FIVE DARK FORCES

Not a single important event at the front was decided without a preliminary conference with the starets. From Tsarskoye Selo instructions were given to General Headquarters [the Stavka] on the direct telephone line. The Empress insisted on being kept fully informed by the Emperor on the military and political situation. On receiving this information, sometimes secret and of the utmost importance, she would send for Rasputin, and confer with him.1

How on earth had he done it? The Tsarina taking advice from a peasant? To the aristocrats of imperial Russia, it was as if she was taking advice from a chimpanzee.

For several years before his death, any outright reference to ‘Our Friend’, as the Tsarina called Rasputin, in the public press was forbidden; the generally understood code in subversive articles was ‘dark forces’. This only served to increase his mystique. When people happened to see him they stared, fascinated. Meriel Buchanan, the Ambassador’s young daughter, spotted Rasputin in April 1916 as she waited to cross a busy Petrograd street. Along bowled an isvostchik with bright green reins, drawn by a shaggy white horse, carrying Rasputin –

a tall black-bearded man with a fur cap drawn down over long straggling hair, a bright blue blouse and long high-boots showing under his fur-trimmed overcoat.2

She was describing, perhaps unconsciously, the costume he died in. Like everyone else, she mentioned his unusually pale, deep-set, staring eyes. She was not a careless writer, but about Rasputin she used the words ‘compelling’ and ‘repellent’ on the same page, which is significant in itself. His sexual attractiveness increased the more demonised he became.

Sir Paul Dukes, then a music student in Petrograd, shared a flat with Gibbes, the Tsarevich’s English tutor, who told him that, if he cared to, he could see Rasputin on the station platform bound for Tsarskoye on a certain day (Rasputin was usually guarded, but on this day apparently wasn’t). Dukes went along out of curiosity, and was not impressed by the man’s scruffy appearance and ‘rat-like’ eyes. A girlfriend of his had once shared a carriage with Rasputin, only to be lunged at mid-journey; she slapped his face and got out. The same thing had happened to her cousin.

Rasputin was born some 1,600 miles from what was then called St Petersburg, in the village of Pokrovskoe in western Siberia. The village was made up of several streets of spacious one-or two-storey wooden houses, with framed windows and carved, painted beams. It was very much an ordinary village, more prosperous perhaps and more lively than most since it was on both the road and the river. In 1915, the Petrograd newspaper Novoe Vremya, in an anti-Rasputin article, described Pokrovskoe as a poor village, a wretched foggy place, remote and wild, inhabited by Siberian zhigani or rogues. 3

Grigori Rasputin was the second son of Anna Egorovna and Efim Aklovlevich Rasputin, a carter and farmer. Maria Rasputina gave her father’s date of birth as 23 January 1871.4 By the pre-revolutionary Julian calendar, this date corresponds to 10 January. Rasputin’s exact date of birth has been an unresolved issue for over a century. Rasputin biographers have given a variety of dates ranging from the late 1860s through to the 1870s.5

During Soviet times, encyclopedias and reference books gave Rasputin’s date of birth as 1864/65. Contrary to the generally accepted view that no authoritative contemporary evidence of his birth exists, the answer is to be found in the Tyumen Archives.

According to a Pokrovskoe church register entry, Rasputin’s parents (his father was aged twenty and his mother twenty-two) were married on 21 January 1862.6 Birth registers indicate that between 1862 and 1867 six daughters were born, but all died in infancy.7 Eventually, on 7 August 1867, a son, Andrei, was born.8 The registers from 1869 have regrettably not survived. Before 1869 there is no mention of Grigori Rasputin’s birth in any of the registers. It can therefore be concluded that he could not have been born before 1869. However, this does not imply that it is impossible to establish Rasputin’s exact date of birth. A census of the population of the village of Pokrovskoe, also in the Tyumen Archive,9 contains the name Grigori Rasputin. In the column opposite his name is his date of birth – 10 January 1869, which happens to be St Grigori’s Day. This corresponds to the date given by Maria Rasputina, although she places the year as 1871 not 1869.10

Rasputin himself was also responsible for the variety of dates given as his date of birth. In a 1907 ecclesiastical file on an investigation into his religious activities,11 Rasputin declares that he is forty-two years of age, therefore implying that he was born in 1865. In a 1914 file on the investigation into an attempt on his life by Khiona Gusyeva, he declares, ‘My name is Grigori Efimovich Rasputin-Novy, fifty years old’,12 which implies 1864 as his year of birth. In the 1911 notebook belonging to Tsarina Alexandra,13 she recorded Rasputin as saying, ‘I have lived fifty years and am beginning my sixth decade.’This suggests he was born in 1861!

Reporters covering the murder of Rasputin at the time stated his age as being fifty. When, six months later, the new Provisional Government set up an Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry to examine Rasputin’s activities, evidence from witnesses who had known him in Siberia and elsewhere was collected by its chief investigator, E.P. Stimson, a respected lawyer from Kharkov. Stimson concluded that Rasputin was born in either ‘1864 or 1865’.14 Tsarina Alexandra referred to him as ‘elder’. He was in fact younger than the Tsar, and it was, perhaps, for this reason that he sought to inflate his age.

According to contemporary accounts,15 Rasputin’s father Efim was comparatively well-off in terms of Pokrovskoe peasants, who in turn had a better standard of living than the peasants in European Russia, who lived in chimneyless log huts. Efim’s single-storey cabin had four rooms – unlike many peasants, who used stretched animal bladders to cover their windows, Efim could afford glass. In later years, Rasputin proudly recalled that as a child he ate white bread rather than the brown bread suffered by peasants in European Russia – and fish and cabbage soup.16

Rasputin’s mother related that the young Grigori often ‘stared at the sky’ and at first she feared for his sanity.17 Stories abound about his developing powers as a youth – he seems to have had a way with animals and became a horse whisperer. Efim Rasputin had a favourite story18 of how his son’s gift first showed itself. Efim mentioned at a family meal that one of his horses had gone lame that day and could have pulled a hamstring. Grigori got up from the table and went out to the stable. Efim followed and saw Grigori place his hand on the animal’s hamstring. Efim then led the horse out into the yard – its lameness had apparently gone. According to his daughter Maria, Rasputin became a kind of ‘spiritual veterinarian’,19 talking to sick cattle and horses, curing them with a few whispered words and a comforting hand.

Stories also abound concerning Grigori’s supposed ability to discover missing objects. On one occasion, a horse was stolen. A village meeting was called to discuss the theft. Grigori pointed at one of the richest peasants in the village and declared him the guilty man. Despite his protests, a posse of villagers followed the man back to his homestead and discovered the stolen horse there. As a result, the man was given a traditional Siberian beating.

