Iliodor had gotten to St. Petersburg first. Bishop Hermogen was also in the city, attending a session of the synod and staying at the Iaroslavl Monastery. He was given further evidence of Rasputin’s transgressions by Captain Rodionov, a Cossack writer and Duma deputy. The three met with Mitya, the half-wit “fool of Christ,” to discuss the starets. They exchanged anecdotes and worked themselves into a moral rage. Hissing with jealousy at Rasputin’s success, the idiot passed on as fact the salon rumors that Rasputin was fucking the empress. He said that the lecher must be killed, or at the least castrated. Iliodor turned on his former friend. He wanted Rasputin kept in a locked cell as far away as possible—the prison island of Sakhalin was suggested—while his house in Pokrovskoye was publicly burned.
Hermogen was less extreme; he felt that they should force Rasputin to swear that he would never go to the palace again. At first, he explained later to the newspaper Russkoye Slovo, he felt that the starets had a “spark of God,” an inner sensitivity and sympathy. “I’ll tell you frankly—I experienced it myself,” he said. “More than once he responded to the sorrows of my heart. He won my heart like this and, at least at the start of his career, the hearts of others.” But by 1911 the bishop had realized, “too late,” what sort of person Rasputin was. “He suffered from a particular ailment, a particular lust,” he said. “I’d call it an ‘ailment of satyriasis.’ ” It was this that he was determined to unmask.
After the receipt of Rasputin’s telegram from Moscow, Mitya and Rodionov pressured Hermogen to go further. Reluctantly the bishop agreed to see the justice minister and inform him of their plan to kidnap Rasputin and lock him in a monastic cell. The minister told him this would be illegal. Rasputin arrived in the capital on December 16. He telephoned Iliodor and suggested he come to Munya Golovina’s apartment on the Winter Canal. At their meeting Iliodor asked Rasputin to go on to the Iaroslavl Monastery, where Hermogen was waiting to see him.
Once his victim was in the monastery, Iliodor telephoned Rodionov and Mitya. When they arrived Rasputin sensed trouble and became nervous. He was ill prepared for the meeting; he was outnumbered, in a stone-walled room deep in the monastery. Hermogen was a powerfully built man, six feet tall, and Rodionov, who had been invited as a witness to the bishop’s denunciation, was fit and athletic. Mitya suddenly yelled in his spittle-flecked voice: “Ah! Impious one!” He grabbed Rasputin by his penis, the author of his debauchery, and tugged at it, staring wildly and cursing. Iliodor joined in the attack, quoting his victim’s own braggings, his voice growing in anger before lapsing into incoherent rage as he accused him of raping the novice Xenia.
The bishop now shouted at him. “You are a liar and impostor,” Rodionov reported him as saying. He was waving a large wooden crucifix. “You say you’re holy, but you live in sin and mud. It is my fault to have introduced you to the tsar’s family. Now I see your true face.… By your deeds you soil the name of the empress. With your unworthy hands, you dare to touch her holy person.… In the name of the living God, I command you to disappear and no longer trouble the Russian people by your presence at the palace!” Rasputin, “eyes pale,” hissed back oaths and threatened “to have done” with the bishop. “So, you filthy debauchee, you refuse to obey the commands of a bishop?” he shouted. “And you threaten me? Know that I, a bishop, curse you!”
The litany of sin, and the vehemence of the curse, left Rasputin cowed and trembling. Both Rodionov and Iliodor asserted this, and Hermogen confirmed it; this was the first and only recorded instance when Rasputin’s self-confidence deserted him. The tirades stunned him; they were unexpected, and they came from powerful preachers, for whom denouncing the ungodly was meat and drink. “Is it true?” Hermogen demanded. “It’s true,” Rasputin quavered. “It’s true, it’s true.” Hermogen punched him in the face and began beating him with the crucifix. Rasputin fought back; his face “lost human expression” as Rodionov drew his Cossack saber and hastened to help the bishop. As he rained blows on the starets, Hermogen roared, “You are smashing our sacred vessels.” He pulled him by his hair to a small chapel. He pronounced a death sentence on Rasputin’s sources of pleasure and power. The starets was not to touch another woman, and he was never again to go to Tsarskoye Selo or contact the imperial family. Hermogen forced him to kneel and swear it on an icon.
