Rasputin was back in the capital for the tercentenary celebrations of the Romanov dynasty in March 1913. Each Easter, Nicholas gave Alexandra an exquisite Fabergé egg of gold, silver, and jewels. For this special year the egg had miniatures of the Romanov rulers and their wives, and a blue steel globe showing the expansion of their territory. The first Romanov tsar, Michael, grandnephew of Ivan the Terrible, had ruled a narrow and barren compression between Europe and Asia; the Poles had recently sacked Moscow, and Russian adventurers barely had crept east of the Urals. Nicholas Romanov now ruled an empire that stretched from Poland to the Bering Strait, reaching along the Turkish, Persian, Afghan, Mongolian, and Chinese borders, until it ran into the foggy waters of the Sea of Japan. More than a hundred nationalities were his subjects.
It rained in torrents in St. Petersburg throughout the festivities. Society hoped that the imperial family would venture out of its seclusion, but no balls were held at the Winter Palace. The nobility and the diplomatic corps were asked to baise mains, or court receptions; Nicholas and his mother attended without the empress. Politicians hoped in vain that the tsar would make some concession to democracy in his speech to the Duma. An amnesty was announced, but it covered only common criminals. Political exiles, Prince Paul Vassily wrote, “men of culture and the highest civic and private virtue, were left to their sad fate … and despairing memories.” People muttered of Rasputin. A special one-ruble coin was struck. It showed Nicholas in the foreground with the bearded Michael Romanov behind; he was, they said, a look-alike for the starets.
A solemn Te Deum was held at the Kazan Cathedral on March 6. The crowds lining the streets were “strangely silent” as the sovereigns passed them; they cheered only when the young grand duchesses smiled at them from under their flower-trimmed hats. The cathedral was full. Rodzianko had reserved seats for the Duma leaders close to the front; since Michael had been elected tsar by the people, the burly man insisted, it was right that the people’s elected representatives should be treated with dignity at the service. He was waiting in the cathedral porch for the arrival of the imperial family when a sergeant at arms rushed out to tell him that an “unknown man in peasant dress and wearing a pectoral cross” had barged into his seat and was refusing to budge. Rodzianko guessed his identity.
“Sure enough,” he wrote, “it was Rasputin … in a magnificent Russian tunic of crimson silk, patent leather top boots, black cloth trousers, and a peasant’s overcoat.” The pectoral cross was hung on a fine gold chain; it was a gift from the empress. “What are you doing here?” Rodzianko bellowed. “What has it got to do with thee?” Rasputin asked, using the familiar pronoun. Rodzianko was not amused. “If you ‘thou’ me,” he roared, “I’ll drag you out of the cathedral by the beard. Don’t you know I’m president of the Duma?” Rasputin’s stare had “an unknown power of tremendous force.” Rodzianko did not succumb to it, feeling an “almost animal force” in himself as he worked himself into a frenzy. “Clear out at once, you vile heretic,” he said. Rasputin knelt and prayed. Rodzianko kicked him in the ribs and was about to seize him by the hair when Rasputin turned to him and said: “Lord, forgive him such sin!” He got up and left by the western door of the cathedral, where a Court Cossack helped him on with his coat and put him in an automobile that sped him away.
The service Rasputin missed was conducted with great aplomb by Patriarch Antiochus, a great bearded figure in a jewel-studded miter, and the choral singing was superb; but the empress was clearly nervous and the tsar’s stern gravity gave no sense of rejoicing. In the evening they went to a gala performance of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar at the Mariinsky Theater. Meriel Buchanan, in the British ambassador’s box, was so close that she could see the fan of white eagles’ feathers the empress held begin to tremble compulsively. The English girl noticed that a “dull, unbecoming flush was stealing over her pallor,” while her labored breathing made the diamonds on her bodice glitter with “a thousand uneasy sparks of light.” She gave way to her distress, whispered a few words to the tsar, and hid herself at the back of the box. She was seen no more that evening.
A wave of resentment ran through the theater. Women looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders, while the men muttered under their breath. It was always the same story, Meriel Buchanan thought. “The empress hated St. Petersburg, disliked its society, its people, anything to do with it,” she wrote. “She refused to take her proper place by the emperor’s side, would not put her own personal feeling in the background and make herself pleasant.” Her father, the ambassador, told her that Alexandra hid herself through real torment or affliction, and not by whim or fancy. That was true; on her rare public appearances Alexandra showed all the symptoms of panic attack: panting, faintness, and distress. But the “disagreeable impression remained in people’s minds,” Buchanan observed, and no amount of argument could make it disappear.
