Rasputin escaped standing trial for the drunken outburst on the steamer, though Beletsky and Khvostov pressed him for an explanation. “He maintained to us that he was not drunk, that he did not annoy women and passengers, but they provoked him to a scandal,” Beletsky later testified, “that the captain of the steamer took their side for reasons of principle because he was a liberal, knowing that he was Rasputin, and that it was entirely under the influence of the captain that the steward made his official complaint against him, which the police did not want to report.” He claimed that he had joined up with the soldiers because they were going out to shed their blood for the country, and that he felt it was his patriotic duty to entertain them.
It was ingenious—the slur that the report was a liberal plot to discredit the government and the throne, the bathos of doomed soldiers on their way to the front—and Beletsky noted that it had convinced the palace. Beletsky himself did not believe a word of it. He checked with Father Martian, who confirmed that Rasputin was “very drunk and annoyed the public.” Rasputin and Vyrubova were clamoring for Stankevich, the Tobolsk governor, to be sacked for wishing to prosecute. As the price for the affair being dropped, Beletsky insisted that Stankevich be promoted to governor of a more important province. Rasputin agreed, on condition that he could name his own governor in his native Tobolsk, where “he must have his own man.”
He was not frightened into discretion. Returning to Gorokhovaya ulitsa “absolutely drunk” at 1:00 A.M. on October 14, he shouted at the woman doorkeeper that she had taken a twenty-five-ruble bribe from an unnamed government minister. “He wanted to bury me,” he yelled, “but he’s buried himself instead.” The wife of an ensign lying wounded in a Petrograd military hospital visited him on November 3. She wanted Rasputin to make sure that her husband would not be returned to the front line when he recovered. On her way out she told the doorkeeper what a weird person he was and described how she had been welcomed. “A girl let me in and led me to his room,” she said. “I saw him for the first time. He said: ‘Undress and go in here.’ I undressed and went with him to a room, the first from the front door on the left. He hardly listened to my request but started to paw my face and then my breasts and he said: ‘Kiss me, I got to like you.’
“He scribbled a note for me and started to pester me over again: ‘Kiss me, kiss me, I like you.’ He wouldn’t give me the note. He said: ‘You make me angry, come back tomorrow.’ ”
Agent Terekhov asked her if she would come back the next day.
“No, to come to him means to bribe him the way he wants,” she replied. “I can’t do that, so I won’t come.”
Khvostov knew that the imperial favor he enjoyed depended on keeping such stories out of the newspapers. “The interior minister has done everything to charm his enemies and disarm them,” Robert Wilton reported privately to London. “He has been ‘hail fellow, well met!’ with all members of the Russian press. He went round to call on all the editors.” He planned to muzzle them by floating a media company on the stock exchange. The shares would be offered to the public, but Okhrana secret agents supplied with special funds would acquire majority control. The company would buy up newspapers, printing plants, newsstands, advertising agencies, cinemas, and even telephone companies. The new owners would then suppress all mention of Rasputin. The scheme collapsed because it was too complex. That it was also illegal was of no consequence to a minister who Witte said “took the prize for rascality, being a man for whom the law does not exist.”
An easier way of keeping the starets out of the press was to remove him from the capital. Khvostov and Beletsky drew up an itinerary for a tour of provincial monasteries. They arranged for a large supply of Madeira and a number of priests to accompany him. The priests demanded so many promotions and perks for escorting Rasputin that Beletsky said he “blushed for them.” Rasputin refused to go.
He needed a minder. Beletsky found an ideal spy-bodyguard in a general of gendarmes, M. S. Komissarov. The general’s career had foundered after he had openly incited pogroms in 1906; his sin was not Jew-baiting, which was government policy, but lack of discretion. Since then, as he later testified, he had been used by the interior ministry for all manner of espionage and dirty tricks. He had, for example, stolen and deciphered correspondence from foreign embassies; he boasted that the interior ministry knew what was happening in foreign policy before the foreign ministry did. He had also supplied bodyguards for senior officials.
Beletsky gave him a squad of Okhrana men and briefed him carefully. The general was to prevent Rasputin from becoming involved in public scandals; if he failed, witnesses were to be bought off. He was to stop the starets from making unexpected trips by citing the danger of assassination. Before Rasputin made his regular morning telephone call to Vyrubova, the general was to pass him details of favors requested by Beletsky and Khvostov for forwarding to the empress; in return, all Rasputin’s petitions to the interior ministry would be granted where possible. Finally, the general was to keep Rasputin alive, and to collect any evidence that would strengthen their hold over him.
