The Rasputin File

by Edvard Radzinsky

  In that period (before 1913), Rasputin did not, as Sazonov describes him, partake of alcoholic beverages or eat meat, and he observed all the fasts. ‘I might call that period of Rasputin’s life,’ Sazonov puts it in the File, ‘the period when he achieved a certain spiritual loftiness from which he later lapsed.’

  And the delighted Sazonov would later invite Rasputin to move into his large, upper-class apartment. As would be entered in the report of the secret surveillance of Rasputin established at that time, ‘On his arrival in 1912, he stayed … in the apartment of the publisher of the magazine Russian Economist, Georgy Petrovich Sazonov, and his wife … Rasputin is evidently involved in a love affair with the latter.’

  But knowing of Rasputin’s sincere religiousness, Sazonov would never have believed it. Just as Olga Lokhtina’s husband could not believe it either. For neither Sazonov nor Lokhtin completely understood that mysterious man.

  Rasputin continued to keep his relations with the tsar wrapped in enigma. He was cautious. Even his friend Sazonov had little to say except that Rasputin called the empress and emperor ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’, since they were indeed ‘mother and father whom the Lord had placed here to watch over and care for the Russian land’. Rasputin had not at that time begun to drink. Sazonov remembered only one ‘sensational’ story in the File:

  ‘The tsarina evidently regarded him with adoration … He related the following fact: he was walking through a Petersburg park and met the tsarina driving in the opposite direction…On seeing him, she ordered the horses stopped, rushed over to him, and kissed his hand in the sight of everyone in the park.’

  The story made the rounds of the Petersburg salons. And the kissing of Rasputin’s hands by the ‘tsars’ would occupy a large place in the interrogations of the Extraordinary Commission. And in the File two of those who knew Rasputin and the royal family well, Vyrubova and another of the tsarina’s friends, Yulia Dehn, would heatedly deny that it had occurred. Most likely they were lying, for they could not explain to the uninitiated that the humbling of pride preached by the peasant was very close to the hearts of both Nicky and Alix. Christ washing the feet of his disciples and the ‘tsars’ kissing the hand of a peasant — the hand, in Rasputin’s words, that ‘feeds you all’ — was something the religious royal family could easily understand.

  The Fashionable Elder

  By 1910, however, even more interesting devotees had announced themselves. A certain Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich had made himself a devoted follower of Rasputin. ‘Bonch’, as he was often called by his friends, was an expert on Russian sectarianism. He had written numerous works on the Old-Believer and other heresies. But it was not that work that would make him famous in Russian history. This modest investigator of heresies was a member of the underground party of Bolsheviks and one of Lenin’s closest associates (he would become a leader of Soviet Russia, the man in charge of the affairs of the Council of People’s Commissars and a founder of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police). The reasons for Bonch-Bruevich’s delight in and enormous curiosity about Rasputin are clear. Lenin’s address on the sects at the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party had been written by Bonch-Bruevich and contained a whole panegyric by the Bolshevik Bonch on the Khlyst sect: ‘From a political point of view, the Khlysty therefore deserve our full attention as passionate haters of everything that issues from the “authorities,” that is, from the government … I am convinced that through a tactical rapprochement of revolutionaries and the Khlysty we can acquire numerous friends.’ So when Rasputin began to be persecuted for his Khlyst sympathies, Bonch-Bruevich would immediately write with the authority of an expert, ‘Rasputin does not belong the Khlyst sect!’ He was obliged to defend his potential allies.

  A Family Close To The Throne

  And then in 1910 at the height of enthusiasm for Rasputin, a whole family turned up among his fanatical devotees.

  Maria Golovina met Rasputin for the first time in 1910. She was the daughter of the chamberlain’s daughter and a ‘most pure young woman’, as Rasputin’s confirmed enemy Prince Felix Yusupov called her. At once she became slavishly devoted to the peasant. The writer Zhukovskaya described ‘Munya’, as she was called in Rasputin’s circle: ‘A young-looking girl … gazed at me with timid … pale blue eyes … She seemed, in her light-grey dress and white hat with violets, so small and touching. Boundless devotion and a readiness to subordinate herself completely were evident in her every glance and word.’