The empress repeated the performance at a big ball given for the family in the Assembly Hall of the Nobility. As tradition demanded she opened it by dancing a Chopin polonaise with her husband, her face grave and unsmiling. She felt so ill that she had difficulty staying on her feet. It was the social debut of her eldest daughter, Olga, and the beautiful grand duchess swept through every dance in a simple pink chiffon dress. Alexandra caught Nicholas’s eye; an onlooker thought he was “only just in time to lead her away and prevent her from fainting in public.” Even Vyrubova thought that, for all the brilliance of spectacle, the mosaic of uniforms, gowns, jewels, and headdresses, there was “little real enthusiasm, little real loyalty. I saw a cloud over the whole celebration in St. Petersburg.”
The Romanovs hoped that the provinces would show more warmth. They went by river steamer to Kostroma, the Volga town where Michael had been three centuries before when he heard he had been elected to the throne. Nicholas’s sister Olga described the loyal scenes that greeted them as “bordering on wildness.” Peasants waded chest-high into the river to catch a glimpse of the tsar; in the towns workmen fell to the ground to kiss his shadow as he passed. Alexandra took it as confirmation that Rasputin’s Russia loved them with all its simple soul. The voyage, she said, showed that government ministers were cowards. “They are constantly frightening the emperor with threats of revolution,” she told a lady-in-waiting. “Here—see it for yourself—we needed merely to show ourselves and at once their hearts are ours.” Kokovtsov, the principal “coward” who went with them, was not convinced. The premier thought that the interest was no more than “shallow curiosity.” If the peasants waded out into the shallows, it was because Nicholas never showed himself on deck, keeping out of the biting wind—and rifle range—below. He feared the tsar did not realize how much the country had changed since a Romanov could rule it by whim.
The financial boom continued—the 1913 harvest was not to be equaled for more than fifty years—but the country was out of sorts, at once churlish and light-headed. A vandal slashed Ilya Repin’s great painting of Ivan the Terrible. It was no isolated act, a journalist wrote, but a sign “of times with no values, no education, and a total absence of moral sense.” Million-ruble fortunes, the novelist Alexis Tolstoy wrote, “appeared as if out of thin air. People doped themselves with music … with half-naked women … with champagne. Gambling clubs, houses of assignation, theaters, movie-houses, amusement parks cropped up like mushrooms.” There was an epidemic of suicides in the capital. Twenty-two were mentioned in the press in the first ten days of April, ten of them on April 10 alone. Only two were aged more than twenty-five, and twenty were girls.
Romanovs joined in the philandering. The tsar’s cousin Grand Duke Andrei was living with Nicholas’s former mistress, the ballet dancer Mathilde Kschessinskaya; his brother Michael had married a twice-divorced commoner the year before and was living in Bavarian exile as a result; his sister Olga was divorcing. In May the crowned heads of Europe met in Berlin for the marriage of Kaiser Wilhelm’s daughter Victoria Louise to the duke of Brunswick. At the state banquet in the Berlin palace, the German kaiser, the tsar, and England’s George V wore one another’s uniforms—the kaiser the dress uniform of the British Royal Dragoons with the Russian Order of St. Andrew at his breast, Nicholas in Prussian Dragoon uniform and displaying the Hohenzollern—and escorted one another’s wives. It was the last meeting of the three royal clans before a war that would destroy two of them.
There was a glittering finality, too, to the last full summer of peace in St. Petersburg. At the Hotel de l’Europe the black barman acknowledged orders for newfangled cocktails in a soft Kentucky accent. In the “phosphorescent, crazy, voluptuous summer nights,” the rays of the midnight sun drifted into gardens and lit “long-haired students discussing with girls the transcendental values of German philosophy.” Stravinsky’s mold-breaking Rite of Spring had a sensational premiere. Futurists dressed in cardboard clothes with flowers painted on their faces chanted a poem of one word, Smekh, “laughter,” and its derivatives. Igor Sikorsky built the world’s first four-engined aircraft at the Russo-Balt plant. It cruised above the city, with sixteen people and a dog aboard in a passenger compartment with a sofa and washroom.
