‘6 Nov. 1915 … Well Lovy, He thinks I better now see the old Gentleman & gently tell it him, as if the Duma hisses him, what can one do…better he goes by yr. Wish than forced by a scandal.’
But whom to appoint? She had absolutely no idea. And once again it was time for Our Friend. No, he had no intention at all of appointing Khvostov. The latter was too tricky and stupid. A completely new person was required. One who would be acceptable to the Duma, yet who would agree to be ‘ours’. The absence of Prince Andronikov, who knew everyone and everything, was telling. Rasputin was evidently obliged to discuss the candidacies for prime minister with his ‘Brain Trust’ — with Simanovich, Rubinstein, and Manasevich-Manuilov.
Meanwhile, the new Duma session was impending. And until a new prime minister could be found, it was necessary to rescue the old one. But to do that, the tsar first had to take a step towards reconciliation with the Duma. And the peasant proposed implementing the great move that he had suggested — that of the tsar appearing before the Duma. A move that appealed to Nicholas, although the proud tsarina regarded it coolly. But she too had learned to compromise. And on 13 November she surprised Nicky by writing, ‘Of course if you could have turned up for a few words, quite unexpected at the Duma (as you had thought to) that might change everything & be a splendid deed & it wld. later be easier for the old man.’
But Rasputin understood that things would not continue that way for long. A new prime minister was needed. He and his ‘Brain Trust’ had to keep thinking.
The Salon And Its Last Days
While the search for a new prime minister was going on, Alix was forced to deal with the church again. Samarin’s replacement, the portly, phlegmatic Baron Volzhin, had disappointed her. He was behaving independently. He had tried to bring about what the previous chief procurator had broken his neck on — the retirement of Varnava, a man hated by the Synod and already the subject of discussion in the Duma. But she would not hand ‘ours’ over: ‘10 Nov….Volzhin will need a good deal of ‘picking up’ from you, he is weak & frightened … so when you see him, make him understand that he serves you first of all & the Church — & that it does not concern society nor Duma.’
It was then that the idea occurred to the ‘Tsarskoe Selo cabinet’ to make the notorious Pitirim metropolitan of Petrograd.
Alix put her usual pressure on Nicky.
‘12 Nov…. Darling, I forgot to speak about Pitirim, the metropolitan of Georgia … he is a worthy man, and a great Worshipper, as our Friend says. He foresees Volzhin’s fright…but begs you to be firm, as he is the only suitable man…it would be good you did it as soon as you come, to prevent talks & beggings fr. Ella etc.’ One other idea completed Our Friend’s bouquet of state proposals. ‘Then Zh[e]vakhov he begs you straight to nominate as help to Volzhin…age means nothing & knows the Church affairs to perfection — it’s your will & you are master.’
Prince Zhevakhov was the dark-haired young man shown standing at the back in the photograph of Rasputin’s devotees. Nothing had been simple for him, either. He had been a minor official of the Council of State. But Rasputin had noticed him at once. Rumour had it that Zhevakhov, too, was a person of non-traditional sexual proclivities, which could ruin a church career. But Rasputin started to promote him, and brought him to the palace. And soon afterwards, the modest official went to Belgorod at the empress’s command to arrange a shrine for the relics of the Prelate Iosaf.
Volzhin refused to accept him as his deputy. A post of second deputy chief procurator was then created for Zhevakhov. After which the first deputy was driven out, leaving Zhevakhov alone.
At the end of 1915 it came to pass that Pitirim was appointed metropolitan of Petrograd and Ladoga. Thereby becoming one of the leading members of the church hierarchy and ‘pre-eminent in the Synod’. He would take up residence in the metropolitan’s chambers at the famous Alexander Nevsky Abbey, the chief monastery of the capital.
The refractory Volzhin was removed at the beginning of 1916. His place as chief procurator was taken over by the silent and submissive Nikolai Raev, the modest director of higher education courses for women.
The coup was over. Alix now had an obedient Synod. And later she would be able to write to the tsar: ‘21 Sept. 1916 … Fancy, the Synod wants to present me with a Testimonial & Image (because of my work with the wounded, I think) — you see poor me receiving them all? Since Catherine no Empress has personally received them alone, Gregory is delighted (I less so) — but strange, is it not, I, whom they feared & disapproved of always.’
She was entitled to the award. She and the peasant Grigory Rasputin had created a new Synod with obedient hierarchs.
‘A Grand Duke? Higher!’
The year 1915 was drawing to an end. At the time, rumours of Rasputin’s power over the ‘tsars’ had taken the shape of every conceivable myth. He had long since turned into a cult figure in the eyes of the capital’s residents. It was then that the yearning rich woman Lydia Bazilevskaya turned up by his side. This tall brunette, the divorced twenty-eight-year-old daughter of a lieutenant general, immediately found her way into the agents’ reports: ‘He came home drunk at one in the morning… [with] an unknown officer and lad … And then Bazilevskaya arrived…They remained until 4:00 a.m.’
The singer Belling would afterwards recall:
It was in November 1915 at six in the evening. An acquaintance of mine, L. P. B-aya [Lydia Platonovna Bazilevskaya] … of whom I knew only that she did ‘charity work’, although mostly for the sake of show … called me up on the phone: ‘Sweetie, come over right away!’
‘Why, what’s the matter?’ I asked, quite surprised by her request.
‘I have a very important person here who is taken with your picture and demands that you come at once.’ L. P. B-aya’s voice was extremely urgent and agitated.
‘Demands?’ I repeated. ‘Who is it, then? Some minister?’ ‘Higher!’ I received in answer. ‘What, a grand duke?’
‘Higher,’ I heard L. P. B-aya moan, obviously exasperated by my slowness. I was seized with indescribable curiosity. Just what sort of person was it? He ‘demanded’, and was higher than everything ‘highly placed’ as it then existed in our understanding…I went and, I must admit, urged the driver on from impatience. When I entered the vestibule, an agitated, flushed L. P. B-aya came out to me and herself quickly began helping me off with my fur coat and even my galoshes.
‘Don’t forget to kiss his hand. He likes that,’ L. P. B-aya informed me in a whisper.
‘What a nasty trick!’ I thought, crestfallen. ‘A priest!’ L. P. B-aya pushed me into the next room, which turned out to be an elegant, bright bedroom with red mirrors, small chairs, and lace pillows. Several ladies and two or three men were sitting in it. I squirmed uncomfortably under the inquisitive stare of a pair of grey, deep-set, small, ugly eyes … Dishevelled, in a lovely lilac silk shirt, high boots, and an untidy beard, he seemed familiar to me, and subconsciously I realized it was Rasputin.
Thus did Alexandra Belling make Rasputin’s acquaintance. And become a member of his salon.
The Salon On The Eve Of The End
While those political squabbles were taking place, the Rasputiniad continued, by then already smacking of madness. Zhukovskaya described the peasant’s salon at the end of 1915 with its now familiar membership:
Sitting at the table by a boiling samovar that never ever seemed to go away was a now pudgy Akilina in her grey dress of a sister of mercy: she worked at the royal hospital. Taking refuge next to her was Munya, who was gazing in meek adoration at Rasputin, who had squeezed me into a corner of the sofa. The doorbell rang. Munya went to open it … The princess had arrived. Shakhovskaya, a tall, plump brunette with slow, lazy, alluring movements. She too was dressed a sister of mercy and worked in the Tsarskoe Selo hospital. ‘I’m so tired, all I can think about is getting some sleep, but, as you see, I’ve come to you.’
‘Well, let me have a look at you,’ Rasputin said. ‘You know how sw
eet you are. Oh, you are such a tasty dish,’ he said, fondling her breasts and sticking his fingers inside her collar … And squeezing her knee, he added, squinting, ‘Do you know … where the spirit is? You think it’s here,’ and he indicated his heart, ‘but it’s here,’ and Rasputin rapidly and imperceptibly raised and lowered the hem of her dress…’Oh, it’s hard with you! Look at me, hypocrite,’ he threatened her, ‘or else… I’ll strangle you. Here’s the cross for you.’
‘I’m going to go home now,’ Shakhovskaya said, resting her head on his shoulder and snuggling up to him. ‘I’ll take a bath and sleep … Father, don’t be cross now,’ Shakhovskaya sweetly pleaded, presenting her face for a kiss. ‘After all, you know, Father!’
‘Come, come, my tasty one,’ Rasputin benignly replied, squeezing her breast. ‘She wanted to.’
This is what has always amazed me about Rasputin’s strange manner. How is it that everything is possible and nothing shameful here? Or is it all different than it seems? To be sure, nowhere else will you see what took place there in that empty dining room. Where pampered aristocratic ladies waited for the caresses of a dirty middle-aged peasant, waited submissively for their turn without getting angry or jealous.
The Testimony Of Those Who Visited The Sofa
Yet all that time the police were describing his incessant search for new women. ‘3 November 1915. An unknown woman arrived to petition for her ensign husband … When she came out, she started telling the porter, “Rasputin barely listened to my request and started holding my face in his hands, and then my breasts, saying, ‘Kiss me…I’ve fallen in love with you.’ Then he wrote out some sort of note and started making advances again. He didn’t give me the note, but said, ‘Come back tomorrow.’ “ And she added, “To go to him, you have to make a down payment on what he wants, and I cannot do that.” ’
Now that the ‘holy period’ was over, what were all those endless women, so scrupulously recorded by the police agents, to him?
The ones who refused him are named in the agents’ testimony. But the unhappy petitioners who agreed to ‘make a down payment’ unfortunately are not. As a rule they are identified by initial only — ‘Madame K.’ — or are referred to as ‘a certain lady’. ‘A certain lady,’ Beletsky testified, ‘in order to return her husband from exile, first gave Rasputin all her money, but he demanded more … She pleaded with him not to touch her.’ But Rasputin ‘gave her an ultimatum: either she did what he wanted and he would ask the sovereign about her husband, or she would never show herself again’. And ‘taking advantage of her nervous state’, he possessed her. And after that went to see her at her hotel several times. And then he ‘broke off relations with her and gave orders not to admit her’.
Zhukovskaya tells similar stories about the obscure women from whom Rasputin extorted ‘down payments’. All the stories have the same ending: he would sleep with the women and then drop them in disgust. But those unhappy women were all so fleeting, and thus unwilling to talk about their misfortunes, that the Extraordinary Commission was unable, except for Vishnyakova, to call a single one of them.
In trying to make sense of our hero, we shall want to remember his fastidious near-loathing of the unknown women who slept with him, and remember, too, their words: ‘he took advantage of my nervous state,’ as a ‘certain lady’ said to Beletsky; and ‘after reducing me to hysterics, [he] deprived me of my virginity,’ as the nurse Vishnyakova testified.
Yet the unknown fallen petitioners constituted a part of the round dance that might have astonished Casanova — all those flashing women’s bodies passing through Rasputin’s bed, or rather across the half-ruined sofa in his narrow little study, only to vanish at once from his life.
The tiny room and broken-down sofa have been described by Alexandra Belling, who visited the apartment. And they have been described in even greater detail by Zhukovskaya:
The sofa’s leather was rubbed completely bare and its back was broken off and propped against it. ‘Well, sit down, sit down.’ Putting his arm around me and nudging and prodding me from behind, Rasputin leaned up against the sofa’s back, and it fell off. After extricating myself, I said with a glance at the broken sofa, ‘It isn’t any good. You ought to at least call a carpenter.’ He became flustered. ‘Yes, it broke off from that itself,’ he muttered, lifting up the heavy back with one hand and returning it to its place. ‘It’s all the sister from Simbirsk. As soon as she spends the night here, it will fall off for sure. It’s goblinry.’
The bulky frame of the peasant woman who sometimes kept Rasputin busy at night had, in combination with the unfortunate sofa’s numerous other tests both day and night, worn it out.
But who were they — the ones who passed over that of t-suffering couch?
From the words of his agents and his own conversations with Rasputin, Beletsky would generalize that besides the petitioners who were tormented by the requirement of having to ‘make a down payment’, the main clients of Rasputin’s sofa were petitioners ‘who took a light view of moral principles, [and] many of them were even proud of Rasputin’s attentions to them and candid about their intimacy with him, however temporary it had been’.
Once again he does not provide their names. For the reason that as a rule they too disappeared with a strange swiftness from the apartment on Gorokhovaya after visiting the sofa. Only a few of them stayed on, in which case the external surveillance agents naturally established their names.
‘Get Out Of Here!
In 1917 the Extraordinary Commission required the ladies who had ‘stayed on’ to answer some disagreeable questions. Their testimony has survived in the File.
‘Sheila Gershovna Lunts, twenty-five, a barrister’s wife, of the Jewish faith, no criminal record.’ This handsome woman had met Rasputin at a party given by Professor I. Kh. Ozerov, the friend of Rasputin’s publisher, Filippov, whom Rasputin had once described to Filippov as ‘a state nobody’. She testified:
I had heard many nasty things about Rasputin before, especially about his attitude towards women, which is why when I came in, and this peasant in high boots and a Russian coat looked at me, I had an unpleasant feeling … Rasputin…made jokes, laughed, and read fortunes from the palms of those present, and his predictions took the form of barely comprehensible apothegms. To me, for example, he said, ‘You are a sufferer, but the Lord Jesus will help you and your truth will win out!’ He joked with the ladies, and tried to embrace first one and then another, but they wouldn’t let him. He drank wine, although not very much.
Rasputin naturally took a liking to the curly-haired Sheila. And the familiar pursuit began.
‘Once he called me in the evening from a certain Knirsha, whom I didn’t know. He said to me over the phone, “Come on over. We’re having a lot of fun here!”’
Knirsha’s apartment was one of the main places Rasputin went for amusement from the end of 1915 to January 1916, his last year. It constantly flickers through the security agents’ entries.
‘21 January. Rasputin…went to Knirsha’s.’
‘30 January. Rasputin went to Knirsha’s…He came home completely drunk at 4:30 a.m.’
Andrei Knirsha was an insurance company official, ‘an Alphonse supported by women,’ as a security agent said of him. And although Sheila’s friends warned her that Knirsha ‘was involved in shady deals’, as she put it, she agreed to go to the suspicious apartment. At fault was the unlucky Jewish Pale of Settlement: ‘I very much wanted my parents, who did not have the right of residence in the capital, to move to Petrograd,’ she would testify. But knowing of Rasputin’s ‘nasty attitude towards women’, she should not have had any doubt about the purpose of his call.
‘I arrived at the apartment,’ Lunts reported, ‘with its chic furnishings, although it was the luxury of a parvenu, and found Knirsha himself there, young but very stout with broad cheekbones. His mistress was the wife of some old general.’ She was amazed to find there too ‘the well-known Duma member Protopopov, who at the t
ime was still only the Deputy Speaker of the State Duma but with whom I was already acquainted at the time, having met him at Professor Ozerov’s… Finding Protopopov in Rasputin’s company gave me an awful start, and later in conversation I observed to him, “It does not befit you to be in such a place,” to which Protopopov replied, “Yes, I agree!” and praised me for my frankness.’
She did not realize that she was present at an historic meeting. Protopopov, one of the leaders of the opposition, was in that haunt to establish good relations with Rasputin and the ‘tsars’.
Hovering round the peasant
at the soirée were several ladies, and Rasputin was provoking the jealousy of a tall blonde lady whose name was, I think, Yasinskaya, and with whom he was evidently on intimate terms. That lady didn’t like me either, maybe because Rasputin had told everyone that he liked me very much, that my eyes knocked him out. A supper was served at Knirsha’s with lots of wine. Rasputin drank his usual Madeira and then called for a Gypsy chorus … Rasputin danced … the party started to take on the character of an orgy … and I left.
Apparently without ever understanding why he had summoned her.
But whether it was the opportunity to help her parents or interest of another kind that was very likely present in that sensual woman, Protopopov’s future lover, she herself ‘called Rasputin and told him [she] had a matter to discuss with him’.
And so Sheila Lunts found herself in the room with the sofa.
‘I heard voices coming from the dining room, but whom the voices belonged to I had no idea. I related my request to him, and told him that whenever my sister visited me and stayed on without official permission I felt enormous anxiety, and I asked him to help me.’
The Rasputin File Page 50