  Munya’s Aunt Olga had been the heroine of the noisiest scandal in the big Romanov family. Olga Valerianovna was over thirty, the wife of Major-General Erik Pistolkors, and the mother of two grown children, when she began her mad love affair with the tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich. It ended with the grand duke’s marrying Olga, for which the tsar relieved him of his duties and banished him abroad. His son from his first marriage, the still-young Dmitry, remained in Russia and had at first lived with the family of Ella and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich; then, after the murder of Sergei, he had been taken in and raised by the royal family. Pavel was pardoned by the tsar in 1905, and returned with his wife to Russia.

  So Munya and her mother were relatives of the grand duke. And they soon became relatives of Vyrubova, too. Vyrubova’s sister Alexandra (or Sana, as she was called in the family) married Olga’s son by her first marriage, Alexander Pistolkors. ‘Sana…was a very nice looking woman with a little porcelain face, and she produced the charming impression of a spoiled and self-centred child,’ the singer Alexandra Belling recalled.

  But Rasputin was later to literally split that family in two.

  In 1910 however, when Munya Golovina saw him that year for the first time, Rasputin became absolutely essential to her. Munya was at the time on the edge of madness.

  In 1917 Munya Golovina was summoned before the Extraordinary Commission for interrogation. I found her testimony in the File.

  The Commission had been impatiently awaiting her testimony. Munya was one of those closest to Rasputin. Moreover, there had been a great deal of gossip about her fateful and unrequited love for Rasputin’s murderer, Prince Felix Yusupov, who had exploited the unhappy Munya in arranging the peasant’s death, a story that would also make its way into the books about Rasputin.

  Munya did in fact have a truly fateful love, but it was not at all for Felix Yusupov. However, let Maria speak for herself:

  ‘In 1910 I lost someone I had been very attached to, which had an untoward effect on my nervous system.’

  That ‘someone’ was the tender friend who linked Maria to the richest family in Russia, the Yusupov family.

  The Richest Family In Russia

  The Yusupov palace stands to this day on the Moika Canal in Petersburg. And within it are the same furniture, the same paintings, and the same mirrors that once held reflections of that family now disappeared into the grave. The Yusupovs were descended from a nephew of the prophet Muhammad. Their ancestors had ruled in Egypt, Damascus, and Antioch. Among their kin were warlords who had served Tamerlane and the Tartar conquerors of ancient Rus; they had then headed splinter factions of the great Tartar horde and ruled within the Crimean, Kazan, and Nogay territories. The Nogay chieftain Khan Yusuf gave the line his name. The fate of his daughter, the beauty Sumbeki is particularly remarkable. The Nogay khans, Sumbeki’s husbands, died one after the other, each at the hands of his successor. But she remained queen, marrying in turn each murderer of her preceding husband. It was then that Khan Yusuf, fearing for his sons, sent them to Russia. The Russian tsar Ivan the Terrible received them graciously and granted them the most spacious lands. Their children, who were converted to Christianity in the seventeenth century, were given the title of prince and the name Yusupov. And from that time forth they occupied the most important posts under the Russian sovereigns, and sometimes were particularly close to them. Hanging in the palace of Felix’s great-grandfather Nikolai Yusupov, in the portrait gallery with its pictures of his three
hundred lovers, was a double portrait. In it were Catherine the Great and Yusupov himself in the form of a completely nude Venus and Apollo.

  In the course of that three-hundred-year period the Yusupovs became the richest family in Russia and the royal family often came to visit their estate in the Crimea, which adjoined the tsar’s own.

  Felix’s mother, Zinaida, was one of the most beautiful women of her day. Rejecting numerous proposals, she had married an adjutant of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the Horse Guards commander Count Felix Sumarokov-Elston. The Elstons were the descendants of an illegitimate son of the most famous Prussian king, Frederick the Great. And after his marriage to the last of the Yusupov line, Count Sumarokov-Elston was given the right to call himself by the unwieldy title, Prince Yusupov and Count Sumarokov-Elston.