“I tried to reform him,” Hermogen recalled to the Russkoye Slovo reporter. “I read a prayer of prohibition over him in the chapel. I ordered him to renounce the actions that so ruinously influenced high society and that reflected on the life of the State. Finally, I told him to return to Pokrovskoye. It seemed to persuade him.” Rasputin swore obedience. “Good,” he told the bishop. “I’ll go to Pokrovskoye. I’ve got plenty of corn and I’ll live comfortably there. And I’ll never be with people from society again.” With that he fled.
He tried to repair the damage the following day. He went to Iliodor. “Save me!” he begged. “Save me!” Iliodor took him back to the bishop, who refused him pardon, turning his back on him with the words “Never and nowhere!”
Word of the beating soon got out through the writer Rodionov. The press seized on it to dig up the old allegations that Rasputin was a khlyst. The Moscow newspaper Golos Moskvy published a letter to the editor from Mikhail Novosyolov, an assistant professor at the Moscow theological academy and a specialist on illegal cults. It was based on a pamphlet he had written and demanded that the synod, still sitting in St. Petersburg, expose Rasputin as a heretic.
“ ‘Quo usque tande!’ ” it started.
These indignant words escape from the lips of all Orthodox men and women against the sly conspirator who betrays our Holy Church, that fornicator of human souls and bodies—Grigory Rasputin, who impudently defends himself under the holy cover of the Church. “Quo usque?”—with these words the children of the Russian church are forced to address the synod, seeing its terrible connivance with Grigory Rasputin. How long will the synod, in whose face this criminal comedy is being played, be silent and inactive? Why is it silent, in the face of God’s commandment to protect the sheep from the wolves?
Why are the guardians of Israel silent when in letters to me some of them openly call this pseudo-teacher “a pseudo-khlyst, an erotomaniac, a charlatan”? Why is the lewd khlyst allowed to do dark deeds under the guise of light?… Where is the ruling hand if it will not throw the impudent seducer beyond the fence that protects the Church?
The reference to the empress’s Friend as an “erotomaniac” and a “pseudo-khlyst” created a sensation. Preliminary censorship had been abolished in the post-1905 reforms. Newspapers were now liable to arbitrary fines and to confiscation after publication. Novosyolov’s pamphlets were confiscated, and copies of Golos Moskvy found in a raid on its printing plant were burned. The paper was heavily fined. The public took it as proof that Rasputin was indeed a khlyst, the lewd pilot of an ark whose members included the empress. The copies that were in circulation “started to sell for fabulous sums of money,” the politician Rodzianko noted, “and all the other newspapers started to publish articles about Rasputin and the illegal confiscation of the pamphlet.” For the first time the press began to run letters about Rasputin’s women victims and published photographs of him with his admirers. “The more zealous the censor and police were,” Rodzianko added, “the more they published and the larger were the fines.”
Rasputin was in deep trouble. Instinctively, as with the blackmail attempt, he felt attack to be the best means of defense. Nicholas and Alexandra had returned from the Crimea to Tsarskoye Selo for Christmas. He got word to them through Vyrubova that Hermogen and Iliodor had “ambushed” and tried to murder him. He asked that they be expelled from the capital immediately, before they could do more harm. He also worked on Sabler, his nominee as synod procurator. The pressure was effective. On January 3, 1912, Sabler presented to the tsar a synod recommendation ordering Hermogen to return to his diocese in Saratov. Nicholas signed it.
It was an unprecedented punishment for a member of the synod to be expelled from the capital while it was in session. Hermogen refused to go. He cabled Iliodor with the news; the monk, who had returned to Tsaritsyn, told the press. Hermogen demanded his right to trial by twelve fellow bishops, who alone could banish him from the synod under canon law. He was refused. On January 16 he demanded an audience with the tsar. “I am ready to obey the orders of the sovereign,” he explained, “but those of Grischa Rasputin, never!” Nicholas let him know via Sabler that he would not see him. The bishop wrote a letter begging him to “pull out the weeds growing around the throne”; it went unanswered. He cabled the empress; she did reply, to say that he must submit to the orders of an authority, the synod, that was instituted from God.
On January 17 Hermogen was notified that the synod had stripped him of his diocese and had exiled him to the obscure Zhirovretsky Monastery in Vladimir province. Iliodor was exiled to the Florishchev Monastery, but the exclusion order could not be served on him. He had gone to ground. Hermogen bowed to his fate a week later and left the capital. “Denunciation of Rasputin had a fatal effect on my life,” he told the Russkoye Slovo reporter. “I was forced to retire from my see. More than that, I was removed from St. Petersburg by force, without having any opportunity to explain myself.” He was philosophical about his treatment. “Even we, people grown wise with theological experience, could not realize at first what sort of person Rasputin was,” he recollected. “Small wonder that weak women who got into his net could not see it either.… As for men, he simply bullied them. He said to those who believe in God: ‘If you send me away, God will punish you. Something terrible will happen to your house.’ ” By that Hermogen meant the tsar; he went on to allude to Sabler and the members of the synod: “With others, who clutched at their position,” Hermogen continued, “he said how powerful he was, how much influence he had, and he warned them: ‘Watch out, you’ll feel bad if you don’t obey me.’ And they obeyed him.”
