Rasputin came to St. Petersburg like a projectile from the medieval past, tattered, black, muttering. The signs of his years on the road were unmistakable. He wore a cheap gray coat, with beggars’ pockets that bulged as if full of food. His trousers were threadbare; the seat “flapped like a torn old hammock,” the monk Iliodor wrote. They hung over peasant boots that were blackened with tar; it became part of his seduction technique to leave traces of tar on the skirts of fashionable ladies whom he embraced, as a keepsake. Ragged, dirty hair, with a rough middle parting like a tavern waiter’s, ran into a tangled beard that looked like black sheepskin pasted onto his pale face. His lips were blue and sensual; above them his mustaches protruded “like two worn-out brushes.” His eyes were steel gray, deep set under bushy eyebrows, sinking into pinpoints when he was angry. His fingernails were filthy and turned in; his hands were pockmarked. His body gave off “an indeterminate disagreeable smell.”
Peasants—most peasants—found St. Petersburg awesome, foreign, almost astral after the villages; it sucked them in as unskilled laborers and gave them the witless faces of zombies. “Apart from muscle power, nothing significant is required—neither literacy, skill, nor even quick-wittedness,” an observer wrote. “To carry iron, to load and unload wagons, to fetch and carry all kinds of heavy weights, to dig and prop up pits, these are some of the tasks of the chernorobachi. But his chief task is to survive on seventy kopecks a day.” They clung to country practices, messing together in factory barracks, chewing sunflower seeds, whose black husks lay on the sidewalks like a carpet of flies, ambling past the glittering shops and hotels on their hours off with doltish wonderment.
From the moment of one’s arrival at the Nikolaevsky railroad station, in its heart, the city clearly demonstrated Peter the Great’s purpose in building it. It concentrated the power of the giant land, in politics, commerce, the arts; but it was not Russian, or truly European. It was moored at a swampy extremity of the empire it ruled, on a level with Greenland and southern Alaska, damp with sea fog in winter and hazed with the smoke of burning forests when summer lightning struck. Everything in it breathed falsehood, the novelist Nikolai Gogol thought; “the foreigners who have grown fat there no longer look like foreigners, while the Russian inhabitants have become somehow foreign, and are no longer either one thing or another.” It had a smell, insistent, penetrating—“of leather, of sheepskin coats, of cabbage soup and sunflower oil”—and its crowds, Tartars in brilliant embroidered jackets, portly, turbaned mullahs, Kalmyks in shaggy caps, coachmen in long, padded gowns of sapphire blue and low, squashed top hats, seemed “so strange and unknown” that foreign visitors asked themselves if this could still be Europe.
It was built above water, bisected by canals and the smooth, gunmetal waters of the Neva. Its great architects, Rastrelli, Rossi, were Italian; the water, and the painted baroque palaces and avenues they set in angular formal gardens, provided its nickname, the Venice of the North. Its streets were wide and perfectly straight. The Nevsky Prospect ran for two and a half miles, flanked with palaces, churches, and arcades, green, red, and ocher, from the monument to St. Alexander Nevsky to the high, gilded spire of the Admiralty. The Morskaya, with luxury shops and hotels, opened onto immense twin squares dominated by the marble and granite Cathedral of St. Isaac. The colonnade of the Kazan Cathedral was modeled on St. Peter’s in Rome. Tsars prayed before its miraculous icon of the Virgin of Kazan in time of war.
The skyline was even and linear, pierced by domes and spires and the new chimneys of power plants and factories; the bright facades were colonnaded and balconied, the prodigious squares artfully positioned. It was unmistakably a city built to a prescription by autocrats. It was dynastic, too; statues of Romanovs glared blindly at its flat horizons. Peter the Great reared his horse above a rock in the Senate Square, sitting astride Russia, Pushkin thought, “on her haunches rearing.” He was dressed as a Roman emperor—fittingly, for tsar was a corruption of the Latin caesar. An embankment of pink Finnish granite faced the Neva along its southern bank. Along it ran the physical evidence of Romanov power: the barracks of crack infantry regiments, the artillery school, the imperial stud, foreign embassies, courthouses. The brownish ocher of the Winter Palace and the Hermitage fronted the river for five hundred yards; here the family housed a magnificent collection of paintings and antiquities that spilled into basements. The windows of Nicholas II’s study looked out over the cobbles of the palace square to an elegant crescent, a third of a mile long, which housed the general staff and the finance and foreign ministries.