Komissarov’s men came from the Okhrana’s external service. The secret police maintained two agencies to spy on revolutionaries. The Internal Agency relied on informers within the groups, what Vassilyev called “secret cooperators or assistants drawn from the ranks of the enemy.” As well as workers, prostitutes, and students, the secret police chief boasted, they included “respected party leaders and even members of the Duma.” These informers were acquired through fear, greed, or malice. The threat of punishment—the noose, forced labor shackled to a cart in an east Siberian mine, imprisonment in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, in a cell with iron-bound doors and double sentries—loosened lips.
Some collapsed as soon as they were arrested, Vassilyev noted, while others needed the secret police “to use their most skillful persuasive powers” before they could be induced to cooperate. Others volunteered to inform, either “in a fit of rage or spite … if they felt insulted, slighted, or betrayed” by their fellows or “answered bluntly that they were doing it for money’s sake.” The general said that the Internal Agency had a system of “inner supervision” of Rasputin, developed by Komissarov, which “penetrated as far as the tsarina’s alcove.” Spying on the tsarina ran well beyond the purview of the secret police. “I couldn’t stay in the dark when such a mysterious and enigmatic trump card as Rasputin loomed on the political and court horizon,” Komissarov said to justify his lèse-majesté. “He had to be deciphered clean.” The inner supervision came across “the most fantastic suppositions of cynicism and pornography” but little concrete fact.
The real effort was made by the agents of the External Agency. Their official duties were to provide discreet security for Rasputin at street level—they were armed—and to report immediately if they got wind of any plot to assassinate him. In practice they treated him exactly as they had been taught to treat a terrorist. rorist. They shadowed and noted his movements and contacts. They were an elite. Only a thousand existed to cover all the Russian empire; of these a hundred were on duty in Petrograd. Six of those were on regular daily assignment to Rasputin, an indication of the Okhrana’s intense interest in him. They were full-time professionals, trained at a special school run by Eustraty Myednikov, the chief of the Moscow Okhrana. He liked to recruit former army sergeants and corporals. They had the necessary discipline and courage for work in which days of boredom could suddenly, if their quarry turned on them, be transformed into moments of extreme danger. The agents had to be “politically and morally reliable,” Vassilyev wrote, “honest, sober, bold, adroit, patient, prudent, obedient, and of good health.” Recruits from minorities with potential revolutionary leanings were barred. “Individuals of Polish or Hebrew descent,” he added, “were, on principle, excluded from any kind of employment in the External Agency.”
Vassilyev described their duties this way: to “keep an eye on suspicious characters in the street, theaters, hotels, railway trains, and similar places of public resort” and to “discover all possible detail concerning the mode of life of such persons and the company frequented by them.” The agents had to be familiar with the city they were posted in, particularly with its “drinking saloons, beer gardens, taverns, and houses with an access to two or more streets.” The last included Gorokhovaya ulitsa 64, with its front and rear entrances. They disguised themselves as porters, doormen, caretakers, newspaper sellers, soldiers, cabmen, and railroad officials. They had to know the taxi stands and fares for droshkys and motorcars, the railroad timetables, the uniforms of garrison regiments. During his training period the rookie agent had to hand in a daily report to show that he had grasped these essentials. His political reliability was tested by other agents, who sought his confidence and made provocative remarks to see if they could draw a response. He belonged to the agency; though he might be married, it was “always regarded as rather an unfavorable circumstance if he showed any excessive devotion to his family.”
Rasputin’s minders allowed themselves only a professional interest in the stream of women who called at his apartment. They interviewed the prostitutes and maids; ladies were recorded only by name and length of visit. They never referred to Rasputin other than by his code name. Agents were instructed to give their subject a “nickname … short and characteristic, suggested, if possible, by some striking peculiarity in the exterior of the suspect.” In deference to Rasputin’s long black hair and beard, they nicknamed him the Dark One. The external service had its own store of uniforms and clothing. The transport section ran a pool of horses, cabs, and motorcars. Agents were trained to handle horses and cabs like born droshky drivers and to acquire “a perfect mastery of the droshky man’s mode of speech” so that they did not stand out at a cab stand. The daily reports on Rasputin were rarely short of detail on his droshky rides; the drivers were either agents or informers. Money was kept on deposit at all railroad stations “for the purpose of allowing agents of the Okhrana to undertake journeys at short notice or no notice at all.” When Rasputin set off for Moscow or Tyumen, an agent went too.
