The Rasputin File (32 page)

But the simple investigator was disinclined to believe her. He did not understand that the special relations between Rasputin’s wife and his devotees precluded jealousy.

Those relations are in fact described in the testimony given before the Extraordinary Commission by the government official B. Alexeev, one of Rasputin’s devotees. During a visit by Alexeev and his wife to Pokrovskoe, the two wives were walking through the house. And they came upon a risque scene involving Father Grigory. Alexeev’s wife ‘gasped and turned away. And then Rasputin’s wife explained, “Each must bear his cross, and that is his.”’ So that Lokhtina was telling the truth: jealousy had no place here. But she too had failed to grasp the reason for the behaviour of Rasputin’s wife. A Russian peasant woman could not, of course, give away a cow. And an accusation of stinginess in that regard would have seemed merely ridiculous to her. She beat Lokhtina for quite a different reason. The idea that Lokhtina herself subsequently recounted to the investigator, that she had ‘decided to remain true to both of them, to both Rasputin and to Iliodor’, apparently frightened Rasputin. He must have been concerned that the crafty Iliodor was using the mad general’s wife as a spy. She needed to be got out of Pokrovskoe. And that is why it was necessary for Rasputin’s
wife to find a pretext to fight with Lokhtina, in order to drive her out of the Rasputin home. And that is what she did.

After the quarrel with Rasputin’s wife, Lokhtina ‘went from them to Florischev Pustyn’, the monastery to which Iliodor had been exiled. ‘I was not allowed to see Iliodor, and all I could do was shout in his vestibule that I had come … Then they sent me away, and a report was filed that I had been suffering from an attack of madness.’

But she would not submit. She was not accepted at home. The paths to Rasputin and Iliodor had been closed. So she decided to find a place at least a little closer to her former heaven. She decided to live near the monk Makary, the spiritual father of the ‘Lord of hosts’, at Rasputin’s favourite monastery. ‘I went to Verkhoturye to see Father Makary … The elder’s cell was undergoing repair, and I was placed in a small storage room, across the door of which the elder put a board with a rock leaning against it. I was fed once a day, receiving whatever food was left over from Father Makary.’

But the monks did not understand her impulse and demanded the woman’s departure from their male cloister. However when Lokhtina had decided on something, it was impossible to change her mind. Then ‘the police came and presented a writ requiring me to leave. I replied that I would not do so voluntarily …But I had to go, since the monks… attacked [Father Makary] and beat him. I sent a telegram to the sovereign about it: “I ask you to defend Father Makary … whom you do not know.”’ And the sovereign defended him. The monks were punished, and the cell of Rasputin’s spiritual father was quickly repaired. And a small addition was made to Makary’s cell so that the mad general’s wife could live near him.

But the investigator was apparently dissatisfied with Lokhtina’s story. He still did not believe the innocent reasons for her fight with the peasant’s wife. And he kept returning to her relations with Rasputin. But she was evasive and obscure about those relations, as was appropriate with people uninitiated into the teaching of the ‘Lord of hosts’: ‘Passions were remote from me whenever I was near Father Grigory.’ And she added, ‘a poor tree may not yield good fruit. And if that is true, then how do you explain that Rasputin’s devotees, both men and women, abandoned luxury and a life contrary to the Gospels and never again returned to their former paths? I speak of the true devotees who followed his precepts.’

His true devotees were those who followed his precepts, or, more accurately, who practised his teachings. Only they understood the meaning of what went on in his house.

A Summer With The Tsars

After receiving the telegram from Vyrubova, summoning him to Livadia, Our Friend left Pokrovskoe at once.

From the agents’ report: ‘10 March. Rasputin boarded a train returning to Petersburg.’ And from Petersburg he set off after the ‘tsars’ to the Crimea.

The tsar’s sisters, Olga and Xenia, had left for the Crimea along with his immediate family. During the trip the two grand duchesses started talking about Rasputin.

‘10 March. On the train Olga told us about a conversation she had had with [Alix]. She had for the first time told her that the poor little one had that awful disease, and that she herself was sick because of it and would never completely get over it … Of Grigory, she said how could she not believe in him when she saw how the little one got better whenever he was near him or praying for him,’ Xenia wrote in her diary. And she added, ‘My goodness, how terrible it all is and how one pities them!’

