The satyr and the saint mingled with each other by the moment in the fall of 1915. Elena Djanumova returned from Moscow on November 24 to plead with Rasputin for her mother. He had bombarded her with telegrams in her absence: “Bringing joy with greetings honoring with calmness,” “Indulging my treasure firmly spirit with you kisses Grigory.” Some of them were such apparent nonsense that she thought the telegraph office had jumbled the words; when they were retelegraphed, they were just as incomprehensible. Djanumova came with a friend, whom she called simply Lyolya. The Okhrana agents identified her as Galina Fyodorovna Filippova, age twenty-nine, the wife of a hereditary honorable citizen. She risked losing her fortune in a complicated family lawsuit. Her lawyer had advised her that Rasputin was the best bet to help her; she was a striking blonde with sly blue eyes.
The women put up at the Russia Hotel and phoned Rasputin at Petrograd 646-46. He asked them to come over right away. He liked Lyolya; he sat on a sofa with her and put his hand on her knee. He took them out to dinner in a private room at the Donon Restaurant on the Moika. He wore a beautifully tailored peasant’s cloth coat with a brocade lining. His eyes wandered over Lyolya, but he was restrained and well behaved. He spoke about Siberia and its grandeur and invited them to visit him there in the summer. “We’ll be fishing,” he said. “I’ll treat you to honey like you’ve never eaten before. Flowers in Siberia smell so sweet.” He got the car to drop them back at their hotel and went on somewhere else.
Elena noticed the Okhrana men trailing them. Komissarov’s agents were remorseless appendages, but Rasputin did not resent them. He got on well with the gendarmerie general, a beefy, coarse man with a sharp eye for humbug and a hard drinker. At first the starets had tried to mount a pious smoke screen during their regular chats. “Stop the holiness, talk sense, and have a drink,” Komissarov said. Rasputin was delighted and began taking his minder with him to nightclubs and the Gypsies. The general amused him, and he picked up the bills. As to the agents, they gave him protection, and he knew he needed it.
“It’s no surprise,” he explained when Elena asked why he was followed. “I’ve got a lot of enemies. I’m sort of an eyesore to people. Would be glad to have me done in. But—try and do it!”
“They love you very much in Tsarskoye, and they protect you?”
“Yes, they do, both he and she,” he replied. “He loves me even more. How can they not love me? If I’m not there, there won’t be them, there won’t be Russia.… You think I’m giving myself airs, Frantic? No, my dear one, I know what I’m saying. Everything will be as I say.”
Rasputin had a hard day with petitioners on November 26; he asked Elena and Lyolya to join them. Some sat in the dining room, while others milled in the hall—priests, students, ladies of the world, monks, officers from crack regiments, all seeking favors. The starets invited individuals into his study, darting out from time to time to embrace a lady, pat a man on the head, or make a telephone call. The ladies sighed with ohs and ahs and said how sorry they were for him.
“How Father works, he gives so much to people.”
“And everybody reaches out for him, he makes everyone warm, he’s like a sun to everyone,” Laptinskaya said, pacing the dining room.
“They tear him to pieces, they don’t give him rest, they torture the father,” the ladies wailed.
Vyrubova came at 1:00 P.M. with a big portfolio. She was treated unceremoniously; everyone called her Annushka. She headed straight for the study and came back with a pack of petitions. She glanced through them and put them in the portfolio. Rasputin came out of his study and threw himself on a chair, wiping the sweat from his brow.
“Can’t stand it anymore,” he complained. “So many folks have come. Received them since morning and still they keep coming.”
Vyrubova comforted him. “I’ll help you, Father. I’ll see some of them. With some of them I can solve their problems without you.” She took over in the study.
Elena had received a telegram that her niece Alisa was seriously ill in Kiev with scarlet fever and diphtheria. “What’s the matter with you, Frantic?” Rasputin asked. “You’re so sad, what’s on your heart?” He led her into his bedroom. She made a sign to Lyolya to follow her. “Comfort Lenochka, Father,” Lyolya said. “Think how unhappy she is, her niece is dying.” There followed “something strange,” which Elena could not explain.