Rasputin’s daughter Maria later wrote that he could also predict the deaths of villagers and the coming of strangers to Pokrovskoe.20 Much of what Maria was to record in her book and published interviews is, however, very much open to question. For example, the Provisional Government Inquiry of 1917 found Pokrovskoe witnesses who had a somewhat different perspective on her father. ‘They note that Efim Rasputin drank vodka heavily,’ the investigator wrote. ‘As a boy Rasputin was always dirty and untidy so that boys of his age called him a “snotter.”’21

Maria’s claims concerning her father’s early life are typical of the retrospective accounts that have come to be accepted without question by many subsequent writers and researchers. It suited Rasputin’s retrospective image to establish that his gifts were evident during childhood. A number of Maria’s claims are very much open to question and are at variance with testimonies given by Pokrovskoe villagers.

In August 1877, when Grigori was eight years old, his ten-year-old brother Mischa died. The two brothers were swimming in the River Toura when Mischa was caught by a current, dragging Grigori with him. Although the two boys were pulled out by a farmer, Mischa contracted pneumonia and died shortly after.

At the age of nineteen, Grigori attended a festival at Abalatski Monastery, where he met a girl two years older than himself, named Praskovia Fyodorovna Dubrovina, from the nearby village of Dubrovnoye. Following a six-month courtship, they married. The precise date of their marriage is unknown, although the 1917 investigation believes it was 1889.22

Marriage seems to have had little impact on Grigori or his lifestyle. He continued to spend his evenings at the tavern. According to E.I. Kartavtsev, a neighbour of the Rasputins in Pokrovskoe, who was sixty-seven years old at the time of the 1917 investigation, he had ‘caught Grigori stealing my fence poles’.23 Kartavtsev went on to explain that,

he had cut them up and put them in his cart and was about to drive off when I caught him in the act. I demanded that Grigori take them to the Constable, and when he refused and made to strike me with an axe, I, in my turn, hit him with a perch so hard that blood ran out of his nose and his mouth in a stream and he fell to the ground unconscious. At first I thought I’d killed him. When he started to move I made him come to take him to the Constable. Rasputin did not feel like going, but I hit him several times with a fist in the face, after which he went to the Constable voluntarily.

Not long after this event, Kartavtsev recalled that a pair of his horses was stolen from his meadow. ‘On the night of the theft I guarded the horses myself… I saw that Rasputin approached them with his pals, Konstantin and Trofim, but I didn’t think much of it until a few hours later I discovered the horses were not there. Right after that I went home to check whether Rasputin was in. He was there the following day, but his pals had gone.’24

As a result of the thefts of the poles and the horses, the Pokrovskoe villagers convened to discuss what should be done about Rasputin and his errant ways. Konstantin and Trofim were expelled from the village for horse-stealing. Rasputin was not, but he faced charges of stealing the poles and a consignment of furs in the local court. He was also accused of stealing a consignment of furs that went missing from a cart he was driving to Tyumen. In his defence, he claimed that he had been attacked by robbers.

According to his daughter Maria, he denied being a thief, and maintained that since he was convinced that other people shared his second sight, and so could track down any stolen object, he could never bring himself to steal.25 Whatever the reality, Rasputin left the village for Verkhoturye Monastery, some 250 miles north-west of Pokrovskoe, shortly afterwards.

Maria asserted that his departure from the village was the result of giving a ride to a young divinity student in his cart, who apparently encouraged Grigori to go to the monastery.26 Many years later Rasputin told a similar story to the Tsar and Tsarina. According to the imperial tutor, Gilliard, Rasputin had been hired to drive a priest to the monastery. During the journey the priest implored Grigori to confess his sins and urged him to devote himself to God. ‘These persuasions,’ said Gilliard, ‘impressed Grigori so much that he was filled with a wish to abandon his dark and desolate life.’27

The reality behind Rasputin’s timely departure from Pokrovskoe seems to have had little to do with such fantasies. Numerous witnesses told the 1917 Inquiry that Rasputin’s involvement in local criminality was now such that he thought it best to make an exit, preferring Verkhoturye Monastery to a criminal record and a custodial sentence.

Rasputin’s three-month stay at the monastery, according to the 1917 investigation, ended ‘the first, early, wild, loose period of his life’. As a result, ‘Rasputin was to become a different person’.28 It left anguish in his soul ‘…in the form of extreme nervousness, constant restless, jerky movements, incoherent speech, the permanent interchange of extreme nervous agitation and subsequent depression’.29

When Rasputin came home he continued to express his delight in the natural world, which had impressed him deeply. He had given up meat and sugar and alcohol. He seemed to be in a state of ecstatic mysticism a lot of the time, but the people of Pokrovskoe snorted at his praying and his visions. He was the same old lying Grisha, as far as they could see.

Rasputin ignored them. Around the age of thirty, wild-eyed and unwashed, shouting and waving as he travelled, and sleepless for nights on end every spring, he was an eccentric figure who vaguely represented the Old Beliefs, the ancient Christian culture of ‘Holy Rus’ whose sorcerers, healers and false messiahs attracted many followers. In particular he headed north and west to the large monastery at Verkhoturye in the Urals, where he worshipped at the shrine of St Simeon of Verkhoturye. This St Simeon had died of fasting and self-neglect early in the seventeenth century, but Rasputin looked upon his spirit as his guardian and mentor.

At some time in his wanderings and contacts with the adherents of ‘Holy Rus’, Rasputin had become involved with the Khlysti. These were the followers of Daniel Filippovich, who had been crucified and resurrected more than once (a story reminiscent of Yusupov’s later account of Rasputin who, allegedly, was poisoned and shot at point-blank range and left for dead before leaping scarily to his feet half an hour later). There were several messiahs like Filippovich in the sect’s history and most of them were said to have been raised from the dead.

The Khlysti were harmless enough, but to the Orthodox mind they were the Devil incarnate. Adherents to the sect believed that repentance was insignificant unless they had something to repent for. So ‘sinning’ – fornication, and plenty of it – was a necessary preamble to repentance. Thus encouraged to indulge themselves, the Khlysti exulted in ecstatic secret meetings, with priests in nightshirts whirling like dervishes into elevated states of consciousness and behaving ‘sinfully’ with their attendant womenfolk before prophesying, praying and repenting.30 Rasputin’s gift of prophecy seemed particularly significant to his followers; he had a ‘sense of catastrophe hanging over the kingdom’.31 But none of this must be divulged… Orthodox priests were appalled when in 1903 they enquired into Rasputin and were told that he held dubious services in a secret chapel under a stable in Pokrovskoe.

