Part 1 Extract - Rasputin - Frances Welch

8/13/2019 Part 1 Extract - Rasputin - Frances Welch

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I Feel My End Is Near

n Grigory Rasputins last day alive the snow ellheavily upon St Petersburg. Te sky at dawn hadbeen dotted with what the sarina called pictur-

esquely wee pink clouds. But the weather had thenclosed in, with severe rosts sending temperatures

plummeting below reezing.Rasputins daughter Maria claimed that no living

Russian could remember a harsher winter than that o1916. Te 18-year-old Maria ound hersel conned toher athers at, where the usty rooms steamed withetid warmth and the pervasive smell was o cabbageand hot sheeps cheese.

Te streets outside usually pullulated with herathers ollowers, the so-called Rasputinki. Up to 400had been known to gather be ore sunrise, waiting aslong as three days to see him.

Grigory Rasputins name was by this time knownthe length and breadth o Russia: he was the Siberianpeasant Holy Man who had inveigled his way into theheart o the splendid pre-Revolutionary Court. His


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mysterious rise had made him an object o hatred, earand reverence.

His claims as a Holy Man, ridiculed and dismissedby some, were accepted, without question, by manywho believed he had been sent by God. Devotees camein search o curious keepsakes: burnt rusks in scentedhankies or soiled linen, limp with sweat. Te most er- vent took Rasputins ngernail clippings, to be sewn into

hemlines, despite one St Petersburg restaurant managertesti ying that the Man o Gods hands were grimy, withbitten, blackened nails.

It was known that Grigory Rasputin had the ears othe sars, as he called the sar and sarina. He also hada reputation or being ree with rudimentary petitionsalong the lines o x it, G. So, alongside the devoteeswould be avour-seekers, ling through the lobby and

up to the third oor, bearing lavish gifs: wine, carpetsand even huge sh. Flowers were a avourite: Idiotsbring resh owers every day. Tey know I love them,Rasputin would swagger ungraciously.

Some o the Rasputinki arrived with wads o mon-ey, others were penniless and in need. Unable to count,Rasputin would bark: Come on, ork it over, be oregrabbing wads and redistributing them at random.One widow, who had lost sons in the war, was awarded23,000 roubles. But most were not so lucky, despite Ras-putins regular, grand address to the queue: I will helpyou all!

On December 16, however, Maria Rasputin peeredout o the window and noted that Gorokhovaya Streetwas empty.


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In act, there had been odd bursts o activity throughthe day, beginning with the drunken return o her atherin the early hours. Rasputin was an uninhibited drink-er and, within the preceding ew days, had pulled offa restaurants door bell and smashed a pane o glass inthe door o his at. His police security guards describedhim on such raucous returns variously as: very drunk,completely drunk, dead drunk and overcome with

drink. Maria had challenged her ather about his drink-ing, but he was unabashed: Why shouldnt I drink? Iam a man, like the others. He considered wine Godsown remedy.

Te sarina Alexandra, ever supportive o the manshe re erred to ondly either as our Friend or Gr, madeonly one re erence to Rasputins weakness, once de-scribing him as very gay afer dinner in the vestry, but

not tipsy.Shortly afer this particular return, the Man o God,

known or his akir-like shunning o sleep, was backon the street. A brie lie-down had set him up or hisnext trip, to his beloved banya, the bath-house, wherehe would have his genitals soaped by one o the littleladies, as he called his women ollowers. Be ore suc-cumbing to the soaping he would shout, con usingly:Demons o lechery, get thee hence! When his daughterremonstrated with him about women, he was equallyunabashed. I Christ could speak with Mary Magda-lene..., he would say, or, more graphically: It doesntmatter i you ornicate a little.

Tese rousing sessions at the bath-house would beollowed by brisk walks to the nearest church, during


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Above: Grigory RasputinBelow: At tea with the Tsarina and two of the Grand Duchesses


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which he slapped his upper arms and rebuked Satan. Atchurch, he would enjoy a well-earned prayer. As he saidrepeatedly: Without sin there is no repentance.

In recent weeks Rasputins movements had beenmore erratic than usual. He had grown wary o leav-ing Number 64. His privileged position at Court hadmade him enemies, and his innate, primitive paranoiahad been uelled by real threats. Within the last two and

a hal years at least ten attempts had been made on hisli e; he had been targeted and nearly hit by sledges, setupon by officers with sabres and stabbed, almost atally,by a woman. In another incident, during the summer o1915, a second woman had been leaving the at whenRasputin had identied her, too, as a would-be assas-sin. Upon his command Drop what you have in yourmuff! a gun had clattered to the oor.

