Grigory himself described this dissipated beginning to his life poetically and tenderly: “When I was fifteen in my village in the summertime and the sun warmed me and the birds sang their heavenly songs I dreamed of God.… My soul yearned for the distance.… Dreaming many times I wept and did not know myself where these tears had come from or why.… So my youth passed. In a kind of contemplation, a kind of dream. And later, when life brushed me, touched me, I ran into a corner and prayed secretly. I was not content and could not find the answer to many things; I was sad. I began drinking.”
What sweet speech. The gift of seduction.
Until the age of thirty he smoked and fornicated and even worse—he stole. But just as he was about to turn thirty, it happened: a novice monk met him on the road and their conversation set the errant soul on the correct path. The mysterious life of the holy man Grigory began with that moment. During the threshing, when the servants laughed at his holiness, he thrust his shovel into a heap of grain and set out for holy places. He walked for more than a year, came home, dug out a cave under his cattle shed, and prayed there for two weeks. Then he went off again to wander, praying at holy places. He was in Kiev, like Venerable Serafim, and then in the Sarov wilderness itself, then on pilgrimage in Moscow, and on through Russia’s endless towns and villages.
He returned home after long wanderings, and as he was praying in church, in front of the people, he beat his brow on the floor in his zeal. From that time he was given to prophecy and healing.
Vera Leonidovna:
“This was a fantastic man. When the fashionable restaurant Vienna opened, I was taken there by Artsybashev, the author of the play Jealousy. What a success I was in that play! Also with us was an incredible man well known throughout Petersburg, Manusevich-Manuilov. There were rumors that he was an agent of every possible intelligence service at one and the same time. It was he who made the suggestion: ‘Let’s go see Rasputin.’ It was right next door to the Vienna, on Gorokhovskaya Street. Artsybashev refused, but I’m a daredevil. Rasputin was sitting in the dining room between two girls, his daughters. His eyes bore into me—I have a physical memory of the sensation. The table was laden with flowers and across sat the young, pale blond Munia—Maria Golovina, the empress’s lady-in-waiting. People kept calling and stopping in constantly. Women came by. Maria kept running to open the door, as diligent as a servant, and then he said to her: ‘Write.’ And he began to speak. It was all about meekness, about the soul. I tried to remember it and later, when I got home, I even wrote it down, but it wasn’t the same thing. Everyone’s eyes had ignited. There was an ineffable flow of love. It was intoxicating.”
I was reminded of this story in the archive. The empress’s dark blue notebook. On the inside cover of the notebook is written its owner’s name: “Alexandra.” Next to this elegant signature is Rasputin’s scribble. Grigory wrote without punctuation: “Here is my peace my glory the source of light in the world a present to my dear Mama Grigory.” He called her “Mama”—the Mother of the Russian Land. Nicholas was “Papa.”
“A present to my dear Mama”—these are his oral teachings, painstakingly recorded in Alix’s elegant hand.
She took them with her to Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg. She would keep rereading them until the day she died.
Here are some of them:
“Whosoever cares only for himself, he is a fool or a torturer of the Light, the ministers we have in general care only for themselves—Ach! That is not the way! Our homeland is broad, we must make room for people to work, but not the leftists or the rightists; the leftists are stupid and the rightists are fools. Why? Because they want to teach with the stick. I have lived fifty years already, my sixth decade is beginning, and I can say: Whosoever thinks he is learned and has studied—wise men speak the truth—he is a fool.
“The Mother of God was intelligent, though she never wrote about herself.… But her life is known to our spirit….
“Never fear releasing prisoners or resurrecting sinners to a just life. Through their suffering prisoners … come to stand above us before God….
“Love heaven, it comes from love, wheresoever the spirit, there are we. Love the clouds—for that is where we live….”
The inordinate influence of a semiliterate muzhik on the mistress of all Russia. Because he ministered not only to the unfortunate son’s body but also to the tormented empress’s soul.
