The Rasputin File (86 page)

The grand dukes Nikolai Mikhailovich and Pavel would also perish in 1919, men whose relatives had taken such a large part in the Rasputin story.

‘On the night of 16 January…I suddenly awoke and distinctly heard my husband’s voice: “I’ve been killed”‘ (from the memoirs of Pavel’s wife, Olga). Beside the tombs of their ancestors, the great Russian tsars, they took the Bolshevik bullet. That bullet didn’t forget Dzhunkovsky, either. He managed to survive the revolutionary period, but then the Stalinist terror came. The former gendarme chief, with his martial moustache, was at the time living in quiet poverty as a churchwarden. But the Stalinist broom swept cleanly. In 1938 Rasputin’s enemy was taken to the Lubyanka Prison and the firing-squad wall.

The Survivors

The rascal Simanovich successfully got out of Russia and took his family with him. The elder’s ‘heavy hand’ did not hinder him. It may be that Simanovich was protected by the gratitude of the dozens of Jews whom he had saved with Rasputin’s help from punishment and the front, as well as that of the hundreds of other Jews for whom he had obtained, through Rasputin, permission to live normal lives in Petrograd. Whether for money, as the police claimed, or disinterestedly, as he himself maintained, he did help the disenfranchised. Iliodor also survived. Although it is unclear which was better: the bullet or the torments that were his portion. In America, to which he emigrated, he was a victim of the stock market crash of 1929, a
terrible ruin that consumed all the money he received from his book on Rasputin. Then came the death of his son and divorce from his wife. He took monastic vows and entered a monastery in Melville, and was later seen in New York. He died in 1952, destitute and completely alone.

Vladimir Sabler, the former chief procurator of the Holy Synod who had been exiled to Tver, also survived the Red Terror. Although not for long. He lived by alms and died of starvation.

The Golovins continued to live quietly in Petrograd. After the death of Father Grigory, they waited, like the tsarina, for universal punishment. And they were not surprised when the Bolsheviks came to power in October. Zhukovskaya recalled:

I found Munya just as quiet and affectionate, with her usual twinkling gaze and even her invariable knitted cardigan, when I went to see her on the Moika, after accidentally finding myself in Petrograd immediately after the October Revolution. Nothing in the house had changed; even the little servant boy dozing in the vestibule and the vicious poodle, Cockroach, were in their places. I was taken to Munya’s little room, and everything there was as of old, even Lokhtina’s bed behind the screen and her staff with its little ribbons, although since Rasputin’s death, she herself had been living continuously in Verkhoturye.

Here Zhukovskaya is mistaken. After the February Revolution, Lokhtina was detained. And contained in the File are documents pertaining to her arrest: ‘On 8 March at the Oktai Cloister Rasputin’s well-known follower …Olga Vladimirovna Lokhtina was arrested.’ She was lodged in the Peter and Paul Fortress. But the Bolshevik coup freed her. And she set off again for Verkhoturye. But the Bolsheviks had obliterated the monastery. In 923 she was seen in Petrograd at a train station. The former general’s wife — an old woman in a torn and filthy shapeless dress but holding a tall staff — was aggressively begging for alms.

Zhukovskaya suffered misfortune, too. Mainly the death of her passionately loved husband. And in 924, although still young, she left the city for good and took up residence in the village of Orekhovo in the Vladimir province. And there in the backwoods she lived the rest of her life as a voluntary recluse, as if atoning for some sin.

Vyrubova also lived as a recluse, in Finland. Having taken religious vows in secret, she lived by herself, almost never going out. She died in a Helsinki hospital in 964 in absolute loneliness.

Despite the revolution and the terror, all of Rasputin’s murderers escaped. None of them died from the bullet nor shared the fates of so many of his
friends. Purishkevich died in his bed of typhoid fever during the civil war, and Grand Duke Dmitry also died in his bed in 1942 — one of the few Romanovs to survive the revolution intact. Prince Yusupov and Dr Lazavert passed comfortably away in Paris.

