Alexandra now careered into politics with manic energy. She dominated her husband in letters, the cajoling and bullying stream of words and dashes and underlinings filling the black leather suitcase in which he kept them. Her views were simple, and ruthless. The autocracy must be preserved at any cost, “for Baby’s sake.” She despised constitutions, “parliamentarists,” the “rotten people” who demanded a government responsible to the Duma, and the cities that bred them. She wanted them hanged or otherwise disposed of—a “strong railway accident” would do. She had cut herself off from other Romanovs. She believed in God, the dynasty, and “the people,” of whom Rasputin was the divine manifestation.
She was proud of the power her husband’s absence gave her. “I am the first Russian empress since Catherine the Great to receive the Ministers,” she boasted to him. Women in Russia were stronger in character, decisiveness, and temper than their menfolk, Ivan Turgenev thought. Another writer, Somerset Maugham, was struck by “the aggressive way in which [Russian] women treat men. They seem to take a sensual pleasure in humiliating them in front of others.” Maugham found Russian men “femininely passive, they cry easily.” It was a phenomenon that all applied to Alexandra and her husband.
The empress’s relation with Rasputin became one of partnership. She provided policy, and he supplied her with politicians, and justification. She had an acute eye for the slightest liberal tendency; when she saw it she was pitiless in destroying it. Her quarry included those who had begged her husband not to leave for the Stavka, some of the most able and respected men in Russia—the foreign minister, the synod procurator, and the ministers of the interior, finance, education, and agriculture. Her contempt for politicians included monarchists. Alexander Guchkov was the leader of the Octobrists, the most right-wing of the major parties, the son of a Moscow tycoon, vigorous, with alert gray eyes, a man who had fought with the Boers in South Africa. He was a royalist and a natural ally, a conservative who stood for landed and industrial interests, but he was a Duma man. “My own beloved darling,” Alexandra wrote as Nicholas traveled to the Stavka. “Guchkov ought to be got rid of, only how is the question, war-time—is there nothing one can hook on to have him shut up? He hunts after anarchy & against our dynasty, wh our Friend said God would protect.”
She needed a reason for such wholesale changes, and a list of replacements. Rasputin gave her both. His enmity—though she always expressed it in reverse, as the hatred of the intended victim for her Friend—was ground enough for dismissal. “God opens everything to Him,” she wrote. Likewise, to enjoy the blessing of the starets was sufficient recommendation for the newcomer. Did Rasputin not have “a wonderful brain—ready to understand everything”? Her campaigns could take several months, scores of letters, but she was, utterly, persistent.
Rasputin was vulnerable to the holders of three key posts. The synod procurator was responsible for church discipline, and the chief of police presided over a network of agents and informers. The interior minister was in many ways the most powerful figure in the cabinet, with broad control over the police and censorship. The three incumbents were hostile; they, or their predecessors, had reported harshly on his conduct. Dzhunkovsky, the errant policeman, went first. Alexandra had the others targeted within a week of Nicholas’s departure. She began with the procurator. “Samarin seems to be continuing to speak against me,” she wrote on August 25. “We shall hunt for a successor.” He was dismissed within days, a fate shared by his successor, Volzhin, when he showed reluctance to meet Rasputin.
Next she turned on the interior minister. Prince Shcherbatov’s tolerance of press criticism of her Friend was intolerable. She wrote to Nicholas on August 29 to urge him to replace the prince with someone who knew what was expected of him. “Have a strong & firm talk with him,” she said. “Put the position of our Friend clear to him from the outset, he dare not act like Shcherb[atov] and Sam[arin], make him understand that he acts straight against us in persecuting & allowing Him [Rasputin] to be evil written about or spoken of.” The new man must “listen to our Friend’s councils.”
