The incident took place in Moscow. Bruce Lockhart came across Rasputin on the fateful evening in the first half of 1915:
One summer evening I was at Yar, the most luxurious night-haunt of Moscow, with some English visitors. As we watched the music-hall performance in the main hall, there was a violent fracas in one of the neighbouring kabinets. Wild shrieks of women, a man’s curses, broken glass and the banging of doors raised a discordant pandemonium. Head-waiters rushed upstairs. The manager sent for the policeman who was always on duty at such establishments. But the row and the roaring continued. There was more coming and going of waiters and policemen, and scratching of heads and holding of councils. The cause of the disturbance was Rasputin – drunk and lecherous, and neither police nor management dared evict him. The policeman telephoned his divisional inspector, the inspector telephoned to the Prefect. The Prefect telephoned to Djhunkovski, who was Assistant Minister of the Interior and head of all the police. Djhunkovski, who was a former general and a man of high character, gave orders that Rasputin, who after all was only an ordinary citizen and not even a priest, should be arrested forthwith. Having disturbed everyone’s enjoyment for two hours, he was led away, snarling vengeance, to the nearest police station. He was released early next morning on instructions from the highest quarters. He left the same day for St Petersburg, and within twenty-four hours Djhunkovski was relieved of his post.56
It was said that Rasputin had hit a woman and exposed himself. The Tsar would not listen to such stories. Not long afterwards, Samarin, a loyal and honest man in charge of Church affairs, was sacked at Rasputin’s behest; murmurs of protest grew louder.
Rasputin was accepted by nearly everyone in Moscow as a complete proof of the Tsar’s incompetence. ‘Down with the autocracy!’ cried the Liberals. But even among the reactionaries there were those who said: ‘If the autocracy is to flourish, give us a good autocrat.’57
In other words, everyone wanted change, but not the changes they were getting. Urged on by his wife and Rasputin, the Tsar took over from Grand Duke Nikolai as Supreme Commander of the Russian Armies, and with Nikolai’s departure, despair grew deeper. More plots seethed around the starets, and anti-Semitism too, because Simanovich (who had, as it happened, been baptised) and Rubinstein were his friends.
From here on in, the Tsarina kept up an endless stream of wifely notes to her husband, which frequently cited ‘Our Friend’ and his opinions. To many others, Rasputin was seen as the evil genius in a triumvirate, the other pillars of which were Vyrubova and the Tsarina. By the time Romania entered the war in August 1916, Rasputin was widely supposed to be running the country.
SIX
ON THE BRINK
With the approach of midsummer in 1916, Sir George Buchanan’s struggle to keep Russia in the war was getting harder. Russia’s infrastructure was as hopelessly underdeveloped as ever and the haemorrhage of men, weaponry and equipment was disastrous. By mid-1916 Russia was calling up her thirteenth million.1 Help had to come from the Allies if Russia were to keep fighting.
Traditionally, finance for Russia’s big projects had been raised in the City of London, but British financiers were in no position to help and money must be got from America, where the British had useful contacts. So, in the first week of June 1916, a few months after his first personal audience with the Tsar (‘I was summoned by an attendant in the livery of an 18th-century courier, wearing a flat hat with a huge bunch of red and yellow ostrich feathers on the left side’), Albert Stopford was cutting a deal. He noted in his diary:
Monday June 5th
To the Embassy, to speak to His Excellency about an American loan offered to Russia by the National City Bank, which had got hung up and seemed more than likely to fall through. Without hesitation he said he would do all he could for it. The Bank representatives who had come from New York wanted him to say a word to Sazonov. The matter was in the hands of Bark, Minister of Finance.
Returned to the hotel to tell the financiers, who asked if I thought the Ambassador would receive them before speaking to Sazonov. I immediately wrote to him and took the letter myself.
Tuesday June 6th
Met the Ambassador on the quay. He stopped me and said he had seen the financiers and agreed with all they said, and had laid the position before Sazonov, who was going that night to Stavka. At the hotel dined on the roof with the Americans, and afterwards went to their apartments to play bridge.2
Sazonov, the Foreign Minister, was tremendously useful to the British, for the Tsar was rarely willing to listen to Allied advice direct; he thought the British were much too pushy. Sir George ‘ventured to suggest’ change in a way that he resented and was forever nagging him to let the Duma make more decisions about which Ministers should be in charge. The French Ambassador was just as bad. Both despaired of the inadequacies of Russia as an ally, and privately recognised that these arose inevitably from a creaking political system which placed so much responsibility on the shoulders of one person – who might, as in this case, prove inadequate to bear it, and who was too stubborn to take their advice, preferring to listen to his wife.
As the war on the Eastern Front went from bad to worse, the British government’s concern about a possible Russian collapse heightened. Such a collapse would be fatal for the Western Front, as the Germans would then be able to direct their full military might in the west instead of fighting a war on two fronts. Britain’s Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, was only too painfully aware of this impending danger, and sought Prime Minister Asquith’s approval for an urgent initiative in the form of a special mission to Russia. Asquith gave his consent and agreed that Kitchener himself was the best man to lead it, for he believed that he was possibly the only British figure the Tsar might listen to. Kitchener, more than most, had always taken a particular interest in Russian affairs, and as a consequence had long foreseen the upshot of a Russian collapse. He was convinced that the fate of Russia was of overriding importance to Britain’s interests, and had spoken in Cabinet on several occasions during the spring of 1916 warning of the forces within Russia trying to bring about an armistice with Germany and consequently a separate peace treaty. Furthermore, Kitchener’s stock in Russian military circles was high and his opinions and reputation carried much weight with the Tsar personally.
As a result of secret diplomatic overtures, the Tsar indicated that he would welcome a delegation led by Kitchener. A secret invitation formally inviting Kitchener to visit Russia and meet with Nicholas was therefore sent in early May 1916. While the supply of munitions was high on Kitchener’s agenda, he particularly wished to impress on the Tsar the destructive effect Rasputin’s influence was having on Anglo-Russian relations and to urge the appointment of a genuinely national government that would draw together Russia’s most able and effective politicians. In light of the fact that the supply of munitions would be one of the mission’s major priorities, Asquith envisaged Lloyd George accompanying Kitchener. However, after the restoration of order in Dublin following the Easter Rising the previous month, the Prime Minister