The Rasputin File

by Edvard Radzinsky

  Anya’s Game

  By the time Anya met Rasputin, she was already close to the throne. Her father, Alexander Sergeevich Taneev, a stout little old man who spoke nothing but pleasantries to everyone, performed the duties of director-in-chief of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancery. It was something of a family post: her grandfather and great-grandfather had occupied it over the reigns of three emperors. On her mother’s side, she had even inherited royal genes; among her ancestors was an illegitimate child of the mad emperor Paul. In 1904 she was presented to the empress and received the royal monogram and rank of municipal maid of honour. Alix immediately realized that she had found a Friend. A year later, in 1905, Anya was already accompanying the empress on the royal yacht, Polar Star. ‘During the trip, the empress complained that she had no friends outside the family, and that she felt like a stranger,’ she explained under interrogation.

  Anya understood the tsarina at once. The observant Vyrubova would in her memoirs precisely describe the consistently peremptory personality of the lonely Alix. But she would be observant only in her book. In life and at the palace she had chosen a different role, the only possible one, given the tsarina’s personality: ‘kind and simple-hearted’. The devoted girl, hanging on the empress’s every word and astonished by her ideas. That is how Anya made her appearance in the life of the royal family not long before Rasputin’s own arrival in their midst. And very soon, Anya started turning up in the tsar’s diary.

  ‘9 January 1906. Sergei and A. A. Taneeva had breakfast with us’; ‘4 February. A. A. Taneeva joined us for breakfast.’ The young maid of honour had in the briefest span of time become a character in the tsar’s diary and in all their lives. And had immediately thrust the Montenegrin princesses out of the tsarina’s heart. At the same time, the sage Anya was visiting Militsa’s palace. To study mysticism, for which the tsarina had such a passion.

  In 1907 Anya got married. Or, more accurately, was compelled to marry. Rumours of far too dangerous a kind had started to circulate about the close friendship between Anya and the tsarina. The court viewed the appearance of the new favourite with jealousy.

  Filippov, Rasputin’s banker and publisher and someone located at the centre of Petersburg life, testified in the File that ‘Vyrubova’s friendship with the empress was explained by some in court spheres as an intimacy grounded in sexual psychopathology.’ And the monarchist A. Bogdanovich, the wife of the general who served as the warden of Saint Isaac’s, the largest cathedral in Russia, would more than once record in her diary the words of courtiers about the ‘unnatural friendship’ of Vyrubova and the tsarina.

  In order to put a stop to the rumours, the devoted Anya decided to sacrifice herself and get married. And she married a modest naval officer, Lieutenant Alexander Vyrubov, though it is true that he owned a rather large estate.

  From Nicholas’s diary for 4 February 1907: ‘Anna Taneeva presented her future husband Vyrubov.’ Once a married woman, she could no longer be a maid of honour, and the court would be pacified. ‘The poor empress sobbed like a Moscow merchant’s wife giving up her daughter to be married,’ Witte mockingly wrote in his memoirs.

  And, of course, the tsarina had asked Vyrubova to talk to the seer Rasputin about her marriage. And Anya, who at once grasped what Militsa had failed to grasp — the peasant’s role in the palace, set off to Militsa’s to make Our Friend’s acquaintance. In order to be able to bring back to the palace what Alix wanted to hear: the most rapturous impressions.

  In point of fact, Anya’s marriage changed neither her life nor her situation.

  The File, from the testimony of Vyrubova: ‘In 1907 I married Lieutenant Alexander Vasilievich Vyrubov, and when we came back from our honeymoon we rented a dacha, first in Petersburg and then in Tsarskoe Selo’ (since that is where the royal family lived). ‘My husband was reassigned to the Field Chancery, and in that same year of 1907 we accompanied the royal family to the sea.’ Vyrubov had been assigned to the chancery so that the friends would not be parted.

