To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History) (13 page)

A separate peace, the British estimated, would release 350,000 German soldiers to fight on the Western Front: it would mean almost inevitable defeat. Refusing to submit to despair, Sir George Buchanan did his best to make the Tsarina reconsider the Tsar’s position.

I took advantage… of an audience which I had early in September [1915] with the Empress to tell Her Majesty that I shared the apprehensions with which the Emperor’s decision was viewed by the Council of Ministers. Not only, I said, would His Majesty have to bear the whole responsibility for any fresh disaster that might befall his armies, but he would, by combining the duties of Commander-in-Chief with those of an autocratic ruler of a great Empire, be undertaking a task beyond the strength of any single man. The Empress at once protested, saying that the Emperor ought to have assumed the command from the very first and that, now that his army had suffered so severely, his proper place was with his troops. ‘I have no patience,’ she continued, ‘with Ministers who try to prevent him doing his duty. The situation requires firmness. The Emperor, unfortunately, is weak; but I am not, and I intend to be firm.
²³

Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaivich was despatched to defend Russia from the Turks in the Caucasus. Tsar Nicholas gritted his teeth and left Tsarskoye Selo to run the war from the Stavka at Moghilev. This, while several hundred miles from any front line, was distant from Petrograd and people said that Rasputin had got the Tsar out of the way in order to better influence policy through the Tsarina. The Tsarina showed Rasputin the maps and plans that her weak little husband had showed
her
; it was tantamount to treason. In intimate suppers in palaces and restaurants all over the capital and beyond, Grand Dukes and Duchesses began to talk about direct action.

A plot was hatched by the Grand Dukes and several members of the aristocracy to remove the Tsarina from power and force her to retire to a convent. Rasputin was to be sent back to Siberia, the Tsar deposed and the Tsarevich placed on the throne. Everyone plotted, even the generals. As for the British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, his dealings with radical elements caused him to be accused by many Russians of secretly working for the Revolution.
²⁴

Nothing came of it, perhaps because at first things did not seem to be turning out too badly. In October of 1915 Grand Duchess Vladimir volunteered brighter news. Stopford wrote home that she

told me she found the Emperor – who had been to see her – quite a changed man, and with quite a different face. He now, for the first time in his life, knows everything, and hears the truth direct. Nikolai Nikolaivich never wanted to know anything, and of what he did know he only told the Emperor so little that it was hardly worth his hearing.
²⁵

But information was not enough. Tsar Nicholas was incapable of taking focused, decisive action without getting the go-ahead from his wife. He did have some strategic and logistic understanding, because he and his family between them controlled most of the country’s resources and knew how much this war was costing to run. He now knew that, for Russian commanders at the front, getting munitions was like pulling teeth.

In November of 1915 the Tsar met Buchanan, and

…made an earnest appeal to His Majesty’s Government to supply the Russian army with rifles. If only they would do so he could, he said, place 800,000 men in his field at once, and strike a crushing blow at the Germans… I could hold out no hope of our being able to supply rifles on so large a scale… I also pointed out that, apart from the question of supply, there was also that of delivery, and that if Russia was ever to receive from abroad the war material in which she was so deficient, drastic steps would have to be taken to expedite the construction of the Murman railway. The Emperor agreed that the work of construction ought to be placed under the control of some energetic and competent official, but he did not approve of the candidate whom I had ventured to suggest for the post.
²⁶

David Lloyd George, the energetic Minister of Munitions, was ensuring that Britain’s manufacture and supply of arms was at last cranking into top gear. He was all for supporting the Russians by sending guns and tanks but clearly recognised that this was going to be of minimal effect unless the political paralysis that was engulfing Russia was addressed. It is clear from Lloyd George’s papers that he was coming to the view that unless Russia’s internal crisis was resolved the outlook was bleak, not only for Russia herself but for Britain and France, who would be left to stand alone in the event of a Russian collapse. It is also clear that Lloyd George was not relying totally on official channels to keep him informed of news and developments in Russia. Days after Buchanan’s audience with the Tsar, he received a personal letter from Sir Ian Malcolm, the Conservative MP for Croydon, who was at the time in Petrograd on an unofficial fact-finding mission. Staying at the Astoria Hotel, Malcolm made his views clear to Lloyd George in no uncertain terms:

The Emperor and family and Court have not a single friend. It is said they have made every possible mistake… when the Revolution comes – that is what it is openly called – comes, I am told that at least half the army is so enraged at the massacre of their fellows, consequent on the lack of munitions, that they will side with the rebellion.
²⁷

Back in Russia, Buchanan was experiencing impatience with what was starting to look like high-level sabotage by the politicians who had paid Rasputin to get them their jobs. Sturmer, for instance, a placeman of Rasputin’s and known German sympathiser, was in charge of the Russian Ministry of Ways and Communications, which included railways. The railway between Petrograd and Alexandrovsk (Murmansk, in winter the only ice-free port) was imperative for the distribution of munitions and supplies but was taking forever to complete. Time and again, the Tsarina and Rasputin would persuade the Tsar to put someone useless in charge of an important government department, only to have the Allies get frustrated by inadequate Russian performance and insist that this person be removed. The Tsar would profess agreement with everything but usually he did nothing. Both he and his wife had a financial interest in the cosy relationship with Rasputin.

It seems barely credible that such a fabulously wealthy Romanov should take money in return for favours, but this is what appears to have been going on. The Extraordinary Commission that examined the death of Rasputin during the spring and summer of 1917 took depositions from Vyrubova and scores of others, and wanted to know what had become of Rasputin’s money. Had there been half a dozen wads of cash under the bed, they could have been stolen. But over recent years hundreds of thousands of roubles had been passed to him in exchange for favours. Had Vyrubova received money from him? She pleaded poverty, but how had she paid for a hospital and a church at Tsarskoye Selo? She said that she had used 20,000 roubles of her 100,000-rouble insurance payout from a railway accident. This was an unconvincingly small sum and she knew it. Gradually, another story emerged. The money from petitioners was apportioned, a small cut to Rasputin, some to Vyrubova and the Infirmary, and the rest to ‘the Empress’s institutions’. At one point the going rate was 1,000 roubles.

November 3rd, 1915, ‘Alex to Nicky’:

…One thing Our Friend said, that if people offer great sums (so as to get a
decoration
), now one must accept, as money is needed and one helps them doing good by giving in to their weaknesses, and 1000 profit by it – it’s true, but again against all moral feelings. But in time of war all becomes different.
²⁸

Weighed down by so much responsibility and so little power, the Tsar sank into an intermittent mild depression. His apathy was often remarked upon. When he was not doing what his wife told him to, he was said to exist in a kind of torpor. People said he was drunk or drugged, probably by Badmaëv (see chapter 5) – but given the common reliance on opiates in those years, he was probably getting whatever he wanted from the family medical advisor Dr Botkin.

He had no trusted, supportive friends at all. He took the Tsarevich to Moghilev for company. He told the Tsarina that he didn’t want the boy to be over protected and fearful of grown-up life, as he had been. The little boy, who was twelve, and delicate, and always got his own way, was allowed to wear a specially made Cossack uniform. They were happy there, away from the women and the dark forces that enveloped the court.

Not a single important event at the front was decided without a preliminary conference with the
starets
. From Tsarskoye Selo instructions were given to General Headquarters [the Stavka] on the direct telephone line. The Empress insisted on being kept fully informed by the Emperor on the military and political situation. On receiving this information, sometimes secret and of the utmost importance, she would send for Rasputin, and confer with him.
¹

H
ow on earth had he done it? The Tsarina taking advice from a
peasant
? To the aristocrats of imperial Russia, it was as if she was taking advice from a chimpanzee.

