The Rasputin File

by Edvard Radzinsky

  The Paradox Of The Dead Man

  Stolypin’s death is a watershed in Rasputin’s biography.

  Before it, Rasputin was a secret, the subject of obscure rumours and vague newspaper articles. And ‘serious people’ simply dismissed as cock-and-bull the stories about the enormous influence at court of some peasant. The governor of Moscow Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, for example. His sister Evdokia was a maid of honour and a friend of Tyutcheva’s, and she hated Rasputin. Naturally, she told her brother about the situation at court, but he did not believe her. Especially since, with the rank of aide-de-camp, he himself visited the capital for duty at court, was invited to tea with the sovereign, and met the courtiers. As he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I considered all those rumours to be the invention of the newspapers and ascribed no meaning to them … I was indignant whenever his name was linked to those of the sovereign and the empress.’

  But with Stolypin’s murder, Dzhunkovsky started to take an interest in Rasputin’s activities. So the assassination of Stolypin, of the person who had been defeated by the obscure peasant, compelled ‘serious people’ to take a closer look at that peasant.

  The senator Vladimir Nikolaevich Kokovtsev, from an old gentry family, was made the new prime minister. Not a brilliant man but hard-working and honest. ‘And that is all,’ as Dzhunkovsky wrote of him.

  ‘Stolypin died in order to cede his position to you,’ Alix told him, meaning, ‘to you as someone who is presumably able to listen to the voice of the man of God and not persecute him’.

  It seemed that the most serious threat to Grigory had passed with Stolypin’s death. But Alix would soon grasp a paradox. The death of the mighty prime minister had proved not a deliverance but exactly the opposite. When he died something irreparable happened: fear passed out of the aristocratic system. And without fear it could not work. No, it was not for nothing that the dying Stolypin had made the sign of the cross at the royal box. The weak Nicholas and the pitiful ministers were now left one-to-one against the Duma. And the peasant, whom it had already become fashionable to hate, was defenceless in the absence of fear. The murdered prime minister had taken vengeance from beyond the grave.

  The first to be emboldened by Stolypin’s absence were the hierarchs.

  The Prophets’ Brawl

  Feofan was remote from the world and capable only of writing vain appeals to the tsar or asking his friends to expose Rasputin, but Hermogen knew how to act. Upon arriving in Petersburg for a meeting of the Synod, he understood that the time had come to put an end to Rasputin. The pitiful Kokovtsev did not scare him. And Sabler, the chief procurator of the Synod, compromised by rumours of his link to Rasputin, did not scare him either.

  Well understanding who was in charge in the royal family, Hermogen knew there was no point in appealing to the tsar. He therefore decided to break Grigory himself— to denounce him and force him to leave the court voluntarily. And if Grigory did not agree, then Iliodor had prepared a lampoon called ‘Grishka’. The letters that Iliodor had stolen from Rasputin were quoted, including a letter from the tsarina, a secret weapon that made both Iliodor and Hermogen confident that it was all over with yesterday’s friend.

  And then came 16 December, the day of denunciation.

  The participants had all gathered by eleven o’clock ahead of Rasputin’s arrival. To Hermogen’s quarters at the Yaroslav Monastery had come Mitya Kozelsky, in whom the tsarina had put such faith before Rasputin. Mitya was tall and scrawny with a withered arm and dressed in shabby but clean peasant clothes. Ivan Rodyonov was there, too, a publicist with close ties to the Union of the Russian People and an admirer of Iliodor’s who had helped him write the ‘Grishka’ lampoon. Iliodor himself, whom Rasputin continued to regard as his friend, was to bring Grigory to them at eleven.

  Iliodor had gone to get the elder: ‘Rasputin greeted me very affectionately. I invited him to come with me to Hermogen’s … “He’s expecting you.” And he said to me, “Well, go on and take me, then … as soon as you can, I want to see him.”’ They got in a cab and set off. It is amazing, but that intuitive person sensed nothing. Just as he would later sense nothing when he was taken to be killed. Evidently, he had complete faith in Iliodor. And that faith had turned off his wild beast’s senses. His exposed nerve endings went to sleep and he became an ordinary simple-hearted peasant. Along the way Grigory talked with naive awe about the opulence of the tsar’s new palace in Livadia. And about how ‘Papa himself showed me around the palace … and then we came out onto a porch and gazed at the sky for a long time.’ Finally, they arrived. The players in the drama were eager to begin. As Rasputin and Iliodor were taking off their coats in the hallway, Iliodor sarcastically said to Rodyonov, ‘Take a look at his elder’s rags, Ivan Alexandrovich!’ Rodyonov said, ‘Oh-ho! The hat’s worth at least three hundred roubles, and the fur coat would cost around two thousand here. Truly ascetic apparel!’ Only then did Rasputin grasp that something was amiss. But it was too late.