Iliodor soon served notice that he would not accept his punishment meekly. From hiding he issued a memorandum to the press. He entitled it “Grischa” and signed and dated it. “Sabler is Rasputin’s creature,” it read. “Grischa tells how Sabler thanked him on his knees for making him procurator of the holy synod. Bishop Varnava is also Grischa’s creature.… Here is my advice on Grischa. He is a khlyst and an incorrigible dissolute. He must be kept away from the tsar and punished, like the depraved soul he is, for having pretended to be a saintly man and coming close to the sovereigns. If Grischa is not distanced, if he is not driven from the light, the throne of the tsars will be toppled and Russia will perish. January 25, 1912. Iliodor.”
Delighted newspaper editors published it; the increases in circulation paid for the fines. Nicholas was furious. At a dinner in the Winter Palace on January 29, given in honor of the money-grubbing father of the Montenegrin sisters, he told the interior minister to take “the most severe measures” against any paper that mentioned Rasputin. The next morning, the minister—A. A. Makarov, for the objections to Khvostov had been sustained—raised the question at a meeting with Prime Minister Kokovtsov and Sabler. The synod procurator thought it imperative that Rasputin leave for Siberia at once. They asked the court minister, Count Fredericks, to take the matter to the tsar. Fredericks did so. “Today they want Rasputin to go,” Nicholas objected, “and tomorrow they’ll think of someone else.”
Makarov had a routine audience with the tsar on February 1; Nicholas told him they would discuss Rasputin another time. Kokovtsov tried again on February 3. “I told him in detail the damage that was being done to imperial prestige and how important it was to cut it off at its roots,” the premier recalled. “The emperor heard me out in silence. He looked out of the window, as he usually does when he is displeased. Suddenly he interrupted me. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s necessary to lop it off at the roots and I’ll take decisive steps to do that. I’ll talk to you about it later, but for the moment let’s not discuss it further.’ ”
He did nothing, and the situation got worse. Iliodor contacted journalists and handed them copies of letters from the empress and her daughters to Rasputin that he had stolen from the blue-checked wrapper on his visit to Pokrovskoye. The letter from the empress was undated but seemed to have been written in 1908 or 1909. “My beloved and unforgettable teacher, redeemer and mentor,” it began.
How weary I feel without you. It is only then that my soul is quiet and I relax, when you, teacher, are sitting beside me and I kiss your hands and lean my head on your blessed shoulder. Oh! how light I feel then. I wish only one and the same thing then. To fall asleep forever on your shoulder, in your arms. Oh! what happiness it is even to feel your presence near me. Where are you? Where have you flown? And I feel so miserable, so sick at heart.…
But don’t you, my beloved mentor, tell Anya [Vyrubova] about my sufferings without you. Anya is kind, she is good, she loves me, but you shouldn’t reveal my grief to her. How soon will you be close to me again? Come quickly. I am waiting for you and I am tormenting myself for you. I am asking for your holy blessing and I am kissing your blessed hands. Loving you forever, M.
The M stood for Mama.
It read like a passionate love letter, and it was seen as such by those who bought or were given one of the thousands of duplicated copies that were soon in circulation. “Only those who did not know the empress, her moral elevation, the crystal pure nature of her family life,” Spiridovich protested, “only profoundly vicious people, fanatics or scandalmakers could find in this letter confirmation of this revolting calumny.” But few, very few, knew the empress. It was bad enough that she should write of kissing Rasputin’s hands, an act of subservience. Worse were the references to the imperial head nestling on the peasant shoulder, to the imperial body falling asleep in the peasant arms, the mentions of love, torment, and happiness.
Was it all mere literary license? Vyrubova and Lili von Dehn later testified that the empress had never kissed the starets’s hands. But why did Alexandra write—and the letter was genuine—that she did? Why did she use lovers’ language—“beloved … how light I feel … I wish only one and the same thing … come quickly”—if her affection was purely spiritual? To suggest that it was not, the press stepped up the flow of stories of Rasputin’s seductions and cuckoldings.
