No balls, no music, no officers in gala uniform greeted the New Year,” wrote Meriel Buchanan. “The men we danced with last year had lost their lives in East Prussia or were fighting in the Carpathians.” Women with dull, heavy eyes read the casualty lists posted on shop windows. The empress now rose at seven, instead of noon, and busied herself comforting the last hours of “unknown solitary men” from obscure regiments. She strung innumerable icons and knitted comforters, for she wanted each man in the immense armies to have something made with her own hands; “but almost no one knew this.”
Rasputin’s fall from grace with the tsar was temporary. On the afternoon of January 2, 1915, Vyrubova was traveling from Tsarskoye Selo to see her father in Petrograd when the train jumped the track. Her legs were trapped in wrecked radiator pipes, and a heavy steel cross-beam fell on her face. She was admitted to the hospital unconscious with severe leg and spinal injuries. The doctor told Nicholas and Alexandra not to disturb her. “She is dying,” he said. “She cannot live until morning.” Occasionally the patient muttered for Rasputin to pray for her.
A telephone call from the palace alerted Rasputin in the late evening. He telephoned Prince Andronnikov for an automobile and was driven to the hospital. He entered the ward, bowed to the tsar, and went over to the bed. “Annushka, do you hear me?” he said. She opened her eyes. “Grigory! Grigory!” she cried. He held her hand and prayed. “She will live, but she will always be a cripple,” he said. With that the tsar’s head of chancellery, Alexander Mosolov, said, “he tottered from the room and fell outside in a faint, from which he awoke in a strong perspiration, feeling that all his strength had gone from him.”
Mosolov was no admirer of the starets and had no reason to exaggerate his powers. It is not possible to judge whether the intervention was lifesaving; but at the least it restored the patient’s will to regain consciousness. Vyrubova did live, and she was indeed crippled, though, with the help of crutches, she recovered sufficiently to negotiate the winding stairs up to Rasputin’s apartment with agility. The apparent miracle, much to Simanovich’s relief, restored the starets to the tsar’s favor.
Rasputin came close to death himself four days later. He was almost run down by a troika driven at him at full gallop along the Kamennoostrovsky Prospect. Okhrana security men caught its occupants and found that they came from Tsaritsyn. It was said that they were Iliodor’s agents, intent on murder. Although they were expelled from the capital, no charges were preferred against them. From now on the alarmed Okhrana men kept full notes on Rasputin’s movements and contacts.
The starets celebrated his escape with gusto, mixing business with large helpings of pleasure. His consumption of wine and Madeira became wilder. His daughter said that he drank more to deaden the continuing pain from his stomach wound. There is an element of truth in this—after one drinking session the Okhrana reported that he was “sick all day”—but his constitution was strong and his recovery rapid. The drinking was part of a general descent into wilder living, a growing sense that indiscretion could no longer harm him. His sexual appetite was always voracious; it fed now on increased opportunity, on power and ready access to cash. It was also better documented in the “staircase notes” taken by his Okhrana minders.
Several visits with prostitutes to his favorite bathhouse on Rozhdestvenskaya Street were recorded. After one of them, feeling exalted, Rasputin cabled Vyrubova: “I could not be with you in body, I send you joy with my spirit. My feeling is a divine feeling. I send an angel to console and comfort you.” On January 12 he took 250 rubles from two peasants who wanted pardons. One had been sentenced for belonging to a sect, the other for forging promissory notes. On January 16, while Vyrubova’s sister was visiting him, an agent saw him “take the prostitute Tregubova on his knee and murmur something.” Maria Sergeyevna Ghil, the wife of a captain in the 145th Regiment, slept with him on the night of January 17–18. In the morning he was given 1,000 rubles by a banker and merchant, Moisey Ginsburg. The bribe was for help in getting a contract to supply coal to the navy.
Simanovich arranged a party in the Gorokhovaya apartment on January 26, paid for by people whose release from prison Rasputin had helped to arrange. Four unknown men and six women attended, the agents reported; one of them was carrying a guitar. The party was noisy; they sang and danced into the early hours. Two days later Rasputin’s wine stocks were replenished by Lev von Bock, a state councillor who owed him favors. On February 12 he visited Prince Andronnikov, returning home at 4:30 A.M. with six men, all drunk. They stayed up singing until 6:00; “in the morning, Rasputin didn’t receive anyone for he slept.”
