It seemed to the naive Rodzyanko that the tsar regretted having done so. He did not understand that the tsar was trying to say that Rodzyanko was not telling him anything new, that he had heard it all before. The tsar could only snort to himself. He knew there had been no ‘rejoicings’ whatever at Sazonov’s apartment, that the general’s wife L. was Lokhtina, who only seemed to be mad because she had left the world of vanity behind and chosen a new life, and that there was no firm evidence in the Tobolsk file that Rasputin was a Khlyst.
And the tsar suggested to Rodzyanko that he obtain the Tobolsk file from the Synod and study it. Rodzyanko was happy: it seemed to him that he had won. After which the tsar presented him to the heir. Rodzyanko playfully introduced himself to the boy as ‘the largest, fattest man in Russia’. And the boy, ‘that remarkably sweet child’, told him how he was collecting money for charitable causes, how ‘he had stood all day with a cup and had collected a whole fifty roubles’.
The fat man decided he had been shown the child as a mark of the highest trust.
But the tsar had really shown him the heir so that he would understand that the boy’s soul was pure. Because Our Friend had taught him to love and serve his neighbours.
Rodzyanko enthusiastically got started on his inquiry the very next day. ‘I had been instructed to obtain the file from the Most Holy Synod, to examine it, and then to report my opinion of Rasputin. Damansky, the deputy chief procurator, brought me the file.’
Damansky, a pitiful Synod clerk and son of a Siberian clergyman, had become Rasputin’s friend and been another of his opponents at the Synod. Rasputin had stayed with him at his home, so Sabler was forced to take on Damansky as deputy chief-procurator.
So Alix immediately learned from Damansky that Rodzyanko had been given the Tobolsk file. And it worried her. There was no direct evidence whatever, but she understood how Rasputin’s enemies could use the indirect kind.
And as Rodzyanko recalled, Damansky
telephoned me the next day and asked me to receive him. As soon as he arrived he announced, ‘I’ve come to ask you to give me back the secret file on Rasputin.’
‘Is it by imperial order?’
‘No, but a very highly placed person makes this request. The empress.’
‘Please convey to the empress that she is as much a servant of the tsar, her husband, as I am.’
‘Your excellency, I have brought with me the religious instructor of the emperor’s children.’
This turned out to be the archpriest Vasiliev. He started telling me, ‘You have no idea what an excellent person Rasputin is …’ I flew into a rage. ‘You have come here to praise a debauched scoundrel and Khlyst! Get out of my office!’
But the Duma’s resolution of inquiry had only been the start of Guchkov’s game. And on 9 March 1912, an incisive continuation followed. When the matter of the Synod’s budget came up, Guchkov rose to his feet. He gave the celebrated speech against Rasputin with which any account of the dynasty’s fall ought to begin.
The Clock Of Revolution Had Begun To Tick
He spoke of the tragedy that had befallen the country. ‘At its centre is an enigmatic, tragicomic figure, a kind of ghost or relic of age-old ignorance.’
Stolypin, the rock that had shored up the dynasty, was no more. And that is why that speech rang out, and with it Guchkov’s audacious question, one that would have been inconceivable a year earlier when Stolypin was still alive: ‘By what avenues has this man achieved his central position? By having seized such influence that even the supreme bearers of state and church power bow down before it!…Just think who is lording it at the summit!’
The tsar was in a fury; he had been denigrated in relation to Alix. As Guchkov later told the Extraordinary Commission, ‘It was conveyed to me by one of the ministers that the emperor had declared, “Hanging Guchkov would not be good enough!” I replied, “My life belongs to my sovereign, but my conscience does not, and I shall continue to struggle.”’
And then Badmaev, as the File makes clear, deftly made a play to the other side. In case the source of Guchkov’s information came to light in Tsarskoe Selo.
From Badmaev’s testimony: ‘I sent a telegram to Rodzyanko: “What are you gentlemen in the Duma doing? Can one actually rely on the evidence of the aggrieved Iliodor?” Rodzyanko answered that he himself was troubled, and that Guchkov had given his speech impromptu, without warning anyone.’
Rodzyanko was troubled because now the tsar’s pride had been wounded, had been insulted. Now it would be impossible to talk to him about Rasputin at all.