But memories of the peasant followed them to their graves. Marina Grey, General Denikin’s daughter, told me a story about Dr Lazavert. The doctor had purchased an apartment in France. And he lived quietly in it, trying to wipe out of his memory the nightmare of that evening. One summer he went away on vacation. When he came back he saw that a new restaurant had opened in his building. The restaurant was called ‘Rasputin’.

The peasant continued to play a mystical role even in the lives of their children. Felix Yusupov’s granddaughter Xenia Nikolaevna told of a trip to Greece her mother had taken after her marriage in 1946. Travelling under her husband’s name, she met the wife of the Dutch ambassador to Greece, a charming Russian woman. They became inseparable friends. When the time came to part, the ambassador’s wife told Yusupov’s daughter, ‘I want to reveal a bitter truth to you that it is possible may displease you. The fact is, my grandfather was Grigory Rasputin’ (she was one of Matryona and Solovyov’s daughters). ‘My truth,’ her friend replied, ‘may perhaps displease you even more. The fact is, my father murdered your grandfather.’

‘Always Together, Never Alone’?

In death and after it Our Friend remained with the family.

The royal family would meet their deaths in a very similar basement to that in the Yusupov palace. And in exactly the same way their bodies would, after the bullets, know water (their corpses were first thrown into a flooded mineshaft). And only later, like the peasant’s remains, would they be committed to the earth. Also like the corpse of Our Friend, the corpses of the royal family would after the execution wander from place to place. And during the search for a secret burial site, the truck carrying the royal family’s corpses would also suddenly get stuck, and a bonfire would be built to burn their remains. As their murderer Yurovsky would write in his diary, ‘Around 4:30 a.m. the vehicle got completely stuck … and it was left to bury or burn them. We wanted to burn Alexei and Alexandra Fyodorovna, but instead of the latter …we burned Demidova by mistake.’

Thus, the body of the heir, for whose sake the peasant had been called to the palace, would also, like the corpse of his dangerous healer, know fire. Bullets, water, earth, and fire. And as a symbol of Our Friend’s presence, Yurovsky saw amulets with the elder’s face and his prayer on the grand duchesses’ unclad bodies. Amulets attached to their naked bodies like snares.

So, as a member all those years of the Government Commission for the Funeral of the Royal Family, I often thought during the incomprehensible, agonizing, many-yeared history of the non-interment of their remains: might it be that he still hasn’t left the royal family? That, as before, his heavy hand remains stretched out over them?

The Precursor

Just who was that man, who appeared in the fire of the first revolution and perished on the eve of the second? He was undoubtedly a deeply religious person. And at the same time a great sinner. With the simplicity of a century of uneducated, ignorant Russian peasantry, he tried to combine the mysterious passions of the body with the teachings of Christ. And he ended up a sectarian, a
Khlyst
, a profligate, yet at the same time remaining a deeply religious person.

He was the epitome of the Russian’s staggering ability to live upright within while enveloped in unceasing sin. Alexander Blok, who was employed by the Extraordinary Commission, wrote a celebrated 1914 poem about that blend of sin and religiosity.

To sin shamelessly, endlessly,
To lose count of the nights and days,
And with a head unruly from drunkenness
To pass sideways into the temple of God.

Three times to bow down to the ground,
Seven times to make the sign of the cross,
To bow one’s burning brow in secret
Upon the bespittled floor.

To put in the plate a copper coin,
Three or even seven times in a row
To kiss the hundred-year-old, poor
Much kissed icon frame.

Happy suffering from the repentance of sin. And the scope of that suffering (and happiness) corresponds to the scope of the sin. Christ had abandoned Rasputin long before. But the peasant continued to pray, not realizing that for a long time he had been serving the Antichrist. And for that reason it was given to him to destroy the very legend of Holy Rus by disgracing the church and the power of the tsar who had been consecrated by it, and by joining his sinful name to that of God’s anointed sovereign.

Rasputin is a key to understanding both the soul and the brutality of the
Russia that came after him. He was a precursor of the millions of peasants who, with religious consciousness in their souls, would nevertheless tear down churches, and who, with a dream of the reign of Love and Justice, would murder, rape, and flood the country with blood, in the end destroying themselves.

