The Rasputin File (25 page)

And Alix, too, was mortally afraid of war. She had not forgotten the recent revolution that had followed the war with Japan. And she knew: in the event of a war with Germany, her brother and her small dukedom of Darmstadt would become her enemies.

But the tsar vacillated, and listened with pleasure to the bellicose speeches of the ‘dread uncle’. And the reason was not merely that ‘the sovereign to his final hour passionately loved Nikolai Nikolaevich’, as Vyrubova put it. It was simply that Nicky was a true Romanov and adored everything military. Like all his ancestors, he had been given a military education and had received his training in the celebrated Preobrazhensky regiment. He kept until his death his Guards’ habit of pacing his room ‘with his right shoulder thrust forward’. As Count Nikolai Panin had put it back in the eighteenth century, ‘Until the day a crippled tsar is born, we shall wait in vain for a change in views.’ Nicholas wanted to be in harmony with society,
the beloved society he loved. So deep in his heart the tsar wanted war.

And then came Father Grigory’s turn. He knew how to read Alix’s secret desires. He knew his role, and he performed it. Rasputin spoke out decisively against the war. As was appropriate for a man of God, he predicted, indeed forewarned of, defeats and revolution. And the tsarina, later remembering those predictions of his, would write to the tsar on 1 November 1915, ‘Our Friend was always against this war, saying the Balkans were not worth the world to fight about.’

She was grateful to Rasputin, and happy, for it had turned out that her own wishes were remarkably consistent with the commands of Father Grigory and heaven.

And so, Stolypin, the tsarina, and finally heaven (Father Grigory) were all against it. And the tsar faltered. And soon afterwards the Council of Ministers acceded to the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Society and the press gave vent to rage and revilement. Tsushima Strait, the greatest defeat in the recent war with Japan, was recalled. The phrase ‘diplomatic Tsushima’ became a common newspaper term for the decision.

Even the most perceptive people believed at the time that the tsar’s refusal to fight had been dictated by Rasputin’s wishes.

In the File, Rasputin’s publisher Filippov cites a famous interview with Count Witte, one of most intelligent politicians of Nicholas’s reign: ‘Count Witte … acknowledged that “there is no doubt we are obliged to the influence of Rasputin that war did not flare up in the Balkans.’“

So in 1909 the Montenegrin princesses and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich had a right to be indignant. It was not enough that Rasputin had hounded them out of the royal palace; now the semi-literate peasant had had the audacity to interfere in high political affairs. He had not given aid to the Orthodox in the Balkans; he had not come to the assistance of their own Montenegro.

The powerful minister Stolypin was also indignant with Rasputin. The newspaper articles against the peasant in the palace had undermined the prestige of the royal family, and resulted in dangerous rumours. And now the prime minister had himself been exposed to humiliation many times.

From the diary of A. Bogdanovich: ‘About three weeks ago Stolypin came with his report and had to wait about half an hour. Because the tsar was at his wife’s, in whose bedroom the “Blessed One’ was sitting.’ And it was with the peasant and not with Stolypin that they had decided the fate of war in the Balkans. And Stolypin learned one other piece of news that could not have failed to disturb him. It turned out that his political rival,
the former prime minister Count Witte, had established contact with Rasputin. And a meeting had already taken place; Father Grigory had visited Count Witte.

‘I said to him then, “Listen, why have you come to see me personally? If they find out about it, they’ll say you’re having dealings with a dangerous man.” Rasputin presented some very original and interesting views to me in the conversation,’ Witte later recalled. And that meeting of the peasant with the liberal Witte, who in 1905 had forced the tsar to grant a constitution, produced panic among the monarchists.

From Bogdanovich’s diary: ‘The fact that the Blessed One has been singing the same tune as Witte constitutes a grave danger … Witte wants to return to power.’

Stolypin learned that the semi-literate peasant had not only been seeing Witte, but he had also been involved in the preparation of the highest appointments and had arranged for a look at a candidate for the post of chief procurator of the Most Holy Synod.