On the northern shore, a golden spire soared as a landmark over the river and the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul. Generations of Romanovs were buried there. Close by was the fortress, its thick walls surrounded by water, in whose cells, their windows covered with iron sheets, generations of their enemies had languished. The summer palaces, parks, and gardens of the Romanovs were spread on the coast and inland, at Peterhof, Gatchina, Tsarskoye Selo. The city was bright with the colors of Romanov soldiers: Knights Guards in silver breastplates; Horse Grenadiers, whose silk-covered helmets ended in strips of yellow and red that floated in the wind. Others reflected the vastness of the empire; the Heir Apparent’s Cossacks, in light blue uniforms, descendants of freebooters who had fled from serfdom in old Muscovy to the free lands of the lower Don and Dnieper, specialists now in repression, charging strikers in their short-stirruped style and sabering Jews in pogroms; Caucasians in red cloaks; Mongol troopers, their faces broad and flat, “with little black eyes, distant from each other like [those of] the Chinese.”
Aristocrats and diplomats met at the Imperial Yacht Club on the Morskaya; with 150 members, it was the most exclusive in the empire. Tennis players, and less distinguished sailors, used the River Yacht Club on the Dvortzovaya Naberezhnava. Good food, political chat, and cards had been offered at the nearby English Club since 1770. Trotting races were held in Semyonovsky Square in fall and winter; the summer racecourse was on the Kolomyagskoye Chaussée. Skaters traced patterns in the Ice Palace of the Aquarium. Photography was popular; the imperial family were keen amateur photographers, and Rasputin loved to have his picture taken. Kodak had a busy shop at Bolshaya Konyushennaya. The winter circus and the all-year cirque moderne were often sold out. The five public theaters were thriving.
Many foreign businessmen were based in the city. Anglican, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic churches catered to them; there was a British-American Congregational chapel. Watkins’s English bookshop on the Morskaya provided them with books, and they played golf on a nine-hole course. Russia’s economy, the fastest growing of any major country, was fueled by investment from abroad. British and French investors held millions of rubles in “Russian Fives,” high-yielding government bonds. Four out of five of the country’s share transactions were handled in the stock exchange at the tip of Vasilevsky Island, next to an animal market where rare birds from Central Asia and dogs from the northern ice fields were sold. The city’s banks controlled the mines and oil wells that Western engineers were sinking to slice out the mineral wealth of Siberia, the Don basin, and the hot shores of the Caspian.
The big hotels were European in standard but not in price. The Europe on the corner of Nevsky and Mikhailovskaya had rooms with baths from 7.5 rubles, about three dollars; dinner in its sumptuous rooms cost 3 rubles. The Cubat and the Bear were the grandest restaurants. The Donon was a favorite with a small garden for summer. Dinner cost 2.5 rubles, a dollar. Germans ate at Leinners on the Nevsky. Dominique’s French restaurant was a haunt of officers—it had a billiard room. Filippov’s on the Nevsky was the fashionable place for fast food, pies, and pastries. The rich traveled by troika, three-horse sleighs and carriages, glamorous and expensive, from 8 to 20 rubles by distance. Izvoshchiks, one-horse cabs that took two passengers, with hoods and rubber tires, cost 20 kopecks a quarter hour. Streetcars, electric, steam, and horse driven, were three kopecks a ride; city transportation suited the poor.
