The Rasputin File (31 page)

But the tsar did follow his mother’s advice. As was his custom whenever a scandal flared up around Rasputin, he decided it would be better for Father Grigory to go back to Pokrovskoe for a while.

‘18 Feb. 1912. He departed from the Nikolaev Station,’ the secret agents recorded. ‘Winter Woman, Bird, Summer Woman, Dove, and Owl accompanied him to the station, along with some fifteen other unidentified people of both sexes.’

All of Rasputin’s permanent devotees had now been given nicknames of their own in the agents’ reports. And they had been conferred with a policeman’s sense of the picturesque. Akilina Laptinskaya (thirty-two) was named ‘Owl’ for her staid, thrifty quality. Pretty little Zina Manshtedt, who still looked like a girl despite her thirty-seven years, was called ‘Dove’. Mother Golovina (fifty-two) was called ‘Winter Woman’, since she was no longer young and lived on the Winter Canal. Her daughter Munya with her clear eyes was ‘Bird’, and Sazonov’s dark-haired, dark-eyed wife was ‘Crow’. But Vyrubova, thanks to her closeness to the ‘personages’, was spared a cognomen.

The agents followed Rasputin onto the train and reported that ‘On the 22nd he arrived in Tyumen and was met by his wife and daughter, who were very glad to see him.’

The peasant wrote to the ‘tsars’ from Pokrovskoe about Guchkov’s resolution. The letter to Tsarskoe Selo is preserved in Lokhtina’s diary. ‘Dearest Papa and Mama! Now the accursed demon gains strength. And the Duma serves him; there are a lot of lutioners [revolutionaries] and Yids in it. What do they care? They’d just as soon see the end of God’s anointed and down with him. And Guchkov, their lord … slanders and makes a discord with
his resolutions. Papa, the Duma is yours, whatever you want to do, do it. Nobody needs these resolutions of inquiry.’

A Report By The Fattest Man In Russia

On 28 February, ‘armed with documents’, that is, with Novosyolov’s pamphlet, the ‘fat man Rodzyanko’ (as he was known in Tsarskoe Selo) set off with his report to the tsar. The Speaker of the Duma began by touching on the perpetually bad administration of the Caucasus. And then he at last turned to the main issue. Rodzyanko brought to the tsar’s attention the ‘universal indignation accompanying the discovery that Rasputin is a
Khlyst.’

‘What makes you think he is a
Khlyst?’
the tsar asked.

Rodzyanko declared that the police had determined that he went to bathhouses with women.

‘Well, what of it? That is accepted among the common people.’

And then Rodzyanko started talking about Novosyolov’s pamphlet, about the Tobolsk investigation, about the letters and confessions of Rasputin’s victims, about the general’s wife L. whom Rasputin had driven mad, about the ‘rejoicings’ that had taken place in Sazonov’s apartment where Rasputin was staying, and, finally, about the baneful influence Rasputin might have on the soul of the heir.

‘Have you read Stolypin’s report?’ the tsar asked him.

‘No, I know about it, but I have not read it.’

‘I rejected it,’ the tsar said.

It seemed to the naive Rodzyanko that the tsar regretted having done so. He did not understand that the tsar was trying to say that Rodzyanko was not telling him anything new, that he had heard it all before. The tsar could only snort to himself. He knew there had been no ‘rejoicings’ whatever at Sazonov’s apartment, that the general’s wife L. was Lokhtina, who only seemed to be mad because she had left the world of vanity behind and chosen a new life, and that there was no firm evidence in the Tobolsk file that Rasputin was a
Khlyst
.

And the tsar suggested to Rodzyanko that he obtain the Tobolsk file from the Synod and study it. Rodzyanko was happy: it seemed to him that he had won. After which the tsar presented him to the heir. Rodzyanko playfully introduced himself to the boy as ‘the largest, fattest man in Russia’. And the boy, ‘that remarkably sweet child’, told him how he was collecting money for charitable causes, how ‘he had stood all day with a cup and had collected a whole fifty roubles’.

The fat man decided he had been shown the child as a mark of the highest trust.

But the tsar had really shown him the heir so that he would understand that the boy’s soul was pure. Because Our Friend had taught him to love and serve his neighbours.

Rodzyanko enthusiastically got started on his inquiry the very next day. ‘I had been instructed to obtain the file from the Most Holy Synod, to examine it, and then to report my opinion of Rasputin. Damansky, the deputy chief procurator, brought me the file.’

