Rasputin (6 page)

Despite this inauspicious start, the bearded pair became friends, spending days fishing on the Tura. Maria offers a slightly unconvincing picture of them casting their lines while enjoying ‘interminable religious arguments and philosophical discussions'.

Meanwhile, bishops in St Petersburg gathered to listen to Rasputin's largely predictable prophecies: one bishop would suffer a hernia, another would lose his mother. A third prediction, that one would father a child out of wedlock, was obviously more outlandish. It is not known how the bishops regarded the finer details of the predictions, but they were generally impressed. Father John of Kronstadt, the highly respected priest who had heard the last confession of Tsar Nicholas's father, Alexander III, interrupted one of his services to proclaim: ‘We have a Man of God in our congregation. Step forward.' Grigory Rasputin leapt forward. He would probably have enjoyed the khlyst-like flavour of Father John's services, during which the congregation were encouraged to shout their sins.

Rasputin's reputation was gathering steam. Reports from the secret police, the Okhrana, echoed the enthusiastic clerics, claiming that Rasputin could blow on a handful of earth and turn it into a magnificent rose tree. Hundreds of women crowded outside the house where he was staying and a St Petersburg paper reported that he ‘restored sight to the blind and movements to the paralysed'. When the occasional question arose about his activities at the bath-house, his friend Iliodor would defend him, supporting newspaper reports that he ‘visits bathing establishments and brings holy word to those who bathe… They are morally cleansed.'

T
he Tsar and Tsarina's own confessor, Bishop Feofan, was one of Rasputin's most assiduous early supporters. Feofan was a particularly valuable ally: along with his connections at Court, he was known to be associated with the St Petersburg Theological Academy. Feofan's credentials could not be faulted, but his endorsement of Rasputin never represented any kind of approval from the Church. The handful of bishops now supporting Rasputin were out on a limb.

Feofan testified at the 1917 Commission that Rasputin had originally arrived with a letter from a Bishop Chrysanthos. ‘Once he [another bishop, Sergius] invited us to his lodgings for tea, and introduced for the first time to me and several monks and seminarians a recently arrived Man of God, Brother Grigory as we called him then. He amazed us all with his psychological perspicacity.' They quizzed him about the fate of a squadron due to engage in a battle with the Japanese. Rasputin was pessimistic: ‘I feel in my heart it will be sunk.' He proved correct.

The Tsarina's unswerving devotion to her husband, ‘beloved Nicky dear' is laid bare in a torrent of passionate love letters. Unfortunately her devotion was inflamed by a protective, motherly impulse; she believed herself smarter than he.

 

Bishop Feofan related how Brother Grigory had gone to Sarov, in 1903, to attend a canonisation, and announced to the congregation that the long-awaited heir to the throne would be born within a year. The prophecy was borne out when, following the births of four grand duchesses, the Tsarevich Alexis was born on August 12 1904. Feofan believed that he had been the one who had told Grand Duchess Militza about Rasputin: ‘I let slip that a Man of God was among us named Grigory Rasputin.' But Grand Duchess Militza had, of course, already shared tea with Rasputin following their less productive exchange over the wood-saw in Kiev.

Such was the trust between Bishop Feofan and Brother Grigory that, at one point, they lived together. It was Grand Duchess Militza who orchestrated Rasputin's move into Feofan's house, but Rasputin soon found the set-up constraining. He disliked limits on his movements or, more importantly, limits on visits from ‘little ladies' and soon transferred himself to the house of a less scrupulous journalist friend. He would eventually move into flats of his own on the English Prospect and then on Nikolaevsky Street.

But Feofan remained happily ignorant of the foibles of his Man of God. Like Iliodor, he was ready with explanations of the trips to the Kazan bath-houses: ‘He too wanted to test himself, to see if he had extinguished
passion in himself.' Nobody would argue with the sainted Feofan when he insisted, even more implausibly, that Rasputin had mastery over the weather. This particular rumour had begun in Pokrovskoye after Rasputin had been assailed by angry fathers and husbands of ‘Rasputinki'. He had raised his arm to the sky at the beginning of a long, dry spell and said: ‘Let there be no rain for three months.'

