The Last Tsar (18 page)

“This is merely a simple Russian man, very religious and believing,” he explained to Count Fredericks, minister of the court. “The empress likes his sincerity, she believes in the power of his prayers for our Family and Alexei, but after all this is our own business, completely private. It is amazing how people love to interfere in all that does not concern them.”

People were interfering. In society people spoke with horror about the astounding ritual that had become the norm in the tsar’s palace: the Siberian muzhik kissed the hand of the tsar and tsaritsa and then they—the autocrat and empress—kissed the rough hand of the muzhik. This exchange of kisses was entirely evangelical: Christ had washed his disciples’ feet. And here they were, the rulers of Russia, humbly kissing the hands of a Siberian muzhik. The people. The tsar’s religious family and an increasingly atheistic society were finding they understood each other less and less.

Rasputin indisputably possessed a supernatural gift. For our century, accustomed to the dark miracles of parapsychologists, there is no mystery in this whatsoever. Still, Rasputin’s mystery did exist.

The mystery began with his strange behavior. His endless debauches, drinking, unbridled lust—all this became the talk of the
town. Petersburg and Moscow saw him boozing outrageously in smart restaurants.

But why? He had an apartment guarded by the police where he could have indulged in drink and depravity to his heart’s content without provoking gossip or widespread indignation. But he preferred to carry on in full view of the entire country.

Perhaps there was a challenge in this: I, a simple muzhik, am above your official Petersburg magnificence, above all your proprieties. I’m dancing a mad dance, committing every kind of obscene act. Burn! Burn! What I want—I get!

This was a wholly self-conscious attempt to exploit the alleged mystery of the Russian soul for his own ends. Tolstoy plus Dostoevsky, a kind of banal Tolstoevsky—the symbol of the West’s perception of Russia.

There was something wrong with this image. A cunning muzhik with a stinging, guarded gaze. Everyone remarked on the intense
guardedness
of his eyes. So why this recklessness? What was his mystery?

One of his noisiest scandals occurred in 1915. He went to Moscow, fulfilling a vow: to worship in the Kremlin at the holy grave of Patriarch Hermogen. His praying culminated, however, in a wild debauch at the Yar, a well-known restaurant. The police report was intriguing:

“On March 26 of this year at about 11
P.M
. the well-known Grigory Rasputin arrived at the Yar restaurant in the company of Anisia Reshetnikova, who is the widow of a man of a respected family, an associate of the Moscow and Petrograd newspapers, Nikolai Soedov, and an unidentified young woman. The entire party was already in high spirits. Once they had occupied a room, the arrivals called up the editor-publisher of the Moscow newspaper
News of the Season
, Semyon Kugulsky, and asked him to join them. They also invited a women’s chorus, which performed several songs and danced the matchish.… Drunk, Rasputin danced the russkaya afterward and then began confiding with the singers this type of thing: ‘This caftan was a gift to me from the “old lady,” she sewed it, too.’ Further, Rasputin’s behavior became truly outrageous, sexually psychopathic: he bared his sexual organs and in that state carried on a conversation with the singers, giving to some his own handwritten notes, such as ‘Love unselfishly.’”

What curious company Rasputin kept: to witness his binge, this cunning, cautious muzhik invited not one but two journalists! And in the presence of these journalists, one of whom worked for the tabloids, he orchestrated this obscene spectacle.

There is only one way a man would act like this: if for some strange reason he wanted everything that went on at the Yar to become common knowledge immediately.

Indeed, that is what he wanted—for everyone to know of his excesses. A sinister detail: at the Yar he told tales about the tsaritsa that they did not even dare include in the report.

“I do with her what I want,” he proclaimed in the journalists’ presence. This was not the only time such statements were heard during his public drinking bouts.