Simanovich was making a fortune. “My self-confidence was growing,” the gambler-fixer wrote. “I saw that many persons respected my relations with court circles. My requests and wishes were coming to be satisfied in government offices.… A lot of people wanted to be useful and complaisant to me. For my part, I tried to be pleasant to them.” Rasputin was proving to be a formidable ally. Vyrubova was constantly asked by the empress to take him messages about Alexis’s health. Simanovich wrote that “his fabulous success with the royal couple was making him an idol. All the Petersburg officials were excited. One word from him was enough for them to receive high honors or other distinctions. Everyone sought his support.… There was no need for special knowledge or talents to make a brilliant career. Rasputin’s nod was enough for that.”
The holy man’s protégé was in “the best relations with all the fast livers of the capital,” mistresses of grand dukes, ministers, financiers. “Society ladies, courtesans, famous actresses, and cheerful aristocratic women—they were all proud of their relations with him,” Simanovich reported with delight. “They were blinded by his success.” With Prince Andronnikov’s help, he knew all the scandals, the “liaisons of high-ranking persons, nocturnal secrets of high life.” Friendship with Rasputin, and the discreet interest of Simanovich, gave those on the make “the chance to know many secrets and to fix their affairs.”
Rasputin took to entertaining them at the Villa Rhode, a restaurant-cum-nightclub on a tree-shaded lane in the suburbs. It was known for its music-hall singers and Gypsies; it was popular with “big names and titles,” the ladies often trying to outperform the entertainers. The villa was a wooden plank building in the Russian dacha style, set in a muddy garden behind a stout fence, with heavy double windows and a small winter conservatory projecting from the first floor. An annex had been added to one side for private parties. Adolph Rhode, the proprietor, used this for Rasputin when he telephoned to make a booking. The table was set with flowers and fish and candies, his favorite dishes, and large supplies of Madeira, a powerfully fortified Georgian wine, stronger than the Portuguese original.
Rasputin’s nights at the villa had a ritual. He first telephoned women he was interested in. Simanovich said that the invitations were always accepted; women took advantage of them to “solicit for their friends, lovers, and relatives. Very many ladies thus enriched themselves as Rasputin was very complaisant in such cases.” There was usually a minister or potential minister present. Rasputin began by drinking steadily, amusing his guests with random quotations from the Bible and stories of his Siberian youth. As he got drunker he described how he watched the stallions in the yards enjoying themselves with the mares. He liked to grasp a woman guest at this stage and leer: “Come, my lovely mare.” If the gentlemen present muttered at this, he turned and scolded them: “Yes, yes, my dears, I know you, I can read your souls.”
After eating greedily with his hands, he usually called for a Gypsy choir. The Gypsies sat on a semi-circle of chairs, the men with guitars in brocaded shirts and bright colored trousers, the women singers in colored silks with kerchiefs on their heads.
The British agent Robert Bruce Lockhart, later to see Rasputin in a notorious nightclub incident, found Gypsy music “more intoxicating, more dangerous, than opium, or women, or drink”; plaintive, melancholic, half lyrical and half sensuous, the singing “will drive a man to the moneylenders and even to crime.” The guests drank the charochka, in which tankards of champagne were filled to the brim, emptied, and left upside down on a plate to show that no drop remained.
Rasputin filled his pockets with notes that he gave to the ladies—scrawled maxims: “Go not from the way of love, for love is your mother”; “I gladden you with the light of love”; “God send your soul humility”—and gifts for the Gypsies: candies, silk scarves, ribbons, powder compacts, and perfumes. He tempted the Gypsy singers to filch the trinkets, crying merrily, “The Gypsies are robbing me!” He loved to dance with them, lithe and light in his heavy boots; Simanovich said that “even professional dancers found it hard to compete with him.” If he became completely drunk—“Siberian drunk”—Rasputin’s warning apparatus failed him and he went too far. He sometimes boasted that the empress was a “second Catherine” and that she and not the spineless Nicholas was the real ruler of Russia; since his guests knew of his influence over Alexandra, it was an unsubtle way of reminding them of his own power. A young Guards officer, Obrasov, once boxed his ears for so insulting the tsar, though most thought it no more than the truth.
Rasputin had a sobering influence, however, in the fall of 1913. After they had successfully defeated their former Turkish masters, cross-hatreds broke out among the Balkan states. They were fueled by Austria, which annexed Bosnia and was determined to prevent Serbia from gaining freedom from Austrian tariffs by breaking out to the Adriatic. Bulgaria, though exhausted by its war of independence against the Turks, attacked its onetime Christian allies in Serbia over Macedonia. Although a diplomatic peace was imposed in London, Austria brought its three corps on the Russian frontier in Galicia up to wartime strength. Tensions ran high.
