Rasputin's Shadow

27

Over in a run-down industrial park behind Webster Avenue in the Bronx, Sokolov stood in front of a lock-up single garage and looked around.

It was quiet. There was no one around. There rarely was. This was a place where people came for cheap storage, whether for cars or, more likely, for junk they usually forgot about. They didn’t visit often. Back when Sokolov had paid for his first rental-in cash, as he had done ever since-it had been less of a dump than it was now. Whoever owned the place hadn’t bothered to do much to it over the intervening twelve years. Maybe a quick lick of paint, once, without bothering to burn off previous layers or fill in the cracks. It suited Sokolov perfectly. He needed somewhere quiet, discreet, and cheap. Somewhere he could come and tinker without anyone noticing or asking too many questions.

He scanned left and right again, making sure there was no one around, then he unlocked the two large padlocks and rolled up the bolted aluminum door. He stepped inside and rolled it back down, and hit the light switch.

The white panel van was there, of course. It was a Ford Econoline, the refrigerated model with the bulky roof-mounted condenser. It was almost twenty years old and looked too tired for anyone to consider stealing. Which was exactly what Sokolov intended. The last thing he wanted was for someone to steal it and make off with the culmination of all his efforts, the end result of a lifetime of study and research.

The obsession that had taken over his life from the age of fourteen.

THE FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY COULDN’T stop thinking of his grandfather’s journals.

By this point, he’d read them several times. The story contained within their tattered pages was remarkable, and it fired up his imagination.

It also terrified him.

It scared him so much that he kept it to himself. He wasn’t going to share it with his father, who was rarely sober after sunset. He thought long and hard about sharing it with his brothers, particularly with Pavel, the third of the four boys and the one he was closest to. But he decided against it. Somehow, although it scared him, it also excited him. In a world of little-if any-possessions, it felt good to have something special, something no one else had or even knew about. Something he could call his own.

The more he reread it, the more he wanted to understand what it was and how it worked. But his grandfather had been very cryptic. The little he’d mentioned about what it actually was didn’t explain much at all. Sokolov understood the reason for this. His grandfather Misha didn’t want his discovery known. He didn’t want anyone else to be able to do what he’d done. He’d mentioned it repeatedly in his diary: his remorse, his horror, his desire to bury his secret forever. And he’d almost managed it. Sokolov had found the journals by pure luck, but his grandfather’s warnings had only served to stoke his curiosity.

It became his obsession. And it coincided with the fact that at fourteen, Leo Sokolov was about to complete his compulsory seven-year general education. Like his peers, his choices were dictated by the state. He could begin employment, go to a vocational school for manual labor, or try to enroll in a technicum-a specialized secondary school. Much against his father’s will, he chose the latter. It wouldn’t be easy, given the remoteness of where he lived, but Sokolov was determined and fought stubbornly until he managed to snare a place at an engineering technical school in Tula, fifteen miles away.

Once there, he threw himself into his studies. He demonstrated a curiosity and a fascination with science that greatly impressed his teachers. His appetite for physics and biology was ravenous. And in the highly centralized government-run educational system that was designed to feed the planned economy, nothing went unnoticed. Sokolov’s intelligence and his hunger for learning soon caught the attention of the regional education committee. Engineering was a priority for the Soviet Union, which concentrated its vocational training resources in areas such as aerospace and military technology, and Sokolov was soon offered a place at Leningrad University.

While advancing his studies in science, Sokolov quietly sought out everything there was to know about Rasputin, especially about the monk’s years in Petersburg, when he’d become a close confidant of the tsar and tsarina. Written information about that period wasn’t plentiful, and most of it was tainted by a propagandist approach, so Sokolov traveled the country whenever he could to try to get to the truth.

He started at the State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg, where he studied the records of the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Illegal Acts by Ministers and Other Responsible Persons of the Tsarist Regime, a commission that was set up in 1917, after the fall of the tsar. In particular, Sokolov was interested in the findings of its Thirteenth Section, the one concerned with understanding the activities of the “dark forces”-political jargon, back in 1917, for Rasputin, the tsarina, and those close to them-that were believed to be controlling the tsar.

The commission’s investigators held intensive interrogations of everyone in the tsar’s inner circle, most of whom were by then languishing in prison. Sokolov also read the reports of the investigators’ travels to Tobolsk, where Rasputin had spent his youth and where they’d interviewed his fellow villagers. All these investigations had been very thorough, but Sokolov knew the reports and transcripts weren’t completely reliable; they were the result of a political witch hunt, seeking to discredit the monk in order to further justify the uprising against the royal family.

But some of the reports would prove useful in other ways. Sokolov got hold of the testimonies of monks from distant Siberian monasteries, where Rasputin’s mysterious wandering had taken him and where his transformation had begun. He found references to the monastery at Verkhoturye, where his grandfather had first met Rasputin, but as much as he scoured the records for any mention of his grandfather, he found none.

Clearly, Rasputin had kept his friendship with Misha a secret.

The commission’s archive also held Rasputin’s unpublished diary, but Sokolov knew enough to not give it much attention. Rasputin was virtually illiterate, and this “dictated” diary was widely assumed to be a fake-one concocted by the playwright and science fiction author Alexei Tolstoy as part of an effort to further discredit tsarism and promote the Bolsheviks.

He pored over the reports of the secret police agents who had been assigned to watch Rasputin, but much to his frustration, he discovered that they were very incomplete. He learned that entire batches of the reports had been destroyed in a fire that burned down the tsarist secret police’s headquarters during the February Revolution, two months after Rasputin’s murder. Other files were destroyed by the police officials who had fraternized with Rasputin and had scrambled to keep any association with him out of sight after the fall of the tsar. Again, there was no mention of his grandfather. Sokolov knew from the diaries that his grandfather and Rasputin had a very close association, but the monk had managed to elude his watchers whenever they had met-which probably saved the life of Sokolov’s ancestor.

There was no record of Misha anywhere.

Sokolov also studied the testimony of Badmaev, a mysterious emchi-a Tibetan healer-at the service of the court. Badmaev was Rasputin’s friend, another supernatural healer in the tsarina’s orbit. Sokolov thought he might find something useful there, but again, it was not to be.

Eventually, Sokolov gave up and decided to focus on what he knew best: science. He committed himself to focusing on replicating his grandfather’s success, using the cryptic hints Misha had-perhaps inadvertently, perhaps out of hubris-scattered throughout the long and detailed text.

It would take him years to figure it out.