There was a paradoxical move involved in this as well that the clever muzhik had discovered. If Nicholas and Alexandra could not believe in his debauches in the palaces, then neither he nor she herself, of course, could believe those filthy words about the tsaritsa he idolized. As if the lips of the man whose devoted love for “Mama” they had known so many years could actually utter such a thing! In the family’s eyes, the mere recounting of such words immediately stripped the rest of its veracity. It all became yet another plot against the poor muzhik whom the devil had beguiled into drinking, a fact his enemies were exploiting.

One more thing: Rasputin knew that the tsaritsa could not get on without him. She would do anything not to believe his enemies. And to avenge him.

This was Rasputin’s mystery: his drunken orgies and dirty stories about the tsar’s family were wild provocations. He put a weapon into the hands of his own enemies, but as soon as they used it they inevitably disappeared from the palace. It was a paradox, but his debauches destroyed his influential enemies. Lady-in-waiting Tyutcheva, granddaughter of Feodor Tyutchev, the great nineteenth-century poet, and teacher to the grand duchesses, waged a war against the holy man. After yet another one of his escapades she demanded that Rasputin be forbidden to associate with the grand duchesses. As a result, Tyutcheva was forced to leave Tsarskoe Selo.

The all-powerful head of state Stolypin compiled a list of Grigory’s adventures and gave it to Nicholas. Nicholas read it, made no comment, and asked Stolypin to proceed to current affairs. Soon the minister found himself preparing for retirement.

Finally, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, Rasputin’s former admirer, who understood the terrible danger looming over the dynasty, came out against Rasputin. So, the man the tsar had named commander-in-chief at the outset of the war, the man closest to the tsar, and the Siberian muzhik.… The muzhik won out.

Until Rasputin’s murder, his enemies would continue to fall into his trap each time they brought out the usual accusations of revelry
and lust. They did not know that he had provided a marvelous and conclusive explanation for Alix and his loyal admirers, revealing the secret reason for his strange conduct.

Felix Yusupov, his future murderer, learned of this astonishing interpretation of Rasputin’s escapades from his friend Maria Golovina, the tsaritsa’s lady-in-waiting: with tender sympathy, she explained to Felix as she would to a not very bright child: “If he does this, then it is with a special purpose—to temper himself morally.”

The holy man, taking on the sins of the world and through his fall subjecting himself to a voluntary flogging by society, as the holy fools did back in ancient Russia—that is how Rasputin mystically explained his escapades. “The tsaritsa had a book,
Holy Fools of the Russian Church
, with her comments in places where it talked about the manifestation of idiocy in the form of sexual degeneracy,” recalled Father Georgy Shavelsky, the archpresbyter of the imperial army and navy.

Rasputin and Anya were the two people closest to the family. Two people who gave birth to terrible myths on which the coming revolution would feed: the spineless, pathetic cuckold of a tsar, and the tsaritsa in the brazen embraces of an adventurist muzhik, a tsaritsa who rumor asserted gave her friend as mistress to the tsar.

A great number of obscene drawings circulated throughout Russia right up until the revolution. One of these “graffiti”: a bearded muzhik (Rasputin) and in his arms two broad-hipped beauties (the tsaritsa and Anya), and all this on the background of brazen virgins (the tsaritsa’s daughters) dancing zestfully.

M
eanwhile, the family lived in nearly idyllic seclusion. Few knew of their real life. An enchanting portrait of them was left in the memoirs of one of those few, the woman who had done so much toward the family’s ruin—Anya.

It is early morning. The family is waking up. Alix’s dream has come true: it is all as it was in her childhood, when she had just such a large family as this. Through her “tireless labor of love” a family has been created. And she—wife and mother—is its shelter and support.

The Alexander Palace has long been cramped for five children. Next door, the enormous Catherine Palace stands empty. But she does not want to change quarters. This is not merely habit for the old hearth but an awareness: our life together, in this small palace, unites us, bonds us.

Her daughters. We know very little about them: shadows in the bloody reflection of impending tragedy.

