The Rasputin File (11 page)

Another Rasputin Riddle

And, really, how could Feofan, then quite delighted with the Siberian peasant, not have shared his delight with Militsa, who was so interested in everything miraculous? ‘Visiting the home of Militsa Nikolaevna, I let slip that a man of God named Grigory Rasputin had appeared among us. Militsa Nikolaevna became very interested in my communication, and Rasputin received an invitation to present himself to her.’

After that, it was all in Grigory’s hands. And, of course, he was able to astound the grand duchess, too. And now went to her palace by himself.

From Feofan’s testimony: ‘He had been there without me. And evidently he had attracted her attention, since they not only started inviting him, but Militsa Nikolaevna asked me to provide shelter for Rasputin in my own home whenever he came to Petrograd.’

But then the riddle begins! According to all the biographies of Rasputin, it was Militsa and Feofan who took Rasputin to the royal palace. But Bishop Feofan states in the File that Militsa had nothing to do with it and he adds:

How Rasputin came to know the family of the former emperor, I have absolutely no idea. And I definitely state that I never took any part in that. My guess is that Rasputin penetrated the royal family by indirect means … Rasputin himself never talked about it, despite the fact that he was a rather garrulous person … I noticed that Rasputin had a strong desire to get into the house of the former emperor, and that he did so against the will of Grand Duchess Militsa Nikolaevna. Rasputin himself acknowledged to me that he was hiding his acquaintance with the royal family from Militsa Nikolaevna.

It is impossible not to trust the extremely honest Feofan.

4

WAITING FOR RASPUTIN

The Blood And Fear Of The Tsars

The family whose acquaintance Rasputin now made had long been waiting for him. And the mystical sensation of unavoidable catastrophe that possessed Russian society lived in that family, too.

Nicholas had ascended the throne a very young man and could assume that he would live to see the great jubilee — the tercentenary of his dynasty. And thinking of that jubilee, Nicholas, the honorary chairman of the Russian Historical Society and a man very fond of history, could not have helped but ponder certain patterns in the Romanov family’s three-hundred-year history. About how short-lived the Romanov tsars were. And about how much blood they had spilled. Peter the Great had sentenced his son Alexis to death for cursing him and his family. Lawful Romanov tsars had been the victims of family coups — the young Tsar Ioann Antonovich and Peter III. Both had been murdered during the reign of Nicholas’s enlightened great-great-grandmother Catherine the Great. In Nicholas’s beloved Tsarskoe Selo, where his own family was in continuous residence, the palace rooms contained furniture from the time of Catherine, and the rooms themselves were redolent of the same fragrances used in her day. Everything was permeated with memories of the great empress during whose reign two lawful tsars had been murdered.

The relay race of family murders lasted the entire eighteenth century. At the very end of the century Catherine’s son Paul I was brutally murdered by the conspirators in a plot involving his own son Alexander, the future victor over Napoleon. Moreover, Alexander’s own life ended obscurely. Either he actually did die in Taganrog as was officially announced, or, as persistent legend has it, someone else was buried in his grave and Alexander himself went off to become a wanderer in Siberia. And after taking vows and the name Elder Fyodor Kuzmich, he spent the rest of his life as an
anchorite atoning for the sins of his family that had sullied an entire century. In any event, Nicholas II’s cousin, the well-known historian Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, not only dared to speak of expiation of the family’s sins but believed the legends about Fyodor Kuzmich and even tried to find the pertinent documents in the family’s secret archive.

But had the dynasty itself actually not ended with the reign of great-great-grandmother Catherine? In Catherine the Great’s memoirs (long held in close secrecy in the royal archives) there is a clear hint that her unhappy son Paul was not the son of Peter III but of one of her lovers. Blood and mysteries. A family that was a mystery even to itself. Such was the past of Nicholas’s three-hundred-year-old dynasty. And his capital of Petersburg itself, that mystical city of ghostly white nights that had been built on a marsh with the blood of thousands of workers tormented by brutality and malaria had been cursed by a Romanov. Evdokia, the first wife of Peter the Great, whom he exiled to a convent, had damned his new capital with the terrible cry, ‘May you be barren!’

