Rasputin (2 page)

The icon from Nizhny Novgorod would form the last tangible bond between the Tsarina and her precious
‘Gr'. The Tsarina regarded their relationship as a sort of partnership, at one point closing her instructions to the Tsar with a robust ‘Listen to your staunch wifey and our Friend.'

Anna Vyrubova now commented on Rasputin's appearance: ‘What about you, Grishka? You do not seem to be in very good health.' That was probably an understatement. He was showing the effects of a late-night session more or less running into a long lunch. One friend testified that, in the course of that day, Rasputin had drunk 12 bottles of his favourite Madeira before passing out.

Though aged just 47, Rasputin's appearance was not good: his close-set eyes were ringed with yellow excrescences. The irises, said to be so dazzling that their colour couldn't be determined – grey, blue and even blue and brown – were dulled. His broad nose was pock-marked, his lips blue and his moustaches protruding like
worn-out
brushes. Following years of use as a napkin, his straggling beard was festooned with decaying food.

His poor personal hygiene had not helped. The French Ambassador in St Petersburg, Maurice Paleologue, said he ‘carried with him a strong animal smell, like the smell of a goat'. The singer Bellin talked of his rotten teeth and foul breath. His friend Aron Simanovich, the jeweller to the Imperial family, admitted that Rasputin had ‘teeth like blackened stumps'.

Rasputin batted off Anna's concern, growling: ‘I am like a horse, nothing affects me.' But his maid, Katya, weighed in: ‘He should get more sleep.' Rasputin retorted that he was not planning an early
night: he had an assignation with one of the richest aristocrats in Russia, Prince Felix Yussoupov, who was to pick him up at midnight and take him to his palace. There he would be introduced to Yussoupov's wife, the Tsar's beautiful young niece, Princess Irina.

Anna Vyrubova later testified at a commission conducted by the Provisional Government in 1917: ‘I knew that Felix had often visited Rasputin, but it struck me as odd that he [Rasputin] should go to their house, for the first time, at such an unseemly hour.' She urged him not to go. But she was less concerned about his security than his status: he should not go to the Yussoupovs' Moika Palace unless he was being invited openly, at a normal time.

As Anna Vyrubova left the flat, she hesitated and Rasputin uttered what would be his last words to her: ‘What more can you ask of me? You already have all I have to give.' Later that afternoon, Anna Vyrubova visited the Tsarina and mentioned Rasputin's plan. The Tsarina was bemused, as she knew that Princess Irina was, at that point, not in St Petersburg but far away in the Crimea.

According to his daughter Maria, Rasputin's last supper at the apartment was an unexpectedly jolly affair, during which he joked and played with her, her younger sister Varya, aged 16, and his young niece, Anna. He plunged his fingers readily into his fish and black bread and honey. After supper, he cheerily showed Maria a stash of 3,000 roubles, stored in a drawer for her dowry. He read his daughters the opening of the Gospel of St
John: ‘In the beginning was the word…' Maria wrote: ‘For the first time I could feel the beauty and truth of those mystic passages.'

But running alongside Maria's reverential memory is the less wholesome testimony of the hall porter, who noted a further visit that evening: ‘A lady of about 25 was with him from 10.00 to 11.00pm'. This lady was also spotted by Rasputin's niece Anna, who clearly had few illusions about her uncle. She recalled that ‘around 10pm a plump, blonde woman arrived called “Sister Maria”,' though she was no sister of mercy. She helped him to remove the tension that apparently took hold of him against his will.' Rasputin and ‘Sister Maria' immediately retired to a little room where they set about removing that tension.

At some point that evening, Maria had taken herself out into the blizzard. She returned at 11pm, missing ‘Sister Maria', but in time to catch the next visitor, Alexander Protopopov, the Minister of the Interior. Protopopov was himself a controversial character, in the advanced stages of syphilis and rumoured to be a necrophiliac. He regularly visited the flat, mostly at the behest of the Tsarina, who hoped the curious pair would discuss the country's troubles and that ‘our Friend' might offer helpful tips.

