Rasputin met the empress frequently at Tsarskoye Selo, traveling to Vyrubova’s cottage by train or in a chauffeur-driven car from an army motor pool provided by Sukhomlinov at the war ministry. He was a regular sight in the town. He often looked the worse for wear, a workingman’s cap pulled down over his eyes, “dirty and unkempt.” He had the trick, however, of sobering up rapidly. On April 26 Dmitri Rubinstein rewarded him for his help in stock ramping by throwing a party for a dozen people. Guitar playing and dancing were heard from the staircase until the early hours. Rasputin was summoned by the empress in the morning. He had hardly slept and was badly hungover. Baroness Vera Kusova urged him not to go in such a state. She was the wife of a cavalry officer, who the Okhrana reported “wanted to get a better position for her husband and struck up an intimate acquaintance with Rasputin into the bargain.” “He’ll spoil the whole thing,” an agent reported her as saying. “Our elder has become spoiled.” After an hour’s catnap he set off fresh enough.
His confidence in his hold on the empress became strong enough for him to wedge his visits tightly between carousals. On May 9, drunk and horny, he sent the caretaker’s wife from his apartment block to fetch him his favorite masseuse, Utina. She failed, and Rasputin staggered to the rooms of a dressmaker who lived on the staircase. “Why don’t you come to me, Katya?” he pleaded. When she refused he told her, “Come to me in a week and I’ll give you fifty rubles.” He saw the empress the next morning. The tsar was proving uncooperative on some plan, possibly the replacement of the commander in chief; on his return Rasputin cabled Sabler at the synod: “My dear, we talked to Mama there and agreed that it is not simple to disturb our ruler.” Then he brought a prostitute to his apartment and locked her in a room until, as the Okhrana men noted, “the servants released her.”
He worried for his safety. Word came from his wife that a stranger had arrived in Pokrovskoye. On May 12 he sent a telegram to the governor of Tobolsk, saying: “A suspicious man has been living in Pokrovskoye for three weeks now one time he says he’s from Moscow then—from someplace else.” He made sure that the governor took the matter seriously by telling him to reply to Vyrubova in Tsarskoye Selo. He narrowly avoided a beating two days later. He went to an apartment on Malaya Dvoryanskaya at 5:00 P.M. At 10:00 an agent across the street saw a woman enter an unlit room in the apartment. She soon ran into a lit room where two men were sitting. The agent then saw Rasputin dash out of the darkened room into the hall, apparently alarmed; he snatched his hat and coat and fled into the street without putting them on. The two men ran after him. Rasputin jumped into a horse-drawn cab while it was still moving. He stood up in it all the way to the Liteiny Prospect, turning every now and then to make sure that nobody was after him. Then he got out of the cab, calmed down, and walked home.
Simanovich, who had good access to intrigues through his gambling clubs, feared another assassination attempt. Maria Rasputin had become engaged to a young Georgian cavalry officer, Simeon Pkhakadze, who asked his prospective father-in-law to a party at the house of Count Tolstoy on Troitskaya Street. Most of the people present were drunk. Suddenly Rasputin saw Pkhakadze draw out his revolver and point it at him. He stared at him and said, “You want to kill me, but your hand won’t obey you.” Pkhakadze was stunned and fled as the guests panicked. Rasputin turned, left the room, took his fur coat, and went home. The young captain went to his rooms and shot himself but survived. Rasputin was jumping up and down, as he always did when in high spirits, when he next met Simanovich. “Well, the danger is over now,” he said. “The attempt has been made. Pkhakadze, of course, is no longer my daughter’s fiancé. He’ll go home now.” Simanovich, convinced that the captain had been given leave from his unit as part of a military plot to kill the starets, told him that the danger was greater than ever.
Later in the month Rasputin accepted a trio of commissions. Ignati Manus, a corrupt Petrograd banker who the French ambassador thought was a leading German agent, was supplying Rasputin with the services of Vera Tregubova. On May 26 Rasputin, drunk, was seen getting out of Manus’s automobile with the prostitute. He kissed and stroked her before retiring to his bedroom. Still unsatisfied, he went again to the seamstress Katya’s rooms. An engineer, Mendel-Emmanuel Neiman, asked him to arrange a pardon for an eight-month prison sentence he was facing for having attempted to bribe his way out of military service. Rasputin assured him that his petition had been handed to “himself,” meaning the tsar. Dolina Mikhailovna asked for Russian citizenship to be arranged for a ready-to-wear clothing magnate from Moscow called Mandl, whose stores had suffered badly during anti-German riots.
A vast catastrophe was engulfing Russian Poland. The Germans were forcing their way toward Warsaw, inflicting such terrible casualties that corps were reduced to “miniature regiments.” Almost half a million troops had been lost since the start of the enemy offensive. “The Germans expend metal, we expend life,” a Russian corps commander said. “They go forward … we only beat them off with heavy losses and our blood, and are retreating.” Nicholas was briefed on the crumbling fronts on a visit to the Stavka. “His hands trembled,” the industrialist Putilov, who was with him, recalled. “He seemed particularly impressed when, myself deeply affected and scarcely able to restrain my tears, I spoke to him of the troops’ unswerving devotion and love for their tsar and motherland.”
