The empress had wanted Alexander Kerensky hanged. But her life and those of Rasputin’s circle were safe for the eight postrevolution months in which he and the moderate provisional government remained in power. True, there were arrests and investigations. Nicholas and Alexandra were held in the Alexander Palace. Kerensky visited them and found them far from monsters. The tsar he rated “a pleasant, somewhat awkward Colonel of the Guards, very ordinary except for a pair of wonderful blue eyes.” Alexandra was made of sterner stuff, “a born empress, proud and unbending, fully conscious of her right to rule.” Vyrubova was held in less pleasant surroundings—a cell in the Peter and Paul Fortress—and was subjected to the medical examination that found her a virgin.
Otherwise the family was untouched; these first revolutionaries had proudly abolished the death penalty. In August 1917 Kerensky transferred them from Tsarskoye Selo to Tobolsk, partly for their own protection, for the Petrograd region was becoming dangerous. The train that took them to Tyumen, on the track Rasputin had so often traveled, carried the flag of the Rising Sun and was marked “Japanese Red Cross Mission.” Kerensky did not want the Romanovs freed by monarchists or murdered by extremists; rural Russia was becoming a place of lynch law and arson, “turning into a Texas,” the newspaper Rech reported, “into a country of the Far West.” As the riverboat Rus taking them from Tyumen to Tobolsk steamed past Pokrovskoye, the family came on deck to look at the village and Rasputin’s unmistakable two-story house, fulfilling his prophecy that they would see his home before they died.
In October the Bolsheviks seized power in a coup d’état. The country slid into civil war. In April 1918, Nicholas and Alexandra were transferred from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg. The rivers were still frozen, and they were taken in carts along Trakt 4, a journey Rasputin had driven many times. The road, Alexandra wrote, was “perfectly atrocious, frozen ground, mud, snow, water up to the horses’ stomachs, fearfully shaken.” They stopped for a noon rest in Pokrovskoye; Alexandra noted that they “stood long before our Friend’s house, saw His family and friends looking out of the window.” The children joined them later by steamer. In the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks began to execute every Romanov they could lay their hands on. Grand Duke Mikhail, the tsar’s brother, was shot in June and his body burned in a smelting furnace. Nicholas and Alexandra were murdered in Ekaterinburg, together with Alexis and their four daughters, Dr. Botkin, three servants, and Anastasia’s pet spaniel, in July. The killers found that each girl had an amulet with Rasputin’s picture on it. A day later Grand Duchess Elizabeth, Grand Duke Serge Mikhailovich, and the three sons of Grand Duke Constantine were beaten and thrown, still living, down a mine shaft at Alapayevsk; a peasant heard them singing, and when the bodies were recovered by Whites, the injured head of one of the boys was found to have been carefully bandaged with a handkerchief. In January 1919 four more grand dukes, including the liberal historian Nikolai Mikhailovich, were executed in the Peter and Paul Fortress. This confirmed his own prediction that he would die close to the tombs of his ancestors, who lay in the nearby cathedral.
Some Romanovs escaped. Dowager Empress Marie, together with her daughters Grand Duchesses Xenia and Olga, were evacuated to the West aboard a British battleship. The dowager empress returned to her native Denmark. Xenia settled in Britain. Olga died in a room above a barbershop in Toronto, Canada, in 1960. The tsar’s first cousin Grand Duke Cyril escaped to France, where he declared himself “tsar of all the Russias” and held court in a Brittany village until his death in the American Hospital in Paris in 1938. Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich, Alexandra’s despised Nikolasha, died in Antibes in the south of France in 1929 and was accorded full military honors at his funeral by the Allies.
Rasputin’s actual and would-be assassins had mixed fortunes. Khvostov and Beletsky were shot in the Bolshevik Terror after sharing the same condemned cell. Purishkevich died of typhus while fighting for the Whites in southern Russia during the civil war. Felix Yusupov lost his colossal fortune when he fled into exile, but his coffers were replenished by a $375,000 defamation action against MGM for the Hollywood movie Rasputin and the Empress; he died in France in 1967. The Moika Palace became a trade union rest home. Grand Duke Dmitri was saved by his exile to Persia. In 1926 he married an American heiress in Biarritz; he was a champagne salesman in Florida in the 1930s. He died at age fifty of tuberculosis in Davos, Switzerland, in 1941. Iliodor went to New York, became a Baptist, and worked for a time as a janitor in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building on Madison Square. He died in the United States in 1952. Guseva, the instrument of his attempt, was released from a mental asylum after the revolution; her subsequent fate is unknown.