This letter apart, there was no evidence that Rasputin slept with the empress. The investigating commission did not interrogate her—that was beyond its brief—but, as mentioned earlier, medical examination proved that Vyrubova, also a supposed lover of Rasputin’s, remained a virgin. Simanovich, operating in the dark area where indiscretion mingled with blackmail, kept himself abreast of Rasputin’s affairs as a matter of professional pride. He had no qualms about passing on the equally scurrilous story that the tsarevich had been fathered by General Orlov, but he mentioned the rumors that the empress was Rasputin’s lover only in the context of Rasputin’s indifference to them.
Negatives, however, are difficult to prove, and the non-affair was no exception. Alexandra’s letters to her husband were published after the revolution; though they certainly show her to have been deeply in love with him, they were no more emotional than the letter to Rasputin. Married women made love to khlyst pilots without it affecting their marital relations; Rasputin was known to have stayed on friendly terms with at least two husbands whom he was cuckolding. When he was reproached for this, he replied that it was not his fault if high-ranking men made their wives and mistresses run after him in the hope of gaining some benefit. “Most of these women,” Simanovich confirmed, “formed a connection with him with the consent of their husbands or relatives.”
As to opportunity, although Vyrubova was present when the empress met Rasputin at her cottage, Rasputin frequently made love while his admirers were sitting in the next room. He brought a Siberian woman named Akulina Laptinskaya to St. Petersburg in 1911; she acted as his secretary and occasional housekeeper until his murder, and also gave massages to the empress. “He’d be surrounded by his admirers, with whom he also slept,” she testified in 1917. “He’d do his thing with them quite openly and without shame. He’d caress them … and when they felt like it he’d simply take them into his study and do his business.… I often heard his views, a mixture of religion and debauchery. He’d sit there and give instructions to his female admirers. ‘Do you think I degrade you? I don’t degrade you. I purify you.’ This was his basic idea. He also used the word grace, meaning that by sleeping with a man, a woman came into the grace of God.”
It was, in fact, Iliodor who unwittingly furnished the most obvious indication that the empress’s letter should not be taken at face value. As he fled toward Saratov, hoping to find sanctuary in Hermogen’s former see, he drew a Pied Piper’s tail of journalists behind him. He kept them well supplied with material and released the stolen letters from the young grand duchesses. They indeed showed how startlingly intimate Rasputin had become with the imperial family—but as friend, confessor, and soul mate, not lover. Olga, now a beautiful sixteen-year-old with chestnut hair and her father’s limpid blue eyes, wrote with unaffected charm to Rasputin of her infatuation with a young Guards officer: “Nicholas drives me crazy. Whenever I go to the Sofia cathedral and see him, I’m ready to climb up the wall and my body shakes all over.… I love him.… I am about to throw myself on him. You advised me to behave more carefully. But how can I do that when I can’t control myself?… Loving you, Olga.”
Tatiana, two years younger, was chatty; she missed playing with “Matryosha,” Rasputin’s daughter Maria, and she wanted to see the fabled Siberia he had spoken about so often. “My dear and faithful friend,” she wrote.
How long will you stay in Pokrovskoye? How are your kids? How’s Matryosha? Whenever we get together at Anya’s we always talk about all of you. And we so wish to visit Pokrovskoye.… Arrange everything as soon as possible, you can do everything. God loves you so.… We miss you, miss you. And mama is unwell without you.… Oh! if only you knew how difficult it is for us to stand mama’s illness. But you know because you know everything. Kissing you heartily and affectionately, my dear friend.…Good-bye. Your Tatiana.”
Marie, twelve when Iliodor handed her letter to journalists, was girlishly worried about being bad when she wrote it. “Sweet, dear unforgettable friend of mine,” she began.
I miss you so. You won’t believe it but almost every night I see you in my dreams. In the morning, when I wake up, I take the gospel which I received from you from under my pillow, and I kiss it.… Then I feel it is you that I kiss. I am so wicked but I want to be kind and don’t want to offend our sweet, good, kind nurse. She is so kind, so good, we all love her so. Pray, unforgettable friend, so that I should always be kind. I am kissing you. Kissing your pure hands. Yours forever, Marie.
Little Anastasia, ten when Russians gloated over her letter, also saw the starets in her dreams. She wondered if he saw her so. “My sweet friend,” she wrote.
