The Rasputin File

by Edvard Radzinsky

  At the beginning of May he returned to Petersburg.

  ‘Rasputin has again appeared on the stage,’ Bogdanovich recorded in her diary.

  That same month Rasputin went to Moscow. At the Nikolaev Station the agents recorded those people who came to see him off, the same people who usually did: ‘Owl’ (Laptinskaya), ‘Winter Woman’ and her daughter (the Golovins), and ‘Crow’ (Sazonova).

  The following encounter took place on the train.

  ‘You Want To Be A Governor? I Can Do That

  When a couple of weeks later a pointed article in his defence suddenly appeared amid the sea of anti-Rasputin articles, it produced a sensation.

  The author of the article, Alexey Filippov, was rich, had his own banking house, and edited a successful newspaper. He had besides a well-deserved reputation as a liberal: he had spent a year in the Peter and Paul Fortress for impermissible words about the authorities. Thereby fulfilling the sardonic words of a fashionable poet: ‘Here’s what: stand for the truth and you’ll end up sitting for it.’ Filippov was a friend of the maid of honour Sophia Tyutcheva, who had suffered because of Rasputin, and he therefore regarded the latter with repugnance. At least until that day in May when they met each other on the train.

  In 1917 Alexey Frolovich Filippov, aged forty-eight, was summoned before the Extraordinary Commission. And in the File, he related:

  In 1912 I went to the Trinity-St Sergius Abbey [a famous monastery near Moscow]. As … I was taking my seat on the train I noticed in the car a peasant of striking appearance dressed in a tight-fitting coat, a man with mystical eyes set deep in sockets whose orbits were surrounded by brown spots. He was accompanied by…a plump woman in black (who turned out to be his secretary Akilina Laptinskaya) …He was examining with childishly naive affection an immense new leather purse that had obviously just been given him by someone. I asked him, ‘Where did you get the purse?’ With that question began my acquaintance with Rasputin…Some sense told me that my new acquaintance was a sectarian, that he belonged to the Khlyst sect. He spoke picturesquely in aphorisms on the most varied topics … and I was especially struck by his deep faith in the Russian people and by his thoughtful rather than subservient attitude towards autocratic power. He stood for the unity of the tsar and the people without an intermediary bureaucracy … I was particularly sympathetic to him since I had recently… been sentenced to a year in the Fortress for daring to point out to a representative of the supreme authority that he did not understand the essence of autocracy…I therefore involuntarily blurted out, ‘If only someone like you could reach the tsar …’ He then went out into the corridor after discreetly beckoning me to follow, and said, ‘Don’t tell anyone …but I’m the Rasputin they’ve been cursing in the newspapers.’

  The conversation continued.

  His interest in [church] art prompted me to propose our going to Moscow together. He agreed to it with a youthful eagerness uncharacteristic of his age … Rasputin was not met by anyone in Moscow, and he went to stay with Nikolai Ivanovich Reshetnikov, a former notary who later became his secretary. But he turned up on time the same day at the Kremlin church hostel. He listened with unusual attention to my hour-long lectures on, for example, the cathedral of Basil the Blessed … We spent two days in Moscow, filling our time with visiting churches. During that time Rasputin and I became friends, and on returning to Petersburg where I edited the newspaper Smoke of the Fatherland, I started to visit him … We saw each other every day then, and I was struck that Rasputin occupied a wretched little room not at all corresponding to the idea of him …as the powerful favourite of the imperial family … Rasputin himself did not drink wine and he discouraged others … Delighted by my arguments on the theme of governing the state, he exclaimed, ‘You want to be a governor? I can do that.’ He lived simply and even humbly, and spoke sparingly and reluctantly of the court and his relationships there. In answer to a question I asked him once about whether the empress really did not give him anything, he said, ‘She’s stingy … terribly stingy.’ Rasputin was at the time hard up, as was apparent from the twenty-five kopeks he would take from me for cab fare, and the twenty-five roubles he once sent for when he was short for a trip to Siberia, although later on he would fling hundreds and even thousands …everyday to whatever chance acquaintances happened to ask him.

