Militsa wished to be the first to know when Rasputin returned to the capital; she telephoned Sazonov’s apartment for reports. The holy man left Siberia early, in mid-March, and she at once invited him to her palace on the English Quay. She had someone important to introduce to him, a young woman, one of Alexandra’s maids of honor.
Anna Taneeva was the daughter of the director of the tsar’s personal chancellery. “A typical, stupid St. Petersburg lady,” Witte remarked, “who also happened to be ugly and shapeless, as commonplace as a biscuit in dough, a young woman who happened to be in love with the empress, at whom she would gaze with ardent, honeymoon eyes, and sigh.” The portrait was cruel: “pink-cheeked, full, and all dressed in fluffy fur,” Anna had charm and loyalty. If she was oversweet, and her sentimentality cloying, her detractors still allowed her kindliness. What struck everyone most forcefully was her stupidity. It had a heroic quality. She repeated whatever was said to her as though it were a response; conversation with her was said to be like “talking to a gramophone.”
Anna had developed what she called a “special religious mood” in 1902, when she was seventeen and suffering a near-fatal bout of typhoid fever. She had heard that people who believed in the power of the prayers of Ioann of Kronstadt would be cured of their sickness, and she asked her parents to call for the priest. “In a state of semi-consciousness, I felt that Father Ioann had arrived and entered my bedroom,” she later testified. “He said a Te Deum and laid his stole on my breast. When the service was over, he took a glass of water and blessed it, and poured it over me, to the horror of the doctor and nurse who mopped me dry. I fell asleep at once. The next day, my fever had dropped, my faculties returned, and I began to get better.”
Anna’s father reported the miracle to the empress. Alexandra visited her sickbed and brought her flowers. Anna was named a maid of honor the following year. She was ill again in the summer, while living at Peterhof with her parents, and the empress brought her a bottle of holy water from the well of St. Serafim. Shortly after Bloody Sunday, she was called to Tsarskoye Selo for a tour of duty. Alexandra gave her a memento—a gray stone medallion in the shape of a heart surrounded by brilliants—and invited her to join the family for the fall cruise to Finland aboard the Standart. Their friendship waxed in the intimacy of shipboard life. They played duets on the piano and sang; Alexandra told Anna of her childhood, of Windsor Castle and Queen Victoria, and of how coldly the court had treated her on her arrival in Russia. As they disembarked Nicholas said, “Now you’ll be on all our trips.” He was glad of a companion who could lift his wife’s melancholy. “I thank God for having sent me a friend,” Alexandra said.
Anna was present at the palace at least twice a week in 1906, and she joined the family again for a long cruise among the Finnish skerries. “During this voyage the empress complained to me that she had no friends outside her family, and that she felt miserable and a stranger,” Anna testified. “Her words somehow brought me close to her, and I started to regard her as my mother.” Back on dry land security men noted that Anna was continuously with the empress and that the two “take singing lessons together, read together, and have long meetings.”
The fact that Anna was unmarried “irritated the tsarina a little,” Spiridovich thought. For five years after Bloody Sunday, Nicholas and Alexandra were not seen in public in their capital. The rulers had become ghostly figures, and there was loose chatter of lesbianism. Alexandra suggested that Anna marry General Orlov, the widower whom some gossips thought was the father of the tsarevich. The general was busy putting down revolts in the Baltic provinces, with notable brutality, and Anna thought him too old for her. But she reluctantly agreed to marry a young naval lieutenant, Alexander Vyrubov.
It was not a love match. Vyrubov’s ship had been sunk under him by the Japanese at Tsushima, and he was prey to violent tempers, vodka, and cards. Militsa realized that Anna had accepted his proposal only at Alexandra’s insistence, and that the prospect of marriage frightened her. Eager to exploit the young woman’s intimacy with the empress, the Montenegrin took her up. They had a mutual interest in mysticism. Militsa lent Anna books in Russian and French—Anna recalled two titles, Eldership and Legends of the Holy Fathers—that she later testified “proved the existence of men who become prophets thanks to a holy life.” It was a fair assumption that she would be ready meat for Rasputin, whom the empress had already described to her. Militsa asked her to come to the English Quay to meet the starets on March 17, six weeks before she was due to marry.