AFTERWORD

In the city to which at the end of the twentieth century the name Saint Petersburg has been restored, I waited for the return of the last tsars. They were coming back in coffins from Ekaterinburg, the city that had executed them, to their own spectral city, the former capital of their drowned Atlantis.

And once again everything was as it had been in the peasant’s day: the Romanov family divided, discord among the people, and the church hierarchs who were inexplicably opposed to the funeral.

And then the airport. A guard of honour stood in ranks, and the wind tore at the banner held by the standard bearer. And later, closer to the plane that had just arrived from Ekaterinburg, the Romanovs formed up, the great rulers’ descendants who had survived the storm. As a member of the Government Commission for the Funeral of the Royal Family, I too was standing at the airport, and I was witnessing a remarkable thing for a writer: the funeral of his own characters.

Those who had flown in with the coffins from Ekaterinburg told how the coffins of the ‘tsars’ had been carried out of the cathedral, and how the heavens had suddenly opened with a pelting rain, a sheet of water over the church. And we who were meeting the coffins replied that in Petersburg, where the day before it had been rainy, the sun had been shining brilliantly all morning.

Everyone wanted miracles.

Then the funeral march burst forth. The cortege of buses with the royal coffins began to move. And the miracle was extended. The quarrels all vanished. And the entire city came out to meet them. People stood in an unbroken line, extending for many kilometres, from the airport all the way
to the Peter and Paul Fortress. And there were people in the open windows of the buildings. And others were waiting on their knees. And the President, who the day before had refused to attend the funeral, had that day suddenly flown to Petersburg to repent before their coffins for all our evil deeds in the departing century.

They found their resting places in the Peter and Paul Cathedral — across the Neva river from their palace and among the tombs of their ancestors. And all Russia buried them that day. And in the country there was a long forgotten sense of joyful union, of a moved, happy ease. As if a stone had fallen away from the soul. As if some terrible spirit had at last released the ‘tsars’ and flown away from Russia for good.

Or was it only for a moment? And an illusion, after all?

Documentary Sources

The File

Purchased at a Sotheby’s auction in 1995. Bound in hard cover. The cover is inscribed, ‘Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Illegal Acts by Ministers and Other Responsible Persons of the Tsarist Regime. Investigative Section.’

All the interrogation records in the File are written on forms of the Extraordinary Commission and signed both by those interrogated and by the investigators. If an interrogation took place at a remote site, and the record was forwarded to the Extraordinary Commission, then it bears an Extraordinary Commission stamp and a document registration number.

The File consists of 426 numbered folios of double-sided interrogation records, so there are in fact 852 pages of documents.

The following interrogation records have been used in this book:

Feofan, Bishop of Poltava and Pereyaslavl (folios 7–20). The interrogation was conducted in the city of Poltava by V. V. Likhopoy, Senior Investigator for the Poltava Judicial District. Supplementary interrogations of Bishop Feofan were conducted in Petrograd by T. D. Rudnev, an investigator for the Extraordinary Commission (folios 219–20, 3 17–20). Handwritten text.

Ruschya Georgievich Mollov, former deputy minister of internal affairs (folios 22–5). The interrogation in the city of Poltava was conducted by V. V. Likhopoy, Senior Investigator for the Poltava Judicial District. Handwritten text.

Maria Timofeevna Belyaeva, Vyrubova’s maid (folios 29–30, 48–9). The interrogation was conducted by I. V. Brykin, an investigator for the Extraordinary Commission. Handwritten text.

Akim Ivanovich Zhuk, a medical orderly who worked for Vyrubova (folios 36). The interrogation was conducted by I. V. Brykin, an investigator for the Extraordinary Commission. Handwritten text.

August Ventselovich Berchik, Vyrubova’s servant (folios 37–40). The interrogation was conducted by I. V. Brykin, an investigator for the Extraordinary Commission. Handwritten text.

Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova, who was employed as the nurse of the royal children (folios 43–5). The interrogation was conducted by T. D. Rudnev, an investigator for the Extraordinary Commission. Typed copy.