Driven underground, the Khlysti referred to each other as ‘Ours’ or ‘Our own’. It was a sect ‘of the people’ that laid claim to a special kind of truth vouchsafed only to the poor. At least, it was ‘of the people’, until Rasputin conquered the ladies of St Petersburg.

His climb was extraordinary; he leapt from one social foothold to the next, up and up in a matter of months. In 1903 his prophecies, and in particular his frankly expressed insights into the character and aims of his listeners, impressed the archimandrite of Kazan. Thus he obtained letters of introduction to an important bishop in St Petersburg, who in turn introduced him to Bishop Feofan, confessor to the Tsarina. Invited to stay at Feofan’s St Petersburg apartment, Rasputin was introduced to Militsa, the wife of Grand Duke Pyotr Nikolaivich, who was sickly. Militsa was one of the two Black Sisters, as they were called, not only because they were dark but because they were from Montenegro. The other sister was Anastasia, the mistress (and later the wife) of that very tall and martial Grand Duke, Nikolai Nikolaivich, who would so badly offend Rasputin during the war.

At this time of social upheaval and impending international crisis, Militsa and Anastasia were close to the Tsarina. People sneered at them as her self-appointed ‘procurers of Holy Men’. Rasputin was the last and cleverest of a long line of these. The Tsarina was credulous about occult happenings and omens, so much so that she seemed silly even in Russia, where the existence of the supernatural was generally accepted.

From her earliest youth it had been clear that the future Tsarina Alexandra of Hesse lacked a sense of humour. In her teens she had received a proposal of marriage from Prince Albert Victor, or Eddy as he was more commonly known, the heir apparent to the English throne. Eddy, who was to die young, leaving the throne to his brother George, was a sweet-natured dandy and not nearly religious enough. Nicholas, the young heir to the throne of Russia, on the other hand, lived in a permanent state of anxiety and would one day be head of the Russian Orthodox Church. But she was a Lutheran…

Alexandra struggled with her religious conscience for more than three years before she consented to marry the Tsarevich Nicholas. He was a repressed, insignificant young man, physically almost the double of his English cousin Prince George. She made a more imposing figure than he did, in her clumpy heels beneath long swishing skirts, and a fussy hat like a huge meringue.

They had not been married long when Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, died in 1894. To celebrate the coronation of Nicholas and Alexandra, an outdoor festival was arranged for the poor, but hundreds of thousands turned up in search of a free meal and over a thousand of them were trampled to death in the crush. Grand Duke Sergei was Governor-General of Moscow at the time, and his mismanagement was blamed. Nicholas and Alexandra had arranged to attend a ball being held in their honour by the French that evening, and did not cancel. As they danced, crushed bodies were still being removed from the scene of the disaster by the cartload. Insensitivity of that kind was not easily forgotten.

St Petersburg society despised Alexandra anyway. Had some gaiety relieved the severity of her character she would have been forgiven almost anything, but she was haughty and distant and did not make friends easily. She was appalled by anything remotely improper, while St Petersburg society was quite relaxed and unshockable.32 Georgina Buchanan, Sir George Buchanan’s wife, who knew her when she was young, accused her of a ‘naïve simplicity’ allied with ‘uncompromising and domineering self-assurance’. She ‘strove from the very first to influence her husband to what she considered was the right way of thinking’.33 Alexandra seized upon the notion that the essence of Russianness was expressed by ‘the people’, and they all, from Archangel to Vladivostok, were fervently loyal. It followed that criticism was alien. In her mystic belief about ‘the people’ she echoed Militsa, but also her grandmother, Queen Victoria. The old Queen’s principles had influenced her when she was a girl, andVictoria was fond of the illusion that she was closer to the spirit of the English than the aristocracy were. Like Alexandra, the old lady could be self-righteous and was deeply wounded by bitchiness. They both wallowed in dramatic self-pity when the opportunity presented itself. But Victoria was sharp and livelyminded and Alexandra was entirely unburdened by reason.

By the turn of the century the court was led by the Grand Duchess Vladimir in St Petersburg, while the Tsar and Tsarina and their three daughters were rarely seen outside Tsarskoye Selo. The magnificent Romanov palaces were rarely, some never, visited and even the treasures of the comparatively modest Alexander Palace were put into storage. Instead, Alexandra had the walls painted mauve and ordered ugly suites of furniture from Maples in the Tottenham Court Road. Queen Victoria herself, with her tartan and watercolour aesthetic, her fiddly little tables and hulking great ornaments, was never as tasteless as this.

To explain her neglect of society, her ignorance of science and her increasing dependence on mystics and clairvoyants and healers, Alexandra flaunted her preoccupation with motherhood. The empire must descend through the male line. Alexandra’s existence would have no meaning for her unless she could produce a son. She must be able to pass the Tsardom to her own flesh and blood. Magic would work; she knew it. Around the turn of the century, Monsieur Philippe, a magician from Lyons, was presented to the Tsarina by Militsa.

Philippe was an obvious charlatan. Only an under-occupied woman half-crazed by a single obsession, as by that time Alexandra was, could have taken him seriously. Her mother-in-law, the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, interceded with Nicholas, but to no avail. Proofs of the Frenchman’s rascality emerged and were put before the Tsarina. But Alexandra had a fatal flaw: the gift of faith. She was like the White Queen who had trained herself always to believe ten impossible things before breakfast. Once she had made up her mind that something was true, it became so. Nothing would shake her belief.

So when, in 1901, she gave birth to her fourth child, which Philippe had told her would be a boy – the new Tsarevich – and it was a girl, she was bewildered. Monsieur Philippe regretted that his prediction had been confounded, but had she had more faith, it would certainly have come true. She saw the point of this, and made herself believe even more.

A condemnatory Secret Service report on Philippe arrived from Paris. The agent responsible, Pyotr Rachkovski, who had run the Okhrana in Western Europe for a decade, was forced out of his job, while Monsieur Philippe stayed. The rest of the Romanovs fumed in the background. The Tsarina (and her husband too, because Nicholas preferred to concur with his wife rather than face the hysterics that would result if he contradicted her) paid Philippe more rapt attention than ever. In 1902 she seemed to be expecting a child. The magician from Lyons diagnosed her condition and announced that this time it would be a boy. After doctors expressed doubts that the pregnancy was genuine, Alexandra would allow no one else to examine her. Somehow Philippe was provided with papers certifying that he was a Russian doctor of medicine. In August, however, the Tsarina was losing weight, and got a second opinion. Hers had been a phantom, that is, imaginary, pregnancy.