After Guchkov’s speech, Felix’s mother, Zinaida Yusupova, tried at the request of her friend Ella — the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna — to talk to the tsarina about Rasputin. Her ‘Crimean estate neighbour’ retorted that ‘Guchkov and Rodzyanko ought to be hanged.’
Rodzyanko had by then finished preparing his report for the tsar on the Tobolsk file, wherein, naturally, he triumphantly stated that Rasputin’s guilt was proved. The tsar returned to Prime Minister Kokovtsev Rodzyanko’s request for an audience with the instruction, ‘The Duma’s behaviour is deeply disgraceful. I do not wish to receive Rodzyanko.’ As he was leaving for the south, the tsar told Kokovtsev, ‘I am simply suffocating in this atmosphere of gossip, falsehood, and malice. I shall try to postpone my return from the Crimea as long as possible.’
Ahead was his train and the white palace in Livadia.
From Bogdanovich’s diary for 14 March: ‘The entire royal family is leaving for the Crimea tomorrow, and Rasputin is to go with them. It is sad to write what sort of taste the tsarina must have if she tolerates that Khlyst.’
The empress walked across the railway platform without saying goodbye to those who had come to see off the royal family. The tsar was sombre. He was very tired of the whole story.
Rasputin had in fact been summoned from Pokrovskoe to the Crimea. But Alix had not done this herself. Her Friend had sent Rasputin a telegram in code without a signature. Alix had proved to them that the Russian tsarina’s will was greater than the dishonest judgments of society.
A Blessing On Madness
Prior to his summons, the peasant had been living the slow life of the village in Pokrovskoe. But that life was destroyed by the arrival of the insane general’s wife. Lokhtina had walked to Pokrovskoe barefoot, living on alms. The former Petersburg arbiter of fashion was frightfully dressed in a strange shapeless white garment hung with ribbons and little icons. Followed by the villagers’ astonished gazes, she walked through the village, shouting ‘Christ is risen!’ Even though Easter was still a good way off.
The story of her ‘madness’ had survived in the File.
The previous year, 1911, Lokhtina, driven out of her family, had gone to Tsaritsyn.
From the testimony of Maria Golovina:
She returned barefoot from Tsaritsyn dressed in a white nun’s habit. It was then that I made the acquaintance of Iliodor, who expressed the view that Lokhtina had reached such lofty heights in her spiritual life that she could be blessed as a holy fool (that is, as someone who feigns madness in Christ’s name). Iliodor even wanted in that regard to conduct a prayer service in our home to bless Lokhtina as a holy fool. But my mother was categorically opposed to it. Nevertheless, Lokhtina, on hearing that opinion of Iliodor’s, abruptly changed her behaviour and started to act like a holy fool … They not only stopped letting her into her apartment in Petersburg but also onto her own estate in the Kazan province that she had conveyed to her daughter as a gift…She lived exclusively by alms.
Now Lokhtina lived like some Russian King Lear in a skirt. The newspapers wrote a great deal about Rasputin’s having driven the unhappy general’s wife out of her mind. As Golovina later testified, ‘Lokhtina’s behaviour raised the fear that she might hurt Father Grigory.’ And Rasputin forbade her to act like a holy fool. Lokhtina obeyed him. But Father Grigory’s main struggle was with her constant shouting that ‘Christ is risen.’ But she continued to shout it. He became
so angry about the shout that it was as if he were afraid of something. And he would mercilessly beat her for it.
Yet during all this the mad general’s wife continued to retain a kind of strange power over the peasant. And not only over him, but also over Vyrubova and even over the ‘tsars’, to whom she would occasionally dare to send sharp or even wrathful telegrams. Moreover, Munya Golovina would respectfully kiss her hand.
It was at the beginning of March 1912 that Lokhtina came to visit Rasputin in his beloved Pokrovskoe. After again driving Rasputin into a rage with her customary ‘Christ is risen,’ she presented herself to him at his lodge. But this time the cruellest of blows was waiting for the general’s wife in Pokrovskoe. She learned of something irreparable — the rupture between Iliodor and Rasputin. ‘Christ’ and the ‘Lord of hosts’ had become enemies. Her universe was destroyed. ‘Lokhtina, who worshipped both Iliodor and Rasputin, tried to reconcile them, but she failed to do so, and it had a grave effect on her mental balance,’ Munya testified in the File. It was on this visit that she became a victim of the break between them.
