The Rasputin File (39 page)

Rasputin is sitting on a chair in the centre. He is wearing a light peasant blouse girded at the waist with a cord, a polished boot gleams, his beard and hair are carefully combed, since he has just come from mass, and his left hand is pressed against his breast. But you only notice that afterwards, for the dazzling gaze of his eyes draws you in, pushing everything into the background and becoming the centre of the picture. Next to him is the already plundered table, the table after tea with a dish and a pile of left-over rolls and little bagels. And around Rasputin and by him and behind him and along the wall and in front of the doorway to the other room crowd the same ten or so women and a few men. And peering from next to the doorway is the telephone that was used to call him from Tsarskoe Selo about the sick boy.

The second picture is also popular, but it contains fewer people than the
first one. Rasputin is sitting at the same table set for tea. He is dressed in black. And again his eyes gleam in the same way. This time he is surrounded by seven ladies and a girl in a then fashionable sailor’s blouse sitting decorously around the table, their faces turned towards the photographer. Some of them were also in the first picture. The only young man in the picture stands next to the closed glass door. That very pleasant young man in a moustache was in the first photograph, too.

Both pictures are usually accompanied by the mute inscription, ‘Rasputin surrounded by his admirers,’ although sometimes, it is true, there is a line to the effect that ‘Vyrubova is in the second row.’ All the other people in both photographs have remained anonymous, their names having slid into oblivion.

But in the File I found their names! It turns out that the investigators of the Extraordinary Commission had identified them.

The File, from the testimony of Vyrubova on the two photographs: ‘That one and the other group analogous to it were photographed by chance — I don’t remember on whose initiative — on one of those Sundays when Rasputin liked to have his close friends gather round his table for tea after mass.’

And she identified those ‘close friends’, ‘the visitors of the first period’: ‘Golovina, Dehn, my sister Pistolkors, and the highly dubious baptized Yids, the Volynskys’. And also Molchanov.

Yes, the pleasant young man in both photographs is Leonid Alexeevich Molchanov, whose testimony I have already cited many times — the son of Bishop Alexei who became exarch of Georgia, thanks to Rasputin.

And summoned before the investigators, Leonid Molchanov himself identified each person in the first photograph in detail. And that polite young man’s memory had retained not merely their last names but also their first names and patronymics. Clearly these people constituted Rasputin’s permanent circle.

Thus, that photograph taken in 1914 on the eve of a terrible war came to life. And it turned out to include not only many familiar people, those already glimpsed more than once in these pages, but also those belonging to Rasputin’s future.

From Molchanov’s testimony in the File: ‘Two group photographs were taken in that apartment of Rasputin’s on English Avenue and later widely disseminated.’ And then he turned to the first picture with all the people.

‘In the last row from left to right are Alexandra Pistolkors and her husband.’

They are standing against the wall — a stout, well-groomed, tall young gentleman, and next to him, his wife Sana with her childlike little porcelain face and her great belly (she was pregnant, as Zhukovskaya mentioned). We shall recall once more that Alexandra Pistolkors, née Taneeva, was Vyrubova’s younger sister, and that her husband, Alexander Erikovich Pistolkors, was the son of Munya Golovina’s Aunt Olga, who had made a scandalous marriage to Grand Duke Pavel. Alexander Erikovich, a former Life Guards officer famous for his cruelty in the suppression of the 1905 revolution, was now retired with a modest post in the state chancery.

Next to the Pistolkorses a young man with a moustache strains to make his face stand out from the others. This is in fact Molchanov himself.

From Molchanov’s testimony: ‘After the Pistolkorses comes me, and then Prince Zhevakhov, brought by his colleague Pistolkors.’

The short moustached prince stands by the doorway, although he is barely visible behind the women’s heads and hats. Yet Prince Nikolai Zhevakhov, a mystic who had taken many trips to monasteries, and who collected apocalyptic visions and reported on them to the tsarina, would become a true devotee of the ‘elder’. And Rasputin would later take that into account. In September 1916 this young man who had previously occupied an extremely minor post, would with Rasputin’s help be appointed deputy chief procurator of the Most Holy Synod.

