Rasputin's Shadow

53

Misha’s Journal

Petrograd

September 1916

Things are spiraling out of control, and I fear the worst.

And yet, it was all going so well.

The mystic peasant from Siberia was well entrenched as the royal couple’s irreplaceable healer, soothsayer, and stalwart. He was influencing virtually all of their major decisions. The empress was and remains his supreme protector and defender. Over the last few years, anyone who made threatening rumblings against him was swiftly removed from his position and neutralized.

That has all changed.

Madame Lokhtina is long gone. The poor woman was banished by her husband a few years ago after he found out about her scandalous dalliances with my master and stripped her of everything she owned. I hear this former beauty, once regarded as a beacon of St. Petersburg’s high society, now roams the back roads of Russia like an escapee from a lunatic asylum, begging for alms, barefoot and still in her filthy white dress, with a strap around her forehead on which the word “Hallelujah” is scribbled barely legibly.

There is no shortage of replacements for her. Rasputin is comfortably settled into his spacious new apartment on Gorokhovaya Street. And although he no longer needs to take his aristocratic beauties or his prostitutes to bathhouses or seedy hotels, he still cavorts openly with his coterie of female companions, causing his vilification to keep rising in intensity and in dangerousness.

He has gone from being the subject of hushed rumors to being paraded disparagingly across newspaper articles on a daily basis. The newspapers are obsessed by him. Only the sinking of the Titanic managed, briefly, to divert their attention from him. The press hounds are fascinated by stories of his incessant debauchery and revelry. There is even talk of rape, such as his having forced himself upon the heir’s nurse at the royal palace.

The nobility and the bourgeoisie are in an uproar. Because of the blind faith and unshakable devotion the tsarina and her doting husband extend to Rasputin, the people have lost all respect for the royal couple. There are even rumors-ill-founded, I would hope-that he has bedded the tsarina herself.

Much to my frustration, Rasputin doesn’t seem to care. While I toil away in secret at perfecting my device and exploring the extent of its powers, he spends his time seducing and partying with the gypsies. He parades his women without shame and flaunts his lecherous ways without apology while the tsar and tsarina reject any criticism of him and shut down any investigation that threatens to give credence to what they deem as nothing more than malicious lies or misinformed ramblings.

There is also a lot of contempt at Rasputin’s meddling in high political affairs. He is openly interfering, going so far as to dictate appointments at the highest level of government and in the Holy Synod.

And then there is his stance against war.

It first flared up when the Austro-Hungarian monarchs, backed by their German protectors, decided to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Russian bourgeoisie and the nobility were enraged and demanded war to defend their Slav brethren. The press was also calling for it. The military, eager for a chance to avenge their defeat in the Russo-Japanese war, wanted it. The tsar himself, educated in a military school and keen to endear himself to Russian society, was also on a war footing.

The tsarina, however, was against it. She hadn’t forgotten the bloody revolution that followed the defeat against the Japanese. She is half-German-the kaiser, Wilhelm II, is her uncle-which made her position even more difficult.

Rasputin stepped in to help. He was passionately against war. As a man of God, it was natural for him to be in favor of peace, but as the empress’s miracle worker, it became a mission at which he couldn’t fail.

He spoke to the tsar repeatedly, warning him of defeats and revolution. The tsar listened-and backed off. War was averted.

I was delighted by this, of course. It was a noble, glorious achievement. Others were not as pleased. In the corridors of power and in the salons, all of St. Petersburg was incensed at how an uneducated and degenerate peasant had blocked a just war and brought down humiliation on their great nation. Powerful voices rose up against Rasputin-first the prime minister, Stolypin, then the Church’s hierarchs, Feofan, Hermogen, and Iliodor.

Stolypin, infuriated by Rasputin’s inexorable influence over the royal couple, unleashed a relentless persecution campaign against him. He spoke out against him in the Duma. He got the newspapers to run vicious stories about his scandalous behavior. He had him followed by agents of the Okhrana secret police, making our meetings more difficult to arrange. The surveillance men even gave Rasputin’s women code names: Winter Woman, Dove, Owl, Bird, and so on. They were only too happy to leak their findings to the reporters who were on Rasputin’s trail.

I was greatly worried by these developments, but Rasputin was unperturbed.