When Rasputin arrived in the Crimea, Alix declared that ‘she had not known anything about it.’ But as Xenia wrote in her diary, ‘she was pleased and is reported to have said, “He can always tell when I need him.”‘ And, as usual, Nicky had to resign himself.

Rasputin stayed in Yalta, from where he was driven to Livadia by car. He was brought to the palace in secret, without being entered in the lobby register. But whenever the royal car passed through the city, and the peasant with the unkempt beard gazed pompously through its open window, the whole city knew: he was being taken to the tsarina. And the palace guard who allowed the royal car to pass through the gate also saw who was being taken to the palace. All the more so, since Our Friend proudly stuck his head out the window, not wishing to hide.

All this time the newspapers had been blaring about Rasputin. Only the sinking of the
Titanic
in April 1912, and the drowning of the great vessel’s unlucky passengers in icy water beneath a clear, star-filled sky, managed to push aside for a little while news of the peasant in the palace. But in May 1912 the names of the participants in the Rasputin story once again began to flash across the front pages.

In May 1912 Iliodor resigned his holy orders as a sign of protest. On 8 May 1912, he submitted to the Synod the request (although it was more like an ultimatum), that it bring ‘Rasputin to trial for the terrible crimes he has
committed on religious grounds, or divest me of my holy orders. I cannot be reconciled to the fact that the Synod, the bearer of the grace of the Holy Spirit, is sheltering a ‘holy devil’ who has cursed Christ’s Church … I will not be reconciled to the profanation of what belongs to the Lord!’

And again the papers were full of noise about Rasputin.

It was then that a manuscript Rasputin had once prepared with Lokhtina was published by his friend Damansky, the deputy chief procurator. And Alix could once more read in it an abundance of words about unjust persecution, the lasting fate of the righteous. ‘I endure terrible smears. It is awful what they write. O God! grant me patience and close up the mouths of mine enemies! … Comfort Thy own, O God! Grant me Thy example.’ He repeated all this to the tsarina, and asked her permission to leave the Crimea and go home. But he knew that she would not let him. And she did not let him. He could rest easy.

At the beginning of May he returned to Petersburg.

‘Rasputin has again appeared on the stage,’ Bogdanovich recorded in her diary.

That same month Rasputin went to Moscow. At the Nikolaev Station the agents recorded those people who came to see him off, the same people who usually did: ‘Owl’ (Laptinskaya), ‘Winter Woman’ and her daughter (the Golovins), and ‘Crow’ (Sazonova).

The following encounter took place on the train.

‘You Want To Be A Governor? I Can Do That

When a couple of weeks later a pointed article in his defence suddenly appeared amid the sea of anti-Rasputin articles, it produced a sensation.

The author of the article, Alexey Filippov, was rich, had his own banking house, and edited a successful newspaper. He had besides a well-deserved reputation as a liberal: he had spent a year in the Peter and Paul Fortress for impermissible words about the authorities. Thereby fulfilling the sardonic words of a fashionable poet: ‘Here’s what: stand for the truth and you’ll end up sitting for it.’ Filippov was a friend of the maid of honour Sophia Tyutcheva, who had suffered because of Rasputin, and he therefore regarded the latter with repugnance. At least until that day in May when they met each other on the train.

In 1917 Alexey Frolovich Filippov, aged forty-eight, was summoned before the Extraordinary Commission. And in the File, he related:

In 1912 I went to the Trinity-St Sergius Abbey [a famous monastery near
Moscow]. As … I was taking my seat on the train I noticed in the car a peasant of striking appearance dressed in a tight-fitting coat, a man with mystical eyes set deep in sockets whose orbits were surrounded by brown spots. He was accompanied by…a plump woman in black (who turned out to be his secretary Akilina Laptinskaya) …He was examining with childishly naive affection an immense new leather purse that had obviously just been given him by someone. I asked him, ‘Where did you get the purse?’ With that question began my acquaintance with Rasputin…Some sense told me that my new acquaintance was a sectarian, that he belonged to the
Khlyst
sect. He spoke picturesquely in aphorisms on the most varied topics … and I was especially struck by his deep faith in the Russian people and by his thoughtful rather than subservient attitude towards autocratic power. He stood for the unity of the tsar and the people without an intermediary bureaucracy … I was particularly sympathetic to him since I had recently… been sentenced to a year in the Fortress for daring to point out to a representative of the supreme authority that he did not understand the essence of autocracy…I therefore involuntarily blurted out, ‘If only someone like you could reach the tsar …’ He then went out into the corridor after discreetly beckoning me to follow, and said, ‘Don’t tell anyone …but I’m the Rasputin they’ve been cursing in the newspapers.’