Protopopov allegedly told Rasputin's daughters to leave the room so that he could talk to their father in private. Testifying later, however, he made no mention of the girls: ‘I stopped by to see Rasputin… around 12.00. I… saw him for about ten minutes and saw only him since he opened the door himself. He didn't say
anything to me about intending to go out.' If he had, Protopopov insisted he would have remonstrated with him: the Tsarina had specifically told him not to let our Friend leave his flat. He made a point, nevertheless, of warning Rasputin that he had heard of a plot against his life.

Rasputin did mention his plans to his daughter, Maria. As she testified: ‘After I got back and was going off to bed, Father told me that he was going to visit “The Little One”.' Rasputin's nickname for Yussoupov was, confusingly, the same as the one used by the Tsarina for her son, Alexis. He also told his niece where he was going. But Maria added that none of them would have been in the least surprised, as the strikingly handsome and charming young Prince, then aged 29, had become ‘for us, my sister and myself, the friend of the household'.

Rasputin also phoned his friend Simanovich, that night, to tell him that he was seeing Yussoupov. Simanovich's loyalty had been assured after Rasputin cured his son of the shaking disease, St Vitus' Dance. Simanovich himself, it seemed, had heard of a murder plot, and was sufficiently worried to warn his friend not to go out, then to insist he call again at 2am. That call never came.

Who the last visitor to the flat was that night was to become a matter of dispute. After dismissing Protopopov, Rasputin changed his clothes for the third time that day. Owing either to excitement or drink, he was unable to dress himself, and Katya had to help him into his favourite light-blue shirt, embroidered with cornflowers: ‘He couldn't button the collar and I buttoned it for him.'
He wore a golden sash and his best pair of blue pantaloons; he also put on a bracelet with a monogram of the Tsar. Then he retired to his bedroom. As his niece Anna testified: ‘Uncle lay down on his bed just after 12 in his clothing.'

Katya felt uneasy and lay awake. She slept in the kitchen, in a bed sealed off by a curtain. She later said that ‘the bell rang at the back door'. After a few minutes, she heard voices, peeked through her curtain and recognised Prince Felix Yussoupov.

But, in an early police interrogation, Yussoupov denied having been to the flat: ‘Around 12.30 Rasputin called me from somewhere… inviting us to go to the gypsies… voices could be heard over the phone as well as a woman's squeal.' The idea of the Tsarina's Man of God telephoning from a noisy venue, in the style of a breathless teenager, apparently did not give rise to comment. But then the police would have been too overawed by Yussoupov's connections to question him further. It would have been unthinkable to take the word of Rasputin's peasant maid, Katya, over that of the Tsar's nephew.

Whether Yussoupov intended to carry on lying cannot be known. But, with his strong sense of theatre, he was soon finding the colourful truth too hard to contain. Within days, he was revelling in the telling of a wholly different sequence of events, beginning with his first glimpse of Rasputin at the flat door. He noted the efforts of the Man of God to clean himself up: Rasputin had combed the food out of his beard and now smelt of cheap soap. Later reports said that he had also covered
his ears and neck with cologne. He took an unexpected pride in his ability to brush up, occasionally calling for scissors for his fingernails and perfumed pomatum for his stringy hair. Maria wrote, however, that, despite all his pains, her father had begun to feel apprehensive about the arrangement. She reported that he said to Yussoupov: ‘Must I leave tonight?'

Maria herself was nervous. Though they were not suspicious of Yussoupov, Maria and her sister Varya had become worried about their father leaving the flat after dark. As he struggled to find his boots, he said: ‘It's those children again, they have hidden them. They don't want me to go out.' But he finally found the boots and was ready to go. Maria, who, like Katya, had been unable to sleep, made unsuccessful attempts to comfort herself with her father's maxim: ‘Nothing can happen to me unless it's God's will.'