Rasputin took her by the hand. His face changed; it became like a dead man’s, yellow, waxen, immobile. He showed the whites of his eyes and jerked her hand. He said hoarsely: “She won’t die, she won’t die, she won’t die.” He let go of her hand, and color flushed back into his face. He carried on talking as if nothing had happened. The telephone kept ringing. New petitioners arrived with flowers and cakes.
When Elena returned to her rooms, a telegram from Kiev was waiting for her: “Alisa is better her temperature has fallen.” Rasputin called at the hotel later; he had turned down an invitation to a dinner party, he said. Elena thought that he was drawn like a magnet by Lyolya. She showed him the telegram. “Was it really you who helped?” He answered firmly: “But I told you she would be better.”
“Well then, do what you did last time and perhaps she’ll recover entirely,” Elena said.
“Silly one, do you really think I can do it?” he said. “It’s not me. It was from above. And it can’t be done again. But I said she’d recover, so why do you worry?” Indeed, letters kept coming for Elena from Kiev. Alisa was making a perfect recovery. As with the tsarevich’s illness at Spala, Rasputin was many hundreds of miles away from the patient when he predicted a recovery that followed at once. Alisa’s doctors, like the tsarevich’s, were astonished; her mother, like Alexandra, thought it a miracle.
Rasputin had recovered from the strains of healing and was in a lusty mood two days later. He spent the night with Princess Stefaniya Semenovna Dolgorukaya in her suite at the Astoria Hotel on the Morskaya. This was risky; the princess was the wife of a gentleman of the emperor’s bedchamber. He was equally free with the mistresses of politicians. The following evening he was visited by a Madame Leikart, who wanted him to intervene in a business affair on her husband’s behalf. He asked her to kiss him; she refused and left. He was not frustrated for long; that night he enjoyed Nadezhda Ivanovna Voskoboinikova, a young widow and the kept woman of Sen. Vasily Nikolayevich Mamontov.
No word of these activities appeared in the press. Alexandra was delighted with Khvostov’s efforts, as well she might have been, for the fat young interior minister had much to conceal. Rasputin was drunk for most of December 1915. He was also working at a gallop. Proizvil, arbitrary and high-handed actions by the bureaucracy and the police, were the greatest grievance in Russia. Few were immune; many petitioners—government officials in frock coats, officers in spurs, Polish refugees, nuns, bankers, messengers, peasants, fine ladies in dresses by the couturiers Paquen and Ducet—filled Rasputin’s hall and anteroom, straining to catch a glimpse of him when the door into the dining room opened. A large sideboard, with a bronze lamp under a large glass shade, stood against the wall, stocked with wine bottles, plates of fried fish, jams, and tea, and baskets of flowers. A rocking chair was by the window.
A clerk from the banker Manus tried to push to the front, but Rasputin stopped him and turned to two young girls. “Well, my doves.” He smiled at them. They asked for help in their education. He peeled off some ruble notes and handed them to the girls. He ignored the banker’s clerk—the man was pushing a receipt book in front of him—and wrote a clumsy note to Vladimir Voyeikov, the palace commandant at Tsarskoye Selo. He scratched a cross beneath the name and the letters Kh V, for “Christ is Risen.” Then he scrawled: “My dear and valued friend, do it for me. Grigory.” He folded the note carefully, handed it to the girls, and gave them his hand to kiss.
He chose an old peasant from Saratov province next. He had come on behalf of a man called Gavrilo Shishkin, who had been sentenced to prison for fraud, and begged Rasputin to use his influence with the tsar to get a pardon. The peasant undid his shirt and extracted a bit of newspaper, unfolded it, and took out 250 rubles. He handed them to Rasputin with a petition. Rasputin pocketed both, made the sign of the cross over the peasant, and told him he would deal with the matter. Evgeniya Terekhova, a rich businesswoman, followed the peasant; she held a petition in her elegant gloved hand, asking for a contract to supply underclothing for the war ministry. “Yes, yes, my dear, I will do it,” he said, stroking her breast and smiling at her while she kissed his hands, then left with a look of triumph. A bald officer with gold pince-nez introduced himself as Sublieutenant Makasov, but a shabby civilian with a greasy hat elbowed him aside and told the starets urgently that he was a village teacher, that he had suffered an injustice at the hands of his director, that he—Rasputin cut him short but promised to write him a letter of introduction to the education minister.
