To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History)

by Cook, Andrew

  The Tsar was left prey to Rasputin, Vyrubova and the Tsarina. He was weak, but they supported whatever self-belief he had: his mystical view of his own divine right to be the Tsar, but also and most importantly his terror of relinquishing power. Nothing must weaken the monarchy. He never forgot that his grandfather, Alexander II, had been preparing to make concessions to the liberals when he was assassinated, while his father Alexander III, a fierce exponent of nationalism, orthodoxy and autocracy, had died in his bed.

  Nicholas welcomed the Tsarina’s constant reminders to be firm, because she said it was Rasputin’s advice. Nicholas was well aware of Rasputin’s faults but had faith in him, as weak people have faith that they are protected by brass Hands of Fatima and St Christopher medals and rabbits’ feet. When others warned him, as they did, that Rasputin’s proximity to the Tsarina was undermining public respect for the imperial family, he found refuge in a sense of martyrdom. He saw himself and the Tsarina elevated from the ignorant world, bearing the banner of holy truth regardless of jeers and brickbats. Psychologically at least, he was the perfect model of a mari complaisant.

  Rasputin’s influence over the Tsar rose as the Allied star fell. The Tsarina was already passing on to him Rasputin’s complaints about the pointlessness of so much loss of life. Paléologue, the French Ambassador, pooh-poohed the idea that she was working against the Allies; to him the Tsarina seemed English in every respect. Sir George Buchanan was not so sure.

  All the same, the Tsarina kept in touch with her brother, Prince Ernest of Hesse, intermittently throughout the war, and in 1915 came close to treason when Prince Ernest prevailed upon a Russian expatriate in Germany to convey a letter to her.6

  April 17th, 1915, ‘Alex to Nicky’:

  I had a long, dear letter from Erni… He longs for a way out of this dilemma that someone ought to begin to make a bridge for discussion. So he had an idea of quite privately sending a man of confidence to Stockholm, who should meet a gentleman sent by you… So he sent a gentleman to be there on the 28th… So I at once wrote an answer… and sent it the gentleman… he better not wait – and that tho’ one longs for peace, the time has not yet come. – I wanted to get all done before your return, as I know it would be unpleasant for you.

  Nicholas did not want to go crawling to Germany – to Alexandra’s bullying Uncle Willy. He honourably passed this letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But instead of confirming that the Tsar and Tsarina were entirely behind the Allies, it confirmed doubts about the Tsarina’s loyalty to them. After Kitchener’s death in June, there were at least two formal contacts with German emissaries.

  In July 1916, Protopopov, then Deputy Speaker of the Duma, visited Stockholm as head of a Duma delegation to Sweden. While there he met an official from the German embassy by the name of Fritz Warburg.7 The German outlined to Protopopov the Kaiser’s desire for a separate peace with Russia and touched on the terms that Berlin was minded to offer. While we have only a fragmentary idea of the terms Warburg put to Protopopov, his claim that they represented an ‘honourable and advantageous’ settlement was probably not an inaccurate one. Indeed, by comparison with the terms the Germans offered the Bolsheviks some two years later, this was as good an offer as the Russians were ever likely to get.

  When Protopopov returned to Petrograd he sought an audience with the Tsar at which he reported on the meeting with Warburg and suggested that Russia might open peace talks with the Germans. The Tsar rejected this overture on the basis that he had given his personal word to the Allies that Russia would not seek a separate peace. With that, Nicholas dismissed the suggestion. Channels between the Germans and Protopopov, however, remained open.

