The Rasputin File Read Free Page A

the Thirteenth Section’s work.
    The head of the Thirteenth Section was a certain F. P. Simpson, a former head of the Kharkov Provincial Appellate Court. The interrogations themselves were conducted by several investigators: two people with the same last name, Vladimir and Tikhon Rudnev, and Grigory Girchich. They, too, had been reassigned to the Commission from provincial courts. As a kind of guarantee that they would have no links to the capital’s former governing clique now under investigation.
    And then came the October 1917 coup. The Bolsheviks who seized power put an end to the Provisional Government. Those who the day before had been ministers in that government were sent to the very same cells in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Where not without humour they were greeted by the tsarist ministers whom they had only recently imprisoned in the same place. The Bolsheviks also put an end to the work of the Extraordinary Commission.
    But in 1927 the Bolsheviks decided to publish part of the interrogations of the most important tsarist ministers, for the tenth anniversary of their revolution. The publication was supposed to be ideological; that is, it was supposed to demonstrate the ‘senescence’ of a tsarist regime controlled by the ignorant, debauched peasant Grigory Rasputin.
    By that time, Alexander Blok, who worked on the stenographs, had died. The publication of the transcripts was supervised by one of the Extraordinary Commission’s most celebrated members, P. Schyogolev, who had agreed to collaborate with the Bolsheviks.
    Before the revolution Schyogolev had been editor of the magazine Times Past . A publication ‘of wholly revolutionary temper’, it had been shut down several times by the tsarist authorities. Leo Tolstoy said that ‘if I had been young, I would have taken a revolver in each hand after reading Times Past.’ For his magazine’s sake he endured a cell in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he himself would eventually interrogate the tsarist ministers who had imprisoned him. But after the Bolsheviks came to power, the once incorruptible Schyogolev changed completely. He became part of the Bolshevik regime. Evil tongues maintained that his apartment contained a collection of documents and furniture from the Winter Palace.
    Seven little volumes entitled Proceedings of the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry were all that Schyogolev published from the immense quantity of material produced by the interrogations. And those pitiful volumes were for many years the chief documentary basis for all the books written about Rasputin.
    It was only four decades later — in 1964 — that another sensational document about Rasputin was added to those volumes drawn from the Extraordinary Commission’s legacy. And it was after the appearance of that document that my search for the File began.
    The Missing File
    In 1964 the journal Issues of History published a sensational number that at the time was eagerly read not only by historians. Printed in it for the first time was the ‘Resolution of the Investigator F. Simpson of the Extraordinary Commission Regarding the Activity of Rasputin and his Close Associates and their Influence over Nicholas II in the Area of State Governance’, a document that until then had been held in a secret repository of the archive of the October Revolution.
    The ‘Resolution’ was a summary of the Thirteenth Section’s efforts to clarify Rasputin’s role.
    I read the issue later when I was starting work on my book about Nicholas II. And the ‘Resolution’ made a stunning impression on me. In his conclusion Simpson quoted extensively from the testimony of people belonging to Rasputin’s most intimate circle: his publisher Filippov; his friend Sazonov, in whose apartment Rasputin had lived and with whose wife he had enjoyed the most intimate relationship; the famous Maria Golovina, a true worshipper of Rasputin who became an involuntary cause of his death; the Petersburg cocottes