“Do not worry, Misha,” he assured me. “He’ll be out of our hair before long.”

“But he’s the prime minister,” I replied.

“Yes,” Rasputin agreed, his tone flush with conviction. “Which is why the tsar will listen when I warn him that this man has seized too much power.”

And so it happened, as he had said it would. The insecure tsar did listen, and his self-esteem was immediately threatened. When Stolypin went to see him, armed with a thick dossier on Rasputin and demanding he be exiled, the tsar rejected the findings and told Stolypin his agents were too simple-minded to understand what they had witnessed. Rasputin’s true motives, he told his prime minister, were beyond their grasp. Then he threw the dossier into his fireplace.

Reports of Stolypin’s being reassigned to the Caucasus didn’t come to fruition. He was assassinated by a known leftist radical at the Kiev Opera House a month after his fiery meeting with the tsar. Rasputin was rumored to have had a hand in arranging the murder. A year earlier, I would have said that was a blatant lie. Today, I am no longer sure what to believe. I do know two things for certain: Rasputin was in Kiev on the day of the killing, and the tsar did put a stop to the investigation into his prime minister’s murder.

Stolypin’s death, and the rumors of Rasputin’s involvement, made things worse. Attacks rained down on him from all corners, including one that would prove far more vicious.

It all came to a head on a moonless night, that of the sixteenth of December. Rasputin told me his friend, the monk Iliodor, whom he’d met when we first arrived in St. Petersburg, would be picking him up and taking him to an evening gathering at the Yaroslav Monastery with Bishop Hermogen and a handful of his friends.

It all went horribly wrong from the moment he set foot in the cloister.

Rasputin told me they were barely inside and taking off their coats when one of the assembled guests, the publicist Rodyonov, started mocking him openly.

“Look at the starets’s humble rags,” he scoffed to the others. “What’s that fur coat worth? Two, two and a half thousand rubles? And that hat. It must be worth at least four hundred.”

“A true testament to self-denial,” Hermogen answered before leading them into the monastery’s reception room.

Rasputin, unsettled by their open taunts, took a seat. Hermogen launched into a demented tirade almost immediately.

“You are a godless scoundrel,” he lambasted Rasputin. “You have offended countless women and cuckolded their husbands. You’re even sleeping with the tsarina. Don’t deny it. We know you are.”

The others joined in, jabbing him angrily in the chest and shouting, “You are an agent of evil, peasant. You are an Antichrist.”

Rasputin was frozen in his chair, stunned and surprised by this unexpected outburst. Then the bishop grabbed Rasputin by his hair and started punching him savagely across his face. “In God’s name, I forbid you to touch any more women,” he barked at him. “And I forbid you to see the tsar or the tsarina. Do you understand me, you scum? I forbid it.” His blows kept raining down on Rasputin, who was too shocked to try to defend himself. “The rule of the tsars is sacred, and the Church will not sit back and allow you to destroy it. You will not set foot in the royal palace again, do you understand? Never again.”

Hermogen let go of the bloodied Rasputin and nodded to Rodyonov. The nobleman unsheathed his sabre. With its blade pressed against Rasputin’s neck, they forced him to swear on a big bronze cross that he would never set foot in the palace again, bashing him on the head with the cross as he made his oath.

I could not believe my eyes when I saw him bruised and battered like that. I have never seen him as shaken-and as enraged. He was livid with anger. He refused to see anyone until his wounds had healed, but he did dictate a telegram that I sent to the royal palace.

The tsar and the tsarina were furious. Not only had the bishop threatened the life of their special friend; he had insulted the tsarina by accusing her of committing adultery.

Hermogen and Iliodor were exiled from St. Petersburg, but they refused to leave. The tsar balked at removing them forcibly, not wishing to turn them into heroes. And so their sniping continued. Pressure was mounting against Rasputin from all sides. We needed a miracle.

True to his wily nature, Rasputin devised one.

IT HAPPENED IN AUTUMN, when the prince fell ill again.

The royal family were vacationing at their hunting reserve at Spala, in the Belovezh forests of Poland. The prince slipped in his bathroom and knocked his thigh. The injury caused him internal bleeding, which spread through his groin and developed into blood poisoning.

