The Rasputin File

by Edvard Radzinsky

  The ‘ambiguous Loman’ was already serving two masters. And the experienced courtier had at someone else’s order devised the provocation. He had decided to take a picture of Rasputin and the scandalous Bishop Isidor in the merry company of inebriated sisters of mercy. He had decided to take a picture of a ‘Rasputin orgy’. And that is why they had ‘made sister Koscheeva laugh’ as the picture was being taken, and why Loman had sat down just before. The cunning Loman had already calculated the future and was serving the conspiracy.

  It was a signal. The denouement was approaching. The rats were already fleeing the sinking ship. And Loman was making an effort and organizing that photo of an ‘orgy’, which he then passed on to the Duma.

  On The Eve

  ‘Towards the end of 1916 the atmosphere in the building on Gorokhovaya Street was becoming ever more intense,’ Zhukovskaya remembered.

  On the outside it was the same bazaar … the constant phone calls …the women buzzing like hornets and crowding into the reception room, the dining room, and the bedroom, women both old and young, pale and in make-up, who came and went, bringing heaps of candy, flowers, and boxes of other things, all of which was strewn about … Rasputin himself, worn out and with a roving gaze, at times seemed like a hunted wolf, and for that reason, I think, one felt in his whole mode of life a certain haste and lack of confidence, and everything seemed accidental and precarious — the closeness of some blow, something looming over that dark, unwelcoming building.

  And like many others in those times, Zhukovskaya remembered and recorded his whisper: ‘“The ones over there are the enemies. They’re all searching, and trying, and laying a trap. I see it all. You think I don’t know it will soon all come to an end? Faith has been lost,” he suddenly said … “ there’s no more faith in the people, that’s what. Well, so long, my little bee! Kiss me goodbye.”‘ She never saw him again.

  ‘It Will Be A Revolution Of Rage And Revenge’

  It had come to pass by the end of 1916. It was not the bullets of revolutionary terrorists, nor the shells of Germans at the front, but the existence of a single person that was threatening to destroy one of the greatest empires in the world. The opposition, society, the court had all struggled in vain against the illiterate peasant with the awful name from an unknown village.

  In the days prior to Rasputin’s murder, Vasily Maklakov, a Duma deputy of the most powerful opposition party, the Constitutional Democrats, came to Moscow to speak before the chief influential factory owners and merchants. A police agent among those present wrote down Maklakov’s speech, and it has survived in the papers of the Department of Police. In the apartment of the millionaire Konovalov, his fellow party member, Maklakov spoke of the unavoidable revolution that Rasputin was bringing about.

  ‘The dynasty is risking its very existence, and not by means of destructive forces from without. It is by means of terrible destructive work from within that it is shortening its potential existence by a good century.’ And Maklakov then uttered some prophetic words: ‘The horror of the coming revolution … It will not be a political revolution, which might follow a predictable course, but a revolution of rage and revenge of the ignorant lower classes, a revolution that cannot be anything but elemental, convulsive, and chaotic.’

  And the sense of inevitable apocalypse that had once more appeared in society now became universal. It was then that the young Prince Zhevakhov told the tsarina of a vision that a certain Colonel O. had had. The colonel had been lifted onto a high mountain from which all of Russia was visible to him, a Russia flowing with blood from border to border.

  Alone

  They still didn’t know that autumn in the Crimean grand-ducal palaces that their last year was ending. But they did sense that a terrible, inevitable time was ahead. And in that looming catastrophe the tsar was alone. As his cousin the historian Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich afterwards recorded in his diary, ‘Around Alexander III there had been a closed circle of a few trusted people … After the twenty-third year of Nicholas’s reign he did not have a single friend left, neither among his relatives nor in high society.’ More accurately, the lonely tsar had only one friend — Our Friend, the universally detested peasant who threatened the empire and the dynasty! Even his mother was opposed to her son, who was destroying the empire.

  The File, from Vyrubova’s testimony: ‘The dowager empress was against the sovereign and the empress. They saw Marie Fyodorovna so rarely that in the twelve years I was with Alexandra Fyodorovna, I saw Marie Fyodorovna perhaps three times.’

