The Rasputin File Page 3

  And in 1927, on this tenth anniversary, it had evidently been impossible to carry out a powerful ideological campaign discrediting tsarism without the help of Schyogolev and the ‘Red Count’. Nor could the campaign itself have been dispensed with; it was, in a phrase of the day, a ‘social imperative’. Schyogolev, as the publisher of the Proceedings, obtained the material, whilst the count did the writing. Thus did the spurious Vyrubova ‘diary’ make its appearance. Its enormous success demanded that the work be continued. Rasputin’s ‘diary’ was intended as a kind of sequel to Vyrubova’s. And as in the creation of Vyrubova’s ‘diary’ and The Empress’s Conspiracy, Schyogolev provided the ‘Red Count’ with historical details from the published and, mainly, unpublished Proceedings. But thanks to the highly gregarious and frequently drunk ‘Red Count’, the story behind the Vyrubova forgery soon got out. There was no point in even thinking about publishing a second one, and the idea was abandoned. Schyogolev, who apparently had a taste for literary hoaxes, then turned Rasputin’s ‘diary’ over to the archive. But by the 1930s the tsarist theme no longer interested the country. And so the diary was left to gather dust in the Commission archive.

  The Unsleeping Eye Of The Police

  But probably the most entertaining documents pertaining to Rasputin that I read at that time in the Commission archive were the volumes of reports by the police agents assigned to cover him. Those ‘external surveillance’ agents were supposed to write a daily account of all Rasputin’s movements about the city. They tried to describe the innumerable visitors who came to his apartment. Noted, too, were any of Rasputin’s absences from his lodgings, the times he returned, where he went, and whom he met along the way. No public figure received a more detailed description of his life over the course of several years than the semi-literate peasant Grigory Rasputin. But the volumes left in the archive were a mere vestige. Part of the surveillance documentation had perished during the February Revolution when the tsarist secret police department headquarters were burned down, and part was destroyed by the police officials themselves, since they, too, had been among Rasputin’s visitors and he among their guests. As the former minister of internal affairs Khvostov testified before the Extraordinary Commission: ‘When I retired from the service, Stürmer [the prime minister] took the documents to his office, especially the ones concerning Rasputin … [as] the main interest was in him. Everything was burned at once.’ But the reports that have survived reveal the wild mosaic of Rasputin’s days — the visits to restaurants and Gypsy singers, the meetings with ministers, the risque scenes in his kitchen to which the agents were privy thanks to a lack of curtains, as well as the jumble of visitors to his apartment: prostitutes, duchesses, bankers, schemers, pious lady admirers, and high-priced cocottes. The police recorded everything: their names, their arrival times, and their departure times the next morning after a night with the peasant.

  Another Rasputin ‘Diary’

  But the missing File of those who knew Rasputin well never left my mind.

  After the start of perestroika I renewed my inquiries. At the beginning of the 1990s I made a careful search for it in Petersburg. But the only document concerning Rasputin preserved in the State Historical Archive, located in the once luxurious buildings of the former Senate and Synod (where, as we shall see, at one time congregated many who had been appointed to those bodies by the simple peasant himself), was a small school copybook with a portrait of Pushkin and the semi-literate inscription, ‘Diry’.

  The discovery in the 1990s of that copybook provoked a wave of articles in the world’s leading newspapers. Rasputin’s ‘diary’ had been discovered! But in point of fact Rasputin, who like all unlettered peasants adored writing, managed only to jot down a few reflections in his wretched scrawl. He evidently used the term ‘diary’ because it sounded important, knowing that the tsar and tsarina kept diaries, too.

  Finally, in the former Museum of the Revolution in the villa of the ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, a lover of the young Nicholas, I saw another recent sensation: the file photographs, discovered in the 1990s, from the inquest conducted after Rasputin’s murder. There was a view of the yard of the Yusupov palace across which Rasputin had run one December night in 1916 while trying to save himself from his murderers. And photographs of his corpse after it had been dragged from the river — of his mutilated face and his naked body with the bullet holes. I succeeded in establishing that the report on Rasputin’s autopsy had in the 1930s been in the possession of the Academy of Military Medicine. And then suddenly it had vanished. In fact, it was not only the documents that vanished. Soon afterwards a number of research assistants who had seen the autopsy report also disappeared. It was the time of the Stalinist terror. True, I did turn up an official document regarding the exhumation and burning of the elder’s body after the revolution. But still, I found no trace whatever of the missing documents produced by the Thirteenth Section, no trace of the File.

