by Cook, Andrew
A plot was hatched by the Grand Dukes and several members of the aristocracy to remove the Tsarina from power and force her to retire to a convent. Rasputin was to be sent back to Siberia, the Tsar deposed and the Tsarevich placed on the throne. Everyone plotted, even the generals. As for the British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, his dealings with radical elements caused him to be accused by many Russians of secretly working for the Revolution.24
Nothing came of it, perhaps because at first things did not seem to be turning out too badly. In October of 1915 Grand Duchess Vladimir volunteered brighter news. Stopford wrote home that she
told me she found the Emperor – who had been to see her – quite a changed man, and with quite a different face. He now, for the first time in his life, knows everything, and hears the truth direct. Nikolai Nikolaivich never wanted to know anything, and of what he did know he only told the Emperor so little that it was hardly worth his hearing.25
But information was not enough. Tsar Nicholas was incapable of taking focused, decisive action without getting the go-ahead from his wife. He did have some strategic and logistic understanding, because he and his family between them controlled most of the country’s resources and knew how much this war was costing to run. He now knew that, for Russian commanders at the front, getting munitions was like pulling teeth.
In November of 1915 the Tsar met Buchanan, and
…made an earnest appeal to His Majesty’s Government to supply the Russian army with rifles. If only they would do so he could, he said, place 800,000 men in his field at once, and strike a crushing blow at the Germans… I could hold out no hope of our being able to supply rifles on so large a scale… I also pointed out that, apart from the question of supply, there was also that of delivery, and that if Russia was ever to receive from abroad the war material in which she was so deficient, drastic steps would have to be taken to expedite the construction of the Murman railway. The Emperor agreed that the work of construction ought to be placed under the control of some energetic and competent official, but he did not approve of the candidate whom I had ventured to suggest for the post.26
David Lloyd George, the energetic Minister of Munitions, was ensuring that Britain’s manufacture and supply of arms was at last cranking into top gear. He was all for supporting the Russians by sending guns and tanks but clearly recognised that this was going to be of minimal effect unless the political paralysis that was engulfing Russia was addressed. It is clear from Lloyd George’s papers that he was coming to the view that unless Russia’s internal crisis was resolved the outlook was bleak, not only for Russia herself but for Britain and France, who would be left to stand alone in the event of a Russian collapse. It is also clear that Lloyd George was not relying totally on official channels to keep him informed of news and developments in Russia. Days after Buchanan’s audience with the Tsar, he received a personal letter from Sir Ian Malcolm, the Conservative MP for Croydon, who was at the time in Petrograd on an unofficial fact-finding mission. Staying at the Astoria Hotel, Malcolm made his views clear to Lloyd George in no uncertain terms:
The Emperor and family and Court have not a single friend. It is said they have made every possible mistake… when the Revolution comes – that is what it is openly called – comes, I am told that at least half the army is so enraged at the massacre of their fellows, consequent on the lack of munitions, that they will side with the rebellion.27
Back in Russia, Buchanan was experiencing impatience with what was starting to look like high-level sabotage by the politicians who had paid Rasputin to get them their jobs. Sturmer, for instance, a placeman of Rasputin’s and known German sympathiser, was in charge of the Russian Ministry of Ways and Communications, which included railways. The railway between Petrograd and Alexandrovsk (Murmansk, in winter the only ice-free port) was imperative for the distribution of munitions and supplies but was taking forever to complete. Time and again, the Tsarina and Rasputin would persuade the Tsar to put someone useless in charge of an important government department, only to have the Allies get frustrated by inadequate Russian performance and insist that this person be removed. The Tsar would profess agreement with everything but usually he did nothing. Both he and his wife had a financial interest in the cosy relationship with Rasputin.
It seems barely credible that such a fabulously wealthy Romanov should take money in return for favours, but this is what appears to have been going on. The Extraordinary Commission that examined the death of Rasputin during the spring and summer of 1917 took depositions from Vyrubova and scores of others, and wanted to know what had become of Rasputin’s money. Had there been half a dozen wads of cash under the bed, they could have been stolen. But over recent years hundreds of thousands of roubles had been passed to him in exchange for favours. Had Vyrubova received money from him? She pleaded poverty, but how had she paid for a hospital and a church at Tsarskoye Selo? She said that she had used 20,000 roubles of her 100,000-rouble insurance payout from a railway accident. This was an unconvincingly small sum and she knew it. Gradually, another story emerged. The money from petitioners was apportioned, a small cut to Rasputin, some to Vyrubova and the Infirmary, and the rest to ‘the Empress’s institutions’. At one point the going rate was 1,000 roubles.
November 3rd, 1915, ‘Alex to Nicky’:
…One thing Our Friend said, that if people offer great sums (so as to get a decoration), now one must accept, as money is needed and one helps them doing good by giving in to their weaknesses, and 1000 profit by it – it’s true, but again against all moral feelings. But in time of war all becomes different.28
Weighed down by so much responsibility and so little power, the Tsar sank into an intermittent mild depression. His apathy was often remarked upon. When he was not doing what his wife told him to, he was said to exist in a kind of torpor. People said he was drunk or drugged, probably by Badmaëv (see chapter 5) – but given the common reliance on opiates in those years, he was probably getting whatever he wanted from the family medical advisor Dr Botkin.
He had no trusted, supportive friends at all. He took the Tsarevich to Moghilev for company. He told the Tsarina that he didn’t want the boy to be over protected and fearful of grown-up life, as he had been. The little boy, who was twelve, and delicate, and always got his own way, was allowed to wear a specially made Cossack uniform. They were happy there, away from the women and the dark forces that enveloped the court.
FIVE
DARK FORCES
Not a single important event at the front was decided without a preliminary conference with the starets. From Tsarskoye Selo instructions were given to General Headquarters [the Stavka] on the direct telephone line. The Empress insisted on being kept fully informed by the Emperor on the military and political situation. On receiving this information, sometimes secret and of the utmost importance, she would send for Rasputin, and confer with him.1
How on earth had he done it? The Tsarina taking advice from a peasant? To the aristocrats of imperial Russia, it was as if she was taking advice from a chimpanzee.
For several years before his death, any outright reference to ‘Our Friend’, as the Tsarina called Rasputin, in the public press was forbidden; the generally understood code in subversive articles was ‘dark forces’. This only served to increase his mystique. When people happened to see him they stared, fascinated. Meriel Buchanan, the Ambassador’s young daughter, spotted Rasputin in April 1916 as she waited to cross a busy Petrograd street. Along bowled an isvostchik with bright green reins, drawn by a shaggy white horse, carrying Rasputin –
a tall black-bearded man with a fur cap drawn down over long straggling hair, a bright blue blouse and long high-boots showing under his fur-trimmed overcoat.2
She was describing, perhaps unconsciously, the costume he died in. Like everyone else, she mentioned his unusually pale, deep-set, staring eyes. She was not a careless writer, but about Rasputin she used the words ‘compelling’ and ‘repellent’ on the same page, which is significa
nt in itself. His sexual attractiveness increased the more demonised he became.
Sir Paul Dukes, then a music student in Petrograd, shared a flat with Gibbes, the Tsarevich’s English tutor, who told him that, if he cared to, he could see Rasputin on the station platform bound for Tsarskoye on a certain day (Rasputin was usually guarded, but on this day apparently wasn’t). Dukes went along out of curiosity, and was not impressed by the man’s scruffy appearance and ‘rat-like’ eyes. A girlfriend of his had once shared a carriage with Rasputin, only to be lunged at mid-journey; she slapped his face and got out. The same thing had happened to her cousin.
