fashion. The court and the Tsarskoe Selo nobility joined the grand dukes in expressing their
Fronde-like
discontent. Prince Zhevakhov recalled that the head of the church secondary school for girls in Tsarskoe Selo not only did not bow to the tsarina upon meeting her but conspicuously turned away from the ruler of all Russia. ‘It is painful for me…not for myself but for my daughters,’ Alix told the prince at the time. Shameful caricatures depicting the Tsarina of all Russia in indecent poses with a bearded peasant were circulated throughout the country. The Tsar of all Russia was now contemptuously called ‘Nikolasha’ in the war-torn, embittered villages. The tsar, who until recently had been for them a dreaded ‘father’, was now depicted in thousands of graffiti as a pathetic husband deceived by his wife and a dissolute peasant.

‘I’m Terribly Busy With… Conspiracy ’

How accurately did Maklakov observe, ‘In the highest circles of the nobility and the court there is fear that the ruling authority on its way to ruin will pull them and all their privileges down with it.’

The legendary Yacht Club was the centre of aristocratic opposition at the time. It had been founded in 1840 during the reign of Nicholas I. Only the upper crust and the most well-born aristocrats — Russia’s blue bloods — were allowed within its walls.

During the reign of Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, the Yacht Club had in effect been a closed political assembly. From there the highest aristocracy conducted its struggle against nihilists and revolutionaries. The Yacht Club was surrounded by mystery and exclusivity.

The club was by tradition headed by the court minister — then Count Fredericks. But even there in that monarchist citadel, as Grand Duke
Nikolai Mikhailovich wrote in his diary, ‘the empress’s … conduct was openly criticized.’ And that was a frightening symptom. Alix attempted through Count Fredericks to put a stop to the conversations. With the magnificent bearing of an old guardsman and his impeccable manners evoking the vanished grandees of the
ancien régime
, Fredericks made a splendid impression at balls, but as a minister he was helpless. Perishing authority has always been surrounded by pathetic people. Not only did the conversations about the tsarina continue, they turned provocative. Grand Duke Dmitry and Felix Yusupov were members of the Yacht Club at the time.

In Petrograd and Moscow, conspiracies were ripening in court circles, among the aristocracy, and in the magnificent apartments of the rich. But outside Petrograd in Tsarskoe Selo the lonely royal family continued to live its hopelessly isolated life. And as before, Alix, the head of the ‘Tsarskoe Selo cabinet’, worked untiringly, summoning the obedient but, alas, powerless ministers. Nicholas was far from the capital at Headquarters.

In the meantime, the last steps were being taken in the great Romanov family to appeal to Alix. It was then that Zinaida Yusupova asked for an audience. The fact that Khvostov revealed in 1917 — that she was involved in his own (unsuccessful) murder conspiracy, offering huge sums to fund it — was no coincidence. That beauty, who was endowed with many talents (she was a potentially brilliant actress with whom Stanislavsky had pleaded to join his theatre), was apparently also one of the principal figures in the great Romanov family conspiracy. And Zinaida Yusupova went to see Alix.

She was ‘received coolly’. And no sooner had she begun to talk about Rasputin than she ‘was asked to leave the palace’. But she declared that before she did so, she had to fulfil her duty before the empress and ‘speak her piece’. Alix listened in silence and at the end of the monologue she said, ‘I hope I shall never see you again.’

Zinaida was close to Alix’s sister Ella. So it was no coincidence that Ella came to see Alix after Zinaida had been thrown out. Her once much-loved sister Ella. The empress listened to her sister in silence, too. And she saw her out to her carriage in silence. As Felix Yusupov wrote, ‘Tears came to Ella’s eyes. “She drove me out like a dog…Poor Nicky, poor Russia.”‘ And Felix had not made it up.

I read in the archives a letter from Ella herself. She wrote it to Nicky after Rasputin was murdered. And in it she described her meeting with Alix: ‘I have rushed to the two of you, whom I sincerely love, in order to warn you that all the classes from the lowest to the highest have reached
their limit…She ordered me to say nothing … and I left wondering whether we would ever meet again…what tragedies might play themselves out, and what suffering was still in store for us.’

The grand dukes’ conspiracy had apparently finally taken shape at the beginning of the dank, rainy Petrograd autumn. As Felix recalled, ‘the grand dukes and a few aristocrats were engaged in a cabal to remove the empress from power and send her away to a convent. Rasputin was to be exiled to Siberia, the emperor deposed, and the tsarevich crowned.’

Not long before Rasputin’s murder, Purishkevich was summoned to the palace of Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich. And the monarchist Purishkevich, one of those who would commit that murder, wrote in his diary, ‘After our conversation, I took from the grand duke’s palace a strong conviction that he was undertaking something impermissible in regard to the sovereign.’

In keeping with a favourite Russian tradition, however, the ‘impermissible’ was limited only to talk. None of them dared violate his oath and raise a hand against the tsar.

But if the grand dukes were going to act, they needed to hurry. For another conspiracy was already brewing at Headquarters. A dangerous conspiracy of generals and the Duma opposition.

‘Among Konovalov [a Duma deputy], Krymov [a general], and Alexeev [the chief of command at Headquarters] some sort of cabal is brewing,’ wrote General Brusilov. And how melancholy is the observation in his notebook of another the tsar’s generals, General Lemke: ‘I’m terribly busy with the matter of growing conspiracy.’

The Last Warning

Once again the grand dukes tried to resolve the situation ‘within the family’, as the ‘dread uncle’ had once suggested to the tsar. At the time a wedding was being planned, the last of the ruling Romanov dynasty.