The Rasputin File (50 page)

He intrigued all day long. He hoodwinked and manipulated. Polovtsev wrote:

Andronikov himself cheerfully told me, ‘As soon as some X is appointed director of some such department, I send him the following letter, “At last the sun of truth has begun to shine on Russia. The mad government, which has been leading us to ruin, has finally realized that the destinies of departments must be placed in noble hands. God preserve us on our difficult path.” And then this X, who has never heard of me, starts calling me up and is ready to receive me on whatever grounds I require.’ Secret papers were transmitted by couriers. He would bribe them to show him the envelopes they were carrying. And without even opening them, he had an excellent understanding of their contents. For example, decorations were usually distributed on 1 January. And he would hurry to congratulate those receiving the decorations before the letters themselves arrived. And the highly placed receivers of the decorations would be thinking in awe, ‘What influence this prince must enjoy in the highest spheres!’

There was, for all those abilities of his, a certain circumstance that impeded the prince’s career: his homosexual propensities and the dark rumours about his apartment. The prince rented, as the police recorded, ‘a large furnished seven-room apartment’. The apartment’s centrepiece was his legendary bedroom. ‘Behind a special screen in that bedroom,’ wrote V. Rudnev, the Extraordinary Commission investigator who interrogated him, ‘there was a sort of chapel with a large crucifix, a lectern, a crown of thorns, a row of icons, and the complete vestments of a priest.’

‘Although I never happened to see him praying there,’ his valet, Pyotr Kilter, testified, ‘the prince received among the icons and the crown of thorns extremely young guests…Throngs of people visited the prince, for the most part cadets, schoolboys, young officers, all of them very good-looking people … They all came as if to their own homes — they drank, they ate, they spent the night, and two to a bed, moreover. Andronikov conducted himself suspiciously, disappearing into the bathroom with one of the young people.’

The Gossips

‘The prince detested women,’ his friend Beletsky testified, ‘and he was visited by only one, the middle-aged Natalia Chervinskaya.’ The reason for the close friendship between the prince and Chervinskaya was simple. They were united in their hatred of the war minister, Vladimir Sukhomlinov. Chervinskaya hated the sixty-two-year-old minister for deserting her sister and marrying a younger woman. Andronikov at the time had been very close to Sukhomlinov. But hoping to get even closer to the powerful minister, Andronikov now informed Sukhomlinov of several of his new young wife’s escapades. Information that had, of course, been provided to the prince by Chervinskaya. After which Sukhomlinov unceremoniously threw the faithful prince out. So Andronikov had come to hate him, too. The prince’s hatred was dangerous. It was rancorous and vindictive. And it united him with Chervinskaya.

Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich hated Sukhomlinov, too, for the minister had spoken out in favour of limiting the grand duke’s influence in the army. Nikolai Nikolaevich’s hostility, however, was also a reason for a certain security in the old minister’s position. For anyone the grand duke was against was automatically liked by the tsarina. But in 1915 the military failures had begun to mount, with, naturally, an increase in the criticism of the war minister, on whom they tried to heap all the sins. And it became clear to Andronikov that a favourable moment was at hand for attacking Sukhomlinov. Moreover, Chervinskaya, the ‘walking rumour’ as she was called in parlours, had informed Andronikov of an important new circumstance: it turned out that Sukhomlinov had also managed to offend Rasputin. As Andronikov testified, ‘Rasputin had the habit of pestering the ministers with his notes… Sukhomlinov did not receive him at all and, in general, was ill disposed towards him.’ So the prince’s plan was a simple one: Rasputin would have to make the tsarina end her support of the war minister. And Andronikov decided to befriend Rasputin.

The Alliance Of The Prince And The Peasant

That decision was why immediately after Rasputin’s return to Petersburg after the attack by Guseva, the agents noted that a certain middle-aged woman was becoming a constant guest at Rasputin’s apartment. And they identified her at once.

As the agents reported, every day at the end of August 1914 ‘Chervinskaya,
Natalia Illarionovna, age forty-eight’ appeared at Rasputin’s. Andronikov’s closest friend was preparing the ground for the prince’s arrival. And soon afterwards the friend himself appeared at Rasputin’s apartment on Gorokhovaya Street. As the prince would later state in his testimony, ‘I went to see him when he was still indisposed after his wounding and return to Petrograd.’