Boxes of cigars and pheasants were sent to Goremykin for the premier’s seventy-fifth birthday. Rasputin played games with his minders. On February 19 he visited the apartment of Nikolai Solovyov, a senior synod official with a young wife, Elizaveta, with whom he was having an affair. When he left the apartment with two ladies, he outsmarted the Okhrana men by jumping into a motor taxi. The next sighting was at 3:00 A.M. when he returned home alone. Two days later he partied with Evgeniya Terekhova, a twenty-three-year-old gentlewoman, in her rooms in the Severnaya Hotel on Znamenskaya Square. He left the next morning. He visited Vyrubova in her cottage in Tsarskoye Selo, where she was recovering well from her injuries. He was back on February 27, going to the Alexander Palace to bless the tsar on the eve of his departure for a visit to the Austrian front. Nicholas wrote later to Alexandra that he felt a “special peace of mind” after the blessing.
Huge orders for supplies and services were being placed by the military. Simanovich and Andronnikov made sure that Rasputin exploited his royal contacts. On March 10 Evgeniya Ezhova, the wife of a businessman from Klin, near Moscow, visited his apartment. She wanted his help in landing a two million ruble contract for supplying linen to the army. It seems that she obtained it, for shortly afterward she moved from rooms in the medium-rated Severnaya to a suite at the luxury Astoria Hotel. After midnight seven men came and stayed until 3:00 A.M. “They screamed, sang songs, danced, made noise, and, all drunk, together with Rasputin went somewhere,” the staircase watchers noted. He was back home at 10:15 the next morning. The agents followed him later to Pushkinskaya Street, where the twenty-six-year-old Vera Tregubova kept an apartment. She was a high-class call girl who claimed to be a music student at the conservatory. The two were seen going into a bathhouse.
As they sported in the steam room and cold pool, Austrian officers were raising white flags on the battlements of Przemyśl. The great fortified city, surrounded by concentric rings of trenches and strong points, guarded the approaches to the Carpathian Mountains. Though the Russians were so short of shells that it was a court-martial offense for an artillery officer to fire more than three a day, they had succeeded in encircling it with bayonet charges. Scurvy broke out in the besieged city. After the last horses had been slaughtered for their meat, the Austrians destroyed their ammunition dumps in an explosion heard fifty miles away. They prepared to surrender.
Nicholas was at army headquarters, the Stavka, at Baranovichi, midway on the railroad from Brest Litovsk to Minsk. Railroad cars were drawn up in a fan shape in pinewoods outside the town, guarded by Cossacks with long Russian bayonets on their rifles. The cars served as offices, map rooms, mess, and dormitories. In his commander in chief’s coach, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich had laid rugs and bearskins. A hundred icons hung on the walls. The headroom was too low for the Romanov giant, and the doors had scraps of paper hung on them to remind him to duck.
A forest clearing was a far from ideal spot to supervise a front that stretched from the Baltic to the Carpathians. The headquarters of the German Oberost, by contrast, were in a palace at Posen, where Ludendorff could relax with his officers over dinner and cigars before returning to his rooms to work into the early hours. The Russians stopped work before an early dinner. Their coaches baked in summer and froze in winter, although the stove in the grand duke’s office so overheated it that the tsar could not “endure it above one hour.” Strategy was discussed around a sandpit where sections of the front were modeled in clay and sand. Here the grand duke outlined plans for armies by tracing lines with his walking stick. Wireless communication was crude; the field telephone network was little better. The only certain way of sending orders for six million men was to use a messenger.
The grand duke ran panting across the clearing to tell the tsar of the fall of Przemyśl and the capture of 120,000 Austrians. A Te Deum was sung in a little wooden chapel built in the pines. It was packed, Nicholas wrote, “with officers and my splendid Cossacks. What beaming faces!” He presented the grand duke with a viceroy’s golden sword, its hilt shining with diamonds, and inscribed “Pour la libération de Galicie.” It was the high point of Russian fortunes in the war, and of Nicholas’s relations with his tall cousin.
Later in the month Rasputin went to Moscow to fulfill a vow to pray in the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Kremlin. He had made it while recovering from his wound in the hospital. He left Petrograd on the night train on March 24, shortly before a woman named Varvara Nishchenko visited him. She left a message promising him two thousand rubles if he obtained the discharge of her uncle, a colonel, who had been called up for duty from the reserve. For all his declared, and genuine, patriotism, Rasputin was heavily engaged in the lucrative business of obtaining deferments and soft billets far from the front. Rules, and shame, were for others.