  The Search For Documentation

  At the beginning of the 1990s my book on Nicholas II was published in Russia. Not having found the File, I had been quite circumspect about Rasputin. I am also the host of the popular Russian television programme, The Enigmas of History. After the book on Nicholas II, I was inundated with letters requesting that I do a show on Rasputin. And I decided to do two on his death.

  I tried to find for the show whatever new information I could in the way of recollections of him. I remembered a manuscript that I had seen in the Archive of Literature and Art when I was still a student. The ‘Memoirs of Zhukovskaya’ have to this day still not been published in their entirety in the West.

  Vera Alexandrovna Zhukovskaya (a relative of the famous scientist N. E. Zhukovsky) was a young writer. But the unrelenting eroticism of her memoirs made me suspect that they were merely a clever invention, that she had never visited Rasputin.

  The strong desire to verify their authenticity reminded me once more of the File. As Zhukovskaya herself wrote, it was a certain Alexander Prugavin who had helped her to gain access to the elder. His was a famous name in Rasputin’s day; he was one of the most prominent experts on Russian sectarianism. Moreover, Zhukovskaya claimed that she herself had taken Prugavin to see Rasputin! And that Prugavin had written a tale based on her stories about her meetings with Rasputin. So I could easily verify the whole story. Prugavin’s testimony about Rasputin had, after all, been cited in Simpson’s ‘Resolution’. That meant that it, too, was in the File. I had to find the File.

  ‘A Large Pile Of Ashes’

  At the time that I was working on the show, I thought of Vyrubova’s papers, too. Transcripts of several of her interrogations had been included in the Proceedings published by Schyogolev. But there should have been more. For, as the investigator Rudnev had written, the Thirteenth Investigative Section ‘gave special scrutiny’ to the activity of the tsarina’s closest friend and the elder’s chief admirer.

  After Rasputin’s death, Vyrubova resided with the royal family at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Towards the end of February 1917, when rebellious crowds were already filling the city’s streets, the heir apparent and the four grand duchesses came down with the measles. And Vyrubova, having caught the disease from them, lay unconscious. She had been taken ill as the friend of the most powerful woman in Russia and had awoken in a palace not merely besieged but drowning irretrievably in a sea of revolution. The palace was plunged in darkness, the elevator no longer worked, and the tsarina was rushing among her patients. Yet hardly had Vyrubova regained consciousness than she and the tsarina started burning documents. At the end of March Vyrubova was arrested and brought before the Extraordinary Commission.

  In her testimony published in the Proceedings, Vyrubova had said in reply to the investigator’s question as to ‘why she had burned a whole series of documents’, ‘I burned almost nothing. I burned only a few of the empress’s last letters, since I didn’t want them to fall into the wrong hands.’ And I believed her. Perhaps she had
in fact hidden the most important documents. After all, had she not kept the tsarina’s letters written during the royal family’s later incarceration in Tobolsk, despite all of Alix’s calls to burn them? And if she had in fact hidden those letters, then was it not also possible that she had taken them with her on the night she fled Red Russia to Finland across the treacherous ice of the Gulf?

  One of the few people close to the royal family to escape unharmed, Vyrubova died peacefully in Finland in 1964. In the Helsinki National Archives I was shown Vyrubova’s police dossier which included the interrogation conducted by the Finnish authorities after she had turned up in a refugee internment camp in the city of Terioki. The Finns fully understood the significance of her testimony. As was stated in the file, ‘this internment-camp deposition is to be conveyed to the prime minister and president.’