Rasputin was born some 1,600 miles from what was then called St Petersburg, in the village of Pokrovskoe in western Siberia. The village was made up of several streets of spacious one-or two-storey wooden houses, with framed windows and carved, painted beams. It was very much an ordinary village, more prosperous perhaps and more lively than most since it was on both the road and the river. In 1915, the Petrograd newspaper Novoe Vremya, in an anti-Rasputin article, described Pokrovskoe as a poor village, a wretched foggy place, remote and wild, inhabited by Siberian zhigani or rogues. 3
Grigori Rasputin was the second son of Anna Egorovna and Efim Aklovlevich Rasputin, a carter and farmer. Maria Rasputina gave her father’s date of birth as 23 January 1871.4 By the pre-revolutionary Julian calendar, this date corresponds to 10 January. Rasputin’s exact date of birth has been an unresolved issue for over a century. Rasputin biographers have given a variety of dates ranging from the late 1860s through to the 1870s.5
During Soviet times, encyclopedias and reference books gave Rasputin’s date of birth as 1864/65. Contrary to the generally accepted view that no authoritative contemporary evidence of his birth exists, the answer is to be found in the Tyumen Archives.
According to a Pokrovskoe church register entry, Rasputin’s parents (his father was aged twenty and his mother twenty-two) were married on 21 January 1862.6 Birth registers indicate that between 1862 and 1867 six daughters were born, but all died in infancy.7 Eventually, on 7 August 1867, a son, Andrei, was born.8 The registers from 1869 have regrettably not survived. Before 1869 there is no mention of Grigori Rasputin’s birth in any of the registers. It can therefore be concluded that he could not have been born before 1869. However, this does not imply that it is impossible to establish Rasputin’s exact date of birth. A census of the population of the village of Pokrovskoe, also in the Tyumen Archive,9 contains the name Grigori Rasputin. In the column opposite his name is his date of birth – 10 January 1869, which happens to be St Grigori’s Day. This corresponds to the date given by Maria Rasputina, although she places the year as 1871 not 1869.10
Rasputin himself was also responsible for the variety of dates given as his date of birth. In a 1907 ecclesiastical file on an investigation into his religious activities,11 Rasputin declares that he is forty-two years of age, therefore implying that he was born in 1865. In a 1914 file on the investigation into an attempt on his life by Khiona Gusyeva, he declares, ‘My name is Grigori Efimovich Rasputin-Novy, fifty years old’,12 which implies 1864 as his year of birth. In the 1911 notebook belonging to Tsarina Alexandra,13 she recorded Rasputin as saying, ‘I have lived fifty years and am beginning my sixth decade.’This suggests he was born in 1861!
Reporters covering the murder of Rasputin at the time stated his age as being fifty. When, six months later, the new Provisional Government set up an Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry to examine Rasputin’s activities, evidence from witnesses who had known him in Siberia and elsewhere was collected by its chief investigator, E.P. Stimson, a respected lawyer from Kharkov. Stimson concluded that Rasputin was born in either ‘1864 or 1865’.14 Tsarina Alexandra referred to him as ‘elder’. He was in fact younger than the Tsar, and it was, perhaps, for this reason that he sought to inflate his age.
According to contemporary accounts,15 Rasputin’s father Efim was comparatively well-off in terms of Pokrovskoe peasants, who in turn had a better standard of living than the peasants in European Russia, who lived in chimneyless log huts. Efim’s single-storey cabin had four rooms – unlike many peasants, who used stretched animal bladders to cover their windows, Efim could afford glass. In later years, Rasputin proudly recalled that as a child he ate white bread rather than the brown bread suffered by peasants in European Russia – and fish and cabbage soup.16
Rasputin’s mother related that the young Grigori often ‘stared at the sky’ and at first she feared for his sanity.17 Stories abound about his developing powers as a youth – he seems to have had a way with animals and became a horse whisperer. Efim Rasputin had a favourite story18 of how his son’s gift first showed itself. Efim mentioned at a family meal that one of his horses had gone lame that day and could have pulled a hamstring. Grigori got up from the table and went out to the stable. Efim followed and saw Grigori place his hand on the animal’s hamstring. Efim then led the horse out into the yard – its lameness had apparently gone. According to his daughter Maria, Rasputin became a kind of ‘spiritual veterinarian’,19 talking to sick cattle and horses, curing them with a few whispered words and a comforting hand.