Kokovtsov warned Nicholas that conflict with Germany, a disaster that could sweep away the dynasty, was approaching. The tsar was unimpressed; he replied with a shrug: “All is in the will of God.” Inflammatory speeches were made in the Duma, and the press whipped up Slav nationalism. Rasputin was frightened by the talk of impending war. In an interview published in the Petersburg Gazette on October 13, 1913, he said that Christians should not kill each other, neither should they kill Turks. In contrast to the supposedly Christian people of the Balkans, he said, “the Turks are more fair and peaceful on religious things. You can see how it is—but it comes out different in the newspapers.” If there was to be war, then “let the Turks and foreigners eat each other. They are blind, and this is their misfortune. They will gain nothing and simply advance the hour of death. While we, leading a harmonious life, will once more rise above others.… Fear, fear War.”
Rasputin was given credit for preserving peace by one newspaper, and by Alexandra. “He always said the Balkans were not worth fighting over,” she reminded her husband later. By contrast, Rodzianko was telling the tsar to “profit from the general enthusiasm. The Straits [Constantinople] must belong to us. War will be accepted with joy and serve only to increase the prestige of the imperial power.”
Iliodor equally dreamed of violence in his Cossack village. He planned to start a revolution in October. “I planned the assassination of sixty lieutenant governors and forty bishops throughout Russia,” he claimed. “I chose a hundred men to execute this plan.” It failed; he had no posse of men, but he had gathered a group of women to carry out the castration of Rasputin. One of them was Khioniya Guseva, a twenty-six-year-old, once a handsome prostitute in Tsaritsyn who had turned to religion and Iliodor when she became disfigured by syphilis. She tended him in the village and swore to mutilate the starets who had ruined his life. “Grischa is a true devil,” she said. “I will stab him. I will kill him as the prophet Elijah killed the 450 false prophets of Baal. Rasputin is worse than them.… Father, bless me so that I finish him.” Iliodor hung a knife on a chain around her neck. “With this knife, kill Grischa,” he said.
The new year of 1914 was greeted with church bells, vodka, flags, and bands. Alexandra remained in seclusion, but her daughters Olga and Tatiana appeared in public, Olga more beautiful still than her tip-nosed sister, with dark hair and amber eyes. Countess Shuvalov gave two balls, one all in black and white, the other the Ball of the Colored Wigs, with the guests in red and green and blue wigs and turbans. Balls at the German and Austrian embassies were well attended, tension or not. Crowds packed the Ural Stone Shop with its carved animals of jade and amethyst, and bought lacquered boxes and wooden toys at the Peasant Shop. Fabergé did good business. Couples hurtled down ice slopes on sleds. Dancing bears and vendors of hot toddy and apple and cinnamon tarts took to the frozen river.
But it still seemed a place open to catastrophe, Anna Akhmatova thought; there was something menacing about its “frightening sunsets, the frightening moon.” Nicholas had not forgotten the humiliation of his forced signature on the October 1905 manifesto. He continued to chip away at the Duma and his minister. He was urged on in this by his wife, and by Prince Vladimir Meshchersky. The prince had been a childhood friend of Alexander III and had traded on this to extract a government subsidy of eighty thousand rubles a year to support himself and the good-looking young men who surrounded him, and to publish a Black Hundred newspaper called Grazhdanin. His catamites prospered as he introduced them to “luxury and dirty work.” Meshchersky advised the tsar that the best way to reduce the influence of the prime minister was to appoint his own man as interior minister. He pointed out that it was the interior minister, not the premier, in “whose hands at present lies control over all rights and freedoms.”
Nicholas appointed Nikolai Maklakov, a young provincial governor and “slapdash reactionary,” to the post. Maklakov was inexperienced and unknown; he said of his new post that “for me it was like a clap of thunder from a clear sky.” He had, however, the virtue of loathing the concessions of 1905. He felt that “one leg had been lifted” by them, and that ever since Russia had suffered “a drunkard’s walk, tottering from wall to wall.” He urged the tsar to carry out a coup d’état against the Duma; he should make a threatening speech in the assembly, to be followed by its dissolution and the abolition of its legislative powers. Nicholas found himself “pleasurably surprised” by the idea, but the rest of the cabinet was opposed to it and the plan was dropped.
