Felix already hated him. The rumours of Rasputin’s depravity had suddenly begun to spread in every quarter.
The antiSemite Leader Who Wasn’t
It was then that Rasputin made his first great blunder.
By 1910 a very definite circle had formed around him.
A few words of explanation. In a state where autocracy had existed from its earliest days, there also existed a tacit, covert alliance of the extreme right and the special police services. The extreme right in Russia consisted of a group of high-born but degenerate aristocrats. They hated the emergent capitalism — the power of money that was starting to take the place of their own power, the power of birth. And they hated the Jews, among whom, despite their complete lack of rights, there were already many new people of wealth.
There were, however, even more Jews among the zealous fanatics of revolution. Lack of rights, poverty, and the humiliation of Jewish young people had turned frightened Jewish youths into fearless bomb-throwers and terrorists. Wishing to weaken the radical movement, the right tried to direct the rage of the starving multitudes against the Jews. And with the blessing of the Department of Police, a war of pogroms against the Jews had rolled across the country. The down of torn feather beds, looted homes, murdered old men, raped women and girls — it all happened. But Count Witte, after having become prime minister in 1905 with the tsar’s approval, ordered the Department of Police to bring those responsible for the pogroms under control, and the police did so. But one can imagine Witte’s surprise when he discovered that the same Department of Police that was supposed to be fighting against the pogroms was secretly distributing notices calling for them! They were being printed by a certain Mikhail Komissarov, a tall, portly thirty-five-year-old colonel, who five years later would become one of the most important figures in the Rasputin story. Komissarov was not an antiSemite. He was merely an officer engaged in carrying out someone else’s secret will. The religious writer Sergei Nilus had just come upon something called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion regarding a sinister plot of the Jews and the Masons under their control. According to the Protocols, ‘Jewry has from ancient times been the tool of theomachy and the devil. International Jewry and the Masons who serve it must bring down the Christian monarchs and found their own Kingdom of Jew-Masons ruled by an Antichrist-king.’ The Protocols were published at once by the stunned Nilus. At the tsar’s order, Stolypin, who succeeded Witte as prime minister in 1906, conducted an investigation. Naturally, the Protocols were exposed as a forgery. They had been written by the same Russian secret police, who had taken as their model another forgery produced in the West, the Testament of Peter the Great, a secret plan for the Russian occupation of Europe.
The wave of anti-Semitism had not abated after the crushing of the 1905 revolution. Anti-Semitic organizations promoting pogroms such as the Union of the Russian People and the Union of the Archangel Michael, gained strength. In the Duma the monarchists Purishkevich and Markov II continually gave speeches inciting pogroms. The impending tercentenary of the dynasty heated the atmosphere. And Rasputin, that simple peasant so beloved of the tsar, seemed to have been created to stand at the head of the rightist crusade against the Jews and the intelligentsia.
Stalin’s Instructor
It was at this moment that Feofan’s friend Bishop Hermogen made his appearance in Rasputin’s vicinity.
If Feofan was a mystic, ascetic, and anchorite, then his friend Hermogen, the bishop of Saratov, was someone immersed in church politics.
During the 1905 revolution the question had come up of restoring the patriarchate — of convening a church assembly for the election of a patriarch. The tsar deferred the question to the Most Holy Synod. And the chief procurator of the Synod, Pobedonostsev, immediately rejected it, frightening the tsar with the idea that a church headed by a patriarch would at once cease to be subordinate to the autocrat. But Hermogen believed that the 1905 revolution had demonstrated the weakness of secular authority. And that a second centre within the state was needed, one that would be independent of secular power and that could, in the event of a return of disorder, keep the state from perishing. The patriarchate needed to be reestablished in Rus. And Hermogen saw himself at its head.
He bore the name of the great patriarch Hermogen, who had saved Rus and the state during the terrible Time of Troubles, and he believed that it was his own destiny to rescue the country from the looming bloody discord that, despite the suppression of the revolution, the elders in the monasteries were continuing to prophesy.
