The Rasputin File Read Free Page B

with whom Rasputin shared tender bonds; and the admirers who fell under his hypnotic influence.
    Naturally, I at once started looking for that testimony in the Proceedings published by Schyogolev. And naturally I failed to find it there. For it was the testimony of people who had liked Rasputin. Their point of view was absolutely unacceptable to Schyogolev. And naturally he did not include what they had to say.
    The quotations that Simpson had taken from the testimony for citation in his report actually changed things very little. For Simpson was trying very hard in his ‘Resolution’ to defend the same point of view advanced by Schyogolev in his publication.
    The ‘Resolution’ sketched the same picture of a crude, debauched peasant rendered senseless by drunkenness and licentiousness who ruled both the royal family and those corrupt ministers who had agreed to serve him as the favourite.
    Was it the whole truth of the testimony obtained by the Thirteenth Section? I had good reason to doubt it. For by then I already knew of the deep dissension within the Commission itself. One of the Thirteenth Section’s principal investigators, Vladimir Rudnev, had even resigned in protest. After emigration, he wrote of his reasons: ‘In August 1917, I submitted a request to be released from my duties in view of the attempts of the President of the Commission, Muravyov, to incite me to patently biased actions.’
    And I resolved to attempt something very difficult for the times: to go to the archive myself and read the testimony that Simpson had quoted in such a biased fashion.
    I won’t recount the efforts that I made to assemble all the official papers required for the right to acquaint myself with the Extraordinary Commission’s documents. Or how worthless those papers actually proved to be. Or how the only thing that did help was my status as a fashionable dramatist, as the author of plays whose productions were nearly impossibleto get into at the time, and as the screenwriter of a film that was then enjoying immense success. Suffice it to say that I obtained access to the Extraordinary Commission archive.
    How astonished I was to find there none of the testimony cited by Simpson! The documents were gone.
    It was highly probable that those documents were the most interesting ones. They represented the testimony of people who had seen Rasputin daily. And of people who for some reason had agreed to serve him with devotion. There, perhaps, lay the solution to the riddle; there, perhaps, was hidden the authentic portrait of that mysterious person.
    I called the vanished documents the ‘File’. And straightaway began my search for the File.
    The Writer Grigory Rasputin
    I did find Rasputin’s own rather pitiful file in the Commission archive.
    First were his famous telegrams to the tsar and tsarina. Solicitously preserved by the latter right up to the revolution, they were confiscated by the Extraordinary Commission and widely disseminated in a variety of publications.
    I also found certain mysterious and still unpublished telegrams sent from Tsarskoe Selo to Rasputin with the signature ‘Darling’ (Dushka) . Those telegrams, which we shall come back to, shed a certain distinctive light on the relationship between Rasputin and the tsarina.
    Also preserved in the archive were Rasputin’s own works. The strongest and most puzzling of these, the ‘Life of an Experienced Wanderer’, was not published in his lifetime. But the other three were: ‘Great Festivities in Kiev!’ (it was during those festivities that the famous prime minister Stolypin was killed), ‘Pious Meditations’ (a collection of homilies), and ‘My Thoughts and Reflections’ (an account of Rasputin’s trip to Jerusalem).
    These particular documents were transcriptions: the semi-literate Rasputin spoke, and someone wrote down what he said. And wrote it down with affection.
    After the revolution, Rasputin’s published writings were all removed from the