The Rasputin File

by Edvard Radzinsky

  The ‘best of Jews’ knew where to send them to look for the funds. And the Extraordinary Commission conscientiously searched the banks for Rasputin’s money. Preserved in the File are the Commission’s endless inquiries to all the great banks — the Union of Provincial Commercial Banks, the Bank of the Caucasus, the Petrograd Municipal Credit Association, the Russian-Asiatic Bank, the Moscow Merchants Bank, and so on. But the replies of the numerous banks surviving in the File are all the same: ‘The bank has the honour of informing the Extraordinary Commission that there are no deposits, securities, or safety deposit boxes in the bank in the name of Grigory Efimovich Rasputin-Novy, his wife, Praskovia Fyodorovna Rasputina-Novaya, his children, Varvara, Matryona, and Dmitry Rasputin, or his niece, Anna Nikolaevna Rasputina.’ Rasputin’s wealth had vanished and evaporated. For no wealth at all survived him. Grand Duchess Olga had been right when she wrote in her memoirs, ‘He left nothing behind, and the empress gave his orphans money.’ The hundreds of thousands of roubles that had passed through Rasputin’s hands were left in the restaurants where he drank to suppress his fear of death; they were left with the Gypsy choruses and in the hands of the endless petitioners and, more often, beggars to whom he gave countless sums. Sums that he treated with contempt. And, of course, some of the money was left in the hospital train and in Vyrubova’s and the tsarina’s infirmaries. But mainly, as Filippov accurately testified, it wound up in the hands of his secretaries, above all Simanovich’s. And, of course, in those of the elusive Akilina Laptinskaya. Not only did she lay out Rasputin for his final journey, but, it would appear, had the remaining money in the house under her disposal.

  Yet no sooner had the February Revolution begun than Akilina, who knew all that mysterious person’s secrets and who had followed him all the way from the chapel under the stable to the empress’s palace, vanished from Petrograd, slipping away into the chaos of the new life. And ‘Voskoboinikova, as soon as she heard about the abdication, immediately left Tsarskoe Selo’, as Vyrubova’s maid, Feodosia Voino, testified. ‘Voskoboinikova left the infirmary on 3 March and never returned.’

  Rasputin’s family met the revolution in Petrograd. His wife, Praskovia, went back to Pokrovskoe to claim their right to his legacy. The writ of distraint inventorying Rasputin’s property and executed in her presence has survived. And the inventory is a pitiful one. Dmitry would return from the war to Pokrovskoe after the Bolshevik coup. And then all of them — Praskovia, Dmitry, and the daughter Varvara — would be sent north by the Bolsheviks to the town of Salekhard. Praskovia would die there, as would Dmitry — of scurvy. Varvara would return to Pokrovskoe, where all trace of her would be lost for a long time. And then she would re-emerge in Leningrad, only to die in obscurity at the beginning of the 1960s.

  But, to make up for all that, Matryona, Grigory’s elder daughter and his favourite, would prove worthy of him. She too would play a fateful role in the destiny of the royal family.

  Life After Death

  After her arrest in Tsarskoe Selo, Alix was no longer able to visit his grave. But Our Friend could now visit her in her dreams. One of them was terrifying.

  She was standing in the Malachite Room at the Winter Palace. And he appeared by the window. His body was covered with terrible wounds. ‘ They will burn you at the stake,’ he cried, and the whole room burst into flames. He beckoned to her to run, and she rushed towards him. But it was too late — the whole room was on fire. And she woke up, stifling a scream.

  Now she waited in fear of the inevitable. And it came. Captain Klimov and his detachment of soldiers stationed in Tsarskoe Selo managed to open Our Friend’s grave.

  In January, ‘under the old regime’, Captain Klimov had noticed the daily guard placed at the construction site of the Serafim Chapel. And in the last months before the revolution, it was in fact to that place that the tsarina had frequently gone with Vyrubova and a guard of court police.

  Along with his soldiers and a member of the State Duma, the journalist E. Lagansky, Captain Klimov decided to look for the grave of the elder in the unfinished chapel.

