Rasputin (18 page)

T
he baneful influence of the Man of God was
undoubtedly
being felt within the Government and the Synod. But, for every one of his small successes, Rasputin was paying a hefty price. His star was falling, and the ‘wasps’, as he called his enemies, were multiplying.

Ever wilder rumours were circulating to the effect that he had slept with both the Tsarina and Anna Vyrubova and that, before taking to bed, he would have his boots pulled off and his feet washed by the Tsar.
Cartoons
were beginning to be published of the Tsarina cavorting with Rasputin; schoolchildren sang lewd songs. The most damaging story was that Rasputin had raped the four young Grand Duchesses and that the girls were now mad with lust. Rasputin’s reply to all these
accusations
was brief: ‘Nobody fouls where they eat.’

Playing cards were printed with Rasputin’s face
replacing
the Tsar’s on the King of Spades. A black market flourished, selling police notes detailing his activities. To staunch the unending gossip, hostesses would have to put up signs: ‘We don’t talk about Rasputin here.’
According
to Meriel Buchanan, the daughter of the British Ambassador, those who did discuss him were afraid to mention his name directly, calling him simply ‘the nameless one’. The Duma member, Vladimir
Purishkevich
, who would later conspire with Yussoupov, distributed 9,000 photographs of Rasputin carousing with the disgraced Bishop Isidor.

The Tsar’s ever more implacable relations, the Grand Duke cousins, made no secret of their suggested remedies: the Tsarina must be sent to a convent and
Rasputin
to Siberia. The Tsar, they added, should be deposed
and Tsarevich Alexis crowned in his place. The Tsarina’s sister, Ella, widow of the murdered Grand Duke
Sergei
, joined the clamour, making a special visit to the Palace. The Tsarina responded by reaching for the phone and requesting a carriage to take her sister away. As Ella later said: ‘She drove me away like a dog.’ Yussoupov’s doughty mother, Zenaide, complained to the Tsarina and she too was sent off with a flea in her ear.

At Easter 1916, when Rasputin was back in Pokrovskoye enjoying a little ‘home’ time, the Tsarina wrote to her husband: ‘Thought so much of our Friend and how the bookworms and pharisees persecute Christ.’ Rasputin’s last trip to Pokrovskoye had begun well, as he was seen off from Petrograd by Munia and Olga Lokhtina ‘with basketfuls of squawking chickens’. But it ended in a furore as detectives were forced to break up a spat between him and his father, Efim, after he had given the elderly man a black eye for calling him an ‘ignorant old fool who only knows how to fondle Dounia’s soft parts’. Rasputin also suffered injuries, and developed an awkward gait. One of the agents watching him reported that ‘Rasputin sidles.’

Coincidentally, Efim died soon afterwards, but
Rasputin
made no effort to sidle to the funeral. He claimed grandly that he sent his son, Dmitri, to the requiem mass, 40 days after the burial, ‘since I myself had to
remain
behind at the Tsars’ request’.

B
y the time Rasputin returned to Petrograd, his
enemies
were seeking to discredit him by any means possible. In autumn 1916 they blamed him for the halting of an important military offensive. He had
indeed
tried to stop the campaign and was pleased when the Tsar appeared to be obeying his instructions. ‘23rd Sept… Our Friend says about the new orders you gave to Brusilov etc “Very satisfied with father’s orders, all will be well,”’ wrote the Tsarina. ‘He won’t mention it to a soul.’ In fact, the campaign, which cost more than a million Russian lives, simply ‘ran out of steam’, as the historian Richard Pipes puts it.

Rasputin’s image was repeatedly tarnished by
reports
that he was acting as a spy for the Germans. His closeness to the Tsarina, by then known as ‘Nemka’, the German one, was raised as an important factor. The British Ambassador, Buchanan, talked to his French counterpart Paleologue of ‘a hotbed of teutonic
intrigues
at the Palace’. Yussoupov had once seen Rasputin with five men, ‘unmistakably Jewish in appearance’, and taken them for ‘an assembly of spies’. It did not help that Rasputin met Ignaty Manus, a German banker, every Friday over a period of several months. Manus had paid Rasputin for his appointment as an actual state councillor and the pair were sufficiently friendly to go out carousing. On May 26 1915 one of Rasputin’s guards wrote: ‘Rasputin came home drunk in Manus’s car.’ Manus was believed by Paleologue to be a German agent.

