The Rasputin File (38 page)

A crafty description. Felix did use the living space. He managed to build the ‘Renaissance-style’ dining room in which he would murder Rasputin.

Zinaida and the tsarina did not talk to each other during the wedding.

Alix had devised the terms ‘ours’ for those who liked the elder, and ‘not ours’ for those who did not. The latter included Elizaveta Fyodorovna’s entire circle, the Moscow aristocracy, the great Romanov family, Petersburg high society, the Duma, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the military aristocracy who surrounded the bellicose grand duke, and the peasant’s former allies, the monarchist right. ‘Not ours’ included just about everyone. And arrayed against them all were Alix, her Friend, and Nicky. Three valiant musketeers.

7

TEA WITH RASPUTIN: THE PEASANT’S SALON

The Inquisitive ‘Satanist’

At the beginning of 1914 one of the most influential salons in Petersburg took shape at the apartment of the peasant from Pokrovskoe. The various descriptions of that salon resemble Akutagawa’s
Rashomon
. Absolutely contradictory descriptions of everything that happened there. For it was necessary to be among the initiated to see everything in its true light. The salon, like everything else in Rasputin’s life, held its mystery.

On 5 August 1917, the celebrated student of sectarianism, Alexander Stepanovich Prugavin, was interrogated by the Extraordinary Commission. The sixty-six-year-old scholar testified, ‘Having studied religious, and especially mystical, movements among the Russian people my whole life, I was naturally… interested in Rasputin’s personality, too.’

In the winter of 1914 a beautiful young woman came to see Prugavin. Introducing herself as a novice writer whose work had appeared under the pseudonym Zhukovskaya, she said that her name was Vera, and that she was ‘interested in religious and mystical movements’ and wanted to penetrate Rasputin’s inner circle. Vera Zhukovskaya relates in her memoirs how Prugavin ‘looked at me in distress … and began asking me to give up my intention of making Rasputin’s acquaintance, since the consequences of that acquaintance would be harmful to me … I repeated that I had made a firm decision and even asked him to obtain Rasputin’s address and telephone number for me.’

Vera Zhukovskaya was a child of that time ‘on the eve of apocalypse’. Like Prince Yusupov and many other young people of the day, she was completely absorbed in the search for unknown sensations. She had already experienced a great deal, including cocaine. And ‘in Paris her search for religious revelation had,’ as Prugavin testified, ‘gone so far as Satanism and
participation in black masses.’ And, as she herself wrote, she had ‘visited the secret meetings of the
Khlysty
.’

Rasputin’s rather frightening notoriety gave her no rest.

‘I have done everything to warn you, and now I wash my hands of it,’ Prugavin told her then. And the next day he gave her Rasputin’s address and telephone number.

As Prugavin testified in the File, Zhukovskaya not only visited Rasputin, she once even took Prugavin himself to see him.

So everything that will now be set forth is the testimony of a witness who was well acquainted with the ‘elder’.

‘Rasputin lived at 3 English Avenue. His telephone was 64646,’ recalled Zhukovskaya. ‘I didn’t tarry and called him at once … I happened to make the call at a rare moment when Rasputin’s phone was free. I heard a rather raspy voice say, “Well, who’s there? I’m listening.” My voice slightly trembling, I asked, “Father Grigory? This is a young lady speaking. I’ve heard a great deal about you. I’m not from here, and I would very much like to meet you.”’

In less than an hour she was entering the doorway of

an enormous grey building … Standing nearby in the lobby were a stuffed wolf and a bear… against the background of a decadent-style window on whose sill a bush of pink heather had begun to wither…The lift stopped at the very top … At my ring, the door was opened by a short plump woman in a white kerchief [this was Akilina Laptinskaya]. Her widely spaced grey eyes gazed unwelcomingly. ‘Do you have an appointment? Come in …’ A door on the other side of the vestibule opened, and Rasputin quickly emerged, moving as if sideways and shuffling his feet. Stocky with unusually broad shoulders, he was dressed in a lilac silk shirt with a crimson waistband, striped English trousers, and two-tone high-top shoes… Dark, wrinkled skin…His hair, carelessly parted in the middle and quite long … and his beard were of an almost uniformly dark reddish-brown colour. Coming right up to me, he took my hand and bowed. I saw a broad, pock-marked nose … and then he gazed at me with small, light-coloured eyes set deep in his wrinkles. On the right one was a little yellow excrescence…A kind of unpleasant feral power emanated from them. They gazed intently with infrequent blinking, and that motionless, magnetic stare was disconcerting. ‘Take her to my room,’ Rasputin said in an undertone, indicating me.