This appointment irritated Rasputin, who had played no part in it. He was jealous of Meshchersky’s influence. He had his own homosexual fixer-prince, Andronnikov, and he resented the interference enough for the tsar to write to Meshchersky advising him to “visit Grigory … he is angry with you.” Meshchersky died before he could take up the invitation; Rasputin and Andronnikov ensured that they gained a hold on the new interior minister by finding a place at St. Petersburg university for his slow-witted son. They also worked on Major General Voyeikov, the palace commandant. “Much respected Vladimir Nikolayevich,” Andronnikov wrote to him on January 19, 1914, with standard flattery. “Following Your energetic, tireless, and creative activity since long ago, I was indescribably happy to learn that the Emperor chose You. Now one can be quite calm that our dear Emperor will be guarded by firm, reliable, and good hands.… I would be very grateful if You would give me the opportunity to call upon You in Tsarskoye Selo at Your convenience so that I may personally inform You of some questions that might interest You.” The two duly met, and from then on Voyeikov received “a mass of notes showing in an unfavorable light this or that statesman objectionable to Andronnikov.”
The tsar’s next reshuffle was entirely to Rasputin’s liking. On February 12, 1914, Nicholas dismissed Kokovtsov; the premier had proved too independent, too hostile to Rasputin, and too sympathetic to the Duma and constitutionalism. Nicholas did not have the courage to sack him face-to-face; instead he sent him a letter, “for,” he said, “it is easier to select the words when putting them on paper than during an unsettling conversation.” The dowager empress saw Kokovtsov a few days after his fall. “My daughter-in-law doesn’t love me,” she told him. “She doesn’t understand that my only desire is my son’s happiness. But we are going in great steps toward a catastrophe, and the tsar listens to no one save flatterers.” She asked him to see Nicholas and tell him all that he knew and feared. “I told her that no one would listen to me or believe me,” Kokovtsov recalled. “The young empress thought me her enemy.”
The tsar wrote to Kokovtsov to say that he would be replaced by “a man fresh for the work.” This turned out to be Count Ivan Goremykin, a tired, ill man in his mid-seventies who expected to die at any minute. “The Emperor cannot see that the candles have already been lit around my coffin,” he remarked on his appointment, “and that the only thing required to complete the ceremony is myself.” He likened himself to an old fur coat that had been packed away in camphor and was being taken out now merely for the occasion. He was cynical, read French novels and watched “Piccadilly weepers” at the theater, and was often found asleep in his office. The court marshal, Count Paul Benckendorff, said that the tsar “neither wanted nor expected him to do anything.”
To appoint a half-dead premier in a stable country would have been remarkable. To do so in turbulent Russia, menaced by foreign war and internal revolution, was utter folly. It was shared by husband and wife, and by the starets. For Nicholas, Goremykin seemed an ideal, a throwback deep into the autocracy of the previous century. “I am a man of the old school,” Goremykin said without shame, “and an Imperial Command is for me a law. To me, His Majesty is the anointed one.… When the decision of such a man is made … his faithful subjects must accept it whatever may be the consequences. And then let God’s will be done.” This attitude delighted the empress, who called him Old Man with affection. “He sees and understands all so clearly and it is a pleasure speaking to him,” she said. Goremykin’s wife was an admirer and visitor of Rasputin’s. She supplied him with boiled potatoes delivered from her kitchen with such speed that they had no time to get cold, and with fish soup, apples, and croissants. “She knew how to cook potatoes ten different ways,” Simanovich said, “and in this way she really won Rasputin’s favor.”
Rasputin and Prince Andronnikov worked closely together. The prince sent flowers and candies to Vyrubova, while Rasputin’s flattery of Goremykin was underpinned by pamphlets Andronnikov wrote in French and Russian to praise the premier’s policies, and by gifts of cigars and pheasants. An “infinite number” of requests were satisfied. Distillers and sugar manufacturers won state subsidies, bankers were given oil concessions, civil convictions were quashed together with “appointments, transfers, pensions, awards from all the institutions, and so forth.”
The starets moved into a new apartment at 64 Gorokhovaya ulitsa. Simanovich and his contacts paid the rent. The street was in the western section of the city, running from Admiralty Square to Zagorodniy Prospect. The dull brick facades were streaked with dirt and soot, and it had a dark air to it; the long overcoats worn by plainclothes police agents were called Gorokhovoyo coats. The murderer in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot, Parfyon Rogozhin, had lived in one of the suviving old buildings on the street, a large, gloomy, three-story house, dirty green, hiding in a dark corner, with thick walls and few windows. Newer apartments had been built since for tradespeople, successful clerks, and minor officials.