When shall we see you? Anya told me yesterday that you would come soon. It will make me so happy. I like it when you talk to us about God.… God seems to be so kind, so good. Pray to Him so that he helps mama to be healthy. I often see you in dreams. Do you see me in dreams? When will you be telling us about God in the nursery? Come soon. I am trying to be a good child like you told me. I shall always be a good child if you are always with us. Good-bye. I kiss you and you bless me. Yesterday I had a grudge against the little one [Alexis] but then I made it up with him. Loving you, your Anastasia.
It was clear that the infatuation with Rasputin was a family affair, based not on the mother’s lust but on a perception of his goodness. He had done his work well. He was the girls’ friend; Olga asked his advice about a boyfriend, Anastasia admitted she had gotten fed up with her little brother. He was kind and loving; he helped them to pray, to be good, and he calmed their mother’s hysteria and made her well. The relationship was full of charm and innocence. The letters damned Rasputin, not the young Romanovs who wrote them. They revealed the extent of Rasputin’s duplicity, the skill with which he concealed his lewdness under a mask of generosity and affection; they sketched the family’s utter trust in him—a loyalty as touching as it was misplaced—and explained the “perpetual incredulity” and hostility the parents showed to those who warned them of the other face of Janus.
The public, however, did not see them in this light. Phrases were seized on—“I feel it is you that I kiss” “Do you see me in dreams?”—to show that the grand duchesses had followed their mother into the Siberian’s bed. Kokovtsov complained that the letters caused “the most revolting comments.… We [he and Interior Minister Makarov] believed that the letters were apocryphal and were being circulated for the purpose of undermining the prestige of the sovereign, but we could do nothing.… The public, of course, greedy for sensation, was according them a very warm reception.” The girls’ letters were genuine, but frankly pornographic fakes were soon in circulation.
The storm raged on. The Duma seethed with anger at the treatment of Hermogen. Mikhail Rodzianko, its twenty-stone chairman, a bluff country squire with a powerful presence—“on a still day he can be heard for a kilometer”—found it difficult to keep the excited deputies under control. The most ardent monarchists were outraged at the tsar’s behavior. “Where do we go?” the extreme right-winger Vladimir Purishkevich demanded of Rodzianko with horror. “Now the dark forces are destroying Russia’s last stronghold—the church. And what makes it even more horrible is that all this seems to come down from the highness of the tsar’s throne. A rascal, a khlyst, a dirty illiterate muzhik is playing with our churchmen. What abyss are they taking us into? My God! I want to sacrifice myself and kill this vile creature—Rasputin.” It was not an idle threat.
Rodzianko recognized that the crisis was real. If the affair could be limited to Alexandra’s “passion for Rasputin’s imaginary gift of prophesy and his hypnotic power which eased her nervous sufferings and abated her fears for her family … then it would not arouse much alarm.” But there was more to it than that. Rodzianko was afraid that Rasputin’s closeness to the tsarevich would influence the child’s receptive soul, “imparting mysticism and making the heir a nervous and unbalanced person.” Respect for the dynasty was being undermined. “Ambitious men, climbers and dark crooks”—the Simanoviches, Sablers, Varnavas, Andronnikovs—were crowding around the starets, flies on the dung heap. More terrible, Rodzianko thought, was that senior officials and ministers had split into “two hostile camps, Rasputin supporters, and the anti-Rasputins.… The gradual rise of Rasputin’s supporters and their success was tempting, and the desertions from the anti-Rasputins to the Rasputin camp grew apace.”
Rodzianko gave the example of a lady, a “happy and exemplary family woman,” who visited Rasputin to solicit a position for her husband. “All right, I’ll see to it,” Rasputin said, openly ogling her. “But come again tomorrow in an open dress with naked shoulders. Otherwise don’t bother.” The lady left, so Rodzianko said, full of indignation and determined not to submit. Once home she fell prey to “invincible melancholy.” The next day she wore a décolleté dress and returned. “Her husband got his promotion eventually,” Rodzianko wrote. “It is a documentary story.”
It alarmed the Duma president to think of the “repulsive impression” this must make on servants, “for whom there are no alcove secrets,” and on ordinary Russians in general. The “gray” people who met Rasputin—“the cabmen who took him and his women to bathhouses, the attendants who gave him separate rooms, waiters who served him during his orgies, the police agents who guarded his precious life”—had no illusions about his holiness. “All they said was ‘The masters are up to their tricks,’ ” and the contempt they felt was helping to tarnish the throne. Rasputin was winning the battle, undermining premiers, ministers, senior churchmen; if it continued Rodzianko was sure it would lead to revolution.
