Nicholas took these exhortations calmly. With a touch of acid, he replied: “My dear, Tender thanks for the severe scolding. I read it with a smile, because you speak to me as though I was a child.… Your ‘poor little weak-willed’ hubby, Nicky.” The immediate loser, however, was Trepov. Having failed to eliminate Protopopov, he tried to resign himself. Nicholas, freshly spurred by his wife’s letters, refused, telling him sternly, “Alexander Fedorovich, I order you to carry out your duties with the colleagues I have thought fit to give you.” Trepov, desperate, tried another way. He sent his brother-in-law, Mosolov, to call on Rasputin and offer him a handsome bribe. Rasputin was to get a house in Petrograd, all living expenses and a paid bodyguard, plus the equivalent of $95,000, if he would arrange Protopopov’s dismissal and then himself quit any further interference in government. As a sop, Trepov offered Rasputin a continued free hand with the clergy. Rasputin, already wielding immense power and having little use for wealth, simply laughed.
By the autumn of 1916, Petrograd society mingled a deep loathing of Rasputin with a blithe indifference to the war. At the Astoria and the Europa, the two best hotels in Petrograd, the crowds drinking champagne in bars and salons included many officers who should have been at the front; now there was no disgrace in taking extended leave and shirking the trenches. Late in September, the season began when society appeared at the Maryinsky Theatre to watch Karsavina dance in Sylvia and The Water Lily. Paléologue, taking his seat in the sumptuous blue-and-gold hall, was struck by the unreality of the scene: “From the stalls to the back row of the highest circle, I could see nothing but a sea of cheery, smiling faces … sinister visions of war … vanished as if by magic the moment the orchestra struck up.” Through the autumn, the splendid evenings continued. At the Narodny Dom, the matchless basso Fedor Chaliapin sang his great roles, Boris Godunov and Don Quixote. At the Maryinsky, a series of gorgeous ballets, Nuits Egyptiennes, Islamey and Eros, wrapped the audience in fairy tales and enchantment. Mathilde Kschessinska, the prima ballerina assoluta of the Imperial Ballet, danced her famous role in Pharaoh’s Daughter. In the treetops high above the ballerina’s head, a twelve-year-old student playing the part of a monkey jumped from branch to branch while Kschessinska tried to shoot him down with a bow and arrow. After the performance on December 6, the student, George Balanchine, was taken to the Imperial box to be presented to the Tsar and the Empress. Nicholas gave the boy a gentle smile, patted him on the shoulder and handed him a silver box filled with chocolates.*
To most of Russia, however, the Empress was an object of contempt and hatred. The German-spy mania was now flowering to its fullest, ugliest growth. Most Russians firmly believed in the existence of a secret pro-German cabal which was systematically betraying them from the top. The Tsar was not included in its supposed membership; whenever the subject of reconciliation with Germany came up, Nicholas always said bluntly that those who said he would make peace separately from his allies or while German soldiers stood on Russian land were traitors. But the unpopular Empress, along with Stürmer, a reactionary with a German name, and Protopopov, who had met a German agent in Stockholm, were widely and loudly accused. After the abdication, the entire Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo was searched for the clandestine wireless stations through which these plotters were supposed to have been in secret communication with the enemy.
Rasputin, everyone assumed, was a paid German spy. In all the years since 1916, however, no evidence of any kind has ever been offered from either the German or the Russian side that this was so. On balance, it seems unlikely. For the same reason that Rasputin rejected Trepov’s bribe, he would have refused money. No foreigner could offer him more power than he already possessed; besides, he disliked foreigners, especially the English and Germans. What is more likely is that Rasputin was used and drained of the information he acquired by others who were German agents. In this sense, Kerensky argues, “it would have been inexplicable if the German General Staff had not made use of him [Rasputin].” It was not difficult to infiltrate Rasputin’s circle. He hated the war and did not avoid people who spoke against it. His entourage already was filled with so wide a variety of people, many of them shady and disreputable, that a few additional faces would scarcely have been noticed. Rasputin was loud and boastful; all an agent would have had to do was sit and listen carefully.
There is some evidence that this is exactly what happened. Every Wednesday night, Rasputin was invited to dinner by Manus, a Petrograd banker. A number of charming and attractive ladies always were on hand. Everybody drank a great deal and Rasputin talked indiscriminately. Manus, Rasputin’s host for these evenings, was openly in favor of reconciliation with Germany. Paléologue, whose own local intelligence service was efficient, believed that Manus was the leading German agent in Russia.