It was handy to the railroad station to Tsarskoye Selo, and Number 64 had two entrances. The building had double doors on the street leading to a dank courtyard. The main staircase led past the doorman and the concierge’s room up to the apartments; a back staircase led discreetly from the courtyard. The common parts smelled of cabbage, hot sheep’s cheese, and black tobacco. Rasputin’s flat, Number 20, was a walk-up on the third floor. It had five rooms and a kitchen. The hall led into an anteroom and a corridor with rooms off it. On the street side there were a dining room and Rasputin’s bedroom and bathroom. He rarely used the bathroom, preferring to go to a bathhouse across the street.
No one was admitted to the bedroom when Rasputin was not alone there. It was a room, a police agent said, that could “tell many tales … disheveled petitioners of the lower classes ran from the room screaming, cursing, and spitting, while attempts were made to pacify them and get them out of the flat.” Okhrana agents were posted outside the concierge’s room and in the street, from where they had occasional glimpses of Rasputin’s activities. Akulina Laptinskaya, Rasputin’s “secretary” who helped him move into the new apartment, liked to entertain him in the bedroom with the curtains undrawn. “Owing to the absence of blinds,” an agent noted, “her erotic exercises with Rasputin presented an attraction for the street.” On the courtyard side was the large room used for receptions. The furniture was heavy and bourgeois, stout wooden chairs, overstuffed sofas, a wooden table. Here he held court. His study was next to it, the kitchen, and the rooms of his daughters and maid. His telephone number was 646-46.
The mood in the city changed during Lent. “Absolutely no one wants war or adventure,” Count Benckendorff wrote, “but the feeling that war is inevitable has grown and grown in all classes.” Men in long brown coats scattered yellow sand on the sidewalks and set bonfires to thaw the ice. In late March the frozen river broke with cracks like pistol shots, and icebreakers churned through the blocks of ice. Then, at last, the guns fired from the Peter and Paul Fortress, and its commandant met the city governor in midstream to proclaim the river open to navigation. Tugs towed landing stages to fix in position on the docks for the passenger steamers. It was spring.
Rasputin hoped to celebrate by seducing a provincial lady, Vera Alexandrovna Zhukovskaya, who had come to Gorokhovaya ulitsa seeking spiritual advice. She was shown into his study by the maid-mistress Dunia. A bed was against the wall covered by a shabby silk coverlet, a washstand next to it, and a lady’s writing desk, with some pencils and dirty pens and a gold watch with the double-headed Romanov eagle engraved on it. A table and two chairs were in the middle of the room. A lady’s vanity table with a mirror was in front of the window. A large photograph of the altar of St. Isaac’s Cathedral was next to it, pinned with ribbons—she remembered that the khlysty also put ribbon-encrusted icons next to windows.
Rasputin came in. He pulled up a chair opposite her, close enough for him to put her legs between his knees. “What good things have you to say to me?” he asked. She replied that there was little in life that was good. He stroked her face, and replied, “Listen to what I am going to say to you. Do you know the psalm ‘From my youth up the lusts of the flesh have tormented me; Lord Jesus Christ do not condemn me therefor’? Do you know it?” She said she knew it very well.
He pressed her knee firmly and told her he would explain. “I tell you that people may sin up to the age of thirty; but then it is time to turn to God, do you see?” he said. “And when you have once learned to surrender your thoughts completely to God, you may sin again, for that is sin of a special kind—do you follow? And as far as sin generally is concerned, you can be freed from it again by repentance. Only repent of everything, then everything is good again.” He asked her to go to communion. She refused. He began stroking her hands and shoulders. She would not understand his words, he said; she had to be convinced by deeds. “Only come to me often, little honeybee, love me and then you will understand everything. Love is the most important thing.” As long as she was a stranger to him, she would ignore his words; once she loved him, all would be clear. He kissed her on the corner of her mouth, so rapidly and simply that she could not object.
The telephone rang. He went to answer it. “Now I shall not let you go again,” he said when he returned. “Once you have come to me you will not escape again! Understand clearly, I will do nothing to you, only come, my juicy cherry.” He asked her for her telephone number. While she wrote it down he squeezed her shoulders and whispered into her ear, his breath warm: “Well, and what more have you to say to me?” She was repelled and pushed him away. “I came to you so that you could give me advice,” she said. “You know well, don’t you, where the truth is and where sin is?” He told her about his friendship with Grand Duchess Militsa—it was a name he dropped often—and how she also asked about sin and did not understand it.
