Rasputin (15 page)

R
asputin was becoming ever more brazen in his attitude to women. He took the adage ‘faint heart never won fair maiden’ a stage further, making aggressive passes at any woman not classifiable as ‘elderly’. ‘Is there something on your conscience that you haven’t dared tell your confessor?’ he would say to women. He would allude to the sex lives of horses before making his moves: ‘Come, my lovely mare.’ His female visitors were expected to feel blessed as he distributed boiled eggs in his soiled hands or gave them lumps of black
bread dripping with soup. After enjoying his favourite fish stew, he would generously proffer a finger: ‘Lick it clean.’

Confusing his prey, he would somehow succeed in occupying the moral high ground: his lust for a woman would be a measure of her impurity. He must have judged one princess, upon whom he advanced without preliminaries, as exceedingly impure: ‘You are a tasty dish,’ he cajoled her, fondling her breasts and sticking his fingers inside her collar. ‘You know where the spirit is?’ he asked her, before lifting the hem of her dress. ‘It’s here.’ He owned a sofa so overused that its back had given way. Though he himself had been leaning on it when it broke, he always blamed one particular large woman: ‘It’s all the sister from Simbirsk…. It’s goblinery.’

And yet Rasputin always took a protective stance when it came to the women close to him. On one occasion, he took the Tsarina’s confidante, Lili Dehn, to task after seeing her out walking with a strange man who was, in fact, her own father. And his daughters were well supervised: suitors were allowed only half an hour to discuss fashion before being unceremoniously thrown out. These lofty attitudes he combined with finely honed advances upon married women: ‘You have sad eyes. He torments you a lot.’

He considered fellow travellers on the long train journey from Petrograd to Pokrovskoye fair game. He liked trains, saying: ‘Without railroads a peasant has to stay home because he can’t walk all through Siberia.’ This statement was, of course, untrue: he had once chosen to cover hundreds of miles on foot rather than stay home. One of the best advantages of train journeys, for Rasputin, was the endless opportunities they offered for ‘rejoicing’. There was a Madame S. whom he tried to seduce in his carriage, backing off only when she pulled his beard. Another female traveller was spotted in his compartment ‘lying with the elder in her undergarments’.

His female visitors were expected to feel blessed as he distributed boiled eggs in his soiled hands or gave them lumps of black bread dripping with soup. After enjoying his favourite fish stew, he would generously proffer a finger: ‘Lick it clean.’

He could not excuse his behaviour with pleas of deprivation. Although he hadn’t had sexual relations with his wife since her hysterectomy, his Siberian maid Dounia, smitten since the age of 14, had been more than happy to move to Petrograd and step into Praskovia’s shoes. According to Maria, their relationship had begun after he made a sudden lunge at her as she undressed him, provocatively, in her nightgown.

Prominent among his ‘little ladies’ at Gorokhovaya Street was the voluptuous Akilina Laptinskaya, described by a banker friend of Rasputin as a ‘woman of inordinate corpulence’. Laptinskaya was something of a renaissance woman. A former nun and trained nurse, she worked for Rasputin as a secretary and financial assistant. She also took on the humbler tasks of supplying him with glasses of water and pieces of fruit. Finally, it fell to her to be ever ready, like ‘Sister Maria’, to relieve his tension. Police guards, supplied by the Palace, would peer, agog, through the uncurtained kitchen windows as Rasputin advanced upon her.

Laptkinskaya explained his process: ‘He would be surrounded by his admirers, with whom he also slept… He would caress them… and when he or they felt like it he would simply take them into this study and do his business… I often heard his views, a mixture of religion
and debauchery. He would sit there and give instructions to his female admirers. “Do you think that I degrade you? I don’t degrade you. I purify you.” That was his basic idea. He also used the word “grace” meaning that by sleeping with him a woman came into the grace of God.’

Reading her lucid testimony, it is tempting to cling to Laptinskaya as some kind of voice of sanity. But she had been distinctly unstable when Rasputin first met her. As a nun, she had suffered a run-in with the mad monk Iliodor, in the course of which she claimed he raped her and he claimed she seduced him. The result was that, by the time Rasputin came across her, she was confined to her cell, clutching at the walls and talking with a deep voice. Rasputin apparently restored her to her senses with the words: ‘I order you to be silent.’

Another ‘little lady’ was Olga Lokhtina, a former St Petersburg society hostess, whom Rasputin had once cured of neurasthenia. Maria claimed her father had undergone months of celibacy before meeting Lokhtina; she had greeted him at her front door in a peignoir and he had been unable to resist her. Days after meeting him, she had forsaken her husband and daughter and followed him to Pokrovskoye. According to one account she travelled the 1,600 miles on foot.

