The Rasputin File

by Edvard Radzinsky

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  An early photograph of Rasputin, probably at the family home in Pokrovskoe. Even out of focus he is immediately recognisable. The narrow face with a ‘large, irregular nose, thick sensual lips, and a long beard’; the hair, as his daughter would write, was always ‘parted down the middle and combed across his forehead to conceal an odd little bump reminiscent of a budding horn.’

  A page from Rasputin’s ‘Diry’, which was his semi-literate way of spelling ‘Diary’. ‘Our hero, who like all semi-literate peasants adored writing’ — although he barely knew how to hold a pen — ‘had managed only to note down a few reflections in his wretched scrawl. He had evidently used the term “diary” for its important sound, knowing that the tsar and tsarina kept diaries, too.’

  Rasputin at Pokrovskoe: his wife Praskovia bore him three sons and two daughters, but ‘more important was that she was a good worker. Working hands were very much needed in the Rasputin household, because Grigory himself was often absent visiting holy places.’

  In this group, also at Pokrovskoe, the women’s clothes suggest they are local. The woman to his left is probably his mother, Anna; the man on the second left his father, Efim.

  The Rasputin home in Pokrovskoe. On the ground floor where he lived with his family, ‘it was the usual arrangement of a peasant lodge’. But upstairs the once indigent peasant had attempted to arrange everything ‘city fashion.’ There was a piano, to which the visiting monk Feofan ‘took indignant note of’ as well as the gramophone that Rasputin ‘so liked to dance to, and the claret-red plush armchairs, and the sofa and the desk. A chandelier was suspended from the ceiling, and placed around the room were several bentwood “Viennese” chairs, then in fashion. And there were two wide beds with soft springy mattresses and a divan. Two weight-clocks in ebony cabinets chimed majestically, and there was a wall clock and another cabinet clock. The monk was particularly outraged by the “large soft carpet covering the entire floor.”’

  Father Ioann, archpriest of the Kronstadt Cathedral, was famous throughout Russia for the gift of healing prayer. He healed Rasputin’s future admirer, the young Anna Vyrubova, as well as Zinaida Yusupova, the mother of Rasputin’s future murderer.

  The youthful Rasputin with the monks Iliodor (left), and Hermogen, who was a fanatical opponent of the freethinking that he was convinced was destroying Holy Rus. It was Hermogen who fought for strict interference by the church in the ideological life of the country, who demanded the excommunication of Tolstoy. At the time, Hermogen and Rasputin liked each other. Rasputin’s contempt for the bloated church hierarchs was close to Hermogen’s heart.

  Hermogen introduced Rasputin to another exposer of evil, a young monk whose ferocious speeches and denunciations had made him famous as the Russian Savonarola. Iliodor, ten years Rasputin’s junior, was huge with a large, fleshy face, high cheekbones, and tiny eyes, and looked more like a Volga brigand than a pious monk.

  Iliodor opened a new life to Rasputin, who had been used to a dozen admirers, but now he saw crowds of fanatics and took pleasure in their wild delight. As Rasputin later recalled, ‘Iliodor would meet me with crowds of people and preach about me and my life. I lived in harmony with him and shared my impressions with him….’ In 1910, while he was Rasputin’s guest in Pokrovskoe, he stole from his friend the letters from the tsarina and grand duchesses that Rasputin had so trustingly shown him.

  The ‘important letter’ was one from the tsarina not intended for anyone else’s eyes.

  A rare photograph of Rasputin with Alix, her daughters, the heir Alexei and their nurse, Maria Vishnyakova. In 1908, when Alexei was not yet four, Rasputin’s visits were usually in secret, arriving at Tsarskoe Selo as if to visit Maria Vishnyakova. This allowed him ‘to avoid having his name written down in the lobby register, where all visits to the tsars were recorded. Once in the palace, he would drop by to see the nurse Maria Vishnyakova, a very nervous individual and at the time an ardent admirer of Rasputin. And then from the nurse’s he would be escorted to the royal apartments.’

  In St Petersburg in 1906 the tsar and tsarina, with a phalanx of grand dukes a few steps behind, walk to a sitting of the Duma.

  On another state occasion, also in St Petersburg, the sovereign, on a horse with a golden coat, is escorted by the grand dukes also on horseback, and the tsarina with the dowager empress in a calash.

  Sergei Witte, perhaps the most influential politician of Nicholas’s reign, althou
gh he was only intermittently a minister and prime minister (1905–6).The tsarina hated him for creating the 1905 constitution that limited the tsar’s powers and the future powers of her son — that had ‘robbed the Little One’ of his legacy. And however useful the brilliant prime minister might have been, she had never been able nor did she wish to overcome her feelings.

