The Rasputin File

by Edvard Radzinsky

  Meanwhile in Tsarskoe Selo itself, a new blow was struck against Rasputin.

  From Tsarskoe Selo crept rumours that the Khlyst, as everyone in Petersburg had suddenly started calling him, had been visiting the royal nursery, and that he had raped Vishnyakova, the heir’s nurse.

  On 3 June 1910 the general’s wife Bogdanovich recorded in her diary that the tsarina ‘is incensed with those who have been saying that [Rasputin] is a scoundrel and so on. Tyutcheva and the senior nanny Vishnyakova have therefore been placed on leave for two months.’

  If the maid of honour Sophia Tyutcheva was well known at court as a fierce opponent of the elder, the information about the royal nurse Mary (as Maria Vishnyakova was called at court) came as a complete surprise. After all, it was by visiting Mary that Rasputin had been gaining entry to the palace in the first place. And she had been assigned that role for a reason. Mary was regarded as one of Rasputin’s most devoted admirers.

  A letter from Rasputin to Mary about the rearing of the heir has remained in the archives.

  ‘12 November 1907. Show him little examples of Divine edification, [and] in all his children’s toys, seek edification.’ After which follow words bearing witness to their more than friendly relations. ‘I have not found pride in you, but have found a deep regard for me in your soul. And you saw and understood me from the first. I would like very much for us to see each other again.’

  From the testimony of Vyrubova: ‘In the beginning, the tsarevich’s nurse … deeply admired Rasputin and visited him in Pokrovskoe.’

  But now ‘vague whisperings’ were beginning to spread at court.

  The File, from the testimony of Colonel Loman: ‘That Rasputin had violated the honour of Vishnyakova was something of which there were only ‘vague whisperings’; no definite charges were brought forward against Rasputin.’

  According to the whispers, in that same year of 1910 Mary had gone on a three-week holiday to Pokrovskoe with Rasputin and his devotees. At night, Rasputin had crept into her room and violated her.

  Simultaneously with those rumours Sophia Tyutcheva spoke out against Rasputin.

  She declared the unacceptability of Rasputin’s visits to the palace nursery. Her declaration was immediately accompanied by awful rumours to the effect that the peasant had been undressing the grand duchesses at night.

  From the testimony of Vyrubova: ‘Probably he did happen to pass through the nursery, but there was not a word of truth to the rumours going about that he undressed the grand duchesses. Those rumours were spread by the maid of honour Sophia Tyutcheva.’

  Tyutcheva, age forty-seven, was summoned before the Extraordinary Commission in 1917. And I found her testimony in the File.

  Naturally she had nothing to say about Rasputin’s undressing the grand duchesses. The rumours hadn’t originated with her. The people behind them were a bit more powerful.

  But Rasputin had in fact come to see the royal children and had conversed with them and had on occasion touched them. When he was healing them. And that is all. Tyutcheva, however, was speaking out against any visit at all by the peasant to the children’s wing, since she ‘considered him a dangerous person with an absolutely clear tendency toward the Khlyst sect’.

  She also spoke about Mary — about the royal children’s nurse, Vishnyakova.

  Feofan’s Rage

  Tyutcheva testified in the File:

  Once on entering the children’s wing, I came upon a terrible commotion. Vishnyakova told me with tears in her eyes that she … and the other devotees had participated in rites of ‘rejoicing’. That what she had accepted as a command of the Holy Spirit had turned out to be simple debauchery … I understood from her account that Feofan, who was her confessor … had in his humility sent them to Rasputin, whom he considered to be one of God’s elders. Rasputin forced them to do whatever he needed, passing himself off as someone acting at the command of the Holy Spirit … At the same time he warned them not to tell Feofan, covering it up in sophistry: Feofan was a simpleton and would not understand such secrets and would condemn them, thereby passing judgement on the Holy Spirit and committing a mortal sin.