The poor were ill served in other respects. Students were a distinct group, a “university proletariat” with thin, pinched faces, in blue caps and shabby greatcoats, aged prematurely from hunger and exhaustion. Livelier souls formed circles to plot revolution and carry out assassinations; the Okhrana devoted much attention to spying on them. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s elder brother had been hanged for planning to kill the tsar with a bomb concealed in a medical dictionary; three government ministers had been murdered by students since the turn of the century. In the slums of the Vyborg district, families of workers shared small rooms, kamorky, each marking out its space with blankets, sleeping on cots that touched each other. The streets were “ashy and indistinct,” turning the passersby into shadows. The faces of the “gray human streams” who toiled in the industrial plants were “utterly smoke-sodden … with bluish veins.” Single men lived on plank shelves that reached to the ceilings of dormitories, their diet black bread and cabbage soup with cucumber, fresh in summer, salted in winter.
A vigor strode the city; it was busy with the future, a world center of ballet, petroleum chemistry, opera, physiology. It had become a rage in the West, for its ballet, for its fabulous Fabergé jewelery, for its caviar and the vodka used in newfangled cocktails. Young Vaslav Nijinsky was starting his career at the imperial ballet school, from which Fokine and Pavlova had recently graduated; Diaghilev was editing Mir Iskousstva, World of Art. The great bass Fyodor Chaliapin, born in a slum, was bringing an actor’s craft to opera for the first time. Prokofiev had just entered the conservatory, to be taught by Rimsky-Korsakov, as Rachmaninov had been before him; Gorky’s play The Lower Depths was attracting the interest of Stanislavsky and his new “method” acting. Ivan Pavlov was about to win a Nobel Prize for his experiments on conditioned reflexes at the Institute of Experimental Medicine; Dmitri Mendeleyev, formulator of the periodic law, was still professor at the university’s chemistry faculty.
It was, too, a nervous time, of extreme thoughts, fear, of the poet Valery Bryusov’s Pale Horse, whose apocalyptic rider charged with a deadening shriek into the storm of cars, buses, whirling signs, cracking whips, and screaming newsboys. “Time quivers and the Look is Terror,” Bryusov wrote. “In letters of fire the Horseman’s scroll spells Death. The crowd tramples madly. Terror stays no one.” Then the sudden dream of destruction passed; “only a woman from a whorehouse and an escaped madman still stretch their hands toward the vanished vision.”
Rasputin took to it, without fuss. The city, restless and satiated, was ready for him. Its summer nights were “phosphorescent, crazy, voluptuous,” the novelist Alexis Tolstoy wrote, and in the long winter darkness, green tables flashed with gold and couples embraced behind its windows as troikas galloped outside. A new fever had come with the boom, and the city craved sensation. The law courts were crowded “with hysterical women, listening eagerly to details of bloody and prurient crimes.”
Hatred and contempt stalked the rich-poor divide. Nijinsky had come from a poor family. When he won five hundred rubles in one of the new gambling clubs, he picked up six pinched-faced whores on the Nevsky. He had often pitied them, and he wanted to celebrate his good fortune by buying them dinner. They snatched and wolfed the food, slobbering wine from the bottle. He was so disgusted that he could not eat; he flung his winnings at them and left the restaurant. “It is too terrible,” he said. “I won’t do it again.”
War with Japan was close; the interior minister welcomed the prospect of a “small victorious war” to keep Russians’ minds off revolution, and strikes crippled big engineering plants. The end of the world was approaching, the philosopher Vladimir Solovyev thought. He could smell it, like “some obvious but quite subtle scent—just as a traveler nearing the sea feels the sea breeze before he sees the sea.” Dawn and sunset glowed with a wash of surreal rose as the sun caught a veil of ash thrown high in the atmosphere by a volcanic explosion in distant Martinique. Malice was on the streets. This caused in society, and particularly in high society, a “heightened nervous and sensual life, weird combinations of religiousness and sensuality.” Spiritualism in hot rooms behind closed curtains vied with prayer in church. It was a time of séances, table rapping, tarot cards, of “neo-Christianity,” where soul was united with flesh.