Four agents were always on duty at Gorokhovaya ulitsa, three at the front door and one by the gates. There was also a concierge at the doorway, a yard keeper and a doorkeeper by the gates. “Because they have nothing else to do, the agents play cards all the time,” Rasputin’s neighbor Blagoveshchensky, a clerk in the synod office, wrote. “Sometimes they go up to the second floor, where one of them stays, and sometimes one of them climbs to the third floor, where there is a bench next to apartment 20. He stays there on duty.” The agents were well known both to their subject and to others in the house; according to their moods, both Rasputin and another neighbor, Neistein, joshed or sneered at them. Rasputin was aware that his conduct outside the apartment might be recorded. Vassilyev said that he was “frankly nervous” whenever he was summoned to Tsarskoye Selo by Vyrubova; the agents “testif[ied] that whenever he knew he was about to meet the tsarina he became extraordinarily excitable and ill at ease.” This jittery state, the secret police chief said, was doubtless caused by fear that word of his excesses had reached the palace.
It is unlikely, though, that Rasputin realized the full extent of the surveillance. Vassilyev’s men were skilled in streetcraft. They knew how to use side streets to hurry ahead of their quarry. If a direct confrontation was unavoidable, they avoided any eye contact; it was through their eyes that they would be recognized again. To see which apartment Rasputin entered in a block, an agent would race up the attic stairs and count footsteps to see which floor he visited. His mail and telegrams were intercepted; a list of people whose correspondence interested the agency was supplied to the post and telegraph office. The Okhrana had “black cabinets” whose job was to steam open envelopes and copy or photograph the contents before returning them to the mail. These agents, Vassilyev said proudly, “acquired such a flair that they would open letters not written by people on the list and discover things.”
Rasputin had silenced prying clerics in Siberia with Varnava’s appointment to Tobolsk. The death of the metropolitan of Kiev created the opportunity to extend this protection to Petrograd. He first had the Petrograd metropolitan transferred to Kiev. On November 12 Alexandra told the tsar that he insisted that Pitirim, the bishop of Georgia, was the “only suitable person” to fill the vacancy in Petrograd. Pitirim was as gross as Varnava; he was suspected of being a homosexual and a thief. As bishop of Tula and later Kursk, he left the administration of the diocese to a deacon, Mitrofanych, with whom he had “relations disapproved of by both the church and the law.” The two stole and sold the plate and other treasures from the bishop’s palace and vestry; Sabler later testified that Mitrofanych had bought a country estate for ten thousand rubles with his share of the booty. Pitirim patronized suspected Podgornovs, followers of the khlyst pilot Stefan Podgorny, who had established arks in Kursk and Kharkov. He “became so popular among them that they claimed that they saw aureola around his head and almost ranked him among the saints.” The scandal forced his transfer to another diocese, where he took up with a young priest named Osipenko. Pitirim had met Rasputin before the war and shown himself to be subservient and useful.
Such was the man whom the starets wished to become the most powerful figure in Russian Orthodoxy. The new synod procurator, Volzhin, whose predecessor, Samarin, had only recently run afoul of Rasputin, warned the tsar that the appointment would outrage the church. Pitirim’s name did not appear on the list of suitable candidates prepared by the synod; Nicholas crossed out the name of the bishop of Riga, the front-runner, with his own hand and wrote in Pitirim. Volzhin resigned; he was replaced by Rayev, another of Rasputin’s creatures, whom Simanovich described as “old and completely insignificant, with a wig, and very comical.”
It took little time to put the new metropolitan to work. Pitirim visited the fixer Ivan Manasevich-Manuilov as soon as he arrived in the capital; the two discussed a mutual contact, a mediocre provincial governor called Stürmer, as a possible new prime minister. Pitirim also arranged the rehabilitation of a close friend of Rasputin and Vyrubova, Isidor Kokolov, a bishop who had been stripped of his see and banished to a monastery as a simple monk for homosexuality. With Rayev’s help Kokolov became father superior of a monastery in Tobolsk, close to the like-minded Bishop Varnava. Pitirim’s “secretary,” Osipenko, proved equally malleable. Beletsky soon realized that he could be bribed, giving him three hundred rubles from police department secret funds.
