The Rasputin File (10 page)

It was in ‘hidden Rus’ among the
Khlysty
that Rasputin first set out on his path to God. There he learned a mystical secret — the ability to foster Christ in himself. He started with that. And it is no accident that even then, in that obscure period of his life, he was the subject of investigation.

The First Accusation

The first ecclesiastical persecution of Rasputin dates back to 1903, when his fame had already begun to spread as far as Petersburg itself. As a ‘man of God’, he was denounced in the Tobolsk Theological Consistory for his odd behaviour towards women who came to visit him from ‘Petersburg itself’. He was also denounced regarding the fact that even in his youth Rasputin ‘had brought from his life in the factories of the province of Perm an acquaintance with the teachings of the
Khlyst
heresy’. An investigator was dispatched to Pokrovskoe. But nothing incriminating was found at the time. Yet from then until his death, the tag of
Khlyst
never left him.

3

THE PATH TO THE PALACE

Conquest Of The Capital

Rasputin began to prepare for his trip to the capital. A place to which his fame had already preceded him. He was still young. But his face was wrinkled by the sun and wind from his endless wanderings. A peasant’s face — even at twenty-five it might sometimes already be that of an old man. His endless wanderings had made him an unerring judge of people. Holy Scripture, the teachings of the great pastors, the countless sermons he had listened to had all been absorbed by his tenacious memory. In the
Khlyst
‘arks’, where pagan spells against disease were combined with the power of Christian prayer, he had learned to heal. He had grasped his strength. A laying-on of his restless, nervous hands was enough. And diseases would dissipate in those hands.

Rasputin appeared in Petersburg in 1903 on the eve of the first Russian revolution. To destroy both Petersburg and that whole world of the tsars, which in a mere fourteen years would become an Atlantis of irretrievable memory.

To our proud capital
He came — God save us!
He charmed the tsarina
Of illimitable Rus …

Why did the crosses on
Kazan Cathedral and Saint Isaac’s
Not bend? Why did not they
Abandon their places?

Nikolai Gumilyov

A Meeting With Stalin’s Patriarch

The legends and conjectures finally come to an end in the capital. Now begins the story of Rasputin that is corroborated by documents and the testimony of witnesses.

As he himself would recount in his ‘Life of an Experienced Wanderer’, he had set out for Petersburg with a great goal — to solicit money for the building of a church in Pokrovskoe: ‘I myself am an illiterate person, and, most important, without means, but in my heart that Temple already stands before my eyes.’

Arriving in the great city, he ‘went first of all to the Alexander Nevsky Abbey’. He attended a service of public prayer and then embarked on a desperate plan — ‘to go directly to the rector of the Theological Seminary, Bishop Sergius, who lived at the abbey’. If this account is to be believed, the notion was indeed a wild one, given his suspicious appearance — worn-out boots, pauper’s coat, tangled beard, and hair combed like a road-house waiter’s. Thus has he been described by the monk Iliodor. And now this wretched peasant is on his way to the bishop’s apartment and asking the doorman to be kind enough to announce him to Sergius. Rasputin himself describes what happened next. ‘The doorman did me the courtesy of a blow on the neck. I fell on my knees before him … He understood there was something special in me and announced me to the bishop.’ Thus, thanks to his ‘specialness’, this peasant directly off the street got in to see Bishop Sergius himself. And captivated him at once.

Astounded by his words, Sergius, according to Rasputin, lodged the unknown peasant at the abbey with him. And not only that! ‘The bishop,’ Rasputin writes, ‘introduced me to “highly placed personages”.’ The ‘highly placed personages’ included the celebrated ascetic and mystic Feofan, who was received at the royal palace.

So does Rasputin describe his arrival in Petersburg in his ‘Life’.

But the period of legend is over. And the File easily demolishes Rasputin’s whole invention. For it contains the testimony of the ‘highly placed’ Feofan about his first meeting with Rasputin.

