Rasputin was still in Pokrovskoye when Nicholas saluted the Baltic fleet from the deck of the royal yacht Standart as it steamed from the Gulf of Finland for the Pacific. Its mission was to lift the siege of Port Arthur. Nicholas expected it to “reverse the whole course of the war” by sinking the blockading Japanese—he was assured by Father Serafim, a die-hard monk who had assisted at his namesake’s beatification, that “only kikes and intellectuals could think otherwise”—but the birth of the heir had not changed his fortunes. Nicholas had been born on the name day of Job the Sufferer, and he accepted ill luck with dull fatalism.
A catastrophe was in the making. Rarely—never?—has a naval expedition been so botched. The commander, aging Vice Adm. Zinovy Rozhdestvensky, called his number two “the sack of shit.” The equally obese commander of cruisers was known as “the vast space.” Three ships collided almost at once, and the funeral party for a dead petty officer was unable to fire a last salute because the men did not know how to load their rifles. Paranoia sailed with them. “Tonight it will be dangerous,” the engineer in chief wrote to his wife while still in the Baltic. “We are passing through a narrow strait and are afraid of striking Japanese mines.” Six days out the Russians mistook British herring smacks in the North Sea for Japanese torpedo boats. Their gunnery was so poor that they missed most of the trawlers but put six shells into one of their own cruisers. The nearest Japanese warship was more than ten thousand miles away.
Suez was closed to them, so they steamed around Africa. Rozhdestvensky was obsessed with running short of fuel and piled coal high on decks and around gun turrets. Ventilators and portholes were sealed against coal dust, and men dropped with heat exhaustion in the tropic seas. No gun drills could be practiced without dislodging the coal piles. While he was off the coast of Nigeria, Japanese infantry seized the high ground around Port Arthur and sank the remnants of the Pacific fleet that Rozhdestvensky was sailing to relieve. He reached Madagascar on December 27, 1904, to discover that the Port Arthur garrison had surrendered the week before.
Reports of the strikes and riots that were coattailing the military defeats reached Pokrovskoye at the start of 1905. Rasputin was disturbed by them; he began to feel that God “required some mission of him.” His wife believed that he had seen another vision of the Virgin of Kazan—he said nothing of it himself—in which she commanded him to go to the capital. His children bid him tearful farewells, and he set out to return to St. Petersburg.
Workers at the big Putilov arms plants in the city struck for an eight-hour day and higher wages. Within a week twenty-five thousand were refusing to work. The city was nervous. On January 6 the tsar took part in the traditional Epiphany blessing of the waters of the Neva from a wooden pavilion set up on the frozen river in front of the Winter Palace. The ceremony dated back to before the Romanovs, when tsars went down to the Moscow River below the ramparts of the Kremlin for the blessing. The guns of the Fortress of Peter and Paul fired a salute. A live shrapnel round was accidentally mixed in with the blanks. “Broken glass shattered from the window above our heads,” an onlooker in the palace wrote. “Someone shouted: ‘They are firing live ammunition.’ … Small holes could be seen in the upper portions of the windows.” A policeman was wounded. Many thought it was a murder attempt on the tsar; he refused to attend the service for the next five years. It put police and army officers on edge.
Three days later, with icy blasts from the east lifting snow from the streets that whirled in the winter sun, Witte rose with the late dawn and looked out his window. A crowd, or rather, he thought, a procession—workers in padded jackets, students with scarves tied over their ears, women and children in their Sunday best—was marching down the avenue carrying church banners, icons, and Russian flags. No red was to be seen, not a red handkerchief; the procession was restrained. Its organizer, Georgii Gapon, was a young, bright-eyed priest who worked with the poor in the slums of the harbor district. He was also an Okhrana agent; before he was blown to pieces, Plehve had ensured that the workers’ movements were infiltrated by the secret police. Gapon wished to present a petition to the tsar, pleading with him to deliver them from the “capitalist exploiters, bureaucratic crooks, and plunderers of the Russian people.” He was sure the tsar would accept it. The marchers were on their best behavior; there were no weapons, not so much as a penknife, and they sang hymns as they walked to the Winter Palace. But their “Little Father” was not in the capital; Nicholas was with Alexandra and the children at Tsarskoye Selo.
“Save us, O Lord, your people!” they sang. “How glorious is our Lord in Zion!” As Witte went out onto his balcony to listen, he heard shots. They whizzed by close enough to kill a porter in a nearby school. Then came a series of salvos. In ten minutes the marchers were running back, some of them carrying dead and women with children among them. Cordons of troops blocked the great avenues leading to the Winter Palace. They had been issued with live ammunition and an extra vodka ration the night before, and were told that workers were plotting to destroy the palace and the dynasty. They warned the marchers to turn back and opened fire when they did not. The worst killings took place in the square in front of the palace. An old man clutching a portrait of the tsar and a child with a lantern were the first to be shot. The company of guardsmen stationed there fired indiscriminately into the marchers.
