Authors: Edvard Radzinsky
Our Friend needed to absent himself from Petersburg for a time. But to send him to Pokrovskoe now would mean to yield to them, to his enemies. Alix was incapable of yielding. And it was decided that Rasputin would, as befitted a man of God, go on a pilgrimage. To see the places most holy to any Christian. As a reward for everything that he had done for the royal family. For all the persecution he had suffered.
And Rasputin set off for Jerusalem with a group of Russian pilgrims.
6
THE EMPRESS’S ALTER EGO
The Mysterious Co-Author
From Nicholas’s diary, 4 June 1911: ‘After dinner we had the pleasure of seeing Grigory just after…his return from Jerusalem.’
We can easily imagine the story he told the ‘tsars’ about his pilgrimage.
His impressions of his journey to Jerusalem were published later that year under the title, ‘My Thoughts and Reflections’. As the publisher Filippov testified in the File, ‘The pamphlet was published by me … I didn’t correct or smooth out Rasputin’s aphorisms, but conveyed them verbatim.’
This does not mean, however, that Rasputin wrote them that way. He could not have written such a quantity of text. He would in the future scribble out his famous memos to the ministers, those few words, at great effort in a monstrous scrawl. So what Filippov published ‘verbatim’ was a text in Rasputin’s own words that had been transcribed by someone else. But before we clarify who that was, let us listen to the peasant’s rapturous voice.
The sea comforts without any effort. When you rise in the morning, the waves speak, and lap, and gladden your heart. And the sun shines upon the sea, as if coming up ever so quietly, and at the same time a person’s soul forgets everything … and gazes at the brilliance of the sun. The sea wakens you from your sleep of cares, and much is thought all by itself. O God, grant us spiritual peace. At sea, illness is temporary, but ashore it is forever — such a wave. At sea, sickness is seen by everyone, but ashore it is unknown to any — a demon confuses the soul. Conscience is a wave, but whatever waves there may be at sea, they will die away, while conscience will be calmed only by a good cause.
And the peasant’s impossible dream came to pass: he saw His city and His tomb.
‘What shall I say of the moment when I approached the tomb of Christ … And such a feeling I had in myself that I was ready to treat everyone with affection, and such a love for people that everyone seemed holy, because Love does not see any defects in people. There, at the tomb, you see all people with a spiritual heart.’
But he knows: the rest is silence, the rest is Mystery, and mouths must be closed to preserve the great moment of the encounter with the Lord’s Tomb.
‘O God, what can I say of the Tomb! I shall say only what was in my heart: “Lord, resurrect me Thyself from the depths of sin.”’ One should imagine that nervous person’s magnetic eyes filling with tears as he told it all to the ‘tsars’, because, as a true actor, he
saw
what he was saying.
O, what an impression Golgotha produces! From that place the Mother of God looked at the heights of Golgotha and wept while the Lord was crucified upon the cross. As you gaze at the place where the Mother of God stood, your tears begin to flow, whether by your will or no, and you see before you how it was. O God, what a feat took place! And they took down the body and placed it below. What sadness is here, and what a weeping at the place where the body lay! O God, O God, what was the reason for it? O God, we shall sin no more: save us with Thy suffering.
And they, who had never ever been to the Holy Land, would see it through his eyes. And a few years later, as they were preparing for their own Golgotha, they would remember those stories of his.
And so, the semi-literate Rasputin could not have written so much. And Lokhtina says not a word about working on the book. And, anyway, the didactic text she transcribed is too different from this inspired one. And how much does this text resemble the remarkable ‘Life of an Experienced Wanderer’. Rasputin would seem to have had the same co-author in both texts. Someone capable of putting the hypnotic force of his words down on paper. Filippov gives a hint of the co-author’s identity. He testified in the File that ‘the proofs were corrected by the empress.’
Of course! The proofs were corrected by the same person who had written down the words. Only the tsarina with her brilliant literary gift (read her letters!) could have conveyed what Rasputin told them in just that way. Although she did not work alone, I think. But with her inseparable Friend, who adored writing, too. For the tsarina, that work was contact with the mystical, with what was hidden. For the Friend, it was something that bound her ever more tightly to Alix.
