The Rasputin File (18 page)

Anya was sly, secretive, cunning, and smart, a dangerous woman who had devoted herself to two passions. Witte wrote, ‘All the courtiers close to the royal family cater to Anya Vyrubova…Anya arranges various favours for them and influences the closeness to the sovereign of one group of political figures or another.’

Her first passion was power. She was the invisible ruler of the most brilliant court in Europe. But her other passion, forever hidden, was
Alix
. And that secret passion was combined with something frightening and carnal that subsequently came unseen into the palace with Rasputin. While in the palace he turned into a holy man, the unseen field of his lust, his unbridled potency, could not have failed to be sensed by the tsarina. And Alix’s passionate carnal dreams in her letters to Nicholas were perhaps not expressions of humble conjugal love but rather an ecstatic summons.

In her memoirs Anya Vyrubova writes that after her divorce she ‘grew even closer to the royal family’, living in Tsarskoe Selo in a little house next to the palace.

From the entry for 7 September 1908 in the diary of the tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Xenia: ‘We drove out to see Nicky and Alix… Alix was in the garden with Olga, Tatyana, and the constant Vyrubova.’

A Mighty Alliance Between The Two

It was at that time that Alix was introducing the mysterious elder to everyone close to the royal family.

The File, from the testimony of Captain (First Class) Nikolai Pavlovich Sablin, master of the imperial yacht
Shtandart
and one of those closest to the tsar and tsarina: ‘I think it was in 1908, while sailing on the
Shtandart
that the empress began preparing me for the fact that she knew Rasputin. She said there are people who have special power as a result of their ascetic way of life, and she announced that there was such a person, namely, Rasputin, and proposed to introduce him to me.’

From the testimony of Vyrubova:

The next meeting with Rasputin occurred a year later on the train as I was on my way to Tsarskoe Selo. Rasputin was also on his way there with a lady to visit some acquaintances …I was very glad to see him and said I would like to talk to him about my unhappy life. Rasputin gave me his address, ‘At the Lokhtins’ on Grechesky Avenue’ …I met with Rasputin in Lokhtina’s living room … Olga Lokhtina was then … still a very nice fashionable lady and not marked by the eccentricity that would later develop in her.

I think it was all much simpler: it was the tsarina who wanted the people dearest to her to be friends, and so Anya went off to what was then Rasputin’s staff headquarters at the apartment of the general’s wife. Lokhtina speaks of this herself in the File: ‘I met Vyrubova before I broke with my family. The first time she visited me was to find out when Father Grigory would be coming to Petrograd.’

Anya knew that all who wished to enjoy the tsarina’s love had to love the ‘man of God’ and feel his power. And she felt it at once. It had always been easy for her to assume roles thus Anya straightaway became Rasputin’s most faithful admirer. A fanatical admirer.

Thus Rasputin acquired his most rapturous adherent, and Anya had her story, that the perspicacious elder had predicted her unhappy marriage. He had predicted it, but she had failed to listen, and she was punished for it.

Lokhtina subsequently yielded her role as the elder’s chief admirer to Anya. She understood that the other woman would be more useful to Father Grigory. As Iliodor put it, ‘Lokhtina resigned herself to that change in her destiny.’

In A Darkened Palace Corridor

The royal family found itself alone. The friends of Nicky’s childhood, the grand dukes Sergei and Sandro, had long since become estranged from him Only the poet KR, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, and his wife were welcome guests in Tsarskoe Selo. Alix wrote down excerpts from KR’ poems in the copybook containing her favourite sayings. Although that copybook would soon turn into a record of the thoughts of the semi-literate peasant Grigory Rasputin. And soon after that only two people would share the isolation of the royal family. Father Grigory and Anya Vyrubova.

With the fall of the Montenegrins, Anya inherited their most importan role. Because Alix did not dare to receive the elder openly — rumours had already begun to spread about the strange peasant in the palace — the tsarina could not let it be known that Rasputin was treating her child. The heir’ illness was still a secret.

And so the royal family met with Rasputin in Anya’s little house in Tsarskoe Selo. Anya’s notes to V. Voeikov, the palace castellan, have survived in the archive of the Extraordinary Commission: ‘Dear Vl[adimir] Nik[o-laevich] … The elder arrived at 2:00 p.m., and Their Majesties wish to see him today. They think it would be better at my house.’

