by Cook, Andrew
We seldom went abroad, but my parents sometimes took my brother and myself on a tour of their various estates which were scattered all over Russia; some were so far away that we never went there at all. One of our estates in the Caucasus stretched for one hundred and twenty-five miles along the Caspian Sea; crude petroleum was so abundant that the soil seemed soaked with it, and the peasants used it to grease their cart wheels.
For these long trips, our private coach was attached to the train… [it] was entered by a vestibule which in summer was turned into a sort of verandah containing an aviary; the songs of the birds drowned the train’s monotonous rumble. The dining-drawing room… was panelled in mahogany, the chairs were upholstered in green leather and the windows curtained in yellow silk. Next came my parents’ bedroom, then my brother’s and mine, both very cheerful with chintzes and light wood panelling, and then the bathroom. Several compartments reserved for friends followed our private apartments. Our staff of servants, always very numerous, occupied compartments next the kitchen at the far end of the coach. Another coach fitted up in much the same way was stationed at the Russo-German border for our journeys abroad, but we never used it.
On all our journeys we were accompanied by a host of people without whom my father could not exist…7
Felix Yusupov would in due course inherit palaces and estates in seventeen Russian provinces. There were several in St Petersburg, several more in Moscow and its environs, a few in the Crimea. His account of his family’s many mansions is littered with throwaway lines such as (about the palace at 94 Moika) ‘the house was a present from Catherine the Great to my great-greatgrandmother, Princess Tatiana’. All the palaces were resplendent with the work of the most accomplished sculptors and painters and furniture makers of Russia and Europe, collected over hundreds of years. Several, like the Yusupov Palace, had more than one ballroom, a picture gallery, and a series of opulent reception rooms; there were billiard rooms and libraries, nurseries and boudoirs, bathing pools and hot-houses, music rooms and secret rooms. At least two of the palaces contained full-size private theatres; the one in the Yusupov Palace was exquisite. Chaliapin, Chopin and Liszt had given concerts there and Alexander Blok had given poetry readings. At the country mansions were acres of conservatories, marble fountains, rivers, lakes. ‘At Moscow, as at St Petersburg, my parents kept open house.’ As a decorative touch, Yusupov’s mother, the exquisite Princess Zenaïde, littered her state room with bowls of precious stones. Her husband, his imagination exhausted, had once presented her, as a birthday gift, with a mountain.
Felix was an obnoxious child, wild and by his own admission dreadfully spoiled. He hated to be bored, but when his parents were not giving receptions and balls the state apartments of the palatial town houses would be closed, and the children confined to the duller utilitarian rooms. Tedium was at last alleviated when Nicholas, Felix’s elder brother, introduced Yusupov the schoolboy to the Bohemian circles of St Petersburg and his then mistress, Polya. Felix had a passion for furniture, interior design and clothes – women’s clothes, particularly, when he got the opportunity to wear them, and as a boy of about thirteen, he did. He and Nicholas and Polya would visit, in secret and in disguise, the night haunts of St Petersburg, with Felix dressed as a pretty girl. After all, as he disingenuously protested, he would hardly be admitted as a schoolboy.
The ‘pretty girl’ was quite a success, and much emboldened one particular night they went to the theatre. Yusupov was aware he was attracting interest from an old gentleman and when the lights went up, he recognised King Edward VII. An English equerry stopped Nicholas in the foyer during the interval and asked the name of ‘the lovely young woman he was escorting’.