  Zinaida and Felix produced two sons: Nikolai, the elder, and Felix, the younger, who would play a fateful role in the destiny of the Russian peasant Rasputin.

  A Story Of Love And Death

  After the revolution and exiled in Paris, Felix described his life. He began his seductive journey into vice while still a boy. It all began with a story resembling a sinful dream of youth. A certain young couple invited the boy, who looked like a nymphet, to take part in their sexual games. Later, Nikolai, a Petersburg Don Juan, the idol of the family, whom Felix adored and envied, continued the dangerous games with the boy and conceived the idea of dressing him up as a young woman. And started taking ‘her’ out to participate in Petersburg night life, a life that closely resembled a feast during the plague, where all strove to reach the very bottom, to try out every form of vice and amusement. The debauchery proceeded to the accompaniment of Gypsy choruses in the private rooms of famous restaurants. It was then that the young Felix experienced the joy of wearing women’s clothing and delight in the lewd glances of men who were driven wild by the young ‘beauty’.

  And as an old man he would remember the triumphs of himself as that charming nymphet. Such as the time during a costume ball when the English king, Edward VII, stared intently at ‘her’ through his lorgnette. And with what delight and terror ‘she’ fled from admirers in a private room in a Petersburg restaurant, escaping into a severe frost in an open sleigh without ‘her’ fur coat and dressed only in a diamond-studded gown.

  Thus did Felix discover his own nature. ‘I have always been exasperated by people’s unfairness in regard to those who enter into love affairs of a special kind,’ he wrote. ‘One may censure those relationships, but not the creatures for whom normal relationships against their nature are impossible.’

  And then his amorous brother Nikolai succeeded in seducing yet another Petersburg beauty, the Countess Heiden. But this time, although a Don Juan is not meant to do so, he fell in love with her. Before then Nikolai had been seeking thrills in Paris in a filthy Chinese opium den, where Felix, under his guidance, had also managed to try out new ways of falling to the bottom. But Nikolai had now been transformed by passionate love.

  The Countess Marina Heiden was at the time the wife of Count A. Manteifel of the Horse Guards. But once away in Paris, the unhappy woman forgot her husband and her honour and spent her nights at the hotel where Nikolai and Felix were staying. Count Manteifel at first wanted a divorce, but his regimental comrades were of the opinion that the honour of the most prestigious Petersburg regiment had been besmirched. The count was obliged to call Nikolai out.

  In the Historical Museum I found the letters of the heroes of this story and the denouement of their tragedy.

  ‘I implore you,’ Marina wrote to Felix, ‘not to let Nikolai come back to Petersburg now…The regiment will instigate a duel, and it will end very badly…For God’s sake, arrange things so that your brother does not come to Petersburg … The evil talk will cease, and by autumn it will all have subsided …’ But Nikolai returned to Petersburg anyway. All Felix had to do was tell his powerful mother about it, and the duellists would not have been allowed to shoot at each other. But Felix oddly did nothing. It could be that ideas of honour played a role here. Or did they?

  There is a certain entry in Felix’s memoirs: ‘I … imagined myself as one of my ancestors, a great Maecenas in the reign of Catherine… Reclining on cushions embroidered in gold…I ruled among slaves… The thought of becoming one of the richest people in Russia intoxicated me.’ But as long as his brother was alive, he could not become a ‘great Maecenas’, for his older brother was the heir. Could it be that he was unconsciously following the example of his Nogay ancestors who had murdered their brothers and fathers in their struggle for power? And that this was why he had not told his mother of the impending duel? But these are merely dreadful conjectures.

  The lovers’ last letters have survived in the archive. Nikolai wrote his the night before the duel: ‘My last thought was the thought of you … To our misfortune you and I met and destroyed each other … In two hours my seconds will come…Farewell, for ever. I love you.’