Attempts on Rasputin’s life were once again on the increase. He was almost run over several times. On one
such occasion, timber was tipped in front of his car, after which he proclaimed: ‘They’ll kill Mama and Papa also.’ Officers with sabres set upon him in a bar when he asked a girl to dance. In a repetition of the strange
episode
with Maria’s fiancé’s frozen fingers, he apparently paralysed these officers with a glare.

One mysterious plot involved a female singer friend of Rasputin, who received an anonymous telephone call from a man promising to provide for her daughter if she would join a conspiracy. Intrigued, the singer agreed to meet the man at a club. Throughout the meeting, the man wore a mask. Many believed the masked man to have been Grand Duke Alexander, ‘Sandro’, the
husband
of the Tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Xenia.

Turncoat friends proved particularly deadly. ‘Pot-belly’ Khvostov, on discovering that the fickle Rasputin had withdrawn his support and was now opposing his promotion, immediately joined the growing band of detractors, citing as his reason a curious piece of skullduggery. He claimed that the Man of God had boasted at a party that he was sleeping not just with the Tsarina but also with her eldest daughter, Grand Duchess Olga. When challenged, Rasputin had reached for the telephone, pretending to call Olga. A young prostitute had duly appeared, her fur-trimmed coat convincing the other guests, ‘country bumpkins’, that she was indeed royalty. ‘This incident persuaded me that Rasputin had to go, to save the Motherland,’ declared Khvostov.

In no time, Khvostov’s partner, Stepan Beletsky, also switched sides. By early 1916, the slippery twosome had recognised that their best prospects lay in getting rid of
Rasputin. Khvostov later said Yussoupov’s mother, Zenaide, had told him she had unlimited funds available for this purpose, while Beletsky had apparently been offered 200,000 roubles by another of Rasputin’s
enemies
. Khvostov first tried to persuade Rasputin to go to a monastery, promising him 8,000 roubles and several bottles of Madeira. Rasputin pocketed the money, but fought his way out of a carriage as the door was being closed.

Soon Beletsky and Khvostov had recruited the head of Rasputin’s bodyguard, Colonel Mikhail Kommisarov, to help them. The treacherous Colonel enjoyed trying to disarm Rasputin by saying: ‘Stop the holiness, talk sense and have a drink.’ Khvostov suggested strangling Rasputin and burying his body on a frozen river bank, to be washed away in the spring thaw. But
Kommissarov
disagreed, preferring poison, which he duly tested on Rasputin’s cats. Discovering his beloved cats dead, Rasputin was furious. He blamed Prince Andronnikov and demanded his exile to a remote town.

In the spirit of endlessly shifting loyalties, Khvostov and Beletsky themselves now fell out. When word got round that Khvostov had been trying to contact
Rasputin’s
deadly old foe, Iliodor, Khvostov rushed to assure Anna Vyrubova that he was innocent of any murder plot: if anyone wanted to kill Rasputin, it was surely
Beletsky
. ‘He wept and said the whole story was a blackmail,’ recalled Anna. Iliodor, incidentally, was doing his bit: he planned to fly over the frontline and drop thousands of copies of his book,
Rasputin the Holy Devil.

The Tsar finally dismissed both Khvostov and
Beletsky in March 1916. For the Tsarina, it was good riddance; she offered a rare acknowledgement of her faulty judgement: ‘Am so wretched that we, through Grigory, recommended Khvostov to you – it leaves me no peace – you were against it and I let myself be
imposed
upon by them.’

Khvostov and Beletsky were now out of the frame, but the growing opposition was unrelenting. Verbal attacks upon Rasputin in the Duma continued, and rose to a head in November 1916, with the leader of the Constitutional Democrats quoting an article published in a Swiss paper which suggested that Rasputin had been behind many recent ministerial appointments in Russia.

