What made these rumours so damaging politically was the widespread belief, which Rasputin himself encouraged, that he was the Tsarina’s lover. There were even rumours of the Empress and Rasputin engaging in wild orgies with the Tsar and Anna Vyrubova, her lady-in-waiting, who was said to be a lesbian. Similar pornographic tales about Marie Antoinette and the ‘impotent Louis’ circulated on the eve of the French Revolution. There was no evidence for any of these rumours. True, there was the infamous letter from the Empress to Rasputin, leaked to the press in 1912, in which she had written: ‘I kiss your hands and lay my head upon your blessed shoulders. I feel so joyful then. Then all I want is to sleep, sleep for ever on your shoulder, in your embrace.’35 But, given virtually everything else we know of the Empress, it would be a travesty to read this as a love letter. She was a loyal and devoted wife and mother who had turned to Rasputin in spiritual distress. In any case, she was probably too narrow-minded to take a lover.
Nevertheless, it was the fact that the rumours existed, rather than their truth, which caused such alarm to the Tsar’s supporters. They tried to convince him of Rasputin’s evil influence and to get him expelled from the court. But, although Nicholas knew of his misdemeanours, he would not remove Rasputin so long as the Empress continued to believe that he, and only he, could help their dying son. Rasputin’s calming effect on the Empress was too much appreciated by her henpecked husband, who once let slip in an unguarded moment: ‘Better one Rasputin than ten fits of hysterics every day.’ The Archimandrite Theophan, who had helped to bring Rasputin to St Petersburg, found himself expelled from the capital in 1910 after he tried to acquaint the Empress with the scandalous nature of her Holy Man’s behaviour. The monk Iliodor and Bishop Hermogen were imprisoned in remote monasteries in 1911, after confronting Rasputin with a long chronicle of his misdeeds and calling on him to repent. It was Iliodor, in revenge, who then leaked to the press the Empress’s letters to Rasputin. The Tsar stopped the press printing any more stories about Rasputin, in spite of the pledge he had given in the wake of the 1905 Revolution to abolish preliminary censorship. This effectively silenced the Church, coming as it did with the appointment of Vladimir Sabler, a close ally of Rasputin’s, as Procurator-General of the Holy Synod.36
Politicians were no more successful in their efforts to bring Rasputin down. They presented evidence of his sins to the Tsar, but Nicholas again refused to act. Why was he so tolerant of Rasputin? The answer surely lies in his belief that Rasputin was a simple man, a peasant, from ‘the people’, and that God had sent him to save the Romanov dynasty. Rasputin confirmed his prejudices and flattered his fantasies of a popular autocracy. He was a symbol of the Tsar’s belief in the Byzantine trinity — God, Tsar, and People — which he thought would help him to recast the regime in the mould of seventeenth-century Muscovy. ‘He is just a good, religious, simple-minded Russian,’ Nicholas once said to one of his courtiers. ‘When I am in trouble or plagued by doubts, I like to have a talk with him and invariably feel at peace with myself afterwards.’ Rasputin consciously played on this fantasy by addressing his royal patrons in the folksy terms batiushka-Tsar and matiushka-Tsarina (‘Father-Tsar’ and ‘Mother-Tsarina’) instead of ‘Your Imperial Majesty’. Nicholas believed that only simple people — people who were untainted by their connections with the political factions of St Petersburg — were capable of telling him the truth and of giving him disinterested advice. For nearly twenty years he received direct reports from Anatoly Klopov, a clerk in the Ministry of Finance. Rasputin fitted into the same category. As the embodiment of Nicholas’s ideal of the loyal Russian people, he could do no wrong. Nicholas discounted the rumours about him on the grounds that anyone shown such favour at court, especially a simple peasant like Rasputin, was bound to attract jealous criticisms. Moreover, he clearly considered Rasputin a family matter and looked upon such criticisms as an infringement of his private patrimony. When the Prime Minister, Stolypin, for example, gave him a dossier of secret police reports on Rasputin’s indiscretions, the Tsar made it clear that he regarded this unsolicited warning as a grave breach of etiquette: ‘I know, Petr Arkadevich, that you are sincerely devoted to me. Perhaps everything you say is true. But I ask you never again to speak to me about Rasputin. There is in any case nothing I can do.’ The President of the Duma got no further when he presented an even more damaging dossier based on the materials of Iliodor and the Holy Synod. Nicholas, though clearly disturbed by the evidence, told Rodzianko: ‘Rasputin is a simple peasant who can relieve the sufferings of my son by a strange power. The Tsarina’s reliance upon him is a matter for the family, and I will allow no one to meddle in my affairs.’37 It seems that the Tsar, in his obstinate adherence to the principles of autocracy, considered any questioning of his judgement an act of disloyalty.
And so the Rasputin affair went unresolved. More and more it poisoned the monarchy’s relations with society and its traditional pillars of support in the court, the bureaucracy, the Church and the army. The episode has often been compared to the Diamond Necklace Affair, a similar scandal that irreparably damaged the reputation of Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution, and that is about the sum of it. By the time of Rasputin’s eventual murder, in December 1916, the Romanov dynasty was on the verge of collapse.
2 Unstable Pillars
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i Bureaucrats and Dressing-Gowns
On the first morning of 1883 the readers of Government News (Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik) opened their newspaper to learn that A. A. Polovtsov had been appointed Imperial Secretary. It was hardly the sort of announcement to make anyone choke on their breakfast. At the age of fifty-one, Polovtsov had all the right credentials for this top Civil Service job. The son of a noble landowner, he had married the heiress to a banking fortune, graduated from the élite School of Law, and steadily risen through the ranks of the imperial bureaucracy. He was, by all accounts, refined, cultured and well mannered; Witte even thought him a little vain. Polovtsov was confident and perfectly at ease in the aristocratic circles of St Petersburg, counting several grand dukes among his closest friends. He even belonged to the Imperial Yacht Club, the after-hours headquarters of Russia’s ruling élite, where on New Year’s Eve he had been told of his promotion.1 In short, Alexander Alexandrovich was a model representative of that small and privileged tribe who administered the affairs of the imperial state.