The light failed, and the sun was consumed in a foggy red circle. In midafternoon a rainbow glistened, and then the wind came up and it snowed in early darkness. At least 150 were killed, and three times that number were wounded. In the evening, obscured in a long cloak, his priestly beard cut crudely in tufts for disguise, Father Gapon fled to Maxim Gorky’s apartment. “Give me something to drink,” he asked the writer. “Wine. Everyone’s dead.” He was blue with cold and hysteria. “Peaceful means have failed,” he shouted. “Now we must go over to other means.” He invoked “my pastor’s curse” on the soldiers and on “the traitor tsar.” Gorky telegraphed William Randolph Hearst’s New York Morning Journal: “The Russian Revolution has begun.”
Ten days later Nicholas consented to see a few specially chosen workers in a margarine, or ersatz delegation. “I believe in the honest feelings of the working people and in their unshakable loyalty to me,” he told them. “Therefore, I forgive them.” The workers were less forgiving of him. They spat at members of the delegation and cursed the fifty thousand rubles the tsar donated to the families of victims as “blood money.” Gapon had fled the city but left an open letter for Maxim Gorky to read out. “There is no tsar!” it thundered. “Between him and the people lies the blood of our comrades. Long live the beginning of the struggle for freedom!” In the clubs, gloomy nobles and landowners passed on stories: of the tsar’s advisers being taken to him concealed in coffins, so frightened were they of assassins, of coming massacres. The slaughter on “Bloody Sunday” ripped the bonds between the Romanovs and the ruled. With a gory bow it ushered in what the dowager empress called the “year of nightmares.”
Three weeks after the killings a revolutionary took his revenge on a Romanov in Moscow. Grand Duke Serge, whose name the half-wit in Saratov had cried as she beat her doll, was a rich prize. The bomb was made of nitroglycerin, and it blasted him into slicks of flesh that stuck to the Kremlin gate as he drove through it in his carriage. The assassin, a Social Revolutionary named Kaliayev, made no attempt to escape. Alexandra’s sister Ella visited him in prison and offered to plead for his life, on condition that he express sorrow for killing her husband. Kaliayev refused; he said his death would speed the fall of the autocracy. Ella, “saintly and beautiful,” withdrew from society into the solace of prayer. She built an abbey in Moscow and became its abbess. Nicholas and Alexandra dared not attend Serge’s funeral.
Violence in the cities gathered pace, and there were outbreaks of cattle maiming and barn burning in the provinces. The rich needed reassurance. Rasputin provided it; he was a man of the people, a symbol that the real Russia had not turned on them, a tsar-loving and God-fearing peasant who was also a phenomenon, unique, exciting. He took minds off dark events. The value this gave him was picked up by the sensitive antenna of George Petrovich Sazonov, a political adventurer and journalist of dubious loyalties. A student dabbler in revolution, close to assassination squads, Sazonov had founded Rossiya, a leftist newspaper, tapping industrialists for money to ensure good press for themselves. He now veered from left-wing to the extreme right, where the financial pickings were higher. He invited Rasputin to stay in his apartment off the Nevsky and put word out to the capital’s religious dilettantes that he had a holy man for their amusement.
Rasputin was soon asked to the salon of a well-known hostess, Varvara Ivanovna Iskul. She invited a writer famous for his works on religious sects, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, to watch him in action. Rasputin arrived late, at eight in the evening. He walked straight into the drawing room, though he had never been in the house before, marching along the carpet with a “free, light step.” He went up to his hostess and, without any preliminaries, “assaulted” her on her famous collection of paintings and antiques, which crammed the room. “Why is it, Mother, that you hang up so much on your walls, as if it was a museum?” he asked. “Perhaps five starving villages could be fed on this wall alone. Just look how they live while the muzhiks starve.” When Varvara Ivanovna introduced him to her women guests, he shot direct personal questions at them. “Is she married?” he asked. “Where’s the husband? Why did she come alone?” He turned to his hostess: “If you were together, I’d see how you are, how you live.” He talked without a trace of embarrassment, joking and chattering.
The holy man’s eyes most drew Bonch-Bruevich’s attention. He looked at people directly, with concentration. His pupils “sparkled with phosphorescent light. He sort of groped listeners with his eyes.” At times his speech slowed to a drawl. Staring at someone directly in the eye, he told a confused story, as if his mind was far away. Then he suddenly snapped to—“What’s the matter with me?”—and hurriedly changed the subject. His stare made a particular impression on all present, especially the women. It flustered them; “they got nervous and then looked at Rasputin timidly, as though wishing to talk to him and to hear him talk.” He picked on a single woman, then turned abruptly and talked to someone else. After fifteen or twenty minutes he resumed his little game. He cut himself short in mid-conversation and went back to the unmarried woman he had first stared at. “It’s no good, Mother, no good, well,” he mumbled. “How can one live like that? You’re such a … It’s no good to be offended … you’ve got to love someone.… Well.” Then he skipped to another topic and walked about the room quickly, bending and squatting a little, rubbing his hands together.