The memory of spilled blood had haunted Nicholas from childhood. He grew up in the palace at Gatchina. In the favourite palace of his great-grandfather, the strangled Paul I. There, as Nicholas’s sister Grand Duchess Olga remembered, the servants claimed to have seen the unshriven spirit of the murdered Paul. And Olga and Nicky were afraid and dreamed about seeing the murdered emperor.

But the blood was not merely in the historical past. Blood had already been shed in Nicholas’s own lifetime, too, on his very first steps to the throne. He had become heir on the death of his grandfather Alexander II, who had been assassinated by revolutionaries. Blood surrounded him.

The Long-Suffering Job

Nicholas had been taciturn and reserved from early childhood. And possessed from youth by a mystical feeling of predestined unhappiness. He considered the very date of his birth an indication of his terrible future. He was born on the day of the long-suffering Job. The French ambassador Maurice Paléologue quotes a conversation of Nicholas’s with Prime Minister Stolypin: ‘“Do you know the date of my birth?” he asked. “How could I fail to, 6 May.” “And what saint’s day is that? The long-suffering Job’s. I have more than a presentiment. I have a deep certainty that I am doomed to terrible ordeals.”’

There are some lines in the memoirs of the tsar’s sister Olga that sound
like an echo of this conversation: ‘He would frequently embrace me and say, “I was born on the day of the long-suffering Job and am prepared to accept my destiny.”’ And a line from one of the tsarina’s letters continues this melancholy theme: ‘you were born on the day of the long-suffering Job too, my poor Sweetheart’ (4 May 1915).

A feeling of coming destruction haunted his highly-strung wife, as well. Which is why the shy princess from Darmstadt was so tormented, weeping for no reason, when replying to the proposal of the heir to the Russian throne that she become the future Russian tsarina. ‘She wept the whole time and from time to time said only, “I cannot,”’ Nicholas wrote in his diary.

And as evidence of the justness of their presentiments there was the abundant blood spilled during the principal event of their lives — their coronation, that mystical betrothal with Russia, that transformation of a mere man into a holy tsar. During a public distribution of souvenirs in the coronation’s honour on Khodynka Field near Moscow, there had been such a crush of people that the whole of the following night was occupied with carting hundreds of trampled victims from the bloodied field. It is not hard to imagine how that affected a couple so inclined to mysticism.

And then with the start of the new twentieth century their presentiments became a reality. Blood became a part of Russian life. The bombs of Russian terrorists began exploding cruelly and frequently. And his dignitaries perished. In just the first years of the new century the minister of education, the governor-general of Finland, and, one after the other, two ministers of internal affairs died at the hands of terrorists. As if in proof of the fact that now no security branch could save anyone from death. The long-suffering Job’s days of sorrow were approaching. His resigned entries after the deaths of the ministers remain in his diary: ‘One must endure with humility and steadfastness the trials sent to us by the Lord.’ ‘It is His holy will.’ A calf destined for sacrifice.

But his wife was a person of entirely different character. She would struggle against her fate. And from the very beginning she sought protection from future misfortunes.

In Search Of A Redeemer

It was the idea of her then inseparable friends, the Montenegrin princesses. Born in a poor country where, as Feofan said in the File, ‘the aristocracy was much closer to the common people,’ the Montenegrins had brought to the palace this idea: that truth, miracle and strength are hidden in the
simple folk, in the common people. An alliance must be forged with the people, bypassing the venal officials and the arrogant court. The people and the tsar with no one between them.

Oddly enough, this was an idea that united all Russian intellectuals, even the most radical, who hated the tsars and who were hated by them in turn. All the famous dominant Russian thinkers — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev — even though they frequently quarrelled with and contradicted each other, and all the diverse tendencies of Russian philosophical thought agreed on one idea: that it was only the common people, destitute, illiterate, downtrodden, who possessed a kind of hidden truth. It was only in the gloom of their wretched huts that the true spirit of Christ survived, preserved through their constant suffering. It was to the folk that one should turn to study a wise and Christian life.