I began to lead a double life: by day I was a school-boy and by night an elegant woman. Polia [sic] dressed very well and all her clothes suited me to perfection… I haunted café-concerts and knew most of the popular tunes of the time and could sing them in a soprano voice. Nicholas conceived the idea of turning this talent to account by getting an engagement for me at ‘The Aquarium’, at that time the smartest café-concert in St Petersburg.8
He auditioned in ‘a grey tailored suit, fox fur and a large hat’ as a young French woman singing the latest songs from Paris, and was engaged on the spot. New frocks and headdresses were ordered. He appeared, took three encores on the first night and was, of course, the toast of the town. For a week. And then,
…on the seventh evening I saw some friends of my mother staring at me through opera glasses. They recognised me from my likeness to my mother, and also knew the jewels I was wearing.9
There was of course a huge row, but this sort of scrape was just the beginning. Scandal followed Felix and his brother wherever they went. They had nothing in particular to do, no role at all – Nicholas at least would inherit the estates, but for Felix, there was no particular future; he certainly did not want to go into the army. They travelled a lot, most often to Paris, where Nicholas fell in love with a famous courtesan and he and his brother learned to smoke opium and escape from police raids. The merry-go-round of pleasure rolled on for several years, but ended in tears. In 1908 Nicholas fell desperately in love with a girl who was about to be married. Married she became; and he and she continued their affair. The husband found out, and challenged Nicholas to a duel. Felix’s beloved elder brother was shot dead.
The family was devastated. Princess Zenaïde never recovered. Prince Yusupov turned in his own fashion to religion and practical philanthropy. With typical savoir-vivre he began as one of a party disguised as beggars who spent a night in the stews of St Petersburg where the homeless and the alcoholic, the desperate and the diseased, sought shelter. He was a kindly young man, and this came as a sad revelation to him. After this he volunteered regularly to help down-and-outs. Also, he was inspired by Elizaveta Fyodorovna, who, since the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei, had turned to good works and the Orthodox Church.
Prince Felix Yusupov, too, began to have spiritual thoughts. In support of this new interest, Mounya Golovina introduced him to Rasputin in 1909, but he was not impressed.
The longer I examined him, the more I was struck by his eyes; they were amazingly repulsive. Not only was there no trace of spiritual refinement in the face, but it called to mind that of a cunning and lascivious satyr… His smile, too, was arresting: it was sickly yet cruel, cunning and sensual. Indeed, the whole of his being was redolent of something unspeakably revolting, hidden under the mask of hypocrisy and cant.10
Felix’s spirituality and generosity to the poor having failed to keep him entirely on the straight and narrow, his parents were still concerned for him. After his brother’s death, the fate of the Yusupov fortune lay in his hands, and he now proposed that when he inherited he would give most of it away. His parents could see that there was not much hope that a good wife might cure him of this exaggerated tendency to largesse, and were probably quite relieved when, despite their protests, he took himself off to Oxford for three years of pleasure, followed by many months of dissipation in London. One photograph from 1910 shows Felix in a braid-encrusted costume and hat as a dashing sixteenth-century boyard, his diffident smile enhanced by lipstick and kohl.
The real trouble began when he got back, and Felix Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich got together. They had known each other since they were small children. Dmitri’s mother had died when he was small and his father, Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, had married again, to a Madame Pistolkors, who already had two children. Morganatic marriages such as this must be discouraged, and Dmitri’s father was banished to live in exile. Dmitri Pavlovich and his sister remained in Russia to be brought up by their uncle and aunt, the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich and his wife Elizaveta Fyodorovna, the Tsarina’s elder sister. Grand Duke Sergei was homosexual and they had no children; in 1905 he was shot dead by an assassin.
Dmitri grew up against this turbulent background, and in due course went into the army.
In 1913, after three years in England, Pr
ince Felix Yusupov was in his twenties, sophisticated, cosmopolitan and still not really the marrying kind. And on his return,
…I saw a great deal of the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, who had just joined the Horse Guards. The Emperor and Empress both loved him and looked upon him as a son; he lived at the Alexander Palace and went everywhere with the Tsar. He spent all his free time with me; I saw him almost every day and we took long walks and rides together.