At the front, the Russians were striving to hold the Germans west of Riga. The Times correspondent Robert Wilton saw the aftermath of a counterattack. The fighting took place in a wet swamp that had frozen. The marks where the Russian infantry had lain formed ice-crusted pools; around them were craters twenty feet in diameter, where German eleven-inch shells had fallen. Company commanders were ensigns who had left school in the summer; battalions were led by captains. Wilton found Russian losses to be “more terrible than anything we knew or even suspected.” One regiment, the 130th, had attacked with 2,400 men. Some of the 225 survivors were badly frostbitten. The young soldiers conscripted in August found conditions “very trying. There is no warm clothing and very little straw. They have to sleep on the bare ground in the trenches.”
The supply problem was easing as industrial production picked up. Wilton reported that the real crisis was in morale, and that was worse in Petrograd than at the front. “Internal politics,” he wrote wearily, “have sunk into a slough of reaction.” Nobody knew why the “fossilized premier” Goremykin survived; the foreign minister, Sazonov, described his boss to Wilton as a “medieval survivor organically incapable of comprehending modern conditions.” The only decisions seemed to be made by “the female head of the Court and Rasputin.… The censorship is becoming daily more oppressive, and every minister seems to be a law unto himself. Things could not be worse, alas!”
By now Rasputin had what Simanovich called “his own council of ministers … more practical and positive than the tsar’s.” It consisted exclusively of women. Old Madame Golovina was the president, supporting Rasputin by her name and authority in society. Her daughter Munya was his intermediary with the higher clergy. Vyrubova helped nominate ministers. The lady of court Nikhitina was in touch with the prime minister. The pretty Lili von Dehn provided contacts in the palace, where she was a maid of honor; she never spoke to Rasputin when he was in the palace, but they often met in the apartment of Kushina, another of his mistresses, who held “merry, intimate parties” for him. Akulina Laptinskaya was Rasputin’s intelligence service, supplying him with the latest gossip and rumors; unknown to him, she also supplied news of his movements to his enemies for a fee.
Nominating ministers involved finding them. This was not easy, for Rasputin’s knowledge of bureaucracy was limited to despising it. “So he constantly turned to me with requests to name suitable persons for this or that ministerial post,” Simanovich said. It was an onerous task. Sackings followed appointments so rapidly that “many of our candidates, knowing the unstable character of the tsar, declined the offers.” The pressure was intense, since the tsar “often telephoned Rasputin demanding that he immediately name a candidate.” Rasputin would ask him to hold the line, then turn to Simanovich. “We need a minister,” he would cry. Everyone in the apartment threw in suggestions while the tsar “was waiting holding the telephone at the other end.” Once, while the tsar was on the phone, Rasputin said, “We need a general.” Simanovich’s son Semyon, who was in the room, suggested a contact called Volkonsky, not a general but a Duma functionary. Rasputin passed on the name, and the astonished Volkonsky became a deputy interior minister. Rayev’s only qualification to head the synod was his chairmanship of the “Scientific-Commercial Unit,” which, despite its high-sounding title, was a front for one of Simanovich’s gambling clubs.
If a choice was particularly difficult, Rasputin turned to Manasevich-Manuilov, the journalist who had interviewed him in 1912 after the Iliodor scandal. He was a small man, elegant, suit impeccably cut, head erect over stiff collar and bow tie, with a bold, oval face, stern and perceptive eyes, and a chill but sensual set to the mouth. Although Rasputin would always make time to see him, he did not appear to exploit the intimacy. He was calm, he did not brag. He smiled often, and kept a distance. There was good reason for the reserve. Beneath the elegance, wrote the French ambassador, who knew him well, was “a stool pigeon, spy, sharper, swindler, chiseler, forger, and ruffian.”
Manuilov was the son of a provincial Jewish merchant—at various times he practiced Judaism, Lutheranism, and Orthodoxy—and he owed his advancement to the patronage of Prince Meshchersky. When he took up with Manuilov, the prince had introduced the provincial boy to the best tailors, and to the secret police. Informing and spying came easily to him, and he had taken over in the Okhrana’s Paris bureau after General Rachovsky had been dismissed for criticizing Dr. Philippe. He betrayed intelligence secrets to revolutionaries, stealing documents from the office safe with a counterfeit key, and betrayed revolutionaries to the Okhrana. In 1904 he photographed the Japanese cipher at the Japanese Legation in The Hague and was rewarded with an Order of Vladimir. Returning to Russia in 1905, he collected thirty thousand rubles from the industry ministry to reopen workingmen’s libraries, which had closed during the risings. He embezzled all but seven thousand rubles of it. Stolypin threw him out of government service. “I am a vicious man,” he said. “I love money and I love life.” The war suited him. He specialized in extorting money from banks, and in helping and then blackmailing men trying to evade military service.