Militsa received her alone in the drawing room. She talked to her for an hour, reminding her that some people were gifted “from above” with the power of prophecy. Anna was sick with anticipation at meeting a living elder; the princess droned on about his virtues; the room was hot, its stuffy grandeur clashing with the icy Neva beyond the windows. Militsa startled Anna by telling her not to be surprised if she kissed Rasputin. “Ask him for whatever you wish,” she said. “He will pray for you, he can ask God for anything.”
The visitor was announced by a footman. A peasant in a plain Siberian jacket breezed jauntily into the room and gave the princess three hearty kisses on the cheek. He was thin, his face pale, with scarecrow beard and hair. Anna thought him “elderly”—though he was thirty-eight—and was struck by his “piercing, deep-set eyes,” which seemed to find their focus deep in her mind and soul.
They paced the room, Rasputin firing personal questions in his staccato fashion. “He asked me about my occupation, where I live, and so on,” Anna testified. “And I, anxious about the forthcoming marriage, for I knew my bridegroom very little, asked him whether I should get married.” Rasputin looked sharply at her. “He answered that he advised me to do so,” she said, “but that the marriage would be an unhappy one.” The conversation lasted about twenty minutes, after which she left.
Anna married her lieutenant at Tsarskoye Selo on April 30, 1907. Nicholas and Alexandra attended the wedding, a signal honor that was not appreciated by the chief naval representative, the navy minister Adm. A. A. Birilev. “The empress wept freely, like a merchant’s wife marrying off a daughter,” he snapped to his friend Witte. “It would have been better if she had waited to shed her tears privately.” The bride kissed the hand of the tsar as well as that of the empress. Birilev did not subscribe to the lesbian scenario. He was convinced of a ménage à trois between the two women and General Orlov; “the devil knows what sort of filth was going on,” he said. His theory gained wider circulation when Orlov was posted to Egypt—supposedly to spare the cuckold tsar further humiliation—and died en route. “The empress and Anna, so I was told by eyewitnesses, went to the general’s grave, left flowers, and wept,” Witte claimed, further evidence to him of the “mysterious ties” that bound them.
The ceremony was sad, the bride distracted, the groom’s broken nerve evident beneath his officer’s brashness. The wedding night was a disaster. The imperial train was lent to the couple to take them to St. Petersburg, and Vyrubov began drinking steadily. When they reached the bridal suite, Anna recalled, the vodka “gave him the courage to be crude. Without any consideration of my feelings or the sanctity of the moment, he practically raped me.” He was so drunk, however, that “his mental capacities were far ahead of his physical ones.” Trembling with shock and mortification, she refused any further advances. “I only wanted him to go away and leave me alone,” she said. “I never wanted to see him again.”
The marriage was proved not to have been consummated, and the Orlov ménage à trois to have been fiction, when Anna was examined by doctors in the months after Rasputin’s murder and found to be still a virgin. She acquired a new name, Vyrubova, under which she would become notorious, and a fresh hold over the empress. Alexandra felt responsible for the scars—physical as well as mental, for the lieutenant beat his wife—that she had inflicted on her friend by encouraging the marriage. Vyrubov was swiftly given a sea posting. In August, cruising the Finnish islands again on the imperial yacht, the battered bride poured out her misery to the empress—“I will not go back to him”—and remarked on the accuracy of Rasputin’s prophecy.
As she spoke Rasputin was still struggling to keep up a semblance of inner holiness. He prayed alone while staying at Sazonov’s apartment in the capital, and continued to do so while visiting the journalist’s summer cottage in Kharkov province in August. “When Rasputin used to spend the night or came to the dacha, the servants said that he didn’t sleep at night but prayed,” Sazonov said. “When we lived in the dacha, children once saw him in the forest deep in his prayers. The children’s story interested our neighbor, a general’s wife, who wouldn’t hear a good word about him. She went with the kids to the woods and, in fact, although an hour had passed since he’d gone to the forest, he was still praying.”