From the testimony of the herbalist Pyotr Badmaev before the Extraordinary Commission: ‘Once while I was visiting Hermogen I saw Mitya [Rasputin’s precursor, the ‘nasal-voiced’ Mitya Kozelsky] making some elaborate movements with his hands. Hermogen smiled. I asked what it meant. One of those present said, “He sees the patriarchal mitre on Hermogen’s head.”’
Hermogen was a fanatical opponent of freethinkers who, he was convinced, were destroying Holy Rus. He fought for strict interference by the church in the ideological life of the country.
There had been in his struggle against freethinking one very important episode of which Hermogen himself very likely took little notice. As rector of the Tiflis Theological Seminary he had ruthlessly punished the seminarians for freethinking. And in 1899 he expelled one of them, a certain Iosif Dzhugashvili, who would take his place in history under the name Stalin, and who would restore the patriarchate so desired by Hermogen. History likes to smile.
Hermogen subsequently testified, ‘I was introduced to Rasputin by Father Feofan,’ who ‘spoke of him in the most laudatory terms as an outstanding votary’. At the time, Hermogen and Rasputin liked each other very much. Rasputin’s contempt for the bloated church hierarchs was close to Hermogen’s heart. But the main thing was that Hermogen dreamed with Rasputin’s help of inspiring the tsar to restore the patriarchate.
In the meantime, however, Rasputin was supposed to take part in the fierce battle against freethinking that Hermogen was then conducting. And Hermogen introduced him to another exposer of evil, a young monk whose ferocious speeches and denunciations had made him famous as the Russian Savonarola. The monk’s name was Iliodor.
The Russian Savonarola
At the age of twenty-two Sergei Trufanov, a sacristan’s son, was received into monastic life and given the name Iliodor. In 1905, at the height of the revolution, he graduated from the Petersburg Theological Seminary and he saw Rasputin, who had just arrived in Petersburg, for the first time in the hallways of the seminary, where he was still a seminarian. In February 1908, the twenty-seven-year-old ordained monk Iliodor was assigned to Tsaritsyn as a missionary preacher. In Tsaritsyn he built a large church with a hall for political meetings. It was there that he began his furious preaching before throngs of admirers. Huge, with a large, fleshy face, high cheekbones, and tiny eyes, Iliodor looked more like a Volga brigand than a pious monk. But Hermogen liked that look of warrior-monk. And Iliodor really did carry on ceaseless warfare in his newly built church. He fulminated against the ‘Yids and intellectuals’ and the ‘rich men and bureaucrats who conceal the people’s needs from the tsar’. He flayed the hated Russian capitalism. He excoriated Tatischev, the governor, and drove him from office. His supporters stuck leaflets on buildings inscribed with the words, ‘Brothers! Do not surrender Russia to the cruel enemy!’ and ‘Cry out with a hearty cry: Down with the kingdom of Yids! Down with the red banners! Down with the red Yid freedom! Down with red Yid equality and fraternity! Long live Russia’s one father, our Orthodox tsar! Our Christian autocrat and tsar!’
When Iliodor and Rasputin made each other’s acquaintance in Petersburg, Rasputin was living in the apartment of Olga Lokhtina. And when the elder’s new friend came to visit him there, he left the mad general’s wife in raptures.
Thenceforth, she would serve them both — Rasputin and Iliodor.
In the File, Lokhtina herself tells of the meeting of the two pastors.
‘I
met the ordained monk Iliodor in ‘08 or ‘09. After his arrival in Petrograd, he stayed with Feofan at the Theological Seminary. At Rasputin’s behest, I went to Feofan and invited Iliodor to visit Rasputin, who was then staying with me … I very much liked Iliodor’s readiness to obey. Father Grigory ordered him to preach a sermon on some topic and he did so unquestioningly.’
Iliodor opened a new life to Rasputin, who although used to a dozen admirers, now saw crowds of fanatics and took pleasure in their wild delight. As Rasputin later recalled, ‘he would meet me with crowds of people and preach about me and my life. I lived in harmony with him and shared my impressions with him.’ And, one should say, shared his most valuable impressions. In 1909 and 1910 Iliodor visited him in Pokrovskoe. And it was then that Rasputin showed him the shirts that the tsarina had given him. And showed him, too, what he had not shown even Sazonov or Filippov, who were very close to him. He showed the monk his letters from the tsarina and her daughters, the grand duchesses. And Rasputin did so because for some reason he trusted Iliodor.