Feofan was called before the Thirteenth Section of the Extraordinary Commission in 1917. And Feofan, then forty-four years old and bishop of Poltava, testified that ‘Grigory Rasputin first came to Petrograd from the city of Kazan in the winter during the Russo-Japanese War with a letter of introduction from the now deceased Chrysanthos, archimandrite of the
Kazan eparchy. Rasputin stayed at the Alexander Nevsky Abbey with Bishop Sergius, the rector of the theological seminary.’

So there was no unfortunate wanderer. By that time, Rasputin’s fame had already reached beyond the boundaries of Siberia. And he had many female admirers in Kazan. And the archimandrite of the Kazan eparchy had himself given Rasputin a letter of introduction to Sergius. So he did not have to make humble requests of the doorman. For he had come to Petersburg with a most powerful letter of introduction from one of the church’s hierarchs. And for that reason, he was of course received by Bishop Sergius without hindrance.

And it was not by chance that Chrysanthos had given Rasputin that letter to Bishop Sergius. At that time, Sergius’s name resounded not only in church circles. The bishop was then at the centre of an event that excited every Russian intellectual.

At the time of Rasputin’s arrival, a series of unusual meetings was under way in the capital on the premises of the Geographical Society. Its narrow elongated hall was invariably packed to overflowing. Gathered on the stage and about the hall were people in cassocks and clerical headgear, and the flower of Russian culture. The meetings were the famous Petersburg religious and philosophical colloquia — a desperate attempt to overcome the destructive separation of the official church and the Russian intelligentsia, and to pull the church out of its lethargy.

At the colloquia the participants talked about the dangerous spiritual crisis in the country and the influence of the sects. The intelligentsia bitterly complained that the official church was becoming increasingly associated in society with obscurantism. That the official preachers failed to speak of the prophetic and mystical essence of Christianity. And that they saw in Christianity only an other-worldly ideal and thus had left earthly life out of the account. The intelligentsia called for the official church to turn its face back to the world and to reveal its spiritual treasures.

The colloquia were chaired by Bishop Sergius, a forty-year-old hierarch and author of audacious theological studies, who had recently been appointed head of the theological seminary.

He had, in the heated disputes, been able to find the right tone. He was not the chair nor a hierarch, but merely a Christian who would say, ‘Don’t argue, be Christians, and then you will achieve everything.’ The colloquia came to an end in April 1903 after twenty-two sessions and twenty-two heated debates, cut short by Chief Procurator Pobedonostsev, who banned them.

(Human destinies are amazing. In 1942, during the war, when he decided to re-establish the office, Stalin appointed Sergius the first Patriarch of All Russia.)

Chrysanthos had chosen Rasputin’s protector well: the future patriarch was open to new trends. How interesting the Siberian prophet of the people must have seemed then in 1903, at the height of that whole story.

And Rasputin did not betray their expectations The ‘specialness’ in the newcomer soon captivated Sergius in truth. And he did in fact introduce Rasputin to ‘highly placed personages’.

As Bishop Feofan has testified in the File, ‘Once he [Bishop Sergius] invited us to his lodgings for tea, and introduced for the first time to me and several monks and seminarians a recently arrived man of God, Brother Grigory as we called him then. He amazed us all with his psychological perspicacity. His face was pale and his eyes unusually piercing — the look of someone who observed the fasts. And he made a strong impression.’

By then rumours of Rasputin’s exceptional gift had reached Petersburg. Which is why the ‘highly placed personages’ wanted prophecies. And here Rasputin astonished them. ‘At the time,’ Feofan testified, ‘Admiral Rozhdestvensky’s squadron had already set sail. We therefore asked Rasputin, “Will its engagement with the Japanese be successful?” Rasputin answered, “I feel in my heart that it will be sunk.” And his prediction subsequently came to pass in the battle of Tsushima Strait.’

What was happening here? An intelligent peasant who knew from the inside the whole unhappy weakness of his great country? Or had Rasputin merely heard what was being written then in all the Russian newspapers: that a squadron consisting of antediluvian ships, sailing without any concealment to engage a modern Japanese fleet in battle, was doomed? Or was it given him to comprehend the mysterious?

