‘Bark…gave the banks promissory notes … [which] began the widespread subsidization of private banks with state funds, allegedly in support of industrial enterprises…The funds were then used by the banking chiefs to purchase stock certificates and speculate on their fall, which would prove especially dangerous in the initial period of the war.’
But Goremykin had neither the strength nor the ability to return Russia to the mute tranquillity of the times of Alexander III. However he enjoyed the most ‘obedient’ relations with Alix, received the man of God, and carefully read the interminable memos that Father Grigory sent him along with petitioners. ‘Dear Elder of God, listen to them, assist them if you can, with apologies, Grigory.’
Rasputin’s friend Filippov testifies in the File how the drunken Rasputin once called the elderly Goremykin at his apartment to pass on the latest petition. Goremykin apologized for not being able to receive Rasputin, since his wife was gravely ill, and Rasputin, slurring his speech, assured him ‘the old woman will soon recover.’ And the old woman did.
The Shadow of Marie Antoinette
The last peaceful year of their empire came to an end with a betrothal in the large Romanov family.
Zinaida’s relations with the royal family had become ever more strained. Rasputin stood between them. And in November 1913 Zinaida wrote to her son about a dinner at the Livadia Palace.
I was seated at the royal table, and during the dances I was called to sit next to the hostess, who congratulated me and spoke a great deal about the two of you. In spite of her conspicuous courtesy, the conversation was dry, and it was clear how far I was from being in her good graces. [The tsar] got off with smiles and handshaking, but didn’t say a word. The fat one [Vyrubova] acts as if she enjoys all the rights of a fifth daughter … The black sisters [the Montenegrin princesses] walk about like people stricken with the plague. None of the courtiers will even go up to them, seeing that the hosts ignore them completely.
It was Felix Yusupov’s turn to visit his future relatives. The tsar liked to play tennis. There is even a film strip, like a message from a vanished Atlantis: Nicholas on his tennis court. On 11 November, Nicholas wrote in his diary about playing tennis with his niece’s future husband. And added the sentence, ‘He’s the best player in Russia; there’s something to be learned from him.’ (That obviously non-military Adonis had to have at least some good points!)
And on 22 December 1913, Xenia recorded in her diary the mother’s customary entry on a daughter’s betrothal: ‘God grant them happiness in love. I cannot believe that Irina is getting married!’
Since Zinaida’s relations with the tsarina were strained, the wedding took place on what was for Alix ‘enemy territory’ — the Anichkov Palace of the dowager empress. The couple were married in the palace church. On 9 February 1914 Nicky entered in his diary, ‘Alix and I and the children went to the Anichkov in the city for Irina’s wedding to Felix Yusupov. Everything went well. There were lots of people.’
A royal escort and two automobiles brought Felix’s new relatives, Nicky, Alix, and the girls, from Tsarskoe Selo.
Irina arrived at the palace ahead of the groom. The beauty wore a gown of white satin embroidered in silver with a long train. A rock crystal tiara with diamonds supported a lace veil. An alarming detail: the tiara had once belonged to Marie Antoinette.
The groom, resplendent in a black redingote with gold-stitched collar and lapels, was at the time stuck in a palace lift. It was an old one that worked intermittently. So it was soon possible to see the entire imperial family, including the emperor, making desperate attempts to free the groom from his accidental prison. While the kind Nicky and the girls tried to help, Alix silently looked on.
A few months remained before the start of world war. And exactly three years until the fall of the empire in February 1917.
The Place of Tragedy is Ready!
Felix’s parents relinquished to him the left side of the ground floor of their palace on the Moika Canal. As he has described it in his memoirs, ‘I installed a separate entrance and made the necessary changes. On the right were the main rooms, including the ballroom with its columns of yellow marble and arcades in the back looking out onto the winter garden, and the living room with its sapphire-coloured wallpaper and its paintings and Gobelin tapestries…All in the style of Louis XVI.’
All in the style of the king whose head was chopped off by revolution.
‘To the right of the lobby I built temporary quarters for the times I would come to Petersburg by myself. One of the doors opened onto a hidden stairway leading down into the basement …I wanted to build in that part of the basement a Renaissance-style salon. The work had barely been completed when revolution broke out, and we never used that living space into which we had put so much effort.’