Dmitri was extremely attractive; tall, elegant, well-bred, with deep thoughtful eyes, he recalled the portraits of his ancestors… Almost every night we took a car and drove to St Petersburg to have a gay time at restaurants and night clubs and with the gypsies. We would invite artists and musicians to supper with us in a private room; the well-known ballerina Anna Pavlova was often our guest. These wonderful evenings slipped by like dreams and we never went home until dawn.11
The Tsar and Tsarina were outraged that Dmitri was falling under Felix’s spell, for they were ‘aware of the scandalous rumours about my mode of living’. Dmitri was confined to Tsarskoye Selo, and Felix tailed by Okhrana agents. Finally, Dmitri escaped the Alexander Palace, and, as young people will, moved into a palace of his own – the Sergei Palace on the Neva. His surrogate mother, Elizaveta Fyodorovna, now in a convent, had made him a present of it. ‘He asked me to help with the re-decoration of his new home’, explained Felix artlessly in his book. This kept the heir to the Yusupov fortunes delightfully occupied, but Princess Zenaïde could see that her son’s aimless mode of life could not be allowed to go on. She found him a wife. She knew Felix well, and perceived that only a beautiful, slender, elegant young girl, who looked very like him, would do: and she found one. Early in 1914, to the dismay of the Tsar and Tsarina, Felix Yusupov married their niece Princess Irina, the daughter of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich and Grand Duchess Xenia. In 1915 their first and only child, a daughter, was born. The couple adored each other, but Irina was under no illusions about her husband’s sexuality.
Late in 1915 he entered the Corps des Pages, the Junior Guards, for a year’s training. This was not so much because, despite his antimilitarism, he was unable any longer to resist expectation that he do the right thing; by his own admission it was because he had no social life, since everyone he knew was in uniform.
By the autumn of 1916 he was preparing for his final examinations. His military training was not arduous, and he got plenty of leave – as did Dmitri Pavlovich, stationed at the Stavka with the Tsar. Irina and the baby remained in the warmer climate of the Crimea while Yusupov spent every spare moment supervising the preparation of their new private suite of apartments at the Yusupov Palace. A few rooms within it were to be set aside for him personally, as a kind of bachelor pied-à-terre for use whenever the rest of the family was out of town.
Four thousand miles away in New York City, Rasputin’s former intimate, Bishop Iliodor, had resurfaced to find himself at the centre of a storm that would have far-reaching repercussions. The chain of events began within a day or two of his arrival on 18 June, when he met with H.J. Wigham, the president of Metropolitan magazine, at his Manhattan office. As a result, a deal was agreed whereby Iliodor would be interviewed by a Russian-speaking journalist named Tobenkin (Iliodor himself spoke no English), who worked for Metropolitan magazine. The interview would centre on a number of new revelations principally concerning Rasputin, the Tsarina and moves to conclude a peace treaty between Russia and Germany. The source of the story, according to Iliodor, was letters, documents and information that he had brought with him from Russia. The contents of the interview would then be used for a series of five articles appearing under Iliodor’s name. It was agreed that he would receive a full and final payment of $5,000 by 1 August 1916.
The interview duly took place in early September and resulted in an initial article entitled ‘Rasputin: The Holy Devil of Russia’. Trailed in the September edition as being scheduled to appear in November, it was billed as ‘The Biggest Magazine Story of the Year!’ Several days afterwards, Iliodor received two unexpected visitors at his home in the Bronx – Archbishop Evdokin and one Mikhail Ustinov, the Russian Consul-General. They told him that they had read in the Metropolitan magazine that he was to write a number of articles about Rasputin and the Tsarina. They urged him not to go ahead with the publication deal and offered him $25,000 if he withdrew them and further agreed not to publish them elsewhere either. Should he not agree, he was told in no uncertain terms that the Russian Consulate would use its influence to prevent publication.
Back in Petrograd, there was a flurry of activity behind the scenes, as the Tsarina began urging her husband, at Rasputin’s behest, to appoint Protopopov to the all-powerful post of Minister for the Interior. On 7 September she wrote:
My own sweetheart… Grigori begs you earnestly to name Protopopov [as Interior Minister]. I believe in Our Friend’s wisdom and guidance… His love for you and Russia is so intense and God has sent Him to be to yr. help and guide and prays so hard for you.