  Hatred of the tsarina was in universal fashion. The court and the Tsarskoe Selo nobility joined the grand dukes in expressing their Fronde-like discontent. Prince Zhevakhov recalled that the head of the church secondary school for girls in Tsarskoe Selo not only did not bow to the tsarina upon meeting her but conspicuously turned away from the ruler of all Russia. ‘It is painful for me…not for myself but for my daughters,’ Alix told the prince at the time. Shameful caricatures depicting the Tsarina of all Russia in indecent poses with a bearded peasant were circulated throughout the country. The Tsar of all Russia was now contemptuously called ‘Nikolasha’ in the war-torn, embittered villages. The tsar, who until recently had been for them a dreaded ‘father’, was now depicted in thousands of graffiti as a pathetic husband deceived by his wife and a dissolute peasant.

  ‘I’m Terribly Busy With… Conspiracy ’

  How accurately did Maklakov observe, ‘In the highest circles of the nobility and the court there is fear that the ruling authority on its way to ruin will pull them and all their privileges down with it.’

  The legendary Yacht Club was the centre of aristocratic opposition at the time. It had been founded in 1840 during the reign of Nicholas I. Only the upper crust and the most well-born aristocrats — Russia’s blue bloods — were allowed within its walls.

  During the reign of Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, the Yacht Club had in effect been a closed political assembly. From there the highest aristocracy conducted its struggle against nihilists and revolutionaries. The Yacht Club was surrounded by mystery and exclusivity.

  The club was by tradition headed by the court minister — then Count Fredericks. But even there in that monarchist citadel, as Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich wrote in his diary, ‘the empress’s … conduct was openly criticized.’ And that was a frightening symptom. Alix attempted through Count Fredericks to put a stop to the conversations. With the magnificent bearing of an old guardsman and his impeccable manners evoking the vanished grandees of the ancien régime, Fredericks made a splendid impression at balls, but as a minister he was helpless. Perishing authority has always been surrounded by pathetic people. Not only did the conversations about the tsarina continue, they turned provocative. Grand Duke Dmitry and Felix Yusupov were members of the Yacht Club at the time.

  In Petrograd and Moscow, conspiracies were ripening in court circles, among the aristocracy, and in the magnificent apartments of the rich. But outside Petrograd in Tsarskoe Selo the lonely royal family continued to live its hopelessly isolated life. And as before, Alix, the head of the ‘Tsarskoe Selo cabinet’, worked untiringly, summoning the obedient but, alas, powerless ministers. Nicholas was far from the capital at Headquarters.

  In the meantime, the last steps were being taken in the great Romanov family to appeal to Alix. It was then that Zinaida Yusupova asked for an audience. The fact that Khvostov revealed in 1917 — that she was involved in his own (unsuccessful) murder conspiracy, offering huge sums to fund it — was no coincidence. That beauty, who was endowed with many talents (she was a potentially brilliant actress with whom Stanislavsky had pleaded to join his theatre), was apparently also one of the principal figures in the great Romanov family conspiracy. And Zinaida Yusupova went to see Alix.

  She was ‘received coolly’. And no sooner had she begun to talk about Rasputin than she ‘was asked to leave the palace’. But she declared that before she did so, she had to fulfil her duty before the empress
and ‘speak her piece’. Alix listened in silence and at the end of the monologue she said, ‘I hope I shall never see you again.’

  Zinaida was close to Alix’s sister Ella. So it was no coincidence that Ella came to see Alix after Zinaida had been thrown out. Her once much-loved sister Ella. The empress listened to her sister in silence, too. And she saw her out to her carriage in silence. As Felix Yusupov wrote, ‘Tears came to Ella’s eyes. “She drove me out like a dog…Poor Nicky, poor Russia.”‘ And Felix had not made it up.

  I read in the archives a letter from Ella herself. She wrote it to Nicky after Rasputin was murdered. And in it she described her meeting with Alix: ‘I have rushed to the two of you, whom I sincerely love, in order to warn you that all the classes from the lowest to the highest have reached their limit…She ordered me to say nothing … and I left wondering whether we would ever meet again…what tragedies might play themselves out, and what suffering was still in store for us.’

  The grand dukes’ conspiracy had apparently finally taken shape at the beginning of the dank, rainy Petrograd autumn. As Felix recalled, ‘the grand dukes and a few aristocrats were engaged in a cabal to remove the empress from power and send her away to a convent. Rasputin was to be exiled to Siberia, the emperor deposed, and the tsarevich crowned.’

  Not long before Rasputin’s murder, Purishkevich was summoned to the palace of Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich. And the monarchist Purishkevich, one of those who would commit that murder, wrote in his diary, ‘After our conversation, I took from the grand duke’s palace a strong conviction that he was undertaking something impermissible in regard to the sovereign.’

  In keeping with a favourite Russian tradition, however, the ‘impermissible’ was limited only to talk. None of them dared violate his oath and raise a hand against the tsar.

  But if the grand dukes were going to act, they needed to hurry. For another conspiracy was already brewing at Headquarters. A dangerous conspiracy of generals and the Duma opposition.

  ‘Among Konovalov [a Duma deputy], Krymov [a general], and Alexeev [the chief of command at Headquarters] some sort of cabal is brewing,’ wrote General Brusilov. And how melancholy is the observation in his notebook of another the tsar’s generals, General Lemke: ‘I’m terribly busy with the matter of growing conspiracy.’

  The Last Warning

  Once again the grand dukes tried to resolve the situation ‘within the family’, as the ‘dread uncle’ had once suggested to the tsar. At the time a wedding was being planned, the last of the ruling Romanov dynasty.

  It was the latest in a series of morganatic marriages. And by no means a joyful event for the dynasty’s prestige. The tsar’s sister Olga had divorced Pyotr Oldenburgsky. The sweet, gentle Pyotr, a scion of the ancient Oldenburgsky ducal family, was a homosexual, so Olga’s decision was accepted with resignation. And now Nicholas’s sister was marrying her ex-husband’s adjutant, Nikolai Kulikovsky, the modest commander of a regiment of cuirassiers. And conferences took place within the great Romanov family to discuss the planned marriage. But the discussions weren’t only about the marriage. The result was the next ‘family embassy’.

  Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich arrived at Headquarters on 2 November. A well-known historian and, as Sandro’s elder brother, nephew of Alexander II and thus the tsar’s kinsman, he was reputed to be a brilliant conversationalist. And now that master of conversation was about to inform the tsar of the conclusions reached at the great Romanov family’s conferences. After a long conversation, he handed Nicholas a letter that he had written beforehand. In it the grand duke said, ‘I long hesitated to reveal the whole truth to you, but after your mother and sisters convinced me to, I have decided to proceed.’ It was, as it were, a collective letter from the family.

  The next day Nicky wrote to Alix, ‘My precious … Nikolai Mikh. came here for one day — we had a long talk last evening wh. I will write to you about in my next letter — today I have no time … ever your old Nicky.’

  He did not dare to tell her the content of that serious conversation, preferring instead to forward Nikolai Mikhailovich’s letter to her.

  Alix read:

  You have said to me more than once that you cannot trust anyone, that everyone deceives you. If that is true, then it is also happening with your wife, who passionately loves you, but who has been led astray by the sheer malicious deceit of those around her. You trust Alexandra Fyodorovna … That is understandable. But what comes from her mouth is the result of clever juggling and not the actual truth …If it isn’t in your power to remove those influences from her, then at least protect yourself from the constant meddling and whispering of the spouse you love.

  The grand duke went on to explain that he had decided on that mission of his ‘in the hope … of rescuing you, your throne, and our dear country from the most terrible and irreparable consequences … You stand on the eve of a new era of unrest, I would even say, an era of assassination,’ and he implored the tsar to provide ‘ministers responsible to the Duma’.

  The tsar had thus been warned for the last time that it was coming — the ‘era of assassination’. And he had been warned on behalf of the entire Romanov Family.

  Anger

  Alix was enraged. ‘4 Nov. 1916 …I read Nikolai’s [letter] & am utterly disgusted. Had you stopped him in the middle of his talk & told him that, if he only once more touched that subject or me, you will send him to Siberia — as it becomes next to high treason. He has always hated … me … — but during war … to crawl behind yr. Mama and Sisters & not stick up bravely…for his Emperor’s Wife — is loathsome and treachery …you my Love, far too good & kind & soft — such a man needs to be held in awe of you— He & Nikolasha are my greatest enemies in the family, not counting the black women … Wify is your staunch One & stands as a rock behind you.’

  And a postscript: ‘I dreamt I was being operated: th’ my arm was cut off I felt utterly no pain. After a letter came from Nikolai.’

  But her anger would not let her finish the letter. And she continued, as always relying on Our Friend’s opinion. ‘On reading Nikolai’s letter He said, “Nowhere does Divine grace show through, not in a single feature of the letter, but only evil, like a brother of Milyukov, like all brothers of evil…The Lord has shown Mama that all that is worthless, asleep.” ’

  The Last Wedding In The Family Of Tsars

  They decided to get married in Kiev, where Olga’s mother, the dowager empress, was living. And where the entire Romanov family decided to gather. And Alix, knowing that Nicholas would also be going to his sister’s wedding, immediately started to worry. She understood what sort of conversations would come up. And she did not fail to condemn the coming celebration — in the words of Our Friend, naturally. ‘5 Nov Our Fr. is so angry, Olga married — as she did wrong towards you & that can bring her no luck.’

  And then came the wedding that Olga described in her memoirs. A simple wedding, a dark little church, the bride in a Red Cross uniform. And when Olga saw her brother, she was shocked: Nicky had changed a lot, with hollow cheeks and bags under his eyes. After the sad wedding, Nicholas at once set off for Headquarters in order to avoid any further discussion of Rasputin.

  The ‘Era Of Assassination ‘ Begins

  Alix’s dream had not been an idle one. For it was then, at the beginning of November, immediately after Nikolai Mikhailovich’s unsuccessful visit that Felix Yusupov revived his acquaintance with Rasputin. And during the inquiry into Rasputin’s murder, Yusupov told the investigator that ‘after a long interval …I met Rasputin in November at Golovina’s home.’ This is confirmed by Maria Golovina in her own testimony: ‘Prince Yusupov met Rasputin at my apartment in November 1916.’

  This is how Felix tells it. ‘M. G. [Maria Golovina] called me up. “Tomorrow Efim Grigorievich will be here, and he would very much like to see you” The path I had to take opened of its own accord…It is true that in taking that path I was compelled to deceive someone who was sincerely well di
sposed towards me.’

  Felix is most likely not telling the truth here. It was simply that after Nikolai Mikhailovich’s unsuccessful visit to Headquarters in November, the hunt for Rasputin had begun. And a plan for the hunt already existed in which the unhappy Munya was intended to play a fateful role in the death of the person she revered. Felix had, of course, called her up himself. ‘Felix was complaining of chest pains,’ Munya testified in the File. And complaining of an illness that the doctors were unable to cure, he easily drew from her a suggestion that she arrange a meeting with the great healer. For Felix knew that that had long been her wish — to unite the two people she loved so unselfishly. Thus, Felix and Rasputin met at Munya’s apartment.

  ‘Rasputin was much changed since the time I had first seen him. His face had grown puffy, and he had become quite flabby. He was dressed in a simple peasant’s coat and a light blue silk shirt and wide peasant trousers made of velvet …He behaved in a highly familiar manner … He kissed me.’ This time the prince did not try to avoid the kiss.

  In conversation with Rasputin the day before, Munya had called Felix ‘little’ (little Felix Felixovich Yusupov in contrast to Felix Felixovich, his father). Rasputin, who adored nicknames, immediately took it up and began calling Felix the ‘Little One’.