The Rasputin File (36 page)

Feofan’s Prophecy

That summer Feofan was no longer in the Crimea. Having obtained the Crimean pulpit through Ella, he had the previous summer been exiled from the Crimea to Astrakhan, which was destroying his health. To Ella’s indignation, he was even forbidden to come to the Crimea for medical treatment whenever the royal family was there.

On his departure from the Crimea, the indomitable but naive Feofan had told everything he knew about Rasputin to the latter’s friend Damansky, the deputy chief procurator.

As Feofan testified in the File, he concluded the conversation with a prediction: ‘Rasputin is a vessel of the devil, and the time shall come when the Lord will chastise him and those who protect him.’ After which he crossed himself and left.

At the time Damansky must have smiled. But a year later, when he learned that he had cancer, he remembered Feofan’s prediction.

In Astrakhan Feofan contracted malaria and a lung disease. Ella was still
able to help to some degree by having him transferred to the Ukraine to live out his days as the bishop of Poltava. And Ella continued to anger her sister by arguing to Alix that it was inhuman to forbid Feofan to seek treatment in the Crimea, that Feofan was her confessor and had done her no harm, and that just as it was their own private affair to love Rasputin, so it was Feofan’s not to. But Alix was afraid of Feofan’s character, afraid that he would get through to the sovereign.

And Rasputin helped her — he looked for an offence of Feofan’s that would forever bar him from the Crimea.

A Veiled Lady In The Crimean Night

This amazing story has remained in the File.

In 1917 an investigator of the Extraordinary Commission travelled to Yalta, where the widow of a local priest, Olga Apollonovna Popova, sixty years old, lay completely paralysed, as she had done for several years. And she gave her testimony.

I have been acquainted with Bishop Feofan for six years. He usually came to see me as an invalid about twice a year…He never said anything either about Grigory Rasputin or about his life in Petersburg…Grigory Rasputin I did not know at all. The first time Rasputin came to me was on 13 October 1913, around midday. Rasputin engaged in a discussion of my life — of my illness and poverty … Then he said straight out, ‘If you want, you can have a thousand roubles tomorrow, leave this apartment, and see your children happy. We won’t have a long conversation about it,’ Rasputin said, ‘but is it known to you that Feofan has been saying that he had sexual relations with the empress?’ He expressed it all in vulgar language. ‘If it is known to you, don’t conceal it, don’t conceal it, and the thousand roubles is yours.’

I objected that nothing of the sort was known to me nor could be. Rasputin got very angry … and ran around the room wringing his hands. And he tried again to persuade me to slander the bishop. I was so outraged, I spat in his face. Rasputin moved away towards the door and said, ‘You and your children shall remember me!’ Then he changed his tone. He repeated several times, ‘No one has ever dared to talk to me so insolently … I know you will think better of it and take back your words. You will take them back, you will, you will,’ he repeated and gazed at me intently … Apparently, my reproof had begun to have an effect. He moved his chair very close and said, ‘Well, I will come with
her
today, if you’ll permit it.’ I
understood him to mean the empress. ‘You will tell the truth when she is here, you will change your mind…You think about it, your children will be happy, and your son’s road will be easy …’ Rasputin evidently realized that he had been pressuring a sick old woman. The thought occurred to me to tell everything to the empress … Rasputin said they would come around midnight.

An automobile drove up to our apartment after twelve. When my son opened the door, Rasputin came in accompanied by a tall woman in a black dress with a thick veil covering her face. She sat down next to me, asked about my illness, checked my pulse, and looked at the bedsores on my back. Then Rasputin came over to the bed, touched the empress’s shoulder, and said, ‘Well, will you tell the truth to her?’ I answered that I told the truth to everyone, all the more since I did not have long to live.

After Rasputin moved off to the side, the empress said, ‘Tell me, did he [Feofan] talk to you about having relations with that person?’

‘That is a complete lie, a foul lie! He never said any such thing and nor could have. I believe the Lord will punish whoever has cast such aspersions on him.’

Rasputin then said something to the empress, but I could not make out the words. Rasputin started whirling around the room and saying ‘She’s afraid! She’s afraid!’