Damansky, a pitiful Synod clerk and son of a Siberian clergyman, had become Rasputin’s friend and been another of his opponents at the Synod. Rasputin had stayed with him at his home, so Sabler was forced to take on Damansky as deputy chief-procurator.

So Alix immediately learned from Damansky that Rodzyanko had been given the Tobolsk file. And it worried her. There was no direct evidence whatever, but she understood how Rasputin’s enemies could use the indirect kind.

And as Rodzyanko recalled, Damansky

telephoned me the next day and asked me to receive him. As soon as he arrived he announced, ‘I’ve come to ask you to give me back the secret file on Rasputin.’

‘Is it by imperial order?’

‘No, but a very highly placed person makes this request. The empress.’

‘Please convey to the empress that she is as much a servant of the tsar, her husband, as I am.’

‘Your excellency, I have brought with me the religious instructor of the emperor’s children.’

This turned out to be the archpriest Vasiliev. He started telling me, ‘You have no idea what an excellent person Rasputin is …’ I flew into a rage. ‘You have come here to praise a debauched scoundrel and
Khlyst!
Get out of my office!’

But the Duma’s resolution of inquiry had only been the start of Guchkov’s game. And on 9 March 1912, an incisive continuation followed. When the matter of the Synod’s budget came up, Guchkov rose to his feet. He gave the celebrated speech against Rasputin with which any account of the dynasty’s fall ought to begin.

The Clock Of Revolution Had Begun To Tick

He spoke of the tragedy that had befallen the country. ‘At its centre is an enigmatic, tragicomic figure, a kind of ghost or relic of age-old ignorance.’

Stolypin, the rock that had shored up the dynasty, was no more. And that is why that speech rang out, and with it Guchkov’s audacious question, one that would have been inconceivable a year earlier when Stolypin was still alive: ‘By what avenues has this man achieved his central position? By having seized such influence that even the supreme bearers of state and church power bow down before it!…Just think who is lording it at the summit!’

The tsar was in a fury; he had been denigrated in relation to Alix. As Guchkov later told the Extraordinary Commission, ‘It was conveyed to me by one of the ministers that the emperor had declared, “Hanging Guchkov would not be good enough!” I replied, “My life belongs to my sovereign, but my conscience does not, and I shall continue to struggle.”’

And then Badmaev, as the File makes clear, deftly made a play to the other side. In case the source of Guchkov’s information came to light in Tsarskoe Selo.

From Badmaev’s testimony: ‘I sent a telegram to Rodzyanko: “What are you gentlemen in the Duma doing? Can one actually rely on the evidence of the aggrieved Iliodor?” Rodzyanko answered that he himself was troubled, and that Guchkov had given his speech impromptu, without warning anyone.’

Rodzyanko was troubled because now the tsar’s pride had been wounded, had been insulted. Now it would be impossible to talk to him about Rasputin at all.

After Guchkov’s speech, Felix’s mother, Zinaida Yusupova, tried at the request of her friend Ella — the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna — to talk to the tsarina about Rasputin. Her ‘Crimean estate neighbour’ retorted that ‘Guchkov and Rodzyanko ought to be hanged.’

Rodzyanko had by then finished preparing his report for the tsar on the Tobolsk file, wherein, naturally, he triumphantly stated that Rasputin’s guilt was proved. The tsar returned to Prime Minister Kokovtsev Rodzyanko’s request for an audience with the instruction, ‘The Duma’s behaviour is deeply disgraceful. I do not wish to receive Rodzyanko.’ As he was leaving for the south, the tsar told Kokovtsev, ‘I am simply suffocating in this
atmosphere of gossip, falsehood, and malice. I shall try to postpone my return from the Crimea as long as possible.’

Ahead was his train and the white palace in Livadia.

From Bogdanovich’s diary for 14 March: ‘The entire royal family is leaving for the Crimea tomorrow, and Rasputin is to go with them. It is sad to write what sort of taste the tsarina must have if she tolerates that
Khlyst.’

The empress walked across the railway platform without saying goodbye to those who had come to see off the royal family. The tsar was sombre. He was very tired of the whole story.

Rasputin had in fact been summoned from Pokrovskoe to the Crimea. But Alix had not done this herself. Her Friend had sent Rasputin a telegram in code without a signature. Alix had proved to them that the Russian tsarina’s will was greater than the dishonest judgments of society.