There were worrying signs that this devotion did not extend to the empress. Muscovites rose to protest the slaughter. For three days they roamed the city setting fires while the police stood by. They hurled Bechsteins and Bluthners, grand pianos and uprights, from the windows of the city’s finest music store. Crowds in Red Square yelled that the war and interior ministers should be hanged. More ominously, they demanded that Alexandra should be sent to a convent for the duration of the war and that Nicholas should abdicate in favor of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich. They moved on to the Convent of Mary and Martha, which Grand Duchess Elizabeth had founded after the assassination of her husband. She had once been popular in Moscow; now they described her in the same terms as her sister Alexandra, Ona Nemka—“She is German.”
A story about her had made the rounds earlier in May. She visited a hospital after the arrival of a fresh contingent of wounded Russians and German prisoners. Some of the prisoners were lying on the floor because the wards were full. The grand duchess ordered the matron to put the Russian soldiers on the floor while the Germans took their beds. “The Germans are used to culture and comfort,” she said. “The Russians won’t feel the difference.” It was untrue; the grand duchess was a notably humane woman who denied that she had so much as seen a prisoner. But the crowd believed the story; they shouted, too, that she was harboring German spies and her brother, Grand Duke Ernest of Hesse, in the convent. She met them at the convent gate and invited them to search. The first stone had been hurled at her—“Down with the German woman!”—when troops arrived to drive them off. As they went, they shouted Alexandra’s name and chanted, “Niemetzkaya bliad,” “German whore.”
When police opened fire on looters, they screamed, “You have no ammunition to fight Germans, but you have lots to kill Russians.” It was a telling insult. General Brusilov still held Przemyśl, taken at such cost on the Galician front; but he pointed out that it was no longer a fortress in the technical sense, since its guns lacked any ammunition. At most 6 prewar regulars were left alive in companies of 250 men; five or six original officers were left in his regiments. “In a year of war, the regular army had vanished,” he wrote. “It was replaced by an army of ignoramuses.”
Rasputin was aware that a full report of the incident at the Yar—indecent exposure, brawling, threatening police officers—had been made by the Moscow police prefect. He was safe only while the compromised Nikolai Maklakov remained as interior minister, and there were signs that Maklakov’s hold on his office was slipping. It was time for another tactical retreat to Siberia. “Grieved long to get home,” he cabled his wife on June 1. “Annushka is in trouble will be operated on they don’t let her out.” The reference was to Vyrubova, who was waiting for an operation on her crushed foot. In the evening he got drunk with Manus and went to the seamstress’s room again. On his way back he pestered the caretaker’s wife on the staircase, asking her to kiss him. She freed herself and rang his doorbell to have his maid lead him back into the apartment.
He left for Siberia the following day, shadowed by two Okhrana agents. The Russians abandoned the Przemyśl fortress. The defeat was a further blow to Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich, already weakened by Rasputin and by the Moscow rioters’ calls for him to be made tsar. The empress was envious of his height, his popularity, his image as the only strong Romanov; the comparison with her “little hubby” was hard for her pride to bear. Given her outrage at his threat to hang her Friend, Rasputin and Vyrubova easily persuaded her that the commander in chief was already speaking of himself as Nicholas III. As Rasputin changed trains in Moscow, she wrote to the tsar of her loathing of “N,” for Nikolasha, the grand duke. She was not inhibited by the fact that her husband was his cousin’s guest at the Stavka. “I have absolutely no faith in N.,” she said. “Know him to be far from clever and having gone against a Man of God, his work can’t be blessed or his advice good.… Russia will not be blessed if her sovereign lets a Man of God sent to help him be persecuted, I am sure.” She rarely used Rasputin’s name in letters, preferring “Friend,” but she did so now. “You know N.’s hatred for Grigory is intense,” she added.
She returned to the fray two days later. “N’s fault and Witte’s that the Duma exists, and it has caused you more worry than joy,” she began. “Oh, I do not like N having anything to do with these sittings which concern interior questions, he understands our country so little and imposes upon the ministers with his loud voice and gesticulations. I can go wild sometimes at his fat position.… Nobody knows who is Emperor now.… It is as though N settles all, makes the choices and changes. It makes me utterly wretched.” The letter dripped with thoughtful malice. It invoked her husband’s nightmare memories of Witte and 1905; it damned the grand duke with arrogance and lèse-majesté; it ridiculed—“his fat position”—and it mercilessly exploited her position as the “wretched” wife. And it was all manifestly untrue. The grand duke was touchingly loyal to his diminutive cousin. His knowledge of “our country” was infinitely broader than her own; he was a soldier surrounded by ordinary Russians, she an Anglo-German isolated from all but one, Rasputin. That, indeed, was the rub. He was the only Romanov whom Russians liked and respected. With Rasputin’s eager endorsement the empress set out to undermine the commander in chief at the climax of the German assault.
Nicholas was in no state to resist her. “I am beginning to feel my old heart,” he complained to her. “The first time it was in August of last year, after the Samsonov catastrophe, and again now—it feels so heavy on the left side when I breathe. But what can I do!” What he did do was take cocaine, which he said cleared his stuffy nose and restored his energy. Alexandra wrote back that she hoped that “the cocain [sic] helped well.” She said that she was finding it difficult to sleep because of stomachache but that a hot water bottle and opium helped. At the front Russian artillery was firing on its own men. A battalion had been ordered to attack a German position with uncut wire and machine guns at Opatow. The survivors lay in shell holes in no-man’s-land. When they began to wave white flags, Russian gunners were ordered to open fire on them.
