While Rasputin was in Siberia the empress took a trip with her daughters and Vyrubova to Mogilev. Rasputin had wanted to go with her—he was worried that the tsar was drifting out of orbit—but General Alexeev, the senior Stavka officer, declined. Alexandra brought the general an icon as a gift from Rasputin, and took up his refusal as she walked with him after dinner. She asked him what he had against the starets. “Nothing, Majesty, personally I have never met him,” Alexeev replied. “Then why do you prevent his coming here? He gives the tsar such comfort. We owe him so much. Twice his prayers have saved Alexis from death.” “Majesty, the voice of the people is the voice of God,” he said. “It is not possible for me to allow the presence here of a man whom the people and the army think ill fated.”
The empress bade him a cold adieu. She hated with the same furious totality that she loved. She loved few, and Alexeev now joined the many she hated. When she heard a few weeks later that he had cancer, she reveled in his sickness. “God sent this illness to save you fr[om] a man who was lossing [sic] his way & doing harm by listening to bad letters & people,” she wrote to the tsar.
It was at best eccentric to entertain four beautiful young women and their mother at a high command in wartime. Nicholas, however, was happy to have the diversion—he thanked Alexandra for “bringing me life and sun in spite of the rainy weather”; tender and loyal after so many years, he said that “when I meet you, having been parted for long, I become stupidly shy, and only sit and gaze at you”—for doing so took his mind away from the disintegration of his government. The agriculture minister found it impossible to get the tsar to concentrate on real problems such as the food crisis. “He kept interrupting me with the everyday trivia that interested him … how the weather was, whether the flowers were out,” Alexander Naumov said shortly before resigning. “Like the neurotic who preserves his equanimity only until some vulnerable point is touched upon, the emperor, clearly exhausted … preferred to think about lighter and happier things.”
Strikes escalated, transport was in chaos. The prices of flour and fat were up 260 percent over prewar levels; the cost of meat had more than tripled, salt sextupled. Internal dictatorship, General Alexeev wrote in a top-secret report, was the sole means of preventing anarchy. He suggested that all civil power be placed in the hands of one man, a supreme minister for state defense. This man would “unite, lead, and direct by his will alone the activities of all ministries and all government and civic organizations.” The idea attracted Nicholas. He would retain military power as supreme commander, while the “dictator” would rule behind the front on his behalf. The man he had in mind was—Stürmer; Stürmer, friend of the empress and the empress’s Friend, Stürmer, the five-million-ruble swindler, “low, intriguing, and treacherous,” “a man on whose word no reliance can be placed.” That was what the Allied ambassadors thought of him. Russians despised him far, far more.
Secrets were no longer kept. The Duma president Mikhail Rodzianko got hold of a copy of the report. He had already warned Nicholas that Rasputin was a direct threat to the dynasty. He now turned on Stürmer, the protégé, over coffee at a private dinner for ministers and Duma men. “You spend your time trying to discover an imaginary revolution,” he accused the prime minister. “You organize monarchist congresses, persecute public organizations, provoke endless intrigues which paralyze administration, and deliver the country into the hands of self-seekers.… Bribery, extortion, plunder are growing on all sides.” Then, without using a name, he moved on to Rasputin. “Persons who deserve the gallows continue to remain in high favor.” The other ministers were restless with embarrassment, but Rodzianko was not done with Stürmer yet. “You should realize that you are neither beloved nor trusted by the nation,” he boomed on. “In your senseless search for a bogey revolution, you are murdering the living soul of the people and creating unrest which sooner or later may breed an actual revolution.”
Rodzianko hastened to the Stavka to warn the tsar against any thought of a dictator, least of all Stürmer. “What measures would you propose for setting affairs in the rear in order?” Nicholas asked him. “Grant a responsible ministry,” he replied. The tsar said he would think it over. He did not. “It goes without saying that Rodzianko talked a lot of nonsense,” he wrote to Alexandra. “Of all the foolish things which he said, the most foolish was … replacing Stürmer.” Far from sacking him, the tsar had a stunning promotion in mind.
