To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History) (18 page)

As the war on the Eastern Front went from bad to worse, the British government’s concern about a possible Russian collapse heightened. Such a collapse would be fatal for the Western Front, as the Germans would then be able to direct their full military might in the west instead of fighting a war on two fronts. Britain’s Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, was only too painfully aware of this impending danger, and sought Prime Minister Asquith’s approval for an urgent initiative in the form of a special mission to Russia. Asquith gave his consent and agreed that Kitchener himself was the best man to lead it, for he believed that he was possibly the only British figure the Tsar might listen to. Kitchener, more than most, had always taken a particular interest in Russian affairs, and as a consequence had long foreseen the upshot of a Russian collapse. He was convinced that the fate of Russia was of overriding importance to Britain’s interests, and had spoken in Cabinet on several occasions during the spring of 1916 warning of the forces within Russia trying to bring about an armistice with Germany and consequently a separate peace treaty. Furthermore, Kitchener’s stock in Russian military circles was high and his opinions and reputation carried much weight with the Tsar personally.

As a result of secret diplomatic overtures, the Tsar indicated that he would welcome a delegation led by Kitchener. A secret invitation formally inviting Kitchener to visit Russia and meet with Nicholas was therefore sent in early May 1916. While the supply of munitions was high on Kitchener’s agenda, he particularly wished to impress on the Tsar the destructive effect Rasputin’s influence was having on Anglo-Russian relations and to urge the appointment of a genuinely national government that would draw together Russia’s most able and effective politicians. In light of the fact that the supply of munitions would be one of the mission’s major priorities, Asquith envisaged Lloyd George accompanying Kitchener. However, after the restoration of order in Dublin following the Easter Rising the previous month, the Prime Minister

went over to Dublin to examine the situation on the spot. Martial law was still in force, and the three principal officers of the crown – the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Wimbourne, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Mr Birrell, and his Under-Secretary, Sir Matthew Nathan – had all resigned their posts.
³

Lloyd George recalled that on his return

Mr Asquith approached me with the suggestion that I should take up the task of trying to negotiate a settlement with the Irish revolutionary leaders. The request came at an awkward moment… Lord Kitchener was to proceed to Russia via Archangel to consult with the military authorities there about closer co-operation in the field, and it had been arranged that I should go with him to find out for myself the truth about the appalling shortage of equipment of which we had heard, and see in what way the Ministry of Munitions could best help remedy it. These were the matters in which I was for the moment far more closely interested than I was in the pitiable and rather squalid tragedy which had overtaken our lack of policy in Ireland. But my plans were upset by Mr Asquith’s proposal.
⁴

In fact, Asquith wrote a personal, handwritten letter to Lloyd George on 10 Downing Street notepaper on 22 May:

SECRET

My dear Lloyd George,

I hope you may see your way clear to take up Ireland; at any rate for a short time. It is a unique opportunity and there is no one else who could do so much to bring a permanent solution.

Yours very sincerely

H.H. Asquith
⁵

Although Lloyd George felt he could not refuse the Prime Minister’s request, he obeyed him with some reluctance. In fact, this decision saved his life, for on 5 June HMS
Hampshire
, which was taking Kitchener and his mission to Russia, was sunk by a German mine off the Orkney Islands. Kitchener and most of the crew drowned (only twelve of some 200 crew survived). A month later, On 6 July, after some deliberation, Asquith appointed Lloyd George Secretary of State for War, a post that in wartime was second only to that of Prime Minister.

While Lloyd George and Kitchener certainly had very different views about the virtues of the Russian imperial system, they were at one on the issue of Rasputin. When Lloyd George took over the War Office, he urged on the Prime Minister the formation of another British mission to Russia, but for months nothing happened. Without a solid Allied-approved agenda for his conduct of the war, the Tsar would not be able to get finance from America or Britain, and would ultimately have to seek peace with Germany.