  While British Intelligence soon picked up word of Protopopov’s encounter in Stockholm from their agents there and monitored developments on his return, the public at large were blissfully unaware of it. Neither did they or his Duma colleagues know that Protopopov had, for some time, been in close and secret contact with Rasputin. The two had met in 1915 through their mutual friend Pyotr Badmaëv, the Siberian doctor and peddler of Tibetan medicine. Known for many years for his participation in the most outlandish of orgies, Protopopov’s neglected venereal disease had finally caught up with him to the extent that he now sought the questionable remedies offered by Badmaëv. He is also reputed to have had incipient ‘general paralysis of the insane’, as it was then known: the symptoms of tertiary syphilis.8

  Later that year, Buchanan, no doubt drawing on an intelligence report, asked the Tsar (whose loyalty to the Allies he claims never to have doubted)

  …whether it was true that, in the interview that Protopopov had had with a German agent at Stockholm, the latter had stated that, if Russia would make peace, Germany would evacuate Poland and raise no objection to Russia’s acquisition of Constantinople…

  These were among the political aspects of the conversation Proto-popov had with Fritz Warburg, but there were also financial ones, for Warburg was an economic adviser at the Stockholm embassy and younger brother of Max Warburg, the Hamburg banker.9 That generation of seven siblings also included the brothers Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York, reformer of the Federal Reserve Bank; Felix Warburg, a powerful New York banker whose father-in-law was the legendary New York financier Jacob Schiff; and Aby, the eldest, a scholar.10 Fritz’s account, as related to the family, may be somewhat disingenuous:

  In July 1916 Fritz stumbled into the history books quite by accident. A Russian delegation was passing through Stockholm on its way home from financial talks in London, when a Count Olusfiev asked to meet a German from the economic sphere. Having sounded out the mood in France and England, he said offhand, he wanted to do the same for Germany. The casual request concealed a serious agenda. During talks at the Foreign Office in Berlin, Fritz had received instructions to follow up on such overtures, and von Lucius encouraged him to meet with the Russians… Perhaps to give the German government some self-protective distance from the talks, Fritz claimed that he attended the Grand Hotel meeting with little official coaching and that he was astonished when the door opened and Alexander Protopopov, vice-president of the Russian Duma, strolled into the room. Suddenly Fritz was engaged in high-level, if discreetly unofficial talks, looking toward a separate peace between Germany and Russia… Felix was careful to stress that he was voicing his own views and not those of his government… [and that Germany’s] real grievance lay with France and England, not Russia. He proposed a swap in which Germany would get Baltic territory and Russia parts of German-occupied Poland, followed by stepped-up trade between Russia and Germany.11

  The Warburgs were on shaky ground. Having established the family in Germany some time between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were now impelled to demonstrate their loyalty to the country. This should not have been necessary, for they were patriotic Germans; Aby loathed Anglo-Saxon culture and Max had won an Iron Cross. Max had been livid when the Chancellor discriminated against Jews in the German army and his disgust at this had been made public only weeks before. The Hamburg bank had financed the construction of Germany’s navy and its merchant fleet before the war. Only last year, Max had sent Carl Melchior, his own closest advisor, to Romania to do deals over grain supplies that were tempting enough to keep Romania neutral.

  But Felix now could only offer territorial advantage, and the Tsar did not need any more land, resources or coastline. At this point the Tsar needed generous capital incentives to make peace. He had been here before, in 1905; he would need money to rebuild the country and repress the rebellious element.

  Russian Jews, in general, were pro-German, and in view of the cruel pogroms and daily insults, as Sir Bernard Pares wrote in a despatch to the Foreign Office, ‘it is difficult to blame them’. German propaganda suggested (with dubious sincerity) that peace with Germany would mean liberation. But Max Warburg could not offer to reconstruct Russia for the Tsar. Germany was suffering from the Allied blockade and so was his bank. By this stage in the war the
German Warburgs, and German and Russian financiers in general, could only have got money for Russia from America – and they knew Wall Street would refuse to lend it to them. Felix Warburg’s father-in-law, Jacob Schiff, so detested the Tsarist regime that he strenuously prevented Russia from getting Wall Street money. Partly out of his hatred for the Tsar’s victimisation of Jews, Schiff had organised finance for the Japanese victory in 1904–5.12 From an old Frankfurt banking family, he could not see why the Germans and Allies were fighting; as his biographer points out,

  Schiff banked on a neutral Wilson to engineer a status quo peace. Objecting to the craze for military preparedness in America, he opposed the export of munitions and funds to the belligerents.13

  With the Warburgs and the Rothschilds, he was Jewish royalty. Together the distinguished old man Schiff, and Felix and Paul Warburg, would decide who got American money and who didn’t. They could make business difficult for banks that propped up the Tsar.

