Rasputin (24 page)

Only Rasputin’s daughter Maria survived into old age; though her long life was distinctly checkered. She and her husband Boris Soloviev, the mystic who had failed to rescue the Romanovs, fled to Vladivostok in 1919. There Boris began a fraud involving courtesans pretending to be the surviving Grand Duchesses.
Businessmen
would give money to kiss the hand of these ‘Grand Duchesses’ and watch sorrowfully as the women boarded a steamer into exile. The courtesans would then scuttle down another gang plank, to be safely back on land before the final whistle blew.

The Solovievs fled next to Romania, then to Germany, with two daughters. The marriage was not a great success: Maria swore she could never ‘love Boris’ while he confided to his diary that he found many women more attractive than his wife. Boris
surrounded
himself with a group of supporters trying to contact Rasputin’s soul, before he himself died in 1926.

Maria, then 28, became a governess in Paris,
before
joining a circus troupe with which she toured
Europe
and the US, billed as ‘the daughter of the famous mad monk whose feats in Russia astonished the world’. She worked as a lion tamer for the Ringling Brothers Circus and was mauled by a bear in Peru, Indiana. There followed a short period of domesticity, during
which she lived in California with her daughters, Maria and Tatiana, and their family dogs, Yussou and Pov.

When Yussoupov published his memoir she tried to have him arrested for murder: ‘To me it is atrocious and I do not believe that any decent person could help
feeling
a sentiment of disgust in reading the savage ferocity of this book.’ She vainly claimed $800,000 in damages. Her plea for sympathy was undermined by the
shameless
ferocity of her own books.

In 1960, she claimed that a rouged homosexual with dyed hair had visited her daughter’s house in Paris and had from there telephoned Yussoupov, saying: ‘You’ll never guess where I’m calling from.’

In August 1968, aged 70, Maria met the
fraudulent
Grand Duchess Anastasia, Anna Anderson, whom Yussoupov had already dismissed as a ‘frightful play actress’. After the meeting, in Charlottesville, Virginia, Maria suffered a sleepless night, insisting that she had been reunited with her childhood friend: ‘Bless God it is [she] but it is such a decision. I am afraid almost to think about it… it gives me the chills.’

She returned to Charlottesville three months later to persuade ‘Anastasia’ to accompany her back to California. She and her friend, Patte Barham, had co-
written
a biography of her father; they hoped the presence of a grand duchess would boost sales. Anna Anderson initially agreed, but then changed her mind. To console themselves, the pair spent the evening letting their hair down in a bar.

Fifty years earlier Maria had scoffed at policemen in Petrograd when they had suggested she had caught her
father sleeping with the Tsarina. Now she was
boasting
that this was exactly what had happened. Maria and Patte left town the following day; by the time they reached Dulles Airport, in Washington, Maria was
denying
she had ever recognised Anastasia.

Gleb Botkin, the son of the Imperial family’s doctor, who believed Anna Anderson to be the real Anastasia, was relieved: ‘A Rasputin gives the case a bad name.’ Gleb’s opinion of Maria had not changed since he had denounced her as an unsuitable playmate for the
Imperial
children at Court. He now described her as ‘a very homely Siberian peasant with the small eyes of a sly pig and saccharin manners of very doubtful sincerity’. Maria Rasputin died in Los Angeles in 1977, aged 79.

T
he St Petersburg hostesses who banned talk of Rasputin in the early 1900s would have been horrified to know that, a hundred years on, the tongues have not stopped wagging. The public’s appetite for history’s ‘mad monk’ will, it seems, never be sated.

Maria Rasputin was not slow in coming forward with her own contribution to the Rasputin legend. She wrote three sensational memoirs of her father:
The Real Rasputin
in 1929,
My Father
in 1934 and
Rasputin the Man Behind the Myth
in 1977.

In 1990, her co-author Patte Barham used her interviews with Maria to flesh out her
Peasant to Palace: Rasputin’s Cookbook,
which features ‘Marzipan Tart
Romanov’ and ‘Grand Duke’s Bouillabaisse’ alongside humbler recipes gleaned from Rasputin’s timorous mother, Anna. Maria had claimed that the Court
adopted
several simple dishes and that the Tsar’s first choice was ‘Rasputin’s Jellied Fish Heads’. She further insisted that her father ascribed his singular sex drive to a basic codfish soup:

‘Rasputin’s Codfish Soup’:

Makes 3 to 4 servings

1 small whole codfish

1 cup whole milk

1 cup heavy cream

salt and pepper

 

Clean codfish; remove head (use for ‘Jellied Fish Heads’, if desired). Cut into fillets and remove bones; cut fillets into pieces and place in heavy saucepan. Add milk and cream. Place over medium heat and bring to scalding temperature; DO NOT BOIL. Reduce heat and continue simmering until fish is done. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Ladle into soup bowls and serve hot.

T
hese four books, written or inspired by Maria, form a small brick in a pantheon of literature, operas, documentaries and feature films about Rasputin.