With the Black Sisters as their only friends, the imperial couple were pretty well isolated by their faith in Philippe. Grand Duke Nikolai, notwithstanding his love for Anastasia, was embarrassed by his own indirect association with the whole affair. Alexandra’s elder sister, Elizaveta Fyodorovna, who was almost as religious as she was and married to Grand Duke Sergei, tried to persuade her that the mystic must go. The Russo-Japanese War was in the offing and Nikolai needed all the help he could get. Regretfully, the imperial couple sent Philippe home to France with an opulent motor car and a generous pay-off.

In the summer of 1904, Alexandra gave birth to a boy. She was delighted that her faith had at last been sincere enough. However, the baby was susceptible to mysterious bouts of illness. Little was known about haemophilia at the time, and it would be a year before the doctors diagnosed his condition. The Tsarina, who was not amenable to science or reason, was deeply ashamed. The elder girls and everyone else in the tiny royal circle were sworn to secrecy. The baby suffered intermittent agonies and the doctors were helpless. Alexandra had nowhere to turn, for by the time haemophilia was suspected, Monsieur Philippe was dead; he died in France in 1905. He had told her, however, that he would ‘return in the form of another’.

Bishop Feofan was introduced to the Tsar and Tsarina and became the Tsarina’s confessor. He was a straightforward, ascetic, Orthodox priest. This was not exactly what they wanted, and Father Ioann of Kronstadt joined the circle. He too came from the regular Orthodox hierarchy, with many followers and a reputation as a healer. But neither he nor Feofan could wholly engage this nervous, superstitious, desperate pair.

Beyond the gates of all the palaces, the clamour for change was growing to a roar. Grand Duke Sergei was blown up by a bomb. Sailors mutinied and peaceful protestors were mown down by Cossacks.

In October 1905, just three days after Nicholas had countermanded his wife’s advice and signed the papers that promised his subjects a constitution, Rasputin came to tea.

The impression he made on that first visit was good, but not earth-shattering. By this time he was in his mid-thirties, could pass for older, and was no longer the wild man from Siberia. He had become used to bathing, for one thing, and wearing clean clothes, still in the peasant style – for he was not a priest. He had visited many houses where there was indoor sanitation and carpets and a piano; even electric light, in one or two. He still ate with his fingers, but he restrained his appetite, and his hollow-cheeked visage with its intense, pale-eyed stare had lost none of its magnetism. He spoke of the sin of pride. To say that he was fluent is an understatement; his words tumbled over each other in a torrent, and to one like Alexandra, who always heard what she wanted to hear, they were magical. He urged the Tsar and Tsarina to ‘spit on all their fears, and rule’.34

By Rasputin’s own admission, the Tsar was not immediately captivated as his wife was. He had rather a lot on his mind.

Rasputin decided to get out of Feofan’s orbit (he had been staying at his apartment) before he made his second sortie into the imperial presence. He must find somewhere else to live. This was not difficult, for since his first visit to St Petersburg he had acquired quite a following. Certain ladies even made a habit of collecting his finger-nail clippings and sewing them into their underclothing. And now he met the devoted fanatic who would welcome him into her beautiful home. Within weeks of his meeting with Nicholas and Alexandra, Rasputin left Feofan’s apartment and moved in with Olga Lokhtina, the wife of a key official at Tsarskoye Selo. She had been called a ‘Petersburg lioness and fashionable salon hostess’.35 That was before she met Rasputin.

She became besotted. According to her, when they met she was sick with an ‘intestinal neurasthenia which tied me to my bed’.36 With or without intestinal neurasthenia, whatever that is, there was to be quite a lot of tying to the bed in future. For like many of the others she began a sexual relationship with the magnetic peasant. In the first weeks, they shared the innocent pleasures of kissing and communal bathing at Pokrovskoe. Six years later, if Rasputin’s friend and publisher Filippov is to be believed, they had evolved a relationship that worked satisfactorily for both of them.

Arriving at Rasputin’s early in the morning for tea as was my custom… I saw him behind the screen that separated his bed from the rest of the room. He was desperately beating Madame Lokhtina, who was clad in a fantastic get-up consisting of a white dress hung with little ribbons, and who was holding onto his member while shouting ‘You are God!’ I rushed over to him… ‘What are you doing? You are beating a woman!’ Rasputin answered ‘She won’t let me alone, the skunk, and demands sin!’ And Lokhtina, hiding behind the screen, wailed ‘I am your ewe, and you are Christ!

By 1911 Lokhtina had been banished from her husband and small daughter and all her worldly goods, and spent her life wandering the highways and byways of Russia, barefoot and unwashed in a white dress with the word ‘Alleluyah’ painted on a bandeau around her forehead. On cold days she wore a wolfskin cap.

But in 1906 she was a fashionable and beautiful woman still married to the uncomplaining senior official at Tsarskoye Selo. At her house in St Petersburg Rasputin was in a position to hear all the gossip of the dwindling royal circle, and he learned that the Tsarevich was sick. What the Tsarina most desired was someone who could offer a cure for her son. Rasputin obtained an icon of St Simeon of Verkhoturye, Olga Lokhtina wrote a suitably deferential compliment slip to be delivered with it under Rasputin’s name, and the Tsar received it.

So it came about that one year after their first meeting, Nicholas granted another audience to the peasant healer from Pokrovskoe, and this time, ‘he made a remarkably strong impression on Her Majesty and on me’.37 He was invited to see their little boy, who was then aged two and undergoing a crisis, and Rasputin’s prayers were followed by the child’s recovery. He seemed able to work miracles.

He did more than pray; he formed a relationship with the child, over the years that ensued. He was always good with children and animals and their instincts are generally acute. He knew how to approach them and was sincerely kind to them.

Had that been all there was to it – had Rasputin been simply a gifted healer who confined his attention to the heir to the throne – he would never have attracted the opprobrium he did. But the combination of a weak Tsar and a strong Tsarina, and the louche, sharp-witted side to this peasant, who quickly understood the role he must play to keep the Tsarina’s loyalty, was an excuse for ribaldry, disrespect and ridicule. It was fear that had kept the people subservient for so long, not love, and the fear had been replaced with mistrust long before. Once the imperial couple were in thrall to an incoherent, semi-literate peasant, even common respect began to diminish.