All this excited the guests. They whispered and said that he had guessed something, that he had said the truth, that he saw a lot. The atmosphere became nervously heightened. “It was the one you can feel in monasteries,” Bonch-Bruevich said, “around Elders, ‘prophets,’ and so forth.” Rasputin met the Montenegrin sisters again. Militsa invited him to her palace on the English Quay overlooking the Neva. She introduced him to Anastasia’s paramour, the Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich. The tall soldier was devoted to a small lapdog, elderly and panting with exhaustion. Rasputin whispered to the dog, stroking it and praying. Its breathing eased; it licked the Siberian and trotted to its master. The grand duke was impressed.
The Baltic fleet decayed in Madagascar. The men got drunk and diseased on runs ashore to the bars and brothels of the Hellville harbor section. A mutiny broke out on the prison ship that accompanied the warships. The ships filled with the reek of animals brought aboard by the men. Instead of ammunition and wireless sets, supply ships from Russia brought thousands of winter uniforms and delivered mail to the battleship Alexander III that was addressed to the Alexander III Electrotechnical Institute in St. Petersburg. When it finally steamed for Singapore in March 1905, the fleet could make only eight knots because of the buildup of barnacles and sea grass on the ships’ hulls. It was April before they reached Singapore, where a launch brought news that the Russian ground forces in Manchuria had been defeated at Mukden. Steaming on for Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, two destroyers rammed each other.
On May 11, as the fleet neared the Tsushima Strait separating Japan from Korea, Admiral Foelkerzam—the number two, the “sack of shit”—died. Rozhdestvensky did not bother to enlighten Adm. Nikolai Nebogatov, Foelkerzam’s nominated successor, and the dead man’s flag continued to fly from the battleship Osliaba. Admiral Togo’s fleet was spotted at dawn on May 14, 1905. Battle was joined in the early afternoon. “At this time our formation, properly speaking, was nothing but a heap,” Nebogatov wrote. Afraid of colliding with each other, the Russians were outmaneuvered. “I glanced around,” a commander on the battleship Suvorov wrote. “Devastation! Flames on the bridge, burning debris on the deck, piles of bodies. Signaling, range-finding, and shot-spotting stations swept away and destroyed. And astern, the Alexander III and Borodino also wreathed in smoke and flame.” Four battleships were sunk before nightfall. The sealed coffin of Foelkerzam was found floating among the debris that marked the end of the Osliaba. Nebogatov headed north for Vladivostok with the survivors, harried by Japanese torpedo boats. Tsushima was the greatest sea battle since Trafalgar. All twelve Russian battleships were lost, eight sunk and four captured, together with seven out of twelve cruisers and six out of nine destroyers. Five thousand Russians were drowned. The Japanese lost three torpedo boats and 117 men.
Rasputin was an antidote to the war, and salons competed to have him. “The unbalanced society ladies could talk and think of nothing else,” General Spiridovich wrote. “They taught him how to dress, to groom himself, to wash—and much more besides.” They embroidered silk blouses for him, bought him fine cloth trousers and red leather boots. He learned to pomade his beard but ruined its subtle scent by using cheap, pungent soap on his body.
On June 14 the captain of the battleship Potemkin, a martinet and harsh disciplinarian, ordered his crew to eat maggot-infested meat for their midday meal. The men refused, arrested him and the other officers, and seized the ship as it lay in the harbor at Odessa. They hoisted the Red flag while revolutionaries fought with gangs of ultra-rightists in the streets ashore. The sailors tried to help them by turning the battleship’s big guns on the city. Their range finding was so poor that they abandoned the attempt and steamed out into the Black Sea. Ten days later they moored in the Rumanian port of Constantza and gave themselves up. Most sought asylum and emigrated to Brazil, Canada, and the United States.
On July 10 news arrived from France for Nicholas and Alexandra that Dr. Philippe had died. They were twenty miles from the capital in the summer palace at Peterhof, whose marble terraces overlooked the sea and a great cascade of waterfalls and fountains in which a gilded Samson tore apart the jaws of a lion. The statue commemorated Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes, happier times for the Romanovs than the string of defeats against Japan. The couple were isolated and fearful. Peasant violence was spreading. On the railroads passengers saw maimed horses and cattle with ripped stomachs hobbling by the track, “mooing or bellowing from pain.” At night the steppe was lit by burning ricks and barns.
The constant threat of assassination was unnerving to a girl brought up in secure England and the small-town safety of Darmstadt. Nicholas thought he would share the fate of the Serbian king Alexander, last of the house of Obrenovich. Alexander had been murdered with his wife two years before, their bodies hurled into the street. The killing “made a particular impression on the tsar,” Witte found, “and filled his soul with fear of his own fate.” At the end Nicholas and his wife showed bravery enough. For now the common sense that kept them immured in rural palaces at Peterhof and Tsarskoye Selo—scores of their subjects, well-bred girls and youths, intelligent and pitiless, furnished with bombs, safe houses, and false identity papers, wished them dead—was taken for cowardice. “From their fortresses,” Witte wrote, “they send telegrams of condolence to the wives of men who have fallen at the hands of foul revolutionary assassins, praise the fallen for their courage, and declare ‘my life does not matter to me as long as Russia is happy.’ ”
They were suspicious of all outsiders, all politicians. “My poor Nicky’s cross is heavy, all the more so as he has nobody on whom he can thoroughly rely and who can be a real help to him,” Alexandra railed. “He tries so hard, works with such perseverance, but the lack of what I call ‘real’ men is great.… The bad are always close at hand, the others through false humility remain in the background.… I rack my brains to find a man and cannot; it is a despairing feeling.” When Prince Sviatopolk-Mirsky, the interior minister, tried to warn her that all Russia was against the existing order, she flushed with anger. “Yes,” she said, “the intelligentsia is against the tsar, but the people support him.” Mirsky warned her that the people were an elemental force: “Today they could slaughter the intelligentsia in the name of the tsar, but tomorrow they could destroy his palaces.” Nicholas was forced to sue for peace with the Japanese “monkeys.”