Rasputin’s Angry Wife?
It happened in the middle of the day. The bizarre episode played itself out in front of Rasputin’s astonished fellow villagers. They saw his wife drag the ‘Petersburg lady’ by the hair through the gate of the Rasputin house out onto the street. And right there on the street start beating the former Petersburg lioness.
And the beaten general’s wife trudged down the street away from Rasputin’s lodge.
It is from this episode that the famous legends about Rasputin’s jealous wife derive, a wife who pulled ladies from her husband’s bed and dragged them by the hair from her home. And that is how the simple villagers, who were not initiated into the secret world that began behind the gates of the Rasputin home, would have had to report it to the newspaper people. That version was also believed by the investigator of the Extraordinary Commission, with his biased interrogation of Lokhtina about her fight with Rasputin’s wife ‘out of jealousy’.
And in the File, Olga Lokhtina explained to the naive investigator that ‘as far as jealousy is concerned, Rasputin’s wife really was jealous of me (if it may be called jealousy) but not in regard to her husband but to Iliodor, whom I revered…As for a fight, there was one,’ Lokhtina acknowledged and then explained.
Cast Out Of Heaven
Once when Rasputin and his family were visiting the home of a fellow villager, I dropped by the other person’s lodge, and discovering there the great poverty of the hosts, started pleading with Father Grigory to give me a cow. I should say that when I get an idea into my head…I don’t give up until what I have what I want. This took place in the presence of some recently arrived visitor, and I reproached Rasputin’s wife for her stinginess [not Rasputin himself but his wife; he was above ordinary life and could only be asked about the eternal] … After Rasputin’s visitor left, she started accusing me of denouncing her in front of an outsider, and grabbed me by the hair…and struck me.
But the simple investigator was disinclined to believe her. He did not understand that the special relations between Rasputin’s wife and his devotees precluded jealousy.
Those relations are in fact described in the testimony given before the Extraordinary Commission by the government official B. Alexeev, one of Rasputin’s devotees. During a visit by Alexeev and his wife to Pokrovskoe, the two wives were walking through the house. And they came upon a risque scene involving Father Grigory. Alexeev’s wife ‘gasped and turned away. And then Rasputin’s wife explained, “Each must bear his cross, and that is his.”’ So that Lokhtina was telling the truth: jealousy had no place here. But she too had failed to grasp the reason for the behaviour of Rasputin’s wife. A Russian peasant woman could not, of course, give away a cow. And an accusation of stinginess in that regard would have seemed merely ridiculous to her. She beat Lokhtina for quite a different reason. The idea that Lokhtina herself subsequently recounted to the investigator, that she had ‘decided to remain true to both of them, to both Rasputin and to Iliodor’, apparently frightened Rasputin. He must have been concerned that the crafty Iliodor was using the mad general’s wife as a spy. She needed to be got out of Pokrovskoe. And that is why it was necessary for Rasputin’s wife to find a pretext to fight with Lokhtina, in order to drive her out of the Rasputin home. And that is what she did.
After the quarrel with Rasputin’s wife, Lokhtina ‘went from them to Florischev Pustyn’, the monastery to which Iliodor had been exiled. ‘I was not allowed to see Iliodor, and all I could do was shout in his vestibule that I had come … Then they sent me away, and a report was filed that I had been suffering from an attack of madness.’
But she would not submit. She was not accepted at home. The paths to Rasputin and Iliodor had been closed. So she decided to find a place at least a little closer to her former heaven. She decided to live near the monk Makary, the spiritual father of the ‘Lord of hosts’, at Rasputin’s favourite monastery. ‘I went to Verkhoturye to see Father Makary … The elder’s cell was undergoing repair, and I was placed in a small storage room, across the door of which the elder put a board with a rock leaning against it. I was fed once a day, receiving whatever food was left over from Father Makary.’
