Maria Rasputin had, by this time, followed her father’s bald instruction, ‘Love Boris’, by marrying, in 1917, a graduate of a school of mysticism called Boris Soloviev. During the last few months of the Romanovs’ captivity in Ekaterinburg, Soloviev tried to rescue them with the aid of 175,000 roubles from a monarchist banker in Petrograd. At one point, he insisted that 300 officers were ready to storm the house in which the family were held captive: ‘Grigory’s family and his friends are active,’ he wrote. But the plans came to nothing and indeed some kind of skullduggery was suspected when several of his fellow conspirators were arrested.
The Imperial family were allowed out twice a day, for half an hour, in a small garden surrounded by a 14-foot board fence. The Tsarina joined in the walks until the guards started taunting her about Rasputin. During the family’s last days alive, graffitti appeared on the walls depicting ‘Grishka’ and ‘Sashura’ (the Tsarina) having sex. Lewd comments were added about the size of Grishka’s penis.
On the night of July 16 1918, nineteen months after Rasputin’s murder, the Imperial family were shot and bayoneted to death. The murders confirmed yet another of Rasputin’s prophecies: ‘If any of the Romanovs [are] involved in my killing… none of you… will remain alive for more than two years.’ One of those involved in his murder had, of course, been the Grand Duke Dmitri.
In the Tsarina’s trunk, Bolshevik guards fell upon a red silk shirt, blue silk trousers and tasselled silk belt belonging to Rasputin.
Rasputin once said to Yussoupov: ‘Disaster will come to anyone who is against me.’ This prediction was, to some extent, borne out. The Black Princesses, Militza and Anastasia, and Grand Duke Nicholas survived the Revolution. All three escaped with the Yussoupovs on the British battleship, HMS Marlborough, in 1919. But they all lived reduced lives in exile. Grand Duke Nicholas and Anastasia spent their last days together in a tiny villa in Paris before moving to Cap d’Antibes. The Grand Duke died, aged 73, in 1929, and Anastasia, aged 67, in 1935. Militza was persecuted by the Germans while living in Italy during the Second World War. She died in Egypt in 1951.
The bull-like Rodzyanko fled to Serbia in 1920 but died in poverty four years later; Dzunkovsky was executed by Stalin, in 1938, at the Lubyanka. The conniving ‘pot-belly’ Khvostov and Beletsky were killed by Bolsheviks in 1918. Prince Andronnikov and the Tibetan healer Badmaev were killed the following year. The dreaded Iliodor, once charismatic leader of thousands, spent his last years as a janitor at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building in New York. He died in the Bellevue Hospital in 1952.
Bishop Hermogen died a martyr’s death in Tobolsk in 1918. Bolshevik soldiers forced him to roll stones naked up a river bank, while prostitutes jeered and insulted him. His persecutors tied a huge stone to his neck and lowered him by his hair into the river. When the White Army arrived, they exhumed his corpse. It was untouched by decay, but for a missing section of beard.
Rasputin’s assassins did not do so badly. Apart from Purishkevich, who died of typhus while fighting for the Whites in 1920, they all survived the Red Terror. The only rain in Dr Lazovert’s life fell, years later, when he returned from holiday to find a restaurant called ‘Rasputin’ opening directly opposite his apartment in France. Settling finally in Romania, the former doctor became an oil trader. He wrote his own account of Rasputin’s murder, but this was discounted by many as ‘mere fiction’. On his deathbed he insisted that he had substituted the poison for some harmless substance.
Yussoupov and his wife, Princess Irina, escaped from Russia with two Rembrandts and a stash of jewellery. They so mismanaged their accounts, however, that they were soon penniless, struggling even to buy light bulbs. At a particularly low point, they were in New York selling their jewels, when they were announced, at a party, as Prince and Princess Rasputin.
But in the end it was their connection with Rasputin which secured their fortune. In 1932, MGM released Rasputin And The Empress, in which a character closely resembling Princess Irina is ravished by Rasputin. The Yussoupovs sued for libel, and were awarded $750,000 or $15 million in today’s money. They subsequently enjoyed a thoroughly pleasant existence, mostly in the South of France. Yussoupov fancied himself a faith healer, spending hours at a time in hospitals and sanatoriums. He and his wife both enjoyed painting grotesque pictures of Rasputin-like faces complete with grimaces.