A month earlier, lled with morbid dread, he hadwritten to his wi e in Siberia, bidding arewell to hisamily. On parting rom his son at the beginning oNovember, he had pronounced: Goodbye, I will neversee you again. He had in ormed Maria gloomily: I seea sort o black cloud over our St Petersburg house andwritten her a letter, with the instruction: Dont openit until Im dead. When sar Nicholas had asked or ablessing at their last meeting, a ortnight be ore, Ras-putin had replied: It is you who should be blessing me.

However, two days previously, on December 14,Rasputin had success ully ventured out to two o StPetersburgs grandest cathedrals. Te sarina, whomhe had seen our days earlier, described the outing ec-statically to her husband. As a granddaughter o Queen


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Victoria, she had grown up speaking English and theImperial couple communicated in English. But herwriting style remained idiosyncratic: Our Friend nevergoes out since ages, except to come here, but yesterdayhe walked in the streets with Munia [Maria Golovin,one o his most aith ul and distinguished supporters]to the Kazan and St Isaacs & not one disagreeable look,people all quiet.

On this last morning, the devoted Munia was withhim again. She had braved blizzards to bring messages,including news o a success ul petition: the dropping oa charge against Rasputins secretary. Te sarina hadwritten peremptorily to her husband: I beg you to writediscontinue the case & send it to the Minister o Jus-tice... Otherwise... there can be disagreeable talks.

Over a ull ten hours (midday to 10.00pm)

Munia carried out chores or the man she called FatherGrigory. In his egalitarian household, princesses andcountesses might be ound peeling potatoes and dish-ing out jellied sh, while servants relaxed at table. Mu-nia, whose mother had been a maid to two empresses,helped other ollowers with their overshoes.

According to Munia, Rasputin seemed happier thanhe had been or a while, but still enigmatic: He was ex-cited and said oday Im going, though he wouldntsay where. His good spirits remained, even afer anoth-er visitor, an elderly woman, had quizzed him about theuture o Russia and he had issued one o his gloomybut curiously accurate prophecies: Little mother, I eelmy end is near. Teyll kill me, and then the thronewont last three months. Such condences would have


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been unusual; he pre erred to keep older women at bay,snapping: Get away, you old carcass! or I have no useor old goats!

Te reezing weather may have reduced the num-ber o visitors. It did nothing to silence the telephone,which rang throughout the day. He had been wokenthat morning by a call rom the sarinas closest riend,Anna Vyrubova. Rasputin received such routine calls

rom Anna or the sarina, or both, on a daily basis.Tere was nothing unusual about this last one.According to the son o one o the sars doctors,

telephone calls rom the sarina would be heralded bythe lugubrious voice o a male operator: You are calledrom the apartments o Her Imperial Majesty. With nospecic name mentioned, the receiver o the call wouldbe obliged, unsettlingly, to guess who was on the line.

Te main telephone at the Alexander Palace was in thesarinas mauve boudoir, wired up under a portrait oMarie Antoinette.

Rasputin had become an unexpected an o thetelephone. He would jump to, answering it himsel andgreeting the caller in a raspy voice, with a rich Siberi-an accent: Here is Grishka. In the peasant tradition,he usually re erred to himsel in the third person. Heper ormed stark telephone cures. Once, when told thatthe sickly sarevich Alexis had an earache, he called theboy to the line: Your ear doesnt hurt. Grishka is tellingyou... Sleep right now. Fifeen minutes later the Palacerang to say the sarevich had allen asleep.

In the last ew weeks, however, the telephone hadbecome a menace. His surprisingly long number


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646-46 was widely known and he had begun to receivecalls cursing him. His responses were o the eye or aneye variety. One caller said: Your days are numbered,to which he snapped back: As or you, you will shortlydie like a dog. Te day be ore his death, he received acall rom a woman: Can you tell me where the uneralservice or Rasputin will take place? He replied: Youllbe buried rst! On his last morning he was thrown,

though only momentarily, by yet another anonymouscall threatening his li e.During a brie lull in the snow all that afernoon,

he received a visit rom the sarinas riend, Anna Vy-rubova. She had come to ask his opinion about a painin Alexiss leg. His reply was sanguine: It is not serious.Just keep the doctors away rom him and he will be allright. He offered a urther, less accurate, prediction:

Grishka can tell you this much. Troughout the rest ohis li e Alexis will not be seriously ill again.

