The Rasputin File

by Edvard Radzinsky

  I answered, ‘I am not afraid! I will not take your thousand, and I will not sell the bishop!’

  Rasputin again tried to persuade me to tell the truth, adding, ‘Your children won’t get anything for this.’ Just as she was about to leave, the empress leaned over to me and said, ‘So you are saying it did not happen?’

  ‘It did not and it could not have. He offered me a thousand roubles if I would agree to slander the bishop.’

  And the empress asked again, ‘So this is your final word?’

  I again answered, ‘Nothing was said nor could have been said!’

  The empress sat nervously and kept taking her glove on and off, while Rasputin repeated, ‘She’s afraid! She’s afraid!’ Then Rasputin took her by the arm and, after giving me a spiteful look, walked out of the room.

  What is the significance of this scene? That he was so certain of the infiniteness of his influence that he would allow himself to lie shamelessly in her presence? Or was it that he had simply realized that it was her dream to drive Feofan out of the Crimea for good. And he knew that she required a pretext. He had merely read her will and carried out her secret wish.

  Subsequently, the tsarina wrote Olga Popova a letter.

  From Popova’s testimony in the File: ‘Soon afterwards I received a letter written in a fine woman’s hand with no signature … It was suggested in the letter that I think better of it and tell the truth.’

  The royal family’s next-to-last meeting with their beloved Livadia was coming to an end. And the Ipatiev night was drawing closer.

  A Portrait Of The ‘Holy Family’ In 1913

  That Petersburg winter Rasputin finally settled down in his own apartment for the first time. Before that he had lived with the Lokhtins and the Sazonovs on charity. And then he had rented his own wretched little corners. The addresses of the ‘Russian’ have survived in the files of the Department of Police: 37 Liteiny Avenue, 70 Nikolaev Street.

  ‘On Nikolaev Street Rasputin occupied a room in an apartment. In the room were a simple bed and a painted wooden buffet table,’ Molchanov recounts in the File.

  But this time his daughters came to him from Pokrovskoe. The peasant had decided to give them a Petersburg education. Let them become ‘little ladies’. Besides, he was tired of not having his own home, of hanging around bathhouses and the squalid apartments of prostitutes. And so Akilina Laptinskaya took matters in hand.

  And in October 1913 after his return to Petersburg from Yalta, Rasputin moved into his first separate apartment: at 3 English Avenue in a building belonging to Alexei Porfirievich Veretennikov. The apartment had been given to Rasputin for a very modest sum by yet another failure attempting to take advantage of his influence. Veretennikov was a major general who had been forced into retirement and who dreamed of returning to the service.

  Both Rasputin’s daughters, whom he had enrolled in a private preparatory school, were now living in the apartment. In 1990, after I published The Last Tsar, my book about the royal family, a ninety-year-old woman named Anna Popova called me. We talked on the phone with the help of her granddaughter. She said that she had attended the Steblin-Kamensky private preparatory school with Rasputin’s daughter Matryona.

  She told of going with Matryona to English Avenue to ask Rasputin for a charitable contribution. And with what frozen fear she had ‘gazed at the sorcerer’. And how he had taken out his wallet, rummaged in it a long time, and finally given them a bank note. ‘He gave very little,’ Popova recalled.

  He was poor at the time. ‘The apartment of four or five rooms was badly and uncomfortably furnished. In one room lived Laptinskaya, who in the absence of a maid put out the samovar and cooked fish soup, while his two daughters shared another room whenever they came home from the Steblin-Kamensky pension,’ Molchanov described the apartment in the File. But, even so, it was the first dwelling of his own to which he could invite all his devotees. Laptinskaya could at last quit her work as a housekeeper and move in with him. Now she proudly called herself his ‘secretary’. The secretary of an illiterate peasant. And to help her, Katya Pechyorkina came from Pokrovskoe to work as a cook and maid.

  Descriptions of Rasputin and his daughters have survived from that time.