Manuilov was a natural partner for the nomination machine. He dined regularly with Rasputin, Manus, and Beletsky, and attended Prince Andronnikov’s salon. “Of course, he would offer his own people,” Simanovich said, but neither he nor Rasputin resented it. Business was business. There was enough to go around, and the tsar appeared to be happy. Simanovich claimed that Nicholas told each new minister that “Rasputin is a messenger of God.… Never in my life did I have such love and confidence in anyone as in Rasputin.” The notes Rasputin scrawled to ministers often contained the phrase “I will tell the loving one.” This implied that he would talk to the tsar on the subject. “A minister on such occasions regarded Rasputin’s request as an order of the tsar,” Simanovich claimed, “and put a corresponding resolution on the note.”
If there was exaggeration in this, and there is ample evidence that the tsar did not share his wife’s total trust in the starets, it was nevertheless taken seriously by the diplomatic corps. Petrograd was a top-caliber posting for ambassadors and foreign correspondents. None had the slightest doubt of Rasputin’s importance. Maurice Paléologue, the shrewd French ambassador, thought it critical to meet the starets and sound out his views on the war. Keeping Russia in the war was a mortal matter for the French and British, for if the Russians sued for peace, more than a hundred German divisions would be freed to fight on the Western front. Paléologue dismissed the more lurid accounts that Alexandra and Rasputin headed a “peace party” that was in secret negotiations with Germany. He remained deeply suspicious of the embezzlers and cardsharps in Rasputin’s entourage. “He is the distributor of German subsidies,” he said flatly of Manus. “He secures the relationship with Berlin, and it is through him that Germany hatches and maintains her intrigues in Russian society.”
The ambassador made a careful note of his meeting with the starets. “Brown hair, long and ill-combed,” he wrote, “a black, stiff beard; a high forehead; a large, jutting nose; a powerful mouth.” He found the whole expression of the face to be concentrated in eyes of a strange brilliance, depth, and fascination. Their gaze was at once “piercing and caressing, ingenuous and astute, direct and remote.” Those eyes. People disagreed on their color—Paléologue thought them flax blue, others steel gray, emerald, yellow, viper green, red—but all sensed their strength. They talked about the war. At first Rasputin condemned it for the sufferings it piled on the Russian people. “There are too many killed, too many wounded, too many orphans, too many ruins, too many tears!” he cried. “I know villages, large villages, where everyone is in mourning.… And those who come back from the war, in what a state, dear Lord! Crippled, maimed, blind!… For a space of more than twenty years only pain will be harvested on Russian soil.”
It was not the talk that Paléologue wanted. He argued back that it was terrible, yes, but an indecisive peace, a peace of exhaustion, would be a crime against the dead. It would risk internal catastrophe. To his surprise, Rasputin agreed. “You are right,” he said. “We must fight until we are victorious.” The ambassador was intensely relieved. He said that he knew people in high positions who had told him Rasputin was trying to persuade the tsar to end the war. The starets gave him a suspicious look, scratched his head, and said, “There are fools everywhere.” He went on to say that Kaiser Wilhelm was inspired by the devil, but that God would abandon him one day and “he’ll crumple up like an old shirt that’s thrown on the dung heap.”
Rasputin had reversed his views to please the ambassador. In fact, he was opposed to the war—“in his opinion,” Simanovich said, “any kind of peace was better for Russia than war”—and he admired the Germans. But it was beyond his powers to influence war and peace. He had no official post, no staff, no direct control of policy, and none of its implementation. He did not govern Russia; what he was doing, with the empress and their appointees, was so rotting the country’s morale that it was becoming ungovernable. The distinction was acute, and it was one that his intelligence fully recognized. Rasputin rarely became involved in political arguments; when he did, as with the ambassador, he retreated. Instead of confronting him, it was easier to ruin a man by dropping a word to the empress.