And indeed Rasputin had. Alix wanted to strengthen her position in the Synod. She was afraid that her enemies would use the Synod to charge Our Friend with
Khlyst
views. And she decided to place at the head of the Synod someone who would be loyal to the elder. It was then that the candidacy was first proposed of the Russified German Vladimir Sabler for the position of chief procurator. Alix then suggested a remarkable new method of appointment to a post: the man of God would have to examine the candidate. Considering Our Friend’s special relationship with heaven, it was logical for him to meet the future head of the Church’s governing body. A meeting was arranged, and Rasputin convinced himself of Sabler’s subservience to ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’. And Sabler, a man with a non-Russian name, was, to everyone’s amazement, subsequently placed at the head of the Most Holy Synod.

The Prime Minister Versus The Peasant

Stolypin must have appreciated the significance of his wait in the tsar’s reception room. It was not just a humiliation, it was a signal: a kind of secret prime minister was attending the tsar.

By then the great prime minister-reformer had grown weak. It is usually the fate of reformers in Russia. Afterwards, when one of the monarchist leaders, the highly intelligent Vasily Shulgin, was asked whom Stolypin had hindered, he tersely replied, ‘Everyone.’

‘Everyone.’ He was hated by the left, for he had more than a few times ruthlessly suppressed their opposition in the Duma, once uttering the immortal words, ‘You, gentlemen, require great upheavals, whereas I require a great Russia.’ He was hated by the right, for his reforms promised the victory of Russian capitalism: Moscow, the ancient ‘Tsargrad’, was fated to become a Manchester. His contempt for the antiSemites of the Union of the Russian People provoked the hatred of ‘rightist’ pastors like Iliodor and Hermogen. And there was one other powerful figure who was stirring up dissatisfaction with him: Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, for Stolypin had categorically opposed Russia’s participation in the Balkan conflict. Nevertheless, Stolypin was supported by the tsar, for Stolypin threatened the tsar with social catastrophe and famine if he did not carry out his reforms. Moreover, his enormous height and booming voice reassuringly reminded Nicky of his giant father and instilled him with confidence.

But Stolypin made a fatal move. A move that might at first have seemed quite auspicious and even to promise a return of his popularity: he spoke out against Rasputin. The prime minister started talking about the situation in society surrounding the ‘elder’.

Nicholas deflected the conversation. And asked the prime minister to meet Rasputin himself. The tsar remembered the impression that Rasputin had made on Stolypin just a few years before.

Stolypin later described that second meeting to a future Speaker of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzyanko. From the first moment the giant prime minister had clearly sensed ‘the great power of hypnosis that was in that person and that produced a very strong impression that, although repellent, was still moral’. But the moral impression was evidently so strong that the prime minister, after ‘overcoming’ it, began shouting at Rasputin, calling him a
Khlyst
and a sectarian, and threatening him with exile on the basis of the ‘appropriate law in regard to sectarians’.

That was a blunder. And as the future would show, a fatal one for the prime minister. Rasputin had a right to feel insulted. And serene. He knew that the Tobolsk Theological Consistory had failed to obtain any concrete proof of his
Khlyst
connections. And the tsar knew it, too, for he had in that year of general persecution of Our Friend acquainted himself with the case.

Who Was Behind It?

So by 1910 everyone had gradually become opposed to Rasputin: the left, for whom he had only recently come to personify the alliance of Iliodor
and the antiSemites; the right and the monarchists, whom he threatened with the return of Witte; Nikolai Nikolaevich and the party of war; the court, which hated the peasant favourite; the ecclesiastics, who were certain he was a
Khlyst;
the prime minister Stolypin; the tsarina’s sister Ella — they were all sick of him.

The first, of course, to take action was the most offended and most passionate of them all, the ‘black princess’. Feofan was a close friend of Militsa’s. And, of course, she was the mysterious ‘someone’ who had opened the bishop’s eyes, and had acquainted him with the Tobolsk investigation and the confessions of ladies whom Rasputin had ‘violated’.

Sister Ella also went into action. The abbess of the Martha and Mary Cloister had already grasped that the second Our Friend was far more dangerous than the first. And the speaking out of Sophia Tyutcheva had been no accident, since she had, besides her own strong Moscow ties (the famous Tyutchev estate outside the city and a house within it), a close friendship with Ella. And the richest family in Russia, the Yusupovs, was also very close to Ella. Thus, in Moscow a front of those hostile to Rasputin had already taken form — what Alix would call the ‘Moscow clique’. And it was Ella who had helped Feofan obtain the appointment in the Crimea when he was exiled from the capital. She realized that the indomitable Feofan would continue his denunciations during the royal family’s trips to their Crimean palace at Livadia.

