In 1925, it was noticed that the plaster under the front staircase in the old seventeenth-century Yusupov Palace in Moscow was a different colour from the adjacent walls. Making a hole, investigators revealed a chamber in which they found seven chests. These had apparently been hastily and haphazardly secreted there by the owners as they were fleeing the country. Discovered in this way were Yusupov family silver, diamonds, pearls, and emeralds, as well as other family documents that were subsequently added to the Yusupov archive.
The day I came to see the Yusupov palace for myself was oddly disturbing.
That morning I had been invited to lunch by Prince Michael, Duke of Kent, who was visiting Petersburg at the time. Descended from King George V, that double of Nicholas II, Prince Michael also closely resembles the last Russian tsar. Both in his features and, more importantly, in his eyes: light-coloured eyes with the same tenderly sad expression described in so many memoirs of Nicholas. Following that meeting with the relative with the face of the last tsar, I went to videotape the palace where the man who had undone the tsar had himself been murdered.
Everything had been preserved: I walked down the same staircase from which Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich and the other plotters had nervously listened to what was going on in the basement.
I went into the yard by the same door through which the bloodied Rasputin had fled, while trying to save himself. And then I returned to the basement which had been transformed by Felix into an elegant room. Here they had sat just before the murder. Standing there now are two silly wax figures depicting Felix and Rasputin. The door to the basement was shut and I remained alone. I had a strange feeling that I had seen that basement before: the small space, the windows raised just slightly above the ground through which only the legs of passers-by could be seen, the massive walls that blocked out all sound. It was a double of the Ipatiev House basement, where the royal family had been executed.
The night afterwards I returned to Moscow. The next day was the premiere of Khovanschina at the Bolshoi Theatre. I had been invited by my friend Slava Rostropovich who was conducting the opera. I looked at the stage and the costumes from the times of the kingdom of Muscovy, the same costumes in which Nicholas and Alexandra had been so fond of dressing up for their ‘historical’ balls. It all seemed like a continuation of the day before.
As indeed it was.
After the opera I went to congratulate Rostropovich. And then in the dressing room crammed with people he said to me, ‘What a present I’ve prepared for you! You’ll go crazy! You’ll simply die! You must come to see me in Paris immediately! I’m holding it there!’ He paused, but I already knew what was next. And he said, ‘I bought some documents for you at a Sotheby’s auction. It’s a complete file, an enormous one. And do you know what it’s about?’ I knew. And he then finished, ‘It’s about Rasputin. It’s the interrogations of the numerous people he knew by the Provisional Government Commission.’
The longest day of my life had ended.
At Rostropovich’s apartment in Paris, in his living room draped with Winter Palace curtains emblazoned with the tsarist coat of arms, and containing an easel with a portrait of Nicholas with those same inexpressibly sad lapis eyes by the great portrait painter Valentin Serov, he pulled out an enormous volume. The testimony of Rasputin’s publisher Filippov, of Sazonov, and of Maria Golovina. And so on. It was the File, the source of the testimony Simpson had quoted.
The File, the one I had been looking for so long!
A Very Brief Description Of The File
The standard cover bore the inscription, ‘The Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Illegal Acts by Ministers and Other Responsible Persons’. Contained within were nearly five hundred pages of documents on the special forms of the Commission with the Commission’s stamp. All the interrogation transcripts were signed by the people who had been interrogated. Here were the signatures of Vyrubova, the gendarme (political police) chief Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, Colonel Komissarov, the doctor of Tibetan medicine Badmaev, the minister of internal affairs Khvostov, the head of the Moscow secret police Martynov, and so on. As though the detention cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress of March 1917 had come back to life. And the signatures of the famous interrogators of the Thirteenth Section who had conducted the interrogations: T. and V. Rudnev and G. Girchich.
What reading it was. The File contained the sensational testimony of Bishop Feofan, the famous church hierarch and ascetic through whom, as had often been claimed before the File, Rasputin had gained access to the royal family. The File also contained the testimony of monks from faraway Siberian monasteries and from the Verkhoturye Monastery where the mysterious transformation of Rasputin began. And, finally, it had the testimony so important to me and so desired by me — the testimony of those who had especially valued and liked Rasputin.