In her testimony to the police on December 18 Maria Rasputin said: ‘Later I went to sleep and did not see whether “The Little One” arrived and whether he and my father left together.'

Years later, however, the fanciful Maria told a different story. She described herself back at her window, watching her father walking along the street, pulling up his collar and making the sign of the cross. She wrote that she wept as she watched him getting into a car with Yussoupov; and swore that, as the motor fired up, she spotted an elegant hand reach out to shut the car door.

R
asputin never had any difficulty reconciling his weakness for beautiful young princesses with a passion for the simple life. During his last years, he spent many a happy hour at palaces repeating one of his favourite instructions: ‘Be glad at simplicity.' He was full of invitations as unlikely as they were picturesque: ‘Come with me in the summer… to the open spaces of Siberia. We will catch fish and work in the fields. And then you will really learn to understand God.'

He evidently wanted his listeners to know he set great store by his Siberian origins. But, as with so many of Rasputin's pronouncements, it is hard to gauge the extent of his sincerity.

What is certain is that the spiritual pride of puritans was among his biggest bugbears. The traditional Siberian had no qualms about embracing wine, women and song. In this Wild East of Russia, if a man could prove he had been drunk when attacking a judge, he would get only three days in prison. A Siberian picnic comprised a parcel of fresh cucumbers and a hearty pail of wine. According to one contemporary traveller, female binge drinkers in comic headgear lined the streets on freezing winter nights. The traveller described one incident during which the women hurled snow at men, then, in a grand crescendo, fell down and threw up their legs, ‘revealing the most remarkable sights'.

The prevailing hedonism was combined with mystical fervour. Hunters in Siberia were reputedly able to teleport themselves from covey to covey. Religious sects flourished in the forests, ranging from groups of Old Believers quibbling over alterations in the liturgy to
fanatics burning themselves to death. In extreme sects, baptisms by fire included male castration; women had their nipples and clitorises cut off while holding icons.

Pilgrims, ‘
stranniki
', wandered through the villages, telling spell-binding stories of their travels in return for food and a bed. Villagers left bowls of food and milk on their doorsteps; these would be snapped up by the
stranniki
, vagrants or escaped convicts, whoever was first. In Pokrovskoye, where Rasputin grew up, the bowls would have been particularly appreciated by the pigs that wandered freely up and down its main street.

In Rasputin's day, the village comprised 1,000 people in 200 houses. The villagers endured harsh winters, with temperatures dropping to minus 50, followed by spring thaws which reduced the rough main track to a sea of liquid mud.

The Rasputins were one of Pokrovskoye's oldest established families, with roots dating back to 1643. Rasputin's supporters have been quick to point out that the family name was derived from ‘
rasput
', meaning ‘crossroad', and not ‘
rasputnik
', debauchee, as was sometimes claimed. Indeed, in the early 1800s, Rasputin's forebears, Ivan and Miron Rosputin (sic), were listed among the village's ‘better souls'.

Whether Rasputin's father, Efim, carried on in the ‘better souls' family tradition is a matter of argument. According to some reports, he liked strong vodka and was a ‘deplorable drunkard'. Though primarily heterosexual, he successfully cultivated young male lovers: this despite his appearance: ‘chunky, unkempt and stooped'.

But at his funeral the family spoke of his religious
dedication and untiring work on the farm. His dutiful granddaughter, Maria, portrayed him as a gentleman of the old school, sipping China tea while railing against the horse thieves who blighted the ‘better souls” lives: canny thieves would lasso their prey then make silent escapes, with the horses' hooves wrapped in rags.

It was claimed, by his supporters, that Efim Rasputin acquired conversational skills and wisdom through his job driving carts. This seems unlikely. He certainly took pride in his work, flaunting a smart carter's badge on his left arm and a cap with an Imperial eagle. But rides on his route, ‘Trakt 4', linking Tyumen and Tobolsk, were so rough that passengers in the clattering carts were obliged to lie full length on piles of hay to save their spines.