Credulity lurked below the surface cynicism. Holy fools, clairvoyants, and magicians were snapped up by hostesses to be put on display in their drawing rooms. A provincial simpleton, Mitya of Kozelsk, half deaf, half dumb, deformed and dwarfish, with two stumps for arms, entranced aristocrats and churchmen with his screechings and crippled walk. The monks of Optina Pustyn, Dostoyevsky’s monastery, had thought him blessed; a sexton, Egorov, claimed that, by praying before an icon of St. Nicholas, he was able to detect the divine meaning behind Mitya’s yelpings and howling. Egorov became his interpreter and brought him to the capital. A highborn girl from the Smolny Institute, the best school for young ladies in Russia, married the dwarf in a fit of religious exaltation.
It was to Rasputin’s advantage to be crude, a “man of the people,” a varnak. This was the slang for Siberian settlers and deportees, from the letters V, R, N, and K which were branded on the foreheads of convicts with irons, denoting “thief,” “robber,” and “punished by knout.” The knout was a whip of raw elkhide that could flay a man’s backbone open. Siberians were famously indifferent to it and the authority that wielded it. They treated high-ranking Russian officials as equals, to the latter’s astonishment; they were untainted by the serfdom that, though it had been abolished shortly before Rasputin’s birth, still cowed the peasants of European Russia.
The lands east of the Urals were too vast for the capital to comprehend. Russian exiles bound for Siberia were allowed to stop at the boundary post that marked the separation of Europe and Asia. Many put their lips to the western side of the cold brick pillar before dragging their fetters into Asia; one scratched the single word Maria on it, the American journalist George Kennan wrote, as if in crossing the Siberian line he was leaving “not only home and country, but life itself.” When Siberians crossed the Urals in the opposite direction, they spoke of “going to Russia.” No Russian ruler had ever visited their homeland. They were thought exotic, prey to strange cults and criminality, thrilling and dangerous—qualities for which the salons of St. Petersburg yearned. Rasputin stepped into a cultivated soil, the investigator thought, “and it dragged him in.”
He roomed at a monastery lodging, gave his letter of introduction to Feofan, and delighted him. The frail little archimandrite talked to him in front of an audience of theological students on the problem of sin. Rasputin argued that sin was indispensable to God. “How is that possible,” Feofan asked, “when our Savior and all the great saints of the Orthodox Church have denounced sin as the work of Satan?” Rasputin’s reply was khlystlike and daring. “Certainly our Savior and the holy fathers have denounced sin, since it is the work of the Evil One,” he said. “But how can you drive out evil except by sincere repentance? And how can you sincerely repent, if you have not sinned?”
He sensed a weakness in the archimandrite and allowed his voice to rise with anger. “Away with your Scriptures!” he shouted. “Truly, I warn you, stop this useless labor so that you can stand before the Lord.… Stop brooding over whence sin comes, on how many prayers a man must say a day, how long he must fast to escape from sin! Sin, if sin lurks in you.… Sin, then you will repent and drive evil from you. So long as you bear sin secretly within you, and fearfully hide it with fasting and prayer, so long you will remain a hypocrite and hateful to the Lord. The filth must be expelled, do you hear, little father?”
Feofan mumbled a defense, but Rasputin fixed “bright, glittering eyes” on him and beat him with words “like a shower of stones” until the archimandrite’s feeble body began to tremble. When Rasputin had finished, Feofan bowed his birdlike scholar’s head, and said simply: “Yes, little father, that is correct, you speak the truth.” The unworldly cleric had heard, from gossip current among the capital’s mystic dabblers, that Rasputin had predicted a recent three-month drought. The Siberian made so forceful an impression on him that he now attributed to him rainmaking powers. Grigory, he told his students, like the prophet Elijah, could shut the sky, creating a drought until “he commands the heavens to open” with teeming rainstorms. It was a sad fact in St. Petersburg, Prince Dzhevakov, a high synod official, wrote, that society and priests “preferred to take a sinner for a saint than run the risk of taking a saint for a sinner.”