The Great Minister’s Fall
But even after his return, Our Friend was unable to live in peace.
The newspaper articles continued. One can imagine what that semi-literate peasant felt upon seeing himself vilified in the
newspapers
. And once again he dictated to ‘Mama’ for the notebook his teachings about those who had suffered for the truth.
Alix was furious. And at the end of 1910 the tsar had written Stolypin a brusque note demanding that he put a end to the newspaper campaign against Rasputin. But Stolypin simply ignored the note and the vilification of Rasputin in the press continued. The prime minister was in fact mounting a resolute attack of his own. Even though his attempt at organizing official surveillance of Rasputin had been countermanded, his agents were still at work. Information was still being collected.
And at the beginning of autumn 1911 the prime minister set off to see the tsar with his report.
There is in the File very important testimony by Sazonov about the episode:
His struggle with Stolypin was very interesting, as I shall relate from what Rasputin himself told me. Stolypin demanded that the tsar have Rasputin sent away. He brought along for his report Rasputin’s file from the Department of Police and communicated everything known to him of a compromising character … including that he, Rasputin, had been going to the bathhouses with women, to the great temptation of society. To which the tsar had answered, ‘I know, and he preaches Holy Scripture there’ … And after the report, he ordered Stolypin to clear out and tossed the report itself in the fireplace … That is why a month before Stolypin’s murder I knew … his fate was sealed. Compare that with little things like the fact that Stolypin was not assigned more or less decent and comfortable quarters for the Kiev festivities, that he wasn’t given an automobile, and so on.
Stolypin was deposed not by the Duma, and not by the rightists or the leftists. That mightiest of prime ministers was brought down by his attack on the peasant.
And Stolypin began to ‘die a political death’. Now Alix conducted a ruthless campaign against the enemy of Our Friend. And soon afterwards Rasputin spoke or, more accurately, gave voice to her thought. ‘Rasputin said of Stolypin … that he had seized too much power,’ Vyrubova testified.
The peasant knew: the weak tsar did not forgive accusations of weakness. The dread prime minister was still carrying out his duties when a rumour began circulating that he would be reassigned as governor-general of the
Caucasus. As his constant rival Count Witte enjoyed noting in his memoirs.
It was then that Rasputin engaged his friend Sazonov in a conversation that stunned the journalist and publisher. And soon afterwards a remarkable expedition — the peasant and his friend Sazonov — set out for Nizhny Novgorod.
Ten Days Before The Murder
The post of minister of internal affairs was a key one in the government. And the prime minister usually tried to obtain the post for himself. As one of the tsarist ministers would later put it, ‘A prime minister without that post is like a cat without his balls.’ That is why Prime Minister Stolypin was also minister of internal affairs.
And what must have been the amazement of Rasputin’s friend Sazonov when the peasant told him that he had received a new assignment from the ‘tsars’ — to find another minister of internal affairs to replace Stolypin! And Rasputin suggested to the quite startled Sazonov that he think about who the best person for the position might be. And Sazonov, overcoming his fear and amazement, evidently did think about it. Because the candidacy that was soon afterwards discussed in Tsarskoe Selo was that of the Nizhny Novgorod governor Alexei Khvostov, whose father was a close friend of Sazonov’s. Thus the expedition to Nizhny Novgorod.
The evidence remains in the File.
From the testimony of Sazonov: ‘Rasputin, carrying out the sovereign’s commission, went to Nizhny, where at the time Khvostov was governor. I went with Rasputin at his request as an old friend of Khvostov’s father’s.’
Alexei Nikolaevich Khvostov was very tall and very stout (Rasputin would later on give him the nickname ‘Fat Belly’) and still young, just thirty-nine. He was the nephew of the tsarist minister of justice, Nikolai Khvostov, had come from a family of wealthy landowners, and was known for his extreme right-wing views.
But Khvostov met the visitors in a most unexpected way.
From Sazonov’s testimony: ‘He greeted me, as an old family friend, with courtesy, but he received Rasputin very coolly and was clearly surprised by our visit. He did not even invite us…to stay for dinner. We saw him between trains.’