  Iliodor wrote:

  The historic moment had arrived. Hermogen, I, and all the witnesses had gathered in the front room. The ‘elder’ sat down on the large sofa. Mitya, limping and waving his withered arm, paced back and forth near Grigory … All were silent … And then something… happened that was improbable, ridiculous, but at the same time terrifying. Mitya cried out savagely, ‘Ah, ah, ah, you are a Godless person, you have done wrong to many mamas! You have offended many nurses! You are sleeping with the tsarina! You are a scoundrel!’ and he began to grab at the ‘elder’. Rasputin started to back toward the doorway. But Mitya, poking him in the chest with his finger, started yelling even louder and more insistently, ‘You are sleeping with the tsarina! You are an Antichrist!’ And then Hermogen, who was dressed in his bishop’s robes, took his cross in his hand and said, ‘Grigory, come over here!’ Rasputin, his whole body trembling, approached the table, pale, hunched over, and frightened.

  And then came the finale, as described by Iliodor.

  Hermogen took hold of the head of the ‘elder’ with his left hand, with his right started beating him on the head with the cross and shouting in a terrifying voice, ‘Devil! I forbid you in God’s name to touch the female sex. Brigand! I forbid you to enter the royal household and to have anything to do with the tsarina! As a mother brings forth the child in the cradle, so the holy Church through its prayers, blessings, and heroic feats has nursed that great and sacred thing of the people, the autocratic rule of the tsars. And now you, scum, are destroying it, you are smashing our holy vessels, the bearers of autocratic power…Fear God, fear His life-giving cross!’

  And then Rodyonov, unsheathing the sabre he had brought with him, led the utterly flummoxed Rasputin over to the cross. And they demanded that he swear to leave the palace. And Rasputin swore. The planned performance had come to a successful end. As a pitiful little peasant of the kind he had once been in Pokrovskoe, Rasputin emerged, or, more accurately, ran from the bishop’s quarters. And was glad that he had done so in one piece and unharmed. Since he believed that the nobleman Rodyonov was quite capable of hacking him to death with his sabre. A constant peasant fear.

  His oath on the cross had meant nothing, of course. He had his own relations with God that were unattainable to those well-fed princes of the church. And his God could forgive an oath on the cross that had been torn from him in terror at the threat of being killed. But he himself could not forgive his friend’s treachery. After all, he knew that Iliodor had betrayed not only him. But Hermogen, too. Because there was a secret thing that Iliodor had concealed from Hermogen and Feofan. Something that bound him tightly to Rasputin. And Iliodor’s treachery and the bishop’s violence impelled the enraged Rasputin to send a telegram to ‘Mama’ at once.

  ‘Upon leaving the Yaroslav Monastery… Rasputin went to a telegraph office and sent the tsars a telegram…,’ Iliodor wrote, ‘that was full of incredible slander … He wrote that Hermogen and I had allegedly wanted to take his life, to strangle him, in Hermogen’s qu
arters.’ There was no particular slander here: they had threatened him with a sabre and struck him on the head with a bronze cross.

  Thus 16 December came to a close, a special day in the life of that mystical person.

  On the same day five years later he would be killed.

  One can imagine Alix’s astonishment and fury when she received his telegram and later learned the details from Anya about how yesterday’s friends had attempted to take his life and deprive her and the heir of the help of the man of God.

  Meanwhile, Hermogen pressed on. He gave a thundering speech against the Khlysty at a meeting of the Synod. First, he assailed Russian literature — all those works by the fashionable writers of the day describing Khlyst practices. The Khlyst theme had by then also found its way into vulgar literature, where the writers Artsybashev and Kamensky had described scenes of Khlyst ‘rejoicing’ and ‘group sinning’. And Hermogen denounced the temptation posed by those writings, too. Then, finally, he turned to his main point, a denunciation of Grigory Rasputin, ‘charging him with Khlyst tendencies’. The Synod listened to him in fear. The hierarchs could guess how furious the tsarina would be. So it was only a minority who dared to support him. The majority, however, followed the chief procurator in expressing its dissatisfaction with the pastor’s interference in ‘things that were not of his concern’.