As an added humiliation he had had to recall Sergei Witte—huge, ungainly, bold, and coarse, a reminder of his fearsome uncles—and send him to negotiate with the Japanese at the Wentworth Hotel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The irascible Witte thought little of Theodore Roosevelt, his “naive” American host; for his part Roosevelt despised the “pitiable” Russian despot. “The tsar is a preposterous little creature,” he said. “He has been unable to make war and now he is unable to make peace.” Nevertheless, the Russian representative was a superb negotiator. Russia lost only the Liaotung Peninsula with Port Arthur and the southern half of Sakhalin Island; she remained a great Pacific power. Witte regained his reputation; the tsar was branded as the first European ruler to be defeated by Asians.
Nicholas consoled himself at spiritualist sessions with the Montenegrin sisters. Militsa’s Znamenka Palace was ten minutes from the Peterhof summer palace, while Anastasia was a thirty-minute walk away at the Villa Sergeievka. The royal couple saw the sisters almost every day at Peterhof, and every other day they went to the Znamenka Palace for a long soiree. Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich, now living with Anastasia and thought of as her fiancé, often joined them. “In Peterhof,” the historian A. A. Polovtsev wrote, “they take no account of the situation and what is going on. They constantly vacillate, now doing one thing, then another, undecided, unconfident, holding mystic séances with those two Montenegrins, whose presence is so unfortunate for Russia.”
Like his ancestor Alexander I, whose library of spiritualist books he had inherited, Nicholas had a penchant for mysticism. Alexandra shared it. During the summer she gave a book called The Friends of God to one of her maids of honor. It was a reprint of a fourteenth-century German work, influenced by the Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart, whose theme was that God on occasion gives divine grace to pious and humble men whom he sends to help the sovereigns he protects. These “friends of God” give the sovereigns moral help and advice on how to rule their people. Rasputin was another visitor to the Znamenka Palace over the summer. He had yet to meet the sovereigns, but the day when, as the dead Dr. Philippe had said, they would find “another friend like me” was not far off.
The couple spent September aboard the imperial yacht Standart cruising off the Finnish coast. The 420-foot steam yacht, capable of making twenty-two knots, black hulled with varnished masts and a great bowsprit picked out in gold leaf, carried a brass band and a balalaika orchestra to amuse the family. Security was maintained even at sea; the crew had Okhrana agents among them, and a platoon of the Garde Equipage kept watch for seaborne assassins. Witte returned a hero from New Hampshire. Nicholas received him aboard the yacht and created him a count, but the honor did not conceal the hostility between them. Nicholas wrote sarcastically to his mother that Witte “went quite stiff with emotion and then tried three times to kiss my hand!” The politician felt that the title was awarded “in spite of his and especially Her Majesty’s personal dislike for me, and also in spite of all the base intrigues conducted against me by a host of bureaucrats and courtiers whose vileness was equaled only by their stupidity.”
This coldness—the sovereigns’ contempt for men of ability, their shared conviction that the tsar’s mission came from God and that his actions were a matter for God and his conscience alone—was nearly fatal. As they came ashore from their cruise at the beginning of October, their empire started to disintegrate. A railroad strike began in Moscow on October 7. It spread almost as fast as the broad-gauge trains could travel. The wave reached Kursk and Kiev on the ninth, St. Petersburg and Kharkov the next day. “Peter is now cut off from the rest of Russia,” Sergei Mintslov, a rare book dealer, noted in his diary on October 12. “Panic is beginning to spread throughout the city.… Sausage shops, bakeries, and grocers’ shops are all besieged.” The price of meat increased by a third during the day. The next morning the St. Petersburg Soviet, a workers’ council, was convened. Its leading figure was a wiry and passionate man named Lev Davidovich Bronstein, known as Leon Trotsky.
The Montenegrin séances continued. “The worse things are, the greater the sorrow,” Witte wrote. “The greater the sorrow, the more the soul must seek surcease in divination. And there will always be soothsayers, especially for tsars—who say: ‘Be patient, you will be victorious and all will be at your feet, all will recognize that only that which comes from you represents the truth and salvation.’ ”In the last three weeks of October, Anastasia visited the palace on all but two days. Militsa dined at the imperial palace seven times and made many telephone calls to the tsar and empress.
