But the question still remains: why did Vyrubova, a rather cold, calculating person, also bow down before Lokhtina? And why in the File do the witnesses speak of the insolent telegrams sent by the general’s wife to Tsarskoe Selo that were nonetheless tolerated by the tsarina herself? And why did the tsar’s daughters correspond with her?
‘She left letters and papers at the Napoikins’ apartment [where she lived] … I made copies of the letters to her from the grand duchesses Olga, Tatyana, and Maria,’ Prugavin testified in the File. And by no means did Rasputin always beat her. Sometimes he even conversed with her for a long time. And she behaved severely with his devotees, like someone older. That in fact is how another witness, the singer Belling, has described the mysterious general’s wife:
A woman came in…dressed in a white homespun dress of old-fashioned cut with the white headgear of an Orthodox nun on her head…Hanging from her neck were numerous little books with crosses — twelve copies of the Gospels … She … whispered something to Rasputin, and whenever someone spoke loudly, she looked angrily in that person’s direction, and then could no longer restrain herself and said, ‘Here at the father’s, as in a temple, you should behave with grandeur.’
‘Leave them alone, let them enjoy themselves,’ Rasputin said.
‘One should have joy in one’s heart but humility on the outside,’ she sternly reproved him.
And Prugavin, the student of sects, was probably right when in the File he slightly parted the curtain concealing the strange general’s wife: ‘I would not be prepared to say that she was mentally ill merely because she maintained that Grigory was the “Lord of hosts” and Iliodor, “Christ,” since I would in that case also have to acknowledge the mental illness of the Khlysty, in whose mysticism one finds the assertion of such incarnations regarding one or another teacher.’
So the question remains: just who was the strange general’s wife?
Yet Another Mysterious Lady
There is yet another of Rasputin’s admirers who was not in the photograph. Even though her name is often glimpsed in the reports of the security agents: ‘On 27 August at 10:55 Vera Illarionovna, the Baroness Kusova, arrived to see him…The baroness spent the night at his place.’
‘The Baroness Kusova left his place at 07:30 on 28 August.’
‘The striking brunette Baroness K.,’ as Dzhanumova describes her.
‘Kusova regularly frequented Rasputin’s salon; she was regularly in attendance there. She had various kinds of business there, various deals,’ a witness testified before the Extraordinary Commission. Which means she was one of the practical ladies with the mercantile ideas who traded her ‘body’?
Vera Kusova herself says something similar, in any case. The File, from the testimony of Baroness Vera Illarionovna Kusova, twenty-seven years old:
I made Grigory Rasputin’s acquaintance in 1913 …My husband was serving in the Crimean regiment, whose patron was the empress…The royal family was then living in the Crimea. I wanted to make better arrangements for my husband. With that purpose but also out of curiosity I once approached Rasputin at the shore … After introducing myself to him, I stated my request. Rasputin promised to help me. In July I went to Petersburg for about two weeks and visited Rasputin with the purpose of asking him again about an arrangement for someone who was very close to me, and also with the purpose of asking him for spiritual support in relation to a misfortune that had befallen me…It turned out, however, that he was unable to give me any spiritual solace, since I saw that he spoke commonplaces to those who came to him for advice. Nevertheless, I continued to visit Rasputin in order to meet with people there who were interesting or necessary to me … I did not view Rasputin as a holy person.
And then the investigator presented Kusova with a certain telegram for her to explain. ‘There was much that was revealed to him,’ she suddenly said, ‘and that is why I wrote to Laptinskaya in 1916, “Oh, if only Father Grigory, who would somehow help from there, too [that is, from beyond the grave], would teach me.”’
So when Rasputin was already dead and she could no longer meet people at his home ‘who were necessary’ to her, she not only continued to communicate with Akilina but even asked for Grigory’s help from beyond the grave. For, it turned out, ‘Much was revealed to him.’ Even though she had just declared that ‘he was unable to give any spiritual solace.’
Perhaps, like Vyrubova, she was by no means telling the Commission everything.