He arrived in Moscow the morning of March 25. He went from the train to have breakfast with an admirer, Maria Arkadyevna. She had promised to introduce him to a friend, Anna-Elena Frantsevna Djanumova. Elena was an attractive woman of thirty-five, the wife of a wealthy Moscow merchant, whose elderly mother had been exiled to Siberia from Kiev. Although Russian born, the mother had remained a German subject and was suffering from the anti-German hysteria. Maria Arkadyevna—Elena discreetly avoided using more than her first name and patronymic in her account—assured Elena that Rasputin would be able to fix her mother’s case.
She rang Elena: “Rasputin is here. Come and have breakfast with us.” Elena was there by noon. She recognized Rasputin immediately. He wore a white silk embroidered shirt over his trousers. His deep-set gray eyes struck her. “They pierce you as though they want to feel to the very depths of you,” she wrote. “They look so shrewdly, so persistently, it makes you feel ill at ease.” She noticed that he used the familiar thou to everyone, old and young. He leaned toward her with a glass of red wine and said, without any preliminaries, “Drink.” Then he said, “Take a pencil and write.” Other guests handed her pencils and pieces of paper. “Write,” he said. She began to write.
“Be glad at simplicity, woe is frantic and wicked—even the sun is not warm for the woeful,” he dictated. “Forgive me, Lord, I’m sinful, I’m earthly and my love is earthly, too. God, do wonders and restrain us. We are Yours. Your love is great, do not be angry at us. Send humility to my soul and the joy of beneficial love. Save me and help me, God.” All the guests looked on respectfully. Intelligent people, shrewd and reliable in other respects, suspended judgment on Rasputin’s banalities; turning dross to gold through force of mind was one of his characteristics. “You’re lucky,” an old lady whispered to Elena. “He paid attention to you at once and he loves you.”
“Take this and read, read it with your heart,” Rasputin told her, pushing the paper back to her. He liked the word frantic; it went with Elena’s patronymic, Frantsevna. It became his nickname for her, Frantic.
The talk turned to the war. Rasputin was in boastful mood. “If they didn’t niggle me, there wouldn’t be any war,” he said. “I wouldn’t allow the tsar. He obeys me and I wouldn’t allow him to fight. What do we need the war for? Anything may happen.”
After breakfast the guests moved to the drawing room. “Play ‘Along the Roadway,’ ” Rasputin said suddenly. A lady sat at the grand piano and began to play. The starets got up and began to sway to the rhythm and stamp his feet in their soft leather boots. He broke into a dance, moving lightly and easily. He floated about the room “like a feather,” approaching the ladies to entice a partner from their circle. One of the ladies could no longer restrain herself and floated to him with her scarf in her hand. Elena saw that nobody was surprised, as if dancing at midday was common. It ended as abruptly as it had begun.
“That’s enough,” Rasputin said, turning to Elena. “You came here on business. Well, let’s go, speak up, what d’you want, sweetie?” They went to an adjacent room. Elena explained her mother’s problem. He became thoughtful. “Your affair is difficult,” he said. “You can’t even mention the Germans these days. But I’ll talk to her”—he pronounced this word after a pause with particular stress to make it clear he meant the empress—“and she’ll talk to him. Perhaps something’ll come out of it. And you must come to Peter to me. You’ll find out there.”
Saying good-bye to Maria Arkadyevna, Elena asked her to visit. “Why don’t you ask me?” Rasputin butted in. “I’ll come.” Elena mumbled that she’d thought he would be too busy but invited him for breakfast. “All right,” he said. “We’re gonna visit the Moscow lady.” Elena noticed that he always stressed his o’s—M-o-O-sc-o-w—in a melodious drawl. She went home in a confused state. So this was the real sovereign of Russia, in a peasant blouse. The racy melody of “Along the Roadway” sounded in her ears, while, she wrote, a “bearded figure flashed before my eyes and tassels of a blue sash fluttered.… Deep-set eyes persistently pierced me and I did not know what to think.”