Intelligent, cultivated, and able, Sergei Sazonov had been foreign minister since 1910. Trusted by the public and the Allies, he suffered the fatal flaw of loathing Rasputin. The empress also suspected—rightly—that he favored a responsible ministry and Polish autonomy. Both of these, she said, would compromise “Baby’s future rights.” She campaigned relentlessly against him. “Long-nosed Sazonov … is such a pancake,” she wrote to Nicholas. “Wish you cld think of a good successor to Sazonov—need not be a diplomat.… Stürmer always disapproved of him as he is such a coward towards Europe and a parliamentarist—and would be Russia’s ruin.” Nicholas gave way in characteristic style. He saw Sazonov at the Stavka and appeared to agree with him over Poland. Sazonov was taking a short holiday in Finland at the end of June when he learned that he had been dismissed. His deputy minister was in tears when he begged the British ambassador to persuade the tsar to reverse the decision. “I cannot exaggerate the services which Sazonov has rendered the cause of the Allies,” Buchanan cabled Nicholas. There was no reply.
Sazonov was replaced by Stürmer. In the five months since Manuilov and Rasputin had brought him to Alexandra’s eye, the “honeyed and furtive” nonentity had acquired the great offices of prime, interior, and foreign minister. Although he now dropped the interior portfolio, he combined the other two. He fancied himself in his new diplomatic role. He hung three paintings in his office, of the great European congresses of Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, with space for a fourth, which he told visitors was reserved for the great postwar Congress of Moscow, over which he would preside. “How fine it will be at Moscow! How fine it will be!” he congratulated himself, repeating his sentences by nervous habit. “God grant it! God grant it!”
On his return from Siberia, Rasputin was pleased enough to see Sazonov gone. He was not so happy that Stürmer had acquired another office without his help. He disliked the distance that Stürmer kept from him. “I’ll do for him,” he threatened. Manuilov, who used them both, tried to maintain friendly relations between the two. He secretly arranged meetings at night in the Peter and Paul Fortress through Lydia Nikitina, Rasputin’s admirer and the daughter of the fortress governor, for Stürmer was terrified of any public association with the starets. Stürmer even denied to Klimovich, the director of the police department, that he knew Manuilov. When Klimovich gave the premier a copy of Manuilov’s police record, Stürmer shook his head and said, “Yes, yes, what a scoundrel! A fine gentleman!” Yet Klimovich testified later that he had seen the two chatting and smoking cigarettes together, and that he was paying Manuilov a salary of eighteen thousand rubles a year on Stürmer’s direct orders.
Rasputin was also angry that the justice minister, Alexander Alexeivich Khvostov, had replaced his fat nephew as interior minister. The uncle was ill and tired. He did not want interior, the most exhausting post in the cabinet. “How did you dare to do me this dirty trick?” he asked Stürmer when he was pushed into it. Khvostov disliked Rasputin and was honest, a combination that troubled the starets.
It did not, though, dampen his spirits. On August 3 his neighbor Blagoveshchensky was kept awake by an all-night drinking bout. He estimated that it involved forty people and a Gypsy choir. “They all sang and danced from nine in the evening until 3:00 A.M.,” he wrote in his diary. “In the end, everyone was drunk, particularly ‘him.’ ” He drank all day from August 6 to 9—he “pestered the servants in the yard, thrust himself kissing on them”—until, to his neighbor’s relief, he returned to Siberia. Alexandra had hoped to go to Tobolsk to visit the shrine to St. Ioann of Tobolsk, illegally beatified the previous summer by Bishop Varnava. Instead she sent Vyrubova and Lili von Dehn, and asked Rasputin to go with them.
Public feeling against the starets was now so strong that Dehn thought it dangerous to advertise the trip. They left Petrograd, however, in a blaze of publicity. “Wires were sent in advance all along the line to announce our advent, and crowds thronged the stations to catch a glimpse of us,” she wrote. They traveled in style in a special saloon carriage attached to a Trans-Siberian train. At Tyumen they took a steamer for Tobolsk, arriving at dusk to find its churches and houses sharply silhouetted on the hills above the black river. The governor and Varnava met them, and they were quartered in the governor’s mansion. They visited the new saint’s tomb the next day and attended a special service in the cathedral.