  It was at that time that Rasputin introduced Filippov to Vyrubova, and although Filippov witnessed scenes in which Anya expressed her usual naive admiration for the peasant, he apparently understood something: ‘Vyrubova impressed me as a woman whose attitude towards Rasputin was one of enthusiasm…but who was using him as a way of exerting a certain influence over the empress.’

  And in response to Rasputin, Filippov introduced him to his own friends.

  Soon afterwards at the editorial office of Smoke of the Fatherland I happened on a conversation between the paper’s publisher, Alexander Lvovich Garyazin, and…the legal counsel of the Maritime Ministry, Ivan Bazhenov, who was repeating the words of some courtier about Rasputin’s sexual outrages with the empress and saying there ought to be a conspiracy to kill ‘that dog’. I objected that I had just made his acquaintance and had been utterly charmed by him, and I shared my impressions…I suggested to Garyazin that he take Rasputin for a drive somewhere in his automobile.

  Garyazin, who owned his own car, something very rare in those days, readily agreed to meet with the scandalous and enigmatic celebrity. ‘Rasputin rejected…the idea of visiting a museum, finding that pictures were rubbish…and much inferior to life…Garyazin suggested a visit to the Foundling Hospital, and, to his utter amazement, Rasputin agreed.’ At the hospital Rasputin

  was transformed …He picked up each child, tested its weight, and asked it what it was eating. In the automobile he said ‘it would be a good idea to bring country girls there from all over Russia. They would learn how to bear healthy children and keep their infants strong’ … Impressions he conveyed to the empress, who unexpectedly came to the Foundling Hospital, made a quick survey of it, and busied herself with ideas for organizing an institute for the protection of motherhood…I took advantage of a convenient opportunity and included an article in Smoke of the Fatherland defending Rasputin, an article that provoked equal astonishment both on the left and the right among those in the press who had been persecuting him. [The article, ‘Childhood and Sin’, appeared in Smoke of the Fatherland on 16 May 1912.]

  Rasputin was wildly delighted with the fact that I was the only one who had dared to defend him in print at a time of the greatest persecution of him and of Guchkov’s speeches against him in the Duma … He carried out all my requests and wishes at once and unquestioningly, and more often than not came to me for advice and let me in on the intimate details of whatever it was he was going through … Although he never said one word about any intimate relations whatever not only with the empress, whom he always characterized as the ‘smart one’, but with any other woman, as well.

  How much does this image fail to resemble that of the awful lust-driven peasant who at the very same time was stalking the streets of Petersburg in pursuit of women! Just who was that peasant? A cunning changeling? A sexual psychopath? Or is it that despite my having written so many pages, I still do not know him any better than I did before? And am still only on the way to his secret?

  A Dandy With ‘Mistakes In Grammar’

  In the summer of 1912 exciting news spread through society.

  ‘7 June 1912. Olga Nikolaevna was betrothed last night to Dmitry Pavlovich,’ the general’s wife Bogdanovich wrote in her diary.

  Dmitry was the tsar’s favourite. His letters to Nicholas have survived, the scoffing letters of a rake. A duellist and hard drinker, tall and well built like most of the Romanovs, a favourite of the Guards — he had everything that Nicky lacked. Despite the return of his father from exile in 1905, Dmitry had continued to live with the royal family. But Alix did not like him. For the youth did not hide his disdain for the peasant.

>   And she looked forward to the marriage of her daughter and Dmitry with dread. It was then that another rake arrived in Petersburg from England, one who, fortunately for Alix, changed everything — Felix Yusupov.

  As Felix later recalled, he and Dmitry saw a lot of each other in the course of 1912–13. ‘He was then living with the royal family at the Alexander Palace, but we spent … all our free time together.’ Felix, who was several years older than the handsome Dmitry, completely captivated the grand duke. In place of the reclusive, monotonous life of the Alexander Palace with its grand duchesses and the empress eternally fussing over the unfortunate boy, Felix revealed another world to him. He did what his own older brother had done for him: he introduced Dmitry to the feverish life of nocturnal Petersburg. Now at night a car waited for the two playboys. Almost every night we drove to Petersburg and carried on a merry life in restaurants, night cafes, and among Gypsies. We invited performers to dine with us in private rooms. And often Pavlova would join us.’ But it was not only the famous ballet star Anna Pavlova who joined them. Felix’s unconventional tastes, which he writes about himself in his memoirs, also attracted to the private rooms male ballet dancers who shared those tastes.