The following morning, March 26, 1915, Elena was woken by the telephone. It was Maria Arkadyevna with her buoyant laugh. “Rasputin spent the night in my apartment, and he’s been agitated since early morning, getting ready to come to your place,” she told Elena. “He came to me to ask for perfumed pomatum, p-O-matum, you know, with an o. And scissors for his nails. When I ask him what for, he says, ‘We’re going to the dark beauty.’ Now you ask him for whatever you want. He’ll do anything. Use the situation.”
Elena rang up her closest friends to ask them over. She explained, “Like myself, they all wanted to have a look at this weird celebrity.”
Rasputin came at 1:00 P.M. in a crimson silk Russian blouse, “merry and complacent.” He talked a lot, skipping from one topic to another. An episode from his life would be followed by a totally unconnected dictum, topped off with a sudden question to someone present. Sometimes he seemed not to be paying any attention. Then he would stare and say abruptly, “I know what you’re thinking about, my dear.” He always seemed to guess right.
He spoke about Siberia and his family. “See my hands,” he said. “Because of hard labor. A peasant’s labor is not easy.” He stretched out his callused hands, the veins swollen. Self-satisfaction inflected in his voice. It seemed strange to talk of peasant life at a table set with crystal and silver. The telephone started ringing. Someone asked him to come for a dinner party with Gypsy entertainers that a group of rich Siberian merchants had arranged for him.
Maria Arkadyevna was worried. “You promised to go,” she said. “They’re waiting for us.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Rasputin replied. “I’m OK here, with the little ladies. Tell ’em I won’t come.”
Arkadyevna was so upset that red flushes appeared on her face. “It won’t do,” she said. “People have organized a feast for you. Everyone is there waiting for you, and you aren’t going. You promised. You’ve got to go.”
“Tell ’em I won’t come,” he repeated. “I’ve got to leave a word here for everyone to remember me by. Give me some paper.”
Arkadyevna asked Elena to go into a different room and implored her to help change Rasputin’s mind because she had promised to bring him with her. Finally, they succeeded. “All right, I’ll go, though I’m OK here,” he said. “Well, ladies, take these.”
He handed out scraps of paper. He wrote on Elena’s: “Don’t avoid love—it’s a mother for you.” To another lady, he scrawled: “God loves those with a pure heart.” Elena’s maid Grusha had been looking at Rasputin with avid curiosity. She was rewarded with her own note: “God loves those who labor and everyone knows of your honesty.”
He walked to the hall and was handed a rich fur coat with a beaver collar and beaver hat. One of the ladies remarked how splendid his coat was. “The dentists gave it to me,” he said, referring to recent and successful influence peddling. A group of Jewish dentists had been convicted of forging professional diplomas that gave them the right to live in Petrograd, where Jews were normally denied residence permits. The convictions were quashed after Rasputin appealed to the tsar.
He kissed all the ladies when he left; “it was his usual manner when greeting or saying good-bye.”
It would have been better if Rasputin had stayed with the ladies. Instead, he went to the Yar, the smartest nightclub in Moscow. He arrived, already drunk, at 11:00 P.M., with a merry widow, Anisia Reshetnikova; a Moscow journalist, Nikolai Soedov; and a young woman the police could not identify. The party had a private room and were joined by the publisher of the Moscow News of the Season. Rasputin ordered a Gypsy chorus to sing to them, and he danced the russkaya. As the British secret agent Robert Bruce Lockhart watched the cabaret in the main hall, he heard a fracas coming from the private room. “Wild shrieks of a woman, a man’s curses, broken glass and the banging of doors,” he wrote. “Headwaiters rushed upstairs. The manager sent for the police.… The cause of the disturbance was Rasputin—drunk and lecherous.”
Rasputin had tried to seduce one of the women in the party. Frustrated, he smashed the mirrors in the room. He pointed at his embroidered blouse and told the singers, “It’s a gift from the ‘old woman,’ ” adding that she had sewn it for him and that “I do with her what I want.” The journalists present knew full well that the “old woman” was the empress. Challenged to prove he was Rasputin, he unbuttoned his trousers and waved his penis at the waiters and onlookers. When the police arrived he told them that he was protected by the tsar. They reported that his behavior was “sexually psychopathic; he was baring his sexual organs and carrying on a conversation with the singers, giving them handwritten notes, such as ‘Love unselfishly.’ ” When the police dragged him away, Bruce Lockhart reports that he was “snarling and vowing vengeance.”
