Rasputin (7 page)

The best known of Rasputin's predecessors at the Court, however, was a French butcher – some said
hairdresser
– called M. Philippe Nizier-Vachod. He had been expelled from a college where he was studying medicine, and had then taken it upon himself to treat patients with what he referred to as ‘psychic fluids and astral forces'. He claimed to live on the borderline between two worlds. The French authorities set no store by his remedies: he was arrested five times for practising medicine without a licence.

The Black Peril, Militza and Anastasia, had met M. Philippe in Cannes. In a great state of excitement, Militza reported back to the Tsarina that this new mystic could cure all diseases, including syphilis. She introduced the Tsar and Tsarina to M. Philippe when he followed the sisters back to Russia. According to some sources, the Tsar met M. Philippe during a visit to France. One of the Tsar's grand duke cousins was horrified, insisting that M. Philippe had a ‘terrible southern French accent'. He added, in further disapproval, that the Tsar and Tsarina would return from sessions with M. Philippe, having ‘fallen into a mystical frame of mind'.

M. Philippe was also able to summon the tireless
spirit of Tsar Alexander III and apparently shared Rasputin's mastery of the weather, once tempering a storm to protect the Imperial yacht, the
Standart
. He even boasted that he could make himself and others invisible. On one occasion, Prince Yussoupov's father waved at Grand Duchess Militza as he spotted her riding in a carriage with M. Philippe but she failed to wave back. When he later challenged her, she replied that he couldn't possibly have seen her: M.Philippe had been wearing a hat that made his companion invisible.

Of prime importance to the Imperial couple was M. Philippe's claim to be able to determine the sex of an unborn baby through the ‘transcendental practice of hermetic medicine, astronomy and psychurgy'. Sadly, his fallibility in this direction was exposed when the Tsarina gave birth to her fourth daughter, Anastasia, in June 1901, rather than the predicted son. Upon the baby's arrival, M. Philippe ungraciously accused the Tsarina of having insufficient faith. As the matter of an heir became more urgent, it was said that he installed himself in the Tsar and Tsarina's bedroom. His capacity to make himself invisible would have proven invaluable.

Aware of M. Philippe's growing band of critics, the Tsar and Tsarina began calling him, cryptically, ‘our Friend', as they would later do with Rasputin. The Tsar made several vain attempts to protect him: at one point requesting a medical diploma from the French Government. He finally gave M. Philippe a cursory title: ‘Inspector of port sanitary services'.

But the disapproving Grand Duke was not to be appeased, noting: ‘The bad thing is that they cover their
visits to Znamenka [Militza's palace] in secrecy.' The Tsar's mother, the down-to-earth Dowager, became so anxious about M. Philippe that she sent secret agents to France to investigate his background. She need not have worried. M. Philippe's days at the Russian Court were, by then, already numbered. The turning point had come when the Tsarina, carried away by M. Philippe's pronouncements, fell victim to a phantom pregnancy. It was believed that M. Philippe had hypnotised her; there were wilder rumours that she had given birth to a monster. Before M.Philippe was dispatched back to Lyon, he correctly predicted that the Tsar and Tsarina would one day have another ‘Friend'. He left the Tsarina an icon with a bell which he said would ring at the approach of enemies. He had one final success, prophesying the date on which he would die, in 1905. When the excitable younger Montenegrin Princess, Anastasia, heard of his death, she proclaimed that his spirit had entered her body.

F
or all the Black Sisters' attachment to their previous men of God, they were particularly possessive of Rasputin. They had, after all, hosted the momentous tea at which Rasputin had first been presented to ‘the Tsars'. After that meeting, Militza had made Rasputin swear not to contact the Palace without consulting her. If he did, she warned obscurely, it would be the end of him. She may have been worried about future fallings-out: relations
between her and the Tsarina had already cooled since the days when the Black Princesses had been in charge of emptying the Imperial chamber pot.

But Bishop Feofan was later to testify that his irrepressible protégé cared nothing for Militza's warnings. Within a few months, Rasputin had contacted the Tsar independently and made several visits to the Palace with Feofan: three years after his encounter with Grand Duchess Militza in the woodshed, the mercurial Rasputin was developing a taste for high society.

On July 18 1906, Rasputin enjoyed his second tea with the Tsar and Tsarina. He had written a sparse telegram: ‘Tsar father, I want to bring you an icon of Righteous St Simon of Verkhoturye.' He brought each of the four young Grand Duchesses and the two-year-old Tsarevich an icon and a piece of consecrated bread. It was said that he challenged the Tsarina to lift a box of matches, having persuaded her that it weighed three tons. The impressionable Tsarina, unsurprisingly, failed to lift it.

He returned to the Alexander Palace, on Friday October 12, and spoke to the Tsar and Tsarina at some length. The Tsar wrote enthusiastically to his most powerful minister, Peter Stolypin, saying that Rasputin ‘made a strong impression on Her Majesty and me – our conversation lasted well over an hour.' The Tsar suggested Rasputin visit Stolypin's daughter, who had lost a leg in a bomb attack. Stolypin agreed to allow Rasputin to give his daughter a blessing. But he remained grimly unconvinced by Anna Vyrubova's claim that his daughter benefited from any kind of healing.

One of the Tsar's earliest favours to Brother Grigory was to allow him to change his name to Rasputin Novy – Rasputin had always wanted to distance himself from the association his name had with the word for debauchee, ‘
rasputnik
'. The request was granted in a record-breaking seven days, on December 22 1906. Later Rasputin would claim it was the little Tsarevich Alexis who had christened him ‘new', having clapped his hands and greeted him with the shout ‘
novy
, novy'.