For the first few years, however, few were aware that the Tsar and Tsarina had found this new miracle-worker. At first even Militsa was not allowed to know, because Rasputin had purposely taken the initiative and presented himself to the royal couple. He did not want to be paraded like a talking dog, and nor did he want to be beholden to Militsa. She had other things on her mind in any case. Her sister Anastasia was to obtain a divorce in order to marry Grand Duke Nikolai. The Tsarina was scandalised and angry, but did not ostracise the couple because they were her friends. Still smarting from this disgrace, Militsa discovered that Rasputin, far from being her own personal discovery, was already an admired protégé at the Alexander Palace; and, what was more, she, Militsa, was no longer the Tsarina’s best friend. Her position had been usurped by a younger woman, Anna Vyrubova.

Militsa was furious, and suspected Rasputin of turning the Tsarina against her. Rasputin made one of his journeys home with several adoring St Petersburg ladies in tow only to find, once he got to Pokrovskoe, that the entire Church establishment of Tobolsk was out to get him. They were asking questions (not for the first time), taking witness statements and generally building a case that he was a Khlyst, guilty of fornication, adultery and sexual orgies with various women. Olga Lokhtina, who had not yet deserted her family in favour of the bare feet, white dress and ribbons, deduced that there must be a malicious and powerful influence behind this sudden investigation. She concluded that the secret enemy was Militsa, and she returned to Tsarskoye Selo and made sure that the Tsar would bury the incriminating evidence forever as soon as it reached him.

From 1907 Militsa, Anastasia and Grand Duke Nikolai were the ‘out-crowd’. Rasputin and Anna Vyrubova were in.

Vyrubova had been an unmarried girl called Anna Taneev when she became intimate with the Tsarina. Her father was a court official and she had never been far from the inner circle – Yusupov remembered loathing her at school. She and the Tsarina were already inciting gossip about a lesbian affair when she married in 1907. Her husband, a nonentity who owned a large estate, proved significant only as provider of a name and a marital status; after a few years they divorced. She accused him of impotence and sadism, and it was true that the marriage had never been consummated. He married again quite soon, was perfectly happy with his new wife and lived quietly on his country estate. Vyrubova and the Tsarina, however, caused talk by sharing a bed.38

One of the most complicated issues in Rasputin’s story is the relationship of the Tsar and the Tsarina. It appeared to be cloyingly affectionate, yet one partner constantly dominated. This is usually a dysfunctional arrangement for both parties. Their religious beliefs would have made it difficult for either of them to admit to marital problems, even to one another, and it seems that they found, over the years, a modus vivendi.

The trouble was, nobody quite believed in it. In 1909 the royal family’s appointed religious advisor, Father Ioann, died. Rasputin, although unqualified as a priest, effectively took his place. By 1910 he was often mentioned in society, and not in flattering terms.

People assumed he was an adventurer, lining his own nest. He complained that the Tsarina paid him hardly anything, yet expected him to be at her beck and call. He was living in modest circumstances in St Petersburg – in fact, in other people’s apartments – and it seemed that all the Tsarina donated was a few roubles and some hand-embroidered silk shirts. But he had always scorned money, and gave generously what little he had; perhaps nice clothes and important friends mattered more.

However, money was being sent home, so other admirers must have given him some. In Pokrovskoe a comfortable two-storey house was being built, the better to accommodate his lady visitors from the capital. Now that he was nearly forty, and those three of his five children who had lived were growing up, Rasputin may have recognised that soothsaying and healing might as well provide a living.

He made new friends. Among them were Bishop Hermogen of Tobolsk and the notorious Orthodox preacher Iliodor. It was the latter who introduced Rasputin to crowds of new followers and, in gratitude, Rasputin invited Iliodor to Pokrovskoe. There he showed him letters he had received from the Tsarina and her daughters; and there, in 1910, Iliodor stole one or two.

Particularly shocking, after 1910 especially, were persistent stories that Rasputin took his St Petersburg ladies to public bathhouses. He freely admitted to this and explained that the Tsarina knew all about it. ‘I don’t go with one person… but with company’, he told his publisher, Sazonov.39 He insisted that it was good for these women to reduce their pride by accompanying a peasant to a bath-house; pride was a sin. He was notoriously promiscuous. Two years later, watchful Okhrana agents would note Rasputin and Mrs Sazonov visiting a bath-house together.

By the end of 1910 Rasputin’s friends were having second thoughts. Bishop Feofan, Bishop Hermogen and, thanks to them, the entire Synod wanted to keep Rasputin in check. The sly Iliodor already supported them, though he remained friendly with Rasputin. There were articles about Rasputin in the newspapers, none of them flattering to him or the Tsar and Tsarina. The imperial couple had not the wit to understand that public opinion mattered. Stolypin, Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, thought Rasputin was a scoundrel; but Rasputin was like a lightning conductor, deflecting anger from its true target.

In 1909 Rasputin and Stolypin had been briefly on the same side. In a kind of dress rehearsal for 1914, the Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans asked for Russia’s protection from the Austro Hungarians. The Orthodox Synod wanted the Tsar to send troops to defend the Serbs; so did Grand Duke Nikolai and the Montenegrin princesses; so did all the young officers who had been humiliated when Russia lost the war against Japan. Only Stolypin talked sense, and pointed out that Germany would attack if the Tsar tried to defend Serbia, and Russia was unprepared to resist. So Serbia was occupied, and Russia humiliated, but the threat of war was allowed to subside. Not because of Stolypin, or even the elder statesman Count Witte, but because Rasputin had advised the Tsar to keep out of it.

The Tsarina

…was grateful to Rasputin, and happy, for it had turned out that her own wishes were remarkably consistent with the commands of Father Grigori and heaven.40

This was the key to his influence. Pierre Gilliard, the Tsarevich’s tutor who saw Rasputin often and was part of the imperial household from 1904 onwards, wrote in his memoir:

Cunning and astute as he was, Rasputin never advised in political matters except with the most extreme caution. He always took the greatest care to be very well informed as to what was going on at court and as to the private feelings of the Tsar and his wife. As a rule, therefore, his prophecies only confirmed the secret wishes of the Tsarina. In fact, it was almost impossible to doubt that it was she who inspired the ‘inspired’, but as her desires were interpreted by Rasputin, they seemed in her eyes to have the sanction and authority of a revelation.41

Stolypin, like everyone else, blamed Rasputin rather than the Tsarina for a whole series of decisions, especially the one that placed a Rasputin loyalist called Sabler at the head of the Synod. He also loathed him for his association with the right-wing Iliodor. And now it came to his notice that Rasputin and Witte were getting quietly friendly, and that Count Witte wanted Stolypin’s job as Prime Minister while he, Stolypin, was losing the Tsar’s support for his reformist policies.