The Trans-Siberian Railroad dropped Rasputin in Tyumen on June 6. He stayed for a night at the Tyumen monastery with his friend Martian, the father superior, who gave a dinner party for him, inviting local worthies and their wives. The Okhrana agents reported that Rasputin was perceptibly drunk after dinner, and that Martian was complaining that he was drinking the monastery dry. The following day Rasputin went with Martian and his maid-mistress Dunia to a scenic spot for a picnic. They rode monastery horses—Rasputin had been a good horseman since he was a small child—and took a parcel of fresh cucumbers and half a pail of wine. Then he left for Pokrovskoye.
On June 11 Rasputin held a party for villagers at his house. “He had a few drinks,” the agents reported, “wound up the gramophone, danced, and incoherently joined in singing.” He started bragging about his influence peddling. He said that he had gotten three hundred Baptists released from punishment for sectarianism; he was meant to get a thousand rubles from each of them but had collected only five thousand rubles in total. He also said that “when I was at the tsar’s last time,” he had persuaded Nicholas to defer the next draft of new troops until the autumn, after the harvest was in.
It was an empty boast. The losses in June were so great that the government was proposing to call up even the second category or ban of men aged over thirty-five; the second ban had only been called up twice in Russian history, in Napoleon’s 1812 invasion and the Crimean war in 1854. Thousands of conscripts were arriving at the front in a state of shock. Those with rifles often did not know how to reload them. “Many had never seen a railroad car before, and the long ride down seemed to have unbalanced them in some peculiar way,” an officer wrote, “for when they arrived they were little short of demented.” Their officers hardly knew what to do with them. “Keep a heavy guard over them until we go into action,” an officer advised a colleague. “They will be the first meat.”
The man most responsible for the shell shortage, the war minister, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, fell at last. One of his protégés, Col. Sergei Myasoyedov, had been hanged in secret for treason in February. When the news was leaked in March, the war minister’s reputation was savaged. Myasoyedov had been dismissed twice from the army before the war, when his extravagance, loose-living friends, and visits to the Second Reich—he had stayed several times with the kaiser at his hunting lodge—led to accusations that he was in German pay. Sukhomlinov had intervened to have him returned to duty. The yellow press revived the charges at the beginning of 1915, and the colonel was arrested on a double charge of pillage and espionage. While serving on the Prussian front, he had sent a relative a lamp and a picture. This constituted the “pillage,” though he maintained that he had bought them. As to espionage, he was said to have received ten thousand rubles from the Germans. The money was never traced, but the colonel was shot. The war minister’s pretty and promiscuous young wife had been linked with the dead colonel; she was now “coupled in none too pleasant a way with certain well-known German agents.”
When it was discovered that Sukhomlinov had turned down a French offer to supply shells, with the airy assurance that “there is nothing to worry about,” the tsar could no longer protect him. He was dismissed in June, though Nicholas at first allowed him to keep his apartment in Tsarskoye Selo and to remain at court. This caused such an outburst of public fury that he was arrested and convicted of espionage. The examining magistrate showed the secret police general Vassilyev the “convincing proof” of his guilt. It was a postcard addressed to Sukhomlinov’s wife. It was sent from Carlsbad by a prewar acquaintance called Altshiller. The message read: “It’s raining in Carlsbad, the roads are bad, so long walks are out of the question.” Vassilyev said that this was hardly overwhelming evidence.
The magistrate retorted that the reference to bad roads and no walks obviously covered up something else—“the devil knows what the man meant!” At the trial the prosecutor failed to establish that the war minister had received any large sum of money. Nevertheless, Sukhomlinov, the man who had mobilized the Russian armies less than twelve months before, was found guilty and imprisoned. His replacement was Gen. Alexis Polivanov, able and respected but no admirer of Rasputin. “Forgive me,” Alexandra wrote to her husband, “but I don’t like the choice of Minister of War Polivanov. Is he not our Friend’s enemy?” His card was marked before he was behind his desk.
The casualties were felt deep into Russia. “Getting empty in the villages,” a peasant told Bernard Pares with a kind of cheery objectiveness. The man said his three brothers had all been killed at the front. The first two were there long enough to distinguish themselves. He said of the third, “Him they put up like a sheep!” Another British observer, Gen. Alfred Knox, visited a village where twenty-four of the twenty-six men called up had been killed. Nicholas Nikolayevich admitted that “training is beneath criticism”; that, in Alexandra’s eyes, was a characterization he shared. Her letters became near-hysterical. “I loathe your being at headquarters,” she wrote the tsar on June 12, “listening to N’s advice which is not good and cannot be—he has no right to act as he does, mixing in your concerns. All are shocked that the ministers go with reports to him, as though he were now the sovereign. Ah, my Nicky, things are not as they ought to be and therefore N keeps you near to have a hold over you with his ideas and bad counsels.”
If Rasputin could not defer the draft, his importance was underlined to his fellow peasants when a steamer with the governor of Tobolsk arrived on its regular run. The starets went aboard and persuaded the governor to drop a fine of fifty rubles imposed on a Pokrovskoye peasant for building a house without a permit. Strolling through the village, he told the secret police agents that three ministers “adored” him—Prime Minister Goremykin and Prince V. Shakhovskoy, the trade minister; he did not name the third—and that he knew Nicholas Nickolayevich very well. He said that the grand duke would have given Russia a constitution in 1905 had he been able to, and that he would soon get his just deserts.
