If Rasputin liked a visitor and decided to help, he took his pen and scrawled a few clumsy lines: “My dear and valued friend. Do this for me. Gregory.” These scraps of paper, carrying the aura of great connections, were often all that was needed to obtain a position, win a promotion, delay a transfer or confirm a contract. Some of these notes, attached to petitions, went straight to the Empress, who forwarded them to the Tsar. Because Mosolov was head of the Court Secretariat, Rasputin’s notes often arrived on his desk. “All were drawn up the same way,” he wrote, “a little cross at the top of the page, then one or two lines giving a recommendation from the starets. They opened all doors in Petrograd.” In one case, Mosolov was unable to help. “A lady in a low cut dress, suitable for a ball … handed me an envelope: inside was Rasputin’s calligraphy with his erratic spelling: ‘My dear chap, Fix it up for her. She is all right. Gregory.’ The lady explained that she wanted to become a prima donna in the Imperial Opera. I did my utmost to explain to her clearly and patiently that the post did not depend in any way on me.”
Usually, because he wrote poorly and slowly, Rasputin did not bother to name the service to be performed, leaving it to the petitioner to supply these details. Often, he did not even name the addressee, assuming that the petitioner would place it in the most appropriate hands. Eventually, to save time, Rasputin made up a supply of these notes in advance. As his petitioners arrived, he simply handed them out.
In return for his services, Rasputin accepted whatever his visitors might offer. Financiers and wealthy women put bundles of money on the table and Rasputin stuffed them into his drawers without bothering to count. If his next petitioner was a person in need, he might pull out the whole bundle and give it away. He had little need of money himself; his flat was simple, most of his wines and foods were brought as gifts. His only real interest in acquiring money was to accumulate a dowry for his daughter Maria, who was in school in Petrograd and lived in a room in his apartment.
For pretty women, there were other methods of payment. Many an attractive visitor, thinking she could win his help with words and smiles, rushed suddenly out of his apartment, weeping or trembling with rage. Helped down the stairs, she went off to the police station to complain that Rasputin had tried to rape her. There, her name and the circumstances of her plight were duly noted, but Father Gregory was never punished.
Along with his droves of petitioners, another cluster of people attended faithfully on Rasputin. Day after day, in front of the house, in the concierge’s lodge and on the stairs leading to Rasputin’s door, lounged a squad of detectives. They had a double function: to guard the starets’s life and to take careful notes of everyone he saw and everything that happened to him. Bored, shifting their feet on the stairs to let the petitioners pass, they scribbled down minute details: “Anastasia Shapovalenkova, the wife of a doctor, has given Rasputin a carpet…. Ail unknown clergyman brought fish for Rasputin…. Councilor von Kok brought Rasputin a case of wine.” When a visitor left Rasputin’s apartment, the plainclothesmen swarmed around, hoping to learn what had happened inside. If the visitor was garrulous, little dramas were scrawled deadpan into the notebooks:
November 2: “An unknown woman visited Rasputin in order to try to prevent her husband, a lieutenant at present in hospital, from being transferred from St. Petersburg…. [She said] ‘A servant opened the door to me and showed me to a room where Rasputin, whom I had never seen before, appeared immediately. He told me at once to take off my clothes. I complied with his wish, and went with him into an adjoining room. He hardly listened to my request; but kept on touching my face and breasts and asking me to kiss him. Then he wrote a note but did not give it to me, saying that he was displeased with me and bidding me to come back next day.”
December 3: “Madame Likart visited Rasputin … to ask him to intervene on her husband’s behalf. Rasputin proposed that she should kiss him; she refused, however, and departed. Then the mistress ot Senator Mamontov arrived. Rasputin asked her to return at 1 a.m.”
January 29: “The wife of Colonel Tatarinov visited Rasputin and … the starets embraced and kissed a young girl in her presence; she found the incident so painful that she had decided never to visit Rasputin again.”
The staircase watch was maintained at night as well as by day, and the police kept track of Rasputin’s evening companions: “Maria Gill, the wife of a Captain in the 145th Regiment, slept at Rasputin’s…. About 1 a.m. Rasputin brought an unknown woman back to the house; she spent the night with him…. Rasputin brought a prosti tute back to the flat and locked her in his room. The servants, however, afterwards let her out…. Vararova, the actress, slept at Rasputin’s.”