Khvostov describes the event more vividly in the File:
Ten days before Stolypin’s murder, Georgy Petrovich Sazonov, an old acquaintance of my father’s, came to visit me along with Grigory Rasputin, whom I had never seen before, in Nizhny Novgorod, where I was governor
… Sazonov, clearly not wanting to disturb our conversation, remained in the parlour. Rasputin was with me in my study. Rasputin spoke of his closeness to the tsar…and of having been sent by the tsar to ‘look into my soul’, and he finished by offering me the post of minister of internal affairs.
Khvostov naturally told him that ‘the position is already occupied’.
‘Rasputin answered, however, that Stolypin would nonetheless be leaving …It all seemed so strange and peculiar to me that I attributed no significance to Rasputin’s conversation with me and spoke to him in a half-facetious tone. And he left angry. I didn’t invite him to dine and refused to introduce him to my family, even though he asked me to.’
It would be surprising if it had not seemed strange to Khvostov. The prime minister and minister of internal affairs was the mighty Stolypin. And suddenly that strange pair arrives: Sazonov, an acquaintance of his father’s and merely one publisher among many, and an uncouth, semi-literate peasant about whom incredible rumours have been circulating. And they start talking to him in all seriousness about the removal of Stolypin himself! Khvostov, like many another ‘serious person’, was unaware at the time of the peasant’s actual position at court. And he could not believe that the tsar would entrust the fate of that all-powerful post to that pair. It all looked absolutely fantastic to him. And beginning to suspect that it was just some court game, Khvostov preferred to politely show the strange emissaries the door. Although he did ask police agents to follow them. After which Khvostov ‘received from the local office a copy of a telegram that Rasputin had sent to Vyrubova that read approximately, “Though God rests easy with him, that is not enough for it.”‘ And deciding that it was indeed a court intrigue of the tsarina’s Friend, Khvostov let it go at that. But what must have been his astonishment, if not horror, when ten days later Stolypin was murdered. And how sinister Rasputin’s words that ‘Stolypin will nonetheless be leaving’ must have seemed to him then.
The Prime Minister’s Mysterious Death
From the diary of KR: ‘3 September … We were horrified to learn that the day before yesterday in Kiev … Stolypin was wounded by several revolver shots.’
Stolypin was killed thanks to several very odd blunders by the secret police.
A monument to Nicholas’s grandfather Tsar Alexander II, the serfs’
emancipator, was to be unveiled in Kiev on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of serfdom. The tsar came for the festivities, along with the grand dukes and Prime Minister Stolypin. And on the eve of the festivities, a certain Dmitry Bogrov appeared at the local offices of the security branch. He was a revolutionary terrorist who had been recruited by the royal security service but who had not had any contact with it for several years. And now Bogrov suddenly turned up with information that an attempt on Stolypin’s life was in the offing. The attempt was evidently going to take place in the Kiev Opera Theatre at the gala performance. And Kurlov the chief of the gendarme corps (political police), Spiridovich the head of palace security, and Kulyabko the chief of the Kiev security office, were all of a sudden strangely trusting. They did not even arrange for surveillance of Bogrov. And not only did they let him into the theatre, they let him in with a revolver!
The tsar left his box seat for the second intermission. Stolypin was standing by a wall with his back to the orchestra and was talking to the court minister Fredericks. He was approached by a young man whose coat-tails stood out among the endless bureaucratic and military uniforms. It was Bogrov. He calmly drew his revolver and shot twice. Stolypin managed to turn towards the empty royal box and bless it with a sign of the cross.
He was carried out to the lobby. Two days later he died.
With their previous experience of murders in which the right-wing and the secret police had, by the hands of agents-provocateurs, culled unwanted tsarist officials, the Duma immediately started speaking of provocation. The monarchist Shulgin made a speech directly accusing the secret police: ‘We have in recent times had a whole series of analogous killings of Russian dignitaries with the collusion of officials of the political police… Stolypin, who, according to Prince Meschersky, had said that “a secret police agent will kill me”…perished at the hand of a police agent with the collaboration of the highest security officials.’