The starets was in a poor state on June 13. Memories of the near-fatal stabbing came back to him. A lady had gone to his neighbor Natalya the evening before. She had asked about Rasputin and then added that she would like to stay in Natalya’s house. When this was refused she left the village. Natalya told Rasputin of this mysterious woman the next morning. He at once sent a man to find her. She could not be found. The agents noticed that Rasputin became very nervous and described the ladies he knew in Alexandra’s circle, apparently frightened that she was checking up on his behavior. In Tsarskoye Selo, Vyrubova was also out of sorts. She wired Rasputin: “Got a feeling like something terrible is about to happen miss you wrote to you bless me. Anna.”
In fact, it was the tsar who had ordered an investigation. As Rasputin had feared, Maklakov had been dismissed. His successor was Prince Nikolai Shcherbatov, an able man who said he found the interior ministry in “such a muddle as I could not reconcile myself to.” Rasputin had no hold over him; although the empress would start agitating for his removal within six weeks, for the moment the starets was vulnerable. One of the prince’s first acts was to order General Dzhunkovsky, his assistant and the Okhrana chief, to produce a complete report on Rasputin and the incident at the Yar in Moscow. Dzhunkovsky was exposed to the full Andronnikov treatment—a flattering letter, gifts of an icon and a Bukhara cloak—but in vain. He took advantage of an audience with Nicholas over the Moscow riots to brief him on the starets. “I reported to the emperor about Rasputin, about his behavior at the Yar, and offered a paper concerning the pernicious nature of his influence that was drawing Russia to destruction,” he later testified. “I asked the emperor’s permission to continue my investigations. He said, ‘I not only give you permission but I also ask you to do it. These reports should be made only to us—let us keep it between us.’ ”
The tsar had left on June 10 for the Stavka, where he was exposed to more criticism of Rasputin. Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich first let fly at Rasputin for his debauches. As he became angrier he moved on to more sinister ground—German agents had access to Rasputin; the peasant knew everything that was being done at the Stavka through the empress. “I never knew about any of this,” the tsar said. “I could never have imagined.” The grand duke then suggested that Alexandra come to the Stavka to be shown the Okhrana file. “Put an end to him,” he urged. “Resolve the matter within the family.” The tsar agreed.
Rasputin was keeping in close touch with the empress. She wrote to Nicholas on June 13, telling him to write at once “if you have any questions for our Fr[iend].” Two days later she indicated that Rasputin felt trouble was being stirred behind his back—“he regrets you did not tell him more”—and forwarded a direct message from him: “Pay less attention to people; use your own instinct.” The Dzhunkovsky report was an ill-guarded secret, and Rasputin had gotten wind of it from his numerous contacts in the secret police. The empress was alerted. She read a copy of it, at first weeping, then in a fury when she found that her favorite nephew had seen it. “My enemy Dzhunkovsky,” she wrote to Nicholas, “has shown that vile, filthy paper to Dmitri.… Such a sin; & as tho you had said to him, that you have had enough of these dirty stories & wished him to be severely punished—ah, it’s so vile.… If we let Our Friend be persecuted we and our country shall suffer for it.… I am so weary, such heartaches and pain from all this—the idea of dirt being spread about one we venerate is more than terrible. Ah, my love, when at last will you thump with your hand on the table & scream at Dzhunkovsky & others when they act wrongly—one does not fear you—and one must—they must be frightened of you.… If Dzhunkovsky is with you, call him, tell him you know he has shown that paper in town & that you order him to tear it up & not to dare speak of Grigory as he does & that he acts as a traitor.… Oh my Boy, make one tremble before you.… You are always too kind & all profit. It cannot go on like that.”
Rasputin knew what was up. “Well, your Dzhunkovsky’s had it,” he told the agents in Pokrovskoye. He was correct. Prince Shcherbatov soon received a note from the tsar: “I insist on General Dzhunkovsky’s immediate dismissal.” In everyone’s view it was Rasputin and Alexandra who had done the insisting; the general testified later that Nicholas “did it under the influence of the tsarina.” His replacement, Vassilyev, was in no doubt that it was a poor career move to take on the starets. “To tell the truth,” he wrote of his predecessor, “he appears to have been rather tactless in his behavior.” The new man, who had full access to Rasputin’s daily movements from his agents’ notebooks, was committed to staying dumb.
Rasputin’s mood lifted. On June 17 Father Martian and Rasputin’s protégé Varnava, the bishop of Tobolsk, came to visit him in a carriage. Varnava had proved as unpleasant as the synod had feared when Rasputin had forced through his appointment. He had developed into a pogrom lover, baring his teeth through his beard when he hissed the word Jew in his strident sermons. His insults were so crude, so tasteless that they excited his audience; he called his many enemies—liberals, fellow churchmen, the intelligentsia, foreigners—“bloodsucking kikes.” He had, the synod complained, “soon turned his diocese into a private domain of Rasputin.” He was “rude with clergymen subordinate to him,” moving them from parish to parish at Rasputin’s whim. His sister, the wife of a petty clerk at the synod, was well informed on church politics; “simple but dexterous, clever and highly devoted to her brother”; both were classified by the commission as “tentacles devoted to Rasputin.” Varnava had taken a leaf out of Rasputin’s book; Stankevich, the Tobolsk governor, complained that the bishop was helping people evade military service by selling them exempt positions in the church.