He began making his resentment public. He refused to censor articles appearing in the press condemning Rasputin. In his joint capacity as Minister of the Interior, he had already ordered Okhrana surveillance in order to gather evidence of Rasputin’s behaviour, which he knew to be inappropriate for a person employed as imperial advisor. Rasputin must have been wary of snoopers, because Alexandra found out about the Okhrana operation almost at once and got her husband to put a stop to it. Stolypin was nonetheless able to report to the Tsar about Rasputin’s

…private life, a series of drunken and sometimes scandalous sexual liaisons and recently, dealings with dubious entrepreneurs and backers trying to turn his influence to advantage.

This is an anonymous description of Stolypin’s report from a book about Nicholas II, published in 1917. Its significance is that it places his drunkenness, and alleged venality, as early as 1910 or 1911, while other writers – relying on the testimony of Rasputin’s friends to the Extraordinary Commission of 1917 – say that his corruption and drunkenness developed later. Jaundiced observers were more impatient. One such was Vladimir Nikolaivich Kokovtsov.

I served eleven years in the Central Prison Administration… and saw all the convict prisons, and… among the Siberian vagrants of unknown ancestry, as many Rasputins as you like. Men who, while making the sign of the cross, could take you by the throat and strangle you with the same smile on their faces.42

Not long after Stolypin’s allegations, Rasputin was advised to make himself scarce for a while, and decided to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

He stayed away for four months, returning in the summer of 1911 and publishing a short memoir of his travels. This was dictated to, and written down by, Lokhtina. Rasputin had learned to read and write by now, but not very well. Lokhtina made his ramblings readable, and captured what was inspiring in them.

In the autumn he went to Kiev, where the Tsar and Tsarina were to attend the opening of a new regional Duma. Stolypin would be there too, because it was thanks to his reforming zeal that regional government had at last arrived.

It is apparent from the evidence of an extreme right-wing politician called Khvostov (a fierce opponent of the progressive Stolypin) that Rasputin had something to do with Stolypin’s assassination at Kiev. Ten days before the Kiev ceremonies, Rasputin travelled to Nizhni Novgorod to pay Khvostov an unexpected visit. Khvostov had never met him before, and when Rasputin offered him Stolypin’s job as Minister of the Interior he thought the man was mad. He pointed out that the position was already occupied. Ah, said Rasputin, but all the same, Stolypin would be leaving. Khvostov made some facetious remark and saw him off the premises.

…he departed angry. I didn’t invite him to dine and refused to introduce him to my family, even though he asked me to do so.43

Ten days later, Stolypin was shot at the Kiev Opera. The assassin had warned the local Okhrana of the time and place of the shooting the night before, but they still let him into the Opera House, complete with revolver.

From the first, Rasputin was named in connection with the assassination. It was all too much for Bishop Hermogen and even Iliodor. On 16 December 1911 (a date that would prove fatal five years later) they tricked Rasputin into visiting the Yaroslav Monastery. There, in front of a kind of clerical kangaroo court, he was tried, found guilty and badly beaten up by the assembled holy men before being threatened at sabre-point, bashed over the head with a crucifix and sent packing.

Hermogen did not stop there, but publicly insisted to the Synod that Rasputin was a Khlyst and privately accused him of adultery with the Tsarina. This could not be allowed to go on, and both Hermogen and Iliodor were sent into exile. Defiantly, they refused to disappear, but holed up in St Petersburg, releasing snippets of scandal to the papers. Even now, Iliodor hung onto his secret weapon: the stolen letters. Meanwhile, the Minister of the Interior who replaced Stolypin was Makarov – and in January 1912 he ordered another Okhrana surveillance. He intended to bide his time and say nothing about what he discovered unless it should ever prove useful to do so. The Tsar agreed to Rasputin’s being watched for purposes of protection; and later events would show that he did indeed need protecting.

Now, in 1912, the Okhrana agents watched Rasputin’s comings and goings, his daily visits to the bath-house with prostitutes and followers, and his visits to the Golovinas’ house on the Moika (Mounya Golovina had been among the faithful since 1908). In her own drawing room Mounya had introduced Yusupov to Rasputin in 1909, before the young playboy left for Oxford. The current Rasputinists gathered there: Zinaida Manshtedt – a lover of his, if the sworn statement of the Tsar’s children’s nurse can be believed – and Lili Dehn, a well-known actress and close friend of the Tsarina. On most days he also saw Akilina Laptinskaya, a nurse he had been close to for years; she had worked at the Verkhoturye Monastery around 1903.

Rasputin would spend all day with one or several of these women, running around the city by cab or carriage, and when left alone, would find a prostitute and take her to a bath-house or, very occasionally, to a room somewhere. These episodes, if challenged, were explained away by his assertion that he must tempt himself, and resist, in order to score points towards his own redemption. If he had intercourse with them, and several women later testified that (with or without consent) he did, no resulting pregnancy was ever revealed.

Sometimes he saw Badmaëv. Badmaëv was a well-connected Asiatic from the Far Eastern steppe who manufactured and peddled herbal remedies to the great and good. He had been a protégé of Alexander III, the Tsar’s father. Mostly, his herbal remedies were prescribed as aids to potency, but he also sold happy pills: concoctions, maybe opiate-based, that made people calm, dreamy and dull-witted. Badmaëv was a friend of Rasputin’s, but was also close to Hermogen and other clerics. He cultivated Rasputin in the vain hope of one day being appointed Supplier of Herbal Cures to the Tsarevich. The connection never worked.

Hermogen and Iliodor were still wanted men, but Makarov knew the stolen letters existed and were Iliodor’s weapon for blackmailing the Tsar. He ordered an Okhrana search and they were found. They appeared to be (and were later confirmed by Alexandra as) perfectly genuine:

My much-loved, never to be forgotten teacher, saviour and instructor. I am so wretched without you. My soul is only rested and at ease when you, my teacher, are near me. I kiss your hands and lay my head upon your blessed shoulders. I feel so joyful then. Then all I want is to sleep, sleep for ever on your shoulder, in your embrace. It is such happiness to feel your presence close to me. Where are you, where have you run off to?… Come back soon. I await you and yearn for you. I ask you for your holy blessing and kiss your blessed hands. Your eternally loving Mama.44

Like others before him, Makarov thought the Tsar would be appalled when he read this and would order Rasputin away from the court. Not a bit of it. Rasputin did leave St Petersburg for a while, but only because his presence was embarrassing; the Tsar was not at all angry (except with the unfortunate Makarov). A contemporary confided to her diary in despair:

The tsar has lost all respect and the tsarina declares that it is only thanks to Rasputin’s prayers that the tsar and their son are alive and well; and this is the twentieth century!45

Nicholas was suspicious of the Duma. He had been gracious enough to permit its existence, but now it stood between him and ‘the people’. It loomed in the tall, fat form of the Speaker of the Duma, Rodzyanko. Behind him lurked all sorts of liberals. Guchkev was particularly odious, for he despised Rasputin. Nicholas told Rodzyanko and the Duma to mind their own business. His family’s relationship with Rasputin was a purely private affair. He was deeply offended; these people appeared to be challenging autocracy itself.