Next to the prince, Molchanov identified two rank-and-file characters, Ervin Khristoforovich Gill, the husband of a pretty devotee of Rasputin’s, and Nina Dmitrievna Yakhimovich, a tall, broad-shouldered lady and one of his truly uncomplaining devotees. And then Molchanov named two figures of greater significance: Olga Vasilievna Loman and her daughter Nadezhda. This was the family of Dmitry Loman, who as has already been mentioned was the builder and warden of the ‘tsars” favourite Feodor Cathedral in Tsarskoe Selo. A former faithful devotee of Rasputin’s, Loman had in 1913 begun making overtures to Rasputin’s enemy Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna, after which ‘Vyrubova had announced to ours’ that ‘we should be more guarded’ with him.

From Loman’s testimony: ‘From that time on I began to notice a cold attitude toward me…and I was afraid I would be sent away from the palace for good…and suffer for it.’

The resourceful colonel therefore tried to re-establish relations with Rasputin. His wife, an ugly middle-aged lady with a mean face, and their young daughter were now frequent visitors at Rasputin’s salon.

The young woman with the hard, cold face standing to the right of Olga Loman and her daughter is another very important figure from Rasputin’s future life. She is Anna Ivanovna Reshetnikova, the daughter of the very
rich and very old Moscow merchant’s wife Anisia Reshetnikova, with whom Rasputin often stayed in Moscow. Anna’s brother would become one of the most trusted people around Rasputin. The brother did not have the best of pasts.

From Filippov’s testimony: ‘The former notary Reshetnikov, who had been convicted of forgery and embezzlement, had been pardoned thanks to Rasputin.’

Reshetnikov would very soon start collecting money from Rasputin’s visitors, and his sister Anna would play a special role in the scandal involving Rasputin at the Yar, a restaurant in Moscow. (See Chapter Ten.)

‘In the second row is Sophia Volynskaya.’ She, too, is a person from Rasputin’s future, of the second stage of his life, which would begin that same year, 1914.

From Filippov’s testimony in the File: ‘Volynskaya, a beautiful, not very young Jew … the wife of the agronomist Volynsky…was a fateful person for Rasputin in the sense of his shift from charity to the cruel exploitation of his clients with the help of that same Volynskaya. Her husband [who had also been tried]…was pardoned, and out of gratitude had made himself something like a financial adviser and instigator of several profitable ventures for Rasputin.’

So he had managed to release Reshetnikov and Volynsky, two of his future ‘secretaries’, from punishment. That was part of his teaching, too. It was not for nothing that the tsarina wrote down in her notebook his words, ‘Never fear to release prisoners, to restore sinners to a life of righteousness …Prisoners… become through their sufferings in the eyes of God — nobler than we.’

True, rumour had it that the beautiful Jew Volynskaya had visited the ‘special room’, where she had paid with her flesh for Rasputin’s efforts on her husband’s behalf. But it was merely a rumour.

From Molchanov’s testimony: ‘Next comes Vyrubova’ (Vyrubova herself, with her large fleshy moon-like face, had been forced to stand by the hated ‘Yid’).

Next to Vyrubova are two acquaintances of ours whose testimony from the File has already been cited. The old woman in mourning is Alexandra Guschina, the inconsolable widow who met Rasputin during prayer. The good-looking woman beside her in the fashionable bonnet with the plume is Yulia Dehn, after Vyrubova the tsarina’s closest friend.

And, finally, there is one other noteworthy character in the row — the rough, short old peasant man with the shaggy hair and beard, a kind of minor pagan god, a Russian Pan. And Molchanov identifies him, too. He is ‘Rasputin’s father’.

‘In the first row are Zina Timofeeva, Maria Golovina, Maria Gill, Rasputin, and Madame Kleist, in regard to whom I was told that she was a dilettante actress and dancer,’ Molchanov continues in his survey.

These young devotees — Zina Timofeeva, Olga Kleist, and Maria Gill — had passed through the ‘special room’ and had thus been rewarded with seats in Rasputin’s front row. But they would soon share the fate of those ‘who flashed by and vanished’. The only one who would stay any length of time was Maria Gill: ‘the twenty-six-year-old captain’s wife’ is among the visitors after 1914 mentioned by the agents who watched Rasputin.

And among these ephemeral devotees she sits, too — Maria Golovina, the famous Munya, as Rasputin himself called her. With a calm and unattractive face, growing old, ‘a most pure young woman’, as Felix Yusupov described her. She has remained unruffled amid all the madness taking place around the elder. For she has been initiated and knows all the secrets of the elder’s teaching.