  ‘A wild Siberian strength shone from their broad, pallid faces with their enormous bright-coloured lips…And their powerful bodies smelling of sweat burst their modest little children’s dresses made of thin cashmere.’ Varvara was thirteen and Matryona was already sixteen. Matryona had ‘a broad white face with a blunt chin … and a low forehead suspended above sullen grey eyes … She would impatiently shake her head, flipping her low-cut bangs away from her eyes … She would pass the tip of her tongue over her broad, bright-red lips in a kind of predatory, animal movement,’ Zhukovskaya recalled.

  And in the File, Molchanov spoke of Rasputin in 1913: ‘His speech was fragmented and not altogether coherent. He kept his eyes on the person he was talking to, and there was a kind of strength in his eyes … His movements were characteristic of a neurasthenic: he hopped jerkily about and his hands were always touching something.’

  He continued to stun his admirers with his knowledge of people, or, more accurately, their hidden thoughts. ‘In that period Rasputin, in addition to his nervousness, manifested an exceptional perspicacity,’ Filippov testified in the File. ‘In the presence of my wife and sister-in-law…he noticed on the basis of elusive signs of some kind that my sister-in-law and I were drawn to each other. And after taking her off to the side, he explained to her that my feelings for her would lead to my divorcing my wife, which is in fact what happened.’

  The first time he met Filippov’s acquaintance, the famous professor of jurisprudence Ozerov, Rasputin discerned ‘an absence of spiritual tranquillity in him as a result of the fact that he cared only about money’. When Filippov explained to Rasputin that Ozerov was a respected member of the Council of State, the peasant said, ‘He’s just a state nobody.’ ‘It was a brilliant characterization of Ozerov,’ Filippov added.

  It was at this time that Rasputin made the acquaintance of the old woman Guschina. Her husband had just died, and life had become a burden for her. Her testimony remains in the File.

  Guschina, Alexandra Georgievna, seventy-three years old, widow of a doctor: ‘Each time at church I would come upon a man dressed in a peasant coat praying very zealously. His manner of prayer was peculiar: he would immediately kneel and lean on his fingers in a strange sort of way … Many people would come to him with greetings and requests to pray for them.’ She was told that the man was Rasputin.

  ‘Once he came up to me after mass and asked, “Why are you so downcast?” I told him about my misfortunes, and he said, “It is sinful to be downcast. You should pray to God.”’

  And he invited her to visit him. And the old woman came to English Avenue. There she found her way into one of the most famous photographs of the Rasputin circle, a photograph that has adorned endless books about him. Actually, that comes later.

  A Cry Of Pain

  The newspaper harassment continued throughout 1913. Rasputin grew accustomed to reading interviews that he had never given, after which the press would ridicule him.

  And his friend Filippov tried once again to defend him in the newspaper Smoke of the Fatherland: ‘A whole literature has been created about the elder … a pile of articles regarding his extraordinary and even inexplicable influence in the highest spheres… Rasputin is an ordinary Russian peasant of inspired intelligence…who mainly has not severed his ties to the common people and who therefore finds his strength in them.’ And Filippov mocked the journalists who ‘publish rumours that Rasputin could have removed such pillars as Hermogen and Feofan’. So even his close friend Filippov did not know the extent of the peasant’s influence in Tsarskoe Selo.

  But sometimes Our Friend yielded to the journalists and himself gave interviews. To Alix’s dismay, for they were often more dangerous than the ones the journalists made up for him.

&nb
sp; Under Filippov’s influence the idea had occurred to Rasputin of putting out his own newspaper.

  ‘I thought of starting up the most real, just newspaper of the people. The money will be given to me — people who believe have been found — I will bring good people together, and I will cross myself and say, “Bless us, O Lord,” and strike the bell,’ he announced in an interview in the Petersburg Courier.

  But Alix evidently put that idea to rest. She realized that he would drown in the business. He would drown in the distraction. She needed him for herself, for the boy, and for conversations about the soul.

  At the time the journalists were trying to learn about Rasputin’s role in the decision not to participate in the Balkan war. And he answered, ‘In general, it does not make sense to fight: to take each other’s lives, violate the testament of Christ, and prematurely kill your own soul. Let the Germans and the Turks kill each other — it’s their bad luck and blindness, but we, lovingly and quietly looking to ourselves, will become higher than the rest.’ And he was again reviled for betraying fellow Slavs. And again Alix instructed Vyrubova to talk to the elder about avoiding journalists.