Such a person, she suggested, was Alexis Nikolayevich Khvostov, the Nizhni Novgorod governor whom Rasputin had looked over four years before and thought too young to be prime minister. He was now forty-three, his frock coat stuffed with flesh, his gluttony matched by his venality. He had matured into an extreme reactionary, a Black Hundred supporter who had taken the precaution of cultivating Prince Andronnikov, and through him Vyrubova and Rasputin. Alexandra thought him a “man without petticoats,” a strong figure who she assured the tsar “is very energetic, fears no one & is colossally devoted to you.” She found “his body colossal … but the soul light and clear.” For good measure he had promised to “do all in his power to stop the attacks upon our Friend.”
That was the empress’s opinion. The tsar checked him out with his uncle, the decent and competent justice minister A. A. Khvostov. “This is a person absolutely inexperienced in this work, one who by character is absolutely unsuitable,” the elder Khvostov wrote of his nephew in a confidential note to the tsar. “This is a man who is very far from stupid, but who cannot be critical of his own instincts and judgments. He is inclined to intrigue … and in all probability will try to become Premier; in any case all his activities in the office of minister will not be devoted to work, but to considerations which have nothing to do with it.” Nothing positive could come from appointing him interior minister; indeed, the justice minister wrote, “I expect harm.” The character reference was wholly accurate; it was ignored. Alexandra insisted that Khvostov be appointed—the name means “tail” in Russian, and she called him “my Tail” or “my honest Tail” in her letters in English to Nicholas. The tsar gave way before September was out.
The new minister’s first decision was to appoint Stefan Beletsky as his deputy and director of the police department. Beletsky struck Bernard Pares, who knew him personally, as a typical professional police official, resourceful, a man of the world, but “not an honest man.” Neither he nor Khvostov suffered any illusions about Rasputin, whom Beletsky thought a “scandalous personage.” From now on a great number of Rasputin’s notes asking for favors were addressed to him. Beletsky testified later that many of them were for exemptions from military service or for subsidies, and he agreed that they were illegal. He was also well aware that Rasputin demanded sex as the price of his favors. He testified that he saved one respectable petitioner after the starets had forced his way into her bedroom, and that another, reduced to hysterics when Rasputin refused to help her unless she submitted to him, was raped when she did not.
Both men later plotted to murder the starets, but for the present they needed him as the Friend at court. Tired old Goremykin, the premier, was no obstacle to them. They drew up a political program—well spiced with invective against Jews, Masons, liberals, and socialists—that they knew would win Alexandra’s approval. Prince Andronnikov pointed out that Rasputin’s assistance would be essential. Beletsky arranged to pay him a retainer of eighteen thousand rubles from the secret police funds to which he had access. Vyrubova was enlisted to help. The prince told her that he would be acting, after a fashion, as Rasputin’s business manager. She arranged an audience for Khvostov at the Alexander Palace. The empress was impressed by his flattery and devotion to autocracy. “I yearned to see a real man at last,” she wrote to Nicholas, “and here I see and hear him.” Khvostov thought her “clever and brilliant.”
In Siberia, Rasputin was involved in an affair of blessed bones. He had never tolerated personal slights; he now extended this intolerance to his protégés. Bishop Varnava was not content with the status Rasputin had won for him; he had set his heart on becoming a metropolitan. An outstanding event in his diocese would help him achieve it. The means was Ioann Maximovich, a priest forcibly sent to Tobolsk two centuries before by Peter the Great to baptize Siberian Tartars; his remains were preserved in the crypt of the cathedral. Varnava wanted his predecessor beatified. He had sent a box of petitions to the tsar calling for Ioann to be ranked among the saints; on examination it was found that most of the signatures were in his own handwriting. The tsar passed the request to the synod. Aware that Varnava was more concerned with self-promotion than sainthood, it did nothing.