All the more so, since in Lokhtina’s testimony in the File we learn something quite different about Kusova: ‘At our first meeting…she related … that her life was in fact not good… Later I happened to hear that her husband drank heavily, and that she suffered because of it. She related that once while drunk he had ridden a horse into her bedroom.’ Yes, the baroness was, above all, an unhappy woman in need of comfort. And more. In the same testimony given by Lokhtina there is a most interesting fact. It turns out that the baroness, like Lokhtina herself, greeted those around her with ‘Christ is risen,’ even though it was not Easter.
A Sermon And A Dance
And all during tea Rasputin spoke without stopping. And while he talked he would from time to time nervously break off a piece of bread and throw it down on the tablecloth, or crumble the rolls with his stubby fingers. But they did not see that. They were listening to him and attending to his sermon.
From Guschina’s testimony: ‘Rasputin impressed me as a holy man. He spoke of God and the soul.’
Prince Zhevakhov (the same one who is in the photograph) recalled the first time he heard Rasputin preach. His colleague Pistolkors had taken him to a Petersburg apartment on Vasiliev Island filled with the curious. And he never forget Rasputin’s inspired speech.
‘How is brutalized man with his beast’s habits to begin living a life that is pleasing to God?’ Rasputin said. ‘How is he to climb up out of the pit of sin? How is he to find the path that leads from our cesspool into fresh air and the light of God? There is such a path. And I shall show it to you. Salvation is in God … And you shall see God only, and only when you see nothing else around you. Because everything around you, all that you do, and even the room in which you sit, conceals God from you. What then must you do to see God?’ he asked with a sort of nervous intensity in the hush that had fallen. ‘After a church service in which you spend time in prayer, go outside the city on a Sunday or a holiday to some clean field. And walk, walk, until behind you see not the black cloud from factory chimneys that hangs over Petersburg but the blue of the horizon. Stand then and think about yourself. How small and insignificant you will seem to yourself then, and the whole capital — what an anthill it will have turned into in your mental gaze … And then what will become of your pride, your self-esteem, your consciousness of power? And you will lift up your eyes to heaven … and you will feel with all your heart, with all your soul, that you are one with the Lord, our Father, and that He is the only one who needs your soul. That He alone will stand up for you … and help you. And will find for you such compassion … That will be your first step along the path to God. This time, you may not go any further along that path. Return to the world, resume your former activity, but hold on to what you have brought back like the apple of your eye. It is God you have brought back with you. And preserve Him and let everything you do in the world now pass through Him … Only then will any earthly affair be transformed into the work of God. For it is as the Saviour has said, “the Kingdom of God is within us.” Find God, and live in him and with him.’
‘What a reverent hush there was in the room!’ Zhevakhov recalled. Even though Rasputin had said nothing new. But a sort of nervous power emanating from him had hypnotized his listeners. So that one may easily imagine what silence, what reverence there was whenever he spoke at the table to those who were devoted to him. And often he would suddenly break off what he was saying, and the resonant voice that Dzhanumova found so astonishing would command, ‘Write!’
He had become
used to it. He would give someone a pencil, and she would transcribe his words. He often repeated his teachings. He knew how important it was to repeat things to his ‘fools’ (as he called his devotees in one of his telegrams — ‘fools’ because they were educated and did not understand simple things). And he dictated ways to keep Love in one’s soul through all calamities and revilement. But above all he spoke about Love for the Creator to those unhappy women, those widows and women who had been divorced or cast off by their husbands, or who no longer enjoyed their love. Abandoned and offended women constituted the absolute majority in his salon.
‘Creator! Teach me to love. Then shall all my wounds received in love be as nothing and my sufferings become pleasing to me.’ And the words sounded like the Song of Songs: ‘God, I am Thine, and Thou art mine. Do not deprive me of Thy love!’ This transcription was made by the tsarina.
When they were spellbound by his teaching, when the faces of his ‘fools’ shone, he instructed them to sing hymns. And all together the Petersburg ladies sang the old hymns. Along with the peasant.
Guschina, Vyrubova, and Golovina have talked about those hymns. ‘Akilina in a high beautiful soprano voice started to sing and the others joined in … Rasputin’s pleasant deep voice resonated like an accompaniment, setting off and playing up the women’s voices. I had never heard such spiritual singing before. It was beautiful and sad. Then they started to chant Psalms,’ Dzhanumova recalled.
And he schooled the royal family in the same thing. As witnesses would testify, they often sang hymns together in their house arrest after the revolution. And at the moment of greatest enthusiasm, of almost general exaltation, Rasputin would suddenly leap to his feet and demand music. And then his famous, somehow desperate dancing would begin. Filippov recalled:
There was in his dancing something Khlyst-like. … He danced assiduously and at length, with special nervous, frenzied movements, leaping and from time to time shouting ‘Oh!’ the way someone would cry out upon being lowered into icy water…He danced fifteen minutes to an hour without ceasing … inspired to the point of a kind of ecstasy or frenzy … He said that all religious people must be good dancers, and in that connection mentioned King David, who had danced down an entire road in front of a temple.
But sometimes at the height of the festivities the telephone would ring, reducing his entire salon to holy awe. And Akilina’s solemn voice would inform Rasputin that there was a call ‘from Tsarskoe Selo!’
And then the guests would begin to leave. And parting with Rasputin was a ritual, too.
‘They started to disperse,’ Dzhanumova recalled, ‘and kissed the father’s hand, and he embraced each one and kissed her on the lips … ‘Some rusks, father,’ the ladies asked. He handed out burned rusks to them all, which they wrapped up in their scented handkerchiefs … and put away in their handbags … and then they whispered to the maid, asking for the father’s dirty linen … And with his sweat, if possible.’ And under the intelligent Akilina’s stern gaze, the ladies would collect the peasant’s dirty linen. And Munya would help those who were leaving to put on their boots.
From the testimony of Molchanov: ‘They would try to say goodbye to him in private, for which they would step into the hallway. I shall note this strange behaviour on the part of Vyrubova: once after saying goodbye to Rasputin in the hallway, she came back into the room for some reason, but on doing so refused to shake my hand goodbye, announcing that she had already said goodbye to the father and would not be saying any more goodbyes.’ It was so nice to take away with oneself the warmth of the holy hand that brought happiness.
Finale Of The First Period: The Mystery Remains
We have come as far as 1914, carefully following the track of Rasputin’s biography.
I have tried to tell everything in detail, and have patiently cited the testimony of both his friends and his enemies. But the two questions posed at the beginning remain. Just who was he really? And what was he for the royal family?
One thing is clear, however: Rasputin was no calculating Tartuffe who made fools of people with pious sermonizing. Tartuffe’s was a European personality. Rasputin’s is mysteriously Asiatic and a good deal more complicated, and his secret a good deal stranger.
I have quoted Rasputin’s thoughts at length. Were they searchings, appeals to God, moments of lucidity, insights? I can now answer that they were all those things.
But the prostitutes, the endless ‘little ladies’, the devotee’fools’, who visited the ‘special room’ and, becoming half-mad, mixed up religion with lust? And I can answer that yes, they too existed.
Yet at the same time Sazonov, Molchanov, and Filippov all speak in the File of this period of Rasputin’s life as a ‘spiritual’ one: ‘A period in Rasputin’s life that I may call a period in which he attained a certain spiritual loftiness from which he later slid’ (Sazonov), ‘in that period Rasputin drank little, and the whole period of his life bore the stamp of modesty’ (Molchanov), ‘being poetically dreamy in the first period of 1911–13’ (Filippov).
Did they not know about his secret life? But Filippov knew a lot. Then why do they speak of his spirituality? And, finally, the royal family: yes, Rasputin preached love, was disinterested, told the ‘tsars’ about things they did not know — about the work and everyday life of the common people, about the joys of the wanderer at one with nature and God — and he relieved the tsarina’s attacks of nervousness, and instilled confidence in the tsar. And he saved their son.