A crafty description. Felix did use the living space. He managed to build the ‘Renaissance-style’ dining room in which he would murder Rasputin.
Zinaida and the tsarina did not talk to each other during the wedding.
Alix had devised the terms ‘ours’ for those who liked the elder, and ‘not ours’ for those who did not. The latter included Elizaveta Fyodorovna’s entire circle, the Moscow aristocracy, the great Romanov family, Petersburg high society, the Duma, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the military aristocracy who surrounded the bellicose grand duke, and the peasant’s former allies, the monarchist right. ‘Not ours’ included just about everyone. And arrayed against them all were Alix, her Friend, and Nicky. Three valiant musketeers.
7
TEA WITH RASPUTIN: THE PEASANT’S SALON
The Inquisitive ‘Satanist’
At the beginning of 1914 one of the most influential salons in Petersburg took shape at the apartment of the peasant from Pokrovskoe. The various descriptions of that salon resemble Akutagawa’s Rashomon. Absolutely contradictory descriptions of everything that happened there. For it was necessary to be among the initiated to see everything in its true light. The salon, like everything else in Rasputin’s life, held its mystery.
On 5 August 1917, the celebrated student of sectarianism, Alexander Stepanovich Prugavin, was interrogated by the Extraordinary Commission. The sixty-six-year-old scholar testified, ‘Having studied religious, and especially mystical, movements among the Russian people my whole life, I was naturally… interested in Rasputin’s personality, too.’
In the winter of 1914 a beautiful young woman came to see Prugavin. Introducing herself as a novice writer whose work had appeared under the pseudonym Zhukovskaya, she said that her name was Vera, and that she was ‘interested in religious and mystical movements’ and wanted to penetrate Rasputin’s inner circle. Vera Zhukovskaya relates in her memoirs how Prugavin ‘looked at me in distress … and began asking me to give up my intention of making Rasputin’s acquaintance, since the consequences of that acquaintance would be harmful to me … I repeated that I had made a firm decision and even asked him to obtain Rasputin’s address and telephone number for me.’
Vera Zhukovskaya was a child of that time ‘on the eve of apocalypse’. Like Prince Yusupov and many other young people of the day, she was completely absorbed in the search for unknown sensations. She had already experienced a great deal, including cocaine. And ‘in Paris her search for religious revelation had,’ as Prugavin testified, ‘gone so far as Satanism and participation in black masses.’ And, as she herself wrote, she had ‘visited the secret meetings of the Khlysty.’
Rasputin’s rather frightening notoriety gave her no rest.
‘I have done everything to warn you, and now I wash my hands of it,’ Prugavin told her then. And the next day he gave her Rasputin’s address and telephone number.
As Prugavin testified in the File, Zhukovskaya not only visited Rasputin, she once even took Prugavin himself to see him.
So everything that will now be set forth is the testimony of a witness who was well acquainted with the ‘elder’.
‘Rasputin lived at 3 English Avenue.
His telephone was 64646,’ recalled Zhukovskaya. ‘I didn’t tarry and called him at once … I happened to make the call at a rare moment when Rasputin’s phone was free. I heard a rather raspy voice say, “Well, who’s there? I’m listening.” My voice slightly trembling, I asked, “Father Grigory? This is a young lady speaking. I’ve heard a great deal about you. I’m not from here, and I would very much like to meet you.”’
In less than an hour she was entering the doorway of
an enormous grey building … Standing nearby in the lobby were a stuffed wolf and a bear… against the background of a decadent-style window on whose sill a bush of pink heather had begun to wither…The lift stopped at the very top … At my ring, the door was opened by a short plump woman in a white kerchief [this was Akilina Laptinskaya]. Her widely spaced grey eyes gazed unwelcomingly. ‘Do you have an appointment? Come in …’ A door on the other side of the vestibule opened, and Rasputin quickly emerged, moving as if sideways and shuffling his feet. Stocky with unusually broad shoulders, he was dressed in a lilac silk shirt with a crimson waistband, striped English trousers, and two-tone high-top shoes… Dark, wrinkled skin…His hair, carelessly parted in the middle and quite long … and his beard were of an almost uniformly dark reddish-brown colour. Coming right up to me, he took my hand and bowed. I saw a broad, pock-marked nose … and then he gazed at me with small, light-coloured eyes set deep in his wrinkles. On the right one was a little yellow excrescence…A kind of unpleasant feral power emanated from them. They gazed intently with infrequent blinking, and that motionless, magnetic stare was disconcerting. ‘Take her to my room,’ Rasputin said in an undertone, indicating me.