Varnava had taken the preliminary step of opening the coffin the year before. He did not, however, unwrap the body to see whether God had seen fit to preserve it and thus qualify it for beatification. The synod ordered him “not to open the face and parts of the body of Ioann.” Rasputin’s presence gave Varnava the confidence to flout the synod in August. The bishop, aping Rasputin, sent a series of flattering telegrams to the tsar. “Thank you, Right Reverend, for the prayers for me and my soldiers who love Christ,” Nicholas replied. In another cable, to Alexandra, Varnava said that he had seen a cross appear in the sky. “I congratulate you on this vision and believe that God has sent you this sign to uphold visibly with love his devoted ones,” she responded. She was not certain that it was a good sign—“crosses are not always,” she wrote—but the essential of involving the rulers was achieved.
On August 27 Varnava proceeded with the glorification of Ioann Maximovich in the Tobolsk cathedral, in open defiance of the synod. Rasputin was present. The following day they met the inevitable outrage by claiming the support of the tsar. Rasputin sent a cable to Stankevich, the Tobolsk governor who was investigating the drunken incident on the steamer. “The tsar’s heart will be comforted in the hands of God in front of the Saint Ioann Maximovich who responds to the prayers of the doleful Grigory Novy,” it read. Varnava wired the synod that, in response to the tsar’s permission to honor the saint locally, “I together with clergy of the parish sang glorification to the metropolitan Ioann of which I humbly inform your holiness and await further instructions.” He signed it “sinful bishop Varnava.” A ciphered telegram from Stankevich to the synod confirmed: “First glorification sung.… Not only the people but most informed people see this as apotheosis.”
Support from the empress was swift. She cabled Varnava on August 29: “Let there be glorification of the saint to assist the tsar in his hard tasks. Alexandra.” With this telegram as insurance, Varnava and Rasputin left Tobolsk for Pokrovskoye to wait for the synod’s fury to break. On August 31 a cable arrived from the synod summoning the bishop to Petrograd to explain himself. He and Rasputin composed a rambling telegram to send to Nicholas. “Stavka, The Emperor,” it began. “Glorification sung the people rejoiced wept the right reverend informed him demand him immediately I ordered now we go to pray … God with us over the whole orthodox army. Your hand is paradise. Bishop Varnava. Grigory Novy.”
The defiance infuriated churchmen and laity alike. “The whole of Russia is talking about it,” Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich wrote. “Priests everywhere are preaching to the people the kind of thing I would not dare whisper in my sleep.” The hostility and the threat of a court case preyed on the starets. On September 6 he took a walk with his two agents. “You know, fellows, the soul mourns, it even makes me deaf,” he told them. “Sometimes there’s peace in my heart for a couple of hours, and then it’s no good again.”
“Why’s it like that for you?”
“Because, guys, bad things are happening in this country,” he replied, “and the darned papers write about me, make me very nervous. I’ll have to defend myself in court.”
He remained edgy. A family row broke out in Pokrovskoye on September 9. Efim Rasputin appeared and started bawling his son out. Rasputin jumped up from the table and “like a madman pushed his father into the yard, threw him down to the ground, and started to hit him with his fists.” Efim cried out, “Don’t hit me, you scoundrel.” The agents intervened to part them by force. The father’s eye was badly bruised and swollen shut. On his feet again the old man scolded his son in even fiercer terms. He dragged up his continuing affair with the maid Dunia. He threatened to tell the world that the only thing his son was good for was “feeling Dunia’s soft parts.” After that the agents had to pinion Rasputin to stop him from attacking his father a second time. He pulled himself together enough to send two telegrams, one to Tsarskoye Selo and the other to the Stavka. He was becoming bored in Pokrovskoye and wanted Nicholas to allow him back to Petrograd.
His son Dmitry had been called up for military service. Rasputin could not ask Nicholas or Alexandra to arrange a deferment; it was a service he provided for others, at a price, but he could not do it for his son without appearing unpatriotic. He told the empress that his son would serve, referring to himself as “Abraham sacrificing Isaac.” In practice, he had his own means of ensuring that Dmitry remained a thousand miles from the front. He took the boy to Tyumen on September 10. His wife went with them. They met up with Patushinskaya, who placed Dmitry in the Seventh Company of her husband’s regiment at Yalutorovsk, safely tucked away from the Germans in Siberia. They spent the night at Father Martian’s monastery. Rasputin stayed put while the others went into town. “I know lots of people in Tyumen, but I don’t have the time to see them,” he explained to Terekhov, one of the agents. Terekhov thought the real reason was that he was frightened something could happen to him in the street. “Rasputin sidles,” Terekhov noted of his awkward gait. “It looks as though he injured his side during the fight with his father.”