  The singer Alexandra Belling saw Vyrubova at the time. ‘I met her at a musical evening,’ Belling recalled:

  She had just been married and was happy … Her husband, a round-faced dark-haired sailor, never left her side, and constantly gazed into her eyes. She laughed continuously and, it appeared, was enjoying life … ‘That’s terribly funny!’ she said to me. ‘You got married on the ninth, and Ion the eleventh.’ And she burst into infectious laughter …But in spite of her gaiety, affectionate voice, sweet smile, and kind eyes, one did not sense sincerity in her, or anything that might have disposed one to credulity … One evening, as I … was singing … and Vyrubova was sitting with her hands over her face and listening … someone came in and announced that Anna Alexandrovna was ‘requested’. She became agitated and hurried out. After a few moments she reappeared in the doorway of the living room with a magnificent white boa round her neck, which made her look quite stunning, and with a splendid bouquet of bright red roses, which she handed to me, warmly thanking me and hugging me, and, as if in pain, pressing her forehead to mine.

  And so she had it all: a honeymoon and happiness and a husband who gazed into her eyes. But ‘after living with her husband for a year and a half, Vyrubova testified before the Extraordinary Commission, ‘I was divorced from him, since it turned out he was suffering from mental illness …He went to Switzerland for treatment — I forget which city — and then we divorced, so I have not seen him since.

  The investigator Rudnev sympathetically recalled, ‘According to Taneeva’s mother, the daughter’s husband had proved to be completely impotent, with an extremely perverse sexual psychology that manifested itself in various sadistic episodes in which he inflicted moral suffering on her and evoked a feeling of utter disgust.’

  Had Vyrubova’s husband really been a complete psychopath who had then disappeared from view into a Swiss clinic? Not at all. Vyrubova’s former spouse remarried, and from 1913 to 1917 lived quietly on his estate. He was held in high esteem in his district, and had even been elected district marshal of the nobility in the city of Polotsk. So it is obvious why the courtiers regarded the reasons given for her divorce with great suspicion and returned even more insistently to their earlier theme.

  And the general’s wife Bogdanovich, the hostess of a monarchist salon, wrote in her diary for 2 February 1908 that Zilloti, an aide to the chief of the naval high command related how struck everyone has been by the young tsarina’s strange friendship with her former maid of honour Taneeva, who married Vyrubov… When during a trip to the skerries the boat got stuck on a rock, the royal family spent the night on the yacht. The tsar slept alone in a cabin, while the tsarina took Vyrubova to her stateroom and spent the night alone with her in the same bed.’

  Basing her account on the word of Dolly Kochubei, née the Duchess of Leichtenberg (and thus a relative of the Romanovs), Bogdanovich sets forth the reason for the divorce as follows: ‘10 June 1908 …An unnatural friendship exists between the tsarina and Taneeva, and…Taneeva’s husband, Vyrubov, apparently…found among her things some letters from the tsarina that led to mournful thoughts.’ The general’s wife would frequently return to the topic: ‘6 February 1909. The young tsarina has had a severe attack of neurasthenia… which has been attributed to her abnormal friendship with Vyrubova. Something isn’t right in Tsarskoe Selo.’

  ‘Something Isn’t Right In Tsarskoe Selo

  But how could she have lived with someone who was impotent and a sadist and yet still play at being the happy couple that Belling so vividly describes? Perhaps she really was happy in those years, happy precisely because her husband was impotent and did not touch her. And only when he tried to master himself and, as they put it in the eighteenth century, direct ‘an arrow into her quiver’, did he seem so terribly ‘sadistic and disgusting’ to her. Perhaps that was why the unhappy Lieutenant Vyrubov had turned into a ‘psychopath in that year and a half. And if this is true, and she did reveal an aversion to men, the
n it is clear why even later that beautiful young woman had no man in her life. For in 1917, a full ten years after her divorce from Vyrubov, she was still a virgin!

  Although there would be numerous flirtations in her life; flirtations for the sake of appearance were part of her game.