Sometimes when Rasputin had been aroused but left unsatisfied by his female visitors, he wandered up and down the stairs, pounding on doors:
May 9: “Rasputin sent the concierge’s wife for the masseuse but she refused to come. He then went himself to Katia, the seamstress who lives in the house, and asked her to ‘keep him company.’ The seamstress refused…. Rasputin said ‘Come next week and I will give you fifty roubles.’”
June 2: “Rasputin sent the porter’s wife to fetch the masseuse, Utilia, but she was not at home…. He went to the seamstress Katia in Flat 31. He was apparently refused admittance, for he came down the stairs again, and asked the porter’s wife to kiss him. She, however, disengaged herself from his embrace, and rang his flat bell, whereupon the servant appeared and put Rasputin to bed.”
In time, Rasputin became friendly with the detectives. As his door opened and his powerful figure and weather-beaten face appeared, the detectives would bow, lift their hats and wish him good morning. Often, they were able to be of service to him. One night, two gentlemen with drawn revolvers dashed up the stairs, declaring that their wives were spending the night with Rasputin and that they had come to avenge the dishonor. While one group of agents staved off the angry husbands, others raced up the stairs to give warning. In haste, Rasputin managed to bundle the ladies down the back stairs before their husbands burst in the front door.
Late at night, Rasputin thundered down the stairs, jumped into his car and drove off to carouse until dawn. The police, stuffing their pencils and notebooks into their pockets, scurried to follow:
December 14: “On the night of 13th to 14th December, Rasputin, accompanied by the 28 year old wife of … Yazininski, left … about 2 a.m. in a car for the restaurant Villa Rode…. He was refused admittance on account of the lateness of the hour; but he began to hammer on the doors and wrenched the bell off. He gave five roubles to the police officer on guard, not to annoy him. Then he went off with his companion to the Mazalksi gypsy choir at Number 49 and remained there until 10 a.m. The pair, in a very tipsy state, then proceeded to Madame Yazininskaia’s flat, from which Rasputin did not return home until midday. In the evening, he drove to Tsarskoe Selo.”
April 15: “Rasputin … called on the honorary burgess Pestrikov. … As Pestrikov was not at home, he took part in a drinking party which Pestrikov’s son was giving to some students. A musician struck up and there was singing and Rasputin danced with a maidservant.”
His revels ended, Rasputin staggered home, still accompanied by the exhausted but dogged detectives:
October 14: “Rasputin came home dead drunk at 1 a.m. and insulted the concierge’s wife.”
November 6: “Rasputin … came back drunk … as he went up to his flat he inquired if there were any visitors for him. On hearing that there were two ladies, he asked ‘Are they pretty. Very pretty? That’s good. I need pretty ones.’”
January 14: “Rasputin came home at 7 a.m. He was dead drunk. … He smashed a pane of glass in the house door; apparently he had had one fall already, for his nose was swollen.”
Day after day, these reports piled up in huge bundles on the desks of the police. From there, they were passed to some whose duty it was to read them, and to many who, although unauthorized, paid handsomely to savor their lusty flavor. Ministers, court offi
cials, grand dukes, countesses, foreign ambassadors, great industrialists, merchants and stockbrokers all pored over them. The talk of Petrograd, they titillated or outraged every important citizen. Marye, the American Ambassador, wrote breathlessly in his diary: “Rasputin’s apartments are the scene of the wildest orgies. They beggar all description and from the current accounts of them which pass freely from mouth to mouth, the storied infamies of the Emperor Tiberius on the Isle of Capri are made to seem moderate and tame.” The notes convinced all who read them that the man they described was coarse, unscrupulous, a satyr. Only one person, offered the chance, refused to read them. The Empress was convinced that the senior officials of the police hated Rasputin and would do what they could to blacken his name. For her, the famous “staircase notes” were only fiction.