Varnava had gone to Petrograd and made a heated appearance in front of the synod. He was ordered to attend a further session on September 10. He failed to turn up and was missing from the apartment where he was registered as staying. The following day he sent a messenger to explain that his mother was seriously ill and that he had left for the provinces to be with her. This was a lie. He remained in Petrograd, hiding in Prince Andronnikov’s apartment. From here he wrote a rambling, hysterical letter to the tsar, describing synod members as “bloodsucking Beilises”—a reference to a Jew falsely accused of murdering Christian babies and drinking their blood—who mocked Rasputin. “It was a torture over me I could not stand it,” he scribbled. “I said why do you want to muddle me and scoff at me for I am a Bishop of the Orthodox Church and the procurator adds that I am friendly with Rasputin and all these bishops burst out laughing and I, excuse me, Great Tsar, said that I am not afraid of you traitors so long as the Great Tsar Nicholas II reigns so he will defend me and will not allow you bloodsuckers to offend me I wept and left.… The poor saint Ioann Maximovich his glorification met suffocating gases of malice from the spiteful synod anarchists he was not spared. Religious feeling of the people violated so as to torment the Tsar and Tsarina.” Many would have read the letter as evidence of insanity; to Nicholas it revealed a religious soul.
Varnava also cabled Rasputin asking for help. Rasputin responded with a flattering cable to the tsar from Pokrovskoye on September 17. “Ioann Maximovich glorified himself with wonders,” it rambled. “It is no good our fathers objecting—they delay too long—God blessed your intention your word is peace and goodwill for everybody and your hand thunder and lightning will conquer all. Grigory Novy.”
It worked. The synod prepared a critical report on the absent bishop. Nicholas split hairs to defend him, saying that the bishop’s “local glorification” of Ioann Maximovich was permissible even if the saint did not meet the requirements demanded by the synod for “all-Russia glorification.” In a note in the margin of the report, the tsar concluded that the synod, recognizing the bishop’s “passionate fervency,” should judge his actions “with pardon and love for the sake of the church.”
It would have been bizarre at any time for Rasputin to pursue the tsar over a two-hundred-year-old corpse, on behalf of a semi-literate bishop with a fetish for being photographed in coffins. To do so when Nicholas had the high command of armies that were daily suffering thousands of fresh casualties was grotesque. A new call-up of two million men was under way. “We have lost something like five million men (I am not exaggerating),” Robert Wilton was writing to London. The war committee of the Duma was complaining that artillery, machine guns, and ammunition were short, that trenches were inadequate, that “neither bravery, nor competence, nor military worth” influenced the choice of commanders.
Nicholas enjoyed himself at the Stavka. “Thank God it is all over,” he wrote to Alexandra when he assumed command. “I feel so calm—a sort of feeling like after the Holy Communion.” With the German advance the headquarters had been pulled back to Mogilev. The city was set on hills above the east bank of the Dnieper River, almost five hundred miles south of Petrograd. It had a pretty cathedral, a governor’s mansion once used by Napoleon’s marshals, four horse-drawn tramlines, and a shabby hotel, the Bristol. The petty routines of military life comforted the tsar, and he ignored the larger picture of the war. He enjoyed the absence of politics. “I do not read the newspapers here,” he said. “My brain is resting here—no ministers, no troublesome questions demanding thought.” He liked to hold parades, at times within range of German guns, for he was not a physical coward; he awarded St. George Crosses by the thousand, and once solemnly promoted all those present at a ceremonial dinner.