Anna Vyrubova had brought an icon as a gif romthe sarina. It was signed by the sar and sarina andtheir ve children and came rom the city o Novgorodwhere, a ew days be ore, the sarina had visited an an-cient prophetess. Te prophetess, in morti ying chainsdespite her 107 years, had addressed the sarina atter-ingly: And you, the beauti ul one, do not ear the heavycross. In act, the ormidable sarina had aged beyondher 44 years. Her acial expression was a daunting mixo hauteur and pain: the legacy o an already troubledli e.

Te icon rom Nizhny Novgorod would orm thelast tangible bond between the sarina and her precious


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Gr. Te sarina regarded their relationship as a sort opartnership, at one point closing her instructions to thesar with a robust Listen to your staunch wi ey and ourFriend.

Anna Vyrubova now commented on Rasputins ap-pearance: What about you, Grishka? You do not seemto be in very good health. Tat was probably an un-derstatement. He was showing the effects o a late-night

session more or less running into a long lunch. Oneriend testied that, in the course o that day, Raspu-tin had drunk 12 bottles o his avourite Madeira be orepassing out.

Tough aged just 47, Rasputins appearance was notgood: his close-set eyes were ringed with yellow excres-cences. Te irises, said to be so dazzling that their colourcouldnt be determined grey, blue and even blue and

brown were dulled. His broad nose was pock-marked,his lips blue and his moustaches protruding like worn-out brushes. Following years o use as a napkin, hisstraggling beard was estooned with decaying ood.

His poor personal hygiene had not helped. TeFrench Ambassador in St Petersburg, Maurice Paleo-logue, said he carried with him a strong animal smell,like the smell o a goat. Te singer Bellin talked o hisrotten teeth and oul breath. His riend Aron Simano- vich, the jeweller to the Imperial amily, admitted thatRasputin had teeth like blackened stumps.

Rasputin batted off Annas concern, growling: Iam like a horse, nothing affects me. But his maid,Katya, weighed in: He should get more sleep. Ras-putin retorted that he was not planning an early


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night: he had an assignation with one o the richestaristocrats in Russia, Prince Felix Yussoupov, whowas to pick him up at midnight and take him to hispalace. Tere he would be introduced to Yussou-povs wi e, the sars beauti ul young niece, PrincessIrina.

Anna Vyrubova later testied at a commission con-ducted by the Provisional Government in 1917: I knew

that Felix had ofen visited Rasputin, but it struck meas odd that he [Rasputin] should go to their house, orthe rst time, at such an unseemly hour. She urged himnot to go. But she was less concerned about his securi-ty than his status: he should not go to the YussoupovsMoika Palace unless he was being invited openly, at anormal time.

As Anna Vyrubova lef the at, she hesitated and

Rasputin uttered what would be his last words to her:What more can you ask o me? You already have allI have to give. Later that afernoon, Anna Vyrubova visited the sarina and mentioned Rasputins plan. Tesarina was bemused, as she knew that Princess Irinawas, at that point, not in St Petersburg but ar away inthe Crimea.

According to his daughter Maria, Rasputins lastsupper at the apartment was an unexpectedly jolly affair,during which he joked and played with her, her youngersister Varya, aged 16, and his young niece, Anna. Heplunged his ngers readily into his sh and black breadand honey. Afer supper, he cheerily showed Maria astash o 3,000 roubles, stored in a drawer or her dowry.He read his daughters the opening o the Gospel o St


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John: In the beginning was the word... Maria wrote:For the rst time I could eel the beauty and truth othose mystic passages.

But running alongside Marias reverential memo-ry is the less wholesome testimony o the hall porter,who noted a urther visit that evening: A lady o about25 was with him rom 10.00 to 11.00pm. Tis lady wasalso spotted by Rasputins niece Anna, who clearly had

ew illusions about her uncle. She recalled that around10pm a plump, blonde woman arrived called SisterMaria, though she was no sister o mercy. She helpedhim to remove the tension that apparently took hold ohim against his will. Rasputin and Sister Maria im-mediately retired to a little room where they set aboutremoving that tension.

At some point that evening, Maria had taken her-

sel out into the blizzard. She returned at 11pm, missingSister Maria, but in time to catch the next visitor, Ale-xander Protopopov, the Minister o the Interior. Pro-topopov was himsel a controversial character, in theadvanced stages o syphilis and rumoured to be a necro-philiac. He regularly visited the at, mostly at the behesto the sarina, who hoped the curious pair would dis-cuss the countrys troubles and that our Friend mightoffer help ul tips.