On far flimsier evidence, the Empress was accused of treason. When Alexandra sent prayerbooks to wounded German officers in Russian hospitals, it was taken as evidence of collusion. Knox, at the front, met a Russian artillery general who shrugged his shoulders and said, “What can we do? We have Germans everywhere. The Empress is a German.” Even at Headquarters, Admiral Nilov, the Tsar’s devoted flag captain, cursed the Empress in violent language. “I cannot believe she is a traitoress,” he cried, “but it is evident she is in sympathy with them.”
Alexandra’s support of Rasputin seemed to confirm the worst. Most people took it for granted that the connection was sexual. In society drawing rooms, municipal council meetings, trade-union conferences and in the trenches, the Empress was openly described as Rasputin’s mistress. Alexeiev even mentioned the prevalence of this gossip to the Tsar, warning him that censorship of the soldiers’ letters revealed that they were writing continuously of his wife and Rasputin. As these rumors flew and feeling against Alexandra rose higher, many of the outward signs of respect in her presence were discarded. In the summer and fall of 1916, in hospital wards she was treated by some surgeons and wounded officers with careless disrespect and sometimes with open rudeness. Behind her back, she was referred to everywhere simply as Nemka (the German woman), just as the hated Marie Antoinette had been known to the people of France as L’Autrichienne (the Austrian woman). The Tsar’s brother-in-law Grand Duke Alexander, trying at this time to locate the source of some of these “incomprehensible libels” on the Empress, talked to a member of the Duma. Bitingly, the member asked, “If the young Tsarina is such a great Russian patriot, why does she tolerate the presence of that drunken beast who is openly seen around the capital in the company of German spies and sympathizers?” Try as he could, the Grand Duke could not supply an answer.
By the end of 1916, some form of change at the top was regarded as inevitable in Russia. Many still hoped that the change could be made without violence, that the monarchy could be modified to make the government responsive to the nation. Others felt that if the dynasty was to be preserved, it had to be brutally purged. One group of officers revealed to Kerensky their plan to “bomb the Tsar’s motorcar from an aeroplane at a particular point on its route.” A famous fighter pilot, Captain Kostenko, plotted to nose-dive his plane into the Imperial car. There were rumors that General Alexeiev was plotting with Guchkov to force the Tsar to send the Empress to the Crimea. Alexeiev, however, came down with a high fever, and it was he who went to the Crimea to rest and recover in the sun.
The growing peril was obvious to other members of the Imperial family. In November, after his return from Kiev, the Tsar received a visit from his cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, a well-known historian who was President of the Imperial Historical Society. The Grand Duke, a wealthy man-about-town and a habitué of Petrograd clubs, was an outspoken liberal; already he had written the Tsar a number of letters stressing the importance of broadening the government’s support in the Duma. At Headquarters, he had a long talk with Nicholas and then handed the Tsar a letter. The Tsar, believing that he already had fully understood his cousin’s views, forwarded the letter to the Empress without
reading it. To her horror, Alexandra found in the letter a direct and scathing accusation against herself: “You trust her, that is quite natural,” the Grand Duke had written to the Tsar. “Still what she tells you is not the truth; she is only repeating what has been cleverly suggested to her. If you are not able to remove this influence from her, at least protect yourself.” Indignantly, the Empress wrote to her husband, “I read Nicholas’s [letter] and am utterly disgusted … it becomes next to high treason.”
Despite this setback, the family persisted. At a meeting of all the members in and near Petrograd, Grand Duke Paul, the Tsar’s only surviving uncle, was chosen to go to the Tsar and ask that he grant a constitution. On December 16, Paul had tea with Nicholas and Alexandra and made his request. Nicholas refused, saying that he had sworn at his coronation to deliver his autocratic power intact to his son. While he was speaking, the Empress looked at Paul and silently shook her head. Then the Grand Duke talked openly of the damaging influence of Rasputin. This time, Nicholas remained silent, calmly smoking his cigarette, while the Empress earnestly defended Rasputin, declaring that in his own time every prophet was damned.