From the tsar’s diary for 1908: ‘6 November …We dropped in on Anya … and saw Grigory and talked with him for a long time.’

‘27 December …We went to Anya’s, where we saw Grigory. Together the three of us consecrated her Christmas tree, which was very pleasant.’

But sometimes it was necessary to escort Father Grigory to the palace to treat the Little One. And again Anya worked out the ritual for the secret delivery of the peasant to the palace.

Our Friend would come as if to visit Maria Vishnyakova, the royal children’s nurse. This allowed him to avoid having his name written down in the lobby register, where all visits to the ‘tsars’ were recorded. Once in the palace, ‘he would drop by to see the nurse Maria Vishnyakova, a very nervous individual and at the time an ardent admirer of Rasputin,’ as Anya obscurely put it in her testimony, and from there would be escorted to the royal apartments.

How it all took place is related in the File by the maid of honour Sophia Tyutcheva, the granddaughter of the great Russian poet and the royal children’s governess:

Once in the winter of 1908, Grand Duchess Tatyana got sick. While her rooms were being aired out, she lay down in Vishnyakova’s room, and I and the other grand duchesses were in the classroom … Looking back into the darkened corridor, I saw the figure of a peasant in a tight-fitting coat. I realized at once that it was Rasputin. I asked him what he was doing there. He replied that he needed to see Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova. I pointed out to him that she was busy and that he wasn’t supposed to be there. He departed without speaking … I went to Vishnyakova, who at the time was putting the heir to bed … and told her that Rasputin had been looking for her … ‘Oh, I’ll catch it from Anna Alexandrovna [Vyrubova]!’ Vishnyakova said…When we saw each other the next day, Vishnyakova said to me, ‘I really did catch it from Anna Alexandrovna because of you.’ And she explained that Vyrubova had asked her never to speak to me about Rasputin, since I didn’t believe in his holiness. The next day Vyrubova was having dinner with me, and out of a feeling of friendship I told her how I felt about Rasputin. To my utter astonishment, Vyrubova suddenly asked, ‘But who is this Rasputin?’

Tyutcheva was astonished because she knew Anya’s simple-heartedness and naivety. She still did not know how capable the simple-hearted Anya was of dissembling. Nor what depths were hidden in her ‘simple soul’.

The Only One

Rasputin understood that the ‘black women hated him and would attempt to use their last formidable weapon against him — Father Ioann of Kronstadt. And he waited and prepared himself. ‘Rasputin indicated reservations with unusual skill… Rasputin… said of Father Ioann of Kronstadt… that he was a saint but, like a child, lacked experience and judgment … As a result Father Ioann’s influence at court began to wane,’ Feofan testified in the File.

Father Ioann, the last person who might have blocked Rasputin’s influence, died in 1909. Now the peasant was alone, the only one.

From Vyrubova’s testimony in the File: ‘And the former tsar and tsarina … had great respect for the priest Ioann of Kronstadt. And after his death Rasputin took his place. In all the adversities of life, during the frequent illnesses of the heir to the throne, during the aggravation of the tsarina’s heart condition, they turned to Rasputin for support, and the former tsar and former tsarina asked for his prayers.

And then, casting all caution aside, the tsars started receiving him at the palace.

From Nicholas’s diary: ‘4 February 1909 …At 6 o’clock the Archimandrite Feofan and Grigory came to see us. He also saw the children.’

‘29 February … At 2:30 Grigory came to see us, and we received him with all the children. It was so good to hear him with the whole family.’

‘29 March (the Day of Christ’s Joyful Resurrection). After dinner I went for a walk with Dmitry. There was a frost and a lot of snow.’ After his walk with his young cousin and protégé, one of Grigory’s future murderers, the tsar learned that Grigory himself had arrived at the palace. ‘After tea upstairs in the nursery I sat for a while with Grigory, who had come unexpectedly.’

Nobody could come to see the ‘tsars’ unexpectedly. Even the Romanov grand dukes had to obtain audiences. But Father Grigory didn’t.

‘26 April … From 6:00 to 7:30 we saw … Grigory … I also sat with Grigory a little while in the nursery this evening.’

‘15 August. I talked with Grigory a long time this evening.’