Temptation surrounded him, however. Sazonov was ingratiating himself with the influential Jew-baiters of the Union of the Russian People and their wives. The holy peasant was an ideal lure for rich reactionaries and bored aristocrats. Witte, who knew him well, said that Sazonov “came to act toward Rasputin like the curator of a museum with an outlandish creature on exhibit.” A flock of curious high society ladies came to the apartment to look him over. Some were willing to practice “purification by sin” with him. Society women were beginning to show off their independence; they were seen dining out in restaurants and visiting theaters unescorted.
Rasputin’s success with cultured young women, so Spiridovich thought, was aided by the fashionable novelists who were exciting their readers with stories of the reconciliation of spirit and the flesh. One of the sensations of 1907, Lidia Zinoveva-Annibal’s novel Thirty-three Abominations, began with the heroine’s lesbian lover describing how she “kissed my eyes and lips and breasts and caressed my body.” Homosexuality was in vogue; another book, Wings, had racy passages on sex between an older man and a youth. So was incest. The hero of the novel Sanin spent much of the book trying to seduce his sister. “If I like, I’ll give myself to the devil!” she declared as her brother gazed lustfully at her naked body through a window. Its author believed in sexual pleasure as an end in itself, for “concepts of debauchery and purity are merely as withered leaves that cover fresh grass.” Sex clubs opened with explicit names, the Burnt-Out Candle, the League of Free Love. At Ivanov’s Tower, an apartment without walls, without clocks, the decadent mystic Vyacheslav Ivanov went to bed at 8:00 A.M. and breakfasted at 7:30 P.M., devoting himself to reviving the cult of Dionysius.
It was not all fun—three characters in Sanin killed themselves—but literary fatalism and pleasure seeking flowed into the smart set’s affectation of tryntrava, the inconsequence of consequence. What difference did anything make? Did it matter if Sazonov’s strange creature was a fraud? What if he was repulsive, a lowlife? It added thrill and danger. He was rough trade.
“I? Not in the least,” a lady told the French ambassador when he asked if she found the starets charming. “He disgusts me physically, with his dirty hands, his coal-black nails.… Ugh! Yet I admit he amused me. He has high spirits and a remarkable imagination. He is even very eloquent at times … he has a deep sense of mystery. He can be familiar, scoffing, violent, joyful, absurd, and poetical. And with all that, no affectations. On the contrary, an incredible lack of manners, a staggering cynicism.”
When one of Sazonov’s ladies was not on hand, to be taken in her own apartment or at Lokhtina’s, which he used often for assignations, Rasputin had no qualms about picking up women on the street. St. Petersburg had a policeman for every 150 citizens, a tradesman for each 75, and a whore for every 30. Two thirds of its men, and some of its ladies, used them. White slavers in Odessa brought girls from across the empire to brothels in the capital that reformers thought were no more than “prison houses for sexual slaves.” The horrified author of Children of the Streets was offered “perverted fulfillment of sexual requirements” by two girls under twelve at five rubles per evening. A few prostitutes of noted beauty and technique made seven hundred rubles a month; most made around forty rubles, three times a mill girl’s pay. Rasputin used them, according to his funds, until his death.
He was careful, however, to maintain his aura of spirituality with his religious backers. He did not like going to church, the security men noted; “he went to services only if he had to, and with ill grace.” He despised most clergymen—“ ‘dogs’ was the word he used commonly for the most distinguished priests”—but he was subtle and insinuating with those he knew to be important. He went frequently to the Theological Academy. He was at pains to keep up his contacts with its rector, Sergei, blond and energetic, a rising star, and with Veniamin, a brilliant monk-lecturer and mystic, as well as his original supporters, Feofan and Hermogen. All had influence with the empress.
Alexandra was exhausted from five pregnancies and the constant worry over her son. His birth, which “should have been the happiest event in the lives of Nicky and Alicky,” the tsar’s sister Olga wrote, “became their heaviest cross.” Alexis was a lively little boy. Pierre Gilliard, the Swiss tutor who was teaching the four girls French, would spot him being taken for sledge rides in the park, careering along the passages, and bursting in on his lessons. Then, “his visits would suddenly cease, and he would be seen no more for a long time,” Gilliard wrote. The palace became chill, and the girls were melancholic. When the tutor asked them what had happened, they replied evasively: “Alexis Nikolayevich is not well.” Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich said that the tsar, his cousin, aged ten years overnight when doctors diagnosed the disease. Life “lost all purpose” for the parents, and visiting them was like entering “a house in which there had been a death.”
