To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin

^FOUR THE SPIES WHO CAME INTO THE COLD

Robert H. Bruce Lockhart was a handsome rugger player with a weakness for dangerous love affairs. He was also a British consular officer with a better understanding of Russia’s troubles than most. He had been in Russia since 1912 and had learned to be wary of the political judgement of his compatriots. In particular, he wrote in 1932,

The extreme revolutionary surge in Russia by the end of 1916 was unstoppable, but very few of the British had yet recognised that Russia’s imperial system was too far gone to save. Part of the problem was the company they kept. Bruce Lockhart was pretty well alone among the British in taking the progressive intelligentsia seriously as a political force, and he was stationed in Moscow. He was also a Foreign Office employee. In Petrograd, the capital, the Ambassador and Consul worked for the Foreign Office; the Military Attaché worked for the War Office; and the British Intelligence Mission was ostensibly part of the War Office, paid for out of Foreign Office funds. While the functions of all three were different, all must keep a close eye on their particular spheres of interest.

In Petrograd, both diplomats and Secret Service men felt it necessary to cultivate contacts in the Duma but also, importantly, among the aristocracy. As newcomers, Sir Samuel Hoare and his wife were completely out of the social loop, and had a dull time of it in consequence. The Hon. Albert Stopford knew the conspirators and brought Dmitri Pavlovich and Buchanan together. But Stopford and Buchanan were older men, on a different wavelength to Dmitri and Yusupov.

Bruce Lockhart was referring to Lt Oswald Rayner, whose job disguised his intelligence function. Rayner, a good-looking young man, was a Smethwick draper’s son, the least likely recipient, one might suppose, of the glittering favours that Prince Yusupov could bestow. Yet at twenty-seven he had been taken up by the inner circle of gilded youth. He had reached this position by his own intellect, industry, charm and great good fortune.

He had been born in November 1888 into modest circumstances, and would in due course have five younger brothers and sisters. At eleven he obtained a scholarship to King Edward’s School, then located in New Street, Birmingham.³ The boy absorbed education like blotting paper, but the son of a draper with six children could go only so far before lack of money would dictate that he go out in the world and obtain employment; and we know from correspondence that the family was in financial difficulties in the early years of the century.⁴ Rayner was good at languages, and when he left school he was fortunate enough to obtain a position as an English teacher at an establishment run by a Mr Ölquist in Helsinki. In Finland (which was then annexed to Russia) he would meet a Finnish couple whose generosity would change his life forever. In February 1907, when he was eighteen, he wrote home delightedly:

Thanks to this kind couple, Oswald Rayner was already soaring away from Smethwick. By April he had moved into the home of Mrs Sinebrichov, whom he described simply as a widow, and ‘Mrs Donner’s mother’. The Sinebrichov family had been providing Helsinki with fine port for over eighty years; in fact, they owned the monopoly on brewing in the city. They had amassed a superb collection of Old Masters and furniture, which was presented to the nation when Finland regained its independence after the First World War. Maybe Rayner was dining off Sèvres porcelain every night or maybe he wasn’t, but in any case he had flown so high that, sadly, his parents could no longer be expected to understand the social stratosphere he was living in. ‘There has not really… been anything extraordinary to write about – a constant round of dinners, and suppers, and clubs, and private entertainments, and parties of all descriptions…’. He gave an account, which was not intended to dazzle but could not fail to, of the lives of those with whom he was now associating.

He was now part of a circle that included ‘Consul Cooke’, and Count Sparre and his wife. Count Louis Sparre was a gifted and famous Swedish artist who had trained as a painter in Paris. He lived in Finland for nearly twenty years and married a Finn. In the last decade he had been a pioneer of Finnish industrial art and design; he had even founded a factory to produce Art Nouveau furniture and other pieces.

Oswald Rayner loved his family, but he would never again live in a back-to-back terraced house with a draper’s shop in the front room. At Oxford he would study Modern Languages, and entered the university in October 1907, graduating with Honours in 1910. By that time Prince Felix Yusupov was already at University College, where he occupied rooms on the ground floor overlooking the street – rooms traditionally known, according to the Master, as ‘the Club’, no matter who lived there. It was here in 1909, through a mutual friend, Eric Hamilton (later Bishop of Salisbury and Dean of Windsor), that Oswald Rayner met Felix Yusupov. The three scholars shared a mutual love of languages and would remain close friends for the rest of their lives. Indeed, Rayner would later name his only son ‘John Felix Hamilton Rayner’ as a testament to his two closest friends.⁷

After university, Rayner applied for a post with the Times newspaper and, in November 1910, was duly appointed Second Assistant Correspondent in the Paris office at a salary of £150 per year.⁸

The following year he moved back to London and embarked on a career in elevated government circles as Private Secretary to Sir Herbert Samuel, Asquith’s Postmaster General. Samuel and Rayner sailed together through choppy waters when, in 1912, Sir Herbert, along with Sir Rufus Isaacs and David Lloyd George, was accused by Belloc and Chesterton of insider trading in Marconi shares (an enquiry later exonerated all three, although there can be little doubt that they successfully conspired to frustrate the process and conceal truth from Parliament). It was during the course of this long and drawn-out episode that Rayner made the acquaintance of Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, with whom he stayed in close contact for at least a decade afterwards.

Throughout his employment with Sir Herbert, Rayner was reading for the Bar. He was admitted with Honours in the Bar finals of 1914, and when the war began he joined the Officer Training Corps of the Inns of Court in September 1914. The Corps had immediately been embodied as a territorial force on the outbreak of war and had initiated a crash training programme for those seeking commissions. Rayner was among twenty-one new recruits to a company under Lt Reggie Trench, who initially described them as ‘an awful rabble’. They were immediately sent off to Richmond Park to begin the basic training that would ultimately lead most of them to service regiments on the Western Front. Rayner appears to have been an exception. In October 1914, a little over a month after he joined the Corps, he was commissioned as Second Lieutenant, Interpreter. He was fluent in French, German, Russian and Swedish. It is generally known that Col Francis Errington, the Corps CO, actively resisted attempts by junior officers to transfer out. However, within three months Rayner had been seconded to ‘special duties’ in the Intelligence Department of the War Office.

Quite how and why, in January of 1915, he was given this secondment can only be the subject of speculation. Whether certain linguists like Rayner were simply identified by the War Office and transferred accordingly, or whether he had a sponsor who guided him in the direction of intelligence work, is unclear. He certainly had a number of influential political contacts in Whitehall through his employment with Sir Herbert Samuel, and as we shall see later on, he would not have been the first person to lobby for such a post.

It was while working for the War Office in 1915 that Rayner made the brief acquaintance of another junior officer, one Lt George Hill, who had initially gone to Ypres on the Western Front in a Canadian infantry battalion attached to the Manchester Regiment. Following a serious injury while on a mission in No Man’s Land, the multi-lingual Hill had then been seconded to the War Office’s Intelligence Department. Both Hill and Rayner, like other new recruits to the department, had a four-week course on intelligence work which covered shadowing, methods of using invisible inks, code and cipher systems and lock-picking among other skills. While their time together in London was to be brief, their paths would cross again some three years later when they would be among the first agents recruited to the new Stockholm SIS station run by Major John Scale.

Towards the end of 1915 Hill was sent to Greece, where he was to work with agents behind enemy lines. Not long after his departure, Rayner was also given his first intelligence posting abroad. In November of 1915 he and Major Vere Benet were assigned to the British Intelligence Mission in Petrograd, where they were to take up responsibility for censorship. In a memo to Sir Samuel Hoare written shortly after Rasputin’s murder, Vere Benet discusses the nature of their censorship responsibilities and describes what ‘Rayner and I have done, are doing and still hope to do’:

Censorship does not mean reading private correspondence in the spirit of inquisitive curiosity, but is rather a branch of military intelligence, which if rightly used, is of great assistance to the Allies.