Feofan showed off his new discovery to Ioann of Kronstadt, a priest at the Andreevesky Cathedral on the fortress island of Kronstadt. This was the base of the Russian Baltic fleet, a ninety-minute steamer ride from the city. Ioann had a large following of “ecstatic pilgrims, hysterical women, and beggars living on church handouts.” Confession in Russia is heard immediately before communion. The crowds waiting for communion were so great that, to break the logjam, Ioann ordered his followers to call out their sins in unison. The cathedral echoed to sobbing and the shouting of sins. He published mystical material in the popular magazines Groza, “Thunder,” and Mayak, “Lighthouse.” His disciples called him the “incarnation of God” and referred to his first follower, a mystic called Porfiriya Kiseleva, as “our Lady.” Ioann was an extreme monarchist who had been summoned to pray at the deathbed of Tsar Alexander III a decade before. Although his intercession had failed, the red-bearded priest remained much in favor at court.
Rasputin went unannounced to a service at the cathedral, taking communion with beggars and pilgrims. His inner spirituality was so intense—or he made it seem so, for Rasputin was always master of his emotions—that he trembled and rocked on his feet. Ioann recognized this in the same terms as Makari. “My son, I can feel your presence in God’s house,” he told the rough Siberian. “The divine spark is within you.” Rasputin told of his vision of the Virgin, and Ioann blessed him as a true starets.
Ioann passed Rasputin along the clerical network to dine with Bishop Hermogen of Saratov on December 16, 1903. The bishop was a big-shouldered ex-lawyer, a fierce and bushy reactionary with a taste for prosecuting any writer he found to have liberal tendencies. Also present was Hermogen’s protégé Sergei Trufanov, a fiery preacher and Jew-baiter who had adopted the monastic name of Iliodor.
These were powerful potential allies. Hermogen’s dislike of liberals made him popular at court. Iliodor was theatrical and puritanical. He attracted huge congregations for bitter, flowing sermons that stigmatized intellectuals as “all Jews” and praised the Russians as a God-bearing people who should shun the corrupt West. He dressed a big doll in a Jewish caftan and had it carried in procession to a bonfire for burning. He despised the nobility as a block between the peasants and their beloved ruler; this endeared him to the tsar and ordinary Russians alike. He was raising money to build a monastery called Mount Tabor at Tsaritsyn on the Volga; its focus was to be a great tower set on a hill built of excavated earth from which he would harangue the masses with his “sermons from the Mount.” The violence of his attacks on governors and police chiefs outraged the government, which he said was in Satan’s clutches, but he enjoyed the protection of the tsar.
Hermogen and Iliodor took the shabbiness and dirt that Rasputin exuded as signs of inner holiness. He made an excellent impression on them. He flattered them. As they began talking, Rasputin seized the bishop’s hand and cried: “I like thee.” Hermogen burst out laughing with delight that the peasant had used the familiar pronoun to a bishop; the new starets, simple and open, seemed the muzhik of a reactionary’s dreams. Rasputin turned to Iliodor and patted him on the shoulder. “Here’s a man who prays deeply,” he said. “Oh, how deeply he prays!” They were photographed together, Hermogen sitting in good humor in the center, Rasputin gazing warily at the camera, neatly dressed in a black cassock but with peasant boots beneath the hem. Iliodor’s face is taut, his lips pursed and his eyes cold and quizzing.
The three already looked a trio. Vassilyev, who was to watch Rasputin meeting new people when he became the secret police chief, admired his technique. Rasputin was boastful and offhand with those he thought unimportant, talking in riddles and leaving them bemused. But with those he thought of consequence, he was observant and attentive. He strained to follow the thread of a discussion, his head thrown back with concentration. He often made intelligent deductions and was careful never to put questions that would reveal his ignorance. He fitted in easily with extreme monarchists. In politics, Vassilyev said, he was “neither a Left nor a Right”; his instincts were sometimes liberal, sometimes authoritarian, but monarchy was always “a kind of religion” for him. He could not conceive of Russia without a tsar. His fundamental principle was “pacification of the enemies of the tsar.” Political parties, policies, and ideology went “far beyond his horizon.” His most acute sense was an intuition of who could secure his advancement and who was hostile.
