Nicholas and Alexandra

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Holy Devil

SUCCESS at Tsarskoe Selo ensured Rasputin’s success in society. As his social position improved, his wardrobe became more elegant. The rough linen shirts were exchanged for silk blouses of pale blue, brilliant red, violet and light yellow, some of them made and embroidered with flowers by the Empress herself. Black velvet trousers and soft kid leather boots replaced the mud-spattered garb of the peasant. The plain leather thong belted around his waist gave way to silken cords of sky blue or raspberry with big, soft, dangling tassels. On a chain around his neck, Rasputin wore a handsome gold cross. It too was a gift from Alexandra.

In his new trappings, Rasputin strode confidently into crowded parlors and became the immediate center of attention. His rich clothes were in striking contrast to his rude, open, peasant’s face with its unkempt hair, matted beard, broad, pockmarked nose and wrinkled, weather-beaten skin. Advancing on the guests, Rasputin seized the hands of every new acquaintance between his own wide, horny palms and stared fiercely into the other’s eyes. Holding them with his gaze, Rasputin began his familiar banter, studded with impertinent questions. Asked what she liked least about Rasputin, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna cited his “curiosity, unbridled and embarrassing.” Olga had a strong taste of this in her first meeting with Rasputin at Tsarskoe Selo.

“In Alicky’s boudoir,” Olga wrote, “having talked to her and Nicky for a few minutes, Rasputin waited for the servants to get the table for evening tea and then began plying me with most impertinent questions. Was I happy? Did I love my husband? Why didn’t I have any children? He had no right to ask such questions, nor did I answer them. I am afraid Nicky and Alicky looked rather uncomfortable. I do remember I was relieved at leaving the palace that evening and saying Thank God he hasn’t followed me to the station’ as I boarded my private coach in the train for St. Petersburg.”

Rasputin was always ready, even in public gatherings, to offer intimate personal advice. The Empress’s friend Lili Dehn first met Rasputin at a moment when she was wondering whether to go on a trip with her husband or stay behind with her infant son. “Our eyes met,” she wrote. “… His eyes held mine, those shining, steel-like eyes which seemed to read one’s inmost thoughts. He came forward and took my hand.… ‘Thou art worried.… Well, nothing in life is worth worrying over—tout passe—you understand. That’s the best outlook.’ He became serious. ‘It is necessary to have Faith. God alone is thy help. Thou art torn between thy husband and thy child. Which is weaker? Thou thinks’t that thy child is the more helpless. This is not so. A child can do nothing in his weakness. A man can do much.’ ”

Beneath his new finery, Rasputin remained the moujik. He gloried in the fact that a peasant was accepted in the silken drawing rooms of the aristocracy and he strutted his origins before his titled admirers. Amid a stream of guests coming in from the street and divesting themselves of furs and velvet capes, Rasputin handed the footman his plain, long, black caftan, the age-old coat of the Russian peasant. In polite conversation, Rasputin used coarse barnyard expressions. It was not a matter of the words slipping out accidentally; Rasputin used them often and with gusto, and he enjoyed the little gasps they invariably produced. He liked to describe in detail the sexual life of horses which he had observed as a child in Pokrovskoe, then turn to a beautiful woman in a décolleté dress and say, “Come, my lovely mare.” He found that society was as fascinated by his stories and tales of Siberia as the Imperial family. Frequently, seated in an elegant parlor, he would shake his head reprovingly and say, “Yes, yes, my dears, you are all much too pampered. Follow me in the summer to Pokrovskoe, to the great freedom of Siberia. We will catch fish and work in the fields and then you will really learn to understand God.” His table manners left people aghast. There is no more vivid image of Rasputin than that left by Simanovich, his aide and partner, who described Rasputin “plunging his dirty hands into his favorite fish soup.” Yet, this raw confirmation of Rasputin’s nature seemed to attract rather than repel. For a jaded, mannered, restless society, Rasputin was an exotic diversion.

At first, Rasputin walked carefully in this new world of the wealthy. He soon discovered, however, that to many of the women who thronged around him, his sensual side was as interesting as his spiritual nature. Rasputin responded quickly. His lusts flared up, his gestures became excited, his eyes and voice turned suggestive, lewd and insinuating. His first conquests were easy and those that followed even easier; talk of his amorous adventures only increased his mysterious reputation. Noble ladies, wives of officers on duty far away, actresses and women of lower classes sought the rough, humiliating caresses of the moujik. Making love to the unwashed peasant with his dirty beard and filthy hands was a new and thrilling sensation. “He had too many offers,” said Simanovich.

