The revolution in Russia coincided with a revolution in the tsar’s family. At just this time, two people appeared at Tsarskoe Selo who are little reflected in Nicholas’s diaries, although they occupied an important place in his life. And in the life of the family. And the country. Grigory Rasputin and Anna Taneyeva Vyrubova.
In her memoirs, Anna Taneyeva writes about her family. Her father, Alexander Sergeyevich Taneyev, was a marshal of the count and director of the imperial chancellery. His grandfather and great-grandfather had held the same post under previous emperors, and his other great-great-grandfather was the conqueror of Napoleon, Field Marshal Kutuzov. True, she fails to mention in her book one other ancestor, whom society rumor plausibly ascribed to the Taneyevs: Emperor Paul I. The blood of this mad emperor (or rather his illegitimate child) flowed in Anna Taneyeva’s veins. Yes, she too was of the Romanov clan.
As a young lady, intoxicated by her first encounter with society, she danced at twenty-two balls and was presented to the empress. Alix had noticed her.
Very soon after, a footman conveyed the empress’s invitation to Anya, as she was called, over the telephone.
Their first conversation. Anya Taneyeva told Alix that as a child she had contracted typhus and was at death’s door when her father summoned Ioann of Kronstadt, who raised her from her sickbed with prayer. The story must have made an impression on the unhappy empress. The miracle of healing. That was all Alix could think of when she looked at this lovely woman: her son.
Anya was quite musical. From the very beginning she managed to pick the right note.
In 1907 she was invited to join the family on their yacht to their favorite place, the Finnish Skerries.
In the sun-filled stateroom they played piano four-handed. Later Anya would tell Alix of how her hands had turned to stone, she was so agitated. Then they sang duets. Alix was a contralto, Anya a soprano, so their duet meshed instantly.
When Anya disembarked, Alix said, “Thanks be to God; He has sent me a Friend.”
Anya was often taken on walks in the Skerries. Bright, tranquil evenings on the tsar’s yacht. Peaceful lights burning onshore. The smell of the water and of the cigarettes in the sovereign’s hands. The white yacht Polar Star slipped through the fallen night.
In 1918, the arrested Anya Taneyeva would find herself once again on the Polar Star, where the Central Baltic staff would convene and the yacht’s new masters—the revolutionary sailors—would take her. Everything would be spat upon, befouled. They would put her in the filthy hold, which teemed with parasites, and then lead her across the familiar deck to be interrogated. And she would remember those other nights.
What was the main reason behind the young lady’s success?
“The most ordinary Petersburg young lady, who had fallen in love with the empress and was always gazing at her with her ecstatic eyes and saying ‘Ach, ach, ach!’ Anya Taneyeva herself is not pretty and looks like a blob of fancy pastry,” Witte wrote in his Memoirs.
After the fall of the tsarist regime in February 1917, the “Special Commission of Inquiry on the abuses of tsarist government ministers and other high officials of the overthrown regime” was created. Assigned to it was a typical liberal figure, a comrade procurator of the Ekaterinoslav district court, a certain V. M. Rudnev. Subsequently he recalled questioning the arrested Anya: “I was … frankly speaking, hostilely inclined toward her.… I was immediately struck by the unusual expression in her eyes, an expression full of unworldly meekness.” Guileless Anya had brought to the tsar’s family sincerity, devotion, and adoration, which were so lacking in the cold court. That was the investigator’s conclusion. He added: “Mrs. Vyrubova could not have exercised any political influence whatsoever. The empress’s intellect and will were far too strong a counterweight.”
Simple-hearted, stupid, and ugly?
Vera Leonidovna:
“She was quite pretty.… A beauty but in a very Russian manner: ash blond hair, great big blue eyes, a luxuriant body.… I remember seeing her for the first time. I was walking down Nevsky after a rehearsal. Atlantis was still alive: smart carriages raced past, and coachmen in tight-fitting indigo coats drove cheap droshkies. I often hear that sound now—the sound of a vanished life.… Here was the magnificent plume of a horse guardsman dashing by. With his back to the coachman and a greatcoat draped over his shoulders, the mayor of Petersburg went flying past surrounded by bicyclists; evidently the sovereign himself was to drive through shortly. It was two o’clock, and I saw the most elegant turnouts.