  The work on ‘Anya’s church’ had been abandoned by the builders, and its entrance was boarded up. But by climbing along the rafters and beams, they managed to reach an opening on the second floor and through it to penetrate the unfinished chapel. Torches were lit. And Klimov’s soldiers set to work with picks.

  The zinc-lined coffin lay deep in the earth. The soldiers, believing the stories about jewels placed in the coffin by the tsarina, hurriedly removed the coffin’s cover. In the dull light of the torches, they saw a head and arms folded crosswise.

  They found no jewels, but on top of the folded arms they did discover a small wooden icon. On its back were the names of the tsarina, her daughters, and the Friend, written in their own hands in indelible ink.

  How many jeers and curses there were in the papers! To place an icon in a coffin and moreover in the coffin of a fornicator! They spoke of sacrilege. But, as the File makes clear, the little icon had not been the tsarina’s doing at all. The tsarina’s friend Yulia Dehn testified that ‘The icon with the signatures that was written about so much was given to Rasputin while he was still alive, and Laptinskaya, who bathed and dressed Rasputin’s body, herself, on her own initiative, put the icon in Rasputin’s coffin.’

  The little icon was sent to the Petrograd Soviet. That year the magazine A Small Light published a picture of it: ‘On the image’s obverse side is an icon of “The Sign of the Mother of God”. On its reverse are the signatures of Alexandra, Olga, Tatyana, Maria, and Anastasia. One under the other. In the corner beneath them is an inscription by Vyrubova: “ 11 December 19 16. Novgorod. Anna.”’

  The coffin was pulled from the grave. Covered with make-up, Rasputin’s disfigured face gazed at the sky. The soldiers, crowding around, examined the shaggy beard sticking out. And the large bump on his forehead resembling a budding horn that during his lifetime he had carefully concealed with his hair, as his daughter Matryona wrote. Then, as called for by the revolutionary times, a political meeting was held alongside the coffin. And those present decided to remove the corpse from Tsarskoe Selo. At which point Alix, overcoming her contempt for Kerensky, asked him through Colonel Kobylinsky, the commander of the security guard, to protect the body from further outrages. And Kerensky gave orders for the corpse to be secretly taken away and buried.

  And so the body’s wanderings began! First the corpse, disguised as a musical instrument, was brought to Petrograd by railway freight car packed in an enormous piano box. In Petrograd, it lay in the garage of the former court department amongst the royal carriages.

  Then it was decided to bury the corpse secretly somewhere on the outskirts of Petrograd.

  On March at dawn, the body in the piano box was taken out along the Old Petersburg Highway to give it secret burial in an uninhabited place.

  But near Lesnoe, the vehicle with the coffin unexpectedly broke down. Just as the vehicle with the remains of the royal family would do.

  And it was decided “to burn the corpse at once right there.” Just as Yurovsky would attempt to burn the royal remains.

  They built an enormous bonfire, and after dousing the corpse with gasoline, they set fire to it. The document regarding the burning of Rasputin’s corpse remains today in the former Museum of the Revolution in Petersburg.

  ‘We the undersigned jointly burned Rasputin’s corpse between 7 and 9 o’clock. The burning took place near the great highway from Lesnoe to Peskaryovka in the complete absence of anyone besides those identified below by our hands.’

  And following, the signatures of F. Kupchinsky, Plenipotentiary of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, Captain V. Kochadeev, Representative of the Governor General of Petrograd, and six students of the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute.

  The legend has persisted that Rasputin did not, during the incineration, disappoint the expectations of the onlookers: through the action of the fire, his corpse seemed to rise up and
only afterwards disappear in the flames. His ashes were scattered to the winds.

  Thus did Rasputin pass through each of the four elements: water, earth, fire, and air.

  But even after his incineration, Rasputin remained with the royal family. He continued to be with them during their whole sad confinement. Hermogen stood at the head of the Tobolsk eparchy, having earlier been exiled there by the tsars for his denunciation of Our Friend. That stern pastor’s power and authority were still unquestioned in Tobolsk. Hermogen wanted to help them escape and could have done so. But Alix could not forget that Hermogen had been Grigory’s enemy. And she did not trust him.