A pretty brunette waited timidly, her eyes red with tears, holding a letter from a Moscow friend of Rasputin’s in her cheap gloved hand. She was called Maria Alexeevna, and she wanted help in getting her husband’s sentence of administrative banishment lifted. Many men—leftists, anarchists, Jews—were being exiled beyond the Urals. Rasputin asked her to wait in a little room off the kitchen. He returned and talked to the officer. An old widow in a poor coat and round hat said that she was destitute and at her wit’s end. Rasputin dipped into his pocket and gave her the 250 rubles he had just received on behalf of the fraud Shishkin.
A young man gave him a sheaf of banknotes; he handed them out to the peasants among his petitioners. An influence peddler named Pogan, a frequent visitor, introduced an engineer, Mendel Neumann, who wanted a pardon from the tsar from an eight-month sentence. Rasputin confirmed that he would bring the case to the tsar’s attention. He greeted a bathhouse attendant whom he knew, a wizened man with thinning gray hair, went into his study, and reappeared with a note. It was addressed to the local prefect of police. “My dearest friend, please excuse me,” it ran. “Help the poor bath attendant. Grigory.” The telephone rang constantly—Vyrubova, Sister Akulina, or Rasputin himself answered it—and messengers with presents of fruit and flowers and wine kept the doorbell jingling. Dunia reminded him that Maria Alexeevna, the girl with the exiled husband in Siberia, was waiting alone for him. He smiled and went to her.
The women whispered to each other as he went to the room; a “peculiar smile” played on their lips. It was a narrow room with an iron bed with a foxskin cover, a gift from Vyrubova, icons hung with ribbons, pictures of the tsar and empress, and biblical quotations on the walls. It was the place where he initiated novices in redemption from sin. Some women had left happy; some stormed out, their dresses awry, to complain bitterly of insults to the agents on the staircase. After a short time Maria Alexeevna came out of the room; eyes scanned her minutely for clues and found her “more sad and frightened than before.” When Rasputin reappeared his “hair clung untidy and rumpled to his temples,” and he was breathing heavily, evidence to the onlookers of payment in kind.
The interlude was brief—as usual a few minutes sufficed him—and Rasputin returned to the waiting petitioners. He blessed two nuns from Verkhoturye, where he had learned his trade from Makari, and promised to help some peasants who complained of a rapacious landlord. A fat banker from Kiev, accompanied by a servant carrying his fur cape, requested a private audience; a messenger from Baron Ginsburg gave him money and asked him to sign a receipt. The sculptor Aronson sat in the dining room; he had been commissioned to do a bust of the starets and was waiting to arrange a sitting.
When Elena and Lyolya appeared, Rasputin’s women became agitated and angry. The starets had ranted about the irritation these “haughty devils” had caused him by their resistance. He took a phone call, from Tsarskoye Selo, and laid siege to Lyolya again. He demanded that they have a tête-à-tête. “Don’t let your soul dry up without love,” he told her. “The soul darkens without the light of love and the sun won’t bring you joy and God will avert his face. Love is paradise.… I want you—and this comes from God and it is sinful to turn Him down. I am deprived of my strength without love.… Give me a moment of love and my strength will grow and”—here he grew crafty—“it will be better for your petition.” The two Moscow women found, they said, that, although “we don’t believe him and regard him critically,” he paralyzed their will and gave everything around them an aura that was “so unusual and it attracts.” They returned to their hotel.
Rasputin sent a colonel’s wife and singer, Madame B, to visit the hotel the following morning. She reproached Lyolya for torturing Father. “We are all indignant at seeing his sufferings. Why don’t you consent to belong to him? Is it possible to turn down such a saint?”
“Does this saint need sinful love?”
“He makes everything holy, and whatever you do with him is holy,” the colonel’s lady said without a second thought.
“Would you consent?”
“Of course,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ve belonged to him, and I regard it as the greatest bliss.”
“But you’re married, aren’t you? How about your husband?”
“He knows about it, and he regards it as a great happiness,” she said. “If Father wants somebody, we regard it as a great bliss—both we and our husbands, those of us who have husbands. We all see now how tormented he is about you. I made up my mind to tell you everything and to ask you on behalf of all the admirers not to torture the holy Father anymore, not to turn down the bliss.”