The clerics brought two kegs of wine with them. They got merry with Rasputin. The steamer from Tyumen called at Pokrovskoye the next morning. A Jew unknown to the agents, but thought to be a businessman from Perm, was aboard. He spent the forty-minute stop at the village talking with Rasputin about obtaining army contracts. Rasputin’s wife and Dunia took the steamer for a shopping expedition to the city. While they were away he sent a brief telegram to keep in touch with Vyrubova: “How’s health, kisses.” The women returned with Elizaveta Solovyova, whose intimacy with Rasputin had been noted in Petrograd in February. The new parish priest, Father Sergei, whom Rasputin had had Varnava appoint, came to pay his compliments and kiss his hand. At 8:00 P.M. the agents saw Rasputin come out of his house with a red face, “apparently drunk,” with the pretty Madame Solovyova. “They took a carriage and drove deep into the forest,” the agents noted. “They returned after one hour, he was very pale.”
The starets had more fun on June 28. Patushinskaya, an officer’s wife from Yalutorovsk, came to see him. When he staggered out of the house, she held him under one arm while Solovyova supported him under the other. He was fondling Patushinskaya “over the lower part of her body,” the agents said. “During the day the gramophone played and he was very cheerful, drank wine and beer.” The ménage à trois came to an end the next morning, when Solovyova got a telegram from her irate husband ordering her to return to Petrograd. Rasputin consoled himself with Patushinskaya, walking around the yard holding her and singing.
On June 30 he took a morning swim in the river and went to the wife of a neighbor, Deacon Ermolai, who read the psalms in the village church. His mind was not on clerical matters. She was waiting for him at the open window of her house and spent half an hour with him. “He visits her almost daily with intimate purposes,” the agents noted. In the afternoon Patushinskaya received a telegram from her husband commanding her to return to Yalutorovsk. Before she left on the steamer the agents saw her “voluptuously kiss Rasputin on the lips, nose, cheeks, beard, and hands.”
The ability to remain on good terms with husbands he was cuckolding sometimes deserted the holy man. When Elena Patushinskaya’s husband objected to the affair, Rasputin had him transferred to Odessa, where he shot himself. In general, though, the husbands accepted their lot, and the phenomenon was well enough known—Rasputin made no attempt to conceal it—to add credence to the rumors of his liaison with the empress.
After a short trip to Tobolsk to see Varnava—the agents did not travel with him and there is no record of the conversations between the two—Rasputin welcomed Ivan Ivanovich Dobrovolsky and his wife, Maria Semyonovna, to the village. Dobrovolsky was approaching fifty, a corrupt and obese state councillor with a sinecure as an inspector of colleges. His wife was twenty years younger. The morning after her arrival on the steamer, she played the piano while Rasputin applauded and stamped his feet. Then he began embracing her—“not being ashamed of his daughters’ presence,” the agents wrote. They did not bother to mention the patient Dobrovolsky. After that Rasputin with Dobrovolskaya and the children “went out into the fields, sang songs, ran about, and Rasputin played ball games with them.”
Deacon Ermolai was equally long-suffering. On July 7 Rasputin and Dobrovolsky were invited to lunch by the villager Arapov. The agents watched as Rasputin “left the house drunk and visited the wife of the psalm reader Ermolai.” He returned home but would have gone to her again had the maid Dunia not asked him not to. He told her “to go to hell” and took a walk in the rain with the agents. He started to talk about the war and how his objections to it had been seen by some as treason. “Last year, when I was in the hospital and rumor had it that the war was about to begin, I asked the tsar not to fight,” he told them. “I sent him about twenty telegrams.… They even wanted to hand me over for trial. The tsar was informed, and he said that ‘these are our personal affairs and can’t be tried.’ ”
He visited Patushinskaya later in July, taking his two daughters and the Dobrovolskys and Ermolais with him. They settled down around Dobrovolskaya as she played the piano in the steamer lounge. At Tyumen they took a train for Yalutorovsk. Patushinskaya was at the station to meet them in a carriage with two horses. She let Rasputin into her carriage while the others took cabs. At her house they were welcomed by her husband. Three husbands were now present—the deacon Ermolai, the fat state councillor Dobrovolsky, and the army officer Patushinsky—and Rasputin was fucking all their wives. They must have known; the Okhrana agents certainly did. At 10:00 on the evening of his arrival, they saw Rasputin jump out of a window onto the terrace of the house. Patushinskaya slipped through another window into the courtyard, “made a gesture to Rasputin, and they both disappeared into the dark.”
At noon the next day, Rasputin took a carriage ride in the forests with Patushinskaya and his daughters. When they came back the daughters went into the house while Rasputin and Patushinskaya went to an empty summerhouse in the gardens. It was a charming little place; the servants told the agents that it had housed exiled Decembrist revolutionaries almost a century before. Perhaps it reminded Rasputin of his pseudo-rape by the general’s wife. The couple spent twenty minutes there. Rasputin left the next morning with his daughters for the train and steamer trip back to Pokrovskoye.
On July 23 Warsaw, the hub of Russian power in Poland for a century, fell to the Germans. Nicholas was overcome with grief and humiliation when he broke the news to the empress and Vyrubova. “It cannot go on like this,” he said. The Russian retreat turned into a rout. “Creeping like some huge beast,” a Russian general wrote, the Germans had turned their heavy guns onto his positions until they had obliterated them. “Then the beast would cautiously stretch out its paws, the infantry units, which would seize the demolished trenches.” The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky howled with anger at the fate of the infantryman:
As they fell back the Russians torched the towns and villages and forced their miserable inhabitants to flee east with them into Russia.