And an amusing thing happened: the Russian tsar confessed then to the very same ideas. That shy tsar of short stature and most un-tsarlike appearance who felt awkward at balls and meetings and in the company of courtiers and ministers, where, it seemed to him, they were always comparing him to his dead giant of a father. How much happier he was with the common people in an atmosphere of adoration and worship.

And there emerged this paradox. The tsar started to seek a connection with the simple folk, and they began to appear at the palace one after another — emissaries of the people. They were found by the Montenegrin princesses. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich told Nicholas of a minor official named Klopov. Klopov was eager to bring the truth of the people to the tsar. He had written endless letters to the grand duke about the embezzlement of public funds in the flour-milling business. And the letters were brought to the tsar by the Montenegrins and read with delight by Alix and Nicky. And the voice of a simple man of the people was heard, and Klopov was summoned to the palace. After a conversation with Klopov, the tsar sent him off with the broadest sort of secret plenary powers to scour Russia and bring back the people’s truth about abuses by high officials. But that initial experience of a meeting with a people’s emissary ended in confusion. The poor Klopov unfortunately had no understanding of anything except his flour-milling business.

But a beginning had been made. Alix, the daughter of an English princess, and Nicky, the son of a Danish one, were infatuated with the noble idea of unity with the simple Russian people.

At the time Alix had been giving birth to girls — one after another they came into the world, three grand duchesses. But the chief thing, giving birth to a boy who was meant for the divine crown, was something the religious Alix simply could not accomplish. Seeking help she met the
Montenegrins and listened to Militsa’s stories about the people of God and the elders to whom God had given a special, great power.

Zhukovskaya wrote that Militsa’s face ‘with its large oblong black eyes, weary and proud, seemed lifeless, like the face of an old-fashioned portrait. She was somehow unnaturally pale.’ Militsa generously revealed to Alix a world of miracles that amazed the granddaughter of the sceptical Queen Victoria. All kinds of things were mixed up in it — Persian literature, the mysteries of Zarathustra, the pagan world of Militsa’s native Montenegro in whose forest-covered mountains lived sorcerers to whom it was even given to speak to the dead, and the miracles of the great Orthodox elders from Russia’s monasteries. Militsa had created an astonishing synthesis of mutually exclusive elements, united by only one thing — the alluring power of the miracles created in her magical world by the common people, by those who knew nothing of the vainness of the court, of that pitiful Vanity Fair.

The File, from the testimony of Vyrubova: ‘Militsa Nikolaevna and Anastasia Nikolaevna, especially the former…in the beginning enjoyed great influence over the royal family, and had, so to speak, a mystical influence. Exceptionally well read in mystical literature and having even studied the Persian language in order to acquaint herself with the Persian mystics in the original, [Militsa] was almost considered a prophetess.’

Alix knew how to make friends and, most importantly, she knew how to
believe with all her heart
. Just as her English mother, Alice, so renowned for her admiration, or, more accurately, her adoration, of the German religious philosopher David Strauss, had known how to believe.

Thus began the search for a man of God. One who would pray to God for a son.

An Hour And A Half With An Idiot?

The first to arrive was Mitya, called ‘Kozelsky’ or sometimes ‘the Nasal-voiced’ (for his difficulties in pronunciation). Dmitry Oznobishin, whom everybody just called Mitya, was a resident of the little town of Kozelsk. A description of him survives in the files of the security branch: ‘He wears his hair long and unbound and goes about barefoot the year round leaning on a staff. He dresses in a cassock of monk style.’ After the revolution, journalists poked fun at the tsarina by describing him as an idiot. As a result, Vyrubova tried in her testimony to protect the royal family from the pathetic Mitya. ‘I don’t think he was ever at the palace,’ she lied to the Extraordinary
Commission. On the contrary, Mitya was there, and more than once.

From Nicholas’s diary: ‘14 January 1906. The man of God Dmitry came to see us from Kozelsk near the Optina Pustyn Monastery. He brought with him an image drawn according to a vision he had had. We talked for about an hour and a half.’