He did not know that one of his best generals, Brusilov, found him unsuited to command “by reason of his ignorance, inability, utterly flaccid will, and lack of stern inner character” and that Brusilov thought those who had urged him to come to the Stavka—the empress and the starets—“are not better than criminals.” He did not sense that he was awkward with the men, that “he did not know what to say, where to go, or what to do.” He believed that he was loved. “The proof—the numbers of telegrams which I receive from all sides, with the most touching expressions,” he wrote to Alexandra on September 9. “The ministers, always living in town, know terribly little of what is happening in the country as a whole. Here I can judge correctly the real mood.” The only places where he admitted he was unpopular were Petrograd and Moscow, and he mocked them as “two minute points on the map of the fatherland.”
The enemy relied on the restless, probing minds of Ludendorff and Hindenburg. As to the Russian supreme commander, he said of himself that “the heart of the tsar is in the hands of God.” He liked the view from his rooms in the governor’s mansion over the Dnieper to the water meadows and stands of beech and chestnut. He rose at nine, had a morning briefing from his chief of staff, Gen. Mikhail Alexeev, and examined the neat flags on the maps in the map room. At three he went out for a drive along the river in his Rolls-Royce. After dinner he played dominoes and watched films, romances and American detective serials. It was a pleasant, gentlemanly existence with the occasional echo of war—he slept on a hard camp bed and reminded himself that he must not complain, for “how many sleep on damp grass and mud!”
Alexis was with him, the boy wearing the uniform of a private soldier and sharing his father’s bedroom. “It is very cosy to sleep side by side,” Nicholas wrote to Alexandra. “I say prayers with him every night.… he says his prayers too fast, and it is difficult to stop him.” The boy was sleeping well—“as I do”—in spite of the bright light of his icon lamp. He woke early, sat up in bed, and talked softly with his father. “I answer him drowsily, he settles down and lies quietly until I am called.” Nicholas thought that the pale boy “gives light and life to all of us”; his lunchtime prattling to visiting generals and diplomats “is pleasant for them and it makes them smile.” The smiles covered astonishment at the presence of a boy in this place of war; a sickly boy at that, who caused a Guards offensive in Bukovina to be delayed for a fortnight because he was ill but insisted that he review the guardsmen before the attack. Nicholas was proud of the eleven-year-old’s conduct. “I shall never forget this review,” he wrote to Alexandra. “The weather was excellent and the general impression astounding.” She was proud, too. “Minds will be purified & they will carry the picture of you & yr Son in their hearts with them.”
It was touching, loving, but it was not war. Neither could Alexandra’s interference qualify as government. It was so frantic that she complained that she could not get a response quickly enough by letter. “Why won’t we have a telephone run from your room to mine?” she wrote. “It would be fantastic & you could tell me good news or discuss a question.… We would try not to pester you, since I know you do not like to talk—but this would be our exclusive, private conversation, & we would be able to speak without concern that someone was listening in.” As the summer heat drained away and the leaves outside her boudoir turned gold and red, she hammered on at the accursed “parliamentarists,” hinting that she wanted Guchkov murdered. “A railway accident in wh he alone wld suffer wld be a real punishment fr[om] God,” she wrote. “Show yr fist … be the master and lord; you are the Autocrat & they dare not forget it, when they do, as now, woe unto them.”
She said that she had enemies everywhere—spitefully, she warned that Nikolasha and his “clique” in Caucasian exile “will try to continue making messes”—and reminded her husband of the need for their Friend. She sent a photograph of Rasputin and one of his combs to Mogilev on September 15. “Remember to keep the Image in yr hand again & try several times to comb yr hair with this comb before the sitting of the ministers,” she wrote. A stuffed fish on a stick followed. “He used it first and now sends it to you as a blessing,” she said.
