To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History) (15 page)

By the turn of the century the court was led by the Grand Duchess Vladimir in St Petersburg, while the Tsar and Tsarina and their three daughters were rarely seen outside Tsarskoye Selo. The magnificent Romanov palaces were rarely, some never, visited and even the treasures of the comparatively modest Alexander Palace were put into storage. Instead, Alexandra had the walls painted mauve and ordered ugly suites of furniture from Maples in the Tottenham Court Road. Queen Victoria herself, with her tartan and watercolour aesthetic, her fiddly little tables and hulking great ornaments, was never as tasteless as this.

To explain her neglect of society, her ignorance of science and her increasing dependence on mystics and clairvoyants and healers, Alexandra flaunted her preoccupation with motherhood. The empire must descend through the male line. Alexandra’s existence would have no meaning for her unless she could produce a son. She must be able to pass the Tsardom to her own flesh and blood. Magic would work; she knew it. Around the turn of the century, Monsieur Philippe, a magician from Lyons, was presented to the Tsarina by Militsa.

Philippe was an obvious charlatan. Only an under-occupied woman half-crazed by a single obsession, as by that time Alexandra was, could have taken him seriously. Her mother-in-law, the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, interceded with Nicholas, but to no avail. Proofs of the Frenchman’s rascality emerged and were put before the Tsarina. But Alexandra had a fatal flaw: the gift of faith. She was like the White Queen who had trained herself always to believe ten impossible things before breakfast. Once she had made up her mind that something was true, it became so. Nothing would shake her belief.

So when, in 1901, she gave birth to her fourth child, which Philippe had told her would be a boy – the new Tsarevich – and it was a girl, she was bewildered. Monsieur Philippe regretted that his prediction had been confounded, but had she had more faith, it would certainly have come true. She saw the point of this, and made herself believe even more.

A condemnatory Secret Service report on Philippe arrived from Paris. The agent responsible, Pyotr Rachkovski, who had run the Okhrana in Western Europe for a decade, was forced out of his job, while Monsieur Philippe stayed. The rest of the Romanovs fumed in the background. The Tsarina (and her husband too, because Nicholas preferred to concur with his wife rather than face the hysterics that would result if he contradicted her) paid Philippe more rapt attention than ever. In 1902 she seemed to be expecting a child. The magician from Lyons diagnosed her condition and announced that this time it would be a boy. After doctors expressed doubts that the pregnancy was genuine, Alexandra would allow no one else to examine her. Somehow Philippe was provided with papers certifying that he was a Russian doctor of medicine. In August, however, the Tsarina was losing weight, and got a second opinion. Hers had been a phantom, that is, imaginary, pregnancy.

With the Black Sisters as their only friends, the imperial couple were pretty well isolated by their faith in Philippe. Grand Duke Nikolai, notwithstanding his love for Anastasia, was embarrassed by his own indirect association with the whole affair. Alexandra’s elder sister, Elizaveta Fyodorovna, who was almost as religious as she was and married to Grand Duke Sergei, tried to persuade her that the mystic must go. The Russo-Japanese War was in the offing and Nikolai needed all the help he could get. Regretfully, the imperial couple sent Philippe home to France with an opulent motor car and a generous pay-off.

In the summer of 1904, Alexandra gave birth to a boy. She was delighted that her faith had at last been sincere enough. However, the baby was susceptible to mysterious bouts of illness. Little was known about haemophilia at the time, and it would be a year before the doctors diagnosed his condition. The Tsarina, who was not amenable to science or reason, was deeply ashamed. The elder girls and everyone else in the tiny royal circle were sworn to secrecy. The baby suffered intermittent agonies and the doctors were helpless. Alexandra had nowhere to turn, for by the time haemophilia was suspected, Monsieur Philippe was dead; he died in France in 1905. He had told her, however, that he would ‘return in the form of another’.

Bishop Feofan was introduced to the Tsar and Tsarina and became the Tsarina’s confessor. He was a straightforward, ascetic, Orthodox priest. This was not exactly what they wanted, and Father Ioann of Kronstadt joined the circle. He too came from the regular Orthodox hierarchy, with many followers and a reputation as a healer. But neither he nor Feofan could wholly engage this nervous, superstitious, desperate pair.

