The Rasputin File (27 page)

A Senate investigation into the actions of Kurlov and Spiridovich was about to begin. But someone apparently got nervous about it. Pressure was applied to the tsar, and at his command the case was closed.

Rasputin And The Assassination

Rasputin was in Kiev on the day of the murder. He later wrote a virtual ode about the Kiev festivities. But his bombastic eulogy was hardly noticed by anyone. Then the news quickly began to spread of his meeting with Khvostov on the eve of the murder and his prediction of the prime minister’s
imminent departure. There was even a rumour that Rasputin had directly foretold Stolypin’s impending death. And in his book Iliodor quotes words allegedly belonging to Rasputin: ‘You see, I foretold Stolypin’s death seven days before it happened.’

This is what people were beginning to talk about in Petersburg parlours. So that Rasputin’s name was at once connected to Stolypin’s murder. The rumours apparently made a strong impression on Sazonov, too. He was frightened that Rasputin, and hence he himself, would be drawn into a dangerous game. Stolypin’s murder showed how such games ended. ‘I started to distance myself from him when I saw that he was beginning to acquire influence over supreme questions of government,’ Sazonov testified in the File.

The Extraordinary Commission took a special interest in the rumours that Rasputin had somehow been linked to Stolypin’s death. And in that regard they interrogated the future head of Rasputin’s own bodyguard, Colonel Komissarov. But they found no evidence.

Had Rasputin really predicted not only Stolypin’s departure (an easy thing for him to do, since he knew the intentions of Tsarskoe Selo) but also his death? If he really had predicted his death, he need not have been a prophet to do so. It could have been connected to the appearance nearby of one of the most mysterious personalities of the day, Pyotr Badmaev, the doctor of Tibetan medicine.

A Very ‘Cunning Chinaman’

The sixty-year-old Badmaev bore the titles of actual state councillor and doctor of Tibetan medicine. He was a Buryat from a distinguished family of Asiatic descent who grew up on the Siberian steppe, where he had roamed with the family’s enormous herds. At the time his brother had a flourishing Tibetan pharmacy in Petersburg and practised Tibetan medicine. And Badmaev set off for Petersburg, too. There he converted to Orthodoxy and acquired an important godfather: he was baptized by Tsar Alexander III.

Badmaev testified before the Extraordinary Commission: ‘I completed the course of study at the Academy of Military Medicine … but by my own choice did not take a degree, so as to have the right to practise according to the principles of Tibetan medicine. And then I started practising in the highest circles of society.’ He treated all illnesses — neurasthenia, pulmonary diseases, venereal diseases — by means of Tibetan herbs, but his chief claim was in restoring masculine potency.

The monarchist Purishkevich subsequently quoted some words about Badmaev that supposedly came from Rasputin: ‘He has two infusions: you drink a little glass of one, and your cock gets hard; but there’s still the other: you drink a really tiny glass of it, and it makes you good-natured and kind of stupid, and you don’t care about anything.’ And in Petersburg they believed in that.

Afterwards the rumour would circulate that Rasputin had drugged the tsar with those herbs of Badmaev’s in order to make him ‘good-natured and kind of stupid’.

In any case, Badmaev treated high society: the former Prime Minister Witte; the metropolitans of Kiev and Moscow; Alexander Protopopov, the Deputy Speaker of the State Duma; and so on. The ‘cunning Chinaman’, Rasputin would call Badmaev. For in addition to medicine, Badmaev had another absorbing occupation: he was an entrepreneur, a businessman.

He dreamed of Russia’s capture of Mongolia and Tibet. And he showered the royal chancery with endless projects. He founded a trading company, Badmaev & Ko (his trading partner), leased land from the Tartars and Mongols, established a huge livestock-breeding farm, and bought numerous camels. He dreamed the farm would become a bridgehead for penetrating first Mongolia and then Tibet. He petitioned the tsar for subsidies to support his grandiose plans, but to no avail. In the end he was ruined and had to liquidate his farm. But he had information, passed down from generation to generation in his Buryat family, about Trans-Baikal gold. And in 1909 he founded the First Trans-Baikal Mining and Industrial Association for the exploitation of gold deposits. But Stolypin, to Badmaev’s great displeasure, had remained cool about these dealings. Badmaev then got one of his secret patients involved in his business — Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich. But after the episode of Kirill’s marriage, the sons of Vladimir were unpopular in the royal family. And again state subsidies were not forthcoming. Badmaev needed a lot of money and he attempted to put right his relations with Tsarskoe Selo by himself. And, as he testifies in the File, he sent ‘herbal medicine’ for treatment of the heir. But the powders ‘were returned with thanks’. He had been shown the door.