On the way back Rasputin insisted they stop at Pokrovskoye and meet his wife, whom Dehn found a “charming, sensible woman.” He said that he wanted the tsar and tsarina to stay with him in his house. “But it’s too far,” Dehn said, shocked. “They must,” Rasputin said, and added, “Willingly or unwillingly, they will come to Tobolsk and they will see my village before they die.” After his murder, as prisoners of the revolution, they did. The little party moved on to Ekaterinburg; it was to be the death place of the imperial family, and Dehn said that, as soon as she got off the train, “I felt a sense of calamity. We were all affected: Rasputin was ill at ease, Anna perceptibly nervous.” They visited Rasputin’s old mentor, Makari, at his fowl-infested hermitage in the woods of Verkhoturye. He fed them bread and cold water, and they slept miserably on the mud floor of his hut. The ladies were glad to return to Petrograd. Rasputin followed them on September 7.
Rasputin returned to unpleasant news. Manuilov had been arrested by Klimovich on Alexander Khvostov’s orders. He was charged with extorting a large amount from a Moscow bank and with selling exemptions from military service. A honey trap, using ten thousand rubles in marked notes, had been laid for him. When the bait was taken, Khvostov told Stürmer that he had “an interesting piece of news which at first will probably frighten you, but later will please you.” Stürmer threw his arms around his interior minister and denounced Manuilov, his self-styled secretary, as “a blackguard and a blackmailer.” But he was not pleased; he was terrified. Manuilov made it clear that he would implicate both Rasputin and the premier at his trial. Stürmer had Klimovich dismissed without reference to Khvostov, who was then relieved of his own post. When he bade good-bye to Stürmer, Khvostov said, “It is the first time that I leave you with a feeling of sincere pleasure.” Russia had no interior minister.
Another of Rasputin’s circle was in deep trouble. Dmitri Rubinstein was accused of spying for the Germans. The financier had bought up all the stock in the Anchor Insurance Company, which specialized in factory insurance, and sold the company to a Swedish firm at a large profit. As part of the deal he sent plans of all the factories insured by the company to Stockholm. Many were plants engaged in the war effort. All mail and couriers were searched at the Swedish border with Russian Finland. When the plans were discovered Russian military intelligence believed it had stumbled on a giant espionage ring. Rubinstein, the Friend’s friend, was imprisoned and faced probable execution. The affair was headline news across the country.
Worse, Simanovich and Rasputin had introduced Rubinstein to Alexandra as a confidential banker. She had used him to transfer money, via Sweden, to needy friends and relatives in Germany. Rubinstein’s role, Simanovich said, was “very ticklish and dangerous and he carried out the tsarina’s commission with great craftiness and won her gratitude.” It was indeed sensitive, for transferring funds to enemy nationals was a hanging offense. Rubinstein’s connection to Rasputin and the empress was common knowledge. He had assiduously used Rasputin’s name, and the claim that he was banker to the royal house, to impress investors on his stock-ramping schemes. Rasputin did not charge Rubinstein for his help in influence peddling. Instead, with typical generosity and disdain for cash, he sent a stream of petitioners on to Rubinstein’s offices and the financier rewarded them with salaried but fictional posts in his bank.
The empress, Simanovich said, was “very much afraid that her relations with Rubinstein might become known, which would have set off an unheard-of scandal.” She tried to get the military to drop the prosecution, but the senior officer responsible, General Ruzsky, a “great enemy of the Jews,” refused. Afraid that she would be able to get his release from prison in Petrograd, the general had the banker transferred to the Pskov penitentiary. Rasputin took Rubinstein’s wife to Tsarskoye Selo to visit the empress in her infirmary. “Calm down and go home,” Alexandra told the hysterical woman, promising to intervene with the tsar. Rubinstein, however, had set up his bank with capital from the Voyeikov brothers, one of whom, Maj. Gen. V.N. Voyeikov, was palace commandant. The bank had run up huge losses, and the brothers were 800,000 rubles out of pocket. For this they blamed Rubinstein, and they connived with the military in Pskov to keep him locked up.