Such was Lokhtina’s devotion that she teamed a white be-ribboned dress with an unattractive wolfskin bonnet given to her by Rasputin. She passed her time chanting psalms and canticles, weighed down by twelve copies of the Gospels which she hung around her neck.
She would bring Rasputin cake, then lie on his battered sofa, while he kneaded her breasts. Their relationship at some point developed a sadomasochistic edge and he started beating her, calling her ‘mad bitch’ as she shouted, ‘Christ is risen.’ ‘She won’t let me alone. She demands sin,’ he would protest, as she responded: ‘You are God,’ while yanking his penis.

When the ‘little ladies’ returned to Pokrovskoye ‘for a little home’, Lokhtina would bathe with Rasputin, his wife Praskovia and two daughters, proclaiming: ‘Bad and dirty thoughts occur only to bad people.’ The stolid Praskovia took everything in her stride. It was said, by Simanovich, that she and Grigory ‘had a sincere friendship and never quarrelled’ and her constant response to his enthusiastic ‘rejoicing’ was an enigmatic: ‘He has enough for all.’ Praskovia did once throw Lokhtina out of the house by her hair; but only because Lokhtina had called her stingy. She and Grigory both took a dim view of parsimony. The Tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Olga, complained that the Tsarina gave Rasputin sashes, crosses and patent-leather boots. His complaint was that she gave him only icons and bric-a-brac: ‘It’s terrible how stingy she is.’ However, he did treasure one of the Tsarina’s crosses, refusing to check it in at the
bathhouse
and preferring to stow it in the toe of his shoe with a sock.

Bishop Feofan once commented mildly that Rasputin was ‘unrestrained in his treatment of the female sex… He stroked them with his hand during conversation’. Others were less reticent; the American Ambassador George T. Marye made an unfavourable comparison
between Rasputin and Tiberius: ‘The storied infamies of the Emperor Tiberius on the Isle of Capri are made to seem moderate and tame.’ A journalist wrote grimly: ‘In place of the Imperial Standard, floated Rasputin’s undergarment.’

B
ut the Tsarina was not to be distracted by what she regarded as idle chitchat. With Russia at war, she must consolidate the power of the Man of God. ‘He sees far ahead, therefore his judgement can be relied upon,’ she told her husband. ‘Hearken unto our Friend, believe him… All my trust lies in our Friend.’ She closed one letter with the confident prediction: ‘a country where a Man of God helps the Sovereign will never be lost.’

She and Rasputin were increasingly thrown together while the Tsar spent more time at the battlefront. Their alliance was probably strengthened by their alienation from what might be called conventional society. The Siberian peasant and the German-born Empress were both outsiders and both, broadly speaking, unpopular. Their developing bond was already regarded with alarm by most of the Tsar’s relations and a significant swathe of the Russian people. It would, in time, be regarded with deep suspicion the world over.

But there seems to have been nothing improper about the relationship. The Tsarina’s unswerving devotion to her husband, ‘beloved Nicky dear,’ is laid bare in
a torrent of passionate love letters. Unfortunately, her devotion was inflamed by a protective, motherly impulse: she believed herself smarter than he. In a letter she drew the Tsar as a babe in arms and wrote: ‘Be more autocratic, my very own sweetheart… Sweety mine… don’t laugh, you naughty one. It is war.’

Rasputin, as usual, echoed and re-enforced her sentiments. What he actually thought about the Tsar’s capabilities remains a mystery, but he didn’t mind
dabbling
in a bit of diablerie and disrespect: ‘Papa understands nothing and cannot cope,’ he wrote once, adding: ‘He’s afraid of everyone. He looks round to see if anyone is eavesdropping.’ No wonder the Tsar began resorting to drugs: ‘Hope the cocain [sic] worked well,’ wrote the Tsarina.

Neither would have seen anything treacherous, however, in Rasputin’s insults. The Tsarina was convinced she was operating in Russia’s best interests: her love for her husband was matched by a fierce loyalty to her
adoptive
country. Rasputin was, as he saw it, simply strengthening the position of the brighter of ‘the Tsars’.

Among the pair’s early, humbler projects was stopping Rasputin’s son, Dmitri, then aged 20, from going to the front. The Tsarina intervened on his behalf: ‘Our Friend is in despair his boy has to go to war.’ So while Romanov princes were being slaughtered in battle, Dmitri Rasputin was safely installed in Petrograd as a medical orderly.

Their next venture was infinitely more ambitious: the ousting of Grand Duke Nicholas, at that point Commander of the million-strong Russian Army. The
Tsarina wrote elaborately to her husband: ‘Sweetheart needs pushing always & to be reminded that he is the Emperor & can do whatsoever pleases him – you never profit of this – you must show you have a way & will of yr. own & and not led by N [Grand Duke Nicholas] & his staff, who direct yr movements.’ Rasputin, she
added
: ‘Does not like N going with you, finds everywhere better alone… N was our Friend’s enemy and brings bad luck.’ For herself she added: ‘I have absolutely no faith in N – know him to be far from clever and, having gone against a Man of God, his word can’t be blessed.’