In fact, throughout his life, Rasputin was usually referred to as Brother or Father Grigory by his supporters; ‘the Tsars' called him, simply, Grigory. Feofan would certainly have introduced him into society as Brother Grigory. His early encounters with the aristocracy included evenings at the home of a Countess Ignatiev. Fortunately for Rasputin, the Countess's salon was known for its outlandish guests as much as for its celebration of the autocratic principle. Next to the barefoot, screaming ‘Blessed Mitya', Rasputin would have seemed eminently presentable.

But his most important new connection was the Tsarina's friend, Anna Vyrubova. She first encountered the Man of God on a train, when, true to form, he had asked her about her ‘unhappy' life. The train carriage did not lend itself to any exchange of confidences; Anna was prevented from filling in the sorry details until the pair had been formally introduced at Militza's palace. But then she poured out her worries about her impending marriage, due to take place in 15 days' time. She had misgivings about her groom, who would, indeed, turn out to be a deranged alcoholic sadist. At this late stage,
Anna was still wondering whether to go ahead with the wedding. Rasputin's predictions were unhelpful: ‘He [Rasputin] told me I should marry but the union will be unhappy.'

It was later rumoured that Anna's husband was maddened after finding her in bed with the Tsarina: the two women were believed to enjoy an ‘unnatural friendship'. Anna was certainly devoted, convinced that the Tsarina had once cured her with the touch of a hand. But the Tsarina, for her part, does not seem to have been so enamoured, once describing her friend as encumbered with ‘stomach and legs colossal'. She added that Anna had an unappealing habit of speaking ‘as if she had a mouthful of porridge'. In fact, contrary to any rumours, Anna remained bemused about sex, flatly refusing conjugal relations with her new husband and lamenting to the young Maria Rasputin: ‘I hear of those who enjoy it so much. I wish I could.'

Over the next ten years, Anna's passion would be directed towards Rasputin. Gleb Botkin, the son of the Tsar's doctor, believed her the victim of ‘sexual hysteria and religious mania…' and that she was ‘head over heels in love with Rasputin'. She was thrilled by his divergent personalities – the ‘peasant with an unkempt beard'; the ‘Saint who uttered Heaven-inspired words'. When he held her hand she is said to have moaned and trembled.

It is not known what Rasputin thought of her in these early days. She was young, in her early twenties, but the Tsarina was not the only one to note her less attractive features. Yussoupov said she had a ‘puffy
shiny face and no charm whatsoever'. The French Ambassador, Maurice Paleologue, dismissed her as: ‘rather stout… with an ample build… a fat neck and full fleshy lips'. Either way, Rasputin made full use of the fox fur which she gave him to put on his bed in St Petersburg. At one point, he suggested provocatively that she watch while he was soaped by his wife in the bath-house at Pokrovskoye.

In any case, by the time of the Revolution, there were so many rumours linking Anna Vyrubova to Rasputin that she finally decided to have herself officially examined by doctors. The result, which she promptly made public, was perhaps unsurprising: she was still a virgin.

W
hat was Rasputin's appeal for the Imperial couple? Both loved the idea of the adoring peasant. The Tsar had a distaste for sophistication, making the same grimace when saying ‘intelligentsia' as when he said ‘syphilis'. Reverence for the peasant was rife within the Russian aristocracy of the time. Many had taken up Count Tolstoy's view that the peasants were ‘closer to God… They lead moral working lives and their simple wisdom is in many ways superior to all the artifices of our culture and philosophy.'

The Tsarina liked to attend public churches with the ever-obliging Anna Vyrubova in order to be with ‘plain people'. ‘The peasants love us,' she insisted.

Amid the fripperies of life at Court, there was always a call for an uncorrupted straight-talker, a character like Queen Victoria's John Brown. Indeed, one of the Imperial family's closest companions, Lili Dehn, compared the Tsarina's faith in Rasputin to Queen Victoria's in Mr Brown. Inevitably the Tsarina's worship of the peasants was encouraged by Rasputin who claimed: ‘Great is the peasant in the eyes of God.'

Rasputin manifested all the right, ‘plain' attributes; he also had good timing. By late 1905, the Imperial Couple were suffering the effects of several bouts of civil unrest and the tragedy of Bloody Sunday, in which the Tsar's soldiers had shot dead hundreds of innocent demonstrators. They were increasingly taking refuge in the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, 15 miles from the capital.

The Tsarina had always been unpopular with the Russian aristocracy. She deemed them decadent, while they dismissed her in turn as haughty and puritanical. She had no time for creature comforts, existing happily on chicken cutlets twice a day for months on end.

The Tsar, meanwhile, was considered a colourless and indecisive character. He was ripe for moulding and cheerfully went along with his wife as she indulged her oddly conflicted appetites for the bourgeois and the spiritual. The Tsarina was as happy ordering chintzes from the latest Maples catalogue as she was cultivating mystics.

Hated by the revolutionaries and mistrusted by the aristocracy, the Imperial couple became ever more isolated. A
folie à deux
extended to a
folie à sept
as the
five children followed their mother's lead in gravitating towards ‘plain' Russians and outlandish prophets. Rasputin, the peasant Man of God, seemed like the answer to a family prayer. The increasingly friendless Imperial Family had found someone they could call, once again, ‘our Friend'.