Scandal had almost lost its power to shock; by the late summer of 1916, the country was close to catatonia. The self-seeking adventurers in high office, the Times correspondent Robert Wilton thought, were now copied in all walks of life. The whole of Russia “seems to be engaged in a whirl of plunder,” he wrote. “Every man is trying to rob his neighbour to the utmost of his capacity.… Never was there a time when money could be earned so easily by nefarious methods.” The collapse in vital areas such as food supply, he wrote, “has, I fear, gone beyond all remedy.” A friend who had just traveled through Siberia told Wilton that it was overflowing with food. In Petrograd, in one of the greatest wheat-growing countries on earth, white bread had disappeared. There was no sugar, little milk or butter, and no meat beyond scrawny chickens.
Pogroms were in the air, and spy mania was universal. Vassilyev met senior government officials who told him that two aides of Kaiser Wilhelm had been seen walking down the Nevsky Prospect with their coat collars turned up; they wanted to know what sort of an Okhrana he was running that allowed such men to stroll unmolested through Petrograd. Radio stations were scented out everywhere. The Germans were said to run regular flights by Zeppelin airship to a forest clearing near Petrograd to land fresh agents and to carry others back to Berlin for debriefing. “It was such idle gossip,” Vassilyev wrote wearily, “that gave rise to the parrot cry, soon in everybody’s mouth, ‘Things cannot go on like this!’ ”
Anyone with a German name, or who had worked for the Germans, was suspect. Russian journalists who had been correspondents for German newspapers were banished to Siberia, though Vassilyev agreed that there was not a shred of evidence against them. He noted that life was intolerable for unfortunates with the surname Kaiser. The privileges of German Baltic barons at court had long been an issue; when Prince Menshikov, known for his wit as well as his catamites, was once asked what favor he would like, he replied, “I’d like to be promoted to be a German.” The war, and the stories of enemy atrocities, added fresh venom to attacks on leading court figures—the German-born empress herself, Count Fredericks, the head of the imperial household, and others with German names: the chief court marshal, the adjutant general, the master of horse. On the Baltic coast the towers of country houses belonging to Baltic barons were reported to be signal stations for the German fleet; the observatory of an amateur astronomer near Riga was ransacked separately by the police, army, and navy.
Inevitably, Prince Andronnikov was the next of Rasputin’s circle to be suspected of spying. The prince was spending immense sums on high living and his lovers. “I cannot even approximately define the amount of his expenses,” his valet Kilter later testified. “My wife used to bring almost every other day 1,000 rubles to him from the Russian-Asian Bank. She received the money by check. He paid 600 rubles a month for his apartment. Not a single day passed without guests coming for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. People used to come in groups, not caring whether the host was at home or not.” The Okhrana received reports that all this was paid for with German money. When Andronnikov was investigated by the Rasputin inquiry commission the following year, no proof of treason was found. The commission was satisfied that he was too flighty and self-obsessed to be a thoroughgoing traitor. He had no political ideals; like Rasputin’s, his opinions of politicians were based on his personal relations with them. “If they ignored him or he quarreled with them, he discredited them in every possible way,” the industrialist Alexis Putilov testified. “If they were good and kind to him, he praised them left and right.”
Nevertheless, the pro-German myths surrounding the empress and Rasputin and his circle were widely accepted and immensely damaging. It was even suggested that Rasputin had engineered the loss of the Royal Navy warship Hampshire, which struck a mine in the North Sea while bringing General Kitchener, the British war minister, on a secret visit to Russia. It is true that Rasputin was pleased—“our Friend says it is good for us that Kitchener died, as later he might have done Russia harm,” the empress wrote to Nicholas—and true that the Germans were grateful to him for the demoralization and scandal he bred. There was no evidence at all that he was in their pay, or of the existence of a “German camarilla” at court. But hard fact in the sullen cities was in yet shorter supply than food.