From his lips poured a stream of great Christian truths, with which she cleansed herself from the day’s trials. An aficionado of religious books and, of course, a hypnotist, he was able to become the longed-for “holy man” of whom she had dreamed in the Sarov wilderness. Saint Serafim resurrected. To Grigory she entrusted her soul.
In the beginning when he first entered the palace, Rasputin was meek and radiant. Later, when he was already settling into his role of holy man, he would be by turns familiar, ferocious, mocking, and threatening with the tsarist couple. There was no pose in this. He was stupefyingly simple and natural.
THE MYSTERY OF RASPUTIN
Rasputin’s mystery lay not in his power of miracle working. That power is indisputable, and it saved Alix’s son repeatedly. He did not even necessarily have to be physically close to Alexei. A twentieth-century sorcerer, he was already using the telephone and telegraph.
The stories have been told a multitude of times.
A call from Tsarskoe Selo to Rasputin’s apartment: the boy is suffering. His ear hurts; he cannot sleep.
“Have him come here,” the holy man addresses the empress over the phone. And very tenderly to the boy who has come to the phone: “What is it, Alyoshenka, burning the midnight oil? Nothing hurts, your ear does not hurt anymore, I’m telling you. Sleep.”
Fifteen minutes later, a call comes from Tsarskoe Selo: his ear does not hurt, he is sleeping.
In 1912 the heir is dying at Spala. He has a bruise, and he is getting a blood infection. But Alix, her face racked by night vigils, triumphantly shows the doctors Rasputin’s telegram: “God has gazed on your tears and accepted your prayers. Be not sad. Your son shall live.” The distinguished doctors can only shake their heads sadly: the terrible finale is inevitable.
But the boy … the boy soon recovers.
During the war Nicholas takes the heir with him to Headquarters at Mogilev. Alexei gets chilled and catches an ordinary cold. But the boy is not ordinary: as he is blowing his nose the blood vessels burst and the blood begins to gush—and this blood the doctors can no longer stop. Alexei is sent to Tsarskoe Selo on the imperial train along with Gilliard and the powerless Dr. Derevenko. The tsaritsa awaits him at the platform in Tsarskoe Selo.
“The blood has stopped!” Gilliard announces triumphantly.
“I know,” Alix replies calmly. “When did this happen?”
“Somewhere around six-thirty.”
Alix holds out Rasputin’s telegram. GOD WILL HELP YOU, BE HEALTHY. The telegram had been sent at six-twenty in the morning.
In 1914 Anya Vyrubova incurs life-threatening injuries in a train wreck between Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo. She is lying unconscious in the railroad guard booth with broken legs and a fractured skull. Rasputin approaches Anya. He is standing over her bed, his eyes are popping out of their sockets from the terrible strain, and suddenly he whispers gently: “Anyushka, wake up, look at me.” She opens her eyes.
How must Alix have felt about the person who resurrected the dead right before her very eyes! The only person who could save—and so many times already had saved—her son! Could Nicholas deprive her of her son’s healer? And her soul’s? Getting rid of Rasputin would mean killing her. And the boy.
So he suffered all of it. He even played along.
He acquiesced to Alix’s request to eat a miracle-working crust of bread from Rasputin’s table and comb his hair with his miraculous comb. Alix had a sacred belief in their miraculous power. He had to pretend that he too believed.
But Nicholas was not simply playing along. For him Grigory was the
result of his own truth seeking, which began with Klopov, the destitute landowner who had become for a time Nicholas’s “man of the people,” and was now finding its culmination in a genuine muzhik in the palace. The union of “people and tsar” had come to pass. Naturally, he knew of Grigory’s debauchery. Unlike Alix, he did not try to construct any mystical justifications for him. He accepted it as the debauchery of the real people, proving yet again that his people were not ready for a constitution. Through this wildness he glimpsed in Grigory common sense, goodness, and faith. For him Grigory’s voice was the voice of the people.
“This is merely a simple Russian man, very religious and believing,” he explained to Count Fredericks, minister of the court. “The empress likes his sincerity, she believes in the power of his prayers for our Family and Alexei, but after all this is our own business, completely private. It is amazing how people love to interfere in all that does not concern them.”