Despite his claim to have ‘avoided all interference in purely Russian affairs’, it very much depends on how one interprets the words ‘avoided’ and ‘interference’. Benet and Rayner’s definition seems to have meant intercepting Russian communications of all kinds on a grand scale and, when they felt so inclined, sharing some of them with their Russian counterparts without playing any active role in what ensued. The report is also a very firm confirmation of the fact that very little news or information was changing hands between friends and foes alike in Petrograd without Benet and Rayner being in the know. Benet himself states elsewhere in the memo that he has ‘read, censored and made notes on some 28, 000 telegrams since April 1916’.

In wartime the Russian Imperial General Staff gave over part of their offices to the French and British Intelligence Missions. They were housed with various Russian government and police departments in a semi-circular sweep of offices, pierced by an arch over a busy road, overlooking the square in front of the Winter Palace. Almost all the British contingent spoke Russian fluently. Some, like Rayner, were censors. Others were engaged in identifying enemy units on the Russian front. This did not involve camouflage and binoculars. It was a desk job, usually accomplished by piecing together whatever snippets of news reached them from other theatres of war and working out which Germans the Russians must be fighting by a process of elimination.

Samuel Hoare, who had a nice eye for detail, wrote a wry account of what he found when he arrived at the Mission in the spring of 1916.

Inevitably, the two crises were linked, the galosh having been left to stew in the samovar for several days. Office life, with its hourly glasses of sugar-laden tea, crawled by at a sluggish pace. There were time-wasting formalities when Russians visited the British office and vice versa; according to Russian military protocol, all personnel had to shake hands with everyone in the room on arrival and departure, and must wear swords at all times. The system was almost paralysed by this kind of thing, not to mention other imperatives to stop work.

Unsurprisingly, co-operation, indeed contact, through work was not so easy to achieve. Those members of the British Mission who already had Russian friends in Petrograd turned to them as a relief from life at the office. Rayner, of course, knew the second richest man in Russia, and it was not long before he and Yusupov renewed their acquaintance.

Yusupov was immensely generous, as only a man could be whose ancestors had been accumulating palaces, furniture, paintings, jewels, serfs, animals, factories, steppes, coastlines and oil fields since the founding of the family by a nephew of Mahomet; and like his great friend Dmitri Pavlovich, he was a great and enthusiastic anglophile. After his first year at Oxford he had invited Eric Hamilton to visit Russia as his guest. Hamilton, a friend of Rayner’s, was quite overwhelmed by the wealth of his host, and his kindness too. He would not have seen the more dissipated side of Yusupov. Oswald Rayner, who probably did, could hardly fail to be dazzled and amused, though it is unlikely that he went native and began to see himself as a Petrograd socialite rather than a British intelligence officer.

Rayner was not alone in the British Intelligence Mission in having friends in high places. Captain Stephen Alley, who shared a Petrograd apartment with Rayner and Vere Benet on the top floor of the Swedish Church Building, had been born forty years ago in the Krivo, one of the Yusupov Palaces in Moscow. His father, John Alley, was an engineer employed in Russian railway construction. Although he had begun life in conditions of privilege by comparison with Rayner, he had wider experience. Many years later he made notes about his early life.

Prince Serge Obolenski was a great friend of Felix Yusupov.

Alley was fifteen when he arrived in England in the summer or autumn of 1891. It was decided that he would be placed as an apprentice with Dewrance & Co., a London firm, and that his academic education would continue by means of evening classes at King’s College.

It would, of course, have been possible to get a fifteen-yearold into a private school or even a crammer. Either because of business misfortune or illness, things at home in Russia may have been on a financial downturn when Stephen arrived in Britain.

But in 1891 he registered at King’s College to study maths, mechanics, Junior French and Junior German (most likely the lessons at Fiedler’s had been conducted in Russian).¹⁰ At the time he was lodging at 39 Paulet Road, Camberwell; but for most of the next three years he would stay with a Captain and Mrs Moody in Blackheath.