The prince, however, did not hide from the investigators his reason for making friends with Rasputin. ‘I realized I would have to utilize Rasputin to bring certain actions of Sukhomlinov to the attention of Tsarskoe Selo.’

But after he got closer to Rasputin, Andronikov must have appraised the situation differently. He saw the peasant’s covert trips to Tsarskoe Selo with his pockets full of petitions. He saw the ‘waiting room’ filled with rich petitioners. So he must have realized that the Sukhomlinov story was a pitiful bagatelle in comparison with the possibilities being revealed at the building on Gorokhovaya Street. The prince was constantly in need of money. He had a modest position as a Synod official. But he had to maintain a huge apartment and a number of young men and to continue to visit the most expensive restaurants, in keeping with his place in society, and so on. And he wanted a hand in that business of recruiting rich petitioners.

But at the time the peasant and his ‘Brain Trust’ needed the prince for an entirely different purpose. Andronikov was acquainted with the most influential people. Through him it would be possible to ‘take a look’ at ‘our’ candidates for the most important posts in the government. When the prince realized what Rasputin wanted from him, he must have been delighted. His dream had come true — a pitiful intriguer and diligent spreader of rumours, he now found himself at the centre of great politics! He would appoint ministers and unseat them. Because he would govern by means of that peasant. Yes, the peasant was cunning. But he was, after all, merely a semi-literate peasant.

Andronikov evidently then suggested to Rasputin that they start with the main thing, finding the next chief of the Department of Police. And that is why at the beginning of 1915 a remarkable meeting took place — Rasputin’s visit to the apartment of one of Andronikov’s closest friends, Stepan Beletsky.

The Return Of A Master Of Provocation

After the February Revolution, Stepan Petrovich Beletsky took the stand before the Extraordinary Commission, and the poet Alexander Blok, whose
job was to transcribe and edit the interrogations, gives a description of him in his notebooks: ‘A soft voice, grey hair, and snub-nosed … and bleary eyes constantly shining.’

At the time of Andronikov’s visit, Beletsky was a bit over forty, around the same age as Andronikov. But unlike Andronikov, he already stood high on the bureaucratic ladder. From 1912 he had performed the sinister duties of director of the Department of Police. Years that had been marked by provocation on the part of the secret police. Under Beletsky, there had been massive infiltration of the revolutionary movement by
agents provocateurs; it
was under him that Stolypin had mysteriously been murdered; it was under him that the anti-Semitic case had been organized against the obscure Jew Mendel Beilis, who was falsely charged in 1913 with the ‘ritual murder’ of a Ukrainian youth. So Stepan Petrovich had become an adept of his department’s most exquisite intrigues. It was now already a year, however, since he had been deprived of his powerful post and sent into retirement as a senator. But the highly intelligent Stepan Petrovich, still at the height of his powers, was naturally eager to resume his career. He frequented influential conservative salons, where he made Andronikov’s acquaintance and then became close friends with him. As Blok recorded in his notebooks, Beletsky related how he ‘had been warned not to spend so much time at Andronikov’s’.

But he visited him often. And happily participated in the new intrigue.

According to the data of the external surveillance agents, Rasputin ‘on 30 January 1915 visited the former director of the Department of Police Beletsky’.

Beletsky was presumably promised his former post. Now they had to look for ‘our’ minister of internal affairs, as well. For Beletsky himself already knew that he would not be suitable for the post of minister. As he later testified, ‘The tsar was cool towards me.’ So the main question of finding ‘our’ minister still had to be decided.

The Lady In Charge

Andronikov believed in the peasant’s omnipotence. Like everyone else in society, he did not appreciate the true situation. The palace coup that the peasant was preparing would have to come about because it was what the tsarina herself wanted. As soon as the war started and Nicky was swallowed up by it at Headquarters, she had made a decision to help him — to take
part in the government of the country. Indeed, how could she not take part in it, if the ministers were everlastingly ‘doing the wrong thing’ and God’s envoy was standing beside her and continually conveying His commands to her. Commands that so happily coincided with what she herself wanted.