Rasputin complained to an agent in Pokrovskoye that he wanted to return to Petrograd, but “Vyrubova is not allowed to invite me.” He received an anonymous letter on September 19 that frightened him. Whoever had written it knew that he was in contact with the tsar in Mogilev. “Grigory, our motherland collapses, they want to sign a disgraceful peace,” it read. “As you receive ciphered telegrams from the Stavka, it means that you have great influence. Therefore we ask you to make ministers responsible to the people so that the state Duma meeting on September 23 can save the motherland. If you do not do this, we will kill you without mercy—we will not hesitate like Guseva did. It will be carried out, wherever you are. The lot to kill you fell on us and there are ten of us.” It was unsigned.
His renewed pleas to Vyrubova succeeded. Rasputin left Pokrovskoye on September 24 for the four-day steamer and train ride to Petrograd. Elena Djanumova was waiting for him there to see if her mother’s exile could be lifted. Over the summer he had urged her in telegrams to go to the capital—“Bringing joy with the light of love and I live with this Grigory”—which otherwise made no sense. Her friend Maria Arkadyevna assured her that they were indeed meaningless, except to admirers, who kept them in expensive caskets like sacred texts and for whom “the darker is their meaning, the better.”
A voice with the familiar drawling o’s telephoned her at the Severnaya Hotel: “Well, is that you, Frantic? You’re in Peter, but didn’t visit me? Why so-o? Come at once.” A man friend at the hotel, a Monsieur Ch, offered to drive her over in his car. He much wanted to meet the “almighty starets,” the local slang for Rasputin. Elena told him to wait in the car while she asked if he could come up. Rasputin flew into uncontrolled fury when she mentioned him. “You’ve come from Moscow with a man,” he bellowed, his pupils dilating. “Nice one. Came to ask me about a petition and brought a man with you. Couldn’t part with him. So that’s what you are. I won’t do anything for you. I’ve got little ladies of my own who love me and indulge me. Go, go.”
He ran to the telephone and spoke in a nervous, shaky voice: “Dusenka, darling, are you free now? I’m coming to you. Are you glad? Well, wait for me, I’ll be right there.” He hung up and gave Elena a smirk. “I don’t need Moscow women, don’t need them,” he said. “Peter women are better than Moscow women.” She rushed from the apartment in tears, vowing never to see the “crude muzhik” again.
She was back the following day with Ch; Rasputin had called her to apologize, meek, gentle. He asked Ch to come up from the car. “Let me take a look at this one,” he said, “the spark that set the forest on fire.” He kissed the man when he came up the stairs and sat him down for breakfast. Then he drew Elena’s maid aside, to complain in tears that Elena was surrounded by “hawks,” his expression for men: “I want to help her, but let her be with me, not with others.”
It was a bravura performance. “By God, Madam, it was so curious,” the maid told Elena. “He speaks so plaintively and the tears keep dropping. Why are you so upset? I ask him—I felt so sorry for him. And he says: ‘Pity, my dear, such pity’—and beats his chest. I felt so sorry for him, Madam, so sorry.” Elena found something so primitive in Rasputin, so alien to polite understanding, that it was impossible to be angry with him. He asked her to come back on Sunday.
He was holding court for women admirers in the dining room. Elena was meeting almost the full harem. The room was hot and heavy with scent, and she had an impression of silks, dark broadcloths, sables, diamonds, and aigrettes in coiffured hair, counterpointed against the white scarf of a Sister of Charity and the threadbare clothes of an old woman. The nursing sister was Akulina Laptinskaya. The elderly woman was A. G. Gushchina, a lonely person to whom Rasputin showed real kindness.
“This is my most beloved, from Moscow—Frantic,” he said. He sat her next to Akulina Nikitishna, called Kilina by all, the pretty and frivolous daughter of the commander of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Tea was poured. Elena was about to help herself to sugar when Kilina took her glass and said to Rasputin, “Bless, Father.” She explained to Elena: “When the Father puts in sugar with his own hands, it’s God’s blessing.” Everyone held their glasses out to him. Dunia came into the room; Elena described her as an “elderly maid” and thought that she was a distant relative of Rasputin. The ladies told her to take a rest, they would do the work.