He was then sent to Scotland to further his apprenticeship in the works of his uncle (also called Stephen) at Polmadie, an industrial suburb of Glasgow which made more locomotives for export than anywhere else in the world. Alley and McLellan at Polmadie were marine engineers and enthusiastic exporters (during the First World War they would manufacture barges for neutral countries).¹¹ In 1894 he enrolled at the University of Glasgow to study analytical chemistry, mathematics and English literature. He was then living at 2 Park Terrace, Ayr and his father was still alive.¹² He remained for a year, attending evening classes, and did not graduate, but accepted a job in London representing Alley and McLellan in their offices at 28 Victoria Street. ‘My uncle Stephen put me up for the St Stephen’s Club.’ This was on the corner of Bridge Street and the Embankment, between the Houses of Parliament and Scotland Yard, and the members tended to be civil engineers (from their professional institution a hundred yards away) or Conservative politicians; Disraeli had been a founding father. At home in Russia there seems to have been some family upheaval, for the 1901 census shows that Stephen’s mother, a British subject who had, like him, been born in Russia, was widowed and had come to live with her son in Greenwich.

The firm in Glasgow was also undergoing great changes at the end of the century. In 1898 his uncle Stephen of Alley and McLellan died, and his son, Stephen’s cousin Stephen Evans Alley (who was only twenty-six), took over his share of the business. McLellan retired in 1903 and Stephen Evans Alley absorbed a rival firm, starting to develop the Sentinel Steam Wagon in Glasgow: it would eventually be used in road vehicles as well as railway locomotives.

With the new regime came the inevitable family dispute.

He also joined the Surrey Imperial Yeomanry, whose ‘A’ Squadron was conveniently close to Victoria Street in Pimlico. The following year, with the Russo-Japanese War in progress, he translated the Japanese sappers’ secret manual (obtained in Russian) into English for the War Office.

But there were business problems.

In 1910 he went to Russia for three years to help build the first heavy oil pipeline to the Black Sea. This was the period of the Caspian oil boom; the Nobels and the Rothschilds were backing the Russian endeavour to transport oil out of Baku, then part of the Tsar’s empire. Huge fields lay beneath the Caucasus, and Russian oil transported by Shell already accounted for about a third of the world’s production.

On the outbreak of war in 1914, having the rare advantage of being truly bilingual, Alley was recruited by the Military Intelligence Department and sent to Petrograd. On a brief period back in London on leave, he attended a Secret Service course in Russell Square where he was ‘taught the art of counter-espionage and many other things’ by former Scotland Yard Superintendent William Melville, by then MI5’s Chief Detective. Back in Petrograd as part of the British Intelligence Mission, he:

At the outbreak of war Sir Samuel Hoare was a Conservative MP. He later recalled that in August 1914 he knew nothing of military matters and had no interest in them:

Although initially commissioned in the (territorial) Norfolk Yeomanry, he had, at the end of 1914, been declared unfit for active service and faced the prospect of being invalided out of the army. During 1915 he was running a recruitment office in Norwich Cattle Market, growing increasing restive and depressed at his misfortune. He therefore sought to pull political strings and find himself a job on ‘one of the remoter fronts where an Englishman might still be required’. In February 1916 a friend at the War Office told him of a possible post in Petrograd. After taking a course of Russian lessons in Norwich, Hoare arranged, through his friends and contacts in government circles, an interview with ‘C’, Captain Mansfield Cumming, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service:

The job firstly involved going out to Petrograd to review the working of the British Intelligence Mission there, which was then being run by Major C.J.M. Thornhill, and secondly to assess the effectiveness of the Russian blockade on trade with Germany. After undertaking the usual intelligence course, Hoare left London for Russia in March 1916 and eagerly set about his task. Although his verdict on Thornhill’s stewardship of the Mission was hardly a flattering one, it seems clear that he was completely unprepared for the inevitable consequences that would follow C’s receipt of his report. Not only did C decide to dismiss Thornhill as Head of the Mission, he chose Hoare to succeed him, granting him the rank of temporary lieutenant-colonel in recognition of his new posting.

Hoare’s appointment clearly created friction within the Intelligence Mission. It would seem that many of the officers under his command not only resented the appointment of a man who was seen as being responsible for the removal of the universally popular Thornhill, but more to the point was perceived as a politician with neither the military nor the intelligence expertise for the job in hand.