The Muscovites answered her sharply; she left offended and perplexed.
Rasputin came himself in the evening. He sat with Lyolya on the sofa, not letting her go.
“What a shame,” Elena said. “They think you’re a saint, but you incline her to fornication. It is sin, isn’t it?”
“Am I a saint?” Rasputin answered. “I’m more sinful than anyone. But there’s no sin in that. In fact, there is no sin. Man invented it. Look at the animals. Do they know what sin is?”
“Animals don’t know what sin is because they don’t know God.”
“Don’t speak like that,” Rasputin snapped. “There is wisdom in simplicity but not in knowledge.”
Lyolya changed the subject to her petition: “All you do, Father, is promise, but you don’t do anything.”
“You don’t do anything for me,” he replied. “All you do is use cunning. Give me a moment of love and your affair will go along smoothly. If there’s no love, there’s no strength in me and no luck. Just like with Frantic. I love her too much, would like to help her with all my heart, but nothing comes out without love.”
Lyolya left the room. Rasputin paced nervously. His face became rapacious; the eyes burned. He wanted an excuse to get Elena out of the suite. “You’ve got wine?” he asked her. “What have you got?”
“No, you know I drink only Madeira,” he said. “Listen, Frantic, slip out to my place. Tell Dunia, she’ll give you some.”
It was midnight, and there was a strong frost. Elena refused. “But I’m telling you that you will go,” he said. “If I send you, you must go.” He looked at her steadily; “sparkles of fury burned and skipped in his eyes.” Perhaps it was the look he had used on Stolypin and Rodzianko, the attempt at hypnosis. Elena looked away and cried out: “Don’t forget yourself. I’m not your servant, and I won’t run your errands.”
Lyolya ran back into the room. Rasputin slowly composed himself and, suddenly, embraced Elena. “Don’t be cross, Frantic,” he said. “I did it on purpose. I wanted to test whether you love me. If you loved me, you would obey me. You’d go in snow and at midnight. My Peter[sburg] ladies wouldn’t have turned me down. Each would have gone with joy. But you, perhaps, don’t love me.” Soon he left.
On December 3 Nicholas set out with Alexis on the imperial train from the Stavka to inspect the southern front. The boy had a heavy cold, sneezing so violently that he started to bleed from the nose, a most dangerous condition for a hemophiliac. His tutor, Pierre Gilliard, fetched Dr. Fedorov, who was aboard the train, but the bleeding was difficult to control and the boy’s temperature began to rise.
Rasputin rang the Muscovites to invite them to a dinner party, boasting that ministers would be present. They refused and were glad to spend an evening in peace. They were dozing off at around 1:00 A.M. when there was a pounding on the door. “Open it, hurry up, my sweet ones,” Rasputin roared. “We’re waiting. I’ve brought a minister with me.” Eventually the knocking stopped. Elena learned that the officer in the room opposite had saved them. He had come to investigate the noise and recognized Rasputin and “Minister Kh.” He stared at them; the minister became embarrassed and persuaded Rasputin to leave. “Minister Kh” was Khvostov.
At 3:00 A.M. Dr. Fedorov woke the tsar and asked him to order the train to steam directly to Tsarskoye Selo. The boy’s condition had deteriorated. The train had to be stopped several times the following day to allow Fedorov to change the plugs he had inserted in the heir’s nose. The boy was cradled in his berth by the giant sailor, Nagorny; it was too dangerous to allow him to lie full length.
In Petrograd, Rasputin was on a spree. The Muscovites avoided him by getting the hotel doorman to say that they had gone to the theater; the doorman said Rasputin was angry and swore at them. He consoled himself by visiting Elizaveta Evgenyevna Svechina, the young wife of an army officer. This was a potentially dangerous rendezvous, since Svechina’s husband was a colonel at the Stavka and thus uncomfortably close to the tsar. Rasputin left at 2:00 A.M. with Maria Markovna Yasininskaya, a twenty-eight-year-old married to a man rich enough to afford an apartment at 104 Moika, a close neighbor of the Yusupovs. The couple took a motorcar to the Villa Rhode, in the Novaya Derevnya district.