Rasputin’s daughter Maria became a lion tamer, touring the United States before settling in Los Angeles. Anna Vyrubova fled Petrograd for Finland, where she died in 1964 at eighty. The tsar’s onetime mistress Mathilde Kschessinskaya ran a ballet school in Paris for thirty years and lived into her nineties. Her St. Petersburg palace, which was used by the Bolsheviks as a headquarters, became a shrine to Lenin. The ballerina Tamara Karsavina, who had recognized Rasputin instantly by his eyes, married a British diplomat and died at age ninety-three in London. Prince Andronnikov was shot by the Reds. The tutor Pierre Gilliard became a professor at Lausanne University.
With poetic justice, the once-disgraced Bishop Hermogen replaced Varnava as bishop of Tobolsk but was arrested by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Although his flock raised 100,000 rubles for his release, a band of Red Guards flung him into the Tura River—not far from Rasputin’s Pokrovskoye—and drowned him. Metropolitan Pitirim was replaced in Petrograd by Bishop Veniamin, who was himself shot by the Reds. Rasputin’s old adversary Bishop Antony fled to Yugoslavia, where he presided over the Synod of the Russian Church Abroad.
Of the politicians, Boris Stürmer and Alexander Protopopov were shot by the Reds. Old Goremykin was caught by a mob in 1918 and strangled. Sukhomlinov fled to Finland in a sailing boat, showing more initiative than he had in office, and went to Berlin. His pretty wife left him for a Georgian officer, and both were shot in the Red Terror. Alexander Guchkov, Mikhail Rodzianko, and Vasily Shulgin, Alexandra’s loathed “parliamentarists,” fled into exile—although Shulgin returned to survive years in Soviet prison camps before dying at age ninety-eight.
In his last days—so Simanovich claimed—Rasputin wrote a final and extraordinary document. He titled it “The Spirit of Grigory Efimovich Rasputin-Novykh of the village of Pokrovskoye.”
“I write and leave behind me this letter at St. Petersburg,” it began.
I feel that I shall leave life before January 1. I wish to make known to the Russian people, to Papa, to the Russian Mother, and to the Children, to the land of Russia, what they must understand. If I am killed by common assassins, and especially by my brothers the Russian peasants, you, Tsar of Russia, have nothing to fear, remain on your throne and govern, and you, Russian Tsar, will have nothing to fear for your children, they will reign for hundreds of years in Russia. But if I am murdered by boyars, nobles, and if they shed my blood, their hands will remain soiled with my blood, for twenty-five years they will not wash their hands from my blood. They will leave Russia. Brothers will kill brothers, and they will kill each other and hate each other, and for twenty-five years there will be no nobles in the country. Tsar of the land of Russia, if you hear the sound of the bell which will tell you that Grigory has been killed, you must know this: if it was your relations who have wrought my death then no one of your family, that is to say none of your children or relations, will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people. I go and I feel in me the divine command to tell the Russian Tsar how he must live if I have disappeared. You must reflect and act prudently. Think of your safety and tell your relations that I have paid for them with my blood. I shall be killed. I am no longer among the living. Pray, pray, be strong, think of your blessed family. Grigory.
Simanovich says that he passed the letter to the empress, pleading with her not to show it to the tsar. She later returned it to him. He showed a facsimile of the letter to the historian Sir Bernard Pares while living in exile in Paris in 1934. Pares ran the letter verbatim in his classic work, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy, which was published in 1939, mentioning how he had come to see it but adding, “I cannot vouch for anything further.” The prophecy is pitilessly accurate—Dmitri was a Romanov, Yusupov a great noble, the future held Red Terror—and the letter appeared to confirm Rasputin’s powers of precognition. Did he write it? It is measured and properly punctuated, the sentence structure and meaning are clear, it does not race off at tangents—in short, it bears none of the hallmarks of the meandering and staccato style of Rasputin’s known scrawlings. “He spoke an almost incomprehensible Siberian dialect,” Lili von Dehn remembered, “he could hardly read, he wrote like a child of four.” At best, he dictated it.