For several years before his death, any outright reference to ‘Our Friend’, as the Tsarina called Rasputin, in the public press was forbidden; the generally understood code in subversive articles was ‘dark forces’. This only served to increase his mystique. When people happened to see him they stared, fascinated. Meriel Buchanan, the Ambassador’s young daughter, spotted Rasputin in April 1916 as she waited to cross a busy Petrograd street. Along bowled an
isvostchik
with bright green reins, drawn by a shaggy white horse, carrying Rasputin –

a tall black-bearded man with a fur cap drawn down over long straggling hair, a bright blue blouse and long high-boots showing under his fur-trimmed overcoat.
²

She was describing, perhaps unconsciously, the costume he died in. Like everyone else, she mentioned his unusually pale, deep-set, staring eyes. She was not a careless writer, but about Rasputin she used the words ‘compelling’ and ‘repellent’ on the same page, which is significant in itself. His sexual attractiveness increased the more demonised he became.

Sir Paul Dukes, then a music student in Petrograd, shared a flat with Gibbes, the Tsarevich’s English tutor, who told him that, if he cared to, he could see Rasputin on the station platform bound for Tsarskoye on a certain day (Rasputin was usually guarded, but on this day apparently wasn’t). Dukes went along out of curiosity, and was not impressed by the man’s scruffy appearance and ‘rat-like’ eyes. A girlfriend of his had once shared a carriage with Rasputin, only to be lunged at mid-journey; she slapped his face and got out. The same thing had happened to her cousin.

Rasputin was born some 1,600 miles from what was then called St Petersburg, in the village of Pokrovskoe in western Siberia. The village was made up of several streets of spacious one-or two-storey wooden houses, with framed windows and carved, painted beams. It was very much an ordinary village, more prosperous perhaps and more lively than most since it was on both the road and the river. In 1915, the Petrograd newspaper
Novoe Vremya
, in an anti-Rasputin article, described Pokrovskoe as a poor village, a wretched foggy place, remote and wild, inhabited by Siberian
zhigani
or rogues.
³

Grigori Rasputin was the second son of Anna Egorovna and Efim Aklovlevich Rasputin, a carter and farmer. Maria Rasputina gave her father’s date of birth as 23 January 1871.
⁴
By the pre-revolutionary Julian calendar, this date corresponds to 10 January. Rasputin’s exact date of birth has been an unresolved issue for over a century. Rasputin biographers have given a variety of dates ranging from the late 1860s through to the 1870s.
⁵

During Soviet times, encyclopedias and reference books gave Rasputin’s date of birth as 1864/65. Contrary to the generally accepted view that no authoritative contemporary evidence of his birth exists, the answer is to be found in the Tyumen Archives.

According to a Pokrovskoe church register entry, Rasputin’s parents (his father was aged twenty and his mother twenty-two) were married on 21 January 1862.
⁶
Birth registers indicate that between 1862 and 1867 six daughters were born, but all died in infancy.
⁷
Eventually, on 7 August 1867, a son, Andrei, was born.
⁸
The registers from 1869 have regrettably not survived. Before 1869 there is no mention of Grigori Rasputin’s birth in any of the registers. It can therefore be concluded that he could not have been born before 1869. However, this does not imply that it is impossible to establish Rasputin’s exact date of birth. A census of the population of the village of Pokrovskoe, also in the Tyumen Archive,
⁹
contains the name Grigori Rasputin. In the column opposite his name is his date of birth – 10 January 1869, which happens to be St Grigori’s Day. This corresponds to the date given by Maria Rasputina, although she places the year as 1871 not 1869.
¹⁰

Rasputin himself was also responsible for the variety of dates given as his date of birth. In a 1907 ecclesiastical file on an investigation into his religious activities,
¹¹
Rasputin declares that he is forty-two years of age, therefore implying that he was born in 1865. In a 1914 file on the investigation into an attempt on his life by Khiona Gusyeva, he declares, ‘My name is Grigori Efimovich Rasputin-Novy, fifty years old’,
¹²
which implies 1864 as his year of birth. In the 1911 notebook belonging to Tsarina Alexandra,
¹³
she recorded Rasputin as saying, ‘I have lived fifty years and am beginning my sixth decade.’This suggests he was born in 1861!