By October 14 the strike had passed over the Urals and the Caucasus into Georgia, Central Asia, and Siberia. Workers with pistols—Brownings and Mausers smuggled in from Belgium—went onto the Moscow streets. Crowds beneath red banners sang the “Marseillaise” and screamed: “Down with autocracy.” In the capital almost everyone had stopped working: cabdrivers, telegraph operators, maids and cooks in great houses, doctors, professors, even stockbrokers and the corps de ballet at the Marie Theater. Shop windows were boarded against looters. A destroyer was kept with steam up ready to evacuate the imperial family to Denmark. Murdered policemen, the tsar complained, Cossacks and soldiers, riots, disorders, mutinies—“It makes me sick to read the news!”
“I am sure that the only man who can help you now and be useful is Witte,” the dowager empress wrote to her son. “He is certainly a man of genius, energetic, and clear-sighted.” Nicholas disliked Witte for those very qualities—so different from his own—and for his dangerous liberalism. But fear, and the unraveling events, obliged the tsar to deal with him. “One had the same feeling as before a thunderstorm in summer,” Nicholas wrote later to his mother. “Through all those horrible days I constantly met with Witte. We very often met in the early morning to part only in the evening when night fell.” Witte had to travel out to Peterhof by special steamboat. Nothing moved on the railroads, and the roads were unsafe. “Snow mixed with rain … a rocky journey,” he wrote, for the weather had turned bad. “En route, we talked of what a shameful situation we were in, when loyal subjects virtually had to swim to reach their emperor.”
The tsar wished to put down the rebellion by force. He gave dictatorial powers to Gen. Dmitri Trepov. The former Moscow police chief had simple views, Witte said: “If people riot, you beat them.… For the likes of Trepov there are no complex questions, for such questions are the inventions of intellectuals, kikes, and Freemasons.” Trepov issued a famous order to his troops: “Don’t use blanks and don’t skimp on bullets.” The order was fly-posted throughout St. Petersburg, but Trepov warned the tsar that clearing the demonstrators and strikers from the streets would cost thousands of casualties. The other way out, Nicholas reluctantly admitted, was “to give the people their civil rights, freedom of speech and press, and also to have all laws confirmed by a state Duma—that, of course, would be a constitution. Witte defends this energetically.” He drafted a manifesto for a constitutional government. “Man always strives for freedom, civilized man to freedom and law—to freedom, regulated by law and the security of his rights,” he said. “The ominous signs of a terrible and stormy explosion each day make themselves felt more strongly.”
Army reinforcements moved into the capital on October 15. They set up machine guns in the university and law schools. No newspapers were published. The power stations ran intermittently, the streetlamps flaming with light for a few minutes before turning pitch black again. A huge searchlight shone down the Nevsky. The “revolution” was expected in a few days. Witte prepared a draft manifesto, scribbling amendments to it aboard the steamboat that shuttled him to Peterhof and back. He discovered that Nicholas was holding two sets of meetings, with himself and with Ivan Loganovich Goremykin, an aging bureaucrat with “a sleepy face and Piccadilly whiskers” and a taste for French novels. Goremykin was working on an alternative manifesto; since he thought that the tsar’s ministers were no more than his servants, it could hardly coexist with Witte’s. It was typical of Nicholas to go behind his back, Witte thought, adding that since the tsar was no Metternich or Talleyrand, his taste for the byzantine led merely to the bloody and shameful. Witte prayed God that “He deliver me from this morass of cowardice, blindness, treachery, and stupidity.”
The Montenegrin sisters were in constant touch with the palace, and with Rasputin. On October 17 the tsar called in Anastasia’s fiancé, Nicholas Nikolayevich. He proposed making him military dictator. The grand duke took a revolver out of his pocket and said he would shoot himself if the tsar refused to sign Witte’s version of the manifesto. The tsar crossed himself and signed. The manifesto made Russia a hybrid, half autocracy, half free. It promised freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and association. No law could be enforced without the consent of an elected state Duma, a parliament. The tsar retained control of military and foreign affairs, and could appoint and dismiss ministers at will. Alexandra was silent with anger at the loss of power. “The empress sat stiff as a ramrod,” Witte recalled, “her face lobster red, and did not utter a single word.”
It was not enough for the left. The tsar had granted everything and given nothing, Trotsky said; the manifesto was no more than “the Cossack whip wrapped in the parchment of the constitution.” For the right it went too far. “Fear has driven them out of their minds in St. Petersburg!” bellowed Dmitri Pikhno, editor of Kievlianin, the only newspaper in Russia to continue publishing during the strikes. “God alone knows what they’re doing! They’re actually making revolutionaries themselves!” He and others like him organized Black Hundred gangs, which pogromed Jews under the banner of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” Membership in the ultra-right, anti-Semitic Union of the Russian People snowballed to more than a million.
On October 31, Militsa and her husband, and Anastasia and Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich, dined with the imperial couple and left very late. The next day, November 1, 1905, Nicholas and Alexandra called on Militsa at the Znamenka Palace. Rasputin was there. The tsar made a note in his diary that evening: “We have made the acquaintance of a man of God named Grigory from the government of Tobolsk.”