Alley, Thornhill’s second in command, was in many ways the obvious person to step into his shoes, but he was overlooked on this occasion, although he was to remain as deputy to Hoare. Perhaps he was considered rather a loose cannon. He had certainly offended the Ambassador, as a terse note dated 15 March 1915 indicates. It is an explanation, point by point, to a third party of an internal row. (It may well be, in view of the style, that the third party was C in England; it reads like a telegram.) He and a Captain Simpson had been hauled over the coals by Sir George Buchanan one Friday afternoon. ‘We were both rather hurt unsympathetic attitude which however caused us show extra deference. Ambassador requested me bring copy my instructions certain hour Saturday afternoon.’ He goes on:

If Alley was in any way put out by Hoare’s appointment, he never showed it. In fact, in another sense, the newcomer’s appointment was tantamount to giving him a free rein, because Hoare was not worldly enough to perceive the subtleties of which some of his staff were capable.

Major Stephen J. Alley MC, as he later became, gets just one mention in Hoare’s account of his year in Petrograd. Sir Samuel and Lady Hoare had a female cook who went berserk in their flat and held up Sir Samuel’s soldier-servant at knifepoint. Hoare was bedridden, at the time, with a fever. (Never a well man, he would live to be seventy-nine.) The Hoares gave the cook notice, but she refused to leave, as under wartime regulations she was entitled to do. They must get rid of her, but could only shudder and discuss legal action until Stephen Alley introduced a visitor: the local Police Commandant. The policeman, who in the nature of his work had grasped the principle of direct action, unceremoniously booted her out of the back door in return for a twenty-rouble note. Local understanding had its uses.

Alley was a military man, not a socialite, but he understood the Russian ruling class because he had known them since he was born. Bruce Lockhart would probably have said he was ‘incapable of forming a reliable political judgement’, but his upbringing and experience of work in Russia would have helped him to recognise the disaster that Russia’s war effort was fast becoming. Even Hoare, whose local knowledge was so much more superficial, could see the problems of social injustice and failing morale that had been intensifying since the war began. And even Hoare heard the stories of dark forces around the imperial household, misguiding them in the direction of defeat.

The Tsar and Tsarina believed ‘the people’ were fired with personal loyalty to them – naturally, for were not the Romanovs rulers by divine right? The Tsar believed so, and this self-righteousness was at once his only strength and his greatest weakness. With Western Europe becoming increasingly secular, Russia – and the imperial couple in particular – clung to the medieval religious outlook of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its political expression was feudal. The Tsar, not by nature a tyrant, had been brought up to believe that the vast mass of his subjects were a resource, like his land and rivers and mines, to be used for the benefit of Russia. And as his wife said ‘The Tsar is Russia’.¹⁶ The peasants were out there like fish in the sea. If men were lost in war, there were always more men, and in the Tsar’s mind they so loved the monarchy and all it stood for that they would feel honoured to serve.

He persisted as far as he could in ignoring change. Perhaps change was easy to ignore because it had been so very slow. The serfs had been liberated in the nineteenth century. There had been some land reform. Soldiers and sailors had mutinied after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, and revolution had threatened to spread; in October of that year the Tsar had been forced to grant Russia a constitution in order to pre-empt it. A constitution meant an elected government, the bi-cameral Duma. That had been instituted over a decade ago. But there was no universal suffrage and ministers were appointed by the Tsar. To a great extent government still operated by petition and dispensation, like a tribal society in which petitioners must queue for days to ask favours of a potentate.

Rasputin understood the system. He was the arch-fixer, and when, from 1915 onwards, the Tsar was at the Stavka, far from the capital, it was Rasputin, in his stuffy apartment in Gorokhovaya Street, whom people would queue to see, and Rasputin who would listen, and scrawl a note to whoever could give them what they wanted.

That the Duma had been emasculated, and that the workers were discontented and always striking, that there was a new urban middle class they did not understand at all and that soldiers at the front were deserting in droves, did not shake the imperial couple in their belief that the Tsar knew best. The Tsar’s reaction to constructive criticism was not to listen or even to confront but to shut out challengers; to send them out of the room as would a vexed schoolmaster. Right-wing aristocrats would have had him do a lot worse, but he was temperamentally inclined to avoid confrontation.

Still worse, he was impressionable. Orders were issued and countermanded, ministers arrived and departed, with disconcerting frequency, as new arguments won him over.