Rasputin made it easier for the ladies by preaching his personal doctrine of redemption: salvation is impossible unless one has been redeemed from sin, and true redemption cannot be achieved unless sin has been committed. In himself, Rasputin offered all three: sin, redemption and salvation. “Women,” says Fülöp-Miller, “found in Gregory Efimovich the fulfillment of two desires which had hitherto seemed irreconcilable, religious salvation and the satisfaction of carnal appetites.… As in the eyes of his disciples, Rasputin was a reincarnation of the Lord, intercourse with him, in particular, could not possibly be a sin; and these women found for the first time in their lives a pure happiness, untroubled by the gnawings of conscience.”

For some, bestowal of this supreme honor by Father Gregory was a matter for boasting, not only by the ladies but also by their husbands. “Would you be ready to accede to him?” an outsider once incredulously asked one of Rasputin’s disciples. “Of course. I have already belonged to him, and I am proud and happy to have done so,” the lady supposedly replied. “But you are married! What does your husband say to it?” “He considers it a very great honor. If Rasputin desires a woman, we all think it a blessing and distinction, our husbands as well as ourselves.”

Every day, numbers of admiring women came to Rasputin’s apartment to sit in his dining room, sip wine or tea, gossip and listen to the Father’s wisdom. Those who could not come telephoned tearful apologies. One frequent visitor, an opera singer, often rang up Rasputin simply to sing to him his favorite songs over the telephone. Taking the telephone, Rasputin danced around the room, holding the earpiece to his ear. At the table, Rasputin stroked the arms and hair of the women sitting next to him. Sometimes he put down his glass of Madeira and took a young girl on his lap. When he felt inspired, he rose before everyone and openly led his choice to the bedroom, a sanctum which his adoring disciples referred to as “The Holy of Holies.” Inside, if necessary, he whispered reassurance into the ear of his partner: “You think that I am polluting you, but I am not. I am purifying you.”

Giddy at his success, not knowing where to stop, Rasputin even made advances to Grand Duchess Olga. One evening after dinner, Olga had gone with her brother and Alexandra to Anna Vyrubova’s cottage. “Rasputin was there,” she wrote, “and seemed very pleased to meet me again, and when the hostess with Nicky and Alicky left the drawing room for a few moments, Rasputin got up, put his arm about my shoulders, and began stroking my arm. I moved away at once, saying nothing. I just got up and joined the others.…”

Not many days afterward, Anna Vyrubova arrived, flushed and disheveled, at Olga’s palace in town. She begged the Grand Duchess to receive Rasputin again, pleading, “Oh please, he wants to see you so much.” “I refused very curtly.… To the best of my knowledge Nicky put up with the man solely on account of the help he gave to Alexis and that, as I happen to know very well, was genuine enough.”

Although the moments were wholly innocent, Rasputin’s visits to the palace nurseries touched the Tsar’s young daughters with rumors of scandal. On the pretext of saying prayers with the Tsarevich and his sisters, Rasputin sometimes hung about their upstairs bedrooms after the girls had changed into their long white nightgowns. The girls’ governess, Mlle. Tiutcheva, was horrified to see a peasant staring at her charges and demanded that he be barred. As a result, Alexandra became angy not at Rasputin, but at Tiutcheva, who dared to question the saintliness of the “Man of God.” Nicholas, seeing the impropriety of Rasputin’s presence, intervened in the quarrel and instructed Rasputin to avoid his daughters’ rooms. Later, Tiutcheva was dismissed, and blamed her downfall on Rasputin’s hold over the Empress. Tiutcheva returned to Moscow, where her family had important connections and were especially close to Alexandra’s sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth. Busily spreading her story across Moscow, Tiutcheva at the same time implored the Grand Duchess to speak bluntly to her younger sister the Empress. Ella was more than willing; having herself entered into religious retreat, she regarded Rasputin as a blasphemous and lascivious impostor. At every opportunity she spoke, sometimes gently, sometimes bitterly, to Alexandra about the starets. Her efforts had no effect except to open a breach between the two sisters which, as time went on, became so wide that neither could touch the other.