Stories also abound concerning Grigori’s supposed ability to discover missing objects. On one occasion, a horse was stolen. A village meeting was called to discuss the theft. Grigori pointed at one of the richest peasants in the village and declared him the guilty man. Despite his protests, a posse of villagers followed the man back to his homestead and discovered the stolen horse there. As a result, the man was given a traditional Siberian beating.
Rasputin’s daughter Maria later wrote that he could also predict the deaths of villagers and the coming of strangers to Pokrovskoe.20 Much of what Maria was to record in her book and published interviews is, however, very much open to question. For example, the Provisional Government Inquiry of 1917 found Pokrovskoe witnesses who had a somewhat different perspective on her father. ‘They note that Efim Rasputin drank vodka heavily,’ the investigator wrote. ‘As a boy Rasputin was always dirty and untidy so that boys of his age called him a “snotter.”’21
Maria’s claims concerning her father’s early life are typical of the retrospective accounts that have come to be accepted without question by many subsequent writers and researchers. It suited Rasputin’s retrospective image to establish that his gifts were evident during childhood. A number of Maria’s claims are very much open to question and are at variance with testimonies given by Pokrovskoe villagers.
In August 1877, when Grigori was eight years old, his ten-year-old brother Mischa died. The two brothers were swimming in the River Toura when Mischa was caught by a current, dragging Grigori with him. Although the two boys were pulled out by a farmer, Mischa contracted pneumonia and died shortly after.
At the age of nineteen, Grigori attended a festival at Abalatski Monastery, where he met a girl two years older than himself, named Praskovia Fyodorovna Dubrovina, from the nearby village of Dubrovnoye. Following a six-month courtship, they married. The precise date of their marriage is unknown, although the 1917 investigation believes it was 1889.22
Marriage seems to have had little impact on Grigori or his lifestyle. He continued to spend his evenings at the tavern. According to E.I. Kartavtsev, a neighbour of the Rasputins in Pokrovskoe, who was sixty-seven years old at the time of the 1917 investigation, he had ‘caught Grigori stealing my fence poles’.23 Kartavtsev went on to explain that,
he had cut them up and put them in his cart and was about to drive off when I caught him in the act. I demanded that Grigori take them to the Constable, and when he refused and made to strike me with an axe, I, in my turn, hit him with a perch so hard that blood ran out of his nose and his mouth in a stream and he fell to the ground unconscious. At first I thought I’d killed him. When he started to move I made him come to take him to the Constable. Rasputin did not feel like going, but I hit him several times with a fist in the face, after which he went to the Constable voluntarily.
Not lon
g after this event, Kartavtsev recalled that a pair of his horses was stolen from his meadow. ‘On the night of the theft I guarded the horses myself… I saw that Rasputin approached them with his pals, Konstantin and Trofim, but I didn’t think much of it until a few hours later I discovered the horses were not there. Right after that I went home to check whether Rasputin was in. He was there the following day, but his pals had gone.’24
As a result of the thefts of the poles and the horses, the Pokrovskoe villagers convened to discuss what should be done about Rasputin and his errant ways. Konstantin and Trofim were expelled from the village for horse-stealing. Rasputin was not, but he faced charges of stealing the poles and a consignment of furs in the local court. He was also accused of stealing a consignment of furs that went missing from a cart he was driving to Tyumen. In his defence, he claimed that he had been attacked by robbers.
According to his daughter Maria, he denied being a thief, and maintained that since he was convinced that other people shared his second sight, and so could track down any stolen object, he could never bring himself to steal.25 Whatever the reality, Rasputin left the village for Verkhoturye Monastery, some 250 miles north-west of Pokrovskoe, shortly afterwards.
Maria asserted that his departure from the village was the result of giving a ride to a young divinity student in his cart, who apparently encouraged Grigori to go to the monastery.26 Many years later Rasputin told a similar story to the Tsar and Tsarina. According to the imperial tutor, Gilliard, Rasputin had been hired to drive a priest to the monastery. During the journey the priest implored Grigori to confess his sins and urged him to devote himself to God. ‘These persuasions,’ said Gilliard, ‘impressed Grigori so much that he was filled with a wish to abandon his dark and desolate life.’27