The Tsar was left prey to Rasputin, Vyrubova and the Tsarina. He was weak, but they supported whatever self-belief he had: his mystical view of his own divine right to be the Tsar, but also and most importantly his terror of relinquishing power. Nothing must weaken the monarchy. He never forgot that his grandfather, Alexander II, had been preparing to make concessions to the liberals when he was assassinated, while his father Alexander III, a fierce exponent of nationalism, orthodoxy and autocracy, had died in his bed.

Nicholas welcomed the Tsarina’s constant reminders to be firm, because she said it was Rasputin’s advice. Nicholas was well aware of Rasputin’s faults but had faith in him, as weak people have faith that they are protected by brass Hands of Fatima and St Christopher medals and rabbits’ feet. When others warned him, as they did, that Rasputin’s proximity to the Tsarina was undermining public respect for the imperial family, he found refuge in a sense of martyrdom. He saw himself and the Tsarina elevated from the ignorant world, bearing the banner of holy truth regardless of jeers and brickbats. Psychologically at least, he was the perfect model of a
mari complaisant.

Rasputin’s influence over the Tsar rose as the Allied star fell. The Tsarina was already passing on to him Rasputin’s complaints about the pointlessness of so much loss of life. Paléologue, the French Ambassador, pooh-poohed the idea that she was working against the Allies; to him the Tsarina seemed English in every respect. Sir George Buchanan was not so sure.

All the same, the Tsarina kept in touch with her brother, Prince Ernest of Hesse, intermittently throughout the war, and in 1915 came close to treason when Prince Ernest prevailed upon a Russian expatriate in Germany to convey a letter to her.
⁶

April 17th, 1915, ‘Alex to Nicky’:

I had a long, dear letter from Erni… He longs for a way out of this dilemma that someone ought to begin to make a bridge for discussion. So he had an idea of quite privately sending a man of confidence to Stockholm, who should meet a gentleman sent by you… So he sent a gentleman to be there on the 28th… So I at once wrote an answer… and sent it the gentleman… he better not wait – and that tho’ one longs for peace, the time has not yet come. – I wanted to get all done before your return, as I know it would be unpleasant for you.

Nicholas did not want to go crawling to Germany – to Alexandra’s bullying Uncle Willy. He honourably passed this letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But instead of confirming that the Tsar and Tsarina were entirely behind the Allies, it confirmed doubts about the Tsarina’s loyalty to them. After Kitchener’s death in June, there were at least two formal contacts with German emissaries.

In July 1916, Protopopov, then Deputy Speaker of the Duma, visited Stockholm as head of a Duma delegation to Sweden. While there he met an official from the German embassy by the name of Fritz Warburg.
⁷
The German outlined to Protopopov the Kaiser’s desire for a separate peace with Russia and touched on the terms that Berlin was minded to offer. While we have only a fragmentary idea of the terms Warburg put to Protopopov, his claim that they represented an ‘honourable and advantageous’ settlement was probably not an inaccurate one. Indeed, by comparison with the terms the Germans offered the Bolsheviks some two years later, this was as good an offer as the Russians were ever likely to get.

When Protopopov returned to Petrograd he sought an audience with the Tsar at which he reported on the meeting with Warburg and suggested that Russia might open peace talks with the Germans. The Tsar rejected this overture on the basis that he had given his personal word to the Allies that Russia would not seek a separate peace. With that, Nicholas dismissed the suggestion. Channels between the Germans and Protopopov, however, remained open.

While British Intelligence soon picked up word of Protopopov’s encounter in Stockholm from their agents there and monitored developments on his return, the public at large were blissfully unaware of it. Neither did they or his Duma colleagues know that Protopopov had, for some time, been in close and secret contact with Rasputin. The two had met in 1915 through their mutual friend Pyotr Badmaëv, the Siberian doctor and peddler of Tibetan medicine. Known for many years for his participation in the most outlandish of orgies, Protopopov’s neglected venereal disease had finally caught up with him to the extent that he now sought the questionable remedies offered by Badmaëv. He is also reputed to have had incipient ‘general paralysis of the insane’, as it was then known: the symptoms of tertiary syphilis.
⁸