A Blessing On Madness

Prior to his summons, the peasant had been living the slow life of the village in Pokrovskoe. But that life was destroyed by the arrival of the insane general’s wife. Lokhtina had walked to Pokrovskoe barefoot, living on alms. The former Petersburg arbiter of fashion was frightfully dressed in a strange shapeless white garment hung with ribbons and little icons. Followed by the villagers’ astonished gazes, she walked through the village, shouting ‘Christ is risen!’ Even though Easter was still a good way off.

The story of her ‘madness’ had survived in the File.

The previous year, 1911, Lokhtina, driven out of her family, had gone to Tsaritsyn.

From the testimony of Maria Golovina:

She returned barefoot from Tsaritsyn dressed in a white nun’s habit. It was then that I made the acquaintance of Iliodor, who expressed the view that Lokhtina had reached such lofty heights in her spiritual life that she could be blessed as a holy fool (that is, as someone who feigns madness in Christ’s name). Iliodor even wanted in that regard to conduct a prayer service in our home to bless Lokhtina as a holy fool. But my mother was categorically opposed to it. Nevertheless, Lokhtina, on hearing that opinion of Iliodor’s, abruptly changed her behaviour and started to act like a holy fool … They not only stopped letting her into her apartment in Petersburg but also onto
her own estate in the Kazan province that she had conveyed to her daughter as a gift…She lived exclusively by alms.

Now Lokhtina lived like some Russian King Lear in a skirt. The newspapers wrote a great deal about Rasputin’s having driven the unhappy general’s wife out of her mind. As Golovina later testified, ‘Lokhtina’s behaviour raised the fear that she might hurt Father Grigory.’ And Rasputin forbade her to act like a holy fool. Lokhtina obeyed him. But Father Grigory’s main struggle was with her constant shouting that ‘Christ is risen.’ But she continued to shout it. He became so angry about the shout that it was as if he were afraid of something. And he would mercilessly beat her for it.

Yet during all this the mad general’s wife continued to retain a kind of strange power over the peasant. And not only over him, but also over Vyrubova and even over the ‘tsars’, to whom she would occasionally dare to send sharp or even wrathful telegrams. Moreover, Munya Golovina would respectfully kiss her hand.

It was at the beginning of March 1912 that Lokhtina came to visit Rasputin in his beloved Pokrovskoe. After again driving Rasputin into a rage with her customary ‘Christ is risen,’ she presented herself to him at his lodge. But this time the cruellest of blows was waiting for the general’s wife in Pokrovskoe. She learned of something irreparable — the rupture between Iliodor and Rasputin. ‘Christ’ and the ‘Lord of hosts’ had become enemies. Her universe was destroyed. ‘Lokhtina, who worshipped both Iliodor and Rasputin, tried to reconcile them, but she failed to do so, and it had a grave effect on her mental balance,’ Munya testified in the File. It was on this visit that she became a victim of the break between them.

Rasputin’s Angry Wife?

It happened in the middle of the day. The bizarre episode played itself out in front of Rasputin’s astonished fellow villagers. They saw his wife drag the ‘Petersburg lady’ by the hair through the gate of the Rasputin house out onto the street. And right there on the street start beating the former Petersburg lioness.

And the beaten general’s wife trudged down the street away from Rasputin’s lodge.

It is from this episode that the famous legends about Rasputin’s jealous wife derive, a wife who pulled ladies from her husband’s bed and dragged them by the hair from her home. And that is how the simple villagers, who were not initiated into the secret world that began behind the gates of the Rasputin home, would have had to report it to the newspaper people.
That version was also believed by the investigator of the Extraordinary Commission, with his biased interrogation of Lokhtina about her fight with Rasputin’s wife ‘out of jealousy’.

And in the File, Olga Lokhtina explained to the naive investigator that ‘as far as jealousy is concerned, Rasputin’s wife really was jealous of me (if it may be called jealousy) but not in regard to her husband but to Iliodor, whom I revered…As for a fight, there was one,’ Lokhtina acknowledged and then explained.

Cast Out Of Heaven

Once when Rasputin and his family were visiting the home of a fellow villager, I dropped by the other person’s lodge, and discovering there the great poverty of the hosts, started pleading with Father Grigory to give me a cow. I should say that when I get an idea into my head…I don’t give up until what I have what I want. This took place in the presence of some recently arrived visitor, and I reproached Rasputin’s wife for her stinginess [not Rasputin himself but his wife; he was above ordinary life and could only be asked about the eternal] … After Rasputin’s visitor left, she started accusing me of denouncing her in front of an outsider, and grabbed me by the hair…and struck me.