The most poignant of all the warning visits was that of Grand Duchess Elizabeth. Dressed in the gray-and-white robes of her religious order, Ella came from Moscow especially to speak to her younger sister about Rasputin. At the mention of his name, the Empress’s face grew cold. She was sorry, she said, to find her sister accepting the “lies” told about Father Gregory; if that was all she had to discuss, her visit might as well end immediately. Desperate, the Grand Duchess persisted, whereupon the Empress cut off the conversation, rose and ordered a carriage to take her sister to the station.
“Perhaps it would have been better if I had not come,” said Ella sadly as she prepared to leave.
“Yes,” said Alexandra. On this cold note, the sisters parted. It was their last meeting.
On one matter, grand dukes, generals and members of the Duma all agreed: Rasputin had to be removed. The question was how. On December 2, a stinging public denunciation was delivered by Vladimir Purishkevich in the Duma. Then in his fifties, a man of sparkling intelligence and wit, the writer of brilliantly satiric political verse, Purishkevich was an orator of such renown that when he rose to speak the entire Duma, including his enemies, beamed in anticipation of what they were about to hear. Politically, Purishkevich was on the extreme Right, the most ardent monarchist in the Duma. He believed in absolute autocracy and rigid orthodoxy, in the Tsar Autocrat as the emissary of God. A fervent patriot, Purishkevich had thrown himself into war work, going to the front to organize a system of relief for the wounded and personally administrating a Red Cross train which traveled back and forth from Petrograd to the front. Invited to dine with the Tsar at Headquarters, Purishkevich had left a highly favorable impression: “wonderful energy and a remarkable organizer,” wrote Nicholas.
Devoted to the monarchy, Purishkevich stood before the Duma and for two hours thundered his denunciation of the “dark forces” which were destroying the dynasty. “It requires only the recommendation of Rasputin to raise the most abject citizen to high office,” he cried. Then in a ringing finale which brought his audience to a tumultuous standing ovation, he roared a challenge at the ministers who sat before him. “If you are truly loyal, if the glory of Russia, her mighty future which is closely bound up with the brightness of the name of the Tsar mean anything to you, then on your feet, you Ministers. Be off to Headquarters and throw yourselves at the feet of the Tsar. Have the courage to tell him that the multitude is threatening in its wrath. Revolution threatens and an obscure moujik shall govern Russia no longer.”
Amid the storm of cheers which rolled through the Tauride Palace when Purishkevich had finished, a slender young man sitting in the visitors’ box remained utterly silent. Staring at him, another visitor noticed that Prince Felix Yussoupov had turned pale and was trembling.
* Buchanan and Paléologue, as representatives of Russia’s allies, were naturally the preeminent members of the Petrograd diplomatic corps, but American representation was unusually and unnecessarily weak due to President Wilson’s appointment of nonprofessionals to the post. From 1914 to 1916, the U.S. Ambassador was George T. Marye, a San Franciscan who had little contact or interest in Russia and got most of his information from the newspapers he received from Paris. At his farewell audience with the Tsar, Marye mentioned that he hoped that after the war American businessmen would flock to invest in Russia. “Russia needed American energy, American money and the Americans who engaged in business in Russia would find the field immensely profitable. No one, of course, is in business for his health—the Emperor smiled slightly as I indulged in this somewhat homely expression,” reported Marye. Marye’s successor was David R. Francis, a wealthy businessman and former Governor of Missouri who arrived in Russia with a portable cuspidor with a foot-operated lid.
* Fifty years later, struggling to convey his strong impression of the Empress, Balanchine said, “Beautiful, beautiful—like Grace Kelly.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Prince and the Peasant
AT twenty-nine, Prince Felix Yussoupov was the sole heir to the largest fortune in Russia. There were four Yussoupov palaces in Petrograd, three in Moscow and thirty-seven Yussoupov estates scattered across Russia. The family’s coal and iron mines, oil fields, mills and factories churned out wealth which exceeded even the wealth of the tsars. “One of our estates,” wrote Yussoupov, “stretched for one hundred and twenty-five miles along the Caspian Sea; crude petroleum was so abundant that the ground seemed soaked with it and the peasants used it to grease their cart wheels.” Once, on a whim, Prince Yussoupov’s father had given his mother the highest mountain in the Crimea as a birthday present. In all, the size of the Yussoupov fortune was estimated fifty years ago at $350 million to $500 million. What the same possessions would be worth today, no one can guess.