  But they kept calling him. And he shouted into the receiver, ‘What do they want from me? Do they really not want to understand that I am a little fly, and that I don’t need anything from anybody? Do they really have nothing else to write about besides me? I do not trouble anybody. And I could not trouble anybody since I do not have the strength. They discuss every step, they mix everything up. Leave me alone. Let me live.’

  And this monologue instantly found its way into the papers along with derisive commentary.

  And they called again. And again he shouted into the receiver and hung

  up.

  I tell you, I am a little fly and there’s no use in concerning yourself with me. There are bigger things to talk about, but for you it’s always one and the same: Rasputin, Rasputin. Be silent. Enough writing. You shall answer to God! He alone sees everything. He alone understands. And judges. Write, if you have to. I shall say nothing more. I have taken it all to heart. Now I am burned out. I don’t care any more. Let everybody write. Let them add to the din. Such, it appears, is my fate. I’ve endured everything. I’m not afraid of anything. Go ahead and write. How much will they worm out of you? I tell you, I don’t care. Goodbye.

  And they published that monologue, too. What was to be done? He was the hero of the day.

  The ambiguity of his situation in relation to the ‘tsars’ had manifested itself in the story of Prime Minister Kokovtsev and the former prime minister Count Witte.

  Did The Peasant Sink A Second Prime Minister, Too?

  After Kokovtsev’s appointment as prime minister in 1911, Alix had released a ‘trial balloon’. She sent Rasputin to ‘examine his soul’.

  As Kokovtsev subsequently recalled, ‘I was startled to receive a letter from Rasputin literally containing the following: “I am planning to leave for good, and would like to meet you in order to exchange thoughts … say when.”‘ And Kokovtsev agreed to meet him. An almost comical scene ensued. Rasputin entered and sat down without saying a word. His silence continued. He gazed at the prime minister. ‘His eyes, set deep in their sockets, close to each other, small, and of steel-grey colour, were fixed on me, and Rasputin did not take them off me for a long time, as if he was thinking of producing some sort of hypnotic influence on me or was simply studying me.’ But the peasant suddenly muttered, ‘Should I leave or not, then? I no longer have an existence, and they are weaving whatever they want about me!’

  Here the prime minister, according to Alix’s plan, was supposed to say how he would defend Rasputin. But Kokovtsev said, ‘Yes, of course, you will be doing a good thing if you leave…You must understand that this is not your place here, that you are injuring the sovereign by going to the palace … and giving ammunition to anybody you like for the most improbable inventions and conclusions.’

  In reply Kokovtsev heard, ‘All right, I am bad, I shall go. Let them manage without me.’ Rasputin was again silent for a long time, and then he got up from his place and said only, ‘Well, so we have made each other’s acquaintance, then. Goodbye.’

  And when Rasputin told her about Kokovtsev’s suggestion that he ‘leave’, Alix no longer liked the prime minister. For the meeting with Rasputin had not just been a meeting with the man of God. It had above all been a trial to test Kokovtsev’s readiness to submit to her opinions, his readiness to join the camp of her friends, to become one of ‘ours’.

  The tsarina complained to Nicky. And the sovereign asked the new prime minister to render an account of his meeting with the peasant.

  When I had finished my account, the sovereign asked me, ‘You did not tell him that we would send him away, if he did not leave of his own accord?’ Upon receiving my answer that … I had no reason to threaten Rasputin with exile, since he had said that he had long wished to leave, the sovereign told me that he was glad to hear it. And that he ‘would be quite pained if anyone were uneasy because of us.’ Then the sovereign asked, ‘What sort of impression did that peasant make on you?’ I replied that I had been left with a most unpleasant impression, that it had seemed to me … that standing before me was a typical Siberian tramp.

  Kokovtsev later formulated it even more candidly for the Extraordinary Commission: ‘I served eleven years in the Central Prison Administration … and saw all the convict prisons, and … among the Siberian vagrants of unknown ancestry, as many Rasputins as you like. Men who, while making the sign of the cross, could take you by the throat and strangle you with the same smile on their faces.’