A “striking brunette, a baroness,” began to collect the dishes. This was probably Vera Kusova, the officer’s wife eager to advance her husband’s career. Another lady, in a violet velvet dress and sable tippet, washed the tea things. A plump young blonde, simply dressed, jumped up to open the door when the bell rang. She was introduced as Munya Golovina; her mother, an important-looking old lady, was also in the room. Munya acted as a maid in the hall, taking fur coats and helping visitors off with their galoshes. “The samovar has boiled away,” Dunia said to her. “You should add water and put on some more coal.” Munya grabbed the samovar and darted off to the kitchen. A corpulent lady in a gris de perle dress, her stoutness concealed by soft folds of crepe de chine, went with her; this was probably L. V. Miller, the wife of a rich merchant, whom the agents described as “middle-aged and lopsided, still with pretensions to be attractive.”
Kilina began to sing “Wanderer,” a haunting folk song. Others caught the air of melancholy and began to sing psalms, Kilina catching the high notes above Rasputin’s light bass. The doorbell rang. A messenger brought in a basket of roses and a dozen embroidered silk shirts, the gift of a lady. The singing stopped for a moment, and Rasputin gave a little homily. “One’s got to subdue oneself,” he instructed. “One’s got to be simpler, simpler, nearer to God. All these ruses of yours aren’t needed. You’re all so cunning, my little ladies, I know you all. I read your souls. Too much cunning.”
Then he began to sing again, the folk song “Russian”; he danced. A woman came in, in a white linen dress of strange monastic cut, with a white cowl pulled almost over her eyes. The twelve gospels, with crosses on the binding, hung from her dress. Someone whispered to Elena that it was Olga Lokhtina.
“At the father’s, one has to behave as in church, with grandeur,” she said sharply.
“Leave them alone,” said Rasputin. “Let them have a good time.”
Guests were beginning to leave. They kissed Rasputin’s hand; he embraced them and kissed them on the lips. “Dried crusts, Father,” they asked. He handed out bits of stale bread, which they wrapped in perfumed handkerchiefs. After whispering with some of them, Dunia came back with two parcels wrapped in newspaper. It was Rasputin’s dirty linen. The ladies asked for it. “The dirtier the better,” they said. “It’s got to have sweat.” Munya Golovina helped them on with their galoshes. One of them protested. “Father teaches us to be meek,” she said and, taking a foot in her hand, put on the overshoes.
On the staircase Elena asked about Lokhtina, the woman in white. “She is the wife of a general and a former admirer of Iliodor,” she was told. “Now she worships Father as if he were a saint. Lives the life of a hermit. Sleeps on boards, puts a log under her head. Her relatives beseeched Father to send her his pillow so she wouldn’t torture herself like that. Well, she consented to sleep on his pillow. A saint-woman.” As she walked into the dark street, Elena felt she had escaped from an insane asylum.
She was back, nevertheless, the next lunchtime in a final effort to have her mother’s exile quashed. Princess Shakhovskaya, a striking, raven-haired beauty in a nurse’s uniform, was in the dining room. She was twenty-six and was married to Prince V. Shakhovskoy, whom Rasputin had recommended as trade minister; she had followed the starets for four years. The police were aware that Rasputin had been sleeping with her—“he calls her ‘my duck’ and she kisses his hands and feet,” they reported—and so were the capital’s writers of satirical verse. The prince, aware that his position depended on the starets, ignored both the affair and the lampoons.
Rasputin was eating fish while the princess peeled potatoes with the most exquisite fingers Elena had ever seen, long and delicate with mother-of-pearl nails. He took the potatoes carelessly, without looking at her or thanking her. She kissed his fingers, sticky with the fish he piled on his plate. He brought Elena a copy of his book of meditations on his journey to the Holy Land; the preface had a photograph of him lying disheveled in bed after Guseva’s attack. He scribbled on the front page: “To my dear simpleton Frantic to remember me by, Grigory.”
