Rasputin by Frances Welch Read Free Book Online

singing his Man of God’s praises to the Tsar and Tsarina: ‘It is the voice of the Russian soil which speaks through him.’ He added that Rasputin had ‘so deep a passion of repentance that I would all but guarantee his eternal salvation’.
    On November 1 1905, two weeks after signing the October Manifesto outlining Russia’s first parliament, the Tsar and Tsarina agreed to have tea with Rasputin. The tea was held on a sunny afternoon, at the Montenegrin Black Princesses’ villa, Sergevka, at Peterhof. Brother Grigory was immediately relaxed, addressing the Imperial couple as Batiushka and Matiushka (little father and little mother). He would soon refer to them even more simply as ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’. The Tsar made a characteristically unforthcoming entry in his diary: ‘We had tea with Militza and Stana [Anastasia]. We met the Man of God Grigory from the province of Tobol.’

    R asputin was not the first mystic at Court. Holy Men had always been a feature of Court life. In the early1800s the Holy Man to Nicholas I had accurately predicted the sequence of names of future monarchs, concluding, ominously, that Nicholas II would be followed by a ‘peasant with an axe in his hand’.
    The vacillating Tsar Nicholas II frequently summoned clairvoyants to conjure up the spirit of his domineering father, Alexander III, who twisted forks in knots and called him ‘girlie’. Alexander clearly retained some influence over his son, and Nicholas was a willing subject, refusing to be put off, even when his late father’s guidance was at its most vague. One medium, a bogus gynaecologist, passed on a typical message: ‘Take courage, my son, and do not abandon the struggle.’ This same medium insisted that a catastrophe in Russia could only be averted while he himself was alive. He was sadly vindicated, dying just five months before the Revolution.
    Another of the Tsar’s peasant clairvoyants correctly foretold the disastrous outcome of the Russo-Japanese War and disconcerted the Tsar by banging dolls and shouting ‘Sergei’. He later insisted she was referring to Grand Duke Sergei, who was blown up by terrorists in 1905. While he consulted clairvoyants, the Tsarina and her friend Anna Vyrubova were said to be obsessed by scrutinising Egyptian cards and reading coffee grounds.
    The couple’s Court priest, Father Vassiliev, was himself no stranger to mysticism. The Tsarina maintained that his religious fervour made him ‘shriek and hop like a dervish’. His favourite homily seemed unhelpful: ‘Don’t worry, the devil neither smokes nor drinks nor engages in revelry and yet he is the devil.’
    Grand Duchess Militza recognised fertile ground and took it upon herself to introduce a series of holy fools to the Imperial couple. First there was Matryona the Barefoot, dressed in rags, who brought icons to the Palace and shouted incomprehensible prophecies. She was followed by an epileptic called Mitya Kobalya from Kozelsk, who, like Rasputin, came with the endorsement of Bishop Feofan. Mitya had short arms and spoke as unintelligibly as Matryona. However, he had the advantage of an interpreter, a sexton called Egorov. Mitya looked the part: ‘He wears his hair long and unbound and goes about barefoot the year round, leaning on a staff’ was the way one onlooker described him. He predicted Russia’s defeat at Port Arthur. He was on less certain ground, however, when asked, years before, whether the Tsarina would bear an heir. The Tsarina herself had put the question to him; Mitya’s response had been to scream so loudly that she had hysterics. The translator’s barely audible interpretation was that it was ‘too early to tell’.
    â€˜Blessed Mitya’ must have been a controversial presence, as Anna Vyrubova later tried to claim that he had never been to the Palace. But on January 14 1906 the Tsar referred