And Prime Minister Stolypin also continued his offensive against the peasant. The Department of Police was put on the case. In the autumn of 1910 the prime minister gave the order for external surveillance of Rasputin’s movements. It was his idea to place on the tsar’s desk the secret agents’ reports and to convince him, finally, of the profligacy of the ‘holy peasant’.

As it is stated in the papers of the Department of Police, ‘surveillance of the well-known elder G. E. Rasputin was instituted on the order of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers Stolypin in October 1910.’

Alix responded immediately. As stated in the same Department of Police documents, Rasputin ‘was observed for several days only. After which the surveillance was terminated.’ The tsar rescinded the order. He could not explain to his prime minister that the facts which the latter had intended to bring to his attention meant nothing to him. And that it was given neither to Stolypin nor to his agents to understand Father Grigory’s behaviour. Or, more accurately, the mystery of that behaviour. A mystery that the ‘tsars’ had come to grasp.

The Peasant’s Gift To The Tsarina

Finally 1911 arrived. In order to quiet the mounting wave of criticism, it was again necessary for the royal family to stop summoning the peasant to the palace, and to meet with him in secret at Anya’s.

Nicholas’s diary for 12 February: ‘We went to Anya’s, where we had a long talk with Grigory.’

But everybody in the court knew. ‘This peasant Rasputin … does not come to the palace, but he does visit Vyrubova in Tsarskoe [Selo], and the tsarina frequently drops in on Vyrubova. Everyone continues to castigate Vyrubova behind her back and to curry favour to her face … All these lords are afraid of one thing only, holding onto their warm little places, although they care little for Russia,’ Bogdanovich wrote in her diary.

And it was then in February 1911, that Alix started keeping a special notebook.

After the royal family’s execution, Yurovsky, their murderer, took some royal documents from the Ipatiev House. Among them was a notebook that the tsarina had brought with her to their last home. And that dark blue notebook has to the present day been held in a Moscow archive. Located in the notebook next to the tsarina’s calligraphic inscription is Rasputin’s own preposterous scrawl: ‘A gift to my warm-hearted Mama. G. Rasputin. 3 February 1911.’

The gift was his sayings, which he had dictated during their meetings at Anya’s house, and which the tsarina had then diligently copied out in the notebook in her own elegant hand. Lokhtina had taught her a great deal, and now the tsarina herself knew how to translate those fragmented Delphic conjurations of his into normal speech.

The majority of the teachings written down by the tsarina concerned the unjust persecution of the righteous. And the value of that persecution for the soul. ‘Lord, how my enemies have multiplied! Many are they who have risen up against me!’ ‘In persecution is Thy path. Thou hast revealed the cross of joy to us.’ She would a few years later in the Ipatiev House be able to repeat ‘In persecution is Thy path’ and ‘Grant us forbearance and silence the mouths of our enemies.’ And again, like an incantation, ‘My soul, seek joy in persecution…heaven awaits those who are banished for the truth.’

And more and more it seemed to her that she was witnessing scenes from the Gospels with her own eyes, that she was witnessing the defamation of a prophet. She would save him! She would stand up to his enemies! She knew how to fight!

The Road To Jerusalem

Maria Vishnyakova and the maid of honour Sophia Tyutcheva, despite Nicky’s goodwill, were dismissed from their posts. The nursery once more became Alix’s fief alone. So that she could once again bring Our Friend to the nursery in the evenings. So that he could without interference heal her poor son and help her daughters, too, whenever they were ill.

It was perhaps then that Grigory grasped the astonishing law that the more severely his persecutors attacked him, the harsher would be the tsarina’s reply. And the more quickly they would disappear from the palace. And the stronger would be his position.

But she saw that Nicky was nervous. For all this time his mother and the whole large Romanov family had been troubled. As Konstantin Konstantinovich wrote in his diary, the dowager empress ‘is in despair that they continue to receive the holy fool Grisha’.