by Cook, Andrew
The reality behind Rasputin’s timely departure from Pokrovskoe seems to have had little to do with such fantasies. Numerous witnesses told the 1917 Inquiry that Rasputin’s involvement in local criminality was now such that he thought it best to make an exit, preferring Verkhoturye Monastery to a criminal record and a custodial sentence.
Rasputin’s three-month stay at the monastery, according to the 1917 investigation, ended ‘the first, early, wild, loose period of his life’. As a result, ‘Rasputin was to become a different person’.28 It left anguish in his soul ‘…in the form of extreme nervousness, constant restless, jerky movements, incoherent speech, the permanent interchange of extreme nervous agitation and subsequent depression’.29
When Rasputin came home he continued to express his delight in the natural world, which had impressed him deeply. He had given up meat and sugar and alcohol. He seemed to be in a state of ecstatic mysticism a lot of the time, but the people of Pokrovskoe snorted at his praying and his visions. He was the same old lying Grisha, as far as they could see.
Rasputin ignored them. Around the age of thirty, wild-eyed and unwashed, shouting and waving as he travelled, and sleepless for nights on end every spring, he was an eccentric figure who vaguely represented the Old Beliefs, the ancient Christian culture of ‘Holy Rus’ whose sorcerers, healers and false messiahs attracted many followers. In particular he headed north and west to the large monastery at Verkhoturye in the Urals, where he worshipped at the shrine of St Simeon of Verkhoturye. This St Simeon had died of fasting and self-neglect early in the seventeenth century, but Rasputin looked upon his spirit as his guardian and mentor.
At some time in his wanderings and contacts with the adherents of ‘Holy Rus’, Rasputin had become involved with the Khlysti. These were the followers of Daniel Filippovich, who had been crucified and resurrected more than once (a story reminiscent of Yusupov’s later account of Rasputin who, allegedly, was poisoned and shot at point-blank range and left for dead before leaping scarily to his feet half an hour later). There were several messiahs like Filippovich in the sect’s history and most of them were said to have been raised from the dead.
The Khlysti were harmless enough, but to the Orthodox mind they were the Devil incarnate. Adherents to the sect believed that repentance was insignificant unless they had something to repent for. So ‘sinning’ – fornication, and plenty of it – was a necessary preamble to repentance. Thus encouraged to indulge themselves, the Khlysti exulted in ecstatic secret meetings, with priests in nightshirts whirling like dervishes into elevated states of consciousness and behaving ‘sinfully’ with their attendant womenfolk before prophesying, praying and repenting.30 Rasputin’s gift of prophecy seemed particularly significant to his followers; he had a ‘sense of catastrophe hanging over the kingdom’.31 But none of this must be divulged… Orthodox priests were appalled when in 1903 they enquired into Rasputin and were told that he held dubious services in a secret chapel under a stable in Pokrovskoe.
Driven underground, the Khlysti referred to each other as ‘Ours’ or ‘Our own’. It was a sect ‘of the people’ that laid claim to a special kind of truth vouchsafed only to the poor. At least, it was ‘of the people’, until Rasputin conquered the ladies of St Petersburg.
His climb was extraordinary; he leapt from one social foothold to the next, up and up in a matter of months. In 1903 his prophecies, and in particular his frankly expressed insights into the character and aims of his listeners, impressed the archimandrite of Kazan. Thus he obtained letters of introduction to an important bishop in St Petersburg, who in turn introduced him to Bishop Feofan, confessor to the Tsarina. Invited to stay at Feofan’s St Petersburg apartment, Rasputin was introduced to Militsa, the wife of Grand Duke Pyotr Nikolaivich, who was sickly. Militsa was one of the two Black Sisters, as they were called, not only because they were dark but because they were from Montenegro. The other sister was Anastasia, the mistress (and later the wife) of that very tall and martial Grand Duke, Nikolai Nikolaivich, who would so badly offend Rasputin during the war.
At this time of social upheaval and impending international crisis, Militsa and Anastasia were close to the Tsarina. People sneered at them as her self-appointed ‘procurers of Holy Men’. Rasputin was the last and cleverest of a long line of these. The Tsarina was credulous about occult happenings and omens, so much so that she seemed silly even in Russia, where the existence of the supernatural was generally accepted.
