The Rasputin File

by Edvard Radzinsky

  How it all took place is related in the File by the maid of honour Sophia Tyutcheva, the granddaughter of the great Russian poet and the royal children’s governess:

  Once in the winter of 1908, Grand Duchess Tatyana got sick. While her rooms were being aired out, she lay down in Vishnyakova’s room, and I and the other grand duchesses were in the classroom … Looking back into the darkened corridor, I saw the figure of a peasant in a tight-fitting coat. I realized at once that it was Rasputin. I asked him what he was doing there. He replied that he needed to see Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova. I pointed out to him that she was busy and that he wasn’t supposed to be there. He departed without speaking … I went to Vishnyakova, who at the time was putting the heir to bed … and told her that Rasputin had been looking for her … ‘Oh, I’ll catch it from Anna Alexandrovna [Vyrubova]!’ Vishnyakova said…When we saw each other the next day, Vishnyakova said to me, ‘I really did catch it from Anna Alexandrovna because of you.’ And she explained that Vyrubova had asked her never to speak to me about Rasputin, since I didn’t believe in his holiness. The next day Vyrubova was having dinner with me, and out of a feeling of friendship I told her how I felt about Rasputin. To my utter astonishment, Vyrubova suddenly asked, ‘But who is this Rasputin?’

  Tyutcheva was astonished because she knew Anya’s simple-heartedness and naivety. She still did not know how capable the simple-hearted Anya was of dissembling. Nor what depths were hidden in her ‘simple soul’.

  The Only One

  Rasputin understood that the ‘black women hated him and would attempt to use their last formidable weapon against him — Father Ioann of Kronstadt. And he waited and prepared himself. ‘Rasputin indicated reservations with unusual skill… Rasputin… said of Father Ioann of Kronstadt… that he was a saint but, like a child, lacked experience and judgment … As a result Father Ioann’s influence at court began to wane,’ Feofan testified in the File.

  Father Ioann, the last person who might have blocked Rasputin’s influence, died in 1909. Now the peasant was alone, the only one.

  From Vyrubova’s testimony in the File: ‘And the former tsar and tsarina … had great respect for the priest Ioann of Kronstadt. And after his death Rasputin took his place. In all the adversities of life, during the frequent illnesses of the heir to the throne, during the aggravation of the tsarina’s heart condition, they turned to Rasputin for support, and the former tsar and former tsarina asked for his prayers.

  And then, casting all caution aside, the tsars started receiving him at the palace.

  From Nicholas’s diary: ‘4 February 1909 …At 6 o’clock the Archimandrite Feofan and Grigory came to see us. He also saw the children.’

  ‘29 February … At 2:30 Grigory came to see us, and we received him with all the children. It was so good to hear him with the whole family.’

  ‘29 March (the Day of Christ’s Joyful Resurrection). After dinner I went for a walk with Dmitry. There was a frost and a lot of snow.’ After his walk with his young cousin and protégé, one of Grigory’s future murderers, the tsar learned that Grigory himself had arrived at the palace. ‘After tea upstairs in the nursery I sat for a while with Grigory, who had come unexpectedly.’

  Nobody could come to see the ‘tsars’ unexpectedly. Even the Romanov grand dukes had to obtain audiences. But Father Grigory didn’t.

  ‘26 April … From 6:00 to 7:30 we saw … Grigory … I also sat with Grigory a little while in the nursery this evening.’

  ‘15 August. I talked with Grigory a long time this evening.’

  The rumours about the peasant, that strange heir of the late Philippe, troubled the Romanov family. On 1 January 1910, Xenia wrote in her diary: ‘It is so sad, I feel sorry for Nicky, and it makes no sense.’ What did not make sense to her was what the brilliantly educated Alix could have had to talk about for hours on end with that semi-literate peasant.

  Nicky and Alix could no longer manage without those meetings. And not just because the boy instantly improved in Rasputin’s presence. The peasant was so different from the court atmosphere in which they lived, an atmosphere of intrigues, and the terrible backbiting so traditional in courts. He never had anything but good to say about people, even about his enemies. And they liked his stories about his wanderings, too. In them were people unburdened by the usual yokes of rank and money. In them were God and nature: sunshine on a meadow, a night spent sleeping on the ground under an open sky — everything that the tsar, so fond of the simple life, could only dream about.

