Rasputin (16 page)

When the Tsar eventually capitulated, his wife moved promptly to the next nag: ‘May the replacement of Nikolasha take place rapidly. No beating about the bush.’ Upon hearing of the campaign against him, Grand Duke Nicholas went to Rasputin’s flat and berated him, calling him an ‘ungrateful pig’. After the Grand Duke stormed out, Rasputin fell to his knees before an icon, praying for those who ‘spitefully use God’.

The Grand Duke’s replacement, it emerged, was to be the Tsar himself. The decision proved deeply
unpopular
: the stout-hearted Dowager, the Tsar’s mother, had already voiced her worries. She wrote in her diary on August 12 1915: ‘He started to talk about assuming supreme command instead of Nikolai. I was so horrified I almost had a stroke… I added that if he did it, everyone would think it was at Rasputin’s bidding, I think this made an impression as he blushed deeply!’ But the
Tsarina
heartily approved of her husband’s promotion. On September 10 1915, she wrote: ‘Our Friend read their cards in time, and came to save you by entreating you to
clear out Nikolasha and take over the Command
yourself
.’

Before departing for the front, Tsar Nicholas met his Cabinet, who pleaded with him to change his mind. Ten ministers had signed a petition registering their objection. He was sweating and clutching an icon as he rose to his feet: ‘I have heard what you say, but I adhere to my position.’

Clinging to his conviction that his rule was divinely ordained, the Tsar was now as isolated as he was
obdurate
. He believed he must not allow himself to be swayed by his ministers: ‘He… convinced himself (or perhaps was convinced by his wife) that on the day of his coronation in 1896 he had sworn to uphold
autocracy
,’ writes the historian Richard Pipes.

A much-quoted article written by Vasily Maklakov, a conservative member of the Duma, seemed to capture the public imagination. Maklakov likened the Tsar to an incompetent driver on a dangerous road: ‘The driver’s slightest mistake will send the vehicle plunging down a precipice, killing all passengers. Among the passengers are capable drivers, but the chauffeur refuses to yield the wheel to them, confident that they will not seize it by force, for fear of a fatal accident.’

After reading the article, Yussoupov attempted to include the outspoken Maklakov in a plot to get rid of Rasputin. Though Maklakov did not want to be directly involved, he did supply Yussoupov with a useful cudgel. He was not against the idea of murder, even coming up with his own scheme. Rasputin, he suggested, should be knocked on the head and run over; a victim, it would
appear, of yet another incompetent driver.

The Tsar had his moments of rebellion. Against the Tsarina and Rasputin’s advice, he insisted upon taking the fragile Alexis to the
stavka
, his military
headquarters
at the front, at Mogilev. But this gesture backfired horribly on one occasion when Alexis developed a
nosebleed
and the pair were obliged to turn back. The attack was so bad that Alexis’s tutor Pierre Gilliard thought that the boy might die. The Imperial train reversed at a snail’s pace, coming to a complete halt every time the boy’s bandages had to be changed.

Upon their return, Rasputin refused, for the first and only time, to come to Alexis’s aid. He may have been smarting after his advice had been flouted. In any case, he gave instructions on the phone and did not appear at the Palace until the following day. Upon reaching Alexis’s room, he made the sign of the cross and dropped to his knees to pray: ‘Don’t be alarmed, nothing will happen.’ The boy’s bleeding stopped, but it was later claimed that he recovered simply because one of the Court doctors had cauterised the wound. Six days later, the Tsar returned to the front alone.

At the
stavka,
the Tsar accrued a growing battery of Rasputin-abilia, forced upon him by his wife, with accompanying instructions. First there was the vial of wine, used to celebrate Rasputin’s name day,
January
25: ‘Pour it into a glass and drink it all up for His [sic] health.’ Then there was the comb: ‘Comb your hair before the sitting of the ministers. The little comb will bring its help.’ Finally, there was a mysterious stick topped with a fish holding a bird: ‘I send you a stick wh.
was sent to Him fr. New Athos to give to you – he used it first & now sends it to you as a blessing – if you can sometimes use it, wld. be nice & have it in yr.
compartment
near the one Mr Ph[ilippe] touched, is nice too.’