The sheer, blind obstinacy of Alexandra’s refusal to see the truth was never more dramatically displayed than in the notorious incident of the Yar in April 1915. Rasputin had arrived in Moscow, supposedly to pray at the tombs of the patriarchs in the Ouspensky Sobor inside the Kremlin. At night, however, he decided to visit the popular Yar restaurant, where he soon became roaring drunk. Bruce Lockhart happened to be present. “I was at Yar, the most luxurious night haunt of Moscow, with some English visitors,” he wrote. “As we watched the music hall performance in the main hall, there was a violent fracas in one of the private rooms. Wild shrieks of women, a man’s curses, broken glass, and the banging of doors. Headwaiters rushed upstairs. The manager sent for policemen…. But the row and the roaring continued…. The cause of the disturbance was Rasputin—drunk and lecherous, and neither police nor management dared evict him.” Eventually, a telephone call reached the Assistant Minister of Interior, who gave permission to arrest him, and Rasputin was led away “snarling and vowing vengeance.” According to witnesses, Rasputin had exposed himself, shouting boastfully that he often behaved this way in the company of the Tsar and that he could do what he liked with “the Old Girl.”
A report including every detail of Rasputin’s behavior was drawn up and personally submitted to the Tsar by General Dzhunkovsky, an aide-de-camp who was commander of all the police in the empire. It was assumed by those who knew its contents that this time Rasputin was finally finished. Nicholas summoned Rasputin and angrily asked for an explanation. Rasputin’s excuse was ingenious and contained at least a kernel of truth. He explained that he was a simple peasant who had been lured to an evil spot and tempted to drink more than he should. He denied the grosser parts of the report and swore that he had never made any statement about the Imperial family. Nevertheless, without showing the report to Alexandra, the Tsar ordered Rasputin to leave Petrograd for a while and return to Pokrovskoe.
Later, the Empress read the report and exploded with wrath. “My enemy Dzhunkovsky has shown that vile, filthy paper to Dmitry [Grand Duke Dmitry, later one of Rasputin’s assassins]. If we let our Friend be persecuted, we and our country will suffer for it.” Dzhunkovsky’s days were numbered. From that moment, the Empress’s letters were filled with a stream of pleadings to “get rid of Dzhunkovsky,” and in September 1915 he was dismissed.*
Whatever else he might be doing, Rasputin always took exquisite care to preserve the image of piety he had created at Tsarskoe Selo. It was the keystone of everything, his career and his life, and he protected it with cunning and zeal. Sometimes, an unexpected telephone call from Tsarskoe Selo would break in and upset his evening plans. He growled, but even when thoroughly drunk, managed to sober himself immediately and rush off to consult with “Mama,” as he called the Empress, on matters of state.
Alexandra’s disbelief in the evil half of Rasputin’s nature was considerably more complicated than a simple, prudishly Victorian blindness to that side of life. She was certainly moralistic, but she was not ignorant or squeamish about sex and vice. She had heard most of the stories about Rasputin’s villainous behavior and she had consciously rejected them as false and slanderous. For this fateful misjudgment on her part, Rasputin himself was shamefully—and yet, as an actor, brilliantly—responsible.
Gregory Rasputin was one of the most extraordinary and enigmatic men to appear on earth. He was an overwhelming personality and a superbly convincing actor. He had prodigious physical strength and caroused night and day at a pace that would kill a normal man. His physical presence projected enormous magnetism: prime ministers, princes, bishops and grand dukes as well as society women and peasant girls had felt his powerful attraction and, when the relationship soured, had been as powerfully repelled.
Now, all of the terrible power of this remarkable personality was concentrated on a single objective: convincing the Empress that he was as she saw him, the pure, devoted Man of God, sprung from the soil of peasant Russia. Because of his painstaking care, Alexandra never saw him as anything else. His superb performance was strongly enhanced by the miracles she had seen take place at the bedsides of Alexis and Anna. Whenever he felt himself threatened, Rasputin skillfully played on the Empress’s fears and her religious nature. “Remember that I need neither the Emperor or yourself,” he would say. “If you abandon me to my enemies, it will not worry me. I am quite able to cope with them. But neither the Emperor nor you can do without me. If I am not there to protect you, you will lose your son and your crown within six months.” Even had she begun to doubt the starets’s purity, Alexandra—having been through Spala and the nosebleed on the train—was not willing to take risks. Rasputin must be what he said he was and he must stay with her or her world would collapse.