  The publisher Filippov testified in the File: ‘In that period of his life Rasputin…was short of money, and I had to lend him small sums of twenty to a hundred roubles that he would then pay back whenever he could. Once I asked him, “Are you, in spite of your closeness to the tsarina, really so hard up?” He answered, “She’s stingy … she gives you a hundred roubles, and when a week later you ask her again, she reminds you, “But I just gave you a hundred.”’

  The tsarina’s frugality, or, more accurately, her stinginess, had become proverbial at court. ‘Alix wouldn’t give Rasputin money. She gave him silk shirts, sashes, and the gold cross he wore,’ recalled Grand Duchess Olga, Nicky’s sister.

  The ‘tsars’ would dress up in costumes of the times of the first Romanovs, and Alix wanted to see Rasputin in an expensive ‘costume of the people’, too. And arriving in Pokrovskoe now, he would happily strut before his fellow villagers in his costume: in silk shirts, patent-leather boots, and crimson waistbands. And in answer to their questions about where that magnificence had come from, he would tell them about the ‘tsars’, who loved and appreciated Grigory. So they would not forget who the Grishka they had denounced to church investigators had become.

  Iliodor recalled:

  Grigory, indicating his satin shirt, said to me, ‘This shirt was sewn for me by the empress. And I have other shirts embroidered by her. I asked him to show them to me. Grigory’s wife brought out several shirts. I started to look at them. ‘Do you want to take some as a keepsake? Grigory asked with a smile.

  ‘Could I have one or two?’

  ‘Take three!

  And he picked out three shirts for me, a red one, a white tussore one, and another white one of expensive linen with embroidery on the collar and sleeves.

  The 1905 revolution was becoming little more than an awful memory. And for Alix, who so wanted to believe in the miracles of Our Friend, Russia had been pacified not by the cruel Prime Minister Stolypin with his gallows and military tribunals but by the marvellous elder with his prayers.

  The long-awaited peace had arrived. But if Nicholas at the time had grown mellow, she continued to be visited by neurasthenia and a terror that seemed to have no cause.

  ‘Head and eyes ache and my heart feels weak’; ‘Heart bleeds from fear and horror’; ‘When head hurts less, I write down the sayings of our Friend, and the time passes more quickly; ‘I am made sick by sad thoughts. These quotations are from her last letters. But she was tormented in those earlier years, too. She was an unhappy woman, who was aware that her cursed heredity had destroyed her beloved son, and who lived in a state of constant anguish from her terrible premonitions. And only Our Friend was able to relieve her nervous anxiety. With his soothing words of forgiveness and love and of the future divine reward for all her sufferings. And with his remarkable hands that dispelled the constant migraines that drove her mad with pain. The tormented Alix needed him just as much as her doomed son did.

  She wrote a letter to Rasputin then. She was trying to write in a simple-hearted way that would be comprehensible to the peasant — to write in his own idiom.

  ‘I am calm in my soul, I am able to rest, only when you, teacher, are sitting next to me, and I am kissing your hands and resting my head on your blessed shoulders. Oh, how easy is it for me then.’

  For her to feel safe now, she needed to have constant confirmation of his special power. And that is why the tsarina and her friend Vyrubova would every day try to find miracles, howe
ver minor: he had predicted the weather, he had predicted the day of the tsar’s return home, and so on. All this has survived in the tsar and tsarina’s correspondence. It was then that Rasputin made the astonishing statement that ‘as long as I am alive, the dynasty shall live.’ This is confirmed in his daughter’s memoirs:

  ‘Father himself used to say in Tsarskoe Selo that when he was gone, the court would be gone, too.’

  And we find the same thing in a great many of the depositions. ‘It has been established,’ wrote the investigator Rudnev, ‘that he said to the sovereign, “My death will be your death, too.’“

  The peasant knew: she was not afraid of those words; on the contrary, they soothed her. For he was alive, that strong peasant still loved by all. And he had promised to live a very long time. And, after all, why would the Lord who had sent him take him away?

  And then in 1910, at the very pinnacle of his success, when he had become the only one, something mysterious started to happen.