By 1911, St. Petersburg was in an uproar over Rasputin. Not all the husbands were complaisant, nor did all the ladies of St. Petersburg enjoy having their buttons undone. The Montenegrin princesses, Grand Duchess Militsa and Grand Duchess Anastasia, closed their doors to their former protégé. Anastasia’s soldier-husband, Grand Duke Nicholas, swore “never to see the devil again.” The two Montenegrins even went to Tsarskoe Selo to report to the Empress their “sad discovery” about Gregory, but Alexandra received them coolly.

It was the Church which initiated the first formal investigation of Rasputin’s activities and carried the first official complaints to the Tsar. Bishop Theophan, the saintly Inspector of the Theological Academy, who had been impressed by Rasputin’s faith and had recommended him to the Empress, was the first to entertain doubts. When women who had given in to Rasputin began coming to him with their confessions, Theophan went to the Empress. Once he had been Alexandra’s confessor; now he advised her that something was fearfully wrong about the “Holy Man” he had recommended to her. Alexandra sent for the starets and questioned him. Rasputin affected surprise, innocence and humility. The result was that Theophan, a distinguished theologian, was transferred from the Theological Academy to become Bishop of the Crimea. “I have shut his trap,” gloated Rasputin in private.

Next, the Metropolitan Anthony called on the Tsar to discuss Rasputin. Nicholas replied that the private affairs of the Imperial family were no concern of the Church. “No, Sire,” the Metropolitan replied, “this is not merely a family affair, but the affair of all Russia. The Tsarevich is not only your son, but our future sovereign and belongs to all Russia.” Nicholas nodded and quietly ended the interview. But soon afterward, Anthony fell ill and died.

The single most damaging attack on Rasputin came from a flamboyant young zealot of a monk named Iliodor. Iliodor was even younger than Rasputin, but he had built a reputation as a fiery orator and crowds flocked to hear him whenever he spoke. Simply by telling the multitude that he wanted to build a great monastery (“Let one man bring a plank, let another bring a rusty nail”), he attracted thousands of volunteers who erected a vast spiritual retreat near Tsaritsyn [later Stalingrad, now Volgograd] on the banks of the Volga.

Austere in his behavior, Iliodor was fanatical in his beliefs. He preached strict adherence to the Orthodox faith and the absolute autocracy of the tsar. Yet alongside his extreme monarchism, he advocated a vague peasant communism. The tsar should rule, he said, but beneath the autocrat all other men should be brothers with equal rights and no distinctions of rank or class. As a result, Iliodor was as unpopular with government officials, local governors, aristocrats and the hierarchy of the Church as he was popular with the masses.

In Rasputin, Iliodor saw an ally. When Rasputin was first brought to him by Theophan, Iliodor welcomed the primitive religious fervor manifested by the starets. In 1909, Iliodor discovered Rasputin’s other face. He invited Rasputin to come with him to his spiritual retreat near Tsaritsyn. There, to Iliodor’s surprise, Rasputin responded to the respect and humility of the women they met by grabbing the prettiest and smacking their lips with kisses. From Tsaritsyn, the monk and the starets set out for Pokrovskoe, Rasputin’s home. On the train, Iliodor was even more dismayed when Rasputin, bragging about his past, boasted openly of his sexual exploits and jibed at Iliodor’s innocence. He gave a swaggering account of his relations with the Imperial family. The Tsar, said Rasputin, knelt before him and told him, “Gregory, you are Christ.” He boasted that he had kissed the Empress in her daughters’ rooms.

Once they had reached Pokrovskoe, Rasputin supported his boasts by showing Iliodor a collection of letters he had received from Alexandra and her children. He even gave several of these letters to Iliodor—or so Iliodor said—saying, “Take your choice. Only leave the Tsarevich’s letter. It’s the only one I have.” Three years later, portions of these letters from the Empress to Rasputin began appearing in public. They became the basic incriminating documents for the lurid charge that the Empress was Rasputin’s lover. Of them, the most damning was this:

My beloved, unforgettable teacher, redeemer and mentor! How tiresome it is without you! My soul is quiet and I relax only when you, my teacher, are sitting beside me. I kiss your hands and lean my head on your blessed shoulder. Oh how light, how light do I feel then. I only wish one thing: to fall asleep, to fall asleep, forever on your shoulders and in your arms. What happiness to feel your presence near me. Where are you? Where have you gone? Oh, I am so sad and my heart is longing.… Will you soon be again close to me? Come quickly, I am waiting for you and I am tormenting myself for you. I am asking for your holy blessing and I am kissing your blessed hands. I love you forever.