She was taken to a narrow room with a single window ‘through the vestibule past a closed door behind which restrained voices could be heard’. It was
there, in the apartment’s largest room, that his ‘salon’ of admirers gathered, and it was their voices she heard.

Left alone, I looked around. Next to the wall by the door was a bed covered with a multicoloured silk patchwork quilt on top of fluffed-up pillows, and beside the bed there was a washstand … Near the washstand by the window was a writing desk. In the very centre of the desk was a large gold pocket watch with the state coat of arms on its cover … There was no icon in the corner, but on the windowsill there was a large photograph of the altar of St Isaac’s Cathedral, and hanging from the photograph a handful of different coloured ribbons. And by analogy I remembered a little peasant cabin belonging to ‘God’s people’ [the
Khlysty]
on the outskirts of Kiev: there had been no icon in the corner there either, but standing on a windowsill was an image of the Saviour with ribbons hanging from it … Pulling up a chair, he sat down across from me, placing my legs between his knees.

It was with the woman’s legs pressed between his knees that the seduction began (as we shall hear from many witnesses). Or, more accurately, a monologue on the religious basis of sin.

‘Don’t you believe the priests. They’re foolish. They don’t know the whole mystery. Sin is given so that we may repent, and repentance brings joy to the soul and strength to the body, understand? O, you are my dear, my honey bee … Sin should be understood … Without sin there is no life, because there is no repentance, and if there is no repentance, there is no joy … You want me to show you what sin is? Wait a while till next week, then come to me after taking communion, when there will be heaven in your soul. Then I will show you what sin is …’ Someone terrifying and ruthless was gazing at me from the depths of those almost hidden pupils. And then his eyes opened wide, the wrinkles were smoothed out, and after giving me a tender glance, he quietly asked, ‘Why are you looking at me like that, little bee?’ and bending down, he kissed me with cold monastic exultation.

And then she left. Evidently a bit disappointed by his affectionate yet indifferent parting words: ‘Only see that you come back soon.’

The Salon Assembles

And then … We shall take her word for it that ‘nothing happened’ later. Rasputin merely introduced her to his ‘salon’. And she wrote it all down in detail.

There were about ten ladies in all. At the far end of the table was a young man in a morning coat, frowning and, apparently, troubled by something. Next to him, leaning against the back of her chair, sat a very young pregnant lady in a let-out blouse. Her large blue eyes gazed tenderly at Rasputin. These were the Pistolkorses, husband and wife, as I later learned in talking to them. But in all the subsequent years of my acquaintance with them, I never saw Pistolkors himself at Rasputin’s again, only Sana. Next to Sana sat Lyubov Vasilievna Golovina, and I liked her pale, sere face very much. She acted as if she were the hostess, serving everyone and keeping the general conversation going.

She saw Vyrubova, too.

I looked at her with curiosity: a tall, stout blonde who was dressed too simply, somehow, and even tastelessly. Her face was ugly with a bright crimson sensual mouth and large blue eyes that gleamed unnaturally. Her face constantly changed. It was somehow evasive, duplicitous, deceptive, and a mysterious voluptuousness and a kind of unquenchable anxiety alternated in it with an almost ascetic severity. I have never seen another face like it in my life, and I must say that it produced an indelible impression.

Sitting next to her was Munya Golovina…who gazed at me with timid, blinking, pale blue eyes … The rest of the ladies were of no consequence, and all somehow of one face.

The Little Dandy

Another lady, too, has described Rasputin’s devotees. Like Zhukovskaya and many others, she had been subjected to the seduction rite. She had listened to and transcribed the same hypnotic whisper that ‘there is no sin in this. That is something that people have made up. Look at the wild animals. Do they know anything of sin? There is wisdom in simplicity. Do not shrivel your own heart.’

She, too, had heard strange assurances from Father Grigory’s permanent devotees. The very pure Munya would tell her something mysterious: ‘He makes everything holy.’ And on behalf of them all, Munya would ask her not to torment him … and to yield to him, ‘for with him there is no sin’.