  The royal family was horrified. ‘Their Majesties, knowing of my scandalous adventures, looked askance at our friendship,’ Felix recalled. Or, to put it more accurately, knowing of Felix’s homosexual propensities, which at the time were punishable by imperial law, the tsars regarded Dmitry’s passionate attachment to Felix with fear.

  Olga’s future husband was forbidden to see Felix. ‘The secret police were keeping an eye on that now,’ Felix recalled.

  The centenary of the Battle of Borodino, the site near Moscow which saw the onset of the destruction of Napoleon’s grande armee, was celebrated in August 1912. Reaching all the way up Tver Street from Moscow’s Brest Station were ceremonial lines of soldiers and behind them crowds of people. The bells of the city’s innumerable churches kept ringing. To cries of ‘Hurrah’, the tsar, Alix, the heir, and Olga took their places in the first barouche. Dmitry sat in the last calash. All eyes sought the fiancé of the tsar’s eldest daughter.

  But Felix proved to be stronger. Stronger than both the royal prohibitions and the happiness of becoming the husband of the tsar’s daughter. The encounters with Felix continued. Rumour had a simple explanation: Dmitry was bisexual. And Dmitry, the future lover of the celebrated Coco Chanel, was then madly infatuated with Felix. In the idiom of the salons of the day, it was called ‘making mistakes in grammar’. Dmitry preferred to move out of the Alexander Palace. Now he was lodged in his own house in Petersburg, and Felix helped him to furnish it in the luxury for which his own home, the Yusupov palace on the Moika Canal, was celebrated. With precious furniture and paintings.

  And so, Dmitry had made his choice. Now with a clear conscience Alix could, or, more accurately, was compelled to, break off Olga’s engagement. Dmitry had compromised himself by his scandalous friendship. But this time, too, Nicholas remained loyal to his affections. He continued to have a soft spot for Dmitry. He chose to regard the rumours with caution. And the peasant understood what was required of him. And he did not let his benefactress down. Rasputin predicted that Dmitry would from his debauched life soon contract a skin disease. So at his request Alix ordered the girls ‘to wash their hands with a special solution after any meetings and handshaking with the grand duke’.

  Had The Prince Been Slapped?

  It was then that another meeting may have taken place between Rasputin and Felix, although the latter does not mention it. The meeting is overgrown with legend. The actress Vera Leonidovna Yureneva told me about it: Felix, infuriated by Rasputin’s meddling in Dmitry’s betrothal, repeated what he had successfully carried off many times before. He dressed up as a young woman and appeared before Rasputin. When the latter made his usual advances, the bad boy’ started laughing at him and insulting him. For which he was slapped.

  For me, however, there is one thing in the legend that rings false. Why didn’t Felix shoot him on the spot? Shooting the debauched peasant after he had dared to raise his hand against the prince would have been welcomed by everyone! True, the situation itself was perhaps not the best one. And for that reason it may have been necessary to do nothing.

  The rumours of a slap had in fact seemed quite fantastic to me, until I found in the File the remarkable testimony of the tsarina’s friend Yulia Dehn.

  ‘In regard to Prince Felix Felixovich Yusupov … that effeminate and elegantly dressed young man visited Rasputin both before my acquaintance with him and during the year of that acquaintance [1911–12]…I know that during some argument between the prince and Rasputin, who did not care for the prince’s behaviour, Rasputin had struck him, after which the prince stopped visiting him.’

  She speaks about it as a known fact. Even though Yusupov was in Petersburg at the time and might easily have refuted her words if they had been an invention.

  Rasputin’s Exoneration

  The tsar had not received Rodzyanko, and the charges that Rasputin was a Khlyst continued unabated. But then what unexpected joy for the tsarina! God had intervened for the elder. The truth had won out: Alexis, the new bishop of Tobolsk, had conducted a new investigation. And the Tobolsk Theological Consistory had reached a new Decision.