“That was when I saw the carriage: a young woman half-reclining, lazily, the feathers of her hat dangling over her beautiful, rather full face, her legs draped with a fur coverlet. ‘There she is,’ said my friend. There was a great deal of talk about her then. If rumor had Rasputin for the tsaritsa, they gave the tsar to Anya as a lover as well. By the way, she always told very sweet stories about herself and always funny things. Only intelligent people know how to make fun of themselves.… She was intelligent. She was also a great actress. This woman, who participated in all of Rasputin’s political games, appointed and ousted ministers, and carried out the most complex intrigues in the court, could look like an utterly artless Russian dolt. Was it a mask? Or had the mask become her face once and for all?”
Yes, Anya immediately grasped “Sana’s” nature. Russia’s mistress was shy. Her ingenuousness clashed with the icy chill of the court. Seeing herself misunderstood, she turned inward. She mastered reserve and distance, which were perceived as arrogance. Anya found the key to Sana’s heart: ecstatic, constant, and unbounded adoration.
Could she really have remained by Alix’s side for twelve whole years playing such a monotonous game, though? Oh no, she was constantly thinking up dangerous, intriguing new games for her imperial friend.
Among the papers Yurovsky brought out after the family’s execution were many letters. All through World War I, breathless with love, Alix and Nicky inundated each other with letters, letters that contained puzzling lines. For instance, once Alix added this enigmatic postscript: “Lovy, you burn her letters so as that they should never fall into anybody’s hands?”
Whose letters? Why mustn’t those letters fall into anybody’s hands? Who is this person anyway, this “she”?
Elsewhere: “If we are not both firm, we will have lovers’ scenes & scandals.… You will see when we return she will tell you how terribly she suffered without you.… Be nice & firm.… She always needs cooling down.” So “she” would dare pursue lovers’ scenes and scandals and, evidently, letters to Nicholas?
Not mincing words, Alix brands this unknown woman: “quite hardened already … nothing of the loving gentle woman.” “She is boring and very tiresome.” And so on.
Here is quite a nasty caricature—testimony to Alix’s infinite jealousy: “She is full of how thin she has grown, tho I find her stomach & legs colossal (& most unappetising)—her face is rosy, but the cheeks less fat & shades under her eyes.” In her letters Alix refers to her as “the Cow.”
But now we have nearly a cry: “No one dare call you ‘my own.’ You are mine, all mine, not hers.… Anya wants to come see us tomorrow & I was so happy that we are not going to have her in the house for a long time.”
Yes, “she,” “the Cow”—this is all Anya. What about “naive” and “meek”? Does this mean the rumor was right? And there was no idyllic love between Alix and Nicky? Was Anya the tsar’s mistress? But here is Investigator Rudnev:
“The facts of the medical certificate for Mrs. Vyrubova drawn up in May 1917 at the instruction of the Special Commission of Inquiry establish beyond a doubt that Mrs. Vyrubova was a virgin.” Does this mean, again, that there was nothing going on? But what was in fact going on? Where are these curses of the tsaritsa coming from?
Meanwhile, almost simultaneously, Alix was writing her husband: “Perhaps you will put in your telegram to me that you thank her for the inclosed letter & send love or messages?” And in another letter: “Ania talks about her loneliness—that makes me angry. She visits us twice a day & spends 4 hours every evening with us,—you are her life.” Does this mean the home wrecker calmly visited every day and they allowed her to spend long hours at court?
What was going on?
On September 2, 1915, Alix wrote Nicholas: “I went with Ania to Orlov’s grave.” On October 4 Alix wrote again: “Then we fetched Ania & drove … to the cemetery as I wanted to put flowers on poor Orlov’s grave.” She informed Nicholas of each visit to “poor Orlov’s” grave. This is amazing, for rumor proclaimed Orlov to be Alix’s lover. Moreover, society gossip named him Alexei’s father.