  But there was someone else she was willing to trust. This was Boris Solovyov, the son of Nikolai Solovyov, who had been Rasputin’s admirer and the treasurer of the Most Holy Synod. The rascal son had grasped the situation and had married Rasputin’s daughter Matryona. That was enough. Alix believed: he had been sent to them by Our Friend. And she gave him the royal jewels to organize their escape. Solovyov took everything. And after the Bolsheviks seized power, he conscientiously turned over to them the unlucky officers who had come to the Ekaterinburg to plan the royal family’s liberation. Thus the peasant continued to be their undoing from beyond the grave.

  The jewels, however, did not bring Solovyov riches. Everything would disappear during the civil war. The semi-indigent Solovyov would find work in Paris in an automobile factory and he died there in 1916 from tuberculosis. Matryona Rasputina-Solovyova got herself a position as a governess and lived with her two little daughters in a tiny Parisian apartment. After the appearance of Yusupov’s memoirs, she noisily brought her father’s murderer to trial. And then that native of a Siberian village turned up in America, where she found work as a lion tamer! She died in the 1970s.

  Blessed Unto Death

  The former tsarina wrote to Anya all about the dead man of God. She connected the blood and horrors of the civil war to God’s punishment for the death of Our Friend. On 17 December 1917, the anniversary of his death, she wrote to the Friend, ‘We are experiencing it together again … I remember … the terrible 7th. Russia too suffers for this, all must suffer for this, what they have done, but no one understands.’

  On 9 January 1918, she wrote, ‘Yet I firmly believe that He will save everything. He alone can.’ Who’s the subject? Grigory? God? Sometimes it isn’t clear any more in her letters.

  Then came their last journey. And the almighty Our Friend was again at their side. The tsar, the tsarina, and their daughter Maria were taken to Ekaterinburg, the city where they would be killed, via Pokrovskoe. The road, the highway from Tobolsk to Tyumen, exists to this day. It passes the houses of the village of Pokrovskoe. And it passed Grigory’s house. Thus, the dream that she had not dared to realize as tsarina, she realized as a prisoner. She saw his river, his trees, and his house — the places where his mysterious transfiguration had taken place, the one he had spoken of so often. The former tsars stopped for a while in front of his house, two steps away from the windows of Our Friend. As Alix wrote in her diary, ‘About 2, got to Pokrovskoe … stood long before our Friend’s house, saw his family & friends looking out of the window’ (14 April 1918).

  Thus, a year and a half after his own murder, he had led them also to a harrowing death. Had his prophecy come true?

  Had There Been A Prophecy?

  Simanovich published in his book about Rasputin a famous prediction of his that has been repeated in numerous books about him. ‘Russian Tsar! I have a presentiment that I shall leave this world before the first of January. If I am killed by hired assassins, then you, tsar, will have no one to fear. Remain on your throne and rule. But if the murder is carried out by your kinsmen, then not one [member] of your family will survive more than two years… I shall be killed, I am no longer among the living … Pray, be strong, and take care of your chosen clan.’ This text, allegedly composed by Rasputin not long before his death, was supposedly given to the tsarina by Simanovich.

  Although this ‘prophecy’ may perhaps sound all right in translation, it does not in Russian withstand any criticism at all. There is not a single word in it from Rasputin’s uneducated but highly poetic lexicon. Beginning with the salutation ‘Russian Tsar!’ Not only could Rasputin not address the tsar that way; no Russian could. It’s Simanovich’s own language. This ‘prophecy’, like numerous other ‘prophecies’ of the kind, was published after the execution of the royal family, and it was undoubtedly written by Simanovich himself. It is one of the many myths that fill his memoir of Rasputin.

  Nonetheless, Rasputin’s predictions of the death of the royal family in the event of his own murder have been attested by many witnesses. Rasputin’s friend, the Asian doctor Badmaev, spoke of them, as did his daughter Matryona, his publisher Filippov, and so forth. To a certain degree, those predictions could have been a means of self-defence for the peasant, who, knowing how much his powerful enemies hated him, had decided by that means to make the ‘tsars’ more vigilant in his defence! But only to a certain degree. For one did not need to be a prophet to predict the death of the ‘tsars’ at that time. Thoughts about the fall of the regime and the death of the royal family were in the air. The bloody first revolution of 1905 had already thundered. And the possible spilling of royal blood had been predicted then not merely by Russian revolutionaries but also by the tsar’s own Prime Minister Witte. The grand dukes and the Speaker of the State Duma also constantly spoke of the need to ‘save ourselves’. So Rasputin’s predictions were merely part of a general sense of looming apocalypse.