  The monarchist Purishkevich, whose bald head and pointed moustache were as well-known throughout Russian from newspaper portraits as his right-wing views, was Rasputin’s implacable enemy and in November 1916, ‘heavily breathing, with a thundering voice’, he spoke publicly of ‘the tsar’s ministers who have been turned into marionettes, marionettes whose threads have been taken firmly in hand by Rasputin and the Empress Alexandra’.

  Alexander Guchkov, son of a wealthy Moscow merchant and one of the most brilliant and adventurous people in the Duma, had helped defend the Armenians during their slaughter by the Turks, had supported the Boers in Africa, and during the Russo-Japanese War, had been captured by the Japanese. He was well-known in the Duma for fist-fights during the sessions. On taking the post of Speaker in 1905, he spoke for the first time of certain mysterious ‘dark forces’ in the highest summits of society. Seven years later he distributed a private letter from the tsarina to Rasputin, which in the opinion of many was proof that the peasant was sleeping with the tsarina.

  P. S. Stolypin, Prime Minister in 1909 was ‘hated by the left, for he had more than a few times ruthlessly suppressed their opposition in the Duma, once uttering the immortal words, “You, gentlemen, require great upheavals, whereas I require a great Russia.” ‘He had categorically opposed Russia’s participation in the Balkan conflict. He was hated by the right, for his reforms promised the victory of Russian capitalism: Moscow, the ancient ‘Tsargrad,’ was fated to become a Manchester. But Stolypin made a fatal move. A move that might at first have seemed quite auspicious and to even promise a return of popularity: he spoke out against Rasputin. He was, however, assassinated in 1911, in Kiev.

  Four photographs of Rasputin taken between 1900 and 1916. His eyes attract, even in photographs, as witnesses testify: ‘the instantly blazing, magnetic gaze of his light-coloured eyes in which not merely the pupil but the whole eye stares’, ‘the hypnotic power shining in his exceptional eyes’, ‘deep-set, unendurable eyes’. The number of fingers used to cross himself was important: ‘Believers’ used three fingers instead of two.

  Rasputin wearing a hospital smock recovering from an attempt on his life. The assailant, Khionia Guseva, later testified: “I had a dagger in a sheath under my skirt … and I pulled it out through a slit in my blouse. I stabbed him once in the stomach with the dagger after which Rasputin ran away from me while I rushed after him … in order to inflict a fatal blow.” They ran past houses and the petrified crowd. A small woman brandishing a dagger, and Rasputin pressing his shirt against his wound. But she failed to stab him a second time. “He picked up a shaft on the ground and hit me on the head with it, at once knocking me down…. It was afternoon and people came running from all directions and said, ‘Let’s kill her,’ and picked up the shaft. I quickly got to my feet and said to the crowd, ‘Hand me over to a constable. Don’t kill me.’ They tied my hands and took me to the regional office, and on the way they … kicked me, but they didn’t beat me.”

  ‘She explained her action as her own decision after reading about Rasputin in the newspapers: “I consider Grigory Efimovich Rasputin a false prophet and even an Antichrist…. I decided to kill Rasputin in imitation of the holy prophet who stabbed four hundred false prophets with a knife.”

  ‘Rasputin lay between life and death for several days. All his admirers and the Royal Family together sent him telegrams with best wishes for his recovery.’

  Anna Vyrubova, who became the tsarina’s companion, was ‘sly, secretive, cunning, and smart. A dangerous woman.’ Sergei Witte, sometime prime minister, wrote, ‘All the courtiers close to the royal family cater to Anna Vyrubova…. Anna arranges various favours for them and influences the closeness to the sovereign of one group of political figures or another.’

  Anya Vyrubova was a second mother to the grand duchesses: Olga, Tatyana, Maria and Anastasia.

  Nicholas and Anna Vyrubova on the beach at Livadia in the Crimea. ‘The last powerful Tartar khanate had been there, and then the divine peninsula had come to be ruled by the ancestors of Felix Yusupov. Now along the sea there stretched a band of golden sand. And above the sea stood the royal family’s white palace of Livadia and the palaces of the grand dukes and the Crimean palace of the Yusupov family.’

  Anna Vyrubova with the tsarina. ‘Everyone continues to castigate Vyrubova behind her back and to curry favour to her face…. All these lords are afraid of one thing only, holding onto their warm little places, although they care little for Russia’, wrote one courtier in her diary.

  Two group photographs were taken in March 1914 in Rasputin’s St Petersburg apartment and later widely disseminated. For the first time it is possible to identify most of those shown.