Within twelve months Rasputin was back in St Petersburg with his position consolidated, because he had effected an apparently miraculous cure.

Over the years, the Tsar and Tsarina had come to rely on him to relieve their son’s illness. He had always managed to do it. He talked to the boy, and prayed with him, sat with him and was generally so comforting that it has been suggested his tranquil presence could have encouraged the release of agents into the child’s body that constricted the blood vessels and staunched internal bleeding. In 1912, also, a cure took place that cannot be conclusively explained by science, since Rasputin was 1,000 miles from his patient when it happened. The royal family had spent most of the summer in the Crimea and now, as autumn began, were at their hunting lodge in Poland when the Tsarevich had a minor accident. Any other child would have had a nasty bruise. Surgeons rushed in from St Petersburg but had to give up; a great tumour had formed in his groin, threatening blood poisoning, but they dared not operate, for he would almost certainly bleed to death.

Rasputin had been in Pokrovskoe all summer. Djhunkovski, Head of the Okhrana, had been quietly keeping an eye on him. Rasputin got a telegram. He prayed. He prayed so intensely that his face was ‘grey and streaked with sweat’.46 He sent a telegram back: the doctors must not be allowed to tire the boy, who would recover.

Indeed he did. Nobody could explain it, but he did. After this, the Tsarina would never allow Rasputin to stay away so long. Soon he was back in St Petersburg, and more secure than before. He brought his two elder daughters to the city to be educated. There was not much money left over, because the Tsarina seemed unaware that he and his family needed money to live, but he rented his own apartment not far from the smart English Quay. He drank a little wine, only rarely too much. He still restrained himself in the matter of food, eating only vegetables and fish and avoiding sugar. Akilina Laptinskaya and young Katya Petyorkina kept house for him.

The old round of visits to Tsarskoye Selo recommenced. This was his heyday; his position had never been more assured. Yet instead of growing fat and complacent he behaved like a man with hounds at his heels. Never exactly well organised, in a matter of months he adopted what we now call a ‘chaotic lifestyle’. He stayed up all night and slept late, and spent the waking hours receiving petitioners and followers, visiting friends and gossiping. Increasingly, there were meetings about deals and favours and money, the whole merry round accompanied by glass after glass of Madeira. Rasputin visited bath-houses daily, usually managed to pick up a prostitute somewhere, and was rarely sober. He liked sweet wine and gypsy music, and would dance himself into a frenzy every night if he got the chance. Night life in the capital was sophisticated and entertaining for those who could afford the Villa Rhode or the restaurant at the Astoria, where the ‘marble stairs and plate glass windows, thick red carpets and graceful palms, gave it a glow of comfort unknown in any other hotel in Petrograd [sic]’.47 Rasputin was frequently seen there; and years later, the head waiter at the Villa Rhode would recall his disgusting table manners.48 After an evening at a night club or a restaurant, he often took his entourage across the Neva towards the Islands, the wilderness, the gypsies – and champagne.

The gypsies were famous; people were in awe of their singing. Bruce Lockhart was stationed in Moscow, and, during his first few days there in 1912, his host at a spectacular ball got up a small party that would go on to Streilna, a night club far from the city centre, to hear the gypsies.

This gypsy music, in fact, is more intoxicating, more dangerous, than opium, or women, or drink, and although champagne is a necessary adjunct to the enjoyment, there is a plaintiveness in its appeal which to the Slav and Celtic races is almost irresistible. It breaks down all reserves of restraint. It will drive a man to the moneylenders or even to crime… It is very costly. It has been responsible for the bulk of my debts. Yet tomorrow, if I had thousands and the desire to squander them, there is no entertainment in New York, Paris, Berlin or London or indeed, anywhere in the world, which I should choose in preference to a gypsy evening…49

The British diplomat is unconsciously describing a shared passion, for Rasputin, whom he despised, was as much addicted to gypsy music as he was.

As for the deals and favours, Rasputin was in a position to provide plenty of those. Yusupov, who is not to be trusted in these matters, wrote about seeing a chest full of little parcels wrapped in newspaper in the flat on Gorokhovaya Street in 1916.

‘Surely that isn’t all money?’ I asked.

‘Of course it is – nothing but bank-notes; I got ’em today,’ he answered without hesitation.

‘Who gave them to you?’

‘Various kind people. I just fixed up a little affair, and out of gratitude they made a donation to the Church.’50

It is plausible enough. For as long as Rasputin dominated the Tsar and Tsarina, placemen appeared at the head of the Synod, and later in key positions in government, and money certainly changed hands. Bruce Lockhart saw the result:

From time to time… I saw the mark of the beast at Chelnokov’s house, where the Mayor would show me a short typewritten note requesting him to fix up the bearer in a safe and comfortable job in the Cities Union. The note was signed in an illiterate scrawl ‘GR’ – Grigorii Rasputin. The requests were invariably turned down by the sturdy Chelnokov.51

Rasputin was not necessarily directly in contact with the supplicants. He was not interested in money, just in having enough of it to do what he wanted and to help others when he wanted to. From early in 1914 his long-time mistress, Akilina Laptinskaya, who had once been a nurse at Verkhoturye Monastery, acted as his ‘secretary’ and passed on to him the cash inducements provided by those who wanted favours. His friend Filippov, a banker and publisher, testified to the Extraordinary Commission in 1917:

Laptinskaya, being a person of exceptional intelligence and perseverance, was guided exclusively by mercenary considerations; various people made presents to her of specific sums on the occasion of Rasputin’s arrival or for Rasputin. And Rasputin threw her out a couple of times… on suspicion of stealing sums in the thousands.52

There must be a go-between. Rasputin himself had to be careful because there were people watching him; Rodzyanko and most of the Okhrana were out to get some dirt on him and Djhunkovski, Head of Police at the Ministry of the Interior, was quietly employing Okhrana surveillance teams. With a rather different agenda, the Tsar still expected the Okhrana to guard Rasputin round the clock because of numerous threats to his life. One of these almost succeeded.