They were refused entry because of the late hour. The Okhrana had arranged for Rasputin to have the use of a private dining room, well away from prying eyes in the public areas. Rasputin was furious that—as the restaurant’s single most important client—he should be treated without respect. He kicked the door and tugged at the bell cord. It came away in his hand. When a policeman intervened he gave him five rubles to keep quiet. The couple then moved on to Masalsky’s Gypsy Choir, a block away. They stayed with the Gypsies until ten the next morning. After that, “heavily drunk,” they went to Yasininskaya’s apartment on the Moika.
His admirers were worried about Rasputin’s disappearance. Kulina Laptinskaya rang the Russia Hotel to see if he had slept with the Muscovites. She was surprised at Elena’s indignant denial. “Were it so, it would be happiness for you,” Laptinskaya said. “He left yesterday—said he was going to you, didn’t come back, so we’re thinking: the Moscow lady consented to accept the bliss. But you take offense. Where is he? Petitioners are waiting for him.”
Kulina rang back at midday to report that Rasputin was back from the Gypsies. He had a bad hangover. His admirers sat silent in the anteroom—Elena had joined them—while the sound of breaking glass came from the dining room. He came in with a bottle of wine in his hand, pale, his hair stuck to his forehead, eyes gloomy. He poured some wine into a tea glass and told the colonel’s wife to drink it. She reminded him that she was singing in a concert that evening, and that he had promised her that ministers would be in the audience. He told her to drink it anyway. Then he telephoned Beletsky. “My good little lady gives a concert tonight,” he told the police director. “Look out, don’t refuse and make sure you come.” Then he rang Khvostov, employing the same peremptory tone: “Look out you don’t miss my little lady’s concert.”
A priest was sitting by the wall. He listened to the telephone calls with surprise and respect; a starets who ordered ministers about was a power indeed. “What a good night I’ve had, Priest,” Rasputin said. “A pretty Gypsy was singing, and she sang so good—‘I’m coming, coming, coming to my dearest one.’ ”
“Those were cherubs who sang to you. Angels in the skies,” the priest said. Elena thought he was mocking the starets but realized he was serious. “Angels in the skies. Angels sang in their glory.”
“I’m telling you, Priest, a pretty Gypsy she was, a young one.”
“Cherubs, cherubs are singing to you with their heavenly voices,” the priest kept saying.
Rasputin grinned and went out to the petitioners. He came back with a pretty young girl, a refugee from the lost Polish provinces. “I’m looking at you, and you are so pretty,” he said. “The little nose, and the teeth—but I don’t love you, I love these Moscow women. They’ve tortured me to death. Had to drink all night long because of them.” He became maudlin. He went to the kitchen and began smashing plates again. Even Dunia, who normally treated him with robust good sense, was silent. Munya Golovina was frozen. They did not see a drunken peasant, Elena realized, but “an infuriated God.”
The telephone rang. Rasputin was asked to come to Tsarskoye Selo immediately. The heir had “swooned away” twice during his journey, and Gilliard thought the end had come. Alexandra was crying and praying as the boy was driven slowly from the railroad station to the palace. His little, pointed face had a “waxen, gravelike pallor,” Vyrubova wrote, as he was carried with infinite gentleness to his room and laid on his small white bed. His blue eyes looked out from his blood-soaked bandages with “pathos unbearable.” Blood poured down his face each time the doctors unwrapped his nose. Science could do nothing; “in despair,” Vyrubova said, “the empress sent for Rasputin.”
His women urged him to go to a bathhouse to sober up before he went to the palace. “You know my horses, they’ll carry you like birds,” one of them said. “First we’ll drive in the sleigh, and you’ll feel better in the frost. And then I’ll take you to a bathhouse. You know it always helps.” Rasputin consented. The women brought clean clothes. He dropped his trousers and changed in front of them; they helped him into fresh boots. Munya Golovina helped him stand upright as they put a fur coat on him. He started to sing merrily and snapped his fingers, “I’m coming, coming, coming to my dearest one,” the Gypsy song of the night before.
