Rasputin (25 page)

I
t is not unusual for followers of religious martyrs to seek out relics. In Rasputin’s case, the seekers seem to have been particularly preoccupied by his penis. Maria had insisted that her father’s member, when erect, stretched to a full 13 inches. This measurement probably came from the maid, Dounia, who, as his lover, might have been expected to know. But in 1914, after Rasputin was stabbed, a doctor reported that his penis was shrivelled, like that of an old man. This doctor explained that alcohol and syphilis reduced genitals and he wondered if Rasputin, then aged 45, was even potent.

Maria made much of her belief that Rasputin’s
murderers
had cut off his penis. She described the moment with relish: ‘With the skill of a surgeon these elegant members of the nobility castrated [sic] Grigory
Rasputin
and flung his severed penis across the room.’ She was probably influenced by the ‘little lady’, Akilina
Laptinskaya
, who washed the corpse and put it in a white
linen
shroud. Laptinskaya was adamant that Rasputin had been mutilated.

But the pathologist Professor Dmitri Kosorotov, who conducted the four-hour autopsy, wrote in his
report
that the penis, though damaged, was still there: ‘His genitals seem to have been crushed by the action of a similar object.’ The similar object was probably Maklakov’s cudgel. The soldiers who dug up Rasputin’s body, after the Tsar’s abdication, also saw the penis and measured it up against a brick. There is no mention in either account of the three penile warts that were said to have so improved his performance.

Several claimant penises were to appear. One
became
the central feature of an erotica exhibition, in 2009, at a museum in St Petersburg. The curator
reported
that Rasputin’s penis outshone Napoleon’s, which he dismissed as ‘a small pod’. In 1968, Maria Rasputin’s co-author, Patte Barham, visited a woman in Paris who claimed to have been given Rasputin’s penis by one of Yussoupov’s servants. Prayer circles were held around this penis, which lay on a velvet cloth, in an overly generous box, 18 inches long and six inches wide. She said the penis itself resembled a ‘blackened over-ripe banana’.

The continued veneration of Rasputin was such that, in 1980, the lavish house at Pokrovskoye was levelled: tourists, particularly the French, were creating a nuisance by taking endless photographs. But in 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, a museum was opened, in a similar house, containing artefacts, documents and photographs of the village’s Man of God. Visitors were invited to enhance their ‘masculine powers’ by sitting on Rasputin’s clumpy, wooden chair.

Icons have recently begun to appear with
Rasputin
cradling the Tsarevich. There have even been calls within the Russian Orthodox Church for Rasputin to be canonised. Church leaders took the calls seriously enough to hold a meeting opposing the move, attended by 100 clerics in Moscow. But the Tsarina would
obviously
have approved; defending ‘our Friend’, she wrote: ‘Saints are always calumniated.’

W
hen the Imperial family’s assassins stripped their victims, they found amulets around the necks of the Tsarina and the four young Grand
Duchesses
containing miniature portraits of Rasputin. After Rasputin’s death, the Tsarina had dreamt that Brother Grigory was looking down from heaven, blessing
Russia
: ‘He died for us,’ she insisted. On December 21 1916, she wrote him a farewell letter: ‘My Dear Martyr, Give me thy blessing that it may follow me always on the sad and dreary path I have yet to follow here below. And
remember us from on high with your holy prayers, Alexandra.’

The letter was buried with him, along with a small bouquet of flowers. It was placed on his chest alongside the icon the Tsarina had sent him on that snowy afternoon of his final day on earth.

Thanks to Richard Davies of the Leeds Russian Archive for sending me the Reverend Lombard’s diary; Kyril Zinovieff for his generosity with his time and reminiscences; John R.L. Carter for his letters about his grandfather; Penny Galitzine for letting me use her grandfather, Prince Dmitri’s, diary; Pamela Pehkonen for lending me books from her personal library; Nicholas Underhill for help with early drafts; Hugh Browton for sorting out computer glitches; Aurea Carpenter for skilled and cheerful editing; finally, my family, Craig, Tallulah and Silas, for putting up with me as I joined, briefly, the ‘Rasputinki’.