The Bishop never tired of singing his Man of God's praises to the Tsar and Tsarina: ‘It is the voice of the Russian soil which speaks through him.' He added that Rasputin had ‘so deep a passion of repentance that I would all but guarantee his eternal salvation'.

On November 1 1905, two weeks after signing the October Manifesto outlining Russia's first parliament, the Tsar and Tsarina agreed to have tea with Rasputin. The tea was held on a sunny afternoon, at the Montenegrin Black Princesses' villa, Sergevka, at Peterhof. Brother Grigory was immediately relaxed, addressing the Imperial couple as Batiushka and Matiushka (little father and little mother). He would soon refer to them even more simply as ‘Papa' and ‘Mama'. The Tsar made a characteristically unforthcoming entry in his diary: ‘We had tea with Militza and Stana [Anastasia]. We met the Man of God Grigory from the province of Tobol.'

R
asputin was not the first mystic at Court. Holy Men had always been a feature of Court life. In the early
1800s the Holy Man to Nicholas I had accurately predicted the sequence of names of future monarchs, concluding, ominously, that Nicholas II would be followed by a ‘peasant with an axe in his hand'.

The vacillating Tsar Nicholas II frequently summoned clairvoyants to conjure up the spirit of his domineering father, Alexander III, who twisted forks in knots and called him ‘girlie'. Alexander clearly retained some influence over his son, and Nicholas was a willing subject, refusing to be put off, even when his late father's guidance was at its most vague. One medium, a bogus gynaecologist, passed on a typical message: ‘Take courage, my son, and do not abandon the struggle.' This same medium insisted that a catastrophe in Russia could only be averted while he himself was alive. He was sadly vindicated, dying just five months before the Revolution.

Another of the Tsar's peasant clairvoyants correctly foretold the disastrous outcome of the Russo-Japanese War and disconcerted the Tsar by banging dolls and shouting ‘Sergei'. He later insisted she was referring to Grand Duke Sergei, who was blown up by terrorists in 1905. While he consulted clairvoyants, the Tsarina and her friend Anna Vyrubova were said to be obsessed by scrutinising Egyptian cards and reading coffee grounds.

The couple's Court priest, Father Vassiliev, was himself no stranger to mysticism. The Tsarina maintained that his religious fervour made him ‘shriek and hop like a dervish'. His favourite homily seemed unhelpful: ‘Don't worry, the devil neither smokes nor drinks nor engages in revelry and yet he is the devil.'

Grand Duchess Militza recognised fertile ground and took it upon herself to introduce a series of holy fools to the Imperial couple. First there was Matryona the Barefoot, dressed in rags, who brought icons to the Palace and shouted incomprehensible prophecies. She was followed by an epileptic called Mitya Kobalya from Kozelsk, who, like Rasputin, came with the endorsement of Bishop Feofan. Mitya had short arms and spoke as unintelligibly as Matryona. However, he had the advantage of an interpreter, a sexton called Egorov. Mitya looked the part: ‘He wears his hair long and unbound and goes about barefoot the year round, leaning on a staff' was the way one onlooker described him. He predicted Russia's defeat at Port Arthur. He was on less certain ground, however, when asked, years before, whether the Tsarina would bear an heir. The Tsarina herself had put the question to him; Mitya's response had been to scream so loudly that she had hysterics. The translator's barely audible interpretation was that it was ‘too early to tell'.

‘Blessed Mitya' must have been a controversial presence, as Anna Vyrubova later tried to claim that he had never been to the Palace. But on January 14 1906 the Tsar referred to an exhaustingly long meeting with Mitya in his diary: ‘The Man of God Dmitri came to see us from Kozelsk near the Optina Pustyn Monastery. He brought with him an image drawn according to a vision he had had. We talked for about an hour and a half.'

If members of the Imperial entourage had misgivings about this particular Man of God, Mitya certainly enjoyed the blessing of another unconventional character
at Court, a Tibetan healer called Peter Badmaev. The healer, subsequently accused of drugging the Tsar, insisted that Mitya ‘impressed me as an intelligent, religious peasant'. But Badmaev's attempts, over two years, to treat Mitya's catarrh were unsuccessful; the Man of God never shook off another of his sobriquets, Mitya the Nasal-voiced. Incidentally, Rasputin mistrusted Dr Badmaev: ‘That Chinaman would betray you for a kopeck.'