Yours,

M. [Mama]

Assuming for a moment that Alexandra wrote this letter to Rasputin, did it, as their enemies charged, prove that they were lovers? No responsible participant in the events of these years and no serious historian who subsequently has chronicled these events has accepted this charge. Sir Bernard Pares says of this letter, “Alexandra, it appears, had inadvisedly used some expressions which a cynical reader might interpret into an admission of personal attraction.” Pares was putting it too carefully. The fact is that Alexandra wrote to all of her intimate friends in this florid, emotional style. Almost all of these sentences could have been addressed to Anna Vyrubova or any one of a number of friends. It is equally possible that the letters were faked. Only Iliodor saw them, and his credentials as an objective source were thoroughly undermined by subsequent events.

Despite Iliodor’s surprise and disgust at what he saw and read in 1909, he and Rasputin remained friendly for another two years. He continued to urge Rasputin to change his ways. At the same time, Iliodor stoutly defended Rasputin when others attacked him. Then, in 1911, Rasputin attempted to seduce—and when that failed, to rape—a nun.

Hearing about it, Iliodor was sickened and enraged. Along with Bishop Hermogen of Saratov, he invited Rasputin into his room and confronted him with the story. “Is it true?” thundered Hermogen. Rasputin looked around and then mumbled, “It’s true, it’s true, it’s all true.” Hermogen, a powerful man, was beside himself. He hit Rasputin in the head with his fist and then beat him with a heavy wooden cross. “You are smashing our sacred vessels,” bellowed the outraged Bishop. Subdued, Rasputin was dragged into a little chapel, where Hermogen and Iliodor made him swear on an icon that he would leave women alone and that he would stay away from the Imperial family. Rasputin swore enthusiastically. The following day, Rasputin appeared before Iliodor, begging, “Save me! Save me!” Iliodor softened and took Rasputin with him to Hermogen. But the Bishop turned his back on the humbled starets, rejecting his pleas with the haughty words, “Never and nowhere.”

Rasputin recovered quickly from his beating and from his brush with abstinence. Within a few days, he was back at the palace, giving his version of the episode. Soon afterward, by Imperial order, Hermogen was sent to seclusion in a monastery. Iliodor was ordered into seclusion also, but he refused to submit. Instead, he wandered from place to place, bitterly and ever more hysterically denouncing Rasputin. The peasant “Holy Man” to whom he had extended his friendship, whom he had meant to use as a tool in purifying the Church and in steering the Russian people back to their historic values—this same unwashed, lewd, immoral peasant—had shattered his own bright dreams. The great career as an orator and prophet had tumbled into the dust. And the knave who had destroyed him walked freely in and out of the palace, had the ear of the Empress and could move bishops and prophets around like pieces on a chessboard. It was at this point, when Iliodor was in this mood, that the letters from Alexandra allegedly taken from Rasputin’s desk first appeared.

Iliodor surrendered himself and was imprisoned for several months in a monastery to await a trial. From his cell, Iliodor scribbled feverish letters to the Holy Synod: “You have bowed down to the Devil. My whole being is for holy vengeance against you. You have sold the glory of God, forgotten the friendship of Christ.… Oh, cheats, serpents, murderers of Christ … I will tear off your cloaks.… Traitors and renegades … You are all careerists; you despise the poor; you ride in carriages, proud and arrogant … you are not servants of the people, you put present-day prophets to the stake.… Godless anti-Christs, I will not be in spiritual communion with you.… You are animals fed with the people’s blood.”

