To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History) (19 page)

With the Warburgs and the Rothschilds, he was Jewish royalty. Together the distinguished old man Schiff, and Felix and Paul Warburg, would decide who got American money and who didn’t. They could make business difficult for banks that propped up the Tsar.

On the other hand, if Felix Warburg was in a position to offer Protopopov nothing the Tsar would want, this calls into question the provenance of the New York money that Buchanan was able to promise the Tsar in the summer of 1916. It may possibly have come from J.P. Morgan Jnr, a noted anglophile whose
Britannica Online
entry includes the lines

…during the first three years of World War I, he became the sole purchasing agent in the United States for the British and French governments, buying about $3,000,000,000 worth of military and other supplies from American firms on behalf of those countries. To finance the Franco–British requirements for credits in the United States, he organized more than 2,000 banks to underwrite a total of more than $1,500,000,000 in Allied bonds. After the end of the war his firm floated loans totaling more than $10,000,000,000 for European reconstruction work.
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The Americans were in a position to impose conditions. They could well have been persuaded by Buchanan’s argument, often stated, that
providing Rasputin were out of the picture
, the Tsar would concede power to a pro-Ally, progressive Duma.

In addition to the feelers put out to Protopopov, and Nicholas’s subsequent reaction, there is evidence to believe that Berlin was also considering other options in terms of brokering a peace with Russia. A decade after the events of 1916, Alexei Raivid, a Soviet consul in Berlin, was having one of his occasional meetings with Baron von Hochen Esten, when the subject of Rasputin cropped up. The Baron, a German specialist in Russian affairs employed by the Hungarian embassy, told Raivid that, in the summer of 1916, he and a number of others were sent to Petrograd. The purpose of their mission was to establish contacts with certain elements of the Russian court who sought a separate peace with Germany. Raivid recorded in his diary an account of what von Hochen Esten told him that day:

In his own words, the ties between the two courts never broke during the war and were maintained unofficially and through illegal means by different elements close to the courts. The main purpose of the mission was to take advantage of the difficult domestic situation in Russia and to warn the influential elements of the Russian Court that the only way to save Russia from the forthcoming revolution would be Russia’s withdrawal from the war with Germany and some domestic reforms. He was charged, if necessary, to cooperate with other persons in preparation of a coup to remove Nicholas II from the throne. On his arrival he got in touch with the following three persons who together with Tsarina Alexandra worked on the development of the separate peace treaty: Sturmer; Beletsky, Director of the Department of Police; and one of the synod leaders, Vasily Mikhailovich Skvortsov. The group, in cooperation with other German agents, sought to persuade Rasputin that he and the Tsarina should lead a movement for peace with Germany. Because Nicholas opposed the idea of signing a separate peace treaty with Germany (he explained his position by the fact that as a nobleman he could not break the promise that he had made to the Allies) he was to be persuaded to abdicate the throne on 6th December (his Saint’s Day) in favour of his heir Alexei. This would then allow Alexandra, as Regent, to conclude a separate peace treaty, as neither she nor the Tsarevich had given such a promise to the Allies. According to a further plan, the Regent would publish a manifesto stating that the difficult domestic circumstances in Russia required the conclusion of a peace treaty and carry forward a programme of reforms in the country. The manifesto allegedly promised to ‘give land to the people’. Von Hochen Esten claims that Rasputin was among those who wrote a draft of the manifesto and that he favoured the idea of a separate peace and totally approved of the slogan promising land for the people.
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While Raivid’s diary represents only one small fragment of documentary evidence to support the notion of such a plot, it was anecdotally well supported in the summer of 1916. It was taken equally seriously by David Lloyd George, on whose desk intelligence reports warning of future catastrophe were beginning to pile up.

I
n August 1916 there was good news and bad. The good news was that Romania had at last declared war against Germany. The bad news was that Romania was so ill-prepared that the country would inevitably be overrun, south of the Carpathians at least, and Russian and Allied military assistance must be given. This expert intervention would destroy the resources that would otherwise allow the Germans to pour across Romania to the Black Sea and stay there. The British Intelligence officer whose team would follow the retreat, burning grain stores and destroying factories, oil fields and oil refineries, was Captain John Dymoke Scale.