Protopopov allegedly told Rasputins daughters toleave the room so that he could talk to their ather inprivate. esti ying later, however, he made no men-tion o the girls: I stopped by to see Rasputin around12.00. I... saw him or about ten minutes and saw onlyhim since he opened the door himsel . He didnt say


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anything to me about intending to go out. I he had,Protopopov insisted he would have remonstrated withhim: the sarina had specically told him not to let ourFriend leave his at. He made a point, nevertheless, owarning Rasputin that he had heard o a plot againsthis li e.

Rasputin did mention his plans to his daughter,Maria. As she testied: Afer I got back and was going

off to bed, Father told me that he was going to visit TeLittle One. Rasputins nickname or Yussoupov was,con usingly, the same as the one used by the sarinaor her son, Alexis. He also told his niece where he wasgoing. But Maria added that none o them would havebeen in the least surprised, as the strikingly handsomeand charming young Prince, then aged 29, had become or us, my sister and mysel , the riend o the house-

hold.Rasputin also phoned his riend Simanovich, that

night, to tell him that he was seeing Yussoupov. Simano- vichs loyalty had been assured afer Rasputin cured hisson o the shaking disease, St Vitus Dance. Simanovichhimsel , it seemed, had heard o a murder plot, and wassufficiently worried to warn his riend not to go out,then to insist he call again at 2am. Tat call never came.

Who the last visitor to the at was that night was tobecome a matter o dispute. Afer dismissing Protopop-ov, Rasputin changed his clothes or the third time thatday. Owing either to excitement or drink, he was unableto dress himsel , and Katya had to help him into his a- vourite light-blue shirt, embroidered with cornowers:He couldnt button the collar and I buttoned it or him.


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He wore a golden sash and his best pair o blue panta-loons; he also put on a bracelet with a monogram o thesar. Ten he retired to his bedroom. As his niece Annatestied: Uncle lay down on his bed just afer 12 in hisclothing.

Katya elt uneasy and lay awake. She slept in thekitchen, in a bed sealed off by a curtain. She later saidthat the bell rang at the back door. Afer a ew minutes,

she heard voices, peeked through her curtain and rec-ognised Prince Felix Yussoupov.But, in an early police interrogation, Yussoupov

denied having been to the at: Around 12.30 Raspu-tin called me rom somewhere... inviting us to go to thegypsies... voices could be heard over the phone as wellas a womans squeal. Te idea o the sarinas Man oGod telephoning rom a noisy venue, in the style o a

breathless teenager, apparently did not give rise to com-ment. But then the police would have been too over-awed by Yussoupovs connections to question him ur-ther. It would have been unthinkable to take the wordo Rasputins peasant maid, Katya, over that o the sarsnephew.

Whether Yussoupov intended to carry on lying can-not be known. But, with his strong sense o theatre, hewas soon nding the colour ul truth too hard to con-tain. Within days, he was revelling in the telling o awholly different sequence o events, beginning with hisrst glimpse o Rasputin at the at door. He noted theefforts o the Man o God to clean himsel up: Rasputinhad combed the ood out o his beard and now smelt ocheap soap. Later reports said that he had also covered


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his ears and neck with cologne. He took an unexpect-ed pride in his ability to brush up, occasionally callingor scissors or his ngernails and per umed pomatumor his stringy hair. Maria wrote, however, that, despiteall his pains, her ather had begun to eel apprehensiveabout the arrangement. She reported that he said toYussoupov: Must I leave tonight?

Maria hersel was nervous. Tough they were not

suspicious o Yussoupov, Maria and her sister Varyahad become worried about their ather leaving the atafer dark. As he struggled to nd his boots, he said:Its those children again, they have hidden them. Teydont want me to go out. But he nally ound the bootsand was ready to go. Maria, who, like Katya, had beenunable to sleep, made unsuccess ul attempts to com orthersel with her athers maxim: Nothing can happen to

me unless its Gods will.In her testimony to the police on December 18

Maria Rasputin said: Later I went to sleep and did notsee whether Te Little One arrived and whether heand my ather lef together.

Years later, however, the anci ul Maria told a di -erent story. She described hersel back at her window,watching her ather walking along the street, pullingup his collar and making the sign o the cross. Shewrote that she wept as she watched him getting into acar with Yussoupov; and swore that, as the motor redup, she spotted an elegant hand reach out to shut thecar door.

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Part 1 Extract - Rasputin - Frances Welch