Back in 1905 only Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaivich, the most famous of Tsar Nicholas’s uncles, had been able to persuade him to sign the October Manifesto and grant a constitution. The Grand Duke was older, more belligerent, and a lot taller; he was six feet six, and his physical presence alone carried authority. And the soldiers respected him, so the Tsar had made him Supreme Commander of the Russian Armies at the start of hostilities in August 1914.

Russia had been bound by treaty to join France and Britain and its old enemy Japan (the Allies) in fighting the expansionist Germans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later, the Turks (the Central Powers).¹⁸ So the Tsar had had to go to war; a Romanov could not break his word. Unfortunately, Russia was unprepared for war in any respect other than manpower. They began with a massive 102 regular land divisions (each of between 12,000 and 20,000 men), where the British began with six. At the very beginning Grand Duke Nikolai, with 1.6 million men at his disposal, sent several divisions to East Prussia, thus gallantly diverting German forces from France and Belgium. The German army was better supplied and vastly better prepared for war than the Russian rabble, and although Russia probably saved the British and French from an ignominious rout, the Russians were easily outmanoeuvred, and tens of thousands killed. This was the battle of Tannenberg, and a great deal of outmoded but useful matériel was gained from it by the Germans.

Before the end of 1914 Turkey had joined the Central Powers. So in 1915, besides trying to defend its western borders, Russia had to prevent Turkey from grabbing the oil fields of Azerbaijan or shoving Russia out of the way right across Central Asia and sneaking into British India. (Persia remained nominally neutral, but unfriendly.) At Grand Duke Nikolai’s request, the British and French deflected Turkish aggression by opening the Dardanelles campaign, which failed.

The Russians were beaten steadily backwards in the west. Morale sank as the German front advanced east along a line approaching Riga in the north, and south to Czernowitz on the border with Romania. Around 750,000 Russians were captured in the summer of 1915 alone. Lines of defence simply crumbled. In Petrograd, Stopford confided to his diary:

At Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar wrung his hands and did nothing. He and his family were self-contained to the point of isolation. From the Tsarina, he received a constant chiding stream of advice, usually presented as the thoughts and insights of their spiritual advisor, Rasputin. Society, liberal and otherwise, was appalled. Rasputin helpfully offered to come to the Stavka to give Grand Duke Nikolai the benefit of his wisdom. He got a telegram by return.

It was never a good idea to offend Rasputin. Already the Tsarina could not invite her beloved advisor to the Alexander Palace, because her husband knew that Uncle Nikolai would find out about it and kick up a row; but this was the final straw. On 28 August 1915, Albert Stopford, dining with the usual clutch of Grand Dukes, heard that Nikolai Nikolaivich was likely to be relieved of his command.²⁰ He informed Buchanan on 1 September.

On 5 September 1915 the news broke decisively: the Tsar in person was to take over as Supreme Commander. Grand Duchess Vladimir, rushing to her palace with this information, was late for dinner. (‘No Romanov is ever late for dinner,’ commented Stopford, appalled.) Forty minutes after her delayed arrival, suppressing his pique and ‘eating my lukewarm potage St-Germain’²¹ among an assortment of Romanovs, he found them dreadfully despondent. Unlike the Tsar, many of these nobles understood only too well the cost of military mistakes. They had seen the wrecked lives of the poor at first hand and they feared an uprising that might threaten the survival of the monarchy. They were aware of the hostile intelligentsia, whose criticisms they abhorred as inspired by alien ideas. Also, they could feel an icy blast from the German approach in the west, and they did not trust the soldiers, sailors or poorly fed people in the streets to cling to the Allied cause.

A separate peace, the British estimated, would release 350,000 German soldiers to fight on the Western Front: it would mean almost inevitable defeat. Refusing to submit to despair, Sir George Buchanan did his best to make the Tsarina reconsider the Tsar’s position.

Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaivich was despatched to defend Russia from the Turks in the Caucasus. Tsar Nicholas gritted his teeth and left Tsarskoye Selo to run the war from the Stavka at Moghilev. This, while several hundred miles from any front line, was distant from Petrograd and people said that Rasputin had got the Tsar out of the way in order to better influence policy through the Tsarina. The Tsarina showed Rasputin the maps and plans that her weak little husband had showed her; it was tantamount to treason. In intimate suppers in palaces and restaurants all over the capital and beyond, Grand Dukes and Duchesses began to talk about direct action.

Nothing came of it, perhaps because at first things did not seem to be turning out too badly. In October of 1915 Grand Duchess Vladimir volunteered brighter news. Stopford wrote home that she

But information was not enough. Tsar Nicholas was incapable of taking focused, decisive action without getting the go-ahead from his wife. He did have some strategic and logistic understanding, because he and his family between them controlled most of the country’s resources and knew how much this war was costing to run. He now knew that, for Russian commanders at the front, getting munitions was like pulling teeth.

In November of 1915 the Tsar met Buchanan, and

David Lloyd George, the energetic Minister of Munitions, was ensuring that Britain’s manufacture and supply of arms was at last cranking into top gear. He was all for supporting the Russians by sending guns and tanks but clearly recognised that this was going to be of minimal effect unless the political paralysis that was engulfing Russia was addressed. It is clear from Lloyd George’s papers that he was coming to the view that unless Russia’s internal crisis was resolved the outlook was bleak, not only for Russia herself but for Britain and France, who would be left to stand alone in the event of a Russian collapse. It is also clear that Lloyd George was not relying totally on official channels to keep him informed of news and developments in Russia. Days after Buchanan’s audience with the Tsar, he received a personal letter from Sir Ian Malcolm, the Conservative MP for Croydon, who was at the time in Petrograd on an unofficial fact-finding mission. Staying at the Astoria Hotel, Malcolm made his views clear to Lloyd George in no uncertain terms:

Back in Russia, Buchanan was experiencing impatience with what was starting to look like high-level sabotage by the politicians who had paid Rasputin to get them their jobs. Sturmer, for instance, a placeman of Rasputin’s and known German sympathiser, was in charge of the Russian Ministry of Ways and Communications, which included railways. The railway between Petrograd and Alexandrovsk (Murmansk, in winter the only ice-free port) was imperative for the distribution of munitions and supplies but was taking forever to complete. Time and again, the Tsarina and Rasputin would persuade the Tsar to put someone useless in charge of an important government department, only to have the Allies get frustrated by inadequate Russian performance and insist that this person be removed. The Tsar would profess agreement with everything but usually he did nothing. Both he and his wife had a financial interest in the cosy relationship with Rasputin.

It seems barely credible that such a fabulously wealthy Romanov should take money in return for favours, but this is what appears to have been going on. The Extraordinary Commission that examined the death of Rasputin during the spring and summer of 1917 took depositions from Vyrubova and scores of others, and wanted to know what had become of Rasputin’s money. Had there been half a dozen wads of cash under the bed, they could have been stolen. But over recent years hundreds of thousands of roubles had been passed to him in exchange for favours. Had Vyrubova received money from him? She pleaded poverty, but how had she paid for a hospital and a church at Tsarskoye Selo? She said that she had used 20,000 roubles of her 100,000-rouble insurance payout from a railway accident. This was an unconvincingly small sum and she knew it. Gradually, another story emerged. The money from petitioners was apportioned, a small cut to Rasputin, some to Vyrubova and the Infirmary, and the rest to ‘the Empress’s institutions’. At one point the going rate was 1,000 roubles.

Weighed down by so much responsibility and so little power, the Tsar sank into an intermittent mild depression. His apathy was often remarked upon. When he was not doing what his wife told him to, he was said to exist in a kind of torpor. People said he was drunk or drugged, probably by Badmaëv (see chapter 5) – but given the common reliance on opiates in those years, he was probably getting whatever he wanted from the family medical advisor Dr Botkin.

He had no trusted, supportive friends at all. He took the Tsarevich to Moghilev for company. He told the Tsarina that he didn’t want the boy to be over protected and fearful of grown-up life, as he had been. The little boy, who was twelve, and delicate, and always got his own way, was allowed to wear a specially made Cossack uniform. They were happy there, away from the women and the dark forces that enveloped the court.