  And that too was immediately communicated to Feofan by ‘someone’. And it shocked him and elicited a new flash of indignant rage. He realized that he himself had sent Vishnyakova and those like her to Rasputin and thus had corrupted their souls. That is why he had demanded that Hermogen speak out at once against his former friend Father Grigory, whom he now simply called Rasputin. That is why he composed a new epistle to the tsar and implored Tyutcheva ‘to convey the letter to the sovereign’. ‘I answered that in view of the fact that my repugnance for Rasputin was known at court, I did not consider it possible to carry out such an errand,’ Tyutcheva testified in the File.

  And after her refusal, Feofan apparently conceived of a desperate plan: to wait for the royal family’s arrival in the Crimea and in a sermon expose to everyone that ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’.

  Meanwhile, as Tyutcheva testified, ‘Vishnyakova went to the tsarina. But the tsarina said she did not believe rumours and … forbade her to talk about it.’

  The same day a footman in a cap with feathers (that medieval post had been retained at court) came to her and ‘conveyed the sovereign’s order that she appear in his study at 6:30 p.m.’.

  And Tyutcheva gives an account in the File of her evening conversation with the sovereign:

  ‘“You have guessed why I summoned you. What is going on in the nursery?” I told him. “So you too do not believe in Rasputin’s holiness?” I answered in the negative.’

  And that reticent man could no longer restrain himself. He told her what he had not told anyone. Usually, when cutting off attacks on Rasputin, he had drily alluded to the fact that their relations with Rasputin were their own personal affair, their personal life. But here for the first time he blurted out, ‘But what will you say if I tell you that I have lived all these years only thanks to his prayers?’ And ‘he began saying that he did not believe any of the stories, that the impure always sticks to the pure, and that he did not understand what had suddenly happened to Feofan, who had always been so fond of Rasputin. During this he pointed to a letter from Feofan on his desk’ (so it did get through, after all).

  ‘You, your majesty, are too pure of heart and do not see what filth surrounds you.’ I said that it filled me with fear that such a person could be near the grand duchesses.

  ‘Am I then the enemy of my own children?’ the sovereign objected. He asked me never to mention Rasputin’s name in conversation. In order for that to take place, I asked the sovereign to arrange things so that Rasputin would never appear in the children’s wing. Before that the tsarina had told me that after six I was free, as if hinting that she did not wish me to visit the children after that hour. After my conversation with the sovereign, I went to the nursery whenever I wished. But the distance between the family and me continued to grow.

  The Mary Riddle

  The most remarkable thing about Tyutcheva’s testimony is that she did not dare tell the tsar the story about Vishnyakova. Because she did not dare insult him with that filth? Or perhaps because there was in fact no story to tell, just ‘vague whisperings’? Even though stories about Vishnyakova’s rape are to be found in many memoirs. But how many other legends about Rasputin have also survived?

  And for this reason the present-day creators of legends about ‘holy Grigory’ have glibly declared the story of the rape to be nothing more than a fabrication.

  But Vishnyakova’s testimony has also turned up in the File! So the nurse Mary may now tell her story herself.

  Summoned before the Extraordinary Commission in 1917, Mary testified, ‘I, Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova, of the Russian Orthodox faith, reside at the Winter Palace, the Castellan Entrance.’ And she proceeds to relate her autobiography. An intriguing autobiography, in my view, one highly reminiscent of the typical story of the illegitimate child of a distinguished father.

  As
a child, she was given to a peasant family to be raised, and then, at someone’s expense, she attended courses to train for work as a nurse. When she finished her training, the unknown student from a peasant family was immediately taken into the household of the Duke of Leichtenberg. Very soon afterwards, just before the birth of Grand Duchess Tatyana Nikolaevna, she was invited to become a nurse for the royal family. She was only twenty-four at the time. One after another the royal children were born and grew up. And, finally, she became the nurse of the heir. So her whole life was spent in the palace. And even after the scandal with Rasputin, when Alix dismissed her and she had ceased to be the royal children’s nurse, for some reason they still did not dare to banish her from the palace.

  When the events in her story took place, she was thirty-six years old. And, as was always the case with royal nurses, that well-groomed, blonde, beautiful woman had no personal life of her own. She became an old maid.