Two days after meeting the rulers—he did not see them again until the following summer—Rasputin acquired his first disciple. Olga Lokhtina, a rich landowner married to a government engineer, had once been a beauty, sad eyed and brilliant, a hostess known for her bitter wit. In her early thirties she was overcome with depression. She became a recluse in her apartment on Grechesky Prospect in St. Petersburg’s fashionable Peski district and took to her bed for five years with a nervous stomach disorder. Doctors put it down to neurasthenia, the same handy catchall for nervous women that they applied to the empress. Lokhtina was weak, eating little and crying often.
Rasputin spoke to her gently at her bedside. She was a religious woman, and he assured her that God was with her and would never abandon her. As he soothed her, she later told the investigator, she felt a great warmth and her spiritual crisis lifted, like mist burning off a river under a strengthening sun. She quit her bed and ventured outdoors. She thought her recovery a miracle, like Lazarus arisen, and her healer divine. She fell to her knees in front of him, calling him “Living Christ” and “Lord Sabbath.” She began dressing entirely in white, pinning her dress with ribbons that had biblical quotations painted on them. She wore a strange white turban as a headdress and tied a bandeau around her forehead with the word “Alleluia” written on it.
The starets returned to winter in Pokrovskoye, inviting Lokhtina to visit him in the spring. His children were growing, and he enjoyed them. He was a good father. The family sat around the stove in the long evenings, and he took the children on his knee. Maria remembered him telling of “great rivers,… Tartar towns with their bright sunshine and narrow streets,… markets overflowing with great juicy fruits,… wandering pilgrims whose lot he had shared.” He lowered his voice to a whisper and spoke of his visions—“a woman of splendid beauty, always with the features of the Holy Virgin, speaking softly to him”—before making the sign of the cross over them. He often prayed in the dug-out chapel, which he filled with icons from his St. Petersburg admirers. The children found the services wearisome but loved to be outside with him in the clear cold of the Siberian winter.
He was proud of little Dmitri’s skills with horses. As they galloped across the snows in a troika together, his son learning to feel the reins, Moscow burned. A general strike brought the city to a standstill on December 7,1905. Panicking Muscovites started a run on banks, withdrawing two million rubles in gold. Barricades were flung up in poor districts and across main avenues on December 9. Maxim Gorky was there, to note that all took part in the “cheerful labor” on the barricades, from “the respectable gentleman wearing an expensive overcoat to the cook-general and the janitor.” Contempt for the tsar—still “Bloody Nicholas”—ran across the class divide. Gunmen shot at troops with “bulldogs,” Browning pistols. The city’s governor-general set up a command post in the belfry of the Stransoi Convent and drew up artillery to destroy the barricades while a machine gunner atop the belfry fired at the defenders, who were slowly forced back into the slum lanes of the city’s Presnia section.
The Semyonovsky Guards, a crack regiment commanded by Col. G. A. Min, rushed from St. Petersburg by express train, surrounding Presnia on the night of December 16. The guardsmen were told to destroy every building from which they came under fire from snipers concealed in attics with Mauser and Winchester rifles. Min ordered them to be merciless: “There will be no arrests.” A thousand civilians, including eighty-six children, were killed before Presnia fell; a hundred troops were killed. “If such a government cannot be overthrown otherwise than by dynamite,” Mark Twain wrote in the United States, “then thank God for dynamite.”
The infantry remained loyal and crushed the risings in the cities. Revolutionary leaders were arrested; Leon Trotsky was returned to prison, complaining that the unarmed heroism of the crowd could not face the “armed idiocy of the barracks.” Black Hundred gangs, incited by churchmen and ultra-rightists, swept through ghettos with knives and clubs. The Russian empire had the largest Jewish population in the world, more than five million, and pogroms speeded a quarter of them into emigration, largely to the United States. In the great Kiev pogrom of 1905, the banker Alexander Gunzburg shouted at the Orthodox mob: “Have you no fear of Christ?” He was beaten, he wrote, with blows “so powerful that my head was driven into my shoulders and my front teeth split.” He escaped to the house of the British consul next door. “The streetlamps are out,” the artist Marc Chagall recollected of his Russian childhood. “I feel panicky, especially in front of the butcher’s windows. There you can see calves that are still alive lying beside the butchers’ hatchets and knives. ‘Jew or not?’ they asked. My pockets are empty, my fingers sensitive, my legs weak, and they are out for blood. My death would be futile. I so wanted to live.” He denied his religion, and the men told him gruffly: “All right! Get along!”
In the Baltic provinces, as the troubles transferred to the countryside, the peasants rose against the German barons, torched their estates, and set up village republics. On Prince Orlov’s estates they soaked the tails of their master’s thoroughbred horses with gasoline and lit them so that they galloped burning through the night. “It is a fight in the dark, in the mud, with weapons which do not reach,” the British ambassador wrote. On one side was the autocrat, “a little man with a snub nose, descendant of an alien and scarcely royal race,” and on the other—“nothing at all—but just simply destruction.” Witte struggled to cope with the bloodshed, and with the tsar. Nicholas was sickened at the concessions he had made, not from his free will, his cousin Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich noted, but “torn from him by force.”