A Photograph Brought To Life
There is a famous photograph of Rasputin that has been compulsory in all the biographies of him. In it Rasputin is depicted surrounded by eighteen or so women and a few men. The photograph is mutely entitled, ‘Rasputin surrounded by his devotees’.
The testimony from the File now makes it possible for the first time to identify everyone in the photograph. And not merely to identify them. Included in the File is direct testimony about Rasputin by several of the people in the famous photograph. So that in the pages of this book the famous picture will, as it were, come to life, and the people who were able to observe Rasputin almost every day will begin to speak.
The File also turned out to contain the testimony of people without whom it would be hard to write an impartial biography of Rasputin. The first of these is Alexei Frolovich Filippov, ‘Rasputin’s publisher and sincere admirer’, as he is fairly characterized by those adhering to the new ‘holy Rasputin’ legends. Filippov was not merely an ‘admirer’ but a fierce defender of Rasputin. In his testimony, the publisher (and, I shall add, rich man and banker) by force of literary habit described everything to the investigator in detail — from Rasputin’s psychology and sexual life to his body and even his reproductive organs, which so preoccupied Petersburg society of the day. The File also includes the testimony of Georgy Petrovich Sazonov, another ‘ardent admirer of Rasputin’, as he is characterized by the elder’s new devotees. And it includes the testimony of Rasputin’s friend and one of the most mysterious figures in Petersburg, the Asian healer Badmaev, who treated the most important tsarist dignitaries with Tibetan herbs. And, finally, the File includes the testimony of a whole group of ladies suspected of the most intimate of relations with Rasputin: the young Baroness Kusova, the singer Varvarova, the young widow Voskoboinikova, and the cocottes Tregubova and Sheila Lunts.
In addition to all this, there are several extended interrogations of Rasputin’s devotees Maria Golovina and Olga Lokhtina, the latter a lioness of Petersburg society whom acquaintance with Rasputin turned into a half-mad holy fool (yurodivaya); the tsarina’s friend Yulia [Lili] Dehn; and so on. Many of the interrogations were transcribed in the investigators’ own handwriting (specimens of which are in the possession of the Archive of the Russian Federation, as are specimens of the handwriting of many of those who were subjected to interrogation and who signed the documents). So it was not very difficult to establish the documents’ authenticity.
The File also allowed me to confirm the authenticity of Zhukovskaya’s astonishing memoirs. I found the detailed testimony of Alexander Prugavin himself, in which that expert on Russian sectarianism corroborated what Zhukovskaya had written in regard to both her having met Rasputin through Prugavin and Prugavin’s visit to Rasputin with her, and to her stories about Rasputin having permitted Prugavin to write his tale. Moreover, in Prugavin’s view, it was ‘Zhukovskaya’s eroticism’ that compelled her to try to understand to the fullest the enigmatic doctrine of the ‘elder’. So she had in fact known very well what she was writing about.
And, lastly, there is in the File discussion of the man who became first R
asputin’s friend and then his enemy, the monk Iliodor, who published abroad a famous book about Rasputin, A Holy Devil. That book has often been considered a mere Pasquil undeserving of serious attention. But in the File the Extraordinary Commission puts questions about the book to the people mentioned in it. It turns out that Iliodor was in the main telling the truth. And that he really did have the letters of the empress and her daughters and was quoting accurately from them. And that he also had the diary of Olga Lokhtina. This is confirmed by Lokhtina herself in the File. After acquainting themselves with Iliodor’s book, both Lokhtina and Bishop Feofan had only a few private observations to make. So Iliodor should not be discounted as a source.
A House Recovered From Oblivion
After I had already started writing this book, I received the last batch of unpublished documents about Rasputin in the Siberian archives. Among them was an inventory of property belonging to Rasputin made immediately after his murder. Included was a detailed description of the legendary house in Pokrovskoe. I now knew every chair in his house and every glass on his table: the petit-bourgeois ‘city décor’ of the upstairs rooms where his Petersburg devotees stayed, and the age-old clumsy peasant style that prevailed below.