Alexandra kept the hemophilia secret—“Don’t say anything,” she told her sister, “people do not need to know”—and nursed her son through his bouts of bleeding, caressing his hand and forehead as he sobbed with pain, his eyes ringed with black as seeping blood swelled into dark bruises on the surface of his skin. Nobody told Gilliard what disease the boy suffered; he deduced it from what he saw. One day the tsarevich slipped from a chair while playing in the classroom, banging his right knee as he fell. By the next day he could not walk. The swelling caused by the hemorrhage spread down the leg; the skin distended and hardened as the blood filled it tight as a drum. Gilliard found Alexandra at the boy’s bedside after a bad night. The inflammation was still spreading. “Groaning piteously,” Alexis had laid his head in his mother’s arms; his “small, deathly white face” was unrecognizable from the romping, handsome boy, with golden hair and his mother’s gray-blue eyes, of the days before. At times he stopped groaning and whispered, “Mummy.” Alexandra kissed him gently—his hair, his brow and eyes—as though her lips might “relieve him of his pain and restore some of the life which was leaving him.” As it struck him that the boy was a hemophiliac, Gilliard saw the empress’s double agony—her son’s awful suffering made worse by her own hereditary transmission of it. “Now,” he wrote, “I realized the secret tragedy of her life.”
The Russian people felt no such sympathy. They knew nothing of the drama; they did not see the empress. Apart from the annual cruise to Finland and a spring or fall vacation in the Crimea, Alexandra was closeted almost permanently at Tsarskoye Selo. Two palaces were set in a walled park behind high iron fences. One, built by and named for Catherine the Great, was vast and ornate, a blue and gilt rival to Versailles, chandeliered, with exquisite parquet floors and rugs, brocaded silver and turquoise curtains, overlooking terraces, ponds, and statues. Alexandra and Nicholas had chosen to live in the nearby Alexander Palace, a more modest two-story country house with classical facades washed in ocher. The pillared center held state apartments and the rarely used ballroom. The family lived in one wing, court officials in the other. A regiment of Cossack escorts rode around the park and its avenues at intervals of fifty yards by day and night. In the palace itself men of His Majesty’s Regiment were stationed in corridors, on staircases, in the kitchens and cellars. Spiridovich’s police agents guarded entrances and exits, searching visitors, tradesmen, and staff, cross-referring to photographic files of known terrorists and dissidents.
The dominant color in the rooms the empress used was mauve. The carpets, the drapes, the cushions, the photograph frames in her boudoir were mauve; so were the flowers—lilacs, violets, and orchids—sent daily from the French Riviera, and the cover on the white upright piano. She bought fifty new dresses each season from Paquin and Worth in Paris but rarely wore them, preferring tight-bodiced, full-skirted dresses in cream and mauve, fussily trimmed in lace. She smelled of Rose Blanche perfume and French cigarettes. Nicholas added to her brilliant stock of jewelry each year with new Fabergé creations. For everyday use she stuck to freshwater pearls; on state occasions she so covered herself with diamonds—at her throat, on her breast, her hands, her ears, in her tiara—that the tsar’s snide aunt Marie said that she had “un goût du parvenue.” The bedroom where she shared a double bed with the tsar was carpeted in mauve. A door led to a small private chapel lit by oil lamps. Another passed to her bathroom, where, true to her Victorian upbringing, the lavatory and the bath were concealed under cloths.