  And Rasputin understood: it was time to move against Kokovtsev. ‘Mama’ no longer wanted the prime minister.

  From Filippov’s testimony in the File: ‘The actual removal of Kokovtsev took place under pressure, highly skilful and persistent pressure, applied by Rasputin, who had the peculiar knack of characterizing a hated person with a single phrase or epithet that left its mark in the midst of a discussion of quite extraneous topics, a knack that had an extraordinarily magical effect on weak and haughty natures like the sovereign’s.’

  And although Kokovtsev had put the government’s finances in order and a period of genuine stability had begun, he was sent into retirement in January 1914 as a member of the Council of State, where he was rewarded, like Witte before him, with the title of count.

  It would seem that the fall of Kokovtsev should have brought about a return to the political stage of the highly intelligent Count Witte, who was so well disposed to Rasputin and who ‘sang his tune’, as Bogdanovich put it.

  Appointing Witte, the favourite of the progressive parties and of industrial capital, would seemingly have solved all the problems. On the one hand, he was attractive to society, and on the other, he had enough intelligence and authority to seal the mouths of the elder’s enemies. And Witte knew that the quick-witted Rasputin understood all this and would support him. But like many people, Witte did not grasp the true situation: Rasputin could be influential only in those instances where the tsarina had not come to her own conclusion. In the other instances he was obliged to play her game: to give expression to Alix’s opinions by means of his own premonitions, predictions, and wishes.

  In regard to Witte, Alix’s opinion was firm. She hated him. For he was the creator of the constitution that in 1905 had limited the powers of the tsar and the future powers of her son — that had ‘robbed the Little One’ of his legacy. And however useful the brilliant prime minister might have been, she had never been able, nor did she wish, to overcome her feelings. Just as Marie Antoinette had been unable to overcome her own aversion both to Lafayette and Mirabeau, however useful they might have proved and however they might have tried to save her.

  And Rasputin understood all this and did not even hint at his regard for Witte.

  But where Alix did not have an opinion, there Rasputin’s kingdom began. Here a nearly forgotten eighteenth-century practice came back in
to its own: that of acting through the ‘tsars” favourite. And if Rasputin could not bring about Witte’s reappointment, he could still influence the appointment of the new finance minister, a position to which Alexandra Fyodorovna was perfectly indifferent.

  It was then that bankers started to gather around Rasputin. And they introduced him to Pyotr Bark. Bark was a child of the young Russian capitalism. He had left the Ministry of Finance as a forty-three-year-old senior official to become the managing director of the Volga-Kama Bank, where he made good use of his old government connections. And then he left the bank and returned to active government service, becoming under Kokovtsev the deputy minister of commerce and industry. Knowing of the situation surrounding the prime minister, Bark and, most importantly, the bankers who supported him, launched a campaign to take control of the Ministry of Finance. As Filippov testified in the File, ‘The fall of Kokovtsev, an extremely cautious politician in matters of finance who had evinced exceptional firmness and independence regarding the banks, was advantageous to the bankers.’

  In January 1914 Ivan Goremykin became prime minister — a seventy-five-year-old whom Rasputin addressed as ‘Elder’, using the archaic vocative form. With Goremykin began Russia’s classic policy of counter-reform, in this case a rejection of Stolypin’s changes. Discussed in that connection were candidates for the new minister of finance. And Rasputin suddenly started talking about Bark’s good soul and abilities. When the empress passed on Father Grigory’s thoughts on Bark, the tsar could only wonder at Rasputin’s importunity regarding a subject of which he had so little grasp. The only explanation was inspiration from on high. And Bark was appointed minister of finance. It was the first time that a state rather than a church appointment had come about at Rasputin’s prompting. Of course, what had taken place was not merely the appointment of a new minister of finance but a revolution, one which Rasputin did not understand. He only knew that money was now being managed by one of ‘ours’. In fact, it was the end of the policy conducted by Stolypin and continued by Kokovtsev. A minister of finance had been appointed who was the protégé of the mighty banks. Those banks would now through their minister of finance begin running the finances of the quasi-feudal state. Filippov, who was himself a banker and knew the machinations of banking from the inside, provided an explanation in the File.