The secondary hemorrhages spread, and the young prince was gravely ill. The doctors gave up hope and told the tsarina to prepare for the worst. The royal couple were frantic and desperate. And this time, Rasputin was nowhere in sight. He was back at his home in Pokrovskoye, too far to attend to the tsarevich in the flesh.

I was in Spala, of course. With my device. Waiting.

We had planned everything to deal with such an eventuality. Rasputin had prepared me as well as he could, but there were many unknowns. I had felt a grave trepidation at what we were doing. We were placing the young heir in mortal danger.

“He will be fine,” Rasputin had assured me, his unendurable gaze anchoring his words in my consciousness. “You will see to that.”

I was too perturbed to mention the fear I felt for my own safety. I would, after all, be stalking the royals on their own grounds.

Rasputin had previously visited the castle on one of the royals’ hunting trips, and knew it well. With a primitive hand, he had sketched out a plan of its layout for me and pointed out the location of the nursery. It was on the first floor and had a large window, which would suit our purposes reasonably well.

I took the train to Spala, shadowing the royals. Once there, I acquainted myself with the clerk at the town’s telegraph office before venturing into the forest at dawn one morning to take stock of what might await me if I needed to act. It would not be easy. My device was rather bulky and difficult to carry, especially through the dense, overgrown forest. Bison and boar roamed the land, and I was not much of an adventurer. At least, I wasn’t until I met Rasputin. I think that has all changed.

Still, if anything did happen to the tsarevich when they were there, it was a golden opportunity. And when the empress sent Rasputin an urgent telegram, imploring him to save her son, I was ready to step in.

The next dawn, I ventured into the forest again. This time, I had my machine with me. I managed to reach the periphery of the castle undetected, and huddled under cover, behind some bushes. I set up my machine and directed it at the tsarevich’s bedroom, and activated it when I saw the messenger riding in with the mail pouch.

Rasputin had sent back a telegram from Pokrovskoye. In it, he told the tsarina, “God has heard your prayers. The little one will not die. Just tell your doctors to leave him alone.”

I crouched in the bushes for three days, shrouded by an unnerving quiet due to the protective wax pellets in my ears, I lived off the meager supplies I was able to carry with me, wary of the wildlife scurrying in the wilderness around me, hoping the guards wouldn’t spot me, hoping even more that my machine would be just as effective as it had been before without having Rasputin’s own healing powers to complement it.

At first, I could hear the young child’s wails of pain and his screams of “Mama, help me!”

But after the first few hours, the cries stopped.

Much to the astonishment of the doctors, the tsarevich soon recovered. And lived. Just as Rasputin had predicted.

He had cured the heir to the throne without even being there.

No one could ignore that miracle.

Rasputin was now truly untouchable.

RASPUTIN COULD NOW DO anything he pleased and was impervious to criticism. He strutted around the city in his leather boots and coats with splendid brocade lining and expensive silk shirts embroidered by the tsarina, brazenly reveling in his adoring circle of aristocratic beauties and prostitutes while openly steering the tsar and the tsarina’s affairs of state. Akilina, his secretary, was taking in piles of money from all the supplicants who rushed to his doorstep, asking him to exert his influence with the royals on their behalf. I now had the resources, and the peace of mind, to carry on with my work and perfect my device. I rented a new laboratory and was advancing in leaps and bounds. My mentor, Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, who had first discovered the magic I was exploring, would have been most proud.

The festive year celebrating the Romanov dynasty’s three hundred years on the throne came and went peacefully. And then the calamities starting raining down on us again.

I had just discovered a frightening potential for spreading the effect of my device using a piezoelectric transducer and a dynamo. The potential was truly terrifying-and it was then that two separate catastrophic events occurred on consecutive days, two assassinations that would affect the lives of countless millions and redraw the map of the continent.

In Sarajevo, on a Sunday in June of 1914, a young Serb murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. A monstrous war now seemed inevitable. As before, the tsar, the military, the old aristocracy, and the young bourgeoisie were all aching for battle. And as before, the tsarina didn’t want it. Rasputin intervened once again and sent the tsar several urgent missives, only this time, the dire prophesies of God’s emissary were rebuffed by the tsar. Even worse, Tsar Nicholas, now firmly on a war path, refused to see Rasputin and instructed him to go back to his village, “for the sake of social calm,” as he put it.