The empress had few visitors other than Vyrubova to lift her spirits; her life centered on her family, and the preservation of her son and the autocracy he would inherit. High society was spiteful to her. When she tried to set up sewing circles to make clothes for the poor, she was ridiculed for behaving like the wife of an English vicar. She gave permission for a charity bazaar to be held in the Hermitage; other charity ladies were jealous, and shopkeepers complained of unfair competition. She was too Victorian, too British, an Englishman wrote; he thought her unpopularity stemmed from “her want of a ‘theatrical’ sense. The theatrical instinct is so deep in Russian nature that one feels the Russians act their lives rather than live them. This was entirely foreign to the empress’s thought.” Courtiers and socialites found her earnest and stilted; she thought them false. When it was suggested that she meet new faces, she replied, “Why? So as to hear more lies?”
The vigorous Russia that was emerging beyond the airless world of the court was ignored. The sovereigns insisted that they valued “nothing so much as simplicity and sincerity” in people, Gleb Botkin, the son of their personal physician, observed; at the same time, “without being conscious of it, they actually appraised people almost solely according to the amount of attention these people gave to quite outward and often nonsensical etiquette.” Their son had acquired this taste for protocol by the time he was four. Botkin’s mother met him at the entrance to the palace, bowed, and said: “How do you do, Your Imperial Highness?” The boy frowned with anger and turned his head away, already aware that none had the right to address him before he had spoken to them.
Alexandra’s day was measured and dull. She breakfasted late on bacon and eggs with well-brewed tea. She was seldom up and about before noon, spending her mornings reading or writing letters in bed. She walked with her Scottish terrier, a notorious ankle nipper, before lunch. She was indifferent to food and wine; frugal, she sold unwanted dresses to a secondhand market, first changing mother-of-pearl buttons to glass. She dealt with correspondence in the afternoon before riding in the park in a black landau or the tsar’s Delaunay-Belleville automobile. After formal dinner she often listened to music—Wagner was a favorite—or played the piano with Vyrubova. Tea with the tsar at 11:00 P.M. ended the day; then they made love, their relationship still urgent and physical, or she read herself to sleep.
Any public function—a reception, a visit to a theater, a gala—was an ordeal that she avoided whenever possible. The St. Petersburg season lasted from Christmas until Lent. Lapps from Finland camped on the ice in the middle of the Neva and offered rides in reindeer sledges. A woman crocodile tamer thrilled the crowds at the winter circus by putting her head in the reptile’s jaws. Hedges of roses, and baskets of daffodils and lilacs, scented the air at the bals blancs for unmarried girls. Outside, heavily padded coachmen chatted in courtyards lit by open fires, the heads of their shaggy horses haloed in the steam of their breath, waiting for girls in fur-trimmed overshoes and fur cloaks, their arms full of flowers and ribbons, to be escorted to their carriages by men in gold and white uniforms and chaperons in pearl gray satin. The dowager empress was often seen in her carriage, a small figure in a black robe protected from assassins by no more than a tall, bearded Cossack riding on the running board.
Of Nicholas and Alexandra, there was nothing. The ballrooms of the Winter Palace were unused, the wheels of the imperial coaches unturned. For the first time in living memory, the tsar failed to bless the waters of the Neva at Epiphany. He was blamed for the severe cholera epidemics that broke out in the summer; the river was heavy with germs, the superstitious said, because the tsar had not purified it. Society had no focal point without the tsar and empress; the glitter was dulled and the unexplained absence blamed on Alexandra’s hauteur and hysteria.
She thought her ailments—pains in the back, the chest, the legs, exhaustion—were real and physical. “If people speak to you about my ‘nerves,’ ” she wrote to a friend in Germany, “please strongly contradict it. They are as strong as ever, it’s the ‘over-tired’ heart and nerves of the body and nerves of the heart besides, but the other nerves are very sound. Very bad heartaches, have not what one calls walked for three years, the heart goes wild, fearfully out of breath and such pains.” Others were not so sure. Her maid, Madelaine Zanotti, thought she was suffering from hysteria: “When she found herself among congenial people she was always quite well, and never complained about her heart,” Zanotti noticed. “But the moment anything displeased her … she immediately began complaining. Believing that her heart was affected, she used to spend the greater part of each day lying on her sofa.”
Rasputin’s first success at the palace flowed from his ability to calm the empress. He also had a natural way with her children. He enjoyed the young, and they, in turn, were enthralled by his stories and the games he played with them. He never patronized them; years later the niece of one of the tsar’s doctors recollected him teaching her to “pray with the most wonderful words” and explaining quietly why she should never tear up flowers, because it was cruel to take life by force.