The scorched earth policy suited the Germans. They found shelter enough among the ruins; they had no civilians to provide for, and the Russians often ran about setting fire to haystacks but left the growing crops intact. Senior officers loaded their mistresses, furniture, even “cages filled with canaries,” onto trains while more than a million refugees stumbled beside the track and through the fields. They were emaciated. When they came across an army field kitchen, the men tore basins of food from each other while women with starving children at their breasts trampled each other to snatch at gray hunks of stewed pork. In these shambling columns, twenty miles and more in length, a British military observer glimpsed vignettes—“two carts tied together and drawn by a single miserable horse, one family driving a cow, a poor man and his wife each with a huge bundle of rubbish tied up in a sheet.” When he asked them where they were headed, they did not know.
With them the refugees brought epidemics and panic. “Unburied corpses are strewn along the road,” the cabinet was told. “Everywhere there is carrion and an unbearable stench. This human mass is spreading over Russia like a vast wave.” Spy fever and pogroms intensified. Jews were hanged on trumped-up charges; their shops, synagogues, and houses were looted. Black Hundred newspapers accused them of “sending their gold to the Germans; this tainted gold has been found in airplanes, coffins, barrels of vodka, and breasts of duck and mutton.” It was, a Jewish deputy complained, “naught but an ignoble lie, invented by men who are trying to cover their own crimes.” The French ambassador warned that the Jews should be treated well, because “there is in the United States a very large, influential, and wealthy Jewish community who are very indignant at your treatment of their co-religionists.” It was, he said, “to no avail.” As to politics, Wilton wrote to the London Times on July 31 that “we may have a situation too serious for anything less than a dictatorship, if not worse.” The bureaucracy was “on the verge of complete breakdown.… The authority of the government is fast slipping out of its hands.”
Rasputin arrived at Petrograd at 10:10 A.M. on the same day, summoned by the tsar. He was met by Nikolai Solovyov, the synod member whose wife the starets had fucked in the forests of Pokrovskoye earlier in the month. He saw Nicholas at the Alexander Palace on August 4. He realized that an interrogation over the Yar incident and an immediate return to Siberia were in the cards; he had already sent two identical telegrams to his wife and to Patushinskaya: “See you very soon, we kiss you.” The audience was not recorded, of course, but Vassilyev, who owed his promotion to his predecessor’s ill-judged handling of the affair, was naturally curious. He asked Rasputin about it the next time they met.
“He confessed, without any more ado, the sin he had committed in Moscow,” the secret policeman wrote. He used his standard line, that to sin was human, and that God understood and forgave. “What would you have, my dear man?” he asked Vassilyev. “Who is innocent before God is also innocent before the tsar.” Nicholas was angry that Rasputin had referred to the empress—“the old woman”—during his drunken ramblings at the Yar. Rasputin lied, denying that he had made any reference to the imperial family. They also discussed the commander in chief. Rasputin urged that the grand duke be dismissed and that the tsar himself replace him. He later boasted that he had “sunk Nikolasha” at this interview.
He had, nevertheless, come close to a fall, and he knew it. He left Petrograd on the first train the next morning. Vyrubova and her sister Alexandra Alexandrovna von Pistolkors picked him up at his apartment in a limousine from the imperial motor pool and dropped him off at the station. They stayed in the car rather than risk being spotted on the platform. The agents noted other less discreet admirers who were there to wave him off: Tatyana Fyodorovna Shakhovskaya, a twenty-six-year-old princess; the infatuated Baroness Kusova; a swindler, Miller; the cuckold Dobrovolsky and his wife.
The contrition Rasputin had expressed to the tsar the evening before lasted long enough for the train to pull out of the station. The agents watched him chatting with three unknown ladies in the carriage. When they left the train at Kamyshlov, he got down onto the platform to say good-bye to them. They introduced him to the army officers who were meeting them. They talked about the Guseva stabbing and something about a hospital. The agents heard one of the officers, a lieutenant colonel, mutter to another: “It’s quite clear that the fellow has hypnosis in his eyes.”
Rasputin was in a petulant mood with the Okhrana men when the train moved on. Solovyov had been seen meeting him when he had arrived in Petrograd. The new synod procurator, Alexander Samarin, a well-respected Moscow nobleman, told Solovyov that such conduct was unfitting for a member of the synod. “Solovyov had a bit of trouble from Samarin for meeting me at the station in Petrograd,” Rasputin said. “But Samarin isn’t going to be procurator of the synod for long.” He glared at the agents and said, “Wasn’t it you who reported my meeting with Solovyov?”
“It’s none of your business,” the agents told him.
“Who else can it have been?” Rasputin said. “The emperor asked about this report and said—perhaps the agents informed on Solovyov. So I said to the tsar—I dunno, maybe it’s them. Well, I’m going home, and I don’t know myself how long I’ll stay there—a week, perhaps longer, it depends how matters stand.” He said that the tsar had offered him his own carriage to go to Siberia, but he had refused the offer. “Once I was coming back from Tsarskoye Selo to Petrograd, and around midnight I saw one of you agents hiding behind an elevator,” he said menacingly. “If I find out who he is, he’s gonna have a bad time.”
On August 6, as the train crawled toward the Urals, the Germans overran the last Russian strong point in Poland, the fortress of Novogeorgievsk. It had a garrison of 100,000 men with 1,600 guns, but a German patrol had captured the chief engineer and found accurate plans of the fortifications among his papers. “We are being wiped out,” the defenders radioed as the Germans systematically destroyed them. “Everything is being swept away, everyone is in panic.” A solitary pilot flew out of the ruins to announce that it had fallen. Polivanov told the cabinet that “the army is no longer retreating—it is simply running away.” Worse followed. “No matter how badly things are going at the front,” the war minister said, “there is another still more terrible situation that now looms before Russia. I feel obliged to inform the government that, when I presented my report this morning, His Majesty told me that he had decided to relieve the grand duke and take over the supreme command of the army himself.” Rasputin’s vengeance was closing in on Nikolasha.
