To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin

^SIX ON THE BRINK

With the approach of midsummer in 1916, Sir George Buchanan’s struggle to keep Russia in the war was getting harder. Russia’s infrastructure was as hopelessly underdeveloped as ever and the haemorrhage of men, weaponry and equipment was disastrous. By mid-1916 Russia was calling up her thirteenth million.¹ Help had to come from the Allies if Russia were to keep fighting.

Traditionally, finance for Russia’s big projects had been raised in the City of London, but British financiers were in no position to help and money must be got from America, where the British had useful contacts. So, in the first week of June 1916, a few months after his first personal audience with the Tsar (‘I was summoned by an attendant in the livery of an 18th-century courier, wearing a flat hat with a huge bunch of red and yellow ostrich feathers on the left side’), Albert Stopford was cutting a deal. He noted in his diary:

Sazonov, the Foreign Minister, was tremendously useful to the British, for the Tsar was rarely willing to listen to Allied advice direct; he thought the British were much too pushy. Sir George ‘ventured to suggest’ change in a way that he resented and was forever nagging him to let the Duma make more decisions about which Ministers should be in charge. The French Ambassador was just as bad. Both despaired of the inadequacies of Russia as an ally, and privately recognised that these arose inevitably from a creaking political system which placed so much responsibility on the shoulders of one person – who might, as in this case, prove inadequate to bear it, and who was too stubborn to take their advice, preferring to listen to his wife.

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

Lloyd George recalled that on his return

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

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

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)

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:

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,

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

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:

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.