From Pokrovskoe Rasputin returned with Iliodor to Tsaritsyn. And again they were met by crowds of supporters, and the crowds’ delighted cries and bewitching enthusiasm.
Iliodor has related in his book how on the night of 30 December 1910, two thousand people saw Grigory off to Petersburg. ‘I informed the people that Grigory Efimovich wanted to build a convent in which he would be the elder, and I asked them to visit him. The people cried, “The Lord save us! We shall go, we shall go with the father! We shall certainly go!” At the station we sang hymns and praised Christ. Grigory started to give a speech from the platform of the railway car about his lofty position, but it was so confused that even I understood nothing.’
Grigory had always spoken in a mysteriously jerky and confused way. Iliodor had so far understood him. Now he did not. For it was then, in 1910, while he was still a guest in Pokrovskoe, that Iliodor reached a critical decision about Rapustin. And as a result, before his return to Tsaritsyn, Iliodor stole from his friend the letters from the tsarina and grand duchesses that Rasputin had so trustingly shown him. Later on, in 1914, Rasputin testified, ‘Iliodor visited me four years ago in Pokrovskoe, where he stole an important letter from me.’
The ‘important letter’ was one from the tsarina not intended for anyone else’s eyes.
But at the time Rasputin did not know any of that. Nor did he understand that by appearing together with Iliodor he had become part of a violently anti-semitic Black-Hundreds group and that a new image of him had begun to emerge: a Black-Hundreds peasant and sorcerer in control of the royal family, an image that would help the liberal opposition in its struggle against the regime. But at the time he was merely trying to help his friend Iliodor, whose patience of the authorities had been exhausted. Those in power understood perfectly well that Iliodor’s activity would end in pogroms against the Jews and a savage response by the revolutionaries. The air still reeked of bombs and the spectre of the failed 1905 revolution. Stolypin took measures. In January 1911, by decision of the Synod, Iliodor was ordered to be transferred to a squalid monastery in the Tula eparchy.
But Iliodor refused to submit. He locked himself in his church at Tsaritsyn with several thousand people and declared a hunger-strike. And Hermogen supported him, but that did not help Iliodor. The tsar ordered him removed from Tsaritsyn at once. But Iliodor had his friend Rasputin. And he would ultimately return to Tsaritsyn despite the tsar’s objection.
As Iliodor himself describes it, when a certain Countess I. merely hinted at dissatisfaction with Iliodor, ‘Rasputin interrupted the conversation. He was trembling as if in a fever, and his fingers and lips shook…He put his face next to the countess’s and, shaking his finger at her, said in his jerky way and in great agitation, “I, Grigory, tell you that he will be in Tsaritsyn! Understand? Don’t take so much on yourself — after all, you are merely a woman! A woman!”’
And the tsarina agreed to help Iliodor, for she liked it that the young priest had such respect for Father Grigory. There followed an order to permit the ordained monk Iliodor to return to Tsaritsyn, and in spite of the prime minister and the Synod, he returned. ‘Iliodor remained in Tsaritsyn thanks to Rasputin’s personal entreaties,’ Vyrubova confirmed in her testimony.
Evidently, there was something very important connecting Rasputin and Iliodor. And it was because of that ‘something’ that there had, for all the difference in their ages, arisen in Rasputin great confidence in and friendship for Iliodor. A much closer friendship than with Feofan, who at the time idolized Rasputin, or with Hermogen, who had grown fond of him. Hermogen himself afterward observed, ‘Rasputin … treated me with special courtesy. But…he preferred to stay with Iliodor in Tsaritsyn.’ It was evidently because of that ‘something’ that Rasputin, who rejected hatred of every kind, tolerated Iliodor’s pogrom-inciting speeches and calls for hate. And Olga Lokhtina, who at the time was initiated into the secrets of Rasputin’s teachings, would in acknowledgement of the special relationship between Rasputin and Iliodor bow down before them both, calling Rasputin the ‘Lord of hosts’ and Iliodor ‘Christ’.