The capital seethed with new ideas, with Reds, socialists, anarchists, Slavophils, Communists, nihilists. Sixteen thousand “politicals” had been sent into Siberian exile in 1901 alone. Leftists had no use for a peasant with an age-old line in mysticism. The establishment—corrupt, lethargic, fearful of its privileges, prey to intriguers—was more fertile ground. Reactionaries made no demands on Rasputin. He had only to express a fear of God and love of the tsar for them to embrace him as a “true Russian,” untainted by city thought, a loyal blockhead of the type they earnestly prayed would save them if—when—“Red Peter” turned on them.
It was an easy role, and profitable. He was introduced to Countess Ignateva, a society hostess and dabbler in right-wing politics. She was married to Count Alexis Pavlovich Ignatev, a former interior minister and right-winger who figured prominently—soon enough, fatally—on the death lists of socialist assassination squads. An “unstable person of limited intelligence,” she was well placed to help Rasputin infiltrate the capital. Her “black salon”—black for reaction, Black against Red—was a haven for the autocracy’s nervous hirelings. Bankers and arms dealers intrigued to win contracts for the coming war against Japan. Officers and would-be ministers, egged on by fanatical priests, worked on half-baked plans to reconquer Constantinople for Orthodoxy. Occultists held séances in her drawing room and claimed that the freshly canonized St. Serafim of Saratov hovered above the table, ringed in fire, to proclaim that a great prophet had come among them. Her guests mixed autocratic politics and mysticism, a combination ideally suited for Rasputin.
He spoke in curt, almost incomprehensible phrases; he made no attempt to adapt his manners to polite society; he fascinated during his brief visit, especially the women. Some saw him after his return to Pokrovskoye. Madame Kazakova visited him again in the village in May 1904, with her daughters Ekaterina and Naria. His fame and his women admirers were growing. “I saw Rasputin surrounded by a number of important-looking ladies,” she testified to the investigator. “They regarded him as a great righteous man. They cut his nails and sewed them up to remember him by. Rasputin shamelessly embraced and kissed these ladies while walking around.” She grilled him on his morals. “He said there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she concluded, “because all people are his kinsfolk.”
The Pokrovskoye priest obtained letters written to him by wellborn admirers named Berlandskaya, Silvers, and Manchtet. Father Pyotr remained convinced that Rasputin was a secret khlyst, and he filed the letters carefully for a future ecclesiastical investigation. They show that Rasputin’s intelligence readily detected the ladies’ unhappiness; a few words, a comparison were enough to lift it. The case of Khionia Berlandskaya was typical of the “nervous women with wretched souls” who clung to him. Her husband had killed himself, and “she grieved, ascribing his suicide to the fact that he had learned about her infidelity to him.” She was inconsolable until she met Rasputin. He told her simply that Christ himself could not prevent a disciple from hanging himself, she wrote, and her burden disappeared. Those who came to see Elder Zosima entered trembling and afraid, Dostoyevsky had written; but they “always came out radiant and joyous, and the blackest of faces turned to happy ones.” Rasputin had acquired that skill, though his intimacy with his soul companions seemed to go further than the aged elder’s. In their letters Berlandskaya and Manchtet wrote that acquaintance with him opened a new era for them and that they were the better for it. They also casually remarked what Rasputin had taught them. “In this respect they use one and the same phrase,” the investigator said, “that Rasputin taught them ‘holy sacraments.’ ”
The investigator admitted that one could only guess at the meaning of these “holy sacraments.” Evidence from other witnesses provided the clue. A woman who had baked communion bread at the Pokrovskoye church testified that, as she was going down into the subterranean chapel with him, Rasputin had once come close to raping her. He assured her that it would not be sinful, for “the Holy Trinity was within him.” Sex, it seemed, was an essential part of the holy sacraments.