He paid further informal visits to the palace through 1907. He called the tsar Batiushka, “Little Father,” and Alexandra Matushka, “Little Mother,” the affectionate names used by loyal peasants for their rulers, embracing them with the Russian triple kiss. At court they were submerged by “aristocrats and gentlemen who trick them,” so it was natural for them to be captivated by this “true Russian” and to show him off to their children.
The tsar’s sister Olga recollected that her brother asked her one evening in the late summer, “Will you come to meet a Russian peasant?” She followed him to the bright, chintzy nursery on the first floor. The children “were completely at ease with him,” she wrote. “I still remember little Alexis, deciding he was a rabbit, jumping up and down the room. And then, quite suddenly, Rasputin caught the child’s hand and led him into his bedroom.” Candles glowed in front of icons on the wall of the modest room, and the tsarevich stood still and silent beside the starets, joining him in prayer.
Afterward Olga took tea with Rasputin and her sister-in-law. His persistent, direct questions set her teeth on edge—“Was I happy? Did I love my husband? Why had I no children? He had no right to ask such questions.” Despite Rasputin’s insight, for her marriage was close to divorce, she was shocked; the more so for Alexandra merely seemed “uncomfortable” with his impertinence and did not intervene. Olga was glad to leave the palace, and she thought the peasant so pushy that she thanked God he did not follow her to the railroad station and leap aboard her private carriage. Olga felt that both her brother and his wife “were hoping that I would come to like Rasputin.” She did not, but she recognized that “a gentleness and warmth radiated from him” when he was with the children. She found it “all most impressive.”
A visit by Rasputin during the fall coincided with one of the tsarevich’s hemorrhages. He went to the boy’s bedside; shortly after the recovery began. “All one knows is that after Grigory examined the child and prayed, the hemorrhage stopped,” Spiridovich reported. The starets told the parents, “Be calm, your son will live, and when he is twenty, his illness will disappear without trace.” This prophecy was passed on to the security chief by the court doctor, who was told it directly by the tsar. A slightly different version was told by the director of the Imperial Theaters, V. A. Teliakovsky. He was asked by the painter Korovine, “Who is this Rasputin?” “Well,” the director replied, “he’s a strange fellow. He was taken to the tsarevich, who was ill in bed with a hemorrhage. His veins aren’t strong; it’s a hereditary illness. When Rasputin went to him, the child burst out laughing.… Rasputin did the same. He touched the patient’s leg with his hand, and almost at once the bleeding stopped flowing. ‘There’s a good little boy,’ Rasputin said. ‘You’ll get better. But only the Lord knows what will happen tomorrow.’ Now, of course, the family think he’s a saint.”
The tsarevich’s doctors were unable to explain this and Alexis’s subsequent recoveries. Some specialists, however, were aware that loss of blood and exhaustion could in themselves so reduce the blood pressure that a hemorrhage would stop. This would occur spontaneously as the crisis appeared to reach its height, and recovery would be noticeable at once. It was not miraculous that Alexis lived; despite medical ignorance of the condition at the time, hemophiliacs could live well into adulthood, surviving repeated hemorrhages. Rasputin’s arrival may simply have coincided with the natural onset of self-healing.
Stress increases bleeding, and it is likely that this also played a part. Rasputin had a natural affinity for people undergoing stress. His self-confidence was easily sensed; he had insight and charisma; his presence was calming. There are several accounts of him dealing with hysteria, and with migraines and other severe headaches in adults. These were sometimes accompanied by Rasputin turning pale, sweating, trembling, falling into exhaustion, and other dramatic symptoms of faith healing.
The phenomenon—prayer, intense physical and mental exhaustion, followed by the patient’s recovery—is inexplicable, but it was repeated on enough occasions, in his Siberian youth, in Kiev and Tsaritsyn, several times in St. Petersburg, and in front of enough independent or even hostile witnesses, such as the tsar’s sister Olga and the head of the chancellery, Alexander Mosolov, for it undoubtedly to have taken place. The physical toll on Rasputin was apparent, too, in his later dealings with the tsarevich’s hemorrhages. On this first occasion with the boy, however, he was quiet and natural. The sick boy’s affection for Rasputin, the instinctive comfort of prayer, and his sense that his mother’s anxiety eased in Rasputin’s presence would have relaxed him and thus reduced the bleeding.