The wealth of the Yussoupovs had been accumulated by centuries of standing at the elbows of Russia’s tsars and empresses. Prince Dmitry Yussoupov, descended from a Tartar khan named Yusuf, had whispered in the ear of Peter the Great. Prince Boris Yussoupov was a favorite of Empress Elizabeth. Prince Nicholas, the greatest Yussoupov of all, was a friend of Catherine the Great, an advisor to Catherine’s son, Tsar Paul, and a counselor to her two grandsons, Tsar Alexander I and Tsar Nicholas I. Prince Nicholas Yussoupov’s estate at Archangelskoe near Moscow was a city in itself, boasting huge parks and gardens with heated greenhouses, a zoo, private glass and porcelain factories, a private theatre and the Prince’s own companies of actors, musicians and ballet dancers. Seated in the audience, Prince Nicholas could, with a wave of his cane, produce an extraordinary effect: all the dancers would suddenly appear on stage, stark naked. A gallery on this Archangelskoe estate contained portraits of the Prince’s three hundred mistresses. When the old grandee died at eighty-one, he had just concluded a liaison with a girl of eighteen.
At his birth in 1887, Felix Yussoupov stepped into a fairyland of art and treasure left behind by these lusty progenitors. The drawing rooms and galleries of the Moika Palace, where he was born, were lined with a finer collection of paintings than those hanging in most of the museums of Europe. There was furniture which had belonged to Marie Antoinette and a chandelier which had lighted the boudoir of Mme. de Pompadour. Jewel-encrusted cigarette boxes by Fabergé were scattered idly about on tables. Dinner parties brought two thousand guests to sit before golden plates and be served by costumed Arab and Tartar footmen. One Yussoupov mansion in Moscow had been built in 1551 as a hunting lodge for Ivan the Terrible; it was still connected by tunnel with the Kremlin several miles away. Beneath its vaulted halls, filled with medieval tapestries and furniture, there were sealed underground chambers which, when opened in Felix’s boyhood, revealed rows of skeletons still hanging in chains from the walls.
Cradled in wealth, Felix nevertheless was a spindly, lonely child whose birth caused his mother great disappointment
. Princess Zenaide Yussoupov, one of the most famous beauties of her day, had borne three previous sons of whom only one had survived. She had prayed that her next child would be a girl. To console herself when Felix was born, she kept him in long hair and dresses until he was five. Surprisingly, this pleased him and he used to cry out to strangers in the street, “Look, isn’t Baby pretty?” “My mother’s caprice,” Prince Yussoupov wrote later, “was to have a lasting influence on my character.”
In adolescence, Felix Yussoupov was slender, with soft eyes and long lashes; he was often described as “the most beautiful young man in Europe.” Encouraged by his older brother, he took to dressing up in his mother’s gowns, donning her jewels and wigs and strolling in this costume on public boulevards. At The Bear, a fashionable St. Petersburg restaurant, he attracted enthusiastic attention from Guards officers, who sent notes inviting him to supper. Delighted, Felix accepted and disappeared into intimate private dining rooms. In Paris, continuing these masquerades, he once noticed a fat, whiskered gentleman staring persistently at him from the opposite side of the Théatre des Capucines. A note arrived which Felix hastily returned; his beaming admirer was King Edward VII of England.
Yussoupov’s first sexual experience occurred at the age of twelve in the company of a young man from Argentina and his girl friend. At fifteen, roaming Italy with his tutor, Felix first visited a Neapolitan bordello. Thereafter, he wrote, “I flung myself passionately into a life of pleasure, thinking only of satisfying my desires.… I loved beauty, luxury, comfort, the color and scent of flowers.” He also tried opium and a liaison with “a charming young girl” in Paris. Bored, he enrolled as a student at Oxford, maintaining at the university a chef, a chauffeur, a valet, a housekeeper and a groom to look after his three horses. From Oxford, he moved on to a flat in London, where he installed black carpets, orange silk curtains, modern furniture, a grand piano, a dog, a pet macaw and a French couple to cook and serve. He moved in a gay circle which included ballerina Anna Pavlova, Prince Serge Obolensky and ex-King Manuel of Portugal. Day or night, when friends visited Felix Yussoupov, he took out his guitar and sang gypsy songs.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty Page 47