  The duel took place on 22 June 1908. First they shot at thirty paces. Nikolai fired into the air, and his adversary missed. Manteifel demanded that they reduce the distance to fifteen paces. Nikolai again fired into the air, and then the count took aim and shot him.

  Nikolai’s last letter is still in the Yusupov archive; it was never given to Marina. Also preserved there is Marina’s entreaty to Felix. A futile entreaty. ‘Felix, I must prostrate myself on his grave…I must see his grave and pray over it. You must understand that, Felix, and help me. Arrange it at night somehow, when everyone at your house is asleep! Help me slip into the church, do this for me, do it for your brother.’ But he did not do it.

  At the time his mother Zinaida Yusupova was confined to her bed with a fever, and would be tormented by episodes of depression for the rest of her life. Felix himself soon afterwards made a tour of his future properties. ‘I imagined myself in all seriousness to be a young lord travelling around the country,’ he recalled.

  The Unbeloved

  As it turned out, however, there was one other victim of the duel: a woman who had loved but who had not been loved in return, and who had forever held onto her love for the one who had perished. This was a love that was not only unrequited but not even suspected. And it was Munya’s, a love that remained with her the rest of her life. Felix kept in his archive a letter from her, too. She also wanted to prostrate herself on the grave of the one who had been killed: ‘I would like to pray once more near him. It is two weeks today since the terrible misfortune, but it continues to grow, not diminish, and it becomes harder to bear with each passing day.’

  The fallen Nikolai had linked her to Felix for ever.

  ‘I cherish my spiritual connection with the past so much that I cannot regard you as a stranger … Never have I been as clearly conscious as I am now that the joy of life has gone from my life for ever, that nothing will ever bring it back.’

  She decided to withdraw into a convent. Her mother was horrified and she was saved by her relative with the ‘little porcelain face’, Alexandra (Sana) Pistolkors.

  The File, from the testimony of Maria Golovina:

  The wife of my cousin Alexander Pistolkors was acquainted with the elder Grigory Efimovich Rasputin, who at that time was considered a holy man who could comfort those in distress … The first time I saw Father Grigory was only for a few minutes, and he made a splendid impression on me. We talked about my wanting to withdraw from the world into a convent … Rasputin observed to me that one may serve God anywhere, and that one should not change one’s life so drastically.

  And she believed him at once and gave up the idea of the convent.

  Ever since the duel, she had been studying spiritualism in an attempt to speak with the one who had been killed.

  All that time I … was doing experiments in the raising of spirits…I was extremely astonished when… Father Grigory asked me, ‘Why are you doing all this? You know,’ he said, ‘how anchorites prepare themselves for visitations of the spirit. Yet you want to commune with a
spirit in the very midst of social life’…He advised me not to occupy myself with that, cautioning me that I could lose my mind. My mother liked Rasputin, too … She was grateful to him for having talked me out of going into a convent …I saw him several times at the Pistolkorses’ over a span often to fourteen days … At the time Rasputin did not drink wine at all … He preached simplicity in life, fought against formality, and tried to persuade people not to judge one another … Rasputin never nursed ill feelings against people who had done him injury of one kind or another.

  And she decided to introduce the holy man to the person most dear to her after her mother — to Felix. ‘The young woman was too pure to understand the baseness of the “holy man”,’ Felix would write.

  And the meeting took place; the first time they saw each other.

  ‘The Golovins’ home,’ Felix recalled, ‘was on the Winter Canal. When I entered the parlour, the mother and daughter were sitting with the solemn expressions of people waiting for the arrival of a wonder-working icon… Rasputin came in and tried to embrace me’ (although Felix managed to elude him). And then, ‘going over to Mlle G[olovina] and her mother, he unceremoniously embraced them and pressed them to his heart … He was of medium height, almost slender, and his arms were disproportionately long … He appeared to be about forty. Dressed in a tight-fitting coat and wide boots, he looked like a simple peasant. His face, framed by a shaggy beard, was crude — heavy features, long nose, and small limpid grey eyes that peered out from under thick brows.’