  But Rasputin unquestionably did have visions and make prophecies. And they were part of the mysterious dark strength that he possessed. On 24 February 1917, well after Rasputin’s death, G. Shavelsky, the archpresbyter of the Russian army and navy and a man who hated Rasputin, wrote down a conversation he had had with Professor Fyodorov, the physician responsible for treating the heir.

  ‘What’s new with you in Tsarskoe Selo? How are you managing without the “elder”?’ Shavelsky mockingly asked.

  ‘You should not laugh,’ Fyodorov seriously replied.

  Everyone laughed here in regard to Grigory’s prophesy that after his death the heir would become ill on such and such a day. On the morning of the day in question I’m hurrying to the palace. Thank goodness, the heir is completely healthy. The court scoffers had already begun to make fun of me, but …in the evening I got a sudden call: ‘The heir is ill!’ I rushed to the palace. It was terrible! The boy was haemorrhaging, and I just barely managed to stop it. That’s the elder for you. Laugh at the miracles all you want.

  So among the visions that that mysterious seer was visited by, must be included the threatening spectre of future regicide and the death of the unfortunate boy. As, of course, must his own inescapable death.

  The Heavy Hand

  And, of course, that mystical person could not have failed to sense his own ‘heavy hand’. He could not have failed to observe in his own life the sorry fate of those who were connected to him. This brings to mind the words in the File of Leonid Molchanov, the son of the exarch of Georgia, who in a meditation on the death of his father, observed: ‘reviewing the past of all the people who had linked their destinies to Rasputin — Iliodor, Hermogen, [and] Damansky, who through Rasputin had made a brilliant career and then had fallen ill with an incurable disease — I came to the perhaps superstitious conviction that Rasputin’s hand was a heavy one.’ Beletsky would use virtually the same words to tell his investigator that he ‘saw the sad end of all the people who had sought support from Rasputin … the fatal disgrace that inevitably was their lot’. The highly placed official Beletsky was considering here the ends of the careers of people who had been connected to Rasputin. He still didn’t realize that he should have been considering the ends of their lives, as Molchanov had done regarding his dead father and Damansky.

  For the February Revolution was merely the first step in the bloodshed.

  Soon October came crashi
ng down. And replenished the cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Now to the tsarist ministers sent there by the February Revolution were added the begetters of that revolution. Amusing conversations took place. The same Tereschenko, who had talked of regicide with Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, and who had reportedly invested five million roubles in the February Revolution, encountered the tsarist minister Scheglovitov. And Scheglovitov happily greeted Tereschenko, ‘So, it is you, Mikhail Ivanovich! Really, you didn’t have to give the February Revolution five million roubles to get in here. Had you hinted to me before, I’d have sheltered you here for nothing!’

  And, on his Gorokhovaya Street, as a symbol, as a recollection of Rasputin’s threatening, upraised hands, the most terrifying establishment in Petrograd was opened — the Bolshevik Extraordinary Commission, or Cheka, so unlike the Provisional Government’s idyllic Extraordinary Commission of the same name. And from the Cheka’s new building on Gorokhovaya, many of Rasputin’s friends would follow each other to the firing-squad wall.

  What a desperate cemetery there is of people tied to Rasputin who died violently. The dangerous gossip Prince Andronikov, who was so close to the elder, was shot in 1919. And the whole honest company of people pushed ahead by Rasputin would lie down in unknown graves with a bullet in the heart — Protopopov, Alexei Khvostov, and Beletsky. With the capital’s removal to Moscow, the former dignitaries were transferred to Butyrki Prison, which survives in Moscow to this day.

  The lawyer S. Kobyakov, who served as a defence attorney before revolutionary tribunals, recalled: ‘On 5 September … in the days of the Red Terror … they were informed that they would be shot. The former archpriest Vostorgov [yet another friend of Rasputin’s] exhibited greatness of spirit before his death: he heard everyone’s confession and absolved them of their sins before they died.’