In 1913, Iliodor, now excommunicated from the Orthodox Church and living under his original name of Sergei Trufanov, concocted a plot. A number of prostitutes were to seduce Rasputin and castrate him. This came to nothing, because Rasputin got wise to it before it happened, but Trufanov did not give up.53 He knew that Rasputin was in Yalta, in the Crimea, advising ‘the tsars’ in the spring of 1914. Everybody knew – people were selling photos of him outside his hotel. Vyrubova visited him constantly (she was staying at the royal household’s summer palace at Livadia) and he boasted to the hotel staff about his hold over the imperial couple. In the end, Rasputin became such a tourist attraction that Nicholas had to send him away. He collected his wife and daughter, who were visiting St Petersburg, and travelled home with them to Pokrovskoe; and Iliodor knew about this, too. One of the women who had been involved in the castration plot was Khiona Gusyeva, ‘a once good-looking exprostitute now seriously disfigured by syphilis’.54 She followed Rasputin to Pokrovskoe.

On 28 June 1914, the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were shot in Sarajevo, and Rasputin came face to face with Gusyeva, in Pokrovskoe, disguised as a beggar-woman

…who asked him for money. As he put a hand in his pocket she pulled out a knife and stabbed him in the stomach, driving the blade up to the rib cage and wounding him badly. Yet as she pulled the knife back for a second blow Rasputin had strength enough left to hold her off with his stick until an angry crowd grabbed her and allowed the starets to collapse.55

The nearest doctor was a six-hour ride away, but he came as fast as he could, and got Rasputin back over the agonising six-hour journey on bumpy roads to the hospital in Tyumen. Thanks to his sturdy constitution he survived, although he was in hospital until late August 1914. Russia by then had declared war. It is quite likely that the Tsar would have vacillated, or even kept his country out of the war, had Rasputin been around to advise him. As it was Rasputin sent telegrams – indeed, prophecies of doom: he said that if Russia entered the war the autocracy would be finished; there would be untold misery and loss of life. He was right on both counts, but his was an emotional appeal innocent of the counter-arguments: the defence of resources, and the honour of Russia, which would be forfeited if the Tsar broke promises. Grand Duke Nikolai understood these points rather better, and was there in person to present them forcefully. Popular sentiment supported war in any case. At first there was an upsurge of support for the fight and the monarchy. It did not survive Tannenberg.

Back in St Petersburg – renamed Petrograd at the start of hostilities in August 1914 – Rasputin rented a new apartment. Akilina Laptinskaya found the one in Gorokhovaya Street, which was comfortable enough to live in with his daughters and Katya, the maid, and to use for entertaining.

Rasputin drank more after the stabbing. He had sipped Madeira or champagne before. Now he turned to vodka and was visibly drunk during the day, not just after an evening’s carousing. Probably vodka helped dull the pain and the fear of another assassination attempt. He was soon a notorious drunkard. This was particularly scandalous because prohibition was in force, as a wartime measure. For those who could afford it, illicit alcohol simply cost more. Night clubs resorted to serving vodka out of teapots.

Alcohol was an expensive habit, and the Tsarina was still mean with money. Rasputin had long ago become reconciled to Akilina’s acceptance of bribes. Soon he had a friend, Rubinstein the banker, who managed his financial affairs and another friend, Aron Siman-ovich, who acted as secretary, agent and gatekeeper.

All observers agree that Rasputin was able to sober up remarkably quickly if he had to. The years of fasting and self-denial had taught him a rare self-mastery, and now, if he was called unexpectedly to Tsarskoye Selo when in his cups, he was able somehow to control himself and appear steady and coherent.

Although the Tsarina was as dependent on the starets as ever, there was a coolness in Nicholas. Despite all Rasputin’s predictions, cheering crowds had greeted the Emperor when war was declared in 1914, and he loved adulation. Also, he was probably fed up with the endless intriguing of Vyrubova, Alexandra and Rasputin. As tends to happen in these small cliques, there had been an internal cataclysm: Vyrubova and Alexandra had gone off each other, while Rasputin was still friendly with both. Vyrubova was reinstated to best friend status, however, after injuries sustained in a railway accident made Nicholas and Alexandra fly to her side. She was given the last rites, but recovered when Rasputin revived her on her deathbed in the royal presence. This made even Nicholas soften towards him – which was fortunate, because Rasputin was soon to disgrace himself more outrageously than ever before.

The incident took place in Moscow. Bruce Lockhart came across Rasputin on the fateful evening in the first half of 1915:

One summer evening I was at Yar, the most luxurious night-haunt of Moscow, with some English visitors. As we watched the music-hall performance in the main hall, there was a violent fracas in one of the neighbouring kabinets. Wild shrieks of women, a man’s curses, broken glass and the banging of doors raised a discordant pandemonium. Head-waiters rushed upstairs. The manager sent for the policeman who was always on duty at such establishments. But the row and the roaring continued. There was more coming and going of waiters and policemen, and scratching of heads and holding of councils. The cause of the disturbance was Rasputin – drunk and lecherous, and neither police nor management dared evict him. The policeman telephoned his divisional inspector, the inspector telephoned to the Prefect. The Prefect telephoned to Djhunkovski, who was Assistant Minister of the Interior and head of all the police. Djhunkovski, who was a former general and a man of high character, gave orders that Rasputin, who after all was only an ordinary citizen and not even a priest, should be arrested forthwith. Having disturbed everyone’s enjoyment for two hours, he was led away, snarling vengeance, to the nearest police station. He was released early next morning on instructions from the highest quarters. He left the same day for St Petersburg, and within twenty-four hours Djhunkovski was relieved of his post.56

It was said that Rasputin had hit a woman and exposed himself. The Tsar would not listen to such stories. Not long afterwards, Samarin, a loyal and honest man in charge of Church affairs, was sacked at Rasputin’s behest; murmurs of protest grew louder.

Rasputin was accepted by nearly everyone in Moscow as a complete proof of the Tsar’s incompetence. ‘Down with the autocracy!’ cried the Liberals. But even among the reactionaries there were those who said: ‘If the autocracy is to flourish, give us a good autocrat.’57

In other words, everyone wanted change, but not the changes they were getting. Urged on by his wife and Rasputin, the Tsar took over from Grand Duke Nikolai as Supreme Commander of the Russian Armies, and with Nikolai’s departure, despair grew deeper. More plots seethed around the starets, and anti-Semitism too, because Simanovich (who had, as it happened, been baptised) and Rubinstein were his friends.

From here on in, the Tsarina kept up an endless stream of wifely notes to her husband, which frequently cited ‘Our Friend’ and his opinions. To many others, Rasputin was seen as the evil genius in a triumvirate, the other pillars of which were Vyrubova and the Tsarina. By the time Romania entered the war in August 1916, Rasputin was widely supposed to be running the country.

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