She was taken to a narrow room with a single window ‘through the vestibule past a closed door behind which restrained voices could be heard’. It was there, in the apartment’s largest room, that his ‘salon’ of admirers gathered, and it was their voices she heard.
Left alone, I looked around. Next to the wall by the door was a bed covered with a multicoloured silk patchwork quilt on top of fluffed-up pillows, and beside the bed there was a washstand … Near the washstand by the window was a writing desk. In the very centre of the desk was a large gold pocket watch with the state coat of arms on its cover … There was no icon in the corner, but on the windowsill there was a large photograph of the altar of St Isaac’s Cathedral, and hanging from the photograph a handful of different coloured ribbons. And by analogy I remembered a little peasant cabin belonging to ‘God’s people’ [the Khlysty] on the outskirts of Kiev: there had been no icon in the corner there either, but standing on a windowsill was an image of the Saviour with ribbons hanging from it … Pulling up a chair, he sat down across from me, placing my legs between his knees.
It was with the woman’s legs pressed between his knees that the seduction began (as we shall hear from many witnesses). Or, more accurately, a monologue on the religious basis of sin.
‘Don’t you believe the priests. They’re foolish. They don’t know the whole mystery. Sin is given so that we may repent, and repentance brings joy to the soul and strength to the body, understand? O, you are my dear, my honey bee … Sin should be understood … Without sin there is no life, because there is no repentance, and if there is no repentance, there is no joy … You want me to show you what sin is? Wait a while till next week, then come to me after taking communion, when there will be heaven in your soul. Then I will show you what sin is …’ Someone terrifying and ruthless was gazing at me from the depths of those almost hidden pupils. And then his eyes opened wide, the wrinkles were smoothed out, and after giving me a tender glance, he quietly asked, ‘Why are you looking at me like that, little bee?’ and bending down, he kissed me with cold monastic exultation.
And then she left. Evidently a bit disappointed by his affectionate yet indifferent parting words: ‘Only see that you come back soon.’
The Salon Assembles
And then … We shall take her word for it that ‘nothing happened’ later. Rasputin merely introduced her to his ‘salon’. And she wrote it all down in detail.
There were about ten ladies in all. At the far end of the table was a young man in a morning coat, frowning and, apparently, troubled by something. Next to him, leaning against the back of her chair, sat a very young pregnant lady in a let-out blouse. Her large blue eyes gazed tenderly at Rasputin. These were the Pistolkorses, husband and wife, as I later learned in talking to them. But in all the subsequent years of my acquaintance with them, I never saw Pistolkors himself at Rasputin’s again, only Sana. Next to Sana sat Lyubov Vasilievna Golovina, and I liked her pale, sere face very much. She acted as if she were the hostess, serving everyone and keeping the general conversation going.
She saw Vyrubova, too.
I looked at her with curiosity: a tall, stout blonde who was dressed too simply, somehow, and even tastelessly. Her face was ugly with a bright crimson sensual mouth and large blue eyes that gleamed unnaturally. Her face constantly changed. It was somehow evasive, duplicitous, deceptive, and a mysterious voluptuousness and a kind of unquenchable anxiety alternated in it with an almost ascetic severity. I have never seen another face like it in my life, and I must say that it produced an indelible impression.
Sitting next to her was Munya Golovina…who gazed at me with timid, blinking, pale blue eyes … The rest of the ladies were of no consequence, and all somehow of one face.
The Little Dandy
Another lady, too, has described Rasputin’s devotees. Like Zhukovskaya and many others, she had been subjected to the seduction rite. She had listened to and transcribed the same hypnotic whisper that ‘there is no sin in this. That is something that people have made up. Look at the wild animals. Do they know anything of sin? There is wisdom in simplicity. Do not shrivel your own heart.’