  On the other hand, if Felix Warburg was in a position to offer Protopopov nothing the Tsar would want, this calls into question the provenance of the New York money that Buchanan was able to promise the Tsar in the summer of 1916. It may possibly have come from J.P. Morgan Jnr, a noted anglophile whose Britannica Online entry includes the lines

  …during the first three years of World War I, he became the sole purchasing agent in the United States for the British and French governments, buying about $3,000,000,000 worth of military and other supplies from American firms on behalf of those countries. To finance the Franco–British requirements for credits in the United States, he organized more than 2,000 banks to underwrite a total of more than $1,500,000,000 in Allied bonds. After the end of the war his firm floated loans totaling more than $10,000,000,000 for European reconstruction work.14

  The Americans were in a position to impose conditions. They could well have been persuaded by Buchanan’s argument, often stated, that providing Rasputin were out of the picture, the Tsar would concede power to a pro-Ally, progressive Duma.

  In addition to the feelers put out to Protopopov, and Nicholas’s subsequent reaction, there is evidence to believe that Berlin was also considering other options in terms of brokering a peace with Russia. A decade after the events of 1916, Alexei Raivid, a Soviet consul in Berlin, was having one of his occasional meetings with Baron von Hochen Esten, when the subject of Rasputin cropped up. The Baron, a German specialist in Russian affairs employed by the Hungarian embassy, told Raivid that, in the summer of 1916, he and a number of others were sent to Petrograd. The purpose of their mission was to establish contacts with certain elements of the Russian court who sought a separate peace with Germany. Raivid recorded in his diary an account of what von Hochen Esten told him that day:

  In his own words, the ties between the two courts never broke during the war and were maintained unofficially and through illegal means by different elements close to the courts. The main purpose of the mission was to take advantage of the difficult domestic situation in Russia and to warn the influential elements of the Russian Court that the only way to save Russia from the forthcoming revolution would be Russia’s withdrawal from the war with Germany and some domestic reforms. He was charged, if necessary, to cooperate with other persons in preparation of a coup to remove Nicholas II from the throne. On his arrival he got in touch with the following three persons who together with Tsarina Alexandra worked on the development of the separate peace treaty: Sturmer; Beletsky, Director of the Department of Police; and one of the synod leaders, Vasily Mikhailovich Skvortsov. The group, in cooperation with other German agents, sought to persuade Rasputin that he and the Tsarina should lead a movement for peace with Germany. Because Nicholas opposed the idea of signing a separate peace treaty with Germany (he explained his position by the fact that as a nobleman he could not break the promise that he had made to the Allies) he was to be persuaded to abdicate the throne on 6th December (his Saint’s Day) in favour of his heir Alexei. This would then allow Alexandra, as Regent, to conclude a separate peace treaty, as neither she nor the Tsarevich had given such a promise to the Allies. According to a further plan, the Regent would publish a manifesto stating that the difficult domestic circumstances in Russia required the conclusion of a peace treaty and carry forward a programme of reforms in the country. The manifesto allegedly promised to ‘give land to the people’. Von Hochen Esten claims that Rasputin was among those who wrote a draft of the manifesto and that he favoured the idea of a separate peace and totally approved of the slogan promising land for the people.15

  While Raivid’s diary represents only one small fragment of documentary evidence to support the notion of such a plot, it was anecdotally well supported in the summer of 1916. It was taken equally seriously by David Lloyd George, on whose desk intelligence reports warning of future catastrophe were beginning to pile up.

  SEVEN

  WAR GAMES

  In August 1916 there was good news and bad. The good news was that Romania had at last declared war against Germany. The bad news was that Romania was so ill-prepared that the country would inevitably be overrun, south of the Carpathians at least, and Russian and Allied military assistance must be given. This expert intervention would destroy the resources that would otherwise allow the Germans to pour across Romania to the Black Sea and stay there. The British Intelligence officer whose team would follow the retreat, burning grain stores and destroying factories, oil fields and oil refineries, was Captain John Dymoke Scale.