There was only one person left who could help him — Rasputin. And Badmaev made his first steps towards closer relations with Grigory.

One of Badmaev’s patients at the time was Lieutenant General Kurlov, chief of the gendarme corps and the person most suspected of engineering Stolypin’s murder. And if the assassination really was arranged, then the ‘cunning Chinaman’ might have received from his grateful patient a hint of the impending demise of Stolypin, so disliked by Badmaev. And then, in striking up an acquaintance with Rasputin, that master of intrigue could,
as evidence of his potential, have brought that information to Rasputin, that hint about the end of Stolypin. Who, as everyone knew, was a mortal enemy of Father Grigory.

And Rasputin could have predicted to the tsarina, with her constant craving for his predictions, that the disliked prime minister would soon perish. As divine retribution.

The Paradox Of The Dead Man

Stolypin’s death is a watershed in Rasputin’s biography.

Before it, Rasputin was a secret, the subject of obscure rumours and vague newspaper articles. And ‘serious people’ simply dismissed as cock-and-bull the stories about the enormous influence at court of some peasant. The governor of Moscow Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, for example. His sister Evdokia was a maid of honour and a friend of Tyutcheva’s, and she hated Rasputin. Naturally, she told her brother about the situation at court, but he did not believe her. Especially since, with the rank of aide-de-camp, he himself visited the capital for duty at court, was invited to tea with the sovereign, and met the courtiers. As he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I considered all those rumours to be the invention of the newspapers and ascribed no meaning to them … I was indignant whenever his name was linked to those of the sovereign and the empress.’

But with Stolypin’s murder, Dzhunkovsky started to take an interest in Rasputin’s activities. So the assassination of Stolypin, of the person who had been defeated by the obscure peasant, compelled ‘serious people’ to take a closer look at that peasant.

The senator Vladimir Nikolaevich Kokovtsev, from an old gentry family, was made the new prime minister. Not a brilliant man but hard-working and honest. ‘And that is all,’ as Dzhunkovsky wrote of him.

‘Stolypin died in order to cede his position to you,’ Alix told him, meaning, ‘to you as someone who is presumably able to listen to the voice of the man of God and not persecute him’.

It seemed that the most serious threat to Grigory had passed with Stolypin’s death. But Alix would soon grasp a paradox. The death of the mighty prime minister had proved not a deliverance but exactly the opposite. When he died something irreparable happened: fear passed out of the aristocratic system. And without fear it could not work. No, it was not for nothing that the dying Stolypin had made the sign of the cross at the royal box. The weak Nicholas and the pitiful ministers were now left one-to-one against the Duma. And the peasant, whom it had already become
fashionable to hate, was defenceless in the absence of fear. The murdered prime minister had taken vengeance from beyond the grave.

The first to be emboldened by Stolypin’s absence were the hierarchs.

The Prophets’ Brawl

Feofan was remote from the world and capable only of writing vain appeals to the tsar or asking his friends to expose Rasputin, but Hermogen knew how to act. Upon arriving in Petersburg for a meeting of the Synod, he understood that the time had come to put an end to Rasputin. The pitiful Kokovtsev did not scare him. And Sabler, the chief procurator of the Synod, compromised by rumours of his link to Rasputin, did not scare him either.

Well understanding who was in charge in the royal family, Hermogen knew there was no point in appealing to the tsar. He therefore decided to break Grigory himself— to denounce him and force him to leave the court voluntarily. And if Grigory did not agree, then Iliodor had prepared a lampoon called ‘Grishka’. The letters that Iliodor had stolen from Rasputin were quoted, including a letter from the tsarina, a secret weapon that made both Iliodor and Hermogen confident that it was all over with yesterday’s friend.

And then came 16 December, the day of denunciation.

The participants had all gathered by eleven o’clock ahead of Rasputin’s arrival. To Hermogen’s quarters at the Yaroslav Monastery had come Mitya Kozelsky, in whom the tsarina had put such faith before Rasputin. Mitya was tall and scrawny with a withered arm and dressed in shabby but clean peasant clothes. Ivan Rodyonov was there, too, a publicist with close ties to the Union of the Russian People and an admirer of Iliodor’s who had helped him write the ‘Grishka’ lampoon. Iliodor himself, whom Rasputin continued to regard as his friend, was to bring Grigory to them at eleven.