  Above: ‘Alexandra (Sana) Pistolkors and her husband Alexander are standing against the wall — a stout, well-groomed, tall young gentleman, and next to him, his wife with her childlike little porcelain face and her great belly (she was pregnant). Next, the young man with a moustache who strains to lift his face above the others is in fact, Leonid Molchanov, who identified those shown to the Extraordinary Inquiry in 1917. Still in the back row, and barely visible, is Prince Zhevakhov, brought by his colleague Pistolkors, and who would, thanks to his devotion to Rasputin be rewarded in September 1916 with the appointment of deputy chief procurator of the Most Holy Synod.

  ‘Next two rank-and-file characters, Ervin Khristoforovich Gill, the husband of a pretty devotee of Rasputin’s, and Nina Dmitrievna Yakhimovich, a tall, broad-shouldered lady and one of his truly uncomplaining devotees. And then Molchanov named two figures of greater significance: Olga Vasilievna Loman and her daughter Nadezhda. This was the family of Dmitry Loman, who has been mentioned many times by us as the builder and warden of the tsars’ favourite Feodor Cathedral in Tsarskoe Selo. The young woman with the hard, cold face standing to the right of Olga Loman and her daughter is another very important figure from Rasputin’s future life. She is Anna Ivanovna Reshetnikova, the daughter of the very rich and very old Moscow merchant’s wife Anisia Reshetnikova, with whom Rasputin often stayed in Moscow.

  ‘In the second row is Sophia Volynskaya, a beautiful, not very young Jew … the wife of the agronomist Volynsky … Next comes Anna Vyrubova, with her large fleshy moon-like face, and next to her the old woman in mourning is Alexandra Guschina, the inconsolable widow who met Rasputin during prayer. The good-looking woman beside her in the fashionable bonnet with the plume is Yulia (Lili) Dehn, after Vyrubova the tsarina’s closest friend.

  ‘And, finally — the rough, short old peasant man with the shaggy hair and beard, a kind of minor of pagan god, a Russian Pan, is none other than Rasputin’s father.

  ‘In the first row are devotees Zina Timofeeva, Maria Golovina, Maria Gill on Rasputin’s right, with Olga Kleist, and sitting on the floor a heavy-set woman with the wide, stubborn peasant face, Akilina Laptinskaya. She too was one of the keepers of Rasputin’s secrets.’

  In the other photograph Molchanov stands with his back to the door. To the Extraordinary Commission he recalled that besides Rasputin the group included ‘Madame Golovina, Madame Gill, Dehn, a woman who had come from Siberia with some request for Rasputin, an old woman from Vasiliev Island, and Rasputin’s older daughter Matryona.’

  Mikhail Rodzyanko, Speaker of the Duma, who introduced himself to the eight-year-old tsarevich as ‘the largest, fattest man in Russia.’

  Maurice Paléologue, the influential French ambassador in St Petersburg, whose gossipy diaries remain an important source as to what court and society were saying about Rasputin immediately before and during the first world war.

  The full list of this St Petersburg poli
ce gathering is no longer available, but number 3 is Stephan Beletsky, director of the Department of Police, and next to him (third from right) is Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, the chief of gendarmes, who controlled the political police. ‘He could amuse the royal children with his very fine bird calls.’

  Cartoons mocking Rasputin’s position were widely distributed. In addition to the tsar and tsarina, Anna Vyrubova (left) looks up lovingly.

  Nicholas with the German Kaiser Wilhelm, a first cousin of the tsarina. ‘From the beginning of 1914, everyone simultaneously started predicting there would be a war. And the tsar, who had just come back from Germany, sensed that its emperor, the martial “Uncle Willy,” was no longer opposed to going to war.’

  ‘And once again [Nicholas] listened with approval to the warlike dreams of the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. And felt with joy the popularity of his own mood. The young Russian bourgeoisie wanted war, and so did the old aristocracy … the army’s favourite, the six-and-a-half-foot tall Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich.’

  The Russian Council of Ministers in June 1915 at the tsar’s headquarters at Baranovich Station. Front row, from right: State Controller P.A. Kharitonov, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, Nicholas II, Chairman of the Council of Ministers L.I. Goremykin, Minister of the Imperial Court, General-Adjutant V.B. Fredericks; back row, from right: Minister of Internal Affairs Prince N.B. Shcherbatov, Minister of Information S.V. Rukhlov, Minister of Foreign Affairs S.D. Sazonov, Minister of Agriculture A.V. Krivoshein, Minister of Finance P.L. Bark; Head of Staff, Commander-in-Chief of the Infantry A.A. Polivanov; Minister of Trade and Industry Prince V.N. Shakhovskoy, unidentified.