IT was evident Marya Mlozov had lured Rasputin to her house under specious pretences.* I discovered later that her example was followed by numerous other people,* and it was under pretext of strengthening his cause for the regeneration of Russia, that his murderers lured him to Prince Yusoopov’s house, and foully assassinated him.*
We chatted on Russia and the War for a while. I gathered he wished for the triumph of Russia above all things, the occupation of Constantinople by the Little Father, and the restoration of the cross to Saint Sophia.* In Russia he wished to have a Peasant Tsar,* one who would defend the interests of the Orthodox peasantry against the Atheistic, riotous-living landlords and bourgeois, who spent most of their life abroad or bullying their peasants. He did not wish Germany to be absolutely defeated for fear the monarchy should be overthrown.
I promised to call and see him in Petrograd. As we parted, the beautiful chimes of the Kremlin bells rang out in the still night air.
abridged
Marya, a bewitching twenty-two, tried hard enough. She brought home a bevy of actresses, she pressed alcohol on him and conveniently fainted into his arms, but Rasputin abstained, so the disgusted company pronounced him a hypocrite. Even the Mystic Maidens and a barefoot Romany girl serving champagne could not tempt him.
The frame-ups even extended to impersonation. ‘I realised’ wrote Shelley ‘that the fearful things attributed to Rasputin were, in many cases, the actual doings of his accusers. Perhaps no man in history has been so furiously calumniated.’ Lili Dehn, who took the ‘no smoke without fire’ line, nonetheless admitted she had never seen anything herself, and complained that ‘Rasputin was even said to have been sinning in Petrograd when he was actually in Siberia.’
Felix Yusupov (1887–1967), Count Sumarokov-Elston. At the Count’s residence in St Petersburg, the Moika Palace, Rasputin accepted cake and Madeira wine laced with cyanide, but appeared completely unaffected. The desperate Count then shot him in the head in cold blood. Moments later, Rasputin sprang back to life and disarmed Yusupov, who fled; it was Vladimir Purishkevich who delivered the final shot. Rasputin’s body was found later that morning, December 30th, 1916, floating in the Malaya Nevka River (‘Little Neva’).
Rasputin wanted Tsar Nicholas II (‘the little father’) to recapture Istanbul (Constantinople) from Turkey and turn the historic sixth-century Cathedral of Holy Wisdom, or Saint Sophia, back into a church again after more than four centuries as a mosque. Back in 1856, Richard Cobden had insisted that apart from this, the Russian Empire had no thirst for European expansion, though our political establishment chose not to believe him. See Misreading Russia.
A phrase evidently used as we today might speak of a People’s King. Tsar Nicholas II was reforming Russia’s monarchy in the way Rasputin hoped until the Communists substituted their own ‘Peasant Tsars,’ Lenin and Stalin. As John Buchan said, revolutions rarely do anything but make things worse; the best thing to do is to restore the old regime, and press ahead with reform, as we did in 1660 and 1689. See Revolution and Reaction.