Now I had seen what he saw. And I had heard his way of speaking, too, which had been left behind in his writings. Now Rasputin was alive. I could begin. Would my portrait be a new one? I did not know. But I knew it would be fair. And the warranty of that would be the participation of those who cared about him.
This book is a completion of the investigation of that mysterious person begun by the Provisional Government in 1917. A unique investigation of Rasputin in which the only testimony permitted is that of people who actually knew him.
But most important is that here will be heard the voices of those whose unpublished testimony is contained in the File.
Once, as I was finishing the book about the last tsar, I impulsively wrote, ‘This is a book I shall never finish’. And once more that whole crowd of former acquaintances has rushed back into my life. And once again I have begun to see that same night in my dreams. That finale in a dirty basement of the history of a three-hundred-year-old empire. And the tsar falls onto his back, and two of the girls crouch by the wall covering themselves with their hands to ward off the bullets, and Commander Yurovsky runs into the gunsmoke to finish off the little boy crawling across the floor. Only now in that smoke I see a bearded man. He who did so much to bring that basement scene. And who knew that it would come.
2
THE MYSTERIOUS WANDERER
The Period Of Legend
The greater half of his life is obscure. In 1917, the investigators of the Extraordinary Commission talked with Grigory Rasputin’s fellow villagers in an unsuccessful attempt to establish his early biography. They merely created an ideological version of the tale of the peasant given to drunkenness and thievery from early youth. Nor are the memoirs of his daughter Matryona much help. Written after she had emigrated, they are the fruit of her own imagination and that of the woman journalist who helped her with them.
But in the Commission archive there is an account of that period by Rasputin himself. In 1907 after he had established himself in the royal family, he would often tell stories about his wanderings in Russia; a transcription under the title ‘The Life of an Experienced Wanderer’ was kept by the tsarina. But we shall keep in mind: he said what his royal admirers wanted to hear was a kind of ‘Life of Saint Grigory’. A legend, that is. We can, however, still find traces in it of what is for us the most interesting thing: Rasputin’s transformation. The few documents about his past recently discovered in the Siberian archives will serve as a supplement.
The Missing Birth Date
Grigory Efimovich Rasputin was born in the Tyumen district of the province of Tobol in the village of Pokrovskoe, a small settlement situated deep in the Siberian expanse on the banks of the Tura river near a large highway.
Following that highway for many hundreds of versts, coachmen would drive their horses along the banks of the Tura from the Ural mountain town of Verkhoturye, with its Nikolaev Monastery (which Grigory would later become so fond of), through Tyumen, and then on to Tobolsk.
It was along that same highway through Pokrovskoe past Rasputin’s house that the royal family would travel to their deaths in Ekaterinburg in the terrible year of 1918.
The birth date of our hero has been a riddle. Even his recent biographers have offered the most diverse dates for his birth, from the 1860s to the 1870s. Soviet encyclopedias give the date 1864–5.
Surviving to this day in Rasputin’s native village of Pokrovskoe are the ruins of the Church of the Mother of God, in which he was baptized. And preserved in the Tobolsk archives for the church are a few ‘registers’, or books in which births, marriages, and deaths were recorded.
In one is an entry for the marriage on 21 January 1862, of the peasant Efim Yakovlevich Rasputin, aged twenty, and the peasant maiden Anna Vasilievna, aged twenty-two.
Anna promptly bore Efim daughters, but they all died as infants. Finally, on 7 August 1867, she gave birth to a boy, Andrei. The boy perished in childhood, too. As with Hitler and Stalin, all the preceding children died. As if God were cautioning about childbearing in that family.
And then 1869. Before 1869 there is no record of Grigory’s birth in any of the registers. So he could not have been born before 1869, and the dates in the encyclopedias are wrong. The registers for 1869 and later have disappeared from the archive.
