Rasputin (23 page)

W
hen the Tsarina heard that the captive
Imperial
family was to be taken to Siberia, she firmly believed they were following ‘our Friend’. On August 1 1917 she wrote a strangely buoyant letter to Anna Vyrubova: ‘My sweet beloved Precious childy… one does not tell us where we go (only in the train shall we know) nor for how long – but we think it is where you and ours were last summer – our Saint calls us there & our Friend – wonderful is it not?’

On their way, the family travelled in a steamer,
Rus,
from Tyumen to Tobolsk and all seven gathered on the deck as they sailed past the village of Pokrovskoye.
Rasputin
’s two-storey house loomed above the other simple huts. His shadow continued to haunt them, as their guard in Tobolsk, Vasily Pankratov, testified: ‘He removed the last vestiges of the halo from the Tsar’s family. He was constantly drunk here, on drunken business, he pestered women with dirty propositions.’

But the Tsarina was indifferent to the guard’s
disapproval
. On the anniversary of Rasputin’s death, she wrote in her diary: ‘The terrible 17th. Russia too suffers
for this, all must suffer for this.’

Eight months later, on their way to what would be their final resting place, Ekaterinburg, the Tsar and Tsarina found themselves, under guard, actually
stopping
in Rasputin’s village. On April 27 1918 the Tsarina wrote: ‘About 12, got to Pokrovskoe, changed horses, stood long before our Friend’s house, saw his family & friends looking out of the window.’

The predicament of the Imperial couple was, by this time, critical. The Tsarina, as usual oblivious, wrote: ‘Com [Commandant Yakovlev] fidgety, runing [sic] about, telegraphing.’ The desperate Commandant had, in fact, heard of several plans to attack the party, to ‘disarm us in order to seize the baggage’ (‘the baggage’ being the Tsar). It happened, once again, as Rasputin had predicted: ‘Willing or unwilling they will come to Tobolsk and they will see my village before they die.’

A month after the Tsar and Tsarina travelled to Ekaterinburg, glimpsing the Rasputins for the last time, the Tsarevich Alexis followed with three of his sisters. On May 22 1918, their ship docked at Tyumen where Maria Rasputin happened to be at the pier, in the course of a home visit, buying tickets. She spotted two of the Imperial family’s retainers with Alexis, waving through a dirty window: ‘They were like angels.’

Maria Rasputin had, by this time, followed her
father’s
bald instruction, ‘Love Boris’, by marrying, in 1917, a graduate of a school of mysticism called Boris Soloviev. During the last few months of the
Romanovs
’ captivity in Ekaterinburg, Soloviev tried to rescue them with the aid of 175,000 roubles from a monarchist
banker in Petrograd. At one point, he insisted that 300 officers were ready to storm the house in which the family were held captive: ‘Grigory’s family and his friends are active,’ he wrote. But the plans came to nothing and indeed some kind of skullduggery was suspected when several of his fellow conspirators were arrested.

The Imperial family were allowed out twice a day, for half an hour, in a small garden surrounded by a 14-foot board fence. The Tsarina joined in the walks until the guards started taunting her about Rasputin.
During
the family’s last days alive, graffitti appeared on the walls depicting ‘Grishka’ and ‘Sashura’ (the Tsarina) having sex. Lewd comments were added about the size of Grishka’s penis.

On the night of July 16 1918, nineteen months after Rasputin’s murder, the Imperial family were shot and bayoneted to death. The murders confirmed yet another of Rasputin’s prophecies: ‘If any of the Romanovs [are] involved in my killing… none of you… will remain alive for more than two years.’ One of those involved in his murder had, of course, been the Grand Duke Dmitri.

In the Tsarina’s trunk, Bolshevik guards fell upon a red silk shirt, blue silk trousers and tasselled silk belt belonging to Rasputin.