  I have thought a great deal about her relations with the tsarina, and in the last book about Nicholas II, I attempted to explain them. Now it seems to me that I understand them better. At the basis of her relationship with the tsarina lay a hidden feeling, profoundly secret and repressed. And it both drew the unhappy Alix to her and frightened her. And knowing of the tsarina’s religiousness and purity, Anya, to hide that feeling, invented a delightful game that in the beginning attached the tsarina to her even more.

  The Innermost Secrets Of The Heart

  I found astonishing testimony in the File. In 1917 the Extraordinary Commission interrogated one Feodosia Voino, who had worked as Vyrubova’s maid. Voino reported that ‘Vyrubova was in love with the tsar, but I don’t know if it was mutual. She received letters from the tsar, and one such letter was intercepted by the tsarina. And then Vyrubova and the tsarina had a quarrel, which quickly came to an end, however. Vyrubova herself warned me and the housemaid that she had letters from the tsar in her safe, and that if she should suddenly die, the letters were to be returned to the tsar.

  This might seem like an invention, had not the tsarina’s own letters survived. During the war, Alix and Nicky, sighing with love, wrote letters to each other that will remain a tale of the most beautiful romance. But there are some mysterious lines in those letters. For example, in one of them Alix adds the following postscript: ‘Lovy, you burn her letters so that they should never fall into anybody’s hands?’ (6 January 1916). And in another: ‘if now not firm, we shall be having stories & love-scenes & rows like in the Crimea’ (26 January 1915). And in yet another, ‘You will see when we return how she will tell you how terribly she suffered without you… Be nice & firm … she always needs cooling down’ (27 October 1914). So, it turns out that ‘she’ had dared to make scenes and rows and to harass Nicholas with letters! And Alix, not mincing words, brands the woman as ‘rude (27 October), and says there is ‘nothing of the loving gentle woman’ about her (20 November 1914). And in another letter, she refers to her as ‘the Cow’ (6 October 1915)!

  But almost at the same time Alix writes to her husband, ‘Perhaps you will mention in your telegram, that you thank [her] for papers and letter and send messages’ (21 November 1914). And in another letter, ‘When A[nya] speaks of her loneliness, it makes me angry, she… twice a day comes to us — every evening with us four hours’ (2 January 1916).

  Anya understood how dangerous for the religious tsarina’s soul were all the rumours about the ulterior abnormality of her love for Alix. And the intelligent Anya devised this game. A game that reassured the tsarina. The game of her repressed, pure, and unrequited love for Nicky. Thus at the time did pupils of the Institute for Noble Young Ladies, while idolizing an older girlfriend, fall passionately in love with the older girl’s chosen young man. But Anya did not permit herself to contend with the empress, she merely allowed herself to make scenes, ridiculous, naive, harmless scenes. The tsar was compelled to soothe the infatuated Anya with letters, while the tsarina did so with compassion. Her role was the harmless ‘third party’ who added tension to their relationship. And that stoked the fire, the passion, in Nicky and Alix’s great love.

  Anya was sly, secretive, cunning, and smart, a dangerous woman who had devoted herself to two passions. Witte wrote, ‘All the courtiers close to the royal family cater to Anya Vyrubova…Anya arranges various favours for them and influences the closeness to the sovereign of one group of political figures or another.’

  Her first passion was power. She was the invisible ruler of the most brilliant court in Europe. But her other passion, forever hidden, was Alix. And that secret passion was combined with something frightening and carnal that subsequently came unseen into the palace with Rasputin. While in the palace he turned into a holy man, the unseen field of his lust, his unbridled potency, could not have failed to be sensed by the tsarina. And Alix’s passionate carnal dreams in her letters to Nicholas were perhaps not expressions of humble conjugal love but rather an ecstatic summons.

  In her memoirs Anya Vyrubova writes that after her divorce she ‘grew even closer to the royal family’, living in Tsarskoe Selo in a little house next to the palace.

  From the entry for 7 September 1908 in the diary of the tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Xenia: ‘We drove out to see Nicky and Alix… Alix was in the garden with Olga, Tatyana, and the constant Vyrubova.’