Scale was six feet four, a thirty-four-year-old Indian Army officer with a wife and young children in England. He was from a genuine British background, the son of a Merthyr solicitor,
¹
educated at Repton and trained as an army officer at Sandhurst. He had learned Russian before the war, during a previous posting in Russia. He fought on the Western Front in 1914, sustaining a serious shrapnel wound to the leg. He was posted to France in the summer of 1916 and, also that summer, was assigned to accompany a party of Russian parliamentarians visiting England, which included Protopopov, the spokesman of the delegation, Milyukov and Shingarev, who were opposition leaders, and many others representing different shades of opinion.

With the entry of Romania into the war in August 1916, Scale was attached to the Petrograd SIS station. He was already well connected in Petrograd society, not only through his parliamentary contacts but because of his acquaintance with Robert Wilton, the
Times’
s Petrograd correspondent, who had accompanied a party of Russian journalists in England a few weeks before his own trip with the Duma members. Among Wilton’s party had been Vladimir D. Nabokov, the Kadet leader. Scale knew his brother, the diplomat Konstantin D. Nabokov, who had from 1912 been Russian Consul-General in Calcutta; he was now at the imperial Russian embassy in England.
²
Konstantin Nabokov corresponded with Scale and undoubtedly primed him with current opinion, such as ‘rumours… of Rasputin’s evil orgies and of the loss of prestige which the monarchy was suffering owing to the disastrous influence of this hysterical and vicious scoundrel blindly believed to be a saint and a miraclemaker’.
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Scale arrived in Russia on 31 August, via Finland, and headed directly for the Astoria Hotel in Petrograd, where most of the British Intelligence Mission was billeted.

The Astoria was a fine five-storied building, built round a large dining hall, down onto the coloured glass roof of which the windows of the inner rooms looked… German-owned… it had been taken over by the Government… and was now the ‘official’ hotel, open only to diplomats, officers and officials… Many people lived there indefinitely, in spite of a regulation that no one save the diplomats and officials of allied powers could stay there longer than a certain number of days. From lunch time till late at night its salons were kaleidoscopes of movement and colour. Cossacks, Guardsmen, naval officers, in fact men in every Russian uniform imaginable (most civilians in Russia wear uniform) sat at tables or stood in groups chatting to their womenfolk. Often very beautiful women they were too, in wonderful clothes and jewellery. Here and there among the throng, officers in the uniform of one or other of the Allied powers were conspicuous. A Romanian military mission had just arrived, and was the centre of new interest. No taciturnity or absence of smiles was noticeable here. In fact one could hardly recognise the airs played by the military band so loud was the buzz of talk and laughter. A cheery, careless place was the Astoria (a happy hunting ground for enemy agents too!).
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He set to work for the British Intelligence Mission. His immediate duties were to exchange news of German troop movements between Russian and British staff officers. Cypher telegrams would arrive from London, explaining which German units were operational in France; they would have to be deciphered and compared with Russian intelligence about the Russian and Romanian fronts. There were endless misunderstandings, queries and frustrations (‘…thus the 21st Reserve Regiment has now been established as belonging to the new 216th Division but it is always down as of 36th Reserve Division…’
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) caused by a combination of German cunning, Russian carelessness, and sometimes, in Scale’s view, London’s willingness to believe French intelligence from Moscow rather than British.