The sleigh ride and the bath had sobered him by the time he caught the train for Tsarskoye Selo. “He came into the room,” Vyrubova wrote, “made the sign of the cross over the bed, and, looking intently at the almost moribund child, said quietly to the kneeling parents: ‘Don’t be alarmed. Nothing will happen.’ Then he walked out of the room and out of the palace. That was all.” The boy, who had been whimpering with pain, fell asleep. He was well enough to sit up in bed the next morning.
On his return to Petrograd, Rasputin rang Elena to invite her to dine with the Gypsies. “The intoxication was gone,” she noted. “He was cheerful and lively.” She turned him down, and instead he met up with a lieutenant colonel, Nikolai Semyonovich Ezersky, and a Gypsy singer, Varvara. He had arranged for charges brought against Varvara by a Kiev court to be dropped, and in return she “sang songs during his orgies and entertained him in other fashions.” Ignoring the scene he had made two days before, he insisted on returning to the Villa Rhode. His party was asked to leave when the restaurant closed at 2:00 A.M. He slept with Varvara.
Elena was with him when the palace telephoned again. “Alyosha [Alexis] is not sleeping? His ear aches? Call him to the phone,” Rasputin said, gesturing for silence. The tsarevich was put on the line. “Why, Aloyshenka, are you burning the midnight oil? Hurts? Nothing hurts you. Go and sleep. Your ear doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t, I’m telling you. Sleep. Sleep right now. You hear me? Sleep.” Fifteen minutes later the palace rang back. The boy’s ear no longer hurt, and he was sleeping.
“He fell asleep just like that?” Elena asked.
“Why not?” Rasputin said. “I told him to.”
“But his ear hurt.”
“I told him it didn’t.” He spoke with a calm confidence, as if nothing else could have happened.
Elena left for Moscow, her honor intact and her petition unanswered. Lyolya stayed on in the hope that Rasputin would intervene in her lawsuit. He sent Ivan Osipenko, the bribable secretary to Metropolitan Pitirim, to collect her from her hotel and take her to a dinner party. She did not know where she was going, but the Okhrana agents reported it as the apartment of a financier, Andrey Knirsche, on Pesochnaya ulitsa. It was a smart affair, with Gypsy singers and a Russian choir. Rasputin was lively, drank heavily, and danced. He took Lyolya to a corner every now and then, talking to her about a “moment of love.”
After dinner a young man asked her to accompany him on the piano. Rasputin followed her with gloomy eyes. When she finished she sat with the singer on a sofa. She heard Rasputin’s voice: “So that’s what you are!” He demanded pen and paper. “I’ll write everything about you to Frantic,” he said angrily. “She’ll understand, and she’ll be sorry for me.” A politician called Alexander Protopopov, who was standing nearby, brought him a sheet of paper.
He sat in an armchair and scribbled a letter. “Here, take that to Frantic, to my simpleton,” he said. “She’s not the kind you are, she’s not a tart.” It read: “Sweet dear my Frantic angry at you don’t send me sly ones my sweet one don’t send them she’s for others give me someone simpler. Come to me I feel like I’m with you. Tears drop. Heart moans. In joy with you. Grigory.” With that he told Lyolya that she could leave. At 2:00 A.M. an Okhrana agent reported that he could see Rasputin dancing through a window. Rasputin returned to his apartment at seven, supported by two unknown men, “dead drunk.”
He returned to the Villa Rhode for a gala Gypsy evening a few days later. Some young civilians and officers at a table took offense when he asked a lady in their party to dance. The officers jumped to their feet, so Simanovich reported, and unsheathed their swords. Rasputin jumped away and fixed them with his “awful stare.” He cried: “You want to have done with me!” They were silent. “You’ve been my enemies, but you’re not anymore,” he said quietly. “You’ve seen that my power won.… You don’t have any power anymore that you can turn against me. Go home.” They did so. There were other occasions on which people set on attacking Rasputin apparently lost their nerve when he confronted them; the incident with his daughter’s fiancé was one. His powers were not magical—they did not save him from Hermogen’s fists and Guseva’s knife, nor would they prevent his eventual murder—but his force of character was an effective deterrent to some who wished him harm.
He had avoided a beating, or worse; he had drunk several cases of Madeira; he had slept with at least six women, and failed to sleep with two; he had received and helped several hundred petitioners; the tsarevich and the little girl in Kiev had pulled through. Rasputin’s fortnight was busy.