R
asputin once said to Yussoupov: ‘Disaster will come to anyone who is against me.’ This prediction was, to some extent, borne out. The Black
Princesses, Militza and Anastasia, and Grand Duke Nicholas survived the Revolution. All three escaped with the Yussoupovs on the British battleship, HMS
Marlborough
, in 1919. But they all lived reduced lives in exile. Grand Duke Nicholas and Anastasia spent their last days together in a tiny villa in Paris before
moving
to Cap d’Antibes. The Grand Duke died, aged 73, in 1929, and Anastasia, aged 67, in 1935. Militza was persecuted by the Germans while living in Italy during the Second World War. She died in Egypt in 1951.

The bull-like Rodzyanko fled to Serbia in 1920 but died in poverty four years later; Dzunkovsky was
executed
by Stalin, in 1938, at the Lubyanka. The conniving ‘pot-belly’ Khvostov and Beletsky were killed by
Bolsheviks
in 1918. Prince Andronnikov and the Tibetan healer Badmaev were killed the following year. The dreaded Iliodor, once charismatic leader of thousands, spent his last years as a janitor at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building in New York. He died in the
Bellevue
Hospital in 1952.

Bishop Hermogen died a martyr’s death in Tobolsk in 1918. Bolshevik soldiers forced him to roll stones naked up a river bank, while prostitutes jeered and
insulted
him. His persecutors tied a huge stone to his neck and lowered him by his hair into the river. When the White Army arrived, they exhumed his corpse. It was untouched by decay, but for a missing section of beard.

Rasputin’s assassins did not do so badly. Apart from Purishkevich, who died of typhus while fighting for the Whites in 1920, they all survived the Red Terror. The only rain in Dr Lazovert’s life fell, years later, when
he returned from holiday to find a restaurant called ‘Rasputin’ opening directly opposite his apartment in France. Settling finally in Romania, the former doctor became an oil trader. He wrote his own account of Rasputin’s murder, but this was discounted by many as ‘mere fiction’. On his deathbed he insisted that he had substituted the poison for some harmless substance.

Yussoupov and his wife, Princess Irina, escaped from Russia with two Rembrandts and a stash of
jewellery
. They so mismanaged their accounts, however, that they were soon penniless, struggling even to buy light bulbs. At a particularly low point, they were in New York selling their jewels, when they were announced, at a party, as Prince and Princess Rasputin.

But in the end it was their connection with
Rasputin
which secured their fortune. In 1932, MGM released
Rasputin And The Empress,
in which a character closely resembling Princess Irina is ravished by Rasputin. The Yussoupovs sued for libel, and were awarded $750,000 or $15 million in today’s money. They subsequently enjoyed a thoroughly pleasant existence, mostly in the South of France. Yussoupov fancied himself a faith
healer
, spending hours at a time in hospitals and
sanatoriums
. He and his wife both enjoyed painting grotesque pictures of Rasputin-like faces complete with grimaces.

He was courted by Hitler, whose envoy pronounced that he would be the best candidate for the Russian throne. After the publication of two memoirs in the 1950s,
Lost Splendour
and
En Exil,
the Soviets offered him an exile in Russia, but Yussoupov dismissed both of these approaches out of hand.

Yussoupov dined out on his gory story, getting quite nettled if a social event went by with no mention of the murder. In a ring on his finger, he wore one of the
bullets
that had hit Rasputin. Oswald Rayner, the British Secret Service agent mooted by some as Rasputin’s
killer
, also boasted a bullet in a ring.

It was with such burlesque details that the
Rasputin
myth continued to flourish. Speculation regarding his sex life was rife. And it was soon asserted, in smart British circles, that he had enjoyed sexual relations with Yussoupov. As Noel Coward wrote: ‘The truth I think is that Rasputin had a tiny little lech on Yussoupov
himself
.’ Yussoupov died in Paris, aged 81, in 1967.