And finally the last character in the photograph. She sits right on the floor, a heavy-set woman with the wide, stubborn peasant face, and thus her heavy peasant legs and bottom are out of view. From Molchanov’s testimony: ‘At Rasputin’s feet is Akilina Laptinskaya.’ She, too, was one of the keepers of Rasputin’s secrets.

The Jealous Man And The Fat Secretary

Akilina, Rasputin’s ‘secretary’, had already inaugurated the second stage in his life. It was at the beginning of 1914 that she began to take money from his supplicants. ‘Laptinskaya, being a person of exceptional intelligence and perseverance, was guided exclusively by mercenary considerations: various people made presents to her of specific sums on the occasion of Rasputin’s arrival or for Rasputin. And Rasputin threw her out a couple of times or so for taking bribes and on suspicion of stealing sums in the thousands,’ Filippov testified.

But by the beginning of 1914 Rasputin had not only got used to her greed and given up on it; he had come to appreciate just how convenient it was. Now he would not have to borrow money and wait for handouts from the stingy tsarina. Now Laptinskaya would hand money over to him. And he himself could be generous, do good works, and give money to the men and women who asked for it. The fat Akilina, of course, had never been afraid of his rages. She was not only his ‘secretary’. Like other simple people, Rasputin liked an abundance of flesh.

And he was jealous of her!

In the File Filippov recalls an episode relating to 1915 when the former nurse Akilina started working on the hospital train organized by the empress.

I happened to run into Akilina Laptinskaya before her departure for the front. I stopped by to see her in her car and gave her a box of candy. Rasputin found out about it…and started berating me furiously and at length for ‘leading his sweetheart astray whom he had long kept for himself as the apple of his eye’. For a long time I could not understand what he was talking about. It turned out the ‘sweetheart’ was Laptinskaya, a woman … of inordinate corpulence … The ‘sweetheart’, who had often visited me, was forbidden to see me.

Rasputin, that pursuer of women, struck Filippov as pathologically jealous. For example, one of his true worshippers, a certain Elena Patushinskaya, the wife of a modest notary in Yaluturovsk, had come to visit him in March 1914. Noted many times in Pokrovskoe by the external surveillance agents, she had dropped out of sight in Petersburg. This is what Filippov says about her in his testimony:

‘I remember Patushinskaya, the wife of a notary from Siberia and a pretty woman, who lived with him for several months on two separate occasions, although never showing herself, since Rasputin was not only physically but also Platonically jealous. For example, he did not like it when people said, “Oh, what a good-looking woman” in reference to “his women”.’

So the pretty Patushinskaya, hidden in the apartment’s depths, did not get into the photograph.

From Molchanov’s testimony: ‘That group was photographed by the photographer Kristinin completely by chance at the wish of one of those present.’

Regarding the other photograph, he testified: ‘Not long before that or soon afterward he also photographed another group similar to the first… As far I remember, besides Rasputin that group included Madame Golovina, Madame Gill, Dehn, a woman who had come from Siberia with some request for Rasputin, an old woman from Vasiliev Island, and Rasputin’s elder daughter Matryona.’

The two photographs, taken before the terrible July of 1914 and the beginning of the world war, sum up, as it were, the first period of Rasputin’s

life.

Molchanov’s testimony is completely confirmed by the testimony in the File of one other figure who appears in both photographs — Munya Golovina.

The small cardboard photograph shown to me in which I am depicted in the first row as the second person from the left also depicts those who had gathered at Father Grigory’s apartment on English Avenue. Shown besides me and Father Grigory are Zina Timofeeva, Maria Sergeevna Gill … Olga Kleist, [and], at Rasputin’s feet, Akilina Laptinskaya … In the second row are Alexandra Alexandrovna and Alexander Erikovich Pistolkors, Sofia Leontievna Volynskaya, Anya Vyrubova, Alexandra Georgievna Guschina, a doctor’s widow, and Rasputin’s father, now passed away.

And Munya conscientiously lists the same names.

Ladies Outside The Frame: The Mysterious Priestess

But the person who may have been the salon’s most important and mysterious visitor remained outside the frame. She was absent when the pictures were taken. Olga Lokhtina was then living at Father Makary’s cloister. And she returned to the capital, to the ‘Lord of hosts’, only occasionally. Her appearances at Rasputin’s home are described in much the same way by all the eyewitnesses.