The drifting scum of gossip was unnerving the empress. “Why does Grigory stay in Petrograd?” she asked Lili von Dehn. She half-wished he would return to Siberia; though, she said, “we can’t possibly discard him, he has done no wrong.” At Alexandra’s suggestion Dehn visited Rasputin at his apartment. He was having tea, and she asked him for a private word. He took her into his room. To her irritation, Laptinskaya went with them. “Grigory, you must leave Petrograd at once,” she told him. “You can pray for Their Majesties just as well in Siberia. You know what is being said. For their sakes, go.”
He seemed ready to take the hint—“I’m sick and tired of it all, I’ll go”—but Laptinskaya raged: “How dare you try to control Father’s spirit! I say that he must stay. Who are you?” Rasputin then said, “Perhaps you’re right. I will stay.”
Rasputin was thus in Petrograd to welcome the new interior minister. Alexander Protopopov came from Simbirsk, a city that sat quietly above the mile-wide Volga, its courtyards and cherry orchards overgrown with grass, a place where “here and there someone sticks his head out of a window, looks around, gaping in both directions, spits, and disappears.” It had produced the revolutionaries Kerensky and Lenin, and Oblomov, the symbol of Russian lethargy in Ivan Goncharov’s eponymous novel. Protopopov had little in common with any of them. He was the “typical noble in debt who is always prepared to do anything that is wanted,” a compulsive busybody with “a finger in every pie,” and his opinions veered at will between the liberal and the reactionary. He came from the gentry—his father owned a large cloth factory in Simbirsk—and had trained as a lawyer. He was small and neurotic; his “wild bright eyes shifted all the time”; with his sleek hair he was said to resemble “an excitable seal.”
His behavior hovered between eccentricity and lunacy. Although the charitable attributed his obvious ill health to a progressive spinal disease, he was almost certainly syphilitic. He had first met Rasputin the previous winter through Peter Badmaev, a practitioner in Tibetan herbalism who was treating him for leg ulcers, hallucinations, partial paralysis, and other symptoms of advanced syphilis. Badmaev was quite as extraordinary as his patient. He was a Russified Buryat Mongol who had gone to St. Petersburg in his youth to study orthodox medicine before abandoning it for Tibetan cures. Tibetans used plant extracts and animal secretions as medicines and were skilled at osteopathy, massage, and hypnotism. Badmaev developed a thriving practice; when he converted to Orthodoxy he was well enough known at court for Alexander III to stand as his godfather. He prescribed powders as specifics against cholera. His popular “herbal infusions”—with names like French perfumes, Elixir du Tibet and Lotus Noir—were probably laced with heroin. Rasputin said they made the deepest concerns “seem like petty trifles.… You’ll become happy, so-o ha-appy, and s-illy that you won’t worry about anything.”
Badmaev suggested to Rasputin that his patient—then a deputy president of the Duma—would make an excellent minister. Rasputin assured Protopopov, with “much giggling and simpering,” that he would find him a portfolio. Simanovich approved; “we had his promise to do something for the Jews,” he claimed. Alexandra duly took up the cause at the beginning of September. “My own Sweetheart,” she wrote Nicholas on September 7. “Grigory begs you earnestly to name Protopopov.… You know him & had such a good impression of him—happens to be of the Duma (is not left) & so will know how to be with them.… He likes our Friend since at least 4 years & that says much for a man.” In the same letter she showed mounting irritation with Stürmer, who was failing to see Rasputin and was thus “a big act” who had “lost his footing.” She had not changed her views on the Duma—it was still full of “rotten people”—but she thought Protopopov’s appointment as interior minister would “make a great effect among them & shut their mouths.”
At first Nicholas hesitated. “Our Friend’s opinions of people are sometimes very strange,” he replied on September 9. “All these changes make my head go round. In my opinion they are too frequent. In any case, they are not good for the internal situation of the country, as each new man brings with him alterations.” He knew his wife’s meddling was dangerous—he apologized nervously: “I am very sorry that my letter has turned out to be so dull”—but he gave way the next day. “It shall be done,” he wrote.