From her earliest youth it had been clear that the future Tsarina Alexandra of Hesse lacked a sense of humour. In her teens she had received a proposal of marriage from Prince Albert Victor, or Eddy as he was more commonly known, the heir apparent to the English throne. Eddy, who was to die young, leaving the throne to his brother George, was a sweet-natured dandy and not nearly religious enough. Nicholas, the young heir to the throne of Russia, on the other hand, lived in a permanent state of anxiety and would one day be head of the Russian Orthodox Church. But she was a Lutheran…
Alexandra struggled with her religious conscience for more than three years before she consented to marry the Tsarevich Nicholas. He was a repressed, insignificant young man, physically almost the double of his English cousin Prince George. She made a more imposing figure than he did, in her clumpy heels beneath long swishing skirts, and a fussy hat like a huge meringue.
They had not been married long when Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, died in 1894. To celebrate the coronation of Nicholas and Alexandra, an outdoor festival was arranged for the poor, but hundreds of thousands turned up in search of a free meal and over a thousand of them were trampled to death in the crush. Grand Duke Sergei was Governor-General of Moscow at the time, and his mismanagement was blamed. Nicholas and Alexandra had arranged to attend a ball being held in their honour by the French that evening, and did not cancel. As they danced, crushed bodies were still being removed from the scene of the disaster by the cartload. Insensitivity of that kind was not easily forgotten.
St Petersburg society despised Alexandra anyway. Had some gaiety relieved the severity of her character she would have been forgiven almost anything, but she was haughty and distant and did not make friends easily. She was appalled by anything remotely improper, while St Petersburg society was quite relaxed and unshockable.32 Georgina Buchanan, Sir George Buchanan’s wife, who knew her when she was young, accused her of a ‘naïve simplicity’ allied with ‘uncompromising and domineering self-assurance’. She ‘strove from the very first to influence her husband to what she considered was the right way of thinking’.33 Alexandra seized upon the notion that the essence of Russianness was expressed by ‘the people’, and they all, from Archangel to Vladivostok, were fervently loyal. It followed that criticism was alien. In her mystic belief about ‘the people’ she echoed Militsa, but also her grandmother, Queen Victoria. The old Queen’s principles had influenced her when she was a girl, andVictoria was fond of the illusion that she was closer to the spirit of the English than the aristocracy were. Like Alexandra, the old lady could be self-righteous and was deeply wounded by bitchiness. They both wallowed in dramatic self-pity when the opportunity presented itself. But Victoria was sharp and livelyminded and Alexandra was entirely unburdened by reason.
By the turn of the century the court was led by the Grand Duchess Vladimir in St Petersburg, while the Tsar and Tsarina and their three daughters were rarely seen outside Tsarskoye Selo. The magnificent Romanov palaces were rarely, some never, visited and even the treasures of the comparatively modest Alexander Palace were put into storage. Instead, Alexandra had the walls painted mauve and ordered ugly suites of furniture from Maples in the Tottenham Court Road. Queen Victoria herself, with her tartan and watercolour aesthetic, her fiddly little tables and hulking great ornaments, was never as tasteless as this.
To explain her neglect of society, her ignorance of science and her increasing dependence on mystics and clairvoyants and healers, Alexandra flaunted her preoccupation with motherhood. The empire must descend t
hrough the male line. Alexandra’s existence would have no meaning for her unless she could produce a son. She must be able to pass the Tsardom to her own flesh and blood. Magic would work; she knew it. Around the turn of the century, Monsieur Philippe, a magician from Lyons, was presented to the Tsarina by Militsa.
Philippe was an obvious charlatan. Only an under-occupied woman half-crazed by a single obsession, as by that time Alexandra was, could have taken him seriously. Her mother-in-law, the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, interceded with Nicholas, but to no avail. Proofs of the Frenchman’s rascality emerged and were put before the Tsarina. But Alexandra had a fatal flaw: the gift of faith. She was like the White Queen who had trained herself always to believe ten impossible things before breakfast. Once she had made up her mind that something was true, it became so. Nothing would shake her belief.