The princess wanted him to go to his study, to give her some confidential advice. He did so with ill grace. They were back in a few minutes. He was angry; she had tears in her eyes. She kissed his hand and left. Elena asked him why he was so unkind to the princess. “I loved her so much once, but I don’t love her anymore,” he said. Elena asked him if he could make men ministers. “No big deal, why not?” he replied, and took her into his study to discuss her mother’s petition. “I’ll do everything for you, my dear one, but you also have to humor me and obey me,” he said. “A promise is a promise. If you do things my way, the affair will be settled. If not, nothing will be done.”
She said she had to return to Moscow. “All right, then, the affair will wait too. You come back and you’ll be with me. We’ll do everything.” His eyes burned; something fettered her movements, and she could not flee. She was saved by the maid, who shouted through the door, “Telephone from Tsarskoye.” Elena left and went straight to the station. That evening the agents saw Rasputin bringing back an unnamed woman to his apartment; she left in the early hours.
The starets was careful to give the empress a different account of his nights—sleepless, filled with somber insights into the fate of Russia. Alexandra faithfully passed them on to Nicholas. She wrote on October 10 that the starets foresaw a food crisis and had dreamed of its solution. “He says that you must give the order that wagons with flour, butter and sugar should be allowed to pass: there are to be no other trains for 3 days. He saw the whole thing in a night vision.”
All passenger traffic was held up, causing such chaos that it did not return to normal for six days. The food supply was indeed in a critical state. Peasants were hoarding their grain because they had no reason to sell it. The goods they had bought before the war—plows, stoves, harnesses, water pumps, clothing—were no longer being made by factories, which had converted to war supplies. The army was taking the lion’s share of freight traffic; locomotives were scarce, for they had been built and repaired in Warsaw, and Warsaw was lost. The railroad minister, Rukhlov, was a Black Hundred reactionary who drove out senior staff who did not share his politics. Inflation arrived at a gallop; by August 1915 the cost of a basket of thirteen basic foodstuffs was up 150 percent over its prewar level. The poor were hungry. Rasputin’s instincts were sound, but his vision did not include preparation. No food stocks were moved to the railheads, and the freight trains ran fast but empty. The minister, “appalled by the frightful disorganization of the railways,” fled to a spa in the Caucasus to take the waters.
Unabashed, Alexandra continued to bombard the tsar with Rasputin’s advice. Much of it was personal and vindictive. The empress reported that he was “very grieved” at Trepov, the transport minister, “as He knows he is against Him.” The starets criticized a new stamp duty scheme by the finance minister on the same ground. He recommended the dismissal of Goremykin as premier, adding that the tsar should wait until he had seen if the elder Khvostov, the justice minister, measured up as a successor. Khvostov did not; Alexandra wrote that when Rasputin saw him, he treated him “as if he was a petitioner.” After a ninety-minute meeting she said that the starets recommended the tsar delay a decision on the premier “according to God.”
Though he remained against the war—“Our Friend was always against the War,” the empress wrote, “saying that the Balkans were not worth fighting about”—he had visions on military strategy. He demanded an advance on the front near Riga, “prompted by what He saw in the night.… He says it is necessary, begs you seriously, says we can and we must.” He told the empress that he had seen Russian troops enter Constantinople in another vision; “He dictated to me,” she wrote to the tsar, “walking about, praying and crossing Himself, and about Rumania and Greece and our troops passing through.” In politics he suggested that the tsar pay a surprise visit to the Duma. The empress reassured her husband that this involved no softening toward the parliamentarists. “He loathes their existence, as I do, for Russia,” she added. Rasputin was shrewd enough to know that some contact had to be maintained with Duma members; with cruel insight he thought of them as “dogs collected to keep other dogs quiet.” The visit duly took place.
Sometimes Rasputin was so overwhelmed by his own thoughts, Alexandra said, that “He cannot exactly remember one of them … but He says we must always do what He says.”