“Only he commits sin who seeks sin,” he said. “But in him who merely passes through it, sin has no part. If you like, I will show it all to you. Go next week to communion, and then come to me while you still have Paradise in your soul. Then I will show you sin, so that you will not be able to stand on your feet!”
“I don’t believe that,” she gasped, feeling remote and incredulous. He whispered, like a magician, his mouth open with lust: “Do you want me to show you?”
He had gone far enough; in an instant he changed and his eyes became “kind, friendly, and passionless.” He asked her gently and with assumed surprise, “Why do you look at me like that, my darling?” He kissed her with “priestly dignity.” In place of the khlyst—insistent, lascivious, seeking out weakness—she saw an honest peasant with meek eyes. He got her to promise that she would return on Saturday evening.
On Saturday she was shown into the dining room, crowded with women and a nervous young man in a morning coat, von Pistolkors, whose pregnant wife gazed at Rasputin with devotion. Madame Golovina acted as hostess and kept the conversation going. Her daughter, Munya Golovina, wore a thin silk dress and a white hat with violets; she also had a look of submissiveness. Vyrubova was there, big, full-figured, and blond with a bright red, sensual mouth and a face that was “equivocal, deceptive, and at the same time seductive.” The Grand Duchess Militsa sat with her hands in an ermine muff; she was dark, her black eyes sad and lifeless, and she was silent.
Rasputin passed the women boiled eggs from the mess of food on the table—tarts, bowls of fruit, peppermint cakes, black bread and gherkins, a bottle of wine. They grasped them eagerly. Vyrubova passed him some bread and gherkins, which he ate with his hands, wiping them on the tablecloth before pawing his guests. He talked spasmodically about the church and the clergy—“I cannot exactly swear that I love them particularly but there are believers even among them”—and warned them that Olga Lokhtina was coming. She had missed the way, he said, and broken away with Iliodor, but he was sorry for her—“the mad bitch.”
She arrived on cue, “improbably bright, broad, pale pink, puffy, disheveled, absurd,” shrieking, “Chr-i-st is ri-s-en!” She wore pleated skirts of different colors that swooped like wings as she staggered around the room. Beneath them she had a pair of old boots Rasputin had discarded. She wore a Siberian wolfskin cap, which Rasputin had also worn, and one of his cast-off red peasant blouses. Little bags were strapped onto her shirt, with scraps of food and old gloves that had belonged to him. Her face was covered with veils pinned with gaudy ribbons; only her “delicate, sad, and beautiful mouth” could be made out.
She had brought Rasputin a cake—“white outside, black inside”—which he tossed back onto the table. At his rejection she took his head and kissed it wildly, stammering, “Oh my dearest … vessel of all blessing.… Ah, you lovely beard.… You delicious hair … me martyr … you my adored one … my God … my beloved!” Rasputin, half-choked by her embrace, snarled at her: “Away! Satan! Away, you devil, you monster!” She redoubled her incantations: “And yet you are mine, and I have lain with you. I have lain with you.… You are my God! I belong to you and to no other.… However many women you take, no one can rob me of you. You are mine!” Rasputin snapped at her—“I hate you, you bitch, the devil is in you”—and threatened to break her jaw. It had no effect. “I am happy, happy, and you love me,” she said, her ribbons and frilled skirts shaking. “Soon I will lie with you again.” He pushed her, and she shouted: “Now, strike me! Strike me, strike me!” She was frenzied; the onlooking women felt chilled and afraid. When Rasputin hit her on the chest, she tried to kiss the spot, but her chin prevented her and she ran around kissing the air, kissing her hands, and kneading her breasts. Eventually she calmed down and lay on a sofa.
When Zhukovskaya asked Rasputin why he insulted the crazed woman, he replied—kindly again—that she had deserted the church. The other ladies had remained silent, their eyes veiled from the hysterical scene, though their faces were red and their breath came in gasps. Then Madame Golovina turned to Lokhtina, saying, “I cannot understand why you deliberately make Grigory Efimovich angry.” Lokhtina demanded soup; she said she had eaten nothing all day and had given the last of her money away to her chauffeur. Munya Golovina fetched her a bowl of soup. Rasputin told her to take it away, but she persisted. “What are you doing?” her mother asked her. “Why do you anger Grigory Efimovich?” Her daughter whispered, “Mama, please let me alone, say no more about it.”