  In her interrogation, Mary remained faithful to her former employers and testified that

  the former sovereign and empress were exemplary spouses in their love for each other and their children … [The tsarina] spent the whole day in the circle of her children, not allowing them to be either fed or bathed without her. Until they were three or four months old, she breast-fed them herself, although together with a wet-nurse, since the tsarina did not have enough milk … The empress herself taught the children English and Russian and their prayers, with the help of the nurses and Princess Orbeliani.

  And then Mary finally turned to her own story.

  Once in the spring of 1910 the empress suggested I visit the Verkhoturye Monastery in the Tobolsk province for three weeks, with the idea of returning in May for a trip to the skerries with the royal family. I readily agreed, since I am fond of monasteries. Zinaida Manshtedt, whom I had met in Tsarskoe Selo at the home of friends of mine and liked very much, was supposed to take part in the trip … And, according to the empress, Rasputin and Lokhtina were also expected to go…I met all the people who were going when I arrived at the Nikolaev Station.

  We stayed at Verkhoturye Monastery for two or three days, and then set off to visit Rasputin at his home in the village of Pokrovskoe. Rasputin had a two-storey house, large, and quite well furnished, like that of an official of middle rank. Rasputin’s wife lived on the ground floor with her dependants, and we were lodged upstairs in different rooms. Rasputin behaved decently in relation to me for several days, and then one night he appeared in my room, started kissing me, and after reducing me to hysterics, deprived me of my virginity. On the way back Rasputin left me alone. But waking up by accident in the middle of the night, I noticed that he and Zina Manshtedt were lying in the same berth. Upon our return to Petrograd, I reported everything to the empress, and I also told Bishop Feofan in a private meeting with him. The empress did not give any heed to my words and said that everything Rasputin does is holy. From that time forth I did not see Rasputin, and in 1913 I was dismissed from my duties as nurse. I was also reprimanded for frequenting the Right Reverend Feofan.

  And the last words, or more precisely, the virtual scream, with which her testimony ends explode from the dry transcript of the interrogation: ‘I cannot testify any more. I implore you to end the interrogation, since I do not have the strength to speak any more about my unhappiness … and consider it my right not to go into the details!’

  The tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Olga, recalls, ‘When the rumours reached Nicky that [Rasputin] had raped the nurse, he immediately ordered an investigation. They caught the young woman in bed with a Cossack of the Imperial Guard.’ Thus, evidently, was the tsar’s sister informed. Thus did Alix defend the peasant.

  Grand Duchess Olga, however, would soon have an opportunity to learn something new about Father Grigory, and this time from her own personal experience.

  The Peasant’s Caress

  It happened in Vyrubova’s house. Rasputin already felt quite at home in Tsarskoe Selo. And all the secrets of the great Romanov family were now known to him. He knew that Olga’s husband, the Duke of Oldenburg, was a homosexual.

  And the peasant drew his own unique conclusion.

  On the evening in question, Alix and Nicky had come to Anya’s little house for a meeting with Father Grigory. Olga had been invited, too. ‘Rasputin … it seemed, was very glad to see me again,’ the grand duchess recalled, ‘and when our hostess and Nicky and Alix left the parlour for a few moments, Rasputin came over to me and, after putting an arm around my shoulders, started stroking my hand. I immediately moved away from him without saying a word.’ Her husband to whom she related the story ‘said with a sombre face that I should avoid Rasputin in the future. For the first and only time I knew that my husband was right.’

  The Transformation Of The General’s Wife

  It was also in 1910 that Lokhtina’s husband suddenly ‘regained his sight’ and presented his wife with the ultimatum that she no longer tolerate Rasputin’s presence in their home. In reply he heard, ‘He is holy. You are banishing grace.’ Her husband stopped giving her money. But yesterday’s magnificent spendthrift now needed nothing more than a black dress and a white peasant kerchief for her head.

  It was then that Rasputin told the ‘tsars’ about the former society lady who had traded the vanity of vanities for a new life. And the tsarina naturally took an interest in her. Thus giving rise to a paradox. Lokhtina’s former status was the wife of a state councillor — was there any way that could have opened the door for her of the least accessible palace in Europe? Yet her rank as faithful follower of a semi-literate peasant accomplished that very miracle.