Beyond the gates of all the palaces, the clamour for change was growing to a roar. Grand Duke Sergei was blown up by a bomb. Sailors mutinied and peaceful protestors were mown down by Cossacks.

In October 1905, just three days after Nicholas had countermanded his wife’s advice and signed the papers that promised his subjects a constitution, Rasputin came to tea.

The impression he made on that first visit was good, but not earth-shattering. By this time he was in his mid-thirties, could pass for older, and was no longer the wild man from Siberia. He had become used to bathing, for one thing, and wearing clean clothes, still in the peasant style – for he was not a priest. He had visited many houses where there was indoor sanitation and carpets and a piano; even electric light, in one or two. He still ate with his fingers, but he restrained his appetite, and his hollow-cheeked visage with its intense, pale-eyed stare had lost none of its magnetism. He spoke of the sin of pride. To say that he was fluent is an understatement; his words tumbled over each other in a torrent, and to one like Alexandra, who always heard what she wanted to hear, they were magical. He urged the Tsar and Tsarina to ‘spit on all their fears, and rule’.
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By Rasputin’s own admission, the Tsar was not immediately captivated as his wife was. He had rather a lot on his mind.

Rasputin decided to get out of Feofan’s orbit (he had been staying at his apartment) before he made his second sortie into the imperial presence. He must find somewhere else to live. This was not difficult, for since his first visit to St Petersburg he had acquired quite a following. Certain ladies even made a habit of collecting his finger-nail clippings and sewing them into their underclothing. And now he met the devoted fanatic who would welcome him into her beautiful home. Within weeks of his meeting with Nicholas and Alexandra, Rasputin left Feofan’s apartment and moved in with Olga Lokhtina, the wife of a key official at Tsarskoye Selo. She had been called a ‘Petersburg lioness and fashionable salon hostess’.
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That was before she met Rasputin.

She became besotted. According to her, when they met she was sick with an ‘intestinal neurasthenia which tied me to my bed’.
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With or without intestinal neurasthenia, whatever that is, there was to be quite a lot of tying to the bed in future. For like many of the others she began a sexual relationship with the magnetic peasant. In the first weeks, they shared the innocent pleasures of kissing and communal bathing at Pokrovskoe. Six years later, if Rasputin’s friend and publisher Filippov is to be believed, they had evolved a relationship that worked satisfactorily for both of them.

Arriving at Rasputin’s early in the morning for tea as was my custom… I saw him behind the screen that separated his bed from the rest of the room. He was desperately beating Madame Lokhtina, who was clad in a fantastic get-up consisting of a white dress hung with little ribbons, and who was holding onto his member while shouting ‘You are God!’ I rushed over to him… ‘What are you doing? You are beating a woman!’ Rasputin answered ‘She won’t let me alone, the skunk, and demands sin!’ And Lokhtina, hiding behind the screen, wailed ‘I am your ewe, and
you are Christ!
’

By 1911 Lokhtina had been banished from her husband and small daughter and all her worldly goods, and spent her life wandering the highways and byways of Russia, barefoot and unwashed in a white dress with the word ‘Alleluyah’ painted on a bandeau around her forehead. On cold days she wore a wolfskin cap.

But in 1906 she was a fashionable and beautiful woman still married to the uncomplaining senior official at Tsarskoye Selo. At her house in St Petersburg Rasputin was in a position to hear all the gossip of the dwindling royal circle, and he learned that the Tsarevich was sick. What the Tsarina most desired was someone who could offer a cure for her son. Rasputin obtained an icon of St Simeon of Verkhoturye, Olga Lokhtina wrote a suitably deferential compliment slip to be delivered with it under Rasputin’s name, and the Tsar received it.

So it came about that one year after their first meeting, Nicholas granted another audience to the peasant healer from Pokrovskoe, and this time, ‘he made a remarkably strong impression on Her Majesty and on me’.
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He was invited to see their little boy, who was then aged two and undergoing a crisis, and Rasputin’s prayers were followed by the child’s recovery. He seemed able to work miracles.