Lionel Barrymore starred in the controversial
Rasputin And The Empress
in 1932; Christopher Lee starred in the Hammer Horror
Rasputin: The Mad Monk
in 1966. Tom Baker took the role of Rasputin in the film of Robert K. Massie’s book
Nicholas and Alexandra
in 1971. Alan Rickman won an Emmy for his performance in
Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny
in 1996 and the most recent film,
Raspoutine,
starred the hulking French actor, Gerard Depardieu. Talks are now being conducted with Leonardo DiCaprio.

In 1978, the pop group Boney M brought out their single ‘Rasputin’, with its chorus ‘Ra Ra Rasputin, Lover of the Russian Queen’. It went to Number Two in the British charts and has since become a disco mainstay. An initial ban on the song in the USSR was eventually lifted and it is claimed that Boney M once performed the song at a museum in Pokrovskoye. Boney M fans also point out that the group’s lead singer, Bobby Farrell, died, spookily, in the same city and on the same date as Rasputin. Farrell did, indeed, die in a hotel in St Petersburg in 2010 and though the date, December 30, seems wrong, it is technically correct since, in 1916, the Russian calendar was 13 days behind the Western calendar.

The face of Rasputin has appeared on vodka and beer labels. The murder cellar, for many years a lavatory, has been re-created as a tourist destination, presided over by semi-convincing models of Youssoupov and Rasputin.

Kyril Zinovieff and his elder sister, both aged over 100, are now, in 2013, probably the last two people alive to have seen Rasputin. Kyril remembers as a young boy going for a walk in St Petersburg with his nurse and
sister
. He saw a cab draw up close. ‘Two big black bears of men were inside the cab. One was laughing his head off. His hat was off, his head was back. I could see his teeth gleaming between his black moustache and black beard. I asked my nurse who he was, she replied that it was Rasputin. I said: “Who’s Rasputin?”.’

Zinovieff was told that Rasputin was immensely important. His parents were friends of the Yussoupovs: ‘Felix harped on about Rasputin’s influence. He and his parents believed Rasputin was the real ruler. I was brought up on that. My father said the Emperor was weak. One of the Galitzines even believed that Rasputin had an office in the Winter Palace.’

He believes that Yussoupov exaggerated his role with regard to the assassination: ‘Felix saw himself as the saviour of Russia.’ But recognising Yussoupov’s
limitations
has not dented Zinovieff’s affection for him: ‘He was amusing. He sang gypsy love songs and had a nice voice. During his libel court case, he retired to a room and played guitar. He was not an intelligent man.’ Zinovieff is dismissive of Yussoupov’s belief in
Rasputin’s
mystical power: ‘That’s all nonsense’… All Rasputin could do was alleviate the suffering of Alexis.’

He may be loosely in agreement with the late Beryl Bainbridge’s assessment of Rasputin: ‘It has been
written
that he was one of the evilest men who ever lived. I prefer to think of him as a breath of rank air, so to
speak, who blew away the cobwebs of the Imperial Palace and strode through the marble corridors in his cossack boots, ordering champagne (actually he might have preferred Madeira) by the bucket and generally being the life and soul of the party.’

F
or all his subsequent iconic status – and he has been celebrated and demonised almost in equal measure – there have always been those who believed in
Rasputin
as a Man of God. In the immediate aftermath of his death, cars and carriages pulled up at the Petrovsky Bridge, where his body had been pushed into the river; devotees were said to have come with pots, buckets and bottles to scoop up what they considered to be holy water. Later, they fought over pieces of his coffin.

Such was the fury of these ‘believers’ that the day after the killing Yussoupov was obliged to retreat to the Anglo-Russian hospital, apparently to have a fish bone removed. Four days later, soldiers were brought in to protect him and Grand Duke Dmitri. Munia claimed to have heard at least 20 supporters swearing vengeance.

The murder proved controversial even among
Rasputin’s
opponents. The secret police called the
conspirators
‘swallows of the terror’. For all her disapproval of Rasputin, the Tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Olga, was horrified: ‘There was nothing heroic about Rasputin’s murder. It was… premeditated most vilely. Just think of the two names most closely associated with it even
to this day – a Grand Duke, one of the grandsons of the Tsar-Liberator, and then a scion of one of our great houses whose wife was a Grand Duke’s daughter. That proved how far we had fallen.’ She added that the
murderers
had done the ‘greatest disservice to one they’d sworn to serve – the Tsar’.

Grand Duke Alexander, Sandro, the man believed to have himself once plotted murder, said: ‘Rasputin alive was just a man known to everybody as a drunken peasant… Rasputin dead stood a chance of becoming a slaughtered prophet.’ The French Ambassador,
Paleologue
, who had been so critical of Rasputin, agreed: ‘To the
muzhiks
, Rasputin has become a martyr. He was a man of the people, he let the Tsar hear the voice of the people; he defended the people against the Court folk, the
pridvorny
. So the
pridvorny
killed him.’