He was courted by Hitler, whose envoy pronounced that he would be the best candidate for the Russian throne. After the publication of two memoirs in the 1950s, Lost Splendour and En Exil, the Soviets offered him an exile in Russia, but Yussoupov dismissed both of these approaches out of hand.
Yussoupov dined out on his gory story, getting quite nettled if a social event went by with no mention of the murder. In a ring on his finger, he wore one of the bullets that had hit Rasputin. Oswald Rayner, the British Secret Service agent mooted by some as Rasputin’s killer, also boasted a bullet in a ring.
It was with such burlesque details that the Rasputin myth continued to flourish. Speculation regarding his sex life was rife. And it was soon asserted, in smart British circles, that he had enjoyed sexual relations with Yussoupov. As Noel Coward wrote: ‘The truth I think is that Rasputin had a tiny little lech on Yussoupov himself.’ Yussoupov died in Paris, aged 81, in 1967.
Grand Duke Dmitri was also feted. He himself felt very torn as to whether he had done the right thing. When he saw his father the day after the murder, he denied any involvement, giving his word on an icon and on a photograph of his dead mother. He was mortified by the acclaim thrust on him and once walked out of a theatre in Petrograd, to avoid the embarrassment of an ovation. He would not have welcomed the news that, in the weeks following the murder, crowds were lighting candles around St Dmitri, at the Kazan Cathedral. He finally broke down with a crise de nerfs on the train taking him from Petrograd to his exile in Persia.
He and Yussoupov fell out of touch, only running into each other, some years later, at the Ritz Hotel in London. The Grand Duke had heard someone singing and playing a guitar in an adjacent room, and correctly identified the singer as his old friend. As Yussoupov wrote: ‘I thought it was an irritated neighbour but it was Grand Duke Dmitri, who I had not seen since “l’affaire Rasputin”. He had recognised my voice through the door.’
The pair resumed their friendship until Yussoupov published his first lurid memoir, in 1927. Grand Duke Dmitri considered it a breach of their agreement not to discuss the murder in public. As he said in a Russian paper published in Paris: ‘Not a single person, including the members of my own family, has heard from me about the events of that terrible night… The same force that impelled me to the crime has prevented me and now prevents me from lifting the curtain on that affair.’ He never spoke to Yussoupov again. Grand Duke Dmitri died in Switzerland in 1941, aged 49, of TB.
For all Rasputin’s pronouncements, disaster seemed, in the end, more likely to befall his supporters than his detractors. Of his bishops, Varnava and Isidor were murdered; Pitirim died in 1920. As for his ‘little ladies’, Laptinskaya disappeared, while Lokhtina was driven to take refuge in Makari’s mud hut. The elderly Goremykin was caught by a mob and strangled on Christmas Eve of 1917. Sturmer was arrested by Bolsheviks and died in the Peter and Paul Fortress the same year. Protopopov fled from the ministry with a briefcase containing the Tsarina’s letters and photographs of Rasputin’s corpse. He had only two years of communing with Rasputin’s soul before he himself was killed by Bolsheviks.
Rasputin’s friend, the jeweller Simanovich, reached the US but was rendered penniless by the Depression; he lost his sickly son, before he himself died, destitute and alone. Anna Vyrubova had a long but lonely life as a Russian Orthodox nun in Finland. She lived in her own apartment, surrounded by pictures of the Tsar, Tsarina and Rasputin. She died in 1964, aged 80.
Rasputin’s faithful wife, Praskovia, son, Dmitri, and younger daughter, Varya, fared particularly badly. At the time of his death, Rasputin’s estate was valued at a rela
tively modest 23,507 roubles and 66 kopecks: roughly £54,000 in today’s money. This included 5,092 roubles and 66 kopecks cash in the Tyumen State bank. His house was valued at 10,000, and 8,000 roubles-worth of property included a 500-rouble fur coat, a 700-rouble gold watch and 900-rouble silver tea service. The Rasputins’ farm animals comprised two cows, a bull, eight sheep and eight horses, with a stud worth 1,000 roubles. In the days before the Revolution, the Tsarina had instructed Protopopov to give the Rasputins 100,000 roubles, but this instruction was never carried out.