Later that year, Buchanan, no doubt drawing on an intelligence report, asked the Tsar (whose loyalty to the Allies he claims never to have doubted)

…whether it was true that, in the interview that Protopopov had had with a German agent at Stockholm, the latter had stated that, if Russia would make peace, Germany would evacuate Poland and raise no objection to Russia’s acquisition of Constantinople…

These were among the political aspects of the conversation Proto-popov had with Fritz Warburg, but there were also financial ones, for Warburg was an economic adviser at the Stockholm embassy and younger brother of Max Warburg, the Hamburg banker.
⁹
That generation of seven siblings also included the brothers Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York, reformer of the Federal Reserve Bank; Felix Warburg, a powerful New York banker whose father-in-law was the legendary New York financier Jacob Schiff; and Aby, the eldest, a scholar.
¹⁰
Fritz’s account, as related to the family, may be somewhat disingenuous:

In July 1916 Fritz stumbled into the history books quite by accident. A Russian delegation was passing through Stockholm on its way home from financial talks in London, when a Count Olusfiev asked to meet a German from the economic sphere. Having sounded out the mood in France and England, he said offhand, he wanted to do the same for Germany. The casual request concealed a serious agenda. During talks at the Foreign Office in Berlin, Fritz had received instructions to follow up on such overtures, and von Lucius encouraged him to meet with the Russians… Perhaps to give the German government some self-protective distance from the talks, Fritz claimed that he attended the Grand Hotel meeting with little official coaching and that he was astonished when the door opened and Alexander Protopopov, vice-president of the Russian Duma, strolled into the room. Suddenly Fritz was engaged in high-level, if discreetly unofficial talks, looking toward a separate peace between Germany and Russia… Felix was careful to stress that he was voicing his own views and not those of his government… [and that Germany’s] real grievance lay with France and England, not Russia. He proposed a swap in which Germany would get Baltic territory and Russia parts of German-occupied Poland, followed by stepped-up trade between Russia and Germany.
¹¹

The Warburgs were on shaky ground. Having established the family in Germany some time between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were now impelled to demonstrate their loyalty to the country. This should not have been necessary, for they were patriotic Germans; Aby loathed Anglo-Saxon culture and Max had won an Iron Cross. Max had been livid when the Chancellor discriminated against Jews in the German army and his disgust at this had been made public only weeks before. The Hamburg bank had financed the construction of Germany’s navy and its merchant fleet before the war. Only last year, Max had sent Carl Melchior, his own closest advisor, to Romania to do deals over grain supplies that were tempting enough to keep Romania neutral.

But Felix now could only offer territorial advantage, and the Tsar did not need any more land, resources or coastline. At this point the Tsar needed generous capital incentives to make peace. He had been here before, in 1905; he would need money to rebuild the country and repress the rebellious element.

Russian Jews, in general, were pro-German, and in view of the cruel pogroms and daily insults, as Sir Bernard Pares wrote in a despatch to the Foreign Office, ‘it is difficult to blame them’. German propaganda suggested (with dubious sincerity) that peace with Germany would mean liberation. But Max Warburg could not offer to reconstruct Russia for the Tsar. Germany was suffering from the Allied blockade and so was his bank. By this stage in the war the German Warburgs, and German and Russian financiers in general, could
only
have got money for Russia from America – and they knew Wall Street would refuse to lend it to them. Felix Warburg’s father-in-law, Jacob Schiff, so detested the Tsarist regime that he strenuously prevented Russia from getting Wall Street money. Partly out of his hatred for the Tsar’s victimisation of Jews, Schiff had organised finance for the Japanese victory in 1904–5.
¹²
From an old Frankfurt banking family, he could not see why the Germans and Allies were fighting; as his biographer points out,

Schiff banked on a neutral Wilson to engineer a status quo peace. Objecting to the craze for military preparedness in America, he opposed the export of munitions and funds to the belligerents.
¹³