Alexander Afinogenovich Orlov was a major-general of the imperial suite, a brigade commander, and namesake of the famous Alexei Orlov who put Catherine the Great on the Russian throne. Alexander Afinogenovich liked to play up his connection to that handsome rake of the gallant eighteenth century, but with a dash of the twentieth century—cocaine and other such pleasures. Everything changed completely with the arrival in Petersburg of the young Hessian princess. Orlov offered up to her his sincere, chivalrous respect. His crude hussar ways disappeared, leaving only the ecstatic admiration of a knight encountering his Beautiful Lady. When Alix was rejected by Nicholas’s parents, Orlov remained constant in his admiration. We underscore—admiration. When she became empress, Alix never forgot the faithful Orlov.
Orlov was assigned to a regiment whose chief was the Beautiful Lady herself. Now he rightfully carried the empress’s colors. The medieval romance continued.
Jack London wrote a story about two people who decide to trick God and make their passion eternal: they come up with the idea of not allowing a final embrace. Alix did not want her romantic passion with Nicky to extinguish in the prose of life. Her instinct as a loving woman told her that it would require “another man” to keep the fire going. And Orlov’s love—the respectful love of a poor knight for an unattainable princess—was the love of that other man.
The court reacted as would be expected: an artless rumor about the tsaritsa’s amorous intrigues was born. The result was a conversation between the empress-mother and Nicholas. But Alix would not allow this exciting game canceled. She thought up something with her friend: Orlov could marry Anya, to forestall gossip. But the handsome general declined, and this, evidently, was his downfall. Orlov was sent abroad, and en route he died suddenly. Possibly the omnipotent secret police was concerned with the family’s reputation.
There was no “other man” now. Would Alix and Nicky’s love actually die of familiarity? Anya took on the role of the other woman. Orlov had adored the tsaritsa platonically. Now Anya would adore the tsar platonically. Now she was the other, creating the necessary tension in the eternal love game between Alix and Nicky. At the same time, she adored the tsaritsa as before … and now the tsar as well! Like a schoolgirl who falls in love with her girlfriend, she idolized the object of Alix’s affections. No, of course she did not allow herself to vie with her sovereign mistress, she merely let herself languish from unrequited love for her chosen one—she even staged scenes, but ridiculous, naive ones. At the center of the new love tension was Nicky the supernumerary, and circling him the two leading actresses in this subtle love play.
Anya was already starting to worry. Voices were beginning to be heard in the large Romanov family: get rid of this friend. But Anya managed to hang on with the help of an amusing new game.
One day she announced to Alix that she had decided to go away. Sacrifice her love for them to calm the court. Soon afterward, to general astonishment, omnipotent Anya married the modest naval officer Boris Vyrubov. Witte commented nastily: “The poor empress wails like the wife of a Moscow merchant marrying off her daughter.” But Anya knew the finale to this marriage in advance—she possessed precise information about her groom—and soon she fled her marital bed, for her husband turned out to be a sexual deviant and drug addict. Anya could tell the mystically inclined tsaritsa that this was her punishment for betraying her predestination. Her lot, having given up on the possibility of a family of her own, was to serve Russia’s first family.
So who was she? Simple-hearted, good, serene, candid? Yes. And also—sly, secretive, cunning, intelligent. A dangerous woman who devoted herself to a single passion. Witte wrote: “The entire inner circle pays court to Anya Vyrubova, as do their wives and daughters. Anya arranges various indulgences for them and influences which political figures get close to the sovereign.”
This was her passion: power. The power that immediately suited the young lady and to which she subsumed her entire life. The secret blood of Emperor Paul. Anya was the invisible mistress of the most brilliant court in Europe.
Then suddenly, in 1914, this unexpected hurricane of insane jealousy from the empress. Everything was in jeopardy!
What had happened? Had Anya overplayed her hand? Were the southern nights to blame—those maddening nights in the white Livadia Palace?
None of them are alive now. They have long since departed this world. We are still trying to re-create the scenes, but the shaky figures dissolve in the darkness. The curtain falls. They are behind the curtain, and we are not going to disturb them.