And it was there, on the very next day, in Pokrovskoye, that the mad woman knifed him.

I wasn’t with him, of course. I had to remain in St. Petersburg, in case the tsarevich fell ill again and needed our help.

“I was walking back from church when this disfigured beggar approached me, asking for help,” he told me. “I reached into my pocket to give her a coin, and the devil woman just pulled out a dagger through a slit in her shirt and stabbed me in the stomach while shouting, ‘Die, Antichrist, die!’ I pushed her away and ran, my mind not registering what she had done to me. She followed me, still brandishing her knife and yelling at me like a Cossack warrior. I felt my legs weaken and decided to turn and face her. I spotted a thick wooden stick by my feet and used it to beat her back until fellow villagers arrived and took her away.”

The woman was an ex-prostitute whose face had been ravaged by syphilis. She had no regrets and likened her attack to a holy duty, saying she had decided to kill him because he was a false prophet and an agent of the devil. Rasputin suspected she had been sent by one of his biggest enemies, the monk Iliodor, and I must say I agree with him on this. Regardless, her act would have consequences as dramatic and far-reaching as that of the assassin in Sarajevo. Her blade would incapacitate the one man in all of Russia who could have kept our great nation out of this savage war.

The nearest doctor was a six-hour ride away. Rasputin hovered between life and death for days. And when he finally recovered, after weeks of care, he was not the same.

The tsar ignored the telegrams Rasputin sent from his hospital bed, in which he implored him to avert the war. In his last plea, my master warned the emperor of “an immeasurable sea of tears” before concluding that “everything will drown in great bloodshed.” The tsar didn’t listen. Russia went to war, a war that would engulf the entire continent and beyond.

Rasputin was now a changed man. In constant pain from the attack, he took to heavy drinking-not just Madeira and Champagne, but vodka, and lots of it-and his character turned foul. He was now shamelessly taking vast amounts of money from all kinds of unsavory supplicants on whose behalf he intervened with the government. The chronicles of the police agents charged with his surveillance now referred to him as “The Dark One.” As his strength returned, the wanton debauchery resumed with a vengeance, now combined with drunken revelry and violence. And as the empire sank further and further into war, he sank with it.

He couldn’t speak out against the war when everyone seemed fervently delighted by the bloodletting. The tsar was away running the campaign, while, back at the palace, the tsarina needed constant uplifting prophesies to keep her spirits up. The public outcries against Rasputin across all of Petrograd-for that is what the capital is now called, St. Petersburg having been deemed too German-resumed with a new ferocity. He feared for his life, and he was plagued by doubt and disillusionment.

And that was when I made my biggest mistake.

I told him about the developments in my work. About how I had refined my device’s powers and greatly extended its range.

“Show me what it can do,” he said, a feral animus radiating out of his deep-set eyes.

I could not refuse.

AS I WRITE THIS, after our return from those most horrific of days in the Urals, I am lost as to what I should do.

The words of Rasputin, the ones that shook me to my very soul as we stood outside the doomed mine and contemplated the result of our cursed deed-they still haunt my every waking moment.

“How?” I remember asking him. “How does this monstrous crime that we’ve just committed ensure the salvation of our people?”

“They won’t listen to me anymore,” he said, his tone guttural but unusually coherent. “They want war. They want bloodletting. They think that is the righteous path that God wills. Well… if they want war, I’ll give them war. I’ll show them the true glory of savagery. We will ride to the front, you and I. And we’ll ride right up to the enemy’s lines and stand back and watch as they slaughter each other at my command. And when these fools see this, when they see the extent of my power… the enemy will beg for mercy, and the tsar will grant me anything to curry my favor.” He smiled and directed his mesmeric gaze into me. “He will even grant me the throne.”

I am lost in a maelstrom of torturous thoughts.

“Everything drowns in great bloodshed,” he had told the tsar in his warnings against the war. Now we are the ones doing the drowning.

I fear my old master has lost his way. He has fallen into a state of grave spiritual temptation. The purity of soul needed to prophesy and heal has turned into a dangerous gift now that he has succumbed to the Antichrist.

I have to do something to stop him. To save Russia.

I have to do something to save his soul.