  But Vyrubova had had nothing new to say. Her answers were a scrupulous reiteration of her testimony before the Provisional Government’s Extraordinary Commission. In 1923, Vyrubova wrote and published her memoirs. She wanted to use her maiden name of Taneeva to conceal her identity, but her publishers preferred Vyrubova. I found no drafts of the memoirs in her archive.

  In Finland she became a nun, although in secret; that is, she was able to live at home rather than in the convent (she was lame in one leg and they took her invalid status into account). I got in touch with the convent where she had secretly taken the veil, but there was nothing there. Vyrubova had lived by herself, seeing almost no one. It even occurred to me that she might have taken a vow of silence of some kind. But it turned out otherwise. Badly in need of money in 1937, she signed a contract with a Finnish publisher for a new edition of the memoirs. But as she was writing, the Second World War began. The First World War had destroyed her empire and her life, and now the Second World War dashed her hopes of obtaining a little money. Memoirs about the Russian tsar and tsarina fighting Germany were not what was called for in a Finland that had become a German ally. Then after the war, when the Soviet NKVD started to make inroads in Finland and émigrés were almost openly deported to the USSR, the tsarina’s friend was very probably afraid to remind people of her existence. Only in 1953, the year Stalin died, did she turn the completed book over to the Finnish publisher. But they failed to publish it; apparently they took the view that the manuscript did not add anything to the earlier editions. Then at the beginning of the 1980s, while going through the Finnish publisher’s papers after his death, his daughter came upon an envelope containing photographs. On it was written: ‘Photos of Anya Vyrubova with her autographs on the reverse’. And she also found the manuscript of Vyrubova’s memoirs. The book was published in 1984. The edition passed unnoticed, since there had been nothing new in it.

  Reading those memoirs prepared for publication in Finland, I knew with certainty that Vyrubova had taken nothing new out of Russia with her.

  Unlike her prudent friend, the tsarina had (fortunately for us) been unable to burn most of her letters in which she expressed her undying love for Nicky. Almost all these letters she exchanged with Nicholas have survived. And endlessly referred to in them is ‘Our Friend’. If one must judge Rasputin’s relations with the royal family before 1914 chiefly on the basis of the testimony of other witnesses, then from the first day of the war the tsar and tsarina begin to speak of those relations themselves. Although one other source did help me to comment on their letters: Olga, the younger sister of Nicholas II.

  The Last Of The Ruling Family

  The rare journalists who visited her in those years found it hard to believe that the owner of the little house hidden away in Canada, the short woman dressed in an old-fashioned black skirt, a torn sweater, and sturdy brown shoes, had once owned palaces and been waited upon by dozens of servants. She survived until 1960 and thus also managed to pass the century’s midpoint. Her funeral at the Orthodox Cathedral in Toronto brought together the remnants of the first Russian emigration. Although her tiny rooms did contain some old furniture, the only thing that really recalled the past was the enormous portrait of Alexander III over the fireplace.

  Olga, Nicholas’s sister, and the youngest daughter of Alexander III, was the last surviving member of his large family. Her memory had been remarkable right up to her death and had amazed the journalist who transcribed her memoirs. And in preparing for the show on Rasputin, I used those memoirs that she had dictated to the insistent journalist — yet another voice from the forever-vanished Winter Palace court.

  Rasputin’s Resurrection In The New Russia

  But at the time I still had not found the File. On the other hand, the 1990s saw the emergence from oblivion of documents concerning Rasputin in the Tobolsk and Tyumen archives. Located there are the birth registers of the Church of the Mother of God, on the basis of which it has at last become possible to establish the precise date of Rasputin’s birth. Contained in the Tyumen archive, as well, are the ‘File of the Tobolsk Ecclesiastical Consistory in Regard to Grigory Rasputin’s Affiliation with the Khlysty’, which had been thought lost, and the ‘File Regarding the Attempt on Grigory Rasputin’s Life’.

  I am grateful to both archives, which considerately provided me with photocopies of the precious Rasputin documents in their possession.

  Grigory Rasputin has of late begun to enjoy something of a resurrection in Russia, and he has even become an essential part of a revived national or, more accurately, nationalistic ideology. Here in truth is another of history’s jests: the man whom Russian monarchists saw as the destroyer of autocracy has become the standard-bearer of the new autocratic ideas.