So when, in 1901, she gave birth to her fourth child, which Philippe had told her would be a boy – the new Tsarevich – and it was a girl, she was bewildered. Monsieur Philippe regretted that his prediction had been confounded, but had she had more faith, it would certainly have come true. She saw the point of this, and made herself believe even more.
A condemnatory Secret Service report on Philippe arrived from Paris. The agent responsible, Pyotr Rachkovski, who had run the Okhrana in Western Europe for a decade, was forced out of his job, while Monsieur Philippe stayed. The rest of the Romanovs fumed in the background. The Tsarina (and her husband too, because Nicholas preferred to concur with his wife rather than face the hysterics that would result if he contradicted her) paid Philippe more rapt attention than ever. In 1902 she seemed to be expecting a child. The magician from Lyons diagnosed her condition and announced that this time it would be a boy. After doctors expressed doubts that the pregnancy was genuine, Alexandra would allow no one else to examine her. Somehow Philippe was provided with papers certifying that he was a Russian doctor of medicine. In August, however, the Tsarina was losing weight, and got a second opinion. Hers had been a phantom, that is, imaginary, pregnancy.
With the Black Sisters as their only friends, the imperial couple were pretty well isolated by their faith in Philippe. Grand Duke Nikolai, notwithstanding his love for Anastasia, was embarrassed by his own indirect association with the whole affair. Alexandra’s elder sister, Elizaveta Fyodorovna, who was almost as religious as she was and married to Grand Duke Sergei, tried to persuade her that the mystic must go. The Russo-Japanese War was in the offing and Nikolai needed all the help he could get. Regretfully, the imperial couple sent Philippe home to France with an opulent motor car and a generous pay-off.
In the summer of 1904, Alexandra gave birth to a boy. She was delighted that her faith had at last been sincere enough. However, the baby was susceptible to mysterious bouts of illness. Little was known about haemophilia at the time, and it would be a year before the doctors diagnosed his condition. The Tsarina, who was not amenable to science or reason, was deeply ashamed. The elder girls and everyone else in the tiny royal circle were sworn to secrecy. The baby suffered intermittent agonies and the doctors were helpless. Alexandra had nowhere to turn, for by the time haemophilia was suspected, Monsieur Philippe was dead; he died in France in 1905. He had told her, however, that he would ‘return in the form of another’.
Bishop Feofan was introduced to the Tsar and Tsarina and became the Tsarina’s confessor. He was a straightforward, ascetic, Orthodox priest. This was not exactly what they wanted, and Father Ioann of Kronstadt joined the circle. He too came from the regular Orthodox hierarchy, with many followers and a reputation as a healer. But neither he nor Feofan could wholly engage this nervous, superstitious, desperate pair.
Beyond the gates of all the palaces, the clamour for change was growing to a roar. Grand Duke Sergei was blown up by a bomb. Sailors mutinied and peaceful protestors were mown down by Cossacks.
In October 1905, just three days after Nicholas had countermanded his wife’s advice and signed the papers that promised his subjects a constitution, Rasputin came to tea.
The impression he made on that first visit was good, but not earth-shattering. By this time he was in his mid-thirties, could pass for older, and was no longer the wild man from Siberia. He had become used to bathing, for one thing, and wearing clean clothes, still in the peasant style – for he was not a priest. He had visited many houses where there was indoor sanitation and carpets and a piano; even electric light, in one or two. He still ate with his fingers, but he restrained his appetite, and his hollow-cheeked visage with its intense, pale-eyed stare had lost none of its magnetism. He spoke of the sin of pride. To say that he was fluent is an understatement; his words tumbled over each other in a torrent, and to one like Alexandra, who always heard what she wanted to hear, they were magical. He urged the Tsar and Tsarina to ‘spit on all their fears, and rule’.34
By Rasputin’s own admission, the Tsar was not immediately captivated as his wife was. He had rather a lot on his mind.