Felix Yussoupov, the Tsar’s flamboyant nephew, had been emerging as the unlikely leader of the increasingly desperate anti-Rasputin faction within the Romanov family. He was present at the Duma for this speech, and clearly found the article all too plausible.

Nearly three weeks later, he heard the fiery Purishkevich also speaking passionately in the Duma, alluding to those ‘dark forces’ invoked by Guchkov four years earlier: ‘If you are loyal to your sovereign… go to the Imperial Headquarters, throw yourself at the Tsar’s feet and… plead with the Sovereign that Grishka Rasputin be not the leader of Russian internal public life.’

Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich lined himself up with the wasps: ‘If it isn’t in your power to remove those influences from her [the Tsarina] then at least protect yourself from the constant meddling,’ he wrote in
protest
to the Tsar. In response, the Tsarina huffed that the
Grand Duke should be sent to Siberia. As she wrote: ‘4 November… He & Nikolasha [Grand Duke Nicholas] are my greatest enemies in the family, not counting the black women [Militza and Anastasia]… Wifey is your staunch One and stands as a rock behind you.’

She also showed the Grand Duke’s offending letter to Rasputin: ‘On reading Nikolai’s letter He said: “
Nowhere
does Divine grace show through, not in a single feature of the letter, but only evil… The Lord has shown Mama that all that is worthless, asleep”.’

At around this time Yussoupov wrote to his mother: ‘We seem to be living on the slopes of a volcano and the same thoughts lurk in all our heads.’ He tried to enlist the support of the British Embassy chaplain, the Rev Mr Lombard, by then a longstanding friend. Over tea he asked the chaplain to talk to the Tsarina: ‘He suggested my trying to contact the Empress, on the score of
certain
knowledge of the Occult lore which I happened to possess. I told him that to supplant R. [Rasputin] would be hopeless and also that probably the Ambassador would have a good deal to say if I attempted to interfere.’

The broadminded padre, as he was known, would not have been disturbed by tales of Yussoupov’s own excesses. As his grandson wrote: ‘His interest in the spiritual, combined with a most sympathetic and gentle nature made him a wide circle of acquaintances in
Russia
.’ But, with all his generosity of spirit, the padre
retained
, for the rest of his life, an unforgiving view of the Russian temperament: ‘From the Tsar to the meanest peasant, the only thing they understand is the knout.’

Yussoupov’s failure to persuade the padre to help
‘supplant’ Rasputin did not deter him. His nervous
excitement
had been increased by some particularly wild claims about the Imperial couple made recently by
Rasputin
. Rasputin had reported that the Tsar was regularly ‘given a tea which causes divine grace to descend on him. His heart is filled with peace, everything looks good and cheerful to him’. He also said that the Tsarina was planning a coup d’état: she would be acting against her husband, on the grounds of his ill health, and was about to declare herself Regent until the Tsarevich came of age.

Yussoupov felt a grand role taking shape. With Grand Duke Nicholas, Grand Duke Alexander and his parents, he was convinced that Rasputin must go. He would have been particularly swayed by the Tsarina’s sister, Ella, who was a nun and a close friend. Their belief was that Rasputin’s presence at Court was
blackening
the reputation of the Imperial family and would soon lead to revolution. His presence had already proven itself a threat to Russia’s internal stability; it was now damaging the country’s reputation abroad.

The British diplomat Samuel Hoare, then head of the Russian bureau in Petrograd, had no hesitation in laying all of Russia’s problems, in late 1916, at
Rasputin’s
door. He wrote: ‘Let the Emperor only banish this man and the country would be freed from the sinister influence that was striking down its natural leaders and endangering the success of its armies in the field.’

Years later, the leader of the Provisional
Government
, Alexander Kerensky, was equally adamant about Rasputin’s detrimental role: ‘Without Rasputin
there would have been no Lenin.’ A survey conducted between January and May 1917 by a Duma
committee
, based on the reports of its provincial agents,
confirmed
Kerensky’s view. It concluded ‘that the spread of “licentious tales and rumours” about Rasputin and the “German Empress” had done more than anything to puncture the belief of the peasantry in the sacred nature of the monarchy’.