Shrewdly, Rasputin secured his position and enhanced his hold by meeting the Empress’s more prosaic need for constant reassurance and encouragement. His conversation and telegrams were an artful blend of religion and prophecy, often sounding like the gloriously meaningless forecasts Which fall from penny machines at county fairs: “Be crowned with earthly happiness, the heavenly wreaths will follow…. Do not fear our present embarrassments, the protection of the Holy Mother is over you—go to the hospitals though the enemies are menacing—have faith…. Don’t fear, it will not be worse than it was, faith and the banner will favor us.” Blurred though these messages were, the Empress, weary and harassed, found them comforting.
Politically, Rasputin’s advice was usually confined to carefully endorsing policies which the Empress already believed in, making certain that the idea was rephrased in his own language so that it would seem freshly inspired. Where his ideas were in fact original and specific, they accurately and realistically represented peasant Russia. Throughout the war, he warned of the bloodletting. “It is getting empty in the villages,” he told the Tsar. Yet, when challenged by Paléologue that he had been urging the Tsar to end the war, Rasputin retorted, “Those who told you that are just idiots. I am always telling the Tsar that he must fight until complete victory is won. But I am also telling him that the war has brought unbearable suffering to the Russian people. I know of villages where there is no one left but the blind and the wounded, the widows and the orphans.”
As the war continued, Rasputin, like Lenin, saw that along with peace the other predominant concern of the Russian people was bread. He recognized that the shortage of food was mainly a problem of distribution, and never ceased to warn the Empress that the most critical of Russia’s problems was the railways. At one point in October 1915, he urged Alexandra to insist that the Tsar cancel all passenger trains for three days so that supplies of food and fuel might flow into the cities.
When it came to the choice of ministers to rule the country, the area in which he exercised his most destructive influence, Rasputin had no design at all. He nominated men for the highest positions in the Russian government simply because they liked him, or said they liked him, or at the very least did not oppose him. Rasputin had no burning ambition to rule Russia. He simply wished to be left untroubled in his free-wheeling, dissolute life. When powerful ministers, despising his influence over the Empress, opposed him, he wanted them out of the way. By placing his own men in ev
ery office of major importance, he could ensure, not that he would rule, but that he would be left alone.
In time, every appointment in the highest echelon of the government ministries and in the leadership of the church passed through his hands. Some of Rasputin’s choices would have been comical except that the joke was too grim. Rasputin once found a court chamberlain named A. N. Khvostov dining at the nightclub Villa Rode. When the gypsy chorus began to sing, Rasputin was not satisfied; he thought the basses much too weak. Spotting Khvostov, who was large and stout, he clapped him on the back and said, “Brother, go and help them sing. You are fat and can make a lot of noise.” Khvostov, tipsy and cheerful, leaped onto the stage and boomed out a thundering bass. Delighted, Rasputin clapped and shouted his approval. Not long afterward, Khvostov unexpectedly became Minister of Interior. His appointment provoked Vladimir Purishkevich, a member of the Duma, to declare in disgust that new ministers now were asked to pass examinations, not in government, but in gypsy music.
Similarly, Rasputin’s ardent endorsement of the Empress’s belief in autocracy was at least in part self-defensive. Only under a system in which his patron and patroness were all-powerful would he survive. He resisted the demands of those in the Duma and elsewhere who urged responsible government, because the first act of such a government would have been to eliminate him. Furthermore, Rasputin honestly did not believe in responsible government. He did not believe that the Duma members or Rodzianko, their President, represented the real Russia. Certainly they did not represent the peasant Russia from which he had sprung. He believed in the monarchy not simply as an opportunist, but because it was the only form of government known in the villages. Traditionally, the peasants looked to the Tsar. Aristocrats, courtiers, landowners—precisely the men who sat in the Duma—were the classes which, historically, had barred the peasants’ access to the Tsar. Seen in this light, it became the Duma members, not Rasputin, who were the unscrupulous opportunists trying to steal the Tsar’s powers. To give the Duma more power than it had, to further dilute the role of autocracy, would bring to an end the old, traditional Russia of Tsar, Church and People. Rasputin understood this and resisted it. “Responsible government,” wrote the Empress to the Tsar, “as our Friend says, would be the ruin of everything.”
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family Page 43