‘Little Dandy’, Rasputin eloquently called her. Vera Dzhanumova was the young woman’s name, and it is mentioned more than once in the police agents’ reports. ‘Rasputin sent a telegram to Dzhanumova: “Pampered treasure, I am firmly with you in spirit. Kisses”‘ Or, ‘He took Dzhanumova …out to the Donon.’

Vera Dzhanumova, the wife of a wealthy Moscow merchant, would after emigrating from Russia publish her memoirs, in which she, too, would describe Rasputin’s salon.

He sat at the table surrounded by his admirers. Everything was mixed up together at that table — chinchilla, silk, and dark homespun, diamonds of the first water and slender egret feathers for the hair, the white kerchiefs of sisters of mercy and the scarves of old women — and all of it was described by the astonished ‘Little Dandy’. ‘The doorbell would bring a basket of roses and a dozen embroidered silk shirts of various hues, [or] a heavy peasant’s coat with a brocade lining of astonishing work.’ The tidy Akilina Laptinskaya would gather it all up and carry it off to the other rooms. The tea drinking would begin. A table set for tea with sweets for the guests. Rasputin did not eat sweets, as the witnesses have testified. ‘He never ate sweets,’ his secretary Simanovich recalled. And his daughter Matryona would mention the same thing in her book of memoirs. Let us remember that, and remember it well: he did not eat sweets.

Before 1913 he did not drink wine and condemned those who did.

From the testimony of Lokhtina: ‘Father Grigory did not use to drink at all.’ And Sazonov also declares, ‘In that period…he did not drink anything.’ And if wine did turn up on his table, then there was just a little and of the sweet variety. He had become used to sweet wines in the monasteries during his wanderings.

And the ladies would keep arriving. Whenever the bell rang, Munya would run into the hall to open the front door, and that daughter of the maid of honour to two empresses and the relative of a grand duke would help the new arrivals to remove their overshoes. For he had taught them humility.

Then Princess Shakhovskaya arrived. ‘The princess, who had abandoned her husband and children to follow Rasputin continually for four years, was a woman of striking beauty and dark eyes,’ Dzhanumova recalls. That beauty was one of the first Russian woman aviators and she had even walked away from a crash.

And all those who came began with the ritual of hand-kissing.

From Alexandra Guschina’s testimony in the File: ‘I would drop by to visit him only in the afternoons … I saw many ladies, [who] all treated him with extreme deference and kissed his hand.’

Then the salon sat down to tea. Zhukovskaya recalls:

On one corner of the table an enormous brightly polished samovar was boiling … [but] what had been put out was very odd: right on the tablecloth next to sumptuous tortes and magnificent crystal bowls with fruit
were little piles of peppermint gingersnaps and heaps of large crude rolls. The jam had been served in smeared jars, and lying next to a luxurious dish of sturgeon in aspic were large slices of black bread…Ina deep bowl in front of Rasputin were twenty or so boiled eggs and a bottle of Cahors. All extended their hands to him and their eyes gleamed: ‘Father, an egg!’ Rasputin took a whole handful of eggs and started presenting them to the ladies, placing an egg in each extended palm…Vyrubova got up and went over to Rasputin, where she gave him two pickles on a piece of bread. Rasputin crossed himself and then started eating, biting off by turns first some bread, then some pickle. He always ate with his hands, even fish, and after wiping his greasy fingers a little between bites, he petted the women sitting next to him while uttering his ‘teachings’ … And then … a tall girl in a gymnasium frock came in. Everyone’s hands were extended to her in greeting: ‘Mara, Marochka!’ It was a very curious thing to see all those princesses and countesses kissing Rasputin’s daughter, and one even … kissed her hands.

Faces Out Of Oblivion

But what is most astonishing is that the File will now give us the chance to see many of those who sat around Rasputin’s table with our own eyes.

Two photographs were taken of the ‘salon’ at approximately that time.

And both of them survived the war and the revolution. The first and most popular is probably in all the books about Rasputin. It was taken in the same main room described by Zhukovskaya, where Rasputin’s salon used to gather round the table for tea. Visible in the background is an open doorway leading to the hall and the next room, the ‘special room’.