Nevertheless, it has been possible to establish an exact date. A census of the residents of the village of Pokrovskoe was found in the Tyumen archive, and appearing next to the name Grigory Rasputin in the column for the ‘year, month, and day of birth according to the register’ is the date 10 January 1869, which puts an end to all surmise. It is the day of Saint Grigory, for whom he was named.
Rasputin’s own efforts are responsible for the confusion about his birth date. In the 1907 ‘File of the Tobolsk Consistory’, he states that he is forty-two. That is, he adds four years. Seven years later, in 1914 during the investigation of the attempt on his life by Khionia Guseva, he declares, ‘My name is Grigory Efimovich Rasputin-Novy, fifty years old.’ That is, he adds five years. In the 1911 notebook in which the last tsarina wrote down his sayings, he says of himself, ‘I have lived fifty years and am beginning my sixth decade.’ That is, he has added eight years!
It is really not very hard to understand that stubborn adding on of years. The tsarina called him ‘elder’. The category of elder is a special institution in Russian ecclesiastical life. In the past, monks had been called elders, but usually only if they were anchorites. In the nineteenth century, however, the term was used for those monks who had been marked by a special sign. Monks who through fasting, prayer, and a life pleasing to God deserved to be chosen by Him. God had given them the power to prophesy and to heal. They were spiritual guides and intercessors before God. But at the same time, elders in the popular mind were also people of great age who had experienced much and who because of their age had repudiated everything earthly. In the lexicon of Russian, the word ‘elder’ also means ‘a very old man.’
Thus Rasputin, whom the tsarina called ‘elder’, was embarrassed by his by no means advanced age. He was in fact younger than the tsar. And so he exaggerated his age, which was an easy thing to do thanks to his wrinkled, prematurely aged peasant face.
The Shameful Name
Rasputin’s last name comes from the shameful word rasputa. The touching attempts of Western investigators and Rasputin’s Russian admirers to derive his name from rasputitsa (the spring or autumn period when Russian roads became impassable from the mud) or from rasputia (a crossing of two or more roads) merely attest to their poor knowledge of the rules of Russian name derivation.
‘The name “Rasputin” comes from the common noun rasputa — an immoral, good-for-nothing person (neputyovyi)’ (V. A. Novikov, A Dictionary of Russian Last Names).
A ‘rasputa’ is a dissolute (besputnyi), good-for-nothing (neputyovyi), debauched (rasputnyi) person. Sometimes the word served as a first name. In the days of Ivan the Terrible, there lived on the White Sea a peasant named Vasily Kiriyanov who gave his sons the names ‘Rasputa’ and ‘Besputa’ (Yu. Fedosyuk, Russian Last Names). Neither student of Russian last names mentions any rasputitsa. It is in fact the first derivation, rasputa, that accounts for the tsar’s attempt to change Rasputin’s last name, one so dubious for a holy man.
Rasputin grew into a skinny, unattractive youth. Yet even then his eyes possessed a strange hypnotic charm. And there was in him a certain tender dreaminess that astonished his crude peers and appealed to the young women. He was, according to the testimony of his fellow villagers, caught with wenches more than once and beaten for it.
As I was assembling Rasputin’s biography bit by bit, I found in a 1912 issue of the New Times an article by a well-known journalist M. Menshikov about a conversation he had had with Rasputin. And in it was a truly poetical story told by the ‘elder’ about his boyhood: ‘At the age of fifteen in my village, when the sunshine burned brightly and the birds sang heavenly songs… I would dream of God. My soul yearned for what was far away. I dreamed [of God] many times … and wept without knowing why or where my tears came from … In that way my youth passed. In a kind of contemplation, a kind of sleep. And then, after life had touched me, I ran to a corner and secretly prayed.’ The journalist had been so entranced by his conversation that in the diary of the hostess of a celebrated Petersburg salon, the general’s wife Bogdanovich, I found this entry: ‘26 February 1912. Menshikov dined with us…He said he had seen Rasputin … that he was a believer, sincere, and so on.’
The Rasputin File Page 4