Secret Lives of the Tsars (35 page)

Others have been more circumspect in their analysis, noting, for example, that some of the personal qualities possessed by Rasputin lent themselves well to calming the suffering child—a process modern medicine now regards as critical to a hemophiliac’s recovery after an injury. Certainly many of Rasputin’s contemporaries remarked upon his uncanny ability to soothe and comfort—“the gift of bringing calm and serenity to the soul,” as one described it. There was also the self-possession
and supreme authority in his voice, as well as his penetrating eyes, which though they both attracted and repelled those upon whom he fixated them, were almost universally described as hypnotic.

“Our eyes met and I was instantly struck by his uncanny appearance,” recalled Lili Dehn, one of the empress’s ladies-in-waiting and a constant companion. “At first he appeared to be a typical peasant from the frozen north, but his eyes held mine, those shining steel-like eyes which seemed to read one’s inmost thoughts.” Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador, recorded a similar impression: “The whole expression on the face was concentrated in the eyes—light-blue eyes [others describe them as green] with a curious sparkle, depth and fascination. His gaze was at once penetrating and caressing, naïve and cunning, direct and yet remote. When he was excited, it seemed as if his pupils became magnetic.”
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Whatever the source of Rasputin’s apparent mastery over the tsarevitch’s disease—and it may very well simply have been a gift for healing—Empress Alexandra sincerely believed this plainspoken peasant was, quite literally, Heaven sent. And with these divinely ordained credentials, Rasputin became one of the few true intimates of the royal family. To their new “Friend,” the emperor and empress were not Their Majesties, but “Papa” and “Mama”—his welcoming hosts.

“They would kiss three times in the Russian fashion, and
then start to talk,” reported General A. I. Spiridovich, chief of the tsar’s personal security service. “He would speak to them of Siberia, of the needs of peasants, of his pilgrimages. Their Majesties would always discuss the health of the tsarevitch or their current worries about him. When he withdrew after an hour’s conversation with the Imperial Family he always left Their Majesties cheerful, their souls filled with joyous hope. They believed in the power of his prayers to the very end.… No one could shake their faith in him.”

It was a strange tableau: the loftiest personages in Russia intimately conversing in their imperial sanctum with one of the many millions of peasants over whom they ruled but rarely ever saw or noticed. Rasputin delighted in this unique access, but refused to modify his essential earthiness to blend in better with his opulent surroundings (even if the material of his traditional attire did become richer over time). He ate with his hands and wiped his mouth with his beard. His language was blunt, even at times to the point of rudeness, but the royals didn’t mind: This is what made him a man of the people.

“All the children seemed to like him,” wrote their aunt Olga. “They were completely at ease with him. I still remember little Alexis, deciding he was a rabbit, jumped up and down the room. And then, quite suddenly, Rasputin caught the child’s hand and led him to the bedroom.… There was something like a hush as though we found ourselves in church. In Alexis’s bedroom, no lamps were lit; the only light came from the candles burning in front of some beautiful icons. The child stood very still by the side of the giant, whose head was bowed. I knew he was praying. It was all most impressive. I also knew that my little nephew had joined him in prayer. I really cannot describe it—but I was then conscious of the man’s sincerity.”

Until Rasputin hit on her.

So there it was: Behind the façade of piety the
staretz
presented to Nicholas and Alexandra lurked an unapologetic lecher; a Siberian satyr who blithely bedded all classes of women with the frequency and relish of a jackrabbit. “He has enough for all,” his oft-betrayed (and apparently resigned) wife once said.

“He would be surrounded by his admirers, with whom he also slept,” Rasputin’s secretary reported. “He would do his thing with them quite openly and without shame. He would caress them … and when he or they felt like it he would simply take them to his study and do his business.… I often heard his views, a mixture of religion and debauchery. He would sit there and give his 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.”

Rasputin’s remarkable success with women—“He had too many offers,” reported his secretary—may be attributed, at least in part, to the pseudoreligious concept he espoused in which it was held that in order to be truly forgiven, one had to gravely sin first. This gave his female followers just the excuse they needed to leap into bed with the magnetic mystic (whose frequent visits to public bathhouses, where his female disciples were granted the privilege of washing his genitals, belies his lingering reputation for being dirty and foul-smelling).