Iliodor had gone to get the elder: ‘Rasputin greeted me very affectionately. I invited him to come with me to Hermogen’s … “He’s expecting you.” And he said to me, “Well, go on and take me, then … as soon as you can, I want to see him.”’ They got in a cab and set off. It is amazing, but that intuitive person sensed nothing. Just as he would later sense nothing when he was taken to be killed. Evidently, he had complete faith in Iliodor. And that faith had turned off his wild beast’s senses. His exposed nerve endings went to sleep and he became an ordinary simple-hearted peasant. Along the way Grigory talked with naive awe about the opulence of the tsar’s new
palace in Livadia. And about how ‘Papa himself showed me around the palace … and then we came out onto a porch and gazed at the sky for a long time.’ Finally, they arrived. The players in the drama were eager to begin. As Rasputin and Iliodor were taking off their coats in the hallway, Iliodor sarcastically said to Rodyonov, ‘Take a look at his elder’s rags, Ivan Alexandrovich!’ Rodyonov said, ‘Oh-ho! The hat’s worth at least three hundred roubles, and the fur coat would cost around two thousand here. Truly ascetic apparel!’ Only then did Rasputin grasp that something was amiss. But it was too late.

Iliodor wrote:

The historic moment had arrived. Hermogen, I, and all the witnesses had gathered in the front room. The ‘elder’ sat down on the large sofa. Mitya, limping and waving his withered arm, paced back and forth near Grigory … All were silent … And then something… happened that was improbable, ridiculous, but at the same time terrifying. Mitya cried out savagely, ‘Ah, ah, ah, you are a Godless person, you have done wrong to many mamas! You have offended many nurses! You are sleeping with the tsarina! You are a scoundrel!’ and he began to grab at the ‘elder’. Rasputin started to back toward the doorway. But Mitya, poking him in the chest with his finger, started yelling even louder and more insistently, ‘You are sleeping with the tsarina! You are an Antichrist!’ And then Hermogen, who was dressed in his bishop’s robes, took his cross in his hand and said, ‘Grigory, come over here!’ Rasputin, his whole body trembling, approached the table, pale, hunched over, and frightened.

And then came the finale, as described by Iliodor.

Hermogen took hold of the head of the ‘elder’ with his left hand, with his right started beating him on the head with the cross and shouting in a terrifying voice, ‘Devil! I forbid you in God’s name to touch the female sex. Brigand! I forbid you to enter the royal household and to have anything to do with the tsarina! As a mother brings forth the child in the cradle, so the holy Church through its prayers, blessings, and heroic feats has nursed that great and sacred thing of the people, the autocratic rule of the tsars. And now you, scum, are destroying it, you are smashing our holy vessels, the bearers of autocratic power…Fear God, fear His life-giving cross!’

And then Rodyonov, unsheathing the sabre he had brought with him, led the utterly flummoxed Rasputin over to the cross. And they demanded that he swear to leave the palace. And Rasputin swore. The planned performance had come to a successful end. As a pitiful little peasant of the kind he had once been in Pokrovskoe, Rasputin emerged, or, more accurately, ran from
the bishop’s quarters. And was glad that he had done so in one piece and unharmed. Since he believed that the nobleman Rodyonov was quite capable of hacking him to death with his sabre. A constant peasant fear.

His oath on the cross had meant nothing, of course. He had his own relations with God that were unattainable to those well-fed princes of the church. And his God could forgive an oath on the cross that had been torn from him in terror at the threat of being killed. But he himself could not forgive his friend’s treachery. After all, he knew that Iliodor had betrayed not only him. But Hermogen, too. Because there was a secret thing that Iliodor had concealed from Hermogen and Feofan. Something that bound him tightly to Rasputin. And Iliodor’s treachery and the bishop’s violence impelled the enraged Rasputin to send a telegram to ‘Mama’ at once.

‘Upon leaving the Yaroslav Monastery… Rasputin went to a telegraph office and sent the tsars a telegram…,’ Iliodor wrote, ‘that was full of incredible slander … He wrote that Hermogen and I had allegedly wanted to take his life, to strangle him, in Hermogen’s quarters.’ There was no particular slander here: they had threatened him with a sabre and struck him on the head with a bronze cross.