I answered, ‘I am not afraid! I will not take your thousand, and I will not sell the bishop!’

Rasputin again tried to persuade me to tell the truth, adding, ‘Your children won’t get anything for this.’ Just as she was about to leave, the empress leaned over to me and said, ‘So you are saying it did not happen?’

‘It did not and it could not have. He offered me a thousand roubles if I would agree to slander the bishop.’

And the empress asked again, ‘So this is your final word?’

I again answered, ‘Nothing was said nor could have been said!’

The empress sat nervously and kept taking her glove on and off, while Rasputin repeated, ‘She’s afraid! She’s afraid!’ Then Rasputin took her by the arm and, after giving me a spiteful look, walked out of the room.

What is the significance of this scene? That he was so certain of the infiniteness of his influence that he would allow himself to lie shamelessly in her presence? Or was it that he had simply realized that it was her dream to drive Feofan out of the Crimea for good. And he knew that she required a pretext. He had merely read her will and carried out her secret wish.

Subsequently, the tsarina wrote Olga Popova a letter.

From Popova’s testimony in the File: ‘Soon afterwards I received a letter
written in a fine woman’s hand with no signature … It was suggested in the letter that I think better of it and tell the truth.’

The royal family’s next-to-last meeting with their beloved Livadia was coming to an end. And the Ipatiev night was drawing closer.

A Portrait Of The ‘Holy Family’ In 1913

That Petersburg winter Rasputin finally settled down in his own apartment for the first time. Before that he had lived with the Lokhtins and the Sazonovs on charity. And then he had rented his own wretched little corners. The addresses of the ‘Russian’ have survived in the files of the Department of Police: 37 Liteiny Avenue, 70 Nikolaev Street.

‘On Nikolaev Street Rasputin occupied a room in an apartment. In the room were a simple bed and a painted wooden buffet table,’ Molchanov recounts in the File.

But this time his daughters came to him from Pokrovskoe. The peasant had decided to give them a Petersburg education. Let them become ‘little ladies’. Besides, he was tired of not having his own home, of hanging around bathhouses and the squalid apartments of prostitutes. And so Akilina Laptinskaya took matters in hand.

And in October 1913 after his return to Petersburg from Yalta, Rasputin moved into his first separate apartment: at 3 English Avenue in a building belonging to Alexei Porfirievich Veretennikov. The apartment had been given to Rasputin for a very modest sum by yet another failure attempting to take advantage of his influence. Veretennikov was a major general who had been forced into retirement and who dreamed of returning to the service.

Both Rasputin’s daughters, whom he had enrolled in a private preparatory school, were now living in the apartment. In 1990, after I published
The Last Tsar
, my book about the royal family, a ninety-year-old woman named Anna Popova called me. We talked on the phone with the help of her granddaughter. She said that she had attended the Steblin-Kamensky private preparatory school with Rasputin’s daughter Matryona.

She told of going with Matryona to English Avenue to ask Rasputin for a charitable contribution. And with what frozen fear she had ‘gazed at the sorcerer’. And how he had taken out his wallet, rummaged in it a long time, and finally given them a bank note. ‘He gave very little,’ Popova recalled.

He was poor at the time. ‘The apartment of four or five rooms was badly and uncomfortably furnished. In one room lived Laptinskaya, who in the absence of a maid put out the samovar and cooked fish soup, while his two
daughters shared another room whenever they came home from the Steblin-Kamensky
pension,’
Molchanov described the apartment in the File. But, even so, it was the first dwelling of his own to which he could invite all his devotees. Laptinskaya could at last quit her work as a housekeeper and move in with him. Now she proudly called herself his ‘secretary’. The secretary of an illiterate peasant. And to help her, Katya Pechyorkina came from Pokrovskoe to work as a cook and maid.

Descriptions of Rasputin and his daughters have survived from that time.

‘A wild Siberian strength shone from their broad, pallid faces with their enormous bright-coloured lips…And their powerful bodies smelling of sweat burst their modest little children’s dresses made of thin cashmere.’ Varvara was thirteen and Matryona was already sixteen. Matryona had ‘a broad white face with a blunt chin … and a low forehead suspended above sullen grey eyes … She would impatiently shake her head, flipping her low-cut bangs away from her eyes … She would pass the tip of her tongue over her broad, bright-red lips in a kind of predatory, animal movement,’ Zhukovskaya recalled.