Grand Duke Dmitri was also feted. He himself felt very torn as to whether he had done the right thing. When he saw his father the day after the murder, he
denied
any involvement, giving his word on an icon and on a photograph of his dead mother. He was mortified by the acclaim thrust on him and once walked out of a theatre in Petrograd, to avoid the embarrassment of an ovation. He would not have welcomed the news that, in the weeks following the murder, crowds were lighting candles around St Dmitri, at the Kazan Cathedral. He finally broke down with a
crise de nerfs
on the train
taking
him from Petrograd to his exile in Persia.

He and Yussoupov fell out of touch, only running into each other, some years later, at the Ritz Hotel in London. The Grand Duke had heard someone singing and playing a guitar in an adjacent room, and correctly identified the singer as his old friend. As Yussoupov wrote: ‘I thought it was an irritated neighbour but
it was Grand Duke Dmitri, who I had not seen since “l’affaire Rasputin”. He had recognised my voice through the door.’

The pair resumed their friendship until Yussoupov published his first lurid memoir, in 1927. Grand Duke Dmitri considered it a breach of their agreement not to discuss the murder in public. As he said in a Russian paper published in Paris: ‘Not a single person,
including
the members of my own family, has heard from me about the events of that terrible night… The same force that impelled me to the crime has prevented me and now prevents me from lifting the curtain on that affair.’ He never spoke to Yussoupov again. Grand Duke
Dmitri
died in Switzerland in 1941, aged 49, of TB.

F
or all Rasputin’s pronouncements, disaster seemed, in the end, more likely to befall his supporters than his detractors. Of his bishops, Varnava and Isidor were murdered; Pitirim died in 1920. As for his ‘little ladies’, Laptinskaya disappeared, while Lokhtina was driven to take refuge in Makari’s mud hut. The elderly Goremykin was caught by a mob and strangled on Christmas Eve of 1917. Sturmer was arrested by Bolsheviks and died in the Peter and Paul Fortress the same year. Protopopov fled from the ministry with a briefcase containing the Tsarina’s letters and photographs of Rasputin’s corpse. He had only two years of communing with Rasputin’s soul before he himself was killed by Bolsheviks.

Rasputin’s friend, the jeweller Simanovich, reached the US but was rendered penniless by the Depression; he lost his sickly son, before he himself died, destitute and alone. Anna Vyrubova had a long but lonely life as a Russian Orthodox nun in Finland. She lived in her own apartment, surrounded by pictures of the Tsar, Tsarina and Rasputin. She died in 1964, aged 80.

Rasputin’s faithful wife, Praskovia, son, Dmitri, and younger daughter, Varya, fared particularly
badly
. At the time of his death, Rasputin’s estate was
valued
at a relatively modest 23,507 roubles and 66 kopecks: roughly £54,000 in today’s money. This included 5,092 roubles and 66 kopecks cash in the Tyumen State bank. His house was valued at 10,000, and 8,000 roubles-worth of property included a 500-rouble fur coat, a 700-rouble gold watch and 900-rouble silver tea service. The Rasputins’ farm animals comprised two cows, a bull, eight sheep and eight horses, with a stud worth 1,000 roubles. In the days before the Revolution, the Tsarina had instructed Protopopov to give the
Rasputins
100,000 roubles, but this instruction was never carried out.

In November 1919, the fabled grand piano and gramophone were confiscated. Eight months later, the Rasputins were stripped of their furniture, mirrors and even dishes. In June 1920, Praskovia, Dmitri and his wife were expelled from their home: as the owner of ten long-horned cattle, Dmitri was denounced as a wealthy farmer, a kulak. In 1933, Dmitri’s wife and a daughter died of TB; three months later he himself died of
dysentery
. Praskovia outlived her son by three years, dying
in 1936, aged 69, with just 76 roubles and 40 kopecks to her name. Varya worked as a stenographer and tried, at one point, to escape to Germany but was stopped at the border carrying the manuscript of a memoir. She was dispatched to a Soviet prison where she apparently died from poisoning in 1924 or 1925.