  The ‘Dark Forces’

  The sleepy new year of 1910 was marked by very few events capable of holding the attention of Russia’s newspapers and inhabitants. However, it was also to introduce some of the key figures in our story.

  Convened in Petersburg was the First All-Russian Congress for the Struggle against Drunkenness, that truly ‘Russian disease’. Amusing incidents from ancient history were recalled, such as a battle in which the drunken warriors lost their trousers. The government was accused of making money from that abiding Russian calamity. Whereupon the insulted representatives of the Ministry of Finance walked out of the congress. Village priests were charged with ‘excessive admiration’ for the famous words attributed to Saint Vladimir, the tenth-century Kievan prince who converted Rus to Christianity, that ‘drinking is the Russian’s joy.’ Whereupon the theological delegation walked out, too.

  The State Duma was occupied with the latest scandal. The well-known monarchist Nikolai Markov, known as Markov II, had demanded the passing of new decrees against the Jews. ‘The Russian people,’ Markov announced, ‘do not wish to become the slaves of the parasitic Judaic tribe.’ Prince Volkonsky, who was presiding, attempted to expunge his words. Markov II was voted out of the Duma for the next fifteen sessions. At another session, another famous monarchist, Purishkevich, reported that the leftist movement in student circles consisted of ‘Jews, and over them, the professors, among whom there are also numerous Jews, and that is why anarchy rules in the universities’.

  This announcement produced an uproar, with shouting and abusive language from all quarters. The Speaker of the Duma ‘lost control and displayed his utter helplessness’. As a result, he was removed and a new Speaker was elected, Alexander Ivanovich Guchkov, one of the most brilliant and adventurous people in the Duma. The newspapers enjoyed publishing his biography. There had not been a single debacle at the beginning of the century that this son of a wealthy Moscow merchant had not participated in. He had gone to help defend the Armenians during their slaughter by the Turks, he had participated in the Boer War in Africa, naturally on the Boer side, and during the Russo-Japanese War, he had even been captured by the Japanese. He was well known in the Duma for fist fights during the sessions and for calling out Pavel Milyukov, the head of the Constitutional Democratic Party, the largest in the Duma.

  On taking the post of Speaker, he gave a speech in which he spoke for the first time of certain mysterious ‘dark forces’ that had made themselves known in the highest summits of society.

  In Moscow on Khodynka Field, sadly famous for loss of life during the coronation, aviators were conducting flights. The celebrated Sergei Utochkin, known in Russia as the ‘hero of the aerial expanse’, made several circuits in a biplane. Seated with some difficulty on the little bicycle-style passenger seat behind him was Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, vice-governor of Moscow (and yet another of our future characters). A female aviator also took part in the flights: the dark-haired beauty Princess Shakhovskaya, who would soon become a fanatical devotee of Rasputin’s.

  On 7 November occurred what was perhaps the only historic event of the year. On that day all Russia was absorbed in mourning. Leo Tolstoy had died at Astapov Station while fleeing his home. Nicholas wrote in an address on Tolstoy’s death, ‘I sincerely regret the demise of the great writer …May the Lord God be merciful in his judgment of him.’

  Of the peasant himself there was only vague talk. No one really knew anything, and for that reason he attracted universal attention.

  The Khlyst Saviours

  People were struck by the mystery of his biography — the transformation of a fallen man, by his rumoured gift of miraculous healing and prophecy, and by the closed world of the royal family in which he was at home. For those on both the left and the right, it was a happy confirmation of a cherished idea: the ‘precious talents of the simple Russian’.

  Nor was that all. Another reason for his popularity was the rumour of his links to the Khlysty.

  Once in my youth I was talking to a family friend of ours, the Acmeist poet Sergei Mitrofanovich Gorodetsky, who was then a very old man. In Rasputin’s time, Gorodetsky was one of the most popular poets of the day, the author of a celebrated book of verse called Spring Wheat. And grinning under his grey moustache, Gorodetsky said something that I have remembered for its paradox: ‘Rasputin was attractive and in fashion because he was a Khlyst.’

  It was only recently, while working on the brilliant period of Russian literature so rightly called the Silver Age, that I came to understand the meaning of that sentence.