Alexandra was delighted with her Friend’s new find. Far from thinking Rasputin erratic, she felt that his worldliness compensated for the protocol-induced limitations of her own and her husband’s existence. “He will be less mistaken in people than we are—experience in life blessed by God,” she assured the tsar. Rasputin and Simanovich took Protopopov to Vyrubova’s cottage and introduced him to the empress on September 21. She spent ninety minutes with him and found him “very clever, coaxing, beautiful manners, speaks also very good French & English.” She was frank with him; she told him that she found it difficult to trust people, and that she expected him to obey. “I am no longer the slightest bit shy or afraid of the ministers and speak like a waterfall in Russian!!!!” she boasted to Nicholas. “And they kindly don’t laugh at my faults. They see I am energetic & tell all to you I hear & see & that I am yr wall in the rear … eyes & ears.” She reveled in her power, her vigor restored, in command; had not her grandmother stamped her name, Victorian, on an epoch? Nicholas acknowledged her role in his reply on September 23. “It rests with you to keep peace and harmony among the ministers,” he wrote. “Thereby you do a great service to me and our country.” In Protopopov she served catastrophe.
The new minister was hopelessly compromised. As Rasputin remarked, his “honor stretches like a piece of elastic.” He was heavily in debt. Simanovich bought out his promissory notes for 150,000 rubles to prevent his being declared bankrupt. “Protopopov promised to give me back this sum after his nomination out of the secret funds of his ministry,” Simanovich said. Some of the promissory notes, together with others from grand dukes and ministers, were found in Simanovich’s apartment after the revolution.
Protopopov met Rasputin regularly if clandestinely at Gorokhovaya ulitsa, coming late at night, wearing false spectacles, “stealing through a back door, with raised collar so as not to be recognized by his own detectives.” His “lascivious girlfriend,” Madame Lunts, an attorney’s wife, was also a frequent visitor. Rasputin deeply impressed him. “Confidential interpreter of events, judge of the people,” Protopopov testified later. “Great influence upon the tsar. Upon the tsarina—enormous.… Anyone else approaching the tsar would have been confronted by the will of the tsarina, while Rasputin not only had her support—but obedience, Vyrubova’s worship, and the love of the tsar’s children.” Vain himself—although he was a civilian, he wore the uniform of a gendarmerie general, with high boots and a dress belt he had designed—he was awed by the “care and attention” the empress paid to Rasputin’s appearance. “His silken shirts were embroidered by her,” he testified. “She gave him the golden cross on a gold chain he wore around his neck, and the clasp had the tsar’s letter, N. He talked to them firmly and with confidence.”
The new interior minister was put to work at once to free the Friend’s friends. He dined with the empress at Vyrubova’s cottage on September 25. Madame Sukhomlinova, the voluptuous young wife of the ex–war minister, had visited Rasputin several times to plead for her husband’s release from prison. The starets had agreed to help; whether she paid him in kind is not known. Alexandra now took a large sheet of paper and wrote to the tsar asking him to order the release of Sukhomlinov and her banker Rubinstein. “Protopopov quite agrees with the way our F[riend] looks upon this question,” she wrote. “Write this down to remember when you see him and also speak to him about Rubinstein to have him sent quietly to Siberia.… Prot[opopov] thinks it was Guchkov, who must have egged on the military to catch the man, hoping to find evidence against our Friend. Certainly he had ugly money affairs—but not he alone.”
The two were released. Graffiti was daubed on walls in the cities: “Traitors defend Traitors.” For good measure Protopopov also had the charges against Manuilov dropped and banned all private meetings of civic organizations. The hopes liberals had in him were dashed within days of his appointment. “A man who works with Stürmer, frees Sukhomlinov, whom the entire country considers a traitor, liberates Manuilov, and persecutes the press,” cried Pavel Miliukov, leader of the Constitutional Democrats, a renowned historian who had taught at the University of Chicago, “cannot be our friend!”