In November 1919, the fabled grand piano and gramophone were confiscated. Eight months later, the Rasputins were stripped of their furniture, mirrors and even dishes. In June 1920, Praskovia, Dmitri and his wife were expelled from their home: as the owner of ten long-horned cattle, Dmitri was denounced as a wealthy farmer, a kulak. In 1933, Dmitri’s wife and a daughter died of TB; three months later he himself died of dysentery. Praskovia outlived her son by three years, dying in 1936, aged 69, with just 76 roubles and 40 kopecks to her name. Varya worked as a stenographer and tried, at one point, to escape to Germany but was stopped at the border carrying the manuscript of a memoir. She was dispatched to a Soviet prison where she apparently died from poisoning in 1924 or 1925.
Only Rasputin’s daughter Maria survived into old age; though her long life was distinctly checkered. She and her husband Boris Soloviev, the mystic who had failed to rescue the Romanovs, fled to Vladivostok in 1919. There Boris began a fraud involving courtesans pretending to be the surviving Grand Duchesses. Businessmen would give money to kiss the hand of these ‘Grand Duchesses’ and watch sorrowfully as the women boarded a steamer into exile. The courtesans would then scuttle down another gang plank, to be safely back on land before the final whistle blew.
The Solovievs fled next to Romania, then to Germany, with two daughters. The marriage was not a great success: Maria swore she could never ‘love Boris’ while he confided to his diary that he found many women more attractive than his wife. Boris surrounded himself with a group of supporters trying to contact Rasputin’s soul, before he himself died in 1926.
Maria, then 28, became a governess in Paris, before joining a circus troupe with which she toured Europe and the US, billed as ‘the daughter of the famous mad monk whose feats in Russia astonished the world’. She worked as a lion tamer for the Ringling Brothers Circus and was mauled by a bear in Peru, Indiana. There followed a short period of domesticity, during which she lived in California with her daughters, Maria and Tatiana, and their family dogs, Yussou and Pov.
When Yussoupov published his memoir she tried to have him arrested for murder: ‘To me it is atrocious and I do not believe that any decent person could help feeling a sentiment of disgust in reading the savage ferocity of this book.’ She vainly claimed $800,000 in damages. Her plea for sympathy was undermined by the shameless ferocity of her own books.
In 1960, she claimed that a rouged homosexual with dyed hair had visited her daughter’s house in Paris and had from there telephoned Yussoupov, saying: ‘You’ll never guess where I’m calling from.’
In August 1968, aged 70, Maria met the fraudulent Grand Duchess Anastasia, Anna Anderson, whom Yussoupov had already dismissed as a ‘frightful play actress’. After the meeting, in Charlottesville, Virginia, Maria suffered a sleepless night, insisting that she had been reunited with her childhood friend: ‘Bless God it is [she] but it is such a decision. I am afraid almost to think about it… it gives me the chills.’
She returned to Charlottesville three months later to persuade ‘Anastasia’ to accompany her back to California. She and her friend, Patte Barham, had co-written a biography of her father; they hoped the presence of a grand duchess would boost sales. Anna Anderson initially agreed, but then changed her mind. To console themselves, the pair spent the evening letting their hair down in a bar.
Fifty years earlier Maria had scoffed at policemen in Petrograd when they had suggested she had caught her father sleeping with the Tsarina. Now she was boasting that this was exactly what had happened. Maria and Patte left town the following day; by the time they reached Dulles Airport, in Washington, Maria was denying she had ever recognised Anastasia.
Gleb Botkin, the son of the Imperial family’s doctor, who believed Anna Anderson to be the real Anastasia, was relieved: ‘A Rasputin gives the case a bad name.’ Gleb’s opinion of Maria had not changed since he had denounced her as an unsuitable playmate for the Imperial children at Court. He now described her as ‘a very homely Siberian peasant with the small eyes of a sly pig and saccharin manners of very doubtful sincerity’. Maria Rasputin died in Los Angeles in 1977, aged 79.
The St Petersburg hostesses who banned talk of Rasputin in the early 1900s would have been horrified to know that, a hundred years on, the tongues have not stopped wagging. The public’s appetite for history’s ‘mad monk’ will, it seems, never be sated.
Maria Rasputin was not slow in coming forward with her own contribution to the Rasputin legend. She wrote three sensational memoirs of her father: The Real Rasputin in 1929, My Father in 1934 and Rasputin the Man Behind the Myth in 1977.