  In fact, the man himself — or, more precisely, his writings — has played no small part in his resurrection. After perestroika, his writings again became available, producing a tremendous impression. In a country where ignorance of the Bible was universal, his forgotten Biblical sayings and muscular language of the people were bewitching.

  The new interest in Rasputin derives from a justified sense that the image of him created over the last century is little more than a political legend. That the testimony published by Schyogolev in his Proceedings of the Extraordinary Commission was essentially the testimony of Rasputin’s enemies. And that there are many inconsistencies.

  But all that the new research has yielded is a political legend turned on its head. The ‘holy devil’ Grigory has become the holy elder Grigory. Russian myths about devils and saints — how many there have been this century! Bloody Nicholas II and then Nicholas the saint, the father and teacher Stalin and then the bloody monster Stalin, the saintly Lenin and then the bloody Lenin. The culmination of all the recent research on Rasputin is the nationalists’ favourite tale about the evil ‘Yid-Masons’. ‘It was, in essence, the Masons who created the Rasputin myth, a myth having as its goal the blackening and discrediting of Russia and its spiritual principle’ (Oleg Platonov, Russia’s Crown of Thorns).

  History loves to jest. The fact is that before the revolution and immediately after it the nationalists of the time accused Rasputin himself of being, well, an agent of the Masons! And they also maintained that the ‘dark forces’ of Masonry had decided to exploit his influence over the tsar and tsarina for their own purposes. Rasputin was accused of being a ‘Jewish stooge surrounded by Jewish secretaries’. So much more amusing, then, are history’s new jests in present-day Russia. The historian N. Koslov has proclaimed Rasputin’s a ritual’ murder. It turns out that Rasputin was murdered by Jews manipulating Masons under their control!

  In this way a new myth has emerged about the tsar and the peasant Rasputin as the preservers of the immemorial Russian ideas of Orthodoxy and autocracy, as men who had become the objects of persecution by Masons dreaming of turning Russia towards the West. It has all become so tedious, simplistic, and vulgar.

  After all, they can make whatever claims they want. They can dismiss the reports on Rasputin by the tsarist secret police agents as lies. They can declare that Rasputin never got drunk, that he never engaged in lechery. That he
was a pure and good Christian who had been slandered by his enemies. For there was no testimony by his friends. The File was still missing. I needed to find it.

  The File

  While getting ready for my television show on Rasputin’s murder, I decided to take a look at the Yusupov family archive.

  The archive has been clumsily divided into two parts. The main Yusupov archive is at the Russian State Archive for Ancient Documents (RGADA). The RGADA archive contains the history of the ancient family’s incalculable riches. Descendants of Tartar rulers who had entered the service of the Muscovite tsars, the Yusupovs became over the course of three centuries the wealthiest of landholders; Rasputin’s future murderer owned thousands of hectares of land. In the nineteenth century the Yusupovs became the greatest of industrialists. In 1914, their income was 1.5 million gold roubles a year. The richest family in Russia.

  The lesser part of the Yusupov archive is held at the History Museum. I found in the two repositories both the largely unpublished correspondence of Felix Yusupov (Rasputin’s murderer) and his wife, Irina, and letters written to Felix by his mother, the beauty Zinaida, one of Rasputin’s chief enemies. The letters reveal how the plot to murder the elder took shape, and they provide a new picture both of the murder itself and of the secret of the relationship between Felix and Maria Golovina, one of Rasputin’s admirers.

  The Yusupov Palace itself is full of secrets. Strange rooms that are not shown on any plan of the building are being discovered to this day. Secrets and corpses are in fact quite in the Yusupov family tradition. The great-grandmother of Felix Yusupov was one of the most beautiful women in Europe. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks discovered a secret door in her apartment. And behind the door they found a coffin with the decayed body of a man. Her great-grandson Felix told a story about a dangerous revolutionary lover of hers who had been imprisoned in the fortress at Sveaborg and whose escape she had engineered. She had apparently hidden him in her palace until his death.