She, too, had heard strange assurances from Father Grigory’s permanent devotees. The very pure Munya would tell her something mysterious: ‘He makes everything holy.’ And on behalf of them all, Munya would ask her not to torment him … and to yield to him, ‘for with him there is no sin’.
‘Little Dandy’, Rasputin eloquently called her. Vera Dzhanumova was the young woman’s name, and it is mentioned more than once in the police agents’ reports. ‘Rasputin sent a telegram to Dzhanumova: “Pampered treasure, I am firmly with you in spirit. Kisses”‘ Or, ‘He took Dzhanumova …out to the Donon.’
Vera Dzhanumova, the wife of a wealthy Moscow merchant, would after emigrating from Russia publish her memoirs, in which she, too, would describe Rasputin’s salon.
He sat at the table surrounded by his admirers. Everything was mixed up together at that table — chinchilla, silk, and dark homespun, diamonds of the first water and slender egret feathers for the hair, the white kerchiefs of sisters of mercy and the scarves of old women — and all of it was described by the astonished ‘Little Dandy’. ‘The doorbell would bring a basket of roses and a dozen embroidered silk shirts of various hues, [or] a heavy peasant’s coat with a brocade lining of astonishing work.’ The tidy Akilina Laptinskaya would gather it all up and carry it off to the other rooms. The tea drinking would begin. A table set for tea with sweets for the guests. Rasputin did not eat sweets, as the witnesses have testified. ‘He never ate sweets,’ his secretary Simanovich recalled. And his daughter Matryona would mention the same thing in her book of memoirs. Let us remember that, and remember it well: he did not eat sweets.
Before 1913 he did not drink wine and condemned those who did.
From the testimony of Lokhtina: ‘Father Grigory did not use to drink at all.’ And Sazonov also declares, ‘In that period…he did not drink anything.’ And if wine did turn up on his table, then there was just a little and of the sweet variety. He had become used to sweet wines in the monasteries during his wanderings.
And the ladies would keep arriving. Whenever the bell rang, Munya would run into the hall to open the front door, and that daughter of the maid of honour to two empresses and the relative of a grand duke would help
the new arrivals to remove their overshoes. For he had taught them humility.
Then Princess Shakhovskaya arrived. ‘The princess, who had abandoned her husband and children to follow Rasputin continually for four years, was a woman of striking beauty and dark eyes,’ Dzhanumova recalls. That beauty was one of the first Russian woman aviators and she had even walked away from a crash.
And all those who came began with the ritual of hand-kissing.
From Alexandra Guschina’s testimony in the File: ‘I would drop by to visit him only in the afternoons … I saw many ladies, [who] all treated him with extreme deference and kissed his hand.’
Then the salon sat down to tea. Zhukovskaya recalls:
On one corner of the table an enormous brightly polished samovar was boiling … [but] what had been put out was very odd: right on the tablecloth next to sumptuous tortes and magnificent crystal bowls with fruit were little piles of peppermint gingersnaps and heaps of large crude rolls. The jam had been served in smeared jars, and lying next to a luxurious dish of sturgeon in aspic were large slices of black bread…Ina deep bowl in front of Rasputin were twenty or so boiled eggs and a bottle of Cahors. All extended their hands to him and their eyes gleamed: ‘Father, an egg!’ Rasputin took a whole handful of eggs and started presenting them to the ladies, placing an egg in each extended palm…Vyrubova got up and went over to Rasputin, where she gave him two pickles on a piece of bread. Rasputin crossed himself and then started eating, biting off by turns first some bread, then some pickle. He always ate with his hands, even fish, and after wiping his greasy fingers a little between bites, he petted the women sitting next to him while uttering his ‘teachings’ … And then … a tall girl in a gymnasium frock came in. Everyone’s hands were extended to her in greeting: ‘Mara, Marochka!’ It was a very curious thing to see all those princesses and countesses kissing Rasputin’s daughter, and one even … kissed her hands.
The Rasputin File Page 29