His view was shared by Nicholas’s mother. On February 13 she summoned Kokovtsov to discuss the affair. She listened to what he had to say about Rasputin. Then, in tears, the dowager empress promised to speak to her son. “My unhappy daughter-in-law,” she said, “does not understand that she is destroying the dynasty and herself. She truly believes in the saintliness of this rogue and we are powerless to stave off this disaster.”
Iliodor was continuing to rail against the injustice done to Hermogen and himself, his journey “a triumphal procession.” He preached against the synod for a few more days, until he was finally arrested and confined to the Florishchev Monastery; but the damage was done. Rasputin tried to repair it. He spun a pretty tale of sex and hypocrisy to explain his rift with the monk. His daughter Maria and his admirers believed it, but it convinced few others. He said that he had become tired of hearing the monk preach that chastity was all when he did not practice it. He said that, during Iliodor’s visit to Pokrovskoye, he had caught him sneaking a look at the maid Dunia while she was stripping to wash. When he had reminded Iliodor of this, in Tsaritsyn the previous summer, the monk had spluttered: “You … you …” “Come,” Rasputin had sneered. “Confession is good for the soul.” “Go! Leave me!” Iliodor had yelled back. “You are no friend but a vicious enemy.… You are the sinner, not I. My life is blameless. Who knows what yours has been?”
The Rasputin explanation for Hermogen’s hostility was equally far-fetched. Maria claimed that her father had found a hole in the accounts of the Union of True Russians, the right-wing league in which the bishop was involved, and was about to expose his fraud when the beating intervened. Its purpose was to kill Rasputin before his allegations against the lecher-monk and the embezzler-bishop could bear fruit.
Rasputin mentioned none of this when he tried to stem the flood of hostile press articles by giving an interview of his own to the newspaper Novoye Vremya. It was published on February 18, 1912. The paper called him Grigory Rasputin-Novykh. The journalist signed himself I. M-v. This was Ivan Manasevich-Manuilov, part journalist, part Okhrana informer, and a full-time intriguer with a penchant for high living and antiques. He wrote it up directly from shorthand notes, catching the jumpiness, the sudden switches in subject, the phrases left to hang in silence.
Rasputin started, like the celebrity he was, by complaining about the press. “Newspapers are like birds,” he said. “Once they start singing, they won’t stop. They chirp.… They hoot.… They hurt.… They exalt.… Some kind of intoxication, a whirlwind. If you get caught in their path, there’s no mercy. They’ll beat you to death.… And why, no one will ask.” He slipped skillfully into the role of the little man beaten up by bullies: “Why did they assault me, the little one?” he asked. “What do I signify, me among the big and the strong? One blow, and I’m gone. No one will remember me. They all pounced on me like one. A kind of wild dance.… Who could I hit? I’m not strong enough.… They’ve made me out as some sort of athlete.… Look at me.… I don’t even know the ABC.… I spell like a little kid. And here, they’re all big, clever, learned, and distinguished.”
A pause, and some self-satisfaction entered his voice. “Maybe I’m not a little one … a bit bigger,” he admitted. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be interested … would not shout in a mighty voice all over Russia. Looks like I stuck in their throat.” He became the people’s champion. “When everybody was silent as the grave, I, the little one, weak one, spoke up,” he went on. “My voice is small but there are people who hear me and want me to speak.… I say all I know, all I feel.… I say it simply. People with good souls, with pure designs, do not need many words.”
He returned to the beating in the Iaroslavl Monastery. “They pounced on me from all sides,” he said. “Slanders.… Dirty tricks.… Bishop Hermogen took it all for granted, that it was true, he didn’t understand anything and started shouting.… I don’t bear him malice. Who gives himself up to malice, walks out on God.… And they have given themselves up to malice.… With covered eyes, with closed ears they walk about and shout and stigmatize Grigory.” He said that a man under the power of lies was worn out and floundered like an animal. “God deprived Bishop Hermogen and Iliodor of wits,” he said. “Where has the bright wisdom gone?… The sun has come down.… It’s not seen anymore.… Only the darkness, black darkness. They run against each other, break their foreheads.… Make a hubbub. Malice has gained the upper hand over the heart.”
The delivery became more staccato, more disjointed and consciously poetic; the guru was hitting form. “You have to weep. Hot tears, that’s what’s needed,” he said, flinging in an obscure aside: “And then, monks.… Associates.… Going into intrigue worse than simple people … into politics … into the whirlwind of passion where the right does not know what the left is doing. Love is needed … and tears. And there’s no love, no tears. Where’s the selflessness? There’s strength in selflessness.… The bad, it’s like the wind.… It makes noise, it hoots.… Everyone listens to it.” But not the good, not Grigory—“those who are higher, who have pure soul, they won’t listen and they step off the malice.”