Actually, it is all quite clear: in 1914 (at the start of the war between her new and former homelands), Alix was on the verge of hysteria, and this combined in her with the strange, carnal quality that had been introduced into the palace with the “Holy Devil,” Grigory Rasputin. Although the palace made the devil over into a saint, the half-mad tsaritsa could not help but sense the invisible field of his lust, the electrical charge of his unbridled power. Hence her passionate, carnal dreams in her letters to Nicholas. No, this was no longer comfortable marital love but a frenzied challenge that found an outlet in the insane jealousy that engulfed her then. Now, as in years past, Anya was energetically playing her part of the safe other woman. But one day Alix saw herself in the mirror: tormented, aging … gray hairs had appeared. And next to Nicky this young, blooming woman with ecstatic eyes riveted to him as if she were begging to be petted. Delusion was born.
Anya behaved wisely. Trying to justify herself would have meant fanning suspicion, so she responded with the offended coolness and contempt of the unjustly insulted. And with rudeness. This last was new for Russia’s mistress, but it proved the best medicine. Soon Alexandra was complaining to Nicky: “her humour towards me has not been amiable this morning—what one would call rude.” To rudeness Anya added yet another kind of medicine. “She flirts hard with the young Ukrainian,” the empress wrote querulously, but “misses & longs for you.” The storm was already abating, however. And soon: “I only dread Ania’s humour”—and, humbly—“I will take all much cooler now and don’t worry over her rudeness … we are friends & am very fond of her & always shall be, but something has gone.”
Everything fell back into place.
In battling Alix’s jealousy, Anya could be perfectly calm. Next to her stood someone who would never allow her to be insulted, her strongest partner in these games with Alix: Rasputin.
Anya had heard of Rasputin from the Montenegrin princesses. When she saw him, she appreciated him immediately.
Rasputin had been long awaited in the palace. At the very beginning of Nicholas’s reign, as the family searched in vain for popular truth seekers and the Montenegrins seduced the Anglo-German princess with the mysterious world of sorcerers and holy fools, he was approaching.
When they went to the canonization ceremonies at Sarov and the mysterious wilderness—here, indeed, the devil took on the guise of the saint: the image of the wise, meek Serafim would be adopted by the Holy Devil—Grigory Rasputin.
“In the village of Pokrovskoe there is a pious Grigory. Like Saint Serafim, and the prophet Elijah, he is given to shutting the sky—so that drought befalls the land until he commands the heavens to open and pour down life-giving rain.” Thus recounted Father Feofan, rector of the Petersburg Theological Academy, to his admirers the Grand Dukes Peter and Nicholas Nikolaevich. And here were the Montenegrins, the grand dukes’ wives, bringing news to the palace: just like the Venerable Serafim, Grigory walked about his village surrounded by innocent girls, and just like him he preached humility, love, and kindness and healed the sick.
Late in 1903, Rasputin appeared in the halls of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy wearing a greasy jacket, oiled boots, and baggy trousers that hung down in back like a torn hammock, his beard tangled and his hair parted like a tavern waiter’s. He had hypnotic gray-blue eyes, first gentle and kind, then fierce and angry—but usually guarded. His speech was strange, too, almost incoherent, lulling, somehow primordial.
While the Montenegrins were passing on to Alix their ecstatic tales of the Holy Man, Anya decided to bring him to the palace. Like a brilliant director she staged her scene: the appearance of the Holy Man before the empress.
It is late at night, she and the tsaritsa are playing Beethoven four-handed. At about midnight, on Anya’s instruction, Rasputin is led silently into the half-lighted room. The empress is seated with her back to him. She continues to play with Anya. The clock strikes midnight.
“Don’t you feel something happening, Sana?”
“Yes, yes,” answers the empress, a little frightened.
Then Anya slowly turns her head, and the poor tsaritsa, obediently, does as well. When the nervous Alix sees the vague figure of a muzhik in the doorway, like a vision, she is struck by hysterics. Rasputin comes to her, hugs the tormented woman to his chest, and strokes her quietly, gently murmuring, “Be not afraid, my dear. Christ is with you.”
