And the peasant’s impossible dream came to pass: he saw His city and His tomb.
‘What shall I say of the moment when I approached the tomb of Christ … And such a feeling I had in myself that I was ready to treat everyone with affection, and such a love for people that everyone seemed holy, because Love does not see any defects in people. There, at the tomb, you see all people with a spiritual heart.’
But he knows: the rest is silence, the rest is Mystery, and mouths must be closed to preserve the great moment of the encounter with the Lord’s Tomb.
‘O God, what can I say of the Tomb! I shall say only what was in my heart: “Lord, resurrect me Thyself from the depths of sin.”’ One should imagine that nervous person’s magnetic eyes filling with tears as he told it all to the ‘tsars’, because, as a true actor, he saw what he was saying.
O, what an impression Golgotha produces! From that place the Mother of God looked at the heights of Golgotha and wept while the Lord was crucified upon the cross. As you gaze at the place where the Mother of God stood, your tears begin to flow, whether by your will or no, and you see before you how it was. O God, what a feat took place! And they took down the body and placed it below. What sadness is here, and what a weeping at the place where the body lay! O God, O God, what was the reason for it? O God, we shall sin no more: save us with Thy suffering.
And they, who had never ever been to the Holy Land, would see it through his eyes. And a few years later, as they were preparing for their own Golgotha, they would remember those stories of his.
And so, the semi-literate Rasputin could not have written so much. And Lokhtina says not a word about working on the book. And, anyway, the didactic text she transcribed is too different from this inspired one. And how much does this text resemble the remarkable ‘Life of an Experienced Wanderer’. Rasputin would seem to have had the same co-author in both texts. Someone capable of putting the hypnotic force of his words down on paper. Filippov gives a hint of the co-author’s identity. He testified in the File that ‘the proofs were corrected by the empress.’
Of course! The proofs were corrected by the same person who had written down the words. Only the tsarina with her brilliant literary gift (read her letters!) could have conveyed what Rasputin told them in just that way. Although she did not work alone, I think. But with her inseparable Friend, who adored writing, too. For the tsarina, that work was contact with the mystical, with what was hidden. For the Friend, it was something that bound her ever more tightly to Alix.
The Great Minister’s Fall
But even after his return, Our Friend was unable to live in peace.
The newspaper articles continued. One can imagine what that semi-literate peasant felt upon seeing himself vilified in the newspapers. And once again he dictated to ‘Mama’ for the notebook his teachings about those who had suffered for the truth.
Alix was furious. And at the end of 1910 the tsar had written Stolypin a brusque note demanding that he put a end to the newspaper campaign against Rasputin. But Stolypin simply ignored the note and the vilification of Rasputin in the press continued. The prime minister was in fact mounting a resolute attack of his own. Even though his attempt at organizing official surveillance of Rasputin had been countermanded, his agents were still at work. Information was still being collected.
And at the beginning of autumn 1911 the prime minister set off to see the tsar with his report.
There is in the File very important testimony by Sazonov about the episode:
His struggle with Stolypin was very interesting, as I shall relate from what Rasputin himself told me. Stolypin demanded that the tsar have Rasputin sent away. He brought along for his report Rasputin’s file from the Department of Police and communicated everything known to him of a compromising character … including that he, Rasputin, had been going to the bathhouses with women, to the great temptation of society. To which the tsar had answered, ‘I know, and he preaches Holy Scripture there’ … And after the report, he ordered Stolypin to clear out and tossed the report itself in the fireplace … That is why a month before Stolypin’s murder I knew … his fate was sealed. Compare that with little things like the fact that Stolypin was not assigned more or less decent and comfortable quarters for the Kiev festivities, that he wasn’t given an automobile, and so on.
Stolypin was deposed not by the Duma, and not by the rightists or the leftists. That mightiest of prime ministers was brought down by his attack on the peasant.