In any event, when ‘Rasputin correctly told the students of the seminary whom he was seeing for the first time that one would be a writer and that another was ill, and then explained to a third that he was a simple soul whose simplicity was being taken advantage of by his friends,’ Feofan fully believed in his prophetic gift. ‘In conversation Rasputin revealed not book learning but a subtle grasp of spiritual experience obtained through personal knowledge. And a perspicacity that verged on second sight,’ Feofan testified in the File.

The ‘Black Princesses’

Feofan invited Rasputin to move in with him — to stay at his apartment. Thanks to Feofan, Rasputin soon turned up at one of the most influential Petersburg houses of the day, the palace of Grand Duke Pyotr Nikolaevich, Nicholas II’s cousin.

The main figures in the palace of the ailing grand duke were two women, the Montenegrin princesses Militsa and Anastasia.

The thirty-seven-year-old Militsa and her sister Anastasia who was a year younger, came from a family of poor Montenegrin princes. They were the daughters of the Montenegrin king, Nicholas Njegos. The elder Militsa was married to Grand Duke Pyotr Nikolaevich. And her inseparable sister Anastasia spent her days and nights at Militsa’s palace.

Anastasia, or Stana as she was known in the family, was married to the Duke of Leichtenberg and had had children by him. But Militsa’s husband’s brother, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, had become a too frequent guest at her palace. And soon high society gossips began to talk of an affair between Militsa’s sister Stana and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich.

This forty-seven-year-old giant and dashing cavalryman was one of the most colourful figures in the great Romanov family. The ‘dread uncle’, as he was called in the family, was a favourite of the Guards’. And, at the time, he was very close to the tsar.

But the Montenegrin sisters were even closer to the tsarina. From the day of her arrival in Russia, the tsarina had been faced with the coldness and hostility of the court. And the Montenegrins had known how to surround her with warmth and an almost servile deference.

And the court sensed the threat. A marriage between Anastasia and Nikolai Nikolaevich would create the most influential clan in the Romanov family. A dangerous clan. The court already knew the strength of Alix’s influence over the tsar. It also knew how power was aligned within the family of Pyotr and Nikolai Nikolaevich. Pyotr Nikolaevich was spineless and ill, while the ‘dread uncle’, Nikolai Nikolaevich himself was, as the empress dowager said, ‘sick with an incurable disease — he’s a fool’. Or, to put it a bit less starkly, he was unbending in a soldierly way. And he repeated the opinions of the Montenegrin princesses. Or, more precisely, those of the elder one, the intelligent and power-loving Militsa.

The black-haired Militsa passed for a great expert on mystical literature. And she took a lively interest in everything marvellous and supernatural. Her sister Stana obediently echoed her. They had not been born in Montenegro,
a country of witches and sorcerers, for nothing. The ‘black women’, the court maliciously called them, alluding to their black hair and ‘black’ place of origin.

And it was no accident that Feofan had come to Militsa’s palace. As he said in his testimony, ‘I more than others was interested in life’s mystical side.’

The File, from the testimony of Feofan:

I became acquainted with the personages of the ruling house … in my capacity as … the inspector of the Petrograd Theological Seminary … The Grand Duke and Duchess Pyotr Nikolaevich and Militsa Nikolaevna often visited the seminary and met with me there. I had heard that the personages of the ruling house wished to become better acquainted with me, but, in keeping with my convictions as a monk, I avoided that… Then on the Saturday of Holy Week the Grand Duchess Militsa Nikolaevna invited me to come to hear her confession. Not knowing what to do, I turned to Metropolitan Antony, and with his blessing I went to see her. And after that I started frequenting her house.

And soon Feofan began to feel at home there. He and Militsa had things to talk about. ‘Grand Duchess Militsa Nikolaevna was very well read … and she knew the mystical and ascetic literature regarding the holy fathers and had even published a work of her own,
Selected Passages from the Holy Fathers’

From Militsa’s palace the path to that of the tsar was a direct one. ‘I was invited,’ Feofan testified, ‘to the home of the former emperor for the first time by Grand Duchess Militsa Nikolaevna.’

So in his conversations with Feofan, the new lodger Father Grigory could easily have understood where the path to the royal family originated. And Rasputin knew that soon ‘the gate would swing open’ for him, too.