The journalist, dashing down shorthand notes, was barely able to keep up with the jerky flow of ideas—“My thoughts,” Rasputin said, “they are like birds in the sky, they fly and often there’s nothing I can do with them.” He changed tack again, this time into an admission. “I’m sinful,” he said. “Great sin more than once tortured me and it was stronger than I. Hermogen knew everything. For him, my soul was open.… I went to him with the good and the bad and he spoke of his love for me. There was great solace in his words and in bitter moments I often found joy … when I talked to him of all my sins and he listened to me kindly and ordered me to go to Jerusalem.”
He followed this lie—there is no evidence that the bishop suggested the pilgrimage—with a confession. It was all that the readers of Novoye Vremya dared hope for. “But sin entangled me,” he said. “I made a mistake.… It was three years ago.… Bishop Hermogen knew everything.… I was deluded! My women admirers were in the village.… They thought they were superior to everyone. Gold, diamonds, and money obscured their brains. They walked about like peahens.… I thought I had to humble them … to humiliate … when a person is humiliated, he understands much. I wanted them to experience all this.” After the innuendo came the revelation: “I made them go to a bathhouse with me.… There were twelve women.… They washed me and they have gone through all the humiliations.”
Twelve women, a bathhouse, every form of humiliation—it was as far as he could go. The retraction followed instantly. “Wicked people said that I hurt them, that an animal spoke up in me,” he said. “They lie, they impudently lie. They tell bad, dirty things.… There wasn’t anything like this.… I was deluded, I was thinking wrongly.… I paid dearly, very dearly for my mistake. They all pounced, especially the local priests.… There was no sin. Sin is darkness.… All my life I escaped the darkness. I was looking for the sun … each ray made my soul quiver.”
He spoke of sin and forgiveness, his favorite line, always reliable: “Sinful man, nearer to God,” he said. “He always thinks about God, he prays … and will be pardoned. His soul is in secret prayer, he is in eternal contrition. The sinner will be the first to present himself in front of God.” Suddenly, he was silent. The journalist had time to look up and see Rasputin smoothing out his beard with jerky movements of his long and bony hand. The eyes were small and colorless; they looked sideways and did not like to be looked into. There was “something nervous in all of him.”
“I gave all my soul to Iliodor,” Rasputin continued. “But they have forgotten that for me there is nothing superior to the power of God and that of the tsar.” The twin pillars of Orthodoxy, God and tsar; it would go down well at Tsarskoye Selo. “All this distresses me. My soul is anxious. Wicked people say that I did harm to the bishop and Iliodor by winning over big men. I know my place. Am I, the little one, to push myself forward? If I’m called, it’s only to talk.… Big men live as in a dungeon. Lies all around.… Everyone with wants, looking for profit, and I don’t want anything, I don’t need anybody.”
He denied that he had ever wanted to be a priest. He’d never even dreamed of it; he hadn’t the literacy and the power of concentration that a priest needed. He’d never preached, he claimed, or spoken in public. He almost didn’t know his ABCs; perhaps it was for the better, because there was happiness in simplicity. What he liked best was being in Siberia and healing and doing good. “They all love me in my village,” he said. “They open their sick souls. I comfort them. Words mean a lot for a sick soul. A person will come to me with black thoughts, giving everything up as hopeless, and then he leaves and, behold, he’s in better spirits.… A smile on his face.… Like the sun on a black day.”
A maid interrupted—“Grigory Efimovich, there’s someone …” Rasputin said he was busy. Whoever it was should call back in the evening. “They say I live wrongly,” he went on, whining now. “Libertine. But I live modestly. I’ve got a household. Two good maids. Kind wife. We get on well. In God’s manner.… I don’t know any women. They’ve covered me with filth from all sides. But filth won’t stick to what is clean.”
The journalist was unimpressed by this declaration of innocence. He asked Rasputin whether he had many women admirers. “Women admirers … many, very many.” The journalist noted that his interviewee was smiling maliciously behind his beard. “Didn’t count them. Women, they’re poor. They’re oppressed. All their life they’re in chains. They need consolation. They remember it for a long time. All sorts of them visit me. Many a tear I’ve seen. Tried to ease their grief.” There were men, too, who visited—about twenty of them. “All these people are for me. They’ll all stick up for me. They won’t let anyone hurt me.”