He did more than pray; he formed a relationship with the child, over the years that ensued. He was always good with children and animals and their instincts are generally acute. He knew how to approach them and was sincerely kind to them.

Had that been all there was to it – had Rasputin been simply a gifted healer who confined his attention to the heir to the throne – he would never have attracted the opprobrium he did. But the combination of a weak Tsar and a strong Tsarina, and the louche, sharp-witted side to this peasant, who quickly understood the role he must play to keep the Tsarina’s loyalty, was an excuse for ribaldry, disrespect and ridicule. It was fear that had kept the people subservient for so long, not love, and the fear had been replaced with mistrust long before. Once the imperial couple were in thrall to an incoherent, semi-literate peasant, even common respect began to diminish.

For the first few years, however, few were aware that the Tsar and Tsarina had found this new miracle-worker. At first even Militsa was not allowed to know, because Rasputin had purposely taken the initiative and presented himself to the royal couple. He did not want to be paraded like a talking dog, and nor did he want to be beholden to Militsa. She had other things on her mind in any case. Her sister Anastasia was to obtain a divorce in order to marry Grand Duke Nikolai. The Tsarina was scandalised and angry, but did not ostracise the couple because they were her friends. Still smarting from this disgrace, Militsa discovered that Rasputin, far from being her own personal discovery, was already an admired protégé at the Alexander Palace; and, what was more, she, Militsa, was no longer the Tsarina’s best friend. Her position had been usurped by a younger woman, Anna Vyrubova.

Militsa was furious, and suspected Rasputin of turning the Tsarina against her. Rasputin made one of his journeys home with several adoring St Petersburg ladies in tow only to find, once he got to Pokrovskoe, that the entire Church establishment of Tobolsk was out to get him. They were asking questions (not for the first time), taking witness statements and generally building a case that he was a Khlyst, guilty of fornication, adultery and sexual orgies with various women. Olga Lokhtina, who had not yet deserted her family in favour of the bare feet, white dress and ribbons, deduced that there must be a malicious and powerful influence behind this sudden investigation. She concluded that the secret enemy was Militsa, and she returned to Tsarskoye Selo and made sure that the Tsar would bury the incriminating evidence forever as soon as it reached him.

From 1907 Militsa, Anastasia and Grand Duke Nikolai were the ‘out-crowd’. Rasputin and Anna Vyrubova were in.

Vyrubova had been an unmarried girl called Anna Taneev when she became intimate with the Tsarina. Her father was a court official and she had never been far from the inner circle – Yusupov remembered loathing her at school. She and the Tsarina were already inciting gossip about a lesbian affair when she married in 1907. Her husband, a nonentity who owned a large estate, proved significant only as provider of a name and a marital status; after a few years they divorced. She accused him of impotence and sadism, and it was true that the marriage had never been consummated. He married again quite soon, was perfectly happy with his new wife and lived quietly on his country estate. Vyrubova and the Tsarina, however, caused talk by sharing a bed.
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One of the most complicated issues in Rasputin’s story is the relationship of the Tsar and the Tsarina. It appeared to be cloyingly affectionate, yet one partner constantly dominated. This is usually a dysfunctional arrangement for both parties. Their religious beliefs would have made it difficult for either of them to admit to marital problems, even to one another, and it seems that they found, over the years, a
modus vivendi.

The trouble was, nobody quite believed in it. In 1909 the royal family’s appointed religious advisor, Father Ioann, died. Rasputin, although unqualified as a priest, effectively took his place. By 1910 he was often mentioned in society, and not in flattering terms.

People assumed he was an adventurer, lining his own nest. He complained that the Tsarina paid him hardly anything, yet expected him to be at her beck and call. He was living in modest circumstances in St Petersburg – in fact, in other people’s apartments – and it seemed that all the Tsarina donated was a few roubles and some hand-embroidered silk shirts. But he had always scorned money, and gave generously what little he had; perhaps nice clothes and important friends mattered more.

However, money was being sent home, so other admirers must have given him some. In Pokrovskoe a comfortable two-storey house was being built, the better to accommodate his lady visitors from the capital. Now that he was nearly forty, and those three of his five children who had lived were growing up, Rasputin may have recognised that soothsaying and healing might as well provide a living.