Back in the capital, the Tsarina was increasingly left to her own devices. But she had every confidence in herself: ‘Silly old wifey has trousers on unseen and was ready to lead.’ And she was more than willing: ‘God wishes your poor wifey to be your help, Gr always says so & Mr Ph too – & I might warn you in time if I knew things.’ Rasputin was, as ever, close at hand: ‘I’ll ask our Friend’s advice. So often he has sound ideas… Our Friend is always praying and thinking of the war.’ Rasputin’s thoughts could be quite specific: ‘Our Friend praying and crossing himself about Romania and Greece & our troops passing through… Says no more fogg wil disturb… Khvostov (Minister of the Interior) brought your secret marche route to me and I won’t say a word about it except to our Friend to guard you
everywhere
.’

At one point Rasputin had a useful dream: ‘He saw in the night one should advance near Riga,’ reported the Tsarina. Otherwise he was full of general tips such as ‘firmness is a rock and wavering is death to all.’ The wavering Tsar tried, to an extent, to be receptive to ‘our Friend”s ideas. He was certainly witnessed by Alexis’s English tutor throwing a letter from one of Rasputin’s detractors in the bin: ‘This is another of those
denunciations
of Grigory. I get them almost every day and throw them away unread.’ Nonetheless, he once added a pleading postscript to one of his letters to the Tsarina:
‘Please lovy mine don’t mention these details to anybody. I only wrote them down for you.’

It should be remembered that the Tsarina wrote to her beloved Nicky with relentless regularity; there were many letters in which Rasputin didn’t rate a mention. But the idea that the Man of God was wielding
power,
through the Tsarina, began to take hold. It became widely known that he was visiting her at Tsarskoye Selo; rumours were rife that ministerial appointments were being made on his say-so.

In June 1915 protesting mobs gathered in Red Square, in Moscow, calling for the Tsar’s abdication: the Tsarina must be sent to a convent and Rasputin hanged. As Governor of Moscow, Yussoupov’s father, ‘Papa
Felix
’, was the man responsible for quelling the riots. He made a hash of it, even boarding up shops that sold
alcohol
with looters still inside.

Shortly after the riots, Papa Felix went to see the Tsar, to complain about Rasputin, and was fired on the spot. Yussoupov’s mother was furious at her husband’s treatment, but the Tsarina remained unrepentant, repeating her maxim that her husband must have
autocracy
: ‘M. Philippe and Grigory say so too.’

The Yussoupovs were not a family to alienate. In her memoir Maria Rasputin, described in police records as a ‘peasant of Pokrovskoye village’, took great pleasure in sniffing at Felix Yussoupov’s credentials: ‘His
nobility
is of recent days. The title of Prince has been in the family for two generations only.’ But the Yussoupovs were at that time the wealthiest family in Russia. One estimate of their estate placed the value of their
possessions,
before the Revolution, at between 300 and 350 million dollars. There was so much oil on some of their land that peasants drove carts over the fields simply to grease their wheels. One year Papa Felix gave his wife a mountain for her birthday. The couple owned a gilded gondola with specially imported Venetian gondoliers and a personal train containing an aviary.

Yussoupov’s furious mother, Zenaide, wrote to her son: ‘Nothing can be done unless the book [the Bible, her code word for Rasputin] be destroyed and Valide [the Tartar word for Great Mother, the Tsarina] tamed.’ Zenaide was used to having her own way: she kept one servant solely in charge of her muffs.

For the Tsarina, the world was now divided into ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’. As the number of ‘not ours’
continued
to grow, so ‘ours’ became more outlandish. There was the poltroonish Prince Mikhail Andronnikov, for example, a well-known conman, who now provided Rasputin with 1,500 roubles a month. Andronnikov was described, even by the forgiving Anna Vyrubova, as a ‘scented person of servile behaviour and dyed facial hair’. Fancying himself a kind of churchman, the Prince installed an altar and crucifixes in his bedroom. But these symbols did nothing to quell his sexual appetite: one of his servants estimated that his master had slept with more than 1,000 young males in two years. To Mossolov, the Prince pronounced loftily: ‘You know I have no official post. I might call myself ADC to the Almighty.’