But the monks did not understand her impulse and demanded the woman’s departure from their male cloister. However when Lokhtina had decided on something, it was impossible to change her mind. Then ‘the police came and presented a writ requiring me to leave. I replied that I would not do so voluntarily …But I had to go, since the monks… attacked [Father Makary] and beat him. I sent a telegram to the sovereign about it: “I ask you to defend Father Makary … whom you do not know.”’ And the sovereign defended him. The monks were punished, and the cell of Rasputin’s spiritual father was quickly repaired. And a small addition was made to Makary’s cell so that the mad general’s wife could live near him.
But the investigator was apparently dissatisfied with Lokhtina’s story. He still did not believe the innocent reasons for her fight with the peasant’s wife. And he kept returning to her relations with Rasputin. But she was evasive and obscure about those relations, as was appropriate with people uninitiated into the teaching of the ‘Lord of hosts’: ‘Passions were remote from me whenever I was near Father Grigory.’ And she added, ‘a poor tree may not yield good fruit. And if that is true, then how do you explain that Rasputin’s devotees, both men and women, abandoned luxury and a life contrary to the Gospels and never again returned to their former paths? I speak of the true devotees who followed his precepts.’
His true devotees were those who followed his precepts, or, more accurately, who practised his teachings. Only they understood the meaning of what went on in his house.
A Summer With The Tsars
After receiving the telegram from Vyrubova, summoning him to Livadia, Our Friend left Pokrovskoe at once.
From the agents’ report: ‘10 March. Rasputin boarded a train returning to Petersburg.’ And from Petersburg he set off after the ‘tsars’ to the Crimea.
The tsar’s sisters, Olga and Xenia, had left for the Crimea along with his immediate family. During the trip the two grand duchesses started talking about Rasputin.
‘10 March. On the train Olga told us about a conversation she had had with [Alix]. She had for the first time told her that the poor little one had that awful disease, and that she herself was sick because of it and would never completely get over it … Of Grigory, she said how could she not believe in him when she saw how the little one got better whenever he was near him or praying for him,’ Xenia wrote in her diary. And she added, ‘My goodness, how terrible it all is and how one pities them!’
When Rasputin arrived in the Crimea, Alix declared that ‘she had not known anything about it.’ But as Xenia wrote in her diary, ‘she was pleased and is reported to have said, “He can always tell when I need him.”‘ And, as usual, Nicky had to resign himself.
Rasputin stayed in
Yalta, from where he was driven to Livadia by car. He was brought to the palace in secret, without being entered in the lobby register. But whenever the royal car passed through the city, and the peasant with the unkempt beard gazed pompously through its open window, the whole city knew: he was being taken to the tsarina. And the palace guard who allowed the royal car to pass through the gate also saw who was being taken to the palace. All the more so, since Our Friend proudly stuck his head out the window, not wishing to hide.
All this time the newspapers had been blaring about Rasputin. Only the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, and the drowning of the great vessel’s unlucky passengers in icy water beneath a clear, star-filled sky, managed to push aside for a little while news of the peasant in the palace. But in May 1912 the names of the participants in the Rasputin story once again began to flash across the front pages.
In May 1912 Iliodor resigned his holy orders as a sign of protest. On 8 May 1912, he submitted to the Synod the request (although it was more like an ultimatum), that it bring ‘Rasputin to trial for the terrible crimes he has committed on religious grounds, or divest me of my holy orders. I cannot be reconciled to the fact that the Synod, the bearer of the grace of the Holy Spirit, is sheltering a ‘holy devil’ who has cursed Christ’s Church … I will not be reconciled to the profanation of what belongs to the Lord!’
And again the papers were full of noise about Rasputin.
It was then that a manuscript Rasputin had once prepared with Lokhtina was published by his friend Damansky, the deputy chief procurator. And Alix could once more read in it an abundance of words about unjust persecution, the lasting fate of the righteous. ‘I endure terrible smears. It is awful what they write. O God! grant me patience and close up the mouths of mine enemies! … Comfort Thy own, O God! Grant me Thy example.’ He repeated all this to the tsarina, and asked her permission to leave the Crimea and go home. But he knew that she would not let him. And she did not let him. He could rest easy.
The Rasputin File Page 24