Alexandra had a simpler explanation. Rasputin had sought help from God, and God had responded. “The imperial family firmly believed that they owed much of Alexis’s improving health to the prayers of Rasputin,” wrote Anna Vyrubova, who was herself to be brought out of a coma by the starets in a well-documented case. “Alexis himself believed it.”
The holy man continued his unholy revels, carrying out his seductions in Lokhtina’s convenient apartment. Spiridovich recorded his affair with Elena—the security chief was too discreet to use her family name, but it may have been Timofeyeva—a twenty-six-year-old with “wonderful gray eyes,” a gentle creature who broke off her engagement when she became besotted with the starets. At first she tried to resist him, but Rasputin’s other admirers did all they could to deliver her to him. “This was the system if someone did not give herself to the starets; it was necessary that she was forced to do what he pleased,” Spiridovich observed. The victim was taken away from her home ground to meet him in company, then abruptly abandoned to him. “It was probably in Lokhtina’s apartment that he deflowered her,” Spiridovich wrote. “The life of the young girl was broken. Submitting to him like a slave, she followed him everywhere as if under a spell.” When Rasputin showed her off to the idiot Mitya, the dwarf cackled, “Good morning, Abbess!” She turned to religion when Rasputin left her and she repented. “She took the veil, entered a convent, and died,” Spiridovich concluded.
Throughout the fall, Rasputin played with his rich admirers. He lay in bed between mothers and daughters, taunting the flesh to fortify the spirit. He was interested only in the pretty. “Get off, you old crazy, get away, you old carcass,” he yelled at an elderly admirer eager to be purified by sin. Others he took to bathhouses for “fervors.” These were not to be confused with visits to the Nevsky bathhouses with prostitutes. “They might end in the same fashion, but the goal was different,” Spiridovich commented. “If Grigory wanted to see a nude woman, he didn’t have to go to a public place. There was no lack of private apartments in the capital where he could find what he wanted.”
He varied his methods depending on who he was with, knowing exactly how far he could go. “He attracted some to his bed, and with others he was an angel of virtue”; with the Montenegrins, and above all with Nicholas and Alexandra, he showed “extreme decency and chastity.”
Rasputin was flush with funds from admirers when he returned to winter in Pokrovskoye. He gave five thousand rubles to improve the church and oversaw the building of a new house for himself, the finest in the village, built of double planks on two floors with high and well-lit rooms looking toward the river. Six double windows overlooked the road, three on each floor, with handsome carved surrounds. The rooms were screened from curious passersby with muslin drapes, which gave the house a solid bourgeois air, as though its owner were a prosperous and respectable local miller. He fenced in the space in front of the house where the sidewalk would have been if rural Siberia had run to such niceties. It gave some privacy. The roof was of corrugated iron, and the eaves had the pretty detail of cross-planing. Metal chimneys replaced the roofholes that served his neighbors. It was well decorated inside, with rugs, china plates and fruit bowls, icons, a desk, and a dining table. There were two guest bedrooms where Rasputin could play test your flesh with visitors.
He was careful that no women were in evidence when Feofan visited him for two weeks in the spring of 1908. He showed off the house proudly to the churchman, taking him to his old cabin and praying with him in the chapel beneath the barn. Feofan had reinforced his high opinion of the starets when he left Pokrovskoye for Saratov to pray in front of the shrine to St. Serafim. Rasputin accompanied him only as far as Nizhni Novgorod. He had good reason not to go on to Saratov, where the bathhouse seductions of four years before were well remembered. The mother superior at the Saratov Convent boiled with rage when Feofan spoke of Rasputin’s holiness. She hurled her fork to the floor and shouted, “That’s what should be done with your Rasputin!” Feofan ignored the outburst and made a favorable report to the tsar and empress on his return.