The investigating commission that sat after the revolution found no hard evidence that Rasputin was a khlyst. It excused his visits to the bathhouse with women on the ground that mixed bathing was common in parts of Siberia. The “night orgies” with harlots and petitioners were established. The affair with the empress was not. The commission looked carefully into the rumors of “intimacies in higher circles, especially those circles through which he had risen to power.” It drew a blank.
The run of negatives can be extended. He had no one killed. Those who tried to kill him escaped with their lives; so did those who succeeded. He was not venal. He could have made millions of rubles; he lived in a rented apartment in the capital, and his only real estate, the Pokrovskoye house, was not the lair of a fortune hunter. In a society riddled with prejudice, he was not a bigot. He was not a German spy; he was not—so many nots, but this the most important—he was not a demon. At his worst he was spiteful, self-important, and dissolute. The spite came from the fear that enemies would destroy the power he so loved; the self-importance from the extraordinary journey from the medieval obscurity of the Siberian backwoods to the modern condition of superstardom; the dissolution—dependent on the observer’s own moral stance—from inner depravity or love of life.
He was, at his best, humane and perceptive. The throngs who climbed the staircase on Gorokhovaya ulitsa benefited from innumerable acts of kindliness. When he could, he healed. He had immense charisma—“spiritual force,” “magnetism,” “hypnotic strength” they called it then—and few pretensions. At a time of warmongering he had the insight to realize its dangers. Most of his political preferences—peace, land for the peasants, rights for minorities, slogans successfully used if not practiced by Lenin—were the only realistic alternatives to revolution. The exception was autocracy. It made him; and those who wished to preserve it destroyed him.
They did so because they held that his excesses—the elevation of the corrupt to the highest positions in the state and the church, the drink, the women, the endless surf of scandal—tainted the throne and demoralized the nation. In truth the throne tainted itself. Concessions were torn from it, and slyly reversed. The tsar, his cousin Wilhelm said, was suited “to be a country gentleman growing turnips”; would that he had done so. Privately loyal and decent, in public he was vacillating, petty, treacherous to his best ministers, constant only in his jealous mistrust of men with character. He paid his lip service to Rasputin, the empress obliged it; after the murder his aide General Voykov remarked that “I did not once observe signs of sorrow in His Majesty, but rather gathered the impression that he experienced a sense of relief.” It was true to type.
As to the empress—the scarlet woman in mauve, the wellspring of reaction, the hysteric with the will of iron—she and Rasputin locked characters. Without her he was no more than a fashionable starets. Without him she was a creature of the vapors, the weak heart, the hours in bed, the neurasthenia. With him she was the tigress—cancer as divine retribution for opponents, the knout as a political prescription. She needed him, she was devoted to him; it was a love story, without the sex, the empress and the shaman. It helped to prepare Russia for revolution and a further half century of the knout, one wielded by Lenin and his progeny with incomparably more venom than any tsarist.
But Russia, polite Russia, helped, too. It had taken the measure of Alexandra from the moment she arrived in St. Petersburg behind a coffin, proud, distant, and politically deranged. Like Rasputin, it knew that Nicholas “lacked insides.” Why did it allow them to ruin themselves, and the country? Because it lacked insides itself? Did it despise Rasputin for himself, or as an impertinent peasant? The fear of Siberian exile, or disgrace, does not wholly explain how the empress and Rasputin were able to defy grand dukes, bureaucrats, nobles, senior army officers, and the other props of the autocracy for so long. The latter knew the country was rotting long before it collapsed; perhaps the truth is that they felt themselves rotten, too, and knew their loyalty had crossed the line that demarcated it from cowardice.
“He has never been bad to me and he did not do anything wrong to other people,” Simanovich wrote. “He could not be blamed for Nicholas being a weak tsar. He helped thousands of people with my assistance and thanks to his kindness saved many people from poverty, death, and persecution.… In my opinion, Rasputin was more honest than all the people who assembled in his apartment.” And, he could have added, than many of those outside it.