“IT ALL STARTED WITH my grandfather’s memoirs,” Sokolov told us.
He talked about his youth, about finding the old journals in the cellar of the cottage he’d grown up in. He was an efficient storyteller and hadn’t dwelled too long on detail, which was good. I could feel a ticking clock bearing down on us all, given that Koschey was still out there, with the device. Sokolov then hit some visible reticence and went silent. We offered him food and drink, which he declined. Then after an uncomfortable moment, he seemed to reach some kind of internal resignation, and he told us what was in the diaries.
64
Misha’s Journal
Karovo, Kaluga Province
December 1926
It was a night that would long be remembered. The night that would change everything.
Not just for me, but for everyone in the empire.
And to the end of my days, given everything that followed, I shall wonder whether or not I should have stopped it from happening.
That winter ten years ago, back in 1916, was bleak and harsh. The war against the Germans was raging on, and eleven million of Mother Russia’s faithful sons had already been sucked into its bloody embrace. Horrific losses increased by the day, and the Army’s supply of weapons was virtually depleted. Across the land, there was great hardship and suffering. With food and manpower diverted to the front, there was widespread starvation. The people were angry. Trouble was brewing.
In Petrograd, we were all living on a knife’s edge. Rasputin was, as always, oblivious to the danger bubbling around us. His mind was elsewhere, strategizing for our grand intervention at the front. I was playing along while desperately searching for a way out of my quandary.
My old master was, by then, in continual fear for his life, and with good reason. He was loathed by all of Petrograd’s society, if not by everyone in the empire. The nobility and the bourgeoisie were outraged at how this sinful peasant had brought shame to the court and how he seemed to control the royal couple as if they were his marionettes. They blamed his meddling for the disastrous mismanagement of the war-it was at his behest that the tsar had relieved Grand Duke Nikolai of his command and taken over the war campaign himself. It was leading to an inevitable revolution that would cause them to lose everything.
It was in that turbulent environment that on a fateful day that December, Rasputin received an unexpected invitation. Prince Felix Yusupov, the young heir to Russia’s biggest fortune, wanted Rasputin to join him and some friends at his palace. The Yusupovs were descendants of the Tatar ruler Khan Yusuf and, it was believed, of the Prophet Mohamed himself. The prince’s ancestors had ruled over Damascus, Antioch, and Egypt before ending up in Russia at the time of Ivan the Terrible and converting to Christianity a century later. Their palace fronting the Moika Canal, one of many they owned across the empire, was a sprawling edifice that rivaled the Alexander Palace in its grandeur. It had ballrooms, bathing pools, and a private theater where Liszt and Chopin had performed concerts. Much later, I would hear that long after the revolution had wrecked the empire and the Yusupovs had fled Russia on board a British warship, the remains of a corpse were discovered in one of the palace’s many hidden rooms. The bones turned out to be those of Felix’s great-grandmother’s lover. This was a family whose history mirrored that of Russia. On this occasion, it was fated to influence it one final time.
Felix and Rasputin had become more than acquaintances over the last year, but Rasputin had never been to the Moika Palace, nor had he met the prince’s wife, Irina, who was the niece of the tsar and was, according to Felix, feeling unwell.
He asked Rasputin if he wouldn’t mind treating her while he was there, and offered to send his driver to pick him up.
Irina was young and attractive. I couldn’t help but think of the poor woman as yet another lamb being led to the slaughter. But perhaps something else was afoot.
Rasputin knew that Yusupov, as Russia’s richest heir and a key member of the nobility, harbored the same hostility toward him as the rest of his enemies. He suspected Yusupov and his friends had other intentions regarding him. Malevolent ones. It was already insulting that the prince couldn’t be seen to receive him during the day and had asked that he visit them in the middle of the night.
Still, he decided he would go to the meeting. He wanted to know what they were up to.
“We’ll use the device,” he told me. “You will set it up outside the Moika Palace before I go in. And once they’re under its effect, I will know what they really have planned for me.”
I harbored the same suspicions, but I had a different plan in mind. I decided I would find out on my own, before he went there.
Not knowing anything about the layout of the palace was going to be a problem. I didn’t know where to set up my device, and I didn’t want to risk riding out there on the cart with the larger machine, the one we’d used at the mines. The only alternative was to use a coat with the conductors sewn into its sleeves, the one Rasputin had used the first time he treated the tsarevich. It would be more powerful than that earlier version, of course. Many years had passed, and my work had greatly evolved. Still, it was a risk, but one I felt compelled to take.
If nothing else, Rasputin had definitely turned me into an adventurer.
I showed up at the Moika Palace the next day and, reining in my nervousness, I presented myself as the personal envoy of Rasputin and asked to see the prince. Felix, curious as to my presence, agreed to receive me. The liveried Ethiopian manservant led me past rooms of astounding opulence, past a library lined with shelves that held what must have been every book ever written, and down a steep staircase to a charming basement room. It had a vaulted ceiling and was divided into two parts. One was a cozy dining room that had a roaring fireplace. There was a magnificent inlaid ebony cabinet beside it that seemed like it was made up of thousands of tiny mirrors, with a splendid rock-crystal crucifix sitting on it. The other part was a sitting room that had a settee facing a large polar-bear skin. The only windows were small and set high in the wall on one side, just under the ceiling.
Before long, the prince joined me there. He was slim and unprepossessing, his features thinly drawn. He reeked of elegance and of breeding, but I found his manner phlegmatic and rather effeminate. As a youth and during his years at Oxford, he was known to enjoy dressing up in women’s clothing and going to nightclubs disguised as such, and I could easily picture him in that attire. Rumors abounded about his liaisons with Grand Duke Dimitry Pavlovich, the tsar’s tall, ruggedly handsome young cousin who lived nearby.
Once we were alone, I switched on the device and waited until I felt the prince was under its influence. Then I began by asking him how he felt about Rasputin.
“That scoundrel is the root of all evil and the cause of all our problems,” he hissed, his eyes bulging angrily. “He is single-handedly responsible for all the misfortunes that have blighted Russia. If he isn’t stopped, he’s going to bring down the monarchy and bring us down with it. Do you know what he did last month?”
I probably did, but I replied, “No.”
“He offered to get me a senior posting in the government,” Felix scoffed. “Me, Prince Felix Yusupov. This illiterate peasant from the armpit of Siberia was offering me a job. In my uncle-in-law’s government.”
“What did you reply?” I asked.
“I took on a humbled air and told him I felt I was too young and inexperienced to serve at such a high level, but that I was immeasurably flattered and gratified by the thought that someone as discerning as he had such a lofty opinion of me.” He looked at me in disbelief, then he burst out laughing.