  A Mighty Alliance Between The Two

  It was at that time that Alix was introducing the mysterious elder to everyone close to the royal family.

  The File, from the testimony of Captain (First Class) Nikolai Pavlovich Sablin, master of the imperial yacht Shtandart and one of those closest to the tsar and tsarina: ‘I think it was in 1908, while sailing on the Shtandart that the empress began preparing me for the fact that she knew Rasputin. She said there are people who have special power as a result of their ascetic way of life, and she announced that there was such a person, namely, Rasputin, and proposed to introduce him to me.’

  From the testimony of Vyrubova:

  The next meeting with Rasputin occurred a year later on the train as I was on my way to Tsarskoe Selo. Rasputin was also on his way there with a lady to visit some acquaintances …I was very glad to see him and said I would like to talk to him about my unhappy life. Rasputin gave me his address, ‘At the Lokhtins’ on Grechesky Avenue’ …I met with Rasputin in Lokhtina’s living room … Olga Lokhtina was then … still a very nice fashionable lady and not marked by the eccentricity that would later develop in her.

  I think it was all much simpler: it was the tsarina who wanted the people dearest to her to be friends, and so Anya went off to what was then Rasputin’s staff headquarters at the apartment of the general’s wife. Lokhtina speaks of this herself in the File: ‘I met Vyrubova before I broke with my family. The first time she visited me was to find out when Father Grigory would be coming to Petrograd.’

  Anya knew that all who wished to enjoy the tsarina’s love had to love the ‘man of God’ and feel his power. And she felt it at once. It had always been easy for her to assume roles thus Anya straightaway became Rasputin’s most faithful admirer. A fanatical admirer.

  Thus Rasputin acquired his most rapturous adherent, and Anya had her story, that the perspicacious elder had predicted her unhappy marriage. He had predicted it, but she had failed to listen, and she was punished for it.

  Lokhtina subsequently yielded her role as the elder’s chief admirer to Anya. She understood that the other woman would be more useful to Father Grigory. As Iliodor put it, ‘Lokhtina resigned herself to that change in her destiny.’

  In A Darkened Palace Corridor

  The royal family found itself alone. The friends of Nicky’s childhood, the grand dukes Sergei and Sandro, had long since become estranged from him Only the poet KR, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, and his wife were welcome guests in Tsarskoe Selo. Alix wrote down excerpts from KR’ poems in the copybook containing her favourite sayings. Although that copybook would soon turn into a record of the thoughts of the semi-literate peasant Grigory Rasputin. And soon after that only two people would share the isolation of the royal family. Father Grigory and Anya Vyrubova.

  With the fall of the Montenegrins, Anya inherited their most importan role. Because Alix did not dare to receive the elder openly — rumours had already begun to spread about the strange peasant in the palace — the tsarina could not let it be known that Rasputin was treating her child. The heir’ illness was still a secret.

  And so the royal family met with Rasputin in Anya’s little house in Tsarskoe Selo. Anya’s notes to V. Voeikov, the palace castellan, have survived in the archive of the Extraordinary Commission: ‘Dear Vl[adimir] Nik[o-laevich]
… The elder arrived at 2:00 p.m., and Their Majesties wish to see him today. They think it would be better at my house.’

  From the tsar’s diary for 1908: ‘6 November …We dropped in on Anya … and saw Grigory and talked with him for a long time.’

  ‘27 December …We went to Anya’s, where we saw Grigory. Together the three of us consecrated her Christmas tree, which was very pleasant.’

  But sometimes it was necessary to escort Father Grigory to the palace to treat the Little One. And again Anya worked out the ritual for the secret delivery of the peasant to the palace.

  Our Friend would come as if to visit Maria Vishnyakova, the royal children’s nurse. This allowed him to avoid having his name written down in the lobby register, where all visits to the ‘tsars’ were recorded. Once in the palace, ‘he would drop by to see the nurse Maria Vishnyakova, a very nervous individual and at the time an ardent admirer of Rasputin,’ as Anya obscurely put it in her testimony, and from there would be escorted to the royal apartments.