At Alexandra’s urging the tsar wanted them reversed. He was made bolder by the success of reaction and the free use of the gibbet and firing squad by a ruthless interior minister, Peter Durnovo, who thought it the mission of the Russian tsar to be “terrible but gracious, terrible first and foremost and gracious afterward.” The rail strike collapsed, unpaid volunteers helped break the post and telegraph stoppage, industrialists felt brave enough to sack and lock out their workers. Cossacks and ex-soldiers were hired to protect country estates. Liberals, who had protested the use of whips on demonstrators in the summer, were rattled enough now to demand that all radicals be shot out of hand. Nicholas noted in a letter to his mother on December 1 that more and more voices were calling for firm action, “which is a very good sign indeed.” Witte obtained the largest loan ever floated—almost three billion francs from France at 6 percent—to make the government financially independent of the elected Duma Nicholas so despised.
It was not enough to save the premier. The tsar listened eagerly to Witte’s detractors. The Black Hundred leader Dr. A. I. Dubrovin, an ugly figure whose loathings foamed from gutter newspapers subsidized by the secret police, warned that the premier “is acting under the influence of the kikes.” Nicholas chipped away on his own account. “As for Witte,” he wrote on January 12, 1906, “since the happenings in Moscow he has radically changed his views; now he wants to hang and shoot everybody. I have never seen such a chameleon of a man.” It was untrue. Witte had no desire to hang the Russian peasant, whom he thought a “slave,” subject to the whims of officials, land captains, village elders, clerks, gentlemen, whose very body “is dependent upon them, for he is subject to flogging.” Progress was paralyzed in the countryside. “When things are bad for the sheep,” Witte warned, “they are bad for the shepherd.”
The shepherd was unimpressed. The day before the Duma was first due to sit, Nicholas asked for Witte’s resignation. “I am going abroad at once to take a cure,” Witte said. “I do not want to hear about anything and shall merely imagine what is happening over here. All Russia is one vast madhouse.” The tsar treated the most able minister in his empire with sly spite. “As long as I live, I will never trust that man again with the smallest thing,” he wrote. “I had quite enough of last year’s experiment. It is still like a nightmare to me.” He replaced Witte with the lethargic Goremykin.
Rasputin was back in the capital in the early summer of 1906. He stayed in Sazonov’s apartment, made his rounds of aristocratic salons, and kept up his contacts with the Montenegrins. The husband of his patroness Countess Ignateva, who had first shown him off to Petersburg society, was assassinated by an anarchist. “Terror must be met by terror,” Nicholas wrote. Goremykin was replaced in July by Peter Arkadyevich Stolypin, a tough country squire, big as a bear and as brave, who had put down revolts as governor of Saratov province by walking unarmed into villages and persuading the rebel leaders to lay down their pitchforks and scythes. He treated revolutionaries with a monarchist’s contempt. “You want great upheavals,” he challenged them, “but we want a great Russia.”
Punitive expeditions of well-trained troops led by hardened officers scoured the countryside; some units executed four out of five of the peasants they arrested. Prisoners were tried within forty-eight hours of arrest and executed at once. It was common for a terrorist to be tried and hanged before his victim was buried. The noose was known as the “Stolypin necktie.” Stolypin dissolved the first Duma and worked on a new electoral law to ensure that the second would be more docile. Within a month of his appointment, a Socialist Revolutionary murder squad called on him at his summer dacha with armfuls of flowers, and a bomb. It killed the assassins themselves—a young man and a pretty girl—and thirty-one others. Stolypin survived.
The following day, Colonel Min, of the Semyonovsky Guards, was murdered for his work in putting down the Moscow rising. Admiral Dubrasov, the city’s governor-general, had already escaped when a bomb thrown into his carriage failed to explode properly. A week after Min’s killing the admiral was accosted by a young man while strolling in the Tauride Gardens in St. Petersburg. The man told him to prepare to die, pulled a Browning from his pocket, fired, and missed. He was arrested and condemned to be hanged. Dubrasov wrote to Nicholas asking for mercy, for he could still see the youth’s “childish, frightened eyes.” The tsar replied that the law was the law, and that not even he had the right to interfere with justice. Since he had intervened to spare the lives of extreme right-wingers convicted of murdering Jews and socialists, Witte thought his reply “childish or Jesuitical.” The same month the chief of the prison administration was killed.
Nicholas and Alexandra were safe from murder in their isolated summer palaces. When Stolypin visited them to deliver reports, he traveled by steamer. For the moment, at least, he enjoyed some protection against the various hazards of the premiership, assassins, and the whims of the tsar. He moved with his family into the Winter Palace, where security was better; and, though the omens were not good—the bombing of his dacha had earned him “great moral stature … he was unanimously acclaimed master of the situation”—the tsar’s jealousy of first-rate men had yet to get the better of him. Neither security nor Nicholas’s approbation—“I cannot tell you how much I have come to like and respect this man!”—would last.
