millions of their subjects.
Or was there another, altogether different reason for their astonishing faith in that man? Some entirely different explanation for his actions?
Of course, when his terrible corpse bobbed to the surface at the beginning of the century, it was all very clear. Rasputin was a servant of the Antichrist. So at the time said both Russian believers and non-believers. With the result that eighty years later one still wants to ask oneself, just who after all was Grigory Efimovich Rasputin?
1
THE FILE: SEARCHING FOR DOCUMENTS
The Prison Ball
I supposed that only when I had found the File would I be able to answer those questions. I had long been aware that the File had to exist.
In the 1970s when I was writing my book about Nicholas, I naturally had occasion to look at the papers of the Extraordinary Commission of the Provisional Government.
In March 1917, after Nicholas’s abdication and the triumph of the February Revolution, the solitary confinement cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress became crowded. Delivered to that Russian Bastille, where during the tsar’s reign political dissidents had been incarcerated, were the people who had put them there — those who not long before had controlled Russia’s destiny. The tsarist prime ministers Stürmer and Golitsyn; the minister of internal affairs Protopopov; the head of the infamous Department of Police Beletsky and his replacement Alexis Vasiliev; the aged court minister Count Fredericks; the chairman of the Council of State Schlegovitov; the palace castellan Voeikov; the tsarina’s closest friend, Anya Vyrubova; and so forth and so on. In a word, the very highest society. So that the fortress’s damp cells, constantly subject to flooding, resembled nothing so much as a brilliant Winter Palace ball.
On 4 March 1917, the Provisional Government formed the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Illegal Acts by Ministers and Other Responsible Persons of the Tsarist Regime. And from the Peter and Paul Fortress the ministers were shunted back and forth for interrogation at the Winter Palace, so familiar to them, where the Extraordinary Commission worked, and where only recently they had appeared in medals and ribbons. Or else the Commission investigators would themselves drive out to conduct their interrogations at the fortress. The transcripts of thoseinterrogations were then deciphered and put into shape. And it was Russia’s leading poet, the famous Alexander Blok, who did the putting. He has described in his notebooks the atmosphere of the interrogations and the appearance of the Winter Palace with its empty throne room, ‘where all the fabric had been torn from the walls and the throne removed, since the soldiers wanted to break it up’.
The transcripts of the interrogations were then prepared for publication. All Russia was supposed to learn, according the Commission plan, just what had transpired behind the scenes in mysterious Tsarskoe Selo, from which the tsar and tsarina had ruled Russia. On the basis of that information the future first Russian parliament was then meant to decide the fates of the tsar, the tsarina, and the ministers — of those people who had just days before governed Russia.
And one of the main questions concerned the semi-literate Russian peasant Grigory Rasputin.
Section Thirteen
The Commission’s executive council and its twenty-seven separate boards of inquiry conducted continuous interrogations of its brilliant prisoners from March 1917 until the Bolshevik coup in October.
A special board of inquiry with the expressive name ‘Thirteenth Section’ was particularly concerned with ‘investigating the activity of the dark forces’. In the political jargon of the day, the ‘dark forces’ were Rasputin, the tsarina, and those close to them. The ‘dark forces’, their true influence via Rasputin over the former Tsar Nicholas II in the area of state governance: that was the substance of
Or was there another, altogether different reason for their astonishing faith in that man? Some entirely different explanation for his actions?
Of course, when his terrible corpse bobbed to the surface at the beginning of the century, it was all very clear. Rasputin was a servant of the Antichrist. So at the time said both Russian believers and non-believers. With the result that eighty years later one still wants to ask oneself, just who after all was Grigory Efimovich Rasputin?
1
THE FILE: SEARCHING FOR DOCUMENTS
The Prison Ball
I supposed that only when I had found the File would I be able to answer those questions. I had long been aware that the File had to exist.
In the 1970s when I was writing my book about Nicholas, I naturally had occasion to look at the papers of the Extraordinary Commission of the Provisional Government.
In March 1917, after Nicholas’s abdication and the triumph of the February Revolution, the solitary confinement cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress became crowded. Delivered to that Russian Bastille, where during the tsar’s reign political dissidents had been incarcerated, were the people who had put them there — those who not long before had controlled Russia’s destiny. The tsarist prime ministers Stürmer and Golitsyn; the minister of internal affairs Protopopov; the head of the infamous Department of Police Beletsky and his replacement Alexis Vasiliev; the aged court minister Count Fredericks; the chairman of the Council of State Schlegovitov; the palace castellan Voeikov; the tsarina’s closest friend, Anya Vyrubova; and so forth and so on. In a word, the very highest society. So that the fortress’s damp cells, constantly subject to flooding, resembled nothing so much as a brilliant Winter Palace ball.
On 4 March 1917, the Provisional Government formed the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Illegal Acts by Ministers and Other Responsible Persons of the Tsarist Regime. And from the Peter and Paul Fortress the ministers were shunted back and forth for interrogation at the Winter Palace, so familiar to them, where the Extraordinary Commission worked, and where only recently they had appeared in medals and ribbons. Or else the Commission investigators would themselves drive out to conduct their interrogations at the fortress. The transcripts of thoseinterrogations were then deciphered and put into shape. And it was Russia’s leading poet, the famous Alexander Blok, who did the putting. He has described in his notebooks the atmosphere of the interrogations and the appearance of the Winter Palace with its empty throne room, ‘where all the fabric had been torn from the walls and the throne removed, since the soldiers wanted to break it up’.
The transcripts of the interrogations were then prepared for publication. All Russia was supposed to learn, according the Commission plan, just what had transpired behind the scenes in mysterious Tsarskoe Selo, from which the tsar and tsarina had ruled Russia. On the basis of that information the future first Russian parliament was then meant to decide the fates of the tsar, the tsarina, and the ministers — of those people who had just days before governed Russia.
And one of the main questions concerned the semi-literate Russian peasant Grigory Rasputin.
Section Thirteen
The Commission’s executive council and its twenty-seven separate boards of inquiry conducted continuous interrogations of its brilliant prisoners from March 1917 until the Bolshevik coup in October.
A special board of inquiry with the expressive name ‘Thirteenth Section’ was particularly concerned with ‘investigating the activity of the dark forces’. In the political jargon of the day, the ‘dark forces’ were Rasputin, the tsarina, and those close to them. The ‘dark forces’, their true influence via Rasputin over the former Tsar Nicholas II in the area of state governance: that was the substance of