  The Right Reverend Alexis, Bishop of Tobolsk … has thoroughly examined the evidence in the file on Grigory Novy. Travelling through the Tobolsk district…he stopped in the village of Pokrovskoe and there engaged in a lengthy discussion with the peasant Grigory Novy about the objects of his faith and aspirations, and talked about him with people who knew him well … From all of the above-indicated, the Right Reverend Alexis has derived the impression that the case against the peasant Grigory Rasputin-Novy of belonging to the Khlyst sect was instituted without sufficient basis, and for his own part he considers the peasant Grigory Novy to be an Orthodox Christian and a person of great intelligence and spiritual aptitude who is seeking the truth of Christ and who can, when the opportunity arises, provide good counsel to anyone who may need it.

  On the basis of Bishop Alexis’s report ‘in regard to new information’, the Consistory decreed in an act dated 29 November 1912, that ‘The case of the peasant Grigory Rasputin-Novy of the village of Pokrovskoe is hereby suspended and considered closed.’

  After reading the Decision, the tsar asked that copies be immediately distributed to the Synod, the ministers, and the Duma. So that the fat man Rodzyanko might be appeased.

  The reasons for the appearance of the Decision, which is contained in the Tobolsk archive, had been a mystery to me. And then in the File I found the testimony of the son of Bishop Alexis of Tobolsk, testimony that made the whole story clear.

  Parting The Curtain Of Exoneration

  In 1917 Leonid Alexeevich Molchanov, the son of the late Bishop Alexis, was called before the Extraordinary Commission.

  He had met Rasputin in 1912. At the time he was secretary to the chief magistrate of the Pskov District Court and was twenty-three years old. His father had been transferred that year from Pskov to Tobolsk, and he had gone to visit him during his vacation: ‘On 7 July I set out by steamboat from Tyumen to Tobolsk… When it became clear that Rasputin would be taking the same boat, the news produced something of a sensation in the crowd.’ And although ‘after the newspaper articles … my attitude towards him was one of opposition’, Molchanov still wanted to meet him.

  ‘I spent the entire day with him until the Pokrovskoe landing, where he had to get off… Rasputin said that much falsehood was being written about him, that Hermogen and Iliodor, instead of performing their pastoral duties, had taken up politics, and that the sovereign did not care for those “synodians” who, instead of performing their pastoral duties, only cared about splendid clothing and ribbons and medals, and who turned up in Tsarskoe Selo in the capacity of dignitaries rather than pastors.’ After hearing Rasputin’s stories about his persecution, Molchanov immediately r
esponded with the story of his father’s own persecution by the members of the Synod. It turned out that his father had once been the bishop of Taurida. And, as his son explained, Bishop Alexis had been slandered. With the purpose of removing him from the Crimea, ‘so that the pulpit could be cleared for Feofan, who was being forced out of Petrograd’. And to do that, the ‘synodians’ had sent Alexis deep into Siberia to distant Tobolsk. ‘Rasputin began to feel sorry for my father … [and] announced that as soon the opportunity presented itself, he would tell “Papa” and “Mama” about it.’

  The story would naturally have interested Rasputin. But when he learned what it was that Molchanov’s father had been ‘slandered’ with, the story obviously interested him even more.

  Victor Yatskevich, the director of the chancery of the chief procurator of the Most Holy Synod, speaks about it in the File. It turns out that Alexis lost his southern pulpit not at all because of Feofan but because of the young teacher Elizaveta Kosheva. With whom the hierarch had had a liaison. At first he had been transferred to Pskov. But located in the Pskov eparchy, as Yatskevich testified, ‘was the notoriously heretical Vorontsov Monastery, which had become a nest of the Ioannite sect’. These were the devotees of Ioann of Kronstadt. They worshipped Ioann as an earthly incarnation of Christ. And they had their own ‘Mother of God’, too: Porfiria Kiselyova. ‘Thus,’ Yatskevich explains, ‘they were an ordinary sect of the Khlyst type.’ And not only did Alexis not move against them; he even began to give their ‘ark’ his protection. For which he was transferred even farther away, to Tobolsk.