But the unending articles in the newspapers, the police descriptions of his pursuit of prostitutes, the inquiries by the Duma with quotations from the evidence of his victims, the story of the royal children’s nurse. All this reached the tsar and tsarina. On every side. Both prime ministers, Stolypin and Kokovtsev, the maids of honour at court, the tsarina’s beloved sister Ella and the other members of the Romanov family all the way to the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich (in whom, by the way, the tsar continued have so much trust that he appointed him commander-in-chief in the war), the tsarina’s confessor Feofan — all these people told the tsar and tsarina about Rasputin’s debauchery. But they did not believe it!
Did not believe it? Or did they know something that explained his behaviour? Something that was beyond the ken of all those shallow accusers?
8
GAMES OF THE FLESH
The Mystery Of His Teachings
To venture an answer to all these questions, I shall first have to return to the attempt to explain Rasputin’s teachings.
Zhukovskaya says of Rasputin:
I first heard of him in Kiev. At the time I had just graduated from preparatory school and, thanks to a chance acquaintance, was visiting the secret meetings of God’s people, as they called themselves (much later I learned that they are also the ones called the Khlysty). And it was there on the outskirts of the city during the usual evening tea with raisins, the favourite beverage of ‘God’s people’, that Kuzma Ivanych, as our host was called, suddenly started talking about the elder Grigory Rasputin … Narrowing his bright eyes (all the Khlysty have utterly special eyes: they burn with a sort of liquid, iridescent light, and sometimes the gleam becomes perfectly unbearable), he…said with reluctance, ‘He was one of our brethren, but we have since disavowed him: he has buried the spirit in the flesh.’
None of the most prominent experts in Russian sectarianism then doubted that Rasputin was a Khlyst. Alexander Prugavin, who devoted his whole life to study of the sects, and who as a Socialist-Revolutionary greatly respected the Khlysty and saw in them an ‘Orthodoxy of the peasantry’, collected the stories of people who had visited Rasputin, proving thereby that Rasputin was a Khlyst who, through his escapades, had distorted and compromised the Khlyst idea. The theologian Novosyolov, the head chaplain of the army and the navy Georgy Shavelsky, the celebrated philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, the archbishop Antony Volynsky, and the bishops Hermogen and Feofan — all both left and right — maintained that Rasputin was a Khlyst. And, finally
, his friend Filippov testifies in the File that ‘Some sense told me that [he] was a Khlyst … that he belonged to the Khlyst sect.’
Rasputin evidently did start out as an ordinary Khlyst. It is no coincidence that from the very start (in their investigations of 1903 and 1907) the Tobolsk Theological Consistory twice concerned itself with his Khlyst affiliation. And if the second investigation may be attributed to harassment by the Montenegrin princesses and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, then to whose influence is the first investigation to be ascribed? And although the second investigation was broadly conceived, the poor training of the Tobolsk investigators in sectarian questions wrecked it (as Inspector Beryozkin admitted in the file). In the interrogation of Rasputin’s adherents, the investigators were overmatched by their fanatical faith in his holiness. Nonetheless, one of those adherents, Khionia Berladskaya, subsequently wrote a ‘Confession’, as we have seen, with testimony about the lechery that she and Father Grigory were engaging in at the time. And Rasputin himself, who categorically rejected the dangerous accusations that he went to bathhouses with women, would soon afterwards in Petersburg be saying quite the opposite. So he had lied during the investigation, as had his followers, since they did not wish or were unable to explain to clergy of the official church the mystical secrets their remarkable teacher had revealed to them.
The Secret Of His Friendship With Iliodor
But evidence of Rasputin’s closeness to the Khlysty is not only to be found in the story of the Tobolsk inquiries; it is also provided by Rasputin’s sworn enemy the monk Iliodor. And not by his writing, but by his behaviour after he resigned from holy orders. Retained in the Tobolsk archive is the testimony of those of Iliodor’s votaries who followed him to the farm where the monk resided after his defrocking. Iliodor had built a new house there, which he symptomatically called ‘New Galilee’ (‘New Israel’ was a Khlyst community outside Petersburg). And he began to preach his own remarkable new doctrine.
The Rasputin File Page 31