The conversation continued.

His interest in [church] art prompted me to propose our going to Moscow together. He agreed to it with a youthful eagerness uncharacteristic of his age … Rasputin was not met by anyone in Moscow, and he went to stay with Nikolai Ivanovich Reshetnikov, a former notary who later became his secretary. But he turned up on time the same day at the Kremlin church hostel. He listened with unusual attention to my hour-long lectures on, for example, the cathedral of Basil the Blessed … We spent two days in Moscow, filling our time with visiting churches. During that time Rasputin and I became friends, and on returning to Petersburg where I edited the newspaper
Smoke of the Fatherland
, I started to visit him … We saw each other every day then, and I was struck that Rasputin occupied a wretched little room not at all corresponding to the idea of him …as the powerful favourite of the imperial family … Rasputin himself did not drink wine and he discouraged others … Delighted by my arguments on the theme of governing the state, he exclaimed, ‘You want to be a governor? I can do that.’ He lived simply and even humbly, and spoke sparingly and reluctantly of the court and his relationships there. In answer to a question I asked him once about whether the empress really did not give him anything, he said, ‘She’s stingy … terribly stingy.’ Rasputin was at the time hard up, as was
apparent from the twenty-five kopeks he would take from me for cab fare, and the twenty-five roubles he once sent for when he was short for a trip to Siberia, although later on he would fling hundreds and even thousands …everyday to whatever chance acquaintances happened to ask him.

It was at that time that Rasputin introduced Filippov to Vyrubova, and although Filippov witnessed scenes in which Anya expressed her usual naive admiration for the peasant, he apparently understood something: ‘Vyrubova impressed me as a woman whose attitude towards Rasputin was one of enthusiasm…but who was using him as a way of exerting a certain influence over the empress.’

And in response to Rasputin, Filippov introduced him to his own friends.

Soon afterwards at the editorial office of
Smoke of the Fatherland
I happened on a conversation between the paper’s publisher, Alexander Lvovich Garyazin, and…the legal counsel of the Maritime Ministry, Ivan Bazhenov, who was repeating the words of some courtier about Rasputin’s sexual outrages with the empress and saying there ought to be a conspiracy to kill ‘that dog’. I objected that I had just made his acquaintance and had been utterly charmed by him, and I shared my impressions…I suggested to Garyazin that he take Rasputin for a drive somewhere in his automobile.

Garyazin, who owned his own car, something very rare in those days, readily agreed to meet with the scandalous and enigmatic celebrity. ‘Rasputin rejected…the idea of visiting a museum, finding that pictures were rubbish…and much inferior to life…Garyazin suggested a visit to the Foundling Hospital, and, to his utter amazement, Rasputin agreed.’ At the hospital Rasputin

was transformed …He picked up each child, tested its weight, and asked it what it was eating. In the automobile he said ‘it would be a good idea to bring country girls there from all over Russia. They would learn how to bear healthy children and keep their infants strong’ … Impressions he conveyed to the empress, who unexpectedly came to the Foundling Hospital, made a quick survey of it, and busied herself with ideas for organizing an institute for the protection of motherhood…I took advantage of a convenient opportunity and included an article in
Smoke of the Fatherland
defending Rasputin, an article that provoked equal astonishment both on the left and the right among those in the press who had been persecuting him. [The article, ‘Childhood and Sin’, appeared in
Smoke of the Fatherland
on 16 May 1912.]

Rasputin was wildly delighted with the fact that I was the only one who had dared to defend him in print at a time of the greatest persecution of
him and of Guchkov’s speeches against him in the Duma … He carried out all my requests and wishes at once and unquestioningly, and more often than not came to me for advice and let me in on the intimate details of whatever it was he was going through … Although he never said one word about any intimate relations whatever not only with the empress, whom he always characterized as the ‘smart one’, but with any other woman, as well.