Mysterious Rumours At The Height Of His Fame
In the meantime, the peasant’s new friend Sazonov had been regaling his friends with stories of Rasputin. The journalist M. Menshikov recalled that
in 1910 at the height of his fame Sazonov brought him to see me…[He was] youngish-looking of about forty and almost illiterate … Some of his utterances were striking in their originality, like the Delphic oracle in a mystical delirium. Something prophetic rang out in those enigmatic words … Some of his judgements about hierarchs and high-ranking dignitaries seemed shrewd and accurate to me … But then very quickly it started to be heard on every side … that he was leading society ladies and young women astray.
Yes, it was then in 1910 that it started to be heard. And heard ‘on every side’. Mysteriously ‘on every side’.
Those rumours had begun to spread six months earlier. And the first to become concerned was the fanatically devoted Feofan.
In February 1909 Feofan had been promoted to the rank of bishop. He would later take umbrage whenever anyone dared to assert that it was Rasputin who had made him a bishop. ‘My candidacy for the bishopric was put forward by the church hierarchs led by Bishop Hermogen. I would never have permitted myself to take advantage of Rasputin’s influence… I was known personally to the royal family and had four times or so heard confession from the empress and once from the sovereign … and I was already the rector of the Petersburg Theological Seminary.’ All that is true: Feofan deserved in every way to become a bishop. But the fact that he was also a friend of ‘Our Friend’ helped, of course. The ‘tsars’ appreciated Rasputin’s friends.
And that is why the tsarina was so surprised when Feofan, Rasputin’s devoted admirer, suddenly began, soon after he became a bishop, to doubt the holiness of the man with whom he had not long before been so delighted.
The File, from the testimony of Feofan: ‘Rumours began reaching us at the abbey that Rasputin was unrestrained in his treatment of the female sex, that he stroked them with his hand during conversation. All this gave rise to a certain temptation to sin, the more so since in conversation Rasputin would allude to his acquaintance with me and, as it were, hide behind my name.’
And Feofan, whom an unknown someone had informed of the rumours, discussed them with the monks at the abbey. ‘After discussing everything, we decided we were monks, whereas he was a married man, and that was the reason why his behaviour had been distinguished by a great lack of restraint and seemed peculiar to us … However … the rumours about Rasputin started to increase, and it was beginning to be said that he went to the bathhouses with women … It is very distressing … to suspect of a bad thing.’
There were in the bathhouses of Petersburg so-called ‘family rooms’. In which families would bathe. And, obviously, those ‘rooms’ were not only used by married couples.
It
was very hard for the ascetic Feofan to take up the bathhouse question with Grigory, whom he considered a man of the holy life. But Rasputin evidently learned about the rumours at the abbey. And decided to broach the question himself.
From Feofan’s testimony:
An occasion helped … Rasputin himself mentioned that he had gone to bathhouses with women. We immediately declared to him that, from the point of view of the holy fathers, that was unacceptable, and he promised us to avoid doing it. We decided not to condemn him for debauchery, for we knew that he was a simple peasant, and we had read that in the Olonets and Novgorod provinces men bathed in the bathhouses together with women, which testified not to immorality but to their patriarchal way of life … and to its particular purity, for … nothing was allowed. Moreover, it was clear from the Lives of the ancient Byzantine holy fools Saint Simeon and Saint Ioann that both had gone to bathhouses with women on purpose, and had been abused and reviled for it, although they were nonetheless great saints.
Very likely, Rasputin himself had at the time talked about the visits of Saints Simeon and Ioann to bathhouses with women. For he would later frequently use that example. And in alluding to the great saints who had tested themselves by looking at the bodies of women, ‘Rasputin, as his own justification, announced that he too wanted to test himself — to see if he had extinguished passion in himself,’ Feofan testified in the File.
But Feofan warned him of the danger, ‘for it is only the great saints who are able to do it, and he, by acting in that way, was engaging in self-deception and on a dangerous path’.
But the rumours of the peasant’s suspicious visits to family bathhouses with society ladies persisted. And soon afterwards they truly were heard ‘on every side’.
The Rasputin File Page 16