Rasputin is one of the most popular myths of the twentieth century. The madness of Russian debauch, the sexual power that vanquished Petersburg society, the diamonds and luxurious furs thrown at the oiled boots of the devil-muzhik, and this muzhik, who defiled the marital bed of Russia’s first family in full view of the country—all this has sold millions of books.
Rudnev, the investigator of the Special Commission of Inquiry, later compiled a very interesting memorandum: “One of the most valuable materials for illuminating the personality of Rasputin was the observations journal kept by the surveillance established for Rasputin by agents of the secret police. The surveillance was both external and internal, and his apartment was under constant watch.… Since the periodic press paid inordinate attention to Rasputin’s unruliness, which became synonymous with his name, the investigation has given this issue proper attention. The richest material for illuminating this aspect of his personality came from that permanent secret surveillance of his apartment, which made it clear that Rasputin’s amorous exploits did not go beyond nighttime orgies with young women of frivolous conduct and chanteuses, as well as with several of his suppliants.… As for his proximity to ladies of high society, in this respect the surveillance and investigation obtained no positive materials whatsoever.”
So, there were no “ladies of high society”! But what was there?
Grigory Rasputin was born in the village of Pokrovskoe, in Siberia, the son of the peasant Efim Novykh. His father was a terrible drunkard who suddenly saw the light, stopped drinking, and saved up a sufficiency. Then his wife died and his muzhik despair kicked in again: he began drinking and lost all his money. His son Grigory was well known at this time for his own dissolute life. As Rasputin he went to Tobolsk, worked as a waiter in a hotel, there married the servant Praskovye, and she bore him three children: a son and two daughters.
Grigory himself described this dissipated beginning to his life poetically and tenderly: “When I was fifteen in my village in the summertime and the sun warmed me and the birds sang their heavenly songs I dreamed of God.… My soul yearned for the distance.… Dreaming many times I wept and did not know myself where these tears had come from or why.… So my youth passed. In a kind of contemplation, a kind of dream. And later, when life brushed me, touched me, I ran into a corner and prayed secretly. I was not content and could not find the answer to many things; I was sad. I began drinking.”
What sweet speech. The gift of seduction.
Until the age of thirty he smoked and fornicated and even worse—he stole. But just as he was about to turn thirty, it happened: a novice monk met him on the road and their conversation set the errant soul on the correct path. The mysterious life of the holy man Grigory began with that moment. During the threshing, when the servants laughed at his holiness, he thrust his shovel into a heap of grain and set out for holy places. He walked for more than a year, came home, dug out a cave under his cattle shed, and prayed there for two weeks. Then he went off again to wander, praying at holy places. He was in Kiev, like Venerable Serafim, and then in the Sarov wilderness itself, then on pilgrimage in Moscow, and on through Russia’s endless towns and villages.
He returned home after long wanderings, and as he was praying in church, in front of the people, he beat his brow on the floor in his zeal. From that time he was given to prophecy and healing.
Vera Leonidovna:
“This was a fantastic man. When the fashionable restaurant Vienna opened, I was taken there by Artsybashev, the author of the play Jealousy. What a success I was in that play! Also with us was an incredible man well known throughout Petersburg, Manusevich-Manuilov. There were rumors that he was an agent of every possible intelligence service at one and the same time. It was he who made the suggestion: ‘Let’s go see Rasputin.’ It was right next door to the Vienna, on Gorokhovskaya Street. Artsybashev refused, but I’m a daredevil. Rasputin was sitting in the dining room between two girls, his daughters. His eyes bore into me—I have a physical memory of the sensation. The table was laden with flowers and across sat the young, pale blond Munia—Maria Golovina, the empress’s lady-in-waiting. People kept calling and stopping in constantly. Women came by. Maria kept running to open the door, as diligent as a servant, and then he said to her: ‘Write.’ And he began to speak. It was all about meekness, about the soul. I tried to remember it and later, when I got home, I even wrote it down, but it wasn’t the same thing. Everyone’s eyes had ignited. There was an ineffable flow of love. It was intoxicating.”