In his endless round of back-scratching, Prince Andronnikov was behind Rasputin’s support of two further dodgy figures: Alexei Khvostov, appointed Minister for
Internal Affairs and Stepan Beletsky, Director of the Department of the Police. Taking her lead from Rasputin, the Tsarina had added her weight behind
Khvostov
, writing to the Tsar: ‘Please speak seriously about Khvostov to Goremykin, am sure he is the man for the moment, as fears nobody and is devoted to you.’ Rasputin wouldn’t have needed great accounting skills to appreciate a fat wadge of 3,000 roubles from the grateful pair.

Following a social slight, Rasputin had originally been opposed to Khvostov. He had travelled all the way to Nizhny Novgorod to speak to him on behalf of the Tsar. But Khvostov, doubting his visitor’s status, had not offered him so much as a biscuit. Indeed, he sent for a policeman to accompany the Man of God back to the station. When Khvostov finally discovered who his visitor actually was and heard that, before leaving, Rasputin had sent a telegram to the Palace, he was panic-stricken and rushed to the capital to demand a meeting with the Tsar to discuss the problem of sewage in Nizhny.

Khvostov’s efforts at reconciliation were so effective that Rasputin soon pronounced him a ‘good man and close ally’. But that did not stop him also referring to Khvostov as ‘pot-belly’ and complaining about his
singing
at the restaurant Villa Rhode: ‘You’re fat and make a lot of noise.’ While the Tsarina continued to support Khvostov: ‘He will not let anything touch us & will do all in his power to stop attacks’, she also felt compelled to mention his weight: ‘His body is colossal but his soul high and clean’.

Rasputin had once been hostile to the Duma, ranting: ‘There’s not a single
muzhik
among them.’ He would
rage that the Duma members ‘want to get rid of the Lord’s Anointed’ (by which he meant himself). There were certainly some who remained convinced that
Rasputin
drove through the streets in a car with blackened windows, shooting at random passers-by.

But now Rasputin seemed anxious for the Tsar to cast off his own reservations and foster better relations with the Duma. When the Duma was reconvened, on February 9 1916, the Tsar appeared in front of the
assembly
, at the Man of God’s suggestion, and was greeted with cheers. Rasputin was pleased. As he said of the Duma members to the Tsarina: ‘One cannot again uselessly offend them.’

Once prized for his stark simplicity, was Rasputin growing more clever or more corrupt? He was
certainly
becoming more pragmatic. ‘Our Friend says that if people offer great sums [so as to get a decoration] now one must accept as money is needed,’ wrote the Tsarina. She and Rasputin even decided it would be politic to mollify the hostile Duma President, Rodzyanko, with a medal: ‘Our Friend says also that it would be a good thing to do… it’s most unsympathetic but alas times are such just now.’

W
ith these strategies and promotions, ‘ours’ hung on in the game. But Rasputin’s relations with his old adversary, the Church, had been anything but straightforward. In July 1915, the Tsar had thrown
a spanner in the works with his appointment of Alexander Samarin as the new leader of the Synod. Four years previously, when Rasputin had suffered his indignities at the hands of ‘Blessed Mitya’ and the other clerics,
Samarin
had demanded assurances that Rasputin remain excluded from the Church. Years later, Samarin was still insulting Rasputin, calling him a horse thief and heretic.

Rasputin complained to the Tsarina about his appointment and she, in turn, protested to her husband. The Tsar made weak attempts to defend his choice to his wife: ‘Changes must happen now & one must choose a man whose name is known in the whole country & who is unanimously estimated.’

But the Tsarina was inconsolable, insisting that
Samarin’s
promotion had reduced Rasputin to ‘utter despair… His enemies are our enemies’. She accused
Samarin
of telling ‘stories against our Friend… using vile words in speaking of him’. She wrote beseechingly: ‘I am so wretched ever since I heard [the news] and can’t get calm.’ In August 29 1915 she told the Tsar to ‘give
Samarin
the short order’. And on September 11: ‘You must set yr. broom working & clear out all the dirt that has accumulated at the Synod.’