From his reply two days later, it is clear that even the Tsar was somewhat doubtful about the wisdom of appointing such an erratic and questionable character as Protopopov, saying that he ‘must think about that question… one should be careful, especially where high positions are concerned’.12
Whatever his doubts, Nicholas does not seem to have held out long, for on 18 September, to the absolute astonishment of virtually everyone, Protopopov’s appointment as Interior Minister was announced. David Lloyd George made clear to Prime Minister Asquith, in a ‘confidential’ memo, that:
Germanophile influences have been considerably strengthened by recent changes. Our friends have disappeared one by one and there is no man now of any influence in the Russian Bureaucracy who can be said to be favourable towards this country.13
In Petrograd, the Tsarina and Rasputin congratulated themselves over Protopopov’s appointment. On the same day as the announcement was made, Alexandra sent the first in a series of telegrams to the Tsar, begging him to halt the latest offensive, which he initially appears to have done. However, acting completely in character, he quickly changed his mind, having come under pressure from military aides at the Stavka. With equal predictability, Alexandra rushed off another missive on 24 September, telling her errant husband that, ‘Our Friend is much put out… says that you were inspired from above to give that order and God would bless it – Now he says again useless losses’. Nicholas countered that changed circumstances had prompted him to reverse the order, to which Alexandra obliviously retorted, ‘Oh, give your order again to Brussilov – stop this useless slaughter… Our generals don’t count the lives – they are hardened to losses and that is a sin… spare those lives’.14
On the other side of the Atlantic, the proprietors of Metropolitan magazine formally announced the cancellation of Iliodor’s articles on 3 October. This was obviously a decision the publishers did not take lightly, as the November edition had already gone to press. The printers had to be instructed to physically remove the article. From a practical point of view, there was nothing that could be done about the front cover, which featured a colour illustration of a sinister Rasputin looming over a helpless Tsarina. Readers were left to puzzle about the contents of the article, which had obviously hit a raw nerve so far as the Russian authorities were concerned.
The veil was finally lifted when officers of the magazine were summoned to appear before the New York Supreme Court on 2 November as defendants in an action brought by an enraged Iliodor. He told the court that he had formerly ‘been a confidential friend and advisor of Rasputin’ and that his account of Rasputin’s influence over the Tsarina had been suppressed by the Russian government. He alleged that Rasputin
is strongly pro-German and has such influence over the Tsarina as to obtain her influence against the Allies… he is now engaged in a conspiracy to bring about a separate peace, with the Russian Government to apply for a loan of three million roubles from the English government, with the threat t
hat in case the money is not forthcoming a separate peace will be signed this winter.15
Before the case could reach the point of judgement, the magazine settled out of court. Whether Iliodor’s motives were guided by his fear and hatred of Rasputin or the sizeable sum of money being offered for his story is very much open to conjecture. The essential threads of his story were certainly taken seriously by the SIS station in New York, headed by Sir William Wiseman. We know too that one of Wiseman’s officers, Captain Norman Thwaites, made several reports to C in London, and to the British Intelligence Mission in Petrograd, concerning Iliodor’s claims. There is also good reason to believe that these reports were not simply second-hand reworkings of information Thwaites had gained from his network of sources. After the case had been settled, Iliodor told the New York Times that:
Prior to the suppression of my articles I was called upon by an agent of the British Government and to him I told some of the facts in my possession concerning Rasputin.16
More compelling evidence still comes from the papers of Station Chief Sir William Wiseman, which indicate that not only had New York SIS had direct contact with Iliodor, but they later actively considered sending him back to Russia on a propaganda mission.17
Matters had now, undoubtedly, come to a critical head so far as Britain was concerned. To Lloyd George, the prospect of a peace deal between Russia and Germany, and the horrendous consequences it would bring for Britain and France on the Western Front, was looming large with each passing day.