Rasputin arrived at Tyumen on August 8 and stayed overnight with Father Martian at the monastery. He took a single first-class cabin on the 11:00 A.M. steamer for Pokrovskoye the next morning. He was out to celebrate. Two hours upriver he came out of his cabin drunk. He started talking with ten soldiers who were aboard and gave them twenty-five rubles to sing to him. After a few minutes he went to his cabin and returned with a hundred rubles. He asked them to sing louder and started joining in the choruses. The singing had been going on for an hour when he took the men to the second-class dining room to treat them to a meal. Russian soldiers were beneath society, forbidden to enter first- and second-class compartments on trains, barred from theater stalls, not allowed to enter restaurants and cafés. Civilians addressed them in the familiar, thou, as they would a child or pet. On steamers they were restricted to the lower decks. The steamer captain ordered them out of the dining room.
Angry, Rasputin went with them. He made them form a circle, placed himself in the middle, and conducted their singing. His high spirits returned. He gave them another twenty-five rubles and paid fifteen rubles for them to have the third-class dinner. He went back to his cabin, emerging from it to complain that he had lost three thousand rubles. He then returned to his cabin, reappearing twenty minutes later drunker than ever. The agents became alarmed. “He visited third class and had a quarrel with a passenger called Raszumovsky,” they noted. “The latter was about to give Rasputin a thrashing, but it passed off peacefully. Then Rasputin quarreled with another merchant from Tyumen—Mikhalev. The deeds of the Tobolsk bishop Varnava were mentioned, at which Mikhalev spat and left.” After that Rasputin lurched around the ship until he came across a waiter, whom he called a “swindler” and accused of stealing his three thousand rubles. The waiter asked some passengers to be eyewitnesses on his behalf and complained to the captain, who said he would report the incident to the police in Tobolsk. Rasputin went back to his cabin, opened the window, and slumped with his head on the table, muttering while the curious passengers “feasted their eyes on him.”
“Why not take off his hair and shave his beard with some clippers?” one of them suggested. Another laughed. “Rasputin, may your reputation as a holy man last forever.” The agents hurried into the cabin and shut the window. At 6:00 P.M., as the ship steamed past the unchanging riverbanks in the yellow heat, Rasputin fell to the floor. He was still there when the ship arrived at Pokrovskoye at 8:00. The agents asked the captain to send two crewmen to help them with Rasputin; the four of them dragged him off. Rasputin’s daughters and his brother-in-law Raspopov turned up at the landing stage with a cart and carried him home.
He was up at 10:00 the next morning. He asked the agents what had happened on the steamer trip, “gasping constantly and wondering how he could have gotten drunk on only three bottles of wine.” He was worried that word might get out to the tsar. “See, fellow,” he told an agent, “it’s not good the way it happened.” He referred back to the Yar incident. “Dzhunkovsky was dismissed, and now he probably will think it’s because of me and I don’t even know who he is,” he said. “Your guv’nor will be sacked soon, as well.” The agents asked, “Which one?” “No, I dunno what his name is,” Rasputin said, and changed the subject.
Fury over Rasputin’s influence, the headlong dismissals that followed his threats, spilled over into the press. Maklakov had used wartime censorship to slash out any reference to him. Shcherbatov, knowing that his own time was short, allowed several attacks to be printed. On August 15 the liberal paper Birzhevye Vedomosti ran this headline: HOW COULD IT HAPPEN? Signing himself Lukian, the writer asked how a “dark parvenu” had mocked Russia for so long. He said that those who tolerated him made up a “core of evil … whose treachery and vacillation have become common gossip.… It is a style of ‘all things are possible, all things permitted.’ … In such a world not even Rasputin seemed unusual.… We have reached the point where nothing surprises us anymore, not even Rasputin. No one even realized the disgrace. Simply an effort was made to silence the press.… Yet what was there to exaggerate when the naked truth was worse than any lie?” Two days later Vechernee Vremya ran a piece suggesting that Rasputin was opposed to the war and working for a “German party.”
On August 19 Varnava sent warning from Tobolsk via a priest, Father Nikolai, that the episode on the steamer had been reported to the police and was by no means forgotten. Rasputin spent most of the day with Ermolai’s wife, having packed the deacon off to church. The unwelcome news was given to him in the evening. The Tobolsk governor was about to have Rasputin arrested by administrative order to serve three months in prison for drunkenness and dissolute conduct. Only Varnava’s intervention was preventing the arrest from being carried out. Rasputin spat and asked, “What do I care about the governor?”
Indeed, he had little reason to. The press campaign merely strengthened him. Alexandra used the articles as a whip with which to beat Shcherbatov, and to convince her husband that he must at once declare himself commander in chief if his authority was to survive. On August 20 Nicholas and Alexandra made a rare visit to their capital. They knelt at his father’s tomb in the Peter and Paul Cathedral and then drove to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, where they prayed for guidance before the icon of the Virgin. They dined with Vyrubova at the Alexander Palace; the tsar was to meet his council of ministers later in the evening. He was nervous, and Vyrubova took a small icon from around her neck and pressed it into his hand. As the meeting dragged on the two women peered in through the French windows from the balcony, watching the foreign minister, Serge Sazonov, argue passionately against the tsar’s decision. All the ministers present were in agreement. The administration would be paralyzed if Nicholas removed himself to the Stavka, two days’ railroad ride from the seat of government. The blame for fresh military defeats would fall on his head. It was no moment for the autocrat to play soldiers.