Rasputin had his ideas, though, and they had a rugged honesty. Above all, as Simanovich said, he “always remained a peasant stressing his muzhik, uncouth nature in front of people who regarded themselves as mighty and superior to all, and he never forgot the millions in the Russian villages.” He had as little time for the Allies as he had for the war. At a party a guest asked him why he sympathized with the Germans and hated Englishmen and Frenchmen. He was drunk, Simanovich says, and answered unexpectedly: “I cannot like the French, because I know they don’t like me,” he said. “They are republicans and revolutionaries, and they think I’m funny. I can only work with monarchists. Monarchists should never fight with each other. They can always get on well. Therefore Russia should reconcile with Germany as soon as possible.”
When he was warned that it was dangerous to talk of peace, he exploded. “I’m not afraid of anything!” he yelled. “No one has the right to kill people. There are people who are agents in money dealings and the sale of land. I want to be such a go-between in peace. Even Papa says I’m right and we should remain neutral.” He was not impressed when he was told that “Papa” had vowed to fight until the last German had left Russian soil. “The tsar can say that,” he said. “He owns his own word. He can give it, and he can take it back. He’s the tsar and he can do anything.” He praised the German colonists who had settled in Russia under Catherine the Great. He was impressed that they drank coffee as well as tea, a sign of wealth. “A Russian likes German goods,” he said. “German merchants have good products, and they look after the customer in every way. Germans know how to work. If a German war prisoner gets to a Russian village, women try to have him in their house because he’s a good worker.”
He was pro-American, too; a fair number of peasants had relatives in the States and received money from them. “Many poor immigrants have become rich farmers in America and were happy with their big wages,” Simanovich commented. “America seemed a fairy land for a poor Russian peasant. Rasputin therefore liked America, and he advised living with America in friendship and peace.”
A deep-dyed reactionary when it came to the autocracy, Rasputin was liberal elsewhere. He backed land reform and wanted manor houses turned into schools. He complained that serfs had lived better than modern country folk. “They got food and clothing,” he said. “Nowadays a peasant gets nothing and he has to pay taxes. His only cow gets taken by the bailiff and sold at auction. Peasant kids run around naked until they’re ten. They get wooden clogs instead of boots. There’s not enough land.… Life stops in the villages.” His passion for railroads went further than making love on them. “They’re afraid that railroads will spoil the peasants,” he complained of landowners. “That’s shit. With railroads a man can look for a better living. Without railroads a Siberian peasant has to stay home because he can’t walk all through Siberia.” He despised noblemen, if not their wives. “Noblemen have too much,” he said with socialist fire. “They don’t do anything themselves, and they stop others from doing anything. If an educated person appears, they cry that he’s a revolutionary and mutineer and get him locked up. A peasant isn’t allowed to have an education. This master’s policy won’t lead to anything good.”
Rasputin was also sympathetic to minorities. Simanovich said that he favored Polish independence—“they are the same Slavs as Russians and they must feel themselves right”—and civil liberties for Jews. Simanovich was a Zionist and owned a small strip of land in Palestine, where he dreamed of retiring. Rasputin shared his attraction to the Holy Land. At moments in 1915 when they tired of “our unhealthy and dangerous life” in Petrograd, they discussed moving there. All that detained them, Simanovich claimed, were “the goals we had set for ourselves. Rasputin wished to conclude peace, and I thought about equalizing Jews’ rights.” Simanovich insisted that the Jewish question must come first. “If we could solve it,” he said, “I might get so much money from American Jews that we would have enough for the rest of our lives.” Ingeniously, he suggested that Rasputin’s departure for Palestine would be such a relief to the establishment that he could use it to win concessions. “I presume that the palace circle and the nobility will agree to equal rights for Jews if thus they can be freed from you,” he said. “I’ll take the money and share it with you. It’ll be enough for the two of us and our families.”
Rasputin was more realistic. “Papa doesn’t want peace,” he said. “He doesn’t even want to hear about the Jews. His relatives won’t allow him to grant a constitution. More than once I said to him: ‘If you grant a constitution, you’ll be called Nicholas the Great.’ … He’s afraid of everyone. When he talks to me in his study, he looks around to see if anyone is eavesdropping. I insisted that my peasants be granted a constitution. But the rich don’t want it.… The fact that Papa won’t allow himself to be persuaded is a great trouble. As soon as I’m away he forgets his promises. That’s our misfortune.”