Rasputin decided to get out of Feofan’s orbit (he had been staying at his apartment) before he made his second sortie into the imperial presence. He must find somewhere else to live. This was not difficult, for since his first visit to St Petersburg he had acquired quite a following. Certain ladies even made a habit of collecting his finger-nail clippings and sewing them into their underclothing. And now he met the devoted fanatic who would welcome him into her beautiful home. Within weeks of his meeting with Nicholas and Alexandra, Rasputin left Feofan’s apartment and moved in with Olga Lokhtina, the wife of a key official at Tsarskoye Selo. She had been called a ‘Petersburg lioness and fashionable salon hostess’.35 That was before she met Rasputin.
She became besotted. According to her, when they met she was sick with an ‘intestinal neurasthenia which tied me to my bed’.36 With or without intestinal neurasthenia, whatever that is, there was to be quite a lot of tying to the bed in future. For like many of the others she began a sexual relationship with the magnetic peasant. In the first weeks, they shared the innocent pleasures of kissing and communal bathing at Pokrovskoe. Six years later, if Rasputin’s friend and publisher Filippov is to be believed, they had evolved a relationship that worked satisfactorily for both of them.
Arriving at Rasputin’s early in the morning for tea as was my custom… I saw him behind the screen that separated his bed from the rest of the room. He was desperately beating Madame Lokhtina, who was clad in a fantastic get-up consisting of a white dress hung with little ribbons, and who was holding onto his member while shouting ‘You are God!’ I rushed over to him… ‘What are you doing? You are beating a woman!’ Rasputin answered ‘She won’t let me alone, the skunk, and demands sin!’ And Lokhtina, hiding behind the screen, wailed ‘I am your ewe, and you are Christ!’
By 1911 Lokhtina had been banished from her husband and small daughter and all her worldly goods, and spent her life wandering the highways and byways of Russia, barefoot and unwashed in a white dress with the word ‘Alleluyah’ painted on a bandeau around her forehead. On cold days she wore a wolfskin cap.
But in 1906 she was a fashionable and beautiful woman still married to the uncomplaining senior official at Tsarskoye Selo. At her house in St Petersburg Rasputin was in a position to hear all the gossip of the dwindling royal circle, and he learned that the Tsarevich was sick. What the Tsarina most desired was someone who could offer a cure for her son. Rasputin obtained an icon of St Simeon of Verkhoturye, Olga Lokhtina wrote a suitably deferential compliment slip to be delivered with it under Rasputin’s name, and the Tsar received it.
So it came about that one year after their first meeting, Nicholas granted another audience to the peasant healer from Pokrovskoe, and this time, ‘he made a remarkably strong impression on Her Majesty and on me’.37 He was invited to see their little boy, who was then aged two and undergoing a crisis, and Rasputin’s prayers were followed by the child’s recovery. He seemed able to work miracles.
He did more than pray; he formed a relationship with the child,
over the years that ensued. He was always good with children and animals and their instincts are generally acute. He knew how to approach them and was sincerely kind to them.
Had that been all there was to it – had Rasputin been simply a gifted healer who confined his attention to the heir to the throne – he would never have attracted the opprobrium he did. But the combination of a weak Tsar and a strong Tsarina, and the louche, sharp-witted side to this peasant, who quickly understood the role he must play to keep the Tsarina’s loyalty, was an excuse for ribaldry, disrespect and ridicule. It was fear that had kept the people subservient for so long, not love, and the fear had been replaced with mistrust long before. Once the imperial couple were in thrall to an incoherent, semi-literate peasant, even common respect began to diminish.
For the first few years, however, few were aware that the Tsar and Tsarina had found this new miracle-worker. At first even Militsa was not allowed to know, because Rasputin had purposely taken the initiative and presented himself to the royal couple. He did not want to be paraded like a talking dog, and nor did he want to be beholden to Militsa. She had other things on her mind in any case. Her sister Anastasia was to obtain a divorce in order to marry Grand Duke Nikolai. The Tsarina was scandalised and angry, but did not ostracise the couple because they were her friends. Still smarting from this disgrace, Militsa discovered that Rasputin, far from being her own personal discovery, was already an admired protégé at the Alexander Palace; and, what was more, she, Militsa, was no longer the Tsarina’s best friend. Her position had been usurped by a younger woman, Anna Vyrubova.