The telephone rang at intervals, and Rasputin left the room to answer it. Lokhtina resumed her masochistic wail: “Carry me off, beat me! Insult me as you like, spit at me.… And now I will lie with you, I will lie with you immediately.” Munya Golovina cleared the dirty dishes as though she were a maid. When Rasputin was called to the telephone again, Lokhtina took advantage of his absence to slip into his bedroom. He rushed in after her, and the ladies listened to the sounds of blows and screeches. When Lokhtina reappeared her veils were torn; Rasputin was breathing heavily, and he wiped his sweating face on the sleeve of his cornflower blue blouse.
Madame Golovina complained that the tension was making her ill; she would need bay rum drops to revive her. The room was thick with sex, hysteria, religious longing. It was clear to Zhukovskaya that those present “must either depart or shriek, fall into convulsions, and smash things.” Vyrubova rose first, and the others followed her to the hall. Rasputin made the sign of the cross over them and bade them farewell. As Vyrubova took his hand and kissed it, Zhukovskaya noticed that she moaned and the whole of her body trembled.
At the beginning of April the imperial family left for a two-month visit to the Crimea. War tensions were growing; Nicholas was hundreds of miles away from his capital, with no reliable radio link, dependent on communications by post and courier. Spiridovich attributed this irresponsibility to Alexandra’s state of “extraordinary nervousness,” which could be relieved only amid the gardens and relaxed family life of the Livadia Palace.
Rasputin joined them, staying at the Hotel de Russie in Yalta. The visit turned into scandal. He bragged of his intimacy with the family to the hotel staff. Newspapers remarked that Vyrubova’s carriage was often seen outside the hotel. Tourist shops did a roaring trade in Rasputin postcards. Nicholas, irritated, suggested that the starets collect his daughters from St. Petersburg and spend the rest of the summer in Pokrovskoye. He agreed. After he left Yalta, Khioniya Guseva came looking for him. When the hotel told her he had already gone, she set out in search of him.
His daughter Maria was now fifteen. She played little games with men when she was bored. She telephoned numbers at random. If a man replied she chattered away to him, telling him that she adored him and arranging a rendezvous on the steps of the Hotel de l’Europe. She would giggle from across the street as the man paced up and down waiting for his mysterious admirer. At the end of May a man played a reverse trick on her. He rang her up, asking for her by name and telling her that he was hopelessly in love with her, and requested a meeting. She told him that she could not see him because she was leaving for Siberia with her father. The caller asked her carefully for the date of her departure.
Maria left St. Petersburg with her father on June 4 for the four-day journey by first-class sleeper and river steamer to the village. As the Trans-Siberian reached the Urals, a British Royal Navy battle squadron steamed past the imperial yacht Standart and moored in the Kronstadt naval base. The British had long viewed Russia as the land of whip and exile, but the threat of European war and fear of German strength had persuaded them to ally with Russia as well as France. The visit was a sparkling affair. Eight hundred guests were invited to a ball aboard the battle cruisers Lion and New Zealand, which steamed up the Neva to the Nicholas Bridge. The young grand duchesses, returned from the Crimea, stole the hearts of the crews as they clambered around the gun turrets. Alexandra met her nephew Prince George Battenberg, who was serving aboard the cruiser, but she did not allow the girls to stay on for the ball. It was a “white night,” when the summer sun scarcely slipped below the horizon and turned the smooth, gray waters of the Neva to gold. The linden trees were out, the fields filled with bluebells and cowslips. Guests were greeted by an arch on the gangway of HMS New Zealand with the word Welcome in huge letters; the mayor of St. Petersburg proposed a toast: “To the finest navy in the world.” The supper was abundant, the champagne half frozen to the Russian taste; the ship’s band played dance music. After the warships left the family began its summer cruise along the Finnish skerries.
Aboard the steamer Sokolovsky on the river from Tyumen to Pokrovskoye, Maria Rasputin was approached by a “dark gentleman” who introduced himself as Davidsohn. He came from the Jewish ghetto in Vilna and was now a journalist on the popular daily Birzhevye Vedomosti. He admitted that it was he who had telephoned her, and that he was determined to follow her home. She did not much care for him and was not pleased when she saw him disembark at Pokrovskoye. He lay low, however, while the Rasputins caught up with friends and local gossip.