Were these, as it suited Simanovich to suggest, really two idealists set on helping their fellow men? Certainly Rasputin had few of the prejudices that marked the Russian stereotype. He was fond of Simanovich, giving him pet names, Simochka and Simoniki, and a ring inscribed “To the best of Jews.” The treatment of Jews, “against whom everything was permitted, everything was possible,” was indeed a moral disgrace; it was, Witte wrote, transforming them “from timorous creatures into bomb throwers, assassins, brigands—revolutionaries—willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause.” Eight hundred thousand Jews had been driven from the combat zones, their shops and synagogues looted, hanged on false charges of espionage.
The two would-be idealists had unpromising material to work with. The tsar was almost casually anti-Semitic, so natural was his inherited contempt. The war was used as an excuse to increase restrictions; all publications in Hebrew characters were banned and correspondence in Yiddish prohibited. Alexandra shared her husband’s views. When she was in Germany in 1910 seeking treatment for her heart, her brother recommended that she see a leading specialist from Frankfurt. In the atmosphere of zhidoedstvo—kike-eating—she did not want to be treated by a doctor who, however well known, was a Jew. She went instead to a local gentile doctor, who did her no good. Rasputin himself associated with Black Hundred pogromists.
Yet there is evidence that he tried—and sometimes tried hard—to fight bigotry. The Siberian had a strong streak of compassion, and, for all his venality, Simanovich was sincere in his Zionism. The two often acted in concert to help individual Jews. They arranged residence permits, helped petitioners to practice legally in the law and medicine, and had fines and exile orders quashed. They put much effort into sidestepping the numerus clausus that restricted the number of Jewish students in colleges and universities. Simanovich said he was besieged every day by “trains of young Jews” seeking entry to Petrograd University. Rasputin wrote standard notes for them to take to ministers and professors. “Dearest minister,” they ran. “Mama wishes that these Jewish students learn in their motherland and that they should not be forced to go abroad, where they become revolutionaries. They have to stay at home. Grigory.” The reference to the empress—Mama—usually meant that the students were admitted despite the quota. Simanovich used his expertise in setting up gambling dens under academic-sounding titles to establish the “Agricultural and Hydrotechnical Institute,” a front that enabled hundreds of Jews and Christians to have their military service postponed until they had finished their nonexistent studies.
The pair also fielded many requests by Jews who wanted to travel outside their domicile or settle in Petrograd and Moscow. Simanovich exploited a loophole that gave rights of domicile to craftsmen and apprentices. He used Rasputin’s reputation to get a foothold in the Petrograd Craft Bureau, which handled such cases. As a jeweler, he also appointed his own “apprentices”—in reality “actors, writers, teachers, et cetera”—and kept a few unused worktables in his apartment to maintain the fiction. In other cases Rasputin arranged for petitioners to register as members of the Petrograd governor’s staff, which gave the right of domicile in the capital.
The starets invariably made his peasant supplicants “doubly welcome, thinking nothing of keeping much more fashionable people waiting,” seldom refusing them money. He was equally generous with Jews and Poles, insisting that “the blood of the minorities is precious.” Even if he had not slept after a night’s drinking, he would appear at ten, bow low, look at the crowd, and say, “You’ve all come to ask me for help. I’ll help you all.” He “never thought twice” about whether a petitioner was worthy of his help. He said to those sentenced by courts, “The conviction and the fear experienced are punishment enough.” He liked to humble the powerful. “Dear generals,” he told senior officers waiting to see him. “You are used to getting priority. But there are Jews without any rights here, and I must deal with them first. Come on in, Jews. I want to do everything for you.”
There is evidence that the empress’s anti-Semitism softened during the war. In one letter to Nicholas, she complained of the treatment of a Russian Jew in her hospital who had returned from America the moment war broke out to enlist in Russia. He had lost his right arm at the front and had been awarded the St. George’s Cross. “He longs to remain here & have the right to live wherever he pleases in Russia, a right the Jews don’t possess.… One sees the bitterness & I grasp it … one ought not to let him become more bitter & feel the cruelty of his old country.” Nicholas replied that “I have made a note on the petition of the wounded Jew from America: ‘to be granted universal domicile in Russia.’ ” But the success was limited to individual cases. There were no legal reforms. “The tsar is afraid to give Jews equal rights,” Simanovich quoted Rasputin. “He’s sure he’d be killed if he did.”