  But Hermogen did not relent. More than that, he even dared to say in private conversation that Grigory had committed adultery with the tsarina.

  And she found out about it all from Vyrubova. For her now, Hermogen and Iliodor were simply liars who for personal advantage had pretended to be friends and admirers of Father Grigory. And who had dared to accuse him, a friend of the royal family — Our Friend. And, most monstrous of all, they had dared, knowing her, to accuse her, as well! One may guess what she said to Nicky! And one may imagine his rage, the rage of the tsar!

  Another Prediction Of The Death Of The Tsars

  And the thunder crashed.

  The File, from the testimony of Victor Yatskevich, director of the chancery of the chief procurator of the Most Holy Synod: ‘During the Yuletide meeting [an unprecedented event in the life of the Synod] Hermogen received an order to return to his eparchy. He did not obey the order and, as I heard, asked by telegram for an audience with the tsar, indicating that he had an important matter to discuss, but was turned down.’

  That is how Iliodor describes it, too. He came to Petersburg to assist Hermogen. The monk wrote the telegram to the tsar at Hermogen’s dictation in the latter’s quarters at the Yaroslav Monastery.

  Hermogen was sitting next to me, and bitterly, bitterly sobbing, and I painstakingly wrote out, ‘Tsar Father! I have devoted my whole life to the service of the Church and the Throne. I have served zealously, sparing no effort. The sun of my life has long passed midday and my hair has turned white. And now in my declining years, like a criminal, I am being driven out of the capital in disgrace by you, the Sovereign. I am ready to go wherever it may please you, but before I do, grant me an audience, and I will reveal a secret to you.’

  A prompt reply to the telegram was received from Nicholas through the Synod: the tsar had no wish to know any secret. ‘Upon reading the answer, Hermogen started crying. And then he suddenly said, “They will kill the tsar, they will kill the tsar, they will surely kill him.”’

  Unlike the majority of such predictions, these words of Hermogen’s were published before the 1917 revolution, before the royal family perished.

  Hoping to avoid a scandal, Sabler tried to moderate the tsar’s rage. But, as he sadly informed Prime Minister Kokovtsev, the sympathies of Tsarskoe Selo were with Rasputin, on whom, in the tsar’s words, ‘they had fallen like robbers in the forest after first drawing their victim into a trap.’

  The denouement arrived. The Synod officially retired Hermogen in absentia to residence at the Zhirovets Monastery. The monk Iliodor was ordered into exile at Florischev Pustyn near the town of Gorbatov and forbidden to show himself in Tsaritsyn and Petersburg.

  And then an unprecedented thing happened. Hermogen and Iliodor refused to budge from Petersburg. In open defiance of the tsar. Moreover, they dared to begin speaking publicly. The mutinous pastors agreed to newspaper interviews, where they vilified Rasputin, the Synod, and Chief Procurator Sabler.

  It was then that Iliodor brought his main, secret weapon into play.

  The Secret Weapon

  And soon afterwards Vyrubova received from Grigory’s former friend a warning about the possible onset of a war: ‘Sister in Christ! How long, then, will you stand by Grigory? …If you do not abandon him, a tremendous scandal shall break out all over Russia. And then what a calamity there will be! Heed me. Fear God. Repent. Iliodor.’

  Vyrubova already knew what scandal the monk’s epistle was referring to. She had already heard about it: Iliodor had promised to publish a lampoon against Father Grigory which would include letters to Rasputin from the tsarina and the grand duchesses.

  Vyrubova invited Iliodor to come and see her.

  Iliodor arrived at Anya’s little house in Tsarskoe Selo. Waiting for him there was the entire little circle of the elder’s admirers: Vyrubova herself, her sister Sana, and her sister’s husband Alexander Pistolkors. The monk has described in his book the danger he felt. In the drawing room sat ‘Pistolkors…brave and cruel… [who], according to him, had during the [1905] revolution hanged by his own hands eighty-five Latvians in the Baltic region’. True, the monk does not also describe himself, a huge fellow with fists the size of large stones. The conversation was opened by Pistolkors. ‘Father Iliodor! What is this scandal you are threatening in your letter to Anyushka? And who is it that intends to make that scandal? Is it not you? It can be done; after all, the French revolution came about when the queen was slanderously accused of stealing some diamonds.’