  Scale was six feet four, a thirty-four-year-old Indian Army officer with a wife and young children in England. He was from a genuine British background, the son of a Merthyr solicitor,1 educated at Repton and trained as an army officer at Sandhurst. He had learned Russian before the war, during a previous posting in Russia. He fought on the Western Front in 1914, sustaining a serious shrapnel wound to the leg. He was posted to France in the summer of 1916 and, also that summer, was assigned to accompany a party of Russian parliamentarians visiting England, which included Protopopov, the spokesman of the delegation, Milyukov and Shingarev, who were opposition leaders, and many others representing different shades of opinion.

  With the entry of Romania into the war in August 1916, Scale was attached to the Petrograd SIS station. He was already well connected in Petrograd society, not only through his parliamentary contacts but because of his acquaintance with Robert Wilton, the Times’s Petrograd correspondent, who had accompanied a party of Russian journalists in England a few weeks before his own trip with the Duma members. Among Wilton’s party had been Vladimir D. Nabokov, the Kadet leader. Scale knew his brother, the diplomat Konstantin D. Nabokov, who had from 1912 been Russian Consul-General in Calcutta; he was now at the imperial Russian embassy in England.2 Konstantin Nabokov corresponded with Scale and undoubtedly primed him with current opinion, such as ‘rumours… of Rasputin’s evil orgies and of the loss of prestige which the monarchy was suffering owing to the disastrous influence of this hysterical and vicious scoundrel blindly believed to be a saint and a miraclemaker’.3

  Scale arrived in Russia on 31 August, via Finland, and headed directly for the Astoria Hotel in Petrograd, where most of the British Intelligence Mission was billeted.

  The Astoria was a fine five-storied building, built round a large dining hall, down onto the coloured glass roof of which the windows of the inner rooms looked… German-owned… it had been taken over by the Government… and was now the ‘official’ hotel, open only to diplomats, officers and officials… Many people lived there indefinitely, in spite of a regulation that no one save the diplomats and officials of allied powers could stay there longer than a certain number of days. From lunch time till late at night its salons were kaleidoscopes of movement and colour. Cossacks, Guardsmen, naval officers, in fact men in every Russian uniform imaginable (most civilians in Russia wear uniform) sat at tables or stood in groups chatting to their womenfolk. Often very beautiful women they were too, in wonderful clothes and jewellery. Here and there among
the throng, officers in the uniform of one or other of the Allied powers were conspicuous. A Romanian military mission had just arrived, and was the centre of new interest. No taciturnity or absence of smiles was noticeable here. In fact one could hardly recognise the airs played by the military band so loud was the buzz of talk and laughter. A cheery, careless place was the Astoria (a happy hunting ground for enemy agents too!).4

  He set to work for the British Intelligence Mission. His immediate duties were to exchange news of German troop movements between Russian and British staff officers. Cypher telegrams would arrive from London, explaining which German units were operational in France; they would have to be deciphered and compared with Russian intelligence about the Russian and Romanian fronts. There were endless misunderstandings, queries and frustrations (‘…thus the 21st Reserve Regiment has now been established as belonging to the new 216th Division but it is always down as of 36th Reserve Division…’5) caused by a combination of German cunning, Russian carelessness, and sometimes, in Scale’s view, London’s willingness to believe French intelligence from Moscow rather than British.

  It is pretty certain that Scale placed himself firmly on Alley’s side of the ‘show’ rather than Hoare’s. Hoare, bright and personable as he was, was essentially a desk wallah. Alley and Scale already knew each other from the time in 1913 when Scale qualified, in Russia, as an interpreter, first class. He would have heard all the Rasputin-related gossip relayed by Alley, Rayner and Felix Yusupov,6 who he had also made the acquaintance of, through Alley, on his previous Russian posting. Quite what this Indian Army man and veteran of the trenches made of Yusupov and his louche social connections can only be imagined. Perhaps by this time nothing surprised him. Yusupov and Pavlovich were fabulously exotic; the Yusupovs were descended from the Tartar hordes who once overran southern Russia, and were said to be the second richest family in Russia. Yusupov wrote of his childhood: