The Rasputin File
Page 51
But there were too many people in his dining room, and she was obliged to leave.
And again she herself called Rasputin and told him:
‘Remember the business I was asking about?’ But it turned out he had forgotten all about it, and he answered, ‘I don’t remember anything, come on over!’ I went over to his place. He wanted to hug and kiss, but I pushed him away. When I repeated my request, he answered, ‘Well, I’ll come to see you, meet your sister, and take care of everything!’
I called him, and he came to see me when there was nobody at home except me and the maid. In the study he started pressing himself on me terribly. I remarked to him, ‘Leave off with that, don’t, let’s just be friends, I have never deceived my husband.’
He asked, ‘Is it true that you’ve never deceived him?’
‘On my word of honour,’ I replied.
‘Well, I believe it then!’ Rasputin said. ‘But if you ever want to deceive him, let me be the first!’ Then Rasputin asked if I had any wine. I told him I didn’t have, but that there was some 180-proof spirits. Rasputin drank a little glass of the spirits and took a bit of apple. Then indicating the chair by the desk, Rasputin said, ‘Sit!’ I sat down. Then Rasputin … started dictating some rubbish to me in Church Slavonic. I filled up a whole page…
After he left, I was supposed to go to him again with my petition: it was a tedious, endless fuss…I stopped going to see him.
And so, Sheila’s testimony was that there had been nothing between her and Rasputin. The easiest thing would be to suggest that she was lying. But remembering Rasputin’s peculiar visits to the prostitutes, I think that up to a point she was telling the truth. And that is the reason why one senses hidden astonishment in her testimony: he made advances to her, and after receiving nothing more than the obligatory light rebuff, let her go with something close to relief. And she continued to visit him. Although it must have been quite clear to Rasputin that she was coming to ‘make a down payment’. And still he did not take it and continued his innocuous importuning, his ‘fuss’. And then suddenly she herself, as she asserts, broke off those visits that were obviously a matter of concern to her. But why?
Just as suddenly broken off were Rasputin’s meetings with another frivolous lady, Maria Gayer. Her own testimony is not in the File. But it does contain a characterization of her by her coachman, Yakov Kondratenko. ‘She… had no occupation. She engaged in loose living. She was, one could say, simply a “woman of the streets”. No sooner would she wink at some strange man, than you would have to drive them to a hotel … I know that she often went to see Rasputin, and that he would come to see her and drink until he was soused.’
The agents recorded constant encounters between Rasputin and Maria Gayer on the 15th, 17th, 19th, 23rd, 24th, 25th, and 28th. And then all of a sudden it came to an end. And she vanished from his life.
Disappearing from Rasputin’s home no less suddenly was yet another extremely complaisant lady, the cocotte Tregubova, whom the agents had earlier described as ‘exchanging deep kisses with Rasputin’. And in the File she tells a story very much like that told by Lunts. Tregubova herself went to see Rasputin frequently, during which the usual Rasputinian pestering went on. But she had only to resist slightly for Rasputin to give up.
‘I went to see Rasputin about ten times, in view of the fact that he had promised to get me a place on the imperial stage, although with the condition that I consent to intimate relations with him. Which of course I did not.’ It doesn’t make any sense — the chasteness of this lady whom both the other witnesses in the File and the police agents are unanimous in calling a ‘prostitute’. And why, given that chasteness, did she go to see Rasputin ‘ten times’ in spite of his ‘pestering’?
According to Tregubova, their relationship ended in an ugly scene. After one of his periodic advances, ‘He spat in my face and said, “To hell with you, then, you Yid.” And he left.’ Following which the vindictive Rasputin decided to drive her, as a Jew, out of Petrograd. On 17 January 1916, she received an order from Beletsky to ‘leave Petrograd … by 10:00 p.m.’ She then rushed to Rasputin, ‘pleading to be allowed to stay in Petrograd’. Apparently, this time her visit satisfied the peasant, since he gave her a letter to Beletsky: ‘Let her be, don’t touch her, let her stay.’ But as she would soon find out, Rasputin then called Beletsky and said, ‘Don’t let her stay, send her away.’ According to the records of the Petrograd Address Bureau, ‘the above-mentioned Tregubova departed from Petrograd for residence in Tiflis.’
What A Strange Story!
And there was another woman — Vera Varvarova. She was twenty-eight at the time. In the File she testified, ‘I’m an artiste, I sing Gypsy romances … I sang in the presence of the tsar.’
On tour in Kiev she had insulted an official and been threatened with a jail term. She went to Rasputin. Soon afterwards she ‘received a document from the Senate cancelling the punishment’. After which Rasputin ‘called me and said, “Come sing for me as my guest.” I went with Staff-Captain Ezersky, with whom I was living at the time. There were a great many guests at Rasputin’s — ladies — and I sang and played the guitar, and his guests sang along and Rasputin danced … After that I often went to see him that year for soirées of that kind … He was completely correct with me, especially as I was constantly in the company of Ezersky,’ she explained, insisting that she had never been in ‘the room with the sofa’. And she described what she had seen happen before her eyes to the ladies who went with Rasputin to the little sofa.
‘He would happen to be affectionate with some lady … and would go with her to the other room and then would chase her out: “Get out of here!”’
But Varvarova had no idea why that happened. And it may be that the sudden end of their relationship is evidence of that.
‘I was tired of the situation, and the last year before Rasputin’s death I did not go to see him even once,’ she said, concluding her testimony.
And the agents’ last entry about her does in fact relate to the end of 1915. But the entry is a very eloquent one: ‘Rasputin came back at 9:15 a.m. along with Varvarova …He probably spent the night at Varvarova’s.’ After which the singer took her place among the throng of vanished petitioners, while leaving the same unanswered question behind, a very important one for understanding our hero: did she leave of her own accord? Or had Rasputin suddenly said to her after their night together, ‘Get out of here!’
But there was still another category of sofa visitor. Beletsky defined them this way: ‘Well provided for materially and having no requests to make of him. But out of a special interest in his personality they deliberately sought his acquaintance, knowing what they were getting into.’ And among them, as Beletsky noted, ‘was a princess from Moscow’.
And Stefania Dolgorukaya, the wife of a gentleman of the bedchamber of the highest court, really was a princess. That thirty-eight-year-old lady, with the abundant curves that were so in fashion at the beginning of the century, used to stay at the Astoria, the most expensive hotel in the capital.
‘1 December. Rasputin and Princess Dolgorukaya arrived at the Hotel Astoria by motor at 3 : 30 a.m., and they remained together until morning,’ the external surveillance agents reported. But it wasn’t only passion that had brought Rasputin and the Moscow princess together. The princess had decided to get her husband transferred to Petrograd, and the peasant was helping her out by making appointments with the necessary people.
‘17 December. Princess Dolgorukaya sent a motor for Rasputin, which took him to the Hotel Astoria … The former Petrograd mayor, General Kleigels, also arrived and they remained together until 2: 00,’ the agents reported.
And there were two other lady friends familiar to us who, although they did not belong to the highest aristocracy, were still quite ‘well provided for materially’. On 8 December Rasputin ‘took Dzhanumova and Filippova out to the Donon. After dinner he went to the Hotel Russia with them,’ the agents reported.
Prugavin, the man who had first sent Zhukovskaya to Rasputin, frankly explained to the investigator in the File, ‘She was someone with strained nerves and very likely a propensity to eroticism, and one has to suppose that with her search for new experiences, she did not find Rasputin’s own quest all that repugnant.’ So indeed it was. Eroticism permeates her memoirs, and it tormented her.
And that bold and quite shameless woman, shameless both in her life and in her writings, would, in describing that microworld of carnality, insist in her book and in conversation with friends that for all the elder’s onslaughts which she endlessly described, she never did yield to him!
But how interesting those onslaughts were. First came a lengthy sermon.
‘It doesn’t matter if you fornicate a little. This, you see, is how it ought to be: I have sinned and forgotten about it. But if, say, I should sin with you and afterwards can think of nothing but your … then the sin will go unrepented. Thoughts must be holy. And afterwards we’ll go to church and pray side by side, and then you’ll forget the sin and know happiness.’
‘But if all the same you consider that a sin, then why do it?’ I asked.
He squinted: ‘Well, repentance and prayer are not given without sin, after all’ … Bending ever lower, he laid his chest against me, and crumpling his body and twisting his arms, he reached a frenzy. It always seemed to me that at such moments he could feel nothing but that savage longing. You could stab him or cut him and he wouldn’t even notice. Once I stuck a large needle in his palm … and he didn’t even feel it … His brutal face drew near and turned almost flat, with his wet hair like matted like wool round his narrow, gleaming eyes that seemed through his hair to be made of glass. Silently pushing him away and freeing myself… I stepped back to the wall, thinking he would hurl himself at me again. But he slowly staggered towards me and said in a hoarse whisper, ‘Let us pray!’ And then he took me by the shoulder and pulled me over to the window where an icon of Saint Simeon of Verkhoturye stood. Thrusting a velvety lilac rosary into my hand, he threw me to my knees, while he himself collapsed behind me and started beating his head against the floor, at first silently, then intoning, ‘Venerable Simeon of Verkhoturye, have mercy on me, a sinner!’ … After several minutes, he dully asked, ‘What’s your name?’ [he had forgotten it, since they were all ‘Darling’ to him], and when I answered, he began beating his head against the floor again, alternately mentioning himself and me. After repeating that … ten times or so, he stood up and turned towards me. He was pale, and the sweat ran in streams down his face, but his breath was perfectly calm, and his eyes gazed mutely and affectionately — the eyes of a grizzled Siberian wanderer. And then he kissed me with cold monastic exultation.
But in all her descriptions, one perceives the frantic curiosity and desire that drove Zhukovskaya to Rasputin’s apartment. That lady-Satanist required force. And there wasn’t any. Her strong resistance or rebuff, which Rasputin had seemingly been waiting for, had been enough for it all to end in exultation and prayer! And Zhukovskaya would keep coming to see him, and it would all be repeated. Alexandra Belling described her own encounters with Rasputin in the same way. Only unlike Zhukovskaya, who wanted Rasputin, Belling had come to exploit him, and he was repellent to her. And that is why there was no prayer after the onslaught, since there was nothing for him to pray about. She was not sinful. And for that reason was easily able to slip out of his embraces.
All this gradually creates the strange feeling that it is as if he craved that rebuff to his onslaughts, so as to let go. It is as if all his eroticism were contained in that constant attacking and rebuffing. In that obligatory rebuffing.
Once More About His Erotic Secrets
‘On my way home,’ Zhukovskaya wrote, ‘I wondered if he had acted the same way with Lokhtina — after driving her to ecstasy, did he set her to prayer? And maybe the tsarina, as well? I remembered the greedy, insatiable passion that burst through all of Lokhtina’s frenzied caresses — such as could only be with a constantly heated yet never satisfied passion. But that isn’t something you’re ever likely to find out… It will, perhaps, only be learned much later, when they’re all no longer alive.’
It’s possible that it was all an extension of that same secret religious experience of his. The same constant summoning of lust and its suppression to the point of indifference, a process that served to ‘refine his nerves’ and that gave him his insights and his hypnotic power. That is why his ‘romances’ with the ladies who pushed him away, like Zhukovskaya, Dzhanumova, and Belling, were so drawn out. And why all those ladies who yielded to him, who satisfied his desires, disappeared without delay.
And the cocotte Tregubova, who obtained wealthy Jewish petitioners for him, visited him until she yielded. And that was why he had decided to send her away. For him, it was a fall. Sin had triumphed. As he had explained it to Zhukovskaya, ‘he had started to think about Tregubova’s.’ And the field of his diabolical strength had been weakened. And for that reason he had begun to hate her. Here, presumably, is the true explanation as to why he tried to remove Tregubova and send her away from the capital. And when the simple Tregubova came to him and apparently yielded to him once again, certain it would help, he ordered her sent from the city without delay. And Lunts and Varvarova and Bazilevskaya and Gayer and the nameless victims of the ‘down payment’ evidently made the very same mistake. And immediately vanished from his apartment. And as soon as poor Khionia Berladskaya had yielded to him, he began to hate her, too. And to avoid her, and his admonitions ended. And the case of the royal nurse Vishnyakova is the same. She had given in to his fierce desire and had yielded in half-madness. And he had at once distanced himself from her. And the outraged nurse declared that he had raped her.
The only ‘yielders’ who remained with him were those who had been initiated into his experience, the true members of his sect, who were ready to put up with his disgust and continue to venerate him. Like the unhappy Lokhtina or the loyal Zinaida Manshtedt or the silent Baroness Kusova. And, ultimately, the sly Laptinskaya and the obedient Patushinskaya, who at their leader’s command played the role of his ‘celestial wives’. To meekly disappear from his bed at his order. Or the others who continued to torment him with unsatisfied desire and harmless ‘fuss’, such as Princess Shakhovskaya and Sana Pistolkors. And those ladies, too, were drawn into his incessant onslaughts, that endless sexual game ending in lofty repentance, exultation, and prayer. That is why there was no jealousy in any of them. And when they tried to persuade the ‘new ones’ Dzhanumova or Zhukovskaya to give themselves, they knew it would be the end of them. That the latest ‘strangers’ would then join the female army that had passed across the sofa and vanished. Vyrubova received her schooling there. It is where she discovered the appeal of the game of unrequited desire. The erotic game into which she had enticed the tsar and tsarina.
The Peasant Searches For A Prime Minister
Between his drinking bouts and ‘nerve refinement’ the peasant had all along been occupied with trying to find a future cabinet head. It was no accident that Sheila Lunts had run into the Duma deputy leader Protopopov at Knirsha’s apartment. Our Friend was choosing the participants of his future political games. Taking place there were something like political auditions. That indeed was why he had brought along with him a certain Osipenko, the secretary (and more) of Metr
opolitan Pitirim. ‘20 December. Rasputin, along with Pitirim’s secretary, Ivan Osipenko, went to see the hereditary nobleman citizen Knirsh[a] (twenty-eight, a bachelor). Delivered there as well were two baskets of wine from the restaurant the Villa Rhode…and a Gypsy chorus was invited,’ the external surveillance agents reported.
The peasant’s ‘Brain Trust’ had been considerably enlarged. Besides the Jews there were now hierarchs from the Alexander Nevsky Abbey. Rasputin had become a frequent guest in the chambers of his appointee, Metropolitan Pitirim. Twelve years before, Rasputin had arrived at the abbey a pitiful supplicant. Now he held sway there. Pitirim arranged banquets and luncheons in his honour. The guest list was unchanging: Bishop Varnava, Pitirim’s secretary, Ivan Osipenko, the chief secretary of the Synod, Pyotr Mudrolyubov, and its treasurer, Nikolai Solovyov. Synod policy was decided at those luncheons.
Now at the end of 1915, however, they were feverishly discussing candidates for the future prime minister. It was not for nothing that Vyrubova, a member of the shadow cabinet, was also present.
‘16 Dec…. Ania was yesterday at the Metropolitans, our Friend too — they spoke very well, and then he gave them luncheon — always the first place to Gregory,’ Alix reported to Nicky, ‘and the whole time wonderfully respectful to him and deeply impressed by all he said.’
‘I Am A Devil, I Am A Demon’
Rasputin’s last year had arrived. That examiner of prime ministers to whom the tsars deferred spent the entire month of January 1916 deep in drunkenness. The security agents’ favourite entry was, ‘There were guests till morning. They sang songs.’
On 10 January he celebrated his birthday. He had reached forty-seven. He would not see forty-eight. The festivities took place under the indefatigable watch of the agents. That morning of 10 January, Komissarov’s men appeared at the peasant’s apartment bearing gifts. Conveying presents, they offered to help take the coats of Rasputin’s guests. After explaining that it was ‘how gentlemen in good homes celebrated’. Finding such a quantity of servants flattering, the peasant agreed. Cunning yet simple, he was! The agents afterwards described the gifts received by Rasputin: ‘a mass of valuable things in silver and gold, carpets, whole suites of furniture, paintings, money’. A congratulatory telegram from on high was also received and read out loud after Vyrubova and the other guests had arrived. The same Synod official Mudrolyubov gave a speech in which he emphasized Rasputin’s ‘significance for the state as a simple man who had brought the people’s aspirations to the foot of the throne’. After Vyrubova’s and Mudrolyubov’s departure, the genuine merry-making began. The peasant drank a lot, read telegrams from all the ends of Russia, and by evening fell down drunk. They put him to bed. After a short nap, he was sober again. Evening arrived. By then a more intimate circle had gathered, ladies for the most part. And he began to drink, demanding the same of the ladies. He plied them all with drink. He demanded Gypsies. The Gypsies came to congratulate him. By then all were completely drunk, with the exception of the Gypsy chorus. The more sensible ladies hastened to leave. The peasant was turning into a beast. In endless dancing and intoxication, he had reached a kind of madness. As had the guests along with him. Everyone sang, danced, and shouted. As the agents reported, ‘Those who remained were overcome by such mayhem that the Gypsy chorus hurried to leave. By 2:00 a.m. only those remained in the apartment who had decided to spend the night. In the morning a noisy row commenced: the husbands of two of the ladies who had spent the night at Rasputin’s burst into the apartment with firearms. The agents managed to escort the ladies out the back entrance.’