“Women,” wrote Rasputin’s biographer René Fülöp-Miller, “found in Gregori Elfimovich [his patronymic] the fulfillment
of two desires which had hitherto seemed irreconcilable, religious salvation and the satisfaction of carnal appetites.… As in the eyes of his disciples, Rasputin was a reincarnation of the Lord, intercourse with him, in particular, could not possibly be a sin; and those women found for the first time in their lives a pure happiness, untroubled by the gnawings of conscience.”

While Rasputin was very careful to conceal his lecherous side from his imperial patrons, he certainly seemed to suffer no inner turmoil over the apparent dichotomy of his nature. “Contradictions,” he declared, “what of them, for you they are contradictions, but I am me, Gregori Rasputin, and that’s what matters; look at me, see what I have become!”

It was true that the rough Siberian peasant, who had spent many years roaming Russia, living hand to mouth while preaching his un-Orthodox brand of religion, had now reached the very apex of society. And to these who had witnessed the “Holy Devil’s” unlikely rise, it was appalling. “In the salons of St. Petersburg, which I frequented fairly regularly, Rasputin was the sole topic of conversation,” reported the Russian minister to Bulgaria. With time, the talk became increasingly salacious.

Much of the gossip revolved around the empress’s relationship with the
staretz
, and came as a direct consequence of Nicholas and Alexandra’s decision to keep their son’s incurable disease a palace secret. Lacking awareness of Alexis’s condition, and Rasputin’s apparently efficacious treatment of it, society became convinced something unsavory was happening between the already unpopular, semireclusive empress and the crude, hypersexual peasant whose gross promiscuity was now public knowledge.

The chatter became louder and more ferocious when a series
of purloined letters from members of the imperial family to Rasputin were published in 1911. One of the most damning was from the empress, whose normally florid style of writing—exercised in this case by a devoted disciple addressing her spiritual master—could be easily misinterpreted as a steamy love letter:

My Beloved, unforgettable teacher, redeemer and mentor:

How tiresome it is without you. My soul is quiet and I relax only when you, my teacher, are sitting beside me. I kiss your hands and lean on your blessed shoulders. Oh, how light do I feel then! I only wish one thing: to fall asleep, forever on your shoulders and in your arms. What happiness to feel your presence near me. Where are you? Where have you gone? Oh, I am so sad and my heart is longing.… Will you soon again be close to me? Come quickly, I am waiting for you and I am tormenting myself for you. I am asking for your Holy Blessing, and I am kissing your blessed hands. I love you forever
.

Yours
,
Mama

Rasputin did little to dispel the rumors—quite the contrary, in fact. The
staretz
basked in the prestige his access afforded him. “He began to feel he had a politico-historical mission,” wrote his biographer Alex de Jonge, “professing to have become convinced that somehow his destiny was linked to the destiny of the nation and the ruling house.”

Rasputin bragged about his influence with the emperor and empress with all the subtlety with which he used to seduce gullible sex partners. “The tsar thinks I’m Christ incarnate,” he crowed. “The tsar and the tsarina bow down to me, kneel to me, kiss my hands. The tsarina has sworn that if all
turn their backs on Grisha [his nickname] she will not waver and still always consider him her friend.”

There was more than an element of truth to Rasputin’s grandiose pronouncement, for though Russia’s sovereign may not have exactly groveled at the peasant’s feet, Alexandra was indeed his fierce and uncompromising defender. “Saints are always culminated,” the empress said to Dr. Botkin in reaction to the public outrage over Rasputin. “He is hated because we love him,” she told her friend Anna Vyrubova. “They accuse Rasputin of kissing women, etc. Read the Apostles, they kissed everybody as a form of greeting.”