Rasputin, of course, had had numerous opportunities to see what happened when they did not coincide. And he had occasion to see it again at the very beginning of 1915.

The Great Prime Minister’s Last Wish

It was in January 1915 that Rasputin was visited by a lady in a veil. Unlike Zhukovskaya, she apparently did not understand just who the person sitting in the booth was. And the security branch agent sitting there clarified who the mysterious visitor was and submitted his report: ‘The Countess Witte visited the Dark One on 8 and 25 January, both times wearing a thick veil. On 25 January she asked the doorman to escort her by the back stairway and gave him a three-rouble tip.’

Yes, it was the great former prime minister’s wife. Witte was dying at the time (he would be dead in February) and he had just finished a long letter to the tsar. After enumerating in the letter the great acts of Nicholas’s reign that had been accomplished with his own participation (the constitution, for example), the old man asked the favour of the title of count for his beloved grandson. So it is clear with what purpose Countess Witte was visiting Rasputin, about whom Count Witte had spoken so warmly.

And Rasputin, of course, carried out her request and asked Alix about a last favour for the count. The tsar was supposed to be coming back from Headquarters, and would be able to grant the dying Witte that boon in plenty of time. But Alix, who hated the former prime minister, was deaf to Our Friend’s request. And the peasant was forced to realize that it was hopeless. So Witte’s beloved grandson did not become a count. And when the tsar returned, Rasputin did not ask him about it. He knew his place: one might go against the tsar, but never the tsarina.

A Fatal Friend

The initial look at Beletsky had yielded excellent results. The dignitary was eager to go back to his previous post and truly understood the obligations that he would have to assume in return. The first of ‘ours’ had been found.
Rasputin’s next step should have been to inform Anya, the messenger between Our Friend and ‘Mama’.

But there was no one to inform. The main communications link had been knocked out. At the very beginning of the new year, fate had dealt a cruel blow to their plans.

On 10 January 1915, Rasputin celebrated his name-day and birthday. On that day, after a long absence, he was visited by his old acquaintance, the young Molchanov. And when Rasputin chided Molchanov for having ‘forgotten him’, the latter was not inclined to explain the remarkable reason for his disappearance. Although he did explain it in the File.

‘At the beginning of 1914, I received disturbing news about my father’s health … and on 20 May my father passed away.’ After his father died, Molchanov stopped coming to Rasputin’s: ‘After my father’s death a feeling of apathy visited me. Moreover, reviewing the past of all the people who had linked their destinies to Rasputin —Iliodor, Hermogen, [and] Damansky who through Rasputin had made a brilliant career and then had fallen ill with an incurable disease — I came to the perhaps superstitious conviction that Rasputin’s hand was a heavy one.’ He could also have included his father, who had obtained his post through Rasputin. And also Anya, Rasputin’s main devotee, who, while Rasputin was merrily and drunkenly celebrating his name-day, was lying unconscious. For on 2 January 1915, there had been a railway accident, which delayed the change in power for several months.

Resurrection From The Dead

‘I had left the empress,’ Vyrubova remembered, ‘and set off for the city … by train. I had taken a seat in a first-class car, the first behind the locomotive. There were many people in the car. We had not gone but six versts to Petrograd, when a terrifying crash was heard. I felt myself tumbling head over heels somewhere and then I hit the ground. When I came to, everywhere around me was silence and darkness. Then I heard the moans of the injured and dying who had been crushed under the wrecked cars. I myself could neither move nor cry out: a huge railway sleeper lay on my head.’

She was pulled from under the train wreckage and placed nearby right on the snow. Two hours later Princess Orlova and Princess Gedroits appeared. They came over to me. Gedroits felt the broken bone under my eye and said to Orlova, “She’s dying,” and left.’

The two maids of honour may have been glad: they thought the Friend was gone.

‘Only at 10:00 p.m. at the insistence of General Resin [the commander of the regiment that guarded the palace], who had arrived from Tsarskoe Selo, was I transferred to a warm shelter by some kind student-orderlies.’ And then she saw the tsarina.