And Stolypin began to ‘die a political death’. Now Alix conducted a ruthless campaign against the enemy of Our Friend. And soon afterwards Rasputin spoke or, more accurately, gave voice to her thought. ‘Rasputin said of Stolypin … that he had seized too much power,’ Vyrubova testified.
The peasant knew: the weak tsar did not forgive accusations of weakness. The dread prime minister was still carrying out his duties when a rumour began circulating that he would be reassigned as governor-general of the Caucasus. As his constant rival Count Witte enjoyed noting in his memoirs.
It was then that Rasputin engaged his friend Sazonov in a conversation that stunned the journalist and publisher. And soon afterwards a remarkable expedition — the peasant and his friend Sazonov — set out for Nizhny Novgorod.
Ten Days Before The Murder
The post of minister of internal affairs was a key one in the government. And the prime minister usually tried to obtain the post for himself. As one of the tsarist ministers would later put it, ‘A prime minister without that post is like a cat without his balls.’ That is why Prime Minister Stolypin was also minister of internal affairs.
And what must have been the amazement of Rasputin’s friend Sazonov when the peasant told him that he had received a new assignment from the ‘tsars’ — to find another minister of internal affairs to replace Stolypin! And Rasputin suggested to the quite startled Sazonov that he think about who the best person for the position might be. And Sazonov, overcoming his fear and amazement, evidently did think about it. Because the candidacy that was soon afterwards discussed in Tsarskoe Selo was that of the Nizhny Novgorod governor Alexei Khvostov, whose father was a close friend of Sazonov’s. Thus the expedition to Nizhny Novgorod.
The evidence remains in the File.
From the testimony of Sazonov: ‘Rasputin, carrying out the sovereign’s commission, went to Nizhny, where at the time Khvostov was governor. I went with Rasputin at his request as an old friend of Khvostov’s father’s.’
Alexei Nikolaevich Khvostov was very tall and very stout (Rasputin would later on give him the nickname ‘Fat Belly’) and still young, just thirty-nine. He was the nephew of the tsarist minister of justice, Nikolai Khvostov, had come from a family of wealthy landowners, and was known for his extreme right-wing views.
But Khvostov met the visitors in a most unexpected way.
From Sazonov’s testimony: ‘He greeted me, as an old family friend, with courtesy, but he received Rasputin very coolly and was clearly surprised by our visit. He did not even invite us…to stay for dinner. We saw him between trains.’
Khvostov describes the event more vividly in the File:
Ten days before Stolypin’s murder, Georgy Petrovich Sazonov, an old acquaintance of my father’s, came to visit me along with Grigory Rasputin, whom I had never seen before, in Nizhny Novgorod, where I was governor … Sazonov, clearly not wanting to disturb our conversation, remained in the parlour. Rasputin was with me in my study. Rasputin spoke of his closeness to the tsar…and of having been sent by the tsar to ‘look into my soul’, and he finished by offering me the post of minister of internal affairs.
Khvostov naturally told him that ‘the position is already occupied’.
‘Rasputin answered, however, that Stolypin would nonetheless be leaving …It all seemed so strange and peculiar to me that I attributed no significance to Rasputin’s conversation with me and spoke to him in a half-facetious tone. And he left angry. I didn’t invite him to dine and refused to introduce him to
my family, even though he asked me to.’
It would be surprising if it had not seemed strange to Khvostov. The prime minister and minister of internal affairs was the mighty Stolypin. And suddenly that strange pair arrives: Sazonov, an acquaintance of his father’s and merely one publisher among many, and an uncouth, semi-literate peasant about whom incredible rumours have been circulating. And they start talking to him in all seriousness about the removal of Stolypin himself! Khvostov, like many another ‘serious person’, was unaware at the time of the peasant’s actual position at court. And he could not believe that the tsar would entrust the fate of that all-powerful post to that pair. It all looked absolutely fantastic to him. And beginning to suspect that it was just some court game, Khvostov preferred to politely show the strange emissaries the door. Although he did ask police agents to follow them. After which Khvostov ‘received from the local office a copy of a telegram that Rasputin had sent to Vyrubova that read approximately, “Though God rests easy with him, that is not enough for it.”‘ And deciding that it was indeed a court intrigue of the tsarina’s Friend, Khvostov let it go at that. But what must have been his astonishment, if not horror, when ten days later Stolypin was murdered. And how sinister Rasputin’s words that ‘Stolypin will nonetheless be leaving’ must have seemed to him then.