Though he cannot have been aware of the significance of the first, two key events in the rise of Rasputin occurred later in 1904. On July 31 the empress gave birth to a son, Alexis, and—on some unrecorded date during his summer wandering—the Siberian met two sisters, grand duchesses, the daughters of the king of Montenegro. They were meddling, dubbed “the crows” by society for their striking black hair and raucous chattering. They dabbled in the supernatural and wizardry, and they had position.
Though their father was “widely renowned for his cupidity and lack of scruples,” the sisters were ladies of the highest society and intimate with the tsar and empress. Militsa, known as Montenegrin Number One, was married to the tsar’s cousin, the weak-chested Grand Duke Peter. Montenegrin Number Two, Anastasia, was married to Prince George Leuchtenberg, who returned to Biarritz shortly after the ceremony to resume a long-standing liaison with a courtesan. She was already on close terms with the tsar’s tall and dashing soldier cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich, whom she later married after her divorce from the prince. Not having much in the way of husbands, the sisters devoted themselves to social climbing and the occult.
Militsa was the cleverer of the two, with a voguish interest in Oriental religions and mystic and ascetic literature. She learned Persian to be able to read Persian mystics in the original and had written a brief book, Selected Quotations from the Holy Fathers. The sisters were dark and stylish, with knowing, haughty eyes and an avaricious slant to the mouth. They nagged officials constantly for handouts; after her husband lost heavily in stock exchange gambling, Militsa damned the finance minister Sergei Witte for his “insolence” when he refused to repair the damage with funds from the State Bank. They were more skillful in building a friendship with the imperial couple. They treated Alexandra with exaggerated deference—“they bowed, they scraped”—and nursed her when she was ill with dysentery, doing “the work of chambermaids,” emptying her chamber pot and changing her linen.
The sisters were infected, Witte wrote, by “that disease known by such names as spiritualism and occultism.” Grand Duke Nicholas was equally inclined to mysticism. “One cannot call the grand duke mad,” Witte said. “Neither can one call him normal.” He once asked Witte whether he thought the tsar was human or divine. When Witte said human, the grand duke said that he “was neither, but something in between.”
Bored, seeking new sensations, the sisters made an incognito pilgrimage to Kiev and stumbled across Rasputin. This, at least, is the claim of Aron Simanovich; others said that Feofan introduced the starets to the sisters, and the investigator accepted this version. Simanovich, however, insisted that he was in Kiev himself when the Montenegrins put up at the Mikhailovsky Monastery. One morning they glimpsed a simple wanderer chopping wood in the monastery backyard. It was Rasputin, earning his board and lodging. They fell into conversation with him; Rasputin told them of his adventures, the monks and monasteries he had visited. He said that he often preached at railroad stations and steamship landings. He was proud of his talents as a preacher and said that he could outargue educated theologians.
The sisters were intrigued; they invited him for tea. There was fire as well as persuasiveness in his stories, and “his gray, penetrating eyes were shining so suggestively that his listeners were seized by an admiration for him.” When he found out the identities of his new acquaintances, he made special efforts to win their favor. He rarely boasted of his gifts, but Simanovich suggested that he made an exception for the sisters, telling them that he could cure all manner of diseases, and that he could foretell the future and divert impending disasters. He had “realized immediately,” Simanovich wrote, “what brilliant opportunities were opening.” He was on his best behavior, looking at the ladies intently and bowing deferentially to them.
The meetings continued; the sisters stood Rasputin to treats, pastries, and candies. He loved sugar in any form—sweet wine, cakes, buns; he sucked his tea through lumps of it. Simanovich noted of his mouth that “instead of teeth there showed some black rootlets.” Far from repelling the Montenegrins, however, he swayed them into “a kind of mystic worship.” Their hearts were “searching for a wonder worker,” and they were convinced that one stood in front of them. He excited them. Forecasting the impact that Rasputin would exert “upon the nervous and mystically inclined tsar and tsarina,” Militsa saw in him a new weapon for strengthening her hold on the imperial couple. She had plans to introduce him at court.