  We shall find reference to this in the evidence of her second idol, the monk Iliodor: ‘She … abandoned society and occupied herself exclusively with visiting the empress at the palace … and interpreting for the tsars the “wise apothegms” and prophecies of “Father” Grigory.’

  And she not only interpreted them. This woman, who combined, as may happen in Rus, a shrewd mind with absolute madness, came up with the idea of transcribing Rasputin’s thoughts and publishing them.

  As she testified in the File, ‘Father Grigory wrote down his spiritual thoughts in a little notebook… I transcribed what he had written down … and a pamphlet was published [his ‘Pious Meditations’, 1911]. I revised neither the substance of his notes, nor the thoughts expounded in them. My work came down to correcting his grammar; but Father Grigory’s thoughts I did not improve.’ However, he sometimes did write things down in his monstrous scrawl, but the semi-literate Rasputin could not write for long. So her main work, evidently, was to transcribe his spoken homilies. This was difficult, for his speech, by all accounts, was incoherent, the larger part of his influence coming from his eyes and hands. The hypnotic effect of his eyes and his glancing caresses. But she understood what he failed to express in words.

  It was apparently with her that the tsarina studied the difficult art of writing down the elder’s words.

  In the middle of 1910, when Lokhtina’s husband finally told her, ‘Either …or…’she made her choice. ‘From 1910 on I was completely estranged from my family, who demanded that I leave Father Grigory and didn’t want me to live with them any more.’ In short, she was driven from her home, and that part of the family’s property belonging to her was taken away. So this hostess of a Petersburg salon abandoned her beloved daughter and left home with a knapsack on her back. She set off for Tsaritsyn to visit Iliodor (or ‘Christ’ as she called him), the main friend of Rasputin (or the ‘Lord of hosts’ as she called him). And on the way, the general’s wife begged for alms.

  What an interesting year 1910 turned out to be. At the height of the peasant’s fame, an attack against him gradually took shape and then increased in strength. And it proceeded along a broad front: Hermogen, Feofan, Lokhtina’s expulsion from her home, and the stories of Tyutcheva and Vishnyakova.

  And, finally, the newspapers. For it was in 1910 that the newspaper campaign was unleashed. Rasputin be
came the main character of newspaper articles. The largest newspapers took pleasure in printing articles about the ‘semi-literate and depraved peasant-Khlyst’ who was enjoying great popularity in ‘certain court circles’. Articles about him always produced a sensation, and the reading public rushed after them. The anti-government Constitutional Democrat newspaper Speech published a whole series of articles.

  And finally in 1910 a powerful newspaper salvo was fired from Moscow as well — from the camp of Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna. A member of the grand duchess’s circle, Mikhail Novosyolov, an assistant professor at the Moscow Theological Seminary and editor of The Religious-Philosophical Library, published a whole series of sensational articles: ‘Grigory Rasputin’s Past Life’, ‘Grigory Rasputin, the Itinerant Spiritual Artiste’, and ‘Another Thing about Grigory Rasputin’. Published along with these articles was the confession of a certain maiden whom Rasputin had seduced, and reference was also made to the investigations of the Tobolsk Consistory, which had accused him of Khlyst involvement.

  In 1910 Rasputin’s name had begun to acquire a wicked meaning. It was turning into a punning synonym for ‘debauchier’.

  The Peasant And Europe

  That all those events coincided was no accident. And the reason for it was the peasant himself. Or, more accurately, his new role. For in the period 1909–10 extremely powerful and influential people had begun to talk about the unthinkable: Father Grigory was not only treating the heir, and not only praying with the ‘tsars’, he had also begun to interfere in high political affairs. The semi-literate peasant had presumed to decide the destiny of Europe.

  In October 1908 the telegraph brought to Russia the news that Austria-Hungary had unceremoniously annexed the Balkan protectorate of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where a large number of Orthodox Serbs lived. A powerful movement to defend its ‘fellow Slavs’ was begun in Russia, which considered itself the leader of the Orthodox world.