Rasputin was unrepentant when Elena saw him off on the Moscow-Petrograd express on March 29. He was standing by a first-class carriage surrounded by women. Elena elbowed through the crowd, “under the cross-fire of curious and derisive eyes.” He embraced her. “Come to Peter with me, Frantic,” he said. “I’ll do everything for you, only come. Remember, if you don’t come nothing will be done.” He kissed everyone who had come to see him off and was gone.
As news of the Yar scandal got out, it was assumed that Rasputin was finished. Russians are tolerant of public drunkenness, but they expected the reference to the “old woman” and the penis waving to inflict terminal damage. He continued, unabashed, in his old ways. He had crossed the line, and he did not care. The first thing he did on his return to Petrograd on the morning of March 31 was send a telegram to Elena: “Gratifying treasure spiritually with you kisses,” it read.
Then he set about gratifying himself, the Okhrana log recording that, on April 3, he “brought a woman to his apartment at 1:00 A.M. who spent the night with him.” As the couple slept the German troops were loaded on trains that would take them from France to the Russian front. At Easter, Rasputin prayed ostentatiously at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Petrograd. At the front Russian troops flew great banners above their trenches proclaiming that “Christ is Risen.” Each man was given ten eggs and eight Easter buns.
On April 9 Simanovich arranged for Rasputin to go to a party at the house of Alexis Filippov, editor of the financial newspaper Stock Exchange Day. He spoke with businessmen and stockbrokers eager for tips and contracts until he became incoherent with drink. He did not get home until 6:00 A.M. A week later he met his old friend Martian, the father superior of the Tyumen monastery. They went to visit an acquaintance, Vasily Pestrikov, who was not at home. Undaunted, the two holy men went on a spree with Pestrikov’s son. They sent for a guitar player and sang with him. Rasputin danced with Pestrikov’s housemaid.
At the front of General Radko’s Third Army in Galicia, the sheep that normally grazed between the lines were gone. No-man’s-land was two thousand yards wide in many places, and shepherds brought their flocks to the grass while Russian troops from the country swapped jokes with them. Nobody connected the absence of sheep and shepherds with German preparations for attack. The tsar shared the optimism. He was inspecting men sent to Odessa and Sevastopol to prepare the invasion of the Bosporus and Constantinople. They were to be landed on the European side of the Bosporus while thousands of tons of burning oil were dumped in the straits to be carried into the harbor of Constantinople by the current. Nicholas expected to annex the city. The Italians declared war on Austria on April 13, confident that the Russians had broken the Habsburg empire; Rasputin returned to his apartment “dead drunk” at 2:00 A.M. The French and British had by now noted that a number of German divisions had disappeared from their front. They warned the Stavka of a “sledgehammer blow” that the Germans were preparing in Galicia. Russian reconnaissance parties reported that German troops were now stiffening the Austro-Hungarians on the southern front.
At 3:00 A.M. on April 19, the sledgehammer struck. For four hours, 1,500 guns poured 700,000 shells onto Third Army. It was the greatest artillery barrage of the war to date. Ten shells fell on each pace and a half of front. The few Russian guns had not been moved for so long that the German gunners destroyed them in the predawn darkness. A British military observer, Bernard Pares, was on a hill behind the Russian line. He watched an uninterrupted, ten-mile line of enemy fire. “The Russian artillery was practically silent,” he wrote. “The elementary Russian trenches were completely wiped out and so, to all intents and purposes, was human life in that area.”
German officers watched the barrage without taking cover; there was almost no return fire. At 1:00 P.M. their shock troops advanced in waves; they need not have bothered to fix their bayonets. One Russian division was reduced from 16,000 men to 500. “Here and there,” the German war diary reported, “loam-gray figures jumped up and ran back, weaponless, in gray fur caps and fluttering, unbuttoned greatcoats, until there was not one remaining.” By nightfall the Germans had taken Third Army’s second trench line and were in open country, “sweeping the unwieldy enemy before them in the exuberant joy of the attack.”
Reserves, thrown in by Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich, were hurried into gaps in the line without rifles with orders to collect weapons from the dead and wounded. They had no training in taking cover and lay exposed to German shell fire until they were killed or wounded. Companies of 250 men that Pares visited were reduced to 40 survivors. “You know, sir, we have no weapon except the soldier’s breast,” they told him. “This is not war, sir, it is slaughter.” When they fell back to the San River, they found they could not dig trenches or build bunkers because corrupt officers had sold the spades, barbed wire, and entrenching timbers to civilians. With bayonets fixed to empty rifles, they fell back and prepared to defend Russian soil against the first invaders to penetrate it since Napoleon.
