Rasputin recontacted Khionia Berlandskaya, still suffering guilt over her husband’s suicide, and persuaded her to return with him to Pokrovskoye that winter. He made love to her on the Trans-Siberian to Tyumen, moving into her sleeping compartment as soon as the train pulled out of Moscow. “He told me that he loved me as a man,” she wrote later. “He instructed me to prepare myself as a woman and began to do what a husband alone is permitted to do.… He forced me, caressed me and kissed me, and lay with me. He then did all he wanted, to the end.” The following morning, he explained that his mission in life was to relieve original sin. He “tested” her again as darkness fell on the slow-moving train, becoming aroused and, she said, “obliging me to acknowledge his excitement.” She was miserable and suffering—“Heavens, how can God help to write all this down!”—and she thought that she must be “dirty, impure, and given over to passion … for he clearly felt it necessary to subject me to perpetual testing.”
Few of his women were as breathtakingly naive as this. Some—actresses, courtesans, bored aristocrats, the mistresses of important men—were quite as cynical as Rasputin and gave themselves to him out of lust and curiosity. Casual sex—and Rasputin’s was casual, often a matter of five minutes and a grunted “now, matushka, that’s better”—was making inroads with the capital’s fast set. If it remained more or less scandalous, and several Romanov grand dukes were living in France and Germany because their liaisons had become known, that added the fillip of danger. Other women slept with him in a matter-of-fact way, hoping to gain advancement for themselves or their families. Nevertheless, Rasputin was aware that to destroy the reputation of a respectable woman like Berlandskaya was to subject her to ostracism and contempt. He had no remorse.
Praskovya Rasputin was chilly when the lovers arrived in Pokrovskoye. She shouted at Berlandskaya, served her small portions at meals, and refused to give her a guest room. Rasputin slept with her on a mattress on the floor; Praskovya removed it and gave her a thin mat. Rasputin found it too uncomfortable to pass a whole night on; he fucked her swiftly when the mood took him. “Ah, this is a heavy stone,” he told her of the “sin” he was lifting from her. “I’ve never known one so heavy.” Another disciple joined them, and he made her wash him in the bathhouse in the courtyard. “He was quite naked,” Berlandskaya wrote, “and he ordered her in front of everyone and in their sight to wash the parts of his body that are covered up more than others.”
When he returned to St. Petersburg early in 1909, Rasputin was short of funds. He rode second class, much to his irritation, while Berlandskaya traveled in third. He ate well but gave her only his scraps.
The young widow later made bitter public accusations against Rasputin, but for the moment he was safe. He made a second important contact at the palace when Vyrubova introduced him to Lili von Dehn. She was the wife of an aide-de-camp, Capt. Charles von Dehn, whom the empress had met on the annual cruise aboard the Standart and to whom she had become close. Lili von Dehn’s son Titi was running a high fever, and doctors feared that he was sickening with diphtheria, then a potentially fatal disease. Vyrubova advised her to see Rasputin and telephoned him to arrange a meeting.
She met him at Sazonov’s. He seemed a “typical peasant from the frozen North,” in high boots, loose shirt, and a muzhik’s long, black coat. Then she noticed his eyes, “shining and steel-like,” in a thin, pale face framed in light chestnut hair. Many people described him as tall; she noticed that he was not, “but he gave the impression of being so.” His stare unsettled her—“I felt at once attracted, repelled, disquieted, and reassured”—but she asked him to come and pray at her child’s bedside.
He arrived with a “quaint creature” dressed like a nun—Lokhtina—who refused to enter the boy’s bedroom and sat praying on the stairs. Rasputin knelt and prayed, then bent over the bed. “Don’t wake him,” she asked, afraid that the strange peasant would frighten the child. “Silence. I must,” he insisted, putting his fingers on the boy’s nose. Titi woke at once but looked at the starets without a trace of fear, telling him that his head ached. “Never mind,” Rasputin said. He turned to the mother: “Tomorrow your son will be well. Let me know if he is not.” Titi slipped back to sleep. The next morning his temperature was normal. His doctor was “astonished.”
The illnesses that Rasputin relieved for adults—Lokhtina’s hysteria, the empress’s “neurasthenia”—were psychosomatic. He had undoubted talent. “Taking the head of the sick person in his hands, as if praying, he could suggest what he liked,” Spiridovich said. “The patient became calm, and the cure was attributed to the prayers of the starets, which were obviously pleasing to God. It was thus that he operated with Lokhtina and others.” Although he was most successful with the suggestible and religious, particularly women, he was also effective with the cynical Simanovich. He used his powers sparingly; he made no claim to be a professional healer, as Dr. Philippe had done. He acted only on request and as a favor to people he knew or as a means to seduction; he seldom boasted of his cures, at least when sober, and was always careful to attribute them to God.
With children the possibility that he was a thaumaturge, a miracle worker, was discussed by doctors. They could think of no other explanation in cases like that of Titi von Dehn. As the tsarevich grew he became more vulnerable to his hemophilia. Shortly after the Dehn case, he fell in the park at Tsarskoye Selo and hit his leg. His aunt Olga saw him lying in his palace room “in such pain, dark patches under his eyes, and his little body all distorted, and the leg terribly swollen.” The doctors seemed more frightened than the family and kept whispering among themselves; they were “just useless.” As it got late Olga was persuaded to go to her room. Alexandra had a telephone call placed to Rasputin in St. Petersburg.
He reached the palace at about midnight, when Olga was asleep. The next morning Alexandra called for her to go to Alexis’s room. “I just could not believe my eyes,” Olga wrote. “The little boy was not just alive—but well.” He was sitting up in bed, his eyes bright, the fever and the swelling in the leg “quite gone.” Alexandra told her that Rasputin had stood at the foot of the bed and prayed. He had not touched the boy. Some claimed that his prayers had coincided with the child’s natural recovery. Olga disliked Rasputin, but she was convinced there was more to it than that. The doctors insisted that no attack of such severity could be cured in a few hours. “Secondly,” she continued, “the coincidence might have answered if it happened, say, once or twice, but I could not even count how many times it happened!”
Lili von Dehn joined Rasputin’s circle. She met him frequently with Vyrubova and saw him when he came to the palace, at this time “on average once a month.” Alexandra treated him “with veneration.” She called him Grigory when she was with him and Father Grigory when she was not. “I believe in him,” she told Dehn repeatedly. For his part, he became angry if he thought people were blocking his access to the palace, and he often said that “Mama is stingy,” complaining that the empress gave him little money.
Having seen him save her son, Dehn had no truck with the rumors of Rasputin’s seductions. Quite the contrary; she claimed that he saved women from themselves. “I know for a fact,” she testified later, “that many women of my world who had affairs and many demi-mondaines were not dragged further into the mire by Rasputin, for—incredible as it may appear—his influence in such cases was often for the best.” As an instance of his morality, she recalled how she met him while out walking in St. Petersburg with one of her husband’s brother officers. The starets was outraged. “Are you following the example of frivolous society women?” he bellowed. “Why are you not walking with your husband?” To women who sought his advice, he said: “If you mean to do wrong, first come and tell me.” If he meant “come and do the wrong with me first,” it passed Dehn by. Rasputin’s admirers met evidence of misdeeds with heroic suspension of disbelief.
Vyrubova traveled to Pokrovskoye at the empress’s expense with three other ladies, their maids, and a palace nurse, Maria Ivanovna Vichnyakova, to satisfy Alexandra’s curiosity. Subsequent police reports recorded by Spiridovich described the visit, in May 1909, as sordid and ill-tempered. Vyrubova’s own account—she used a different date—was of a rural idyll full of prayer and sanctity.
She said that Rasputin met them at Tyumen station in a peasant cart drawn by two farm horses. The house was “almost biblical in its bare simplicity.” The guests slept on straw mattresses laid out on the bare wooden floors of the upstairs bedrooms; there were icons on the walls and faintly burning tapers in front of them. She made no mention of the rich furniture mentioned by other witnesses. They ate plain meals downstairs with four peasant friends of their host; “sitting around the table,” she said of these guests, “they sang prayers and psalms with rustic faith and fervor.”
Every day Vyrubova and the other ladies went down to the river to watch Rasputin drawing in his nets. He had become fisherman as well as farmer. They often had dinner by the river, cooking the fish “over little campfires on the shore,” sharing their raisins, bread, nuts, and pastries. They visited Verkhoturye together, saw the relics of St. Simeon, and talked with the starets Makari in his forest retreat. “This aged and pious monk,” Vyrubova reported to the empress, “held Rasputin in higher respect than the village clergy.”
In the police account Rasputin traveled with the ladies Vyrubova, Madame Orlova, the mother of the dead general, Rasputin’s conquest Elena Timofeyeva, and a lady Spiridovich referred to as Madame S, possibly Anna Dmitrievna Shipova, a maid of honor in the court of the princess of Oldenburg. People who knew Rasputin well denied it—in seven hundred pages of memoirs, the former premier Sergei Witte made no mention of their meetings, and a future premier would see him only in secret in the Peter and Paul Fortress—while those who did not, seeking to gain advantage, claimed that they did. Some who came across him, like Madame S, were protected by the use of an initial.
The anonymity Spiridovich afforded her is explained by events on the first night outbound from Moscow on the Trans-Siberian. Rasputin and Elena took the two top couchettes of a sleeping compartment, with Madame S on the berth beneath. During the night Rasputin fucked Elena noisily. When he had finished he climbed into Madame S’s berth. She grabbed his beard and pulled it as hard as she could before seeking sanctuary for the rest of the night in the corridor. At Tyumen station they were met by two telegas, which drove them off at spine-jolting speed. When the elderly Madame Orlova complained, Rasputin hissed: “Why am I lumbered with you?” They arrived in Pokrovskoye, sore and upset, at 2:00 A.M. Rasputin put Madame S in a separate bedroom. In the morning he ordered her to wash in the river. She did so, weeping with humiliation. A peasant woman who had come to get water tried to comfort her. When she learned that she was staying with Rasputin, the woman shrugged expressively, picked up her bucket, and trudged off to the village.
At lunch Vyrubova asked Rasputin to bless each course. There was little talk after the scandal on the train. After the meal they went for a walk. They met Father Pyotr, the village priest, but Rasputin refused to introduce the women to his old enemy. “No need!” he said angrily. He bought each of them a head scarf in the store. They said psalms when they returned to the house—the two accounts have that much in common—with Rasputin swinging his arms like a conductor. After dinner, at six, Praskovya Rasputin washed her husband in the bathhouse in the courtyard while Elena and Vyrubova looked on. Vyrubova suddenly reddened and cried: “Come here! Come here! The Holy Spirit has descended on Grigory Efimovich!”
As the ladies came out of the house, a dog began to bark. Praskovya Rasputin pushed them back indoors, warning, “Look! Priests are coming!” It was a false alarm. The village priest walked past without looking in. Rasputin came out of the bathhouse, lobster pink, drying his face on a towel. “Ah, you’re young,” he reproached Madame S, “much too young to be so chaste.” She accused him of being a khlyst. Vyrubova calmed him.
He took them by cart to a neighboring village the next morning to meet two peasants he introduced as “my brothers in Christ.” They insisted on taking the ladies by the waist to walk with them. When they returned to the house, Vyrubova said that she wanted to send a telegram to the empress. “We are bathed in beatitude,” it read. The others objected; the visit had become an ordeal. Rasputin told her to send it, and she did so. In the evening Rasputin had a wire from Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich asking him to return to St. Petersburg for the consecration of a new chapel. Rasputin said they would leave the next morning.
The “brothers in Christ” drove them to Tyumen in telegas. Madame S threatened to tell the empress that Rasputin had made love to Elena on the outward journey. Vyrubova retorted that all his deeds had a “divine character.” Rasputin made them sing psalms in the carriage; a Siberian industrialist on the train warned the ladies that these were khlyst songs. A soldier asked Madame S if it was true that one of the empress’s maids of honor was traveling with Rasputin. She felt ashamed. At Vyatka, Rasputin tried to kiss her; she slapped him, and he became angry. He said that he had spoken well of her to the empress—“and this is how you treat me. What am I to say about you to her now?”
As they neared St. Petersburg, however, Rasputin’s behavior improved and he resumed his role as starets. When he embraced the ladies as the train drew in, it was to mollify them. Vyrubova left without a word. Madame S’s husband was on the platform. Rasputin sneered to him that his wife had “done nothing but argue with me the whole time.” True to her threat, Madame S wrote a letter to the empress, thanking her for the opportunity of visiting Pokrovskoye but adding that Rasputin merited “neither the favor nor the confidence of Their Majesties.” She said that Madame Orlova could vouch for his misconduct.
Orlova was summoned to an audience at the palace, Spiridovich said, but she maintained that nothing untoward had taken place. The problem was Madame S, a “prude who sees depravity where there is none,” whose lies were calculated to disgrace Vyrubova and worm her way into the empress’s favor. An embellished version of the episode was soon making the rounds. “Vyrubova went to Tyumen to the screwball’s place and spent several days there,” Madame Bogdanova noted in her diary. “Several ladies’ maids were outraged by the screwball. One of them is pregnant, and it seems that Annushka [Vyrubova] is going to bring up the baby.”
Rasputin’s next scandal was religious. He took up the cause of Iliodor, the young monk he had met with Hermogen on his first visit to St. Petersburg. Convinced that the church was rotten, the tsar betrayed, and Christianity dying, Iliodor had moved to Tsaritsyn on the Volga to raise a popular movement to protect Russia against the Jews, Freemasons, anarchists, and church leaders he thought hell-bent on destroying it. He arrived in the city with three rubles and seventy kopecks in his pocket and was given a small chapel on wasteland in an outlying slum district.
He was a Don Cossack by birth, and his sermons were a battle cry against “drunkenness, filth, selfishness, and sordid rapaciousness of all kinds.” Bargemen, porters, timber carriers, the scum of the Volga, wept for their sins and “gloried in his bold mouth.” He saved alcoholics by holding long services that kept them out of the vodka shops until they closed. He took prostitutes out of the riverside brothels to hear him preach, and shamed their customers by reading out their names. Robert Wilton, the London Times correspondent, was intrigued enough to visit Iliodor, finding a congregation of thousands, “a sort of Russian Salvation Army.… Desperadoes and a similar class of women flocked to him.” With “wax-like fingers and a face transparent from long vigils,” Wilton wrote, dressed in white vestments, the monk stood above the dirty crowds like an angel as he harangued them; he “caught the people’s hearts, and held them.”
Fifty thousand gold rubles were raised by public subscription to build a monastery for Iliodor while the poorest of his flock toiled on the site without wages. It was a dramatic building, like the film set of a medieval fortress, with battlements and wooden towers. It matched the monk’s crusading calls for violent counterrevolution against politicians and in favor of the tsar. He denounced the prime minister, Stolypin, for selling his soul to the Jews. He kept a photograph of the “Antichrist” Leo Tolstoy, and the faithful spat on it as they passed. He had made a model of a huge dragon, which he said represented revolution, decapitating it with a sword when his sermons reached their climax. Alarmed officials reported that he was spreading sedition. “I am accused of treason,” he thundered in reply from the pulpit. “The government demands that I cease preaching the divine truth. I declare holy war on the synod and the government.… I am ready to die a thousand deaths. I ask you, brothers and sisters, to do the same!” He had tunnels built in the clay beneath the monastery; when the provincial governor sent troops with a message for him to hold his tongue, he disappeared. Wilton thought that “the monk’s madness has a world of method in it.”
After a rabble-rousing performance in the summer of 1910, in which Iliodor openly called on his followers to arm themselves, Stolypin and the synod persuaded the tsar to sign an order expelling him from his Tsaritsyn power base. He was ordered to enter a monastery in Minsk. At this he traveled to St. Petersburg to see whether Rasputin could use his influence to have the order revoked. The two holy men resumed their friendship; Rasputin assured Iliodor he would help. He introduced him to Vyrubova. She knelt before him and kissed his hand. “Well, you saw it with your own eyes!” Rasputin bragged to Iliodor as they left. “What do you think of that!” They arranged to meet the empress at Vyrubova’s cottage. She asked Iliodor not to indulge in “demagoguery” but recommended that Rasputin appeal to the tsar.
He did so. In the account Rasputin gave to Iliodor, Nicholas argued that he could do nothing, since he had already given his consent to the order. “You are the tsar,” Rasputin replied. “Act like one. You have given your word, and you can take it back. When you threw Iliodor to the dogs to be eaten, you signed your name like this, from left to right. All you have to do is to sign it from right to left. Then you will have acted like a real tsar.” Rasputin was always at his most boastful with Iliodor, himself not a reliable witness. It is highly unlikely that Rasputin was so cavalier with a man as sensitive of his position as Nicholas. Nevertheless, to Stolypin’s fury, and the growth of Rasputin’s reputation, the tsar indeed revoked the order.
Nicholas attended celebrations at Poltava to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the victory of his ancestor Peter the Great over the Swedes. He was met with cheers, a sound he had heard rarely since Bloody Sunday, and he assured the French military attaché that they proved both his popularity and the fact that “we are no longer at Petersburg.” He said that “the rural population, the owners of land, the nobility, and the army” remained loyal. Those against him, he said, were “composed above all of Jews, students, landless peasants, and some workers.” With this comforting but untrue thought, he took his family to spend three months of late summer and fall abroad. They visited the yachting regatta at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, where Nicholas sailed with his look-alike cousin, the future George V of England, and partied with another cousin, German Kaiser Wilhelm. Alexandra visited her brother in Darmstadt and went to the spa at Nauheim to see heart specialists. Rasputin went with Bishop Hermogen to visit Iliodor in Tsaritsyn.
The monk’s followers feted Rasputin as the savior of their prophet and an angel of God. He enjoyed himself. A line of women formed in the monastery to seek his advice. He kissed the pretty ones and turned the others away: “Mother, your love is pleasing, but the spirit of the Lord does not descend on me.”
He cured two demented souls at Iliodor’s request, according to police reports. A carter’s wife, “young, beautiful, and buxom,” was prey to voices in her head that made her curse and convulse. Iliodor’s attempts to exorcise her demons with prayers, crucifix, and holy water failed. She continued to shriek. Rasputin asked to be left alone by her sickbed. After a few minutes the cries ceased. The wife then came smiling from her bedroom, peaceful and content, while Rasputin followed to say that he had cast out the evil spirit, with a “sly, triumphant smirk on his lips.” This cure was followed by the treatment of the niece of a rich merchant, Madame Lebedeva. Rasputin said that he could not exorcise her demons in the bedroom where she lay, and he had her carried to an isolated room. He spent several hours with her, reappearing in the late evening while she slept quietly, as though “surrounded by angels.” News of “miracles” swept through Tsaritsyn. When he set off for his winter trip to Pokrovskoye, taking the grateful Iliodor with him, Rasputin rode through cheering crowds in a flower-strewn carriage.
Iliodor reported that Rasputin drank heavily on the steamer trip up the Volga and boasted that the tsar thought him “Christ incarnate.” He said the starets claimed that Nicholas “cannot breathe without me” and had knelt before him. He said that both tsar and empress had kissed his hand. This was a sign of subservience in Russia—a reason why Iliodor was deeply impressed when he saw Vyrubova greet the starets—and rumors that the sovereigns thus debased themselves to Rasputin were persistent enough for the investigating commission to examine them carefully after the murder. No evidence was found. Vyrubova said in her testimony that—although “the emperor and empress called him simply ‘Grigory’ and he called them ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’ ”—neither ever kissed his hands. They kissed cheeks. Although Iliodor’s account was written after he had fallen out with Rasputin, it is doubtful that he invented this out of malice; additional accounts show that Rasputin embellished his palace tales when he was in his cups. His other claims on the steamer ring true. He said Alexandra had sworn to him that she would never waver and “always consider him to be her Friend.” He showed the monk blouses embroidered for him by the empress and her daughters, and he told how he freely enjoyed himself with society women, fucking them until he “overcame the flesh” and they became “passionless.”
When they arrived in Pokrovskoye, Iliodor found the house to have none of Vyrubova’s “biblical simplicity.” There were leather sofas, glass bookcases and a piano, potted plants and palms. Amid the icons were photographs, of the imperial family, court dignitaries, and ministers, signed with flattering dedications. The study reminded the monk of a cabinet minister’s private room, with heavy leather chairs and a big oak table with piles of telegrams on it. Rasputin gave him a guided tour, pointing out which Romanov or society beauty had presented which piece.
He gave a reception for the monk, inviting village worthies, a couple of schoolmarms, the owner of the general store, the commune secretary and his wife. He dressed up in a raspberry satin blouse, blue trousers, and red slippers. They had candies, nuts, and jam doughnuts. Rasputin walked up and down, hands in pockets, self-important, and led them in singing canticles. He had insisted that Father Pyotr be there; the parish priest did not join in the general jollity. The next morning the priest got Iliodor on his own and told him of Rasputin’s “debauchery.” “Grigory gets young girls, and he lays them, he lays them,” the priest said. “Now he has these airheads from Petersburg who come and see him. They bathe with him, they sleep with him.… He’s nothing but a drunk and a troublemaker.… The villagers think he’s a thief, an imbecile. He’s always trying to suck up to the bishop. He offered money for the church and the villagers didn’t want it—they know how he gets his money.… He thinks of us priests as less than dirt. He says that divine grace bypasses unworthy priests and falls directly on the simple. Naturally, that means on him. He has the nerve to say that when he beds a woman, he blesses her and delivers her from carnal desire.”
Iliodor, intense, obsessed with moral crusade, his own passions turned inward by his vow of chastity, was troubled by sexuality. He discussed it with Rasputin while they sweated in the bathhouse together. “I am safe from desire,” the starets told him. “God has given me this gift in recompense for the penances imposed on me. Touching a woman is the same for me as touching a plank of wood.” He explained how this state was achieved. “I direct my lust from here”—he indicated his loins—“to my chest, my head, and my brain. Thus I become invulnerable. And if a woman touches me, she is also delivered from desire. That’s why women run after me. They want to pleasure themselves, but they’re afraid of losing their virginity, or they’re afraid of sin. So they ask me to deliver them from the lusts of the flesh, to make them invulnerable as I am.” He described his recent visit to Makari in the Verkhoturye woods. While Makari had prayed in his cell, he had lain naked with the women, spread-eagling them against his legs and thighs and curing them of lust. When they returned to Pokrovskoye, he’d had them bathe him, and they had knelt in front of his nude body and kissed it.
It was, as Iliodor well knew, khlyst talk. The monk claimed that Rasputin sent two servant girls to his bedroom in a vain attempt to “make a khlyst” of him. This is unlikely. Rasputin was no procurer for others; none of his acquaintances makes a wholly credible witness, and Iliodor’s later hatred made him less reliable than most. The theme of the bathhouse discourse, however—sex, sin, purification—was one Rasputin returned to often. If he boasted, he had reason to; he was welcomed to the imperial palace and in the beds of highborn ladies. He was forty, and already there was none in the gray and servile history of Russian peasantry with whom to compare him.
On December 6 Rasputin sent a telegram to Nicholas in his and Iliodor’s names congratulating the tsar on his name day. They received a reply from Vyrubova: “Very touched by your congratulations. We thank you with all our heart. Anna.” Iliodor was “stupefied.” A few days later the village postman Mikhail delivered a large envelope bearing the imperial arms and seal. Rasputin read it through, stroking his beard with pleasure, and told Iliodor that it was an autograph letter from the empress. Iliodor asked if he often had such correspondence. He showed the monk a bundle wrapped in blue checked cotton that held letters written to him by Alexandra and the young grand duchesses. It was a dangerous indiscretion. Iliodor purloined some of the letters. To a man at war with the government, they might provide useful insurance.
The two holy men left Pokrovskoye for Tsaritsyn on December 15. There was no train from Tyumen until the following morning. Iliodor slept at the monastery, Rasputin spending the night at an admirer’s house. They stopped off at Saratov to spend a day with Bishop Hermogen. Iliodor told him that Rasputin bathed with women. “Why do you do that?” the bishop asked the starets in despair. “You mustn’t. It won’t do.” Rasputin appeared to be contrite, but when he was alone with Iliodor, he told him never to mention baths to the bishop again.
They arrived at Tsaritsyn on December 23. Iliodor suggested that he hear Rasputin’s confession in his monastery the next morning. Rasputin appeared worried, and the monk asked him if he wished to unburden himself of his sins. Rasputin scratched his nose with his finger and said, “It’s got nothing to do with that.” “What then?” Iliodor said. “It’s about my enemies,” he replied. “What’s going to happen if they all get together, if they trouble the tsarina’s soul, if they stir up a row?” Iliodor assured him that God was with him and would direct his fate. “All right,” Rasputin said. “That’s all.”
If he sensed that the monk was turning against him, he made no effort to mend his ways in front of him. Visiting a rich merchant’s wife, he tried to embrace her sister, a pleasing brunette. She slapped him twice around the face, hard. “Well, she landed a beauty on me, the bitch!” he said to Iliodor, half amused, as he beat a retreat. He was taken to see a “holy fool,” a half-wit dressed in tatters called Nastia, in the hope that he could cure her. When she saw him she covered her face and screamed, spitting and throwing the contents of a chamber pot at him.
On December 28 Rasputin sent a telegram to the tsar’s children, a verse copied from a canticle. The next day he distributed Christmas gifts. He had bought a thousand handkerchiefs, candies, apples, sugar loafs, cheap rings, and holy medallions. A crowd of several thousand came to the monastery. He told the girls that the presents would indicate what was to become of their lives. They rushed forward; he gave most of them rings, to show that they would marry, but he slipped some of them medallions, meaning that they would enter convents. He promised Iliodor fifty thousand rubles to build a convent next to the monastery.
He left on the evening of December 30. A procession escorted him to the railroad station singing “Save Us, Lord.” They sang the national anthem as the train drew in. Iliodor blessed the locomotive, and Rasputin blessed the crowd. He asked the local officials who were present to make sure that enthusiastic word of his triumph was passed to the capital. After he had gone Iliodor heard the confession of a twenty-eight-year-old novice, Xenia, a naive woman, “chaste and pious, no beauty but pleasing.” She was working for a local tradeswoman to show penitence, and Rasputin had seen her bringing supplies of holy bread to the monastery. She told the monk how she had lost her virtue.
“Father, it happened over Christmas,” she said. “While I was getting ready for bed, Rasputin came and told my mistress: ‘My good woman, send Xenia to the monastery. I have great need of her.’ Of course, I went, even though it seemed strange to need me so late. He didn’t beat about the bush.… He told me right off to undress. I obeyed. He lay on the bed and said, ‘Fine, my little darling, come and lie with me.’ I thought, Father, that he was a saintly man whom God had given the grace to purify our sinners’ bodies and to heal them.
“He embraced me in such a way that only a tiny place of my body was not covered by him. He kissed me full on the mouth. I cried out to him—‘Grigory Efimovich, what are you doing to me, a poor girl?’ ‘It’s nothing, nothing,’ he said. ‘Stay lying there and be quiet.’ I asked him what he was doing with me, and did Father Iliodor know? ‘Certainly, he knows,’ he said. I asked if Bishop Hermogen knew. ‘Of course he knows. He knows everything. Don’t worry.’ And then I asked, ‘Our father the tsar and our mother the tsarina, do they know?’ ‘Yes, yes! They know better than anyone.’ Father, I didn’t know what to do, listening to him.… He tormented me for four long hours.”
By the time Iliodor wrote this account, he was actively seeking to have Rasputin murdered. His story is, however, consistent with others, indicating that the inner struggle between faith and the flesh of Rasputin’s early years was almost over. The following year showed that sensuality, and desire for power, had won; spirituality became his greasepaint, the stage prop of a great actor.