  It is amazing, but all the celebrated writers of the age had in one way or another become interested in the then mysterious Khlyst sect. The celebrated writer and philosopher Vasily Rozanov went to live in a Khlyst community and wrote about the Khlysty in his The Apocalyptic Sect. Two influential minds of the day, the husband and wife team of the novelist Dmitry Merezhkovsky and the poet Zinaida Gippius, lived in a Khlyst community in 1902. And they wrote to Alexander Blok, ‘Everything we saw there was…ineffably beautiful.’ And Blok, Russia’s foremost poet, and the famous writer Alexei Remizov (as Blok’s wife reports in a letter to her mother) ‘went to a Khlyst meeting together’. Yet another well-known writer, Mikhail Prishvin, wrote in his journal for 1908:’9 November… Together with Blok, Remizov, and Sologub [another influential figure!] I visited a Khlyst community.’ The famous poets Konstantin Balmont and Andrei Bely also wrote about the Khlysty. And the best-known peasant poet of the beginning of the century, Nikolai Klyuev, tells, while creating a fashionable biography for himself, of his wanderings with the Khlysty. ‘Many looked hard for a rapprochement with the Khlysty,’ wrote Prishvin.

  What made them do so was their shared sense of looming apocalypse.

  The same sense, in fact, that had impelled the leaders of the intelligentsia to try to find a common language with the official church in the religious philosophical colloquia of 1903. And to try without success. Now it had been decided to try to act through the sects. The intelligentsia believed that it was in the sects, and above all in the most powerful of them, the Khlysty, that those who expressed the true religious aspirations of the people were coming together. The Khlysty, Prishvin wrote, ‘are a subterranean river … An immense kingdom of Khlysty, elusive and unidentifiable, has emerged … within the Orthodox Church itself.’ The intelligentsia believed that an alliance between its own spiritual wing and the spiritual wing of the common people — the sects — would be able to stand athwart the coming storm. The sects, as a bridge to the people. Merezhkovsky wrote, ‘We need to “reach out to the people” in our own new way… There is no doubt that something is happening and beginning to ripen everywhere and in everyone, and we shall go out to meet it. And … the crossing over to the people will be easier and more natural through the sectarians.’

  The intelligentsia would later mock the royal couple for their faith in a benighted peasant. Yet at the same time and however paradoxically, they dreamed of the same thing. But all this to
uched only the intelligentsia’s leaders. For the ordinary philistine, the Khlysty remained religious criminals, the embodiment of secret debauchery.

  While Father Grigory was living with the Lokhtins, the general’s wife had in essence become his secretary. There in her salon Rasputin won himself ever more new devotees. It was through the Lokhtins that he met Georgy Sazonov, the publisher of progressive economics magazines.

  In 1917 Sazonov was, along with other followers of Rasputin, summoned before the Extraordinary Commission. And in the File I found his testimony.

  Sazonov, Georgy Petrovich, sixty years old, testified that his family ‘were old friends of the Lokhtin family, of the engineer Vladimir Mikhailovich Lokhtin, his wife Olga Vladimirovna, and their daughter Lyudmila … Olga Vladimirovna telephoned with the information that Grigory Efimovich Rasputin had asked permission to visit us.’

  Thus began their friendship. And Sazonov describes Rasputin as he was in those years: ‘He impressed me as a nervous person…He could not sit quietly in one place, but fidgeted and moved his hands…He spoke jerkily and for the most part incoherently.’ But when that fidgety person gazed at his interlocutors, ‘a special power shone in his eyes that had an effect on people who were… especially susceptible to external influence.’

  By this time a circle of crazed female admirers had formed around Rasputin. ‘The women who surrounded him treated him with mystical devotion, called him “Father”, and kissed his hand.’ But the thing that most pleased the deeply religious Sazonov, just as it had his friend Lokhtin, was Rasputin’s ‘sincere religiousness’, something quite rare in those years. ‘That religiousness was not feigned, nor was Rasputin posing. Our maid said that whenever [he] happened to spend the night at our house, he prayed instead of sleeping … When we stayed at our dacha, the children saw him in the forest deep in prayer … Our neighbour, a general’s wife who could not hear his name without revulsion, made an effort to follow the children into the forest, and, even though an hour had passed, also saw him deep in prayer.’