Her Victorian education, the legacy Alix received from her English grandmother Victoria, she passed on to her daughters: tennis, a cold bath in the morning, a warm one in the evening. This was for the good of the body. And for the soul—a religious education: reading
books pleasing to God, strictly observing church rituals. “Olga and Tatiana were at mass for the first time and bore up for the entire service excellently,” a gratified Nicholas would record in his diary.

When Olga was quite tiny, the older girls teased her: “What kind of grand duchess are you if you can’t even reach the table?”

“I don’t know myself,” Olga answered with a sigh, “but you ask Papa, he knows everything.” “He knows everything”—that was how Alix raised them.

Wearing white dresses and colored sashes, they descend noisily to the empress’s lilac (Alix’s favorite color) study: there was a huge rug, so cozy to crawl over, and on the rug a huge box of toys, which were passed down from older to younger.

They were growing up.

“Olga has turned 9—quite the big girl.”

Olga and Tatiana—these names frequently appear together in their diaries and, later, when Nicholas went to Headquarters, in his correspondence with Alix. Here they are quite little: “Olga and Tatiana rode their bicycles side by side” (Nicholas’s diary).

“Olga & Tatiana returned only at about 2.” “Now O. & T. are at Olga’s Committee” (from letters of the tsaritsa).

And so on.

Olga was a snub-nosed blonde, enchanting and impetuous. Tatiana was more focused, less spontaneous, and less talented, but she made up for this lack with her equanimity. Tatiana was like her mother. The gray-eyed beauty was the conduit of all her mother’s decisions. The sisters called her “the Governor.”

And the two younger girls, so tenderly devoted to one another, both merry, a little plump—broad in the bone, like their grandfather: Marie, a Russian beauty, and good-hearted Anastasia. For her constant readiness to serve everyone they called Anastasia “our good, fat Tutu.” They also called her
schwibzik
—little one.

They did not like to study very much (this is evident from the many mistakes in their diaries). The sharpest was Olga, who did have an aptitude for learning.

“Ah, I understand: the helping verbs are the servant of the verbs. Only one unlucky verb, ‘to have,’ must serve itself,” she told her teacher Gilliard.

The sentence of a girl surrounded by servants from the cradle.

They slept in large children’s beds and on cots, practically without pillows, two to a room.

They would take those cots with them into exile, all the way to
Ekaterinburg; they would sleep on them that very last night. Then their murderers would spend the night on those beds.

Like the whole family, they kept diaries. Subsequently in Tobolsk, when the commissar came from Moscow, they would burn those diaries. Only a few notebooks would remain.

I am looking through the diaries of Marie and Tatiana, in the traditional scrapbooks, with gold bindings and a moiré lining (their father had started his diary as a boy in just such books). Marie’s faceless enumeration of events: “This morning church, supper in the evening with Papa and Alexei, in the afternoon tea with Ania.”

Tatiana kept exactly the same kind of diary.

Again in Olga’s diary (in a plain black notebook; she wanted to be like her father even in this): “We had tea.… We played tiddlywinks.” And so on. But one thing is surprising: it is always “we” in the diaries. They were together so much that they even thought of themselves collectively.

An enchanting detail: dried flowers remained in the girls’ diaries. Flowers from the park at Tsarskoe Selo, where they had been so happy. They took them along into exile and preserved them between the pages of their notebooks. After burning nearly all their diaries, they put the flowers in the remaining notebooks. Souvenirs of a destroyed life.

I turn the pages cautiously. If only they don’t crumble into dust, these flowers, dried once upon a time by little girls in the last carefree summer of their life.

There is a photograph in the empress’s album.

She is lying on a couch, her head flung back, her disturbing, tragic profile. Around her on little benches sit her daughters and on a pillow on the floor—Alexei. The girls are gazing at him with adoring smiles. The delicate oval of his face, the light chestnut, curling hair with a streak of bronze, and his mother’s gray eyes—the little prince. The chronically ill prince.