collapse.
Shrewdly, Rasputin secured his position and enhanced his hold by meeting the Empress’s more prosaic need for constant reassurance and encouragement. His conversation and telegrams were an artful blend of religion and prophecy, often sounding like the gloriously meaningless forecasts which fall from penny machines at county fairs: “Be crowned with earthly happiness, the heavenly wreaths will follow.… Do not fear our present embarrassments, the protection of the Holy Mother is over you—go to the hospitals though the enemies are menacing—have faith.… Don’t fear, it will not be worse than it was, faith and the banner will favor us.” Blurred though these messages were, the Empress, weary and harassed, found them comforting.
Politically, Rasputin’s advice was usually confined to carefully endorsing policies which the Empress already believed in, making certain that the idea was rephrased in his own language so that it would seem freshly inspired. Where his ideas were in fact original and specific, they accurately and realistically represented peasant Russia. Throughout the war, he warned of the bloodletting. “It is getting empty in the villages,” he told the Tsar. Yet, when challenged by Paleologue that he had been urging the Tsar to end the war, Rasputin retorted, “Those who told you that are just idiots. I am always telling the Tsar that he must fight until complete victory is won. But I am also telling him that the war has brought unbearable suffering to the Russian people. I know of villages where there is no one left but the blind and the wounded, the widows and the orphans.”
As the war continued, Rasputin, like Lenin, saw that along with peace the other predominant concern of the Russian people was bread. He recognized that the shortage of food was mainly a problem of distribution, and never ceased to warn the Empress that the most critical of Russia’s problems was the railways. At one point in October 1915, he urged Alexandra to insist that the Tsar cancel all passenger trains for three days so that supplies of food and fuel might flow into the cities.
When it came to the choice of ministers to rule the country, the area in which he exercised his most destructive influence, Rasputin had no design at all. He nominated men for the highest positions in the Russian government simply because they liked him, or said they liked him, or at the very least did not oppose him. Rasputin had no burning ambition to rule Russia. He simply wished to be left untroubled in his free-wheeling, dissolute life. When powerful ministers, despising his influence over the Empress, opposed him, he wanted them out of the way. By placing his own men in every office of major importance, he could ensure, not that he would rule, but that he would be left alone.
In time, every appointment in the highest echelon of the government ministries and in the leadership of the church passed through his hands. Some of Rasputin’s choices would have been comical except that the joke was too grim. Rasputin once found a court chamberlain named A. N. Khvostov dining at the nightclub Villa Rode. When the gypsy chorus began to sing, Rasputin was not satisfied; he thought the basses much too weak. Spotting Khvostov, who was large and stout, he clapped him on the back and said, “Brother, go and help them sing. You are fat and can make a lot of noise.” Khvostov, tipsy and cheerful, leaped onto the stage and boomed out a thundering bass. Delighted, Rasputin clapped and shouted his approval. Not long afterward, Khvostov unexpectedly became Minister of Interior. His appointment provoked Vladimir Purishkevich, a member of the Duma, to declare in disgust that new ministers now were asked to pass examinations, not in government, but in gypsy music.
Similarly, Rasputin’s ardent endorsement of the Empress’s belief in autocracy was at least in part self- defensive. Only under a system in which his patron and patroness were all-powerful would he survive. He resisted the demands of those in the Duma and elsewhere who urged responsible government, because the first act of such a government would have been to eliminate him. Furthermore, Rasputin honestly did not believe in responsible government. He did not believe that the Duma members or Rodzianko, their President, represented the real Russia. Certainly they did not represent the peasant Russia from which he had sprung. He believed in the monarchy not simply as an opportunist, but because it was the only form of government known in the villages. Traditionally, the peasants looked to the Tsar. Aristocrats, courtiers, landowners—precisely the men who sat in the Duma—were the classes which, historically, had barred the peasants’ access to the Tsar. Seen in this light, it became the Duma members, not Rasputin, who were the unscrupulous opportunists trying to steal the Tsar’s powers. To give the Duma more power than it had, to further dilute the role of autocracy, would bring to an end the old, traditional Russia of Tsar, Church and People. Rasputin understood this and resisted it. “Responsible government,” wrote the Empress to the Tsar, “as our Friend says, would be the ruin of everything.”
How did Nicholas regard these ardent, persistent letters exhorting him to choose this or that minister and, above all, to believe more in “our Friend”? There were times when he reacted by quietly ignoring her advice, wrapping himself in a mantle of silence, avoiding direct answers and calmly going his own way. The very vociferousness of Alexandra’s letters is evidence that she was often dissatisfied with his response; had she truly been ruling the empire and Nicholas merely a pawn executing her commands, these insistent, repetitive exhortations would not have been necessary.
But if Nicholas did not always gratify his wife’s entreaties, he rarely confronted her with an overt refusal. This was especially true in any matter involving Rasputin. Toward the
Nevertheless, when the Empress threw herself at him verbally, pleading that he follow the advice of “the Man of God,” Nicholas often bowed. He knew very well how much she counted on the presence and prayers of Rasputin; he had seen with his own eyes what had happened at the bedsides of Alexis and Anna. To comfort her, encourage her and appease her fears, he endorsed her suggestions and recommendations. This relationship was greatly accentuated once Nicholas had left for Headquarters. Then, having left the management of internal affairs in the Empress’s hands, Nicholas regularly deferred to her suggestions in the appointment of ministers. And it was her choice of ministers, proposed by Rasputin, beseechingly pressed on and unwisely endorsed by the absentee Tsar, which lost the Tsar his throne.
* A novel explanation of Rasputin’s two violently contrasting images—the holy man and the debauchee—is offered by Maria Rasputin in her book,
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
IN the early autumn of 1915, Alexandra Fedorovna had been Empress of Russia for twenty-one years. During this time, she had shown little interest in politics and no personal ambition. Except in defense of Rasputin, she rarely even mentioned government affairs to the Tsar. She scarcely knew her husband’s ministers and, during the first decade of her marriage, held them completely in awe. In 1905, Count Fredericks persuaded her with difficulty to speak to the Tsar on a political matter. When he came back and asked her a second time, Alexandra burst into tears. After her son was born and Rasputin appeared, she intervened when he seemed threatened. Then her power could become formidable: Kokovtsov’s dismissal as Premier was primarily her work. But she remained shy and silent in the presence of the ministers and she still had no experience in government affairs.
All this changed when Nicholas took command of the army. Then the gap he left behind in the civil administration was filled by his wife. It was not a formal regency; rather, it was an almost domestic division of family duties. As such, it was wholly within the tradition of the Russian autocracy. “When the Emperor went to war, of course his wife governed instead of him,” said Grand Duke Alexander, explaining what he considered a natural sequence of events.
That Nicholas regarded her role in this light is clear from his letters. “Think, my wify, will you not come to the