People were interfering. In society people spoke with horror about the astounding ritual that had become the norm in the tsar’s palace: the Siberian muzhik kissed the hand of the tsar and tsaritsa and then they—the autocrat and empress—kissed the rough hand of the muzhik. This exchange of kisses was entirely evangelical: Christ had washed his disciples’ feet. And here they were, the rulers of Russia, humbly kissing the hands of a Siberian muzhik. The people. The tsar’s religious family and an increasingly atheistic society were finding they understood each other less and less.
Rasputin indisputably possessed a supernatural gift. For our century, accustomed to the dark miracles of parapsychologists, there is no mystery in this whatsoever. Still, Rasputin’s mystery did exist.
The mystery began with his strange behavior. His endless debauches, drinking, unbridled lust—all this became the talk of the town. Petersburg and Moscow saw him boozing outrageously in smart restaurants.
But why? He had an apartment guarded by the police where he could have indulged in drink and depravity to his heart’s content without provoking gossip or widespread indignation. But he preferred to carry on in full view of the entire country.
Perhaps there was a challenge in this: I, a simple muzhik, am above your official Petersburg magnificence, above all your proprieties. I’m dancing a mad dance, committing every kind of obscene act. Burn! Burn! What I want—I get!
This was a wholly self-conscious attempt to exploit the alleged mystery of the Russian soul for his own ends. Tolstoy plus Dostoevsky, a kind of banal Tolstoevsky—the symbol of the West’s perception of Russia.
There was something wrong with this image. A cunning muzhik with a stinging, guarded gaze. Everyone remarked on the intense guardedness of his eyes. So why this recklessness? What was his mystery?
One of his noisiest scandals occurred in 1915. He went to Moscow, fulfilling a vow: to worship in the Kremlin at the holy grave of Patriarch Hermogen. His praying culminated, however, in a wild debauch at the Yar, a well-known restaurant. The police report was intriguing:
“On March 26 of this year at about 11 P.M. the well-known Grigory Rasputin arrived at the Yar restaurant in the company of Anisia Reshetnikova, who is the widow of a man of a respected family, an associate of the Moscow and Petrograd newspapers, Nikolai Soedov, and an unidentified young woman. The entire party was already in high spirits. Once they had occupied a room, the arrivals called up the editor-publisher of the Moscow newspaper News of the Season, Semyon Kugulsky, and asked him to join them. They also invited a women’s chorus, which performed several songs and danced the matchish.… Drunk, Rasputin danced the russkaya afterward and then began confiding with the singers this type of thing: ‘This caftan was a gift to me from the “old lady,” she sewed it, too.’ Further, Rasputin’s behavior became truly outrageous, sexually psychopathic: he bared his sexual organs and in that state carried on a conversation with the singers, giving to some his own handwritten notes, such as ‘Love unselfishly.’”
What curious company Rasputin kept: to witness his binge, this cunning, cautious muzhik invited not one but two journalists! And in the presence of these journalists, one of whom worked for the tabloids, he orchestrated this obscene spectacle.
There is only one way a man would act like this: if for some strange reason he wanted everything that went on at the Yar to become common knowledge immediately.
Indeed, that is what he wanted—for everyone to know of his excesses. A sinister detail: at the Yar he told tales about the tsaritsa that they did not even dare include in the report.
“I do with her what I want,” he proclaimed in the journalists’ presence. This was not the only time such statements were heard during his public drinking bouts.
There was a paradoxical move involved in this as well that the clever muzhik had discovered. If Nicholas and Alexandra could not believe in his debauches in the palaces, then neither he nor she herself, of course, could believe those filthy words about the tsaritsa he idolized. As if the lips of the man whose devoted love for “Mama” they had known so many years could actually utter such a thing! In the family’s eyes, the mere recounting of such words immediately stripped the rest of its veracity. It all became yet another plot against the poor muzhik whom the devil had beguiled into drinking, a fact his enemies were exploiting.