The addressees retaliated by unfrocking Iliodor. Raging, he screamed, “I will not allow myself ever to be pardoned,” and renounced Orthodoxy. Uncertain what to do with himself, he considered becoming a shepherd and “borrowed sufficient money to buy a flock of fifty sheep.” But this idea seemed tame, and, instead, he decided to start a revolution. “It was my intention to start a revolution on October 6, 1913. I planned the assassination on that day of sixty lieutenant governors and forty bishops throughout Russia.… I chose a hundred men to execute this plan.” But the plan was uncovered by the police and Iliodor went into hiding. As a fugitive, he gave his blessing to the formation of an organization of women and girls, most of them wronged by Rasputin, which had as its sole purpose Father Gregory’s castration. One of the women, a pretty twenty-six-year-old former prostitute named Khina Gusseva whom Rasputin had used and then spurned, wished to go further and kill the starets. Iliodor pondered the thought, agreed, opened her blouse and hung a knife on a chain around her neck, instructing her, “With this knife, kill Grishka.”

Eventually, Iliodor slipped across the frontier into Finland disguised as a woman and began writing a book about himself and Rasputin. When his book was finished, Iliodor first offered it to the Empress for sixty thousand roubles. This piece of blackmail was rejected and the vengeful former monk then took his manuscript to an American publisher. Later, even he admitted that into the book he had put “a bit extra.”

Although he wielded great influence, Rasputin was not a frequent visitor at the Alexander Palace. He lived in St. Petersburg, and when he came to Tsarskoe Selo, it was usually to the little house of Anna Vyrubova. Avoiding the palace was not Rasputin’s idea. Rather, it represented a decision by the Imperial couple to observe a certain circumspection in their interviews with the controversial starets. The palace police saw everything. It was impossible even to creep up a back staircase without the event being noted and recorded; the following day, the news was all over St. Petersburg. In the later years, so rarely did Rasputin come that Gilliard never met him inside the palace. Baroness Buxhoeveden, who lived just down the hall from the young Grand Duchesses, never met him at all.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that she saw Rasputin infrequently and then under circumstances ideal for him, Alexandra refused to consider that there might be another side to her Man of God. “Saints are always calumniated,” she told Dr. Botkin. “He is hated because we love him.” The family despised the police who surrounded them day and night; they took it for granted that the police reports of Rasputin’s activities were fabrications. The Empress flatly refused to accept any hint of Rasputin’s debauchery. “They accuse Rasputin of kissing women, etc.,” she later wrote to the Tsar. “Read the apostles; they kissed everybody as a form of greeting.” Alexandra’s opinion was confirmed by the faithful Anna Vyrubova. “I went often to Rasputin’s lodging,” said Anna, “bringing messages from the Empress, usually referring to the health of Alexis.” But Anna saw nothing of which she did not devotedly approve. “Rasputin had no harem,” she insisted. “In fact, I cannot remotely imagine a woman of education and refinement being attracted to him in a personal way. I never knew of one being so attracted.”

Neither by temperament nor by experience was Anna Vyrubova equipped to judge the matter of physical attraction. Nevertheless, her innocent reports of Rasputin’s behavior were not the result of blindness or stupidity. When Anna was present—and her visits were always announced in advance—Rasputin’s behavior was rigidly correct. The ladies of his circle, knowing Anna’s importance to their hero, followed suit.

After the Revolution, Basil Shulgin, an intensely monarchist member of the Duma and one of the two men who, trying to preserve the monarchy, obtained the abdication of Nicholas II, analyzed Rasputin’s role: “Rasputin was a Janus.… To the Imperial family he had turned his face as a humble starets and, looking at it, the Empress cannot but be convinced that the spirit of God rests upon this man. And to the country he has turned the beastly, drunken unclean face of a bald satyr from Tobolsk. Here we have the key to it all. The country is indignant that such a man should be received under the Tsar’s roof. And under the roof there is bewilderment and a sense of bitter hurt. Why should they all be enraged? That a saintly man came to pray over the unhappy Heir, a desperately sick child whose least imprudent movement may end in death? So the Tsar and the Empress are hurt and indignant. Why should there be such a storm? The man has done nothing but good. Thus a messenger of death has placed himself between the throne and the nation.… And because of the man’s fateful duality, understood by neither [Tsar nor people], neither side can understand the other. So the Tsar and his people, however apart, are leading each other to the edge of the abyss.”

Pierre Gilliard was more succinct. “The fatal influence of that man [Rasputin] was the principal cause of death of those who thought to find in him their salvation.”