Anyone who dared impugn her “mentor,” the man she considered the salvation of her son, and of Russia, earned the empress’s unswerving enmity. Prime Minister Peter Stolypin—widely regarded as Russia’s ablest politician, and the best hope to lead the nation into its semiconstitutional future—despised Rasputin
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and was thus, in turn, hated by Alexandra. Even Stolypin’s assassination in 1911 did little to temper her wrath. “Those who have offended God in the person of our Friend may no longer count on divine protection,” the vengeful empress proclaimed. Similarly, Stolypin’s successor, Vladimir Kokovtsov, also faced Alexandra’s antipathy over Rasputin and eventually found himself out of a job.

Dowager Empress Marie was mortified to read the lurid accounts of Rasputin’s debauchery, and more aghast still that Alexandra continued to receive him anyway. “My poor daughter-in-law does not perceive that she is ruining both the dynasty and herself,” Marie confided to Prime Minister Kokovtsov in February 1912. “She sincerely believes in the
holiness of an adventurer, and we are powerless to ward off the misfortune which is sure to come.”

In an effort to persuade Nicholas and Alexandra of the looming danger Rasputin represented, the dowager empress had what was described to the Bulgarian minister as a “heart-to-heart talk” with them. Addressing the empress, according to this account, Marie stated bluntly, “It is no question of you, or your affections, your convictions or rather your religious manias. It is a question of the Emperor, of the Dynasty, of Russia! If you go on this way, you will be the undoing of us all!”

Alas, if Marie expected any support from her son in her attempt to break Rasputin’s spell, she was gravely disappointed. Nicholas proved every bit as unyielding as his wife on the subject—domestic harmony absolutely depended upon it. “Better one Rasputin than ten fits of hysterics a day,” the tsar once remarked in an unguarded moment.

Besides, to Nicholas II, Rasputin “was just a good, religious, simple-minded Russian,” as he told his security chief. “When in trouble or assailed with doubts, I like to have a talk with him, and invariably feel at peace with myself afterwards.”

The emperor, who described himself as “suffocating in this atmosphere of gossip, lies, and malice,” was, like Alexandra, particularly sensitive to challenges against the
staretz
in the Duma and in the press. As far as he was concerned, it was no one’s business whom they invited to their home—a stance Rasputin, protecting his own position, actively encouraged. “What are these questions about Gregori?” he said to the emperor. “It is the devil’s doing. No questions should be asked.”

Basil Shulgin, a monarchist member of the Duma, wrote about the two sides of Rasputin, whom he called “a Janus,”
and the ocean of misunderstanding between the emperor and his subjects that resulted:

“To the imperial family he [Rasputin] had turned his face as a humble
staretz
and, looking at it, the Empress cannot but be convinced that the spirit of God rests upon this man. And to the country he has turned the beastly, drunken, unclean face of a bald satyr from Tobolsk.… And because of the man’s fateful duality … neither side can understand the other. So the Tsar and his people, however apart, are leading each other to the edge of the abyss.”

A leap further toward that chasm came in the fall of 1912, when Rasputin solidified his power after he at least appeared to have rescued Tsarevitch Alexis from what was by far the most frightening trauma the boy had yet suffered.

The imperial family had retreated to their vast hunting estate in Poland when, in the midst of their relaxed vacation, eight-year-old Alexis took a terrible tumble jumping into a boat. At first it appeared the fall had caused minimal internal damage—just some swelling and bruising below the groin. But then, after the family moved on to their smaller estate at Spala, the empress took her son on a fateful carriage ride through the surrounding forest paths. Before long, Alexis began to wince in pain and cry out every time the carriage jolted. Duly alarmed, Alexandra ordered the driver to return to the lodge as quickly as possible.

“The return drive stands out in my mind as an experience in horror,” recalled Anna Vyrubova, who had accompanied mother and son on the ride. “Every movement of the carriage, every rough place in the road, caused the child the most exquisite torture and by the time we reached home, the boy was almost unconscious with pain.”

The doctors were, as usual, helpless as the blood from broken vessels flowed unceasingly, filling a large area around the original injury and creating a massive hematoma. Pain-relieving drugs were never administered to Alexis for fear of their addictive qualities, so the boy lay in agony as his life slowly ebbed away.