The Rasputin File (89 page)

An early photograph of Rasputin, probably at the family home in Pokrovskoe. Even out of focus he is immediately recognisable. The narrow face with a ‘large, irregular nose, thick sensual lips, and a long beard’; the hair, as his daughter would write, was always ‘parted down the middle and combed across his forehead to conceal an odd little bump reminiscent of a budding horn.’

A page from Rasputin’s ‘Diry’, which was his semi-literate way of spelling ‘Diary’. ‘Our hero, who like all semi-literate peasants adored writing’ — although he barely knew how to hold a pen — ‘had managed only to note down a few reflections in his wretched scrawl. He had evidently used the term “diary” for its important sound, knowing that the tsar and tsarina kept diaries, too.’

Rasputin at Pokrovskoe: his wife Praskovia bore him three sons and two daughters, but ‘more important was that she was a good worker. Working hands were very much needed in the Rasputin household, because Grigory himself was often absent visiting holy places.’

In this group, also at Pokrovskoe, the women’s clothes suggest they are local. The woman to his left is probably his mother, Anna; the man on the second left his father, Efim.

The Rasputin home in Pokrovskoe. On the ground floor where he lived with his family, ‘it was the usual arrangement of a peasant lodge’. But upstairs the once indigent peasant had attempted to arrange everything ‘city fashion.’ There was a piano, to which the visiting monk Feofan ‘took indignant note of’ as well as the gramophone that Rasputin ‘so liked to dance to, and the claret-red plush armchairs, and the sofa and the desk. A chandelier was suspended from the ceiling, and placed around the room were several bentwood “Viennese” chairs, then in fashion. And there were two wide beds with soft springy mattresses and a divan. Two weight-clocks in ebony cabinets chimed majestically, and there was a wall clock and another cabinet clock. The monk was particularly outraged by the “large soft carpet covering the entire floor.”’

Father Ioann, archpriest of the Kronstadt Cathedral, was famous throughout Russia for the gift of healing prayer. He healed Rasputin’s future admirer, the young Anna Vyrubova, as well as Zinaida Yusupova, the mother of Rasputin’s future murderer.

The youthful Rasputin with the monks Iliodor (left), and Hermogen, who was a fanatical opponent of the freethinking that he was convinced was destroying Holy Rus. It was Hermogen who fought for strict interference by the church in the ideological life of the country, who demanded the excommunication of Tolstoy. At the time, Hermogen and Rasputin liked each other. Rasputin’s contempt for the bloated church hierarchs was close to Hermogen’s heart.

Hermogen introduced Rasputin to another exposer of evil, a young monk whose ferocious speeches and denunciations had made him famous as the Russian Savonarola. Iliodor, ten years Rasputin’s junior, was huge with a large, fleshy face, high cheekbones, and tiny eyes, and looked more like a Volga brigand than a pious monk.

Iliodor opened a new life to Rasputin, who had been used to a dozen admirers, but now he saw crowds of fanatics and took pleasure in their wild delight. As Rasputin later recalled, ‘Iliodor would meet me with crowds of people and preach about me and my life. I lived in harmony with him and shared my impressions with him….’ In 1910, while he was Rasputin’s guest in Pokrovskoe, he stole from his friend the letters from the tsarina and grand duchesses that Rasputin had so trustingly shown him.

The ‘important letter’ was one from the tsarina not intended for anyone else’s eyes.

A rare photograph of Rasputin with Alix, her daughters, the heir Alexei and their nurse, Maria Vishnyakova. In 1908, when Alexei was not yet four, Rasputin’s visits were usually in secret, arriving at Tsarskoe Selo as if to visit Maria Vishnyakova. This allowed him ‘to avoid having his name written down in the lobby register, where all visits to the tsars were recorded. Once in the palace, he would drop by to see the nurse Maria Vishnyakova, a very nervous individual and at the time an ardent admirer of Rasputin. And then from the nurse’s he would be escorted to the royal apartments.’

In St Petersburg in 1906 the tsar and tsarina, with a phalanx of grand dukes a few steps behind, walk to a sitting of the Duma.

On another state occasion, also in St Petersburg, the sovereign, on a horse with a golden coat, is escorted by the grand dukes also on horseback, and the tsarina with the dowager empress in a calash.