I was reminded of this story in the archive. The empress’s dark blue notebook. On the inside cover of the notebook is written its owner’s name: “Alexandra.” Next to this elegant signature is Rasputin’s scribble. Grigory wrote without punctuation: “Here is my peace my glory the source of light in the world a present to my dear Mama Grigory.” He called her “Mama”—the Mother of the Russian Land. Nicholas was “Papa.”
“A present to my dear Mama”—these are his oral teachings, painstakingly recorded in Alix’s elegant hand.
She took them with her to Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg. She would keep rereading them until the day she died.
Here are some of them:
“Whosoever cares only for himself, he is a fool or a torturer of the Light, the ministers we have in general care only for themselves—Ach! That is not the way! Our homeland is broad, we must make room for people to work, but not the leftists or the rightists; the leftists are stupid and the rightists are fools. Why? Because they want to teach with the stick. I have lived fifty years already, my sixth decade is beginning, and I can say: Whosoever thinks he is learned and has studied—wise men speak the truth—he is a fool.
“The Mother of God was intelligent, though she never wrote about herself.… But her life is known to our spirit….
“Never fear releasing prisoners or resurrecting sinners to a just life. Through their suffering prisoners … come to stand above us before God….
“Love heaven, it comes from love, wheresoever the spirit, there are we. Love the clouds—for that is where we live….”
The inordinate influence of a semiliterate muzhik on the mistress of all Russia. Because he ministered not only to the unfortunate son’s body but also to the tormented empress’s soul.
From his lips poured a stream of great Christian truths, with which she cleansed herself from the day’s trials. An aficionado of religious books and, of course, a hypnotist, he was able to become the longed-for “holy man” of whom she had dreamed in the Sarov wilderness. Saint Serafim resurrected. To Grigory she entrusted her soul.
In the beginning when he first entered the palace, Rasputin was meek and radiant. Later, when he was already settling into his role of holy man, he would be by turns familiar, ferocious, mocking, and threatening with the tsarist couple. There was no pose in this. He was stupefyingly simple and natural.
Rasputin’s mystery lay not in his power of miracle working. That power is indisputable, and it saved Alix’s son repeatedly. He did not even necessarily have to be physically close to Alexei. A twentieth-century sorcerer, he was already using the telephone and telegraph.
The stories have been told a multitude of times.
A call from Tsarskoe Selo to Rasputin’s apartment: the boy is suffering. His ear hurts; he cannot sleep.
“Have him come here,” the holy man addresses the empress over the phone. And very tenderly to the boy who has come to the phone: “What is it, Alyoshenka, burning the midnight oil? Nothing hurts, your ear does not hurt anymore, I’m telling you. Sleep.”
Fifteen minutes later, a call comes from Tsarskoe Selo: his ear does not hurt, he is sleeping.
In 1912 the heir is dying at Spala. He has a bruise, and he is getting a blood infection. But Alix, her face racked by night vigils, triumphantly shows the doctors Rasputin’s telegram: “God has gazed on your tears and accepted your prayers. Be not sad. Your son shall live.” The distinguished doctors can only shake their heads sadly: the terrible finale is inevitable.
But the boy … the boy soon recovers.
During the war Nicholas takes the heir with him to Headquarters at Mogilev. Alexei gets chilled and catches an ordinary cold. But the boy is not ordinary: as he is blowing his nose the blood vessels burst and the blood begins to gush—and this blood the doctors can no longer stop. Alexei is sent to Tsarskoe Selo on the imperial train along with Gilliard and the powerless Dr. Derevenko. The tsaritsa awaits him at the platform in Tsarskoe Selo.
“The blood has stopped!” Gilliard announces triumphantly.
“I know,” Alix replies calmly. “When did this happen?”
“Somewhere around six-thirty.”
Alix holds out Rasputin’s telegram. GOD WILL HELP YOU, BE HEALTHY. The telegram had been sent at six-twenty in the morning.
In 1914 Anya Vyrubova incurs life-threatening injuries in a train wreck between Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo. She is lying unconscious in the railroad guard booth with broken legs and a fractured skull. Rasputin approaches Anya. He is standing over her bed, his eyes are popping out of their sockets from the terrible strain, and suddenly he whispers gently: “Anyushka, wake up, look at me.” She opens her eyes.