The ministers did not mention that the influence of Rasputin and the empress would increase greatly in the tsar’s absence; it was understood by both sides. “I did not dot the i’s or mention any names, and indeed there was no need to,” Sazonov said of his pleadings with Nicholas. “The tsar easily grasped the unsaid meaning, and I saw how distasteful my words were to him. It was painful to me to refer to the dangerous part that the empress had begun to play since Rasputin gained possession of her will and intellect.” Nicholas did not contradict him, but, he wrote, “as I spoke he seemed to recede farther away from me till at last I felt that a deep gulf lay between us.” Nicholas heard them out, sitting bolt upright. He gave his fatalism full rein. “He replied that he felt it to be his mission and his duty to assume this responsibility,” the agriculture minister Alexander Krivoshein told the London Times correspondent Robert Wilton. “If it was written that he and his dynasty should perish … well, it was written, and he could not alter it.” In two days he would leave for the Stavka. He clutched her icon in his hand, Vyrubova said; when he returned he was sweating.
The following morning eight of the thirteen cabinet members met in Sazonov’s rooms at the foreign ministry. They signed a joint letter of resignation to the tsar. “Yesterday at the meeting of the council, we unanimously begged you not to remove Grand Duke Nicholas from the High Command of the Army,” it said. “We venture once more to tell you that to the best of our judgment your decision threatens with serious consequences Russia, your dynasty, and your person.” The irreconcilable differences within the government, it said, were “inadmissible at all times, and at the present moment fatal.” The letter was handed to Nicholas on August 21. He left for the Stavka the same evening. He refused to accept the resignations, but Alexandra would drive all those who signed the letter out of office.
She wrote her husband a triumphant letter to read on the train. “I cannot find words to express all I want to—my heart is far too full,” she began. “Never have they seen such firmness in you before, proving yourself the Autocrat without wh. Russia cannot exist. Forgive me, I beseech you, my Angel, for having left you no peace but I too well know yr marvellously gentle character.… I have suffered so terribly, & phisically [sic] overtired myself these 2 days, & morally worried (& worry still till all is done at the Headquarters & Nikolasha goes) only then shall I feel calm.… You see they are afraid of me & so come to you when alone—they know I have a will of my own when I feel I am in the right—& you are now—we know this, so you make them tremble before your courage & will. God is with you & our Friend for you.… His holy angels guard & guide you.… Sleep well, my sunshine, Russia’s Saviour.”
Sensing catastrophe, Sir George Buchanan sought the empress out in a last-ditch effort to persuade her that no man could run both an empire and a modern war. “You will win not laurels, but a crown of thorns,” the court chamberlain warned the ambassador. Alexandra told Buchanan that the tsar’s place was with his army in the field. “I have no patience with ministers who try to prevent him doing his duty,” she said. “The emperor is unfortunately weak, but I am not, and I intend to be firm.” Her face was set and cold, and she dismissed him with “haughty displeasure, barely giving him her hand to kiss.”
The Romanov clan was beside itself with fear. Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich visited the dowager empress, his aunt. “I found Aunt Minnie terribly despondent,” he wrote in his diary. “She believes that the removal of NN [Nicholas Nikolayevich] will lead to N’s [Nicholas’s] inevitable ruin. She kept asking, ‘Where are we going? Where are we going? It isn’t Nicky he is sweet, and honest, and good—it’s all her doing.… She alone is responsible for all that is going on. It was not my dear boy who did this!’ ” She was reminded of the times of Paul I, “who in his last year began removing everyone loyal, and our great-great-great-grandfather’s sad end haunts her in all its horror.” Paul was strangled in a palace coup.
The tsar confirmed that the deed was done on his arrival at the Stavka. “Thank God it is all over, and here I am with this new responsibility on my shoulders!” he wrote to Alexandra, telling her that he had read and reread her letter and that it had put him at peace. “Nikolasha came in with a kind, brave smile, and asked simply when I would order him to go. I answered in the same manner that he could remain for two days.” The empress knew her man; she feared that backsliding would follow any delay in getting the grand duke safely posted away to a consolation command in the distant Caucasus. “Get Nikolasha’s nomination quicker done,” she fired back. “No dawdling, it’s bad for the cause.” The tsar complied. The grand duke was dispatched immediately, not even allowed leave in Petrograd on his way.
Thus, a tsar, who had led no more than a company as a young man, and whose knowledge of weapons systems was limited to the horse and saber, took responsibility for the six million men of a whipped and bleeding army. From the rear his imperceptive and unbalanced wife reassured him that she and her Friend were in control. “Do not fear for what remains behind,” she wrote. “Don’t laugh at silly old wify, but she has ‘trousers’ on unseen.… God will give me the strength to help you … & you have Grigory’s St. Nicholas to guard & guide you.” The spectacle, a British observer wrote, was “amazing, extravagant and pitiful … and one without parallel in the history of civilized nations.”
Who was to blame? “The loathsome Rasputin,” Robert Wilton wrote privately to London, “played no small part in suggesting the tsar’s mystical motives for taking up the High Command. Rasputin always works in the same way. He tells the empress that he has had a vision that certain things must be done.… The empress then retails this stuff to her husband and the trick is done. It reminds one of … the Byzantine court.”