It is pretty certain that Scale placed himself firmly on Alley’s side of the ‘show’ rather than Hoare’s. Hoare, bright and personable as he was, was essentially a desk wallah. Alley and Scale already knew each other from the time in 1913 when Scale qualified, in Russia, as an interpreter, first class. He would have heard all the Rasputin-related gossip relayed by Alley, Rayner and Felix Yusupov,
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who he had also made the acquaintance of, through Alley, on his previous Russian posting. Quite what this Indian Army man and veteran of the trenches made of Yusupov and his louche social connections can only be imagined. Perhaps by this time nothing surprised him. Yusupov and Pavlovich were fabulously exotic; the Yusupovs were descended from the Tartar hordes who once overran southern Russia, and were said to be the second richest family in Russia. Yusupov wrote of his childhood:

We seldom went abroad, but my parents sometimes took my brother and myself on a tour of their various estates which were scattered all over Russia; some were so far away that we never went there at all. One of our estates in the Caucasus stretched for one hundred and twenty-five miles along the Caspian Sea; crude petroleum was so abundant that the soil seemed soaked with it, and the peasants used it to grease their cart wheels.

For these long trips, our private coach was attached to the train… [it] was entered by a vestibule which in summer was turned into a sort of verandah containing an aviary; the songs of the birds drowned the train’s monotonous rumble. The dining-drawing room… was panelled in mahogany, the chairs were upholstered in green leather and the windows curtained in yellow silk. Next came my parents’ bedroom, then my brother’s and mine, both very cheerful with chintzes and light wood panelling, and then the bathroom. Several compartments reserved for friends followed our private apartments. Our staff of servants, always very numerous, occupied compartments next the kitchen at the far end of the coach. Another coach fitted up in much the same way was stationed at the Russo-German border for our journeys abroad, but we never used it.

On all our journeys we were accompanied by a host of people without whom my father could not exist…
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Felix Yusupov would in due course inherit palaces and estates in seventeen Russian provinces. There were several in St Petersburg, several more in Moscow and its environs, a few in the Crimea. His account of his family’s many mansions is littered with throwaway lines such as (about the palace at 94 Moika) ‘the house was a present from Catherine the Great to my great-greatgrandmother, Princess Tatiana’. All the palaces were resplendent with the work of the most accomplished sculptors and painters and furniture makers of Russia and Europe, collected over hundreds of years. Several, like the Yusupov Palace, had more than one ballroom, a picture gallery, and a series of opulent reception rooms; there were billiard rooms and libraries, nurseries and boudoirs, bathing pools and hot-houses, music rooms and secret rooms. At least two of the palaces contained full-size private theatres; the one in the Yusupov Palace was exquisite. Chaliapin, Chopin and Liszt had given concerts there and Alexander Blok had given poetry readings. At the country mansions were acres of conservatories, marble fountains, rivers, lakes. ‘At Moscow, as at St Petersburg, my parents kept open house.’ As a decorative touch, Yusupov’s mother, the exquisite Princess Zenaïde, littered her state room with bowls of precious stones. Her husband, his imagination exhausted, had once presented her, as a birthday gift, with a mountain.

Felix was an obnoxious child, wild and by his own admission dreadfully spoiled. He hated to be bored, but when his parents were not giving receptions and balls the state apartments of the palatial town houses would be closed, and the children confined to the duller utilitarian rooms. Tedium was at last alleviated when Nicholas, Felix’s elder brother, introduced Yusupov the schoolboy to the Bohemian circles of St Petersburg and his then mistress, Polya. Felix had a passion for furniture, interior design and clothes – women’s clothes, particularly, when he got the opportunity to wear them, and as a boy of about thirteen, he did. He and Nicholas and Polya would visit, in secret and in disguise, the night haunts of St Petersburg, with Felix dressed as a pretty girl. After all, as he disingenuously protested, he would hardly be admitted as a schoolboy.

The ‘pretty girl’ was quite a success, and much emboldened one particular night they went to the theatre. Yusupov was aware he was attracting interest from an old gentleman and when the lights went up, he recognised King Edward VII. An English equerry stopped Nicholas in the foyer during the interval and asked the name of ‘the lovely young woman he was escorting’.

I began to lead a double life: by day I was a school-boy and by night an elegant woman. Polia [
sic
] dressed very well and all her clothes suited me to perfection… I haunted
café-concerts
and knew most of the popular tunes of the time and could sing them in a soprano voice. Nicholas conceived the idea of turning this talent to account by getting an engagement for me at ‘The Aquarium’, at that time the smartest
café-concert
in St Petersburg.
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