The rumours about the peasant, that strange heir of the late Philippe, troubled the Romanov family. On 1 January 1910, Xenia wrote in her diary: ‘It is so sad, I feel sorry for Nicky, and it makes no sense.’ What did not make sense to her was what the brilliantly educated Alix could have had to talk about for hours on end with that semi-literate peasant.

Nicky and Alix could no longer manage without those meetings. And not just because the boy instantly improved in Rasputin’s presence. The peasant was so different from the court atmosphere in which they lived, an atmosphere of intrigues, and the terrible backbiting so traditional in courts. He never had anything but good to say about people, even about his enemies. And they liked his stories about his wanderings, too. In them were people unburdened by the usual yokes of rank and money. In them were God and nature: sunshine on a meadow, a night spent sleeping on the ground under an open sky — everything that the tsar, so fond of the simple life, could only dream about.

The publisher Filippov testified in the File: ‘In that period of his life Rasputin…was short of money, and I had to lend him small sums of twenty to a hundred roubles that he would then pay back whenever he could. Once I asked him, “Are you, in spite of your closeness to the tsarina, really so hard up?” He answered, “She’s stingy … she gives you a hundred roubles, and when a week later you ask her again, she reminds you, “But I just gave you a hundred.”’

The tsarina’s frugality, or, more accurately, her stinginess, had become proverbial at court. ‘Alix wouldn’t give Rasputin money. She gave him silk shirts, sashes, and the gold cross he wore,’ recalled Grand Duchess Olga, Nicky’s sister.

The ‘tsars’ would dress up in costumes of the times of the first Romanovs, and Alix wanted to see Rasputin in an expensive ‘costume of the people’, too. And arriving in Pokrovskoe now, he would happily strut before his fellow villagers in his costume: in silk shirts, patent-leather boots, and crimson waistbands. And in answer to their questions about where that magnificence had come from, he would tell them about the ‘tsars’, who loved and appreciated Grigory. So they would not forget who the Grishka they had denounced to church investigators had become.

Iliodor recalled:

Grigory, indicating his satin shirt, said to me, ‘This shirt was sewn for me by the empress. And I have other shirts embroidered by her. I asked him to show them to me. Grigory’s wife brought out several shirts. I started to look at them. ‘Do you want to take some as a keepsake? Grigory asked with a smile.

‘Could I have one or two?’

‘Take three!

And he picked out three shirts for me, a red one, a white tussore one, and another white one of expensive linen with embroidery on the collar and sleeves.

The 1905 revolution was becoming little more than an awful memory. And for Alix, who so wanted to believe in the miracles of Our Friend, Russia had been pacified not by the cruel Prime Minister Stolypin with his gallows and military tribunals but by the marvellous elder with his prayers.

The long-awaited peace had arrived. But if Nicholas at the time had grown mellow, she continued to be visited by neurasthenia and a terror that seemed to have no cause.

‘Head and eyes ache and my heart feels weak’; ‘Heart bleeds from fear and horror’; ‘When head hurts less, I write down the sayings of our Friend, and the time passes more quickly; ‘I am made sick by sad thoughts. These quotations are from her last letters. But she was tormented in those earlier years, too. She was an unhappy woman, who was aware that her cursed heredity had destroyed her beloved son, and who lived in a state of constant anguish from her terrible premonitions. And only Our Friend was able to relieve her nervous anxiety. With his soothing words of forgiveness and love and of the future divine reward for all her sufferings. And with his remarkable hands that dispelled the constant migraines that drove her mad with pain. The tormented Alix needed him just as much as her doomed son did.

She wrote a letter to Rasputin then. She was trying to write in a simple-hearted way that would be comprehensible to the peasant — to write in his own idiom.

‘I am calm in my soul, I am able to rest, only when you, teacher, are sitting next to me, and I am kissing your hands and resting my head on your blessed shoulders. Oh, how easy is it for me then.’

For her to feel safe now, she needed to have constant confirmation of his special power. And that is why the tsarina and her friend Vyrubova would every day try to find miracles, however minor: he had predicted the weather, he had predicted the day of the tsar’s return home, and so on. All this has survived in the tsar and tsarina’s correspondence. It was then that Rasputin made the astonishing statement that ‘as long as I am alive, the dynasty shall live.’ This is confirmed in his daughter’s memoirs: