Halley’s comet reappeared in 1910, and the talk was of imminent apocalypse. Leo Tolstoy died in a railroad siding. The individualist painter Mikhail Vrubel expired of dementia and exhaustion in an asylum, believing that God would give him emerald eyes if he could remain standing for seventeen days. In Moscow, at the fashionable Yar restaurant, Rasputin’s favorite, a young man named Praslov approached a beautiful woman sitting at a table with a party of older men in evening dress. She laughed when he asked why she was out so late and in such company. He pulled a revolver from his dinner jacket and shot her repeatedly. Several of those subpoenaed as witnesses committed suicide rather than give evidence; Praslov, who was the woman’s ex-husband, was acquitted. In St. Petersburg the titled parents of two young students refused to give them the money for a champagne supper; they forced their way into the apartment of a well-known actress, knifed her to death, and stole her jewelry to pay for their meal. “I’ve decided to get away,” Alexander Blok’s mistress told him. “The only thing left to do here is to lie down and die.” The poet did not join her, for he enjoyed the “smell of burning, blood, and iron in the air.”
The economy was booming with Stolypin’s reforms. He sold off state-owned land, including the vast Siberian crown lands to which peasants from European Russia flooded in the boxcars of the Trans-Siberian. He was creating from the most energetic peasants a sturdy yeoman class as a counterweight to radicals, taking, he said, “a gamble not on the drunken and feeble but on the sober and the strong.” Russia had the world’s highest growth rate, fueled by foreign capital. Moscow industrialists upended their top hats on bar counters and filled them with champagne corks. Distant revolutionaries fell into gloom. In the southern oil fields a Bolshevik agitator called Joseph Stalin, arrested in March for hand-setting strike calls on a flatbed press in the slums of Batum, felt the tide was flowing against revolution.
But Nicholas was tiring of his prime minister—Stolypin was too masterly, too much admired—and Russia was tired of the tsar, and his wife. “In the house of the Romanovs, a mysterious curse descends from generation to generation,” Dmitri Merezhkovsky wrote. “Murders and adultery, blood and mud … the block, the rope, and poison—these are the true emblems of the Russian autocracy. God’s unction on the brows of the tsars has become the brand of Cain.”
In Andrei Bely’s fashionable novel The Silver Dove, the poet hero deserts his beautiful and sensitive fiancée for a pockmarked peasant woman. She was the “great whore.… The movement of her breasts, her thick legs with their white calves and the dirty soles of her feet, her big belly, and her sloping, rapacious forehead—all frankly bore the imprint of lust.” She thrust herself on the poet, “pawing him and pressing her plump breasts against him—a grinning beast.” But she was not his; she belonged to Mitya Kudeiarov, a carpenter and khlyst pilot, whose ark performed dark deeds in the forests. “The Russian earth knows the secret,” Bely wrote. “So does the Russian forest.… If you are Russian, there is in your soul a red secret—to live in the fields, to die in the fields.… There is that in Russia which destroys books and smashes buildings and puts life itself to the fire.” Kudeiarov had a double face that “always looks like half a face; one side of it winking craftily at you, while the other is always spying on something, always afraid of something.”
Lust, two faces—Rasputin. A provincial girl who searched out the “strange new saint” found the Janus in him; her account appeared in René Fülöp-Miller’s 1928 biography, Rasputin: The Holy Devil. At first Rasputin reminded her of the peasant preachers she knew at home, his gaze gentle and monastic, his “worthy, simple face” haloed by his light brown hair. Then she saw another man—“mysterious, crafty, and corrupting”—peering out from eyes that still radiated kindness. He sat opposite her and edged closer. The pale blue eyes darkened and bored into her. As he thrust forward his “great wrinkled face, distorted with desire,” she was overcome with lassitude. His eyes, deep in their sockets, “furtively roved over her helpless body.… His voice had fallen to a passionate whisper, and he murmured strange, voluptuous words in her ear.”
She was on the point of surrendering to him when she dimly remembered that she had come to ask him about God; perhaps Xenia would have been saved if she had thought of God instead of Iliodor and the sovereigns. As she struggled consciously against him, her heaviness lifted. He sensed the resistance immediately; “his half-shut eyes opened again, he stood up, bent over her, lightly stroked her girlishly parted hair, and pressed a passionless, gentle, fatherly kiss on her forehead.” His face smoothed, and he blessed her, almost humbly; only in the depths of his little eyes could she see “the other man, the sensual beast,” lurking.
Rasputin was at Vyrubova’s cottage several times a week. Alexandra remained ill and nervous despite her visits to doctors in Germany; Vyrubova was with her at the palace every day, and Rasputin called frequently. Until now he had stayed partly in the shadows, as Mikhail Rodzianko put it, “doggedly preparing solid ground for himself.” As he felt his power grow, “this wild fanatic throws aside all restraint. His erotic adventures become more impudent and disgusting, the number of his victims and his worshipers grows.” The fear of enemies Rasputin had mentioned to Iliodor was justified; he was fast acquiring them.
Stories of the visits to Pokrovskoye appeared in the press in January 1910. They were noted at the Theological Academy in St. Petersburg, together with a letter from Khionia Berlandskaya detailing Rasputin’s behavior toward her. Archimandrite Feofan was alarmed at the mounting evidence of Rasputin’s misconduct. Although the newspapers had not mentioned the connection with the palace, Feofan thought it his duty as the tsar’s confessor to warn him that the peasant philanderer was a danger to the dynasty. “I made up my mind to take a last measure against Rasputin, to openly expose him and to impart everything,” he testified later. Nicholas refused to see him and suggested that he meet Alexandra and Vyrubova. “I spoke about an hour and tried to prove the state of Rasputin’s spirit,” Feofan testified. “The empress objected to this, she worried, she quoted ecclesiastical books, and it was clear that someone, most probably Rasputin, taught her to talk like this.” As they parted she told him that saints always suffered such calumny.
Feofan was an early example of the disgrace that pursued those who spoke out to the empress against the starets. He was first dismissed as confessor to Nicholas; when that failed to silence him, he was transferred from the academy to a distant bishopric in the Crimea. Rasputin flirted with the idea of filling the vacant post at the palace himself. Hermogen had remained loyal to him despite Feofan’s protests. “He is a servant of God,” the bishop warned Prince Dzhevakov when the latter told him that the synod had doubts of Rasputin’s sincerity. “It is a sin to judge him and think critically of him.” It was necessary for a confessor to be a priest, and Rasputin discussed his ordination with Hermogen. “They’ll make me a priest and I’ll become the tsar’s confessor and stay at court forever,” he boasted. In the event, though he obtained Hermogen’s blessing and had himself photographed wearing a priest’s soutane with a pectoral cross on his chest, he did not have the patience to learn the liturgy necessary for ordination, and the scheme lapsed.
Rasputin fell out with the Montenegrins and their husbands over having extended his habit of insulting churchmen to saints. He was “so disgustingly rude” about Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich’s favorite, St. Sergei of Radonege, that the grand duke swore, “I’ll never see the devil again!” It was the beginning of a long feud; Rasputin was fortunate that Alexandra’s own relations with the grand duke were cooling. He survived, too, a scandal in the palace itself. Maria Vichnyakova, the palace nurse who had been on the Pokrovskoye trip, told the children’s governess that during the visit Rasputin had stolen into her room and seduced her and that she had seen him “lying in his underclothes” with Madame Mandshtet on the Trans-Siberian. The governess, Sophia Ivanovna Tyutcheva, advised the girl to go to Alexandra and repeat her allegations. The empress, Tyutcheva later testified, “declared that she didn’t believe this hearsay, that she saw in it the activity of dark forces wishing to annihilate Rasputin.” She accused the nurse of lying, forbade her to speak to the tsar, and sent her on an indefinite leave of absence to the Caucasus.
Alexandra’s anger now fell on Tyutcheva for having encouraged the nurse to complain. A palace messenger ordered the governess to go to the tsar’s study at 6:30 the same evening. “Sophia Ivanovna, you can guess why I called for you,” he said. “What’s going on in the nursery?” She told Nicholas what had happened, adding that she was shocked at the way Rasputin went unchaperoned into the bedrooms of the young grand duchesses and the heir, and at his “gross familiarity” toward them. “Do you not believe in the holiness of Grigory Efimovich?” Nicholas asked her. She replied that she did not. “And what will you say if I tell you that all these hard years I’ve survived only thanks to his prayers?” he asked. “You survived thanks to the prayers of all Russia, Your Majesty,” she replied. It was a diplomatic answer, and it did not satisfy Nicholas. “The emperor started to say that he was convinced all this was a lie,” she testified, “that he didn’t believe all these stories about Rasputin, that everything sticks to the pure.” She felt she had no option but to resign from the palace staff.
It was a serious matter. The governess was the daughter of Fyodor Tyutchev, a metaphysical romantic whose tragic love poems many Russians knew by heart. She had credibility. When she moved to Moscow and told of Rasputin’s influence and lechery, she was believed. In her Caucasus exile the nurse Vichnyakova confessed her seduction to Metropolitan Antony, the bishop of Volhynie, at a clinic where he was being treated for a nervous disorder. She detailed Rasputin’s involvement at court, pleading with the churchman to save the imperial children from the “devil.” Antony requested an audience with the tsar and repeated what the nurse had said. Nicholas told him that it concerned his family alone and that the church had no right to pry. “No, My Emperor,” Antony replied. “It is something that concerns all Russia. The heir is not only your son. He is our future ruler, and he belongs to Russia.” When the tsar repeated that he would not tolerate any interference in palace matters, Antony said nervously, “Very good, Sire, but permit me to think that a Russian tsar should live in a crystal palace open to the eyes of his subjects.” Nicholas bade him leave; his nerves returned and he suffered a breakdown.
Stolypin was concerned enough to order a report to be made from the dossier the security services were keeping on Rasputin. It left little doubt of his lifestyle; it told of “carousals, his love of women, his relations with dubious entrepreneurs and promoters who exploit him.” The head of the police department, Gen. P.G. Kurlov, warned the premier not to show the report to Nicholas; “it might seem to the emperor,” he said, “a wish to darken the person who enjoyed his favor.” Stolypin ignored him and gave the tsar the gist of the report. Nicholas heard him out in silence, and then, “with characteristic obstinate calm, suggested Stolypin proceed to the business of the day.” No action was taken. The dowager empress was concerned enough to summon Vladimir Kokovtsov, the finance minister, to her apartments in the Anichkov Palace. “My son is too kind,” she said. “He has not given his answer because he is trying to find some other way out of the situation. He seeks advice from no one. He has too much pride and, with the empress, goes through such crises without letting anyone see he is agitated.… My son has so little luck with people.”
Rasputin was acquiring new friends along with his enemies. Munya Golovina lived with her wealthy mother, the widow of a state councillor, in a fine apartment on the Winter Canal. The girl had recently lost a man she was in love with and was ill with grief when she met Rasputin. Both she and her mother took to the holy man at once. At the turn of the year Munya asked a family friend if he would like to meet the starets. She described him as “a man of exceptional spiritual power who had been sent into the world to purify and heal our souls, and to guide our thoughts and actions.” The friend was Prince Felix Yusupov, heir to the biggest fortune in Russia, who was waiting to go up to Oxford.
The prince thought Munya innocent and guileless—he referred to her as Mademoiselle G in his writings to spare her embarrassment—and he was intrigued by her enthusiasm for Rasputin. She thought him an “apostle come straight from Heaven,” Yusupov wrote, a man with no weakness or vice who passed his life in prayer. Yusupov accepted the invitation to take tea with Rasputin in the Golovinas’ drawing room. A peasant in baggy trousers and great top boots came into the room with short, quick steps, bade the prince “Good evening, my dear boy,” and tried to kiss him. When that failed he calmly put his arms around mother and daughter and gave each of them a hearty kiss. Yusupov was irritated by the peasant’s self-assurance; “there was something about him that disgusted me,” he wrote. He was of medium height, muscular and thin, with long arms and a scar on his forehead. Yusupov guessed his age correctly at forty. “He had a low, common face framed by a shaggy beard, coarse features and a long nose, with small, shifty gray eyes sunken under heavy eyebrows,” Yusupov wrote. He, too, sensed the Janus in Rasputin. “Although he affected a free and easy demeanor,” he went on, “one felt him to be ill at ease and suspicious. He seemed to be constantly watching the person he was talking to.”
As they drank tea Rasputin quoted the Old and New testaments at random. The prince studied him closely. “He was not in the least like a holy man,” he wrote. “On the contrary he looked like a lascivious, malicious satyr. I was particularly struck by the revolting expression in his eyes, which were very small, set close together, and so deep-set in their sockets that at a distance they were invisible.” Even close up it was difficult to see whether they were open or shut; the impression was one of being “pierced by needles rather than merely of being looked at.” Yusupov was revolted by the starets’s “sweet and insipid smile.… There was something base in his unctuous countenance; something wicked, crafty, and sensual.”
But Munya Golovina and her mother never took their eyes off him, drinking in his every word. After a while Rasputin rose and pointed at the girl. “What a faithful friend you have in her!” he told Yusupov. “You should listen to her, she will be your spiritual spouse. Yes, she has spoken very well of you, and I too now see that both of you are good and well suited to each other. As for you, my dear boy, you will go far, very far.” With that he left. A few days later Yusupov met Munya again. She told him, he wrote, that “Rasputin liked me very much and wanted to see me again.” Maria Rasputin, in hindsight, claimed her father had described young Felix as “a frightened boy, frightened by the world … by his own desires, which I doubt even he understands … frightened by the future and torn between many demons.” Rasputin had met his murderer. Shortly after Yusupov left for Oxford.
The Golovinas were classified as Rasputniky, the sneering term used for those admirers who thought him divine. Another such was Sister Akulina, a novice he had heard screaming while he visited a convent in Okhits. He had found her lying in her cell, her face to the wall, “her whole body writhing, a deep masculine voice coming from her lips, moving in convulsions.” He entered the cell, knelt beside her, and prayed. “I order you to be silent,” he said. Her face took on a “glow of serenity.” Her fits never resumed. She had asked to be relieved of her vows and had now followed him to St. Petersburg, “openly and unashamedly in love with her master, always taking a place at his feet, ever ready to serve him, running to fetch a glass of water and a piece of fruit, lovingly stroking his hand or kissing his cheek.”
Others, the entrepreneurs and promoters of Stolypin’s report, were under no illusion that Rasputin was holy. They merely found him useful. Financiers began approaching him in 1910. The journalist Sazonov used his houseguest’s influence to raise backing for a financial weekly called Ekonomist. Its early editorials attacked the finance minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov. Sazonov suggested that this line would change if the finance ministry placed official advertisements at inflated rates. It was soon praising the minister’s “brilliant financial acumen.” Sazonov next presented a proposal to the ministry for a grain bank, a project he said was backed by Rasputin and would deal in the rotten grain that piled up on the railroads after the harvest. A bank charter was duly obtained. The ministry further obliged Sazonov by changing the charter to authorize the establishment of a regular commercial bank called the English Bank.
Charters were difficult to obtain; Sazonov promptly sold his for a quarter million rubles. Part of the money was used to finance a new newspaper, Golos Zemli. Claiming that Rasputin enabled him to enjoy the confidence of the tsar, Sazonov persuaded the director of the finance ministry’s Credit Chancellery to summon the board of the English Bank and suggest that they help the newspaper. The bankers agreed to underwrite it and to grant Sazonov a further hundred thousand rubles. It was astonishing that anyone as corrupt as Sazonov should exert “great influence through the instrumentality of Rasputin,” Witte wrote, “but it is nonetheless a fact.”
An irrigation scheme in the Transcaucasus, coal contracts, and an unsuccessful attempt by a group of distillers to break the state vodka monopoly were other uses to which Rasputin’s influence was put. He was not paid; he played no active role and he had no business sense, but his name was already enough to impress financiers and officials, and he was happy for it to be used. He was motivated by flattery and power, not cash. Those who exploited his name, by contrast—Simanovich and a fellow fixer whom he introduced to Rasputin, Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich Andronnikov—were entirely ruble driven. The prince was a bizarre figure, a snob, vain, with a sharp tongue, witty when he wished to be, and a promiscuous homosexual. He was the publisher of a small-circulation Black Hundred magazine, Voice of Russia, which few people read. He behaved as a statesman, however, pomaded and black suited, always carrying an important-looking yellow leather briefcase. He had no regular income, though he spent “immense means” on a large apartment, on drink, on expensive gifts for his lovers. He made his living from character assassination, and blackmail.
Andronnikov knew everyone, and most of their vices and secrets. These he passed on for more information, or for an introduction, or for money. He had been plying his trade when Rasputin was still a wanderer. The industrial magnate A. I. Putilov, chairman of the mighty Russian-Asian Bank, recollected how Andronnikov insinuated himself into the finance ministry and then came to him with details of new contracts and tenders, and “all manner of rumors and suppositions.” His clients found him an invaluable political conduit, and they feared him. The prince could “always harm a person that was unpleasant to him.” He had a habit of tapping his briefcase as though it were full of dark secrets, instead of the pile of old newspapers that an Okhrana search found it to contain. The prince’s burning wish, Putilov said, was to “play a strange political role, to have free access to high dignitaries and thus to satisfy and entertain his vanity.”
Cadets at military academies were under standing orders never to enter Andronnikov’s apartment, a place of “vice and religiosity … at the same time a chapel and a saloon where homosexuals of all Petersburg came to meet each other.” It was big enough to have two separate sets of rooms. The prince received respectable visitors in a drawing room furnished with overstuffed armchairs, antimacassars, and oil paintings of country scenes. When the conversation turned to money, he led his guests into a book-lined study in which he kept carefully updated files on leading politicians and their weaknesses. The visitors were unaware that “all manner of crooks caroused in other rooms.” These were hung with black silk curtains and decorated with icons and lecterns. They smelled of incense, and a crown of thorns hung on a wall. The prince sometimes wore a chasuble to heighten the religious atmosphere. His bedroom was decorated as a chapel, with an altar and a cross. On the name days and birthdays of his friends, he had a monk come in to hold services. “Crowds of people visited the prince, mostly youth,” his valet Peter Ivanovich Kilter testified. “Cadets, schoolboys, young officers, all very handsome.… Very often they were brought right from the street and impressed by their slovenliness. All this turned the apartment into some kind of dirty haunt.”
Particular favorites were Ensign Smirnov, a brother of the famous opera singer, and a Baron Sripper. The baron lived in the apartment illegally—he was not registered in the capital—and was later arrested for fraud. “All these people used to come to the house as if they owned it,” the valet said. “They ate, drank, and stayed the night and slept on beds two by two. Andronnikov behaved suspiciously, absenting himself in the bathroom with the young men.” Andronnikov hated women, his valet said, and was visited by only one, an elderly relative of the war minister who “delivered him rumors.”
His lobbying technique was crude but effective. “As soon as some Ivan Ivanovich Fintiflyushkin,” he explained, using the Russian equivalent of John Doe, “is appointed director of a government department, I send him a letter to say that ‘at last the sun of truth has risen over Russia. The crazy government that has led it to ruin has finally understood that the fate of the department in charge of the most important affairs’—in fact it’s no more important than a shithouse—‘should be entrusted to your noble, educated, and firm hands. A happy era has come, and I, a man ardently loving my motherland, am relieved by this because I believe that an exceptionally successful choice has been made. May God save you.… With deepest respect, Andronnikov.’ ”
At this, the prince continued, Fintiflyushkin would come through on the telephone to thank him for his kind attention. “I warn him to be wise and prudent as he is surrounded by worthless people I won’t mention.… If he needs support I will render it because of my love for the motherland. Fintiflyushkin is hooked and I have only to show my visiting card to be received and have my problems settled.”
The prince boasted that the technique was so successful that he had ministers “bumping their heads” to obey him. Another of his tricks involved his cultivation of the government messengers who carried important correspondence. Orders and medals were distributed in packages each December 6 and January 1. By having the messengers show him the mail, Andronnikov could congratulate the recipients in advance. He sometimes persuaded the messenger to delay delivery—the promotion of the navy minister Grigorovich was an example—so that he could place two telephone calls. The first said that he was striving to arrange the honor, and the second confirmed that it was on its way.
Despite his disapproval of the monks of Mount Athos, Rasputin was tolerant of homosexuals. He had much to learn from the prince on the skills of subverting politicians. The two began to see each other frequently.
Rasputin had enough funds now to take his own apartment, at 70 Nickolayevskaya ulitsa. Although he was often invited out, he kept open house, and Simanovich and Andronnikov ensured that there was usually a “diverse society” in his dining room. Guests brought food with them—caviar, choice fish, fruit, and white bread. The table—bare of any cloth—always had potatoes, sour cabbage, and black bread on it, and a boiling samovar. Rasputin’s pantry was well stocked. He liked to throw hunks of black bread into a tureen with fish soup bubbling in it and take them out hot to give his guests. Salt and bread, traditional peasant offerings, were kept for important visitors. They often took them away; Rasputin’s crusts became status symbols.
His study was the only well-furnished room. It served as his “place of intimate rendezvous with society ladies”; his lovemaking, Simanovich said, was carried out with “impossible simplicity” and speed. He took the lady from the dining room into the study, and a few minutes later saw her out before visiting the bathhouse on the other side of the street from the apartment. He brought his daughters from Pokrovskoye and placed them in a good school. Simanovich noticed that he never swore in front of them. The girls had their own bedroom and never entered a room when guests were there. He had brought the maid Dunia, the participant in the Kubasova pseudo-rape, with him from Siberia. The girls knew that he slept with her, but Maria said she loved her like a mother. “I found the liaison delightful,” she said.
Maria was aware of her father’s other indiscretions. Rasputin spent an evening of Gypsy dancing with a former Finnish ballerina, Lisa Tansin. The couple got drunk and returned to her villa with other revelers. An orgy ensued in which a naked Rasputin was photographed surrounded by naked women. Returning home in the early hours, unsatiated, Rasputin shared his bed with Dunia. A man later came to the apartment with a package containing the compromising photographs. He said that they would be shown to the tsar unless Rasputin left the capital forever. Dunia advised her lover to counterattack, to be like the woodcutter in the Russian folktale who turned on a wolf slavering to eat him with such a terrible roar that the beast fled.
Rasputin at once took a droshky to Tsarskoye Selo. He told the tsar of the incident at Tansin’s villa and showed him the photographs. Nicholas looked at each of them closely, “a frown creasing his usually smooth brow,” shaking his head sadly. He said that blackmailers were clearly using Rasputin as a pawn in a filthy game “to weaken my position and destroy the Romanov line.” He told the holy man that he had been “foolish, very foolish, but no doubt the temptation was great.” No damage had been done, though they might try again.
Rasputin’s daughter said she was told this by Dunia. The detail is odd. Why should Rasputin have taken a bumpy, four-hour droshky ride to the tsar when his normal railroad journey took thirty-five minutes? But it was in character for the tsar to be tolerant of lapses. “He often closed his eyes to the escapades of his favorites,” Simanovich wrote. “Their behavior even amused him.” He recruited Caucasian princes to his personal convoy, though they were “prone to carousing and overindulgence”; he was confident that they would die or kill for him. He often paid their gambling debts; one of them, Prince Dadiani, pawned his epaulets after a drinking bout, certain that Nicholas would retrieve his honor by settling with the men with whom he had been playing cards. Simanovich, who cultivated the officers of the convoy, was playing a noisy game of macao with them in the palace in the early hours when the tsar stormed into the room in his nightgown to complain about the noise. After reprimanding them he gave each of them ten rubles and sat down at the card table to play himself.
It was in character, too, for Rasputin to enjoy having his photograph taken, particularly with women admirers; he did so often. He was an exhibitionist when drunk—he later exposed himself in a well-documented case in Moscow—and he knew Lisa Tansin. His behavior made him vulnerable to blackmailers, but his character gave him a natural defense. He was brave, and he had little sense of shame.
The prime minister, however, was less malleable than the tsar. Iliodor was continuing his fiery preaching. Countess Ignateva, whose salon Rasputin often graced, asked General Kurlov to meet Iliodor on a visit to the capital, so that he could “form a correct opinion” of him. The countess arrived at Kurlov’s office late at night with a “tall, lean monk with burning wild eyes.” The text of one of Iliodor’s sermons, noted by an Okhrana agent, was lying on the police chief’s desk. It called on his followers to use violence against the authorities. Kurlov asked the monk how he could reconcile it with his monarchist, right-wing views. “I’m not inciting the people to mutiny,” Iliodor yelled at him. “I can think what I like of officials who are traitors to the emperor.” Kurlov concluded that the monk was a “downright maniac.”
The lunatic was unabashed. For good measure on his return to Tsaritsyn he decided to speak up for his friend Rasputin. He gave two long sermons on consecutive Sundays to crowds of more than five thousand, explaining that there was nothing wrong in Rasputin’s kissing women or bathing with them, because he was “protected from desire.” The sermons were reported in the press. The synod ordered Iliodor to leave Tsaritsyn and enter an obscure monastery at Novosilsky in Tula province. He refused to go. Kurlov’s agents intercepted telegrams from Hermogen and Iliodor to Rasputin asking for his help. Rasputin confirmed that he would seek a favorable result.
Iliodor’s flagrant disobedience, and Rasputin’s meddling, were sapping the prestige of the church. It seemed “in the depths,” in decay. “What is happening … cannot help but weaken the influence of the church,” Witte wrote, “it cannot help but arouse fears for the future of Russia.” Stolypin and the synod procurator, Dr. S. M. Lukyanov, ordered a second investigation into the starets. Stolypin again reported his concerns to the tsar. The prime minister detailed how deeply Rasputin was compromised and demanded that he be removed from court, or so Rasputin himself claimed to his friend Sazonov. Stolypin “told the tsar that, to the great incitement of society, Rasputin went to a bathhouse with women,” Sazonov later testified that Rasputin said. “The emperor said to this: ‘I know, there he also propagates the Scriptures.’ … He ordered Stolypin to leave and threw the police department report into the fireplace.”
In his own version of events, Stolypin said that the tsar had asked him to meet Rasputin so that he could see for himself that the starets was sincere and misunderstood. As soon as he entered his study, Stolypin reported, Rasputin had tried to cow him with a “hypnotic” stare. “He studied me with his whitish eyes, uttered some mysterious incoherent quotations from the Bible, and gesticulated at me,” Stolypin said. “I felt an irresistible disgust rising inside me toward this reptile in front of me. But I knew that he had a great power of hypnosis and somehow he impressed me, in a repulsive way.”
Kurlov was also at the meeting. He recalled a thinnish man with a dark red beard and piercing eyes, a “certain kind of cunning Russian peasant,” who protested that he was the most harmless and peaceful of people. The premier was unimpressed by the holy man’s careful show of innocence. “Getting over my feelings,” he said, “I raised my voice and told him outright that I had documentary evidence against him. He was in my hands, I could squash him by bringing him to trial. I ordered him to leave Petersburg without delay, go back to his village, and never appear here again.”
Alexandra protested angrily to the tsar when she heard Rasputin’s account of the interview; she made no secret of her hostility to Stolypin. Nicholas refused to countermand the order expelling Iliodor from Tsaritsyn despite a flood of telegrams from the monk’s followers begging him to do so. Rasputin, judging the ice to be wearing thin, left to winter in Pokrovskoye. It was a timely decision.
The tsar sent a personal envoy to Tsaritsyn to tell Iliodor to submit to the synod. He chose his aide-de-camp Captain Mandryka, an officer in the Fourth Sharpshooters’ Regiment attached to the imperial bodyguard. The captain was the godson of the superior of the Balachov Convent in Saratov province and an admirer of Rasputin, a fact that reassured Alexandra that he was the right man to send.
Mandryka was welcomed in Tsaritsyn; he was offered bread and salt, and a Te Deum was celebrated for him. Iliodor was not there. Alerted by Hermogen, he had fled to Serdobsk. Mandryka followed him there and told him that the tsar insisted he obey the synod. Muttering with anger, Iliodor reluctantly gave his word that he would go to Novosilsky.
On his way back Mandryka visited his godmother’s convent. She was away in St. Petersburg, but the nuns greeted him eagerly. They told him proudly that Grigory Rasputin had stayed at the convent and had chatted with them about his intimacy with the tsar and empress. They showed him a telegram that had arrived for his godmother after her departure for the capital: “One of your godsons is sent on a mission to Tsaritsyn for our affair,” it read. “Influence him. Grigory.” The captain was appalled that news of his trip had been leaked to the starets, almost certainly by Vyrubova on the empress’s behalf. He made inquiries with local police and officials. He was told that Rasputin was a khlyst, a debauchee who violated young girls, abused them, and “chased demons.”
The captain arrived back at Tsarskoye Selo on the morning of February 10, 1911. He was at once invited to lunch at the palace. It was Mardi Gras, and the family had blinis. After lunch he took coffee with them and gave his report. He told them all he had learned of the starets—the warning telegram, the baths with girls, the khlystlike philosophy. “They even say,” he concluded, “that he enjoys the favor of Your Majesty.” With that, the nervous captain burst into tears. Nicholas hastened to get him a glass of water; Alexandra sighed deeply. He left.
The next morning—Vyrubova was quick—Mandryka had a telegram from his godmother: “You’ve made a mess.” He saw her three days later. “You’ve ruined your career,” she told him. “Rasputin is a good man. He must be saved.” There were signs that, although Alexandra was cold and distant to the captain, Rasputin was in serious trouble. When Mandryka reported back to the palace at the end of the week, Nicholas shook his hand warmly, gave him lunch, and seemed pleased.