The next question was ideal for the starets—what impression was Petersburg making on him? He aimed his reply directly at the palace. He knew well that Nicholas and Alexandra despised the city; he knew, too, their belief in autocracy and in the love that peasant Russia had for them.
“Clerks all around,” he said of the city. “Toadying. One eats another. They’ve pushed truth into the corner here … it’s afraid to peep out. But Russia needs truth. It must rule. It’s strong. Everybody is in a hurry here.… Urgent matters.… Live in intoxication, that’s what they do.… They say good words and don’t have any notion of what’s good.… Hypocrites.… It’s so painful.… I wish that God could make it so that truth wins.”
He fashioned himself as the little man, the loyal peasant-thinker. “And sometimes I hear untruth and I feel like raising my voice all over the great Russia,” he said. “Then I look at myself.… Ridiculous, all this.… Little one, that’s what I am. What can I do? Can I make anyone listen to reason? All sorts of big people here, they lie.… They invent things and are listened to.… People are strangled in this big city. They think about everything. But they forget about God.”
He was pleased with himself. He leaned forward on the arm of his chair, a light shining in his small eyes. He smoothed out his dark-colored blouse. “They’ve told me here about the ecstasy.” Suddenly he laughed out loud. He waved his bony hand. “What sort of ecstasy is that? They all lie.… They cheat. And when someone spoke up sincerely, from his heart, they started to cry: ecstasy.” He was talking of religious ecstasy, a subject close to khlysts and the sects, and he was careful to circumscribe it. He was guarded, too, when the journalist asked him about visions.
“No, I haven’t had them,” he said, carefully going on to confirm his spirituality. “But when I’m alone, in the quiet, I feel kind of ethereal.… I can hear my heart beat.… Begin to feel easy. I start to think about the deeds of the saints. I want selflessness so much.” He emphasized the word selflessness, and slipped in a claim of personal modesty. “But I’m small.… Not fit. Just dreams, that’s all.… And dreams, they are like flowers.… I’ve been trying my strength.… Tortured myself severely more than once. I want so much to be nearer to God. All dreams. And once a man is deprived of God, what’ll be left?”
He took a swipe at séances. There is no evidence that Rasputin ever summoned up spirits, or felt the need to; he won his admirers through force of personality, not by tricks. He had fallen out with the Montenegrins by now, and judged it safe to mock table rappers. “You fly in your dreams to God and you feel so warm at heart,” he said. “Everyone is looking for it. And the sinful think that it’s enough to tap with one’s fingers on the table so that a vision appears.… Foolishness, all foolishness.” He finished his appraisal of the soul with a burst of phrases. “Devotees, they are different.… They have visions.… The sick … must be cured … must pray.… When I was twenty, I had all these thoughts but my chest ached.… I went to the holy places, to Verkhoturye.… Prayed there hard.… Felt easier afterward.”
Without effort he switched to politics and the state of Russia. Again, beneath the babble, the aim was true. He slipped the knife into the Duma and its politicians, and twisted it with words he knew were sweet for Nicholas and Alexandra. “I’ve heard somewhere that I was the enemy of the state Duma,” he mocked. “Am I, really? I’ve never been to the state Duma.… What’s going on there, I don’t know, don’t want to know.… May God judge them.… All I think is about Russia, like a son about a mother.”
He dropped in a reference to his powerful patrons, a clear warning that he was protected by the palace. The politicians, he said, “don’t like me having top people among my acquaintances. But they came to me by themselves.… I didn’t go into any sort of politics and never will. But the state Duma assaulted me, the little one.… They’ve got big deeds to do but all of a sudden—me. As if the power is in me and I’m in the way.… I don’t hinder. And when I have to speak, I talk about truth, about ways to God, about human lies.… About the soul.”
A mirror for the empress, he accused the politicians of ruining the empire. “They have to think in the Duma, and they rush about like women and in this chaos forget about the empire,” he said. “I don’t really represent anything. Shall I really go against what they want from above? No, I’m not this kind of person.… I’ve never had thoughts like these. I want everything to be good. But there’s a kind of whirlwind instead.… Destroys our house. The whirlwind is not good. One can do something only when it’s peaceful, calm.”
He leaned forward. “Strength is needed.” He meant the tsar, the autocracy. “Do you understand?”
The interview was over. “I’m leaving for Siberia now,” he said. “Want to stay for a while in my own place.” It was a bravura performance, never resting long enough to be trapped on any topic, mixing confession with defiance, a shrewd mind digging itself out of trouble. Throughout it, those brilliant little eyes were fixed on the palace.