Rasputin’s malice was added to the commander in chief’s other problems. Many Russian Germans had been exiled to Siberia in the spy frenzy of the war. Simanovich was running a profitable sideline getting permission from the Stavka for them to return. The fixer petitioned Nicholas Nikolayevich once too often. The grand duke cabled him from headquarters: “Satisfied for the last time. If new petitions are sent you to be exiled to Siberia.” Simanovich went immediately to Gorokhovaya ulitsa. Rasputin cabled the grand duke suggesting that he visit the Stavka to see him. He got a definitive answer by telegraph three hours later. “If you come I’ll have you hanged.”
The starets was furious. “From that time he bore the thought of revenging himself on Nicholas Nikolayevich at the first opportunity,” Simanovich said. He rebuked the starets for making an enemy of the grand duke, “threatening our position,” and stirring up hatred against himself. “People like me are born once in a century,” Rasputin snapped back proudly. “My power cannot spread everywhere, but I achieve all I need.”
Over the next days, Simanovich noticed Rasputin’s “strange behavior.” He ate nothing and drank Madeira heavily. He was silent and often jumped up as if trying to catch someone with jerky movements of his hands, threatening with his fists: “I’ll show him!… I’ll get him!” It was clear to Simanovich that he was going to “revenge someone.” He would spend a whole day like this, going out in the evening to the bathhouse with an Okhrana agent, coming back at 10:00 P.M., looking very tired. Without saying anything he went into his study and wrote something on a piece of paper, which he carefully folded. He then went into his bedroom, put the paper under the pillow, and got into bed, falling asleep immediately. It seemed like sorcery to Simanovich, who had seen him do it before and asked what was on the bits of paper. “I put down my wishes,” Rasputin replied, “and they come true while I sleep.” He added that he had notched his wishes on a stick before he had learned to write and that thus he had prevented many misfortunes.
The next morning he woke relaxed and amiable. He grated the note in his fingers until it crumbled and threw it away. Then he said, smiling, “You can rejoice, Simanovich. My strength won.” Simanovich said he did not understand. “Well, you’ll see what will happen in five or six days,” Rasputin replied. “I’ll go to Papa and I will tell him all the truth.” He picked up the telephone, and Simanovich listened to him place a call to the palace. He got through to the tsar’s office right away; the palace switchboard had standing orders to connect him immediately.
“What is Papa doing?” he asked the aide-de-camp.
“He’s busy with his ministers,” the young officer replied.
“Tell him that I have a divine message for him.” The aide’s response to this modest claim was not recorded, but the tsar duly came through on the line. “What’s happened, Father Grigory?” he asked.
“I can’t tell you over the phone,” he said. “May I come over?”
“Please do. I also want to talk to you.”
Rasputin was driven to the palace and was received at once. He recounted what had happened to Simanovich and told the tsar that he had had a “divine appearance” during the night. This had informed him that in three days Nicholas would receive a telegram from the commander in chief to say that the army had rations enough only for three days. He sat at the tsar’s desk, filled two glasses with Madeira, and insisted that the tsar drink from his glass while he drank from the tsar’s. When they had taken sips, he mixed the wine in one glass and told the tsar to drink it. Having completed these mystical preparations, Rasputin said that the tsar should not believe the grand duke’s telegram. The army had sufficient food. Nicholas Nikolayevich wanted to sow panic and disorder in the army and the country so that he could retreat under the pretext of food shortages. He would then occupy Petrograd and force Nicholas to abdicate. The tsar was shocked, or so Rasputin reported to Simanovich. “What am I to do?” Nicholas asked. Rasputin replied: “He wants to exile me to Siberia, but I’ll send him to the Caucasus.”
Three days later the cable advising of bread shortages in the field arrived from the grand duke at Stavka. The shortages were real enough, caused by transport bottlenecks; there was not a scrap of evidence that Nicholas Nikolayevich was plotting a coup. However, Simanovich wrote, “It was enough to seal his fate. Nobody could dissuade the tsar that the grand duke was contemplating a march on the capital to overthrow him from his throne.” It would take a little longer, but Rasputin was fertilizing the ground for his vengeance.