How must Alix have felt about the person who resurrected the dead right before her very eyes! The only person who could save—and so many times already had saved—her son! Could Nicholas deprive her of her son’s healer? And her soul’s? Getting rid of Rasputin would mean killing her. And the boy.
So he suffered all of it. He even played along.
He acquiesced to Alix’s request to eat a miracle-working crust of bread from Rasputin’s table and comb his hair with his miraculous comb. Alix had a sacred belief in their miraculous power. He had to pretend that he too believed.
But Nicholas was not simply playing along. For him Grigory was the result of his own truth seeking, which began with Klopov, the destitute landowner who had become for a time Nicholas’s “man of the people,” and was now finding its culmination in a genuine muzhik in the palace. The union of “people and tsar” had come to pass. Naturally, he knew of Grigory’s debauchery. Unlike Alix, he did not try to construct any mystical justifications for him. He accepted it as the debauchery of the real people, proving yet again that his people were not ready for a constitution. Through this wildness he glimpsed in Grigory common sense, goodness, and faith. For him Grigory’s voice was the voice of the people.
“This is merely a simple Russian man, very religious and believing,” he explained to Count Fredericks, minister of the court. “The empress likes his sincerity, she believes in the power of his prayers for our Family and Alexei, but after all this is our own business, completely private. It is amazing how people love to interfere in all that does not concern them.”
People were interfering. In society people spoke with horror about the astounding ritual that had become the norm in the tsar’s palace: the Siberian muzhik kissed the hand of the tsar and tsaritsa and then they—the autocrat and empress—kissed the rough hand of the muzhik. This exchange of kisses was entirely evangelical: Christ had washed his disciples’ feet. And here they were, the rulers of Russia, humbly kissing the hands of a Siberian muzhik. The people. The tsar’s religious family and an increasingly atheistic society were finding they understood each other less and less.
Rasputin indisputably possessed a supernatural gift. For our century, accustomed to the dark miracles of parapsychologists, there is no mystery in this whatsoever. Still, Rasputin’s mystery did exist.
The mystery began with his strange behavior. His endless debauches, drinking, unbridled lust—all this became the talk of the town. Petersburg and Moscow saw him boozing outrageously in smart restaurants.
But why? He had an apartment guarded by the police where he could have indulged in drink and depravity to his heart’s content without provoking gossip or widespread indignation. But he preferred to carry on in full view of the entire country.
Perhaps there was a challenge in this: I, a simple muzhik, am above your official Petersburg magnificence, above all your proprieties. I’m dancing a mad dance, committing every kind of obscene act. Burn! Burn! What I want—I get!
This was a wholly self-conscious attempt to exploit the alleged mystery of the Russian soul for his own ends. Tolstoy plus Dostoevsky, a kind of banal Tolstoevsky—the symbol of the West’s perception of Russia.
There was something wrong with this image. A cunning muzhik with a stinging, guarded gaze. Everyone remarked on the intense guardedness of his eyes. So why this recklessness? What was his mystery?
One of his noisiest scandals occurred in 1915. He went to Moscow, fulfilling a vow: to worship in the Kremlin at the holy grave of Patriarch Hermogen. His praying culminated, however, in a wild debauch at the Yar, a well-known restaurant. The police report was intriguing:
“On March 26 of this year at about 11 P.M. the well-known Grigory Rasputin arrived at the Yar restaurant in the company of Anisia Reshetnikova, who is the widow of a man of a respected family, an associate of the Moscow and Petrograd newspapers, Nikolai Soedov, and an unidentified young woman. The entire party was already in high spirits. Once they had occupied a room, the arrivals called up the editor-publisher of the Moscow newspaper News of the Season, Semyon Kugulsky, and asked him to join them. They also invited a women’s chorus, which performed several songs and danced the matchish.… Drunk, Rasputin danced the russkaya afterward and then began confiding with the singers this type of thing: ‘This caftan was a gift to me from the “old lady,” she sewed it, too.’ Further, Rasputin’s behavior became truly outrageous, sexually psychopathic: he bared his sexual organs and in that state carried on a conversation with the singers, giving to some his own handwritten notes, such as ‘Love unselfishly.’”
What curious company Rasputin kept: to witness his binge, this cunning, cautious muzhik invited not one but two journalists! And in the presence of these journalists, one of whom worked for the tabloids, he orchestrated this obscene spectacle.
There is only one way a man would act like this: if for some strange reason he wanted everything that went on at the Yar to become common knowledge immediately.
Indeed, that is what he wanted—for everyone to know of his excesses. A sinister detail: at the Yar he told tales about the tsaritsa that they did not even dare include in the report.
“I do with her what I want,” he proclaimed in the journalists’ presence. This was not the only time such statements were heard during his public drinking bouts.
There was a paradoxical move involved in this as well that the clever muzhik had discovered. If Nicholas and Alexandra could not believe in his debauches in the palaces, then neither he nor she herself, of course, could believe those filthy words about the tsaritsa he idolized. As if the lips of the man whose devoted love for “Mama” they had known so many years could actually utter such a thing! In the family’s eyes, the mere recounting of such words immediately stripped the rest of its veracity. It all became yet another plot against the poor muzhik whom the devil had beguiled into drinking, a fact his enemies were exploiting.
One more thing: Rasputin knew that the tsaritsa could not get on without him. She would do anything not to believe his enemies. And to avenge him.
This was Rasputin’s mystery: his drunken orgies and dirty stories about the tsar’s family were wild provocations. He put a weapon into the hands of his own enemies, but as soon as they used it they inevitably disappeared from the palace. It was a paradox, but his debauches destroyed his influential enemies. Lady-in-waiting Tyutcheva, granddaughter of Feodor Tyutchev, the great nineteenth-century poet, and teacher to the grand duchesses, waged a war against the holy man. After yet another one of his escapades she demanded that Rasputin be forbidden to associate with the grand duchesses. As a result, Tyutcheva was forced to leave Tsarskoe Selo.
The all-powerful head of state Stolypin compiled a list of Grigory’s adventures and gave it to Nicholas. Nicholas read it, made no comment, and asked Stolypin to proceed to current affairs. Soon the minister found himself preparing for retirement.
Finally, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, Rasputin’s former admirer, who understood the terrible danger looming over the dynasty, came out against Rasputin. So, the man the tsar had named commander-in-chief at the outset of the war, the man closest to the tsar, and the Siberian muzhik.… The muzhik won out.
Until Rasputin’s murder, his enemies would continue to fall into his trap each time they brought out the usual accusations of revelry and lust. They did not know that he had provided a marvelous and conclusive explanation for Alix and his loyal admirers, revealing the secret reason for his strange conduct.
Felix Yusupov, his future murderer, learned of this astonishing interpretation of Rasputin’s escapades from his friend Maria Golovina, the tsaritsa’s lady-in-waiting: with tender sympathy, she explained to Felix as she would to a not very bright child: “If he does this, then it is with a special purpose—to temper himself morally.”
The holy man, taking on the sins of the world and through his fall subjecting himself to a voluntary flogging by society, as the holy fools did back in ancient Russia—that is how Rasputin mystically explained his escapades. “The tsaritsa had a book, Holy Fools of the Russian Church, with her comments in places where it talked about the manifestation of idiocy in the form of sexual degeneracy,” recalled Father Georgy Shavelsky, the archpresbyter of the imperial army and navy.
Rasputin and Anya were the two people closest to the family. Two people who gave birth to terrible myths on which the coming revolution would feed: the spineless, pathetic cuckold of a tsar, and the tsaritsa in the brazen embraces of an adventurist muzhik, a tsaritsa who rumor asserted gave her friend as mistress to the tsar.
A great number of obscene drawings circulated throughout Russia right up until the revolution. One of these “graffiti”: a bearded muzhik (Rasputin) and in his arms two broad-hipped beauties (the tsaritsa and Anya), and all this on the background of brazen virgins (the tsaritsa’s daughters) dancing zestfully.