The Prime Minister’s Mysterious Death
From the diary of KR: ‘3 September … We were horrified to learn that the day before yesterday in Kiev … Stolypin was wounded by several revolver shots.’
Stolypin was killed thanks to several very odd blunders by the secret police.
A monument to Nicholas’s grandfather Tsar Alexander II, the serfs’ emancipator, was to be unveiled in Kiev on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of serfdom. The tsar came for the festivities, along with the grand dukes and Prime Minister Stolypin. And on the eve of the festivities, a certain Dmitry Bogrov appeared at the local offices of the security branch. He was a revolutionary terrorist who had been recruited by the royal security service but who had not had any contact with it for several years. And now Bogrov suddenly turned up with information that an attempt on Stolypin’s life was in the offing. The attempt was evidently going to take place in the Kiev Opera Theatre at the gala performance. And Kurlov the chief of the gendarme corps (political police), Spiridovich the head of palace security, and Kulyabko the chief of the Kiev security office, were all of a sudden strangely trusting. They did not even arrange for surveillance of Bogrov. And not only did they let him into the theatre, they let him in with a revolver!
The tsar left his box seat for the second intermission. Stolypin was standing by a wall with his back to the orchestra and was talking to the court minister Fredericks. He was approached by a young man whose coat-tails stood out among the endless bureaucratic and military uniforms. It was Bogrov. He calmly drew his revolver and shot twice. Stolypin managed to turn towards the empty royal box and bless it with a sign of the cross.
He was carried out to the lobby. Two days later he died.
With their previous experience of murders in which the right-wing and the secret police had, by the hands of agents-provocateurs, culled unwanted tsarist officials, the Duma immediately started speaking of provocation. The monarchist Shulgin made a speech directly accusing the secret police: ‘We have in recent times had a whole series of analogous killings of Russian dignitaries with the collusion of officials of the political police… Stolypin, who, according to Prince Meschersky, had said that “a secret police agent will kill me”…perished at the hand of a police agent with the collaboration of the highest security officials.’
A Senate investigation into the actions of Kurlov and Spiridovich was about to begin. But someone apparently got nervous about it. Pressure was applied to the tsar, and at his command the case was closed.
Rasputin And The Assassination
Rasputin was in Kiev on the day of the murder. He later wrote a virtual ode about the Kiev festivities. But his bombastic eulogy was hardly noticed by anyone. Then the news quickly began to spread of his meeting with Khvostov on the eve of the murder and his prediction of the prime minister’s imminent departure. There was even a rumour that Rasputin had directly foretold Stolypin’s impending death. And in his book Iliodor quotes words allegedly belonging to Rasputin: ‘You see, I foretold Stolypin’s death seven days before it happened.’
This is what people were beginning to talk about in Petersburg parlours. So that Rasputin’s name was at once connected to Stolypin’s murder. The rumours apparently made a strong impression on Sazonov, too. He was frightened that Rasputin, and hence he himself, would be drawn into a dangerous game. Stolypin’s murder showed how such games ended. ‘I started to distance myself from him when I saw that he was beginning to acquire influence over supreme questions of government,’ Sazonov testified in the File.
The Extraordinary Commission took a special interest in the rumours that Rasputin had somehow been linked to Stolypin’s death. And in that regard they interrogated the future head of Rasputin’s own bodyguard, Colonel Komissarov. But they found no evidence.