One more thing: Rasputin knew that the tsaritsa could not get on without him. She would do anything not to believe his enemies. And to avenge him.
This was Rasputin’s mystery: his drunken orgies and dirty stories about the tsar’s family were wild provocations. He put a weapon into the hands of his own enemies, but as soon as they used it they inevitably disappeared from the palace. It was a paradox, but his debauches destroyed his influential enemies. Lady-in-waiting Tyutcheva, granddaughter of Feodor Tyutchev, the great nineteenth-century poet, and teacher to the grand duchesses, waged a war against the holy man. After yet another one of his escapades she demanded that Rasputin be forbidden to associate with the grand duchesses. As a result, Tyutcheva was forced to leave Tsarskoe Selo.
The all-powerful head of state Stolypin compiled a list of Grigory’s adventures and gave it to Nicholas. Nicholas read it, made no comment, and asked Stolypin to proceed to current affairs. Soon the minister found himself preparing for retirement.
Finally, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, Rasputin’s former admirer, who understood the terrible danger looming over the dynasty, came out against Rasputin. So, the man the tsar had named commander-in-chief at the outset of the war, the man closest to the tsar, and the Siberian muzhik.… The muzhik won out.
Until Rasputin’s murder, his enemies would continue to fall into his trap each time they brought out the usual accusations of revelry and lust. They did not know that he had provided a marvelous and conclusive explanation for Alix and his loyal admirers, revealing the secret reason for his strange conduct.
Felix Yusupov, his future murderer, learned of this astonishing interpretation of Rasputin’s escapades from his friend Maria Golovina, the tsaritsa’s lady-in-waiting: with tender sympathy, she explained to Felix as she would to a not very bright child: “If he does this, then it is with a special purpose—to temper himself morally.”
The holy man, taking on the sins of the world and through his fall subjecting himself to a voluntary flogging by society, as the holy fools did back in ancient Russia—that is how Rasputin mystically explained his escapades. “The tsaritsa had a book, Holy Fools of the Russian Church, with her comments in places where it talked about the manifestation of idiocy in the form of sexual degeneracy,” recalled Father Georgy Shavelsky, the archpresbyter of the imperial army and navy.
Rasputin and Anya were the two people closest to the family. Two people who gave birth to terrible myths on which the coming revolution would feed: the spineless, pathetic cuckold of a tsar, and the tsaritsa in the brazen embraces of an adventurist muzhik, a tsaritsa who rumor asserted gave her friend as mistress to the tsar.
A great number of obscene drawings circulated throughout Russia right up until the revo
lution. One of these “graffiti”: a bearded muzhik (Rasputin) and in his arms two broad-hipped beauties (the tsaritsa and Anya), and all this on the background of brazen virgins (the tsaritsa’s daughters) dancing zestfully.
Chapter 5
THE TSAR’S FAMILY
Meanwhile, the family lived in nearly idyllic seclusion. Few knew of their real life. An enchanting portrait of them was left in the memoirs of one of those few, the woman who had done so much toward the family’s ruin—Anya.
It is early morning. The family is waking up. Alix’s dream has come true: it is all as it was in her childhood, when she had just such a large family as this. Through her “tireless labor of love” a family has been created. And she—wife and mother—is its shelter and support.
The Alexander Palace has long been cramped for five children. Next door, the enormous Catherine Palace stands empty. But she does not want to change quarters. This is not merely habit for the old hearth but an awareness: our life together, in this small palace, unites us, bonds us.
Her daughters. We know very little about them: shadows in the bloody reflection of impending tragedy.
Her Victorian education, the legacy Alix received from her English grandmother Victoria, she passed on to her daughters: tennis, a cold bath in the morning, a warm one in the evening. This was for the good of the body. And for the soul—a religious education: reading books pleasing to God, strictly observing church rituals. “Olga and Tatiana were at mass for the first time and bore up for the entire service excellently,” a gratified Nicholas would record in his diary.
The Last Tsar Page 13