  Pistolkors was alluding to 1785 and the famous matter of the ‘queen’s necklace’. An episode in which there had also figured letters from a queen — forged letters from Marie Antoinette. Pistolkors meant to say that the letters that Iliodor was threatening to publish were also fabricated. And he was reminding the monk how a similar falsehood had ended in France. It had destroyed the reputation of Marie Antoinette and brought the revolution closer, and with it the death of the queen, as well as of many who had originally conspired in the affair.

  But this time the queen’s letters were genuine.

  The conversation failed to produce the desired result. Iliodor had apparently gone in the hope that Vyrubova would ask for the letters and that he could then trade them for his and Hermogen’s right to remain in their former places. But Vyrubova could not have proposed such a thing, even if she had wanted to, since the tsarina would not have allowed her to yield to blackmail. And after hearing the monk out, Vyrubova remained silent. And that silence was a threatening one. Iliodor understood: there would be no trade. But he was not frightened. For behind him stood powerful people.

  Meanwhile, the letters to Rasputin from the tsarina and the grand duchesses were being disseminated throughout Petersburg.

  Only from the File has it at last become clear to whom the tsarina was obliged for that dissemination.

  The Tibetan Physician Again

  The File, the testimony of Badmaev: ‘I treated the holy fool Mitya Kozelsky for a pulmonary catarrh for about two years … Mitya impressed me as an intelligent religious peasant.’

  When the scandal broke, Badmaev, that dangerous man, immediately grasped how much might be derived from the situation. And at the height of the scandal he made friends through Mitya with Iliodor and Hermogen.

  At the time Hermogen and Iliodor had still made no move to leave the capital. Alix was in a rage. The minister of internal affairs was ordered to convey the obstreperous pastors to their places of exile under a political police escort. But the minister, A. A. Makarov, realized that this should not be attempted. The pastors’ arrest would immediately turn them into heroes in the eyes of society. And the
approaching session of the Duma already promised a great scandal. But Alix did not want to think about society. She wanted justice. As Marie Antoinette had once wanted it.

  Badmaev understood that his hour had come to rescue the hapless minister Makarov. And to spare Grigory future shocks. And everyone would be grateful to him.

  It was then that Iliodor suddenly vanished. To the joy and relief of the minister of internal affairs. Now the monk could be searched for and reports about the search be sent to the tsarina.

  What really happened was that Badmaev had suggested to Iliodor that he hide out at his dacha. And, as Badmaev testified in the File, ‘Iliodor came to me at night.’ At the same time Badmaev ‘provided Hermogen with a medical document certifying that he was suffering from an intestinal catarrh and that he would unavoidably have to remain in Petersburg for a while’. Both rebellious pastors now had complete faith in Badmaev. And he succeeded in reading what Petersburg had been whispering about.

  From Badmaev’s testimony in the File: ‘Hermogen read me a manuscript of Iliodor’s called “Grishka”.’ And he added the following: ‘On the basis of letters from the tsarina personally given to Iliodor by Rasputin, they were convinced that Rasputin was sleeping with the tsarina.’

  And Badmaev went into action.

  The ‘cunning Chinaman’ laid out the whole intrigue in the File. First he approached the government and offered to save the situation. He promised to persuade Iliodor and Hermogen ‘to set off for their places of exile without excesses’. And at the same time he extracted a promise from Minister of Internal Affairs Makarov ‘that Hermogen’s departure into exile would take place in dignity, without guards, in a special car’. Makarov, pleased, agreed at once. ‘And I took Hermogen to the station in my own motor car,’ Badmaev testified in the File. After which a grateful Hermogen wrote to Iliodor, ‘Go to Florischev Pustyn, and pay attention to what Pyotr Alexeevich tells you — he won’t do anything bad to you.’ And Iliodor, for whom Badmaev had arranged a separate compartment, also agreed to go into exile quietly, to Makarov’s delight. The government was now in Badmaev’s debt.