In 1990, her co-author Patte Barham used her interviews with Maria to flesh out her Peasant to Palace: Rasputin’s Cookbook, which features ‘Marzipan Tart Romanov’ and ‘Grand Duke’s Bouillabaisse’ alongside humbler recipes gleaned from Rasputin’s timorous mother, Anna. Maria had claimed that the Court adopted several simple dishes and that the Tsar’s first choice was ‘Rasputin’s Jellied Fish Heads’. She further insisted that her father ascribed his singular sex drive to a basic codfish soup:
‘Rasputin’s Codfish Soup’:
Makes 3 to 4 servings
1 small whole codfish
1 cup whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
salt and pepper
Clean codfish; remove head (use for ‘Jellied Fish Heads’, if desired). Cut into fillets and remove bones; cut fillets into pieces and place in heavy saucepan. Add milk and cream. Place over medium heat and bring to scalding temperature; DO NOT BOIL. Reduce heat and continue simmering until fish is done. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Ladle into soup bowls and serve hot.
These four books, written or inspired by Maria, form a small brick in a pantheon of literature, operas, documentaries and feature films about Rasputin.
Lionel Barrymore starred in the controversial Rasputin And The Empress in 1932; Christopher Lee starred in the Hammer Horror Rasputin: The Mad Monk in 1966. Tom Baker took the role of Rasputin in the film of Robert K. Massie’s book Nicholas and Alexandra in 1971. Alan Rickman won an Emmy for his performance in Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny in 1996 and the most recent film, Raspoutine, starred the hulking French actor, Gerard Depardieu. Talks are now being conducted with Leonardo DiCaprio.
In 1978, the pop group Boney M brought out their single ‘Rasputin’, with its chorus ‘Ra Ra Rasputin, Lover of the Russian Queen’. It went to Number Two in the British charts and has since become a disco mainstay. An initial ban on the song in the USSR was eventually lifted and it is claimed that Boney M once performed the song at a museum in Pokrovskoye. Boney M fans also point out that the group’s lead singer, Bobby Farrell, died, spookily, in the same city and on the same date as Rasputin. Farrell did, indeed, die in a hotel in St Petersburg in 2010 and though the date, December 30, seems wrong, it is technically correct since, in 1916, the Russian calendar was 13 days behind the Western calendar.
The face of Rasputin has appeared on vodka and beer labels. The murder cellar, for many years a lavatory, has been re-created as a tourist destination, presided over by semi-convincing models of Youssoupov and Rasputin.
Kyril Zinovieff and his elder sister, both aged over 100, are now, in 2013, probably the last two people alive to have seen Rasputin. Kyril remembers as a young boy going for a walk in St Petersburg with his nurse and sister. He saw a cab draw up close. ‘Two big black bears of men were inside the cab. One was laughing his head off. His hat was off, his head was ba
ck. I could see his teeth gleaming between his black moustache and black beard. I asked my nurse who he was, she replied that it was Rasputin. I said: “Who’s Rasputin?”.’
Zinovieff was told that Rasputin was immensely important. His parents were friends of the Yussoupovs: ‘Felix harped on about Rasputin’s influence. He and his parents believed Rasputin was the real ruler. I was brought up on that. My father said the Emperor was weak. One of the Galitzines even believed that Rasputin had an office in the Winter Palace.’
He believes that Yussoupov exaggerated his role with regard to the assassination: ‘Felix saw himself as the saviour of Russia.’ But recognising Yussoupov’s limitations has not dented Zinovieff’s affection for him: ‘He was amusing. He sang gypsy love songs and had a nice voice. During his libel court case, he retired to a room and played guitar. He was not an intelligent man.’ Zinovieff is dismissive of Yussoupov’s belief in Rasputin’s mystical power: ‘That’s all nonsense’… All Rasputin could do was alleviate the suffering of Alexis.’
He may be loosely in agreement with the late Beryl Bainbridge’s assessment of Rasputin: ‘It has been written that he was one of the evilest men who ever lived. I prefer to think of him as a breath of rank air, so to speak, who blew away the cobwebs of the Imperial Palace and strode through the marble corridors in his cossack boots, ordering champagne (actually he might have preferred Madeira) by the bucket and generally being the life and soul of the party.’
For all his subsequent iconic status – and he has been celebrated and demonised almost in equal measure – there have always been those who believed in Rasputin as a Man of God. In the immediate aftermath of his death, cars and carriages pulled up at the Petrovsky Bridge, where his body had been pushed into the river; devotees were said to have come with pots, buckets and bottles to scoop up what they considered to be holy water. Later, they fought over pieces of his coffin.
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