Had Rasputin really predicted not only Stolypin’s departure (an easy thing for him to do, since he knew the intentions of Tsarskoe Selo) but also his death? If he really had predicted his death, he need not have been a prophet to do so. It could have been connected to the appearance nearby of one of the most mysterious personalities of the day, Pyotr Badmaev, the doctor of Tibetan medicine.
A Very ‘Cunning Chinaman’
The sixty-year-old Badmaev bore the titles of actual state councillor and doctor of Tibetan medicine. He was a Buryat from a distinguished family of Asiatic descent who grew up on the Siberian steppe, where he had roamed with the family’s enormous herds. At the time his brother had a flourishing Tibetan pharmacy in Petersburg and practised Tibetan medicine. And Badmaev set off for Petersburg, too. There he converted to Orthodoxy and acquired an important godfather: he was baptized by Tsar Alexander III.
Badmaev testified before the Extraordinary Commission: ‘I completed the course of study at the Academy of Military Medicine … but by my own choice did not take a degree, so as to have the right to practise according to the principles of Tibetan medicine. And then I started practising in the highest circles of society.’ He treated all illnesses — neurasthenia, pulmonary diseases, venereal diseases — by means of Tibetan herbs, but his chief claim was in restoring masculine potency.
The monarchist Purishkevich subsequently quoted some words about Badmaev that supposedly came from Rasputin: ‘He has two infusions: you drink a little glass of one, and your cock gets hard; but there’s still the other: you drink a really tiny glass of it, and it makes you good-natured and kind of stupid, and you don’t care about anything.’ And in Petersburg they believed in that.
Afterwards the rumour would circulate that Rasputin had drugged the tsar with those herbs of Badmaev’s in order to make him ‘good-natured and kind of stupid’.
In any case, Badmaev treated high society: the former Prime Minister Witte; the metropolitans of Kiev and Moscow; Alexander Protopopov, the Deputy Speaker of the State Duma; and so on. The ‘cunning Chinaman’, Rasputin would call Badmaev. For in addition to medicine, Badmaev had another absorbing occupation: he was an entrepreneur, a businessman.
He dreamed of Russia’s capture of Mongolia and Tibet. And he showered the royal chancery with endless projects. He founded a trading company, Badmaev & Ko (his trading partner), leased land from the Tartars and Mongols, established a huge livestock-breeding farm, and bought numerous camels. He dreamed the farm would become a bridgehead for penetrating first Mongolia and then Tibet. He petitioned the tsar for subsidies to support his grandiose plans, but to no avail. In the end he was ruined and had to liquidate his farm. But he had information, passed down from generation to generation in his Buryat family, about Trans-Baikal gold. And in 1909 he founded the First Trans-Baikal Mining and Industrial Association for the exploitation of gold deposits.
But Stolypin, to Badmaev’s great displeasure, had remained cool about these dealings. Badmaev then got one of his secret patients involved in his business — Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich. But after the episode of Kirill’s marriage, the sons of Vladimir were unpopular in the royal family. And again state subsidies were not forthcoming. Badmaev needed a lot of money and he attempted to put right his relations with Tsarskoe Selo by himself. And, as he testifies in the File, he sent ‘herbal medicine’ for treatment of the heir. But the powders ‘were returned with thanks’. He had been shown the door.
There was only one person left who could help him — Rasputin. And Badmaev made his first steps towards closer relations with Grigory.
One of Badmaev’s patients at the time was Lieutenant General Kurlov, chief of the gendarme corps and the person most suspected of engineering Stolypin’s murder. And if the assassination really was arranged, then the ‘cunning Chinaman’ might have received from his grateful patient a hint of the impending demise of Stolypin, so disliked by Badmaev. And then, in striking up an acquaintance with Rasputin, that master of intrigue could, as evidence of his potential, have brought that information to Rasputin, that hint about the end of Stolypin. Who, as everyone knew, was a mortal enemy of Father Grigory.
And Rasputin could have predicted to the tsarina, with her constant craving for his predictions, that the disliked prime minister would soon perish. As divine retribution.
The Rasputin File Page 20