During July the sovereigns attended ten soirees, and dined twice, with Militsa at the Znamenka Palace. Anastasia and Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich were present on each occasion. So, on July 18, was Rasputin. This second meeting with the imperial couple was noticed by Spiridovich’s palace security. They ran a routine check on him. They found a “peasant of modest allure” and noted that he sometimes attended evening service in the small chapel that lay between Peterhof and the Villa Sergeievka; the empress also liked to pray there and had made donations to it. Rasputin was given a security code name, Blue Shirt, in deference to the light blue blouse he wore with his peasant breeches. It was standard secret police practice to use physical descriptors for people who interested them—they had recently given an obscure oil field agitator known as Joseph Stalin the code name Ryaboi, “Pockmarked”—but they concluded that Blue Shirt posed no threat to the physical security of the sovereigns. The mental state of the rulers—their isolation, the table rapping—was of no official concern to the security services.
A meeting in front of a third party, even one as well connected as Militsa, was not enough for Rasputin. On October 12, Prince Putiatyn, the court marshal, handed the tsar a letter from Iaroslav Medved, a monk and Militsa’s former confessor. It was written on Rasputin’s behalf and requested Nicholas to grant him an audience so that he could present the imperial family with an icon. Nicholas asked the prince to arrange the visit.
Rasputin came to the palace alone early the following evening. He brought with him an icon of St. Simeon of Verkhoturye, painted on a wooden panel twelve inches high. Nicholas gave his visitor tea and introduced him to the children. Rasputin blessed each of them and gave them small icons and pieces of holy bread. He was remarkably assured. He greeted the children, including the heir, with the traditional Russian triple kiss, cheek to cheek. Nicholas noted in his diary that night: “At 6:15, Grigory came. He brought an icon of St. Simeon of Verkhoturye, saw the children, and chatted with us until 7:15.”
After Rasputin had gone, Nicholas asked Putiatyn what he thought of their visitor. Putiatyn replied that the starets seemed mentally disturbed. Nicholas was visibly upset and angry. He turned away and stroked his beard and mustache. Together with drumming on the windowpane and chain-smoking, this was a sign of the ill temper his exquisite manners normally concealed.
The critical meeting—the acceptance into the bosom of the family, the first sight of the heir—had occurred. The appearance of Rasputin, the politician Mikhail Rodzianko declared, and the start of his influence “mark the beginning of the decay of Russian society and the loss of prestige of the throne and the person of the tsar himself.” That was with hindsight. For the moment the Montenegrin sisters kept their protégé in the front of the imperial mind.
There were other things to discuss. The Petersburg prefect, F. V. von der Launitz, was shot dead by a gunman at the opening ceremony of the dermatological department of the Institute of Experimental Medicine, where the recent Nobel Prize winner Ivan Pavlov taught. Because he could not be identified, the assassin’s severed head was displayed in a jar of alcohol in the capital in the vain hope that someone would recognize it. The “kike-eating” new governor-general of Moscow, Horschelmann, narrowly avoided another murder squad. Gen. V. P. Pavlov, the chief military procurator, who had set up field courts-martial across Russia, was less lucky. He had dealt with cases pitilessly and had received many death threats. He stopped taking walks in public; instead, he took the air in the walled garden of his residence. An unknown gunman climbed the wall, shot him dead, and fled. It was not easy to be a loyal subject of the tsar.
Slowly, Stolypin’s dual-track policy, of reform and repression, land handouts and hangings, won back stability. The tide of killings in the countryside, and the political assassinations in the cities, ebbed. The table talk in the palace was of other things—miracles, holy men, visions. “Militsa and Stana dined with us,” Nicholas wrote on December 9, 1906. “All evening they talked of Grigory to us.”
The subject of their conversation, as the sisters knew, had recently passed through the city of Volyn on his way back to winter in Siberia. Rasputin stayed there with a very religious lady—Spiridovich referred to her only as Madame O—at the suggestion of Feofan, who had instructed her in the faith. Madame O, a handsome blonde, met Rasputin at the railroad station. He astonished her by kissing her full on the lips in greeting. Once in the house he looked at her pretty maids “with the leer of a famished wolf.” He insisted on a tour, including her bedroom. He sat on the bed and complained about its hardness. She said that she wanted an uncomfortable mattress to mortify her flesh for the sake of her soul. Rasputin laughed. “That’s a waste of time,” he said.
He asked her—knowingly and insistently—if there was anything she wished to confess. She refused, saying that he was no priest and so could not bless her. “Listen, I know how to fuck really well,” he said suddenly. She stormed out of the room. He followed her and suggested, seemingly contrite, that she could become his “spiritual daughter.” He asked her to go to Pokrovskoye with him. “Why?” she said. “There are no holy places there that I know of.” He scowled and tried a different tack. He told her of the Montenegrins and their husbands, the grand dukes and princesses he knew by their pet names—Stana, Militsa, Petroushka, Nikolashka. She told him that he should show more respect for them. “Why?” he asked. “What good would that do me?”
To flatter her he sent a telegram to Militsa in St. Petersburg; he said that he had found “my ideal lady.” Madame O was unimpressed. For a starets her guest had remarkably little interest in holiness. He drank too much, his table manners were disgusting, and he was too lazy to visit the local Potchaiev shrine. He had, she said, the air “of a man who is on to a good thing.” She was glad to see him move on to Pokrovskoye for the winter.