And in the File, Molchanov spoke of Rasputin in 1913: ‘His speech was fragmented and not altogether coherent. He kept his eyes on the person he was talking to, and there was a kind of strength in his eyes … His movements were characteristic of a neurasthenic: he hopped jerkily about and his hands were always touching something.’

He continued to stun his admirers with his knowledge of people, or, more accurately, their hidden thoughts. ‘In that period Rasputin, in addition to his nervousness, manifested an exceptional perspicacity,’ Filippov testified in the File. ‘In the presence of my wife and sister-in-law…he noticed on the basis of elusive signs of some kind that my sister-in-law and I were drawn to each other. And after taking her off to the side, he explained to her that my feelings for her would lead to my divorcing my wife, which is in fact what happened.’

The first time he met Filippov’s acquaintance, the famous professor of jurisprudence Ozerov, Rasputin discerned ‘an absence of spiritual tranquillity in him as a result of the fact that he cared only about money’. When Filippov explained to Rasputin that Ozerov was a respected member of the Council of State, the peasant said, ‘He’s just a state nobody.’ ‘It was a brilliant characterization of Ozerov,’ Filippov added.

It was at this time that Rasputin made the acquaintance of the old woman Guschina. Her husband had just died, and life had become a burden for her. Her testimony remains in the File.

Guschina, Alexandra Georgievna, seventy-three years old, widow of a
doctor: ‘Each time at church I would come upon a man dressed in a peasant coat praying very zealously. His manner of prayer was peculiar: he would immediately kneel and lean on his fingers in a strange sort of way … Many people would come to him with greetings and requests to pray for them.’ She was told that the man was Rasputin.

‘Once he came up to me after mass and asked, “Why are you so downcast?” I told him about my misfortunes, and he said, “It is sinful to be downcast. You should pray to God.”’

And he invited her to visit him. And the old woman came to English Avenue. There she found her way into one of the most famous photographs of the Rasputin circle, a photograph that has adorned endless books about him. Actually, that comes later.

A Cry Of Pain

The newspaper harassment continued throughout 1913. Rasputin grew accustomed to reading interviews that he had never given, after which the press would ridicule him.

And his friend Filippov tried once again to defend him in the newspaper
Smoke of the Fatherland:
‘A whole literature has been created about the elder … a pile of articles regarding his extraordinary and even inexplicable influence in the highest spheres… Rasputin is an ordinary Russian peasant of inspired intelligence…who mainly has not severed his ties to the common people and who therefore finds his strength in them.’ And Filippov mocked the journalists who ‘publish rumours that Rasputin could have removed such pillars as Hermogen and Feofan’. So even his close friend Filippov did not know the extent of the peasant’s influence in Tsarskoe Selo.

But sometimes Our Friend yielded to the journalists and himself gave interviews. To Alix’s dismay, for they were often more dangerous than the ones the journalists made up for him.

Under Filippov’s influence the idea had occurred to Rasputin of putting out his own newspaper.

‘I thought of starting up the most real, just newspaper of the people. The money will be given to me — people who believe have been found — I will bring good people together, and I will cross myself and say, “Bless us, O Lord,” and strike the bell,’ he announced in an interview in the
Petersburg Courier
.

But Alix evidently put that idea to rest. She realized that he would drown
in the business. He would drown in the distraction. She needed him for herself, for the boy, and for conversations about the soul.

At the time the journalists were trying to learn about Rasputin’s role in the decision not to participate in the Balkan war. And he answered, ‘In general, it does not make sense to fight: to take each other’s lives, violate the testament of Christ, and prematurely kill your own soul. Let the Germans and the Turks kill each other — it’s their bad luck and blindness, but we, lovingly and quietly looking to ourselves, will become higher than the rest.’ And he was again reviled for betraying fellow Slavs. And again Alix instructed Vyrubova to talk to the elder about avoiding journalists.