All of which helps to explain why few tears were shed for Stolypin even in the immediate aftermath of his death, and why his name rarely passed the lips of his immediate successors. The new premier, Kok- ovtsov, told the council of ministers that it was their 'moral duty' to 'preserve, continue, and embody the elevated principles' with which Stolypin's 'whole work had been imbued'. But by this he meant no more than a belief in 'the good of Russia and a strong faith in her power and her great future'.22 There was no commitment to reform and Kokovtsov was in no position to achieve it, being far from the dominant prime minister that Stolypin had once been.
Few incidents in Russian history have attracted as much attention from counterfactualists as Stolypin's assassination. Certainly no event has contributed more to the re-evaluation of Russia's imperial past in the early twenty-first century. And yet, paradoxically enough, this seems to be a case where the level of attention has been inversely proportionate to the plausibility of the results. There are many points in Russia's past at which history might have turned in a different direction. Stolypin's assassination is not one of them.
GRIGORY RASPUTIN AND THE OUTBREAK OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
June 1914 douglas smith
H
e mistook her for a beggar when she first approached.
It was early on the afternoon of 29 June 1914. Grigory Rasputin, recently returned from the capital to his village of Pokrovskoe in western Siberia, had just finished lunch with his family and was on his way to send a telegram. He had opened the gate and was stepping out into the road when there she was at his side. As Rasputin reached in his pocket for his coin purse, the woman drew a long dagger from under her garment and thrust it into Rasputin's belly. He buckled over in pain, moaning, 'I'm hurt! She stabbed me!' and then set off running down the street trying to escape. After about twenty paces he turned to look back. She was dressed all in black with a white kerchief over her face covering everything but her eyes. In her right hand she held the bloody dagger aloft. And she was chasing after him. Rasputin kept running in the direction of the village church, then he stopped and picked up a large stick from the road. As she came near he raised the stick and brought it down hard over her head, knocking her to the ground. The villagers came out at the commotion, grabbed the woman, and dragged her back up the road to the Pokrovskoe district administration building.1
Rasputin was helped back to his home and laid down on a bench. His family was in hysterics. A local medical orderly was fetched, and he bandaged the wound to stop the bleeding. Meanwhile, Alexander Vladimirov, the senior doctor in Tyumen, the closest large city some fifty-two miles away, was summoned by telegram, and he immediately set out for Pokrovskoe. Rasputin drifted in and out of consciousness. At one point he called for a priest. It seemed to those gathered around Rasputin that there was little hope he would survive.
Vladimirov and his assistant arrived in the early hours of 30 June. After a brief examination, he decided that they would have to operate immediately for there was no chance of getting Rasputin back to Tyumen alive. Rasputin was put under with chloroform, and the doctor made a three-and-a-half-inch incision between the wound and the navel. Sections of Rasputin's small intestine had been sliced and had to be sutured. The wound was extremely serious; the threat of infection was great. It would be some time before they could be certain that Rasputin was out of danger.2
Her name was Khionya Guseva. She was thirty-three years old, single, and a resident of the city of Tsaritsyn (Volgograd), where she worked as a seamstress. The white kerchief she wore served to hide a grotesque deformity: Guseva was lacking a nose. She was questioned for two days. From the start she confessed to her crime, saying that Rasputin was 'a false prophet, slanderer, a rapist and a molester of young maidens'. It soon became known that she was a follower of the radical right-wing priest Iliodor, once one of Rasputin's most prominent supporters, now among his greatest foes. Guseva claimed she had acted alone and that the attempt to kill Rasputin had been entirely her own, although it was clear to the police, and to Rasputin, that Iliodor had played some role in the crime. Before they could track him down, however, Iliodor, disguised as a woman, fled his home and escaped abroad. As for Guseva, after a year-long investigation she was found irresponsible for her actions due to insanity and placed in the Tomsk
Regional Clinic for the Insane, where she would remain until March 1917 when she was released by the Provisional Government, her attack interpreted by Russia's new rulers as an act of patriotic heroism.3
Almost immediately after the attack Rasputin's daughter Matryona sent a telegram to Nicholas and Alexandra describing what had happened and how her father had miraculously survived.4 The royal family was sailing in the Finnish skerries on The Standard when they got the news. Alexandra cabled back: 'Deeply disturbed. We grieve with you and are praying with all our hearts.'5
The attack was a terrible blow to the ruling family who had drawn close to Rasputin after he first appeared at court in November 1905. Born in Pokrovskoe in January 1869 into a simple peasant family, Rasputin by 1914 was the second most famous (if not infamous) man in Russia after the tsar. His early years are largely unknown. After what appears to have been a rather rowdy youth, sometime in the 1890s Rasputin had a religious awakening. He left his wife to join the ranks of Russia's holy pilgrims (stranniki) spending many months away from home wandering across the vast country from monastery to monastery in search of enlightenment. With time, word of a Siberian holy man of profound Christian spirituality and with a mysterious gift for healing and prophecy reached St Petersburg. Rasputin came to the attention of clerics at the capital's Theological Academy and then made the acquaintance of the so-called Black Princesses, the sisters Militsa and Anastasia, daughters of the king of Montenegro, who introduced Rasputin to Nicholas and Alexandra.
The couple, and particularly Alexandra, had long been interested in mystics and popular holy men, an interest shared by many in the Petersburg elite, and over time they came to see Rasputin as one of their few true friends, someone who could be counted on to speak honestly about all matters, could convey to them the transformative beauty of Orthodoxy, and could ease the suffering ofAlexis, the haemophiliac tsarevich, through the power of his prayers. As the years passed, Alexandra also came to believe that Rasputin possessed unmatched insight into practically all matters, be it faith, politics and even warfare.